compassionate collaborators

I haven't gotten very far with Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, in fact, I got as far as a section comparing the hermeneutics of 9 vs those of 10 when my book suddenly disappeared and still hasn't been tracked down. This seems like a book I'll savor very slowly, perhaps never finish.

For a few weeks I've been considering the way Reza Negarestani frames the word complicity in the book's title, and noticed that it has mapped onto my questionable understanding of the mysterious way of the mysterious world. Especially in my view of those days which could be called Camel's backbreakers. Yesterday was one of them.

Early enough I could tell that something odd, difficult and unfathomable was pushing down on the morning, in my mood, which was desperate for no reason, and in my daughters, who both woke up in a gloom that blossomed into tragedy in my mind. In the old days I think I would have wondered what sort of therapy we should all be in or what medication we should be on, or what I'd done wrong as a mother, or what my mother had done wrong, or my mother's mother or father's father, or if we should leave Brooklyn, if happiness was elsewhere, etc. Was it from Buddhism that I learned that that which has no beginning also has no end, in fact, has no independent existence at all?

In the midst of this torrent of anguish which appeared for no discernable reason many illusions broke and reality was reconfigured, psychic alliances returned, maladaptive psychic habituations were shattered. In the end, a pelagic love emerged and relationships, deepened, abyssally, abyssmally. Russell, the only stooge in a good mood, blossomed to the occasion of nurturing his miserable sisters and mother through this burst of emotion, thankfully, fearless, quite confident of his ability to finesse the broken hearted back into health. And soon enough the system was back up, returned, better, less robotic, more vital.

I've never seen a mood come down (or up?) on the family so systemically and discretely before. More often I watch the mood come up on myself, and on those days when it seems that I need to break down and through whether I like it or not, I've watched odd things, complicitous materials misbehaving, push me over the edge of some mechanically entrenched interface with life to some place where I come to life again, and the world comes back with me. It is like being sucked into a chiasmic gyre and born out the other side, and it terrifies. But afterwards I am beyond grateful for the power of the cycle of Reality's cruel mercy to restore the soul. I think of whirlwinds in the desert, blowing life into a dessicated existence.

As for what Reza means by complicity, hopefully I'll get to explore that again some day. I have a feeling it's a darker (and far more brilliant) sort of vitalistic cycle than what I've adumbrated here. Or maybe not, when I sense the as yet unutterable ways I and everyone else will continue to break, and what forces will help do the work.

No teacup love.