http://sigilization.bandcamp.com/

the plays the thing

"That which cannot be said, must be passed over in silence." Ludwig Wittgenstein

I must admit, I do not understand Wittgenstein. And by this I don't mean to say I don't get why he did things or what his motivations were. His incomprehensibility reveals such things unclearly: that he wanted us to not know; that he wanted us to see how impossible it was to explain and that the explanation was not the thing. For Wittgenstein the use of language was a game and the game was always afoot, inseparable from it's use. You can not use language to talk about language because that was not its purpose. If you tried to play the game outside of itself, the game ceased to be. And thus by trying to explain himself, by posturing meta-linguistically, Wittgenstein became unintelligible.

However, game is not an explanatory meta language, something that exists as an alternate, elevated, explanatory reality that might somehow shed light on -isness. Nothing, if I'm more or less getting Wittgenstein, is an explanation. Nothing is an alternative to reality. Everything is what it is and there are no meta-languages that explain some other is-what-it-isness. Virtual reality is not almost reality. It is essentially reality. Game is not something we do outside of reality. It is its own experience inexplicable in other terms.

Marshall McLuhan offered a similar explanation of where we might be when we are engaged in such worlds. "The medium is the message" might be seen to imply that being in the act is its own reality, rather than any goal or purpose we might try to invest it with. The medium we find ourselves in is more essential than what we might try to get out of it.

Our culture tends to conceptualize human activity not concerned with industriousness, work or what was back in my youth so popularly termed economic reality, as distraction, diversion, pastime, entertainment, dream, hobby, amusement, party or game. That which can not be seen as a brick in the ongoing construction of infrastructure is the ethereal, pointless dust of fantasy. And yet a fascination with the fantastic, with the chimeras of the human imagination, has always existed, right along side the pyramids, the aqua-ducts and the armies. We have proposed gods, we have told stories and written songs and poems of inspiration, love, honor and invented a thousand adjectives for the intangible, we have dreamed and believed and imagined and created, ingested entheogens to have vision, to stare past the banal and be in some other medium, speak in another tongue, experience another essence, not alternate, not altered, but original. We live in symbol. Why trust one and not the other.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern." William Blake

It has been argued that there is an innate impetus in the human consciousness to periodically alter its state. It is the contention of Andrew T. Wiel, "that the desire to alter consciousness is an innate psychological drive arising out of the neurological structure of the human brain. Strong evidence for this idea comes from observations of very young children, who regularly use techniques of consciousness alteration on themselves and one another when they think no adults are watching them. These methods include whirling until vertigo and collapse ensue, hyperventilating and then having another child squeeze one's chest to produce unconsciousness, and being choked around the neck to cause fainting. Such practices appear to be universal, irrespective of culture, and present at ages when social conditioning is unlikely to be an important influence." Being told by someone what the experience is like would be about as useful as hearing about sex or food. The experience of the flower or the view of the beach can not be given by word or picture, because the flower can not be conceived of usefully as a meta experience and translating it into a meta experience renders it meaningless babble. Perhaps what we desire is a profound reality, a change that wakes us from the sonambulism of routine to the perceptiveness of being. We don't enter other realities by altering our consciousness as much as we wake ourselves to what reality is by a change in landscape.

From a traditional and confined point of view, waking experiences are viewed as extraordinary and never viewed as useful until they are applied to the conventional experience of reality, the sleepwalk. The drug experience can't be seen as validated until one comes back to straight life with an idea of god; education can't be seen as meaningful unless it is related to the creation of good citizens with acceptable community standards; books and movies and paintings and actions must have messages; playing sports can only be interpreted through an explanation of war or competition; game must be about dexterity or problem solving or, at its worst, training people to be good, violent soldiers. We are obsessed with utility. Enjoyment and happiness are goals and unhappiness and cruelty must be enlightening, positive thinking must bring us material gain and negative thinking must be punished.

Game is not simulation. It is stimulation. Game can not be defined by an external game. Game exists as an engaged reality, meaningful in the way that it is and not as a referent to alternate ways of being. In game we are awake in ways we just don't seem to be while we work, eat, crap, sit. It is a meditation on -isness.

But then again, I simply don't understand Wittgenstein.

mullets of the mind

A review of Universidad de la Sierra Juarez by a coworker

"I’ve been working at the university for 4 months now and I really enjoy it. marsha is right in saying that the university is not in Oaxaca, but is in a small town of 2000, about an hour and a half away. It really is a lvoely little town. i’ve never felt so safe or experienced ssuch a strong sense of community before. Clearly this isn’t going to be a party town, but its still very social. theres often fiestas here or in the neighbouring village, basketball is big if you want to get involved and us teachers always eat together and get together a couple of times a week. And oaxaca is fantastic for a weekend trip. with hardly any expenses in the town, you’l have plenty money left to enjoy.
the univeristy is still small, and we only teach 3 hours a day. Wyou’ll never have work to take home with you which is a big bonus. you’ll always be paid on time and our holidays are guarenteed. the students are great too. I will be honest and say thart disipline is quite strong here, on both the students and the teachers. this is sometimes hard to ajust too, but i still think the students, collegues, town and location outweigh this.
So if you’re thinking about working here and are prerpared for small town life, i would most definately recommned it."

My Response:
As there are more than sufficient apologists for the Oaxacan Sierra, the innate nobility of its indigenous people and the idyllic comunero culture, I thought some grumpy and glaringly absent criticism should be added. While trying to make an informed decision regarding the job offer from UNSIJ and sifting through the interminable blogs of those who had come to the wooded hills to pet the locals, this was the only teacher's comment I found. There is now also this repetition on Dave's ESL cafe:
Skewed View  (this post has been deleted)
Its few hints at trouble are hardly sufficient to permit a meaningful prediction of the town's plodding ennui and prejudices, or the inefficient silliness of the university's authoritarian beauracracy. I was certainly fooled.

The mountain area of Ixtlan is a pleasant enough day trip from Oaxaca City for trout and vistas. Teachers, however, quickly move beyond the delights of the regular tour. Despite the mountain beauty, the town itself is a colorless smudge of unexceptional buildings and exceptional noise on the side of an often cold and rainy mountain. Fittingly, the central value of this gray existence seems to be privation: the opportunity to prove one's communal chauvenism by suffering nobly for its central narratives. The north's individualism sees society and its governance as having some responsibility to its members for their well being, failing which it is appropriate to question one's loyalty to that collective. The comunero cosmovision, contrarily, proposes that one has obligations to the community through which one earns their rights. Granted, northerners' privileges can be egocentric and consumer driven, but it is difficult to point out just what “rights” the locals actually earn. It quickly becomes clear that mythologies of personal freedom and the right to a certain degree of comfort are not part of the local constitution. Rather, the strong sense of belonging and duty conflict personal desires and their expression and, subsequently, the benefits of community such as accommodation, food and transportation, are all obediently suffered as frustratingly limited and unreliable resources. After all, one should not ask what their community can do for them, but what they can do for their community.

But more importantly, here as everywhere, the community's defensive homogeneity renders interpretations of outsiders and their differences essentially absurd. Gringos are seen through a blurred lens of condemnation and jealousy as rich, selfish, all consuming juggernauts. The subsequent derision of foreigners, despite the kindness of a few locals, ranges from paranoid aloofness to outright staring and scoffing. “Jennie speaks quite a bit about the sense of community and belonging. However, I think this is a very personal experience for her and not a universal. There are some truly friendly folks up in the mountains, but overall the people are cold and suspicious and noted to be so. This is only the surface of very deep and complex cultural conflicts that one should be prepared to confront. To say that everyone is coming to a friendly little Mayberry is absurdly misleading. “

However, as discomforting as the town might be, the real disappointment in this adventure is the Universidad de la Sierra Juarez. The workday is 8 hours with only 3 of those spent in class. This leaves 5 – 7 hours a day, depending on whether you include the 2 hour lunch, to fill with whatever you can come up with, the expectation being a project within your field of expertise. English teachers are left somewhat alone, but that is more a reflection of the meaningless inconvenience English is seen as by the overburdened students, back stabbing, competitive professors and psychotically delusional, meglomanical administrators. In fact, the experience of an English teacher is akin to that of a pet dog, chained in the back yard where it remains possessed, but neglected.

To add to the campus's confusion as to what it is that English teachers are doing there, most modern language facilitators are trained in the touchy-feely concepts of the communicative methodology which emphasizes the fragile second language personality; comfortable, fun, student-oriented environments; and topics of personal importance to the students. These ideas are in complete contradiction to the apparent rote, memorize and regurgitate under-threat-of-the-whip methodologies of the university, whose antiquated vision is that education should always be painful and burdensome and all progress should be quantifiable. How else can you enculturate people into a cruel spirited and combative system of winner-loser hierarchies?

This focus on evaluation over real learning is completely in concert with the appearance over content imperative of the university. In fact, to be seen to be in blind submission to the anti intellectual doctrines of the place seems far more important than any real teaching or learning. Hence, a bevy of rules, regulations and inefficient tasks are given that seem to have no bearing whatsoever on any interpretation of education and more to do with whittling down the intrusive foreign decadence of individualism in favour of depersonalized and obedient workers. Jennie advises us to laugh it off.

Part of the general disrespect for the department, as well, is the expectation that few English teachers will stay past their initial 6 month contract. Apart from deciding to get out at the first opportunity, teachers are too often let go for running afoul of the school's many unforeseeable pitfalls. Expressing or asking for an opinion may go against the University's demand for mindless obedience, but surprisingly can also go against what the students have come to expect education to be. Student complaints were frequently leveled against English teachers (a la Khmer Rouge or Invasion of the Body Snatchers) during my stay and 6 university teachers were not offered a second contract. No official reason is ever given for not renewing contracts and in fact the departing teachers must actually write Orwellian letters of resignation in which they thank the school for giving them the opportunity to share their knowledge. When called to the office to be told that I would not be offered another contract, the vice rector thought it unimportant to have my file on hand or to be able to give me any idea as to why I was not to continue. He simply kept repeating that he didn't want a scene and that he would give me a letter of reference if I complied. Unofficially, I was fired for teaching swear words in response to a class request, though one suspects that there was more to it than that. I was told that the majority of my students had complained about me, but upon further investigation it seems that the complaints were actually forced corroborations from students who had been hauled in and questioned at random. My immediate superior made little effort to protect me and sided quickly with the administration as his most prudent course of action, continuing to insist that the students that had been pulled aside to be questioned were truly complaints. None of us are really of any importance to the university and it is easiest to throw one deserving trouble maker to the wolves and avoid an administrative confrontation. And I clearly have troubles with authority. But, in the nasty subterfuge of UNSIJ one could never know from what direction attacks might come. When asked in a secret vote, only 2 of around 50 students said that they did not want me to continue teaching them. That I really can't trust what the students said in this informal survey anymore than I can trust the whispers given as reasons for my dismissal only demonstrates how bent things in the university can be.
There is so much more to say, but all of this surely sounds already like mere whinging about the realities of the world. Prejudice exists and work sucks. Nonetheless, Ixtlan is a special case that will definitely not appeal to all. If you are a complacent and obedient person, if you have no exaggerated respect for your individuality or comfort, or perhaps want to deeply challenge your bourgeois needs, you may do well here. Some people do. But the tourist blogs that are so predominant are misleading, and you should be warned that Ixtlan is a challenge that requires more than a romantic notion of community, or being prepared for a strict work environment and life in a very tiny, very rustic town. You should be very honest with yourself about your ability to cope with so little. When there are much more pleasant options for teaching in Mexico, one should be be very thoughtful in deciding whether or not to go to the culture shock and deprivation of Ixtlan de Juarez.

swearing as a second language

supersitious dread of word magic

The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words

http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2009/03/30/why-do-we-swear/

http://people.howstuffworks.com/swearing1.htm

http://people.howstuffworks.com/swearing.htm

http://www.eslhandouts.com/worksheets/swearing-and-the-f-word-lesson-plan/

http://www.eslhandouts.com/materials/fuck.mp3

http://realesl.com/2008/08/09/using-fucking/

pertinent and interesting discussion as to whether a sane man could become insane from long incarceration with lunatics

"... a goodly one ... "

An Ode to One Last Go Round in Los Mochis, Sinaloa and a Final Demise to Mayberryism
 
“Looking for the good in everything is equally as misguided as looking for the bad in everything.” – Joseph Curiale

"No one knows how truly bad he is until he has tried very hard to be good" – C.S. Lewis

It has been a foggy year, give or take a few foggy days and, though many of you will dismiss my less than amazing tale as the mere fantasy of a mind completely overcome by cheap mota and mezcal, I beseech you to take my banalities with all seriousness. Boredom, the kind of vein drying, bald headed accountant boredom I have endured and returned from the brink to howl of, I assure you, is not the passive creature that rain-stymied children sulk about. There is a form of living blank, like the -isness of an arctic whiteout or the businessman’s weekend, bland-storm beige, where the stark knowledge of so little is as much madness as the psychedelic chaos of knowing all. Life could never be so short as to inspire a reconstitution of this featureless, goal-less walkabout of insufferable waiting into a moment with yet something to seize. How it finally came to an end I cannot say. I expected no end to ever come nor that the end would be in any way a respite. Does one expect, if one passes into hell and abandons all hope, that yet there may be an exit?
The last thing I remember is someone screaming (children at obnoxious play some witnesses tried to persuade me . . . oh, how the mind reverses its view when you flip it on it's back) and the sounds of gunfire (could have been my sandals floppity slapping on the soles of my callused feet, but what kind of story would that make) as I ran for the bus and narrowly escaped the black mystic shadows of Oaxaca in favour of the cowboy booted, polka stepping, Felipe-Calderon-ass-kissing north. For the sake of sanity one should never assume that any move is for the better. As Sartre asserted, one does not decide this or that for the sake of good or evil, but simply because one must choose. Leaving one dissatisfying thing in the hope that the next will answer our existential lack is a silliness we all indulge in from time to time. The entirety of modern marriage and the subsequent divorce industry are built upon such delusions. But as Buckaroo Waldo Emerson knew, no matter where you go there you are. This is not to say that a change of atmosphere is not a fine breath of fresh air, but that a breath of fresh air cannot fix what’s wrong with this old world.
A re-breath of re-fresh air. I once lived in Mayberry and re-plotted my return, my re-escape. It was built by an American go getter in the middle of poverty, sugarcane and Porfirio Diaz, peopled by one of each kind of professional, presented as employment and security and modernity and equality to the shoeless. It was meant to be a Utopia. It occurs to me that what crouches beast-like in any concept of a perfect -isness for humanity is the access to things. Food and shelter are never enough when one talks of perfect being. In the corporate socialism or the “Integral Cooperation” which informed my Mayberry, there were row houses, durable shoes, 8 hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours of culture, railways and shipping lines, irrigation ditches and straight, wide roads, built without a single thought as to how invading armies might become baffled while trying to find the corporate offices. After all, the invaders were the ones who started the city. Here, I thought, closer to the top of the pyramid of needs, were people with more and more on their minds.
What becomes of Utopia once it has been established and the taco stands are set up outside the baseball stadium? It becomes of course a shopping mall, a place where one can get what one wants and what one wants is, and always has been, more: the self glutted with its greedy desires. Utopia rips open a hole and teases the wound continuously agape with the promise of what it will stuff it with: more utopia, heroin, beautiful women, endless and affordable beer, superb food, cars, sunshine and good teeth. But does the fruit never rot on the vine in paradise? Death, Wallace Stevens reminds us, is the mother of beauty.
Mayberry is not a place on a map. It is a dream of contentment. People, even those in our ill perceived paradise, in truth live in the suffering world and take their respite where it is offered. For those of us who think we have arrived in Mayberry there is only the hell of our complacency to enjoy. Schopenhaur’s suffering or boredom. Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs does not peak in an enlightened and philosophical society, rather a self contented yawn and sprawl that would remind us of the insides of our eyelids if we actually felt or thought anything.
Where is it that one finally runs away to? Inside the mind, deluded and isolated from “negativity” or to the beach where the waves and whiskey wash away concern and let the world destroy itself without dissent? How do we maintain our discursive, connected equilibrium when everyone has receded into the passive, egocentric skull and painted all the windows black? “I just want to be happy” we all piss and moan, but could we really stand it? What we really want is to be left alone and not perturbed by such dismal thoughts. That, we think, we can translate it into a kind of happiness. TV is happiness. Sex is happiness. Drunk is happiness. Happiness is happiness. Hell is other people. But happiness, heaven, I suggest, is sheer boredom, irresponsibility, gluttony. Hell, other people, suggests responsibility. Utopia is a product of hell, the responsible answer to it's question, a need perceived, a factory built, a shopping mall stocked, a consumer duped, a dismally boring heaven created, a boredom suffered, a need re-created, a need perceived, a question made.
My error was not the desire to run away, it was not returning to a place I once lived and expected to be the same, rather it was to believe that I wanted to live in Utopia. It was everything I could have asked for. I asked for peace and I got it, boredom on a platter to stare at without rhyme or reason, only to have and poke and ponder and not even feel good about. It’s as my mother says to the kids running around her house and picking up all the bric-a-brac, “It’s only for looking.”
I have stared into the wee hours of the day and imagined myself an observer. But I have not been observing and I have not been living. Boredom is not a place or a condition attached to paraphernalia. Discontent inspires dreams of paradise, but paradise inspires discontent. In the myopia of my boredom, in the malls of Utopia, I dream of discontent and continue to desire .


"For thirty years people have been asking me how I reconcile X with Y! The truthful answer is that I don't. Everything about me is a contradiction and so is everything about everybody else. We are made out of oppositions; we live between two poles. There is a philistine and an aesthete in all of us, and a murderer and a saint. You don't reconcile the poles. You just recognize them."- Orson Welles (1915 - 1985)

"It is in vain that we search for an essential difference between good and evil, for their constituents are the same. The crucial distinction lies in their structure, i.e., the manner in which the pieces are assembled. Evil is disintegration, an angry juxtaposition of alienated opposites, with parts always striving to repress other parts. Good is the synthesis and reconciliation of these same pieces." – Charles Hampden-Turner / Maps of The Mind

Hamlet: What have you, my good friends, deserv'd at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
Guildenstern: Prison, my lord?
Hamlet: Denmark's a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o' th' worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

post - "nod" ernism in the dreams of the dead

(thanks to j. chadwick for the title)

"In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind."
The Lotos-Eaters, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)

As archetypal human dilemmas go, none captures the insistent insouciance of the crumbling western consumer dream quite like the lotus eaters in The Odyssey. At once aware of the world's cruelty but determined to fulfill mythological promises of paradise, Odysseus' men gathered in their war weary, fatuous circles to reaffirm their delusions, stoned to the rafters on the plant of bliss. There amongst the oblivious, they tried to assuage the cognitive dissonance grumbling from the memories of victories gained at the cost of so many dead. They whole heartedly embraced the lie by opening themselves unequivocally to whatever mental contagion would bring them peace. What harm is there, I hear myself repeating with them, to take a brief respite from work, weariness and the knowledge of inevitable death? I, too, have been raised to believe I deserve some happiness.
Hence I have run not walked from the culture of which I knew too much. The growing brown shirt movement and racial intolerance of Canada, the pro-war, anti-socialist, blame the poor, shoot the hippo, jingoism of recent memory has walked me quietly and quickly to the nearest exit. Yet, nowhere is lotus bliss more apparent than in the escapism of an ex-patriot community. On the one hand we are proud and self congratulatory for having perceived and rejected the evil doing of our homelands, only to demand a contradictory anti-intellectualism towards anything that would disrupt our pleasant dream. It isn't uncommon for people to misinterpret local law, that foreigners are not permitted political involvements, as justification for not discussing politics at all. As such, social, political, economical or ethical acumen can be read as deplorable and deportable dissention. Far beyond murder it is to point out the palm fronds crashing down amongst our idyll.
In the house across the way there is no activity. This is sufficient to confirm something is wrong. I have come to the street of big houses to tend the Voltaire-ian gardens of some fellow escapees and have become accustomed to the rhythm of this little pseudo suburban road. My neighbor moves and shakes, comes and goes, like the steady wash of waves on our seemingly happy beaches. But not this week.
The facts are non-existent. There is no newspaper and no form of communication but gossip. All that seems true is that he was taken from his restaurant by men with guns.
When the police assaulted the zocalo in Oaxaca during the last teacher's strike they apparently captured some 500 people who they then deported to the state of Nayarit in a recapitulation of Guantanamo Bay. Some of those people were just unlucky enough to have chosen that particular moment to go shopping for eggs. They were tortured of course. I only know this because one of the locals is a psychologist who was involved in post traumatic stress treatment for the detainees. Most refused the treatment because they had already seen psychologists in their Nayarit prison and had been made aware of the intricacies of "treatment" by their captors. They were encouraged, in the midst of what must have been one of the most horrific moments of their lives, to see their discontent as a skewed perspective, to see their grief as the product of their improprieties.
For the new president, Felipe Calderon, the biggest problem Mexico faces at this moment is the transportation of drugs up the coast. Of course, only drug users would also be dissenters in the beautiful dream that is green and pleasant Mexico. That the teachers of Oaxaca and the APPO are dissenters, trouble makers, surrenders them to the inquisition of Calderon's anti-drug army. That Calderon's anti-drug army may be involved in the drug trade is an irony that has certainly fried the sensibilities of the Mexican public.
Contrarily, for too many of the gringos the protests in Oaxaca are about better wages and an inexplicable, culturally endemic unrest. One can practically hear John Wayne's voice pronouncing with no hint of wavering self-doubt that the natives are restless, while completely ignoring just why that might be. The facts are non-existent. There is no newspaper and no form of communication but gossip. All that seems true is that mangos fall from the trees like manna from heaven.
We all, surely, have anxieties about how the world could be and have all had our anxieties lured into dreary congeniality by our fear. Uncertainty and the reluctance to speak about what is not sure, what disrupts, has quieted our cynicism, defensiveness and critical judgment. But such "positive" thinking, trying to pass off our muzzles for some kind of zen, doesn't change the world. It just shuts out what is inconvenient about it. And in the confusion criminals of every kind make off with whomsoever they wish as we nod our heads in passive accord.
Despite the fragmentary appearance of the community's reaction to the kidnapping, there is an unsettling theme running through our conversations. I noticed a distinct relief of tension in myself when I was told the victim was involved in questionable business practices. The event was removed from the paranoic dread of random violence and delivered into the realm of justice, cause and effect, good and evil, god. Such specific comings and goings surely have nothing to do with us general rabble. I have rejected the event's suggestion of wholesale human malevolence for the comfort provided by non-involvement.
Yet, I keep thinking of the detainees in Nayarit being told that their dis-ease, their sins against the state, had incarcerated them. I think of a boss who tried to have the only aware person in the department fired for having too much initiative, I think of a co-worker who, after the fact, spoke shockingly well of a job she had hated and with bubbly enthusiasm reminded me that life was all about enjoyment. I think of Odysseus' men rejecting stark life completely for peaceful somnambulism. And I surely agree that life cannot be unwaveringly about fear and pain. And yet it is, in as much as it is about coming to terms with perennial suffering. We have no patience for the process. We hope that there is somehow a quick resolution to our strife and we consume the answers like cigarettes. We consume. We congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment and cluck and strut with our chests puffed out at those who "resist." We go on vacation. We leave.
"What you resist persists" goes the popular Jungian quote that has been used to substantiate the bland inertia of our era. To think is to sin against our safe, shell-like personal truths. Because truth, our truth, is a selfish little, self serving, self created reality, that any real thought would pop like a blister. We dread knowing. We can not go back to the same old strife, the same old pain, the same old same old.
Jung was not offering a solution to our dilemma in his clever aphorism. It is only to our generation of sound byte addled head nodders that "don't think about it" could somehow resolve the confusion of so many years of baffling human cognizance. We want ... no ... we demand the answer now and it is narcissistically easy to embrace the lotus. But Jung also said, "There is no coming to consciousness without pain." Yes, we must be Buddhist and strive for acceptance, but no, we can not be insincere about it. We should not just embrace this or that because it serves our purposes and we just don't want to suffer anymore ... should we?
We have theories about our disappeared neighbor. We dabble in explanation, justification, discrimination to give our disregard the appearance of awareness. Meanwhile, we dream in paradise and offer money, subservience, condemnation. We allocate blame to individual negativity when people are visited by strife, anything to stay in the hidden port, to hold fast to our vacuous, guiltless peace. Yet, should those who stoke the all consuming machine have need of more fodder, they will know exactly where we can be found.