Le Lapin

There is a strange seductive quality worry has to it. Worry masquerades as care. Worry invents conclusions and outcomes that usually do not come to pass. And if those worries do arise in reality, an exponential worry complex emerges.

Rebecca Solnit had described worry as an activity claiming to know something that one truly does not. In this bodied activity, done in the face of the unknown, worry digs pits in stomachs, summons acid in the the soft canals for precious air and water, and can occasionally drive one mad or so far as to not be able to clearly see.

Can such horrible ruminations be truly set aside, opening up to a vastness of not-knowing and the surprises that may invariably delight or disappoint? Or is it better (meaning more functional here) to face worry straight in the eye?

Giving such an abstract voyage some experience-based context, let’s look at losing something. Pick a thing, any thing: a birth date, a flight, a promise, or an important meeting, a cherished item. There are deeper losses such as those caused by catastrophic events, but those are at a whole other level barely touched by such anecdotes here. And no confusion about tragedy out to be conflated with worry. The matter, or worry at hand, are those of the somewhat everyday, that try as you may, end up as impossible to forgehtaboutit.

The lightening bolt of mild panic to terror that cuts through in the moment of losing something contains the power to steal breath and induce a chemical toxin with the body. And because humans are an adaptive species, some folks develop toxic resistance to toxicity, in that they no longer notice the imbalance of the system. That’s why follow your gut to find it (whatever it-thing happens to be) doesn’t always work. The fight, flight, freeze responses shut down sensory processes which aid in finding about as effective as hugging a brick wall, which is why we often call in for back-up. This back-up person usually witnesses a brunt of erratic behavior, frenzied emotional expressions, and the overall sense of suffering. A lost it-thing catalyses into some kind of significant thing, and the worry poises itself as an emperor without clothes. Pretending to be important, and posing a significant barrier to getting on with life.

There are a grave number of things wrong in the world- again mind you not the life-or-death matters here, but a lot of matters made up to be really important. Obliterating worries then isn’t about not caring, but rather letting go of what has happened or what might, to free up the energy to pay attention to what is happening.

Another tactic could be: If you have found yourself to have lost something, start washing. Wash everything you can find. Wash by hand, down on your knees, go around picking up your place. You may not find what you were looking for, but you might find some thing else instead.

Finally, talk to your worry: what is that space of loss? Is it bright or is it dark? Is it abrasive or chaotic? And in this conversation, can you find yourself a slice of contentment? If there is not light, there is no light, bath in the darkness. If there is sand paper or chaos, polish yourself on it or go dancing in the whirlwind. Whatever it is that is worrying you also has a match within you, like a lost sock makes friends with a mismatched sock.

And there you have it; you have literally taken your worries down.

You won the boxing match.

Underwater Prism, Macquette for Public Art Installation, Developed 2016. Prism was a gift from my Oma, the box was sources from a Glass Master in Oslo, Norway.

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The story behind the image: The original analogue film exposure is from Musée d'Orsay. The museum became my favorite in Paris. The image is a take on a historical image (you have probably seen before). Made in Spring 2023, during my Paris poetry residency through The Trélex Residency. This was my second Trélex residency, as the first one I completed at the foothills of the Jura mountains in Switzerland to study psychology and pedagogical methods for healing trauma, alongside painting studies and concept development for a future exhibition on the theme of Damocles.

I had not intended to make photographs on the trip, as by now, almost every person in the world with access to the internet sees the world through images already. This means, almost everything has been photographed. Our collective imaginations are consciously and subconsciously full of precognitions of what we expect things to be like. Therefore, when a viewer enters a city or space, the potential for invention is distorted by the subtle images we already have within our collective memory.

To experience what is there directly becomes a nearly impossible task, yet one I try for. To frame something in any way that can contribute to the already impressive oeuvre of photographers in the world has become a greater if not even more impossible challenge. Moreover, the responsibility of understanding this flooding of images to the public means I had to hop over the knowing of this form of kitsch and try to imagine a meaning of time that reflects the evidence I gained from my experience of life: there are no closed circles. The construct of time as we use it to cooperate with each other is a construct serving, not evil, but rather a system that supports billions of people on the planet. The dark tinge of the stories people are telling about reality today is reflected by the fact the bodies are still illuminated by the reality just beyond the frame-within-a-frame.

Perhaps unnecessarily optimistic, the vision of darkness per my understanding of photography is that white is darkness and darkness is light: not in the actual sense of things, but more in a Jungian or beyond the veil sort of perspective- a perspective that cycles with no myths around the moon, but the beautiful pragmatism of never-ending changes of seasons and subtle shifts that is life. In this way, everyday getting to know life, even in an expected image, the shirt invites viewers to physically take on a Vision that invites individual vision and imagination. The image has no story, but we make one up…and it is that confluence of serendipity, awareness, playful cynicism and willingness to keep imaging that fueled this collaboration that was also made possible by, my dear friend and bio-field practitioner, Stephanie Joyce Larson. Her support, among many, allowed me to cross an imaginary portal of a painful shared delusion and relentless punishment back to the path I had set out on as a toddler.

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"Structure, in the making and demolition of form, when brought into light with the human relationship with environment makes outcomes of social relationships evident to me. The description of toxic masculinity can be ascribed to the absence of masculinity. The exhausting petulance of progressive ideology has an emotional labor that seems to justify the self-proclaimed and righteous feminist. There are always costs and risks associated with any temporary benefit. The necessity for difference and discernment relative to constancy and healthy change has been fashioned into an ideological feedback loop with a populace unwilling to reconcile the consequences such ideologies have on life. In that I am interested in structures that endure, perhaps only in the intimate moments of grief, do humans reflect on the memory of what their actions cause." -Mari Amman

Y-Blokka, Olive Oil Soap. Why should I know anything? I survived the effects of the mental perversion and managed to live to share with anyone who may dare to care. The fastest reaction to thinking that doesn’t have us nodding along as bobble heads usually has been to deny, deflect, reject, and so forth. Do what you want with the information. Please avoid accosting the messenger, that’s stale and would be just so Judas of you. Further medical research is below. There are a great number of reputable resources available. In fact, science is required to be done in public. This is part of the ethics required of the scientific method.

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Y Form, Biological Reference

Definition: noun, plural: immunoglobulins. (1) Any of several classes of structurally related glycoproteins in the blood serum, produced by plasma cells as an immune response against foreign agents (antigens); antibody. (2) The fraction of the blood serum containing antibodies.

Supplement: An immunoglobulin (Ig) is a glycoprotein; it is comprised of a glycan and a protein constituent. The basic functional unit of an immunoglobulin has a Y-shape. It consists of two identical heavy chains and two identical light chains. In each of these chains, there are variable and constant regions. The apical portion of the variable regions serves as antigen-binding site. The plasma cell produces immunoglobulins as a response to an antigen, i.e. non-self foreign agent. The immunoglobulin may also be described in this way: it is composed of two Fab (fragment, antigen-binding) regions and one fc (fragment, crystallizable) region. The Fabs include the antigen-combining sites whereas the fc region consists of the remaining constant sequence domains of the heavy chains, cell-binding site, and complement-binding sites. In placental mammals (including humans), there are five classes (or isotypes) of immunoglobulins based on structure and biological activity.

SS-B/La Antibodies, IgG, Serum Reporting Name: SS-B/La Ab, IgG, S, Useful for: evaluating patients with signs and symptoms of a connective tissue disease in whom the test for antinuclear antibodies is positive. Testing for SS-B/La antibodies is not useful in patients without demonstrable antinuclear antibodies.

Clinical Information: SS-B/La is an extractable nuclear antigen (ENA) composed of a 48-kD protein combined with RNA species. SS-B/La antibodies are found primarily in patients with Sjogren syndrome or lupus erythematosus (LE), where they occur with frequencies of approximately 60% and 15%, respectively.(1,2) SS-B/La antibodies occur only infrequently in the absence of SS-A/Ro antibodies. SS-B/La is 1 of 4 autoantigens commonly referred to as extractable nuclear antigens (ENA). The other ENA are SS-A/Ro, RNP, and Sm (Smith). Each ENA is composed of 1 or more proteins associated with cytoplasmic or small nuclear RNA species (snRNA) ranging in size from 80 to 350 nucleotides. Antibodies to ENA are common in patients with connective tissue diseases (systemic rheumatic diseases) including LE, mixed connective tissue disease, Sjogren syndrome, scleroderma (systemic sclerosis), and polymyositis/dermatomyositis. See Connective Tissue Disease Cascade (CTDC) in Special Instructions.

Interpretation: A positive result for SS-B/La antibodies is consistent with connective tissue disease, including Sjogren syndrome and lupus erythematosus.

Testing Algorithm: See Connective Tissue Disease Cascade (CTDC) in Special Instructions.

Clinical Reference: 1. Homburger H, Larsen S: Detection of specific antibodies. In Clinical Immunology: Principles and Practice. First edition. Edited by R Rich, T Fleisher, B Schwartz, et al. St. Louis, Mosby-Year Book, 1996, pp 2096-2109

2. Kotzin B, West S: Systemic lupus erythematosus. In Clinical Immunology Principles and Practice. Second edition. Edited by R Rich, T Fleisher, W Shearer, et al. St. Louis, Mosby-Year Book, 2001, pp 60.1-60.24

Method Name: Multiplex Flow Immunoassay

Specimen Type: Serum

Specimen Required: Container/Tube Preferred: Serum gel; Acceptable: Red top; Specimen Volume: 0.5 mL

Specimen Minimum Volume: 0.35 mL

Specimen Stability Information

Specimen Type

Temperature

Time

Special Container

Serum

Refrigerated (preferred)

21 days

Frozen

21 days

Reference Values

<1.0 U (negative)

≥1.0 U (positive)

Reference values apply to all ages.

Test Classification:  This test has been cleared, approved, or is exempt by the US Food and Drug Administration and is used per manufacturer's instructions. Performance characteristics were verified by Mayo Clinic in a manner consistent with CLIA requirements.

CPT Code Information 86235

LOINC Code Information

Test ID

Test Order Name

Order LOINC Value

SSB

SS-B/La Ab, IgG, S

33613-1

Result ID

Test Result Name

Result LOINC Value

SSB

SS-B/La Ab, IgG, S

33613-1

Mayo Clinic Laboratories | Neurology Catalog Additional Information: mml-Behavioral, mml-Epilepsy, mml-Headache, mml-Movement-Disorders, mml-Demyelinating-Diseases, mml-Neuroimmunology, mml-Neuromuscular, mml-Autonomic, mml-Pediatric, mml-Spinal-Cord, mml-Neuro-ophthalmology. https://neurology.testcatalog.org/show/SSB

Connective Tissue Disease Cascade (CTDC)

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How to put this lightly?

Dead butterflies not pictured.

This was one of the editorial photographs printed on the cover of a Malibu newspaper of a fundraising event for a tragic death, that resulted in further-preventable tragedy.

I feel terrible about making an image that looks so happy, because that was what I was hired to do. I get it: in a cost ratio assessment of life, we cannot sit around in sad heaps for everything. The rub of nausea with me witnessing this “liberating” of life to vainly recover the pain of a human life lost elsewhere, is an idea that was so deeply out of touch with reality. Not to critique the idea either because the notion seems born of the pain from where it came. That pain, not processed, produced more. Perhaps one of my favorite books on pain, The Body in Pain, by Elaine Scarry, describes the relentless systems humans devise to avoid suffering that create only more.

Not pictured are the butterflies that fell out of the boxes, probably due to oxygen starvation. Those that survived were trampled on by feet not watching where they were going. I’m reminded again why I avoid large crowds….

The joyful sunlight and perfect smiles also remind me why I am able to be comforted by darkness and why I always loved Fiona Apple’s song about not going to sleep to dream. As much as I love living in the light, as most mammalian beings do, the metaphorical darkness I’ve had intense contact with has somehow made facing the discrepeancies in human behavior easier to speak plainly about. And it has made the dreamworld, the subconscious, the strange landscapes of the mind easier to navigate. Prior to, I might have been caught up in the moment as anyone else pictured, but the thing about having been a phtoographer is that I had felt so much distance between myself and life. When I am not photographing, I experience so much…maybe too much as it feels. The mentalisation aspect of framing, keeps a business about inside. But without the framing and metering mental activity I have really gotten in touch with the depth from where visions arise, deep inside….but this rabbit hole is not about the vision-body relationship- it’s about caring about what can be done here and now…the choices today that may or may not unfold in the future.

Confessing alleviataes confliction. This image is a strange twist from the typical discourse in war photography, known for the moral issue of to photograph or do something to help, which has really taken to the streets since the advent of the “smartphone” where we all have the aility to become programmable recording bodies. The compulsion to record, makes me wonder if we are ready to record accurately or want to just see the sunshine. The repulsive comment section is like watching a spiritual boxing match on most social media…which is why you were invited down this path in the first place. The “toxicity” of happy only desire spills out into a putrid waft of phony. I suggest we turn the volumne way, way down, get inside an anechoic chamber and hold on to witness that deeper feeling within.

In fact no one can stop things happening far away…or so we say and yet pontificate over expensive coffee and tea about the “butterfly effect.”

The girl who was hit by a car cannot be retrieved. Neither can the dead butterflies.

Perhaps sometimes the best thing to do in life is let ourselves greive. As I can confess more than running from that grief means it will catch up to you later. It will not just fly out of the box into the light joyfully. As the butterflies were hatched for this fund-raising event, I never knew that nearly a decade later the pretty looking picture with heavy reality behind would have so much relationship to my own life.

The weight of sorrow, the burning in the nose, the wetting in the eyes, might be the only thing keeping us from becoming fully robotic in modus operandi.

Cheers to the softness of our beings. It seems they are wiser than our minds.

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Analogue images of SEAS Anechoic Chamber in Moss, Norway, are below. These were made thanks to PRAKSIS Oslo’s artistic residency a Global State of Pareidolia.

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So far I have yet to find any placebo or remedy for my cat allergy*. I adore them, and most of them seem to be fond toward me. Alas, my immune system doesn’t like cats, and not more than a day before my eyes are puffy, red, throat itchy, and body exhausted.

Hearing the sweet mew of the cat while everyone was away, made me cave, inviting the fluffy beauty in. I offered her some mackerel and water, and let her snuggle behind my legs. What could be the harm?

Now when I return home, the cat is looking for me. Innocently, not being able to do anything about the way what she is makes me allergic, and me not being able to do anything to resist wanting to let the cat in.

Animals aren’t supposed to be left alone either. Perhaps someone else won’t be allergic to her someday, and I hope she doesn’t take my distance personally.

*for some reason Norwegian forest cats and Siamese cats seem to be less immune reaction inducing. Perhaps allergies are about our ancestry….

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Sorry for all the buttons…apparently even Substack can have glitchy days, where the point, click, delete, functions do not properly work. It’s just technology and not the end of the world, right?

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In the perspective of geological time, the concept of personal becomes relegated to bones. In the imaginary realm, our life stories become echos. As Freud-freaks battle it out with Lacanian devotees, and the Jung hummers, the notion of self, in my experience and perspective of spirituality, can be ascribed as a notion of a memory body. The memory body performs as the soma animation, a kind of ghost-like connection with the way the realm of bodies, mental imprints, and objective reality appears to be. I’ve long wondered about the motivations that make me remain committed to making art, and always think long and hard (though not always correctly) about each decision I make.

The challenge of life is that we really do not know in advance, until something is done. If I press myself for an intuitive answer, sometimes I am correct, and sometimes incorrect. The process of coming to answers from within, without becoming wholly solipsistic or having a horrific god-complex is one that has me wrangling with the present day Identity issues.

Identity per the definition of the word exists within the realm of math as the quality after transformation that is left unchanged, “the equality of two expressions for all values of the quantities expressed by letters, or an equation expressing this, e.g. ( x + 1)2 = x 2 + 2 x + 1” , the fact of being who or what a person or thing is, has risen in use since the 1950’s from “mid 16th century (in the sense ‘quality of being identical’): via French from late Latin identitas, from Latin idem ‘same’.” This equation typically presents itself through false equivalences, often known as rhetoric. The fact the use of this ideological tactic has risen can be traced back through time, and I do not mean in a conspiracy theory kind of way, but rather in a sort of Fischli David and Weiss way of how one thing can lead to another…understanding how a politic came to be is a way of applying philosophy to freeing oneself, to making informed choices about forming the future.

What someone is…and who someone was a relational introductory course when I studied social psychology in Japan. That study got pretty heavy fast. I was floored, or bombarded with the information I was learning about what makes people do things. Many of those behaviors seemed shallow or superficial, and therefore seemed obviously related to the prevalence of depression.

Having experienced a great deal of heavy things, I cannot say sadness and depression are the same thing, and having witnessed a fluidity in the misuse of certain terms, largely in part thanks to the internet, and what I have witnessed the agitation from being too digitally connected and distracted can inspire.

Conflate all that to the notion of the cosmos and suddenly we have a concept of aliens being as real as another imaginary entity responsible for the way life goes. That word has become quite taboo: God. In place of the word God, the more popular use of the word, Universe. I get it, a lot, having long wanted to name a pair of dogs Higgs and Boson, the word God or any grand organizing energy such as entropy may want to be avoided due to ascribed associations with religions, persecutions, and war.

The thing with taboos though, is the concept is there, hiding out as another term. Of course people just want to do what they want, live free and so on. Yet to loads of curious minds, understanding the big questions about life sometimes comes for the sake of the delight of understanding, and others, use in particular aims.

The state of suspended curiosity is the only way I came to be able to live with no knowing, and as Rilke described the necessity to live with the questions.

In the delusion of human controlled energy, which we have made great advances in channeling thanks to technology, these big questions I find often best addressed through objective reality. Theory, after all can disorient and warp the realm of the mind so far as to start believing or imaging seeing fairies and aliens, when the proof of the ability to generate flying cars (Joby) and harness nuclear energy exists.

All to be said, the strange thing about being human is the identification with ones vocation and how much that identity is healthy or unhealthy, and what is involved contextually with social groups and the self. A delicate balance in moving from culture to culture carries different weight for designers, teachers, architects, sellers, antiquities dealers, engineers, musicians, and artists….each of these labels bearing some kind of ghostlike archetypal signature, when in reality (the objective one, not just the imaginary) there are all kinds.

In being human, perception of what someone is really like can get complicated based on expectation, ability to have difficult conversations, explore projection, aspiration and continually changing data.

Some people live with reality believing it’s a virtual simulation, that belief is born out of minds who often believe there is no God, and they are intellectually superior for understanding the belief in the Universe. I like to think of these as physics fundamentalists that would have failed the basic course in physics itself. Because one needs a nuanced understanding of chemistry, math, and variables in controlled and uncontrolled environments to make such conflations between theory and reality.

Regardless of the validity of each persons individual beliefs, there are patterns of thought and behavior that can be reliably predictable, and there are other times, when open, complete surprise can occur.

Transforming the unconscious into awareness can be aided by yoga and meditation, but usually requires a great deal of life experience and quiet time to real-eyes. Yoga, reminds me of a psychic globe, which is to say something upright, becomes upside down depending on which vantage point you are to the crystal ball. Somehow yoga became the air stoking fires of narcissism it claimed to ameliorate. This was something I experience while attempting to unself, myself…which supremely backfired in the most eloquently destructive ways. This is one of the many reasons adding to the becoming allergic to self-help culture.

Furthermore, any kind of Identity project is carried out in a social context. That is to say self-actualization comes through social settings and culture. Culture is as much as what is permitted as it is also not permitted. The lines as to permissible and impermissible involve dynamics and dialogues, also known as realms of the mind to contend with…and to that, independent thought a rarified experience.

I cannot say I have ever had a truly original thought. I cannot think of one time that is true. Therefore the process of discovery is nearly impossible and has led me down some pretty deep rabbit holes, as the Internet has become excellent at providing, and the library too! I Heart Huckabees, is one of my all time favorite existential films because it playfully makes fun of self-obsession, any one of us can joke ourselves into believing as freedom, but is really a mental trap that also entraps the muscular-skeletal system of the body.

This is where the notion of personal gets used as a performative construct or archetype for story telling, and in that, a person lives a life that becomes a story. Self authorship as it has been written about by the likes of Jordan Peterson and discussed in podcasts tends to have a certain intonation willing a kind of assertion of self and identity that performs in today’s context as a reaction. Prior to today’s 25 various gender identities (maybe exaggerating here) may be understood in the sense that before individualism, there was a type of collectivism that was so normal, everyone had the same name. The notion of the spirit and soul, did not have the same distinguishing factors that is presumed today. This kind of cultural variation, has long made me wonder which notion of spirit produce…

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Spring has always been 

the saddest season 

full of big promises 

and instability 

knowing all will pass

after summer anyway 

The rain

The sun

The shine

for Heaven-sakes

make up your mind 

Wind 

You make me

want to blow over

all your pauses and gusts 

whatever celestial becoming

forces living beings

to endure such

impatient forces 

soon to be

scorched and released 

the most intense beauty

before the snow

we all once had feared 

the deep sleep

and yet 

on repeat  

Spring is the hardest season

as another round

of broken promises

wears hearts thin

and in conjuring up

images of that eternal cup 

was always filled 

from the bottom up 

not top down 

oh such swanky ideas 

impeding 

through a stampede 

of bombs 

endlessly 

destroying 

love visions

of a family 

Happy 

ever after 

stories 

only the mutually 

courageous 

can contain

for the rest 

of faint hearts 

paint glasses fractured 

and filter the sunlight

in oversized coffins 

called places of worship

Kisses to the death 

Instead 

where that love belongs

to earth and wind 

I whisper to you now

Spring is the hardest season

all the hate 

for what follows 

the months 

after the dandies 

have blown away 

may disappear 

when the collective 

gets what they want 

it runs in ruin 

resulting in a wish 

for the solidity 

of a bulb that blooms 

not once 

but twice 

not only after 

but during 

a Winter 

that only seems 

to feel like forever 

because we invited 

quite successfully 

Eternal Spring.

* Mari Amman, Oslo, Norway, 2024

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I promise to scream

if I have to hear

about another self indulgent alibi

for polyamory

I promise to scream

if I have to to hear

about another ignorant claim

to people having no right to self defense

but you see I have already not

Screamed

but exposed my crown

to the icy cold fjord

to keep a facade of calm

to comfort those all around

but I have to scream

Because love should not be taboo

and money not god but a means

I do not abide by the sophist intricacies

complicating things

I’ve exposed myself to those ways

and found out their deceit

rots the heart and hollows out the mind

trading the soul

with time

we never are returned such debts

I have already screamed

but had my mouth covered

by someone I thought

would love me forever

I did not scream for all the things

beyond my control

and forgot

my body could easily become

someone else’s if I dared to trust

and so I did

anyway

I took to risk and the cost

And found myself

loving again anyway

Is it ok for me

To tell the fool he is that

If my heart doesn’t stop screaming

God dammit

Tell the truth

because the lies are just too much

and I do not

longer want to cry.

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OH YEAH ….if you want to be a guest, or have a recorded discussion…let’s do that since I’m getting tired of the sound of my own voice: [email protected]

The risk of sharing with whoever stumbles down the Le Lapin rabbit hole I ventured into or simply existing in this world has begun to feel more like the Netflix series: You. There have been more than a few encounters with someone’s like Joe, in the show, to which I wish had been aired decades ago. Despite being raised a bit sheltered and focused, and then willfully seeing the world through the frame of the mindset I have seems to have been considered both a character flaw and deficiency. These are social psychology issues that seem to be justified by transactional social policies as of late. I continue wishful thinking for healthier discussions instead of the stymied, blamed filled patriarchy and matriarchy tropes popularized in academia and social media alike. All has become as enticing as moldy bread, and I don’t even eat regular bread, so I can barely tolerate the gritty spores wafting about the hot wind of hate. I often wonder if the molded bread famed for taking people on psychedelic trips, drunk on their own minds, and distorted perceptions contributed to the institutional situation rampant in the street of apathetic sophistry posturing as higher or more elevated than those who care about the healing properties of beauty free from the aggrandizement of covert social policy.

The days of old priests being the esteemed cultural gurus drunk on rotten seed grain as a means to try to access the other realms to return to warn others about, has birthed a social algorithm tripping people out on actual black mirror traps, fantasy turned nightmare or heartbreak, and a population of people strung out on fear. These realms where the mind dissolves into a sort of debaucherous stew seems to be the absolute opposite of enlightenment and the very definition of madness through a slow immolation of that which creates life: the ability to create healthy relationships. This requires vulnerability and interdependence which are also socially misappropriated as weakness and codependency. A hefty inner fortitude is needed in a time where filling out a profile and swiping up, left, or right in the search of someone who checks off all your made-up boxes, differs from the beauty of commitment people made even during times of war, to love each other instead of turn against each other. There are all kinds of relationships that are relegated the the banality of a transaction these days: romantic, work, and even friendship which seems to be eating away at the beauty of the connection of values, virtues, philosophies of mind and being….making those who know and embody such ways mystified as modern day elves or shamans.

Not so long ago, common decency, as I had ascribed it, became a rarified find in the sea of mass delusion, agreement on mass hypnosis and molded-tripped out delusion. Please keep in mind here, I’m not reporting as being above such pitfalls, but having incurred and endured several dark nights of the soul only because a few friends cared enough to see me through self isolation…a key marker of these friends is they are all around their 60s, or as my friend of over 20+ years near my age is also a rarified being. This seems to indicate a generational shift is in the works, and the memory of people who have contact with personal responsibility, for caring about the feelings of others, for understanding what human relationships are about, is at risk of being completely lost.

The horrifying aspect of learning about emotions is their ability to inspire the opposite of relating and understanding in pathological creatures. I could have never, before the last decade, imagined someone looking upon sadness with glee, or happiness with envy. The resonance of such ideas remind me of the far left of the piano: low drop of the key. Perhaps I’m a simpleton, but seeing happiness makes me happy, seeing something strange makes me laugh, seeing sadness makes me also feel sad. All of those emotions I can feel and work with. My belief is that we have culturally run into trouble by pathologizing emotions or thinking there is some kind of intellectual or moral benefit from not feeling them. I believe more in the realm of feeling now because of the cost of having overridden my body of feeling with my mind focused on the idea of love or the goal of doing the good or right thing, which is to understand why someone else would harm and forgive them even if they do it over and over.

In this world, the love term, like others, is thrown around, sometimes with care and sometimes not. How can we know what love is, as rock ballads once sang out? I would like to think the difference between love and a transaction is obvious by communication and action- yet the reality of an unrecognized or unwilling insecurity to be shared, surfaced and healed is relegated to the separateness idealized in purely autonomous beings parsed from having any connection to each others emotions at all. This is where Christian morality bridges into Artificial Intelligence algorithm as a perversion of the teaching of life, through the insistence on being anointed, as Sowell uncovers in The Vision of the Anointed. Making mention of such a book has revealed the neoliberalitists’ folly: they are the very thing they proclaim to be fighting against, which in turn happens to be the very fabric of the reality formed on deep-lasting, meaningful connection and reality. The idea that connection has to be entirely localized, totally congruent, similar or dogmatic in perspective only furthers the nich-ification and cultural apathy sometimes called wetiko….the ancients had it right, and the answers are within our hands, in our hearts, and within the ability to do something about these things provided the actions are correct actions and not actions made in the image of appearing correct.

Appearances can and quite often are deceiving. The first impression is not always correct, but sometimes it is. The forever decision can sometimes be altered or rescinded. The freedom to both make up ones mind and change it must be allowed for both the sake of human sanity and the future of the species.

I have come to understand the suspicion and virtue the conception of love as being everything under the sun based on the cosmic philosophy of all matter as a form of God. The vilification of the night, or that which is under the moon seems to be emerging through the use of the internet and AI as a projection of the subconscious -particularly when it comes to human relationships and imagery playing a kind of spiritual warfare on the vilification of desire and nature’s impulse to take its course.

The already daunting notion of getting to know someone and all their layers to form relationships that withstand time is one of the several well documented erosion of our time. While people are protesting about the environment, I often wonder if this is a side effect of the things within their lives they wish they had more of a handle on. And so when one cannot resolve the tumult within themselves, they project it upon the world instead of seeing, feeling, smelling and being with what is there. One of the most peculiar things I have heard is to never trust your senses for they lie to you. This is one of the many reasons why I have renounced much of the westerns uptake of yoga; the tendency to pervert understandings, or turn meanings upon themselves was well written about in Death of the Author by Roland Barthes. This means, you are making up the meaning based on your subjective interpretation of the words. These sign forms, I, as a writer, or therefore as an artist, have no responsibility to forming…but for the fully aware person, will understand the plural possibilities to which they can be read, digested, misunderstood and understood based on the etymology and eptigentic history of the reader or viewer. Over t…

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The heart is capable of so much more than the mind alone. Let us allow men to cry and our arms to drop, if only to lift open up to an embrace. May we be free of our conditioning and have the courage to a hearts open future. Even if it means to stand shaking, naked, a light protect those who are confronted by a sword. For those who walked away from the fight, the tyranny, at least we led ourselves to sea, no longer naive but innocent still. Thankful to those who stood up to ideological pathology, to those who say no more to slavery. Only those who have taken the life of those who dared to dream have a life in an eternal darkness within. For the illuminated who know how to transform and transmute dark into light, have the gentleness to bear the weight of floating on without a fight.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lelapin.substack.com/subscribe