If it can't happen, it can't happen. There are no compulsions on events. Nothing needs to happen. But something will happen anyway. When I don't like what happens, I curse. Cursing is way of expressing disagreement. But curses are not understood literally, their meaning is established socially and through convention. So at any given time only the curses of the current time are understood. Others get lost. We are thinking of a curse in two ways: a linguistic unit that establishes its own meaning and so is capable of both escaping the corrosive nature of time and it still exists as a stable unit of language that can operate for everyone who is familiar with the tongue. Familiarity with a language is still a given for a curse to work. We cannot escape that. We have to work on fragments language that hold no semantic meaning and so require no translation.

Unlike simple verbal aggression, the curse imagines a certain other. This other, is an operator who is believed to actually have a say in what happens. Nothing happens on its own. There are omens and symbolic hints which can be deciphered to know which way the wind is blowing. This knowledge is used in cursing.

Curses might seem to be full of personal angst and enmity but actually they are only predictions. These predictions rest on the fact that basically the world we live in is amoral, but an account is kept. Injustices cannot be addressed in narrative but are addressed appropriately by time. Time makes sure that everything gets evened out. At a sufficient scale, the texture of time is that of a evenly dense pancake. Curses are signposts. Curses reveal that there is sufficient disarray in the system and things are generally not rosy. Curses speak of how the sedated pace of events does not signify a lack of contrary energies and motivations. Nothing might be happening, but things are not at peace.

This is important to know because nothing ever happens. And that does not mean that nothing is brimming under the surface. And if we are making do with an uneventful landscape, we can at least be invested in the tension that is building up. Eventually, but we do not know when, the tension will break out and alter the landscape. This is the only way of talking about the future. This is the way in which the future and the present are in simultaneous operation.

How do we know that we have been compromised? What if someone curses us silently and then we come under a spell? We will then behave like a zombie and not have any capacity for independent action anymore. We have to set alarms.

We have to survey our perimeter and embed alarms at all our open ports. Whenever something breeches the perimeter the alarm will ring.

How do we make sure that the alarm works as it promises it will? How do we trust it? If we suffer a breech, a whole operation will need to be undertaken. The sole motive of this operation would be to isolate the breech and contain the influx of foreign narrative.

Suffering a breech is itself a big risk. The chance of the above operation being successful is remote. Most operations fail.

So alarms are important. We need to understand that 'prevention is better than cure' is not just standard good advice. It is the survival mantra. We live by it. And if we fail, we will also die by it.

Contamination is death.

Foreign narrative is not bad but it takes us away from self-absorption. We value our self-absorption because if we think of anyone else than ourselves, we won't ever be able to do anything anymore.

We want to curse but we also we will be cursed. We know. This is certain. Somewhere along the way, somebody someone will curse in a more potent verbiage than us. Our nastiest, our most virulent, most passionate curse will only pale in comparison. We live in the shadow of that moment.
Every fire must cool and come alive again.

At this moment we only care about the placement of the alarms. A breech must not occur. If it does, we must know. Once we know, it must be plugged.

We can only remain in existence if we are obsessed about not ceasing to exist. We have to stand guard on ourselves. Prevent any leak and fight all attempts to colonise.

If we fight a colonial conquest, we occupy the position of a coloniser ourselves. There is no other way of persisting, either occupy or be occupied. It is possible to not contest. Sometimes it is even possible to walk away. But when you walk away you are only delaying what can happen right now.

Alarms help you remain in continuous production as all the potential breeches are pursued and blocked.

We need everything to be easy. Effort is not just a distraction. It is inhibiting. It has a curve and all curves have a segment of non-optimal functioning. Why should this be accommodated?

We understand a heap of marbles scattered on the floor. We understand that everything might come to nought and we will left anxious and listless.

But we do not understand who someone on a streak would want to not help themselves to the fullest extent possible. Effort cuts into the full force of the pull. If you were to be trapped in the burning cockpit of a military aircraft, you would eject. Imagine if in mid-fall, when gravitation is all that you need to rely on, you slow down. Because of this slow-down, your parachute does not have enough pull. It does not unfurl. What will you feel then? How will you deal with the inevitable death that you will be facing in seconds?

Convenience is a double-edged word. We seek convenience. But we all need to serve convenience. If we seek and do not serve, we might hit a dry patch at some point. The landscape is populated by the outbursts of convenience emanating from multiple actors.

The zero-sum universe manages to retain its balance by drawing an equivalence between the net convenience sought and served in the system. Any selfish twitch can turn the whole system upside down.

It is very important to remain conscious of this. We can dare to want only as much as much we can afford to give. If we want to liberate our flesh, we need to at least throw in our sin into the game. The transactions in the ethereal universe that keep us ticking cannot be toyed with. No one is otherwise interested in our survival. We can perish like the poor, disenfranchised dogs living on the street and nobody will bat an eyelid.

We are obsessed with our survival. This is entirely our own lookout. Our obsessions are not prioritised by the system. Each actor is equal. Every actor is equally susceptible to illness, death and other ways of diminishing.

So we need to recognise the role we play in the assembly line. We are not important. We are not special. We need to give away everything that comes to us. That is the only way we can retain a trace amount of the flow.

What we give and how we give it has to be conveniently packaged.

The convenience we extend is the convenience we can enjoy.

A curse is a convenient way to communicate our displeasure.

A breech that is not subtle and has its own dramatic entry is called a rupture.

A rupture comes as a surprise.

It clearly marks a break between that which was and that which is. Ruptures might be messy. Ruptures might leave an unwieldy situation behind.

Because we often do not know what we are upto.

And we often do not know what we will come to.

But if we keep spinning, the skeleton of the future might become a pattern that we spontaneously spin with our own hands.

But to keep spinning, we need to know if we are investing our resources in the pursuit of some realistic and rational goal. This is similar to wanting to know the future. And we can never know the future.

This fear of heading towards an uncertain future coerces us to have a plan b and a plan c. Having any plan at all is a recipe for disaster. While all of this is happening how can you lose focus of the moment by planning? Plans attempt to lead the present towards a desired future. How can there be any desired future?

We are in line for disaster. And we only need to make peace with that. If we don't plan, how can any eventuality be perceived as positive by us? Everything should offend us equally. We cannot possibly like any of the possible outcomes.

We need to develop a capacity to keep spinning into the blind, without a plan - without a clue. With commitment and adherence to the rhythm and passion.

We have so far focussed on the act of cursing and spitting it out. Now, we must talk about what must be done when we are cursed. What if someone walks in and tosses a curse on us? How do we protect ourselves?

When the curse infects us, it makes a rupture into our system. We need to quickly mend this. How do we do this? When we are at risk, we must know that the solution to our predicament can only come out of the same place as the predicament. We can hope to produce the solution only if we keep producing in the first place.

The rupture can be addressed by not letting it distract us. But why are we helping you? Don't we want our curses to inflict damage? Why are we teaching you ways to develop a defence or better still a reasonable offence?

A tactic can remain effective only if it constantly meets new challenges and betters itself. Else like any instance of exposure, it will be exhausted after a duration. We need you to fight us. We want to fight you. We want to inflict damage on you and be the aggressor (so to say). And we also want to be the victim. By playing both these roles, we can target our curses with higher precision. We know the vulnerbilities and can plan offences against the defence mechanisms.

We always want to be as abrasive as we are. Abrasion is a matter of developing ways to remain abrasive. Time is a factor here. And history is relentless. The only way to escape history is to find ways to escape the narrative.

Escaping the narrative is retaining the potential of rupture.

We live our lives in a way that we incriminate ourselves repeatedly. We know which actions will not work with our own constitution and we repeat these actions again and again. Do we crave the negative self-association that comes with crime? Why do we want to be our own culprits? On attaining a negative self-association, we become free from the rules of optimal conduct that are constantly projected on us by the moral forces in our environment. These moral forces are only evangelical channels of the command and control system we live in. Once we find ourselves lacking in any way, the system can absorb us. Once we need something from the world, the world will absorb us easily. Crime is the refusal to take the blame. Punishment's sole objective is to break humans and crush their will. The society can only deal with weak humans who have made a deal. Those who dare to hold out are excluded from the spoils of compliance as well. There is nobody watching out for those who stand up and stand out.

Those who stand up or stand out are not open to manipulation. They do not provide additional fuel.

Anyone with a sufficiently macro perspective will agree that there is no outside. There is no individual choice as far as participation is concerned. If any one of us is corrupt, all of us are corrupt because we haven't figured out how to be separated. We have only figured out our numerous interconnections. We are intertwined in undeniable ways. Your food is my excreta. My nightmare is your life.

And because of the pathology of our connection, we find ourselves in this mess.

You insist on behaving as an autonomous individual. The autonomous individual is a myth of course. Ecologists have traced the connections between systems and between individuals and systems but not between individuals. Each thought is a land-mine because the scope of repercussions cannot be contained and all repercussions are not expressed. Sometimes people just sit heart-attacks out. They do not even flinch. As repercussions can neither be measured or mapped, we have to accept that we are only swimming in a lake swarming with crocodiles. The unknown disaster is more dangerous than the known disaster. We need to tread carefully. We need to check with everyone we believe to be alive if they are dead instead. Life can speak up, death cannot. And sometimes that is the problem.

Curses are masks. Masks hide something and reveal something else. This temporary management of appearances helps in balancing at least two urgent needs. One, is the need to nullify the opposition. Once the opposition is nullified, some progress can be made and the situation which seems like a crises can even be remedied. Two, is the need to proceed as planned. In spite of the discussions, a larger project has been underway. This project demands the timely dedication of resources and the equally timely delivery of material. When any particular pillar of the project becomes unstable, a dispute arises.

Masks help in executing complex discussions under the front of abstraction. It might seem to someone not familiar to the pragmatics of discussion in the room that the topic under discussion is coffee. But in reality a complex battle formation involving a massive cost and thousands of lives is the current engagement. Abstraction helps to de-sensitise discussions. It helps to divert the overbearing sentiment towards rational argumentation and away from sentimental brooding.

That leaves us in a difficult position. We do not know what to do with our emotion anymore. Emotion is a problem because we have not been trained to deal with it. We have been trained to understand emotion as a deterrent to rational thought. On the contrary it is a lens that aids the complex perception of ideas that otherwise will never be perceived at all.

The absence of emotion from our cognitive apparatus has led us to a difficult point in our evolution. We produce anger, irritation, fear, confusion and other artefacts of a troubled mind because we are basically starved of emotion. Nothing touches us because we are stuck on a dry piece of land and we do not know how to swim. We need swimming lessons.

After our swimming lessons, we will be able to float. But float while precariously holding on to the edge of the pool. Courage to let go and allow our body to swim will take time and in this time we can enjoy the feeling of not being able to navigate the terrain. After we learn how to swim, we will not be able to forget how to swim again. Water will become like land. Water will know its place and it will not overwhelm our nostrils.

Then we will need to learn to swim and still drown sometimes as well. That day we will learn how to wear a mask.