cosmology 1

If the ancients in their worship of mother earth, earth godesses, etc had known about the actual size of the universe, would they come to the conclusion that it was a mother universe with us snug and secure in the womb of it, full and safe in empty space?
For its size is such that it shocks the human senses, it's a scale by which we can be measured and found less than insignificant. It is the boundless whole, the empty void of pre-creation in itself, frighteningly empty, and we are only its microscopic germs on the backs of microscopic germs, unbelievably miniscule, an infestation of atoms invisible in the grasping, touching, enormously vast stretch of empty and starlit space. Speaking for myself and my little human race, for my planet and its neighbours, for my little spiral galaxy- that is, speaking as a microscopic speck on an infinitesimally minute dot- what can actually be said that is not made meaningless, in the actual, as opposed to the apparent, scheme of things? The universe laughs at us because we are a speck, and we strive, and do not laugh with it. Which begs the question why do we strive, why do we bother, we insects, we germs, kicking and biting against one another, for brief and temporary reasons. This is not mysticism, this is not the voice of metaphysics. These conclusions were arrived at by the route of cold scientific fact, that droning voice so arrogantly brought home to us over the whole course of our lives, insisting on its own superiority, oblivious to the fact that by starting out to explain everything they have ended by explaining (in human terms at least) nothing.
Of course, in the wider scheme of things it doesn't matter. I am a speck on a speck on a speck, creation's aborted consciousness.

Written June 17th

I walked away today, with a small, compact feeling of joy, i was smiling and even laughing to myself, but it wore off as the evening came on... And yes the old longing has come back, and with it much, much more. Its bittersweet. I suppose the intimations of mortality are haunting me with the impetus to produce something lasting. That will retain its strength or resonance, beyond what i will end up doing. And i want to write out of what i sustain within my own subjective thought. That is, the ingrained and inward pool of feeling that tends always toward action of some kind, delicious and growing like today, a wet spring, approaching an early summer, in which i don't feel daunted or afraid, but could sustain myself, old as i am, for ever, not regretting anything, not passively accepting anything but noticing everything, so that those that can come after me can say that i lived.

I care nothing for how others see me. I am extracting my suffering and laying it bare. Write! Offensive bile, mundane rubbish, write fictions and factoids... but write! Write truths, what you consider to be truths. I'm sickened by symbols, by common sense, by received wisdom. All of it is liable to be reversed.
Write even if you can't write. Above all, complain. Complain and cry from your core. It's liberating. Disgorge, hold nothing back. Write love letters. Look at everything and discard freely what does not appeal to you.
On politics i know one thing: The "there is no alternative" people are wrong. Haunt your loved ones, be full of bile even if it's counter productive. Find what you're sure of and stick fast to it. Don't deny your negativity and jealousy, instead, ride them like beasts, feel their power and glory. It's not masochistic either, to hell with masochism. There is a transcendence in it, in accepting poverty, sickness, violence, all the negative emotions; there's a synthetic end, a conclusion, a get-out-clause, an escape which partakes of their violence and intensity. For every backward action there's an equal and opposite forward action. Drop self-consciousness except where it seems apt.

I'm restless and i can't settle down to anything.. I think i want to experience life, and love. Other men's visions appear to me stale and flat, uninteresting. I like pictures, not the printed word.
I like the spoken word and the unvarnished truth. I love to counterpose myself against false statements, shallow words. Things seen falsely and shallowly, to empty myself of pretense and, finding something still within me, to cast it out into the void, shattering the fragile cage of social interaction, or disregarding it, not holding it or anything as sacred, not chained to anything...
I don't like films or fictions. But i like comics, sequential pictures, they seem to me honest and useful fictions, especially the better Japanese ones. It's a different way of seeing; though reading right to left fills me with uneasiness.
I start a book but never get far in, a conventional western book i mean. I think i haven't read properly; indeed i never read anything properly. I forgot how to read years ago. All you can do is write your own truth, but you can never read. I get no pleasure from it, except an arcane, perverse, bitter joy at inflicting myself, my nihilism, on others. I want them to know that i am alive. But i can't write stories anymore. Still, what is emerging from me, from my core, is unique.

Group conformity encouraged by the reward of acceptance...
Impersonal state control enforced through personal acceptance, because to dissent it to become socially undesirable.
In this way, the needs and desires of the individual, natural or not, can at every stage be used against him, to persuade him to perform certain activities...
The difficulty comes when the individual loses faith in the rewards held out to him. Loss of faith in commonly-accepted values brings with it a breakdown in conformity.
Thus is born in the individual a desperate desire for personal autonomy, unconnected and free from regulation, a drive for liberty.

With organisation of the masses comes regulation of the individual... Individual coerced into certain behaviours by collective force, he has all kinds of expectations, prejudices, and values, infecting the deepest substrata of his thought, that are not his naturally but are the suggestions of society. Society's expectations form an unbreakable hegemony, perhaps the hardest force in the world to resist. Values, ethics, morals, it seems their function is to obscure inequalities, to conceal unfairness.
Social organisation on a large scale entails coercion for the individual. There is something brutal about the idea of a nation state, something sinister about the notion of work as productivity, and that a permanent state.
The organisation and functioning of a given society, regardless of the political model it follows, must always entail a degree of force. Isn't majority rule a sort of violence against the individual?

Imagination as sleep. "Distracting me from my writing would be like rousing the dead from their sleep." Kafka. (paraphrase).
Writing for oneself: "The best things one writes are for oneself." Ginsberg.
The imagination sleeps and veritably dreams in the act of writing itself, which functions as a trance. Thereby the imagination casts itself upon an ocean of words, and may truly plumb the depths. I meditated on stillness and slumber, i let my story be a resting place for the imagination.
Therefore no more writing for others, to be popular, for friends, for a marketplace, to seem clever. When you begin to think, what if my friend, sister, hero reads this, you become self-conscious. The imagination is stymied and no depths are plumbed at all. My story becomes, once again, a resting place for the imagination, where it may wander and play at will.
Tools of the writer: pen n paper.
Hazards of the writer: excruciating loneliness, paralyzing isolation. Meaningless scribbles of the biro in the lonely room.
Personal faults: procrastination, never finishing anything, lack of faith. No productivity.
Why? Because to produce becomes sickening.