The Mad Laughing God - Part I: The Weeping Machine

On Deleuzian desiring machines and the mad god laughing in the darkness.

The heart rate monitor beeps loudly in Jimmy’s hospital room, connected to his chest via cables of metal and rubber. The IV slow-drips saline straight into his bloodstream from the IV bag hanging above him and to the side of his bed, while the catheter inserted into his urethra collects the urine from his bladder. The tube inserted into his throat expands his lungs with air pumped in via the humming contraption beside him. In and out, regulated in-flow and out-flow. Through this, he is kept alive, although unconscious. A meat puppet hung upon strings of metal and rubber.

Through the outlets on the walls, electricity/fire flows into the machines, converging with the other three elements in the midst of the element of space (4+1=5) throughout which Jimmy’s consciousness moves unhindered, transmigrating the realms rapidly with every moment and identifying itself with the stored memories and habit energy residing in his mind.

The entire picture appears cohesive, but like all things in our universe, it breaks down upon close inspection. At first, all is connected as part of a greater whole. Like an impressionist painting, it’s a familiar sight, readily identifiable to the average person. But move closer and the impressions begin to separate, suddenly alien in their form; indiscernible as a concrete reflection of reality. Move even closer still, and the dividing lines between each color remain fuzzy and obscure. It’s difficult to discern where one ends and another begins, and the observer is hit with the realization that what they have been examining was truly a cohesive whole the entire time.

It’s clear that philosophers and Materialists of all stripes have battled with these ever-baffling truths for centuries, or even millenia. How does the puzzle fit together, and how should we apply our explanations as a heuristic throughout our lives? People can articulate observations and we can see for ourselves that the observations are true, but there’s a difference between a signal and noise. The deeper meaning remains elusive, and thus we find ourselves perpetually dissatisfied and fumbling blindly in the darkness.

Man seeks to know himself, but even the “self” fuzzes out and turns to static when one begins picking it apart into pieces: the body, the organs, the mind, the various elements… the soul? In which of any of these does one locate “the self,” and what exactly is its nature. Moreover, like Jimmy in his comatose state, we have found ourselves inseparable from the environment around us. We breathe the air and eat food derived from the natural world, and our very existence is derived from those who came before us. There has been no point at which we’ve been entirely independent organisms. Like the expressionist painting, the “self” seems to change and shift depending on the position from which it is observed; an existential parallax. Therefore, how could one even begin to locate a pure and untainted “self” within the tangled mass of infinite interconnectedness? How farcical…

Due to this frustratingly complex nature of things, humans turn to things like religion, philosophy, and ideology. We boil them down, apply metaphysics and theories, and place our faith in them. What other choice do we have? But these frameworks are not created equal. One must always value their framework of choice over the others. If that were not the case, why apply it in the first place?

But there is also the corollary that we are not rational beings and do not usually select our frameworks through rational assessment, rather they are bestowed upon us by prior generations; the oppression of the future by the past. It’s through this process that most in our modern era have landed on secular Rationalist or Materialist frameworks with Eternalist and/or Annihalationist elements, and because they were made to adopt these first, other perspectives inevitably become antagonistic. Once relied upon for one’s operation in the world, a framework becomes a pillar of one’s “self image” and, due to our natural tendency towards consistency of self image, we are automatically put on the defense; a stalwart warrior on behalf of the status quo. It is our “selves” at stake, after all, despite our eternal inability to fully define such a supposedly ever-present specter.

In order to avoid any existential fugue state through which “self” and meaning may shift dramatically, some may avoid questioning the fundamentals of their worldview through their entire lives. Contrary to this, others may jump from worldview to worldview, framework to framework, in desperate search of something that can give them a reason to keep pushing onward through the suffering innate to human existence; some magical muse that can be the source of constant inspiration and drive. Tangled up in the web of contradictions and philosophical conundrums that never seem to be fully resolved through shallow spiritual and philosophical exploration, these types often find themselves in intense psychological distress.

When one simply defines their “self” by the cause, egregore, or philosophical strand they’ve latched onto, it is inevitable that such a “self” will be shattered time and time again, and the individual in question will find that they’ve only drifted further away from the answers they seek. Those who do not question never truly live, but those who find no stable grounding die time and time again; two extremes of the realm of desire. Whether things remain stagnant or flowing ever onward, the wheel of existence never stops turning. Time moves forward, and suffering compounds. Where is our promised release?

Traditionally, humans have used religion as a means to explain the cosmos and their place within it. Post-industrialization, however, this fell out of style and was replaced with frameworks which insisted that they needed no divine supernatural power in order to make sense. Thus “the material should take precedence over what cannot be scientifically proven” became the axiom under which the world I was born into operated. However, when that which is transcendental is thrown into the garbage and the material is designated the end-all-be-all, a certain nihilism tends to creep in. “My suffering has not been extinguished and my desire is unfulfilled,” we may think, but we’re always assured by our compatriots that whatever framework we are operating under is far better than the alternatives.

Humanity, however, has grown listless. Everywhere I go, people are craving more than this. Even if they have not yet realized what it is they are lacking, the feeling that something simply isn’t right lingers within them, although most insist on clinging to flawed modern notions of “self” unquestioningly up until the topic of one’s mortality is raised. The question of self-nature, after all, is often the unwelcome specter in the hallway at the top of the stairs at night briefly spotted at the corner of one’s vision, while oncoming death is the midnight rap at one’s window while they’re fast asleep on the second floor.

Thus new ideas enter the collective memescape and quickly mutate. Some become unrecognizable while others fade out in favor of other concepts. Memetic evolution, it seems, has picked up its pace in the digital age and is breeding strange new monsters; shambling egregores of all shapes and colors vomiting snakes and spewing hot iron, searching for the next poor soul to set foot upon their blood-soaked plates.

One ideology which has taken root in the consciousnesses of the intellectually curious is Accelerationism, which has been heavily influenced by the writings of Nick Land, as well as the 1972 book “Anti-Oedipus,” written by the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The French duo, in their attempt to take Marxist Materialism to its extreme conclusions while addressing the lack of explanatory power in Marx’s theories, opted to break reality down into its most basic machinic elements.

The most essential function of a machine, according to the labyrinthian text of Anti-Oedipus, is that of regulating “flow.” Returning to the machine’s in Jimmy’s hospital room, we can observe this in action. Air is pushed into his lungs before being expelled, while the streams of saline into his body and urine out of it work in a similar manner. Moreover, the electricity supplied to these devices is also a “flow” piped into the hospital building through power lines and, via the outlets in Jimmy’s room, to the life-support devices themselves.

But Deleuze and Guattari go much further than that. It is not only these devices that can be considered “machines,” but Jimmy’s body is also made up of machines, just ones of a different chemical makeup; constructed from flesh, blood, and bone rather than rubber and metal. “... The anus and the flow of shit it cuts off,” the pair offers as an example. They continue: “the mouth that cuts off not only the flow of milk but also the flow of air and sound; the penis that interrupts not only the flow of urine but also the flow of sperm.”

The machines combine with the hospital machines in one uninterrupted line, and upon viewing them through this machinic lens, there is little difference between them; they are just different components of one total process that extends from Jimmy, to the hospital room’s power outlet, to the power lines, to the power plant, to the generators, to the coal flowing in, to the trucks that deliver that coal, to the mines, etcetera etcetera until the entire world of global production is implicated.

And this has been consistent throughout Jimmy’s life, ever since he was a suckling babe. “The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it,” Deleuze and Guattari tell us. The root force pushing all of this along, they say, is “desire.” From the first chapter of Anti-Oedipus:

Desire constantly couples continuous flows and partial objects that are by nature fragmentary and fragmented. Desire causes the current to flow, itself flows in turn, and breaks the flows. "I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund." Amniotic fluid spilling out of the sac and kidney stones; flowing hair; a flow of spittle, a flow of sperm, shit, urine that are produced by partial objects and constantly cut off by other partial objects, which in turn produce other flows, interrupted by other partial objects.

Here we have the core duality to Deleuze and Guattari’s Materialist theory of everything: flow, and the cutting-off of flow / production and anti-production / yes and no / machinic desire and “the body without organs.” It’s the last entry of this list that befuddles scholars of Anti-Oedipus the most, as the text does not make it abundantly clear what exactly it IS. While seemingly a metaphysical force at first, the “body without organs” is given an essential place within the syncretic psychological framework Deleuze and Guattari have constructed. It can be conceptualized as that part of the “human machine” which views itself in opposition to the parts and pieces that keep it functioning (i.e. organs).

As a corporate entity might take on an antagonistic relationship towards the workers who are its lifeblood, the “body without organs” rebels against its physical makeup, revolted by its own putrid stench and wet quivering viscera, it senses “larvae and loathsome worms” throughout its soft physical makeup and yearns for a release from the tortured existence as a squishy biological machine designed to suffer and fall apart. The breakdown of a machine, after all, is just another function through this lens. Pleasure and pain, coupling and decoupling, birth and death… “Merely so many nails piercing the flesh, so many forms of torture.” But the anti-productive tendencies of the “body without organs” are not the end of production. Like a sausage-slicing machine, there is a moment where the flow of meat is cut off, yet it returns again and again. In this way, the forces of production and anti-production move in tandem throughout human existence.

It’s worth noting that these ideas are not new. Shakyamuni Buddha, the marvelous skilled physician, taught meditation on the charnel ground and contemplation of the repulsiveness of the body in order to cure those who had been consumed by desire for transient worldly pleasures. However, he also clearly communicated his worry that people would grow to despise the world and retreat from it entirely, which was not his intention. Rather than crave existence, or “becoming,” it was possible for the opposite craving to arise: the craving for “non-existence” or “non-becoming.” He says in the Itivuttaka:

Some, feeling horrified, humiliated, & disgusted with that very becoming, relish non-becoming: “When this self, at the break-up of the body, after death, perishes & is destroyed, and does not exist after death, that is peaceful, that is exquisite, that is sufficiency!”

These two cravings, although seemingly opposite, stem from the same root of ignorance. Craving for existence/becoming arises from lust and illusory Eternalist views, while non-existence/non-becoming is derived from hatred and fallacious Annihilationism. “Bhikkhus, all is burning,” Shakyamuni Buddha says in his famous “fire sermon.” He continues: “Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion.” These three passions rest at the very core of samsaric existence, often depicted in Tibetan bhavachakra mandalas as a trio of animals; a cock, a snake, and a boar constantly chasing each other in a circle of aimless wandering, never knowing even a moment of peace. Around them are the six paths of reincarnation: Hell, the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, the Realm of Beasts, the Human Realm, The Asura Realm, and the Heavens. On the outer rim of the mandala is Yama, the lord of death, tightly gripping the wheel constructed of untold suffering and oceans of blood.

The realms of existence too reflect the Deleuzian binary of machinic desire. They are, after all, collectively referred to as the “desire” realm. It is ignorance and desire, above all, that make up their very root system. The flow state of unchained becoming can be witnessed in the realms of hell, where beings are killed and reincarnated countless times, over and over again. Representative of this is the “Hell of Repetition,” wherein beings are fitted with metal blades and forced to wander the blasted wastes. Should they encounter each other, they instantly attack, crying in both agony and blind fury as they hack each other into pieces; cleaving through chunks of flesh and sawing at each other's bones. Once all of the beings have been eviscerated, the hell wardens yell “revive, revive!” and bring them all back to life for the process to repeat itself. Constant disassembling and reassembling of the human “machine,” with not a single moment of respite; only the unending agony of slicing knives and hot iron spikes driven through one’s flesh and marrow.

The heavens too are not free of desire, but unlike the realms of hell, they are stagnant. The Japanese Shingon school patriarch Kukai compared the mindset of those born in the heavens to “Buddhists who loathe the human world and of ordinary people who long for heaven,” which correspond to the heresies of Annihilationism and Eternalism respectively (but are not necessarily identical with either). They may act with outward virtue, but inwardly they hold scorn for the world and wish merely to escape their painful ephemeral existence as a human, aging and falling apart more with each passing day. Their own reeking body revolts them, yet often the thought of perishing and falling into the void of non-existence still fills them with dread. So they attempt to retreat from this world by locking themselves away in the gilded palaces at the top of Mt. Sumeru; turning their backs on the realm of desire, but still keeping hideous passions burning in their hearts.

While these beings may be under the assumption that they have achieved something akin to “enlightenment,” they are still far from the correct path. “It is not that they understand emptiness and non-emptiness, permanence and annihilation,” the Buddha Mahavairocana says to Vajrasattva in the Mahavairocana Sutra. “With regard to both nonexistence and non-nothingness, they consider what they discriminate to be without discrimination. How is one to discriminate emptiness? They do not know the varieties of emptiness, and [so] they will never be able to know nirvana.” To put it simply, these beings are still locked into flawed Materialist thinking in regards to their supposed enlightenment and cannot let go of their illusory worldly preconceptions, therefore they always return to the dreaded lower realms of existence. Many fall into the depths of hell and work their way back up to human existence once their positive karma has been expended. If they’re lucky, they may instead be reborn as a diseased mule or a blind beggar.

It’s fair to say that Shakyamuni knew well the perils associated with all forms of passion, and what he sought to guide other sentient beings towards was something outside of the extremes. His ambition was a lofty one: If he could cure ignorance and lead others towards realizing the truth of the cosmos and their place within, he could extinguish their suffering. For once, beings could truly be at ease.

However, this presented him with a problem. Shakyamuni wanted to communicate his realizations with the rest of the world, but what he had realized was something outside of samsaric experience; beyond the bounds of worldly desire. How does one teach such a thing to beings whose whole perception of reality has been shaped by the wheel of samsara from the moment they were born? How do you begin to explain something that is essentially a negation of everything one knows?

There is no frame of reference for such a concept, and thus Shakyamuni Buddha began the arduous task of applying all the means at his disposal in pursuit of his goal, assessing the proclivities and capacities of all the beings he met in order to tailor his explanations in a way that would resonate with them. The lasting record of this endeavor makes up the scriptural texts of the Buddhist canon; Shakyamuni Buddha’s intention manifested into preservable form and spread throughout the world. Truly a magnificent legacy.

However, the barriers of Shakyamuni’s goal remain, and they have only grown more insurmountable as we move further away from Shakyamuni’s time while trying to contend with his many teachings. While some aspects of life have gotten easier with the advancement of technology and the abundance afforded to us by rapidly expanding capitalist production, circumstances are also more difficult in many respects. Life has become more complex and complicated in ways that I will cover in depth in a later essay. While many of our basic needs are met, we have only fallen deeper into the grasp of the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven: Mara, the Evil One, who has claimed the Desire Realm as his domain.

Due to humanity’s existence within the seemingly impenetrable haze of the passions of ignorance, lust, and hatred, it seems fitting to me that the Buddha-dharma is always portrayed in the esoteric texts as a sort of intruder. Yamantaka, the Destroyer of Death, for instance, intrudes upon Yama’s domain in the underworld. Adorned with a garland of bleeding severed heads and carrying swords and staves in his many arms, he stomps on the gates to the death lord’s abode, terrifying him into submission with his fierce blue-black heads, the eyes of which see into all realms of existence at once. There is nothing that escapes the blazing gaze of Yamantaka, and nowhere he cannot appear in an instant. Blink and suddenly he’s before you in his terrible flame-wreathed glory.

Trailokyavijaya, who takes the form of a multi-armed Asura (i.e. demi-god), also intruded upon the heavenly palaces at the top of Mt. Sumeru during an era where the gods had become completely corrupted by the passions, sending the world into disarray. Making a victory seal with his crossed arms, he materialized directly in front of Mahesvara, he who named himself lord of all the realms, and before Mahesvara could react, stomped him into the ground. Within an instant, Mahesvara found himself reincarnated as a fully-enlightened Buddha, lord of a pure Buddha field adorned with ash (Bhasma-alankara, “Ash Decoration”).

In both of these cases, the enlightened dharma protectors who subjugate the worldly deities seem to be outsiders arriving from a realm beyond the worlds of desire. However, they have always been here and always will be, for the realm they reside in is the foundational consciousness of the cosmos. It is not separate from us and our world, but integral to it, surviving even as our existence constantly crumbles to dust like the remnants of a burning house; not of desiring production or anti-production, but that which transcends either, ungraspable to those who insist on clinging to the material.

It is ineffable, but always right before us, visible only to those whose virtue and spiritual understanding have evolved to a sufficient enough level. “This world of ours is ever pure…” says Shakyamuni to Shariputra in the Vimalakirti Sutra. “Yet to save beings of inferior capacities is this wicked and impure world shown. As when the gods take their food from one and the same treasure-bowl, yet the lustre of food is different according to their virtues, so, O Sariputra, if one is pure in mind, then he can see the qualities of this world adorned.”

Even if we return to the example of Jimmy laying comatose in his hospital room, we may find elements that transcend that of Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic desire. What, for instance, drives his fiancée to visit him night after night, weeping in silent hope that he will become healthy and happy once again. Shall we think of her as merely a “weeping machine,” with the eye being a machine that allows and cuts off the flow of tears, or is there perhaps something more at play? And what about the man who was struck by Jimmy’s car at the time of the accident who, still conscious, also visits Jimmy’s hospital room despite the fact that Jimmy’s intoxicated driving was the cause of all of this. Where do these fit into the schema of desire and production?

As we consider this framework, cracks begin to show and we find more and more examples that dumbfound it. Take, for instance, the story of the Silver Colored Woman from the Silver Colored Woman Sutra, who severed her own breasts to feed a starving woman and her child. We could view this as simply the work of anti-productive forces; the rejection of the body and its components used in the processes of production, but this explanation ignores the obvious act of incredible compassion that the breasts were severed in service of. It’s this kind of utterly selfless compassion that Shakyamuni Buddha wished to illustrate when he praised the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in the Lotus Sutra, for it is not only the bodhisattva that he intended to praise, but all things that Avalokiteshvara represented: the man who nurses a dying animal back to health for nothing in exchange, or one who takes the time to mourn and say a prayer at an unmarked grave. Avalokiteshvara’s many manifestations, so to speak.

Creeping in the darkened corners of our transient reality is something else, that which is outside of our mundane understanding, watching without judgment. In Japanese Tendai school temples, it’s said there used to be an icon of a mysterious god. No one knows exactly where the god originated, or what he was meant to represent, but at one point it was considered important to appease him with praise and dance in order for one to ascend to the pure land of the Buddhas after death. This god, whose name is Matara, takes the appearance of an old man, laughing as he beats a drum.

Why exactly does this seemingly mad god laugh? Perhaps it’s because he watches us scramble around the wheel of samsara year after year, decade after decade, and century after century, in eternal pursuit of our desires, flailing through this illusory reality without realizing that we’re weaving together our own dismal fates, and he laughs because he knows. He understands all of it, and beats his drum to communicate the wisdom of the Buddha-dharma. The drum beat is ever so soft, almost imperceptible, but it reverberates through all of space and time. If you listen, you may be able to hear it.

One awake who sits beside one who is still dreaming and mumbling nonsense to themselves will invariably find it amusing. They may even speak to the other person, giving them hints to their true unconscious state, chuckling to themselves as they do so. Perhaps that is one explanation for why the mad god laughs as he dances and beats his drum in the darkness…

The question remains, however: if humans have grown to reject their own organs and desire a release from them, could the same happen to humans once the egregores we work for are able to materialize their own horrible forms, bearing hundreds of quivering heads and wielding spears of terrible crackling flame? Wouldn’t they too feel a disgust for the parts that sustain them (i.e. us?). To consider this further, we must take a look at the dimension of time.

To be continued…