No Prophet in His Own City

You won't drag me into platitudinous political thinking; instead, I'll draw you into erotic thinking. I'll penetrate the thought behind you, meaning that you are merely signs of it, embodying it, and therefore embarrassing me, claiming that I am a fig leaf - with no genitalia behind it. For you who call me (to my face!) a hiding coward, you too are not really yourselves, but rather a bird singing another's song, and what's more important to a bird than originality?

A Shame to Humanity (Source)

I dreamed that once again everyone called me fake on Facebook. Again, they attack the exterior of a circle instead of addressing the content of a circle - the black matter. Again, ad hominem arguments, to nullify the words behind the password sign. Again, they rummage through a dreamer's bed - to ignore his mind. So here, I too will do it - I'll address you personally, but exactly the opposite of you. I won't return the same worn-out black coin, I won't expose hypocrisy or superficiality or auto-anti-shtreimelism [Translator's note: A play on words referring to self-hatred among ultra-Orthodox Jews], but rather the opposite - I'll fill the void behind the public humiliations and give you depths. You won't drag me into platitudinous political thinking; instead, I'll draw you into erotic thinking. I'll penetrate the thought behind you, meaning that you are merely signs of it, embodying it, and therefore embarrassing me, claiming that I am a fig leaf - with no genitalia behind it.

For you who call me (to my face!) a hiding coward, you too are not really yourselves, but rather a bird singing another's song, and what's more important to a bird than originality? Because if I try to penetrate the mind of someone capable of ignoring me on Facebook when I'm in the same conversation and corresponding about me in the third person with others, just because I'm not a person like him, turning me from a subject to an object, just because I'm a cat - I always arrive at philosophy. That same arrogance of abstract, alert thought over erotic, dreamy thinking. After all, for years I've been hearing complaints about the state of literature: about the lack of integration between originality and sources, about no longer relating to tradition and myth, and about not yet being able to relate to the future, or even to the technological present, but always imitating some past writing of "literature". About not trying to find a new formula, about the outdated novel, about conformism and narcissism and psychologism and sociologization and contamination of theorization and Americanization and cinematization and PR-ization. And you know what I think every time, like a blockhead? Black circle.

But I dream - therefore I do not exist. After all, you'll never meet on the street someone who has never left their bed. And if you don't know me (and to remove all doubt, you don't know me), and if in an anti-cultural cultural system there's no publisher to publish, or critic to bring forth, or researcher to understand, and if the only newspaper personally bans the cat from here to eternity (an official decision by the editor-in-chief solely because they don't know who I am, and what business does a cat have in a newspaper) - then the dream is not an option in culture at all. And then - my entire enormous enterprise collapses into itself like a black hole. Concentrated, indeed, 100% natural black circle juice, but he who values his life should stay away. How many years will I continue to write into the void like this? Broadcasting to outer space? How many years of darkness must pass? And if the light years arrive, won't it already be too late in terms of space-time? When I'm beyond the event horizon, and relevance is constantly moving away from place and time? I want to howl and howl. Meow!

Because nowadays everything is personal. And he who has no persona - meaning the only one who might pose an alternative to "nowadays" - is not of our time. I'm writing for a future generation that will read, a generation more religious than you, and also more secular, a more discreet and dreamy and black generation, and rounder than you, more open but also more closed, more sexual and less pornographic, and more feline, and howling less, and most importantly - a generation that will already invent the technological platform for short, dense, allusive content that doesn't waste time, utilizes space, and stimulates the mind to dream (hint: not a book). A generation that will know how to appreciate content free in spirit, without uninspired material limitations of theorism and realism, and most importantly - without body. The messianic victory of spirit and virtuality over materialism and hardware, which I probably won't live to see. Yes, they've informed me that I'm ill.

But you, you can't do without a body. Despite the glorious, extensive pseudepigraphic tradition of your people - you're sawing off the branch you're sitting on. Because it wasn't always like this. In fact, you are the deviation, yes, you with the profiles and display windows - instead of nicknames and lustful dreams. If we speak in your language, personalization actually started from Foucauldian thought, which came instead of structuralist thought. Because where in the past they saw impersonal mechanisms, for example structures that are objects, conspiratorial power thinking began, turning mechanisms into subjects, and therefore it's easier for the masses to identify with and understand it - and to trivialize it. For example: one can argue that a system operates in such a way that it has an aspect of consciousness (false?), with feedback loops that reinforce it, and this is a reasonable claim - but too abstract for the masses. On the other hand, one can argue that the capitalists/pharmaceutical companies/Jews etc. sit somewhere, planning manipulations against us - and this is a claim that's much easier to incite with and manipulate with. Because people understand malice, not the banality of the mechanism. Monkeys need to beware of an evil-plotting gorilla, but don't need to understand the ecological system of the jungle.

And from there, personalization has spread everywhere: elections became personal, Facebook became Zuckerberg, movements and social changes turned into morality tales at the expense of specific people (who said #MeToo and didn't receive?), and it ends with ad hominem arguments on Facebook and the search for black artists (but heaven forbid not round ones), because who are you to speak if you're a white man, and I want the story of the writer (meaning not the story he wrote, but the story that wrote him). These are the protocols of the Facebook children and they contain not a drop of secrecy but only publicity, because they are a conspiracy against abstract thinking itself, of a generation that knew not Euclid. This is the result of stopping the study of Latin grammar, theology and plane geometry (if you don't study Talmud at least study geometry!). It would be fine if they knew how to do high philosophy and looked down on the subconscious, but the brain network has turned into a cloud of gray fog and the theory of knowledge is unconscious.

And then psychology and sociology are fused at the point of connection (meaning trivialization) between them. And it would be fine if it was just about flattening literary characters - it's about flattening real characters. Non-round people walk among us. People who are not black inside. People whose soul is not covered, who have no secret inside, but are themselves wrapped in a profile. The main problem with personalization is not that it threatens the public - but the individual. Not only does the public sphere become a spectacle but also privacy. And then how do they call me, with the rudeness of materialistic creatures? Fake. The consciousness of the dream has died - it is false consciousness. Am I ultra-Orthodox? Am I a cat? Am I divorced? Am I a virgin? Am I secular? Am I leftist? And people are not ashamed to ask me as a first question: "Who are you?" as if I'm at a job interview with them.

Imagine if the word "I" had a gender. What a terrible thing that would be. And if it were up to them, there would be grammatical conjugations today for verbs performed by cats, and for verbs of the ultra-Orthodox, and for nouns of dogs - and one couldn't even hide behind a word. And people like me would simply die. Yes, it's not that the circle can reveal itself - only die. And then one day, maybe in a few years, you'll hear that he died. And then you'll start to take an interest in what he wrote. After all, this is the agreement between us, or more precisely its secret appendix. If I commit suicide then there will be value to the ten books I wrote. And if not - then not. In this profession, suicide is just a proof of seriousness, and at the very least will prove that you know how to die. Many people complain about the state of original literature, but the moment there's originality - it's no longer considered literature from their perspective. Because the words are not the words they know. The subjects are not classic. The format is like an unformatted disk. And then they wonder why they don't know the great writers of the time, why everything is hidden in smoke, and only when it disperses, including the ashes from the burial urn - then we'll talk. And they don't understand that sometimes there's something burning inside. That meanwhile is already turning into a lump of coal, and will simply stop writing, after all it's not some burning bush that is not consumed. But who cares.

So where are they hiding, all the important writers of your days, all the artists of your era, all the innovative philosophers, the original thinkers, the poets who changed the formula, those who articulate the thinking of future generations, that is - the entire culture? Where has the great culture disappeared to? Why did you (in what unfortunate timing of luck) happen to live in a barbaric era, where everything has already been written, and there are no great people? Perhaps because you turned out small? After all, you identified that there was something there. Something from another world. From another era, and not some era from the past. After all, you are not fools, and that one you searched for with candles does not write for fools. But for the deaf. After all, one doesn't need to be a genius. You read a paragraph or two. It's very obvious. Content that hasn't been written yet, form that hasn't been created yet. You can see the originality from space. But you're busy with your head in the sand. After all, where were you when all this happened? You were busy. Busy. Busy with a thousand nonsense things, which you clearly know are not the future. After all, you know that it's just variations, even the greatest writers you put on a pedestal, they are some kind of greatness that is not of your time, that has no message. Because you were not willing to hear a message.