The Grand Conjuring Trick Called The Authentic

Dtain Field Rain Tree

 Saint Monday. Marx's core definition of Alientation isn't about feeling lonely, it's about Structural Separation. His argument went on to suggest that the Industrial Machine alienates, or separates us people from the Product, from the Act of Production and from Nature. As a result the earth and its creatures become resources to be optimized.

 This comforting and simplistic view from Marx, all rather fell apart when the Early Soviet Union decided to optimize the week by doing away with the weekend. Everyday a work day, a worker's day off spread across Stalin's Week, this way the machines never went idle. Why no one had ever thought of it before was a mystery to the cocktails and brunch crew.

 And yes, in the barcodes of industrial man, Authentic has become a certified destination you can buy with a credit card after you've got your half a sourdough loaf wrapped in plastic.

 There again the Eastern Dionysus was Shiva. Shiva was a long way from  being a home owner on Mount Olympus. He was the rythmn of creation, preservation and destruction. His authentic was Lord of the Cosmic Dance, when he stopped dancing the cosmos vanished.

 To Marx, Dionysus was probably an opiate and Shiva a savage who didn't understand why Hegel was upside-down

 

 

An Authenticity Issue

Some Clouds

 Ok Chaps! Let us proclaim a reality. Hark the Herald, and I'll quote the following:

 "When the elite strip-mine the shared purpose of a society, they don't just impoverish the lower echelons; they isolate themselves. They lose the capacity for authentic human connection because they view everyone else as a data point to be liquidated or an asset to be acquired."

And this:

 "Once you are that isolated, you become terrified. You realize, at some subconscious level, that you are a naked emperor sitting on a pile of stolen grain."

 Yes indeed, profound agonizing loneliness is not a security problem, it's not an excuse to violate the weak without consequences, it's not an excuse to buy an island, contemplate a Utopian Village with hot and cold running water, air-conditioning and obedient help.

 A subject we addressed in the prose essay "Beaky Cap, who the hell are you kidding!"

While we are Livestock let us remember the silence and peace of a library

Milkweed leaf in morning sun

 We're still high on Black Darren, nudged up against the iron binding pigments of Red Darren, staring across the Olchon River, contemplating Offa's Mercia. Of course we are restless, this time it has to do with the Acting Witan of Mercia, their declaration that Middlesex, Berkshire and Buckinghamshire are Mercian lands, and the general unease of our understanding that the genuine business minds of the Industrial Revolution emerged from King Offa's Tamworth. Good solid men of sense, none of this wishy-wash of the cidar drinkers in the south who reckoned it was someone else's job to drove pigs.

 More recently our optimizing industrialists have learned to bypass the conscious mind  "The data-highwaymen discovered that the quickest way to keep a human eye glued to a glass screen is not to offer them a calm, balanced, worked example of macroeconomics or historical nuance. The fastest way to unlock the brain's attention center is to trigger a primal, somatic spasm—fear, tribal outrage, validation, or lust. The fantasy world isn't a grand ideological project! It’s a global cash-crop harvested from our nervous systems."

 Hear me now. Digital Highman want your attention, your peace and your sanity, it's a magic mushroom or a hen-bane they feed us. And guess what? Most of us are engaging the rush, we give them our devotion and give the Highwayman what he wants from us.

The view from Offa's Dyke redux

Milkweed

 Yesterday's mention of Offa's Dyke may have failed to penetrate or add balance to my attempt to stick it to the rich. The Dyke is a hundred and seventy odd miles through the Welsh Marches from Chepstow in South Wales to Prestatyn in North Wales. It was built by a Mercean King called Offa to make certain he could get his tarrifs from Welsh famers and traders and make sure the Welsh dragons stuck to their own country. Offa built a financial empire, his capital, a place called Tamworth in Staffordshire, was apparently awash with pigs, every household had a drove of them. King Offa was, in short, a Christian, he was nice to his wife, put an image of her on one of his coins, he was totally un-moved by the Beatitudes, it was just business, and, like most rich people, he was about as far as possible from being a poet it's possible to get. A Jeff Bezos of the second half of the Eigth Century, his entire existence was an optimization problem.