Why the coin and not the butterfly?

To live an esthetic life: to live a life for experience, for personal lived experiences which are intrinsically subjective and beautifully unique. This life is one of nature, of natural beauty which is less theoretically constrained by metaphysical and physical systems. This is not necessarily a life of solitude and it can be lived through rich and varied connections and lovers and friends. But some solitude is important and an esthetic finds appeal in their own time and their own prospections. An esthetic life is that of exhilaration, of the ability to see the esthetic appeal of risk and for it to be enough to tempt you past any theoretic barriers to the action. It’s likely one of experimentation, of induced hallucinations and of appreciation of the esthetics accessible via natural methods. Esthetics is orgasmic and organic

And sexually liberal and welcoming and is in every ecstatic moment prospected there is estheticism. Prospecting as an esthetic is intrinsically sensory and it is the chance to build the rich tapestry of sensual experience, from our tactile, acoustic, visual, haptic, and aroma that is, paradoxically, one of the key providers of the ‘human’ experience whilst also bringing us far closer to the estheticism of our non-human animal kingdom neighbours. Estheticism can have a darker side too - it can build a life of loss, of failed attribution, of failed self-belief and of an over-valuing of outside viewpoints (which are theoretic so be wary). It can herald some incredible prospective lows, of depression, anxiety, self-loathing, even hatred towards others. It may skip arm in arm with other disorders of the experimental manner, whether that be insomnia, narcolepsy, ADHD, Asperger’s, Autism.

These so called ‘disorder’ are falsities - they are all theoretically imposed and so must be estheticised as such - but we use them here to demonstrate again this distinction between the foundations of thought for an esthetic and the foundations for a theoretic. And there is so much more that can still be said of estheticism, it is honestly bringing me close to tears to fathom that so much of human existence has concerned itself with boxing and splicing and theorising out lived experience into ever smaller, ever more arbitrary, ever more controlling and ever more intersectionally violent ‘units’ of bland and diluted shared theoretic knowledge. How much have we lost as humanity by failing to see real value in estheticism and shunning members of society who could have been einsteins and could have been nightingales and could have been tolkiens and could have been bob dylans and could have been marie curies and could have been van goghs, shakespeares, da vinci

And I really am crying now. As humanity has been so concerned with theoreticism for so long that we’ve forgot why we are really here - we are

Here to have our own private, personal experiences. And if some peoples esthetic pursuits bring them intellectual stimulation and creative genius and perhaps this is once recognised outside of their lifetime (but perhaps it is also not, and that is ok too) but if some peoples esthetic pursuits are as I have just described then why, why on earth would we ever allow humanity to stifle these pursuits by compartmentalising an individual

Theoretically at an age of four years or even younger and telling them their lived experiences are false because they can’t solve primary level math as theoretically elegantly as the kid next to them.

How blind do we have to be generationally to allow this? To bring the theoretic closer and closer to the inception of life such that even before a living, breathing and estheticising human being takes their first breath and sees their parents for the first time and opens their lungs and bellows an indignant scream at the unjustness of being taken from their comfortable esthetic Womb and thrust into a world they immediately know to be toxically theoretic… even before all that this child’s future parents are scheming and planning and designing and they’ve decided that if the child has one certain genitalia then they are going to imbue such extensive systems of theoretic thought to this child that it is overwhelming to even try to prospect how different this child’s esthetic life will be if they are instead born with the same genitalia but simply located externally in the groin. They will introduce their daughter to a society which disrespects them, talks over them,

Shouts over them, abuses them, disadvantages them, rapes them and has the audacity to require them to work the double shift to sustain this same fucked-up paternalistic system. And all because of the outward or inward trajectory of some gonads and the imbued meaning these parents have decided to theoretically take to be more important than their own personal retrospective and prospective lived experiences - their estheticism is the only minute aspect of this complex universe which can really be said to be theirs and they spend their entire lives ignoring it for a theoretic certainty

And this doesn’t stop, because next parents are thinking of the amount of melanin and then complexion of skin of their future child and have decided that they will introduce that child into a theoretic system which has used the melanin of thin layer of outer biological matter to theoretically severe emotional and esthetic links between man and ‘other’. And through this severing, the patriarchal and now white hegemony built entire trade systems which relied on absolute ignorance of estheticism and embraced the theoretic approach to valuing human life. These trade systems moved millions and millions and millions of darker composed outer

Biological matter humans through the cruellest and most depriving esthetic experiences that perhaps have ever been experienced by a biological life species, human or non-human, and

Justified all of this in the name of profit - a theoretic concept that has come to hold more sway in the hegemony than the retrospective and prospective experiential, esthetical lives of billions,

Billions that the hegemony has decided are theoretically less value able because they have less of this paper with imbued meaning. And because of this theoretic reduction in value the hegemony has decided that to maintain their theoretic system then it is necessary to ensure that these billions have a poorer esthetic life, one filled with hardship and insecurity and family separation and torture and reduced self-expression and lack of opportunity and exploitation and that these people are deserving from the day they are born of this esthetic experience because of their theoretic lack of this imbued paper.

And the hegemony has to do this because without it how would they maintain the other billions of individuals in a theoretic system which, when one takes time to really scratch the surface esthetically, one realises that these billions of theoretically prosperous individuals are just as trapped and the only difference is that this trap is one of excess and that the hegemony decides that for these billions the best aspiration they can have personally, beyond their love for fellow humans for fellow animals for their senses and for their esthetic prospectives of life, that instead the aspiration that they should have is to continue to accrue infinitely more of this theoretically imbued paper (but not if their biological outer matter layer is dark or if their genitalia are internal or if their esthetic prospectives can class them as mentally disabled, or if they can be clinically diagnosed as depressed or manic or any other range of clinical disorders,

Clinical disorders that theoretics have decided better represent human prospective experience more so than their own personal esthetics) and to these people, these clueless hoarders, the hegemony presents a beautiful, elegant (esthetic but deeply evil) trap in which individuals can never reach a state of esthetic bliss, only ever calamity, through their pursuit of theoretic success. And these individuals now form our global elite, overwhelming white, able bodied, male, old, and embolic in all dimensions of their theoretic lives as life incarnate of theoreticism, and this global elite is more powerful than the people, or the failed layers of theoretic ‘democracy’ the people have tried to install (government) to protect themselves, but which instead chase the same sick theoretic infinite goal, with the only difference to the successful global elite being that our public servants pursue this goal with even more violence, ever more hatred towards one another, ever more exploitation, but now not only of

individuals but also of the very same democratised institutions that the people built - through use of a taxation system that has been theoretically justified as important for the citizens of a certain patch of dirt - a patch of dirt that is cut deeply and cut so deeply that if you are born kilometres from a fellow human being and on the wrong side of a border in North Korea-South Korea, Haiti-Dominican Republic, Singapore-Malaysia, Canada-United States, or even Boulder\Colorado-Boulder or Northern England\London or any rural area\any urban agglomeration then you are deserving of lower propensity, of lower education, of lower quality of life, of lower esthetic experience, because our theoretic systems deem it to be the case that the location at which you are thrust forth into the world from your protective esthetic experience of your mother’s womb and love, that this entirely arbitrary determination of a scrap of dirt on a gigantic mass of plenty of dirt, that this determination will

This determination will now for evermore decide your fate. It shall decide how much you are provided theoretically to survive, it will decide which camp of esthetic deprivation the hegemony will separate you into - either the camp of billions who live forever without the quality of esthetic life they could have because they have too little paper which is imbued theoretically as money or the camp of billions which lives forever without the quality of esthetic life they could have because they have (paradoxically both too much and too little) paper imbued with theoretical meaning as currency - and within this camp you will most likely remain for the rest of your life and the rest of your descendants’ lives who will continue to live in entrenched and enforced and constructed layers of poverty and exploitation and sorrow and pain not because of any esthetic laws that say it to be but instead because of the theoretic laws that we as the human race have built, the laws we built

Built with the intention of trying to theoretically explain a world which is not a theoretical experience. We built a system of theoretic understanding based on theoretic observations and both proposing and relying upon theoretic laws to try and explain a phenomenon of conscious, of prospective experience, of conscious, sensual living, to explain this phenomenon in theoretic terms when all along it was an esthetic foundation of knowledge, an esthetic system of beautiful, natural, ethereal chaos and that all along through the hundreds of thousands of years of human experience, of theoretic evolution, of language, of the onset of shared communication, of Javon’s Paradox, of entire belief systems called religions, of hunting and gathering, of hominin bipedalism, terrestrial bipeds and opposable thumbs, of tool use, the wheel, fire and of the agricultural revolution, of memory, both retrospective and prospective, and sociocultural heritage

Of communications, cooperation, coordination and finally corporation, of complexity, of currency and trade, of exploitation, slavery, torture, of academia, philosophy, scripture and the printing press, of nation states, lines in dirt, trenches in dirt and war, war over these lines, war over religions, over these esthetic shared systems of thought which posed as theoretically grounded and then built real theoretical influence, and used it to control systems of thought, systems of governance, sexuality, abortion, of cardinal sin, of sexual abuse and rape and exploitation, of heaven and hell and purgatory, and if after all of that by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God, and wars over resource, over exploitation, over imperialism and conquest, wars over arguments, misunderstanding, and incongruence of theoretical value systems, and then on, on to agglomeration to cities, to regions to smaller and smaller and smaller theoretic units

, theoretic units of spatial aggregation which divide the planet into continents, sub-continents, countries, regions, states and counties and census tracts, local authority units and municipalities, boroughs, wards and community districts, zip codes, and latitude-longitude coordinates, smaller and smaller still until we decide that the intersections of a theoretic system of horizontal lines and a theoretic system of vertical lines are deemed sufficient for us to finally relax this relentless pursuit for granularity and all the while the dirt is there and we’re staring it in the face and attributing it with geographies and cultures and societies and religions and laws and values and ideals and philosophies and all the while the dirt is there and we are fighting, killing, maiming and nursing, murdering, raping, converting and unconverting, crusading, conquesting and claiming and all the while the dirt is there and if only we would just pause and just lie down and look up from that dirt

And finally, finally realise that whatever theoretic system that we impose and whatever name we give this dirt whether it is Persian, Islamic, Roman, Ottoman, Iberian, Mayan, indigenous, communist, settled or resettled, capitalist or free, whatever name we give this dirt when we finally allow ourselves the chance to lie down and look up only then will we see, and only will we see if we choose to, that whatever theoretic system we have selected to splice and dice our dirt we are still looking up at the same sky, the same moon, the same sun, solar system and stars, the same galaxy, universe and cosmic expansion and the same singularity in which space and time lose all meaning and this is it because we are not viewing a system that is theoretic, and as much as we scream it is, it is not and never will be and all we have to do is admit this and return to something we’ve always had but have chose to shun to ignore, to throw out and spit upon and that is our ability to see the world for what it is

For what it is to us, for what it means, for what our consciousness selects from an ever ending array of attentive possibilities to imbue with meaning, for how it feels, how it tastes, smells, sounds, for what we see, what we really truly see when we look through our eyes and don’t look at institutions and hierarchies and taxonomies and theoretics and just truly fucking stop and look and for once, collectively accept that we and we alone imbue this incredible esthetic, this rich tapestry of experience and perceptual possibilities, with all the meaning that we want and that collectively we and we alone can change the way we imbue this tapestry, we can change the way we have decided to build our theoretics, our systems, our institutions and values, we can change all this and it requires nothing from us, this change makes no demands, no requests, no terms and conditions, no ifs, no butts, it has always been there this chance is sitting in our hand like a butterfly, just waiting, waiting,

waiting through the shifting spin of our dirt in space and the shifting spin of our sun and our moon and our stars and our solar systems and our galaxies and our universe and it has always been there since all eternity just waiting patiently without judgement, without resenting our lateness or imbuing our reluctance with any meaning, and I’m sobbing and I’m sobbing because when will we finally realise that all we ever have to do is just open our fingers and watch as the butterfly slowly unfurls it’s wings and dusts itself off from an eternal sleep and looks up at us and, without judgement, without resenting our lateness or imbuing our reluctance with any meaning, it flaps and flutters and glides away, away from our hand and up from where we lie on the dirt. Up, up it glides, floats, twists and turns, it never falters nor falls and it is always there always as we begin to finally, collectively realise what we have done, what we could have always done, and we look upwards through

At some point

through our tears and some of us, many of us, retrospectively and prospectively finally, finally, finally fucking see the world for what it is, for an esthetic tapestry of perceptible thoughts and those of us who have seen this, have always seen this and never known how to describe it, breathe a collective sigh of relief and return to our uninterrupted prospections, our tirohanga, our tirohanga whañui, our uninterrupted esthetic appreciation for the beauty of life.

But if we ever stop looking at the flopping, swooping butterfly and the singularity beyond it and slowly turn our head to gaze down at our left hand now empty, left with nothing but the dust of the butterfly wings, wings so delicate that to touch them is to destroy them and then slowly turn our head to look at our right hand then we will scream and scream and scream because we’ll finally see our right hand for what it is and realise that this whole time we never thought to check, how could we be so stupid, so presumptive, so arrogant to have spent our whole existence staring so intently at our left hand, at our enclosed butterfly, at the beauty of its wings, it’s eyes, the shapes and patterns of the glorious markings, it’s delicate, light legs, it’s antenna standing alert and we have watched as it has ruffled its wings, we’ve watched as it has slept and lazed and gazed up at us, gazed internally and gazed without judgement, without resenting our lateness or imbuing our reluctance with

any meaning, without questioning why we’ve never let it fly and yet never ever touched it’s wings, why we’ve stared so intently at the dust on their wings, the golden glittering matter that falls from them to our palm and it waited so patiently, so softly, so calmly until we opened our hand and now are looking at our right hand and screaming, our right hand, the hand of certainty, the hand of rationality, of theoreticism, the hand of god, and we’re screaming and sobbing and wrenching because our right hand we have tied to the ground, knots so tight they pull us into the dirt with the strips of frayed ropes protruding from their burrows in their Earth. And the part of dirt we chose to tie our right hand to, the patch of dirt that we selected from our singularity, our universe, our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, our continents, our countries, our regions, our municipalities, our coordinate grid, that patch of dirt that we chose and through this choice decided that theoretically

we must tie ourselves to it, retrospectively and prospectively, and without ever stopping to think about it esthetically, that patch of dirt, our dirt, my dirt not your dirt, dirt I would fight for, love for, die for, that patch of dirt that I knotted my arm to and clenched my fist, that patch of dirt is in a puddle of oil and the oil is burning. And we’re screaming and wrenching and our arm is burning and it always has been burning we just never stopped to look away from the beautiful dust on our enclosed butterfly’s wings. We never stopped to check on theoreticism - we trust our right hand and always thought it was estheticism we had to watch, our left hand the hand kept lightly closed and gazed at internally and gazed at eternally. And the skin is melting, the flesh dripping into the pit of oil and sizzling. Maggots are burrowing as we scream and scream and scream and the flies swarm our bubbles and broken skin, our pink seared flesh, and our stark, exposed white bones, slowly tinting to a golden

auburn, bronze tinge, like the colours of autumn leaves, the beautiful oranges and browns and goldens, and we can see our wide eyes reflected in the shining oil on the glowing bones, the brittle white turning to autumnal leaves and finally to red hot searing jolting pain, like staring into the sun as it moves closer and closer and closer until there is nothing but darkness and you realise that your staring, your relentless staring has brought you no more insight, no more knowledge, no more facts and figures and theories and findings for the sun, it has just brought you blindness. Your insistence that theoreticism is the only way you could ever start to understand the sun, and your refusal to pick up the broken lens, the lens you broke, the lens of estheticism, and to have held that darkened lens to cover and protect your eyes, that refusal finally confronts you and asks you why, why

, why! Why were you so insistent you were right to look and not to see. And your arm is crackling now

And as the skin melts away you finally see the ropes for what they are and you trace their frayed and blackened journey up and down your arm to your hand and now you finally see, though some small part of you always knew, you finally see that charred and blackened coin, that you’ve got clenched so tightly in the now white bone brittle fingers. And you stare and stare and, though some part of you always knew, you finally see that the rope runs through the centre of the coin, looping from one side of your arm to the other, pushing out through the dirt, tracing your arm and the hole in the coin, and then plunging back into ground. And all along you could have just unclenched your right fist and let go of the coin. You could have pulled your hand from the oil and the burns and the searing heat and the stink of burnt flesh and the auburn tinge and the red hot glaze and the final crisp white bone. You could have let go, let go of your insistence on theoreticism and of the burning flame, you

could have opened your left hand and watched as the butterfly fluttered and spiralled upwards and seen, really seen and felt the golden dust, the specks of dust left by the butterfly wings in your palm. Those little specks of estheticism, always in your reach but never truly attended to. But you didn’t. You kept your hand closed and watched and watched and watched your butterfly while your right arm, clenched tightly on your coin, burned in a pit of oil.

And you ask yourself why? Why why why why? Why the coin and not the butterfly? Why did I think I needed to trap both? Why didn’t I just let the butterfly free and let the coin go and realise, finally and fully, that you didn’t need to hold either in your grasp. You can let both go. You can look up at the sky and push your back up. You can look around the horizon, the beautiful luscious greens, the fantastic blues and yellows and oranges, the smells, the sounds of birds and insects and nature, all just waiting, waiting for us to stop staring down at the dirt, waiting for us to stop staring, with our butterfly and coin clenched in our fists, waiting without judgement, without resenting our lateness or imbuing our reluctance with any meaning, without questioning, just watching, patiently as our arm burned.

And so we prospect. How did we arrive here? Or more importantly how could we arrive here? We think back, back from the dirt, back through the universe, the singularity but there’s nothing. Nothing there, no meanings, no lessons, not in the whole history of time. We spent an eternity looking, we’re asking, prodding, poking, shouting, screaming. Nothing. A void. A void that we walk and walk and walk through for an eternity with such sure directions, forwards, backwards jumping and zig zagging always deciding our direction, theoretically and purposefully and always stating and structuring and testing and trialling and refuting and corroborating and splicing and studying, studying our void for an eternity with no meaning to find.

And what now? This is it. We’re finished. We’re heading for an inevitability. We’ve looked back and nothing, not a single fragment of the entire history of time, from singularity to where we have chosen to look from is able to give us an answer. And so we accept. Whatever we do, whatever we wish for, what we choose, what we decide will lead us back to that small patch of dirt in an otherwise lush and glorious green forest. It will lead us to be standing there and staring down at our dirt. Just staring, until someone jolts us and we lie down and rest our head and look up at the sky and the singularity and think perhaps now, perhaps now we can think back and retrospect, from the singularity to this moment, for the entirety of time, perhaps now we will find the answer, but a part of us knows, and has always known, that we cannot and that we will never find the answers we’re looking for in that eternity of retrospection.

And we look down at our hands and realise they are already clenched. In our left hand we see our butterfly, so beautiful, so delicate, so patient. And now we look to our right arm. Smooth, lightly tanned skin. Blonde hairs, almost white in the glaring sun, with freckles and moles traversing the contours of skin. So smooth from here but if we were to stare and stare and stare we would see the contours on our right hand and we would see through the tightly grasped slender fingers, and we would see our coin. Our brilliantly golden, gleaming cold, bright and ferocious coin.

And the tears are coming now because we know where we are. We retrospected on an eternity and yet here we are, back at this spot. And we know that whatever we do, our retrospection will always lead us here, to this glade, to this patch of dirt, to this butterfly and coin, to these clenched hands, to the gaze of a watchful, waiting owl.

Because all along, the answers never lied in theoreticism. The answers never came from looking for them. The answers come precisely when we stop looking for them. When we stop questioning and prodding and categorising and re-categorising and classifying and taxonomizing and theorising and falsifying. Because there is no answer and nothing from with which it can arrive to us. There is simply being. There is simply existing, existing in a simple and yet sensually ecstatic sense. Existing to learn and to love and to listen, but just to exist. To experience life, to experience it esthetically and take value from simplicity and sensescapes and friends and family and loved ones and hated ones. To take value from all of it and allow it to wash over us, wash away our tears, wash away our burns. There is no answer when we don’t ask questions. There is simply being and it is simply beautiful.

And through our tears we look up at the oak tree that grows next to our patch of dirt, the aged oak, with its strong, long branches stretching into the sky. It has been growing forever and for never, and we can see the cuts and bruises that traverse it’s trunk, the cuts from our axes and our scythes and chainsaws where we’ve tried and tried and tried to tear it down, to burn it, to fuel our relentless desire to burn and to build and to create and to question. We look up, up into the furthest and farthest branches and we see an owl. A wise old barn owl. With golden, auburn eyes, piercing yet peaceful. The neat, snow-white gown of feathers. The presence. The waiting. The wisdom of the whole natural world is in those eyes and that patient waiting, waiting without judgement, without resenting our lateness or imbuing our reluctance with any meaning,

simply waiting.