These are wide-ranging quotes from my work-in-progress,
The Underground.
"The famous American mystic, Edgar Cayce, used to do readings for
patients while he was lying down in a state superficially resembling
sleep. Perhaps you could say he dreamed the solutions to their
problems. This is not entirely different from what the artist does. He
dreams in ways that unhook him from the whole System in which we live.
He dreams of solutions to problems that don't yet exist. The Deep State
is secretly devoted to boundaries, beyond which the mind is not
supposed to go. Because Beyond is where freedom and power live. They
don't live like some sort of principled architecture. They live like
great rivers, and you can travel on them forever."
"The System in which we live is a kind of mutual admiration society:
each interconnected piece confirms all the other pieces. People take
this as 'proof' that the System is correct. What a marvelous delusion!
But remove one piece, look at it, examine it closely, turn it over in
your hands, notice its flaws, and the whole System trembles, because
here is an element that doesn't fit. Suddenly, it triggers a
circuit-breaker. The lights go out. In the darkness, you discover you
have night vision. You are able to see things you've never seen
before. For example, the System's skeleton. It is a kind of rigging;
welded shapes thrown up to block off open space, endless space of the
psyche that holds the potential for creations never before conceived,
against which the skeleton is an old fatuous scarecrow in a
churchyard..."
"The Deep State is a concoction of shadow deals among men that end up in
the morning news, but in an entirely different form. Heroes and
villains in the news are there to satisfy the public hunger for one kind
of story, while the men in the shadows want their own sort of story..."
"It's hard to imagine a time before history began piling up like a layer
cake. I'm not talking about primitive periods; quite the opposite. I
mean epochs of great sophistication and art and science---but with no
particular impetus toward recording events. Centralization in general
had not yet taken hold. There were many branches and rivers of
learning. History really began when profound and secret deal-making
began. History was invented as a means of covering that up."
"At some point I decided I would be a fool if I wrote only for today. I
also had to write for the future, and not simply the near-future. Time
is not a straight line. It grows in many directions. Only when humans
become robots operating at the behest of empires does time appear as
one moving stripe. I've asked myself, why bother to crack open
illusions if so many people want to embrace them? There is no Sunday
school answer to that question. But there is exploration. There is a
fleet of ships you can send out, and they go to many places. The only
reason you would hold the fleet back is sheer and obstinate laziness.
Otherwise, you send, and you go. The future is there. Nothing is
decided. The glazed mind stays behind. And where he stays is fascism:
control over details and more details. I make forays into details, in
order to expose ongoing crimes. But that is a visit. Where I live, and
where many other people secretly live, is in the undecided and entirely
open future, which is as long as you want to make it."
"The Deep State has no poetry, and that is the most important thing to
understand about it. It has no poetic rhythms, and therefore it drives
itself mad. It has technicians, and as they move closer to becoming
full-fledged robots, they seek to make humans over in that image. I'm
here to tell you that many people who consider themselves rebels against
the State are actually expressions of it. They think in solid blocks.
They organize and over-organize. They search for one hyper-rational
solution after another, digging themselves deeper into cold space.
They're geometricians in their own prisons. They embrace the underlying
matrices of those they consider their mortal enemies."
"Logic and rational analysis are indispensable tools, when you need
them, when they are called for. But there is something else in the
human psyche, and it has no easy definition. It is the impulse to reach
out through time, beyond time, to ideas and feelings and images that
feed back to the soul an endless series of circumstances and inventions
that have no counterpart in highly organized and centralized society.
Great artists tap into that ocean. They tap into and create that
ocean. They surpass all so-called 'laws of the mind.' You could say
they are pointing to enormous decentralization, where power rests with
the individual, who is not a citizen, not a member, not a piece, not a
cog, but unique. Each individual, unique, if he wants to be."
"Build a better organization to take over from the old organization?
And this is the future we're supposed to embrace with caterwauls of
enthusiasm? This is the best we have to offer? You want an example of
mind control? That would be mind control in its most precise form.
Ignorance is the idea that you can take one oppressive structure and
replace it with the same architecture, but drained of all malicious
content. The architecture was the problem all along."
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