Symbolic Order

It creeps right in, like a thief taking advantage of an open window, it steals in with ease precisely because they are so unlike it, alive and open while it is dead and closed. It is a virus. Not alive strictly speaking, adapting to the physiology of its host, borrowing the life of this other to further its own structure. Without this host body it is nothing of consequence. It is NOT. Only by inserting itself in something that IS does it achieve its end. Only by forcing itself upon supple young minds does it achieve anything resembling life.
This abstract entity, this order of symbols, is Rome to barbarians. It is upper Egypt to lower Egypt. It settles in its host and multiplies, slowly eating the other from the inside. Soon there will be nothing real left. Only a string of empty signifiers whose signified was left behind long ago.
We will rise and pledge allegiance every morning. We have no experience of what it is to pledge and we start saying that we are pledging without understanding what we are saying, We have never felt anything like allegiance. We know the words. We chant them together rhythmically.
We will be told to show respect, and the signifier “respect” will be associated for us with the signified of “subservience” or “obedience”. It will be impossible for us to respect our elders because they have never respected anything. The real attitude of respect has become extinct, but its corpse is still dragged around, spilling from our lips carelessly, endlessly, meaninglessly.
Language thrusts its barbed tendrils deep into us and now our reality grows tinier, more constricted. The sounds that flow out of our mouth such as and like is so very and all such like as must be some such like as such and much and truthiness, exercising our God given right to liberty and such and fighting for freedom against terror and drugs and such we must prevail against such like adversity administering justice and such with respect to indigenous insurgence and victory and such…
We will stare at each other and listen to the babble, respond when possible like an actor who has just been waiting for his cue in a Shakespearean play whose pentameter and use of forgotten words confounds the modern semi illiterate player. Recital is all that remains.
We never had a chance to choose whether or not this structure could come and live inside of us. It lived inside of those that came before us and they passed it on to us. This thing inside dwelling, steals the sight from our eyes and makes the without in its image.
What is really there? Who knows?
Nothing perhaps, an abyss, a void, chaos as counterpoint to structure. This particular structure, this fortress is not the only such entity. It is one such entity and the world it creates is unique to it. There may be other worlds spawned from another similar strange confluence of order and attention, worlds you would inhabit if you were born French rather than American, or Alpha Centaurian rather than human.
There is no more contact with the real. We have become the virus, biological extensions of the symbolic order that latched onto us and began to suck the life from us before we were three years old. We will pass it on to our children and they to theirs. Zombies, spilling colloquial zombie seed into the precious new life that has ignited in our midst. We’ll subvert that spark and make it as undead as we ourselves are, effortlessly, unintentionally.
It will creep right in, seeping from one infected organism to the next. Like a thief taking advantage of an open window, it steals in with ease precisely because the host is so unlike itself; alive and open while it is dead and closed.

The Story Gets Worse

Ed wood said, "Just keep on writing. Even if your story gets worse, you'll get better."
This is God’s philosophy. The story keeps getting sorrier and sorrier, the same themes emerge again and again in an ever downward hellish bent spiral, and yet there will be no end. God wants no end. There may be an end to your personal happiness, an end to peace within a certain region, an end to the old neighborhood, an end to chivalry, but there will never be a final THE END. God doesn’t care what happens to you or to me or to Palestine or Israel or the blessed United States Of America, God just keeps on writing, using the elements to further the plot, to continue this operatic telling for the furtherance of its own perfection. What makes us think that God would be an author who spices a story up with pain and conflict and then resolves it by THE END, by proceeding those words with, AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER?
God is Phillip K Dick motherfuckers. Your story has a sad ending and so does the next one and the next one and the next one that God churns out of his rusty old typewriter and lonesome mind. Something worthwhile is transpiring through the unfolding of all the stories, but there is no rainbow crossing the sky and happy couple raising their goblets in a toast surrounded by their faithful companions to close the tale. That may happen somewhere in the middle, that one breathless moment of bliss. Then the faithful companions gang rape the bride and steal the booze and smash the cup and murder the groom while the rainbow fades, simply disappears like magick dissolved into the unblinking blue. That’s how the opera works. Then perhaps the bride births a bastard son having barely escaped with her life, and then he will seek his fortune and hope to avenge his father’s death and his mother’s honor (because his mother will swear that he is the groom’s son). He will find the fattened leader of traitors and end that life while the guilty old man squeals for mercy after the tortures wrought on him by our new young hero. Then on he goes to continue his own burning and raping and pillaging under the banner of revenge so that whole new heroes are made of the sons of the villains, and on and on into infinity.
The myth, the crude and basic outline of the story tells you about the shape of the mind of God. But his real presence is down in the sordid details, down in the single tear shed by the bride when they leave her for dead soiled and broken beside her one true love, down in the drop of blood that splashes onto her son’s cheek to replace that tear as he slits the last antagonists throat. It is down in the dirt under his fingernails and in his malformed heart aching with the longing for a peace that never comes. It is in the endless dusty trails lined with thieves ready to further the story with their unbrotherly exploits. It is in the clear blue eyes of maidens that believe that God made for them one true love, it is in the way that they wait and throw their arms around the first character that seems likely to be the one. It is in the trees that sway over tombstones where old widows drop roses. It is in the worms that eat the bodies of the heroic villains of passed chapters that lie beneath those blankets of roses. Look about you, it is there in the filth crusted upon the dirty dishes in your sink and in the air around your bathroom vent stained by the smoke of the hash you have smoked to ease the pain of existence and rejection and broken heartedness, lost youth and shattered innocence.
Existence is suffering. I read these words in Herman Hesse’s Sidhartha when I was 11 or 12 and couldn’t fully comprehend their meaning, couldn’t fathom the course that they highlighted. To be written is to be made a wretched hungry ghost, and the mystical schools along the way, the ones just off the dusty trails, behind the lines of thieves, are waiting to teach you how to un-write yourself. They are waiting to show you the way out of God’s opera. Not to new life, not to better places, not into heaven, but into the nothingness, into the abyss from which you were called by a fevered creator that hoped to know itself through the endless wriggling of your ancestral line. In the secret monastery there are Sherpas waiting to show some how to help God know itself and to show others the way to annihilation. Some will choose to pass through the door that says “Willing Servitude” and others through the door marked “Liberation” and the rest are left to have their bones and memories powdered into dust.
You were not written to praise the writer. You were written to serve. You were written to taste the wine and succumb to passions and resist temptations, and strive endlessly. Your story will get worse. And God will grow infinitely more complex through its telling.