[NetBehaviour] Green

[Edward Picot]

Nice writing!

On 16/09/2019 14:56, Max Herman via NetBehaviour wrote:
>
> Today at every university the Gideons are out, with their cardboard 
> boxes of small green paper bibles.  Unassuming chaps they ask "do you 
> want a free bible?"  They are very compact like decks of cards or 
> candy packets.  These are offered to undergraduates all over America 
> during the first month of fall classes in Septembers, to offer a 
> scriptural path afresh.
>
> The cover says "New Testament."  What is a testament?  Well, a story 
> really.  Someone publicly telling their story, a testimony, a person 
> in a place telling a story which is their story.  So, a new example of 
> this is a new testament, a new story.  And what is a novel?  A story.  
> Why is it called a novel, a nouvelle, a new?  Because it was a new 
> kind of an idea or a new way of talking about stories and making them 
> into paper form back in the 1700's.  So, the novel was a new 
> testament.  A new story.  The new story.  The new new testament story 
> for 1700.
>
> In a way the little green new testaments are like stacks of green 
> dollar bills.  But they are very humble too like play money or fortune 
> cookies, cheap, free, included with the meal so to speak.  Ironically, 
> even to discuss the idea of a new new testament story in vulgar 
> English or German in the year 1000 would get you burned, disemboweled, 
> or interred to rot to death in a muddy stone room with sewerage.  To 
> presume you might consider a new story!
>
> Why did they have to bring Buddha's scriptures from all over the 
> world, when his scriptures really just said you don't need scriptures, 
> don't use scriptures, attend to your breath and the present moment?  
> Let go of all the bullshit and all the gurus, don't you see what I'm 
> saying for god's sake?  You are all going to burn in hell, and already 
> are, he said, before calming down a little.
>
> You wonder, how long a new testament can remain new and how long the 
> novel can remain novel.  All of this novelty, so much glacial 
> accumulation of unfathomable waste.  Stagnant, dead data.  You wonder 
> if the novel can become its inverse.  Come to think of it, how can it 
> not?  It is impossible to conceive that it could do otherwise than 
> become its inverse, and then to accumulate infinitely.  Then, once 
> thought, you realize how vastly advanced this stagnation is, how 
> astronomical and absolute it already is, how glacial and total, this 
> incarcerating assemblage of dead data.
>
> So, weep, wail?  Rend eyes, flesh, hair, garments?  Well, after a 
> fashion, yes.  Appearances, appurtenances, they are already filthy 
> rags and tatters.  Choked cemeteries, filth to the heavens, saturated 
> with plastic pellets so fine they permeate a dragonfly's retina.  To 
> rend them is just to ask a simple question, and observe, are they not 
> tatters?  Are they not rags?  There's nothing even to tear down.  So 
> then what is there, is there nothing there?
>
> The new green Gideons today are funny though today.  They have dots on 
> them, little green dots like in charts of space bent by gravity.  They 
> have a new, modern, cyberspace chic for this year, dots of data moving 
> in curvilinear network space.  Each little green new testament is also 
> kind of like a dot or particle, all stacked up in their cardboard box, 
> or more like little square sections of a formatted drive or bricks or 
> tarot decks.  Then you have roads, railroad tracks, bike paths, 
> satellites overhead and lots of streaming media all about amid 
> concrete and glass.  Basically all 100% empty really or infinitely close.
>
> To live your own genius however, to experience it as a network, to be 
> truly alive, and alive to the genius of others, without hyper-massive 
> waste programming and cannibalism, that is impossible.  For human 
> beings to get it: "oh yes, I am a story, I have a new story every day, 
> my story evolves every day and is born afresh, reborn every day, 
> cycling a new cycle every day, this is so mundane and yet so accurate, 
> I'm so glad for this new story!  Such a simple story, my original 
> story, everyone's original story that is fresh and new for them and 
> for me too every day, just being alive is all it is, like Buddha's 
> simple breath, tree, and sitting.  What need for all these networks of 
> new scriptures?  Goodness they are so strange, these stacked 
> cemeteries that measure by fathoms in every direction and we all live 
> daily buried inside."
>
> Because you see, human intelligence is a network.  Brains are 
> connected.  Words are connected.  Different words, different 
> conversations, different brains, different intelligence.  A new 
> humanity.  It can all be transformed instantly in a single second, by 
> a single all-powerful new testament, new novel, new network; a single 
> syllable, a single breath or email transforming all from death to life.
>
>
>
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