House of Being: The Ecconomics of the Text and the Gesture of the Soul

We are sitting here as we watch the oil and energy crisis grow increasingly fierce. There seems to be a kind of a bottleneck on growth: that comes in the mode of the limited resource of energy.

That's really what we face in the light of the information revolution: we have the information, and we have put it out there on the web, but only as long as the web retains energy.

We already pay the phone companies in order to have access to the world wide web. Lets face it, communication ain't free. However by web it takes a lot less energy than me transferring my whole body half-way round the earth by jet airplane. We may log hundreds of hours of internet conversations, but may have used only a fraction of the same amount of energy and/or money as if we had traveled for three hours on a commercial jet.

So it's cheaper to "conversate" (this term gratefully acknowledged as a neologism) via the web. We have in this sense uploaded the virtual bodies of our discourse from paper to electronic inc.

The thing with a written letter is that it is stable; perhaps one day we will manage to make an electronic network as stable as a three-hundred year old letter: the ink is still there, the hand that wrote and the eyes that first looked in receipt belong to physical bodies of people who have passed on: but the gesture of the body, and, in that, a piece of the gesture of the soul remains in the physical gesturing of each of those letters, and the letters also contain some form of yearning toward the subjectivity of the one they were originally intended to be received by.

There are lots of stories of the prometheus types who believe they have discovered a source of unlimited energy. They seek to bring this into the world: they are turned into Pariahs and shunned. Perhaps this could go back in human history (beyond Prometheus) to the example of Christ, of Nikola Tessla.

There is still one principle in an energy system that had not been thought through for Tessla: even if he found an abundant source of energy, abundant does not mean infinite.

The human race has a tendency to push limits. As all life forms tend to expand to their maximum capacity within a given system. Things tend to move to extremes until they exhaust the given base energy of a system, or a set of hunter entities moves up the food chain and reduces the population of the emerging species once again. Any meta or predator species is reliant on the other elements of the system, and ultimately to a certain energy base of a system, in order for it's survival. Predators might even get smart and herd flocks for them to prey on.

So here we are, this flock of sheep called humanity, chained to an addiction to oil because oil companies want us to purchase oil. Are we preyed upon? -Of course. Our labor and energy is going more and more to feed the oil industry.

Global scarcity of fuel: as the pond fills up with lily pads: Chinese industry now kick-started, India not far behind: the energy system that used to have a few elite countries producing refined goods and exploiting the under-developed countries for resources dwindles: "too many chiefs and not enough indians," that is what some people will say. But we knew the system would get like this. This is in somebody's plan, no? There must be someone who is fantastically rich and well informed who is playing "God" or at least "Demi-ourge." But I Cannot believe that this fabulously wealthy man or woman would want the system to implode, apparently the way it's doing. It's a juggling act, oh yes, to be certain, but it is not just a matter of throwing these things up in the air too lightly: the hell of this juggling act is that if we cease juggling and the light goes out, then that is "it" for us. We step out of the system and things are completed, done at least in our respect. The knowledge, and the yearning, that rests in the libido of these writings, would then be extinguished, for each of these writings themselves is bent and formed from some inner voice that is yearning toward the future, that it itself expresses a gesture of soul seeking to live forever. Ah yes, but you only live forever in those small acts of kindness. And this small act of kindness is what apparently disappears in the technological age: now we only have grand sweeping theories of kindness.

But kindness is a sort of acceptance of obliteration. You leave a mark that is immortal insofar as you have received or insofar as you have fed. Isn't this what kindness boils down to? Nurturance of another human soul? (Rod Gorney may have gotten this much right).

What is the act of kindness for all of us human beings toward the earth? Is that not the same old question; the same old answer to which seems to be "we are stewards." This is old news in one respect: probably as old as the Christian mytheme in some respects. Deeper still is the question driven deeper to the level of materiality: the earth becomes my own materiality: the fabric of the gesture becomes woven of the human body, the gesture of an open hand. But deeper still to my own particular, finite, singular existence.

Singularity. this term is used as a potential source of energy, a potential source of something very strange, and very other. Currently we are producing singularities in the largest particle accelerator in the world. So far we are still alive: what is that that keeps us alive, really if not our love that extends itself? What is a singularity but a curled up contraction? A black hole!

We are facing an economic black hole: the finite reserves of one energy system are rapidly dwindling: what is two or three hundred years geologically? The hope of the system: to discover an advanced and super-abundant energy system from which to grow.

Tessla did not think to the next step of the energy system. Or to the fact that the human race, as is common to most systems (not just parasites, unless we count the vegetable kingdom as parasitical to the solar/mineral system), will expand to the limits of the energy system and simply absorb it: at a certain point it flourishes to excess (Bataille) but then dies back.

Bigger is not necessarily better: sometimes its just uglier. There has to be a shift in consciousness. The sprawl of urban and suburban landscapes: blighting the intelligence (and apparently successful juggling-balance) of living systems (chaparral, forest, kelp bed, tundra, wetland, desert, prarie, swamp...) creates harsh forms of abuse to intelligence: inner cities produce abusive people: straight-formed concrete, glass and steel: lacerate and pulverize the human soul in an abstraction: Corbusier's architectural obscenity: "a house is a machine for living."

Dynamiting trees in "Fitzcarraldo" Herzog sees the wilderness as an opposing resource of tremendous energy, but it is guarded by its intense opposition to human "leisure." Opposing us, the ultimate example of forest, and the instinctual lives of we human beings ourselves: "suffocation and fornication in the jungle," is what Herzog calls it. He calls it a "glacial emptiness in the eyes of the Grizzly bears" (in Grizzly Man): this force guards and protects nature as it terribly opposes us in its innocence. Innocence, I laugh, innocent we are not.

But what if we human beings have to learn to live on the threshold of that terrible outer existence: that nature. We make simple encampments and tell each other stories of what is and what should be. We are, above all, small, minuiscule, dwarfed by the immensity of the forest, all of us, each and every one, anthropologists who have "gone native." The only answer that I believe Heidegger could think of: "Language is the house of Being."

Such words, Heidegger's words, are written to carry the greatest depth of grief, and to bring out a shattering and most utterly singular expression, the gesture of the soul of the soul. Singularities contract, but love extends itself a little further: from the shattering of the soul, there remain those who pick up the pieces: not just rag-and-bone-men: we are picking up pieces of lives. And what is life if we do not extend in offering to give someone, a friend, the one we serve... to give someone back their soul. This may be the essence of any "therapy" or any real "education."