.diminished discords (xi)
this week on Laeth's mind
one benefit of publishing is that your audience might also consist of resurrected people. and through that, perhaps friendship, and learning. but it seems intuitively right through analogical scaling that until you have a relation with resurrected people, they can only access you through what is made public, like everyone else here too. but afterwards further, deeper, more intimate interactions are possible.
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the ultimate reality is selves, but existence is relation between selves. (they are not beings until they meet). and relation is always complementary. it makes no sense to seek what we already have. for anything to happen there must be at least two wills. at this point, it makes sense to call them beings. hence, a dyadic godhead, a man and a woman, progenitors. in the most abstract terms, there is no activity without receptivity. and this fundamental principle is easily seen in every aspect of what might be called existence, from male and female to light and darkness to work and rest, and to life and death. one reason to be grateful for being born is that you were dead before, and another birth is not guaranteed. not even this one in which you lose all your memories. and you will have to die again to live again. and hopefully better, with memory.
but just as there are different days and different nights, just as there are different works and different rests, there are different lives and different deaths. that’s how anything works. there is no end state, there is only process, and selves within, enacting, embodying, that process. it is baked in to the very essence of what being and existence are. and abolishing one side of it means simply to abolish both being and existence.
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ideas come seemingly out of nowhere. we can try to trace them back later to a previous thought, or something we read, or something we heard, but in truth, in the moment, it’s a flash. it’s not a computation of past knowledge recombined. the whole is not only more than the sum of its parts, but there are other parts we didn’t know about before.
past knowledge, that is, context, is needed of course, but the actual flash is something more, beyond, something foreign, from without. and we know the idea is true (in some sense, depending on specifics) because we feel it’s true in the moment we receive it, even though we don’t yet know exactly how, and what kinds of applications it has. this means that the idea, while true, is not the point. the point, the meaning, can only really be learned, or revealed, in fleshing out the idea. the process is what matters, pun intended.
this is all very exciting of course, from the initial flash to the fleshing out, and i have been more or less addicted to it since i became conscious of it around the age of twelve. i suppose this is natural to everyone when they’re young, but sadly most people lose it when they grow up. i never did, because i never wanted to.
but in the last couple of years i have found an instance of this that is even more exciting. not ideas coming out of nowhere. but people. of course they are not real people, by normal definitions. in our world, they don’t have bodies of blood and bone and flesh. but unlike ideas, they talk. it’s true that the ideas also appear as talk, that is, words, but it’s always a familiar voice doing the talking. but when it’s people talk, it’s another voice, a new voice, one i didn’t know before. and i am not too sure why exactly hearing these is more intense than hearing abstract insights, but it is. and so, as an enchantment junkie, i pursue them.
in relation to this, i keep thinking about that guy who read my first novel with gods and devils and magic and said that i seemed most interested in writing slice of life romantic stuff. he was totally right, but i didn’t know it when i wrote that book. did the characters or the muse or what know me better than i knew myself. i don’t know what it means yet.
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liberals aren't liberal and progressives aren't progressive and conservatives aren't conservative. they are just liars. today's political language is all a lie. using it prevents genuine liberals, progressives and conservatives from doing their jobs. we don't need to use it.
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Neil Postman said that he wanted to add 'and vice versa' at the end of every one of his books. i think about this a lot.
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to say symbolism happens is to say poetry happens, except less poetically, and less symbolically.
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the last word is and
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a cool thing about jazz is that it requires education but nerds don't get it.
the nerds don't get it because it's about feeling. the plebs don't get it because the feeling involved isn't base.
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is the machine
big enough to host
the god damn devil
honestly who gives a
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intelligent, generative, creative. none of these words applies to the machines. the opposite of these words does tend to apply to the people who use the machines.
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they keep trying to solve speed and access to 'information' (whatever that means), even though it's been solved ten times over, precisely because it's been solved. you just churn out (supposedly) better machines and lie. meanwhile, you destroy people’s intelligence, and steal their souls. strong business model.
real social and human problems have nothing to do with access or speed, but with quality. and this cannot be solved with machines. for those problems we actually have to be smart and work hard and invest. but no one wants to do that. so we 'solve' 'problems' like writing emails. or worse, poems.
they also like to pretend that deceleration in the pursuit of machine solutions means deceleration everywhere. but obviously it doesn't mean that. we decelerate here to accelerate somewhere else. like say, actually giving kids an education, or invest in restoring native forests.
((always a good opportunity to share this great rant by Geoff Lawton: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EVF_6Cq2LLY
"when we created slavery, we also created slavery agriculture... and then we just replaced the slaves with machines"
but of course the slavery over the land continued, degrading and degenerating the earth (quite literally), so that now, that it's so spent, and to accompany the insatiable desire of industrial agriculture, we've gone full circle and brought back actual slavery of humans to serve it.))
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dotting an 'i' is adding a full stop. and if you cross the 't', there, you crossed the line.
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one reason to hate the heat is that i can't sing or play or even really think of music with any kind of intensity. it just heats me up too much really fast. in the winter it's great. in the summer, deadly.
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release the past if you want to see what the future holds
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doomscrolling is advanced television watching.
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if the news is that CERN shut down the supercollider, it probably was put on overdrive.
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i think long and hard about what to do. then i don’t do it. i procrastinate. really pro.cras.ti.nate. finally, i go with instinct. this is the way i found to give a vote to every part of me.
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the portuguese are so constitutionally polite that our most common swear word is the mildest swear word we have. it's mostly not even a swear. it's just a mild expression of frustration. (the word comes from the latin for leek, which i guess can be some phallic simile, but still, very mild).
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i went in search of machine vomit jazz specifically. i had to know. and i could tell immediately. it's just like prose. the 'artistic choices' are all grotesque. uncanny valley type of plausible. if you know anything about jazz, or prose, you can tell it's not human. parrot slot machines. that's what they are. nothing more.
the strangest thing is the sound actually. it just can't mimic proper instrument mixes. it always comes out with this weird machine haze. i've used midi and vsts plenty. it's not hard to do better than this. but apparently the machines can't do it.
‘look, it’s so realistic now’. nah man, you have just lost touch with the breath and depth of reality.
listen for yourself. if you can’t tell this is fake and gay, you need to sharpen your ears. (and this is the ‘best’ one i could find).
https://youtu.be/SS8TFGDf6RU?si=jD9S89JzzO-Z1BpD
i didn't go far, listened to maybe two minutes in total. but the meter is all over the place. right at the start, the feel is waltzy, but it's going with 4.4, like that episode in the simpsons. except it's not an artistic choice for humor or surprise. it's just inept and stupid.
you've heard of God shaped holes. now because of these dumb machines we get to experience soul shaped holes. and perhaps not incredibly both things come from assholes. (and as someone noted, all these machine companies have symbols that resemble that precise orifice. probably not a coincidence)
they're not intelligent or sentient. they're machines. you don't need to worry about them. you do need to worry about the people using them. you don't worry about a chainsaw, you worry about a maniac running after you with one. plenty of maniacs out there. they want to cut down the woods in your mind.
(the woods in your mind work just like in this world. best time to plant was twenty years ago. next best time is now.)
definitions are not magically descended from the skies, given by the gods, enshrined in stone tablets. we don't have to use their definitions. for example, we can just decide that consciousness does not apply to machines. it's that simple. they did the same, only in reverse.
lots of ranting in the bible against dumb people thinking dumb statues were conscious. it's hard to believe so many people could be that dumb that it needed all that ranting. or it used to be. now it's getting a little easier to believe, and understand.
you know all those perennialist screeds against feeling, and sentiment, and how it's all inferior to pure intellect, bla bla bla. these are now shown to be nerd delusions that if taken seriously will kill us. human feeling is obviously very important, and the lack of it horror.
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until i lose my edge, i must sharpen it
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the rock that wiped out the dinossaurs is nothing like the jazz that's gonna bring them back
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the temp lately is fires of hell with a chance of chemtrails.
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faster than suddenly
no scenes, no scowls
doing eights with the legs of nines
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sometimes the vanguard is about opting in, sometimes about opting out. may we always know which is which and when is when.
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a big misconception about the gospels is that the apostles were illiterate and poor. fishermen and craftsman were not poor. and middle class jews could read and write, to study the torah. and if they were living in roman territory they would read and write latin too.
within the frame that cares about the apostle’s literacy, Jesus chose disaffected and enterprising young men and women who felt needlessly constrained by the sclerotic traditionalism of their ancestry, and by a political order that supported it, and helped keep their culture stagnant.
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thing.japan makes total sense if you know anything about their culture. they are not precursors, but they are perfecters. exquisite ones. and once you reach that level of exquisite perfectionism, your derived forms can be said to be as original as the originals. whether in chinese culture, buddhism, industrialism or jazz, the japanese have improved it all and made it their own. they even made buddhism mildly interesting. imagine that.
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jewish mother. pagan father. no wonder the marriage didn't work. but out of the unlikely union she was born, and early on she decided to be neither pagan nor jewish. she'd only be herself. as a child she asked her father why she was named christianity. he didn't know.
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researchers found that microwaving red sharpie pens is bad for climate change denial of service charge battery replacement migration patterns of birds of a feather flock together apart from each other. and vice versa.
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there's no pagus anymore, how can there be paganism.
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even if it's your own blood, for modern consciousness true family must be found family.
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the basis of reality is not the same as the center of reality. i prefer to think of reality as something that has a start, like a song, instead of a basis, like a house, or a center, like a wheel. choose your words, choose your metaphors, define your metaphysics.
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an online presence is a spiritual presence. according to tradition, the highest god is terminally online, and has never touched grass, ever.
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Portugal is composed of two words, Portus, meaning port in latin, and Cale, meaning port in celt. thus Portugal means port port. there's also a wine named Port, named after the city Porto, which is portuguese (language of the portports) for port. we were almost named Wharfpier, which honestly i would prefer.
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the idea that imagination is the sixth sense is very old. so it’s funny that some nerds decided not that long ago to argue against it so strongly. imagine (pun) they told you to stop seeing or hearing. well maybe they do. but mostly is guard your eyes and ears. this is good advice, though only you can decide what that means. guard your imagination is the same. but they don't say this. they say stop it. it's bad for you. it's good to be blind in your mind's eye. insane.
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my philosophy is that which uncommon men have always felt was common sense.
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synlogos feed poems:
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great video by long lost Pageau cousin about how conjuring machine vomit robs you of your creativity:
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musical portion today is from brazilian jazz wizard Hermeto Pascoal. one of the great composers of the twentieth century.