#ancient apocalyse or something

[swagging-back-to]

fossils and archeology are irl lore but no one cares

[antikate]

Shot through the heart, and you’re to blame, you give being in love with an ancient horrifying supernatural entity a bad name

Crowley invented Valentine’s Day. Great for making single people miserable because they’re single. Then they do stupid things like drink too much and end up confessing their love to their best mate via drunken text and everything gets awkward and horrible. (Not that he’d know anything about that, thankfully Aziraphale didn’t get a device capable of receiving text messages until after the apocalyse and by then they’d got it all sorted.)

Not-single people are miserable because their ungrateful husband never does anything although one year they got a car wash voucher and couldn’t decide if that was better or worse. Or they forget to make restaurant reservations in advance and end up eating a reheated pie in a shitty pub in Shoreditch.

It’s the kind of self-inflicted misery humans specialise in.

Which is why it’s especially galling when Crowley finds himself in one of those dodgy high street florists where the bouquets look to have been assembled by a drunk four year old wearing a blindfold. Baby’s breath! And shitty spindly hothouse roses! And luridly dyed gerberas! It’s an insult to plants. It’s an insult to love. It’s an insult to St Valentine, who was beaten to death with clubs and then beheaded.

Still. He’s got dinner with Aziraphale in 20 minutes and well, it’s the look of the thing, innit? Can’t turn up without flowers on stupid horrible Valentine’s Day, even something as trite as roses. Can’t miracle them up because Aziraphale will know, and doesn’t like “fake flowers” because he’s a fussy bastard.

He chooses the least worst bouquet and then, because demonic impulses die hard, buys a very large teddy bear to go with it. The bear is clutching a heart which reads “shit bitch you is fine”. It’s horrible. It’s tacky. It’s everything awful about modern Valentine’s Day in one synthetic bear, and Aziraphale is going to hate it.

But because it’s Aziraphale he’ll be obligated to pretend to like it.

Crowley smiles as he walks into the restaurant and sees Aziraphale sitting there, already half a bread basket in.

“Ah there you are!” The angel wiggles in his seat, glowing with delight.

Without another word, Crowley presents the flowers and the bear, and stands back, waiting for a reaction. Instead, Aziraphale just smiles, and hands over a small gift bag. Inside is a box of a chocolates, those Belgian seashells with the creamy filling. Crowley likes those.

There’s also another teddy bear. This one has little devil horns and a black cape and is holding another love heart, this one reading “too hot to handle”.

Crowley looks up and sees Aziraphale is trying not to laugh, and then he is laughing, and then they’re both laughing.

“You really are a bastard,” he says, sitting down next to the angel.

“It was very nice of you to buy me flowers,” Aziraphale says. “And I think after dinner we should ceremonially burn these awful things, don’t you?”

“I have a better idea,” Crowley replies.

A few hours later, in the depths of hell, Beelzebub receives a gift of a teddy bear clutching a heart that says “shit bitch you is fine”. At the same time, in heaven, Gabriel walks into his gleaming celestial office and is startled to see a teddy bear dressed like a devil sitting on the empty surface of his desk.

Gabriel lifts the receiver of his phone and dials a very forbidden number. It is answered on the first ring.

“You shouldn’t have, you spicy little devil,” he says down the line.

“Ugh, why would you even, this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen and I saw Hastur naked once,” Beezlebub buzzes in return.

“Shall we rendezvous at the usual location?” Gabriel croons in tones that make every single angel in Heaven cringe in embarrassment even though they don’t know why.

“Fine,” Beelzebub snarls and hangs up, but they are almost smiling.

(And somewhere in the afterlife, St Valentine complains that he’d rather be clubbed to death and beheaded again than have his name sullied in this manner, but all the other saints are used to his moaning and ignore him.)

((Apologies to @pearwaldorf))

[antifatalism]

a review of Nowhere Zone Waste Wilderness: Timonium Nature Walk (/as guided by Nick)

workin out some notes for a more thorough review and reflection on the nature walk nick took me on some months ago

Some basic points he asked me to elaborate on: 

“pre-apocalyse” spaces - 

“colonized” ecosystems

“young ecosystems”

the value of the tour as a nature walk 

----

In Capitalist society, or Western society, or whatever you want to call it, but most especially in the “capitalist” paradigm, there exists an interesting problem of space. “Space”. Probably one of the first concepts that has to form in a thing after it is born, if it is mobile. Along with “object” and “self”. As things have now come into existence, or really maybe that began in the womb, or maybe it’s a genetic (/pre-ontological) kind of knowledge, though I don’t think it has to be, nor if it were would it change my point here -- as “things” come into existence, to a subject, at any point in their existence as self-recognized/possessing objects, the subject experiences a new dichotomy: matter vs space. Perhaps in the womb, as we maybe like to assume when thinking about psychological origins, a creature feels that all stimuli are some kind of “matter”, some kind of stuff. But now, in a world where the density of the environment has diminished but the density of certain “things” has increased, as if all the density of stimulation have separated into “stimuli” -- and again, maybe this begins in the womb, or maybe its just a kind of “creation myth” that is, if not true about the “real history” of animal (or just human, or whatever, “subject”) thought/self-referential existence. And now, in between these “things” (including the self), there exists (or rather, “doesn’t exist) something new. Space. 

As the subject comes to recognize space as being not real, but that in fact they are breathing air of substance, seeing far-off appearances that the subject has come to assume are real “things” that are just far away and blurred, etc, the subject redefines space as being something structural to the existence of everything. It isn’t the “non-stuff between the stuff”, so much anymore, but the metric faculty of the existence of “stuff”, which perhaps can be seen bare were “stuff” to be taken away, but anyway, that’s not important, what’s important is that the “space” encases, forms, is filled to some extent by, everything. 

So, space is now the definition of what stuff can be, as objects. Not as stimuli; no, their stimulation capacities and qualities have little or nothing to do with the space things take up, except maybe in abstract, meta-space, semiotic sorta ways. (”shapes” becoming signs, letters, etc.) And because “space” all began as the thing necessary to understand how to navigate safely between those new aggregates of density - “objects”/”things” - and even that when those things are so far away as to not even be able to really feel out the definitions of space, and even when it’s understood that there was never space to began with, just stuff so thin that it can be navigated through assumedly safely without consideration, at least in terms of density -- even then, more than it cared to recognize stimuli as such, the subject now recognizes “things” as “matters” of space, and space as the measurable area which can contain things. Space becomes a thing, in this way, that without having any stimulation quality or capacity of its own, can still allure and frighten the subject as things, when they were still stimuli and then assumed but yet-uncontacted stimuli, once were. 

I’m not sure how much longer i should go on about space. But basically, I gave a little rant about it because these feelings are the reasons I think it’s interesting that people are so concerned with “space”s. Safe spaces, art spaces, free spaces, natural spaces, etc. Space is so important, the recognition of it and the politics of its designations so epistemologically integral to what people fight for and strive to create. Space is all about relationships between things, which people can’t help but recognize and “respect” each other as such even as they see each other as relatively equal “subjects” (not everyone, of course, and perhaps only limitedly anyone, or whatever, doesn’t matter). It’s neat. 

So what is a “natural” space? Well, I think it’s several other things, in what people respect as a former whole that those things are only pieces of. First, a “free” space - a space where no dominant force has designed the environment for its singular benefit, oppositional to the good of others, and therefore exploitative; where, perhaps, any force can do whatever it wants, perhaps chaotic. However, it is also a “beautiful” or “composed” space, as people will imagine “beauty” and “composition” are not so much matters of control-oriented design, but rather, wise correlation of co-developing things being guided by some genius, perhaps only the genius of good fortune which is comprised really only of the co-developers themselves. It is a “primordial” space - insofar as it pre-exists and remains beyond the creative control of human beings, or other things a subject might recognize as other subjects, unless it is a singular, omnipotent subject like “god” or “nature” as they are sometimes understood. Finally, and often most characteristically, a “natural” space is a “green” space. It is full of green stuff, of living things that don’t really move, only grow slowly and metabolize in a way that is virtually invisible to us unless observed longer than we tend to observe things. These are the primordial things, the ones we respect as generally the most egalitarian, non-controlling, mutually-aiding things, the things that can most likely exist in ancient webs of co-development, the fibrous stuff of an “ecosystem”, in which animal /moving-things can exist but don’t necessarily help define, even though really they are just as essential as plants, but anyway, moving on. 

Ecosystems. Systems of eco-, coming from a Greek word which meant “house” or “environment”, according to Wikipedia. It’s funny, leaving the word “ecosystem” kind of redundant. Let’s forget that “eco” also basically means system, or rather, system so intradeveloped that it becomes almost a permanent-seeming (primordial even) thing - or at least, that “eco” is a word used to describe the things we believe are essential to create such environments - and pretend it means “green”. Green things, those fibers of the intersubjective or at least inter-object codevelopment or coexistence. The potential for such complex systems to exist, systems so complicated with layers of cause and effect coming from so many things and going to so many things that they seem to have little or no “exploitation” or “control” or anything else basically heirarchical going on; systems which seem like things themselves, and all the things that comprise them their organs. But on top of all that kinda doomy stuff I just said that maybe implied a reduction of “ecosystem” to something political or mechanical, there is the fact that ecosystems are greater than us subjects, blameless of the kind of shit we do, serving our interests in balance with the interests of all things while at the same time not really existing at all, but merely being the implied ghost of the regulation that occurs when all things seek to existence and require some kind of balance with each other to do so. Or really, more than that, an ecosystem is a reminder that the subject is a thing with a story behind it, which created it and which is not created by it, and that the subject doesn’t exist as such without the ecosystem that produced it. Even if “artificial” -- human-made, or subject-made, or ego-made, whatever, supposedly non-absolutely-cooperatively-made -- systems define much of how a subject things of itself, indeed is responsible for much of what any subject might thing of any other subject, they at least sometimes are unfailingly aware of that time they recognized themselves, as objects, things pre-existing themselves, things created by a system greater than themselves, responsible for their existence as thing before they could become responsible for themself as self, if they feel confident to claim that at all. 

Humans are animals. Humans generally consider the “subject” to cut off at human, or even only specific “types” (races, genders, age-groups, able-bodies, whatever), or occasionally they also throw “pet” animals into the mix by considering them things that might deserve heaven, or they sometimes look into their eyes and think about their own self-respect, or whatever. What they almost always don’t think of as fellow subjects, I’d guess, though, is plants. Plants are things. Plants are, at most “divine” things. Crucial things. A really important part of the “food system” and the rest of the environment responsible for our continued existence, the existence of our bodies, ourselves as “objects”, the progenitors of our “selves”. Plants are green, they are fibrous, they form fibers that connect them together and therefore to some extent further erase their individuality, their isolation, and continue to grow as mass entities known as ecosystems, along with all the big and tiny animals and germs and whatever that gets caught in the mix. Simplistic and all due to human isolationism, really, or perhaps a way to ignore human parasitism and the responsibility of becoming not such. Or whatever.

There’s maybe no solution to the problems of human parasitism, isolationism, objectification, and other excuses for cruelty and ignorance. That’s not what I’m here to write about. I’m also not trying to say “space is a bad idea” or that our perception of “emptiness” and “otherness” are disgusting and bad. Nope. 

So what follows ecosystems?

PEACE!

What is peace? it’s emptiness and quiet, or the appearance of such kindly created by “good natures”. Yup, it’s nice stuff. Because we all want to be quiet and empty sometimes, and maybe a little warm and happy too. Sometimes though we want the former part so bad we don’t worry about the good stuff. That’s real. A lot of people want to create peace so bad they’d give up p much everything to make it possible. I pretty much do too, at least sometimes, given the mood. Whatever. But anyway, I bring up peace after all that other stuff because I want to talk about how it exists in relation to stuff, object, self, space, and ecosystem. Let’s start with the last. 1. We define ecosystems as the things that function, not based on our intentional (and perhaps therefore objectifying/controlling) cooperation, but in spite of our ignorance of the system. Ecosystems imply peace to us because they seem impeccable, made up perhaps of microviolences and even threats to ourselves, but generally easily hurt by our actions. For good reason, since a lot of the planet has been forcibly altered in, by all accounts, disfiguring and “disintegrating” ways due to human “industry” and intra/inter-species fighting. So we think, we create massive violences, so bad we have take “responsibility” for them, because in the long run they damage environments and destroy the possibility of ourselves finding “peace” in them. And within such logic is the sad discovery that sometimes “peace” is more easily found in destroyed places, even places we are personally responsible for destroying, because as destroyed places, they are made “innocent”. Victims, maybe, or depleted resources if we don’t want to consider them as subjects, or ruined environments, whatever. Our fault. For sure. And this peace that follows anger acted out, big mistakes being made, creates an imprint we tend to take a brief rest in, get sad and judge ourselves for indulging in the peace “we created” by destroying something independent or resourceful or beautiful, and run from it. These spaces are embarrassments to us, more often than sacred sites we owe anything to. I guess this is what I want to talk about. 

Landfills, artificial wetlands; those wooded areas, between shopping centers and business complexes, which perhaps don’t even have a name to designate them any “type” of environment; perhaps old “suburbs”, which have outlived the suburban dream of “peace”, guilty of hypocrisy and often economic failure as they are; industrial parks; destroyed beaches, forests, and other environments that just never got sponsored for repair by well-intending organizations; etc. “Nowhere zones”, “waste wildernesses”. Places that have things growing in them, things moving in them, peace feel-able in them, air pretending to be space in them, space bounding them, even. 

Oh, but I forgot an important thing about space, and how it relates to capitalism. boundaries! borders! Where do they come from? Why, from anxiety about and ascribing value to space as the potential for active, potentially harmful or useful or beautiful things to arise from! Places, as shapes, as “spatially”-defined emptiness-chunks full of stuff, where systems play out even if unmeddled-with, where someone must keep things safe and prevent others from trampling if ecosystems, robbing if resource storage, sabotaging if factories, occupying if private and personal, etc. We get the concepts of inhabitants, custodians, rights-holders, masters, dependents, because we have created geographical specificity alongside spatial property. 

But what I’m really trying to get to is mold. But before that I guess I need to talk about “sacred” space. This is space that pre-exists the idea of “property”, and simply is space so important to people, which they respect as beyond their understanding as a system, that they will defend against attempts of others to control or change it. Sacred spaces aren’t designated to define their boundaries, their “space-ness”, but rather to name them as respect-worthy things, as “places” without necessarily being spaces. The “sacred” tagline is attached to the “space” description because, in this world of property, it has become necessary to define its transcendent place in the world of “space”. It cannot be property, even if it has to be treated like the most important property. It might be property to some, unclaimed property maybe, but to those that care about it, it is more important than anyone’s right to it. 

So i guess what I’m saying is, people try to de-property places they care about by designating them as “sacred spaces”. They do this because, if enough people can agree to respect the designation, then the space has a body of defense. It’s an odd relationship, but in a way the place is still being abstracted and identified as a space, and therefore subjugated to being understood as having boundaries. But the intention is to recognize it as free, boundless, etc, as a germ for total freedom/boundlessness which should come, somehow, with the same being available to humans, along with that peace they like so much. To be innocent, free of isolation and abuse. Why is it so hard to create “sacred spaces” as kind of spatial protection spells around places people care about? 

Well, capitalism. Propertying goes on and on. There is nothing sacred without divinity; humans don’t recognize the fact that ecosystems require co-development, not expertise and installation. They are chronically guilty of changing things, while dipping in and out of feeling part of anything at all. So they make boundaries to try to have a “space” they can feel always-in, having a right to being-in, and being right to expel others when others make them feel at all not the same as the space, when others make them or their space feel changed. They can’t hold on to a place emotionally without holding on to it politically, and often with the really dumb politics of “property”, “right”, or outright “want” and violence. 

You know what’s cool about this comsos though? mold. 

Mold is gross. it disintegrates the dying. it kills and eats the skin of things. it absorbs the smallest amount of resources, but is hated as being decay itself. Sure, things die with it, often. Fungus might as well be defined as decay. Even though mushrooms thrive on living trees, in ancient forests, where subterraneously the mushrooms and the trees share space seemingly limitlessly with their fibers and roots. Where the moss of the trees provides pest control and nutrients, I think, or imagine. I know sloths need the moss. Which is different than mold, to be sure. What I’m talking about here, scientifically-termed, is fungus, and fungus-affiliates: fungus-plant combos, fungus-bacteria combos, etc. combo combo combo combo combos. They are real and important. to still more combos. 

Mold, all fungus, thrives on airborn entities of itself. it gets all over the place, spore-wise. maybe it came from space. doesn’t matter. it’s important here. 

it adds all sorts of colors. I once grew tempeh in a glass container in my bedroom. It was less-than-freezing temperature, so i had the container wrapped in electric blankets and sat it on a chair beside/above a space heater. The tempeh came out super multicolored - black, brown, purple, green, pink, orange, general pale, and others “in-between”. It tasted fine and didn’t get me sick. It was all the same dang mold, you might say, the one i meant to grow, knew to eat, even though it didn’t look like the store stuff. I assume the fluctuating temperature and other unstable conditions caused the crazy coloration. Isn’t that nice? Colors not due to “adaptation” as a survival tactic, I think, but as kind of frivolous products of adaptation as a fact, coincidence, situation, whatever. Predetermined maybe, but only by all the stuff that was there, not by external systems of purpose. The mold didn’t need to change colors, it changed colors because it reacted to its environment. 

I guess what I’m trying to point out is, stuff happens passively, reactively, often. Some spaces happen that way. Some spaces are created, treated like shit, never given much designation except maybe a property name, and abandoned, never to be cared about. But they exist, so so so passively. And maybe an ecosystem develops, as a young one is already present, when you think about how the stuff growing, even if put there on purpose to soak up toxic underground flows or hold the earth together where otherwise nearby industry would crumble it, is still building relationships with each other. Even if those relationships kill off some species, or force them to change. Nobody around to say what’s right or wrong. Nobody destroying what they love, on accident or purpose, and feeling terrible about it, suffering or throwing away their concern. 

there’s nothing good about ruins or the little wasted spaces that grow like vacuums in our geography. but they offer a kind of peace, they reflect something important about ourselves. I don’t know who i’m referring to, besides  myself btw, but maybe you feel similarly.

i haven’t finished writing this, but in quick, the final point was “pre-apocalypse spaces”. The way that people think of the possibility of an “apocalypse”, some kind of massive disaster, total economic failure, whatever. Usually it looks a certain way: like the spaces nick and I talked about. The spaces that, even if everything was getting “apocalyptic”, would probably remain much like how they already were. They would still be too young of ecosystems to provide much for humans or most other animals; they’d maybe still be full of toxins, slowly airing off, being dissolved, whatever. Maybe that’s part of the peace they offer now, too. Idk.