Useful Thorns
Suspension of Disbelief: Part Two
If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
Per usual: movie spoilers ahead.
It’s somewhat common now, in alt-communities on social media, to speculate that the Deep State reveals its technologies under the guise of science fiction movies.
For example, the hyper-realistic mask that Tom Cruise uses to look like Christopher Walken in the 1996 blockbuster “Mission: Impossible.” And the voice modulation technology, too—this is supposedly real, according to insiders.
But things went a step further in John Woo’s 1997 film “Face/Off.”
It deals with two characters, held in a dialectic: FBI agent Sean Archer, who is seeking revenge against Castor Troy, for killing his son Mike.
After Troy is knocked into a coma, Archer literally has Troy’s face and voice grafted onto his. He’ll proceed to infiltrate Troy’s terrorist compound, seeming like the king in the flesh.
But Troy wakes from his coma and is able to get Archer’s face and voice grafted onto his—making sure to eliminate any witnesses of the procedure.
Troy then infiltrates Archer’s suburban life, meanwhile completing heroic FBI missions. He reads Archer’s diary and becomes close to Jamie, the family’s teenage daughter.
This infiltration of Archer’s home is an interesting turn of events, because we see the terrorist get a little sloppy and cocky with his strategy—ultimately leading to his demise.
When Troy witnesses Jamie having trouble with her boyfriend, he offers some tough guy advice: “Do you have protection?”
He hands a butterfly knife over to Jamie. She’s been dressing in a punk style lately, and he leans back in a chair, saying: “This isn’t you. That’s just a mask you’re hiding behind.”
A butterfly knife. How appropriate, for the supporting actress who is obviously in a state of becoming, of reaching her true face.
The climax comes when it’s time for Troy and Archer to duke it out, having infiltrated each other’s homes and families.
Jamie must make a crucial decision: is the man who APPEARS to be her father a savior—or is he a man who will take her hostage and potentially kill her?
Instinct prevails, and she stabs Troy with the butterfly knife he gave her, ultimately allowing her true father to win the day.
Archer gets his face back after defeating Troy, and adopts Troy’s son into his own family—thus washing away the loss of his biological son, and redeeming the child of a murderer, giving him a chance at a better life.
All of these themes will be front and center for this powerful Aries Solar Eclipse, the effects of which reverberate throughout spring.
Redemption is a major theme—as is turnabout.
Deception plays on this theme of turnabout.
The world of illusion is in a battle with the true nature of things—and truth is detected through raw instinct.
Surely emotions and events will flip-flop constantly like a pendulum, driving some people crazy with impatience. Who are the imposters in the New World—and who are those we can trust?
People may rush to some kind of conclusion and fail their Jamie Test, mistaking a terrorist for a savior. You may see people advocating for actual war, believing they are on the right side of history.
Instead of getting caught in some binary dialectic, some mirror image of polar opposites, Jamie is the butterfly between thesis and antithesis—the human spirt that enters a process of becoming and evolution, soaring with raw instinct, between a rock and a hard place.
Likewise, when we find our way outside of logical traps, we may find that redemption brings in something from a “foreign land”—just like Adam will now become Archer’s foster son and Jamie’s foster brother.
This may make us feel uneasy, because we’re having to integrate an acute growing pain.
It may be a person, an idea, a new job or literally a physical place, but through a process of dealing with pressurized extremes or opposites facing off, it’s highly likely that you will integrate some “foreign element” that allows you to find a middle path and thus find redemption.
It really could be as simple as making friends with someone from a seemingly opposing tribe, an act which then reinvigorates a certain art scene or business community.
The basic point is that Archer, through his inability to cope with the loss of his biological son Mike, ends up neglecting his own family, particularly Jamie, who’s in the middle of a punk identity crisis.
It took literally losing his own face to realize that he could’ve been tending to his own garden this whole time.
Likewise, all of us have lots of resources or tools around us that are in motion and going through prosperous growing pains—and we may ignore these, caught up in the spectacle of some warring micro tribes, deciding which side we should be on, because we’re so hungry for meaning.
Meanwhile, the middle path is right there. A plant in our garden is asking for water.
“Face/Off” is thus a story about Archer returning home, after he had emotionally wandered off in an attempt to find redemption.
It shows us that the answer was always close by, in the form of butterfly Jamie, who couldn’t resurrect her dead brother of course but was still a place where her dad could put his love.
Ultimately, things work out in the end because Archer’s family grows, and so does Jamie, by learning to stand on her own two feet.
I think that will be a hallmark of this time, too: there will be some real bumps or bruises for many people, and you would wish that it would play out easier, even though it pretty much will work out constructively in the end.
But maybe that’s how it has to be—maybe there was no other way for Jamie and her father to work through the deep traumatic karma brought by the death of Mike.
Life is strange and mysterious. It gives us bizarre avenues and losses of identity as we seek to restore the fabric of things that have become torn by mass trauma, like the pandemic.
We get stuck in binary wars trying to heal this trauma, but somehow it takes us away from the things in our lives that actually PRODUCE something.
And God knows that production is at a premium right now. Do you know how hard it is to get decent new furniture, for example? Weeks of delays. It may be a silly metaphor to some, but it speaks to how much our society has been rocked by instability.
And so let’s dive in and explore more of what this eclipse will bring.
Afterburners: Disengage
Make no mistake: there will be a lot of rage out there at this window of time.
Suppressed rage ready to blow. Real pressure cooker stuff.
Someone’s between a rock and a hard place, trying to decide which one they should ram into and gives them a better chance of surviving…
Israel vs Palestine, Coke vs Pepsi, Democrat vs Republican…
But again, there’s Jamie, who teaches us that fear isn’t the best motivator. We can tap into a moment of real, raw instinctual action. We can tap an inner power that goes straight to the soul, like the primal scream of birth.
That could be quite a good thing, as numbness and stagnation tries to take hold of the cultural wasteland, forcing people into thinking they have to take a side. “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”
But as I’ve discussed tirelessly here and on Twitter for years, these kind of big picture macro revolutionary attempts or “awakenings” never quite produce the orgasmic payoff that the actor intends to get.
It’s always some future date when their desired “golden collapse” will come and they along with the homesteader Instagram moms will be crowned kings and queens of Raw Milk Utopia (formerly known as the United States of America).
The Big Tent gave us a shared cultural conversation. It began as neutral, but turned Leftist/globalist over time. It's now in shambles, but the parochial Right wants to meme it back to life for a world where their codes have "retvrned."
A lot of social media is people gamifying the power of their chosen memes—detecting in some trashy Netflix show a toxic masculine character that their rightwing shitposting inspired (or so we’re led to believe). Or maybe they notice that Tucker Carlson made a reference to one of their chosen ideologies or theories.
Nothing would make anyone happier on the right than to have the 24/7 government-media complex to be wholly intact, like it was before 2020. This would allow them to project their vision onto a continuous reel, like a strip of film in a movie projector.
It’s not good to the current right and its various flavors for that whole complex to be in shambles. They almost need the degenerate and impotent left to remain in power, because while the left parasitically attached to Western institutions, it kept the host half alive for many decades—although now it is just a corpse, just complete ruins we all sit in.
The left wants the Big Tent back, too. It wants a movie screen to project its constellations of meaning upon. It is obsessed with woke remakes to a sickening degree. For a revolutionary movement that once gave America countercultural relevance with figures like Timothy Leary and events like the Monterey Pop Festival, the radical left is now a hollow shell of what it once was.
The radical right, on the other hand, is plagued with failure to launch syndrome. It is essentially a juvenile movement stuck in arrested development. Social media fills up with “conservative babe calendars” and other such nonsense as people get into the purity spiral doldrums, saying things like “OnlyFans is degenerate, but USA bikinis are freedom, baby!”
It’s really just nonsense on all sides, fueled by suppressed anger.
In this way, you can imagine people of all stripes kicking in the afterburners, trying harder and harder to capture some kind of macro relevance.
All sorts of subgroups, from cults to micro tribal niches, are trying to stitch together a "tent" they can project their vision on that all global humanity must see, like a sitcom episode or blockbuster film from the 90s.
Instead, the true macro reality is just multiple micro patches.
I would recommend readers of this newsletter to disengage afterburners, check in with ground crew, get out of the cockpit for a second, gaze at the horizon, go with the flow, feel inspired.
Learn how to tend that inner flame that can detect the difference between appearance and essence—ready to strike when the time is right, whether that’s a job, a relationship, a place you want to live.
It could happen soon, for you. Maybe even tomorrow. I’m not saying it’s ages away.
But very likely the thing you want requires commitment from you, a real investment of drive and energy—thus, it will create ripple effects far into your future, and cause you to look at your past in a new way.
So you want to strike when the moment is right—not when you think you “should” strike, because some subgroup online is saying you’re way behind on your optimized health or fitness, for example, because all these people have been taking XYZ supplement for six months and you haven’t.
Well, who cares? Your divine timing is YOUR divine timing, and trying to force a fast forward montage of personal development is never fun.
The rite of passage is crossed at just the right moment.
Let’s dive deeper with some concluding thoughts.
Bullet with Butterfly Wings
The ultimate 90s song about feeling rage in the face of a careless system is “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” by The Smashing Pumpkins. The lyrics go:
“Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage.”
It’s not a particularly uplifting song at face value, but at the time it was supposed to be a rallying cry against a complacent globalist culture that tried to hide the grit and the grime.
Today, those lyrics look and feel a little different. It’s oddly reminiscent of the average person’s experience on social media, as they attempt to inflate their effect on some supposedly unitary substance called “society.”
Beneath the soldier’s hard and strident attempts to break through the malaise, there’s a suppressed rage—because the real attempt at self-definition requires that one integrate ideas from multiple fields.
Many would rather gamble on the chance that their narrow vision will somehow redeem the entire Western wasteland.
Cultists wish to inject hyper-real meaning into mundane activities that now hold the aura of a primitive talisman.
Literally everything that is essential to daily functional life—walking, breathing, eating and drinking—is myopically obsessed over into order to overcome the loss of the Big Tent.
It’s much like Archer going on a wild goose chase, involving himself in high-tech skin grafting to avenge his son’s death, when there’s literally a garden of earthly delights in his backyard (a beautiful wife and daughter—the film hints at this when Troy refers to Jamie as “a peach”).
Again, Archer’s journey is shown as necessary.
And perhaps all of us are trying our best to reinvigorate our lives without diving too deep into the cultural rabbit holes that send us on wild chases of meaning.
It happens, though. Something catches your eye and you’re off researching an odd topic for an hour or two, only to come back down to earth and realize that a lot of your gifts are already here.
And these gifts—or tools, if you will—are what churn the soil of the wasteland, revive it, seed it, restore it as a fertile place of growth.
Sometimes to me it seems that the Current Thing or latest meme is like a useful thorn—a kind of butterfly knife to the thigh that acts as a purging agent.
You check in on the latest conversation about gender and relationships these days, or what’s happening in the job market, or what’s happening in Washington D.C.—it all kind of sits with you poorly, but it jump starts you, too.
Something about it doesn’t satisfy, and you step away, standing in contrast to that whole mess.
You take a breath. You look in the mirror of your own instincts and see an individual carved out who can really CREATE something in this brave new world.
It’s scary, maybe. But it’s real.
And it saves you from becoming a foot soldier who walks into a war of his own making, taking a bullet and believing he’s dying for honor, for some giant banner across the sky that will form a new nation…
But really he’s just sacrificed himself for a fragile hope that he could finally BE someone in the world.
Why? Because he believes his only path to redemption is through submitting to “The Cause.”
I’m here to tell you that you already ARE becoming someone in the world. You can create NOW.
If you’re curious about some of the things I make, you’re free to find me at https://www.instagram.com/paulpublisher — where I try to dig up a jewel of meaning in the wasteland through spontaneous portrait photography.
So seize the budding opportunities for growth when your gut tells you. Continue to build on what you have, even if it takes a few spurs to sharpen your senses.
Don’t burn it all down for some fleeting chance at faux-revolutionary redemption. Channel your passion authentically and wisely.
If you like the topics discussed in this newsletter, you can buy a copy of my Patchwork Manifesto here.
My investigation draws on ancient teachings to explain why we stand at the edge of radical change.
It’s a challenging read. Consider this tiny manual if you are just starting your journey.
This is absolutely fantastic stuff Paul!