The cuckoo Clock - A touch of Evil

A smile of a child is as beautiful as a woman’s face on the verge of orgasm in a sadomasochistic ritual…this is the world that Nietzsche and Bataille want; were innocence, beauty, and the sublime reign supreme – cruelty and evil in the sense of the innocence of expenditure and abundance and not in the all to/o real sense of cruelty and evil out of egoism, control and weakness - it is all a question of non-economy and economy.

The cruelty and Evil that Nietzsche and Bataille subvert from Christianity and Darwin is in the non-economic sense of nature as a cruel feast of waste and abundance - to produce a rare flower all the world and life was set aflame…

The beautiful and the sublime are rare creations, and all the abundance and cruel waste of a sun giving creation was needed to produce one instance of beauty and artistic expenditure.

The Nietzschean truth; the cruelest cultures (the renaissance, ancient Greece etc…) are the most beautiful: artistic in their vitality and most life-affirming in their creations. As Orson Welles (a rare genius severely crushed by the egalitarian laws of the many) said in his film a “touch of evil” (no doubt referring to Nietzsche):

"You know what the fellow said: In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

…..one could argue that the Swiss cuckoo clock is a fair substitute, who is to judge?...not even a “touch of evil” was necessary to produce such a clocking wonder….what a bargain!….on the other hand, lets us not forget that Switzerland is also the birth place of LSD: Albert Hoffman and his schizophrenic bike ride surfing on the highest democracy that the world has ever known....LSD as one of most powerful synthetic hallucinogens ever created is the supreme example of the rare sublime and beautiful, and not a drop of blood was needed for its creation - all the chemistry of the world was needed for one sublime molecule to emerge - except of course, for the few early experiments who thought they could fly…Nietzsche after all? Or is that Bill Hicks?:

“You never see positive drugs stories on the news, do ya. Isn't that weird cos most of the experiences I've had on drugs, were rrreal fucking positive. Er. Who are these morons they're finding that's what I wanna know. I used to want to call the news, "Come over to our house! Watch Tommy, he's a pig, film him!" "Oink oink." "Hee hee, he's been doing that for hours. He's killing us. You getting all that?" You know what I mean. Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. "Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy." What a dick, fuck him! He's an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn't he take off from the ground first? Check it out. You don't see ducks lining up to catch elevators to fly South. They fly from the ground, you moron. Quit ruining it for everybody. He's a moron, he's dead, good. We lost a moron, fucking celebrate. Boy I just felt the world get lighter - we lost a moron. Put on the Hammer album, I'm ready to dance! "We lost a moron." I don't mean to sound cold or cruel or vicious, but I am so that's the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought”. (From “Revelations”)

Style vs. Content - The Decay of Living

Say yes to life! Affirmation, negation mere appearances, no oppositions but creation, suffering and illness as overcoming etc……I find all this quite sickening. My “natural” inclination or temperament is not Deleuzian or Nietzschean but Cioranic, but I find it more fun to write about the greatest affirmers who have ever lived: the unholy life-trinity of Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, than in my first negative loves Schopenhauer, Leopardi and Cioran…but of course, as Deleuze would say, their style is their refutation. Style for Deleuze is a non-organic life that cannot help to express itself through the vilifications and negations of the content…like life that emerges even in the most remote and inhospitable regions of the world; grass (in more ways than one…) cannot help to grow amongst the negating pavements…

As a general rule pessimist are great stylist, (with the exception of Nietzsche, but maybe because he is also the cruelest of philosophers) optimist are too busy working about their content in a never ending justification or rationalization of appearances (Hegel’s labor or tarrying of the negative) to worry about “mere” ornamentation.

While of course for a pessimist, style is all there is; for a pessimist the content of the world is plain to see, yes to the Hegel’ “sense-certainty”, the senses do no deceive (for the optimist or rationalist they always do, that is their affirmative starting point) esthetes of the abyss, they enjoy expressing the farce-horror of life’s tale told by an Idiot “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” (maybe I should get off my dogmatic post/modernist fixation and around to reading that Shakespeare guy…after all) - or at least it’s more fun than death or suicide.

Cioran always maintained had he not had the idea of an exit/escape (i.e. suicide) he would have killed himself long time ago…instead of dying on his death bed with Alzheimer disease; an ironic and almost Nietzschean way to die for a self-confessed pessimist.

On the other hand, Cioran believed in nothing and forgot everything, he was far too ironic to believe, in pessimism or anything else for that matter (that is his Deleuzian charm)…ironic on the edge of his slippery slippers abyss, (or more aptly “myse on abyme”) how could he not be, in the postmodern age of disbelief and hyperconsciousness: “we live in a hell were every moment is a miracle”...

While…Schopenhauer was like Freud, a hyper-rationalist in a dark, irrational universe (and by now a hyper-ironic universe)…a rational labyrinth in a maze of insanity…or is it a universe lost in the fun-house of a Gödelian strange-loop caught within infinity?…Cantor maintained that the set of all sets (that includes all sets) is God, or the void for Badiou, or maybe it is a Dog after all… woff…wooff..woooff….wooooff etc…Dog = God and EVIL= LIVE, this is what is supposed to happen when you play 80’s black metal (is there a pink?) backwards…how do you play a vinyl backwards? Never found out…I guess I never will……ok…quit the rammmmmbling… Leaving you with the Oscar Wilde of the abyss:

Cioran (my favorite chat up lines…)

Life creates itself in delirium and is undone in ennui.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

To Live signifies to believe and hope - to lie and to lie to oneself

By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.

Everything is pathology , except for indifference.

Mosaics of Lost Time - Alice in Wonderland

I remember…. when we used to wake up at midnight…Mozart’s requiem of voices would greet us on the laser gyrating platinum…lines of coke on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”.., vodka and ecstasy would peak us above the horizon…like vampires we would awake from our coffins, pupils dilating into orbs of dead moons, seeking not blood, but the life pulse of the city’s techno beats…

I remember…those Goth’ eyes of yours dancing almost naked in the ultraviolet strobes of light, the beat would be relentless…dance or die…I would kiss your violet lips, it felt like kissing infinity, beauty multiplied by a million taken to the power of infinity. Our bodies would lose themselves into a million of shards of crystals within mirrors, reflecting abysses within abysses…Van Dyk’s “for an Angel” would flap us on and on and on…

I remember…melting into flows of lava, every peak such a total ecstasy that it felt like oblivion, there has never been so much pleasure and ecstasy…that it turned into its extreme reverse, excruciating pain, as such, every valley was a relief, a moment of sanity before the roller coaster took me up again to the infernal peaks. I have never burned so much with you Alice ever….like a moth drawn to a flame consumed by fire within fire….

I remember…our come downs…our “massive attack” chill outs…cuddling each other so strongly for fear it would not last, sex would have ruined it…If I recall correctly, we probably never actually got a/round to having sex; after total love and ecstasy what could there be… we cried…it almost felt like a crime…we had truly stolen the fires of heaven from the gods, and there was a certain pride in it…this wasn’t happiness but heaven in a maze, for the fear of retribution was never far away ( the chemical gods do get angry...)…sleeping throughout the day, the curtains perpetually drawn day and night, vodka bottles and foiled papers of scattered caramel traces with white scrolls circling the one side of our bed, the artificial non-smell of Mdma gently aromatizing the bed-side table…we would sleep-wait until midnight silently stoned almost without a word or breath for fear of disturbing the circle-balance of heaven we found ourselves in…to step beyond the circle again// would be to lose it all, surely another emerald-ruby night is not possible….yet it was, until the twilight dawn…

I remember…as vampires addicted to life we arose again, the doors of our catacombs creaked open, blowing the closed curtains with tremors of silky folds, the fresh night air of the city twinkled in our deadpan eyes; yes, it was going to be another night, another joyriding on the stolen ecstasy of the gods…

I remember…that it was never enough…we got addicted to each other, and everything else chemical or otherwise, were mere means to get higher and higher, every limit a temporary limit, a mere testing boundary to our unholy faith…this wasn’t love,,,but madness…none of us could take it...we knew it would not last, like your favourite band “Joy-Division” love would truly tears us apart…and of course, bang on time the grim-reaper appeared, “it” and you vanished without a trace, as if it never happened…..

Wherever you are Alice, you have haunted me for nearly a decade…either dead or alive, or maybe knowing how foxy-cute, sharp and narcotic you are, probably in between, always paraphrasing Morrisey’s “thinking about life or death, nooone of which are very appealing….” Indeed, between life and death is where we all want to be….

Kaleidoscope vs. Stereotype - The Gem like Flame

One of Deleuze’s missing footnotes from “Difference and Repetition”: Walter Pater’s (like Deleuze another Kaleidoscopic aesthete of/from the Chaosmos) famous conclusion - The Renaissance:

“To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike”.

Whether “artificial” or “natural” there can be no ecstasy without a singular/spiritual repetition within all the social and bio micro/macro repetitions forming/habiting our daily selves…keeping the repetitive and singular flame alive through the habitual material repetitions is the most im/possible thing in life.... there is no other difference, no other differential ecstasy worth fighting for:..a kaleidoscopic flame frozen within amber…

Infinite Creation vs. Finite Decreation

In the major strand of…the western religious-aesthetic-philosophical discourse the question of Difference is isomorphic with the iso/function of “spirit”: to elevate or “infinitize”, create, disrupt and sublimate and is indissociable from Repetition i.e. “matter” - whose function is always to “finitize”, mechanise, bring down and establish identities (and “desublimate” or “decreate” them again)…. Sade (no.. not the cute singer… what a beautiful contrast!) Schopenhauer and Freud are probably the sole thinkers approaching “bare repetition” i.e. the truth of the matter of materialism (with a minimum “human all too human” idealism/“spirit”//through the back door) - they portray existence as a process of “decreation”: life creates (better.. has created) in order to destroy with as much suffering and blood as... possible…while Bergson and Deleuze frame life as an infinite boundless creating creation, no limits except our social selves with their petty ego driven representations….