Load-bearing and unarmored, because it has to turn. The one segment where every passage crosses, and the place the boot is put, which takes the turning and leaves the head working.
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The neck holds the head up and has nothing over it.
Everything else that matters is boxed. The brain sits in a case of bone. The heart and the lungs sit in a cage. The cord runs the length of the back inside a column of vertebrae with muscle packed over it, and then at one segment that column comes out from under the shoulders and stands in the open, seven small bones and skin on them.
This is not an oversight in the design and it is not weakness. The neck is unarmored because it has to move. A thing that must turn cannot be cased, and the exposure is the price of the turning. Armor and rotation are one trade, made once, and the body made it on purpose. So the exposure is not a defect in the creature. It is what the capacity costs.
[See THE LIMIT · TOWARDS · THE BOOT]
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EVERY PASSAGE CROSSES AT ONE PLACE
Air crosses there. Blood crosses there, in both directions. The cord crosses there, and every nerve that reaches an arm, a hand or the gut leaves through it. Swallowing crosses there. The voice is made there.
Nowhere else does that many separate passages run through one unarmored segment. A single placement reaches all of them at once, and the operator does not have to know which one he wanted. The boot is not set on the neck because the neck is fragile. It is set there because it is the one location where a single foot does the work of six.
[See THE MENU OF BOOTS · IMPRISONMENT]
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WHAT IS TAKEN IS THE TURNING
The head is left intact. That is the first thing about the position and it is usually read as restraint.
The eyes work. The mind works. What is gone is the rotation, which is the capacity to select what is faced.
Towards is to plus the turning. Remove the turning and what remains is to: a line, a terminus, a direction set by whoever set the position. The creature under the boot can still look. She looks at the ground her cheek is on and at whatever stands in the arc she was fixed in, and the looking is unimpaired, which is why the operator can say without lying that nothing has been taken from her sight. The boot does not blind. It fixes the orientation, and orientation is the second law's entire motion.
[See DYS-ORDER · THE REFUSED NOTE]
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IT IS THE OUTSIDE OF THE THROAT
The neck and the throat are one site read from two sides. The throat is the passage. The neck is the column the passage runs in.
The throat is where the kindling sequence finishes. Tears make the yielded field, gall kindles in that field, the heart warms, the warmth rises to the throat, the throat opens, the voice carries its roughness. Every stage after the heart happens at this one segment. So the boot is set on the last stage of the kindling sequence, from behind, and the operator never has to reach the tears or the gall or the heart, because the sequence has to come out through a column he is already standing on.
The two amputations work at the source. This works at the exit. They are one prevention performed at two ends of a line, and the second has the advantage of not requiring anyone to find out what the creature was going to say.
[See THE THROAT · THE SOUNDING]
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THE INSTRUMENT IS DESCRIBED AND THE POSITION IS NOT
Every account of this encounter has more to say about the boot than about the neck.
An instrument has a mechanism, a history, a catalog and a manufacturer, and every one of those can be described from outside. There is a literature on the boot: its types, its correct application, its lawful and unlawful uses. The position under it has no mechanism. It has an occupant, and an occupant can be described only by someone willing to be where she is.
So description drifts, without anyone intending it, to the side of the encounter that can be written from beside it. Intending otherwise does not correct the drift, because the drift is not a preference of the one describing. It is where the describable is.
[See THE VANISHING POINT · THE UNOBSERVED PRESS]
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THE OFFERED ARMOR IS THE COUNSEL TO STOP TURNING
What gets recommended to a creature in this position is that she protect herself. Harden. Guard the exposure. Stop leaving it open.
Follow the schedule on that counsel. It costs the one giving it nothing. It costs the operator nothing. Nothing is maintained anywhere in order to keep it free, and it arrives with real concern attached, which is what keeps it in circulation.
Then read what it asks for. A closed neck is a neck that does not rotate, and a creature who does not rotate is fixed in one orientation by her own hand, which is the outcome the boot was applied to produce. The counsel completes the occupation and moves the maintenance of it onto the occupied, and once that transfer is made the boot can be lifted without the position changing.
[See THE COST TELL · CHEAPER RATE · DELEGITIMATION]
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The neck is where the body agreed to be reachable in exchange for being able to turn.
So everything done at that segment is done at the place the creature opened in order to face anything at all. The occupation did not find a weak point and exploit it. It found the terms the body was built on, and stood on them.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
