A Charming Vision

The boy-band and related 'artists' as modern variation on Castrato singers.
These modern castratos provoke sexual desire in young girls, which is by definition unrealisable in the denatured lives of these singers who exist in this vision as pure image. The provoked desire of the child's is channelled into lakes of wholly false saccharine sentiment, and the consummation of the castrato's promise of love and the child's desire is in the form of money paid by the child( or child's parents) to the pimps- record companies, Louis Walshes- of these castratos, which then secures the illusion of the loving bond.
This is also an illustration of alchemy under the materialist, consumerist philosophy: the base matter of human emotions transmuted into the higher substance of gold. What use are the ephemeral emotions and desires of a child or adult consumer after all if they cannot become the vehicle for an act of economic consumption? The new patriotism. And one could say that the otherwise dangerous primeval world of the consumer's inner life is justified by this very process of transubstantiation of the body and mind's workings into the higher substances. Rather than a potential source of disorder and inconvenience to society, the inner world of the individual consumer is a convenient pool of resources to be mined and harnessed, and to act as a lubricant for the smooth workings of the societal machine.
In Babylon, Victor Pelevin describes the human's place in the economic world as a cell within an overall economic organism through which passes the life-force of money, but that strangely the economic organism is an endlessly lower evolutionary lifeform than its own cells.

A good time to link to Bill Hicks.

Big-Band Music

Shit music played by lots of people.

Mythic Benevolent Post

Our modern soul and world are in sore need of mythical understanding, wrote Karen Armstrong in A Short History of Myth. With that in mind, I've decided I might as well provide a little in the way of said mythic sustenance, though I can't promise my interest will extend to fleshing out this mythic morsel to what might be imagined to be required depths of literary matter.

There is a wound in the mind of God, and the drops that pour from his wound are the words that flow into the mind of man. Thus the Word was with God and the Word was God. These words, or drops of blood from the mind of God, when coalesced wisely, form ideas which take us back towards the mind from which they flowed. However the words are emanations of the mind rather than the mind in its fulness, and just as the wound heals and the external blood dries up, so words should not be mistaken for autonomous beings in themselves apart from the mind which is their life-source, otherwise they too dry up and die. Thus the dried-up intellectual who takes the drops of blood for the all, feasts on them as if they were life itself, and becomes more and more a refugee from living truth.

Mammon

In 1934, the same year the masonic symbolism of the Pyramid and All-Seeing Eye were put on the dollar bill by 32nd degree Freemason, Franklin D Roosevelt, his later Vice-President, 32nd degree Freemason Henry Wallace, wrote the following in his book, Statemanship and Religion: It will take a more definite recognition of the Grand Architect of the Universe before the apex stone( capstone of the pyramid) is finally fitted into place and this nation in the full strength of its power is in position to assume leadership amoung the nations in inaugurating 'the New Order of the Ages'. Oh yeah, Henry? What the hell, might the electorate have wondered, are you talking about? 

 The phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum appears on the dollar under the pyramid, meaning New Order of the Ages, or New World Order in its slightly changed form. Above the pyramid, Annuit Coeptis, God, or Providence, has favoured our undertaking. One might recall the lines from the New Testament, No servant can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon. Also Jesus casting the traders from the tempple. But here, the Freemasonic political leaders unite their money intrinsically with the God of this world, as if they are of one ideological source. Who is the God of this world again?

Belief System

Where the mind conceives of something and then bows down to its own conception.

The Count

Some rather strange words from 'The Count of Monte Cristo', a work that reveals in the person of Edmond Dantes the philosophical vision of an inhuman avenging angel portrayed at times as a zenith of human perfection, a man apparently beyond good and evil, though Dumas does include dashes of somewhat unconvincing Christian sentiment to which Dantes ultimately supposedly surrenders. The effect of such pandering to literary expectation or society norms being to muddy the waters of the essence of the book.


"With the eyes fixed on the social organisation of nations, you see only the springs of the machine, and lose sight of the sublime workman who makes them act: you do not recognise before and around you any but those placemen whose brevets have been signed by the minister or the king; and that the men whom God has put above those titulars, ministers and kings, by giving them a mission to carry out, instead of a post to fill- I say that they escape your narrow, limited ken.
Because you remain eternally encircled in a round of general conditions, and you have never dared to raise your wing into those upper spheres which God has peopled with invisible or marked beings.
"And you allow then that such spheres exist, and that these marked and invisible beings mingle amongst us?"
"Yes...you see them whenever God pleases to allow them to asume a material form: you touch them, come in contact with them, speak to them and they reply to you."

Dumas, perhaps not so incidentally, was a Freemason; friends with Garibaldi, also a mason. In de Lampedusa's great novel The Leopard, it is taken as given that the unification of Italy was a product of the actions of Freemasons, which given Guisseppe Mazzini was a Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy is not too surprising.

Road to Ruin?

Eminent scientists have revealed that mathematical deduction aided by external observation has revealed that we are on an apparent collision course with future time, which for some as yet unknown reason has decided to go into reverse. The most widely accepted explicating hypothesis- The Temporal Self-Defence Theory- posits that rather than plunge into some irreversible imminent apocalyptic scenario, possibly of an environmental nature, time chose to cease its onward path to apparent death and, unable to simply stay in a static state of non-existence, began its retreat back in the direction from whence it came.

A view being treated as heresy by most within the scientific establishment is that we are looking at the problem from the wrong end, and that it is actually us who are doing the illegitimate reversing, and the imagined future time returning which we are approaching is normal time advancing in its legitimate scientific path.

Another thought is that time isn't as infinite as some had imagined, and that when one reaches a certain end-point one is bounced back in the direction from whence one came. A philosophical sect has arisen from within this camp that rather than meet a kind of elastic end-point, time is in the nature of an escalator which keeps circling infinitely. This will be familiar to many as according with Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence, which under EU regulations from January 1st, academics will be obliged to term The Escalator Theory. This vision, however, doesn't seem in accord with the nature of the scientific evidence; under this escalator vision time as a whole continues to proceed in the same direction. It is simply that the chronological progression is in the form of a loop.

Noone has been as yet been able to furnish any convincing vision of the scenario that will arise when time collides, though one leading figure has ventured the interesting opinion that "Anything could happen."

It should be mentioned that a lone voice is also claiming that this is "all bollocks," the result of a faulty telescope and bad mathematics, but he has been shunned by his colleagues and described as "gambling with our children's futures" by no less an authority than Nobel winner, Albert Einstein Gore.

CIA Rendition Jet crashed with 4 Tons of Cocaine

Short piece here. Big story- must have been all over the free mainstream press. Or perhaps not.

Another Literary Breakthrough

Devoted as my every waking moment is to literary experimentation- an activity which causes me no pride, it being no more heroic than a fireman rescuing the infirm and elderly from a flame engulfed building- I have another boundary pushing idea whose execution I am pursuing with full intellectual diligence.
I have decided for a new fictional work to abandon words altogether, they being the relics of a bygone age of shallow certainty shameful to the modern intellect. It will be a 150 page work or thereabouts, which I will title A Notebook. The technical problem causing me most difficulty is whether the pages of this book should be lined or blank.

Murder-Mystery Mystery

A fabulous thought secreted by the thought processes labelled 'mine': to write a book describing itself( insofar as a book is capable of self-description) as a murder-mystery; but unexpectedly, and perhaps uniquely for a murder-mystery, the mystery lying in the total absence of a murder within the book. Perhaps the characters- for what is a work of fiction without characters- could lounge around some hotel of the upper-crust type, sunning themselves, making louche comments(whatever they might be), and becoming gradually more confused at the absence of dynamism within the structure of their pleasant but dull existences in the form of the lack of a murder which they all seem to have expected as a matter of course, and which they seem to feel to be( by a matter of oblique and subtle inference) the ultimate reason for their presence in such a collective environment. And what is a murder-mystery without a murder? Such intellectual refinement.
"A hotbed of taut, but excruciatingly delightful paranoia." "A parable for our times" will proclaim some esteemed reviews. I think I'll call it Guilty by Omission.

An after-thought: that through the accumulation of unbearable, unjustified tension and mistrust, where each character is utterly doubtful of his own future- whether he is to be kill or be killed, be a guilty accomplice, a comparative innocent but who will have a guilty secret revealed, etc... that one of these people breaks under the tension and so as to release the unbearableness of this unbearable tension actually does commit a murder, perhaps for reasons he could hardly elucidate, but ultimately to bring a degree of certainty to a life from which is lapsing into formless chaos: as is well known, fear of self-annihilation within formless chaos is the source of all ego-sustaining action. And so the murder-mystery without a murder wherein lies the mystery becomes a murder-mystery with a murder wherein perhaps lies a deeper mystery.

New Pelevin Work on Horizon

From Dalkey Archive Press article, Letter from Russia by Dmitry Golynko-Volfson. Full article here from which I've extracted the following:

For many established writers or for their younger colleagues, the attempt to find “territories of freedom” becomes not only a cultural mission, but also a major ethical responsibility...The new novel by Victor Pelevin, Svyashchennaya kniga oborotnya (The Sacred Book of the Werewolf), came out exactly a year after his previous outing, Dialektika Perekhodnogo Perioda iz Niotkuda v Nikuda (The Dialectics of the Period of Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere).
In each of his new novels, Pelevin works a miraculous transformation: turning vulgar Soviet anecdotes into wise, instructive parables.

In The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, all spheres of Russian life are portrayed as being a veritable werewolf-orgy, but the way out of this nightmare is not through silver bullets and the like, but through an elevated love. Werewolves in contemporary Russia are by no means just characters out of folktales. The mass media regularly draws attention to new unmaskings of so-called “turncoats” in the high ranks of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Federal Security Service, connected to criminal organizations and “grazing” off of these government institutions on behalf of the mafia. According to Pelevin, all the agents of political power—including law enforcement, the oligarchy, and the Kremlin—are either secretly or openly werewolves, diabolical creatures from the underworld. Thus, for these ruthless, modern-day monsters, love has changed from a positive, everyday value into something revolutionary.

Pelevin’s novel tells a moving story about love between two werecreatures, a little fox and a big wolf. The fox works as a prostitute in Moscow hotels, and becomes a mistress of the wolf Alexander Seryi, a lieutenant of the Federal Security Service, who with his magic wand has invigorated the Russian oil industry.

The intensity of his emotional experiences makes the wolf lose his supernatural abilities. Love transforms him into an ordinary dog, nicknamed Pes “Pizdec,” an ordinary State Security bureaucrat. But the fox achieves mystical enlightenment, dissolving in an iridescent luminescence right over Bitssevskiy Park, where Pelevin likes to ride his bicycle. The fox’s opinions on life are very close to the author’s: for Pelevin, even a contemporary author is a clever kind of werewolf, transforming himself to better adapt to the global market in order to win the right to an independent opinion.

It sounds well-suited to Pelevin's strengths, and hopefully will show the relative paucity of The Helmet of Horror to have been more due to the constraining nature of its framework, both in structure and theme, rather than any sign of a decline in his powers.

Language and Madness

As said in the earlier piece Doubt, Wittgenstein, a Refutation, doubt itself as an existential state is intrinsically dependent on language. It is an attempt of the mind to disconnect from reality by the only means available to effect such a disconnection, and that is by the means of language in such a way that this language violates its own nature; ie it transgresses itself and robs itself of its own significance. Madness is the state arising from this insane use of language pushed to its logical, or illogical, conclusion. Where language is used properly it posseses an intrinsic relationship to reality, thus allowing oneself to speak meaningfully, whereas in the case of the madman this relationship breaks down and his words are simply self-referential, or that his words simply refer to the illusion created by those very words. One’s language creates the edifice of one’s madness.

Madness in the ordinary personal sense is not caused outright by bad reasoning - its most likely source being some trauma or sequence of traumas from which the shocked mind uses language as the escape route to create an alternative reality into which this suffering mind chooses to dwell.

However, on the level of cultures - as opposed to individual lives - such madness is most likely to be caused precisely at source by this skewed reasoning, or use of language in which the intellectualising mind disconnects from reality and creates a false alternative of its own devising.

Art is

Art is the unity of veracity and structure in no particular order.

Tolstoy: Master and Man

I recently consumed, in an intellectual sense as opposed to a nutritional one, a book of short stories by Tolstoy, called Master and Man. In short, the stories are imbued with a magnificent profound simplicity, especially the title story which is one of the zeniths of literature. Oddly, the story How Much Land Does a Man Need?, which I found a bit too bound to the yoke of its moral intent and rendered somewhat tedious as a consequence, was described by James Joyce as the greatest short story ever written. Which just goes to show how one can never trust a Dub.
My other reading of Tolstoy consists of Anna Karenina, which I admit to not especially mad about, but subsequently found War and Peace to be superb.

Non-Accumulation of the Superfluous

Too many words have been spilled discussing other words, here as well as elsewhere, and so I will not willingly add to the linguistic effluence that plagues us all, casting us into the over-crowded and inane abyss of the superfluous from which one emerges- if one emerges- a lesser more confused entity in this, the raging sea of earthly existence.

When all is said and done, there is very little- in fact nothing- that can be said(or done), else our sentence descends into degraded nonsense. This time of which it could be said that all has been said and done is not, however, a time that has come upon us as yet, since it is clear that many things are still being said, such as this, and many other things being done. This hypothetical time of silence and inaction could not be said to be a time about which one could say very much, as one very quickly exhausts what one say about such silence and inaction. Try it, you'll produce a few lines along the lines of "An ever deepening stillness spread to and expanded within the inner sanctum of his being, which was expanding at a rate of knots. No words disturbed the mystery of the peace that was the very nature of his silent self, and in fact, there being no words, there was no his to have a self, nor self to have a his, which entities could be disturbed by these words which were now no more. The deepness deepened as he..." You'll weary of it after a time.

The Two Faces of Egotism

Positive Egotism: "I am great."

Negative Egotism: "I am shit."

Language and 'Language'

"Without words there would be no language and vice versa": words deposited on this very blog by the same author of the the string of words unfolding on the screen at this unfolding moment...now passed. In the absence of the word 'language', however, there would still be language, or what is referred to by 'language', i.e. the words which collectively comprise a language. But if there were no language then there would be none of the words necessary to the existence of language, including, needless to say, the word 'language' itself. So the existence of 'language' owes its existence to the existence of language, but the existence of language does not owe its existence to the existence of 'language', and in the absence of the existence of 'language', that which we refer to by 'language', ie language, could still exist, but would be referred to by the form of another word existing within itself. 'Language' could come to exist within this language, but would signify something other than language.

Doubt, Wittgenstein, a Refutation

To cast off the idiot Questioner, who is always questioning,
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin
Silently plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave;
Who publishes Doubt and calls it knowledge

William Blake, Reason and Imagination.

I recently read an introduction to Wittgenstein, the bookshop having gotten this instead of the Tractatus book that had actually been ordered in my effort to introduce myself to this thinker's thought. Anyway, having gotten the tedium of the scene-setting out of the way I'll move onto the main point which relates to W's overcoming of a Descartean question of doubt, ie how can one know anything is real as perhaps what one imagines to be real is merely a dream or some such....in short how can one trust in the reality of reality. Or at least I think that's the essence of the matter.
I am dependent on my middleman's guidance as to how Wittgenstein shot this thought down, but I found his refutations not quite as potent as could have been, and a bit tedious. What Wittgenstein's points are I'm afraid I've not the inclination to search and describe, but my position is that that there is a very direct way to attack the matter, and in a manner so close and apparently natural to Wittgesntein's own way of thinking as for it to be very likely that W did in fact use the following argument elsewhere, and if so excuse my ignorants. Whether this is the case or not, this refutation is on the basis of language itself. This relates somewhat to an earlier piece I wrote here.

To say anything is to involve oneself necessarily in an acceptance that the language one is using is real and imbued with meaning; that the words one is using- if used correctly, ie meaningfully- are meaningful. This is the necessary ground from which one can say anything. So to ask the very question- how can I trust in the reality of the 'real'- is to begin with the foundation that language is real and that one is engaging in a meaningful and real act. To accept the reality of anything- in this case, language- is necessarily to accept the reality of reality. Reality cannot exist within unreality.

The position of Doubt is contrarily a nihilistic intellectual proposition in the true sense, within the framework of which one cannot grant oneself the liberty of believing language to be real and intrinsically meaningful. And so, within this framework of doubt the question of doubt cannot be asked, as to ask the question requires an acceptance of the very reality or meaningfulness of language which doubt, if true to itself, must doubt. And so, since the question of doubt cannot be formed, then doubt cannot exist, as doubt requires a mind utilising language so as to doubt.
Doubt is an intellectual activity, and all intellectual activity necessarily involves a faith in the reality of the language one is using, be it mathematical, linguistic or otherwise. This is the necessary ground.
All in all, the sceptical position is self-contradictory, and should be destroyed as a sensible proposition immediately at source.

To sum up: To ask the question of Doubt is to accept the reality of the language used in the asking, which is to refute the question.

Onwards

Once again I have been informed of the rising tide of awareness being exhibited by the common hordes arising from the literary minuets displayed here that are but the shabbiest of cast-offs of mine consciousness but which trifles I do not begrudge my fellow inhabitants of this earthly existence. I say 'fellow inhabitants' not to imply that the mere enclosing of our respective sense of selves within the human physical structure is sufficient to suggest any but the most superficial of comparisons in our wildly disparate spiritual and philosphical essences, but to show that I am not one to deny the essential sameness of this bodily vessel which our selves do deign to inhabit, and the further reality of the earthly plane that our bodies do in turn co-inhabit. We are truly one, even if only in that very superficial sense.

And being one, even if only in said superficial sense, I feel it incumbent upon that which is referred to as me to continue to effect the deepening of the sea of awareness alluded to earlier. Before I go on, one should realise that what is written here is merely the palest of shadows of what I write in the pure land of perfect forms, which branch of this world as it relates to language we refer to as The Land of Perfect Lexicon. However, this land of pure form is utterly inaccessible to those of us not existing within it, which is to say all of us, so the realisation that what is written here is merely the palest of shadows... etc. could be said to be not much fucking use to anyone, as could be said to be the world of pure forms as a whole.

There is also, incidentally, the theory of imperfect or impure forms, which argues that the apparent forms we see around us are merely shadows; the vastly improved versions of a world of half-baked, ill-conceived first draft archetypes, the theoretical constructs of a neanderthal intelligence which is the world of the true, and which our 'reality' merely mimics.

Kafka on Blindness

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

What is Art

I've been spurred onto furthering my exploration of the field of art following my previous piece, which I am told did much in the way of lightening the load of the common man in his struggles in the earthly domain.

What is art? A much debated question in various circles. Circles? Moving on. Another way to phrase the question is what isn't art, which once classified leaves us with the categorical remainder being the relevant substance. Listing all that isn't art is however not an activity for which I am willing to spare the voluminous time demanded of such a venture, so I'll return to the original form of enquiry in the form of the question, what is art.
A certain online dictionary reveals the following words designed to educate:

the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.

This you will agree is nonsense, for to judge of what is more than ordinary significance requires knowledge of what is ordinary significance. Do events and objects helpfully declare themselves to be above, below or equivalent to this standard of import? No, they don't. Upon picking up a ringing telephone is one greeted by a declaration by the caller that this is a call of ordinary or below oridinary significance? I leave it to the reader to decide. Or alternatively does a picture on the wall announce its ontological being to be above this state of ordinariness and hence art, while contrarily a photograph in that most reviled of substances, a newspaper, announces its innate significant ordinariness, or even sub-ordinariness? Again, no.
Though I have even been too slack in my criticism. What of these aesthetic principles to which the relevant objects must conform, tell me more- what are they? But our author says no more and seems to imagine that it is sufficient to have lobbed this grenade of grievous obfuscation into the no-man's land of the reader's ignorance, and that by some mysterious alchemical process of self-determination wonderful illuminatory psychological events will transpire and enlighten all.
But all that will transpire is our poor citizen will feel himself cast adrift in this nebulous sea of aesthetic principles, and be more confused and helpless than when he began. He had needed the intellectual clarification to one slippery enquiry; now he needs a second and more treacherously esoteric issue clarified before he can return to the first.
Art must conform to aesthetic principles...are these principles written down somewhere? If so where, and if not why not. And if not are we fools to trust in their existence? But even if the nature of these famous- some would say infamous- aesthetic principles can be made clear, a point strikes me: Art must conform to aesthetic priciples. What must aesthetic principles conform to? They must conform to what it is that makes art art. So art must conform to what makes art art so as to be art. Whilst of course being of above ordinary significance.

Nature of Art Explained

The moon was up in the sky like a big white round thing. It was dark around it in the manner of a great bowl of murky black soup except with bits of light(stars) in the soup. You might say this meant it was not really resembling soup at all but unlike property developers art knows no boundaries. This is because this is the way the mind is in its ability to think freely of material constraints again unlike property developers who are limited by the real in terms of things like building materials and the laws of physics. Though the artist is limited by the tools of his art also such as paint and words though the writer is free to make up words if he wants though if he is too liberal with this noone will understand him so his art will be a purely private thing for himself and noone else, that is unless this noone else becomes a someone else by going to lengths of undetermined extremity, possibly out of all proportion to the reward gained by such efforts, to understand his art.

Kafka's The Castle

I have just read Kafka's The Castle, having merely read a few short stories previously. An extraordinary work; life rendered in a kind of elemental, skeletal dream world. I don't feel I have the ability, and to a compensating extent much interest in critiquing books( I have my doubts about skeletal, elemental dream world), or for that matter any ability for descriptive prose whatsoever, but that very refusal to be edited or reduced into a lesser form than it is is an element of what is so extraordinary about this work, and perhaps of art in its purest sense. A much impressed Aldous Huxley wrote of it: One would need to have a very special sort of mind to write it... In a work of art, a truth is always a beauty truth; and a beauty truth is a mystical entity, a two-in-one; the truth is quite inseparable from its companion, so you can only state in the most general terms what its nature is. 

 The desire to leave the work, in this case The Castle, as it is and not analyse it perhaps includes the temptation towards nebulosity, but it does seem on the other hand a temptation towards the kind of certainty that is inimical to the nature of The Castle to wish, for example, to decipher the meaning of K's assistants: to seek a hook upon which to rest the rationalising intellect, whereas Kafka seems to dissolve all such refuges of false certainty. 

To resort to the words of another great artist of the last century, Andrei Tarkovsky, might be a helpful escape route for this post: We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it...A true image is an abstraction, it cannot be explained, it only transmits truth and one can only comprehend it in one's own heart. Because of that it's impossible to analyse a work of art by utilising its intellectual significance. I am an enemy of symbols. Symbol is too narrow a concept for me in the sense that symbols exist in order to be deciphered. An artistic image on the other hand is not to be deciphered, it is an equivalent of the world around us. I think symbol and allegory rob the artist.

And from Tarkovsky again, but on a somewhat different theme: Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.

Desperate Horseshite

Idea for tv programme with good-looking cardboard people wheeled around from scene to scene delivering lines of fascinating candour. Called- yes you've guessed- Desperate Horseshite.
I've a feeling this may be a parody of something I haven't ever looked at, and could be accused so of not being fair and unfairly judgemental towards this something I haven't looked at, but this accusation would be scornfully dismissed due to the inevitablity of this something I haven't looked at being desperate horseshite. And so there is no need for me to view said desperate horseshite, as this viewing would merely, and infallibly, lead to the desperate horseshite being desperate horseshite conclusion already realised, though without having suffered the pointless penance of watching desperate horseshite just so as to know that desperate horseshite is indeed desperate horseshite.

Time Again

As I stand in a certain spot looking in a certain direction, I do not occupy a definitive point of perception which excludes the reality of all other possible points of perception. Instead I occupy a continuously shifting position within the visual field, which is comprised of an infinity of points of perception all existing simultaneously. Reality here is the totality of this field of vision as opposed to the distinct reality of the individual points.
The same can be said of time. We occupy a continuously shifting position within this field, again with all the individual points of time existing simultaneously. This may sound stranger than the field of vision, but to take a look at the alternative which is that the only point of reality in time is the present moment which is continuously advancing thus sending all previous time into oblivion or unreality. Time from this perspective is a knife-edge of reality surrounded by unreality in both directions, which seems a very artificial picture of the real.

I wrote this a while back, and I was naturally unsatisfied with the weakness of the final line. We should realise that with time, it is a case of one or the other; that either there is this knife-edge of reality constantly disappearing into & surrounded by nothingness, or there is a field of time, all time in a sense existing simultaneously.
The first notion of time would be typically rendered as "The past is dead." If we can talk of something being in a state of non-existence, then this is an absolute. There is no 'did exist at one time, but no longer.' To meaningfully speak of non-existence is to mean absolute non-existence uncontradicted by moments of existence.
Using this understanding of time, there is always a point of perspective which renders all other points non-existent, or unreal. "But you are forgetting that that point of reality is real." But that point is made unreal by another point, and so on. So to say that time exists in the conventional sense, ie all existence is solely within this ever dying moment, is to say that time doesn't exist. This would seem to be contradicted by experience.

The only time is a perpetual present; it does not make sense to speak of a previous moment not existing anymore, or of the past being dead. What exists in the present is the present; it is meaningless to speak of some other events in some other time not existing in this present. If we take a period of time such as the 1970s, everything that exists within that duration exists fully within that duration. It makes as little sense to say the 1970s, or things, events within the 1970s no longer exist in the 2000s as to say the 1970s don't exist in the 1930s. All three are real in themselves, and being real cannot be made unreal.
What is real doesn't become not real in some later dimension. One cannot meaningfully say "Julius Caesar doesn't exist now." The reality of Julius Caesar exists within the time of his existence, he doesn't not exist in another time.
Simliarly it is meaningless to speak of an elephant not existing within the room in which one is currently located, assuming that the room in which one is located does not contain an elephant. Or a glass of water in one corner of the room isn't made unreal by an apple in another corner, which is an approximate in sense to the rendering unreal of previous time by the onwards chronological movement of time.
That past and future are not within the field of my perception, but that is as as far as I can go in terms of claims to their unreality.

Abstract People

People who derive their sense of reality from theory or/and external observation, but who fail to make of themslves their means of knowing. The lens by which they envision life merely bits of externally observed information somehow strung together into some ill-formed general theory mistakenly imagined to be the rational conclusion of the observed information, and all life is filtered through this theoretical lens....life through a glass very darkly. Nothing is ever risked in their external pursuit of truth, and naturally nothing of any substance is found. They stand immersed in an epic landscape and argue about the map.
Because they are neither hot nor cold but lukewarm- if that- Life has no choice but to spit them out of its mouth.

Torture and its Destination

Without going into the very dubious truth claims of this War on Terror process, I'd like to take a look at the results of the state's allowing itself practices of torture such as water-boarding and electro shock stun-belts in its interrogation techniques, granting for the sake of argument that this committing of evil actions is a felt necessary means to an end, rather than a wallowing in evil for its own sake.
Where the incarcerated is by official policy not deserving of human rights, essentially sub-human, then it is natural that the interrogators will find it easier to inflict the desired torture with an easy conscience that this quivering sub-human mass of fear and pain is deserving of his sub-human treatment. The fact of his quivering in fear will also confirm for the torturer his own superiority to this figure who in turn is deserving of the contempt with which he is being treated- we are not automatons and this is the nature of the psychological, emotional dynamic of this scenario. The 'terrorist' is guilty by definition, and the torture will yield the proof of this, thus justifying the torture.
My main line of interest though is what does the act of torture do to the torturer. The research of Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, is well known when in 1960 he designed an experiment to test the limits of obedience. He recruited students from the university to take part in a pilot study, and in individual sessions they were told that they were participating in an experiment that would measure the effects of punishment on learning. Each participant was then directed to inflict a series of electric shocks on a "learner," increasing the intensity of the shocks with each wrong answer given. Although the learner appeared to be just another volunteer, he was actually a confederate of Milgram's and received no shock at all.
In short, about 60 percent of students administered what they thought were genuine shocks to the learners up to the point of fatal doses for the crime of giving wrong answers, even when hearing the death screams of those being tortured.
Likewise one could look at the Nazi concentration camp system, the gulag, etc in pursuit of this question as to what torture does to the torturer as a kind of psychological process or fact, and what is naturally found is that the torturer does not remain the reasonable, rational being he may have been prior to such actions, but that he quickly becomes the doer of these actions both inwardly and outwardly; he becomes with his inner being the torturer that he is in his physical actions.
It seems beyond comprehension in terms of modern civilised European life that the concentration camps could have happened, but evil is a spiral into which one quickly descends... with the committing of evil, one enters deep spiritual waters and opens the door to what seems a kind of demonic possession- or alternatively a very dark, primal area of the mind- and this all the more so when in a collective environment such as a state prison, where the vital first step through this trapdoor is positively encouraged by the state authorities before whom the soldier/warden is taught to surrender his will.
For this reason the events of an Abu Ghraib are in no sense an unfortunate aberration, but the logical and inevitable psychological or spiritual destination arising from practices of torture. This would inevitably be known by the relevant authorites, as is the certainty that the abuses that come to public light are exceptions only in that very sense of coming to public light, as opposed to being rare unfortunate occurences.

Ancient of Days

Through similar or possibly identical means to the earlier occasion when I traversed the apparent boundaries of time and was blessed to witness the birth of language, as described here, I have again been psychically transported back to pre-historic times and sampled some of 'human' life from that primal era, and what follows is my humble and inadequate attempt to give literal form to my privileged perusings.

Two significantly hairy and odorous creatures clothed in blood-stained furs emerge from a cave. The impression gathered from the taller one is an anguished effort to find some form by which to express some inner process, which it might be excessive to describe as thought.
"What did you think of that?"
"Well, you know me and art. How bout yourself?"
"To be perfectly honest, I thought it was a bit cliched. I was at that exhibition of Loutraux' in the Lascaux Cave last month and it seems to me he's too self-consciously trying to out-Loutraux Loutraux; you know that whole primitive art 'tappping into elemental forces, bypassing the corrupting intellect' thing."
"Maybe you're right. Though, I have to say I found the whole exhibition very dark, and actually quite hard to make out the paintings. Do you know who was curating it?"
"Some asshole who thinks this badly lit cave idea is in keeping with the whole primitive ambience...'nascent form emerging from the blackness,' and all that bullshit. I heard one of the organisers twittering on about the question of the existence of an art-work when there's noone there to see it. I felt like saying, what about when there is someone there, but he can't see it cos the stupid organisers won't bother to light the fucking gallery."
"Idiots. You should have spoken up."
"I know. Conscience doth make cowards. Anyway, they'd have probably just dismissed me as some ignorant philistine crawled out of the swamp."
"You're probably right."
"I know I'm right. The chattering classes. Simmering gobshites wouldn't know art if it kicked them on the arse."

Translating Tolstoy: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Interesting interview with the acclaimed translators of particularly Dostoevsky here.
In Dostoevsky's work, as your translations reveal, the language is occasionally strange and the forms are much more dramatic than in Tolstoy's fiction. When I picked up, for instance, your Brothers Karamazov a few years ago, it was a revelation to recognize the dynamic energy of the language.

Their translation revealing of the intentionally awkward and strange use of language most obvious in their Notes from Underground, which other translations will render more readable or 'natural', not grasping the deliberate strange coarseness of the language as an essential component of the work.

Experimental Piece

Placed before nouns, and used to specify a general conception, or to denote a particular person or thing common carniverous quadriped of the same genus as the wolf, mainly domesticated followed or devoted one's attention to with the hope of attracting, winning, gaining, etc the indefinite article, meaning one, placed before nouns singular small domesticated quadruped, belonging to the family of felines, kept as a pet and for catching rats and mice.

What I have done here is, for the sake of wisdom and the furthering of literature, to replace the words of a fairly simple sentence with dictionary definitions of each word. I will repeat the piece below displaying the sentence in its primordial form in parentheses:

(The) Placed before nouns, and used to specify a general conception, or to denote a particular person or thing (dog) common carniverous quadriped of the same genus as the wolf, mainly domesticated (chased)followed or devoted one's attention to with the hope of attracting, winning, gaining, etc (a)the indefinite article, meaning one, placed before nouns (cat)singular small domesticated quadruped, belonging to the family of felines, kept as a pet and for catching rats and mice.

Inflation

In financial terms, this can be described as money becoming worth less money, or in existential terms a symbol coming to signify less than it used to signify. What was signified has remained as it was, so one is led to infer that something has occured to the signifier. What that may be remains obscure, but an idea worth serious consideration is that of Plato, which is that currency on this plane of existence is a pale reflection of the currency that exists in the world of pure forms, and that the etheric thread connecting this earthly dimension to that heavenly one is becoming weakened as a result of the cumulative sinking of vast numbers of the human consciousness into the hallucinatory realms of materialism and its technological offsprings. Consciousness is of course the element which secures the route between the two dimensions, and the atrophying of this element and the ensuing spiritual synaptic highway has led to this process of money becoming less real. It is only natural that money- which is merely a symbol and of the most precarious existential being- should be the first entity to manifest such a loosening of the bonds of existence and begin to fade into non-being.

Currently, the US dollar is plummeting in value, and worth far less European money than it used to; in other words, compared to many earlier moments in time, a larger number of abstract numbers on one side of the Atlantic is now required to equate with a number of abstract numbers on the other side of the Atlantic. The fading from view of the US currency is only natural as the American collective consciousness has entered more deeply into the materialistic, unreal realm than anywhere else, assured as it is that this plunging of consciousness into the unreal capitalist, televisual realms of applied materialism is a holy surrender to the American God, and where true individual salvation lies.

And so with the resulting weakening of the mind and the bonds to the Real, the Less Real phenomena of this world must become ever less real, and there is the realest of dangers that should this proces of unrealising of the human mind continue, the disconnection between the reflected and the true may become absolute, in which case all meaning will depart from this realm and it will instantly fall into non-existence. America may be the first to go, but by no means would it be alone in its downfall.
It should be stressed to anyone seeking an eastern philosophical silver lining that this non-existence would not be an enlightened one of Pure Emptiness or Absolute Mind, but its very degraded non-existing opposite of impure emptiness or absolute mindlessness; the unimaginable hell of an eternal vacuum into which no thought enters nor from which any departs.

Big News

With the shocking realisation that every country on earth is seemingly burdened by massive unpayable debt, the planet has decided to declare itself bankrupt.

Weather Channel Founder: Global Warming ‘Greatest Scam in History’

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming; It is a SCAM. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming. Other scientists of the same environmental whacko type jumped into the circle to support and broaden the “research” to further enhance the totally slanted, bogus global warming claims. Their friends in government steered huge research grants their way to keep the movement going. Soon they claimed to be a consensus.

Rest of article here at what looks an intersting site. There was something about that Albert Einstein Gore I couldn't quite take seriously. On the other hand, there's no shortage of competition in the field of extraordinary scams.

Thomas Mann and More Sorcery

Following on from the earlier Dr Faustus post, here Mann distills some of George Sorel's Reflections on Violence : A book by George Sorel entitled Reflexions sur la violence (whose theory that)...in the era of the masses, parliamentary discussion would prove utterly inadequate as a means of shaping political will; that in the future what was needed in its place were mythic fictions, which would be fed to the masses as the primitive battle cries necessary for unleashing and activating political energies; that henceforth popular myths, or better, myths trimmed for the masses, would be the vehicle for political action - fables, chimeras, phantoms that needed to have nothing to do with truth, reason, or science in order to be productive, to determine life and history, and thereby to prove themselves dynamic realities... It made it possible to understand that truth's fate was closely related to that of the individual, indeed identical with it - and that fate was devaluation. 

 

Good News

It has come to my gratified attention that my previous post has, by a veritable firestorm of mental osmosis, passed from deep-thinking mind to deep-thinking mind across and beyond the confines of our beloved Europe, and altered the intellectual landscape irrevocably. This pleases me, not because of any honour this does me- a field of temptation to which I have proven impervious time and again- but because I have the highest hopes for the common mind, despite its present labouring in the squalor of filthy and degraded ignorance. If I can lift souls from the darkness of stupidity, who can argue then that I have not done my fellow man a service immeasurable?

Humour- Unravelling the Mystery

The thing we have to remember is that without humour things wouldn't be funny. The two are inextricably linked. Can we find an underlying cause or causes which will help us understand and, hence, create humour?
Think of a fat man falling down a steep staircase; this is undeniably very funny. But why? The obvious answer would seem to be the mind's desire for order, and this situation satisfies such Euclidean motive on several levels. The man is overweight-he has transgressed the law of optimum physical being, is in disorder, and deserves to be punished. What better way than falling down a stairs? But this is not all: by constrast, the mind also gets to savour absolute order in the form of gravity. The laws of science at the service of hubris, a wronged world righted. The combination of these factors is what makes the above so humorous and prompts the spontaneous bursting forth of laughter.
So humour would seem to ideally involve the unity of the particular and the universal in the portrayal of moral and natural order.

Thought and Form

We pour our intelligence or consciousness into various forms, and, like a liquid poured into various containers, this intelligence takes on the apparent form of that into which it pours itself. Art is essentially thought; a form into which consciousness pours itself. This post is the attempt of intelligence to find a form appropriate to its own will. This probably why stories abound of the more unhappy genius requesting his works be destroyed on his death. He presumably knows and wishes his request will not to be carried out, but there is a frustration and shame that he feels his sense of reality has not found the form that does full justice to itself. And also, incidentally, why the notion of freeform art is an intrinsic stupidity...a work of art is its own form. Sticking the word "free" in front of itself as if some kind of liberation is implied is simply comical.

To ponder a recently mentioned notion of free-will being a useless concept...
First one must understand freedom:
"the state of being free or at liberty rather than in confinement or under physical restraint."
The idea of free-will or lack of, however, exists wholly within the confines of its own discussion, or form. The very thought of being or not being free is confinement within that form. Even should consciousness decide, after much internal debate, "I am free," this is to localise consciousness within that thought, and being localised or narrowed, consciousness is not free. Say this "I am free" to yourself; see how ludicrous and pointless it feels.

It is probably worth looking closer at this "I am free" statement. The essential element here is the I portion. The its being or not being free aspect is a meaningless addition that affects nothing(the attempt to turn a noun into both a verb and adjective?). Who or what is the I that is or isn't free? We'll forget about " a sense of self as a being in time, progressing towards..." and all that, and instead try and concentrate on this I as something existing purely within the moment. Like "free-will," does the I exist wholly within the confines of its own conception? As said earlier, intelligence or consciousness flows into various forms, and this intelligence takes on the apparent form of that into which it pours itself. The I is a thought intelligence takes on. This isn't quite to say that this I thought is an illusion; within the form of itself it is real, but without this form in what sense does it exist?
Maybe who I am, or what I is, is that life which animates the body between birth and death; the body a form into which consciousness pours itself for the duration of life. The corpse is no longer animated by this life/intelligence/consciousness. Within this life, language is another form into which consciousness pours itself, and to define this broad self or consciousness simply as a point narrowed within this language form which itself has produced is utterly flawed.

Bush Regime Preaches Democracy, Proposes Tyranny

Paul Craig Roberts' latest.
Alas, no reason as yet to supply a title Bush Renounces Evil, Admits "New World Order" is Satanic Conspiracy.

Sorcery and Nature

From Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus:
Every collaborative venture with nature, every attempt to tease phenomena out of her, to "tempt" her by exposing her workings through experiment-it all comes very close to sorcery, indeed is already within its realm and is the work of the "Tempter," or so earlier epochs were convinced, and a very respectable view it is, if you ask me.

In earlier epochs also, certain strains of knowledge were viewed as sacred and indeed dangerous, and to be kept far from the eyes of the profane. It could be said that knowledge doesn't get much more dangerous than that of nuclear energy, nor does life get much more profane than the political field. What a lovely couple these two make.
The scientist as sorcerer to those calling themselves "the State"; that in itself a piece of verbal sorcery where the skilful manipulation of words invokes powers from without.

Mathematics + One

Following on from the success of yesterday's post which achieved much, another post intimately related in theme to the preceding will follow. Again we are in the realm of the mysterious and esoteric, this time in the infinite form of the square root of two, probably(according to Wikipedia) the first known irrational number.
The discovery of the irrational numbers is usually attributed to the Pythagorean, Hippasus of Metapontum, who produced a proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2, or two. According to one legend, Pythagoras believed in the absoluteness of numbers, and could not accept the existence of irrational numbers. He could not disprove their existence through logic, but his beliefs would not accept their existence and so he sentenced Hippasus to death by drowning. Other legends report that Hippasus was drowned by fanatical Pythagoreans or merely expelled from their circle.
The irrational defence of the falsely imagined rational. Anyway, quite a large number of the opening numbers of the square root of two follow:

1.4142135623730950488016887242096980785696718753769480731766797379907324784621 07038850387534327641572735013846230912297024924836055850737212644121497099935831 41322266592750559275579995050115278206057147010955997160597027453459686201472851 74186408891986095523292304843087143214508397626036279952514079896872533965463318 08829640620615258352395054745750287759961729835575220337531857011354374603408498 84716038689997069900481503054402779031645424782306849293691862158057846311159666 87130130156185689872372352885092648612494977154218334204285686060146824720771435 85487415565706967765372022648544701585880162075847492265722600208558446652145839 88939443709265918003113882464681570826301005948587040031864803421948972782906410 45072636881313739855256117322040245091227700226941127573627280495738108967504018 36986836845072579936472906076299694138047565482372899718032680247442062926912485 90521810044598421505911202494413417285314781058036033710773091828693147101711116 83916581726889419758716582152128229518488472089694633862891562882765952635140542

If this has whetted your appetite, all of the first million of the square root of two's digits can be enjoyed at your lesure here, and remember this is but a prologue to an infinity of digits which one could literally spend one's lifetime reading. And who could argue that it would be a wasted life?
Incidentally, now might be the time for a confession. This is supposed to be mathematics at its height, and yet I find these numbers to be, if not dull, a little monotonous in their effect. Which isn't to suggest the fault is any but mine own.

Mathematical Consideration

You've probably all been wondering at the paucity of mathematics related posts on this site. The truth is it's not a subject in which I have any real aptitude, and perhaps by extension, interest. However, I feel I should redress the balance a little, and with that in mind I've chosen to post the first thousand digits of the mystical phenomenon that is Pi. I'd like to point out the fourteenth and nineteenth lines of the sequence, which are particularly fine. Enjoy.

3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510
58209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679
82148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128
48111745028410270193852110555964462294895493038196
44288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091
45648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273
72458700660631558817488152092096282925409171536436
78925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094
33057270365759591953092186117381932611793105118548
07446237996274956735188575272489122793818301194912
98336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798
60943702770539217176293176752384674818467669405132
00056812714526356082778577134275778960917363717872
14684409012249534301465495853710507922796892589235
42019956112129021960864034418159813629774771309960
51870721134999999837297804995105973173281609631859
50244594553469083026425223082533446850352619311881
71010003137838752886587533208381420617177669147303
59825349042875546873115956286388235378759375195778
18577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989 . . .

Western Esteem

It's come to my attention that affluent governments of the West are offering enticements to governments of the destitute East so as to provide vast numbers of humans educated in the English language so as to post comments on Westerners' blogs so as to keep said Westerners' sense of self-affirmation at a desirable level. Too many of these Western citizens are engaged in blogging, but there are not sufficient others to comment on these blogs and so massage the relevant sense of self-worth of said bloggers. It is hoped that Easterners, for a certain financial incentive, can help fill the relevant self-esteem void by scouring the blogosphere, as it is known, and posting comments on blogs. The scheme is being labelled The Circus Gambit, in a clear reference to the famous maxim of social control, Bread and Circuses.
To economise on both the financial and temporal aspects, Eastern students are being equipped with an arsenal of phrases that can be inserted, generally with the aim of bolstering the blogger's self esteem, but occasionally with less adulatory phrases for purposes of realism to allay suspicion. A selection of these below:

Yes, that is what I feel I've always wanted to say, but didn't know how.
You're clearly very intelligent. I'll check back often.
That's exactly how it is!
You've made me look on the world in a new and more refined light.
Are you sure that's not racist?
I was thinking of killing myself, but reading your blog has filled me with optimism.
Apart from a somewhat idiosyncratic usage of grammar I daresay you've written a miniature masterpiece, almost infinite in its subtleties of exposition.
How lovely!
That is bordering on the psychotic.
It is as though I have found the voice that mirrors my innermost essence. Thank you.
Judging by your words, you have a way with them.
You have helped me understand the joys of abstraction.
This is a glimpse into a rarefied intellectual world in whose existence I had not dared to believe.
Is it by intent that the internal structure of your finely wrought sentences mysteriously echo the contrapuntal harmonies of the great music of the Baroque period?
Your spelling is shit.


I have obviously contented myself with limiting the scope of the above to the English language, and, for reasons of not caring enough to do otherwise, inferred that Westerners are synonymous with use of the English language.

Mirror Mirror

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what is the most useless concept of them all?

That would be the idea of free-will, or/and lack of.

The Prosaic and Philosophy

There might be something to be said for viewing vast swathes of the enquiry into truth known as philosophy as occuring as a monologue within the mind of an individual seated within a rather shabby room and engaged in the smoking of a regular intake of hashish.

It occurs to this individual that he would like a cup of tea. However, instead of this leading to what one might imagine to be the straightforward, uncomplicated process of getting up to turn on the kettle and the other prosaic processes leading to the desired conclusion of having and drinking the desired cup of tea, certain trains of thought are set in motion within his intoxicated and perhaps somewhat paranoid mind. Key thoughts might include:

Are the asking of this question and the physical activities it may lead to independent acts of a free-thinking and willing individual or is all this determined by processes of which I and the very concept I are mere elements?
To what extent can I consider the thought of the kettle to coincide with the actual kettle in itself?
If my experience of this external reality is received through the senses, and my senses place me at an inevitable distance from what I perceive, to what extent can I in turn speak of a kettle in itself existing in a universe within which I also exist?
Do I dare undertake the conjectured tea-making processes, thus embarking on one particular life, and sending to oblivion all the infinity of other lives that I could have embarked upon were I to choose a different course of action.

The above thoughts are simply some key points from which the vastness of the resulting philosophical enquiries could ensue. In this ever expanding monologue, for the sake of clarity within the individual's mind, various tributaries of these lines of enquiry could be labelled under headings such as "Heidegger says" or "Kant claims" or some such. This helping him to keep track of the endless arguments and counter-arguments in the various discussions, such as to what extent it is reasonable to have thoughts about a kettle and tea within the broader context of one's language having a foundation in truth, as opposed to a kind of linguistic hallucination of convenience.

Ideally, having solved all the self-created problems, our hashish consuming individual would then with an easy mind make himself a cup of tea. The chances of such a happy, & dare one say it, sane conclusion are however almost infinitely remote.

Another Powerful Idea

A book called Western Civilisation and its Menopause. All that remains is to flesh out what this might mean, and to write it. Possibly to include digressions such as the paralleling of the workings of the alimentary canal with the great painters of the Northern Renaissance, with special focus on Roger van der Weyden. Again, on what basis I will justify such analogising is as yet unclear, but a bit irrelevant as the idea is a great one.

An Inversion of Truth

One doesn't like to boast but I may have just given birth to a conception that may lift literature from the quagmire that threatens to drown it in its sprawling tentacles of negation. My idea literally turns the idea of the novel on its head. When one picks up this projected novel, or book, all will seem as normal. However, when one opens this tome to see what lies inside one discovers that the writing is upside down. To read it, one will have to either turn oneself or else the book in the desired direction, depending on preference and perhaps utilitarian spatial considerations whereby the turning of oneself upside down is or isn't feasible.

As one reads the work and its intrinsic subject matter, one will be in a constant state of bemused astonishment that one is reading an upside down book. This will naturally lead to all sorts of implications regarding reality, perception and the like, though I can't pretend to as yet have any idea what these implications might be. This will keep the critics busy for centuries.

Letterary Word Game Solution

The above, which is to say below, piece has unsurprisingly proven a tad too difficult to all comers. I did receive a deluge of private requests for "more clues", but I feel I could not do this without falsifying the integrity of the contest. The correct order of words of the admittedly esoteric piece should have been rendered:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills.

Congratulations to E. Emerick, Stoke who essayed the following by private mail:

I as wandered a cloud lonely
High vales o'er hills floats on that and.

Bad luck, E, but a worthy effort. The poem was by the poet William Wordsworth who used the given words in the earlier order.

Letterary Word Game

Re-arrange the following words to form the opening lines of a famous poem involving daffodils by a well known Romantic poet:

Cloud a as lonely wandered I
Hills and Vales o'er high on floats That

For those in need of help- there is a code-breaking system, which could be described as implementing the art of inversion, or turning things around, that might prove useful in finding the correct solution.

The Back Up- Elberry Take Note

Perhaps the apex of civilisation has been reached with the remarkable product displayed here. A little sorrowfully, one must admit it's downhill from here on in.

Pelevin on Myth and Progress

From the prologue to his Helmet of Horror book, far from his best, by the way.

"According to one definition, a myth is a traditional story, usually explaining some natural or social phenomenon. According to another, it is a widely held but false belief or idea.
If the mind is like a computer, perhaps myths are its shell programs: sets of rules that we follow in our world processing, mental matrices we project onto complex events to endow them with meaning...
Our programs were written when the human race was young – at a stage so remote and obscure that we don’t understand the programming language any more.
The road away from myth is called 'progress'...
Progress is a propulsion technique where we have to constantly push ourselves away from the point we occupied a moment ago.However the funny thing is that the concept of progress has been around for so long that now it has all the qualities of a myth. It is a traditional story that pretends to explain all natural and social phenomena. It is also a belief that is widespread and false."

The great iconoclast of intellectual systems, Krishnamurti, would I'm sure agree, with the emphasis on progress applied to the individual and his search for truth. The thinking mind trying to get to an ideal place which lies somewhere in the future, itself being the problem. Video here where he, perhaps contrary to some expectations, critiques phenomena like transcendental meditation along the lines of "nonsensical meditation". Who is trying to transcend who and why?

Pelevin & Cactus Collection

"The next few weeks were a confusing period of time for the cactus collectors of Moscow. It seemed that a big new player entered their tight little universe. He was operating on a scale unheard of in the past, and disappeared without a trace after exhausting the entire Moscow stock of a particular cactus known mostly for its beautiful flower and complete absence of thorns..."

Victor Pelevin reminisces on his days of investment in the hallucinogenic cactus, mescaline here. A couple of more extracts:

ONE OF THE TERMS THAT CAME INTO MODERN English from the Russian in the wake of "gulag" and "pogrom" was "samizdat." It is usually defined as a system of clandestine publication of anti-Soviet texts in the countries of the former Eastern bloc. This definition somewhat implies that "samizdat" meant Solzhenitsyn. In fact, "samizdat" meant Castaneda. The explanation is simple: When you live in a gulag from the day of your birth, reading a book about gulag in your free time feels a bit too patriotic. You want something different.

Castaneda's most beautiful trick was based on the popular belief in the existence of fiction and nonfiction. This belief takes it for granted that there is a qualitative difference between two books if the first one tells a success story that never happened to a fictitious character, and the second one tells a success story that will never happen to you. In a way, this difference does exist. But it is not a difference between two books, it is a difference between two settings of the reader's mind. Here lies the real magic that makes the four Gospels either a dull specimen of ancient postmodernism or the Truth that proves itself as it unfolds in front of your eyes. Never mind the text. What matters is the legend, or, to be precise, your willingness to kindle this legend with life.

And from an interview with Pelevin, some thoughts linked to the Solzhenitsyn point:

The first Bulgakov book I read was The Master and Margarita. As for the lessons I drew, I’m afraid there were none, though it overturned all ideas I had about books before...However, the effect of this book was really fantastic. There’s an expression “out of this world.” This book was totally out of the Soviet world. The evil magic of any totalitarian regime is based on its presumed capability to embrace and explain all the phenomena, their entire totality, because explanation is control. Hence the term totalitarian. So if there’s a book that takes you out of this totality of things explained and understood, it liberates you because it breaks the continuity of explanation and thus dispels the charms. It allows you to look in a different direction for a moment, but this moment is enough to understand that everything you saw before was a hallucination (though what you see in this different direction might well be another hallucination). The Master and Margarita was exactly this kind of book and it is very hard to explain its subtle effect to anybody who didn’t live in the USSR. Solzhenitsyn’s books were very anti-Soviet, but they didn’t liberate you, they only made you more enslaved as they explained to which degree you were a slave. The Master and Margarita didn’t even bother to be anti-Soviet yet reading this book would make you free instantly. It didn’t liberate you from some particular old ideas, but rather from the hypnotism of the entire order of things.

And finally a short quote I love from the same interview:

Phenomenologically any politician is a TV program, and this doesn’t change from one government to another.

The Miraculous and Reality

The common idea of a miraculous event, if it could be said to take place, is that this is a contravention of the laws of nature by a higher power. Which is to say that the laws remain intact; it's just that they have been momentarily superseded. This is an incorrect vision. Somewhere in the New Testament is the line, "If Satan's kingdom is divided, how then shall Satan's kingdom stand?" The corollary being that God's kingdom or Reality as it is, unimpaired by delusion, is not divided against itself. However, the miracle which contravenes nature's laws would be an example of this kingdom divided against itself; a God who breaks the laws of his own composition. Instead, the correct view should be that if a miracle occurs, then it is our notion of nature's laws that are in error: a notion of reality which is simply the mirror of a limited and self-limiting intellect which seeks to enclose life within a system of self-imagined boundaries and laws. Perhaps this setting of limits is the will to power in action of the intellect where it seeks to be master of reality rather than its servant.
Until very recent historical time the notion of the crystal ball or some such device in which one oculd see what is happening elsewhere on this globe would probably be either dismissed as fantasy or, if accepted, viewed as involving the contravention of nature's laws by an alliance with some external force. However, we now know there to be no such laws; the essence of television being where the hidden powers of reality are tapped into, thus enabling the sending of images, more or less instantaneously, through space.
Similarly, we could look at an instrument such as the telephone as an example of electronically enabled telepathy. Where people tend to make the error is to imagine that because technology is involved, this explains the phenomenon away, but this is lazy, superficial thinking. Technology is not in any sense sufficient unto itself; it is simply tuning into the intrinsic intelligent pathways and magic realism of life.
So to recap, in the possible event of what is considered miraculous we should not interpret this as the contravention of nature's laws from without, but as illustrating a more profound reality than that conceived of by a static intellect.

Best Enemies Money Can Buy

Video interview with Anthony Sutton here. Some information on Sutton here, a historian who wrote books such as Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, The Best Enemy Money Can Buy and America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones.
The quality of resolution is low but certainly not the quality of information.

Heart of Darkness

I doubt I have any gift for critiquing books, but I'd like to recommend King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild about the reign of sadism and economic rape of the Belgian Congo, under the very conscious leadership of King Leopold II; a monster to hold his head high amongst later and more famous examples of the diabolic type. An excellent book which will send me back to re-read Conrad's Heart of Darkness, who himself figures in Hochschild's work.

The Polytheistic Religion of Nationalism

Nationalism is a polytheistic faith in invisible entities whose wills are purported to be performed by the numerous priests and high-priests of this faith in the various fields of politics, the military, education, etc. The deities worshipped are often mutually antagonistic, and the greatest of these gods, ie those with the greatest number of believers, or perhaps most virile or fundamentalist believers, desire the murder and annihilation of other gods whose followers can then, if they are sufficiently worthy, become converts to the greater god, whose greatness has been proven by his defeat, in the persons of his followers, of the other god's followers. If not worthy, they can become slaves to the nationalist god to whom they are now subject.

The gods of nationalism often desire offerings in the way of human sacrifice, and to this end wars are fought. The gods are also often placated by the lesser offerings such as subjection of sacrificial victims to torture and imprisonment.

Within this field of metaphysical deities and the human structures that serve them are some dangerous souls who believe that the gods of nationalism do not actually exist at all, but that they are purely mental fabrications used by the priests and high-priests of these supposed religions to justify their own egotistical interests and will to power. These atheists warn that nationalism is often a tool of manipulation of the masses by ruling elites, and the typically blood-thirsty deities they claim to serve are simply their own wills projected onto an imaginary divine entity which cloaks the true nature of their actions in a foggy, mystical aura.
The atheist would prefer a statement such as "America/The Soviet Union(tick where appropriate) has attacked Afghanistan" be rendered as "The fuckers that run America/Soviet Union have attacked Afghanistan."

Admittedly, we have entered a more complex issue here where The Soviet Union saw the apparent spiritual union of various nationalist deities into one far greater deity, but this evolutionary progression suffered an unexpected dissolution and the old deities reconvened into their separate selves. Victor Pelevin has an interesting and unusual hypothesis in his book, Babylon, regarding this where he says: "The USSR which they'd begun to renovate and improve...improved so much that it ceased to exist(if a state is capable of entering nirvana, that's what must have happened in this case)."

There are those who wish for a single all ruling god over all the Earth, and these monotheists are known as Globalists. These globalists, needless to say, intend to be be the high-priests of this all-powerful divine entity, should their aims be realised. It would be anathema to this priestly class' notion of reality but possibly they are to be the unwitting vehicle of Pelevin's idea where the One World State will be realised only to dissolve itself through an enlightenment experience where the individual ego sense of this deity is transcended, and an enlightened anarchy ensues. This mirroring St Francis' notion of organised Christianity's desired end being its own dissolution; religion being the means to a higher end in terms of individual life and consciousness rather than an end in itself- a dangerous notion which nearly cost him an unpleasant death at the hands of the Inquisition, a body far more organised than religious. Though perhaps these committers of satanic acts were very religious; they just weren't quite being truthful about the nature of the religion they believed in...a tree shall be known by its fruit and all that. The idea that people clearly immersed in evil might lie seems a strangely undervalued notion.

Epiphany

Another brief extract of the mentioned work:

He stared into the waters beneath the bridge that he stood on that enabled people and traffic to pass over the afore-mentioned water that flowed underneath the relevant structure. "Life is like a river," he thought. "Just when you think you have understood it, it falls apart."

Literature- An Ascension

There follows a fragment of the seventeenth chapter of a projected novel to which I plan to devote my creative energies in some future time with the purpose of bringing literature to the next level. This follows on from some earlier invaluable additions to the canon of intellectual good works such as here and here.

The grey sky was a positive incarnation of the opaque dullness which seemed to stifle his soul of late, and from which he could not draw the will to alter these psychological/emotional, etc conditions so unpropitious to a healthy sense of well-being in the seat of his consciousness which, if we take the liberty of saying is located anywhere, was in his head.
"This sky is a metaphysical entity," he said to his co-pedestrian colleague.
"A metaphysical entity? I suppose it is. Spengler's Decline of the West comes to mind. You know, civilisations as organic entities which live and die, and from the compost heap of one civilisation's death arises another."
"Yes, that is interesting. Have you read Hegel?"
"You're referring to the unfolding of time as a historical process programmed by God to lead in an upward curve towards a great heavenly future. This, you will understand, is, for the sake of brevity, a somewhat barbarous rendering of Hegel."
"Yes, that is what I was intimating."
"Though to return to the sky as analogy or even metaphysical entity, and remember life can be multi-layered in its meanings, if this goodly firmament were to mirror Hegel's hypothesis then there should be a little more sun peering through the clouds, don't you think?"
"But naturally. And we should be approaching the sun rather than it behind our backs."
"Undoubtedly. Though remember a setting sun in one corner of the earth is a rising one in another."
"Most certainly. And I am sure our friend Spengler would approve."

The friends were suddenly confronted by two very large gentlemen with very short hair.
"Have you got our money, assholes?"
"You'll get your money."
"I know we will. You got till tomorrow night. And by the way, that Joyce book you lent me- Ulysees..."
"What about it?"
"It's shit."

Consumerism

the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable; also : a preoccupation with and an inclination toward the buying of consumer goods

Consumerism is practical capitalism which is a system concerned with the flow of an imaginary substance called money, and the creation of complex systems condusive to the circulation of this imagined substance.
Many are fooled into thinking that consumerism is a utopian creed about the creation of heaven on earth arising from the creation of products beneficial to man and that money is the catalyst that enables circulation of these products to occur. This is erroneous: it is the products that exist so as to facilitate the circulation of money, not the other way round.
Though, as usual, the issue of consumerism is more complex than simply this reduction, as explored a little earlier here. Which isn't to say that the manipulation of matter by human intelligece is necessarily negative, but the exclusive materialism of pure consumerism must inevitably lead to the leakage of all meaning from civilisation. This nihilistic end-point of civilisation is the magnet towards which is drawn the current ethos & its societal structures. Dostoevsky viewed the various new isms as themselves negative spiritual entities injected into life by the dread spirit with the express intention of leading to the collapse of truth. He, as shown in The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, seemed to consider that at the top of the power pyramid that the human agents of this process were actually conscious of their role as opposed to the unwitting propagators of lfe-denying processes which they didn't understand.

Hesse on Dostoevsky

"I said Dostoevsky is not a poet, or he is only a poet in a secondary sense. I called him a prophet. It is difficult to say exactly what a prophet means. It seems to me something like this. A prophet is a sick man, like Dostoevsky, who was an epileptic. A prophet is the sort of sick man who has lost the sound sense of taking care of himself, the sense which is the saving of the efficient citizen. It would not do if there were many such, for the world would go to pieces. This sort of sick man, be he called Dostoevsky or Karamazov, has that strange, occult, godlike faculty, the possibility of which the Asiatic venerates in every maniac. He is a seer and an oracle. A people, a period, a country, a continent has fashioned out of its corpus an organ, a sensory instrument of infinite sensitiveness, a very rare and delicate organ. Other men, thanks to their happiness and health, can never be troubled with this endowment. This sensory instrument, this mantological faculty is not crudely comprehensible like some sort of telepathy or magic, although the gift can also show itself even in such confusing forms. Rather is it that the sick man of this sort interprets the movements of his own soul in terms of the universal and of mankind. Every man has visions, every man has fantasies, every man has dreams. And every vision every dream, every idea and thought of a man, on the road from the unconscious to the conscious, can have a thousand different meanings, of which every one can be right. But the appearances and visions of the seer and the prophet are not his own. The nightmare of visions which oppresses him does not warn him of a personal illness, of a personal death, but of the illness, the death of that corpus whose sensory organ he is, This corpus can be a family, a clan, a people, or it can be all mankind. In the soul of Dostoevsky a certain sickness and sensitiveness to suffering in the bosom of mankind which is otherwise called hysteria, found at once its means of expression and its barometer. Mankind is now on the point of realizing this. Already half Europe, at all events half Eastern Europe, is on the road to Chaos. In a state of drunken illusion she is reeling into the abyss and, as she reels, she sings a drunken hymn such as Dmitri Karamazov sang. The insulted citizen laughs that song to scorn, the saint and seer hear it with tears.

The rest of the essay, The Brothers Karamazov--The
Downfall of Europe here.

Nothing Much

Dictionary.com defines nothing, amongst several alternatives, as "something that is nonexistent." If something is, how can it be non-existent? This was very wisely discussed here, and it might therefore seem I'm simply blithely repeating myself for the sake of posting something so as to end the inerim of not posting anything.
But anyway, Merriam Webster Online Dictionary tells us that the word nothing is a pronoun, adverb, noun and adjective, and the thing referred to by this versatile word is "something that does not exist"; a strikingly similar definition to the earlier one. So we have a word that does exist referring to something that doesn't exist. If it doesn't exist, why does it need a word, might argue an economically minded intellectual; an iconoclastic Puritan of the mind. Though someone else might argue that words themselves don't exist; that they are illusions within consciousness, and so the word that refers to something that isn't also isn't; a double negative.

This point has sent me back to the online dictionary, and I see that illusion means "perception of something objectively existing in such a way as to cause misinterpretation of its actual nature." Which inevitably sends me in search of "objectively" to see how this illuminates the word reality controversy, and I find that objectively means "With objectivity," which is admittedly not much bloody use. Thankfully however, this "objectivity" is described as "Judgment based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices."

A dog, to which the word dog refers, may be encountered in an act of perception, insofar as for the sake of sanity we decide to accept our senses as being innately intertwined with reality, and so this dog may be described as included within the field of observable phenomena. The symbol of the word dog may be similarly encountered like when viewing it within this very sentence. However, this is merely the visual symbolic representation of what is itself a symbol, which, by the relevant definition earlier can hardly be said to be of an observable phenomena, and so by strict grammatical rules of existence does not exist.
Which, I think, leaves us with a non-existent word referring to a non-existent something, or indeed the absence of a something with which to have a non-existence. Which in turn leaves us in a very difficult situation, none of these words existing objectively, though consolingly it could be said that there is no "difficult situation", since the entire entangling situation is an edifice built upon a language structure that does not, according to the rules of language, exist: an imaginary castle made of imaginary sand.

The Future Has Caught Up WIth Us

Brilliant succinct piece by Paul Craig Roberts, here.

Materialism is Materialism

Materialism:
1. Philosophy: The theory that physical matter is the only reality and that everything, including thought, feeling, mind, and will, can be explained in terms of matter and physical phenomena.
2. The theory or attitude that physical well-being and worldly possessions constitute the greatest good and highest value in life.

The two above are one and the same thing, or that the second crass materialism of the age is the incarnaration of philosophical materialism. And so, the bankrupt prevalent ideology of the affluent West with its materially comfortably off but truthless populations is materialism in practice. Materialism is devoid of any sense of truth whatsoever as it relates to human experience and any sense of hierarchies of being; no state of consciousness is to be valued over another, everything simply is- to be human is simply to be a physical object in the midst of other physical objects, and one's worth as an individual is in direct proportion to the worth of one's objects, ie, to be a consumer. The consumer exists in sofar as he consumes. So there is, perhaps paradoxically, a value-system of being, and it involves the ascension of truth in terms of objects reaching towards an absolute value in money terms. Like under spiritual visions of existence, humanity reaches towards infinity, but now one with a money sign preceding this infinity.
Both capitalism, by which is included consumerism, & communism are the transmutation of materialism into the realm of history past, present & projected future; they are lines which meet very naturally within the finite, springing as they do from the same source of materialist philsophy.

The exclusive materialism of pure consumerism must inevitably lead to the leakage of all meaning from civilisation as materialism is an active philosophical corrosive; it is without any higher truths, and must deny and remove any such notions of being. Despite its adherents claims, it is simply nihilism(cleverly masked with a demented grin of idiot happiness), and if modern civilisation is to consistently see it through to its end, it will see itself through to its own end also, arriving as it must at this nihilistic end-point towards which all is drawn.
The Richard Dawkins & other re-heaters of this old philosophy, which one would imagine were something new on the intellectual horizon, should look with pride on the game-show/Big Brother, Scrictly Come Lobotomising cultural mores of the present, as this is the logical incarnation of the materialism which they exalt. Everything simply is, so one has any argument against anything from cultural infantilism to extermination camps. And, naturally, great art which tends to exalt life as intrinsically significant is wholly undesired. The game show & boy-band is much more satisfactory; products of the entertainment industry to be consumed by who else but the consumers. A clear example of the omnipresence of this ideology having insinuated intself into culture is the nonsensical notion that one cannot say one art work is greater than another, all is mere opinion...for example, Boyzone are as great as The Beatles; everything simply is with nothing of any greater intrinsic worth than any other. As said, nihilisim in fancy dress.

The famous angst of modern society springs from the dislocation of individual consciousness from an external world under the sway of materialism, which the individual rightly feels to be inconsistent with his self-evidently significant consciousness. Rather than saying, for example "This is the spiritual, intellectual arena in which I dwell" & getting on with it, the poor individual's consciousness turns in upon itself, and he becomes this indwelling, unhappy individual; a modern gnostic- living in a divided world, though in place of the gnostic's escape route of the Absolute, he simply has his own individual angst-ridden consiousness to dive into.

Materialism is solipsism within the physical domain, though comically, unlike ordinary solipsism where the individual mind asserts itself to be all there is, the assertion is coming from the mind that the physical is all there is. Also, materialists can be seen as a variation on the sect of the castrates, though with the mind & consciousness being the troublesome area of temptation that must be removed or explained away.
Perhaps if its adherents live to see society see this idea through to its end, a voice will be heard to echo TS Eliot's lines:
That is not it at all.
That is not what I meant at all.

To prolong this a little, and to end on a less sombre chord, a quote form the great film-director Andrei Tarkovsky:
"...it seems to me that the individual today stands at a crossroad, faced with the choice of whether to pursue the new technology and the endless multiplication of material goods, or to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, turn to God."

A Word

In a formally satisfying & strikingly thematic follow-on to the previous Words post, this post is about a word, & that word is hexasyllable which Dictionary.com describes thus:

hex·a·syl·la·ble /ˈhɛksəˌsɪləbəl/ [hek-suh-sil-uh-buhl]
–noun- a word of six syllables

Ironically, hexasyllable is a word of only five syllables, or a pentasyllable. Pleasingly, pentasyllable is itself a pentasyllable. Word is a word of one syllable, but, sadly, syllable is a word of three syllables, or trisyllable, which is itself a word of four syllables or quadrisyllable, while quadrisyllable, being comprised of five syllables, is, of course, an example of the pentasyllable we met earlier. Quadrivalvular is, incidentally, also a pentasyllable, meaning possessed of four valves, while valve is described by Reference.com as:

1. any device for halting or controlling the flow of a liquid, gas, or other material through a passage, pipe, inlet, outlet, etc.
2. a hinged lid or other movable part that closes or modifies the passage in such a device.

Words

This is something of an offshoot of the Secondary Objectivity post, where Aldous Huxley describes places such as certain places possessed of a "numinous presence...the psychic presence of men's thoughts & feelings projected into objectivity & haunting the sacred place."
Similarly, words are psychic vessels or vortices which attain their significance through the focusing of human intelligence within these symbols, and which are nourished & deepened by the accumulated concentration of minds projected within these mental forms. In this is something of the sacredness of the Word, where the attuned mind isn't simply using a kind of utilitarian communication tool, but is immersing itself within a living network of psychic vortices which have attained a greater charge of significance through the inflowing of men's thoughts into these intellectual pathways. We are not talking about objective objects after all, but nodes within consciousness.
Similarly to an animal, a word or even language sickens & dies when life ceases to flow into its forms, though there is always the possibility of future resurrections when later minds renew these corpses of thought with the breath of consciousness.
"Corpses of thought" being a line in Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan to describe charred books within a burn out library.

Humour

Humour is the putting words together to make things funny.

Seven CIA Veterans Challenge 9/11 Commission Report

Seven CIA veterans have severely criticized the official account of 9/11 and have called for a new investigation. “I think at simplest terms, there’s a cover-up. The 9/11 Report is a joke,” said Raymond McGovern, 27-year veteran of the CIA, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates during the seventies. “There are a whole bunch of unanswered questions. And the reason they’re unanswered is because this administration will not answer the questions,” he said.
In his blurb for 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out,” edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott, McGovern wrote: “It has long been clear that the Bush-Cheney administration cynically exploited the attacks of 9/11 to promote its imperial designs. But the present volume confronts us with evidence for an even more disturbing conclusion: that the 9/11 attacks were themselves orchestrated by this administration precisely so they could be thus exploited. If this is true, it is not merely the case, as the Downing Street memos show, that the stated reason for attacking Iraq was a lie. It is also the case that the whole “war on terror” was based on a prior deception."
William Christison, a 29-year CIA veteran, former National Intelligence Officer (NIO) and former Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis also describes the 9/11 Commission Report as a “joke” and offers even more outspoken criticism. In a 2006 audio interview he said, "We very seriously need an entirely new very high level and truly independent investigation of the events of 9/11. I think you almost have to look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a joke and not a serious piece of analysis at all.”

Rest of article at link.