Gothic fascinations / 2 K

"The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event".
Roland Barthes

The first thing my camera eye took in: cemeteries with their mournful statues and melodramatic epitaphs, junky squats riddled with graffiti, satanic pentagrams, wasted aluminium wraps, abandoned production sites, several “rave” spaces after the event, and last but not least, abandoned industrial sites/warehouses that still populate here and there the urban field of our sprawling cities…

Cemeteries, urban wastelands, warehouses, derelict spaces and squats: one could call them wastetopias, to borrow from Foucault’s anti-utopia notion of disjunctive spaces: Heterotopias. These wastetopias are my gothic fascination.

Whilst Foucault’s spaces are based on the hetero function of certain spaces in a grander social space, which are heterogeneous or other to the grander space in which they find themselves imbedded, my waste-spaces, are former spaces of life which have been laid or put to waste, “deathsized” so to speak. But Thanathos calls for Eros. The image of Eros framed within the urban frames of Death - the capturing of these two aesthetic forces in one form-image.

Kate K (or double K) had surged from various K Holes, and wanted to be sane again; can’t quite imagine why escaping from an dissociative anaesthetic would entail taking up the aesthetics of photography…maybe as she surmised, the photographic image is a safe and cool point: space and time do not move. A good excuse as any, I guess.

Of course the moving image (i.e. cinema) is drugged time all on to itself, as Gilles Deleuze purports to "argue". Cinema is time on drugs. As it turned out, we both hated cinema, we preferred the “real” thing (unlike uncle Gilles who preferred the sitting on your ass screen approach to life). The moving image, we both suspected, was, as all good Bergsonians know, a fiasco - the moving image does not really move, it’s made out of discrete stills!!!! And what double K needed, was exactly that, stills – to still her life. No more Ks would be added to her name. "Stills" to stop the K madness surfacing again; she had to stop the pull of the vortex K Hole from surging; for Alice was always waiting with her rabbits and Cheshire smiles to take her down to Kwonderland…what a naughty girl,, sweeet Alice…

When I first meet my K, she was adjusting her camera, not quite knowing what F stops meant, or what the fuck lens to use or not….“let’s stop the charade” I whispered….The order of things finally restored, the female principle has become muse. The White Goddess has not left our sunken world. Her frail frame would be framed.

She was a frail creature, whether by design or by intoxication she did not say, with sunken eyes, trembling lips and a whiter shade of pale skin…cute in a sort of wasted way. The contrast was from another world, behind the lens she was magic; she became more embodied, fuller and her frail limbs restored to a higher aura of life: in which7 the wasted looks combined with a hard lusciousness...that would have made even the angels weep of cum…

The camera eye followed her every move, and my eyes became possessed by an image from another world. Was this the same double K? Or I’m I on liquid K? The flashing flashes kept my questions at bay. I pursued her across wasted land,.. her poses were a tropical provocation to the derelicts around her. Her lips were pouting a hyper-Bardot aura of unbridled erosia amidst ruins of desperate desolation…Eros and Thanathos all in one images…

Triads

Technological environments as pure aesthetic engineering, trance-like states produced by electronics producing the most primeval effects of ancient rituals. Pleasure domes are to be engineered. Welcome to the gates of the moments of Eternity…

Spiritual masks implementing techno-carnivals, permitting wearer to assume another identity to transgress for a night the limits imposed by the work of matter…

The fascination for the aesthetic is with the form, not the content; but paradoxically it is the content that gives the form, not the other way round. Nietzsche/Kant: live the content of your life as if it were form, purely formal…

We search for the vectors of beauty…the illumination of bodies magnified into divinities lived in the sublimation of being…

The soul of the body

There's a fascination for things that do not exist in the material/conventional ways of the world, “regulative ideals” or “virtual events”, spiritualities such as: justice, community, eroticism, love, mysticism, intoxication, etc.

Filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni (the Blanchot and Camus of film) in his “beyond the clouds” quartet (four stories that have the theme of “im/possibility” haunting them from within) films the “im/possibility” that love, communication and eroticism are not of this world, but “are” at the interstices of the real and the imaginary.

Beautiful Ines Sastre in the foggy Italian town of Ferrara meets her love of all time, but only for one night; they refrain from making love. The male character (Silvano) performs a mime of caresses over Sastre’s half naked body as if to Platonise her body into a halo that will last into perfection. End of relation. And the male character leaves in the mist of the morning dawn.

A bodily Love so perfect it would not last a second of consummation; to carry on for another night, another day, would be to ruin and destroy - to refrain from the feverish embodiment of an “event” that could not possibly exist in the profane economic matter of things - an illusion born out of this world has no more chance to survive into reality than a mirage in the desert could be proven to be an oasis…

A Love so strong, a body so beautiful, that one cannot live “it”. By not actualising, what, by all regards is the strongest thing ever, they abstain from fulfilment, from fulfilling the event, and “win” by losing. Both partners in crime refrain from embodying a love that is too strong to survive into mediocre reality - paradoxically, all the stronger for not having been lived, for having never happed. To abstain is to preserve, a sacred caress without profanity: protected from the ravages of entropic actualisation, from the termite materialisms of actually living “it”. For not being equal to the event of their lives, for bodily recognising but not actualising or consummating the event, they fulfil another order: such is the temporal price of eternity.

But what a temptation to go back (in fact Silvano meets Sastre three years later) to actualise further and further that night, just a touch…just a touch to further caress the night into delirium…and all will be alright…if love is a drug, then we are all junkies, shooting up pure ideals, virtual crystallisations, in our, material far too material, veins…

The virtual preference of not actualising a physical lust, a psychic intoxication, a spirituality of mind and body (love) - what is in fact only a virtual idea (of the imagination?) - is almost never achieved in reality, we are too weak, so inevitably, as Oscar Wilde saysd “each man kills the thing he loves”.

But what if it was the other way round, as7 in the fear it would not work out, when in fact everything is in place to be one of the greatest actualities in existence. We “counter-actualise” the event. We ruin the actual with the apprehension that it could not possibly be anything that would last beyond a lustful kiss, and we move on, in our material ways.

An inversion like the Italian softcore film “l’anima del corpo” (“the soul of the body”, a Wittgenstein inversion: “the face is the soul of the Body”; to understand this is to apprehend the secret of the universe) in which an im/possible coupling attempts to exist, and in fact does exist: a beautiful twenty year old girl and a seventy year old feeble man (and talking about inversion, how come the other way round is not possible? it seems that even the event, spirit, has its limits…). Of course, the male character is not taken in by the erotic relationship; he knows that it is not possible. Money and other material interests are at play, as always, he repeatedly whispers…

But how can he resist (which he doesn’t) her “freely given” bodily gift? Why is she giving herself so freely? What’s in “it” for her? What does she want in exchange for her given youth? He’s so sure that she nothing but a whore, whoring after strange gods (economies of egos and deceits) that whilst they tumble in various erotic couplings, he becomes obsessed, not only by her youthful vitalism, which he sucks dry as if to invigorate his aging frame with new blood (she’s the vampire however, he’s convinced by that…) but in finding out that after all, her soul, her spirit, is only a simulacrum of eroticism, a simulation of orgasmic bliss without exchange…whore and only a whore, she will be found out to be just that…but of course, he never finds out…he cuts off the money…she comes back for more bodily ecstasies, and freer than ever…the more she fucks other men and women the more she comes back for him, freer than ever. She resists his every attempt of entrapment, all the traps designed to make her confess her simulacrum - her innocence is still intact after every chess move he makes.

On the chessboard of life, spirit is white and matter is black; but her white is never taken, his black matter loses every piece of evidence…the more he loses the more he becomes obsessed by her soul motives…

Is there a moral? Material scepticism destroys spiritual doubt. Maybe, in the end, he whispers, she may have been genuine after all…but it’s too late, he has poisoned the relation with matter. He has checkmated himself. Destroyed by not having faith in the event, he was not equal to the event that was actualised, he was not worthy of what happed to him, of the event that surged in him…for the body is the face of the soul, and he looked elsewhere, in thinking the soul somewhere secret, hidden away, separate from the body…

1 the event is not realised, even though the event has surged into the real; but it retains itself by not actualising itself. 2 the event has happed, but it is not recognised to78be the case. The event in both cases never happens…

How many times we spoil, desecrate and defile the event by over recognising “it”, over determining “it”, materialising “it” by wanting to embody “it” at all costs…

How many opportunities missed, how many potentials lost because we are too postmodern for our virtual heads and hearts to take the oblique ironies of things seriously…

Baudrillardage

Baudrillard is dead. The prophet of simulation is dead. But in the age of simulacrum and simulation, can one really die? Baudrillard is a mere image now, but was he (or we) ever more than an image shimmering in the desert of the real?

…because Baudrillard knows that nature is the first simulator of the simulacrum:

"Snow no longer falls from on high. It lands only at those venues designated as winter resorts" (Cool Memories).

…and that because theory has become inseparable from anything and everything, oh how sweet the days of alienation and critical distance…

"For us everything is predictable: we have extraordinary analytical means but no situation to analyse. We live theoretically well beyond our means: hence our deep melancholy" (The Transparency of Evil).

"Every event today is virtually inconsequential, open to all possible interpretations, none of which could determine its meaning" (Fatal Strategies)

….because:

"Popular fame is what we should all aspire to. Nothing will ever match the distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher’s who has seen you on television" (Cool Memories).

…because Baudrillard always believed in not believing in a world before the word, in the beginning was the word:

“As to whether language is the trace of the imperfection of the world, no story better demonstrates this than John's. Up until the age of 16, John, a happy and handsome youth, gifted in every sense, had never spoken. He had never uttered a single word until the day when, suddenly, at tea-time, he said: "I would like a little sugar." His ecstatic mother cried out: "But, John, you speak! Why didn't you ever say anything?" And John replied, "Until now, everything was perfect” (The Perfect Crime)

…because Schopenhauer’s all is will has become digital; the white ontology of boredom still remains inscribed in the screen eyes of our fading reflections…

“Stuck for hours on the motorway with his family, a tourist declares: `Well, you know, we're on holiday. Here or the beach, what does it matter?' The need to be nowhere - this is what drives the hordes out on to the roads. And nowhere means anywhere but home. It's the same with work and leisure: drudgery in the one place, drudgery in the other. The moment of freedom comes in moving from one drudgery to another. And if you go away, it isn't to wipe out the effects of the eight daily hours of forced labour, but to compensate for not being forced to work twenty-four hours a day, as the higher executives do - people who have no need of holidays” (Cool memories IV)

….because Baudrillard is Camus’ Sisyphus revisited for the mediatic age:

“Ants, too, must know that God is dead, since they engage in such frantic activity. Is it to avoid internal revolts and boredom that they have developed such a relent­less programme (not too different, perhaps, from the human race)? Have they developed a cult of the absurd or some crazed ritual for turning life and its mean­ing to their own perverse ends? Have they invented a perfect model of cloning, the only way of guaranteeing the eternity of a species and solving the problem of indi­vidual existence? A wonderful hypothesis, but how can we know? Let them speak, on walking around these ants, let them confess! What is their message? Yet they just go enormous distances to bring back things that are actually plentiful on the anthill (in this, too, they are not so different from the human race)” (Cool memories IV)

And last but not least, because Cioran is his bittersweet simulacrum, minus the either or choice between reality and illusion:

“Like the disabled child who sued his mother for not having worn her safety belt, when she was pregnant, in the crash which left him disabled, soon all children will be able to sue their parents for having brought them into the world” (Cool Memories IV)

Baudrillard for ever….we won’t miss you, you are the age...

Gorgeous A -Trance the world - (in 80 days)

She travels around the world, around all the trance festivals of the world: Fullmoon, Soulclipse, Solstice, Omni, Rainbow…Gorgeously curvaceous, beautifully precise in her manner, dressed in an impossible mix between the darkness shades of Goth and the kaleidoscopic colours of psychedelia…a psychedelic trance angel that wears Yves Saint Laurent, Opium and Gucci…all the more beautiful in77 that these logos of luxury and pretension will soon be ripped to pieces and soiled by lustful hands, dust and dancing bodies…An deep sea oriental goddess far too refined for the gyrating crusties surrounding her…a top-model who has finally escaped her gloss and make-up cage into the trance freedom of the open-air. A flesh made sculpture…if geometry had an origin she would be “it”…

She trance travels and pursues a worldly adventure of freedom and transgression. She encounters bodies that come in all races, shapes and sizes - from all over the world…seeking in tandem a hedonic transfiguration through the pills & thrills of dance, nature, artifice and chemical disunity.

Just image…imagine, she provokingly whispers…a life purely lived on rhythm, light, and chemical intensity – time and time again, only to get higher and higher on the vibes of life itself. Her eyes sparkle with excitement as she tells me her story…She only lives for the music of the mind, the lust of bodies and the dance of the soul…trance, Goa trance, dark trance, psytrance…all around the world, the same vibe, the same dance, the same beat…Rio de Janeiro, LA, Madrid, Amsterdam, Bombay, Tokyo, etc. secret and not so secret festivals are located and zoomed in by eagle eye Amelia, or “Gorgeous A”, as she is nicknamed by her party network…

How does she finance such a lavish and intensive life style? I ask…she didn’t need to follow up on my question; the mischievous look gave it all away. I guess that one thing that being beauty graced has over mere mortals is the actuality of a life lived in pure immanence, a life of pure immanence. Her life fuels her/self; she is all she needs, she lives off herself: no matter, no work - there is no distance between what you fell and what you need.

She pays her dues in fluids of semen and milk. Amelia is indifferent to the female or male side of things: young or old, mothers to be or fathers on the run…it’s all flux and fluids for her…She is the very embodiment of Pierre Klossowski’s philosophical fantasy of “living money”; following in footsteps of the “passion utopia” of Charles Fourier, Klossowski imagined a “payment” made out of libidinal sensations; impersonal transactions of what bodies could give and receive: a kind of “universal prostitution” without the commodity of money to enact the exchange.

Amelia is her own capital, so she can afford the best of what capitalism has to offer: global trance.

Amelia does “it” in secret however. Only an elected few will ever know what sweet transgressions lurk behind those emerald sparkling eyes of hers…always keen to get down and dirty with the beats, the beasts and the lasers…

As if her life was not intense enough, like a Wildeian Lord Henry, I further whisper sweet transgressions into Amelia/Dorian not so bright mind. After all, I got all theory she could possibly ask for: the Batailles, Foucaults, Deleuzes, and the Artauds etc. She voraciously opens up to these sweet lullabies…I entice her for more confessions whilst implanting here and there, more mind fields for her to transgress, more limits to absolve and dissolve… As psychedelic guru John Lilly says in the “centre of the cyclone”:

“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits”.

A game with the limitless cosmos, a gamble she seems to play to win…

The Sublime Viscosity of the Milky Way

Aesthetics is – in direct opposition to the hedonic and the ascetic...

Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics: the sublime is contrasted with beauty. Beauty = harmony (and proportion) of form, and is within the non-conceptual realm of the re/presentable; whilst the sublime is the formless, it is excess and infinity: i.e. magnitude (“mathematical sublime”) and power (“dynamic sublime”).

“All of this”, for Kant, means that the aesthetics of the sublime is the “subjective” effect of trying to re/present what exceeds the comprehensive faculties of the mind. A thundering gap between apprehension and comprehension - which gives rise to the sublime aesthetic experience: a double-bind aporia: simultaneously made out of the necessary and hopeless effort of the “imagination” to estimate the magnitude/power of the sublime object (e.g. storm, war, pyramids, etc...) - paradoxically, this lacuna or hiatus is felt as: aesthetic pleasure.

But what are the post/modern objects of the sublime? What is sublime nowadays?

One object stands out among the many, the most sublime of all post/modern objects: Bukkake…

Bukkake is a sublime object, because of its excessive, disproportionate, explosive, and of course, volcanic modality.

Mainstream western video porn has always been obsessed with “the” ejaculating on the face of woman after coitus - the so called “money shot”. The whole affair seems pretty tame, and dare I say, quite boring, but not for the Japanese who/ seem to have a semen fetish to end all fetishes. In their usual fashion of taking western “technological values” (i.e. happy go lucky nihilism) to the extreme, they have taken the western porn’ “money shot” to the limit; hence, the pearly birth of Bukkake (recopied back into the west with a lucrative niche of its own).

According to some pseudo legend, Bukkake is an old Japanese tradition of punishment (the porn world loves tradition: “no ejaculation without tradition”…), in which women were punished for their “disrespect” by being isolated in some rundown location, and then sequentially ejaculated on by a group of on cuming males, (who// take it in turn to aim and project - usually the female face (Emmanuel Levinas would not be surprised) is the principle aim of the penal parade…

DVD Japan is taking this venerable tradition of semen ingrata to the limit; and when one takes any phenomenon, even the most trivial and banal, to the limit, it topples over into sublimity. Sublime excess; for which the imagination struggles to re/present “with” and “in” an adequate idea/frame: a sublime object is an object in constant need of, but perpetually failing, re/presentation:

Bukkake is no ordinary (beautiful) semen shower, the (female) object is not washing in “it” but bathing in “it”, or should I say, flowing in “it”? The female night is taken by a whiter shade of pale...

Flows of upon flows of molten lava hit the flesh, from head to toe. Flow pearls of thick viscosity transmogrify what was merely beautiful into the sublime formless of the disproportionate and the immense...

The thick viscous whiter than white transparently fusions the mundane skin beneath with an otherworldly ivory glow. However one tries to look at the gang-bang dream-shower scene, it is “almost” impossible to re/present within an adequate idea of rational perception - the sheer and banal quantity has been enlarged into an (aesthetic) quality unbeknown to the dollar signs participants...

The (aesthetic) spectator loses all grounds of comprehension and the aesthetic effect of the sublime takes over - at least if one is not lustfully or vicariously “participating” oneself. As Kant said, the aesthetic state is defined by its disinterestedness and contemplative enacting. One should keep all hands off, if one wants to experience the viscous sublime...

Jaded Valerie – Faites vos Jeux

The gyrating cubic lights highlighted here and there her marble polished flesh...

I threw a few aphoristic lullabies at her, like darts to eye; her blood was so gorged with artifice and additives that all was win to her emerald orbed eyes, her emerald jaded fancy lit up the night with forest greens...

Emerald forests, Amazon greens, emerald darknesses, emerald fires, emerald lands, emerald abysses within abysses...

"I think that would be lovely" she said, turning around, "Are you..." she could not say anything else: "No I’m not, but I could be" I feared that I had broken the chemical spell with such hollow words, words that sounded awkward and pretentious.....but then aren't we all pretending? Amateur gamblers trying to be magicians, whose tricks are always found out in end, to be, just that, tricks... "that sounds wonderful" Valerie languidly whispered, "lets us go” almost pausing for an emerald moment outside time... “who knows…we might win this time"….

Luscious Sixteen

When it comes to going on Hedonic Holiday, nothing can stop them, they descend south like a bunch of locusts and consume everything in sight...I always prefer the end of August beginning September period - when the sun is already hitting lower, and where there is a gentle melancholia of excesses long past swirling in the air: atmospheres of broken loves, jaded sex and wasted looks dense up the sandy streets and brightly beaches...Not that I would know anything about beaches or lowering or otherwise assembled sunshine, both of which I hate in equal measure. For me, the only sun is the moon and the only light is the night. It’s after all only by moonshine that one has hopes of encountering something more enticing than array of sun fried lobsters...Although I wasn’t quite expecting this one...

Stumbling back through a Van Gothian vortex night, high and low on illegal non-equilibrium dynamics, I encountered something that did not fit. No surprise there, one might say, “my” mind-object relation had been blasted away long time ago. I was swirling with empathic ecstasies and joyful space-temporal distortions that even Henri Bergson could not speculate up...in short, my space-time was definitely out-of-joint, as Gilles Deleuze would say, off its hinges and into the pure empty form of time...

So how come this apparition out of the paradoxia of temporal distortions was not fitting? : give me hallucinations of alien beasts copulating with unconceivable forms, spatial-temporal speeds of infinite precision, vertigo abysses within abysses, eternity in an instant, falling infinity, Van Goth’s spirals of vivid colors, abstractions and patterns of impossible geometries, OK, but a Female Goth in the South of France, NO.... that is really and really impossible with or without drugs. In London Camden or Paris Montmartre one would expect, from time to time, to encounter dark angels stumbling out from their clubbing coffins...For some unknown reason I started to completely lose it, ego loss went even further; bad trip on the horizon, anxiety/panic attack coming its way…all figures, real or hallucinated, started to horrifically morph into reptile human assemblage: shake eyes, reptile hair of flowing medusa shakes, nails of knives... knowing from experience, that when the chemistry starts its devouring dance from within, one needs to let go even further, to let go of the infinitesimal shards of control one still has left…

Paradoxically as it may sound, one needs to lose control even further in order not obliterate into a chaos-insanity of no return...sure enough, nightmare morphed into pure heaven...

Everything was swirling around me, except for the eye of the storm: a pure white lusciousness of marble light rightly pierced in all the right orifices, and hellishly cute...no sunshine has ever graced this otherworldly creature...definitely one of Lucifer’s Angels stranded on the highway to Hell. It seems the road to hell passes by sunny France. I must admit Lucifer has taste; his daughters have that impossible quality of: virginal vixens: Maria Magdalena (medieval style) and Britney Spears (Disney-porn style) all in one...She could not have been more than sixteen - even in my altered states the female number is unmistakable - …black hair with streaks of violet-red gushes of colour, a waterfall of hair in slow motion framed a face made of marble with flaming black lips and feline slits for eyes: black pools reflecting stardust universes...She was sitting cross legged on the edge of some broken down wall, one of her black lacquered sandals dangerously dangling off one of her toes...

I said something but it came out garbled, she garbled something back sounded like a cross between Spanish and German...well, all cognition lost, I tried intuition instead, that didn’t work either... so fuck, lets just jump into it...it did not take long to understand the gestures of erotic invitation....couldn’t help thinking even in my hyper-hallucinogenic state that she was asking/fucking for money...the reality principle is hard to destroy...I thought Hell was free. Who knows what really happened then...one thing for sure is that in my altered states, all social inhibitions, neurosis, and other closed systems had been dissolved for good...pierced kisses in all the right places, devouring tongues that could not help but to feed of each other…a ravenous lust beyond human concern kaleidoscoped the night into a formless shattering. Got sucked dry by a luscious vortex…sweet sixteen turns sixty nine…

Since no plastic was inserted between me and this otherworldly creature, maybe, just maybe…an angel of death? Woke up to a non-surprise; the money in my wallet was missing…how kind of her to put my divested wallet backkk… nicely inserted in my jacket. Who knows maybe she had some kind of rolling stones sympathy for me...a sympathy from the Devil...the rolling chorus...you could almost hear it in the stillness of the rising orange tinged dawn... another day...another aborted quest...

Df / xy

…liquid ambrosia flowed down her eyes…

…the spiral void kept increasing, wanting more and more, consuming fires that weren't even there…

.... Jaded girls caught the diamond eye....eyes of jade reflected the moonlit dance floor…beads of sweat trickled snake lines of spherical exhaustion…

She whispered more that she could tell…

Huxley / Flaubert - Is this All?

Aldous Huxley shows the precise nature of the dilemma:

“My preoccupation with the subject of mysticism - an interest partly positive, partly negative; a fascination that was also hostile - dates back to my youth. The title of my first volume of undergraduate verse, The Burning Wheel, is derived from Boehme, whom I read while still at Oxford...The negative interest became positive in the early Thirties, not as the result of any single event so much as because all the rest - art, science, literature, the pleasures of thought and sensation - came to seem... "not enough." One reaches a point where one says, even of Beethoven, even of Shakespeare, "Is this all?"

If Huxley needed the illuminated realms of psychedelia, it is because, in the end, “all the rests” do not deliver…

From the realms of Psychedelia to the Aesthetic cult of Beauty:

"For me, there is only beautiful verse in the world, well-turned, harmonious, singing sen­tences, beautiful sunsets, moonlit nights, colourful paintings, marble sculptures of antiquity, and striking faces. Beyond that, nothing. I would rather have been Talma than Mirabeau because he lived in a more pure sphere of beauty. I pity birds in a cage as much as enslaved peoples. In all of politics, there is but one thing that I understand, riots”. (Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet, 6-7 August 1846).

Madame Bovary, c’est moi….

The Black Sea of Infinity - The Lovecraftian Sublime

…hints of a new infinity, vast life forms from earth's deep time, human insanity with the appearance of a new star, the stellar unknown beyond the horizon, is always horrific…

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direc­tion, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."' The Call of Cthulhu

Infinity, the perpetual grinding novelty of the cosmos, the virtual immensity in which all potentials await their realisations, the very cosmic existence that is affirmed by Deleuze and Bergson, is, for Lovecraft, a cosmic horror of unspeakable terror.

"the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness." (The Silver Key)

Let’s face it, a world of the infinite repetition of the same (Schopenhauer’s Will and Nietzsche’s eternal return) or a world of the infinite repetition of difference and novelty (Bergson and Deleuze), either way, will not do…whatever the interpretation, we want something more, the sublime and the beautiful are no longer an option…the horror, the horror…and even more than that…

Rotten life – Almost too Easy to Live

Contrary to the dripping dark fin de siecle style of Schopenhaurian nihilism, Camus’ absurd glorifies the sun, and the midday mean; it’s a pagan nihilism of sea, sex and sun:

“For the mistake of a certain literature lies in thinking that life is tragic because it is wretched. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming, that is its whole tragedy. Without beauty, love or danger it would be almost easy to live” (Camus)

....an aporia if there ever was one:

“In the best ordered lives a moment always comes when the scenery collapses. Why this and that, this woman, this job and this appetite for a future? To put it all in a nutshell, why this fever for life in these legs that are going to rot?” (Camus)

So the question remains, why is Sisyphus happy?

Gipsy Eyes – Keeper of the Seven Keys

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...

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...

“It is never the beginning or the end which are interesting; the beginning and end are points. What is interesting is the middle”. (Deleuze)

We know the beginning and the end already, it is set: nothingness to nothingness. Birth and death are two sides of the same life coin, but there is still a dimension between the two surfaces, however infinitesimally small - in between the two sides there is leverage for something to happen, becomings are always possible. It is always the middle that one searches in one’s activities, for the world is perpetually starting and ending at every point.

There is no life, no beauty, no spirit, in the deluded searches for closures and origins....

Like a surfer, it is always a question of inserting oneself into an already existing movement, and like judo, one uses a greater strength, not so much against itself, but for oneself: glide, fall and slip, but never posse/s or control: one’s finite activity is always against an infinite multifarious background of sublime passivity:

“There's no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting‑into‑orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to get into something instead of being the origin of an effort”. (Deleuze)

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…

Red and Black enflames the pupils, and clarifies a face to the warm beauty of a dark blue cube gyrating in the nightlight of a higher dimension….

That night he loved a body like a material harmony caught within a moving architecture…

Any absolute black materialism is not far removed from the whitest spirituality….

If beauty is black, red is love, then one may need two elements: line and attraction - along the black line of beauty attracted by the overflowing redness of love…

She danced all night it, her skirt a transparently gazing into the night-dome of the sky above…

Vast like the night, geometrically precise as the shades clarity…

Black and Red....

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....

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….

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…