What are you rebelling aginst? What have you got? A better world or a better logic?

meika loofs samorzewski

Can you fix the world by typing better?

The world is made in the same moment we are each born, and just as helpless. We are each already there, but not quite all there. This is part of the help and part of the helplessness.

Photo by K. Mitch Hodge “A sculpture for The Derry City Walls by Antony Gormley. The sculpture represents the divisions from the civil war in Northern Ireland locally referred to as "The Troubles." What I find interesting about this sculpture is the division is not between the people, but within the people themselves (May, 2021)” on Unsplash

Baby and world are not the same thing, not even the same kind of thing, like twins, say, born in January, nor are they two faces, or sides, of the one thing, they are not real and can never be (any)thing, not even something to be thrown inthegap after being rent asunder.

Photo by Drew Thomas on Unsplash

In birth the individual arises out of a process in which the world shares everything, just as one shears out a place in it, family first.

Photo by Senjuti Kundu on Unsplash

Both faces/sides world/self can be called soul, but it is not the breath, it is not the atmosphere.

They are more like fuzzy developments impinging on reality from possible emergent but ultimately mechanical processes that we see in hindsight and call intelligence. Our soul/bias and world/frames are tendencies to map along with what contingencies allow us to predict, for a while.

To leave the person and enter the cloud of unknowing that is the world is to walk mystery into the gap.

The ‘walking’ megalithic statues (moai) of Easter Island by lCarl P. Lipo, Terry L. Hunt , Sergio Rapu Haoa (notice the blindfold)

Some peeps and their ways, abstract this gap-stuff as immortality or absolutes or even an infinite jest. Practices are not necessarily just-so stories, nor require them.

Some people carry more of the world, some worlds carry more souls of us, ‘these they’ are confused. And it depends how you carry yourself and the world. Some are the world, some world themselves, some self the world, some cannot tell the difference, some tell everybody too much. Sharing as command.

Some carry a lot of the world in themselves with grace and forbearance, some hate the world as they love themselves, as if there is a trade-off between the world and the self-soul, so then there is trouble for all in a cool-aid solution.

To respect the person is to world together, to respect the world is to person better, power can do neither. Power is a know-nothing, if it does not know itself. That is the nearest calamity. You'd better believe it.

You can call it social capital, and pledge your life to it, but real capital too often seeks to parasitise it, just as capital cities seek to countrify it all into empires and glorious throne rooms, backed up by counting rooms, and mercenaries-in-waiting.

In the world you are yourself.
                       you are yourself in the world.
                                               when the world and you are healthy,

Individualism is not a threat to the world, for the individual, and the world will go on regardless.

The world will make do with individuals, even broken ones, even wilfully islandic incels, but the individuals may not do so well. Empires glory in the blood of individuals. Empires are not the world. No collective is.

 

First published on substack in 2023.