"These are wood shavings not rubber bands."
—Bryan Ray
Dear diary,
For words, love & leave. For concepts, maintain the embrace. That’s what I say. Fall in love with individual words, because they truly are lovable, but they’re also mortal, and they change with usage, so love them with an understanding that the relationship is never forever. But by “concepts” I mean the ideas that are draped by the words: a concept can be rephrased with synonymous terms, like a woman changes her negligee. It’s not the undergarment—however splendid it is—that one wants to hold; it’s the body beneath it: the curvaceous flesh.
Truly My Satan thou art but a Dunce
And dost not know the Garment from the Man
—as Blake always sez, in the first line of “To The Accuser who is The God of This World”. It’s like when the Spirit of Wisdom moves a snake in the garden to give good advice to a damozel, which maddens Jehovah (naturally), so, in attempt to harm the Spirit of Wisdom, which is the culprit of this good deed that requires punishing, Jehovah mangles the physical form of the snake — the insinuation is that he removes the creature’s legs, like a mobster might do (“Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above every beast of the field: upon thy belly shalt thou go” Genesis 3:14); and Wisdom gets away scot-free. Basically, Jehovah kills the messenger.
This topic came to mind because yesterday bored cops from various countries finally removed Assange from the…
Will a reader of my diary even know who Julian Assange is? Should I bother explaining, as if my diary has a reader? Maybe the important thing is what Assange means to me:
In my eyes, Assange is the antidote to a certain type of tyranny. We live in an age where everything that one wants to be transparent (freely available) is opaque, privatized; & meanwhile, everything that one would prefer to remain private (the personal lives & loves of all people) is surveilled: automatically recorded and made accessible, regardless of reason — freely available to the goons with the guns. Enter Assange: when he appears, he pulls back the curtain — I’m thinking of the curtain from The Wizard of Oz (1939), that conceals the man at the controls who doesn’t want to be observed — thus exposing a part of Power that was acting unseen. Now, if we say that “good” means whatever helps the people in general, and “evil” means whatever causes harm to people in general, then it’s the evil aspect of Power that usually wants secrecy — for whatever good that Power does (can Power do good? — I ask this sincerely), it desires to broadcast. Following these definitions, Assange is one who fights evil. He makes it hard for the Biggest Powers to do their harm clandestinely. He catches them red-handed, preserves the evidence, and makes this evidence available far and wide. So it’s obvious why the most powerful thugs want to blot him (I am categorically against being hyperbolic, but this is exactly the thing that old Rome did to Jesus: they illegally evicted him from his sanctuary & tossed him in the back of a government van; also noteworthy is the fact that Jesus, when seized by the police, happened to be reading the same book as Assange at that instant: Gore Vidal’s History of The National Security State) — and it’s equally obvious why We the People should be upset about this mistreatment.
But I’m just a guy who’s disconnected. Whether I say one thing or another, it doesn’t matter to the world, because the world doesn’t know me. I actually think that I might be one of the only people who the Powers don’t surveil. I’m not worth their time, because my reach is so limited. You could purchase a two-way walkie-talkie system, and put one of the portable transceivers in your baby’s crib, while keeping the other handheld device on your person, and then stride over to the other side of your apartment, to the opposite wall of the room from the baby’s crib, & speak loudly & clearly into your radio, so that your voice comes crackling out of the crib-side speaker; and you will have reached as many people as I do with this blog.
(Think about it: I post my private diary online, blatantly in public, every day, for all to see, and nobody reads it. I am the one blind spot of surveillance capitalism.)
Anyway, that’s why I began this public diary entry by speaking on the crux of words-versus-concepts. I was wondering, when Assange was taken, how we humans got to this point: cuz it seems a backwards step, compared to past progress — and I think that’s right: I think that, in the pre-computer world, mankind had figured out that it’s better to maintain free-speech laws precisely for our most despicable enemies, and to set up the system such that the law’s enforcers could never arrest a soul and keep that soul in custody indefinitely without having to declare the clear rationale for the arrest and immediately engaging in a fair trial, etc…
[Editor's summary: REASON for law. NO REASON for art.]
So we chiseled out these guidelines long ago, in a faraway galaxy. But then computers were invented, and the Internet ensnared us in its net. That’s when We the People fell asleep: because the net was entertaining (read: lull·a·by·ing). And it’s not like the folks from the Powers that Be are more crafty or evil that the previous Jerks that Were — the goons with the guns from old Rome and elsewhere, who caused us to craft all these protections in the first place (free speech, etc.) — it’s just that there’s always a fraction of the populace of humanity that wants to cheat ahead; and they will try the same tricks in every age that falls alseep: cuz they’re inherently non-creative. That’s kinda fortunate for us normalfolk, us poets: it means that we don’t have to try very hard to unveil their shenanigans, to pull the curtain back and expose their deception. This leaves us more time for art. (Lovemaking is an artform.)
Yes, but words. I keep drifting from the center. I was trying to explain why the…
For instance, how does the phrase “Department of Defense”, which sounds so noble, come to denote strictly first-strike warmongers? Or, likewise, how does the word “noble”, which once meant something like “highborn prig”, come to sound almost… noble?
It’s cuz words can be shuffled around to cover any action; thus, if we trust words, we’ll eventually get duped by evil acts. But if we keep our word-love skeptical and alert, by forcing ourselves constantly to use synonyms & devise alternate explanations for familiarly admired ideas (like God, freedom, country, church, etc.), then life’ll be funner with cute puppies everywhere and even the fish will not smell fishy anymore (& they will no longer feel so slimy).
I don’t think I’m making a very clear point with this entry, and that’s angering me more and more, the more that I add to this textual trash-heap. I’m at the point, to tell the truth, that I’d almost rather throw in the towel, and just get a job as a tax collector, like old Saint Matthew, and work for the NSA (the U.S. National Security Agency), so that I can spy on cute grandfathers when they leave their cell-phone positioned just so on their bed, casually (unintentionally) when they’re getting ready for a glorious night of slumber… I could turn on their phone’s camera, using my Remote-Control Privileged Corporate Access, and watch them toss & turn beneath their sheets. And, of course, every night, six or seven times, they would wake up to use the restroom, because their cup runneth over; after which they’d try to get back to sleep, & I’d be watching them all the while…
But if Jesus was killed by Rome because he exposed their creditors’ system of debt-enslaving the populace, then how did his name come to mean invisible friend who serves as a flashlight to guide me as I stumble thru each day? — I will tell you how that happened:
After Jesus was slain by the banksters who got their big bailout, the Apostle Paul comes along and says “Hey maybe we shouldn’t pay attention to Jesus’ message, cuz that would anger our masters, the Creditor Class; instead, let’s pretend that Jesus died AS A DUTIFUL PAYMENT OF DEBT, because God is like a bankster in the sky; and, therefore, if we all follow suit, and keep slaving away in America to pay off our own debts, in which we daily drown for our daily bread (as they say in the casino business: the house always wins), the nightmare can continue to cycle indefinitely; thus we avoid having to figure out a way to distribute the would-be abundance of riches. Let us not create heaven on earth; let us only dream of heaven.”
Now I’m even more pissed at myself, cuz this whole Paul-vs.-Jesus thing is a bad tic that I have; but I was trying to speak on the tragedy of Assange, which has nothing to do with any of this. War & finance & taxes & power & debt & secrets & evil have nothing in common.
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