Bob van der Wal
Frass

October 15 - 27, 2016

Dear Great-Great-Grandchildren of Bob van der Wal,

I am writing to you from the prehistoric past of balconies, tree-lined streets, church bell sound and seasons, in an alpine country. You will know some of these things from the film museum (it's a shame that only those remained from the institutions of history). I doubt they can convey seasons properly though, despite the hyper-sensorial technologies you enjoy under your dark sun. Like the first day of fall today: when your whole body suddenly realizes the creeping cold, early sunsets, wet winds, and decomposing greenery. It's this day, when somehow I took courage to dial the number of your Great-Great-Grandfather on our solid communicational apparatuses and learnt that even the grand quest of finding yourself can never be done alone. That withdrawal and connectivity are not contradictory. I want to tell you why. Because I believe it to be an epochal insight from a time when our likes embarked on the advanced states of love that all you children are now brought up with, and that you will be able to rely on when confronting your destinies: when Denk III Jr will soon inherit governance over the Great Parliament of Hustlers, when Jellykah will embark on the watershed discovery of inexhaustible deepsea plant nutriens, and when the young Cappu and Cino will overthrow the enslavement of all black and white peoples.

At the beginning of my time as a thinking and feeling person in this world, love was to be understood as the dissolution of Ego. In myriad lessons of joy and of pain it was crucial to pursue what a now Ancient French philosopher coined the Rhizomatic, the root-like growing of subjective nodes into each other, a subterranean osmosis of energies. It was important yet never easy at that time to erode the idea and sentiment of the Individual and explore the passions and forces of utmost connectivity in order to be, that is, to be other than the barbarian regime of property and its merciless rule of scarcity and competition. Some people still believed this could be done by pure intellect, they sometimes were willing to involve their affect and affection too, but it proved difficult to align with the rejection of their own and other bodies on the one hand, and the relapse to their own and other privacies on the other hand (or person), when alliances have been made as they should, and the separation of filaments was revealed as illusion. We used to call it Microcosmos.

Then, like all growing, however gradual, ruptures took place, old skin stretched, then broken, for further reaches to unfold. What if a Rhizomatic web of gelatinous subjectivities was insufficient for the longevity of love? What if the spaces between filaments have been insufficiently understood in their function for the Cosmos at large? If there was place within plasm that actually kept it together? If it's invasion by ever more subtle alliancing (the expansion once thought of as strengthening bonds) was disabling the gravitational force of non-matter?

At the threshold of love's new horizon, I glimpsed at the contours of the Dividual. Of emotions and entities that alloy by virtue of a particular kind of separability. Love suddenly seemed to be better understood as the dissolution of the basic fear that constitutes the monstrosities of Ego in the first place. Because separation is feared by any symbiotic species' survival, that is any species at all, Ego was formed for protection, from skull to banana peel to membrane to self, formerly known as Darwinism. What is now taking shape as Macrocosmos however won't shed no tears over evolutionary evidence, and does not exhaust itself in attempting to jellyfying it all. It focuses instead on the fallibility of fear, staring into the black holes of a not yet quite known space in between, it's abundance of absence that is neither death nor indifference, but its ability to make up the Macro.

You now know, young whales, why I never doubted your love. Yet your intuitions are not inbreed but instincts acquired in oceanic transition. It may take centuries to keep up with their understanding. I am grateful to your great Great-Great-Grandfather to encrypt this for me.