The real class system is a heirarchy of transmission

Culture is that in which stories incubate, grow, live out their story lives.   There’s no other kind of culture.  Psychically, socially  — our lives are an environment, no more “alive” than atmosphere or noosphere.  What live in truth, in the way we believe ourselves to live, are the beings that act and breath in us — not what we call gods, but what we call stories.  To understand it, is like reimagining ecosystems as beings.   I can’t totally explain it yet. These things they live forever, in many cycles, while we deplete and replenish our flesh, language, and media.  There are those in whom great stories culminate — in great seizures of fame, crime, birth. . . .  Those people are the most “nutritious” made of the softest most fertile stuff, to receive the spirit, and keep it feeding.  Most of us are rank clay: home to the same story of birth, hardship, vanity, and death.

Who would you rather kill, JFK or Laura Palmer?

Even Agent Cooper wants the Torah, that November day in Dallas, impossible to solve, easy to understand.  It’s easy for the police because they look at the newspaper longer.   Coincidences conspire toward the infinite.  The author’s name: the letter D is used four times: the reader.  After hundreds of metaphors  try to become stairs and mirrors, readers from other nations build in the temple of the article.  They add their own centuries, the temple of every possible mathematical operation, bullet wounds in the body. 

 Three!, says a coroner with the confidence of a first grader whose grandmother (who thinks the child’s a genius) holds up three fingers.  No one can even agree on the temperature at the time.  He is the president, facts accrue until they fall into mysticism.  Nobody knows who killed JFK, implicating millions.    

 So that’s the nature of the impossibility of reality, that woman of regal proportions in fur, bejeweled by a grand stair and a chandelier, made up to look thirty-two, but near, is fifty-some, the fox in the light, fake.  Wait - the fox, dead, is real.

Wicked quiddity

Liquidity.  Over a year ago, I noticed a waxy residue, sticky as pitch, glazing my sagging, browning fern.  Turns out the culprits are scale insects: tiny bodiless (or headless) parasites which siphon sap with a nightmarish, toothed/hooked protrusion.  Their discrete individualities are undeserving of the plural: they’re really one colony, making my job as exterminator as difficult as that of a social reformer: there’s no heart at which to strike, no regular pulse to monitor.  It’s infested my fern and broken my will.  I was told scales are pesky, but nothing I do eradicates them.  I know deep in my heart of hearts there is a substance that would decimate the scales and leave the plant unharmed.  I think there’s such a substance for everything.  Looking at my fern, still dwindling after so many amputations, and imagining the hideous non-existent faces of the ovular bugs, slurping down the plant’s life-force, I conceptualize the quiddity of a thing as that which is undone by that substance, the substance which kills it instantly and otherwise doesn’t nick a fly.  Hence, the essence: uniquely destructible yikes.

Criminal Heroes

Criminals are heroes: they keep the cops off our backs.  Were it not for gangsters, thieves, and the like keeping the law busy, there’d be a pair of beady eyes staring in my bedroom window right now.  Every society needs a criminal buffer between the people and the power: an atmosphere of criminality, an ozone layer of criminality.