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poly_chromatic2013-11-20 10:06 am
unflagging) wrote in poly_chromatic2013-11-20 10:06 am
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[ αиσиумσυѕ ] || [ тωєиту-fινє ]
War, ladies and gentlemen.
The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the word. What right man would have it any other way?
It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
It is your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each. All other trades are contained in that of war.
And it endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance in either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is also the nature of war whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
For those who say might does not make right, I tell you this:
Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.
I put this to a priest once. Nihil dicit. He does not say. But the priest has said. For this priest has put aside the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor. The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself.
Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.
He refused to reply. But what could I ask of him that he'd not already given?
But enough of war. I have another tale I like better. Recall that men of god and men of war have strange affinities. I've told this story to another before, and he was a man of war. I'll tell it to you because I wonder what you'll think--not what you'll do with the story, but what you'll think. It's a twice-told tale, but you don't care, do you?
The universe, of course, is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain--although it may think it can--the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe--universes, indeed, but let it stand for both--is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in the world we know, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind--no, nor woman's either--can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatic and the romantic. There was a time, yet a hundred generations before the world (a certain world at least) moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of reality. Even so, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. One company (or cabal) led the way in this regard: North Central Positronics, it called itself. Hush--it sounds prosaic again, but endure it a while, or think of it as a set piece to the story, use it as you please. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts, there were remarkably few insights.
For some, their many-times-great grandfathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which they called cancer, almost conquered aging, walked on the moon... They made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles: they split the atom, unwound the twin strands of DNA, found elements that vanish as quickly as they are formed, created means of communication through the very air, means by which to speak across empty air, the ways and means to walk on the moon itself, built robots and contraptions sent into outer space that could be controlled at great distances and which would send back sights and sounds on that invisible wavelength, a network of instant communication that linked up the whole of the world and was as much toy as tool. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight. There were no great odes written to the wonders of artificial insemination--having babies from frozen mansperm--or to the cars that ran on power of the sun. Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search. Do you see? Perhaps you do. Perhaps your wandering down those forgotten passages have left you with some ability to comprehend for the moment. But never mind--that's beside the point. Here is the point:
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. Here you see why I laugh at Key XVI and it's dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o'er his base into the sea. Here now you see why I laugh and though you think you don't understand, you do. You know these things in the depth of your heart and in the depth of your mind. You know without knowing. You know what connectivity and centering such a thing, such a place might be.
Size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.
You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?
Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: the pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
Perhaps you have already seen what place our universe plays in the scheme of things--as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it's already begun to happen.
Think how small such a concept of things make us. If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for such a race of gnats? Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see... what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?
Imagine the dust of the Mojave Desert, which surely you have seen or have seen something akin to it, and imagine a trillion universes--not worlds but universes--encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, a chain never to be completed.
Size, you understand. Size.
Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. Key 16 if you like, Key 19 as I prefer--but, hush, that's perhaps an idiosyncracy and you might not understand. Still. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?...
You dare not. You cannot.
I've told you the same story that I told the one I showed that card to so long ago. It matters less to you than it did to him. To you perhaps it's entertaining, perhaps it's pretty sounds in the air. And that is all it must be to you. It is not for you to seek. It is not your intended end.
A man seeks his own destiny and no other. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.
That same desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.
What could I ask of you that you have not already given?
[ooc: Cut for massive tl;dr. Is it real or is itMemorex curse-induced? Nihil dicit. This post is an anonymous text post. And I'm not really sorry for double-posting. I really wanted to do this.]
The good book says that he that lives by the sword shall perish by the word. What right man would have it any other way?
It makes no difference what men think of war. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.
It is your own trade we honor here. Why not rather take a small bow. Let each acknowledge each. All other trades are contained in that of war.
And it endures because young men love it and old men love it in them. Those that fought, those that did not.
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance in either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is also the nature of war whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
For those who say might does not make right, I tell you this:
Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgments ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.
I put this to a priest once. Nihil dicit. He does not say. But the priest has said. For this priest has put aside the robes of his craft and taken up the tools of that higher calling which all men honor. The priest also would be no godserver but a god himself.
Men of god and men of war have strange affinities.
He refused to reply. But what could I ask of him that he'd not already given?
But enough of war. I have another tale I like better. Recall that men of god and men of war have strange affinities. I've told this story to another before, and he was a man of war. I'll tell it to you because I wonder what you'll think--not what you'll do with the story, but what you'll think. It's a twice-told tale, but you don't care, do you?
The universe, of course, is the Great All, and offers a paradox too great for the finite mind to grasp. As the living brain cannot conceive of a non-living brain--although it may think it can--the finite mind cannot grasp the infinite.
The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddied field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
The universe--universes, indeed, but let it stand for both--is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in the world we know, more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind--no, nor woman's either--can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.
The prosaic fact of the universe's existence alone defeats both the pragmatic and the romantic. There was a time, yet a hundred generations before the world (a certain world at least) moved on, when mankind had achieved enough technical and scientific prowess to chip a few splinters from the great stone pillar of reality. Even so, the false light of science (knowledge, if you like) shone in only a few developed countries. One company (or cabal) led the way in this regard: North Central Positronics, it called itself. Hush--it sounds prosaic again, but endure it a while, or think of it as a set piece to the story, use it as you please. Yet, despite a tremendous increase in available facts, there were remarkably few insights.
For some, their many-times-great grandfathers conquered the-disease-which-rots, which they called cancer, almost conquered aging, walked on the moon... They made or discovered a hundred other marvelous baubles: they split the atom, unwound the twin strands of DNA, found elements that vanish as quickly as they are formed, created means of communication through the very air, means by which to speak across empty air, the ways and means to walk on the moon itself, built robots and contraptions sent into outer space that could be controlled at great distances and which would send back sights and sounds on that invisible wavelength, a network of instant communication that linked up the whole of the world and was as much toy as tool. But this wealth of information produced little or no insight. There were no great odes written to the wonders of artificial insemination--having babies from frozen mansperm--or to the cars that ran on power of the sun. Few if any seemed to have grasped the truest principle of reality: new knowledge leads to yet more awesome mysteries. Greater physiological knowledge of the brain makes the existence of the soul less possible yet more probable by the nature of the search. Do you see? Perhaps you do. Perhaps your wandering down those forgotten passages have left you with some ability to comprehend for the moment. But never mind--that's beside the point. Here is the point:
The greatest mystery the universe offers is not life but size. Size encompasses life, and the Tower encompasses size. Here you see why I laugh at Key XVI and it's dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o'er his base into the sea. Here now you see why I laugh and though you think you don't understand, you do. You know these things in the depth of your heart and in the depth of your mind. You know without knowing. You know what connectivity and centering such a thing, such a place might be.
Size. The child, who is most at home with wonder, says: Daddy, what is above the sky? And the father says: The darkness of space. The child: What is beyond space? The father: The galaxy. The child: Beyond the galaxy? The father: Another galaxy. The child: Beyond the other galaxies? The father: No one knows.
You see? Size defeats us. For the fish, the lake in which he lives is the universe. What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?
Or one might take the tip of the pencil and magnify it. One reaches the point where a stunning realization strikes home: the pencil tip is not solid; it is composed of atoms which whirl and revolve like a trillion demon planets. What seems solid to us is actually only a loose net held together by gravity. Viewed at their actual size, the distances between these atoms might become league, gulfs, aeons. The atoms themselves are composed of nuclei and revolving protons and electrons. One may step down further to subatomic particles. And then to what? Tachyons? Nothing? Of course not. Everything in the universe denies nothing; to suggest an ending is the one absurdity.
If you fell outward to the limit of the universe, would you find a board fence and signs reading DEAD END? No. You might find something hard and rounded, as the chick must see the egg from the inside. And if you should peck through the shell (or find a door), what great and torrential light might shine through your opening at the end of space? Might you look through and discover our entire universe is but part of one atom on a blade of grass? Might you be forced to think that by burning a twig you incinerate an eternity of eternities? That existence rises not to one infinite but to an infinity of them?
Perhaps you have already seen what place our universe plays in the scheme of things--as no more than an atom in a blade of grass. Could it be that everything we can perceive, from the microscopic virus to the distant Horsehead Nebula, is contained in one blade of grass that may have existed for only a single season in an alien time-flow? What if that blade should be cut off by a scythe? When it begins to die, would the rot seep into our universe and our own lives, turning everything yellow and brown and desiccated? Perhaps it's already begun to happen.
Think how small such a concept of things make us. If a God watches over it all, does He actually mete out justice for such a race of gnats? Does His eye see the sparrow fall when the sparrow is less than a speck of hydrogen floating disconnected in the depth of space? And if He does see... what must the nature of such a God be? Where does He live? How is it possible to live beyond infinity?
Imagine the dust of the Mojave Desert, which surely you have seen or have seen something akin to it, and imagine a trillion universes--not worlds but universes--encapsulated in each grain of that desert; and within each universe an infinity of others. We tower over these universes from our pitiful grass vantage point; with one swing of your boot you may knock a billion billion worlds flying off into darkness, a chain never to be completed.
Size, you understand. Size.
Yet suppose further. Suppose that all worlds, all universes, met at a single nexus, a single pylon, a Tower. Key 16 if you like, Key 19 as I prefer--but, hush, that's perhaps an idiosyncracy and you might not understand. Still. And within it, a stairway, perhaps rising to the Godhead itself. Would you dare climb to the top? Could it be that somewhere above all of endless reality, there exists a room?...
You dare not. You cannot.
I've told you the same story that I told the one I showed that card to so long ago. It matters less to you than it did to him. To you perhaps it's entertaining, perhaps it's pretty sounds in the air. And that is all it must be to you. It is not for you to seek. It is not your intended end.
A man seeks his own destiny and no other. Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same appointed time, for each man's destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and contains within it all opposites as well.
That same desert upon which so many have been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.
What could I ask of you that you have not already given?
[ooc: Cut for massive tl;dr. Is it real or is it
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[Please consider all replies in this post from Flagg to be as anonymous as his original post.]
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I would think they would long for their youth, as any would.
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And perhaps there were some who were stronger than others and perhaps some perished and perhaps some thrived and perhaps all were subjugated under the one who first forced order into chaos.
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You're welcome.
no subject
Anonymous
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No I still fail to see the purpose.
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