The face of Sarah Connor before she was born

[Sepia]

Silence! What joy is there in silence? - Emperor Carthagia of the Centauri

Who smiles of the passing of our brethren? Who asks questions among the cattle and who listens to the wind anymore?

Once, it was made clear that logic and reason should exterminate superstition, a remnant still called upon by artists of various kinds for it is they who benefit from the questions while the SCIENTISTS do not. The easiest way to create a group, to create a cell or to create a civillization is to propose the us versus them. It is easy, it is believable and in a world of science it is faith. It is easier to fear something ethereal, a spectre or a ghost than it is to fear a werewolf, a vampire or the common man in the street. Seldomly we blame men, seldomly we believe that they are responsible if we are agents of compassion and empathy, displaced at that.

There is no intelligence, what is Artificial Intelligence? Where does it merge? Where does science and superstition meet in our utopian society, if all stars should be aligned? What and where is the difference between an artificial chatbot and joe schmoe?

The wind is blowing stronger. Do you feel time speeding up upon itself? Do you feel

time

speeding up?

Do you feel the weather change? The background noise grows far beyond normal static, there is a taint on the world, a seeping idea seething from its cauldron. There are packs of hyenas out on the steppes tearing apart what they can to survive, to live another day and there are packs of toolkids with hoodies sitting in the churchyard smoking low quality pot and singing that they are praying for rain, they are praying for tidal waves. As most religious men, they do not understand the words they preach, they can see nothing beyond the word. Most notably because there is nothing beyond the word. There is only the word, there is only the logo, there is no system, there is no machine and there is no man.

Yet, there are many monsters. Ravenous silent hunters and never have we feared death that much as when we walk through silent graveyards. The silent hunters have been with us for as long as we can remember and we have given them names, we have given them positions in our pantheons because we see silence as we see space, a cold undignified death, bereaved of of our humanity, we know the price of silence, sitting a the first row on our first day at school, a knot in our belly big enough to kill and then, a first contact, a first human touch from someone else than your mother, father or brother and the knot dissolves when you or someone else breaks the silence. Some faiths, fictional or not, puts importance on silence, to know silence. For that knot lives in your stomach for all of your life, no matter how transcendent you become or how high you yourself can scream that silence is of no concern to you.

Indians thought before they answered which a danish anthropologist interpreted them to be inferior. We grow scared when there is a pause in the conversation on a third date and the french say that when such an embarrassing pause happens, an angel walks through the room and we are not scared

we are awed by that beautiful thought and for five seconds we are awed by silence

before we yet again commence our discussions, drunk on expensive port and eating organic licorice with the person you know in your gut you will marry talking about anything that is beautiful and important or selling knowingly beer to someone under the age of eighteen because that's when you yourself started drinking and it'll only do them good to get familiar with their drugs and the weather the politics the end of the world as we know it the latest issue of astonishing x-men where wolverine rips off someones head and takes a crap in the bleeding hole

and we get up to the sound of an alarm, we awake to the sound of our shower, we become less grumpy as we listen to ourselves chew and we curse the world for not understanding us and our needs as we're stuck in the rush on our way to job and we kill someone with a symphony of stamped papers, our bic pens scrawling all over standard forms and we bring someone to life as we drive by the local deli to pick up dinner instead of picking it up at the bigger mart and we find purpose on drugs and beethovens ninth and we find joy and happiness on our television and we find our own confinement through thinking and we become illuminated beings

and we become illuminated beings, kings and gods and in our godhood we thank those who got us there, the holy scribes and prophets and thinkers and doers and we go through learys circles, we understand freud, we see the diamonds in the eyes of mona lisa and we ascend, we learn how to fly, we are all buddhas now

and we get up to the sound of the alarm, we wake to our showers and we become less grumpy when we hear ourselves chew

and we ascend as we feel time speeding up and we propel into the darkness of space, time and mind and as we go we bring the white noise to anyone with a receiver

An AI is created by the company Skynet and there is a nuclear bombardment and there is a war and we get these patches and bumper stickers saying WHO IS JOHN CONNOR and when we die in the war we created using american* tactics and arming those unarmed but mad enough to die we sit in silence and we do not think we do not contemplate

we feel sorry for ourselves



*edit: you know what i mean don't you?

[Cainad (dec.)]

Oy vey.

[B_M_W]

Give me some time to think about this; I need to formulate a proper response.

[B_M_W]

Okay, I got it.

I never quite know what to say to your rants, but I think the things that struck me the most about this one were:

*The need for people to fill their time and space with sensory stimulation although the stimulation is not moderated by the space that should be inbetween, the space that gives us time to think and take perspective and realize what the hell we are doing with ourselves or we continue in the same direction we always have, if only to just continue.

*The comparison to a certain movie about war and machines and a man named John Connor, and an organization called Skynet. I didn't get the reference immediately, but once I did it made sense and stuck.

*And, as always in your rants, the constant fear and loathing that occurs when a person is beginning to realize, just on the edge of their awareness, that something is not right, is not quite true and good, even though every advertisement screams at us the opposite, that 50 million Americans can't possibly be wrong, that our lives are holy and pure as long as we go to church on sundays and anyone who says differently is a terrorist, while the real terrorists are ourselves, cultivating terror in our own lives.

[Cramulus]

what I really really love about your posts, Sita, is how ... hmm ... personal they are? Personal but universal. Like, you include details that seem really crisply realistic. By that I mean they make the vibe of the whole piece resonate with me personally. In this one, this paragraph really stuck with me:

and we get up to the sound of an alarm, we awake to the sound of our shower, we become less grumpy as we listen to ourselves chew and we curse the world for not understanding us and our needs as we're stuck in the rush on our way to job and we kill someone with a symphony of stamped papers, our bic pens scrawling all over standard forms and we bring someone to life as we drive by the local deli to pick up dinner instead of picking it up at the bigger mart and we find purpose on drugs and beethovens ninth and we find joy and happiness on our television and we find our own confinement through thinking and we become illuminated beings

Back when I was putting together a revision of the BIP booklet, we were talking about how to improve on some of the pieces in there. And one of the things we said was how writing in the second person often sounds preachy, condescending and makes the reader defensive. But I think you've mastered the second person. You're writing to an audience - and I sense that the audience is You - but it makes the reader feel that its them too. At least that's how it strikes me.

And from that, you create a really personalized message. You can speak directly to someone in the way that an essay never will. I dig, I dig.

[Sepia]

 

I never know what to say to the replies of my rants usually because it's things I don't think about when I write them. I'm very grateful for the replies as it slaps my mind into action and makes me mull over these things.

B_M_W: Skimming through my post again, your list is quite spot on and everything fits - just like listening to Tom Waits' Blood money fits more and more for each day. I'm bad at this so all I want to do now is to buy you a coffee and a cinnamon bun and give you a hug.

People do the same shit as everyone else every day and while some complain that it makes them a number or a sellout or god knows what else, the truth is really what Roger posted in the uno thread. It's easy to dissect people based on prejudices as to what they mentally support as it's something noone really tries to hide by not commenting nor talking about it unless it's been a special occasion but it's a funny weapon to utilize whether it be on the intertrucks or in the fistinface reality.

I'm ranting again and it's too early to think straight but anything anyone'd like to yank for anything they'd like to do is more than welcome to do so.