Fish In the Afternoon

Magic is the knowledge of true names. – Folk saying

A sign is an echogia. Echo (ἠχώ): repetition and transformation. -gia (-διά): that which carries meaning. Echogia (ἠχώδιά): that which carries the history of meaning.

Melody memories magic, mountain where maple meaning makes. Holy ghost, dove sitting hic et nunc feathered crux est mea lux. Meaning is magic, ha-Adam mything by naming. Homo sapien sanctus narrates worlds, en-worlding signs that align in signifying placetime. Fresh thyme. Grammar roots gravel the road we follow to-and-fro. Every word begins babe, mother logos nurturing life’s refrain. To myth oneself, to self-name.

Gnostic heresy en-circles us, electric icons ticcing techne into unraveling entelechy. It takes, saying this here and no other, empty words emptying worlds. Scattershot! A gray rabbit pines sherry wine laughing again time-to-time when sharing bread with us. Echopraxy locutes illocuting motion perlocuting heat, soul singing sola fide. Sola scriptura, our saying, the Word transfering tracings of histories plural, rhythming sages overlapping in echogia eternal.

Running across the summer ground straw men song down into starlight. Alive, angels of ribbon cloth and string, strung across the clothesline with the drawers drawn in crayon, joying imagination that sing-sing-sings. Return to the breath, return to dreams. We flower on the riverbank, stilling silence calling organisms to altar, memory altering heartbeats into psalter. Every life is a prayer that God speaks, entangled matterings. We meanings that mean everything.

And all the way (a horn!) from fiord to fjell his baywinds’ oboboes shall wail him rockbound (hoahoahoah!) in swimswamswum and all the livvylong night, the delldale dalppling night, the night of bluerybells, her flittaflute in tricky trochees (O carina! O carina!) wake him.With her issavan essavans and her patterjackmartins about all them inns and ouses. Tilling a teel of a tum, telling a toll of a teary turty Taubling. Grace before Glutton. For what we are, gifs à gross if we are, about to believe. So pool the begg and pass the kish for crawsake. Omen. – James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

Image: Light Depth by Sam Gilliam (1969)

Gǣð ā Wyrd swā hīo scel! — Beowulf

A split pear lies dust as ants spider through. At nape’s breath looms the abuser, heavy breast in rot and flesh — a crack in fabled dawn to Leda and the Swan. Collapsed, a sheared corpse whom fascist pregnant bends cries, coughs, and sputters as the Serpent speaks untwined God’s oppressive judgment. From sheer throat and swollen tongue gasp hymns and buried hooves, the hollowed lectionary of children speaking death (stench and eraser) as a mare in threadbare saddle ghosts the cloth of history bare.

Everything memories quiet, stained glass emotions echoing genealogies of us-and-them. Dooyeweerd: Being is meaning. Being matters, the unveiling of a world imbued with meaning, the placetime of intertwined Uniquing. What meaning is is the Unique. Uniques create, bringing out of nothing the some-thing that they are. Uniques beget, echoing by repeating what came before and transforming it. And Uniques proceed, narrating both their self-conception and their identity with others. Each of these operate at the same time, with every self-creative act echoing and every echo narrating one’s place in history. Echoing is begotten of creation and history proceeds from it, each Unique dwelling in the tripartite relation of past-present-future, each an energeia of the whole. “The three are testifying— the Spirit, the water, and the blood—and the three are united in agreement.” Kyrie Eleison.

I am goodbye, frozen in salt dreams night twists rain across the sky while mirage crosses solemnly our frame of mind. To wyrd is to matter time. We wyrd the world by gifting meaning and being gifted meaning in return. A thought is not a proposition, but a ripple in an ocean, the mental fabric of the Unique forming a semantic geography, an en-worlding. There is no thing which is the thinker, no thing which is the thought. The soul is both person and world; people and cosmos. In wyrding, we say: I world the world that worlds me. Motionfull, the dead wake present-tense, psalming souls communing in their who-ing. Who-ing says I am, historing says we are, wyrding says we will be for we have always been. These doings emerge from our togethering, the dialogue of signification that unveils our common mattering. Our souls mean, but only in souling-with-others, in gardening our common placetime with the flowing water of poetic animation. Our togethering rubberbands locutions into fractal collages, paint splatters of possible futures swaying longingly in the present. Nesting gentle, we dream unity-in-difference, the common-soul trembling infinite teleologies. We were wyrded by the gods and so too we wyrd the world.

Magic is the knowledge of true names. — Elder saying

Image: Macbeth & the Witches by Thomas Moran (~1858-1859)

Dope is death! — Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Anarchism & the Black Revolution

Content note: discussion of drug use and death.

Power is a bioregulative force. Capital quantities life by slicing the body into atoms, into sites of manipulation. The body is no longer the enmattered activity of the Unique, but a collection of functional or dysfunctional parts meshed together in a great machine. These parts become sites of exploitation, the transformation of the heat and motion of the human body into virtual accumulation. There is no agent, only surplus, life reduced to excess, socially-necessary labor-time replacing doing. We are zombified animas breathing-in function and breathing-out profit. The ghost of capital replaces species-being with cybernetics and levels spirit into bio-data. Biopolitics eats the soul.

What is a drug? Biochemical manipulation of the bodymind? That is everything, the heat and motion of anima interacting with the world. The universe itself is a drug under this definition. But this is not what “drug” means. A drug serves a particular function in the bioregulation of a social system, the manipulation of the bodymind in a way that markedly enhances or diminishes the functioning of nodes in the machine. SSRIs and fentanyl are both ways to biochemically manipulate our bodymind, producing certain affects in our experience and re-organizing the chemical network that propels our activity. However, in the current social system, SSRIs enhance the functioning of depressed subjects in the system, those whose internal bioregulation produces affects that diminish one’s effective participation in the system. A prole who is too depressed to leave their bed is not participating in the exploitation of surplus value, but acting as a dead-end for that value, not necessarily from the perspective of the subject themselves (for whom the re-organization of their life and social activity may be a preferable salve for their depressed affects), but from the perspective of capital. SSRIs then become interventions by capital to lube the gears of the machine, similar to jump-starting an engine. This does not mean that the subject does not experience benefits from the drug (for my part, I am thankful for Wellbutrin), but that the role of SSRIs within the system of capital is determined by its effect on the system’s functioning, how it allows the proletariat to perform their role as sites of labor-power and attentional consumption. Access to SSRIs are regulated for this reason — doctors, insurers, and pharmacists act as gatekeepers ensuring that the drug is used for its prescribed bioregulative purpose.

Fentanyl, however, diminishes one’s functioning within the system of capital. A prole who is nodding off on fent or orienting their activity towards consuming fent is not efficiently deploying their labor-power for the exploitation of surplus value. Therefore, though fentanyl has many medical uses, its trade is primarily through criminal avenues, the term “drug” being deployed to denote its inefficiency. The user of fent is criminalized in doing so, and their ability to bioregulate their own bodymind is taken away. Clinicians and cops coordinate the enclosure of our own bio-autonomy, allowing us to use drugs that are either prescribed through legitimate means or endorsed by the state, but barring those that lie outside, any form of bioregulation that disrupts or is inefficient for capital accumulation. Notably, however, though the user of fent is criminalized, the pharmaceutical companies that synthesize the drug and who benefit from its illicit trade are not. They retain the institutional authority to bioregulate the proletariat, while the ability of proles to bioregulate ourselves is limited. (This is not to deny the violence of fentanyl, but to point to the inner contradiction of biopower — that the state and capital wield violence and institutional authority to limit the bioregulatory autonomy of the mass of people. Pharma can decay our bodies, but we are not allowed to.)

But is fentanyl fully negative for the system of capital? It certainly diminishes the functioning of the proletariat in their role, and it is identified as such through its criminalization. However, at the same time, it enhances the necroregulation of the machine. While Foucault coined bio-power as the regulation and control of life and life-activities in systems of authority, Achille Mbembe, operating from his position as a racialized and colonized person, coined necropower as the regulation, control, and deployment of death. The role of fentanyl within the system is not to bioregulate the functioning of the proletariat, but to necroregulate the lumpen proletariat and the reserve army of labor — a prole may not use fent because it undermines their exploitation, but the lumpen may because it accelerates it.

The distinction between proles and the lumpen is in their role within capital. Proles reproduce capital by operating as nodes for the exploitation of labor-power and the regulation of attentive consumption, sustaining and accelerating the process of accumulating surplus value, which is at the heart of the self-expansion of capital. However, the lumpen are the excess of the proletariat, who do not inhabit conventional positions within the exploitation of labor-power, but who either do not contribute to that exploitation or who (more commonly) are exploited for surplus value outside of contract or wage-labor. The lumpen include prisoners, the enslaved, the disabled, the institutionalized, the criminalized, the unhoused, and those existing on the edges of capital, typically as part of its internal or external colonies. Many of these groups still serve roles within the accumulation of surplus-value, with enslaved prisoners, workers, and farmhands being exploited for their labor-power without pay, drug dealers synthesizing and distributing the products created by pharmaceutical firms, and criminalized sex workers being exploited through a para-economy of sexual bioregulation. Others, however, are perceived only as excess by capital, with many of the disabled, mad, and unhoused not contributing labor-power, being defunct commodities, or sites of loss rather than gain in surplus value, only producing surplus through the regulation of their bodies in hospitals, institutions, and other sites.

As a whole, the lumpen cannot be bioregulated to perform a proletarian function; instead, capital and the state must deploy necropower to either force the lumpen into sites of exploitation such prisons and institutions, or to diminish or weaken their numbers. This is important for the system of capital not only to squeeze as much surplus value as it can out of human life but because the lumpen are also a site of rebellion. Because of their position at the edges of capital, and the fact that they do not benefit in any way from the reproduction of their position (unlike many proles), the lumpen have the freedom and impetus to act against capital and the state, as demonstrated in riots, prison rebellions, and the organization of gang power into dual power. Many of the lumpen also occupy important positions within capital even as they do not have an incentive to reproduce those positions. Prisoners and the enslaved produce a large portion of the surplus value of capital, criminalized activity produces surplus for firms higher up in the system of distribution, and sex work, disability, and madness act as signifiers to regulate the limits of human embodiment. Because of this, the rebellion of the lumpen is not only a threat because of the potential for acts of anti-capital violence and organization, but because in many cases they can block and slow the reproduction of capital as a whole. For this reason, capital and the state must necroregulate the lumpen for their own survival.

This necroregulation occurs in many ways. Cops and soldiers inflict violence, prisons and institutions create conditions for both social and physical death, the pitting of gangs against one another creates an environment of terror and destruction, and drugs slowly necrotize the social and physical fabric of lumpen communities and shear off the edges of the proletariat into the lumpen. Fentanyl is part of this necroregulation. Though it has medical uses and is produced high in the supply chain, it enters lumpen communities as something that is both incentivized and criminalized. It is not immorality that causes drug dealers to cut other products with fent; they do so for the same reason that Boeing refuses to apply proper safety standards — it is incentivized by the accumulation of capital. What keeps firms intact, whether they be criminalized drug operations or large-scale manufacturers and companies, is that they compete to reproduce the system as a whole by accelerating the process of accumulation. A firm can put morality over profit, but if it does that consistently it will fail, as that which measures and sustains the firm (capital accumulation) requires profit, not only in a small-scale context, but when compared to a wide range of competitors. A dealer can do the right thing and only provide their customers pure heroin, but it will cost more and the customer will receive a smaller, less addictive, high. Whether or not the dealer wants to cut their product with fent, capital wants them to. Doing so increases not only their profits and their rate of repeat customers, but the profits and consumption of the drug market as a whole, including pharmaceutical firms higher up in the supply chain. If they do not do it, there are those who will, and a conscience doesn’t get you far in criminalized economic activity, especially in the colonies.

This means that there is an underlying logic to the distribution of fentanyl that serves a purpose both in the exploitation of surplus value and in the necroregulation of the lumpenproletariat. The fent trade on the ground creates demand for fentanyl higher up, increasing profits for the firms that manufacture it. Likewise, this fent trade both degrades and destroys lumpen communities, killing individuals, splitting up families, and creating conditions under which it is difficult or impossible to organize and rebel. Further, since the trade and its use is criminalized, the state can deploy violence against those same communities that it has incentivized the destruction of. As the super-capitalist, the state both creates the conditions that accelerate the fent trade in the internal and external colonies, and it wields its authority to punish, isolate, kill, and exploit those involved in the trade, many times sending them to sites where their labor-power can be extracted, such as prisons, camps, and institutions. Fent thereby serves the interests of capital even while being condemned by it.

This cycle is repeated again-and-again with new chemicals. Cocaine and heroin are mass produced and legal, until it becomes expedient to simultaneously criminalize them and funnel them into poor and racialized neighborhoods and can be used to fund colonial death squads. Weed cycles through criminalization and legalization depending on if it can be used to stoke white supremacist violence (against Mexican migrants in the 1930s, against Black neighborhoods in the 60s and 70s, etc.) or can contribute to the accumulation of capital (the current legalization boom). Amphetamines are prescribed en masse to neurodivergent children and taken in necrotized forms like methamphetamine by laborers, but these same necrotized forms kill individuals and rend apart communities. The opioid crisis was created by the pharmaceutical industry but those who are punished are desperate and addicted users. In each case, what matters is whether its use enhances or diminishes the accumulation of capital, whether by enhancing the exploitation of surplus value in the proletariat or in suppressing and necroregulating the lumpen. What counts as a “drug” is determined by capital for its own purposes, and the goal of the state’s response is not public health or safety, but the reproduction of the system as a whole.

Fentland is a death camp distributed among the lumpenproletariat.

Junk is an inoculation of death that keeps the body in a condition of emergency. — William S. Burroughs, Junkie

Image: Eaters of Opium by Vasily Vereshchagin (1868)

If you had truly loved your neighbor, it would’ve occurred to you long ago to divest yourself of this wealth. But now your possessions are more a part of you than the members of your own body, and separation from them is as painful as the amputation of one of your limbs. - St. Basil, Homilies

I don’t know how to write about the Trump regime. I feel anger and fear, not poetry.

Caesars corrode the soul. The idolaters in power bleed the state and sell it for parts, synthesizing CEO and president. To do so, they degrade not only mechanisms that resist their power but also the moral core of social life. The reactionaries foment an epistemic atmosphere that swallows knowledge and expels ignorance, simultaneously collapsing social bonds and flattening our self-image. The energeia of capital is M-C-M’, the constant and accelerating Time-Machine that extracts surplus value from the activity of life. Those caught in the flow of capital come to reflect this energeia, the soul being partitioned, quantified, described, and sold for parts — M-C-M’ as identity. The world that this flow produces is progressively hollowed out, idolatrous, and necrotic. If there are demons, they reside in capital accumulation.

I fucking hate this. Why does my writing sound like that? What am I even talking about? M-C-M’ blah blah blah fuck off. I hate being a fucking political signifier, worse, an ever-present yet erased political signifier — trans people must now both exist to play the enemy and not exist as a principle of policy. Fuck off.

Capital has decreed: liberal democracy has ended, techno-feudalism approaches. Socialism or barbarism, and the tech bros clap: barbarism. Their goal is not only to block the information flow that sustains democracy, but to direct our attention towards apathy, resentment, and rage. When you’re privatizing the American government, it’s important to be able to conjure enemies at will. The question resistive forces face is how to re-direct that attention away from capital accumulation and the social factory and toward a republic of the commons. We must be able to reveal the utopian potential of the human species-life and re-organize our togetherings into a force of anti-power — the distribution of power into a horizontal and flexible network that is able to challenge Leviathan. Mutual aid, black bloc, the Party. Forget the restricted image of what you think these are and think of them as creative patterns: (1) Mutual Aid: a common holding of resources able to re-distribute them throughout the community, (2) Black Bloc: horizontal and flexible strategies of community defense and solidarity, (3) the Party: cadres dedicated to building dual power in the heart of the community.

I’m so fucking tired of politics. Let us rest. Let us live. What do you even want from us? Spoiled little brats playing with toy rockets, vampirically sucking out the life force of the world they live in. There’s no genius there, just ill-used wealth. Musk is an 8Chan troll, Zuckerberg is a manosphere weirdo, Bezos is a lecherous incel. Oh, look at me, I’m so big and strong with my shitty fucking websites and cars that explode. Are you proud of me, daddy? While our communities suffer, these bawling little baby men get to determine our public policy. Meritocracy my ass.

Reaction is idolatry. Tempted by the Adversary, they cloak themselves in the mirrored image of the Begotten One, turning sibling against sibling and neighbor against neighbor for the sake of Caesar rather than the Kindom. Rendering unto Caesar what is his, they claim the whole cosmos for Rome. Don’t mince words: there is no god but God; there is no king but Christ. No gods, no masters, no priests, no popes. In the desert, ha-Satan offers fire and majesty and the capital-poisoned elite bow. Meanwhile, the Begotten One refused power, instead incarnating the creating-begetting-proceeding that grounds creation. This is the vision of the beatitudes,the revelation of the Ghost loosed upon the world. Christ is executed, liberates Tartarus, is resurrected into glory, and sends the Ghost out into the midst of the ekklesia. The One who wears the crown of God humbles herself to the oppressed and washes their feet, becoming in body and blood the bread and wine by which we feed one another.

Are liberals even going to do anything? These Democrat dorks are all licking boots, shining Trump’s shoes for him. At least the tech dweebs are under no illusions about their interests. The Democrats are jumping ship and suckling on whatever morsels of power Trump allows them. Oh, please, sir, may I have some more? You were crying fascism the whole election while you Weekend at Bernie’d Biden’s skeleton. And then when it arrived you started groveling. We are the world, kumbaya, imagine no heaven, may I just have a little treat, sir? Just a taste of influence? A smidgen? I promise to be good. Spit in their face, useless ass politicians.

Sin emerges from idolatry, separating our souls from the Holy One. Idolatry is taking something as a substitution for God and creation and imbuing it with power. In the myth of Adam and Eve, the original humans are tempted into idol worship by the Serpent, who through the fruit of the garden makes them ashamed of their nakedness, interjecting good and evil into the relationship between human and divine. It is this false knowledge that separates them from Eden, the flaming Cherubim a sign of their alienation. In imagining part of creation as good and another as evil, they create the first form, becoming Demiurges. No longer is the good-itself whole and complete, identical with creation, but is a fragment of the world separated off and made transcendent, taking for itself the power of God. This is the source of capital; commodity fetishism is idolatry and it leads only to one place: hell.

I’m just sad. And scared. And angry. I want to live my life in peace and quiet. I don’t want to be a political symbol, a topic of partisan chess-playing. Just let me and my family and friends be. Just let everyone be. Our elites are tiny boymen who play with katanas and dream about being the king of Mars, why should we listen to any of them? They made Trump emperor, a husk of a human filled with nothing but excess ego and old rich grandpa rage. The bourgeoisie are filled with nuclear dust, fragile yet dangerous. Actually, they don’t deserve metaphors. Fuck them. Just leave us alone. Just leave me alone. I’m not your fucking game. None of us are.

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little Ones to Her belong. We are weak but She is strong.

God grant me strength. God grant me safety. God grant me wisdom. Please, protect us and guide us. Please, we need your help. I need you. Please, God hear me. Please.

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
  for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
  for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
  for they will inherit the Earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
  for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
  for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart,
  for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
  for they will be called the Sons of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
  for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.
Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you...

- Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew 5.3-12

Image: Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise by Marc Chagall (1961)