terminal 0
unfinished
NEFX - "Transcendence of Topicality in Messages - a Preface" As both a preface to future content and a brief explanation of a key aspect of its nature: Thoughtpieces dealing with ultimate concern ideally should grapple with, allude to, and signal affinity with the the foibles of the day, even if only in a contextually appropriate attachment; yet also speak in terms of root principles whence the right answers (or at least right questions or investigations) thereto derive. That is, they should apply as well to different situations (let alone names and titles) of generations ahead as those of today, and not become so easily bound to their time. Moreover, this abstracted conception of contemporary phenomena, often decried as “vague”, can be effective in helping one apprehend core principles, their ramifications, and the individual’s own according core convictions regarding them. For whenever a notion or even mere word already heavily charged by mass or otherwise culturally conditioned memory is even uttered, many reflexively fall prey to a kind of “thought-funneling” that they are seldom themselves aware of as it occurs, and see the degree of truth in a statement as correlating only with its conformity or non-conformity to said notion or word -- whose actual nature and ramifications they may really only dimly understand. They “get their hackles up”, so to speak; they render and hastily attack an impression, be it at times accidentally rightly, that is nonetheless based primarily in outward form whose content has already been widely generalized across time, and is both based in a fixed constant and yet also slowly and subtly changing (as in a cultural game of Telephone). What’s more, this outward form may still not be actively perceived as one for it to be declared so, but is rather assumed to be one merely by a word or term ascribed to it; and indeed, titles often pass for outward forms, meaning we are quite often operating on phantasms of phantasms of phantasms. There may be no foreseeable true escape from this mortal folly, but it can and should be minimized by aiming at terminology that is both beyond and yet suggestive of whatever specific visage that living history takes on in the moment. Paradoxically, it is only the content which is dedicated to the attack of outward form that is most commonly worthy of killing on sight, for its content primarily concerns outward form itself and lies somewhere on the spectrum between being indistinguishable from it and only shallowly belying it for likely ulterior reasons. It is the annihilating vaccuum of content: Rather than grappling within itself as a basis for action, it only ever gets outside of itself, for it lacks true core. Its nature lies in adversariness and it can only ever ultimately have adversaries. To think beyond this -- nay, to think substantially at all as a first principle, as if before the fall that comes with the awareness of this adversariness -- is essential now and for all future of consciousness.