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September collective re-assessment directives 11.17 through 14.04, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (2028)
This originating document was published in Paris five years ago, on the eve of the second plebiscite. Last week, in preparation for the first rentrée littéraire of the new administration—and just before he was freely and peacefully passed—the author made substantial revisions. The additions, which took the form of marginal notes and footnotes, have now been incorporated in their proper places in the permatext, and are enclosed in brackets. The full transcript was second-level CRAD certified on 27 August 2028. The positions expressed are therefore judged adequately consistent with those of the individual collective. Any deviations are coincidental and immaterial.—Ed.
1.
I travel in worlds you can’t even imagine! You can’t conceive of what I’m capable of! I’m so far beyond you! I’m like a god in human clothing! Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips! —Saul Goodman, “JMM”, Better Call Saul, 30 March 2020
It is not yet September. As I write, self-piloting machines designed by machines designed by highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, tracking my movements, transmitting my data, and—should these ghostly, ghastly efforts to know and contain me fail—trying to kill me.
I know that the men [and women!—“old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist” (Orwell)] responsible for their creation accuse me of hubris and ignorance, and, I am certain, of madness. No matter. Anybody who can read clickbait knows that we are in deadly danger.
[Orwell again: “An army of unemployed led by millionaires quoting the Sermon on the Mount—that is our danger.” ]
No matter. The desire for change may be, as our keepers so often state, “borderline” and “out of fashion”, but this will not stop me from seeking to see this tragic situation for what it is—free of divine intervention, free of human treachery, unfiltered by vanity, unthrottled and unamplified by technology—by means of the last remaining arrow in the quiver, a fresh pair of human eyes.
[Shakespeare: “Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.” ]
In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
--W.H. Auden, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats", 1940[Auden once wrote: “History to the defeated / May say alas but cannot help nor pardon.” Later, after the Moscow trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the Spanish Civil War, he disowned the poem: “To say this is to equate goodness with success. It would have been bad enough if I had ever held this wicked doctrine, but that I should have stated it simply because it sounded to me rhetorically effective is quite inexcusable. In art as in life, bad manners, not to be confused with a deliberate intention to cause offense, are the consequences of an over-concern with one’s own ego and a lack of consideration for (and knowledge of) others. Readers, like friends, must not be shouted at or treated with brash familiarity. Youth may be forgiven when it is brash or noisy, but this does not mean brashness and noise are virtues.”]
2.
Are the tech billionaires mere bandits, beating us down by blacklists, bribery and de-boosting algorithms? Hitler said once that to accept defeat destroys the soul. The connection between my thoughts, my acts and my destiny are still impossible to establish. God has left the stage. He is in the box next to mine [, next to a woman in a fur coat and pearls who has yet to look at the stage]—just another passive observer, present, but at the same time remote and reticent and uninvolved. The words recited by the players are not his. The chorus is quiet.
Phèdre is the pale, skinny woman sitting by herself in the shade, hiding from the sun, waiting for me to stop writing so she can get up from her chair, face us, smooth the creases in her skirt, and begin to explain her actions, which she in fact does not understand. She is tired, and anxious, and driven by forces beyond her comprehension. Some of her destiny could of course be her fault [she has “lost control” of her passions], and some of it is just bad luck, but most of it is inherited, determined by the actions of her ancestors, generations upon generations of ghosts. For she is descended from Helios, the sun’s god. Her father was Minos, the king of Crete and judge of the dead. Her mother was the witch Pasiphaë, who, cursed by Aphrodite, fell in love with the fairest bull born in its herd, coupled with it and gave birth to Phèdre’s half-brother, the monstrous Minotaur, who, having suckled on the milk of his mother until her breasts were dry, was forced by the king into a labyrinth under the royal palace. There, it ate only human flesh and every year [every seven or nine years] was fed seven young men and seven young maidens from different kingdoms in Greece. When it was Athens’ turn, the victims were drawn by lots [except Theseus, who volunteered]. They entered the labyrinth unarmed. No one saw them again. Only Theseus survived, because of the love of Ariadne, Phèdre’s sister, who fell for him at first sight and gave him a sword to slay the minotaur and a ball of thread to retrace his way out of the labyrinth.
[“Would you believe it?” Theseus is said to have told Ariadne, just before he abandoned her to Dionysius on a beach. “The Minotaur barely defended himself.”]
Phèdre then, the daughter of the sun and the king of hell, the offspring of life and death. She has a sense of what’s coming, how she will destroy herself and what she loves, but she is blind as to why, and powerless to do anything about it. She is not in her right mind, as they say. [How could she be?]
Minos and Pasiphaë and all the demigods and demons are offstage, where most of the important action takes place. At the table, playing cards, are Hippolyte, Phèdre’s handsome stepson, and Aricia, the beautiful princess of the royal blood. Across from Phèdre, standing, staring straight ahead, seeing nothing, is Phèdre’s husband, Theseus, the king of Athens. They have two children together. They feel nothing for each other.
Theseus is oblivious, and absent, and Phèdre, like her mother, is ruled by obsessive lust. She wants only one thing: to fuck her stepson. Imagine now that this is written in classical Alexandrine metre—what the poets of the Pleiades called vers héroïque, heroic verse: twelve syllables with a break in the middle dividing the line into two hemistichs (half-lines) of six syllables each.
Auden again: “It is impossible to imagine any of Racine’s characters sneezing or wanting to go to the bathroom, for in his world there is neither weather nor nature. In consequence, the passions by which his characters are consumed can only exist, as it were, on stage, the creation of the magnificent speech and the grand gestures of the actors and actresses who endow them with flesh and blood.”
[You slept through most of it.]
Near the end, Hippolyte dies offstage. Learning of his death, Phèdre takes poison and confesses her illicit love to Theseus. Once again, the next fourteen victims are led into the labyrinth. We hear their voices. We hear their steps echo down the passages. We watch our lord and redeemer leave his seat and walk toward the sunlight. He has the face of a man and the body of a bull.
3.
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, Not to be born is the best for man; The second-best is a formal order, The dance’s pattern; dance while you can. —W.H. Auden, Death’s Echo, 1936
[Ovid tells the story differently. His Phèdre is driven half-demented by Hippolyte’s youthful beauty. She tries to seduce him. Hippolyte, bored by sex, is cursed for this by Aphrodite. Disgusted by the old crone’s clumsy advances, he defends his chastity. Phèdre slanders him. Too-credulous Theseus exiles him. Hippolyte races away in his golden chariot, and when he reaches the Corinthian sea, a monstrous bull bursts from the waves and frightens his horses. The chariot is dashed against the rocks. Hippolyte is dragged to his death, and his defeated soul is forced from his disfigured, broken body.]
[Hippolyte, now a “miserable shadow” in the kingdom of Pluto, gains the favour of the goddess Diana, who gives him back his life through the ministrations of Asclepius, the god of medicine. Once revived, Diana erases his memory and gives him a new appearance and a new name: “Virbius”, i.e. Vir-bis-vivus, the “twice-born man”.]
[I am he. The twice-born man.]
[In Plutarch, Theseus's mother Aethra coupled with the god Poseidon and the mortal Aegeus, king of Athens on the same night. Theseus was born of both their seeds. Before leaving Aethra to return to Athens, Aegeus buried his sandals and sword under a heavy boulder and told Aethra that if their grown son could lift the boulder and take the tokens left under it, he must come to Athens to meet his father and claim his birthright.]
[In Athens, Medea, having poisoned her enemies and slaughtered her children, chose Aegeus as her new consort. They have a son. When Theseus appeared, Medea convinced Aegeus that he was an imposter trying to steal their son’s inheritance. They decided to poison him, but as Medea was about to hand Theseus the cup, Aegeus recognized the young man’s sword and sandals. He knocked the cup from Medea's hand and welcomed Theseus into the family.]
4.
The captive mind deserves its prison, it would be an error to think otherwise. If you refuse to acknowledge this, you are living in the same communalizing pen of falsehood as they are, and therefore undeserving of [anything remotely resembling even echoes of] truth, beauty or justice.
The idea of liberty remains perhaps our most haunting spectre, at once a motivating passion of the human soul and its most depleting and disturbing delusion. All human beings have their roots in the real, the active and the natural, in a deep grounding participation in the present, a profound reverence for the past, and an assured confidence in their presentiments of the future. All this is fantasy of course. Freud understood this:
The subject’s mental activity attaches itself to a current impression, an occasion in the present that has succeeded in arousing one of his major desires. From here it harks back to the memory of an earlier desire, usually belonging to his childhood, in which this desire is fulfilled. It now invents a situation, lodged in the future, that represents the fulfilment of this desire. This is the daydream or the fantasy, which has its origin in the present experience and the recollection of the past: so that past, present and future are strung together on the thread of one desire that unites all three.—Sigmund Freud, “The Creative Writer and Daydreaming”, 1908
Physical and moral needs aside, the need for truth has never been more constitutive and crucial. Essential to its continued presence in our community is unbridled access to reliable and accurate information. Most people lack the means to verify the veracity of what they see and hear. Propaganda is rife. Errors are everywhere. Both extremes of the political spectrum include elements that seek to upset the balances we have so assiduously put into place. On the left, however, there are those who want everyone to enjoy the same privileges, even though these privileges are empty, and on the right a section that equates goodness with success, and failure with evil, and jealously guards their right to be exploited.
Knowledge is a parlour trick. Trauma, as we now know all too well, is mind-neutral, and ██ █ ███████ ███ ████.1 [Intelligence, too, even its most radiant forms, is no guarantee of performance and value. Facts lie, too.] The difference between the smart man and the half-wit is infinitesimal. [In terms of basic “housekeeping” sequences, a chicken, a banana and a common fruit fly are 60% identical!] ███ ████ ████ ██ █████-█████ █████████.2 The intelligent man, as Simone Weil has told us, who is proud of his intelligence, “is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.”
Two prisoners, in neighbouring dungeons, communicating by knocks against the wall. The wall is what separates them, but also what allows them to communicate. So we and God. Every separation is a link.—Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1948
The same is true of all “our” so-called talents. And all our attributes and qualities, the stuffing of our doll life, the padding that is said to ”make the man”. We are no more predicative or attributive than we are substantive. Hitler was clever. Pol Pot exhibited true genius. That they ate only meat or only vegetables, had blue eyes or green eyes, long arms or short, is insignificant. We have all committed unspeakable crimes, and the gods have cursed every one of us, since, to summon once again Simone Weil, “we have lost all the poetry of the universe.”
This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And, at the same time, it is the passage.
The Greeks did not share our obtuse conceptions. Our truths, our sense of justice, our sense of love and complication, these would have struck them as strange, if not aberrant. That we no longer die as human beings, but ██ █ ███████ ████ ██ ███████ ██ █████ ██ ██████, ██ ██ ██████ ██ █████. ██ ██ ███ ██████████ ███ ████, ████ ███ ███ █████ ██ █ ██████, ███ ████ ███████ █████████ ██ ██ █████ ██ █████ █████████, ██ ██ ██████ ██ █████████. ███ ██ ███ ████ █████████ ████████████ ███ ██ ████, ████ ███ ███ ██ █████ ███ █████████. ██ ████, ████████████ ██ ███████ █ ████, ███ ████ ██ █████. ███ ██████████ ███████ ████ ██ ████ ███████████ ███ ██ ████ ███ ██████████ ███████ █████████ █████████ ██ ████ ████████████ ██ ███████ ██ ██████ █████. ███ ███████████ ███ ███ ██ █████ ██ ███ ████████████ ██ ████ █ █████████ ███ ███ ██ █████ ██ ███ █████ ████3
5.
Ovid describes the birth of Adonis. The son of Myrrha, whom Aphrodite, to punish Myrrha's mother, who boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the goddess, cursed with insatiable lust for her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus. After tricking her father into sleeping her, Myrrha was changed into a myrrh tree, but still gave birth to Adonis. Aphrodite took the baby boy to Persephone in the underworld. When he grew into a handsome young man, both goddesses fell in love with him—and shared him—half his life was spent beneath the earth, the other upon it. Then, Diana, seeking revenge for Aphrodite’s curse of her devoted Hippolyte, sent a wild boar to gore Adonis during a hunting trip. He bled to death in Aphrodite's arms, and where his blood fell grew anemones [and roses.]
In another version, Aphrodite caused Adonis to fall in love with Diana’s favourite virgin girl, Erinoma. The girl spurned his advances, so Adonis snuck into her bedroom. Adonis hid in a cave to hide from the gods who loved Erinoma. Hermes lured him out, and Ares, transformed into a wild boar, wounded him mortally with his horn. Aphrodite brought him back to life. Erinoma bore him a son.
Adonis was also loved by the male gods. He was androgynous. Masculine in his affections for Aphrodite, feminine in his love for Apollo.
[Elsewhere, Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and madness, carries him away.]
6.
Experimentation, indeed, will often lead to deplorable excesses of cruelty. It is normal thus to be wary of the impersonal, to have natural fears of impartiality, to want to turn one’s back on “objectivity”. These, however, are the reactions of the half-demented, the impure of heart and mind. In our search for true justice and just truth, biases must be annihilated, personal advantages run through with the bronze sword of anonymous detachment.
The cult of the individual rose from the song of Homer and the pen of Shakespeare, from the writer’s reflex to raise her name and reputation to the level of a god. To truly relieve suffering, one’s voice must be subsumed, spurned, stifled. █ ██████ ██ █████ ███ ███████████ ██████████. █████ ████████ ████ ██ ██ ███ ████ ████'█ █████████████ ███ ███████ ███ ████████ ████████. ███ ████ ███ ████ ██ ███████ ████ █████ ███████████. 4
Can one still defend it? Does it have a future? Simone Weil [who was passed—starved herself to death—on 24 August 1943 at the age of 34 in Grosvenor Sanatorium (Ashford, Kent)] said no, as all art is collective, and all that is collective is dead [“there are only dead collections of people”] and the true covenant of body and soul has been irreconcilably broken:
Greek art coincided with the beginnings of geometry and athletics, medieval art with craftsmanship, Renaissance art with the beginnings of mechanics, etc. Since 1914, there has been a complete break. Comedy itself is virtually impossible: there is only room for satire (when was it easier to understand Juvenal)? Art can only be reborn from the bosom of the great anarchy—epic, no doubt, because misfortune will have simplified many things... It is therefore quite pointless on your part to envy Leonardo Da Vinci or Bach. Greatness these days has to take other paths. It can only be solitary, obscure and without echo... (and there can be no art without echo). —Simone Weil, “Beauty”, Gravity and Grace, 1947.
Yet, surely, if beauty is real and life has true meaning, if real presences exist in matter, and connections between and within individuals are sacraments in the fullest sense of the word, then why are so many of us lost? Why do we crave the demonic? Weil: “Does this resemble the hunger of black mass lovers for consecrated hosts?”
All the horrors which occur in this world are like the folds imprinted on waves by gravity. That is why they contain a beauty. Sometimes a poem, like the Iliad, make this beauty perceptible. — Simone Weil, “The love of God and Affliction”, L'attente de Dieu, 1963
██████ ██████ ██ █████████ ██████████: █████ ██ ████ ████ ███ ██████ (████ ███ ██ ██████ ██ ██████████ ███████)? ███ ███ ████ ██ ██████ ████ ███ █████ ██ ███ █████ ███████—████, ██ █████, ███████ ██████████ ████ ████ ██████████ ████ ██████... ██ ██ █████████ █████ █████████ ██ ████ ████ ██ ████ ████████ ██ █████ ██ ████.5
Love bade me welcome.
Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
--George Herbert, "Love (III)", 1633 Most available data on the subject is self-reported. This of course presents its own set of challenges. Type, articulation and setting affect response. Most are authored and therefore authorizable, but the best are essentially anonymous, both personal and impersonal, and therefore neither the one nor the other. Our institutions’ predilection for credentialization resists their inclusion. [However, this has shown signs of changing for the last decade, and the rate of these changes appears to have significantly accelerated during the first years of the present administration.████, ██ █████, ███████ ██████████ ████ ████ ██████████ ████ ██████... ██ ██ █████████ █████ █████████ ██.6]
Moving downward, the “mirror of grace” is the essence of all political and social engagement. The rest—art, poetry, charity, rights, obligations, duties, orientation, complications—serves only to enshrine or embalm it. The ascent, the transcendent, is purely and nominally sensitive. The descent, the fall, is sensitive and spiritual. Weil: “It is the paradise that every being desires; that the slope of nature leads to good.”
7.
Improvement makes strait roads,
but the crooked roads without
Improvement, are roads of
Genius. Sooner murder an infant
in its cradle than nurse unacted
desires. Where man is not nature
is barren. Truth can never be told
so as to be understood, and not be
believ'd. Enough! or Too much!
--William Blake, "Proverbs of Hell", 1793
We have not been dispossessed. We never had anything that could be taken away. We therefore have nothing to give, either. This is a liberating notion. Nothing, that is, beyond the skeleton “I”, the coatrack, the scarecrow exclamation point upon which everything else is draped.
Such projects as ours are never finished, only abandoned. You and I (and I and I and I and I and I) are bound by certain contexts and authorities, but these in turn are boundless. Nothing can contain them. Dance, therefore, while you can. ██████ ████████, ███ “██████ ██ █████” ██ ███ ███████ ██ ███ █████████ ███ ██████ ██████████. ███ ████—███, ██████, ███████, ██████, ███████████, ██████, ███████████, █████████████—██████ ████ ██ ████████ ██ ██████ ██. ███ ██████, ███ ████████████, ██ ██████ ███ █████████ █████████. ███ ███████, ███ ████, ██ █████████ ███ █████████. ████: “██ ██ ███ ████████ ████ █████ █████ ███████; ████ ███ █████ ██ ██████ █████ ██ ████.”7
Here we have reached a new threshold. A new bridge. A new passage into the labyrinth. Who among us holds the string, who among us holds the sword?
“What will my redeemer be like? I ask myself. Will he be a bull or a man? will he perhaps be a bull with the face of a man? or will he be like me?”—J.L. Borges, The House of Asterion”, Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, 1964
Think, if it helps, of love
Or alcohol or gold,
But do as you are told.
I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn't there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing? --W.H. Auden, "Precious Five", 1950 
September collective re-assessment directive (S-CRAD) 11.17, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (2028)
S-CRAD 11.23, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (2028)
S-CRAD 11.47, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (2028)
S-CRAD 12.07, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (2028)
S.CRAD 12.14, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (2028)
S-CRAD 13.01, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (2028)
S-CRAD 14.04, issue 1-94 B2 (Denso) (2028)
“Improvement makes strait roads,
but the crooked roads without
Improvement, are roads of
Genius. “ Written by Blake, told by Chris - read and appreciated by jake
Really lovely installment Mr Mooney
Wow, remarkable read.