Dialectics as a pointless Valhalla
Dialectics as a pointless Valhalla
fighting to die to heave up out of death to fight again
It’s easy to fall into old routines, into the safety of slogans, that rend the air into curt dialects, and slanging matches, that echo their way into lazy dialectics, an oppositional magic, as if there could never be anything more than that two-step must.
Everyone can count to two they say, me and you, but there is already more here among us.
Note: at ‘everyone’ it is already crowded, so the shouty back projection is a hindsight of sorts, but not a kind of memory of a simpler time, a simpler systematization. It is a sophisticated rhetorical device passing as chat curious in a military mess hall.
A dragon upon the shield, sneaking on a red field. A fire-fear of intending breath.
If you can remember where you stand, that is ‘one’ … —knowing you carry with you every where, and take it for granted. By who? You now know who you are. Count ‘two’.
There you are upon a foreign field.
Where you have two hands with shield and an edge. You think, “but that’s three holdings.” Three haves. Is that a wherewithal you seek? Where is the enemy mine? Is that four already, Even without the many more?
Two things fighting are the simplest things a human mind can hold when stressed, already over-burdened as they are with language and identities that claw at them like the dead, and always the babies screaming in their ears. ‘Two’ is a comfort called order sought in the fog of war. Sought, but never found. Some call it cognitive load.
“I…” you say, looking at yourself, “me- — .”
Your hands are full of what exactly? And what is that in you ear. Thoughts still buzzing like flies at a corpse. You open your mouth to yawn it away, but instead you scream.
And what is that smell?
A baby takes up both hands, so the dialectic is no more, things multiple multiply, there is no argument because reproduction does not heave up into a crude amalgam, a stolid congealed synthetic hindsight that both pretends at progress and dispenses simplistic structures as comfort to the dead. The shouted prayer is no hug.
Reproduction wears away the opportunities these honours betray, like shamans in a swamp.
Instead, indeed, a solution must be found in multiple agreements that cross insure, that negotiate and reconcile accounts, that work to judge what is to come tomorrow, the point of view that worlds together, survives together. We are already many more than two by the time we can separate ourselves and learn how to count like some hero in the night fielding promises to long-gone yesterdays.
We are already many more. The many more that seek a balance as we dance the many missteps our hands swear by.
The scambait of order and an even louder voice to drown out the many mores’ whimpering submissions is a parasitic Johnny-come-lately’s self-love. A smirk on the face of the earth heaved up by a failure to recognise themselves in others. Winners are grinners they shout, “I am the synthesis!”
The strong arm is a strong voice that elects no one, and negotiates less. ‘I am the world',’ they say, ‘my body is its temple.’ A death cult beckons where everyone dies in a meat wave in Valhalla’s foyer, they they do it again tomorrow and get no further. That is not progress. “It’s a syntactical mistake,” someone whispers insolently in the military mess.
But in a better world, the fighter comes to see victory loose to sense and sensibility.
The world is a baby tomorrow. A stone in your third hand. How do you… — dance with that? “Do not give a sword to a man who cannot dance.” —is that the best we’ve got?
Survival doesn’t care if you are a moron, if you survive. Survival doesn’t care how illogical your feelings are that push you into ignoring the simple mechanics of hindsight, even if they are honoured in a breach birth. Survival doesn’t care about how inconsistent your thoughts are, how unfaithful you are to the shouty sky father’s threats. You are not a baby. We are a baby.
Survival does not care if you survive.
A bronze age in your ear? Slip me a quiet word, and we’ll have five more.
An iron fist in your…
— did you jump back? Are we agreed?
Tomorrow is a baby, not a dragon on your shield.