Avalon

[pataphor]

There's been a radio silence for a while, the reason is autumn was
coming and I noticed a concomitant decrease in inspiration for exercise
as the sunlight was slowly retreating. As avid readers of my posts
(none) probably know by now, my whole shtick is to make progress, and
that has so far been through improving mentally, by doing physical
exercise. So it seemed that I had to sit out a few seasons and await
the return of the light in the coming spring time.

However.

I decided that instead of ceding ground to the enemy all at once, I
would still exercise as much as I could, while also catching the fading
rays of light whenever the combination of daytime and sunlight gave me
the opportunity to sit with exposed skin on my balcony.

The results were very unexpected. This down tempo approach resulted in
me starting to dance during exercise for the first time in lord knows
how many years. Also, I could now get into the kind of rhythm that would
enable steady progress, with perceptible improvements in agility on a
day by day basis. I increased my range and took up taking small
strolls several times a day in addition to a major exercise effort
every other day.

I don't know what kind of explanation would fit this phenomenon but my
guess would be that it is always harder to do the last 10% than the
first 90%, so that could mean that aiming for 50% or 75% would leave
one with most of the energy reserves intact, while trying to work too
close to the envelope would be like pouring most of all money into
health care to prolong the life of the elderly and sick, while
neglecting the advances that could be made by preventing certain
conditions to occur in the first place.

Unfortunately, not all the news is good. More and more I came to
realize that whatever progress I am making is more like a return to
better times, maybe in a kind of Marcel Proust style, as in the search
for lost time, or maybe in an attempt to run myself into a better, maybe
a mythical or magical, world, as in trying to find the lost city of
Avalon.

I don't know how to rhyme this sense of progress with the idea that it
is just a restoration of what has been lost. Maybe one can get into a
slump in an unnoticeable way, all the time thinking that one is still
doing well, only to accidentally stumble upon some means of getting out
and then seeing the kind of dirt one has been spending one's time on,
or in.

This post could alternatively have been named "the mists of Avalon" in
reference to a certain author or a movie, but I am very conflicted
about the whole theme as told in that retelling, although I have only
seen a small part of the film, where there seems to be a story in a
backward and violent medieval time where a king takes a married woman
for his wife, claiming they have been acquainted since before they were
born. Also, the way the spiritual powers make themselves known in that
framing is by some kind of psychotic episodes or nightmarish daydreams,
which is not all too enticing.

For that matter I am more fond of one Roxy Music's last hits, also
named Avalon, which now has a nice MV with it, about things happening in
a mysterious castle where a young woman dances in circles and frowns on
the singer trying to touch her. It is more classy, but still there is
some wolfish sexual tension in the air, which seems quaint to me even if
its impact is softened by the red rose symbolism.

In essence, the idea of Avalon, or similar things, has been with me for
a long time, and its resurrection from a dormant state has been a side
effect of this second growth spurt in my progress. It happened as I was
making my usual training round, when at some point I came across a
luxurious building that one could easily mistake for a castle.
Enlightened by the physical state the running had delivered me in I
felt like I could easily build or acquire such a residence for myself.
A few days later I tried to actually change reality in such a way as to
move towards that state of affairs, as if I was shadow walking in one
of Roger Zelazny's amber novels.

These kind of inspirations happen to me in an organic way. Like, in the
story in the paragraph above, earlier I had seen a young man walking a
motorcycle with the motor running at high speed. I was wondering why
would he not use all that power for propulsion, and that led me to the
idea that while I was making my training rounds, maybe I wasn't putting
all this energy to good use.

More recently, this morning I had other kinds of omens, like there was
some kind of gigantic sewage cleaning machine which looked like an
elephant with a man walking next to it, for which I could find no good
analogies until a bit later when I started to notice that the ponds
around Oberon's castle, as I now have internally renamed the place for
myself, had some unpleasant smell. This is why this post was nearly
named "Oberon's stinking ponds".

I realize now that most progress comes with pain and opening one's eyes
can result in seeing a lot of dirt that one was ignoring before. In
fact I suspect that one of the reasons I was unnoticeably getting into
this slump was that I had been closing my eyes for certain truths, in a
maybe mistaken assumption that it was needed for me to be able to
continue existing.

Like it seems clear that in order to deal with any official
organization whatsoever in this world one has to accept that one can
never go against the money, at least not for long. It results in a
state of affairs that is not unlike someone saying, we are against
raping girls, therefore all the girls you are going to get are already
pre-raped by the system, so you don't have to worry anymore about that.

It's a variant of starting with the big lie upfront, like this doctor
could not possibly have completed their education without not going
against the system, and then trying to get people to swallow that big
lie that every official person has plastered over them as if there was a
large placate on their foreheads saying "I am a servant of the ruling
class".

One doesn't necessarily have to be a practicing postmodernist to see
the unworkability and ugliness of such a system even though most people
caught in it sincerely believe they are working for the 'good' side.

Some time ago I had a nasty experience on IRC where a 'socialist' IRC
channel was occupied, or rather squatted on, by some extremely evil mod
who had some believers with him (her). As I noticed that the guiding
page of the channel tried to put feminism and the battle for equal
rights for people of color into the charter of socialism I was
wondering if the current state of affairs would even allow us to go
after such relatively luxury targets. Like, sure, maybe women make 75%
of what (white) men make, and colored people (in the US!) maybe make 50%
of that, but we're fighting against a system where a few, maybe 10?,
people control most of the money, wouldn't it be better to go after
these problems that are several orders of magnitude more important and
relevant than keeping up some racial or sexual divide that may well be
put there intentionally, to prevent people from even noticing the big
lie, that, as I mentioned before, everyone official is like wearing a
big placate of, on their foreheads.

But instead of arguing my position, people just tried to sabotage my
standing, by making derogatory remarks, and, when I tried to defend
against those, I was repeatedly cautioned to stop distracting and
instead engage more with the subject. The subject that I myself was
trying to bring up!

Such occurrences start some kind of doubt in myself in which I wonder
if I fail to have some intelligent capacity that would be necessary in
order to understand why they would choose such underhanded tactics to
oppose me, or that maybe it is the case that these people are mere
intellectuals who lack even the basic capacity for self reflection that
would be necessary to understand what they themselves were saying to me.

In the end I decided that maybe it was a good thing that I was banned
early, like not much investment was lost and now I could spend my time
with more worthy people. The problem is that most all positions in
society are occupied by these kinds of psychopaths, which leads me to
yet another title this post could have been under, that also has some
nice kind of double entendre to it: "the dark lord colors between the
lines".

With that I hoped to express my feelings originating from a small
encounter with a person clad in black who was on a motorcycle coming
from the other direction. There was not enough space on the path for me
running towards him and him simultaneously trying to overtake a woman
bicyclist, also coming towards me. So he angrily sounded his horn.
However I easily managed to sidestep the bicycle path for enough time
to let them pass by, after all it is only a barrier of say 20 cm high.

This led me to the following chain of insights, in combination with
the IRC affair and other background, that the dark lord, who was
represented by the guy in black, even though the association is purely
figurative, and not much ill will exists toward the impatient driver,
that the dark lord necessarily must operate within the lines, as evil
stops existing when it has completely annihilated and taken over the
good. So this was a very exhilarating and exiting experience, that was
also witnessed by the next biker coming from that direction, who I could
'tell' also saw the true state of affairs in the world, right at that
moment.

Now, obviously for the reader it can be doubtful whether all these
persons were really incarnations of this or that, maybe they were just
busy getting to work and not players in some grand allegorical scheme
involving alternate realities that one could reach by transforming
castle like buildings into properties surrounding Oberon's castle on
the mythical island of Avalon.

But that is exactly the point. From a certain alternative reality
viewpoint, and one that postmodernism was able to make available in these
recent times, multiple narratives apply, thus freeing us from the swamp
of imposed authorities in the most libertarian way possible, be it that
because of its state of origin it was initially associated with mostly
leftist thinking.

I now realize that neither left nor right is all there is, just that the
escape can be found in some alternative that we still have to uncover,
sidestepping the people that can only see red or blue and that forget
about green, or who try to shoehorn colors that have aspects of it into
the camps of those two basic colors, while claiming that only these
basic tints are representing 'truth'.

We still have to work out how all those multiple narratives and
viewpoints can work harmoniously together, and in that way my Avalon is
very different from a total freedom libertarian society, as much as it
is different from a socialism dominated by intellectual bureaucrats
that are secretly impersonations of Satan.

But this is the new game plan, to restore lost memories, even those
that I totally forgot that I forgot or could possibly ever have had, like I
would just create the neurons and their associated connections out of
thin air and pure energy, energy resulting from physical exercise that
does not use up but that stores, sets aside, and dances.

P.

'And, of course, makes one change the station to begin with'