nirgle.net - spring 2009

As of today, my ever-expanding sphere of potential causality has grown to encompass 49 stars in the known galaxy, having now reached and extended beyond Mu Hercules. This is no small feat, and I have managed to accomplish most of it sitting right here at my computer in this very pose, this slightly skewed angle of derision, bubbling out my coronal mass ejections of the internet kind. Because of limitations on the speed of light, today is the soonest possible moment Mu Hercules could know about my existence, however frivolous; and actually, right now, quite fittingly, is the first time I have ever heard about Mu Hercules, at least the Mu Hercules that existed 27.4 years ago. So we're bonded now, you could say, in that quantum-tangled sort of way.

I can only imagine what other celestial wonders exist beyond the reach of such a magnificent star as Mu Herc, what other beautiful vistas bask beyond. Unfortunately for the opposing viewpoint, it's just more of me and my irritable incoherencies frisking by at the speed of light as time unfurls; in fact it's probably a good thing there's little else out there but carbon compounds and gamma ray bursts, I am prone to stage fright and would likely just forget my lines.

I can't rid my mind of the filthy richness of my future. It's been there around the clock since September when a casual interest that seemed too good to be true turned out not to be. Having to expend energy and mind-power for the profit of others is a satisfactory state of affairs for only so long, for certain people anyway. My aversion to working for (and reporting to) other people continues to breed on unabated, so with luck I won't outgrow my current mode of making a living before the alternative is fully ready to go.

This isn't one of my senseless ruminations, people. But naturally it is quite secret, for no good reason really. Half of you already know anyway. I am not the most talented mathematician of the Middle Ages, but I know the guy who was. It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice.

Before you experience with your own eyes and ears the reality of any given situation, that situation is a dangerous thing to behold in your mind, too susceptible to the sculpting of your inner desires, too malleable under the weight of your dreams and aspirations for it to be able to hold its real shape. After enough time pondering the what-if's and if-only's and I'm-gonna's, your mind can weave itself a nice comfortable little cloud where you can curl up in a fluffy, warm bed and dream happily ever after. Only when you actually get into an airplane and jump out into the cloud do you realize that the fluffiness is an illusion, the warmth is really a biting cold, your padded bed is just a collection of water molecules you're now falling through, and all you dream about is getting back into the airplane you shouldn't have foolishly jumped out of to begin with.

I don't like to reveal too much about my strategies, and it is certainly not my intent to divulge any national security secrets here, but I think you should know about this. Qui-Gon Jinn was on to something important when he advised Anakin (in the first installment of the star wars documentaries) about quieting his mind in order to hear what was really going on around him. As an ongoing apprentice of a learned master myself, I can speak confidently about the wisdom in this message, although naturally you won't believe me and will think I am merely making it all up, which I probably am. I could potentially be berated for imparting such valuable emotional intelligence upon the masses, of course, but fortunately this is one of those things that will simply pass by those who are not ready to understand it anyway, so I should be safe.

The demand you put upon yourself for absolute self-integrity and honesty is where it all starts. This is the first trial. You don't need to worry about being honest with others; in fact, there is much to be said about a campaign of deception and subterfuge when properly executed against the world around you (take this website, for example). You, however, need to know exactly what's going on behind the curtain of your mind at all times, to be 100% in tune with every microscopic thought and feeling while the world flounders around in the cloud of confusion that appears to be you. Even in arbitrary matters you need to be precise. There can be no generalities or rounding off on anything--perfection is the key. Avoid superlatives like the plague, avoid any tendency to exaggerate. Lie through your teeth if you want or need to, but know what you really mean, what you're really feeling. If, in some distant corner of your mind, there has been a suboptimal unconscious reaction to the present situation, be aware that not everything is as fine as it might seem.

Once this has become habit, the next phase is the gradual introjection of this affinity for accuracy and its corresponding aversion for all things untruthful. This won't happen overnight. You will naturally put up some resistance to this over the years, but it needs to become a strategy upon which you base all your thoughts and reactions, self-evaluations, and self-criticisms. At first, everything must be questioned, and you will need to do this consciously. After a few years of mercilessly demanding this integrity from yourself, as this modus operandi becomes a part of your mental wiring, you will notice the self-deceit growing slowly quieter and more distant until it fades from your everyday existence altogether. You will have short-circuited the loud calamity of your human condition and will have encountered a peaceful, resigned acceptance of the way you really are.

As the rift between reality and fantasy contracts, you will steadily perceive this same gulf in others growing wider and wider until it becomes a maddeningly open chasm. Around this time, you will know you are in the third phase, because it will drive you crazy, at least at first. The contrast between your tranquil acceptance of the way the world is and the senseless emotional spending of others to keep it the way they want it to be, this will become clear as day, dark as night. And gradually this instrument of emotional measurement will become sharper over time, this sentimental night vision will become focused.

If you can calm your reaction to the self-deceit of others, you will enter phase four and will begin learning to accurately sense the degree of inaccuracy in everything people say. It will cease to amaze you, cease to annoy you, and you will just accept it for what it is. You will start to naturally gauge the factor by which people either over-embellish or under-embellish the message they are conveying to you and of which they have fully convinced themselves.

And that's the key, the underlying strategic goal here: to know people better than they know themselves, to know the truth of a person through the nature of his or her lies. To be one layer of intelligence deeper inside their own mind than they are, which will become a valuable strategic advantage and one you will find yourself using all the time.

The south polar evening was dark and frozen. A blizzard hurled snow on its winds over a landscape of ice two thousand feet thick from surface to bottom. There were perhaps sixteen hours of darkness left before the next brief appearance of the sun over the horizon, though that appearance would last only a few short-lived hours. The blizzard would last much, much longer.

In an effort to get as far away as possible from the onslaught, a thousand emperor penguins trekked single file toward the edge of the ice, three miles away. Arriving at the end of the shelf, the line of black beads reflected off the edge of the sheet of ice, gathering around and about itself like a dangled rosary bunching into an open palm. In this way, the penguins slowly built their life-sustaining throng, what the French referred to as a tortue, or turtle. By the time the last of the penguins had joined up with the group, from overhead they resembled a huge black dot on the blanket of pallid ice.

By that time, in instinctive penguin fashion, the apparently immobile mass had begun circulating slowly. The outside rear layers peeled off to spiral around and inward upon the rest of the group at the front, each body in turn sharing time in the middle of the tortue, that epicentre of remarkable warmth in the bitter polar climate. In proper formation, only one-sixth of the bodies of the penguins would be exposed to the thrashing blizzard at any given time. There were no complaints; just an automatic cooperation in the interest of mutual preservation.

The emperor penguin itself, Aptenodytes forsteri, was three feet tall and all black and white, except for a tuft of bright yellow plumage on its head. On this evening, a thousand of these short, fat tuxedos moved slowly around each other, exposing their sun-yellow heads on the circumference of the tortue for a few minutes each before shuffling to the leading edge to be taken back into the crowd.

A hundred metres into the march, one penguin, with bright red plumage where the yellow would normally be, nudged out onto the periphery of the group, standing out from the rest. This particular penguin, head gazing out into the white nothing, followed his cue behind the other members on the outside of the group, taking his turn on the frosty, wind-hammered exterior. He moved slowly around the circle like a red dot on a yellow, rotating compass rose, coming to a stop at his new place on the leading edge of the assembly. Then, with a shudder of his body, he stood there at the edge and peered around, scanning the horizon, which was now about twenty feet away in the blowing snow. He turned inward to face the crowd, and was soon overwhelmed by a wall of bouncing black, white and yellow blobs moving around to protect him from the blizzard hammering his black backside.