Elective Affinities - To the Ones I Love

The great thing about love {or erotic attraction} is that “it” transgresses all boundaries: psychic/social bounds and territorial/nationalistic limits - if luck takes kind, one can either expend or fall.

Emmanuel Levinas is wrong, the other per se, is not a transcendental escape from our self-enclosed ego prison of pure immanence. Only a particular (elective) other will give us signs or means of escape. The other is an “object” like any other, immanent, material and egoistic, (an economic bundle of lust and unfulfilled desire) all the way down, like everything else; as Schopenhauer says, the Will swirls everywhere from the micro to the macro.

What makes the possibility of escape possible is the elective affinities between two self-enclosed subjectivities, two others, that on their own would be nothing, economically enclosed on themselves without eXtasy: we are all made of the same economic “wilful stuff”, and yet, some others are more equal than others…

How many elective affinities are there? How many erotic ones are there to light up the gargoyles of being? How many loved ones are there out there? Chinese, Japanese, African, Arab etc…what would be the age limit? illegal, 16, 20, 30, 40, 50, illegal; What would be the physical limit? How many elective affinities will never reach eye or spirit?

What would be she be doing right now?: a darkly Goth girl head-banging to a cradle of filth band of the moment, a beach girl wailing to the sea surfs of a Californian sunset beach; a managerial clean cut precision lady closing a deal in spires of neon light; a down and out junkie burning caramel for the night; high-cheek bones hitting her trade in the prowling shadows of Prague’s nightly visits; a Zazie skating rainbows in the metro; jaded ladies burning bright in the arcane boundaries of higher learning, studious ladies setting off the cold pages of laborious texts to a brighter immensity …right under my eyes?

Whilst all these virtual ladies exist in the actual, they exist divergently, will never actualize into the convergence of actual proximity - an ecstasy of life never shared, a higher peak of life never reached, a valley of rest never lived…

Are there any limits to love, to Eros? Why the marketing pretence of the absolute? Sex sells, ok, but why does Love or Eros sell? if there is no such thing…As a useless film once said: “Can a full grown woman fall in love with a midget?” The “beauty and beast” syndrome - the other way round seems less likely in our culture, ugliness or deformity for a man is a misfortune, for a woman unforgivable…

… lonely hearts in virtual space:…to all those virtual ladies out there in the cold infinity of our finite existence: maybe in the next world, or some other world beyond the known horizons of deep space…either way, a Lovecraftian pale beauty beyond all earthly bound existence, a whiter shade of pale, a thinly figure from the outreaches of unspeakable and unfathomable horrors of abysses within abysses, will do just fine…

The Moronic Inferno

By the time that an average adult will have reached full moronichood, “it” will have watched and heard with his full Technicolor senses:

1000.000.000 pop tunes
2.000 newsreels
7.000 movies
5.000 sitcoms
5.900 video games
3.567 porn movies
3.000 horror movies
2.000 commentaries “about” incomprehensible French/German thinkers…
……and the list goes on and on…

The junk piles up, up and down, around it goes...nowhere - the end of history and no/one has noticed…Baudrillard forever…

A World of Images

When it comes to the realm of the mind, there are no illusions; in the case of consciousness the appearance is the reality. There is no outside, no criteria except the social consensus: that is how one fells most of the time and sees most of the time, due to so and so social determinants, which then, as Foucault has shown, become bodily, chemical and physical. If “everybody” was on acid (like the psychedelic cultures of the Amazon, the shamanic cultures of the past) then that would be the reality. There are no absolute physicals out there, states of consciousness and states of reality are completely arbitrary - that is what so uneasy and frightening about psychedelic exploration; and what is so pathetic about philosophers, phenomenologist, and philosophers of mind is that all their “work” is done from a normal (i.e. arbitrary) state.

Bergson’s whole philosophy is based on the intuition, that there is only a distinction of degree between so called perception, and the things perceived, no fixed nature to see for once and all time - there is not on one side, the (brain) representation, and world (as represented) there is only a continuum. For Bergson, the universe is a collection of images, and the brain and body visions are also images, objects as much as any other objects, images caught within an infinite series of images; no absolute centre can determine the criteria of the world or the ultimate perspective. So affecting the brain chemically is not an illusionary praxis, but creation of more images within an infinity of other images, increasing the ad infinitum perspectives of the cosmic kaleidoscope: the universe twists and increases its images at every turn…

Amsterdammed - Stoned and Dethroned

Welcome to Amsterdam, Venice of the North...if things get really bad, you can always go to Amsterdam, from Spinoza to Camus, Amsterdam gives equal fall for all. For some unknown reason every time I go, I have never been able to get beyond the first circles of hell: the magnetic density of sex and drugs play their impeccable boundaries at every turn, always limiting me to the centrifugal center...no smiley wind mills or gushing tulips for me l guesws...

At night you can’t miss them: hundreds of ultraviolet female flowers fire up the central canals into a tropical hothouse…neon colored lingerie set- ablaze the circular arteries of the dammed city…framed within imperial windows they remain on their stools looking divinely cute....A female shaped hell of captured beauties...a female Zoo?..

With their lit up figures, these courtesans of the electric night seem to glow beyond all profane life, haloed in a whiter shade of purity. But appearances can be deceiving; they all look so soft tanned, child-like and chiseled from the outside, but on the inside, often, is quite different…

The transfiguration of ultraviolet light plays wonders, especially where there is nothing underneath to be transfigured. As Schopenhauer would say, life cannot be both a wonder and a willful reality all at once, something has to give....and invariably it does, mostly in the wrong direction, or if you are lucky, nowhere at all. Strange that life needs so many illusions to spur it on, you would think that hunger and lust would be enough...one of the very few blind-spots of “the will” that Schopenhauer does not, or is unable, to explain away...

Like the porn industry, and elsewhere in Europe, Amsterdam has received a capital influx of flesh from the East; which means that all previous criteria has/ been raised to the tenfold: beauty levels flowing to higher tones than one could possibly imagine. A brand of wild beauty is overflowing the known aesthetic spectrum, all known beauty gradients are transgressed one by one. Some of the girls are so beautiful it hurts; it pains to repay them so cheaply...Beauty is cheap, sex divine, love impossible...

Anywhere else, you get what is all around, but not here in Amsterdam, where things are turned upside down, for a while... And here I am as so many nights before: drunk, coked up, ecstasy downed, engorged with lust…ready to embrace a cheap darkness...into the streets one heads into the artificial covered night…cruising the main canals where girls “clothes” and make-up are made to flower under artificial suns, growing curvaceously tropical flesh in carnivorous designs…galvanized by artificial light, luscious reptiles bathe by florescent moonlight...

Lights sparkling her translucent baby-doll dress, legs lush and shiny, eyebrows puckered…a slight smile on her face as she eats nuts and sprouts, her only dinner for the night...the bottle of vodka flows...you find that she is from an industrial town in the Russian lands, where kids wear gas masks to school amidst fumes of chemical pollution...Siberia, Volgograd, Vladivostok, Kazakhstan, and all those other evocative high cheek bone names…they sound as cruel as they sound...

Some grueling anticlimaxes…the level of THC being so high, that one is, sometimes, even too high to come...they don’t just grow herbs here, they engineer them...

And then, the happy go lucky smiley ones, of the coffee-shops, mostly Dutch clubbing girls, just for week-end or night hookers: earning some cash for their wardrobe, synthetic drugs, and organic food. Here the line between cash and attraction gets blurred...It is amazing what girls will do, and not do, for cash, professional advancement or anything else that take[s their youthful fancies....

Down a side canal, she takes you somewhere against some damp wall, or walks you down into a basement of some building or “boat”…at other times they step warily out of hidden enclaves, and shatter you with their dazzling eyes that are reflected off by iced up waters...still spurred by the possibility that you might run across, somewhere among the many, the one, the one you have been looking for without aim, idea or goal... a fresh face from the underside appears, her first time, her feet a little sore from high heels, her first day at “work”....

...“The most beautiful women are on the street”, he roughly claims, street?, oblivious to the fact that there are no streets here, we are in Amsterdam, not NYC, I angrily argue, as if to make an ontological distinction of the uttermost importance; as if all reality depended on such babulations...does THC make you ontological, or just paranoid? ontology as applied paranoia?....“You just have to find them.” It’s On the “streets”...”It’s On the “pavements” he pimply continues...”where women come to earn hard currency; in hordes they descend, from all around the world; from all the impoverished cities and villages of the world, trading on their looks”, hoping to make enough to return one day, in glorious sunlight, after the fall, I boringly add...the oratory continues to flow right into depths of the frozen night...too far to care...

…A few are sunken and sullen, who drawn away as you kiss them....but with those sensuous lips and warm oval deep eyes, she could have graced covers, who could resist...I gently reach across and caress her face, and we kissed, a soft kiss on the luscious lips, on her tropically wild lips, a lover’s kiss? No way....

....In end, we wake up to Polaroid cheap-shots of ourselves, amidst stars of scarlet and white. Pale faces sinking in the background, either way there is no way out...dammed in Amsterdam…as a cheesy pop song used to go: Plastic eyes looking milky white…

Bad Films

Always the profane without the illumination, is this not what the cinematic screen is all about?

“I beg you, learn to see ‘bad’ films; they are sometimes sublime” - Ado Kyrou

…The Pristine Dawn of a New Year

If reality has been virally overcome into simulation, if the screen has eaten up the entire world in a fractal process of hungry simulations, can one not postulate a reversal taking place at some point in the future? Maybe, 2006 will get a few more beastly sixes to its empty v00ids…Time will reverse itself; the arrow of time will turn backwards, undoing all the simulations that have taken place from the start of the TVverse. Simulations will revert themselves back, pulled by the gnawing gravity of the Pac-Man real….the real will irrevocably eat up, from all around, the pixels that make up our plastic, always beeping, life support screens…

The cinematic screens of our life will dissolve and carnivorously melt the plastic from our life…the screen is dead, long live God….

Can the real caught without a reference, without the hope of ever hitting bottom, remerge? And realise the real? Again? this time for real… Can’t the real come back by gradually and virally infecting all simulation with its disruptive fragments of reality?

What will it take to wake up the dead?

Gradually, instant by instant, second by second, almost imperceptibly, all mediated phenomena will implode from within…: all electronic “communication” would suddenly stop working and whisper the absolute silence of the real…digital devices and celluloid would be dissolved from within…all memory appliances would suddenly reverse and rewind themselves by erasing themselves from all simulation, without leaving a trace…camera and TV would explode, not being able to contain the real expanding within…cinemas and blockbusters burned down by spontaneous fires of burning media…BollyHolly producers would suffer long agonizing deaths brought about by avant-garde serial killers wanting to realize their Hollywood “creations”…multibillion “producers” would be slashed in dark corners by an epidemic of suburban killers wanting moooooooooore, more real-special effects…Multimillionaire gangster rappers would be compelled to kill themselves for real, shoot themselves in the head for real, all porn stars would be compelled to fuck themselves to death, chanting “Viagra all the way, to the grave”…keep it real “Niggers With Attitude” Rappers would be forced by resentful fans to listen to RAP 24 hours a day, until their ears and “brains” ooze the blood of the real… ….hungrily emerging from the depths of the Beverly Hills’ sewers, a Spielberg would be eaten alive by a group of Zooless Jurassic alligators…electromagnetically pushed by the weight of the real, broadband and P2P networks would go auto-mad and download everything in existence, downloading the world to death…a King-Kong would escape a Los Angeles ZOO, looking for a mate, mysteriously drowning a Kate Winslet in Kong luscious cum, bukkake and bestiality has never been sooooooo gooooooood and real until this cUming day....
.....ZIZEK would be crucified and sacrificed (taking Baudrillard’s call for a post-modern philosopher sacrifice, à la lettre, for real) in the flashing reality of a Las Vegas, stuffed like a turkey with his own textual verbiage, by a resentful gang of Lacanians, who have suddenly discovered that Lacan is a load of bollocks, the emperor has no phallus...stickers everywhere proclaiming “Zizek died for our sins”…These roaming gangs of Laconic Lacanians having wasted their whole lives on the symbolic and the imaginary, deduce to mimetically spread their new found reality equation, their new Christian gospel of the real; proclaiming “long live the real, therefore I Kill”…even forcing Baudrillard to appear on reality TV and to hostagelly announce: “I like it”….and so on…Let the real make its way…

…The real will take revenge on all those poisonous simulations, reverting and reversing all the simulation back to the pristine dawn of the clean, pure and the well cut: no more porn, no more poetry, no more philosophy, no more BollyHollywoods, no more Sega, no more Nintendo, No more Sony-Bony, no more imagines, no more, full stop…Let the real make its way…

….Resolutions for 2006: burn all media, liberate and copulate with your neighbours, ignite bonfires of vanities up and down the country: burn your record and video collection, burn down all art galleries, bomb the TATE by installing an exploding garden shed (apparently, art exhibit of the year 2005) containing flying captions: “this is not art”…bomb museums and other TV imprisoned life…rob your own bank account…thrown out all your game-stations, and get back a life, even if you never had one…. the real is awaiting….reality is the ultimate terrorist organisation, all “it” needs is a bit of encouragement… Let the real make its way…

Venetian Nights - Appassionata in la Serenissima

Venice’s carnival, like most of Venice’s topology, is a tourist fly trap, a material carnivorous spending spree of rainbow colors and pollution. But inside that very carnivorous carnival, there is il carnevale - a spiritual repetition waiting to spirally repeat itself through the material repetitions of the hedonistic carnival screaming above...

No matter how much color and life the authorities try to put into la serenissima there is no clearing of the melancholic atmosphere of decay and death that haunt/s the wooden foundations and stony surfaces. Death in Venice, as Thomas Mann profoundly narrated: the narrator tries to leave all the signs of decay, disease and death he fells and senses, but he comes back, magnetically drawn back, to follow Eros along the winding alleys...

One has to wait for sun-down, and in the cold February misty night of a drowning city, resolve oneself to follow the contorted labyrinth, towards a secret Venice: where the shouting, clinking tourists and dressed-up-fun players, do not tread, where angels fear to tread...only masked demons amidst the sweeping mist and golden lights can walk the Venetian land...

The I, masked and dressed up as an eighteen century libertine (a kind of Marquis De Sade without the wig and lice) walks the Möbius bandy alleys, with a determined resolve...the crowds dilute into trickles, the mingling crowds fall away into the distance...One continues to repeat the stony footpaths; one by one, the costumes and masks become realer, less touristy...one quietly falls into the darkly depths of la serenissima.

Suddenly, a threshold is reached...one enters an opaque dreamland of sparkled lights, mist and fog, where luscious ladies made of satin and veil, glance furtive eyes through baroquely contorted masks...One gets possessed by an alien passion, another tempo, another rhythm, another becoming is awakened from within: another repetition is beating its erotic rhythm - one is simultaneously stalked and stalker...

Masked and cloaked one is perpetually seduced by mysterious female shapes and figures coming in out and out of the swirling background, into the foreground, and then back again, back into the abyss of white and rosy cheeks...Are these figures for real? or is it all just a dream within a dream, waking up to another dream....

It would come as no surprise in the land of il carnevale, of courtesans and Casanovas, that it is the erotic, the erotic signs of embodied figures, that one follows and feverishly decodes...and hopefully consumes...

The beauty of naked flesh in the cold pale mist amidst the flowing stiff baroque folds of satin dresses swirling in the mist...nipples cold as rubies, set the stony alleys afire....The revelry is now only a distant murmur, a more somber affair awaits...

One takes her by the hand or is taken by her hand, it is hard to tell which, the misty swarming threads absolve all distinctions; but I guess, it does not matter. Her slit eyes are so pure it almost breaks one’s heart, like a Dante’s Beatrice, it almost suspends one’s being in purgatory, in between heaven and hell; it could be either, neither or both at the same time...

The paradox of the mask, of the disguise, is that it allows and reveals; no deception and ego games are allowed to play their reign anymore - a deeper Dionysian self emerges through the Apollonian surface disguise of mask and appearance... spiritualizing all the profane habits of the material world one has left far and far...behind...

A spiritual dimension is broken through...in the cotton depths of la serenissima, in the eye of the storm, one swirls and swirls, hand in hand, kiss in kiss, embracing and embraced...intertwined fevers before the fall...Complete strangers beckon a purity that no knowing and habit could ever achieve - in the abyss alterity of the other, not all is lost, there is a dim ray of recognition, of distant communication, shining forth: Adriane’s eternal laws of attractions are the only signs of recognition that can thread and illuminate the dark places of absolute strangers. The moonlight beauty of it all, is that it is not totally arbitrary, without rime or reason...the same in alterity, alterity in the same....one seeks the only one, the only figure that attracts and distracts... To my favorite Esmeralda, to all the courtesans of the colddddddddd Carnevale' february nights, the Venetian nights are truly yours, and no one can take them back from you...wherever Esmeralda, Serenissima forever....

Spaces of Desire

The basic level of an enclosed gathering, should strive to be a conceptual and creative platform beyond all profane origin: creating a total multi­dimensional and polymorphous experience, within an environment which accepts and encourages loss of individualism, heterogeneous diversity and unfettered expressionism. A multi‑dimensional event which would take being on all levels - social identity, looks, age, sexual orientation and gender would be dissolved in the continuum of a boundless circumference. Something for everybody, without loss of purity, ambiguity or aesthetic form...

Such events would be multi‑faceted and work on a variety of levels, providing something for everyone, by connecting disparate elements: all those elements which do not go together in the day light of the work/economic world above, would be uncovered, and have a chance to bear fruit. The night connects, the day disconnects...

The Lulu of Ms Brooks

Louise Brooks is a geometric perfection from another time…this time however, exceptional as her bodily art-deco outline was, it was, this being more rare, equal to a beauty of mind and spirit. An avid reader of Schopenhauer between takes, she professed to love nothing and no one, no Hollywood, no motherhood, no lover, or stardom. And this is why she will be always in my heart: a star that burned ever so bright /without the secular allure of stardom to corrupt it up... My fascination for Ms Brooks has remained intact…

A Schopenhauerian beauty to grace our cold nights…Louise was immortalised in one film, German expressionism Master G. W. Pabst’s 1929 “Lulu”/Pandora Box:

"In a corner sat a very beautiful girl reading the aphorisms of Schopenhauer in an English translation. It seemed absurd that such a beautiful girl should be reading Schopenhauer, and I thought quite angrily that this was some sly publicity stunt of Pabst's. Some twenty-five years later, I found out that Louise Brooks really did read Schopenhauer…". (Sight and Sound, 1967)

Louise’s beauty is divine because it is silent. She belongs to the black and white sublime, a sombre beauty made out of shades of silver and darkness - a sublime age, before the beauty garish of Technicolor and noise availed itself over all celluloid - an epoch of loss, rather than gain…

Her spirit, her integrity, cost her: a gradual slide into destitution…this is my kind of woman, always pure, no compromise, no regrets, and always an angel from the offside of heaven and hell…

“There is no Garbo. There is no Dietrich. There is only Louise Brooks!” right on…


http://www.livejournal.com/users/louisebrooks/

Full Circle

T.S. Eliot in the conclusion of the Four Quartets: after an endless consummated journey one knows one’s origins for the first time, as part of a circumambulated totality:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

This circular wholeness should be the very essence, or fabric, of existence: “a condition of complete simplicity”. Life as a circle of consumed fire, costing no less than every­thing...until one arrives, in the exploration, at a point or another on the lines of the circle…and then finally, the circle is sealed tight and curvaceously closed...all the discrete fragments-dots and endless dispersed pixels consolidated into a continuous curve, the circle of life circled…

Charmed by the sirens of life, we invariably think there is something more than the dark rocks were are heading t00000000000000

Our Great Physicians of the Infinite...

« Oui, Deleuze aura été notre grand physicien, il aura contemplé pour nous le feu des étoiles, sondé le chaos, pris mesure de la vie inorganique, immergé nos maigres trajectoires dans l'immensité du virtuel » (Alain Badiou)

The cosmic fire of the stars...

"To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And A Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour"

(William Blake Augeries of Innocence)

A Library of Imprisoned Souls – Ocular Sphinxes

I have always liked libraries (cemeteries of dead life, of all that life could be) and spend most of my time in them. Not so much for reading (god forbid,s!) but rather, for the encounter, and hopefully the capture, of the dreamy female gazes that populate such enclosed hexagrams: ocular butterflies flirting amidst the hushed and rustling density of textual absorption…

Libraries are deeply erotic places, text, eyes and bodies mingle in a silent frenzy, which has driven many to lose their bookish reasons…out of studious oblivion a flash of ocular desire is awaken: eyes that disturb the peace, that disrupt the textual silence…fevered summits of ocular fervent sunders the neutral sphere… for an suspended instant, bodily form and textual content reach their zero point of fusion, amidst the rustling of papers…the sinuous resemblances of what is written or read is, for a while, disavowed…

The gaze spills over the edge of text and book, into the eyes of the other, in a suspended frame, text and desire momentary lapse into each other. Dreamy contemplations, that dream the person across the distant rows as the ideal soul that, maybe, will light up the darkness...Without spoken acknowledgement and amidst the reading of same author or subject, there is a play of fevered lubricity, often approaching delirium…yes, libraries and their bookish labyrinths, have never been places for studious sublimation or disinterested objectivity…

The true patron of all libraries has always been De Sade (a textual existence par excellence). And let us not forget Bataille, Borges and Foucault. All three thinkers considered libraries places of infinity, and hence, of the imaginary: simulacrums which disrupt the universal ideal and power claims of logical knowledge. A strange paradox indeed…The library has always been the infinite transgression of the ideal of universal knowledge, not its foundation or preservation. The conditions of bookish abundance, of textual profusion, is an accursed share, an infinity within, that perpetually disrupts, the closures and finitudes of universal knowledge. It is not surprising that throughout history it is the libraries that one burns down first, before all else…the destruction of text and the rape of bodies go hand in hand…violence as metaphysics…

Libraries, cemeteries, museums…all belong to the same dream series, somber repositories of what has never been and will never be…frozen dreams for a pristine dawn that has, and will, never come…the owl of Minerva, has never flown, neither in dawn or dusk…

Notes from Underground

“I've seen things...seen things you little people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium... I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched c-beams glitter in the dark…all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain...” (Blade Runner)

Is life a sarcastic smile in a deadpan universe?

The human is a tight-rope over an abyss between finitude and infinitude: all humans are inebriated by life-death forces beyond them - a human life made out of two directional forces, which move in opposite directions: time and matter. As such, man is torn apart like a sphinx answering his own questions - an infinity loop caught within the impossibility of an ascendance or descendance. No doubt, this is one of the reasons that the world so uncannily shimmers, a dream caught within another dream, ad infinitum…as if existence/life was not quite there as it should be…life’s horizon always falls away, whether in distance or nearness…

Consciousness, subjectivities and desires are embodied infinities, and yet, they are encased by finitudes or limits - social and natural - which sunder everything to an infinite potential that will never be individually fulfilled. What could be possibly more insane, tantalizing and Sisyphus like, than this earthly life we all fall into, for a while…Stringless Puppets waved around in the crystal sea of time…in which every cosmic wave and minutely drop is another world translucently foreclosing other worlds.. 0of which we will never see, feel or conceive...How could we possibly not be haunted by these “je ne sais quois” these “almost nothings”, as Vladimir Jankélévitch would say, these unknowables, ungraspables and untouchables, twinning and spiraling below the surface of our ego days and somber nights…

The Thirst for the Infinite - Hopperian Beauty

"When you are in bed and you hear the barking of the dogs in the countryside, hide beneath your blanket but do not deride what they do: they have an insatiable thirst for the infinite, as you, and I, and all other pale, long-faced human beings do. I will even allow you to stand in front of your window to contemplate this spectacle, which is quite edifying....Like those dogs, I fell the need for the infinite. I cannot, cannot satisfy this need. I am the son of a man and a woman, from what I have been told. This astonishes me...I believed I was something more" (Isidore Ducasse Lautremont, Les chants de Maldoror).

Don’t we all believe the same?...

In a 1982 essay entitled "What I Believe", Ballard spelled out some of the obsessions that inspire his work: "I believe, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the ele­gance of graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels." These dispirited landscapes of Hopperian Beauty, haunt us all…

One could add to the complex of Hopperian beauty, (Edward Hopper, the genius painter of desolate lit landscapes) the following: echoing warehouses of overgrown emptiness, hollow factories of corroded iron, motorways of speeding light, the solitude of glazed looks across the dark night of neon lights, venetian blinds criscrossing the illuminated lines of a solitary night, and above all, the white reflections of pale naked flesh in exhausted motel rooms...

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...

The Death of Art - Hegel and Picasso

"In art the mass of people no longer seeks consolation and exaltation, but those who are refined, rich, unoccupied, who are distillers of quintessence’s, seek what is new, strange, original, extravagant, scandalous. I myself, since Cubism and before, have satisfied these masters and critics with all the changing oddities which passed through my head, and the less they understand me, the more they admired me. By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques, I became famous and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortunes, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt were great painters. I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and exploited as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than it may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere." Pablo Picasso (Interview with Giovanni Papini in Libro Nero, 1952)

It is maybe not Picasso’s fault...higher forces are at play...Hegel had already proclaimed the death of art one hundred years before... Art, for Hegel, had reached its expressive limit, its “spirit” or Geist, had been exhausted. Art’s expressive form had achieved all that it could (i.e. Romanticism). In Hegel’s scheme of things, art had reached full-circle in the complete self-awareness of itself as art...in other words, art becomes self-conscious. What is more Self-conscious than the “art” of Warhol, Joyce, Pound, Schonberg and Picasso?

As soon as a particular expression of Geist starts becoming self-conscious, it multiplies itself; art is everywhere, there has never been so much “art” in the world than today...and yet, what is “art”?

The very asking of the question amongst the proliferation of “arts”, is for Hegel, the Zeitgeist, or the “signs of the times”, that art is dead. Art becomes self-conscious, as it starts theorizing about itself in an interminable questioning of itself. How many artists think and breathe theory, how many discourses on art...but where is the inspiration, as opposed to the derision, where are the muses?, “the faces that would launch a thousand ships”? ...the life and beauty of Helen of Troy, swapped for...the Pamela Andersons of this profane world, selling burgers and optical devices for clear cut enemas...

....Art and beauty are not fresh anymore; canned, like Warhol’s Campbell soup tins, or Marilyn’s simulated beauty. How different, to take Picasso’s examples, the beauty and art of, Giotto, Titian and Rembrandt. Great painters, because they still had everything to paint, all the beauty in the heavens was still awaiting to be captured in art’s luminous form; they had spirit, as opposed to Picasso‘s “shock of the new” vanity games…the mere matter of “the strange, original, extravagant, and scandalous”….

When a spiritual or “Geist” expression (art, religion, ethics etc.) achieves complete self-awareness of itself, it is “dead”, it becomes equal to itself, the circle circled, and all dynamics (i.e. dialectics) is lost...of course, nothing is really lost for Hegel, all is incorporated in Geist’s dialectics towards the absolute, to full self-consciousness of itself, as itself, oops... getting a bit too Hegelian here...Hegel is hard to resist...

As is often the case, Hegel’s announcement of death, could be in Mark Twain's famous words, an “exaggeration”. Yes, an exaggeration, the spirit of Art, continued after Hegel’s own death. Hegel was wrong, art did not die…it merely survived. The nineteen century of Mahler, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Baudelaire and impressionism, still had something to prove, it pushed art’s spiritual form to the limits. Every crevice and crack of art’s expressive form was explored and exploded…but, however much art’s spirit was pushed to the limit, it did not break the beautiful form (no Finnegans wake of the text or Schonberg’s “amusic” here..)…art was just at the limits of complete self-consciousness, just before the flat-liner of self-consciousness...art’s life machine was still beeping singular tones…

But…in the twentieth century, Hegel may have been right after all. Art’s spirit had been completely exploded, every form, law, and composition transgressed. Where could art go, if not into self-oblivion, collapsing under the weight of its own self-consciousness….Art will be buried in the cemetery of human delusions, with all the other dead illusions putrefying in sunken graves: God (Nietzsche) Man (Foucault) the author (Barthes) reality (Baudrillard) etc…However, just before death, on the edge of oblivion and destruction, a distinct phase operates, which Hegel’s dialectics completely misses: just before the twilight of death and self-oblivion, self-consciousness breads derision and parody. Before dying, art, like most things in life, becomes ironic. Picasso knew that art was dying, he could smell arts putrefying bodies in the galleries and museums, the cemeteries and prisons of art …Picasso was self-conscious of art’s exhausted forms; thus in twentieth century, he could only be a public entertainer (like Dali and Warhol)…but, also at the same time, a wavering beckon in the desolate night of art…a beckon of all that has been lost, that is still, incredibly enough, sparkling through the materialistic veneer of the “games, absurdities, puzzles, rebuses, arabesques” of so called “art”…

What about the twenty-first century? Is there a life after death? Or is it a mere survival? Are the arts and artists in limbo? mere ironic pantomimes of past glories...all the more ironic, in that, there has never been so many techniques available, for artistic expression...Just imagine, what a Mozart could do, for the spirit of music, with the latest synthesizers and computer-tech...what viral soundscapes, what spiraling melodies...what infinity a Mozart could draw, from a mere binary machine. Unfortunately, we have the synthesizers and tech, but we do not have the Mozarts... Techno...Techno...Techno...but no requiem...

...Hegel talked about the dialectical ruses of History, (it all works for the “best” in the end) but isn’t History ironic? If as Marx said, History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as comedy, surely you need a third repetition to complete the triad, and irony will do just fine...the only entertainment there is, for a Godless God who is bored by all perfection and imperfection...irony with its bitter sweet symphonies, could even entertain a Godless God
...STOP...

The Uncanny Baroque – the Personal and Impersonal

The uncanny thing about the Bergson/Deleuze complex is, like all true spirituality, its baroque impersonality. A strange platonic reversal is at work in the Bergson/Deleuze matrix, by the fact that it is the objective (i.e. matter) that is personal, whilst the impersonal is the subjective. Bizarrely, the objective: our limits, aging, bodies, loss, self/ego psychology, language and social states of mind etc…are personal to the very core of our being, while paradoxically, the subjective is impersonal: it is not subject to the same temporal durations or rhythms. The psychic beats and dances to a different fugue…

The subjective and all its impersonal affects (life, the unconscious, libido, sensations, love, ecstasy, etc…) do not lose, limit, degrade, age, etc…with time, since they are not objective objects (i.e. not “located” “in” the space of matter/brain) rather, such affects have infinite disappearances and process as their ideal tempo. In short, the subjective ideal does not “age” or is subject, despite (the current) material inevitability of death, to bodily meta/physical finitudes (Heidegger drop dead!). This is why for Emmanuel Levinas, the subjective is the locus of, and is, the (actual) infinite. Uncannily enough, we personally inhabit or partake (in the mix of the banality and repetition of the everyday) a life that is far cosmically bigger than bigger:…a spiralling vertigo, a vortex sundering subjective life “into” the objective depths of the banality of being and matter…

The purity is clear: spiritual subjective “affects” vs. objective “effects” (the causal causality of matter). What is more objective and personal than the language we speak (or is spoken, “it” speaks us) our limits, our psychological weakness, our neuroses and our social quarks and quirks etc…What is more subjective and impersonal than the bubblings of the unconscious, dreams, libido and love etc...

….neither a philosophy of idealism or realism…the subjective is “real” because it does not technically exist, there is no “proof” or yard stick to measure impersonal awareness or “affective” contents…the objective is “false” because it exists, “it” can never be anything but itself, hence “it” can be mathematically/scientifically measured and effected…

The subjective is in disjunction with the objective and its statistical entropy mediated relations (although of course, the subjective is dependent on the objective/matter, but dependence does not entail identity and finitude). As such, for Bergson/Deleuze, the subjective is the locus, and is, the Virtual (equivalent to Levinas’ infinity)…

The Virtual, has nothing to do with the sad effects of virtual reality, on the contrary, the Virtual is the realm of the surface and the simulacrum: pure undiluted life itself, pure impersonal subjectivity - life in its pure negentropic potential…

For Deleuze, the Virtual is the “primordial soup” of life’s subjective impersonals: pre-individual singularities, multiplicities…difference-in-itself…and other madnesses and diseases of life that, from time to time, bubble up to the healthy equilibrated surface - in short, the Virtual is time and infinity all in one chaos, the chaosmos…

…chaosmatic bubbles exploding through the superficial membrane of objective life…