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…