Nice writing!
On 16/09/2019 14:56, Max Herman via NetBehaviour wrote:
Today at every university the Gideons are out, with their cardboard
boxes of small green paper bibles. Unassuming chaps they ask "do you
want a free bible?" They are very compact like decks of cards or
candy packets. These are offered to undergraduates all over America
during the first month of fall classes in Septembers, to offer a
scriptural path afresh.
The cover says "New Testament." What is a testament? Well, a story
really. Someone publicly telling their story, a testimony, a person
in a place telling a story which is their story. So, a new example of
this is a new testament, a new story. And what is a novel? A story.
Why is it called a novel, a nouvelle, a new? Because it was a new
kind of an idea or a new way of talking about stories and making them
into paper form back in the 1700's. So, the novel was a new
testament. A new story. The new story. The new new testament story
for 1700.
In a way the little green new testaments are like stacks of green
dollar bills. But they are very humble too like play money or fortune
cookies, cheap, free, included with the meal so to speak. Ironically,
even to discuss the idea of a new new testament story in vulgar
English or German in the year 1000 would get you burned, disemboweled,
or interred to rot to death in a muddy stone room with sewerage. To
presume you might consider a new story!
Why did they have to bring Buddha's scriptures from all over the
world, when his scriptures really just said you don't need scriptures,
don't use scriptures, attend to your breath and the present moment?
Let go of all the bullshit and all the gurus, don't you see what I'm
saying for god's sake? You are all going to burn in hell, and already
are, he said, before calming down a little.
You wonder, how long a new testament can remain new and how long the
novel can remain novel. All of this novelty, so much glacial
accumulation of unfathomable waste. Stagnant, dead data. You wonder
if the novel can become its inverse. Come to think of it, how can it
not? It is impossible to conceive that it could do otherwise than
become its inverse, and then to accumulate infinitely. Then, once
thought, you realize how vastly advanced this stagnation is, how
astronomical and absolute it already is, how glacial and total, this
incarcerating assemblage of dead data.
So, weep, wail? Rend eyes, flesh, hair, garments? Well, after a
fashion, yes. Appearances, appurtenances, they are already filthy
rags and tatters. Choked cemeteries, filth to the heavens, saturated
with plastic pellets so fine they permeate a dragonfly's retina. To
rend them is just to ask a simple question, and observe, are they not
tatters? Are they not rags? There's nothing even to tear down. So
then what is there, is there nothing there?
The new green Gideons today are funny though today. They have dots on
them, little green dots like in charts of space bent by gravity. They
have a new, modern, cyberspace chic for this year, dots of data moving
in curvilinear network space. Each little green new testament is also
kind of like a dot or particle, all stacked up in their cardboard box,
or more like little square sections of a formatted drive or bricks or
tarot decks. Then you have roads, railroad tracks, bike paths,
satellites overhead and lots of streaming media all about amid
concrete and glass. Basically all 100% empty really or infinitely close.
To live your own genius however, to experience it as a network, to be
truly alive, and alive to the genius of others, without hyper-massive
waste programming and cannibalism, that is impossible. For human
beings to get it: "oh yes, I am a story, I have a new story every day,
my story evolves every day and is born afresh, reborn every day,
cycling a new cycle every day, this is so mundane and yet so accurate,
I'm so glad for this new story! Such a simple story, my original
story, everyone's original story that is fresh and new for them and
for me too every day, just being alive is all it is, like Buddha's
simple breath, tree, and sitting. What need for all these networks of
new scriptures? Goodness they are so strange, these stacked
cemeteries that measure by fathoms in every direction and we all live
daily buried inside."
Because you see, human intelligence is a network. Brains are
connected. Words are connected. Different words, different
conversations, different brains, different intelligence. A new
humanity. It can all be transformed instantly in a single second, by
a single all-powerful new testament, new novel, new network; a single
syllable, a single breath or email transforming all from death to life.
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