#markqet

Humbling to hear this so many years after 2005.

...

I thought about how most of my experience of going to Peru to drink ayahuasca had been about working through the shame of having done such a thing in the first place. I spent half a month's salary and met some awful people and a few good ones to discover a fact that I disclose with not a little embarrassment: plants can communicate. Some people will think I'm a crazy asshole for saying so, but they never gave a plant money and had the plant tell them actual facts in return."

When cities grow, humanity progresses, and when they shrink, the social body is threatened with regression into barbarism.

Without having studied the question, one might easily imagine that cities are distributed randomly. And in fact, a number of accounts depict the founders of cities leaving to fate the choice of a site on which to settle and build protective walls. The course of the flight of birds, the spot on which a stag was hunted down and taken, or the point at which a ship ran aground determined where a city was to be constructed. Thus the capital of Iceland, Reykjavik, is supposed to have been founded according to the will of the gods. (5)

In 874, the fugitive Ingolfur came in sight of Iceland and cast into the water the wooden images that served as his household idols. He sought vainly to follow their course, but they eluded him, and he had to establish a temporary camp on the shore. Three years later, he rediscovered the sacred pieces of wood, and moved his settlement to a nearby site, which turned out to be as favorably situated as possible in this formidable “Land of Ice.” (6)

(5): Labonne, Annuaire du Club alpin, 1886. [Reclus’ note] (6): Ingolfur Arnarsson was the first settler of Iceland. After being banished from Norway he set sail for Iceland. He brought along the posts from the high seat, or throne, of his home in Norway. On sighting land, he threw the pillars into the sea and asked the gods to wash them ashore at the appropriate spot for a settlement. He lost sight of the pillars and built a farm on the southeast coast. The posts were finally located along the coast to the west, and the settlement was moved to a spot that was given the Norse name “Reykjavik,” or “Bay of Smoke,” after the geothermal steam that rose there.

I fell into poor thinking from a spliced together web-based logic, and barely read anything apart from social media posts for a long time. I ran into a lot of cognitive hazards.

Today was a better day, as I reflect on these habits of consumption versus action. I began the day reading, I ate more, and better, and I listened to a talk on capitalist eternisation - or the sense that people fall into that there is no alternative to it.

What emerges, thinking of where my mind is now, is that I started to believe, automatically, in some external salvation, like a messiah of some sort that would transform mine and our collective lives. What I realize is that staying engaged in the moment and building the future is what makes things move. Yes, there are non-human forces in the world (the weather, the actions of plants and animals), no, there is no "knight in shining armor" coming to rescue me from isolation and poverty.

Instead of an infinite deferral of my own needs, I am absolving my guilt about past moping, allowing for error and nonlinear growth, and working to believe in myself as a social being. There are few free events where I live, but there are at least enough chances to interact that I feel a modicum of social liveliness.

I would like my learning habits to be daily, rather than weekly or semi-weekly, and I rouse myself some days earlier instead of hiding in bed. I don't want to name my experience as mental illness, but I do recognize that it can be detrimental to be so withdrawn.

My gripe with life is that I die and I do not accept any comforting lie about afterlife or reincarnation, even though I have heard many. I simply know what I get through perception, and I orient consciously toward the material. My dad always tells me to have purpose, but I tend to deny his advice because of a poisonous religious aspect to his thinking and action (which is, at a minimum, patriarchal and racist).

I am extricating purpose from that personal relationship; what I am adding now is a commitment to critical theory as a practice, my particular project which in effect stimulates liberation.

I have also found some web resources for adult literacy and basic learning, so that I have more than just a passing ability to use language and thought. It also gives me something simple but structured to focus on.