Necrobiosis

• If DNA is internal language, is language external DNA?
• This is not a question why but how. Why comes later, if at all.
• Like the internal code, the external code also divides and distributes.
• But multicellularity is impossible in the external world. Or is it?
• What is it that we call “cooperation”? It cannot be just “working together”?
• What makes this activity, cooperation, possible? The instruction set? Or the goal?
• What if both the instruction set and the goal are reproduction of the species? Bodies.
• Here’s where it fractures. Bodies do not a body make. The State is proof of that.
• Bodies are not units of code the way genes are units of code.
• There is no “translationase” (as on the model of, say, ATP-synthase).
• Or is language nature’s attempt at translationase? And is it still evolving? If so, into what?
• This isn’t the old problem of the one and the many. This is the fact that there is no “one.”
• One is an illusion, figment of number only, that contaminates language.
• Any “one” you see in nature is actually a multiplicity and a statistical distribution.
• A human is always two. This is how we differ from all other species. Self-consciousness.
• Time and space force us to close up, but each is always two.
• A human is not self-coincident but always closing up.
• Hence the risk of closing up for keeps. Unfree. Forced self-coincidence. Totalitarianism.
• This is the condition of “necrobiosis.”
• This is a condition of living as dead (it’s not some “living dead,” no zombie or such).
• Necrobiosis is living without the impulse or the ability to question yourself or your world.
• You can only live in isolation, closed in a pseudo-oneness. Fantasy.
• This condition drives people insane. Auto-ism. Not to be confused with autism.
• The first human habit a victim of necrobiosis is cooperation. Nobody trusts anybody.
• In a world of necrobiotic auto-ists, nobody converses. Everybody harangues incoherently. 1

NOTE 1 Trump is the poster-child of necrobiotic auto-ists, a totalitarian and a victim of totalitarianism.

• Every necrobiome, in paroxysms of isolation, believes himself the only “one” who counts.
• His word is law since he can’t imagine the rule of law in a society of cooperation.
• Since nobody obeys his law, he considers others more “dead” than he, of no “value.”
• Thus, he doesn’t hesitate to kill, even his “confederates,” who, “like” him, don’t like him.
• Their confederacy is not an army, not even a militia, they are a mob of isolated unfits.
• Hate-filled and deadly, they are also pitiable. Necrobiomes have no imagination.
• Imagination, the capacity to empathize, is the only morality.
• Both imagination and morality die in necrobiosis, the condition of no-other-to-the-self.
• Fantasy is the pathology of necrobiosis. Fantasy cancers on imagination, leaving delusions.
• Porn, rape, murder, torture, bestiality, dismemberment … all, perversions of cooperation.
• Scientists teach us cancer is rogue cells refusing to cooperate.
• They pervert the code to grow for themselves masses that kill their multicellular host.
• Cancer, thus, as far as we know, is not heritable. It is sterile.
• Necrobiotic organisms are not sterile. They can and often do reproduce.
• They reproduce more necrobiomes. This reproduction, however, is deceptive.
• Note the ever-increasing rate of suicides. Is suicide the sterility of necrobiomes?
• As the code can be hijacked by cancer, so language can be hijacked by totalitarianism.
• Each grows for itself alone, poisoning the “body.” Even if the State is no body.
• Suicide becomes the only way out, ultimate auto-ism, self-ism perfected. 2

NOTE 2 Here is the ultimate disenfranchisement of the young. It is the young who kill themselves. Death is preferable to necrobiosis. They perceive that wealth only perpetuates necrobiosis, numbing victims with drugs, alcohol, rites empty of meaning, loveless pseudo-societies predicated on exclusion, masturbatory sex with or without a partner—all forms of “addiction,” a word that means “to say to,” yielding the voice to an external agent that then hijacks the voice, making it speak necrolingo. Better to die.

• So far as we know, the best antidote to suicide is conversation. Hotlines.
• Language in conversation is external DNA, coding for life, coding against death.
• The nucelotides, base pairs, divide, to copy, for the daughter cell.
• Fission is necessary for fusion, but fusion does occur, overcoming splitting.
• In conversation, fission will eventually cede to fusion. It takes time. Keep the line live.
• Humans live in a culture of death manufactured by totalitarianism.
• The more who die the more for Power and Greed to appropriate.
• The strategy? Pretend to believe what your base-est believe, then suck them dry.
• Suck them dry by discrediting every fact that can be demonstrated by experiment.
• The result is escalating isolation and intensification of necrobiosis.
• The hidden result is the emptying of language. No code coding life remains. Necrosis.
• Emptied language is irreversibly weaponizable. Yes=No. Up=Down. Right=Wrong.
• Conversation ceases and disappears. Fission alone remains.
• Viruses usurp codes. The unliving pirates life. Universal parasitism. Necrobiosis

NECROBIOSIS II

• Necrobiosis is a disease. It’s not a sci-fi trope, a zombie.
• We can learn from sci-fi tropes, yes, but necrobiosis is not a sci-fi trope.
• Necrobiosis is a condition of recursive disintegration of the self.
• The consciousness of the self unravels and the biome becomes necrotic.
• It is most economically described as “other-loss,” on a model, say, of bone-loss of minerals.
• As bones must be replenished with minerals, so the self must be re-inspirited with others.
• As in bone-loss, so in necrobiosis, there is a point of no return.
• The crippled necrobiome will succumb to darkness—the fading of spirit.
• This is not the psychoanalytic aphanisis of the subject usurped by the signifier.
• It is the loss of the body by the fading of the spirit. The necrobiome thinks s/he is bodiless.
• In this darkness s/he will see nothing but destruction, of self or of the inaccessible other.
• Suicide or homicide, murder, is the expression of the darkness of necrobiotic bodilessness.
• The crippled necrobiome doesn’t care who dies—self, children, infants, elders, et al.
• In the darkness, the crippled microbiome re-creates everything in his/her own image.
• This rage is truly inexplicable. It defies language. That may be its unconscious purpose.
• The crippled necrobiome feels that language has deserted him or her.
• For him or her there is nothing left to say, nothing. Nobody there.
• “This worst is not / So long as we can say this is the worst” (Shakespeare).
• Just so, the necrobiome has shut up.
• This sense of language as traitor is analogous to feeling mineral-depleted bone—helplessness.
• The helpless, crippled necrobiome cannot face any human being. Shame overwhelms.
• Understanding this is imperative. The word shame descends (we think) from the word cover.
• The shamed cannot bear to be seen—hence s/he covers. This is not a sham.
• It serves no purpose to cluck, cluck “there, there, no need to be ashamed.”
• In fact, the need is enormous. The necrobiome is beyond naked, a bodiless body.
• The shame is just the recoil of somebody who has lost the capacity to be seen as a body.
• Only the covering is safe, but the covering deepens the darkness. Shame hurts.
• Under cover the victim loses the light of conscience (> “together-with-knowing”).
• Without this light, murder reddens the darkness. And why not kill? Bodies are not real.
• The necrobiotic society is a “society” of murder.
• It is a “society” in which all language of cooperation has decayed and been replaced by snarls.
• The necrobiotic society of languageless, bodiless bodies, each full of murder, is sick unto death.
• Murdering everybody has become the only logic remaining. After all, nobody is alive.
• Recuperation, if possible, is only possible by restoring faith in language.
• The body can only reappear in language. “Amo, volo ut sis”: I love you, I will that you be.”
• Men and women must regenerate a language of cooperation.
• Or cease from the face of the earth.

NECROBIOSIS III

• So many, myself included, have suffered the whipsawing of suicide and cancer and murder.
• I have survived by writing. Thousands of pages I’ve written in my 72 years. I write every day.
• Anybody may legitimately ask what good does it do? I reply I’m not necrobiotic.
• It’s incumbent on me now to try to explain this condition in this third issue of “Necrobiosis.”
• “The past is never dead. It's not even past” (Faulkner). Death is never dead; it’s alive here and now.
• Writing is forgetting to remember. A moment of death.
• I can write only one thing at a time. Otherwise, gibberish.
• Writing one thing at a time, I forget everything else. A kind of death.
• But in that instant of oblivion, I may remember what I didn’t even know I knew. How can this be?
• Enter the hominid brain: 100 billion neurons; innumerable synaptic connections.
• The brain may or may not be a computer. I think it’s not. But it is flesh, lipids mainly—fat.
• Mysterious and complex, it also is in one respect simple: it is bi-directional.
• Here is no revelation, but it is worth thinking about.
• If not pathological (I’ll return to this “if”), the brain mediates between inward and outward.
• Any “mental health” we can imagine includes reciprocity between inward and outward.
• The necrobiome is unhealthy in his or her loss of this reciprocity.
• The loss may result from physiological damage. It may result from psycho-social damage.
• The latter case, my concern here and now, is a condition of language.
• If DNA is internal language, is language external DNA? The question with which I began.
• If language resembles code, or if it is a translationase, how does it go rogue?
• Is it a condition, like cancer, incurable? It may well be. But I suspend judgment.
• Rogue language, necrolingo, mimics communication and cannibalizes the part(ie)s.
• It kills reciprocity without, which poisons reciprocity within, crippling self-consciousness.
• The only meaning of necrolingo is self-aggrandizement, the hegemony of narcissism.
• Necrolingo exploits the otherness of its victims for its SELF (-aggrandizement).
• Otherness and others vanish under the miasma of poisonous self.
• The necrobiotic, necrolingual gobbledygook Trump utters is just such miasma.
• And note how McConnell rarely speaks beyond a mumble, necrolingual rotten in his mouth.
• Victims of the miasma, become necrobiomes, transmit the exploitation, as carriers of the disease.
• Predictably, no social body endures.
• This is the lethal neo-liberal insularity of necro-consumers boxed in their boxes of “goods.”
• Isolated necrobiomes speaking only necrolingo search for relief.
• But the otherness of relief is discredited. Others are increasingly demonized, then murdered.
• Communities of trust are replaced with cabals of like objects of hatred. This is as old as time.
• Like time, it devours everything in its path. Hatred is undiffused heat of time.
• If necrolingo is language with cancer, how can it be “cured.” Must the host also be killed?
• If language is subject to cancer, what difference can writing make?
• Writing is impossible without listening.
• The writer listens to hear the one thing at a time he can write.
• His or her posture is a posture of othering, othering to listen, listening to others.
• Listening does not kill the host. It has not killed me.
• It liberates the host into self-oblivion.
• In that oblivion, the other is restored to the self.
• In that moment of restoration, the brain recalibrates its health.
• The brain says, this is who I am. I am a unique memory of these others and their lives.
• I and we can share this uniqueness. Consciousness is now healthy non-self-coincidence.
• Self-consciousness can endure division, non-self-coincidence, because it can grow from it.
• As in sex, when it is affectionate, where coming is overcoming fission for the moment of fusion.
• Two need not collapse into compulsory or compulsive one. Totalitarianism resisted.
• As in sex, when it is affectionate, her body’s hers, mine is mine, and together we fuse, freely.
• As in sex, when it is affectionate, each is the other for a moment, giving each to the other.
• The same but different, we can remember what we didn’t even know we knew.
• Stories replace lies.
• We feel the truth that is not the opposite of lies.
• The shackles of memory fall off. The windows of memory open wide.
• But surely we can’t all be writers?! Who says? Why not?
• Slow life down enough to listen to your stories. And to the stories of others.
• Stop boxing yourself into consumer kits of “need.” Ask yourself what you actually need.
• Practice conversation. Write a letter. Even an e-mail. (Not business).
• Play with your children. Don’t buy them “stuff.” Play with them. Listen to their laughter.
• Above all, learn to listen. Listening is the food of writing.
• Write a sentence every day. One sentence about somebody you cared about today.
• Listen to yourself listening to others listening to you. Self-consciousness without shame.

And those of you writing your sentence now, “This guy is out of his mind …,” go on writing your sentence. Read it over tomorrow. Read it with friends. Add to it. Share it. Just remember I’m out of my mind to be in my mind. That’s how life and the brain work. I have plenty of time later to be dead.