words are images

A robin has started coming every day now, territorial and protective. Legs like varnished twine. I would like to live in a hedgerow. Words are images. Something is breaking in the way we perceive the world. Some kind of syncretism/collapse is here already, but the dissociative dimension is too strong. Everything is like a carnival that won’t end. Nobody wants to be at a festival forever; even the most ecstatic person occasionally yearns for rest. Everything we realise too late, as ever. What is ending, exactly?

All these recordings and no time to listen to them. We created the world as a giant archive. A whole planet resembling the Pioneer plaque without (yet) an audience to see or hear. If aliens didn’t exist we would have to invent them. Perhaps we already did.

Human history is the history of sacrifice. The transition from direct sacrifice to symbolic sacrifice, and from voracious gods to a loving God, is the most beautiful attempt at a solution to the problem. In the forgetting or murdering of God we recreate earlier cultic practices all the while imagining our superiority to worshipful peasants. Each new technology demands new blood: time, fertility, youth, life, nature. Man must labour, man must act, if only, in the first place to stay alive.

The temporary nature of all things. Eternity is more on the side of peace than action, or at least one hopes so, and hope has an uncanny habit of returning. Can one practise hope the same way one tries out patience and the other outward virtues? It is imperative to be grateful. I am so glad I can still walk. I am so happy the sun is here sometimes. That shade of green. The baptism was beautiful. Christ died for our sins. That is a lot of death for a lot of sin. It never ends, except when it does.

And it was words that got us here and the alphabet shot through with zero and aleph null. And the beauty that is uneven is giving way to a symmetry that will end us, and it was always going to be impossible to hold open that which couldn’t be named because might is mightier than what is not mighty and every nothing has its day. And we all betray one another whether we mean to or not, and our intention might live on in a cloud of ends, or they might not. Even the as if gets codified because everything does. Betrayal is beautiful says Genet.

There was a time and there was a place, and now there is no time and every place, or some time and a little place, and everyone has felt a version of this at every moment. And we do not choose our abstractions, they choose us, and sometimes we take to them and sometimes we do not, and some abstractions lead us to the garden and others to the flames.