iRREPARABLE DEBTS:

People don’t owe you anything for the things you’ve done right, nor do the things that you’ve done right negate the things that you’ve done wrong; they can only help you understand the difference.

I have done much for those who were ungrateful, not because I felt I owed it to them, but because I felt I owed that to the World. I held myself in debt to no man. I would take from those who had enough to spare, and I would give only to those who needed me. Some have tried to hold me in their debt for things that they’d done right, but I could never let them live with all the things that they continued to do absolutely wrong. I wanted nothing in exchange for my own deeds except for the respect that comes with knowledge.

At some point, Rob defended his best friend by saying that I shouldn’t focus upon what I think that people owe me. But my rage then could not be contained, for whom he was defending all ways tried to hold me in his debt and never could be satisfied. Without me, they would not have even met. Yet I don’t claim they owe me anything for what I did correctly. They owe me reparations for their damages. They owe me for what they did wrong. And I will not apologize for having warned them.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

USEFUL TOOLS:

YouTube recently removed my favourite version of The Holy Gift, an album by the rock band Tool which is their album Lateralus, but with the order of the tracks restored to what fans deduce to be the proper, hidden order. This video was also tuned to A=432, a Pythagorean, classical tuning system which produces meditative states. A lifelong music student and a longtime meditator, as well as a Tool fan of considerable years, I can attest to the validity and beauty of this reinterpretation. But as tends to be the norm, this avenue of artistic experience has again been mitigated by the greed of a corporation and the utilitarian pretensions to moral authority of consumers who entirely miss the point.

The fact is that people really did put a lot of work into decoding the track list, retuning every track, and mixing them together in such a manner as to accentuate the smoothness of the transitions, layering endings and beginnings on top of one another in a serene, surreal fashion. For a corporation to remove these videos is to mitigate not only the religious quality of the music as a communal discussion but also the same work ethic which drove its initial creation, though in this case no money was being made for the effort. It may be true that neither did the record company or the band profit from their message being heard in this interpretation of its purest form. Nonetheless, the point is not for either party to hoard a reward for every individual who happens to get the sacred message that the songs (and their entire marketing) profess. True fans will make the sacrifice of their own accord, without regulation or coercion, even if only for the trippy album artwork and the satisfaction of owning a copy. True fans likewise take the time to make this version available out of respect for what they estimate to have been the hidden intent of the artists, a meaning woven into the art itself in the manner that great literature contains subtext. No one should have to be penalized for this, and to restrict it entirely is simply barbaric, since this was the version that was quite probably “meant to be heard” but, given the peculiar nature of the piece, never meant to be sold, and even if it could be marketed it would defeat the artistry of its obscurity.

Since the compiler did not pretend to own the rights, most probably making this matter clear, since the music was not available for download but could only be streamed, since the album has been in publication for nearly twenty years, since Tool remains an iconic band that continues to tour and whose hiatus has made fanatics wild about recent releases, since this fanaticism is fueled by the incredible following that not only the product but its entire mythology have produced, since this mythology must be propagated by a free internet and is only hurt by censorship, since the band’s message is one of both freedom and finding inner peace through sound, especially in the wake of hardship, since this is part of the same Renaissance Ideal for Art that informed the entire conception of Lateralus, by the band’s own admission, since the lead singer’s aversion to his fans is as incomprehensible as are his views, and since fans continue to try to comprehend him, as much out of respect as out of curiosity, and since this striving brings them to that felt need to share their findings that mystics feel, the suppression of this content must be considered mental subjugation.

At most, this attitude would only reward the ungrateful fan who would try to profit from the calculated sale of the album to privileged buyers. And who is to say that that is not the best description of the Music Industry?

No one tried to make a profit off of this. No money was made, and neither was it lost or saved. In the absence of this video, no additional advertisement has been salvaged with which the album may be marketed; rather, the most authentic form of advertisement, that of the profoundly, ecstatically satisfied customer, was compromised to an absolute extent. Those who did not know about the video were not hurt by their ignorance; those who knew of it were only offered benefit, as reflected in the comments, which were uncharacteristically both brilliant and, for the most part, kind and reverent, both towards the band and towards one another, to say nothing of the Universe Itself, which the album succeeds best in presenting, beyond even mere “representation”, once itself presented in this “illegal” form which was only illegal because the producers clearly intended for it to be hidden, beyond a reasonable doubt in light of the apparent facts. Any one who would resort now, out of desperation, to purchase the album in its incomplete form would not only be penalized for his or her devotion, but such an individual would conceivably be very rare, for most listeners who discover the video are probably all ready in possession of the original product, and those who are not yet in possession of it probably would have no intent to purchase it except by avenue of this unauthorized act of advertisement. Above all: since no money was exchanged, no one got hurt. Because it was free, it was liberating, as intended.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

USELESS TOOLS:

Tool’s derivative brand of occultism is a different kind of cult from the sorts of cults they criticize; the rather libertarian, psychedelic-inspired rejection of all formal authority creates a hell on earth that is not the patriarchy of being told what to do, nor the matriarchy of being told what not to do, but something perhaps even more diabolical and depraving: a totally nihilistic anarchy wherein all acts, towards all beings, are permitted, but the ability to act out of protection, out of shame, out of conviction or disgust can only be effective to the same extent that natural chance permits, requiring the weak to place their faith in an invisible logos who lives in the numbers and thus makes sense of the chaos, the conscience reduced to a vestige of its former optimism as Maynard snarls “no one is innocent”. This is not an authoritarian state wherein you are told what to do or not to do, but it is an even deeper rung of hell where no one knows WHAT to do, since all actions are fundamentally meaningless and most of them harmful, except for those carried out by the same people who have to suffer for them. Tool is a fantastic band for adolescents because it rejects authority; unfortunately, adult life requires new faith to be found in new authorities in order for it not to spiral out… into madness.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

THE NORTH KORE: (Reposted and Amended.)

Do you want to know why I am “still” a communist? It is because I don’t wish to be punished for my virtue. I do not wish to be punished by my “equals”, constantly derided by them, either out of envy for my “gifts” or out of pity for my “failings”. I do not wish to be sabotaged by those I care about the most, those I am ready, time and time again, to pledge my LIFE to, and to give it sooner than I give the sacrifice a second thought. I love the North Koreans for their true egalitarianism, untinged by the perverse will which condemns one to the arbitration of his fellow’s perverse whims. I weigh them more generously against images of models and celebrities, unattainable gods and goddesses of the entertainment class, a new clergy that keeps their wealthy rulers in power. I can tolerate, I think, the pains of hunger knowing that I suffer not alone but among millions of human neighbours. But to be alone entirely!! To find that my place of employment is no righteous institution, that my fellows work to serve their private ends and not collective goals, and that my needs depend upon not only my abilities, of which I offer without hesitation, but by arbitration from superiors who represent THEIR interests. It is Hell. Wouldn’t you agree? I enter youthful, full of vigour and conviction, and I leave a tormented and tattered husk of all my prior optimism, seeing it for what it all ways was: sheer propaganda. The gap is much too great to be ignored; it haunts me in both waking and in sleep, driving me closer every day towards madness, a descent so maddening to watch in itself. And if this gap is not between reality and fantasy, it is between THEIR reality and mine. And then mine is the fantasy which represents the life they really live, for which they are forever seldom held accountable, for ethics lie beneath them. The only fantasy we share is that we are all equals, and if my equality is simply “equal opportunity” I am forever slave to opportunists and manipulators. Where I enter I enter at the lowest position, answering to everyone though getting little answer for my own questions, deferred perpetually to my superiors who in turn delegate to my peers, some of whom are my most notorious oppressors. I know not why a government must be so ruthless for its people to be better than this. But I have to hope that if someday my government can truly live up to some semblance of a moral code, then I will be rewarded for my virtue, not because I seek award or praise, but just because without it those who fall short of that virtue and who hurt me and my fellows won’t be punished*. If we can’t be equals, truly, owing to their shortcomings, at least a better State would shelter me from the oppression of my peers.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

*Clearly I demonstrate that my longing for equality is pure and that my willingness is great to make all the necessary sacrifices, to take all the risks, and to accept the hardships; I simply can have no sympathy for those who do not feel that longing for a human cause. If equality is truly impossible, I will accept as well the burden of status, a most peculiar concept to me but one that undoubtedly should favour me if I have remained blameless in service to my fellows, instead of punishing me for the service at the behest of those same fellows. This longing for justice is no different from my yearning for equality, and if I should have to accept this reward at the expense of those who are responsible for our depraved condition, then I will do so knowing that I am protecting us by punishing them, for the most of us would surely never question our human solidarity. My faith in our equality will not be mitigated, and neither will my willingness to undergo the aforementioned hardships, risks, and sacrifices. The embarrassment of holding status will be the fault of those, then, who no longer have it, for it is only in their failure to accept our universal solidarity that they would leave us no recourse except for such a meritocracy. At that point, I will have then to accept the example set by North Korea as the best worldly standard, a true practical Utopia, and you will never be able again to call my integrity into question by suggesting an ulterior motive. You will no longer hurt us with absurd and persistent disconfirmation, forcing us to clear our names when it was we who were clear of all wrongdoing from the beginning. Your petty projections will be meaningless before the law, and I will not be blamed that this should have to be the way things are, for I devised neither the problem nor its solution; I sought only refuge for all. As certainly as I know that this is the Truth, I can expect others to hear it as the Truth, without its being adorned or sold in order to accommodate a self-entitled, narcissistic paranoiac skeptic. At any rate, I have all ready answered any theoretical attacks against my dignity, with great expedience, within the text itself, and no warrant remains to be produced against me.

Dm.A.A.

ALL TRU!SM:

Not only did he sabotage my courtship with a woman who was certainly the only chance I ever had of getting laid in twenty years. He then date raped this woman, whom I loved, leaving her to die of paranoia, augmenting those suicidal ideations which had driven me to her protection to begin with and which probably had drawn her Soul towards me, seeking sanction. As my life dissolved in trying to salvage her and repair the damage, he exploited her perverse attachment to him with both utter pride and apathy, even besmirching her image, calling her “demonic”, most probably well after they had slept together five times and under the influence of drugs which he’d supplied. Though I offered him recourse and lease, he used the opportunity to demonstrate a sort of dominance, so that when her attempts to win his favor failed, her life depending on success, he not only refused to help, but he accused me of having produced this travesty. Whereas ordinarily my guilty conscience is my guide towards transcendence, for the first time in my life I think I found it turned against me, for he managed to reach such a depth of sheer depravity that I felt guilty by default of being in his species, and of course his outlook was such that I was simply the lesser male of this same species’ gene pool. Years I’ve spent trying to remedy deficiencies which never were my own, only under the burden of a concept that he could not prove but that I could no more disprove than extricate from my mind or undo. If ever my good graces had been more abused, they were by my ex-girlfriend, someone whom he cannot claim to be an unrelated anecdote revealing something of my character, for it was she that he would use to justify his treachery, though never had he done a thing to shelter me from her own malice, and the time that past since she broke up with me was greater by each measurement than that which has past since I met this recent tragedy I called my one true love. When I learned that she was involved with him again, against my wishes and her promise to me, by some blackmail or delusion, I confronted him as best I could, only to learn that some expressions of my tortured heart, which by then reached a pitch of hatred I had not imagined possible previously, and towards him, had found their way into his knowledge, so that somehow by being presented as a “hateful message” TOWARDS her one might think that the hate was INTENDED FOR her (for if this had not been true, his argument would have been foolish, and transparently so, but the good graces of any audience, the living proof that his worldview is mad, would hear only that which accords him undue dignity, turning his pointless truth into a pointed lie). I never hated her. Her weakness simply angered me. 

For it destroyed her ultimately. 

It was not long after she had died that he began to use another woman. Somehow he had established himself as the alpha male, reducing all my desperation, first to help, then to love, then to save, to impotence and to inferiority. Somehow I had to wrestle with the World which he had turned against me in my mind and often in reality, herself included. Somehow I felt guilty for her death, though not because his accusations carried any weight, but rather because it was through me that he met her, and that same fact which reminds me of my innocence now burdens me with guilt, for I was not the only victim of my trust and my naivete. He cleared his name, in petty semblance, of moral inferiority, condemning even my own righteous condescension to his foregone and ignoble dominance. My single plan, my solitary goal, justified by a Great Agenda which I only dimly comprehended, was to keep My Love alive. This plan he vilified, condemning her to die in utter solitude even as he dismissed my moral high ground in attempting to protect her, as if that ground were equally his own.

Did I mention that he vandalized my keyboard? It was a birthday present from my parents when I was first starting to compose in high school. I played it for my Hero’s Journey presentation in Ms. Rowan’s class. I wrote my first few songs upon it. We would jam with it when I still craved his company within my band. I brought it to his Mother’s Condominium under the auspices of getting that same band together, since she needed it. It took me many moons to get it back. I live ten minutes from his home. But he’s not one to answer when it’s inconvenient for him to do so.

Anyone who can respect him is a suicidal wreck. I cannot say I scapegoat him, for I own all of my own darkness in this exposition, clear about how he attempted to use that same darkness to subvert and contradict my Light. It’s either him or me. He made that clear. All of my life has been a preparation for this battle. If there’s any life beyond this, either in this lifetime or the next, it will come only when his reign is over.

I survive just to survive him.

Dm.A.A.

M!CA!AH: (666 mots.)

How could you probably suggest that Fascist and barbaric dictate that all must be fair, before the fact, in love and war? Must it not be MADE fair only AFTER the fact that these heavy burdens are charged with the same dictates as the rest of Life is? CLEARLY in a pursuit so engaging as love and sex only the most stringent moral minds can be regarded as attractive and deserving, and I tire of that madness that would haunt me otherwise. Nobody WANTS to be on the receiving end of this injustice, so it is impossible to justify, ever. I never would submit to such a conflict unless I were lied to prior to the fact. You cannot say that it is justified because others seek only the same happiness which *I* seek, for it’s clear that if my seeking this same happiness is just then they are INJUST by inhibiting my own pursuit of it, and NO one can be justified in seeking it if ANY one could ever be inhibited by the pursuit of it in the pursuit of it; that’s just as mad as it would sound. The Categorical Imperative is not “treat others in the way you THINK that they WOULD treat you, given power”, but “treat others in the way that YOU DESIRE TO BE TREATED”. By that definition, yes: let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments. True love cares little if the woman is a bimbo or the man is a drug addict. It cares little if both sufferers involved suffer from sheer delusion. If they’re happy, you can’t judge them, yet no honest man or woman can be HAPPY leading a relationship which, by its NATURE, causes strife, and to that same extent that we desire for our passions to be VINDICATED by relationship, those same passions are VILIFIED, rightfully so, when they inhibit the expression of an other’s passion. No two people can bypass my rights and needs by some sort of emotivist conspiracy, and I will NEVER be accused of harbouring their evil in potential form by those whose sins are written all over their hands. The injured party must submit to no insult, to add to injury, for being innocent and trusting, for one’s sole mistake to be to trust, and for the fact that others, failing to atone for the mistake by honouring the purity of the intent, to turn that same mistake towards lesser purposes. What purpose could be lesser than a competition without the consent of the competitors? What could be closer to rape? And what, fundamentally, would be more repulsive to the sexual instinct in rational and altruistic beings?? The injured critic is not blamed for one’s own misery, for no such misery could ever have been self-inflicted. Criticism does not make for misery; it barely even can be said that misery alone has caused it. Criticism is not judged by the effect it has upon the critic, so how can the critic thus be judged for the effect his criticism SEEMS to have upon him? Must we not conclude that that same criticism was not the CAUSE of the misery, but rather that it sought to remedy and to redress it? CLEARLY criticism must be judged not by projection of “intent” upon the critic but a recognition of the critic’s TRUE intent according to the facts which criticism has exposed in its responses to injustice. What could be more moving, sympathetic, stirring or Romantic? After all: those same Romantics who had deified Shakespeare knew that the purest of heart was the unrequited lover, for in spite of total isolation, even from the object of his love, he could pursue that love which did not alter when it alteration found, which TRULY answered only to its own virtue and power, knowing that consent was just conspiracy against its relatively noble nature. THAT alone is fair in love and in war. Everything else is barbaric and absurd.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

EGO:

I think that finally I understand it. You see, if I had been selfish in the slightest then I would have done my part to keep this all from happening. I would be led then to believe, or I am led NOW to believe, that he would have had no regrets about it. But lo and behold: I let it happen, without knowing it was possible. And now that I hate him for doing it, he feels betrayed!! Had I simply restricted him, then he would have been blameless, but of COURSE I am a fool for not having EXPECTED him to so betray my trust. This is not mitigated by the fact he KNOWS exactly what he did. Now he seems to believe I wish to salvage my own selfishness, for altruism failed to get me what I want, and by doing so LATE I can afford to blame him for it. Well: he’s right. I CAN afford to blame him for it. But the fact remains that I salvage my self-interest because I was NOT self-interested to begin with, so selfishness does not concern my character. There’s no way around that fact. People like him just cannot help but tear me down. They know I’m smart enough to see the worst in them, and so long as I do that I corroborate their view of EVERY one. Even if it is ONLY them that I find evil in, by scapegoating them for the evils of my Life I only prove myself to be a part of those same Evils of the World. It’s really very cowardly of him. I’m smart enough to see right through it, but I want more than to be intelligent. I really want to be KIND, like I was when I was young, before I even knew that I was smart. Intelligence people would recognize in me, but kindness I saw in myself before they did. It is too personal to squander on those who are so divorced from it they think it to be a delusion. I get people. It’s just that if I cannot fool myself into believing they are Better, or that they CAN be, then I risk going totally insane. I MUST gamble upon them, constantly, in order to feel totally alive. I must make myself vulnerable. Just to try to prove what only by an act of courage in this way can I prove: that someone would follow my example, and by doing so the World becomes a brighter, better place. I think they KNOW that that is what I’m doing. And they know that it’s so crazy that I have to tell myself that I will never be betrayed, that evil is a figment of my own imagination, just to keep on doing it. Yet so what if I’m proven wrong? So what if I can’t sleep, while he is fucking someone that I love to death? So what? I saw it coming. It was just my ego which could not accept it. Most egos will work towards the establishment of some dominion within the World. Mine cannot do that; it must by necessity EXPECT accommodation, for my Soul accommodates it as it nurtures all Beings. Nothing can justify the slight against my Soul. But while my Soul can weather it, my mind cannot. My Soul knows there’s this Other Side to people. But my ego’s not a coward for ignoring it. It’s still the ego of a hero. When these cowards see my ego writhing, they see themselves in it, terrified of ever being put into its posture. That is why they are not communists; the greatest evil in their world is that which forces them to trust their neighbours, knowing just how evil their neighbours can be, for they are themselves just as evil. But is that not enough reason to be forced to be Better?? Of course it is, and I do not deny that’s easy for me to say. I’ve earned that right by giving so much of my own Life up to Human Life Itself. So what do these cowards do? They see my ego writhing, and they seem themselves within it, and they think it foolish for having allowed itself to fall into despair, pretending towards that Dignity which no ego can have, projecting that same Dignity upon others as if that burden was their own. But this says nothing of the Soul. For that ego was noble, loyal to the Soul as friends are loyal to each other. And the Soul needed the ego to look past the evils of the World and to see some Good in these people, even at their most horrid of moments. That was why I could not sleep. Because my waking mind had had enough.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]