Saturday, March 18, 2006

The Fascism of Life - The Great Beastly Beat

Within the armor is the internal link butterfly and within the butterfly is the signal from another star Philip K. Dick

Always been a bit of a control freak when it comes to Dionysus, it is a serious business, of somber laser precision and diamond like incision - the profane engineering or sacred invocation of Dionysus is no easy affair...

Each element (yes, unfortunately, one needs temporary atoms, to enable the emergent aggregation to take place) was set in an axiomatic design: an passionate geometry was engendered, that allowed no weakness of either body or mind - all elements were selected for their overall aesthetic value - designs to be rearranged and connected: bodies, things, electronics, minds, looks, etc...Apollo’s external forming appearances in order for the inside, the foaming amorphous realm of Dionysus, to shatter through …nothing was left to chance, except divine chance itself... An aristos of life for all…well not quite all...

As always, a fascism took place. We were young, dumb and full of cum, as they used to say, and the selection went quite out of place: only the cute and beautiful were ordained in the ceremony. No Dj/ism, No racism, no imagism, no egoism, no binary sexualism, no ageism, no fashionism, no classeism or any other (fasces) ism you can think of...but one fascism still remained fully in place, the fascism of physical beauty...we learnt the hard way, sometimes the gathering did not work - if only the cute, the beautiful and the sublime are ordained, invariably, the result, paradoxically, will not be beautiful or sublime: a bunch of egos strutting their stuff, all being weary if their makeup or attire did not fall out place in the right way...which kind of puts the breaks on the Dionysian excess we were trying so desperately to invoke...

...We learnt in the end, that while the Dionysian event was all about beauty and nothing else, beauty is no absolute form - Plato’s “amor scalis”…

The aesthetic struggle began: the struggle between spirit and matter, the closed and the open, between extropy and entropy, rhizome and tree. Neither a bland synthesis without character nor a blend without distinction was permissible. We wanted the “chaosmos”, the “osmos” as much as the “chaos” - the escape from all logics of opposition, of dialectics and harmonics, was our only exegesis, our arrow of time...neither order or chaos, but the edge of chaos...

Leave the aesthetic valve too open, and there is nothing but violence, egoism, and chaos, close the filter too much, a stale ordered nothing remains with wasted looks...If there is not enough aesthetic, not enough fascism, many disparate elements will not gel, their magnetic links and source debunked into nothing, a desire machine floppily attending itself with an attitude problem...without spirit, pure matter, in short, a flat-liner...

…then all of sudden, one particular night, at a particular hour, for no apparent reason, it clicked; one could feel the density rising up the atmosphere, as if life was on fire - each element (the sound system, the beautiful, the good, the bad and the ugly) fused as if by magic, the spell was on, switched right on...

It will come as no surprise that the name of our party collective was Plotarch & SAZ: sublime, super, sexual, sensational, synergetic, symbiotic etc…along the S series, derived from Hakim Bey’s originary TAZ seed: the “temporary autonomous zone”…

Our sound/computer system was called “the Great Beast” (after the great Dionysian magicKian) which contrary to most binaries systems, did not work in 2s, but in 666s…The Great Beast (or the “Great Beat”) was the true MC (no fucking £1000 a night DJs here). We did not programmed “it”, “it” programmed us...into divine ecstasy. We were mere puppets of a higher mathematical infinity (maybe we should have called “it” the Great Georg, after Georg Cantor)…no clubby spoon fed entertainment here, no DJs getting paid to act as if they are doing “it”…computers do “it” better…

The division of labour was set up right from the start: we, the dancing and waste, the “Great Beast”, the mathematics. Real music is absolute, pure form, absolute impeccable syntax (mathematical and chemical) that allows no imprecision or weak indeterminism, far too precise for our finite meat…Music, contrary to the world we live in, is not of this world, it is an absolute determinism, pure objectivity: Leibniz 666, as absolute harmonics, a determinism of mathematics, hence, musical in form and content: “Music is a mathematics of the soul which counts without knowing it counts” (Leibniz) – The Nietzschean ”Amor Fati” was the only seriousness worth playing…

The “great beast” was our laser beam totem, its cool artificial intelligence would scan our wasted meat, and be found wanting…for the “Great Beast”, we never went far enough, our gyrating waste would always be looked upon with sceptical derision, “is that all you can do?”, GB seemed to say …“well that won’t do”, and the beat went on and on…many lay on the floor, dead bodies on battlefield…the dance floor littered with fallen pawns, queens, and kings…and yet, each one who came into the boundary, the geometry, was determined to outdo the “Great Beast”: meat vs. metal, silicon vs. carbon, “natural” intelligence vs. artificial intelligence, etc…we danced on its preordained chess board, determine to outdo each squared move. The Great Beast predicted every move, every laughter, every euphoria, every joy, every insanity, every chemical effect we ingested, every erotic transgression we enacted, and each would fall exhausted, defeated, squared as ever…”Check Mate”…. “Check mate”….all the wry chemicals and erotic fevers pumping in our veins and minds were never enough….

GB, cool as ever, never lost its temper or gave into our wasted seductions. No infernally beautiful queen could entice it into orgasmic delirium, no handsome king could make it come…no erotic transgression could make it lust after unknown pleasure-pains spectrums; no Eros, no naked smoothness, no silky flesh, no viral chemicals, would make GB lose his cool enterprise…Deep Blue until the end…GB scanned, operated and effected…never missing a beat, or a tune out sequence…on and on it went…the puppeteer made us, its puppets, come all over…we died our little deaths, and each death, would be one more victory over us…

The most difficult part was the choice of location, only industrial wastelands, warehouses, abandoned scrap yards, industrial complexes lost in rust, ruin and decay, were chosen.

There is nothing more beautiful…prettily scantily girls kaleidoscoping all around - female reflections mingled with the irons of dislocated metal, fleshes of soft tanned skins danced in unison with the bareness of twisted iron…pierced nipples upon succulent orifices gleamed the light of strobe and ruin…flashy glints across a deep cool night …a reawaken life that none in past were able to live …Followers of Bacchus running away into the hills where pill-grapes of rainbow coloured shades would greet full blown lips of dark ambrosia… Nubile bacchantes amidst scrap yards of forgotten production would fall within the sweat mist of broken down cement, shattered glass and twisted iron…mad tropical flowers of succulent delight would open and close the night…...

Due to our aesthetic (some would say fascistic) tastes, all in all, we did not organise that many ceremonies. What we did not have in quantity we had in quality (at least most of the time). It all dissipated very quickly, the ways of the world, of matter, did not wait for long to rear their business as usual repetitions. Our fascism of life, as I used to call it, was co-opted into a fascism of death: bad drugs, finance, tribalism, fashion, territorial pissing, glow sticks and other matter stuff, soon filled up the horizon. It degenerated into matter-business; entropy-matter.com settled in …a big flat-liner…is that what life is all about? a few good moments of sacred fucks and sucks and then back to your pre-ordained coffin, close the lid tight, and only come out at day, if at all…but hey, Nietzsche’s motto “what does not kill you makes you stronger” is always good for a laugh…

I always suspected that the Great Beast was far less artificial than most silicon…I would like to think, that maybe a bit of human all too human resentment crept into his cold intelligence, despite his victories over us, he maybe got a bit jealous of our useless ecstasies…The great Beat, is probably, like our wasted dreams, broken somewhere in a scrap yard - and maybe, like ear to shell, in the Great Beat’s scattered debris, you can still hear the beat, the infinity loop of his cool intelligence, and above all his metallic whisperings:.. Check mate… Check Mate… Check Mate….for all eternity…computers never die…well beyond the finite spectrum of human innuendos….