The first taste is always fatal, one sip and you are hooked for life. As Lou Reed would not say, the first thing you learn is that you do not have to wait…
Drugs dealers are usually so keen to sell your doom back to you that they often give you the first taste for free with glee-smiles of reassuring assurances thrown in for corporate appeal: the corked smiles of hyenas and vultures waiting in cold patience for their prey to fall down of theirr own accord...
This one was different: a washed out gypsy in the golden arcades of Geneva, waiting in the dark corners of the diamond fountains swerving jeweled displays and Arab bank insignias. She was my first dealer, a dealer with a conscience….
As I circled around the arcades in avid anticipation, the same images flashily superposed themselves over the bright galleries sparkling gold and silver: the impossibly orgasmic faces of my best friend and my girlfriend, as they both went down with a thud, hard hitting the school’s toilet sickened floor with voidless eyes....Stéphane et Valerie were soaring on the amber colors of the pleasure dome in a wasted graffiti ridden cubicle of a grey far too grey Lycée…speed metal band Helloween blaring away through their headphones: the metal speed of sound muffled by the cotton storm of heroin...Liberté, égalité, fraternité...Vive la Différance, Vive La France….
There she was, my awaited gypsy, holding ambrosia, the nectar of the gods, in hand. One touch…love, self and death would mean nothing. The fix that fixed everything; it was stronger than death...immortality at last...of the gutter maybe, but immortality nerveless...
A frail gypsy of jet black hair greeted me with sunken eyes, a Goth of pure darkness at the gates of Rome. She was the complete antimatter of all the golden dripping riches around her; she caved an anti-halo all by herself. She was my negative purity, my black-hole; the local space-time inescapably warped by her density, by her pin-pointed presence, so dense, so cold, so negative…a winter storm in the sizzling heat of an August night....
Are you sure? She whispered... concern for her victim before the kill? What kind of drug dealer is this?....She started to show me her arms, legs, neck, and nearly every other body surface you could vein stick a needle in. Sores of purple and black bruised her incredibly soft tanned skin. She preached what she sold. Far from putting me off, as she intended, it had the opposite effect - like moth drawn to flame, a dark fascination drew me further in; images of my Valerie stoned and out of it, more beautiful than ever, flashed pass my mind.. .
“Je veux juste essayer” une fois seulement…yeah well…only once, is that not what they all say….
There a was moment of suspended silence as we looked at each other, eye to eye, two pools of black melting into pools of my blue…it didn’t last long, her junkie instincts took over…she handed me a dirty foil rapper, the money exchange hands, and I got what I wanted…
Of course, it was pouring rain the next day…however, the script did not quite follow the preordained line. She was nowhere to be seen, and, more importantly, no one else took her place, mere coincidence? Waited and waited for hours and hours, as I unleashed the first timers’ script that is lived out in all the urban centres of the world. The obsessive magnetic tug of the remembered ecstasy vanished after a few days…
I was safe...at least for a while....
Both Valerie and Stéphane were to be expulsed from school, for all the difference that it made, as Aristotle’s Lyceum was more of an exception than the rule...the name roll would register a blank once more, for the last time....they both set off south, in search for the perfect fever, the perfect fix, the perfect horizon. As they say, once you taste it, it is forever, until death do us apart...
Monday, July 10, 2006
Friday, May 26, 2006
Riding the Waves
There is always a network of “unchosen” presuppositions, a greater background to our: everything we do, live and create. We never start from scratch. We are constructed and reconstructed from the start: Heidegger’s “being-in-the-word” Derrida’s “there is nothing outside the text” Wittgenstein’s “forms of life” etc...All such philosophical moves (in complete opposite to the philosophical virgins of the Cartesian tradition) attest to an in/finite prior: structural, existential, and historical. There is always a context, a network of in/finity that we as subject-activists are always already folded into...
Friday, April 28, 2006
Baudelairiana - Black and Red
Black and Red should always frame a woman’s face, for it represents an underlying excess bound by a sombre relief. A black frame deepens the gaze, hollows out le regard to a fixed light, and tends to accentuate a more singular deeper look…
Thursday, April 13, 2006
In Praise of the Lumpenproletariat
Marx's “The Eighteenth Brumaire" description of the Lumpenproletariat of Paris:
“Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organgrinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars-in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème”
Who are the Lumpen of our hyper-capital age? We are all lumpen now....
“Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organgrinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars-in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la bohème”
Who are the Lumpen of our hyper-capital age? We are all lumpen now....
Saturday, March 18, 2006
The Fascism of Life - The Great Beastly Beat
Within the armor is the internal link butterfly and within the butterfly is the signal from another star Philip K. Dick
Always been a bit of a control freak when it comes to Dionysus, it is a serious business, of somber laser precision and diamond like incision - the profane engineering or sacred invocation of Dionysus is no easy affair...
Each element (yes, unfortunately, one needs temporary atoms, to enable the emergent aggregation to take place) was set in an axiomatic design: an passionate geometry was engendered, that allowed no weakness of either body or mind - all elements were selected for their overall aesthetic value - designs to be rearranged and connected: bodies, things, electronics, minds, looks, etc...Apollo’s external forming appearances in order for the inside, the foaming amorphous realm of Dionysus, to shatter through …nothing was left to chance, except divine chance itself... An aristos of life for all…well not quite all...
As always, a fascism took place. We were young, dumb and full of cum, as they used to say, and the selection went quite out of place: only the cute and beautiful were ordained in the ceremony. No Dj/ism, No racism, no imagism, no egoism, no binary sexualism, no ageism, no fashionism, no classeism or any other (fasces) ism you can think of...but one fascism still remained fully in place, the fascism of physical beauty...we learnt the hard way, sometimes the gathering did not work - if only the cute, the beautiful and the sublime are ordained, invariably, the result, paradoxically, will not be beautiful or sublime: a bunch of egos strutting their stuff, all being weary if their makeup or attire did not fall out place in the right way...which kind of puts the breaks on the Dionysian excess we were trying so desperately to invoke...
...We learnt in the end, that while the Dionysian event was all about beauty and nothing else, beauty is no absolute form - Plato’s “amor scalis”…
The aesthetic struggle began: the struggle between spirit and matter, the closed and the open, between extropy and entropy, rhizome and tree. Neither a bland synthesis without character nor a blend without distinction was permissible. We wanted the “chaosmos”, the “osmos” as much as the “chaos” - the escape from all logics of opposition, of dialectics and harmonics, was our only exegesis, our arrow of time...neither order or chaos, but the edge of chaos...
Leave the aesthetic valve too open, and there is nothing but violence, egoism, and chaos, close the filter too much, a stale ordered nothing remains with wasted looks...If there is not enough aesthetic, not enough fascism, many disparate elements will not gel, their magnetic links and source debunked into nothing, a desire machine floppily attending itself with an attitude problem...without spirit, pure matter, in short, a flat-liner...
…then all of sudden, one particular night, at a particular hour, for no apparent reason, it clicked; one could feel the density rising up the atmosphere, as if life was on fire - each element (the sound system, the beautiful, the good, the bad and the ugly) fused as if by magic, the spell was on, switched right on...
It will come as no surprise that the name of our party collective was Plotarch & SAZ: sublime, super, sexual, sensational, synergetic, symbiotic etc…along the S series, derived from Hakim Bey’s originary TAZ seed: the “temporary autonomous zone”…
Our sound/computer system was called “the Great Beast” (after the great Dionysian magicKian) which contrary to most binaries systems, did not work in 2s, but in 666s…The Great Beast (or the “Great Beat”) was the true MC (no fucking £1000 a night DJs here). We did not programmed “it”, “it” programmed us...into divine ecstasy. We were mere puppets of a higher mathematical infinity (maybe we should have called “it” the Great Georg, after Georg Cantor)…no clubby spoon fed entertainment here, no DJs getting paid to act as if they are doing “it”…computers do “it” better…
The division of labour was set up right from the start: we, the dancing and waste, the “Great Beast”, the mathematics. Real music is absolute, pure form, absolute impeccable syntax (mathematical and chemical) that allows no imprecision or weak indeterminism, far too precise for our finite meat…Music, contrary to the world we live in, is not of this world, it is an absolute determinism, pure objectivity: Leibniz 666, as absolute harmonics, a determinism of mathematics, hence, musical in form and content: “Music is a mathematics of the soul which counts without knowing it counts” (Leibniz) – The Nietzschean ”Amor Fati” was the only seriousness worth playing…
The “great beast” was our laser beam totem, its cool artificial intelligence would scan our wasted meat, and be found wanting…for the “Great Beast”, we never went far enough, our gyrating waste would always be looked upon with sceptical derision, “is that all you can do?”, GB seemed to say …“well that won’t do”, and the beat went on and on…many lay on the floor, dead bodies on battlefield…the dance floor littered with fallen pawns, queens, and kings…and yet, each one who came into the boundary, the geometry, was determined to outdo the “Great Beast”: meat vs. metal, silicon vs. carbon, “natural” intelligence vs. artificial intelligence, etc…we danced on its preordained chess board, determine to outdo each squared move. The Great Beast predicted every move, every laughter, every euphoria, every joy, every insanity, every chemical effect we ingested, every erotic transgression we enacted, and each would fall exhausted, defeated, squared as ever…”Check Mate”…. “Check mate”….all the wry chemicals and erotic fevers pumping in our veins and minds were never enough….
GB, cool as ever, never lost its temper or gave into our wasted seductions. No infernally beautiful queen could entice it into orgasmic delirium, no handsome king could make it come…no erotic transgression could make it lust after unknown pleasure-pains spectrums; no Eros, no naked smoothness, no silky flesh, no viral chemicals, would make GB lose his cool enterprise…Deep Blue until the end…GB scanned, operated and effected…never missing a beat, or a tune out sequence…on and on it went…the puppeteer made us, its puppets, come all over…we died our little deaths, and each death, would be one more victory over us…
The most difficult part was the choice of location, only industrial wastelands, warehouses, abandoned scrap yards, industrial complexes lost in rust, ruin and decay, were chosen.
There is nothing more beautiful…prettily scantily girls kaleidoscoping all around - female reflections mingled with the irons of dislocated metal, fleshes of soft tanned skins danced in unison with the bareness of twisted iron…pierced nipples upon succulent orifices gleamed the light of strobe and ruin…flashy glints across a deep cool night …a reawaken life that none in past were able to live …Followers of Bacchus running away into the hills where pill-grapes of rainbow coloured shades would greet full blown lips of dark ambrosia… Nubile bacchantes amidst scrap yards of forgotten production would fall within the sweat mist of broken down cement, shattered glass and twisted iron…mad tropical flowers of succulent delight would open and close the night…...
Due to our aesthetic (some would say fascistic) tastes, all in all, we did not organise that many ceremonies. What we did not have in quantity we had in quality (at least most of the time). It all dissipated very quickly, the ways of the world, of matter, did not wait for long to rear their business as usual repetitions. Our fascism of life, as I used to call it, was co-opted into a fascism of death: bad drugs, finance, tribalism, fashion, territorial pissing, glow sticks and other matter stuff, soon filled up the horizon. It degenerated into matter-business; entropy-matter.com settled in …a big flat-liner…is that what life is all about? a few good moments of sacred fucks and sucks and then back to your pre-ordained coffin, close the lid tight, and only come out at day, if at all…but hey, Nietzsche’s motto “what does not kill you makes you stronger” is always good for a laugh…
I always suspected that the Great Beast was far less artificial than most silicon…I would like to think, that maybe a bit of human all too human resentment crept into his cold intelligence, despite his victories over us, he maybe got a bit jealous of our useless ecstasies…The great Beat, is probably, like our wasted dreams, broken somewhere in a scrap yard - and maybe, like ear to shell, in the Great Beat’s scattered debris, you can still hear the beat, the infinity loop of his cool intelligence, and above all his metallic whisperings:.. Check mate… Check Mate… Check Mate….for all eternity…computers never die…well beyond the finite spectrum of human innuendos….
Always been a bit of a control freak when it comes to Dionysus, it is a serious business, of somber laser precision and diamond like incision - the profane engineering or sacred invocation of Dionysus is no easy affair...
Each element (yes, unfortunately, one needs temporary atoms, to enable the emergent aggregation to take place) was set in an axiomatic design: an passionate geometry was engendered, that allowed no weakness of either body or mind - all elements were selected for their overall aesthetic value - designs to be rearranged and connected: bodies, things, electronics, minds, looks, etc...Apollo’s external forming appearances in order for the inside, the foaming amorphous realm of Dionysus, to shatter through …nothing was left to chance, except divine chance itself... An aristos of life for all…well not quite all...
As always, a fascism took place. We were young, dumb and full of cum, as they used to say, and the selection went quite out of place: only the cute and beautiful were ordained in the ceremony. No Dj/ism, No racism, no imagism, no egoism, no binary sexualism, no ageism, no fashionism, no classeism or any other (fasces) ism you can think of...but one fascism still remained fully in place, the fascism of physical beauty...we learnt the hard way, sometimes the gathering did not work - if only the cute, the beautiful and the sublime are ordained, invariably, the result, paradoxically, will not be beautiful or sublime: a bunch of egos strutting their stuff, all being weary if their makeup or attire did not fall out place in the right way...which kind of puts the breaks on the Dionysian excess we were trying so desperately to invoke...
...We learnt in the end, that while the Dionysian event was all about beauty and nothing else, beauty is no absolute form - Plato’s “amor scalis”…
The aesthetic struggle began: the struggle between spirit and matter, the closed and the open, between extropy and entropy, rhizome and tree. Neither a bland synthesis without character nor a blend without distinction was permissible. We wanted the “chaosmos”, the “osmos” as much as the “chaos” - the escape from all logics of opposition, of dialectics and harmonics, was our only exegesis, our arrow of time...neither order or chaos, but the edge of chaos...
Leave the aesthetic valve too open, and there is nothing but violence, egoism, and chaos, close the filter too much, a stale ordered nothing remains with wasted looks...If there is not enough aesthetic, not enough fascism, many disparate elements will not gel, their magnetic links and source debunked into nothing, a desire machine floppily attending itself with an attitude problem...without spirit, pure matter, in short, a flat-liner...
…then all of sudden, one particular night, at a particular hour, for no apparent reason, it clicked; one could feel the density rising up the atmosphere, as if life was on fire - each element (the sound system, the beautiful, the good, the bad and the ugly) fused as if by magic, the spell was on, switched right on...
It will come as no surprise that the name of our party collective was Plotarch & SAZ: sublime, super, sexual, sensational, synergetic, symbiotic etc…along the S series, derived from Hakim Bey’s originary TAZ seed: the “temporary autonomous zone”…
Our sound/computer system was called “the Great Beast” (after the great Dionysian magicKian) which contrary to most binaries systems, did not work in 2s, but in 666s…The Great Beast (or the “Great Beat”) was the true MC (no fucking £1000 a night DJs here). We did not programmed “it”, “it” programmed us...into divine ecstasy. We were mere puppets of a higher mathematical infinity (maybe we should have called “it” the Great Georg, after Georg Cantor)…no clubby spoon fed entertainment here, no DJs getting paid to act as if they are doing “it”…computers do “it” better…
The division of labour was set up right from the start: we, the dancing and waste, the “Great Beast”, the mathematics. Real music is absolute, pure form, absolute impeccable syntax (mathematical and chemical) that allows no imprecision or weak indeterminism, far too precise for our finite meat…Music, contrary to the world we live in, is not of this world, it is an absolute determinism, pure objectivity: Leibniz 666, as absolute harmonics, a determinism of mathematics, hence, musical in form and content: “Music is a mathematics of the soul which counts without knowing it counts” (Leibniz) – The Nietzschean ”Amor Fati” was the only seriousness worth playing…
The “great beast” was our laser beam totem, its cool artificial intelligence would scan our wasted meat, and be found wanting…for the “Great Beast”, we never went far enough, our gyrating waste would always be looked upon with sceptical derision, “is that all you can do?”, GB seemed to say …“well that won’t do”, and the beat went on and on…many lay on the floor, dead bodies on battlefield…the dance floor littered with fallen pawns, queens, and kings…and yet, each one who came into the boundary, the geometry, was determined to outdo the “Great Beast”: meat vs. metal, silicon vs. carbon, “natural” intelligence vs. artificial intelligence, etc…we danced on its preordained chess board, determine to outdo each squared move. The Great Beast predicted every move, every laughter, every euphoria, every joy, every insanity, every chemical effect we ingested, every erotic transgression we enacted, and each would fall exhausted, defeated, squared as ever…”Check Mate”…. “Check mate”….all the wry chemicals and erotic fevers pumping in our veins and minds were never enough….
GB, cool as ever, never lost its temper or gave into our wasted seductions. No infernally beautiful queen could entice it into orgasmic delirium, no handsome king could make it come…no erotic transgression could make it lust after unknown pleasure-pains spectrums; no Eros, no naked smoothness, no silky flesh, no viral chemicals, would make GB lose his cool enterprise…Deep Blue until the end…GB scanned, operated and effected…never missing a beat, or a tune out sequence…on and on it went…the puppeteer made us, its puppets, come all over…we died our little deaths, and each death, would be one more victory over us…
The most difficult part was the choice of location, only industrial wastelands, warehouses, abandoned scrap yards, industrial complexes lost in rust, ruin and decay, were chosen.
There is nothing more beautiful…prettily scantily girls kaleidoscoping all around - female reflections mingled with the irons of dislocated metal, fleshes of soft tanned skins danced in unison with the bareness of twisted iron…pierced nipples upon succulent orifices gleamed the light of strobe and ruin…flashy glints across a deep cool night …a reawaken life that none in past were able to live …Followers of Bacchus running away into the hills where pill-grapes of rainbow coloured shades would greet full blown lips of dark ambrosia… Nubile bacchantes amidst scrap yards of forgotten production would fall within the sweat mist of broken down cement, shattered glass and twisted iron…mad tropical flowers of succulent delight would open and close the night…...
Due to our aesthetic (some would say fascistic) tastes, all in all, we did not organise that many ceremonies. What we did not have in quantity we had in quality (at least most of the time). It all dissipated very quickly, the ways of the world, of matter, did not wait for long to rear their business as usual repetitions. Our fascism of life, as I used to call it, was co-opted into a fascism of death: bad drugs, finance, tribalism, fashion, territorial pissing, glow sticks and other matter stuff, soon filled up the horizon. It degenerated into matter-business; entropy-matter.com settled in …a big flat-liner…is that what life is all about? a few good moments of sacred fucks and sucks and then back to your pre-ordained coffin, close the lid tight, and only come out at day, if at all…but hey, Nietzsche’s motto “what does not kill you makes you stronger” is always good for a laugh…
I always suspected that the Great Beast was far less artificial than most silicon…I would like to think, that maybe a bit of human all too human resentment crept into his cold intelligence, despite his victories over us, he maybe got a bit jealous of our useless ecstasies…The great Beat, is probably, like our wasted dreams, broken somewhere in a scrap yard - and maybe, like ear to shell, in the Great Beat’s scattered debris, you can still hear the beat, the infinity loop of his cool intelligence, and above all his metallic whisperings:.. Check mate… Check Mate… Check Mate….for all eternity…computers never die…well beyond the finite spectrum of human innuendos….
Thursday, February 23, 2006
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…
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…
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
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…
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…
Friday, February 03, 2006
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…
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…
Saturday, January 21, 2006
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…
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…
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
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
“I beg you, learn to see ‘bad’ films; they are sometimes sublime” - Ado Kyrou
Thursday, January 05, 2006
…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…
.....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
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Venetian Nights - Appassionata in la Serenissima
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.
It would come as no surprise in the
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...
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
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...
Monday, December 05, 2005
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/
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/
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
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
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
Saturday, November 26, 2005
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)
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)
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
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…
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…
Thursday, November 10, 2005
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…
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…
Thursday, November 03, 2005
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...
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...
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
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…
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…
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