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.