Diip Stait is cliché, trope, myth, meme without material form except as it manifests through lived experience in the mediated subliminal realms of political, economic, and class belief. It is cultural icon, bursting with unquestioned assumptions, myriad subtle mis-directions, imbued with godlike powers, spreading a miasma of fear and apathy. And it is so much more…
For such a diffuse organism, the big picture is best seen as a multiverse, impossible to absorb in mere 4D or 5G. Naming parts begins analysis, yet the system operation is elusive, virus-morphing, a billion generations old, invisible behind shiny illusion, whispering propaganda into your sleeping brain, your very tissues, limitless frequencies monitoring your quarks and gluons, your karmic biorhythms, and like any good parasite, numbing you to your drained spirit, your thwarted realizations, while you think you are thinking, free…
Now. Behold THIS strange and terrible beauty. Many subtle parts and materials assemble into its complex presence. A sum here is more than parts; the materials are everyday objects, habits, ideas you never knew might be tricking you into complacency. The closer you look, the cheesier and more battle worn the construct, yet you cannot look away. Do not look away! You know it lives and is watching you.
Behold OUR strange and terrible beauty! We chant and shout in temples sacred, sporting and profane; we deliver explosive blood treasure sacrifices throughout the world to it; we stare mute, transfixed, into its trillion eye screens, waiting anxiously for it to tell us the secret of satisfaction; and yet if it were flesh, it is as hardened armor, offering no succor, just an unblinking stare, watching, a buzz saw mouth anticipating its best moment to devour you.
Behold! O Strange and Terrible Beauty! Is this the first time you see the un-seeable up close? Haven’t you sensed it hovering over your cyclic rituals, in dreams of immanent needs, desire for a better world, full life in close interdependence with many people? Yet these stillborn silently signaling ghosts slide away, slipping through an ephemeral passage as between leaves of a book, to a dimension somehow always just beyond your grasp, swept by a fetid cloud of seemingly inevitable inchoate forces!
Those forces are careless constructs of human creation, not eternal and universal. You are being played. We made this god, and we can, we must, make other, better gods, both in the image of our better selves, and ourselves in that image. It will only happen if we try.
Try.