GOA – Kali Moonshine

Goa, India. December 6, 1997. Any day now, the season's about to start....moon months of acid, Thanatos, Eros, drug-busts, pure ecstasy, synthetic blips, trance, smack and moonshine. Any day now…. "I shouldn't be telling you this," whispers an English DJ from Birmingham, close to Goa's hidden workings, "but we're in for roller coaster and there are no valleys, only peaks. We have to wait however, cause the local kids are taking exams and the authorities do not want a load of fucking drug casualties stumbling about, It'll put them off their schoolwork." …we would not want that would we? to disturb the growing economic nightmare, sorry, tiger, from its studious grazing…

The build up to that first party is hyper-tense…that first kick off land is awaited by all with trepid tremors. The beaches are so womanly beautifully smooth it’s a crime to look…hard to breathe, humidity so dense it could cut a knife…at last, release: "a moon party…Monday”….

”Vita Femina” , “Life is a woman”, as Nietzsche would say, maybe he was thinking of Kali the four armed skulls wearing blackness, the Indian Goddess of annihilation and destruction, hence, of creation and life affirmation. Shiva is never too far behind, waiting in Kali’ blood stained shadows…

…"It's bad for Indians to see such things" says a middle-aged Indian smoking Ganja in a chillum…talking about blackness… this is the finest blackness in the world mmmm…

"You westerners think it is so easy, so spiritual, come here and you can live well for just a few dollars. On what you would spend on just one meal in your own country you can live for months here, what any Indian would die for, you waste for. You do nothing but waste energy …ok, hook me up to the national grid, or whatever the Indian equivalent is, if they have one… he continues, among puffs of narcotic smoke…just breathing it is already inhaling the madness of the gods… "You take too many drugs it's a bad example to India. It's not a good thing for upcoming Indians to see this much liberation"…liberation, or is that waste…aren’t the two synonymous?...

…there's a cute Indian girl hanging and talking with the western party travellers. She has just finished an MA in software engineering…how fucking original is that!.....from Delhi University and is taking time out to trav­el up and down her Kali-immense country. She wearing tight Calvin Klein denims, a purple “I’m an innocent slut” T-shirt…or something to that effect, well that is the west for you…did I say marketing…another thing to try for India’s starving masses... and high-hell sandals…is that not a contradiction in terms, fashion is cruel, stupid and effective, they all want to belong…and carries designer Gucci label baggage. Most of the hippy party goers…no I’m not a hippy, kill all hippies, haven’t you heard of punk, Kali’s anarchy in the universe…the spiritual ones, annoy and irritate her, because they only want to see the old India, the ancient places, they don't have time or curtsey for India’s evolving computer…hey Bill, there is an Indian up your arse…..film Bollywood here I come… bank­ing, investment…ehh ehn oh a no comments…fine arts…hard to stifle a yawn, how boring…"I like the parties," "It’s fun, wild, good - but it’s weird also. It's somehow too easy down here, too wonderful a fool’s paradises were all that glitters is not gold…what if it was…ok…silver will do…

….however, for us, it’s the package-charters who piss us off, we contemptuously dismiss them as hedonistic pimps, 'two weeekers' without grace or excess. Two weekly-weepers of booked returns invade the land of sweetness and light…

…this coming party, like many others, is for the Goa’s aesthetes: those holy graces that stay for months, roaming from hole to hole, and don't have regular lives-jobs back home…

The kind of people who are prepared to die for a gram, a pill, a kiss, and yet, somehow, always make it to the end, no doubt because excess is a sacrificial duty here. The moon and white beaches of Goa don’t ask for less. You have to earn the respect of Kali and only excess will do: burn…burn...burn like the thundering flames wavering in the distance, where all night/day the Hindus burn their dead on crackling pyres, filling the night with the acrid smell of burned flesh…Kali is everywhere…

There are some other western travellers inhabiting the outskirts of Goa, like the so called “Rainbow tribe”: who take long-term medita­tion studies, learn Sanskrit or work for months on end as Mother-Theresa vol­unteers in Kali ridden Calcutta. Some of them don't have any respect for the Goa Technoids. "Those techno-trance people” spits out an Italian Rainbow girl, "they just bring their own fucking culture to India. This is a good place to explore something spiritually different from the material west, but as long as they have their techno drugs they don't seem to care…indeed…we dance on the synthetic void and crave for a whiter moon…

“…have you ever felt so free? "No" smiles the girl with the purple shades. "Welcome to Goa."…

“Ok space cadets... prepare to hurtle yourselves through the cos­mos, hyperspace yourselves in twelve dimensions….” blips the sampled trance track played across the moonlit darkness...

We dance to the side of Kali in unison with her cosmic dance - her relentless beat and rhythm in divine synchrony with the trance of our synthetic machines.

Avid seekers of an infinity beyond all dawns, we reach that bittersweet point of no return where life and death are no more - no more fear, no more angst, no more neurosis and civilised decorum…

We taste the quintessence of freedom on our synthetic-lysergic coated tongues, and want more…of course…the black goddess is ever present in the shadows of our dancing lights….awaiting for blood and overdose to come her way…who will be sacrificed? No one knows…or cares…

Death is the authentic seal of our excess, without it, it would be all a joke, another packaged life from weepy-two-weekers.com, and no spirit would be present…Kali accepts only spirit; there is no counterfeit that can pass her scrutinizing mad ruby eyes, they red glow in the moonlit darkness… shadowing by moonlight, Kali sees all, and forgivee nothing...

Mercy…Mercy…Mercy, Mandy K…

I remember in early nineties when I was squatting in London’s King’s Road (always squat within the land of the posh!!) I met the purest of girls in a luxury of style:

Invariably, her black eyes were heavily underscored as if it had been weeks since she had last succumbed to the weaving hands of Morphus. As the days went by, an always whiter and whiter skin, wider and wider eyes, as if there was never enough light, avid pupils hungry for more light. It is always the beginning of the habit that is the most beautiful, because of the strangely ethereal transparency the skin takes on in the early days of the pristine dawn…

As the life of the body dwindles, the soul tries to ascend the valley of the body. She was destined to lose, but oh boy! (her favourite expression) what a ride…She ascended and ascended… double, triple, quadruple, the white light…Light and more Light…a translucent angel flapping in a luminous void…

There is always a light, neither inner nor outer, to reach…and it is of course, never enough; a perpetual falling in a gravity of cotton, that is neither ecstasy nor the negative of ecstasy, but rather, the underside of ecstasy. It is almost ecstasy turned inside out. If ecstasy had a shadow, this would be its experience: it is not “take the best orgasm you ever had, multiply it by a thousand and you are still nowhere near it” but rather, a total subtraction, neither addition or multiplication. Take all the best orgasms you have ever had, subtract them to the power of a million, and you are still nowhere there: a collapsed ecstasy under the weight of its own gravity – the ecstasy of an infinite density.

“I was bored” she told me “I decided to experiment. For 3 months I’ll take, and then I’d stop. I wanted to experience this rush that people laid down everything for it, the experience of an extreme purity on the edge of chaos, and then I’ll stop”, yes, yesss of course, sweeter in hell than the heaven they give us…

Eventually, if you waited long enough, an afterglow of a halo emerged, an angel out of the gutter, and then back again…never saw her again, except her crying mother. Always running with the quicksilver flow of life, thinking one can be swifter than death, but I guess not… The shadows of death catch the good, the bad and the high in equal measure.

Mandy K, R.I.P…Somewhere, beyond or nowhere…
…if nothingness or the void could be experienced we would forget to die…

Eyes and Bodies – The Dark Side of the Moon

The dark side of the moon: in shades of cobalt-blue, towards an erotic darkness we fall…

Not happiness, we live for beauty…and yet, how we always ruin it. How deep the disease of matter eats into the human body. We want to posses and control; whether, it is “just” physical attraction, the lust of one night, the love of three months, the kindness between two passing strangers…no we can’t take it, we must buy, have and show power, we want to cash it all, always go to the bank of our needs and status, control freaks opening up the coffins of exchange. Fear, always fear to lose, or that we might be taken for a ride…despite the fact, that for a few hours, days or seconds we felt what beauty/life was all about: “the best things in life are free”, and how strange that we can never live up to that freedom, and yet, it is all “there”, in the flagrance eyes of passing strangers, the yearning never ends… If souls could speak they would not tell us…

Glimmering techno ladies that fill the night with their graces and empty it with their egos…

We are not what we seem to be, or think we are what we want to be. We are acted upon by the images projected by our imagination, optical illusions reflected off the opaque surfaces of existence…

After and before ecstasy, life is a sublime climax that never comes…

Half-glimpsed behind empty forces, we are lead towards a boundless circumference…

Half-glimpsed and half-tried, the expended night always leaves stereo traces of a bitter sweet melancholy…

Shimmering summer nights: her hands tied above, criss-crossing both hands over an arch of naked steel…her eyes reflected deep pools of light, almost whispering: “it’s the way, not the climax, just the flow…”

Extremes of desire burning in the night, spirited illusions of a viral infinity…

A sense of ease in the lightness of existence is the spirit of life…

Freedom can only come out of beauty…

Marble Cool - Dionysian Cuts

The crude and the pure: one seeks a purity of expression that verges on being a crude poetics…

Eros is always about our desire for the impossible-real, not the real of our egoistic illusions that imprisons relationships, but the real that eludes materiality…

Dionysus dances techno, feeding on grapes of rainbow pills, singing tales of chemical sex, lust and love…

Sparkling nights, where everything twinkles, eyes, lights, skies, and desires…

…beauties who nurse their skin by moonlight and stagger around the meat rack, abyssal eyes spiralling with drugs for every star. All those girls that go too far, prolonging the ecstasy till dawn…maybe…just maybe, share a spiritual secret…

Pills of many colours reflected the caramel opaqueness of smack…

Sweat and ecstasy remained in a state of lived music. Hard-edged, metallic, molecular and bass driven: abstract rhythms of silvery nights…

…on the dance floor a crowd locked into the groove, faces and bodies cutting angular shadows against geometric patterns of coloured beams…

…naked…the girl’s skin perspired a dense abstractness, mirroring hues of metallic blues, greens and rusty silvers; the colours shimmered, rearranging shifting surfaces across her marble-cool skin …unhinged from the beat ambiance, she looked like a beautiful otherworldly extraterrestrial siren washed up on the sublime shores of an alien lust…

Time and matter, for once, stood still…hours, minutes and seconds dripped dropped like sinuous lava, melting everything, stripping all of life’s lust and pornography away…yet, full of erotic longing….

…lights made of infinite colours drawing vectors and arcs of optical designs, greeted us beyond the boundaries of time and space…

It’s all about Crystals - Crystal Infinities

Writing should be a search, a quest through words, whose only direction is the beyond of words - life in its pure sacred immanence…

Writing is not about stories, theories and contents, which in our post-modern world have been exhausted to the point of sick parodies, but rather, a clearing of words through words – to write the crystal thunder of silence on the opaque infinity of being…

The infinite soul of man for the finitudes of science: not only is God dead, but Faust is about to collect his dues, any moment now....

What does one do, when one sees an infinite promise full of life and beauty? one tries to catch those eyes, maybe to glimmer a possible empathy, even to try to capture the secret possibility of a spiritual communion - whose reality will always be in dispute, even after the event - was it all an material illusion?

The crystal quest: find and inebriate the true passion of minerals and crystals, and break on through to the other side of infinity…

The only feel and hope there is: to live under the archway of a crystal infinity…

If there is nothing, and all is matter, why the perpetual epiphenomena of life and self?

In-between spirit and matter, shimmering mirages in a desert of illusions….

A general emptiness from time to time infuses all things: people speak, but, they don't make sense, apart from a strange phonetic cacophony; almost like, slivering lizards bathing in the white coldness of multiple moons....silvery lizards hiding in-between the city’s shapes and shadows...

Eyes that exchanged nothing, except the void of each other…

Night-time in the ultraviolet shaded city: under cheap neon lights and the thudding vibes of elegant beats, he waits, for a female design to emerge, out of the undifferentiated darkness, into the crystal light…He sat down, near the edge of the dancing crowd, a void looking for another void. Then, one fall of light caught his eyes; emerald eyes reflected the gyrating lights around the dazzling shards…

Dressed in black, slits high in front…dancing away all she had, Valerie felt, at last, a kind of melting freedom, gently surging itself to the pounding rhythms, gently pressing her inside, or so it seemed, for the heroin-ecstasy mix was already fading blue...

A sacred whore from Babylon, rising from the shadows of the gods...or maybe not...a material girl graving for thrills, tricks and chemistry…

London Calling

Saw a beautiful face of a darkly woman appearing out of the top branches of a ..tree blowing in the wind, above my window. Quite an uncanny appearance almost surreal in its face-branch design, a true epiphany…one always waits, mostly in vain, for these spiritual singularities/events to happen which open-up for an instant the suffocating no-exit immanence of material existence….from time to time, a luminous sign of an exit called transcendence flashes in the dark cinemas of our existential matter…

…and talking about events and matter, London after New-York and Madrid has been hit by a series of “terrorists” attacks. As if life wasn’t difficult enough keeping a job down and commuting to work everyday…of those London commuters who woke up this morning to go to work like any other day, some of them are dead, and most of them are severely injured…keeping a job down in the major cities of the west is becoming like Russian roulette...of course, this is what the terrorists want, to breed a perpetual atmosphere of fear, disorientation and panic, to break down the “enemy” psychologically and socially… this is the ultimate Foucauldian breeding of the “panopticon”: the ultimate presence in the most widest sense possible with the fewest means - the terrorist eyes and presence are everywhere covering the largest area possible, even when they are not there, and no bombs are present - the terrorists also know their Deleuze, to avoid major capture keep the cells rhizomatic and avoid the tree…

Chaosmos - The Aesthetics of Grace

Beauty is always wild, untamed; a Dionysian frenzy pursued in form, a pure gift of exuberance, a rarity not a commodity…

Spiritual singularities that break the matter of the linear world are the eternal hypocrisies of all times…

Amongst the tones of flesh and curves that one chooses, it’s important to remember that they are signs of ones own transcendental instinct, that such "attunements" have to be trained towards an intense "microscopic messianisms": to pierce the modern life-chains, and reveal all around us the infinity of nuances and gains of imaginative graces…

You can buy women’s finite bodies and simulations but you can’t buy their infinite ecstasies. Whether poor or rich, one is either lacking in matter or completely imprisoned by matter. One hopes for more. Isn’t this why we say, spirit, love or Eros rule the world, yet, simultaneously hypocritically, we always fail to hear those calls, the calls of the sirens…

Chaosmos - Life is all about floating selections in a sea of inconsequentials; yet, this savage intensive sea, this web related background of undifferentiated heterogeneity, is the necessary backdrop, for the extremes of the peaks and the singularities of selection to emerge…out of the mass of undifferentiated relations…

Art is what life is all about…

A summer night falls on our cities and ourselves, in the gentle breeze of the shimmering lights they lusted in their sweaty golden reflected light, two oily undulating reptiles from another Eden…

Rituals of pain and pleasure took place in dark rooms of velvet hues, ivory breasts were plunged into pressing hands. Lips of luscious red kissed over legs of divine proportion tied in black streams of silk…finalizing an invisible contract with an ebony angel…

Her body reflected the dark underside of a strange spirituality…

She stopped dancing as if exhausted, moved nearby to those eyes that she could not help enticing, or even resist...if only she could yield a bit more, without fear…

Lust of love - They began walking through the dancing crowd into the dark streets outside, through the electronic sounds of the beating hearts he followed her, with the white light moon above and the city’s amber fire ahead, in tune with the hollow rhythms of her high-heels clicking on the pavement. Arriving at the outskirts of the city, amongst the broken down factories and empty iron barracks casting heavy shadows he turned to her as she pouted out her luscious lips...they both embraced under twisted steel, bathing in the sun of an oblique moon...and he languidly whispered “I lust you…I want to fuck you…“

What is the sea? a chaos of translucent droplets within drops…

I love you I love you – Pretty Vacant

Eerie, eerie….

The denizens of the spectacle have reached such levels of celluloid awareness that they are unable to stop the filming, even when the outside-filming has allegedly stopped. This desperate “strange-loop” logic of the spectacle is fully illustrated by the infamous Pamela Anderson’ “sex” video, where Tommy Lee cannot stop filming, even though he seems to be fucking for “real” the most beautiful woman in the world; yet, he still wants to film, so that he can masturbate to the recorded digits….so=- even when you get the most ejaculated woman in the world you still film…eerie…it seems there is no escape from the “strange-loop” infinite regress levels of the spectacle, no absolute meta or outside exit…Tom and Pam between their cocks and cunts scenes shout: I love you, I love you, I love you… they are not quite sure, hence, they have to repeat the sacred words innumerable times throughout the video…one can’t help perceiving an eerie glow emanating from the video’s recorded action, on the side of the living-dead maybe, “pretty vacant” as the spectacular sex-pistols:

Oh we’re so pretty oh so pretty vacant
But now and we don’t care
Don’t ask us to attend cos we’re not all there
Oh don’t pretend cos I don’t care
I don’t believe illusions cos too much is real
So stop your cheap comment
Cos we know what we feel
We’re pretty pretty vacant
We’re pretty pretty vay-cunt
And we don’t care

Barely Legal - From Botticelli to Bacon

…our high/low “cultural” representations are the most violent in a world that compared to the past is the least violent in actuality (at least in the happy go lucky West): enframing all media representations to the auto-logic of capitalism, which effects the automatic permutations of/to the extreme: hard rock becomes heavy-metal, then trash, etc…porn, gonzo porn etc…horror, gore, hip hop rap, gangster rap…the faster they go, the sicker they go…on and on..:from Botticelli to Francis Bacon; courtly love to hardcore-porn, gothic sublimity to slasher gore etc…

And yet, this has not always been the universal case. One only has to contemplate the art of the middle-ages, to see that it is a pure and positive inverted heavenly mirror of the real violent negatives: deaths, plagues, miseries etc…of daily life. Our culture is the exact opposite, what Nietzsche and many others called a decadent age, enthralled and fascinated by the very antithesis of their boring fat lives…like domesticated animals grinding against their cages entranced by the wilderness beyond…hence, the violent representations circling around the mediasphere…

And the people who consume the violence of representation, are the fat classes of suburbia who have never stared death or Eros in the face: the bored teenagers with their dead eyes on weed, the dads who slip the gonzo videos to ejaculate to “barely legal” pony-haired girls taking it up into their cum dripping carnivorous voids …the mums who dream of male seducers from the outskirts…

This is the classic Freudian “condemnation” of culture and civilization, but with a big difference; all the diverted repressed materials of sublimation are now out in the open: the unconscious as a libidinous screen, not a dark theater. This is what Freud could not predict: the libidinous botany and flora of the dark continent of our collective unconscious, would literarily exteriorize itself out onto the digital celluloid.

Freud underestimated the power of sublimation, because he was not exposed to the media medium of high-technology; he could not imagine that capital/technology could take over and colonize the unconscious, to externalize by objectify it: glossy print, celluloid, digital, silicon…

Yet, this media mediated exteriorization is severely different from the surrealists who attempted to do the same through aesthetics: capitalism hijacked the unconscious and determined to make a profit out of it; as everything else, another standing reserve to exploit. And who says exploitation (i.e. business), upholds the values of the common, the blandest and homogenous: the unconscious is reduced to a stereotype of form, within stereotypes of content.

Capitalism can take anything except instability, and will not tolerate lacks of identity (how //ever temporary and ambiguous) of any kind (the fashions of authentic belonging reigns supreme) whether conscious or unconscious.

Cinderella and the Big-Other

Things to do on “reality-TV” (as there is.,- fuck all else to do): read aloud the collected works of Baudrillard and Debord (or better just show the covers); discuss with your baboon inmates an complex hybrid of Berkeley’s and Anselm ontological proof of the existence of God and reality: how a bunch of morons can watch a bunch morons and still know that they exist if God is not watching, hence, God exists, since he is too busy watching himself...Peruse the collected works of Marx and Marcuse, by quoting abundantly from their works, focusing on the one-dimensionality and commodity fetishism of the capitalistic mode of production…proclaim no-logo Naomi Klein the pinup of the decade and that you want to see her naked in Playboy (or better still, Hustler) for didactic purposes7of course!: isn’t this the perfect illustration of Bataille’s eroticism, the non-logo queen in the logoliest of all brands? Well you get the drift…. and it's bound to happen; either because an automatic permutation of the spectacle is missing, or because of those unemployable PhD philosophers (of the continental variety) roaming around the streets likee packs of eye sunken wolves - intellectual expenditure without economic return (or is that suicide?) …would make Bataille proud ….

One could say it has already happened. Germaine Greer a “radical” feminist, always ready to criticize the phallic idiocy of the male species, happily Zooing in Big-Brother’s spectacular animalism…Who is next? Judith Butler?, Julia Kristeva? Luce Irigaray?, Helen Cixous?.

Do not all feminist secretly want their MTV, to erotically succumb back to their animal seductive simulating origins? Isn’t this what feminine “jouissance” is all about, the secret yearning for the porn dominance of the Lacanian “Big other”?...the spectacular slut within at last!!!...there goes Bataille again….and I’m off to dream about cute poststructuralist feminists engaging in somewhat / unorthodox theorizing in the boudoir

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….

Time and Infinity - The calls of the Sirens

Unlike Odysseus we must hear the Sirens, those beautiful voices singing infinity and time from a bottomless sea…without crashing our ships in the process…

To think or intrude on the infinite…the outside…is seen by Kant as the perpetual seductive madness of reason that must be resisted by any means necessary. For Kant of the first critique, reason is an island,] but it is always tempted by its own imagination to go beyond the shores of possible experience, the tempestuous sea of the outside - the sirens of infinity and time.

The only thing we can think or experience is our human all too human finite limits. To think beyond the categoricals that Kant so laboriously expounded is not only incoherent,, but sheer madness - the stuff of poets, junkies and DMT psychonauts…not sane philosophers…

Of course to posit a limit is immediately to invite transgression…the speculative madness of German idealism is the product of such attempted transgression. The irony being, that father Kant generated a brat pack of unruly children whose only oedipal cry was: “fuck off… I’ll show you the thing-in-itself”. Fiche, Schelling and Hegel are the speculative “madnesses” that Kant sought to avoid, Leibniz seems critical in comparison….But of course, they were far too bourgeois, far to “pipe and slippers” academics to risk real movement, real transgression, they wanted the power not the danger, they were fakers of the absolute, mere mimics of the infinite…Kant could rest in peace after all.

We had to wait for Nietzsche’s hammer to dynamite the whole finite Kantian edifice to bits, at last the sea opened up, through the experience of the “eternal-return”. But is Nietzsche’s “eternal-return” really the ultimate? Is it the infinite and time of thought and experience? Or is it another ploy for substituting infinity for finitude, time for eternity? being for becoming? While time may be infinite matter/space is finite, hence the recurrence of all possible life combinations again and again….

What if a midnight demon told you that all that you have ever lived and experienced will never recur, never ever again, neither in form or content…never again, ever again, will there be a sun, an earth to revolve around…what would you do then?

A Neutral Universe - Cynicism, Fatalism and Transgression

In my personal experience Italian Catholicism (my last girlfriend was Catholic, God bless her!) is a strange breed of cynicism, fatalism and transgression. I must say, it has a certain aesthetic, if not erotic charm....

All of which // reminds me of Georges Bataille….

Georges Bataille’ whole thought-sensibility is Catholic, in form and content: marriage, church, sin, guilt and “god” are all there, mirrored in negative form. Bataille’s very meaning of eroticism is Catholic - the essence of eroticism is transgression - echoing Kierkegaard’s aesthetic reflections in “either/or” that it was Christianity that brought Eros into the world, not the pagans of antiquity.

More aptly put, eroticism is a verb not a substantive - it is what “happens” to a homogeneity or body. It is transgression not in the dialectical sense, but in the irreversible form of something that “happens” and disrupts, but never appears as such.

Eroticism is “opposed” to sex or pornography and the so called sexual revolution: the order of the “restrictive economy”, repressing eroticism’s “general economy” within.

For Bataille religion, marriage, taboos etc (homogenous orders) are immanently necessary; they give values to an otherwise neutral universe. And likewise, the transgression of those particular values “founds” the values of those values...When a “woman” succumbs to eroticism, it is marriage or personal/social integrity (the fear of loss of control, degradation, “good/bad girl”, etc…) that is the ”foundation” that “founds” the subsequent sacred excitement of eroticism.

Bataille’s eroticism is always feminine in attitude, feminine “access” for the male: as Levinas’ Eros/femininity, it is a moment of otherness/alterity in the masculine/ego economy of the same. Bataille is well aware of the Feminists of the future, and posits Femininity (as Levinas does) in terms of gender, hence applicable in principle (but not in present actuality) to both man and woman – which may have the paradoxical effect of destroying eroticism for both man and woman, if it is economized into “equitable equality”…

Eroticism’ sacred vertigo is due to a double-bind situation: the “im/possibility” of succumbing to the animal within and yet not quite being human either - an angst suspended state of grace between two impossible polarities - this is definitely not California’ symmetric porn… or the asymmetric Gonzo Gymnastics of Porn Machine “Rocco Siffredi”.

The aporia is, that while porn is “exciting”, it is not: it is a boring void in the midst of physiological excitement, because it lacks the transgressive quality that only eroticism can bring (although it cannot help b../t to feed on it) which is neither visible nor genital.

Of course, pornography is the ultimate in visibility and genital hyperbole. Porn is the suppression by any means necessary of eroticism’ in/visible “general economy”….and sometimes like all “restrictive economies” of matter, it fails to completely repress the spirit within, erotic moments in porn movies sometimes happen… one inadvertent vulnerability gushes forth amongst the grinding physics…

The irony being that it is porn and sex that represses eroticism (and love?) not the other way around.

In our age of the hedonistic imperative it is sentimentality and love that are shocking and obscene…as Roland Barthes’ “A Lover's Discourse” " puts it: “a touch of sentimentality," would be "the ultimate transgression . . . the transgression of transgression itself . . . the return of love in another place”

Georges Bataille where he alive today, would no doubt be on the censor boards (and would make a good marriage counsellor) whilst writing such classics as:

“The Sacrifice of the Gibbon”

“In order to renew this tender pact between belly and nature, a rotting forest offers its deceptive latrines, swarming with animals, colored or venomous in­sects, worms, and little birds. Solar light decomposes in the high branches. An Englishwoman, transfigured by a halo of blond hair, abandons her splendid body to the lubricity and the imagination (driven to the point of ecstasy by the stunning odor of decay) of a number of nude men.

Her humid lips open to kisses like a sweet swamp, like a noiseless flowing river, and her eyes, drowned in pleasure, are as immensely lost as her mouth. Above the entwined human beasts who embrace and handle her, she raises her marvelous head, so heavy with dazzlement, and her eyes open on a scene of madness.

Near a round pit, freshly dug in the midst of exuberant vegetation, a giant female gibbon struggles with three men, who tie her with long cords: her face is even more stupid than it is ignoble, and she lets out unbelievable screams of fear, screams answered by the various cries of small monkeys in the high branches. Once she is trussed up like a chicken-with her legs folded back against her body-the three men tie her upside down to a stake planted in the middle of the pit. Attached in this way, her bestially howling mouth swallows dirt while, on the other end, her huge screaming pink anal protrusion stares at the sky like a flower (the end of the stake runs between her belly and her bound paws): only the part whose obscenity stupefies emerges above the top level of the pit.

Once these preparations are finished, all the men and women present (there are, in fact, several other women, no less taken with debauchery) surround the pit: at this moment they are all equally nude, all equally deranged by the avidity of pleasure (exhausted by voluptuousness), breathless, at wits' end . . .

They are all armed with shovels, except the Englishwoman: the earth des­tined to fill the pit is spread evenly around it. The ignoble gibbon, in an ignoble posture, continues her terrifying howl, but, on a signal from the Englishwoman, everyone busies himself shoveling dirt into the pit, and then quickly stamps it down: thus, in the blink of an eye, the horrible beast is buried alive.

A relative silence settles: all the stupefied glances are fixed on the filthy, beautifully blood-colored solar prominence, sticking out of the earth and ridicu­lously shuddering with convulsions of agony. Then the Englishwoman with her charming rear end stretches her long nude body on the filled pit: the mucous-­flesh of this bald false skull, a little soiled with shit at the radiate flower of its summit, is even more upsetting to see when touched by pretty white fingers. All those around hold back their cries and wipe their sweat; teeth bite lips; a light foam even flows from overly troubled mouths: contracted by strangulation, and even by death, the beautiful boil of red flesh is set ablaze with stinking brown flames....................................

Like a storm that erupts and, after several minutes of intolerable delay, rav­ishes in semidarkness an entire countryside with insane cataracts of water and blasts of thunder, in the same disturbed and profoundly overwhelming way (albeit with signs infinitely more difficult to perceive), existence itself shudders and attains a level where there is nothing more than a hallucinatory void, an odor of death that sticks in the throat.

In reality, when this puerile little vomiting took place, it was not on a mere carcass that the mouth of the Englishwoman crushed her most burning, her sweetest kisses, but on the nauseating JESUVE: the bizarre noise of kisses, pro­longed on flesh, clattered across the disgusting noise of entrails. But these unheard-of circumstances had set off orgasms, each more suffocating and spas­modic than its predecessor, in the circle of unfortunate observers; all throats were strangled by raucous cries, by impossible sighs, and, from all sides, eyes humid with the brilliant tears of vertigo”.

Well done George…

Fatal Strategies - The Divine Within

Since I still can’t sleep and insomnia is according to Cioran and Levinas the inlay epiphany of existence (in my case a stoned one, of the Skunk variety) … I guess, I’ll Blog on into the Chaosmos…as ever lexically incoherent and still hoping for more dubious chemicals coming my way....

The pope is dead (although God beat him to it) and the churches are still what Nietzsche called: the empty tombs of god. A strange post-modern irony is going on here. How come millions deeescended on Rome young and old, when every Sunday the local churches are half empty, populated by the ugly and the grey?

How come young people from around the world are praising a pope which would condemn their very being and acts (sexual or otherwise)? What’s going on if anything?

It reminds me of Zizek’s analysis of ideology (what no doubt has become in the post-modern age an ironic vertigo, ideology as irony) everybody knows the reality, they have seen through the opium veils of false consciousness yet they still do it; a case of “forgive them for they know what they are doing”.

Or is it a case of Baudrillard’s post-ideological, post-Debord seduction of signs in the simulacrum which has no other aim than to expend itself in the ecstasy of communication…Fatal STRATEGIES INDEED… the sheer seductive joy of participating in material ecstasy, without depth or intention - pure matter without spirit….all is surface and it definitely glitters, Jesus is a superstar…

Or could it be, dare I say, “ontologically genuine” - spirit gashing forth without exchange?

Between Commas , and Points ….

I always have a problem of where to insert the comma (Flaubert spent whole days putting the in or out of just one comma) so sometimes I prefer points…dots…. Just like in life one never knows where to put the pausing spaces and suspensions that are so necessary to keep the flow of life flowing...

The Vertrix – A Body Without Organs or a Corpse Without Organs?

Life begins with an E; it certainly did for me…Deleuze is right, Repetition is always of the singular (event); not repetition as a series of iterations of the same instance/individuation. It is the singular “first time” or Difference that repetition itself repeats – “the event” - to use Deleuze’s own examples: the festival, Monet’s lilies etc… When the Woodstock rock festival 'emerged out' (of all the previous rock festival repetitions) it was a singular event, all the subsequent series of Woodstocks (Woodstock 2000, 2001, 2002 etc..) are not a repetition of the same Woodstock festival iterating itself as the same festival throughout time, but rather the repetition of that singular event (i.e. the original Woodstock festival). This has the paradoxical meaning that what is actually involved in repetition is the always repetition of a singularity - not repetition of/as the same, the common or the general'

A real Repetition always involves a series (of itself through iteration) but what it repeats in-itself, is the first instance of itself - what Deleuze calls “Difference in itself”. It is this Difference that instigates and generates the subsequent series of (its) singular iterations – then, repetition breaks its serial line or continuum with a discontinuity and a Difference emerges out of the “same” singular repetition; which starts another series along another continuum which in turn produces a discontinuity (difference in itself) and a singularity or an event “emerges out”, and creates its singular series…and so on…

This is why the first (E)cstasy is always the best, the event in itself, the ecstasy breaks the previous serial habit of the continuum with a “difference in-itself”; a change of quality and intensity, which has no serial relation to what went before…hence the compulsion to repeat the experience; to take the ecstasy and create an ecstatic series - not to experience the same ecstasy time and again, but rather to repeat or in this case to recapture, the singular break of the differential “first time” event.

Philosophy is the ecstasy of thought, the heroin of contemplation: one of the reasons for my obsession for philosophy is the sheer disbelief that my being is bound or limited by chemistry (Deleuze always believed in the “Pharmacy” as he says in his Abecedary) and the subsequent realisation that one needs to fill in the chemistry with something else (philosophy is of course the worse "content" drug of all).

What Deleuze calls the “Virtual” is a deeply adequate conception for the realm of subjectivity (and nature which Deleuze "subjectivises" without the ontological primacy of the subject): there are whole potential intensities which are waiting endogenously to be actualized in our subjectivities, whole virtual spectrums of intensities which are hidden and made inaccessible by our habits and “ordinary means”…The Vital question is why something “Different in itself” is needed to access those virtual intensities, why the “intensive” needs an asymmetry, a disjunction, a disequilibrium to upset the habits of our mind and world. And it is always a question of relations, what new relations can effect a change in the “temporary nodal coagulations” (TNC) of Substance and Subject, not the Substance itself which has no dynamics. No essences only relations, such is the art of Rhizomatics (i.e. relations are external to their temporary subject which is in-itself just a bundle of previous relations)

The art of drug taking is to develop a symbiotic relationship which does not destroy you in the process - on the edge of Chaos: without falling into the abyss (what Deleuze aptly calls a black hole) such is the balancing act which has to be simultaneously maintained with and within an “vertrix” of disequilibrium - the intensive ethics-aesthetics of the Chaosmos:…seeking to reach the intensive ideal of crystals and their process of crystallization: the Deleuzian “body without organs”; not the “corpse without organs”, such is the challenge…