…liquid ambrosia flowed down her eyes…
…the spiral void kept increasing, wanting more and more, consuming fires that weren't even there…
.... Jaded girls caught the diamond eye....eyes of jade reflected the moonlit dance floor…beads of sweat trickled snake lines of spherical exhaustion…
She whispered more that she could tell…
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Monday, October 23, 2006
Huxley / Flaubert - Is this All?
Aldous Huxley shows the precise nature of the dilemma:
“My preoccupation with the subject of mysticism - an interest partly positive, partly negative; a fascination that was also hostile - dates back to my youth. The title of my first volume of undergraduate verse, The Burning Wheel, is derived from Boehme, whom I read while still at Oxford...The negative interest became positive in the early Thirties, not as the result of any single event so much as because all the rest - art, science, literature, the pleasures of thought and sensation - came to seem... "not enough." One reaches a point where one says, even of Beethoven, even of Shakespeare, "Is this all?"
If Huxley needed the illuminated realms of psychedelia, it is because, in the end, “all the rests” do not deliver…
From the realms of Psychedelia to the Aesthetic cult of Beauty:
"For me, there is only beautiful verse in the world, well-turned, harmonious, singing sentences, beautiful sunsets, moonlit nights, colourful paintings, marble sculptures of antiquity, and striking faces. Beyond that, nothing. I would rather have been Talma than Mirabeau because he lived in a more pure sphere of beauty. I pity birds in a cage as much as enslaved peoples. In all of politics, there is but one thing that I understand, riots”. (Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 6-7 August 1846).
Madame Bovary, c’est moi….
“My preoccupation with the subject of mysticism - an interest partly positive, partly negative; a fascination that was also hostile - dates back to my youth. The title of my first volume of undergraduate verse, The Burning Wheel, is derived from Boehme, whom I read while still at Oxford...The negative interest became positive in the early Thirties, not as the result of any single event so much as because all the rest - art, science, literature, the pleasures of thought and sensation - came to seem... "not enough." One reaches a point where one says, even of Beethoven, even of Shakespeare, "Is this all?"
If Huxley needed the illuminated realms of psychedelia, it is because, in the end, “all the rests” do not deliver…
From the realms of Psychedelia to the Aesthetic cult of Beauty:
"For me, there is only beautiful verse in the world, well-turned, harmonious, singing sentences, beautiful sunsets, moonlit nights, colourful paintings, marble sculptures of antiquity, and striking faces. Beyond that, nothing. I would rather have been Talma than Mirabeau because he lived in a more pure sphere of beauty. I pity birds in a cage as much as enslaved peoples. In all of politics, there is but one thing that I understand, riots”. (Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 6-7 August 1846).
Madame Bovary, c’est moi….
Sunday, October 15, 2006
The Black Sea of Infinity - The Lovecraftian Sublime
…hints of a new infinity, vast life forms from earth's deep time, human insanity with the appearance of a new star, the stellar unknown beyond the horizon, is always horrific…
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."' The Call of Cthulhu
Infinity, the perpetual grinding novelty of the cosmos, the virtual immensity in which all potentials await their realisations, the very cosmic existence that is affirmed by Deleuze and Bergson, is, for Lovecraft, a cosmic horror of unspeakable terror.
"the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness." (The Silver Key)
Let’s face it, a world of the infinite repetition of the same (Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s eternal return) or a world of the infinite repetition of difference and novelty (Bergson and Deleuze), either way, will not do…whatever the interpretation, we want something more, the sublime and the beautiful are no longer an option…the horror, the horror…and even more than that…
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."' The Call of Cthulhu
Infinity, the perpetual grinding novelty of the cosmos, the virtual immensity in which all potentials await their realisations, the very cosmic existence that is affirmed by Deleuze and Bergson, is, for Lovecraft, a cosmic horror of unspeakable terror.
"the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness." (The Silver Key)
Let’s face it, a world of the infinite repetition of the same (Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s eternal return) or a world of the infinite repetition of difference and novelty (Bergson and Deleuze), either way, will not do…whatever the interpretation, we want something more, the sublime and the beautiful are no longer an option…the horror, the horror…and even more than that…
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