hello. sorry for not posting more frequently, i’ve been having issues being clear. a few notes on this poast.
1) i am using footnotes, and i will be defining words not based on any theorist explicitly, but simply based upon how i conceptualize them. this has a great deal to do with Randy’s recent essay. i’ve had enough of placing my thoughts into the shoes and clothing of other thinkers, as if they are not valid without the mask of an Other.
2) sometimes i capitalize the word “other.” when i do that, it would be helpful for you to imagine the “O” not as the capital of the letter of, but as this:
3) “it is the business of philosophy to preserve the power of the most elemental words” -Martin Heidegger - Being and Time
4) today’s music was found by my lovely, kind, and deep-hearted fiancé. isn’t that a nice cat?
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there’s something really lovely about dirt.
it is a word that, when forced into the context of modernity, becomes completely meaningless.
if you go to “the store” (that large rectangular building, filled with wandering confused employees and wandering confused consumers), you will find all sorts of dirt.
planting dirt, indoor dirt, outdoor dirt, outdoor pro dirt, indoor pro dirt, outdoor potting dirt, full shade dirt, moss infused dirt. sand is sold as dirt, it’s all in the dirt aisle after all.
dirt is not an object that yields to iterative production. computers, wallets, shirts, even romantic partners, with the creeping supremacy of online dating, are always-already conceptualized and reified1 by the modern mind as “products.” products, that which one purchases, that which one enters the large concrete box and becomes dazzled by the vastness of offerings in order to find. “going to the store” is an act of violence, an instance of man vs. man. retail therapy is an addiction to self-punishment, an admittance that, after all, that which is already built must be better than what one can find/create/will by oneself. we can get into all sorts of little linguistic dances around what a “store” is, store of value, a story, stories of buildings, levels of construction, storage as that which one deems not worthy of immediate consumption and access, the idea of one’s skeletons in one’s closet being placed into storage, the store as storage of the Other iterated through capital, the ever-changing nature of the store, the question of what one does being constantly referenced to the “stores” of an-Other.
but we would be getting away from dirt.
i have recommended to folks that they place seedlings in the soil of their surroundings, and nurture those seedlings to watch them grow and take root. if i was a doctor, this would be the general-purpose-medication that i would dispense to every patient regardless of their symptoms. my friend CatSoup has done this, look at his lovely tomatoes.
dirt is only meaningful when it touches what you are living. when it is a context of your lifeworld.2 when i say dirt, i do not want you to imagine a scoop of soil in your hands. i do not want the color to explained to you.
i want you to get a spoon out of your cupboard, find the closest patch of soil, and dig until you hit what you call dirt. i want you, from the bottom of my heart, to dig past the grass and look at the soil of the place that you are. that is your soil. that cannot be any Other’s soil. it will not be shipped, transported, packaged, or sold. that is where you are.
this has a lot to do with what Randy has been writing about. i am horrified of a world where people think of stock images when they hear words. the idea of gOOgle search optimization determining the images of your mind is something that you should both think about and actively fight. there are people that are trying to not only capture your desires, but to flatten the shapes of your mind3 into
<mental_noun img = “the beauty of the consciousness flowing around the world, constantly readjusting and analyzing the word in the context of those you love and value, reorienting and readjusting forever unto love” />
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[google (noun)]
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<mental_noun img = “google result image” />
this is also why graphic novels are bad. this form of media assumes that you don’t have the capacity or desire to “fill in the blanks” of description. humans want to fill in blanks, they want to assign meaning. we are story-telling animals, there’s no way around that. there used to be millions of mental harry potters, different heights, inflections, accents, feelings, emotions. now there is one daniel radcliffe. this helps sell more plastic toys. i suppose that’s good. or maybe it isn’t.
when i first moved into this home, the corner of the lawn where my garden now grows was a stand of weeds. thistle, rhubarb, catnip, you name it we had it. i mowed all of these down, then shoveled the root systems out of the ground. then i shoveled the dirt out of the earth in a 10’x10’ square. in the process, i unearthed a series of snack bags, soda bottles, and a couple of condoms. once i had done that, there was simply no more soil. about a foot down, i hit rock. not a solid rock foundation, of course, but gravel. i had to go to the store, and buy some dirt. i did that. it is shitty, awful, garbage dirt for the efficient growth of plants. no nitrate additives, no filtration additions. after about a year, the dirt had changed colors completely. out of the bag, it was a deep dark black. now, it is a nice brown. there are thistle roots, decaying rhubarb stems, a never-ending assault of every weed under the sun. but i still plant every year. some years every crop dies, or never bears any fruit at all. some years i drown in tomatoes. to be honest with you, something i have been trying desperately to do throughout this set of paragraphs, i could not care less about the fruits of my labor.
now that dirt is my dirt.
reification: making a made-up category real. the made-up category of “dirt,” a word that should be used to point to a pile of dirt that is in your immediate vicinity, to instruct another person about what is underneath the greenery of one’s surroundings. this word is reified by capital, and reified into bags, with production deadlines, a need for the acquisition of dirt from the store in order to undertake the economic activity of “gardening.” it is made real it is made physical through an Other that is not you. of course you can reify, but when is the last time you imagined an object, and then created it with your own hands?
lifeworld: habermas quotes schutz and luckmann’s Structures of the Lifeworld to get at this: “the lifeworldly stock of knowledge is related in many ways to the situation of the experiencing agent. It is made up from sedimentations of formerly actually present experiences that are bound to situations.” one’s lifeworld is both that which is unknown explicitly by one, the “subconscious” to batter you over the head with a baggage-laden term, and the world that one sees. it is what appears to one, what allows one to see, what currents and tides lay behind one’s explicit orientations, and one’s orientations. it’s what you care about, and how you choose to care for it. it is what matters to one, and it is what makes one one instead of two, three, or four. multiple personality disorders are essentially disparate lifeworlds appearing and disappearing in the same subject, one could say something about wage labor as encouraging this sort of nonsense. this is, funnily enough, also why there is no point in trying to explain why one does what one does to one’s parents. they are simply in a different lifeworld. they read the news, and believe what is told to them. their lifeworld is devoid of the paranoia and constant questioning that typifies the online-all-the-time-know-what-a-groyper-is-like-share-retweet-fourteen-headlines-processed-every-minute under 30 man of modernity.
the shapes of your mind: how you think. the flow of the river that is you. what you see when you close your eyes and calm down. what you think of when you sleep, when you dream. there is an effort to “flatten” the minds of mankind. to make each man like the other, each woman like the other, to get those problematic folds out of the mind so that you are totally alright with watching youtube videos for 8 hours a day. so that the normal that is sold to you is not only bought by you, but bought with joy, with expectation of release. cynicism is not good, your cynicism is. hypocrisy is not good, your hypocrisy is. you are the central element to your world, and retreating into the dreams a boardroom wrote for you will not make your world any less your own. it will only make it a flat, dull, plain.
Your writing is easy to get absorbed into.
O of the Other is an eye always watching. Making you too afraid to sun your balls because the neighbors might see.