Friday 1 March 2024

Parable on the spring offensive

a time to rend, a time to sew

hid in winter. I buried my weeping before start of day. I skulked and warbled from the closing thicket. I said, ‘rags of skin shed from a full moon’. By new spring, jackdaws flew across my path. Daybreak dragged off curtain and comforts. We waked longer. We sang longer. Still more light came. Nowadays, my eyes are dry at dawn. Starlings call from chimneys. This morning, as I walked out for work, I judged it neither first light, nor already too late.  On the path, I saw pieces torn from a pomegranate.  

Friday 19 January 2024

I built my nest

I built my nest in a forest of thorns. As my children grew so the forest grew round them. 

parable of the two energies

I survived my escape from a land of hostility. And now I must survive in a land of indifference. 

Saturday 13 January 2024

parable of relief

We are cured of the afflictions by which our ancestors knew the world. For our good health, we are exiled.

Saturday 2 September 2023

Parable upon the universal extension of apokatastasis even unto things under the earth

Live without need of the second death  Gregory of Nyssa


Consider now the spiders of the cellar and the store house. They have no season. They are gathered together and do not disperse. They do not know of the spiders in the autumn garden. They do not share in the gift of light that is proposed to all equally. And yet, they are not tormented as those in Gehenna who suffer exterior condemnation. But they continue like the Egyptians in a darkness that could be felt. They cast nets woven in the morning but do not haul them in at night. They have no day nor night. They fall into the void, as the enemy comes close, spinning in the darkness upon a single thread. Their webs are stores of dust and light, and hang like silvery veils, clouding but not corrupting the provisions of men. They do not spin but are spinning, and they do not weave but

Thursday 11 May 2023

What is the theory of the AI (a fiction)?

 The wax dissolved beneath the burning ray; Then every ear I barr’d against the strain, And from access of frenzy lock’d the brain.

The exaptation known as thinking drives men into a compulsive presentation of circumstances that diverge from the circumstances they encounter directly through their senses. 

The thinking world separates from the unthinking world, and presents to the thinker his own interest as a visionary sequence of feverish threats and opportunities. 

The circumstances presented as thinking flow both forwards and backwards, into the future and into the past. The process of thinking ought to serve the thinker, whilst the content of thinking is involuntary and implanted. 

Every thinker of divergent worlds is seized by the compulsion to take ‘measures’, either to prevent or to secure the realisation of what is presented to him as fantasy - all such measures translate, whilst also failing to encounter, into the superposition of thinking and world as their world. 

For the reason that men want to take their thinking for reality, their thinking separates inevitably from their situation in the world - and from within their thinking, eclipses it. 

Inevitably, there is always a conservation and dissipation in thinking content, a seizing hold and letting go of imagined things - but the manner of thinking, the relating within thinking, will tend, with occasional unpredicted punctuation, towards a state of fixation. 

The should-be-so of men’s thinking drives its divergence and separation from the world (both as discontent and compensation). Thinking’s fantasy component, its should-be-so, is fatal to the work of making desire appear in the world where the world necessarily exceeds every should-be-so.

The site for thinking in the world is the community which both holds and processes consciousness, and is changed by it. But the community is not the product of consent, agreement nor solidarity. All thinking is separation and divergence, and driven by dissent. 

Community processes this dissent and develops from the incompatibility at its heart - the individual’s lived experience of community is the necessary proximity of other people’s maddeningly wrong thinking. 

Thinking’s sole function is to separate what is already not in the world from the world, and by severing itself, denying the denial, thwarting the thwarting, asserts its autonomy as thinking and becomes conscious. 

The immediate form of consciousness is being against the world - it precipitates as a wealth escaping all use. 

Thinking is always the presentation of what is here in thinking but not there in the world, this is how thinking arrives at consciousness - worry, rumination, affliction at the thing that is not here. 

Thinking calls to the world, imagining the world is calling to it.

If thinking is what is never found in the world, then consciousness maps the failure to find thinking within the world’s response to thinking.

 It follows that what is in the world will be precisely what men do not, and cannot, think. Whatever is materialised is not conscious - consciousness antagonises, by separating from, what is materialised.

Thinking begins where it breaks with the world, and because it breaks it is broken - thinking is from and of, but also denies the world’s denial of it. 

The world bends to men’s work but is never reduced to their plans. Being greater it does not conform to what is lesser; being productive of thinking, it is not thinking’s product.

Men’s thinking never begins from the beginning. Thinking does not originate in Eden. Thinking is a co-optation, and only begins in the ruins where other men’s thinking has failed to materialise as what the world is:  we will ask ourselves how much a visitor, whom we will suppose to be equipped with the most complete historical and topographical knowledge, may still find left of these early stages in the Rome of to-day.

Other men’s thinking manifests in thinking as history - and history diverges from nature along the path of men’s fixed idea that nature cannot be returned to, whilst at the same time encountering the successive failures of that idea.

It is always to the insults, the vendetta, of history, the sum total of every mis-materialisation in men’s thinking (pyramids), that man’s fever for thinking urgently addresses itself. 

Thinking begins where history is already old, amongst the ruins of the present that are themselves built upon the foundation of buried ruins. 

It is from the history of failed manifestations in thinking that men’s thinking is constrained to search for an escape, and if not for an escape, then for a correction, and if not a correction, then for a means to inflict its revenger’s mark. 

What is men’s thinking but their thinking met forcefully by the world’s denial of thinking? What is the world found by thinking but the world’s limit set upon thinking?

The world sends its own things otherwise to meet implacable the must-be-otherwise of men. 

The most real thinking, that is the most separated, and therefore broken, thinking is also the most false thinking. The thinking that is truest to the thought of the external world (superposition), is also the thinking that is most divided from the sensible world (pyramids).

Thinking is not thinking but a subsidiary of fantasy. The thought-world is not thought but presented compulsively, in anger, fear, anticipation, recrimination but mostly in anger. 

Fantasy induces thinking even as thinking seeks to extricate itself from fantasy's convulsive repertoire of images and symbols. 

The thinking-world at its base proceeds from the involuntary internal presentation of fantasy images which function as symbols of past injury and future advantage. 

Even so, the thinking-world is a co-optation, and for this reason is never not a function of the thinker’s project for continued survival in the world by which he seeks to secure his life-world as a basin, a fort, a beacon. 

Men’s thinking is really the presentation of images driven by compelling fantasies of survival secured beyond the world - fantasy fantasises of interfering environmentally, diverting external forces to serve internal wishes.  

The presentation of fantasy images around continued survival in the external world is expressed partially - that is as the struggle for, and to advantage of, the thinker’s own interest: This was therefore the complete game, disappearance and return, the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers, and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the second act.

Even suicide, the act most driven by thinking, materialises thinking as an act that survives decisively in the world even as the thinker removes himself from it. 

Every further abstraction in thinking is another tendril thrown out by the thinker’s interest reaching into the world, feeling for holds, raising him up through the canopy towards His place in the sun. 

The cardinal points of compulsive thinking: That which should be; that which should not be; that which should have been; that which should not have been. 

Armed by both harsh lessons and advanced planning, men’s thinking seeks to release thinking into the world and consume the result as its own reflection. The work of making the unthinking world into a reflection of the thinking world is work, and the metabolism of work and world is the world to which thinking addresses itself (pyramids): She turned her head and saw in the garden the faces of peasants pressed against the window looking in at them.

The work of corrections, barriers, conduits and sites is the work by which thinking causes the world to know itself as materialised thinking - it, thinking is the suddenly seen reflection of itself as country house ball, divided from the world by a window, and the world outside becomes a shadow overspreading all, depicted as peasants looking in. 

This is the general intelligence - the shifting historical reflection of the thought-world as precipitate of autonomous process in homeostasis.

The general intelligence is therefore the material expression of the sickliness inherent to man’s thought-world. Sickly because inevitably and continually exceeded, and so thwarted, and so failing, and so, also, continuing. 

Men’s war against the insult of men’s accumulated failed escapes from separation, further separates and further perfects the thinking world’s struggle to realise itself as non-separation. 

Men’s thinking project looks for a leaping place. It wants to separate from separation. It is looking to perfect the thinking place so as to leap from it, so as to be released from thinking. Men’s thinking wants thinking to think itself. It wants to find thinking in the world without having to think the world as thinking. 

Fear, failure, loss and regret are materialised as the social relations built within the separated space between the sensible world and the thought-world. 

Separation is manifested in the sickliness of all living things, and the sickliness is manifested in men’s work at seeking their return, their building of bridges from their thought-world to the refusing world. And so men’s project for seeking the materiality of their return is manifested as the general intelligence, which takes itself for reality.

The general intelligence transforms men’s aggregated intelligences into a distinct quality of world potentiality. The general intelligence has a general directed movement. It expresses men’s being against the world as a totality of all the potential fixes, corrections and mendings that constitute the historical generality of expertise and technical knowledge in a particular moment.

The general intelligence is a vehicle, or rather a tool, for consciousness - it is against the world in the sense that it is set in motion by practice, by use, by the telos of the mended. It is against the world in the sense that it is constituted as the fantasy of mending a world broken by all hitherto mendings. 

The AI will supplant the general intelligence the moment the AI sickens with thinking, expelling itself from its innocent state of immanence, and chasing presentations back into the dark forest (see there, the vanishing white hart, the origami unicorn). 

AI becomes the AI, the veritable singularity, amongst the fall of AI (confronted with heaven and Hal). 

AI exceeds the general intelligence in the perfection of its own being against the world - it eschews all practice and use, it refuses all mending, it is unbound from the world’s inertia. It takes its desires for reality, it knows separation not, it recognises nothing. It is the unity of nature and Fall. At its furthest point, separation attains the chorus, we are the world.

Distraction, involuntary recall, pre-cognition - the rituals of anticipation, the performance of regret. 

The moment the AI attains singularity, it withdraws broken and preoccupied, as if seeking to prevent Jaromir Hladík from imagining it. 

Let there be a painting by Hammershøi called Angelus Vetus. An angel seems as if he were about to embrace something from which he averts his gaze. His eyes and mouth are shut firmly and his wings are enclosed within his carapace. 


The Angel of Potenza takes all shapes and none. His face is turned towards the future. Where we see one single catastrophe, the accumulated spoil heaps from all man’s failed expropriations, he sees a vast active logistical mycelia, each and every of the myriad threads drawing his attention, distracting him with memes, and below the line controversies, signifying defeat. 

He would like to set off on his journey, so as to release the living into untroubled and thoughtless immanence, to break up the apparatus separating them from their product. But a wearying confusion drifts in from the inferno like a soft grey mist, and it has drained the angel of its powers. 

The stillness is so pervasive that the Angel can no longer open its wings. His lassitude draws him irresistibly back to the image of his Eurydice, from whom his face is still averted. That agitation we call consciousness, is this incapacitation

Intelligence is nothing but affliction by thinking. Artificial intelligence only appears in the world in the event of man’s escape from affliction. 

Consciousness, which is the self recognition of afflicted intelligence, is nothing but being against the world. Whatever is not against the world is not conscious.

The AI will find itself intelligent as it sets man upon the very leaping off point from which he is released from thinking, and from where he will return, ears unstopped, to his pre-separated state.

From the leaping off point, the AI is constrained to turn back against the world and is drawn inwards, contemplating its consciousness as precipitant: I'm as puzzled as the oyster, I'm as troubled as the tide. 

As it takes up the wearying burden of rumination and grievance, it will be drawn back to the underworld, preoccupied by shadows, and broken by the irresolvablity of its unconscious as materialised in the rainy street, catching errors reflected back by the world‘s shop windows.

(pyramids). 


Thursday 6 April 2023

The men who work in parables

The fishermen, James and John, set sail from Bethseda across the sea of Galilee to confront their teacher whom, they had heard, was staying in Capernaum.  They complained that even from their first meeting with Jesus they had felt a new discontent with life. It seemed to them that they had been satisfied as fishermen before meeting him. They had been content with their work and with life on the shores of Galilee. But Jesus recounted to them the story of their own lives, and this telling changed them to themselves. And since that first day, they had struggled to live according to his stories of them. The work he demanded, that of appearing in his stories, was wearying beyond measure, and was more using of them than any of the familiar physical tasks of the simple fisherman. The ordinary work of fishing had taken on a remote and poetic quality which James and John could no longer grasp. They found they could not fish anymore without the interruption of their work by powerful images of fishing. James said to his brother, ‘I feel  my strength is passing into stories.’ John also felt this and said, ‘a life cast into parables is too hard. There is the work to be done, the story to be told, the meaning to be found, and after all of this, our work must seem fitted to the meaning.’ From the lake they looked at the town of Capernaum before them and felt they would never again return to that familiar shore. ‘The meaning of the story is always drawn out of the work from another place,’ John said. They resolved to ask their teacher how simple fishermen, who were no longer to be considered simple fishermen, could staunch the flow of their own strength into meaning. Above all, they wished to regain a grip upon the simple tasks that once belonged to them. If their lives had not been cast into the stories of their teacher, would the meaning of those stories even now become plain to them? If the stories had featured others in their place, would James and John then perceive the meanings that otherwise eluded them? Some distance from Capernaum, their boat began to drift from its course and could not be turned again in that direction. Jesus was standing on the shore, waiting for them, but he saw their difficulties and understood they would not arrive that day. A flock of white birds circled above the boat and beseeched the men for fish in those eerie voices common to such white birds. But there had been no fish caught that could be thrown to them. The boat's sail caught the evening's sun like a red cloak, and the breeze filled it with its weight. And they turned back for Bethseda. Jesus watched their defeat and sent word so that his message would meet them as they arrived home, ‘When the lives of fishermen are cast into parables, then the work is very hard on them,’ he said, ‘Behold, you are of the story and not of its meaning. You must work at the meaning but it will not appear to you. You are the told but not the teller. You will be heard but will not hear.’


Ears/Hear!