Charity starts at home as they say, and as a little extension of this it might be interesting to look at the relationship of the British political and intellectual aristocracies to her next door neighours Ireland during the height of said empire, and from there to possibly get an idea of the ruling ideas of that empire, and to hypothetically extend such attitides to areas of dominion further afield. British Prime Minister Disraeli:
"The Irish hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain & superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alteration of clannish broils & coarse idolaty(Catholicism). Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry(!) and blood."
Historian Charles Kingsley on seeing the devastation during the Famine in the mid-nineteenth century:
"I am daunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along the hundred miles of horrible country. I don't believe they are our fault( that people were forbidden education, destitute and starving to death while foodstuffs were being removed to Britain). I believe that there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better & more comfortably fed & lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours."
One sympathises greatly with this man having to look at such white chimpanzees starving to death. To mention a line in the light of this from the esteemed Roger Scruton: "Unlike Islamic culture, western culture has gone out to the stranger, has tried to understand, to sympathise, to learn, in every arena where learning is available."
As an afterthought to add a little information on Charles "White Chimpanzee" Kingsley:
In 1859, Kingsley was made chaplain to Queen Victoria. From 1860 to 1869 he was professor of modern history at Cambridge and in 1873 was appointed canon of Westminster. His book The Water Babies is a story for children written to inspire love and reverence of Nature.
. . . And just to add the obvious if necessary addendum: the philosophy of superior and inferior races most virulently perhaps espoused and acted upon by the Nazis is merely the essentially seamless continuation of the inner thoughts that were driving the British Empire, and presumably all empires, though now within the Germany and Europe of the 20s and 30s embedded within very extreme social condtions and as an overt ideological position rather than as a kind of unnoticed but more all-pervasive ambient background as was the case in Britain. The Nazis are attempting to act consciously on the logical implications of the ideology, and so the viciousness of its inner truth is revealed, whereas in Britain where there is no need to espouse the ideology, it being soaked wholly into the fabric of State, and this truth can go on on its merry and superficially even benign way in the arena of history, an obvious manifestation of the inner ideology of empire being the notion that the inferior colonised should be grateful to the superior coloniser for helping to raise it a step or two towards the level of itself. And of course a failure of the colonised to be grateful to their colonising masters can then be dismissed as a manifestation of their very inferiority; thus Disraeil's indignation with the Irish "lack of sympathy with the English character". Their failure to accept the English colonisers as ubermenschen a symptom of their being untermenschen, to transfer a little terminology.
Sunday, 30 December 2007
The Width of Wisdom of Roger Scruton
"It is one of the most deeply rooted superstitions of our age that the purpose of education is to benefit those who receive it."
The above the opening line from Roger Scruton's essay, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged. Where Scruton goes from here I will leave for now, but concentrate on this line in itself.
The first natural focus of attention is on the word superstition. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary describes this as "a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation b: an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition
2: a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary."
So superstition tends to refer to irrational beliefs such as faith in practices for warding off bad luck, the ominous foretelling of dark events by means of, for example, a black cat crossing one's path, breaking a mirror, etc. Or maybe someone else might describe belief in a deity as a superstition. Here Scruton chooses to interpret the notion of education's purpose to be beneficial to the educated as being of this ilk of phenomenon- not simply a debatable proposition, but a distinctly irrational one.
Is this an educated use of the word superstition? Or is it an irrational usage of a loaded word designed, consciously or subconsciously, to lend false weight to an argument that doesn't suffice as proof in itself?
To get a clearer look at this issue we should understand what education might actually mean. It has a far broader significance than simply the passive accumulation of knowledge fostered in an external education system.
Evolution in the sense of progress is from simple, relatively unfree structures to more complex profound ones such as the higher mammals. So the human is a more profound entity than an amoeba, but human evolution occurs very much within the individual life, rather than simply being a matter of impersonal biological processes. From birth the individual as a psycho-physical organism is undergoing extraordinarily profound and complex processes of self-deepening such as the development of linguistic abilities, walking, hand-eye coordination, etc, and this naturally does not end at age four, but continues through life. So the individual is an existential reality involved in a living evolutionary process of self-education, through which processes as a direct immediate consequence he is made more profound and enhanced as a living structure. The mind is deepened and transformed existentially as a result of its education; it isn't a question of its gaining materially from this education in some hypothetical future. The purpose of the child's development in the area of linguistic ability isn't some abstract like a potential benefit to language; it is the onward development and enhancement of the child as a living being, whose existence is an absolute value.
This innate genius of the mind and body for self-transformation and refinement is the ground upon which education depends, and for which serves the entirety of its purpose. Life is the first principle of life, not culture. It is also, needless to say, the ground upon which the creation and fostering of culture depends. The culture we produce is an outpouring of our human reality, whereas the notion that we are subservient to what we produce is an example of the description used recently of a belief system where the mind conceives of something and then bows down to its own conception.
Scruton sees as especially pernicious the idea culture and knowledge being “relevant to the interests of the kids themselves”. I am not arguing in defence of whatever form of education Scruton is attacking, but a great work of art or thought is great because it is intrinsically of extreme relevance to life. Relevant isn't in the sense of some mundane question of practical utility, but in the sense of being a profound distillation and reflection of the artist's immersion in life, and given the universality of the human condition this naturally feeding into the life of the art 'consumer'. The whole point of an artwork is the dynamic of its transformative existential effect on the experiencer's mind: in the words of Andrei Tarkovsky, "The purpose of art is to provide a spiritual jolt." It doesn't exist simply to exist, and naturally without a human mind it has nowhere to exist.
True teachers do not provide knowledge as a benefit to their pupils; they treat their pupils as a benefit to knowledge. Of course they love their pupils, but they love knowledge more...And their overriding concern is to pass on that knowledge by lodging it in brains that will last longer than their own.(Education is) the process whereby knowledge is transferred from one brain to another
In total contrast to the transformative dynamic of the child's development of innate kinetic mental and physical potentialities Scruton's vision of education is of us fulfilling our function by being static storage devices within which knowledge is preserved and passed on: an all too solid subject object universe dualism.
He seems to see knowledge and culture as a kind of semi-divine world of higher reality to which its priests, the teachers supply the children as ritual vessels within whom is preserved the holy substance of culture. We are in a sense a lower evolutionary species than our abstract culture.
As for his use of the word love here, it is unfortunately covering two very different emotional experiences. What one feels for knowledge is a very different experience than that we should feel for a living person, and that anyone would first of all confuse the two 'loves', and secondly to place love of external knowledge higher is a reflection of sadly enervated sense of life. Such a description of one's feeling for culture being love also rings false and something of a sentimental cheapening of the nature of much of the highest art.
What does it benefit ordinary children that they should know the works of Shakespeare, acquire a taste for Bach or develop an interest in medieval Latin? All such attainments merely isolate a child from his peers, place a veil between his thinking and the only world where he can apply it, and are at best an eccentricity, at worst a handicap. My reply is simple: it may not benefit the child – not yet, at least. But it will benefit culture.
What it benefits a child or any person is the immediate existence of his existential being. That Scruton imagines the youth's intermingling of his mind with Bach is at best an eccentricity which may be of benefit at some hypothetical future date shows how little he understands of the human condition, imagining that benefit is to in terms of some tangible material gain. Life at the level of profit and loss rather than directly apprehended as living truth. And as he apparently sees no such gain in the broadening of the child's psycho-physical being both in the playing and listening of such self-expanding music, then this is "at best an eccentricity". At best! And this is the man who imagines himself as a defender of culture.
As for his idea that the deepening of one as an evolved autonomous person "places a veil between his thinking and the only world where he can apply it": this is so comically senseless as to almost be beyond criticism. Scruton seems to accept as a given that the world of reality is wholly disconnected from the world of culture. In what reality does culture exist if not this reality? And within what reality is culture created in the first place? Yes, that would again be this reality. And that profundity places a veil between oneself and life rather than deepening its connection! What absurd schizophrenic vision. It is a kind of lower gnostic vision where reality is accepted to be intrinsically inane and disappointing, while culture offers a sentimentalised haven for the disappointed soul, as evidenced by Scruton's statement elsewhere that "wisdom is the truth that consoles." Consoles against what? The answer to that presumably: what is imagined to be reality. Enslaved within a false intellectual system, with a fuzzy faith in culture as a higher realm and end in itself.
Scruton has possibly a well-intentioned aim which is to provide a bulwark against the rising tide of ignorance, but his own ignorance of life leads him to vapid worship of false gods: knowledge over the individual, the abstract over reality; though most likely the underlying motive beneath his position is the Hegelian exaltation of the authoritarian State over the individual- in total contrast to the truly democratic position.
The above the opening line from Roger Scruton's essay, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged. Where Scruton goes from here I will leave for now, but concentrate on this line in itself.
The first natural focus of attention is on the word superstition. Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary describes this as "a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation b: an irrational abject attitude of mind toward the supernatural, nature, or God resulting from superstition
2: a notion maintained despite evidence to the contrary."
So superstition tends to refer to irrational beliefs such as faith in practices for warding off bad luck, the ominous foretelling of dark events by means of, for example, a black cat crossing one's path, breaking a mirror, etc. Or maybe someone else might describe belief in a deity as a superstition. Here Scruton chooses to interpret the notion of education's purpose to be beneficial to the educated as being of this ilk of phenomenon- not simply a debatable proposition, but a distinctly irrational one.
Is this an educated use of the word superstition? Or is it an irrational usage of a loaded word designed, consciously or subconsciously, to lend false weight to an argument that doesn't suffice as proof in itself?
To get a clearer look at this issue we should understand what education might actually mean. It has a far broader significance than simply the passive accumulation of knowledge fostered in an external education system.
Evolution in the sense of progress is from simple, relatively unfree structures to more complex profound ones such as the higher mammals. So the human is a more profound entity than an amoeba, but human evolution occurs very much within the individual life, rather than simply being a matter of impersonal biological processes. From birth the individual as a psycho-physical organism is undergoing extraordinarily profound and complex processes of self-deepening such as the development of linguistic abilities, walking, hand-eye coordination, etc, and this naturally does not end at age four, but continues through life. So the individual is an existential reality involved in a living evolutionary process of self-education, through which processes as a direct immediate consequence he is made more profound and enhanced as a living structure. The mind is deepened and transformed existentially as a result of its education; it isn't a question of its gaining materially from this education in some hypothetical future. The purpose of the child's development in the area of linguistic ability isn't some abstract like a potential benefit to language; it is the onward development and enhancement of the child as a living being, whose existence is an absolute value.
This innate genius of the mind and body for self-transformation and refinement is the ground upon which education depends, and for which serves the entirety of its purpose. Life is the first principle of life, not culture. It is also, needless to say, the ground upon which the creation and fostering of culture depends. The culture we produce is an outpouring of our human reality, whereas the notion that we are subservient to what we produce is an example of the description used recently of a belief system where the mind conceives of something and then bows down to its own conception.
Scruton sees as especially pernicious the idea culture and knowledge being “relevant to the interests of the kids themselves”. I am not arguing in defence of whatever form of education Scruton is attacking, but a great work of art or thought is great because it is intrinsically of extreme relevance to life. Relevant isn't in the sense of some mundane question of practical utility, but in the sense of being a profound distillation and reflection of the artist's immersion in life, and given the universality of the human condition this naturally feeding into the life of the art 'consumer'. The whole point of an artwork is the dynamic of its transformative existential effect on the experiencer's mind: in the words of Andrei Tarkovsky, "The purpose of art is to provide a spiritual jolt." It doesn't exist simply to exist, and naturally without a human mind it has nowhere to exist.
True teachers do not provide knowledge as a benefit to their pupils; they treat their pupils as a benefit to knowledge. Of course they love their pupils, but they love knowledge more...And their overriding concern is to pass on that knowledge by lodging it in brains that will last longer than their own.(Education is) the process whereby knowledge is transferred from one brain to another
In total contrast to the transformative dynamic of the child's development of innate kinetic mental and physical potentialities Scruton's vision of education is of us fulfilling our function by being static storage devices within which knowledge is preserved and passed on: an all too solid subject object universe dualism.
He seems to see knowledge and culture as a kind of semi-divine world of higher reality to which its priests, the teachers supply the children as ritual vessels within whom is preserved the holy substance of culture. We are in a sense a lower evolutionary species than our abstract culture.
As for his use of the word love here, it is unfortunately covering two very different emotional experiences. What one feels for knowledge is a very different experience than that we should feel for a living person, and that anyone would first of all confuse the two 'loves', and secondly to place love of external knowledge higher is a reflection of sadly enervated sense of life. Such a description of one's feeling for culture being love also rings false and something of a sentimental cheapening of the nature of much of the highest art.
What does it benefit ordinary children that they should know the works of Shakespeare, acquire a taste for Bach or develop an interest in medieval Latin? All such attainments merely isolate a child from his peers, place a veil between his thinking and the only world where he can apply it, and are at best an eccentricity, at worst a handicap. My reply is simple: it may not benefit the child – not yet, at least. But it will benefit culture.
What it benefits a child or any person is the immediate existence of his existential being. That Scruton imagines the youth's intermingling of his mind with Bach is at best an eccentricity which may be of benefit at some hypothetical future date shows how little he understands of the human condition, imagining that benefit is to in terms of some tangible material gain. Life at the level of profit and loss rather than directly apprehended as living truth. And as he apparently sees no such gain in the broadening of the child's psycho-physical being both in the playing and listening of such self-expanding music, then this is "at best an eccentricity". At best! And this is the man who imagines himself as a defender of culture.
As for his idea that the deepening of one as an evolved autonomous person "places a veil between his thinking and the only world where he can apply it": this is so comically senseless as to almost be beyond criticism. Scruton seems to accept as a given that the world of reality is wholly disconnected from the world of culture. In what reality does culture exist if not this reality? And within what reality is culture created in the first place? Yes, that would again be this reality. And that profundity places a veil between oneself and life rather than deepening its connection! What absurd schizophrenic vision. It is a kind of lower gnostic vision where reality is accepted to be intrinsically inane and disappointing, while culture offers a sentimentalised haven for the disappointed soul, as evidenced by Scruton's statement elsewhere that "wisdom is the truth that consoles." Consoles against what? The answer to that presumably: what is imagined to be reality. Enslaved within a false intellectual system, with a fuzzy faith in culture as a higher realm and end in itself.
Scruton has possibly a well-intentioned aim which is to provide a bulwark against the rising tide of ignorance, but his own ignorance of life leads him to vapid worship of false gods: knowledge over the individual, the abstract over reality; though most likely the underlying motive beneath his position is the Hegelian exaltation of the authoritarian State over the individual- in total contrast to the truly democratic position.
Friday, 28 December 2007
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.
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.
Monday, 24 December 2007
Saturday, 22 December 2007
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.
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.
Friday, 21 December 2007
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 fuck, 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?
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 fuck, 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?
Wednesday, 19 December 2007
The Count
Some rather strange words from The Count of Monte Cristo; a work that reveals in the person of the Edmond Dantes the philosophical vision of an inhuman avenging angel portrayed at times as a zenith of human perfection; a man 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.
"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.
Monday, 17 December 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, 15 December 2007
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.
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.
Friday, 14 December 2007
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.
"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.
Thursday, 13 December 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
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 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. His language creates the edifice of his madness.
Madness in the ordinary personal sense may not be effected outright by bad reasoning; its source being some trauma 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.
Madness in the ordinary personal sense may not be effected outright by bad reasoning; its source being some trauma 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.
Tuesday, 11 December 2007
Monday, 10 December 2007
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.
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.
Friday, 7 December 2007
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.
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.
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
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.
More on the Good and Some on the Bad
I have relatively recently written on good and bad writing in pursuit of the furthering of the ideal contained within the idea that good writing is good for the culture to which is added the good writing; and for the person doing the good writing whose intellect is refined by the moulding of his thoughts into good form; and also good for he doing the good reading of the good writing, whose aesthetic and perhaps even moral sense is improved by the catalyst of the good writing upon his sense of self, within which could be said to contain the aesthetic and moral sense which are improved by the reading of the relevant good. It is my conjecture that this goodness is a good in itself due to its intrinsic goodness- the intrinsic goodness of the good being itself by definition good.
Contrarily I view bad writing as a vile contagion upon the mind of the man that conceives and propagates the bad writing; and that also the mind of the man that encounters the bad writing is polluted by its intermingling with the defiled waters of the filthy abomination of bad writing- abominations by their very nature tending to be filthy abominations. But as if this were not enough, bad writing is also an insidious and nefarious contaminant upon the very culture that the mind of man- in this case, the despoiled mind of man- spawns. That the culture spawned is innocent of all intent in this despoiling of itself is true but all the more piteous; culture being an essence devoid of the capacity for individual judgement and free-will, and so without an immune system that might defend the citadel of its purity from invasion by pollutants from without.
In perfect aesthetic balance to the earlier proposition, it is my conjecture that the badness of this bad writing is a bad in itself due to its intrinsic badness- the intrinsic badness of the bad being itself by definition bad and without compensating goodness to offset its own badness.
Contrarily I view bad writing as a vile contagion upon the mind of the man that conceives and propagates the bad writing; and that also the mind of the man that encounters the bad writing is polluted by its intermingling with the defiled waters of the filthy abomination of bad writing- abominations by their very nature tending to be filthy abominations. But as if this were not enough, bad writing is also an insidious and nefarious contaminant upon the very culture that the mind of man- in this case, the despoiled mind of man- spawns. That the culture spawned is innocent of all intent in this despoiling of itself is true but all the more piteous; culture being an essence devoid of the capacity for individual judgement and free-will, and so without an immune system that might defend the citadel of its purity from invasion by pollutants from without.
In perfect aesthetic balance to the earlier proposition, it is my conjecture that the badness of this bad writing is a bad in itself due to its intrinsic badness- the intrinsic badness of the bad being itself by definition bad and without compensating goodness to offset its own badness.
Saturday, 1 December 2007
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.
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.
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