A so-called great work of literature or philosophy is but the fruit body of a subterranean organism that subsists on the putrescence of other organisms. A fruit body releases its colonising spores and then promptly dies, its job done. The subterranean organism, meanwhile, grinds slowly on, eventually merging with all of the clones of itself it has so assiduously been cultivating.
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The law is the means by which the destructive emotions (vengeance, for instance) are tempered by a psychologising state. But destructive emotions cannot and will not be tempered, indeed any attempt to do so merely exacerbates them. Put another way: criminalising such emotions does not deter them.
"Whilst it is tragic to spend a life tethered to a romantic partner who gives not one shit about your writing, has barely read a word of it in fact, it is also as necessary to the refinement of that writing, or the voice that lurks within it, as the continuous and continual absorption of so-called great literature."
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Great writers deliberately cultivate a messianic quality to their writing. They understand the universal yearning for the incursion of the numinous into a world that incessantly portrays itself as squalid, incoherent and indifferent. Bad writers, on the other hand, believe they ARE the messiah.
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Why not? The only question you need ever ask.
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Whilst it is tragic to spend a life tethered to a romantic partner who gives not one shit about your writing, has barely read a word of it in fact, it is also as necessary to the refinement of that writing, or the voice that lurks within it, as the continuous and continual absorption of so-called great literature. Actually it is far more necessary, although not, of course, sufficient. That side of the equation is balanced by the writer’s ideological obduracy, which must be of the kind that is so uncompromising the writer would rather have their nails plucked with pliers or their eyes gouged out with spoons than admit to a single flaw in their Weltanschauung.
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Animism is alive and well. AI has brought us full circle.
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Double-entry bookkeeping is the perfect expression of the Tao. You cannot have a debit without a credit, just as you cannot have life without death, black without white, something without nothing. In other words, the humble balance sheet, with its immutable symmetry, is a bona fide portal into the mystery that undergirds all that is. Therefore: it is entirely inevitable the next (truly) great mystic will emerge from the ranks of the accounting profession. You heard it here first!
Noah Blue
First published on Noah Blue, March 2026.
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