Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Ghosts of Pandemic Isolation

What already seems as though it were some distant, mythical past when human beings gathered en masse in carelessly-shared social places and no one had to hold their breath or jealously secure their body-borders for fear of some invisible viral death. How soon we forget the frenzied rush and crush of crowds, the night-lit noisy […]

Categories
Philosophy

An Unfurling Emptiness

Every mind is like this: patterns, faces, surfaces and dreams. We recombine these things in different ways and while we might all arrive in different places and by different paths or idioms of cultural and linguistic orientation – it is fundamentally the same process that we are all engaged in. We all spend our lives […]

Categories
Psychology

Control is only really Fear wearing a Mask

No one is in control of life anywhere near so much as we might choose to believe. At some level we all know this but we also rarely choose to acknowledge it; it frightens us. Our endless fascination with pattern and order, with declarations of certainty and knowledge – these are at least in part […]

Categories
art

Beauty is a Joy and a Forgetting

Beauty is such a strange sadness to a wise beholder. Truth, wrapped in youth like those blossoms that in aging inadvertently aspire to become the hollow frames or elder coccoons to which their own pattern or tapestry in time must trace an inevitable descent and unforgiving trajectory. We celebrate the flower, the spring growth and […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Social Distancing

…and in all of our isolation, our distant alienation from all the life we once knew, when all social contact and that intimacy or literal warmth of another’s presence and friendship has become a silent vacuum of absence – what do we have left? We have our empty, listless lives and the dawning awareness that […]

Categories
Philosophy

Event Horizon: Life and Death

Entering into life is always and ever to pass across an event horizon towards a dark infinity; all futures, freedom and choice trace an inevitable arc and trajectory towards singularity and extinction. Entropy provides limited degrees of freedom or choice but teleology binds us.

Categories
Alien Anthropology

The Storm is upon us all…

There is a deepening feeling of doom (and gloom) as coronavirus begins to take hold across our community. We see the numbers growing daily; accelerating, exponentiating. At some point this will no longer be “someone else’s” illness, it will be upon us; a tidal surge of trillions of sinister nano-scale biological robots, wicked ribonucleic algorithms […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

Crown of Thorns: this gathering storm

This nauseating fear and gathering storm, the manifestation of an unacknowledged, unknown horror: our bodies were never impermeable, our minds – never infallible. The juggling, shuffling and dancing patterns of information and entropy from which we emerged – these were never some distant Otherness and isolated (or tamed) danger and threat of difference, of distance. […]

Categories
Philosophy

The Fall

What we most often fail to acknowledge is that this focal node and yawning abyss of pluripotent significance and semiotic elasticity that we experience as “Self” is in fact the doubly-inflected presence of an absence, the exponentiated self-replication of an entirely abstract self-representational void. Other than that we could hardly grow or evolve and become […]

Categories
culture

The Gospel of Emptiness

Our images, our Self- or Other-portraits and all of our representational fantasies are always subtle dissimulations of a projected, doubly-inflected Self that we only ever feel that we need to cultivate – (in ourselves as much as in others), to construct, because it is precisely what is expected of us, what everyone else “does” (or […]

Categories
Alien Anthropology

We lonely atoms…

…and these, all of these bodies, these artefacts and inscriptions that were once dust will once again be dust. These that were once lonely atoms drifting in all of cosmic space and time will once again be set free to wander. Many, many trillions of years from now even atoms will devolve into a slowly-dissasembling […]

Categories
culture

The Emptiness of Art

The true mystery of art lies not in the many ways that it is a “thing”, in the mischievously multiplicitous subtleties of manifestation; it rests in the many (more) ways in which it is a vacuum, a void, a potentiality and the endless presence of absence. We seek meaning in matter but fail to understand […]