Knowthing Zine #3
Knowthing Community
Spring 1993
The Sapphires Are On Fire
by Guy Folks
The sapphires are on fire. Our ability to plaster slogans on top of their slogans is the only possibility we're left with: to think enough to redetermine their deterministic world into something more precious, more perfect. They lie and tell us this is the perfect world, the ideal where even the horrors are designed to bring out some greater design. Our plan is to eliminate the horrors and to critique the design that has been presented to us. This doesn't mean a criticism necessarily; it means a critique. And yet when the structures of civilization in the western world are fully examined, there is such a compelling argument for a passionate universe away from these horrors that it must be accepted that the simulation of the ideal is the only proper action.
The first step is a step away from what has been presented and a return to first knowledge. Wipe the slate clean first; imagine the void and then come back to reality. Descartes had the general idea right, but his claims to the existence of God did not follow from these premises. We propose a different approach.
This is to know things and still know nothing. Knowthing.
The guards piss on us every day
Creeps and lunatics run the prisons
Watching us from a glass ivory tower
They take a big bite of steak
And justly condemn the prisoner
20 years for improper lavatory usage
Since there's a camera in yr. toilet
They watch us and tolerate those small breeches of decorum
Calling out,
Father, Father, they know not what they do.
Motivational Speech
by Karen McEwan
Enormity of being: eternally beautiful immensity, intricate and monstrous. Ethics and aesthetics, chaos and disorder, being and non-being, wasteland and fruitful valley. Compartmentalize until you can't see the whole. Wrap your head around insignificant, petty details. You're so good at memorization. Decompartmentalize until you wake up sucking on a lemon, embraced and horrified by the vastness of the Whole. Krishna-consciousness, consciousness of a beautiful girl wearing glasses in a coffee shop and the muck that gets in their shoes when they walk through the gutter. With that thinking, you have to lap up the dirt too, and you like it. You like it.
And then try to wrap your head around the one you seek, the one that will make you the best before you know what the best is. Before you know who you are. A connection that shifts and spirals out of control. But keep hanging on because it's so damned beautiful. It's determining what connections you need, what connections are best for you, and knowing that what might be best for you kills others.
Break down and break off and leech on again. You don't know what the fuck you're doing. You don't know how to live or how to act. Your mind is still wrapped up in whether to value beauty or logic, because sometimes they're really mutually exclusive. You gravitate towards beauty, but if you knew a transcendent and valid ethical system existed, you would give up the beauty for that. You would give up the beauty for an evil god, as long as you knew it really existed.
Buddhistic peacemakers, streetlamp halos, strawberries, smiles of inanimate objects, the beautiful fucking stream of human history, and the rest of the delights that make your face hurt from smiling, the ones you catalogue obsessively.
You forget about Monstrosity, Moloch: war machines, vultures, Mephistopheles pulling at your legs and stabbing the Sacred Heart.
Just rest.