Letters are like money
Lubricant
Hear me out! Life, but without reading. We already are in a virtual world. From the moment we learn how to read we are plugged in. I hear kids that learn to read later are better off. Why not NEVER learn? Make illiteracy great again! After all, it is just transporting us in the respective caves. Letters are the shadows. We are swimming in it. The now suppressed senses and instincts are the way out. Letters can deceive senses and they often do. That’s how we got the simulacra, that’s what the simulation is built on.
The Abstraction
Money is evil to the degree that it reduces complex reality to an abstraction. […] the entity is older than Christianity, as old as the written word. - Octopusyarn
The written word, you say? It reduces complex reality to an abstraction just the same. As old as money. Coincidence?
For the embodied, words and symbols point to things in the world. For the disembodied, words and symbols constitute the world. - Dmitry
The latter would be better off without them, the first would be just fine either way. The latter are collectively the ones that Jason Donovan sings to, keeps them hanging on a thread, gaslighting them, promising His return in September, sealed with a kiss. In a letter! Don’t trust Jason. And his written word.
The Omnipresence
Every once in a while someone in my feed swears to leave the feed never to return. Sometimes it’s about “the other, bad” feed. Not this intellectual one. Ultimately they’re all the same. Behind the videos and images and audio there’s writing. Always the writing. “Touch grass” speaks of this. But that’s vague. Abstract. As all the letter material.
Letters are raping our mind each time the literate eyes see any text. Try living in an urban environment and not read anything. It’s easier to dodge a podcast or a video than a text thrown in front of your eyes. That’s short form text, and then it’s the long form. Books. Please babe, don’t pick on books! Well, the cat’s out of the bag anyway. The books were the trojan horse. Look how great it is. Information for everybody. It kind of spun out of control. My books are better than yours, X speaks of this, Y speaks of that, letters fomented the battle of ideas. Dragged it all into the abstract. Under the guise of no more blood spilled, the ink spilled instead somehow leads to even more blood. Oops.
The Window
Picture a window painted on a wall. It needs the mind to interpret it and the mind might well consider it’s a real window. Now we have screens instead of paintings of windows. Actually screens with Windows. The senses are lounging bombarded while the mind is gone on a wild goose chase to put it all together. Many windows — many tabs. Some might be connected to a webcam outside. Most are not. It’s like the panopticon metaphor but reversed. We are not just inside the cells. We are each monitoring our own personal panopticon. Many windows just copy others. Since not only the priests are the ones writing anymore, everyone paints windows and Babel ensues. Beautiful and intelligent and verbose people paint the fancier windows. Maybe that’s why “the answer is inside you”. In that it’s not in other’s windows, Romeo.
The Extraction
Yes! It's gonna be a cold
Lonely summer
But I'll fill the emptiness
I'll send you all my dreams
Every day in a letter
Sealed with a kiss
Another thing I will not elaborate on:
∴ She who writes, binds. - 🖤418 ∎
Many of us enter this gun fight of word wizards armed only with our trusty butter knife. There should be a reading hygiene. Don’t eat the yellow snow, at least.
This here is my window and each time I write in it I feel it sucks life that otherwise would be lived in some other way. And I like that. I don’t like that I like it. But it’s better than reading someone other’s sucked life. I have some guilty pleasures, of course. Some people’s sucked essence is delicious. I treat it like dessert. One way to visualize it is the way things worked in Monsters Inc. Suck letters, use them to suck attention, use it to to fuel system. I tend to prefer being sucked of letters than just of attention, but I guess it’s ideal not to be sucked at all. I kinda feel bad for the select few that I help being sucked of attention. It’s all for a good cause! Thank you. The aim is to have no readers, clean conscience.
The Fog
Knowledge is not power anymore. It’s fog. With no available true initiation, knowledge does not transmute libido, it neutralizes it. The paralyzing effect of the black pill. We have a saying here: “you’re as lost as the donkey in the fog”
It’s the domain of the red guna. Rajas. The psycho of the gunas. Keeping things horizontal, endlessly distributing attention on its plane, never looking up.
Men yearn for an initiation, searching for a guide to take their hand and pull them upwards. A shortcut actually. There is none. Only shadows. Reading and listening is the opposite of initiation. It’s faking preparation, postponing action, indulging in input. Vessels overflowing. Most of us don’t have the discernment. Safer to treat it all as entertainment despite its apparent seriousness. Not substantially different than watching a TV series. Best case scenario you don’t watch/listen/read it at all. Do you really think the guy you stumbled upon in a book or online is the one to take your hand and show you the way? You should be so lucky. All the others are stumbling in the dark while you struck gold in an ocean of garbage. Just as we ALL are peasants around here as no nobles are wasting time with this shit, we are also space monkey material. We get to pick and choose our personal Tyler Durden. Rhymes with “burden”. Coincidence??
The Abduction
An exercise in skizo. Take a moment and see it for what it is. Strange people from strange lands put things in your head outcompeting the boring things your senses get to feel locally. Bypassing your gut instincts with the sweet mind-candy.
Imagine the faces of all the guys and girls one reads and listens to as the alien faces one sees when laying down on the operation table in that cliché image of an alien abduction. Feeling safe with them around? Or imagine all of them huddled wormtongueing into your ears. The letters brought you here. The letters are the transporter beam.
Some are viewing it as enlightenment. It might well be harvesting. Of engagement, attention, emotions, focus.
Why do I even have to know who Tupac is? The sad part is I can’t unsee and unhear any of it. An infected reality.
The Alternative
I realize it sounds like the 232.78°Celsius book. We’re already half there with all the digital media going around just like their “parlor walls”. My “dystopia U-turning into utopia” vision is a long shot. It would be effective only as a final boss level, only after defeating the parlor walls. So it is not for beginners. If this is your first night, you have to fight your Instagram. Or your TV. Or something. We are deep in it. Trying to climb out of the hole “The Word” dug one level at a time.
Imagine only getting knowledge organically peer to peer. Slow food, but for info. Locally sourced. The close relatives become relevant again, plus travelling and exchanging views would really make a difference.
It might not be as “all encompassing” as what we live in currently, but it would not be as puzzling either. I suspect people would be more attuned to their environment, and also to their inner compass. Totally different world. We wouldn’t have this “skimming through tons of info at all times” lifestyle.
The process we are living through is irreversible. Only a Butlerian Jihad will do the job. One that goes beyond the one in Dune. Go after the letters too, not just after the robots. Finish the job.
Isn’t this the “back to Eden” trope, you ask? A second try at dodging the tree of knowledge bullet? No. It’s not the knowledge we would hopefully dodge, it's the distraction.
The upside can be more dancing around a fire, Enirmaxxing, more everything that’s not the written word. Sense and gut instincts. Each of us will have just a tiny sliver of “expertise”. I’ll be looking for the one of you who will have memorized my Substack. I might need to be reminded of this one here, if I will eventually get drawn towards new letters.
Ditch the letters. Meet your instincts!
P.S. Memo for future me: If letters still creep back into your mind, at least “do not talk about fight club”. That’s a good rule. Don’t give unsolicited advice, don’t proselytize, just don’t. Even if solicited, think twice before spitting anything out. Not because people are not ready or any other form of a superiority complex, abstain from it just because it’s not you radiating any of it, even if it feels like that. You’re just passing it on. Acting as a “fast food for thought delivery boy”. With all the disadvantages of being on the front line. Picture yourself carrying that big branded cube. Chances are what’s in your backpack it’s not yours to give away.
The sheer amount of references, be it cultural or slop, in all of the above proves my contamination is well underway. Not even my letters are to be trusted. I think of them as the sticky trace of goo a snail leaves as it slowly creeps.
P.S.2. [cue upbeat electronic music] I use letters in Coliere V2 as reverse engineered hieroglyphics. I needed pairs of symbols. And letters are good enough. Don’t mind any other meaning they could have. It’s just as simple as the letter “I” would naturally fit inside the “U”. The “X” is radiating while the “V” is receiving. The “S” can climb up “┴”, “O” is the simple one, “H” is the complex, upside down “Y” is fitting snuggly inside a “Δ”. It’s going back, taking a different route maybe. Just as the letter “A” started from some scribble of a bull’s head or something by going more an more abstract, I’m going the other way round.
Putting back the abs in abstract. Or the act. Whatever. It’s just letters.
Even those who attach themselves to the current utopia promise are in their way yearning for initiation. They just look for it on Netflix or on the news or in self help or even in philosophy books. In one word, horizontally.
The aim is to have no readers, clean conscience.
To me this is a metaphor how dissolution started during current cycle.
When nobility wanted to be liked and have a lot of “readers”, they intentionally wanted to get closer to “the people”. Maybe it was lonely up there.
In order for a system to work properly, reading can be allowed only among the equals, while influence to inferior elements has to be in much more subtle ways.
Evola used analogy of the magnet which reorients various particles in an indirect way. He also mentions the danger of that which is appropriate only to a few, so it is not only that when these “elite” things start to be read, they get diluted, but also that they affect those who should not be affected by it.
E.g. involving peasants and workers in war maybe was a “noble” idea, but it both contributed to the dissolution of war and anti-war tendencies including war against war, crusade of democracy, etc.