Category Archives: Works

Craft as conversation

Design, Enworldment

To be alive to craft is to converse well with materials. Good conversation is reciprocal exchange — give and take, hearing and responding — within an event of emergent meaning.

Hans-Georg Gadamer said that in the best games, players are participants through whom the game plays itself, and, similarly,  in the best conversations, the conversation has itself through its interlocutors.

In craft, artisan and artifact, speaking a common language of materials — physical or otherwise — participate in the emergence of form.

This is your civilization on drugs. Any questions?

Enworldment, History

Postmodernism is civilization on acid.

Those bale-wire concepts that held everything together are snipped, and the whole is flying apart into mad coils of notional chaos. This wild profusion can eventually be gathered back up, after the unbound ideas release their spring energy in expansion and diffusion. 

Ontological veils

Enworldment, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

The sefirotic garments are ontological veils. Physical veils selectively admit and deflect light, ontological veils selectively admit and deflect realities. Where a physical veil deflects light, light dims. Where an ontological veil deflects realities, those realities remain ungiven, withheld in oblivion. There is dimming, but not a darkening dimming. It is an oblivious dimming.

Blindness is not darkness. Conflation of blindness and darkness makes misleading metaphors.

Darkness conceals visibly.

Scotoma unreveals invisibly. When nothing is present, nothing is absent.

According to Etymonline, reveal / revelation comes from

revelen, “disclose, divulge, make known (supernaturally or by divine agency, as religious truth),” from Old French reveler “reveal” (14c.), from Latin revelare “reveal, uncover, disclose,” literally “unveil,” from re- “back, again,” here probably indicating “opposite of” or transition to an opposite state + velare “to cover, veil,” from velum “a veil”.

If we imagine revelation as lifting of the veil of oblivion, revelation designates an extreme of being shocked by the inconceivable — or as we say with accidental poetic precision, blindsided by something totally unexpected — then revelation loses its divine intervention overtones and becomes something at once more mundane, but also much stranger.

My first experience of radical shock, a revelation that required me to rethink everything, left me utterly underwhelmed with “supernatural” miracles. They seemed unimaginative — just suspending this or that natural law — slightly snagging the fabric of nature with mysterious arbitrariness, but leaving it more or less intact.

The revelation I received forced me to reweave nature on a vast new loom. I wasn’t even aware of the old loom, or that my old nature was woven upon a supernature.

In the domain of blindness, ocular migraines are instructive.

Designerly metaphysics

Design, Enworldment, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Before any beginning is infinitude.

Pure infinitude. Ein sof.

Before the beginning, the infinite articulates itself. Finitude is articulated within infinite ground, inseparable from it, like a ripple in water. Articulate finitude in infinite luminous ground. Atzilut.

At the beginning, inside the threshold of finitude, articulate infinitude defines finitude within itself, enclosing it as being, within its infinite ground, still luminous.

Finitude, inception of being. Beriah.

Within history, being articulates into beings, each a finite everything, each defining itself against what it is not, each bounding its own finite portion of infinitude within itself. The infinite ground pervades each being, but infinitude is paradoxically excluded, cloaked in nihilitude, oblivion.

For some beings, the infinite ground still glows brightly or dimly behind the oblivious cloak, numinous nothingness, alive with paradox, irony. For other beings, everything is all that there is.

From within finitude, piercing of the cloak is ex nihilo. From without, this is creation, revelation, instauration ex infinitum.

Each being bears within itself an ideal order, a schema of forms, a repertoire of possibilities and impossibilities within itself, what can and cannot be received, what ought and ought not be. This is enception: capacity to receive, to perceive, to conceive. Conversely, and just as importantly, incapacities — rejection, filtration, the maintenance of finitude-preserving oblivion.

Beings suspended in paradoxical oblivion, the ground of actuality. Yetzirah.

Each being actualizes, lives, articulates itself, defines finite beings within its being, beings actualized in myriad ways, acting upon the material ground, which is — surprise! — vestigial inarticulate infinitude, that common ground of beings, that which each being is not, but which is given.

Each being brings its own finite order to materials, its own articulations, its own capacities and abilities, its own objectivity. Each being enworlds what is given.

In the act of enworldment, materials may be persuaded to cooperate, but often they resist, and sometimes they revolt, sometimes the being breaks and must reform. Through the commonality of material, beings encounter one another, and through materials, cooperate, resist, revolt, conflict, win, lose or break.

The infinitude meets infinite in Assiyah.

The capillaries of the divine light saturate the tissues of chaos. This saturation materially forms, combines, shapes, ensouls, and sets the world in motion — literally animates it — like trees climbing themselves from the soil to meet the sun.

The light saturates the common world with meaning before returning the spent light to its source.

And for us, enmeshed in life, this spent light returning to its source, this is reflection on life, on being, on the source of being. Metaphysics is the rising smoke of spent light, piercing the roof of being, seeking its source. In its plumes can be seen rays of incoming light, and here we are told the story of Creation the only way we know it, in reverse.

Notes on design esoterism

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Esoterism, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Ontopologically, Beriah sur-prises what Yetzirah variously com-prises as objective content in Assiyah.

Neither Beriah nor Yetzirah is something that can be comprehended.

Yetzirah comprehends by one of myriad formational, enworlding principles. Yetzirah is not itself comprehensible, for the reason that sight cannot be seen.

Beriah comprehends (envelops) comprehension through observation of difference among enworldments, even differences across recollections of observations. Beriyah is even less comprehensible than Yetzirah, for (to make an anomalogy) Beriah is transcendent sensus communis among all possible Yetziratic enworldments, against and within the limitless Oneness of Atzilut.

And every Yetziratic enworldment is some particular social sensus communis regarding the human lifeworld.

And the human lifeworld is Assiyah — the perceptual sensus communis of human perception.

To understand all this inside-out and outside-in, backwards and forwards, to-to-bottom and bottom-to-top, and to know it by heart, soul and body, and therefore internalize and, more importantly, spontaneously externalize its pragmatic consequences, is to “suprehend” what transcends, yet grounds, comprehension.

(Suprehension is the whatless therefore of pregnant oblivion.)

Concepts concerning Beriah are not a conceptual grasp of Beriah, but derviations across differences. Another anomalogy: Light emanated within Atzilut is transmitted by Beriah, refracted through Yetzirah, then reflected upon Assiyah — and only upon reflection can a truth be grasped, indirectly.

Design esoterism seeks to dissolve the Axial regime and its domain divisions, in order to resanctify what has been secularized. Religion is disinvented, exvented. Methods are ritual. Tools are ritual objects. Organizations summon responsible collective beings.

Esoterism wants to materialize.

Lord, truly we have come to the end of this kind of vision of heaven.

Exnihilism is at the heart of it.

New ex nihilo irruptions from Beriah are preceded by intense apprehension. We let go or lose grip on our Yetziratic social sensus communis and ascend into aporia, where, on all important matters, our intuitive reach exceeds our cognitive grasp. But this loss “opens the hand of thought” so new forms can alight on our open palms — a new as-yet-solitary social sensus communis.

Dreamt awakening

Anthropology, Enworldment, Philosophy

Identities are the result of participation in particular forms of social life. We participate in social being, and this gives us some portion of reality as a world.

Identities enworld us, with others who also belong to the identity. They are our co-inhabitants of our enworldment, and we identify with them.

We notice our own identity most starkly in encounters with those of other identities. We sense a difference that is as important as it is hard to describe. They sense that they inhabit some other world where things are experienced and talked about and judged very differently. We categorize them, first, as different from us. As we encounter multiple forms of difference, we categorized and name categories, not only those of others, but our own.

Here is where things get tricky. While identities can be categorized, and categorizing identities can be helpful for recognizing our identity as an identity, not naively as some privileged true world — identities are not categorizations.

We do not belong to an identity simply by categorizing ourselves or being categorized by others.

And identities exist independently from categorization. We may participate in a social being without even being aware of it. And sometimes this unawareness of identity represents a naivety toward the role social being plays in how reality is given to us. Failure to recognize participatory identity results in naive realism.

Now, imagine a scenario. Imagine a social group whose members fully succumb to a category mistake that conflates identity with categorization. And imagine that participation in this social being consists of doing precisely this “identification” both of oneself and others, so that real identity — identitarian participation — recedes into the background, while identity categories are thrust into the foreground. And that background identity, the actual identity of this group devolves into a thoroughgoing naive realism… of having transcended precisely what that to which they have succumbed: a dreamt awakening.

Hermeneut lifecycle

Existentialism, Geometric Meditations, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Wheel

For a decade I have struggled with an enduring aporia, a question concerning enception. (An enception is a capacity to receive a given of some particular form.) My question concerns whole versus part, but even just saying it this way gives me the missing answer.

At various times I have talked about enceptions in terms of a holistic ordering principle among capacities (or faculties) and at others as the capacities (or faculties) themselves to be ordered.

When approaching enception part-to-whole we emphasize enceptions as multiple capacities of reception of givens — a capacity to -ceive / take in a reality of some particular form, whether through perception, conception or intuition. Without enception for a particular form, that form remains submerged in oblivion. With the enception the form can be taken as a given — a perceived given reality or conceived given truth.

Enceptions operate at every scale. The perceptions of our five senses are taken-together (con-ceived) gives us sensus communis (perceptual common sense of what is real). And our social participation mediated by language gives us another common sense of shared understanding of the world with others of our community. Communities collaboratively build varying enceptive systems of understanding, each with its distinctive knowledge and practices.

This scaling brings us to the other use of enception, the whole-to-part approach. Here an enception which is a principle of holistic ordering, which crystallizes or harmonizes multiple capacities/faculties into a stable and self-reinforcing subjective system with its own ontology and objectivity. According to this view, the enception is not so much a function of parts, but of the stability of some ultimate, ordering enception. By this view, with a change in ultimate enception, givens can both irrupt into givenness or vanish back into oblivion. This seems true.

How I managed to not see this all along is beyond me: The hermeneutic circle is also the hermeneut lifecycle.

I knew this.

West and autumn and evening:
Establishing,
Perfecting,
Immortalizing.
North and winter and night:
Questioning,
Breaking,
Liberating.
East and spring and morning:
Playing,
Experimenting,
Discovering.
South and summer and day:
Believing,
Committing,
Conquering.

Beings cycle through phases,
each phase a relation of whole and part,
with its own mood and thrust.
In west and autumn and evening,
beings participate in the order.
In north and winter and night,
beings revolt against a world
unable to comprehend them.
In east and spring and morning,
beings wander freely,
groping for possibilities of relation.
In south and summer and day,
a movement emerges,
persuading and enlisting –
proceeding from the most yielding
to the most resistant.

Looping in on exnihilism

Everso, Exnihilism, Philosophy

To put it differently (but still topologically), what would be the opposite of a metaphysics of surprise? — its everse?

The everse of a metaphysics of surprise would be a metaphysics of comprise — a belief, explicit or implicit, in our own capacity to comprise the absolute in some ultimate theism, pantheism, theory or praxis. It is the root category mistake that reality, even truth, can be comprised — a comprehensible everything.

Divine surprise, the ex nihilo irruption of light — not from darkness but from blindness — from the oblivion-veiled infinite — annihilates the faithless faith of nihilism.

Now absence of evidence of impending meaning can never again be taken as evidence of its absence. The scotoma of hopelessness is its herald. Exnihilism.

Crossing design with Kabbalah

Design, Design Instrumentalism, Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Pluricentrism

I’m meditating on design-related expressions I have coined. These ideas orbit a central concern, which makes the difference between a project that is for me and one that is not.

  • Practical fantasy — The idea that our favorite tools project a world around us — a potential story-field — and within it, ourselves as protagonist. Within a practical fantasy tool use is an enworldment creating/sustaining ritual.
  • Precision inspiration — The intentional pursuit of epiphanic re-enworldment through design research. In precision inspiration a new possibility of enworldment is found through productive conflict among existing enworldments — those researched and those doing the research. What results opens radically new possibilities for designed artifacts and the enworldments they seed and project. A key point to precision inspiration is that it inevitably involves traversing the aporic liminal void between enworldments and suffering the dread intrinsic to such traversals.
  • Pluricentrism — I was calling this polycentrism, but I am now using polycentrism only to describe the emergent being of a dynamic interaction among multiple agential centers as viewed from the third-person perspective as a system. But each agent within a polycentric system still experiences and acts within the system from its own center, and this is what pluricentric means. A designer who seeks to cultivate a living polycentric system must consider it pluricentrically, so each center experiences particilation as worthwhile and chooses to participate in a way that makes the polycentric system flourish as a whole and for each and every participant. Any system approached from within from multiple points is approached pluricentrically. Service design is designed pluricentrically and engineered polycentrically.
  • Enworldment — This is the projection / crystallization of reality as given to a soul in some particular faith-state, which is a stable dynamic set of enceptive capacities. Think of enworldment as the consequence of lived faith — the pragmatic maxim concretely lived out.
  • Instaurationalism — This is the name for design reasoning — a reason that knows and practically accommodates the reality that reality exceeds truth, but that truth can expand its capacities if it follows reality beyond its current limits of comprehension. It is a half-joking but fully serious portmanteau of instauration (discover-creation) and rationalism.
  • Synetic design — This comes from the phenomenon of synesis — or understanding as togethering. A phenomenon is spontaneously taken as together (con- + -ceived) as a gestalt, together in common with other understanders, united by common understanding.
  • Bullshit-chickenshit. — This is the antithesis of practical fantasy. Bullshit is impracticable fantasy posing as an attainable possibility. Chickenshit is practice without any desirable, meaningful outcome. Most of what happens in corporations is “bullshit-coated chickenshit”. This is what is meant by the pejorative “corporate”.

Service design should, theoretically, be the greatest opportunity to do the kind of work at the heart of all these ideas.

Unfortunately, in practice, the kind of organization that needs and can afford service design is usually in crisis precisely because it misconceives its business in ways that make such work impossible. The aporic void is impassible because powerful people use power to suppress aporia and the anxiety it induces.

For the last couple of years, and especially the last year, I have been connecting these design concepts to Kabbalah.

Kabbalah gives them my design-informed ideas stability and coherence. Design experiences and the concepts and vocabulary I have developed to cope with the uncanny, unnerving and harrowing aspects of design (as well articulating the inspiring, ecstatic, fulfilling rewards of design success) provide me experience-nearness and concrete cases to substantiate otherwise abstract Kabbalistic ideas.

The enworded, enworlding artifacts are what are given in Assiyah.

The enworlding synesis happens in Yetzirah. Corporate bullshit and chickenshit happen in Yetzirah, too, when a feeble, dying Yetziratic collective (corporate) being lacks the courage to give up the ghost, and cranks out lifeless objectivity that nobody can care about or believe in. Precision inspiration is the sokution, but it is not for the faint of heart.

Polycentrism is the manifestation in Assiyah (third person) of pluricentric being (first person) in Yetzirah.

Precision inspiration transpires against the background of oblivion — from which inspiration irrupts ex nihilo in epiphanic moments of creative revelation or revelatory creativity, in other words, instauration. Radical design effects instauration ex nihilo.

The orbital center: Keter d’Beriah.

Haloed dread.

The faith in the pregnant oblivion, the everpossible miraculous birth, the heart of the exnihilist soul.

Continue reading Crossing design with Kabbalah →

Olamot

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Phenomenology, Philosophy

I understand the Olamot (the four worlds) topologically.

What is given in Assiyah, the world of formation is anything that can be perceived, conceived and contained within the grasp of comprehension. This includes objective abstractions and all content of imagination. All content is Assiyah.

What is given in Yetzirah is all acts of formation — perception, conception or comprehension. Whatever subject contains objective content — however it does the containing — is Yetzirah. Yetzirah is active concavity: capacity for forming.

What is given in Beriah is the ground of differing formations. Between containments, objectivities, ontologies — between revelations of radically different enworldments — is inconceivable nonworldment, which we experience as dreadful void — abyss — from which ex nihilo revelation and creation irrupt.

What is given in Atzilut is the infinitely meaning of the absolute One, whose light floods in through whatever accepts its place within it, whatever no longer envies it and has shed its apotheotic ambitions.

Kabbalah is the practice of receiving all that is given.

Assiyah is objective, and that includes not only material objectivity (Malchut d’Assiyah) but all intentional objects, every possible object of any possible subjective operation. Only Assiyah can be thought about objectively — that is, in terms of definable objects of thought.

Yetzirah is subjective, and that includes not only (or primarily!) personal subject but all scales of subjective formation. Yetzirah is always and essentially participatory, and that participation enworlds and forms within an enworldment. Yetzirah is participatory enworlding.

Beriyah is what is given through sheer absence between enworldments. It is the ground of all enworlding and the truth of that ground, the truth that every objective world is enworlded. At its highest is the truth that between enworldment and enworldment lies dreadful, inconceivable nothingness from which enworldment proceeds ex nihilo, that something entirely beyond enworldment (enworldments, subjects and objects) is the condition of enworldment. It is, for us, the ex nihilo from which all revelation irrupts, by which we intuit creation ex nihilo.

Atzilut is the mystery beyond and behind Beriyah that transmits itself through the three lower worlds and gives worlds life and purpose and infinitude of possibility within absolute One.

Hineini void

Judaism, Politics, Star

The irresponsible cannot be held responsible for anything but they are guilty of every neglected call to respond.

“Where are you?” . . . Nowhere, never, nobody.

Non-present.

“What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? — Seek zeros! –”

Quantlocked

Exnihilism, Kabbalah

Altruism without intuition of transcendence is sentimental idolatry.

An intuition of transcendence requires consciousness of being conceived, comprehended, enveloped, embraced by layer upon layer of interlapping, ever-magnifying magnanimity approaching one soul of infinite magnitude, at once both absolutely one and infinitely plural. Chokhmah and Binah proceed from the principle of immanence the possibility of One within an infinite absoluteness with nothing beside it to give number meaning.

Without two, one is meaningless. Lurianic Kabbalah solved the riddle of One without two, by positing a prenumeric duality of infinity and nothingness, which makes a miraculous duality out of nonquantity: Ztimtzum.

Poor, lucky humans! Thrown into a world peopled with numerable objects, we know nothing (literally) of the truer everted word from which we emerged — our omniscience everted to the purest ignorance!

So when we hear “infinity”, we cannot help but hear it as a quantity of limitless addition — more heaped upon more, across time, moment heaped upon moment. Infinity, however is a quality preceding quantity, which contains within itself one possibility, which for us, is our sole actuality: quantity.

And when we hear “nothing”, we cannot help but hear it as the absence of a quantity — zero. But nothingness is not an absence of something, it is only the divine innovation of relative absence of infinity — the possibility of finitude, manifested first as obliviousness. It is a patch of shade in infinite light in which all is pre-articulately infinite, and finitude is latent possibility. To understate this, almost-but-not-quite-infinitely (“myriadically”) it is as articulate a “thing” as a ripple across a spark of a flame in the heart of a zillion overlaid suns. (Indians have thousands of years head start on any of us, attempting to indicate qualitative infinity to finitely-bound human minds.)

With infinity and nothingness, we now have two. And from two the quantity one can be derived.

Qualitatively, we pre-count, Infinite, Void, Two, One, Zero and now the quantities one, two, three and onward to myriad (the indeterminately large, incorrectly called infinity by quantlocked minds), and backwards through negation, starting with zero, to negative one through negative myriad.

Zero is a shadow cast by a shadow. Zero is the shadow of nothingness, and nothingness is the shadow of infinity.

Our best access to nothingness is witnessing ex nihilo revelation, against which infinity is dimly intimated.

I was winding up to say something, but I cannot remember now…

…

Oh.

Altruism is the false transcendence of the quantlocked soul.

It knows something important is out there, but its faith can acknowledge only what its stubby mental fingers can grasp and cognize. We grab a garden by a berry, cram it in our pie hole, and strut around like little gods, like we created that garden by consuming it.

Its world is objects, comprising littler objects, composing larger ones. Itty-bitty subatomic objects heap up to make, vast, vast supergalactic objects.

Ah, sahib, it is objects all the way down and objects all the way up. Is the very tallest heap — taller even than the famous tower of Babel — is the megaultraobject named “God”. Do you believe or disbelieve in the megaultraobject? Such is the debate endlessly rehearsed by quantlocked theologians vs quantlocked atheists.

Ah sahib, until we learn to evert infinity and nothingness, and both together, and both apart, it is religious category mistakes all the way down and all the way up.

Altruism grasps Eden by the fruit and bestows upon it all kind of divine benevolence, without inhabiting the transcendent enveloping relationship that gives such benevolence meaning. The fig-leaf of moral vanity, the strutting about of “I am good, selfless person” gives it away. It is godless aping of divinity. Meaningless charade of ethic in vacuous ethos.

The only altruism that matter is magnanimity, the serving of ever greater scales of selfhoods, who are themselves ever greater scales of selfhoods, across whom is transmitted an unbearably bright trickle of divine light from the heart of Ein Sof.

This is my current intuition of Kabbalah — a spark of inspiration I have received as a gift via Am Yisrael, to whom every Westerner and anti-Westerner owes gratitude, whether or we acknowledge or refuse to acknowledge it.

And those who seek redemption from gratitude through murder — by cross, by sword, by theological contortion or atheological politicization — only compound their debt with criminality.

Rome’s murder — blamed on Jews, with despicable cowardice — was redemptive only in its own decaying collective imagination.

No convexity — whether statue, book, man, ghost or concept — is a permissible object of worship — by virtue of its form.

Topology of mystery

Everso, Exnihilism, Kabbalah, Metaphysics, Philosophy

Metaphor: A human mind has both armspan and handspan. The armspan embraces reality itself in an all-embracing, enworlding faith. Within this faith, a handspan grips givens in an ontology and corresponding objectivity of objective truths.

Absolute truth is, with respect to human minds, concave. It is the truth surrounding and surprising the total comprehension of every enworlding faith and all perceptually, conceptual, comprehensible givens within it.

We sense this concavity most at the limits of objectivity, where the reach of mind exceeds its grasp, where comprehension fails. Apprehensive intuitions of incomprehensible givens mark the boundary.

But this concavity also permeates the comprehensible. In truth, it is the very essence of comprehension, and it is this concavity which molds the convexity of each given within whatever objectivity a particular ontology embraces in understanding.

The human mind knows objective truth, not because reality is objective, but because our minds are objective, and when we try to know, we grasp mental objects by their defined outer edges.

The objective mind embraces and grasps. We comprehend only the convex givens our mind can comprise and hold together in its all-embracing, all-gripping mind. Whatever embraces and grasps the mind itself is by nature and structure, incomprehensible.

And when we try and fail to comprehend some comprehensive given beyond the enworlding arm-span, we encounter mystery.

The theological category mistake treats subject as existent object. It cannot help but misconceive mystery as heavenly objects hidden behind a veil. It projects object where the given is not object-form.

Psychology carries theistic category mistakes into atheism, attempting to sate the human need for mystery, without fulfilling it. Psychology misconceives mystery as unconscious ideas submerged beneath the surface of consciousness. But there is no object “there”.

Mystery needs a new topology. Mystery is what we experience when we try to comprehend as convexity what comprehends us within a transcendent concavity.

Mystery hides itself in plain sight, in seeing, and intimates its presence inaudibly, in the silence of hearing. Mystery conceals itself in the pervasive oblivion of ex nihilo creation-revelation, fermenting, sparkling everywhere all at once, always, to all, in perpetual irruptions of minute epiphanies.

Positive metaphysics is objective projection into the incomprehensible comprehending everse of objectivity. Negative metaphysics is awareness of the futility of comprehending the comprehending incomprehensible.

Mystery can be suprehended through everted objectivity — through subjectivity properly understood.

In the light of subjectivity properly understood, personal subject and an academic subject are subjects in the same sense of the word.

On decadence

Autobiography, Philosophy, Politics, Star

Decadence, etymologically, means state of decay. To decay, to decompose, degenerate, deteriorate, disintegrate.

The overtone in decadence is the dis-integration of subject. And subject is multiscalar.

A person, a family, a community, a nation, an international class or an international order can break down.

One faction is alienated from another, and stops associating or is set against another in conflict.

In an individual, individuum is lost, and becomes multiple individual factions inhabiting a socio-biological dividuum. Each faction does what is pleases in disregard of the others. One faction wants to be healthy and disciplined, but another faction sees a slice of chocolate cake and devours it, health be damned.

A decadent organization, large or small, shatters into mutually alienated and hostile factions that no longer care about the organization as a whole.

A subjective being is decadent when it loses its integrity — its intersubjective integration — and disintegrates into intersubjective anarchy. A We or an I is divided against itself — and often cannot stand other aspects of itself. Self-loathing, other-loathing, convulsive inter-factional alienation and conflict prevail.

A place is decadent when it loses its habitational integrity — its spatial coherence — and is chopped up into dissociated spaces. (Christopher Alexander dedicated his life to repairing places.)

Time is decadent when it is fractured into dissociated instances. Attention is on one thing for a few seconds and then another thing. Momentum is arrested in stop-start motions. Each start lurches in a different direction, in a this-that trajectory. This meeting, then that meeting. This TikTok video, then that video. This topic, then that topic. This election cycle, then that one. This great event, then that one. This mass hysteria, then that hysteria.

There is no evolving flow or development of being through time, across places. Things fall apart. Mere anarch is loosed upon the world, and all that.

There is no time or attention for a long train of thought in a decadent world.

Everything is interrupted mid-thought, mid-sentence.

Only bite-sized bits of information will be eaten. Anything bigger than a bon-bon is too much to chew and bypassed as bad communication.

Only tactic-sized strategies may be followed. The longest long-game is to decide the next move before the problem evaporates into obliviousness.

Perspective is impossible, because each eye spasms toward what is shiniest. Cubist double-vision induces double-think dysunderstandings. A person wants perfect equity and unfettered freedom under theofascist-marxist totalitarian rule… as long as whoever made you feel like something the cat dragged in feels even worse.

A conversation of interrupted sentences is interpersonal decadence.

I am interrupted and interrupted and interrupted by people who increasingly need to not understand the truth.

An insincere exhortation

Ethics, Everso, Philosophy

This is easier to say than to believe, so please allow me to say something true — from the head and not yet from the heart true — with aspirational sincerity:

We should stop exalting individual genius. The epoch of this ideal ended years ago.

The future belongs to a capacity to participate in transcendent supraindividual genius — to consciously play a part in conceiving something inconceivable to any solitary person, and to feel fitting gratitude for all gifts exchanged to bring the possibility to actualization.

Around a seminal spirit is a wombinal soul.

Gratitude is owed, but gratitude will not be collected until it is freely given.