Break on Through - Gnostic Fire in the Ice-Field of God

Fragments of an ethics of evil...from a forgotten past to an unknown future…

The Gnostics believed that this world was not created by a perfect God of luminous light, but rather, that it was created out of complete darkness by an evil demiurge …must have got away with “creation” when God was busy elsewhere…The implications are quite obvious, the world of matter is Evil (here Evil is ontological, not psychological, Plotinus, Heidegger, Bataille and other thinkers, share this anti-humanist view)…

As such, we are prisoners of the immanent world of matter, but where is, as Levinas would say, the exit? Where is the transcendental escape from the suffocating plane of immanence? According to the Gnostics, only contact with the divine source within (i.e. gnosis) can obliterate us from the prison-world of immanence/matter. For while Evil created the world of body and matter, there is still a divine spark of light caught within the darkness: within the corroded depths of our bodies and hidden within the ego trappings of matter, a sparkling soul awaits its dawn…In this sense, the Gnostics’ Evil = Matter equation is quite conventional. Evil is fundamentally a passive form and based on lack; it cannot create anything of its own accord. Evil is a parasitical form and a viral relationship. Since the evil demiurge could not create something out of nothing, he used and subverted god’s original light of creation and buried it deep within the folds of his and our “constructed” world of matter.

As most religious practices the Gnostic were mostly ascetic; one could put them in the right category, but there was also a left wing, the libidinous Gnostics. The logic is impeccable: if the world is evil, you have only two choices in relation to the world of matter: either expire or indulge. In either denial or excess (two sides of the same coin) what counts is taking “it” to the limit, taking matter to the limit. And hence, to destroy matter/evil, in order to “break on through to the other side” (was Jim Morrison a Gnostic? “there are things know and unknown and in between are the doors”)…

If the world of matter is evil and you want to escape to the other side of matter, you can only do it with darkness and in darkness: the asceticism of the sun or aestheticism of the moon…

…a baroque logic for the otherworldly: use Evil to escape Evil, since you have no choice in the matter, you can only escape through what is given to you…

… sado-masochistic rituals of unspoken madness would court gang-bangs of fervent delight, whose outcome was not the usual hedonistic half-filled holes of desperate fluids, but rather, the shattering of an openness to the divine white light above (which has the distinct advantage of being somewhat less sticky)…ruby flows of libidinous sacrifices would bring willing victims to the altar of divine madness; again, this would not be the usual indulgence of sadistic freaks consecrating their pathological egos, but rather, the divine destruction of matter - thunder open the Evil material body – no longer closed onto itself...the outside beckons...

Maybe, all modern “Islamic” terrorist groups are innately Gnostic…(although I severely doubt it)…for they seem to have no aim or claim, except destruction and mayhem; and more shocking to western sensibilities, is the fact that they are prepared to destroy themselves in the process of destroying others…

Maybe, Islamic groups have incorporated a strange Gnostic absolutism of evil which has become highly delirious and absolutely fatal. Fatal strategies are at play here. The twisted logic goes like this: if you want to change and spiritually liberate or cleanse the world from the evils of matter, destroy it (unfortunately without the libidinous ecstasies of the ancient left-wing Gnostics). Now of course, it is difficult to destroy matter, virtually impossible, only God can do that, but “we” Westerns have come close to it. If God created the Atom, we have constructed the destruction. It is only a matter of time, as a few Hollywood movies have shown, that terrorist cells do it for real, on some divinely chosen metropolis...for Gnostic terrorism, maybe, that would be enough destruction and suffering to stop the evil ways of the world, what 9/11 could not achieve…An Hiroshima and Nagasaki of Evil liberation…in an Evil world, only Evil will spiritually cleanse the world…

….if things change for the “best” and the good, if there is such a thing, it is not because of freewill and ideal resolve, but because a disaster of such unfathomable proportion has led generation after generation to say: never again, never again will such barbarity happen again…how long will the memory of the horror linger on in successive generations is an unknown Number…time is the greatest atom killer of them all, it kills and destroys all in end, being and beings in equal measure…

…I do not know if, or why, suffering and evil are sooo linked to the “good”, all I know is that maybe, a few fanatical groups are willing to pay the price of no return…

…I do not know whether God/Good or the Devil/Evil created the world, but I do know that whatever their multifarious deliberations and choices of possible worlds before creation, and whoever-whatever was ultimately responsible for the outcome, they would have created the same identical world in both cases…a strange outcome indeed…

Nadja

The mirrors of all mirrors...the "surrealist glow in the eyes of all women"...

...Surrealist women: oblique objects of desire, figures of refracted beauty, muses from the sun-moon unconscious...childlike, mystical and receptive...

Melanie in the Sand - Condoms for the Death Drive

There is always that vacant moment admix the torpid passions of lustful bodies, which signs the death warrant of all desire; usually the girl, at some strategic point, spits out the magic word: “do you have a condom?” “you know we should…maybe” etc…(although it sounds better in French, from a Brigitte Bardot pouting 18 year old…Hi Melanie) at that point everything vanishes, the looks, the beauty, and the soft tanned skin in the sand…The spirit of attraction becomes like everything else, a mere transaction, plasticized fluids in a plastic life, or in Kant’s words ”to dispose over oneself as over a thing and to make of oneself a thing on which another satisfies his appetite, just as he satisfies his hunger upon a steak”.

Steak indeed…how is it possible that in the admixture of two ravishing pulses (which have no other ulterior motive than their immanent laws of attraction) reason/economy pops up its ugly head: admix the Dionysian frenzy, in the maelstrom of desire, a bureaucrat appears and demands his dues: all the accounts have to be in order before one proceeds to the next phase…at that point I usually give up, and kiss Her to death, as opposed to the little death and the big death…on this occasion, I left my Schopenhauerian pathos behind, Melanie enticed me further amidst the sand and moon…and all in good measure I flowed externally: full of protein, good for the skin and hair…jolly good! Economy is restored after all…I must admit it would be a sorry affair to see the luscious youth skin of the Melanies of this world corrupted by the viral…

Melanie was merely beautiful by sunlight; she was divinely sublime by moonlight…her deep pool eyes immersed all the stars above... and she looked whitely divine pearling Bukkake of reflected moonlight…none of us would want to die for that, would we?

A Rational Disorder of the Senses – Rimbaud vs. Kant

"In Rhetorique de la Drogue" Derrida speculates that the whole question of drugs is essentially a « praxis », or better still, an « art » of the testing of limits: of body and text, of sign and sense…in short, the limits of subjectivity/world are put into question or deconstructed (not destroyed)…the same goes for philosophical thought, which is about having limits and transgressing those arbitrary established limits. No matter which philosopher one reads, the philosophy in question will invariably start from a primordial limit, whilst, at the same time, displacing other limits by reconfiguring them elsewhere…anchors of finitude in the infinity of thought…

Since the substrate, or limit, of thought is psycho-chemical (and not ontological, rational, or eidetic, the three Hs of philosophy will have to go down the hole, or drop some K…) one needs to physically effect the abstract of thinking, to think anything at all: thought is a physical manifestation like any other “object” in the world…the radical altering of the abstract of thought is the unchained abruption and (temporary) dissolution of self and world: the praxis of fire that Heraclites stole from the gods, and Plato, unfortunately, recaptured for man…

Think about the “psychological” effects of drugs transposed to the abstract of thought. This would include the following abstract becomings, twisting and shattering the realm of thought: visual, auditory, tacit, olfactory, gustatory distortions and kinaesthetic perceptions, infinite differential changes of/in durations (time and space interchanging rhythmic folds) instantaneous changes in the rate of mental contents; body image changes, objective hallucinations, immense and heightened awareness of colour, abrupt and frequent affects and spiralling speeds...etc…if all this could be completely transposed to the abstract of thought, we all would be Gods, or at least, Dionysus would heed our calls…for Rimbaud’s “rational disorder of the senses” is, as Deleuze pointed out, not too far from the free “disorder” of the mind’s faculties in Kant’s Critique of Judgement….as Deleuze said, philosophy, as opposed to art, is still awaiting its abstract revolution…let us pray...for good, dutiful and beautiful chemistry...