# [D13:6M] Vision: [[In the Shell is the Seed for the Tree without End]] Hexagram: [[Thirtieth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Thirtieth Trial]] Symbols: #twin #bomb #fire #child #bodyadrift #shell #seed #TreeWithoutEnd #dreamer #warehouse #flesh #ears #eye #house April 27th, 1992 I. The twins hold hands as they walk across the street.  In the far distance is an evergreen, which for a moment, appears as if a little tree grows upward from the joining of their hands.  And then they simply fall over, the boy and girl.  I never even heard a shot.  I’ll never know the sniper.  I wanted to make a painting of it, the moment before they were killed, but what would that do?  I don’t seem to have the same belief in things—in myself—I once did.  The old tarnished religious beliefs don’t hold: Faith, Progress, Justice. I tried making a self-portrait recently.  I couldn’t find even the remotest likeness in it.  Likeness used to be easy.  I feel sometimes as if I’m living in the past, and, here, where my body is now, this is the wrong time, the wrong place.  I’m not supposed to be here.  What used to seem like virtues are mere habits now, and what would be virtuous now is to let everything fail, let everything die and never come back.   I was lonely long before the war.  I took it like a badge of courage.  Loneliness as a way of being above it all, having one up on others.  Never give up on your dreams, people will say.  You know her, she never gave up!  But I say, the day comes when giving up becomes the virtue.  At the point you realize it’s harder to let go than it is to keep clinging, years after year, to an image of how you thought things were meant to turn out, that’s when you know it’s time.   No one ever asked me to make art or anything else.  Sometimes I hear another voice: “It’s okay to die.”  “It’s okay to die” also means “it’s okay to stop killing yourself.”  Admit your nothingness and let it all play out.  One thing’s as good as another. II. Sometimes I try to read whatever spiritual junk.  I used to read a lot of it.  I tried the Bagavad Gita recently.  I find myself interested in the strange intimacy of the language, its poetic amorality, realistic somehow, but soon I feel annoyed by it, and I’m not even sure why.  I put it down and never bother to think of it again. When everything you know is being bombed to shit every day, you start to feel stupid making paintings still.  Look out your window and see the mortar perforations running up the side of the building next door like an acne-infested teenager.  It looks dumb.  It says, “I’m bored.” Don’t get me wrong, others think war is the perfect time to make art, and I get it.  Resilience.  Resistance.  It says, you can take our lives but you can’t take our souls.  That might be right and I wish I could feel it too.   But you look at the shit everyone sells in the West.  America’s the worst.  Illustration.  Peacetime aesthetics.  Lifeless.  Polished.  Stridently pointless.  War never gets to those who deserve it most.  The sum of their entertainment, what they sometimes have the nerve to call art, reads like jokes about their own indifference.  Paintings on Instagram of thirty-year-olds lying by swimming pools and beaches sipping margaritas.  Is there an actual world like that? I’m humiliated by my own jealousy but also by how impersonal the world’s unfairness is.  Nature itself.  Things grow and thrive on one part of the hill and die and rot a little farther out.  Something flows right over here but not over there.  The aquifers running under our feet aren’t ashamed of themselves. III. You know something is real when it’s pathetic.  Nothing whole and put-together makes me feel anything at all.  Everything real is broken.  That’s why no one likes reality.  We prefer disguises.  Put this razzle-dazzler on the wall.  It looks good in the dining room.  Lies are a kindness, a gift, even when we want something in return by giving it.   Those of us who see that nothing is worth having anymore are willing to bomb you back.  You fuckers should know that.  Antisocial spiritualists, that’s us.  The superior inferior.  Blowing ourselves up and setting ourselves on fire.  Expecting nothing in return, this is our gift to the world.   Someone will say, but wait, the suicide bomber actually believes this will make the world better; they believe eternity awaits them.  But the fire itself is eternity, right here and now.  The bomb itself.  No one honestly believes in 72 virgins, least of all a woman or child.  And the self-immolating Buddhists?  Come on, they never believed in anything at all; that’s their whole thing. Someone will say, that’s not an accurate summary of Buddhism, to which I say, you’re just distracted by the jargon and the statues.  Every Buddhist who fails at turning off their brain secretly knows.  And the secret is this, I’ll tell you: no one succeeds in turning off their brain if they have one in the first place. IV. Some of these people are totally batshit.  The Alchemists and Mystics.  Christian.  Jewish.  The Zohar.  In Kabbalah, god is called Ein-Sof, meaning “without end.”  He contracts, withdraws Himself, and this is called Tzimzum.  Through Tzimzum, He makes this world, our world.  He contracts and implodes and the force of that energy fragments into an infinite number of pieces.  We’re made from the pieces.  Hovering around in a void, specifically the place where his light can no longer directly reach, is where we are.  We’re supposed to feel good about this because it means we have free will, apart from a single imminence in which we would not otherwise even exist as human beings. You should try to read some of this yourself.  We’re supposed to feel the deepest truths are to be found in paradox.  The something in the nothing.  Like, if you could imagine some ghostly body out there drifting around in space, a piece of this Cosmic Person is in you, and therefore accessible within yourself even though this Cosmic Person is out of reach forever.  So you follow the logic and you realize that this means every person on the fucking planet is part God.  And then you think, well, wait a little minute, aren’t all these gods busy as hell blowing each other up?  Pushing each other down the stairs?  Walking each other off the plank?  Is God, like, one big schizophrenic?  But then you remember.  He created the world by blowing himself up, just like all the other looney-tunes in buses, planes, and concert halls. So what are we to expect? And this is what I’m getting at: there is no action a person takes which God Himself hasn’t taken a trillion times already.  Every mortar that kills a kid? God. The kid? Also God.  The roof that collapses on this family? God. The family? Gods.  And each of these little Gods, each one sends ripples out into the world as they’re snuffed out of existence.  These ripples?  We call that creation.  Every little mortar shell is a God of Creation, as well as each extinguished life of a child.  It’s a collaboration really.  Each itty bitty little mortar shell is a seed for a tree without end.  Creation’s DNA.  The fire that burns forever, just under the surface of everything. V. So last night I have this dream, and let me tell you I’m a pretty fucking good dreamer.  In this dream is a dark and vast warehouse.  It’s so dark I don’t see anything at first.  Every time a drone bomb outside destroys another building, another life, another world, the flash of it momentarily lights up the inside of the warehouse, and that’s how I see it, an enormous elephant as large as the warehouse itself, squeezed in, its fat flesh pressed against every wall, and you can hear it wailing, frightened, enraged.  With every new explosion, every new flash, it wails and cries, and I can see it a little better each time so that what at first appears like strange markings on its skin, soon appear like hundreds, and then thousands of marks until a spotted pattern encompasses the animal.   Then, finally, I’m, like, kneeling there and there’s one last blinding explosion just outside this dark rumbling warehouse and my ears are ringing and I’m rubbing my eyes, looking up at it from the floor, and that’s when I realize I hadn’t seen it right.  It’s not an elephant, it’s all of humanity pressed back together into the Ein-Sof, into one fleshy mound, and all these spots are their ears and eyes, twitching, blinking, bewildered.  And I know it’s come for me too, this bulbous elephant-like thing, to force me back into itself.  I’m afraid.  I’m so afraid.  Not because I’m afraid to die, understand.  I haven’t been afraid of that in a long time.  What I’m afraid of is to be stuffed into it, buried alive in the grotesque collectivity of it, without even being allowed to die.  This Ein-Sof-in-Reverse is one body away from bursting out of the warehouse, and, right then, I wake up.  VI. Are you getting this?  A warehouse.  Aware.  House.  You see?  The dream is asking.  It’s asking, is it worth it?  Being aware of what the world is while living inside it?  Is it worth living inside the Matrix when you know it’s just a farm for feeding robots?  It feels somehow as if this one dream is everyone’s dream, and it’s flying around in our sleep, taking inventory.  The elephant in the room, the big question.  Who still thinks the world is worth saving?  Will you stay and hope and trust and pray and do all of this shit despite how god-awfully pointless it all is, this fucking zoo made up of the shattered pieces of a god who ran away?  The question is a chill running the length of my body. All those little eyes and ears for each time I see what I don’t want to see, hear what I don’t want to hear.  This dream?  It’s an encounter with the Ein-Sof, and the world, our world, is the warehouse.   And if God is a piece of each of us, it also means that this is true at every scale.  Meaning, the Ein-Sof is what fills the House of my Awareness, my body.  My warehouse, you know, how can it contain it what’s uncontainable?  How do I?  How should I?  How does the world? Lately, I have the most sickening suspicion.  Not just that we’re near the end, because I hope so, I can accept that. The end itself is no tragedy.  The end is the end of tragedy.  What sickens me is the suspicion that with each end is a new beginning, that, in a sense, the circus is never permitted to tear down the tents.  Eternal Return, this is called.  Going around and around and around.  Usually, the idea is that we or the Universe or whatever become more aware with every iterative recursive emergence.  But my question is, what difference does it make?  So that what?  The scenery changes?  The suspicion is that the reset button has already been hit a hundred billion times before now, and a hundred billion times more is what awaits. I don’t understand people who actually want eternity.  Who, being truly aware, wants their awareness forever and ever and ever?  Perhaps death is the only kindness there is.  But in the big picture?   There’s no such thing.