The Outpost

The Outpost was originally a poetry blog called El Típico Stahlblau. It featured poems in Spanish by a medical student, writing under the pen name Stahlblau in the early 2010s. Stahlblau is the color of steel, and of the sky after raining. It’s German for a sort of bluish gray, or grayish blue.

The blog resurfaced in the spring of 2020. It was renamed The Outpost, as its vocation is to be an austere observation point in a remote or disputed territory. All the poems were removed and the website became a platform for its author’s irregular musings on different topics, almost always gravitating towards geopolitics.

Geopolitics

(γῆ - gê "earth, land" and πολιτική – politikḗ "politics, affairs of the cities").

Earth

Some say if planet Earth was reduced to the size of a billiard ball, it would be the smoothest billiard ball ever produced by Man.

Mathematically, a ball is a solid figure bounded by a sphere. It can be open or closed, the difference being that an open ball does not include the sphere that encloses it, while a closed ball does. Earth is usually described graphically through maps, which are topological representations of this spherical boundary, the surface that separates what is Earth from what isn’t.

Some human activities, like aviation and space exploration, happen outside the smooth limits of the ball (“over” the map). Other activities, like fracking and mining, happen deep inside those limits (“beneath” the map). Nonetheless, since the concepts of vicinity and remoteness are relative, one could say that, given sufficient perspective, all human activity happens in the proximity of Earth’s surface. As a sphere, said surface is continuous and finite. Thus, all events unfolding within it are materially connected to one another, however tenuously.

Politics

In Genesis, Cain is expelled from paradise after murdering his brother. Left to wander the Wilderness, he is marked by God so that he will not face retribution for his crime and goes on to found the first City. The process of building cities is called Civilization (from Latin civitas – city). It begins under the spell of Cain’s mark; the sign of God’s adjournment of retribution.

A City is a place of Non-Wilderness: its primary characteristic is that it has walls, intended to keep the wolves at bay. It feeds on half-truth and denial of Man’s dark depths, keeping him in a sort of time-out from his terrible nature. Life in the City is a suspension of disbelief in the idea that Man will always be a Wolf to Man. We call the management of this illusion Politics.

Understood as a series of political events happening along Time (i.e.: History), Politics becomes a fourth dimension, to be added to the three Euclidean dimensions in which Earth (geo-) exists. Summarizing: geopolitics really is 4D Chess.

Conspiracy

The substance of 4D Chess is conspiracy. Those who conspire (con- spirare) are those who “breathe together”, meaning they share the same disposition of the spirit. Conspiracies can be explicit or implicit, secret or open, complex or simple, clever or dumb. Their common denominator is an element of shared intent, and the collective undertaking of a series of intended actions. Conspirators share a narrative of the world around them: a memeplex that they are set to navigate in a specific way.

For an external observer, what can be perceived of political reality is an emerging synthesis of many simultaneous, conflicting conspiracies. It’s like watching a game of chess, but the players are invisible, only a couple squares are clearly seen, and all the pieces come in similar shades of grey.

Given the impenetrable nature of what is being studied, this blog has no aspiration to become a database for comprehensive descriptions of reality and dense theoretical discussions. True to its origins as a poetry blog, it intends, like a haiku, to capture the clash between hard facts and flashing intuitions, and to reveal a glimpse of certain “poetic instants” in geopolitical reality. If the reader finds this entertaining and inspiring, then The Outpost will have achieved its purpose.

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