Disease

Cities are cesspools of disease. Of many kinds. Those that effect the whole body as well as those that only effect only specific senses. Like there is a disease that effects vision in a way that makes everything seem real. Ghost and physical entities become the same. Eyes make it possible to be adjusted to an entirely synthetic city. There is no need anymore for cities to be an interplay between the natural and synthetic. Everything is synthetic.

I do not remember the names of all the diseases that I am cataloging here. At the time I discovered them I did not think that they would propagate at the scale they eventually did. Maybe I even treated them as trivial phenomenon.

In the days of study, I remember observing other diseases too. The one, for instance that effects the sense of smell. It neuters it, it allows us to live the foul smell of dead space around. Space dies when from a shamanical resource and raw poetry it becomes a part of coordinate systems and maps. When it becomes the unit of the entire system of property. In the smell of dead and dying space can be felt the agony and trauma of cosmic pores getting plugged. Humans are trying to make spaceships, inter-galactic telephones, time-machines. We chase these as if they were answers to elusive riddles. Finding these answers underneath our feet would be a disappointment.

Then there was a disease that effected the sense of scale. From being able to fathom oceans and reading deserts of sand, we have been reduced to being able to only measure rooms in terms of square feet or meters. The skill of decompressing expanses of space into navigable spans of space was developed across a millennia but lost in a few centuries. That is one of the reasons why we misread all works of literary intent from history. What they wrote about is continents, what we read is rooms and sunlit porches. This misreading paints in our head an illusion of development, standing on the shoulders of giants. But actually we are only standing in the piss-pool of the giants of history. We don't even think at the same scale of ambition or domicile, we get the jitters on thinking of unwalled gardens where we can roam freely.

But maybe the disease that effects our sense of balance and continuity is the most widespread and most degrading in nature. This strikes at child-birth giving us no chance to develop an antidote or acquire a culturally learnt defence. We have to suffer the effects of this disease. The suffering starts early, around the age of five or six. The only way we have been able to contrive is to declare the aberration as a feature. So the conspiracy of evolution collaborates with this disease and declares that the compulsion to feel balanced and accept only the continuous has actually been a cognitive faculty under development for many years. Feeling balanced means both the physical, bodily balance and the largely mental sense of well-being. This compulsion can also be called the compulsion of fabricating flatland. We actually use a lot of our hardware and software for making up this illusory feeling. Fluids in our body do the background drudge work of translating a rough ride into a smooth one. Much like image stabilising algorithms. The pathogenic nature of continuity is actually two-dimensioned. One dimension looks at our continuity filter as a narrative device and another as psychosis. We will read into the latter here.

Psychosis is actually a disruptive element in the complex environment of the mind. It initially produces continuity to break it and fragment the psyche. But something goes wrong. We fight so hard and so passionately to protect this perception of continuity that psychosis only becomes a marginal player in consciousness. Effecting the few who actually lose this fight. But why do we fight? It's a flaw actually, easier to understand through an analogy. Think of this. A piece of bread is kept on your plate. You don't know where it came from, for all you know it came out of thin air. But then you are hungry so you accept ownership of it and consider it your own. At that moment somebody comes and asks for the piece of bread back. But by that time you are already salivating and you fight back, call something yours that never belonged to you anyway.