The Lambent

Tag: life

  • To Provoke Your State

    To Provoke Your State

    This staircase, it leads only to
    Some old pictures of you
    Through an a thousand mile long tube

    Black Country, New Road – Concorde

    The orator no longer need stand, huddled by masses for declaration.
    The author, free from the printing press’s oppression.
    The artist, no longer bound by the material limitations of space.

    How incredibly horrifying / wondrous!

    I can provoke your emotional state using agreed upon symbols running “through an a thousand mile long tube.” What responsibility! Either laugh at Charlie Kirk’s death / Or calmly explain the implications of political violence and practical harms of right-wing politics1. Either / Or2, it doesn’t really matter. You’ll tell me I deserve death regardless while either reciting jumbled talking points from a YouTube grifter3 / Or a Twitch streamer who read half of The Communist Manifesto before ADHD forced their return to TikTok.

    I can provoke your rational state using vocal utterances bouncing hollowly between the cave walls within your echo chamber. Either tell you Jewish space lasers caused a series of wildfires4, sourced from my personal opinion of how wildfires spread and an antisemitic worldview / Or that heating our planet with fossil fuels is bad, sourced from peer-reviewed academic papers5. Either / Or, it doesn’t really matter. We’re all lunatics lighting ourselves on fire with torches cast in midday sun6. It’s not like we even notice though. Either you’re unhealthily obsessed with one random guy exploiting a welfare program to notice Peter Thiel pouring gasoline onto your already enlightened head / Or burning yourself alive is in fashion now, it can’t be harmful if we’re all doing it.

    To expound upon that sickening amalgamation festering between our neurons would in all likelihood provoke the few brain cells left within my skull’s containment to disappear in shame for who we are. The potential of our connected globe, yet we stumble continually through a revolving door of either Andrew Tate / Or Vaush. Insisting that there exist only two choices for building a fantasy world balanced on delusion. Repetition of the declarative statement, “humanity cannot think for itself.” Therefore, we must happily sip idiocy, rather than provoke our own mindful state. Either laughing with glee at suffering / Or bored out of our mind at the brain rot we’re ingesting. Either way, it doesn’t matter because we’re all collectively chanting with a deranged gleam in our eye, “Let those whose bile we consume, consume us.”

    There sits endless space – Our obligation to take voice, pen, and brush to it. The only means by which to defy slop is to confound it with art. There is a possibility that truth continually lies, obscured under this stupor of idiocy. But if there exists only idiocy, then one might rightfully conclude that only idiots exist and surrender to becoming an idiot themself, for we are social creatures. To idle among the void-sized hole AI’s bile has formed is to surrender humanity to a tech billionaire. To an oligarch proclaiming before your face through action that he doesn’t believe in your right to existence.

    In some sense, “Boredom is the root of all evil.”7 Not because boredom provokes oneself to engage with irrational activity, but rather because its passivity allows boredom’s default production of uninspired product to be assimilated into the bile by those with goals less than humanity’s enrichment through art and reason.

    References:

    1. Three Arrows. “The Myth of Charlie Kirk,” October 12, 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh0el8phS_o. ↩︎
    2. Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 43-46. (Either / Or An Ecstatic Discourse) ↩︎
    3. Shoe0nHead, “These People Are Sick,” September 18, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJENP0Rr8p0. ↩︎
    4. Justin Gray, “MTG Says the Deadly California Wildfires May Have Been Caused by Lasers From Space,” X, January 28, 2021, accessed December 21, 2025, https://x.com/JustinGrayWSB/status/1354870334655262724. ↩︎
    5. hbomberguy, “Climate Denial: A Measured Response,” May 31, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLqXkYrdmjY. ↩︎
    6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: The Gay Science, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 125. ↩︎
    7. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Essential Kierkegaard, 2000, p. 51. ↩︎