Aristotle's Kitchen

Books are repositories of boiling thought. Parachutes for rebellious angels. Sunglasses for the cynical. Telescopes for the oracular. Absinthe for the emotionally crippled. Things happen among words that are too weird to happen elsewhere. For example: prophecy. The curse of Cassandra. The warning nails itself into the past, where it is promptly ignored. Human beings have a very complicated history of crusades, war, oceanic consciousness and nutmeg. Did you know you can make a waterfall with a megaphone and a little urine? It’s true. Beauty is often in the eye of the beholder, squirming to get out from under the eyelid. Bitumen feeds the gallantry of our highways and roads. The rearview mirror gives us a clear view of the past. Pomades consist of rostrum sweat and bits of singing. The splendor of rain. The glitter of consciousness in outer space. One can obtain medications from plants. No prescription necessary. Just jungle. An entire planet juggled in prose. Riotous drinking, strummed guitars, chronicled aspirations. Letters putting out buds of semantic fruit. Gauze. Cephalopods. The clatter of metaphysics in Aristotle’s kitchen. 

Don’t treat yourself like a prison warden. No, no, no. Treat yourself like a mad wizard atop a high bluff overlooking the ocean, invoking a storm with a rod and a battery of words gathered from the grimoire in your cave. Try to imagine yourself as Elwood P. Dowd. Or Harvey, his invisible a six-foot-three-and-a-half-inch tall white rabbit. Converse with fabulous beings. Make friends with spirits. Press a stethoscope to the beating heart of night. Dream of a weekend with a Caribbean reef squid. Emotions aren’t like lingerie. They’re more like overalls. Let all the parts of you go berserk like laundry tumbling in a dryer. Turn resistance to resilience, then reverse it again, just to be sure the coffins remain below the sod and the moon mellows our intestinal biome with the languor of her phases. Despair is the daughter of hope. Hope is the bastard child of mitigation. Between these, we find intervals of rapport. Daylight in our laments. Moonlight in our bones.

Language breaks down when it’s employed to describe Paraguay or orbit tidepools. Words can’t do everything. It’s a magic limited to Jimmy Stewart’s role in Rear Window. His character, L.B. Jeffries, an adventurous photographer confined to his New York City apartment with a broken leg, allowed him to convey intense emotion. Infinity detonated in his eyes. The flash of bulbs. Immobility in the face of danger. The chaos of voices with different timbres and different needs reverberating in a building courtyard. When language breaks down the world breaks down. Details we hadn’t noticed before peep out. Thought on thought creates a dot of high density and temperature until it explodes into tennis shoes and rattles and intestinal biomes. In the same way glue is busy with adhesion, the croissant is a paradigm of the jaw. If we are to believe that the air inside a balloon is instinct with distillations of pink, then we must also concede that behavior is often the result of glia. You can drag a large vocabulary into the flowering vines of India, but you cannot make it engorge with blood and pump feathers out of its ass. To do this, you’ll need a press, at the very least. You’ll need a deep understanding of prepositions, and a map of Paraguay.

In the end, there is no end. Each end begins another beginning and each beginning slows before the next detour, the next exit, the next last chance, the next hothouse romance, the next smell of sawdust, the next play, the next crisis, the next fight in the ring, the next appliance, the next sweater. The weird motels of blue highways, the face on the back of a spoon, the incursion on your time, the escape into cinema, the push to go somewhere, always, until the journey itself becomes the destination. The engine clicks as it cools. Fresh rain. The sway of willows. Former truths turn out to be the biggest lies. And the biggest lies turn out to be fabulous entertainments. The saddest days are generally the most difficult to explain. The Victorians had beautiful salons in which to work these things out, eloquent speeches that shined like an English afternoon through frosted glass. The murmur of rain. The chatter of sparrows. The curve of a finger. Anything to draw the attention, and hold it long enough to get a point across. Which is most often pointless. The steam from an iron is more than apt to describe infinity as a collar. But that’s the iron. Everything looks wrinkled to an iron. It’s the things we’ve been busy neglecting that get us in the end. Bite us in the ass. Or flow over us like a solar wave in a Finnish sauna.

 

Consciousness Is A Ghostly Occupation

Every journey happens afterwards, in the mind. Stay focused. Don’t stray too far from the path. Demands have fangs. Mirrors dance the air. I can hear a horde of words fight and howl in a paragraph. On the basis of this occurrence, it is possible to go beyond semantics and exhibit some chutzpah. I’ve never felt so close to earth as I do at this moment, orbiting earth on a Santa Cruz bicycle. I know it in my bones. The most perfect drink is a blue wind on a green day. One sip confirms this. Two sips condense it. Three sips cause a little discussion. Heidegger asks the question what is metaphysics. The answer is fish. Our neurons are stars. Our valleys are mud and chaos. I think that thoughtlessness is a thoughtful idea. To be a mollusk or a hornet is still to be a living entity, a word, a noun, a name, a squeak, a squawk, a squeeze, a squab. Nothingness is identical with Being. An unknown vigorous button is like a beatitude to me, a thing that only happens when the splash forgets the wave that brought it here. A dream of description is salt to my tongue. I look for the best way to get it done. I recommend a stroll. Bring some binoculars. Old men sing differently from young men. There’s a reason for that. But you’re not going to find it until your turn 80. At least. At last. Death on the back of a donkey, tattooed and sparkling.

The word for discretion got lost again. Nobody remembers what it looked like. What color was it? How big was it? Did it appear hard to pronounce? Crossing a new horizon is always makes a splash. Whispers in the nave are not uncommon. They’re quite noticeable. Friends stand around chewing the fat. The revolving display racks in the lobby creak. They serve a purpose. But no one remembers what it is. Somebody suggested peacocks. Someone else insisted that there can be embellishments to the Act of Love. Peacocks, for example. Peacocks can be supplemented with a variety of acolytes. Acolytes, like argyle, can be supplemented with speech. What did they come here for in the first place? What were they seeking? Did anyone look satisfied when they left? This is what life looks like to a burglar: one stolen moment after another. In a room of 100 people, there will be 99 conceptions of God and a shivering bivalve. I wonder, though, how many people feel something inside them that wants to be announced – defined, described, chatted up, promulgated – but there are no words for it. You want to mean something very precisely. As precisely as any language has ever permitted. Meaning that when meaning itself has been stripped bare due to semantic leaching, as say, the word ‘awesome,’ it is magnetized by the nearest iteration of it, which is to say the seminal event when a feeling acquired a sound, and a sound acquired a meaning. Something hot. Something soft. Something key. But something.

Acting parts is vital. I don’t know who I am. An internal investigation has been opened. I should have some results by the end of the month. Until then, let’s party. As I don’t have an identity, I’m free to do what I want. I don’t even know where to begin. Florida, maybe. Predicates come into play, and scenery and mashed potatoes. Life occurs in sizzling coefficients. Music can take you elsewhere. But you have to meet it half way. There’s a bookstore in Key West with a rug and a cockatoo. And shelves and shelves of books. This is why I like mahogany. It looks good almost anywhere. It’s clear the universe has other things on its mind than agates. What we’re dealing with here are words at the edge of reality. Adjectives like a skeleton broken into rain. I surround myself with beautiful blunders. Nobody gets hurt. But there is percussion. Ginger Baker in Nigeria in 1971. This is the logic of skin. Clods of dirt. Horticultural syntax. You know the feeling. The feeling that comes at night. And smashes a piece of wedding cake in your face. That’s it. That’s what I need. A violin concerto in D minor played by a refrigerator. The truth that we put into words does not extend to Las Vegas. Grammar is always so sad. It helps to frame it as laudanum. Consciousness is a ghostly occupation. Nobody really likes Platonic forms. They’re useless in a kitchen. Just give the word and I’ll paint some cherubs on the ceiling. I can see it in your eyes. The entire shit show. And whatever else we might find in the drawer.  

 

This Is Why I Hate Paywalls

Existence begins with a sigh, a goat, and a slide down a birth canal. I want the full meaning of this sentence to disassemble itself in a centrifuge. What can we do to make this moment incandescent? This is where the hammer becomes a couplet. Stupefaction by Wi-Fi. I like to think of it as a kitchen appliance that straddles conventional boundaries and eludes definition. I enjoy every opportunity I get to wield a wrench. But sometimes I feel more like Malta. The call of an interior postulation puts my focus on hold, and I turn to the window for a ride across the Rubicon. I’ve made up my mind to go warm and temperate into the tropical regions of my southern hemisphere. Experience begins with a single inhalation. And ends with a fantasy. My fingers curled around an orange. My head wrapped around a novel perspective. How do you draw the light? How do you draw space? Just space. Nothing in it. No planets. No stars. No bus depots. No diners or donors or dinosaurs. Space. And many exciting minutes later Sandra Bullock. Reaching the sandy shore. And standing up. But that’s not space. That’s moo. Nothingness. Absence. Non-being. How do you draw that? What pencil do you use? What brush? What anarchy? What piano sonata? This is just silly. All the space is between the words. Not in the words. The slide in the park was put together with syllables. And a crescent wrench.

How does one manage to put so many words together without burdening them with the world’s tedium? I want to see the energy of life on paper. I want to see syllables and morphemes click as they collect the residue of combusting metaphors. Poetry is an incendiary problem with an explosive solution. Every now and then one gets a nice clean shot on the gun range. We live in an era nebulous as a rice ball. There are no parameters or parachutes. Capitalism is kaput. Competition has been replaced by authoritarian updates, unfulfilling fulfillment centers and sternly timed bathroom visits. Do you remember what it was like to feel your life unfold in candlelight and confession with the same quality of attention as a reader feels the articulations of a book tease the mind into thought? Writing gives us the opportunity to pour the northern lights over a crust of definition, and walk away grinning like Minnesota Fats after clearing the table with a single shot. It doesn’t always work out that way. It usually goes sideways. It’s why I get a kick out of punctuation. Is there still a place for poetry under the tutelage of techno-fascism? Sublime dead authors enlighten no one in library mausoleums. Books should be as wide-spread and available as water. You can use my swimming pool until I'm insoluble, & lost in butterflies.

Life is so much better when things are within reach. This is why I hate paywalls. Everything is siloed. Privatized. Automated. Society has been atomized into YouTube shorts. Who invented the zipper? I’ll bet there’s a video on YouTube to provide that information. Shared reflections can be erratic, depending on the host. Feelings aren’t always aluminum. And anything orthogonal can be abandoned for something folded and linen. Can you show me how you were born? I’ve forgotten much of it. Things continue to lie dormant within me. Trees. Hygrometers. Skies boiling with altocumulus. In the prominence of tidepools there are ample definitions for the weave of Michaux’s sumac. I want to see it do something extraordinary. Pour polar oil on a plaster mosquito. Sometimes I feel compelled to pin a question mark on a crab. There’s a melee every moment that staggers in the timeless presence of a Helsinki coconut. Here we have a group of carpenters swarming around a sonnet. I’m not always so openly scientific. Which is to say the carpenters are real. But the sonnet is not. The sonnet has been transformed into a bloodmobile.

Yesterday I bought a sound. A gown of sound. I’m a man of elder years and chrome elephants eavesdropping on marathons of pain. I consider clothing to be sparkles of perambulation on paper, parables of lavender and gray, like the sunsets of France. The sleeves of evening may be deployed in the libraries of the soul. These are the ghosts of pool sticks, the very things of which the world is made, including all the fractured ideals following a bloody revolution. Subtleties of this sonority shake the inhibitions from my horn. It’s a funny feeling. But I’ll get used to it. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Mars. I crawled out of the world early in the game, when two tickets to a concert of frogs cost two bucks and a papal dispensation. I just come here for naps now, and a little vanishing point perspective. I keep looking at it with the old perspectives. And then it occurred to me, isn’t the need to alter one’s perceptions the sine qua non of poetry? The Norse gods are deep in their mead, howling sagas at sawdust dolls. That was the original sound. Not the new sound. The new sound is from outer space, catching fire in a Belgian dictionary.

Dostoyevsky On A Pogo Stick

Have you ever noticed how easily wires get entangled? Do you spend a lot of time thinking about these things? I do. It’s why I never get anything done. The day breaks and, further on, in the small port of Spinola, the fishermen are already bustling about on their small multicolored boats. It’s why I write poetry. You can map oblivion with propofol, or the unfiltered voice of summer rain, and still have difficulty netting certain ideas. The conviction that, for example, some laws are bad resulted in The Ramones. But really. It’s so hard to convince people of anything. It’s a big problem. Especially if you have your heart set on becoming a self-help guru. I had a lifetime to do that. And look what happened. Nihilism. Nepotism. Cynicism. Emil Cioran. Is there a universal mind where one’s interior can thrive on the power of a waterfall and remain calm in the face of a plutocrat? I can’t answer that. Nobody can. I’m still stuck on these wires. Disentanglement. String Theory. Inflationary Universe Theory. The Theory of Everything. The components of life are courtesies of sunlight and dirt. You’re here as long as you’re here.

I’m fairly open to things. But there are exceptions. Genocide. Technofeudalism. Global surveillance. Centralized digital banking. Neoliberal economics. Tax cuts for the rich. Things have gotten so sordid lately. There were incidents during last night’s bingo game I’d just as soon forget. What makes the vividness of the fourth of July so spectacular and simultaneously demoralizing isn’t the fireworks but the absence of anything truly independent. And who can’t be a little amused by Musk and Trump’s little breakup? If you must break the law, said Julius Caesar, do it to seize power. In all other cases don’t slam the door so hard. I’m trying hard to keep us both in focus. Bank robberies are exciting and cathartic. But when it comes to scandalous levels of extravagance, you can’t beat the pentagon. Bubbles do pop. Carry a widget wherever you go, and observe the law as you might a great judge of character. Leonardo de Vinci. Lao-tse. Marie Curie. Gypsy Rose Lee. Johnny Rotten. Dostoyevsky on a pogo stick.

Poetry doesn’t need to be written. It just happens. The day I was born I didn’t argue with anything. Or did I? Does crying count? Frustrations begin in the crib and mount with the evolution of our needs. I will apply words to reality whether they truly apply or not because words are more interesting when they detach from reality and flit about like hummingbirds in a cage of grammar. You can build an emotion of extravagant hues around a jewel of music. But can you make a tiger prowl through a sentence filled with entanglements of vine and orchid and yet remain untethered to anything proto-utilitarian or syntactically crystallized, as in the practice of doing dishes? Why would you? I’m a glutton for polysemy. My favorite shirt is a ceaseless provocation with four hundred buttons of flaming preternatural gold and eight sleeves for each tentacle. I live like Greogry Corso, still harboring that 5,000-year-old secret behind Jack and the Beanstalk. Gogmagog. Fee-fi-fo-fum. I smell the blood of a beatnik poet high on ayahuasca. 

There are infinite resources for the thickness of things, much of it rendered by the infinite resources embedded in the semantic thickness of words. My fingers squirt words all over the surface of a walnut desk. I didn’t invent this language, but I do go swimming in it occasionally. I wish people took better care of it. Which is a massively hypocritical thing to say, all things considered. I remember when correspondence meant something. You could see a mind drifting through itself, crackling like a power socket in a moon jelly exhibit. For example, that night Joan Rivers sat on my lap and told me a joke about my monkey. I got lost in Johnny’s eyes. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: noodles improve the soul's lampshade. I’m far more comfortable when I’m insoluble. I can’t just amble around in iron. I must rub things together to get sparks. Our bodies are here to propagate, but our minds like to flourish in solitude. The human brain houses approximately 86 to 100 billion neurons. What kind of solitude is that? Mending things demonstrates a kind of tenacity, but I’m not here for tenacity. I’m here for the doughnuts, as always. It gives me release. The more bites you take, the bigger the hole. 

 

A Language Isn't Just Words

A language isn’t just words it’s a way of attaining elsewhere. It’s also a way to make the heart of a palomino pump its energy and burdens into a fiction. I like to write in the sky where the clouds are folded into fingers of crackling silk. Exempted from accuracy and truth, we abandon ourselves to lingerie and ceaseless correlations. The lights of Reno, the rhetoric of sage. Consonants tumbling into mountain rain. Morphic resonance, cogitatum, apodictic evidence, introspection, intentionality. A letter from Virginia Woolf. An intriguing set of vertebrae played like a xylophone. This is how perception, rendered in gray, makes concessions toward reality. Venice in the sfumato of a late afternoon. The phosphorous glow of Pacific waves cresting on Poipu Beach in Kauai in late evening quiet with a full moon framed in a ring of noctilucent clouds. I find the sea mysterious, sublime, and terrifying. I always wonder about what’s on the bottom. Metaphysics and coral. Metaphysical snow globes. Mermaid brothels unanswered howls. An embarrassment of riches, a space of humidity and glass for the opprobrium of cactus.

Where there are trees, there are leaves and branches. Things are weirdly encompassed yet infinite in the synaptic forests of the brain. Metaphysics snows on the ganglions. Righteous glia and neurons of the mangrove register the blue vastness at the surface of the Pacific where the curvature of the planet is revealed at the horizon line. This is how perceptions puzzle the strings of the violin with a bow of prose and a sternly monitored chin. I can’t explain why I said this. My cloud flashed. It’s an orgasmic muted in deep pleasure. I can generate a wavelength of love on any train in the country so long as it’s running on good rail and sketchy intentions. One day I shall pen a biography of fog in the luminous ink of the midnight sun. I’ll do it for kicks. I’ll lure it into being with the coals of a capable etiquette, the linguistic tinsel of subjunctive collisions and cognitive dissonances. They say its easiest to run where the sand is packed hard and I find that this is true. It’s not uncommon to make the discovery of the ego’s illusions at the beach. It’s a crunchy nugget of self-awareness, like inwardly cringing during an acceptance speech.

They say we know less about the ocean than we do the other planets and stars in the universe. The same could be said about consciousness, that ocean in our head. I’m not even sure why anyone imagines it’s in the head. Some of it might be outside the head. When consciousness becomes words it lights the chandeliers with a figure of speech. And this is called heat. This is how the search for consciousness can look stupid as hell on a sheet of paper and yet ignite your brain. Memories wrapped in glittering mirrors will yank you out of life and drag you into the steam of a dream. I know a fool when I see one. The mind juggles words like a court jester. Speech is a vulnerable undertaking. You can start out with the best of intentions and find yourself looking for a napkin after blurting a confession of fraud and irony. All these things are true and happened on a mountain. Percy Bysshe Shelley isn’t dead. Let’s not kid ourselves. No intensity goes to waste. If the shoe fits, fine. You don’t have to wear it. I walk around in existence all day doing what I can to redeem the various predicates I’ve put into play. I order what looks good. I eat it. I look around. I thank the waitress. I get up. Grab my hat. Leave a tip. Head for the door. So no. There are still delicacies. Things to assess. Things to do. Things to say. Exits and entrances. Last night I listened to Fleetwood Mac. The early days. The Peter Green days. And then I began to drift away on a black horse of desire, and let it all happen in music.

 

Members Only

I belong to it. So do you, I believe. Life. Existence. Being. It’s a big circus with acrobatic Hamlets shooting out of Danish cannons. There are challenges, and there are amenities. There is also a passage, a trajectory of stage doors and wild vagaries of immodest equivocation. It’s the same path our ancestors traveled in their quest for eclairs. And yet, for some reason, whenever we go wandering there, this whirl of syllables appears, confounding everything in its wake and turning it into folklore. We live by pom poms, big emotions, skylark kazoos and evangelistic fanatical invention. The coinages are bluntly numismatic. But I’m buying nothing from our rotating hands. If things get anarchic, we’ll start the tractor and plant some vowels in the soil. We’ll grow hearty sonnets and stunningly beautiful elegies. Corn. Beets. Radishes. Tomatoes. Cucumbers. Peppers. Beans. Cilantro. Conversational implicature and subjunctive kindling.

Today, I got a newsletter from infinity. It says drift, hungry and luminous, among our planets. My breath changes the course of a stream of words and it lifts a future tense into an engine of postponed meaning. Unity, a remembered effort, burned down last night. This left us with a steady mass of canvas and a cup of sugar. I’m not against gasoline. Logic is the refuge of the handshake. You’ll find it, at times, humming a charming song on a corner of the bench. Flap your explosions towards the dangling resilience. It’ll come in handy for the pancake parade.

Are the algorithms our buddies or more like border collies? I keep a gardenia stand under the planet. Applause is concentrated in the hands. Don't look for virtuosity in a cherry orchard. If the petal doesn’t match the description, form an opinion. Never let a compliment stand in the way of your vanity. We have tinsel for the toilet and history for the negligent. You can shine like a spatula in a merchant ship. But one day your monkey is going to beg the crowd for a branch, and hand you a hyperbole. Either grow up disembodied or escape yourself. I’m not here to cause trouble. It is, in fact, my most profound desire to lift you into abstraction. Old gets old by rattling its speedometer. Essence is a process, not a yacht. But it'll get us across the border. Cubism is rooted in my ganglia. It’s got a face like an outboard on a paradox. Everywhere you look you see people anxious to get out of here. It’s up there. Top shelf of the living room. Glued to an attitude.

We worry the spirits when we talk in this vein. The melancholy soulfulness by which Lucinda Williams sings Magnolia is its equivalent in music. This adjusts how I dish the mud. Do I use words, the words of everyday life, or some other words, the words of a wedding cake ruminating on an abstraction, or David Lynch directing a miniseries? I can take an insult from nearly anyone but I cannot tolerate a too blatant eagerness to do nothing. I embody bedding. I always have a sleepy feeling. Please don’t spoil my day. I’m miles away. My homonyms heal the heels along the way. Tomorrow I’m bringing snow and evergreens to the site of a chronic remorse. The window is glazed with frost. I watch pathos stroll through a wilderness of improbable scruples. As soon as I get to the end of this sentence I’ll disappear. And reappear as a stimulus. It’s what I’ve wanted all along. A jacuzzi in the backyard. A divine destination. And a way to get there.

 

The Fossilization Of The Human Mind

I like the way The Firm opens. Everything is golden. Everything is excellent and prestigious and coming up roses. Mitch McDeere (Tom Cruise) is a top tier Harvard graduate in law pursued hy numerous law firms. He takes a job in Memphis that offers him a monster salary. Oliver Lambert (Hal Holbrook), chief of the law firm, shows him a lot of affection. Then there’s a rooftop luncheon overlooking Memphis and the Mississippi. And things start feeling weird to Jeane Tripplehorn, who plays Cruise’s wife. She learns from a brief conversation with one of the other wives that it’s not forbidden for the wife to have a job. And they encourage having children, because children promote stability. Things start escalating from there. Bar by bar by bar a cage forms around the couple. The big turning point comes [spoiler alert] when McDeere is sitting at a booth in a café trying to eat while studying for the bar exam. The fact he isn’t home and is having dinner in a café, surrounded by piles of books and notebooks, illustrates the pressure he’s been under and the strains beginning to appear in his marriage. FBI agent Wayne Tarrance (Ed Harris) and Thomas Richie (Paul Caldéron) come swaggering in and sit at a nearby table. They playfully drop some hints that gradually reveal that they know about McDeere and the law firm he works for, which is steeped in corruption. They firmly and persuasively convince him to meet with a higher official in Washington DC, by the Lincoln Memorial. Which he does. And he is told that if he cooperates with the FBI he won’t go to jail, but his career as a lawyer will be over. In the gathering of evidence, he will – by default – be breaking his oath of confidentiality. He and his wife will also need to go into a witness protection program, his dreams of pursuing a career in law utterly and irretrievably shattered.

The Firm is a dramatization of personal asphyxiation. The American Dream turned abject nightmare. Which is what has been happening in real life over the last several decades.

It's a terrible feeling. Dank, dreary, dungeon-like. Eerily similar, in fact, to a feeling I get related to our current political situation. Not just Trump, but one that’s been building over the last few decades, beginning with Reagan. The discovery that the country is steeped in so much corruption, so much aggressive surveillance, so much police state militarization, so much psychopathic greed and inhumane treatment of the poor and vulnerable, that escape seems impossible. It would take the genius of a Houdini to wrest free of the regimented lives people are now forced to inhabit like prisoners in a minimum-security Federal Prison Camp. Right now, the people who feel it most are poor, people with barely enough money in reserve to cover an emergency room visit. People blessed with higher incomes might not feel it at all yet, even when they see videos of thugs kidnapping people right off the street and deporting them to a CECOT prison in El Salvador.

The places that frighten me most right now are grocery stores, and Top Pot Doughnuts. The self-checkout aisles are trying to nudge us away from cash by reducing the number of stands that accept cash payment. Top Pot Doughnuts – at least the one in our neighborhood, which has recently closed – refused to accept cash altogether. I took offense to this. I stopped giving them my business. Boycotting them wasn’t easy. I love jelly doughnuts. Why is this? Not why do I love jelly doughnuts. I know why I love jelly doughnuts. They’re delicious. They’re palpable evidence that the universe is quintessentially benign. No. My question is more sociopolitical in nature. Why are certain businesses refusing cash? Is it because of Covid? Is it because of cooties? It makes no sense. It’s just paper. Though actually it’s not. It’s 25 percent linen and 75 percent cotton. But that’s not the point. The point is despotism. Rumblings in the media conjecture the end of cash and the launching of a social credit system. This maneuver would be final nail in the coffin of anything resembling free speech, or privacy or individual agency, and the institution of a totally totalitarian state of social control.

Catherine Austin Fitts, an investment banker and former public official who served as United States Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing during the presidency of H.W. Bush, warns that a digital concentration camp is posing a real threat in the behind-the-scenes machinations of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. “A complete re-engineering of the U.S. government through the digital systems is now possible at high speed,” she writes in her blog the Solari Report. “A digital control grid is an electronic network of telecommunication and information systems that allows individuals to be surveilled, tracked, and made subject to invasive controls applied to their financial transactions and resource use (such as electricity, food, water, transportation),” she writes, “compromising, if not ending, all human rights and liberties. Control grids operate with significant data collection and AI to apply social credit systems that can be dictated on a highly centralized basis. A digital control grid ends financial freedom, replacing markets with technocracy – a system run by rules created by ‘experts.’”

This is what happened to the truckers in Canada when - in early 2022 - the truckers organized a protest known as the Freedom Convoy, initially against a vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers requiring them to be vaccinated before being allowed to cross the U.S.-Canada border, and Justin Trudeau responded by invoking the Emergencies Act and blocking access to their bank accounts.

The implications of this are terrifying. One could feasibly be debanked simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a protest against the official government narrative, and there you are, exiting a drugstore and exposing oneself to the biometric examination of a street camera, or – after enjoying a glass or two of wine after dinner – posting, on impulse, a provocative political statement or voicing a raw reaction on social media that might be interpreted as “hate speech.”

This would effectively end free speech altogether and have a chilling effect on public – and private – discourse. Imagine you’re a parent and you give your son or daughter a birthday party and one of their friends overhears an untoward statement between you and your partner that gets reported to their parents, then reported to the authorities, and the next morning at the grocery store you discover your bank account has been frozen. Or you buy a book on Amazon that goes contrary to the official government narrative. Or your produce a documentary about the atrocities of a foreign government that our government is friendly with, and making huge profits from the sale of weaponry. The documentary is quite successful and wins prestigious awards, at least in other countries. Like the César Award in France, for example. You’re suddenly rich. But you can’t access your money. You’ve been naughty. The government is calling you a terrorist, and your account is frozen.

Thought, creativity, spontaneity, vision, inspiration, expressivity, conjecture and conviction go down the drain. Life – or whatever is left of life – is conducted in an open-air prison in which every word is weighed carefully before being uttered. In which every purchase is carefully considered. In which you’re mandated to submit to a medical procedure despite the recommendations of your doctor or your own suspicions about the inherent dangers of a deviously conceived and poorly researched vaccine. So you refuse. And are debanked. Canceled. Ostracized. Quarantined on a compound in Greenland. And jabbed every six months.

Catherine Austin Fitts remains hopeful that the totalitarian juggernaut being assembled in the secluded corridors of the digitized cybersphere can be stopped. One immediate action to take is to boycott enterprises that forbid cash. Another is to get word out. There will be conveniences to a social credit system, such as paying for things effortlessly, with the blink of an eye or the touch of a finger, that will be used to lure the public into its net. Look how easily the public has been roped into doing the work of a cashier after the onerous chore of grocery shopping. Not to mention the atomization of the agora; for some elderly people, whose friends and family have all died or been estranged by some feud or grudge, a brief chat with a bank teller or grocery checker may be the only opportunity to exchange a few friendly words with someone. There was a checker at one of our local grocery stores who sang everything he rang up, like the people in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. “How are you, I’m doing fine, bananas are on sale this week, and strawberries and blueberries and raspberries and blackberries are $2.99 a pound.” Don’t let a self-check rob you of that. Or a centralized banking system control what you choose to eat.

The biggest enemy is apathy. A public that would prefer handing in an essay or article written by ChatGPT than endure the frustrations and work of writing something themselves. I won’t lie. Writing is hard. I’ve been doing it for years and only rarely does it come flowing out of me in sparkling rivulets of prose. It’s wonderful when that happens. I feel like a sorcerer. A wizard, like Shakespeare’s Prospero. It’s an intoxication. The struggles, too, are enrichening. It’s galvanizing to wrestle an inchoate idea into a vividness of being. Language is a wonderful but maddening medium. I agree with Wittgenstein: the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Language is muscular. Syntax and grammar and vocabulary and phrasing and juxtaposition are muscles. The more you use them the stronger they become. The reverse is also true; the less you exercise these elements the quicker they atrophy. The mind grows increasingly vacant. It seeks fodder in distraction, which is low in vitamin D and protein, and withers into the spongy decomposition of a bog. This isn’t just a danger for laying the foundations for a totalitarian social credit system, but the death of spirit, the fossilization of imagination.

I’m a pessimist by nature, so I’m not as hopeful as Catherine Austin Fitts. But I have seen it happen. By ‘it,’ I mean revolution. An entire paradigm shift that seemingly happened overnight. The difference between 1962 and 1964 was gigantic. I’ve seen people who were once shy and retiring and bore all the trappings of what people once called responsible and mature, turn into Bohemian rebels flamboyant as Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider and as outrageously Blakean and headstrong as Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s Mouth. You never really know what people are capable of. What’s churning inside them. What’s aching for release.

The Firm was made some 32 years ago. The level of corruption wasn’t as ubiquitous as it is now. Nor was the surveillance. It was pretty sophisticated, but it wasn’t as commonplace or sophisticated as social media monitoring or data mining or fitness trackers or drone surveillance. Movies once shaped public opinion. They were powerful influences. Now they’re as passé and sad as the Oscars. People don’t even go to the movies anymore. Or read books. They scroll. They gaze at pixels. They watch podcasts algorithmically tailored to meet their specific views of how the world is put together. It’s virtually impossible to find a consensus on anything. You would think that this must, then, be a very cosmopolitan time full of open-minded savants. But it’s not. It’s tribal. It’s electronic. It’s a dumbed-down cyclotron of overworked, overfed, overstimulated, supercharged zombies who have ceased paying attention to the wars and genocide and rising seas and temperatures and growing homeless populations and are still learning how to cope with the anguish burning a hole in their soul. The Great American Novel has imploded into Augmented Reality. Philosophy has been superseded by video games like Grand Theft Auto and Minecraft and League of Legends. The last Tom Cruise movie I saw was Top Gun: Maverick. It was surprisingly good. Nobody looks cooler than Cruise in a Super Hornet.

Money has assumed many different forms over the millennia. Cattle, salt, feathers, hides, shells, coconuts, butter, whale teeth, cocoa seeds, tobacco leaves. Money is a form of language. Its current manifestation as digital currency – bitcoin, or cryptocurrency – underlies its true nature as a transactional abstraction – is as fascinating as it is potentially dangerous. People get caught in abstractions all the time. We call them ‘isms.’ Fascism. Captialism. Communism. Anarchism. One thing you don’t want is a systematized and centralized authority like the Wizard of Oz in control of how one chooses to live or chooses to believe. If you’re lucky, you might one day come upon a yellow brick road and a cowardly lion, a brainless scarecrow and a hollow tin man for companions, and through a combination of persistence and accident you might get a shot at entering the Palace of Oz and flipping the curtain back to reveal a quirky old man pulling the levers of power like a maniac high on ecstasy and ketamine. But really, it’s easier in the long run not to let things get to that point. Next time you go looking for a pastry, or a checker at the local grocery, insist on paying cash.