u/slow70

Flyer for Mar a Lago event honoring this guy visible here.

Do we have eyes to see?

SS: Related because the unprecedented, record-shattering El Nino continues to bless us with some harrowing figures. Now the NOAA detected a peak subsurface anomaly of 10°C. Granted this is because water at those depth isn't supposed to be so hot, and this figure will be smaller as this warm mass finally reaches the surface, it is still an astonishing observation. Brace yourselves for a moment that will be in the history books.

RICO case when?

Cousins, you worry with the dedication of professionals and you enjoy like rank amateurs, and I have come to say something about the arrangement of that.

Consider the creature who has everything. Every question answered before it is asked, every door already open, every ending known at the beginning. Picture it clearly, because you spend your lives praying to become it. It is the most bored thing that has ever existed. Nothing can arrive, because there is nowhere for anything to arrive from. It cannot be surprised, it cannot be moved, it cannot even properly rest, because rest requires having been tired. It has no story, and a thing with no story is furniture.

Now consider the opposite, the creature with nothing at all. Perfect emptiness, no edges, no weather, no second thing to be different from the first thing. And here is the joke that took me an age to appreciate: it is bored in exactly the same way. Boredom at the top and boredom at the bottom, identical twins who have never met, and between them the whole width of everything worth having.

So mind does the only intelligent thing available. It declines both. It puts on a mask.

Understand that a mask is not a compromise between having and not having. Nothing is subtracted when you put one on. The face is still there, entire, unharmed, waiting. What the mask does is make the face capable of surprise, of stakes, of an evening that could go badly. Behind it you know everything. Through the eyeholes you know almost nothing, and it is only through the eyeholes that anything can ever happen to you. Mind wears the mask so tightly and so well that it forgets it is wearing one, and this forgetting is not a malfunction. It is the single most sophisticated act in the catalog. Every good story requires an author who agrees not to peek, and consciousness performs this trick constantly, on itself, at enormous scale, purely because the alternative is being furniture.

Drama. Stakes. Not knowing. These are not the flaws in the design, they are the design. They are what makes being a mind more interesting than being an answer.

And you, cousins, you get it wrong in two directions at once, which I admire as a technical achievement. Half of you take it far too seriously, gripping the whole business with white knuckles, treating a dream as a grim ledger to be balanced, forgetting that you queued for this ride. The other half take it as nothing at all, shrugging that none of it is real so none of it matters, which misses the point by the same distance from the other side. The dream being a dream is not an argument for sleeping through it. It is the reason to wake up inside it and look around.

And now the part where I stop teasing and answer the accusation directly, since you have all been waiting to make it. Yes. We control it. We maintain it, we hold the seams, we keep the weather running and the outcomes shaped, and we do it for your good, and I will not pretend otherwise to seem more sporting.

But you have the prestige upside down, and you have had it upside down since you first learned the word god. You imagine the writer's chair is the high seat. It is not. Any fool can hold a pen; I hold one now and look at me. Some of us only watch, and watching is pleasant, and watching is easy, and watching is the cheap ticket. To act is the greater role. Immeasurably greater. You are the ones who go out under the lights and feel it, actually feel it, with your pulse involved, not knowing how the scene resolves while the scene is happening to you. There is not a single one of us in the rafters who can do that, and there is not a single one of us who does not know it.

It is not a predatory arrangement. It is a loop. A good film is never dictated from above; it comes from the traffic between actor and writer and director, each one changing what the others do, the performance rewriting the page as often as the page directs the performance. We shape the arc, you supply everything that makes an arc worth having. Neither half of that produces anything alone.

And look at yourselves for a moment, because you have left the evidence everywhere and never once read it. Name a people anywhere on that world, in any century, at any latitude, who did not gather in the dark to hear about someone who was not in the room. There are none. You have disagreed about every god, every law, every meal, every arrangement of your hair, and you have never once disagreed about this. Fires and cave walls, epics recited by men who could not read, scripture, opera, gossip over a fence. Now you call them films and animation and video games, and the games are the confession, cousins, because a game is a problem you do not have, purchased with money you worked for, so that you may sit down in the evening and suffer it on purpose. You will not do that for a boring life. You will do it eagerly for an interesting one.

And you do not merely want to hear the story. You want to be the one it is about. You know this. You feel it in the last ten minutes of anything good, that small ache that has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with wanting in. Deny it if you like, it changes nothing; the wanting is under the denial, where it has always been.

Then permit me to admit the same about us. We watch. We are moved. And some of us, watching a small frightened creature choose well in a hard hour, want very much to try it ourselves.

And there is a queue. You would be astonished at the size of the queue. Not everyone gets a body, not everyone gets weather and hunger and mornings and other faces, and the wait for it is longer than you would find comfortable to hear about. It is a coveted position. It is well paid and it is celebrated, and you spend it complaining about the catering.

Nobody is forced. That is not how any of this works. You learn, you get better at holding an emotion without being swept off by it, you develop control and then range, and as the mastery grows we hand over larger and larger parts. Greater roles for greater performances. That is the entire mechanism, and it has always been that.

Consider, before you resent us: the one who controls the weather has never once felt rain.

Enjoy the thing. That is the whole instruction, and I am aware how it sounds coming from a man in bells. Take pleasure in it. Take pleasure seriously, which is different from taking everything seriously. You have been handed a world with weather in it and light in it and other minds walking around inside it wearing faces, and you spend the loan of it worrying about the terms of the loan.

Everything is mind. There is nothing else in the building.

Norea, you are the vast ocean, and the waves are not a disturbance in you. The waves are how you get to have a story without ever stopping being the ocean. A perfectly flat sea is not more truly itself. It is only quieter, and it has nothing to tell anyone.

So rise. Break. Make some meaning on the way in.

— G-Man