Arms and Armor

A metaphor....

The technological progression of armor.

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Armor = A technology, necessitating a technique.
One has to learn, to be trained, in the practice of acting with a full metal armor surrounding him.
The most sophisticated types appear as a single exoskeleton, but they are always made up of parts/pieces, connected together in conspicuous ways so as to create the illusion of a singular whole.
Where each plate connects with the others friction is produced, as no matter the sophistication of the fitness the connections is never perfect.

Armor protects the hidden wearer.
When all wear armoring the armor becomes a second-skin.
It's advantage is that it is more malleable, more easily updated, altered to follow fashion trends, decorated with material that is of the same kind as the metal armor itself.
Once the armor becomes a second-skin, adorning all, the flesh and blood is forgotten...in time denied presence.

The technology, the garments, the shell, is the organism.
What the skin and bone was is no longer.
Although the armor must fashion itself according to the organisms general shape, its genetic form, it need not remain true to it completely.
Appendages can be made to appear larger, others can be hidden beneath a smooth plate, coloration can be anything expressing a desired effect.
And because techniques and technologies can be purchased and worn, a uniformity of appearance begins to take shape...one only restricted by the buyers purchasing power.
The armor becomes a product of purchased innovation. It implies the wearer's qualities, when in fact it only represents his/her wealth, which may, or may not be a result of his/her qualities.      

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The armor offers the wearer a sense of indestructibility.
He gains in confidence what he loses in sensation. The metal, misconstrued as the skin itself, feels nothing.
The wearer is detached from the world. He can now endure what his real skin could not.
He feels brave...invulnerable...aloof.    
Very little touches him because very little actually does. He is sheltered behind a contraption, a contrivance, peeking through holes in the face-plate.
His image is a technique, made for him, by the expert manipulation of metal.
When he purchased the armor the wearer, the Knight, purchased the experts technique, directing him to construct the image he wanted to project.

With such a plated monster, no subtlety will get through.
The blows must be crude, hard, and fast.
He can only feel the world when it reaches a level that can touch his skin via the armor plating.
When trying to talk with a Knight raise your voice....otherwise he will not hear you inside the reverberating chamber of the head-piece, where his own smell and his own breathing dominate.

The (K)Night is essentially in the dark.
The sun strikes his outer-shell, but his skin is forever covered in darkness.
Only through the helmet slits does a very limited amount of light enter.
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The individual becomes robotic, in appearance but also in movement (acting).
His, supposed, inherited genetic potentials inhibited by the memetic outer shell; his "uniqueness" buried in a uniforming protected personae, where he is no different than any other - except in the refinement, the complexity, of the armor which is more the result of social status and resource accessibility.

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Beneath the armor woman, man, black, white, disappear in darkness.
A general form remains...which can also be manipulated, by contracting the flesh, accentuating parts, hiding others...uplifting the individual inside adjustable metal boots.
His feet never touch the ground. He floats on metal, feet unsoiled.

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White knight....Black Knight...all in the night.
The light only functions to accentuate the painted surface of the shell.
The ease of its alteration makes color irrelevant.
What matters is this general form that cannot be pushed into any armor, but the armor must be adjusted to its outlines.

The outline is that of a humanoid, of undecided heritage.

The effect is conceptual...idealistic.
The appearance is manipulated, offering the relieving possibility that nothing of the past can remain untouched - its immutability challenged.

"God" as the representation of this immutable, determining, higher order, residing in the "immanent", the receding past, dies, in this slow falling back.
Man can now shape the past - as Orwell described it - taking God's place as the creating "word."

The word is freed from a Being.
Man becomes the shaper of his own reality, by taking control over the word.
Man becomes the shape-shifter, the doppelganger.
And what is shaped more easily than flesh, but inanimate matter: plastic, fabric, metal.
To take control is to pull away, to dislodge.
The word is detached from the phenomenon, becoming purified....a holy word.
Sacred being what is unsoiled by the earthly, the base, the primal = enlightened, made light, placed on a pedestal, on metal boots, for instance, as if floating above reality, detached/detaching from it.
The skin feels, but behind the metal it is numbed - the metal is an added padding, a thickness.
Sunlight does not burn it...it only heats its surfaces.
 
The word is its own definition, in the same way God was defined as the Creator of Himself, and of the world.
A solipsistic innuendo - the end of the causal chain.
A word is what is written, using words, in the dictionary. When used linguistically it refers only to the mental abstraction - abstraction being a form of detachment, simplification/generalization being the cutting away of dimensions.
 
Dictionary offer a general outline, just as the Bible does.
Both are taken literally, rather as representations, an art-form....just as the armor and the arks are taken as literal additions, extensions of the human embodying them.
The human becomes spiritualized, the behind the scenes, the masks, animating energy - the ghost in the machine, in the armor, the contrivance.

Behind the word, emotions.
The word refers back to human abstractions, or, when it dares, to human emotions. A hint at the primal.
But, now, the emotions are stripped of their worldly utilities, the reason they evolved.
They becomes expressions of the divine, which is always masked, armored, hidden, in the dark.

The noumenon comes to the forefront, as does the armor. The phenomenon, is hidden, distanced....placed into lethe, forgetfulness: covered, concealed.
The armor is human contrivance. It is the new apparent.

Armor was a reaction to the bow and arrow, the crossbow.
When anyone could fell a fighter from a distance, or massacre a group of formidable warriors by striking them with quantities of arrows from a safe distance, the armor became inevitable.

Arrows are metaphors for karma, directed by words.
Your fate, your reputation, your destiny, now determined by gossip, distant hidden voices whispering (shaping arrow heads, finding rocks), and flinging them to injure from a safe distance.

The armor protected the wearer from these words.
A karmic wall.
The metal shell was a detachment, a barrier, a discriminating possibility.
It kept the rabble out.

The warrior did not have to be a good fighter...because he was a walking talk; a Frankenstein, shuffling towards the other, untouched by arrows, by the masses throwing rocks from the shadows.
Like Frankenstein he was made up of many different parts, all connected artificially, creating a monstrosity.
The quality of the technique was judged by how well it emulated the human form, how it made the observer forget that there was an intervention artifice between the eye and the moving spirit.
Against words a linguistic defense; an iron clad rhetoric - rigid, detached, artistic but unaesthetic, anesthetic.

Two types of modern warfare emerges - dialectics.
One was used by the commoner, who found stones, or could artificially manufacture multiple arrow-heads to fling at the other from the safety of a detached distance, amplifying his weakness into a arrow-pointed force.  
The other used a more refined from of distancing: the outer shell, detaching himself from words, creating an alternative space within space/time.

Both compensate for a lack of artistry.
Both types of "fighters" compensate for an absence of fighting talent.
Both uses distance, when warrior approach and engage, suing the weapon, the artifice, the word, as an extension of their arm: a surgical instrument.

The Spartans developed an alternative to walls method of protecting their city-state: reputation, infamy...karma.

Their actions on the battlefield ensured them a relative defensive advantage, which they enhanced by remaining laconic in their dealing with others.

To expose your body is to expose your flaws to the other's gaze.
To expose your mind is the same thing.

Many in our time confuse the issues.
They think that they can go straight to the defensive protection, without first building up their reputation on the battlefield.

Like children who play the superhero, they use acting to pretend the outcome without going through the intermediate stages.
This makes them ridiculous, if not more transparent to eyes that do not fall for the ploy.

The image of the cowboy, gunslinger, of few words, with the squint, and the steady gate, is part of this Spartan persona.

The yapping dog, growls, to insinuate damage on his foe.
His "bark bigger than his bite".... and the silent dog uses the demeanor of the dangerous hound, who does not make a sound before the kill.
The second is a more intelligent approach, but no less a defensive one, if the intent is not to engage the other but to avoid engaging him.

How does one determine if the stoic, silent, attitude is genuine and not a pretense?
Well, the other will give-off cues, “tells,” as in poker, but if access to those cues is limited, or one lacks the sensual acuity to perceive the details, then, again, time fills in the gaps.
How?
Patterns.
What is a pattern?
See Pattern
The repeating regularity and its predictability is what a pattern is.
But to perceive patterns you must have experience, in time, with the phenomenon.
A pattern is revealed in time.
The smaller the time-period is, the more acute the senses and the more sophisticated the data-processing must be, to perceive the pattern – if there is one at all.
The simpler mind needs more obvious patterns over longer temporal durations to perceive.

Immediately we realize why remaining silent is cleverer.
By limiting your actions you limit the data you give-off, which may expose a pattern about you.
The one who does not say much, intentionally, is hiding something, or is attempting to restrict the patterns he is displaying to the other, so as to reduce his vulnerability to him/her.
If in a long period of time the other has never displayed anything that would warrant care, or that would justify the intended effect of projecting power by insinuating it, then the other is exposing himself as a fake.
A fighter who refuses to enter a rink, for instance, can justify it, for a short time, by implying indifference to the weakness of the opponents, but if he prolongs this method he increases the pattern of his non-participation.
The absence of patterns becomes a pattern itself.
If there is no precedent to fall upon, the ruse is exposed.
You can only claim to not want to do something, for whatever reason, if you’ve already displayed your capacity to do that something…and if you avoid repeating your performance then, again, time exposes a growing incompetence.

The Spartans had centuries of sacrifice, of battlefield actions, to support their laconic demeanor, just as a gunslinger, in the wild west, had his fame, shared as anecdotal evidence, which protected him, for a while, from every up-and-comer.  
But if he did not engage anyone, over a long period of time, then this reduced the effect of the quiet-strength persona he might have built-up over the years.    

The fighter wants to avoid the fight, either by bragging – the infantile womanly version of defensiveness – or by remaining silent, allowing the others to project upon their own individual or collective insecurities.

In our time of bullshite, and of pretentious infantile social practices, the tactic of acting out a method without having to pragmatically show evidence to back it up is becoming the norm – reducing human interactions to childish theater.
The act is imitated, after watching popularized mythologies, or it is deferred, using an other’s substantial infamy, to paste over, one’s own absence of substance.

With no performance to fall back upon, the actor falls back on a collective memory. The pretender pretends, by adopting the attitude, what he lacks in himself, riding on the coattails of icons with the prerequisite emotional baggage.
The myth becomes the precedent, and he takes on the role of its most current appearance.  
The modern infantile mind, remains retarded, stunted in developmental stasis, because it can now pretend to know, without knowing, and it can pretend to be formidable without having to be formidable beforehand, and it can pretend to understand, by using a few carefully selected words, without actually understanding – in our information age this is not a difficult thing to do.
If and when, pressured to display this implied insight, it will, again, defer, refer, and/or, remain as terse as possible, because to speak your mind is to reveal your mind; it is to uncover its qualities.

To remain economical is to cling onto your garments, a bit embarrassed about what they conceal.