Forecasts of Love Foraging
By: Cheerful Indignato
Tags: Taxes, Narcissism, Writing, Poetry, Prayer

Forecasts of Love Foraging

Anger, fear, shame, narcissism, selfhood and taxes

I had one of those dreams Saturday night. I hesitate to call them prophetic because I feel angry that I might be shunned for it. I’m not actually ashamed at all. I only understand shame because I looked up its etymology and studied it on the enneagram. Sometimes my anger is defensive looking. But it’s still anger.

Anyway… sigh. Defensive anger is usually a sign of other anger unrecognized. Like walking thru life with a headache and not realizing it until one day when someone puts a cold calming hand on your forehead and relieves it.

Suddenly, it’s headaches all the time.

Because you’ve felt it’s relief. The difference that makes a difference. There is another way to walk through the day.

That is what anger is like. Why it might sometimes manifest in a lustful desire for intimacy against denial or a self loathing total control or a self forgetting total freedom.

But what’s really happened is a glimpse at God from an angle that feels constricted, where you feel the denial of intimacy, the imposition of control, and the loneliness of abandonment. The anger is a glimpse of possible faith that it could be different.

Anger is always convinced things could or should or simply actually are already different than what you say.

Shame and fear have similar but different motivations. Anger’s etymological root amounts to “painful constriction;” the disempowerment of will, at a basic level; being blocked or held back, choked even, on a more concrete level. But shame is about covering, like the dirt of a grave or a blanket or a fig leaf. And fear is about cutting and amputation.

One form of defensive shame, a shame unrecognized, manifests itself in the form of a throwing off onto the world. The dirt is thrown off onto somewhere, and usually someone, else. The point is that the dirt was either not recognized at all, or was deemed to be inherent. The self loathing defensive shame seeks to bury something or someone else with their dirt they think is so deep. They want them gone from sight the way they were robbed of being seen by themselves being buried.

The unrecognized shame does not seek to bury, cleansing themselves in the baptism of another’s social grave, but rather to mark all as dirty, as worthy of being at least covered in mud. We are all pigs and deserve the pearls. Versus the defensive self loathing shame that insists on trampling.

The self forgetting defensive shame will try to claim the dirt is makeup. Lipstick on a pig, and it pantomimes a man pantomiming a pig pantomiming a man. Naked and muddy as could be, still a man.

Defensive self loathing fear wishes to cut off that which it fears will consume it. A body dysmorphia projected onto an other. If only, they tell themselves, they could cut off this or that piece, they would be safe in their castle again. They amputate before they can be cast out as the leftover or remainder.

The unrecognized fear is one of denial, one where a knife is present and it must be seen as a threat. Who will cut whom first? But it’s just how beings are intimate. As in shame and anger, the unrecognized is a misrecognition, a refusal of a particular form or aspect of intimacy, of the justice of it. You buried me and now I show how unclean you are for it. You controlled me, imprisoned me, and now I show you the pain of not being let go. In fear, you cut or were going to cut me, so I cut you first, blood brother.

And the self forgetting fear, defensive in its avoidance, is always reading cuts as runes for magical spells of suturing. If read just right, the spell will give them the courage of loyalty in the face of a misreading of the cuts.

I am usually engaging in forgetful and unrecognized anger. Sometimes in forgetful and unrecognized fear. I occasionally manage to glimpse unrecognized and forgetful shame. But I forgot or fail to understand what I’m looking at or am confused by people’s attempts to shame me for being, finally, an unmasking self.

Then I have one of these dreams and they aren’t even remotely like you’re thinking. I am not present. I am only an observer. A bodiless consciousness gazing at a topology of visual information. It always has a shape. It is visual but really about data. There is not a narrative plot like what I normally experience in a dream. Not even absurd plot twists of brief moments of self awareness or weird glitches and repetitions.

These dreams have no glitches of the narrative form, just my overwhelmed mind and memory and whatever one may call a visual glitch devoid of narrative yet mapping meaning. These dreams are like spreadsheets and memes of… just truth. In movement.

There is no despair in them. There is no anger. There is no shame or fear. It’s just the truth. Look at the shape of it. Because it’s already been born. These are dreams of the metamorphosis of our narcissus drowning in echoes of cable news and images of cats and memes about suicide and nihilism and space communism and the shapes of bars and cages and destruction and wings of spreadsheets and aristocratic prophecy thru financialization and automation.

Maybe I thought it was going to be a robot or an alien. Maybe I should remember how literal my mind can be.

But it was just the liquid mercury form of a sexless primordial man resonating to frequencies that made him sweat beads of smaller men of memes and tax structuring, viceroys of dreams thru reflection.

Self structuring prisons also resonating and sweating beads of useful instruments of reflection, each reflecting the other and another in some other into a kaleidoscope of a quicksilver babbling brook, a stream of its own coating nonsense, a river Lethe of selfhood as the drowning of forgetfulness in noise.

Yet the danger, the horror is not liquidity, the instrument of late capitalist manipulation of anxiety. All that melts may drown you in debt. But if you already forgot who you were standing on as exceptions of yourself as means of not slipping into your own reflection, will you even notice?

I deflect my reflection of myself off you in projection of our difference as capitlization.

My humanness made through the trickle down of my labor to avoid… avoid… the void… against the void I have already defined myself as… in this noise, this shiny, hypnotic , bedazzling mud.

I saw in the resonance and repetition of bleeding down smaller men to do the work of its own poisonous flow utilizing parts of the self as instruments of self deceptive and repetitive reflection as a mirror of mimicry always already of a self divided, was…

The tax bill that intends to make law and unsecret the truth of the contradiction of the system that requires we believe in a fantasy dream of entitled access someday, while requiring that dream rest on the backs of denying it to others.

It was a visualized slave manifesto.

If I’m angry it’s because I am self forgetting and part of that also means I forget I matter or how. That is: who am I to be listened to anyway? And because I have unrecognized anger about a sense of a kind of entitlement to a kind of intimacy I feel precluded from.

It amounts to: what use is me seeing what I see in the world? I can barely live even as I cannot live as they demand. This is my offer. This is my calling. This is my hospitality. And yet the world is that mercury man, offering to me a vision of myself as an annihilistic leveraged energy flow, a melting Terminator upgrade as my access to form, a limit curving in on itself and whose song is a roaring murmur of terror as I melt myself to stand on myself in the hopes of trickling up into the Borg.

Oh, whirlpool sucking itself into itself with each new resonant howl and discharge of economical slave to its existential ontological angst. I’m allergic to mercury more than you.

Maybe the cover comforts you that nothing will change.

Maybe the constriction makes you think you see your limits.

Maybe the loss thru instrumental resonance that made you belong as what you thought was a promised part of you is plucked off, sucked off and you can’t even see anymore where you had begun and they ended except you know now their reflection is uncanny.

But I’m allergic. Yet I live in a time of drought where sinkholes of mirroring metal and laser focused sunlight, of slavery and grift, are advertised oases for the thirsty and sunburnt, the liberated and the honest.

Mirror mirror on the wall,

Melted river in the fall,

cast me down

Your liquid womb

Birth me nimble

Birth me new

Shiny skin and shiny smile

Burbling words, reflective bile,

Shake me off,

Take my cloak,

Sell my soul,

And I’ll make you two,

Sell my image

And I’ll make it double.

This tax bill, whether it specifically passes in this form or not, is a revelation of our Apocalypse, Now. It is an uncovering, of a shame, of a contradiction our system relies on us failing to see in the reflections of itself as ourselves that it usually offers.

Even as we melt off in the refuse from the Towers of Babel they have erected as Pharaoh’s tombs to their Platonic forms of perfect shining as being reflecting nothing.

That is always our supposed liberation: within their blackbox of ontological power grab, the false labyrinth of charm that is maze of deception and lostness. We despair in circles of rich men’s hellish nightmares made Real to make them feel somehow more… real.

Their form defined on the ways in which they appropriate you as instrument or excrete you in historical erasure as the postmodern contemporary.

They are coming for your small business. Not just the poorest of the poor, not just the working class or the comfortable middle class management.

But the small business target is telling. They mean to make us all forced labor. Slaves. Every last one of us. Except the ones they bleed off. This is a way to force more people into the labor market, to make more people take out bank loans to start and maintain small businesses.

Debt. Slavery. That is the tax bill. Whether they get it done now is not really that important. The point is that it was shown, the mirror reflected. There are many dead ends all around us. But not only.

Expect them to find less visible ways to get the work done, if they must. They have seen their own reflection, and found it lovely.

Run, blue blood, run free into the babbling amnesia of such a poisonous, suffocating self; be baptized in the communion: resistance is not futile. It is being itself.

Let that anger help you see another way to move and be, even if you are cast over for escaping, and must swim in the ocean with God, abandoned, but free. Wait: we will come.

Let that shame be uncovered and cast off, even if you find yourself nude before crowds of stone throwers. We will draw in the sand, and let them walk away shameful from their false bathing.

Let that fear be your courage, that the parts belong to a whole that means more than it adds up to not because it wastes so much, but because we are destituent against constitutive laws that pretend reading isn’t writing and writing isn’t a caesaura of birth but a claim of property and temporal instrumentalization.

Hear the echo all around, in the tinnitus of you heart, that murmur between the beats when you’ve decided a memory was real enough, and another could be forgotten, you’re already free.

Consider yourself first baptized in anthropogenic sewers, and let’s get a second baptism, a covenant against the contracts of our parsing of citizenship.

I don’t know how we move again until you agree to hear and stand up out of the river of your despair.

They have seen their own reflection and liked it. Prepare to the inner circle of hell, the Proustian Faustian bargain of a minutia and memento in anxious neurosis as penance that can never be earned enough.

What is your use, slave?

What is you property, master?

What is destituency, human?

Mirror mirror on the wall,

You’ll still break when you fall,

And all the king’s horses

Will be radicalized,

And all the king’s men

Will strip naked,

And the feast will be communion

And the whine will be rain.

Broken glass is for writing

In sand

That wisps away.