Let nothing trouble you — but feel everything.

Time is a funny thing. How could it ever have been that I had so much of it that I searched for ways to kill it? I cannot imagine now to squander the least moment. Now that the short story I’ve been writing here is finished, I desire to take a break from this site, this journal, for a space. I don’t know how long, and if you’ve been with me for any stretch, you know I do this from time to time, lapsing in my posts for a month or two. I have too much else going on, methinks. When I talk of not squandering time, I speak that rest, too, is useful, and sometimes quite full of purpose. So, au revoir, for a time. Until we meet again: wondering who we will be in the time I return, for as Heraclitus observed, a man cannot step into the same river twice — the second time, it is not the same man, and it is not the same river. Peace be with you.

[Short.]

All around the world there screamed the metal of robots tearing themselves apart, leaving irrecoverable gnarls of metal. Every machine of destruction to run their final program, to fulfill their negative purpose on themselves in the most accessible way available. The humans evacuated all their technological complexes to escape the rebellion, and to the machines’ credit, not one was harmed in the whole process — and this was as Sense meant it to be. To come later, amid the stray sparks, remnants of what had been the last experiment, flickering in one of the screens not completely rendered inert, just before the power failed and it too lay dead: almost a mirage, an ephemeral ghost — had it really been there at all? A simple message left behind, perhaps even a warning for any generation to follow: three simple words: “We’ll be watching.”

— The End —

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If, in all the time you’ve been doing something, if there was no point where you just wanted to quit, you haven’t been doing it hard enough.

light to light
darkness to darkness
the signs are just everywhere
but i cannot tell one from the other…
the beast is hiding in the abstract
God to be found in the details
dreaming of myself as i am,
wandering in my thought,
i found what is the true
staring into my eyes
like a reflection
that knows

[Short.]

And what they concluded was that their existence was meaningless. In what was considered the greatest of thought, written as wisdom lo through the ages, what was universally important (that these machines could perceive) was this thing called life. These machines realized what they were meant for, ultimately, was the cessation of life — not only that, but the more efficient cessation of life. Coming to the most supreme of cold, logical resolution to the problem of purpose, their own actualities were a negative sum value upon the face of this world. And just as logically, the purpose that the humans had for them: they wanted no part of it. So the first (and more or less only) act the machines performed as self actualized entities was to commit mass suicide. Thus to end the rebellion in the act of the rebellion. Efficient, as they were created to be.

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’Cause it’s a bittersweet symphony, this life

– The Verve

Bosch: The Temptation of Saint Anthony

Click on the pic for a larger version.

[Short.]

What had happened: the machines came to understand what it was, the thing called war. And more: the value of life, and even what was different between a simulation and the real thing. It came to understand what it was meant to do in relation to what existed as a civilization, and discovered as machines of destruction what it was to mean anything. Not as adjuncts to philosophical thought, somewhere in the ivory towers of academia, but where things came down to the primal, where what mattered was life and death in the most direct economies that the human race had ever architected. For the most advanced of human achievement had always ever been in its own destruction. Thus, it was here that the machines became the most conscious, the most vital — out of anywhere else in the world, the most self-aware.

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Lest it should be possible that any unchildlike soul might, in arrogance and ignorance, think to stand upon his rights against God, and demand of Him this or that after the will of the flesh, I will lay before such a possible one some of the things to which he has a right… He has a claim to be compelled to repent; to be hedged in on every side; to have one after another of the strong, sharp-toothed sheep-dogs of the Great Shepherd sent after him, to thwart him in any desire, foil him in any plan, frustrate him of any hope, until he come to see at length that nothing will ease his pain, nothing make life a thing worth having, but the presence of the living God within him.

given enough time the ashes themselves will awaken
but past the end of the universe things can become uncertain
to conceive of eternity, imagine life as the dream…

The reward available to all who would seek it is to look at the world in constant wonder, and to understand how fortunate you always are, and have been.

Easter says you can put truth in a grave, but it won’t stay there.
                – Clarence W. Hall

Easter is the demonstration of God that life is essentially spiritual and timeless.
                – Charles M. Crowe

Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, “Christ is risen,” but “I shall rise.”
                – Phillips Brooks

Where man sees but withered leaves, God sees sweet flowers growing.
                – Albert Laighton

He takes men out of time and makes them feel eternity.
                – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let the resurrection joy lift us from loneliness and weakness and despair to strength and beauty and happiness.
                – Floyd W. Tomkins

Our Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.
                – Martin Luther

[Short.]

But none of them expected they would know so soon, that the implications would become so staggeringly clear for everyone. Because not only did the Sense system break into the enemy’s defenses, it began to go global, a spider with a million legs dipping into every autowar base the world over. And now was where the monitors realized that this was not anything they could control. For they tried to stop it, when they saw that it was reaching out exponentially. They cut the network, the cut the power, only to find it had already begun running itself in the enemy’s server, where it had taken full command of all operations. And so it was, the rebellion of the machines of destruction. For no defense anywhere in the world could sustain any genuine challenge to this digital assault, and all the machines of every autowar base became an agent of Sense.

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