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The Museum of Vestigial Desire

The Book of Curses

tags: cooker

If it can't happen, it can't happen. There are no compulsions on events. Nothing needs to happen. But something will happen anyway. When I don't like what happens, I curse. Cursing is way of expressing disagreement. But curses are not understood literally, their meaning is established socially and through convention. So at any given time only the curses of the current time are understood. Others get lost. We are thinking of a curse in two ways: a linguistic unit that establishes its own meaning and so is capable of both escaping the corrosive nature of time and it still exists as a stable unit of language that can operate for everyone who is familiar with the tongue. Familiarity with a language is still a given for a curse to work. We cannot escape that. We have to work on fragments language that hold no semantic meaning and so require no translation.

Unlike simple verbal aggression, the curse imagines a certain other. This other, is an operator who is believed to actually have a say in what happens. Nothing happens on its own. There are omens and symbolic hints which can be deciphered to know which way the wind is blowing. This knowledge is used in cursing.

Curses might seem to be full of personal angst and enmity but actually they are only predictions. These predictions rest on the fact that basically the world we live in is amoral, but an account is kept. Injustices cannot be addressed in narrative but are addressed appropriately by time. Time makes sure that everything gets evened out. At a sufficient scale, the texture of time is that of a evenly dense pancake. Curses are signposts. Curses reveal that there is sufficient disarray in the system and things are generally not rosy. Curses speak of how the sedated pace of events does not signify a lack of contrary energies and motivations. Nothing might be happening, but things are not at peace.

This is important to know because nothing ever happens. And that does not mean that nothing is brimming under the surface. And if we are making do with an uneventful landscape, we can at least be invested in the tension that is building up. Eventually, but we do not know when, the tension will break out and alter the landscape. This is the only way of talking about the future. This is the way in which the future and the present are in simultaneous operation.

Sting tags: dump

Curses sting. And that is their most immediately perceivable effects. If we do not bother about the emotional damage involved in facing the curse, then how do we assess the importance of the curse's intent.
Not all curses are equal. Some sting less, some sting more.
How do we calibrate curses against the degree of sting that we want to cause?

If we are going to curse at all, we need to keep a grip on what the effect of our curses is going to be.

At this point, we will not trackback to remembering why we want to curse at all. That is well established. We have issues. We want to settle these issues and we will find every way possible for us to do so. If curses offer a way, and we tell ourselves that curses offer a way, then we want to become adept at cursing.

Can we go to someone, can someone tell us everything there is to be known about the intricacies involved with cursing well?

At this point we are clearly able to see that someone else is entering the room. This entity enters the room and asks us to write our own revelation. We can know all that there is to be known. This knowledge that we discover on our own is going to be strange to others. For us it will answer all our questions. For others it will seem like unschooled gibberish. And that is fine. That is just the way it should be.

Sometimes the sting emerges from some specific issue that has emerged from the narrative.

Sometimes the sting emerges from the conflict between the generic in the environment challenging the grains of specific visions that you hold in your head. Any such conflicts which challenge what we have with what we should have are set up to lose. We are not going to cede any ground. We will dance on your toes. We will shoot freely into the air till everyone is dead.

This confrontation yields an angst that is very valuable.

We can package this angst as the sting that our curse holds.

Why do curses sting? Curses sting because we inject a little bit of our intensity into the quagmire of social language and as a foreign substance, the social language system is taken by surprise. This surprise forces it to rupture. And the sting of this rupture is felt.

Simplicity tags: dirt

Linguists insist that language has the capacity to be complex only to throw most of us off the scent of the message. If everyone figured a way to be sharp then there would be nothing left to be discovered, and no individuals to celebrate. So linguists say that language exists to be used in any way that an individual may choose to use it as. Rules of grammar cannot dictate a style or a value. But the reason for this is not immediately apparent. It'd be easy to imagine a way of using language so that it'd be a kit of parts with a fixed instruction set that allows constructions to be in a specific format. But that is not the case. The language that we use requires experience and ability in the individual practitioner to either render meaning in a simple format or to make meaning of a complex and layered scope of language in a simple form.

A curse breaks apart these constraints. If we essentially speak in riddles, then we will not have to talk in a bland way and then specify our specific payload of intent in order to communicate. We engage in plain-speak only to remain understandable and accessible to as many people as possible. But what do we get out of being understood? So many might understand us, but the knot in our throats does not get dissolved. In fact if more people understand us we sometimes forget the location of the knot in our throats. Being understood distracts us from the process of understanding ourselves. If we do not understand ourselves, we cannot represent ourselves accurately and have to rely on third party understandings of ourselves that are constantly projected on us. For us to be be something beyond our projection, we have to become blind and deaf. We have to remain obsessed with the echo of our own voice, reverberating inside our head and dis-regard all the other voices that we hear in the landscape.

To remain angry, we need to be unable to rationalise. Rationality is oriented towards diffusing our anger. But we need to keep things simple. And the simplest format of how things can be is remain the way we are. The way things already are makes us angry. We need to remain angry. We need to curse from the depths of our anger and project the stench of our passion.

Curses are simple, do not think about them too much and complicate them. Feel the naked punch of language and succumb.

Covert tags: candle

Covert operations need a stealth shield. They play with the cover of secrecy that is designed to be withdrawn at the right time. Curses are like that. They need to spring up and not be graciously presented. To retain their ability to spring up, they need to be slipped into regular parlance without too much priming. Curses do not have any build-up and do not have any winding-down. They come at you like nothing you have seen before. In the military logic, the covert operation is twice as safe as a regular operation to run. If it fails, it is easy to deny responsibility for it and operatives die but that is what they signed up for. If it succeeds, then the job is done and it is easy to express joy over a coincidental meeting of objectives without claiming responsibility for it.

Covert operations allow the denial of the intent.

Curses are deployed covertly but then they operate in an open battle-field situation. It is impossible to covertly curse someone because the curse might not be understood as a curse at all and so it might easily be diffused.

Such is language. Being explicit is a necessity and not a choice as subtlety has exhausted itself and to open the door now, we have to hammer it down. If we stand here knocking, the door will never open and we will never enter the scene.

Curses are inherently violent modes of expression. This does not mean, that by advocating a curse as a panacea of our times, we are advocating armed conflict. Because nothing can work on its own. Along with the ability to curse, we need to develop an ability to gauge the sharpest moment to slip it into our discourse. We need to lead and direct the conversation towards the point of inflection. Mapping the narrative, editing, manipulating, prospecting, call it something you like. But violent crime does not fit the description easily.

Language can be rule-bound and subject to penalisation. There are too many variables. Sometimes things just don't work. Meaning can be encrypted. And then as a text, as a piece of code, it also needs to feel honest. But both of these afflictions do not work together sometimes. Texts need to fail sometimes, in order to work. And that is covert.
Texts otherwise cannot cloak very easily. They only have the first read, a small window of access to affect us. If during that access, they fail. They fail for good.

Slander tags: cave

When you malign me, your false stories do not stick but the possibility of the falsehood being true actually does. And you know that. And that is why you manage your aggression towards me the way you do. You keep throwing these half-truths and these outright lies on me and you enjoy the damage that you cause. But stories are forgotten, even exciting ones, and presence is experienced in the titillation of the here and now. So the evidence against slander is always stacked up. There is a disconnects between the narratively was and the experience cane. And then it becomes very easy to unravel the distinction.
So, we should make it a little difficult. We should not give it away. If slander becomes more the norm than the exception, a socially-acceptable form of story-telling, it might alter the kind of social systems we have. and the social-system needs altering if only to make them more fun.
One of the things that we have to become good at, is telling things to people's faces that otherwise we would only tell behind their backs. The curse is this ability. The curse will cancel slander. It will bring to the frontal plane of negotiations what is right now only a hidden transaction. By doing this we also puncture the culture of social niceties and politeness which is largely unnecessary and only devalues the potential of conversation.
The curse comes to the rescue. If our most honest and emotional way of communicating with each other is to be blunt and insulting with each other, then so be it. It is better than falling in love anyway. Romance makes it easy to share stories of vulnerability and trauma but it makes it more difficult to curse. And so romance should not be indulged in.
To retain the sharpness and dexterity needed to be able to curse proficiently, we must become dry and remain unaffiliated. Nothing should come in the way of our angst. We need to be able to function as transparent pieces of glass sometimes. At least in relation to our act. Our act needs to be transparently accessible. If our acts needs us to interact socially, then violence is only a vent for the violent urges that get generated naturally. We are never in total agreement with anyone, but total agreement is what we crave for. Our social connections, sometimes resist and try to hold on to their own perspectives. But how is that possible? In the radiant brilliance of our transmission how can anyone refuse to receive. Our transmission includes all the arguments necessary, a refusal to receive does not even let these arguments operate.

A Batch of Prototype Curses tags: sequence two

  1. May you find meaning in mindless drudgery.
  2. You will become a car with no driver!
  3. Miss the deadline.
  4. Find no affection, be dry as a bone.
  5. May you become a surveyor of trends.
  6. May all your friends be in awe of you.
  7. Have money for everything, but no desire.
  8. Be the darling of legends.
  9. Draw a blank.
  10. Lust for glory.