Christmas Quiz

The season that's in it, a Christmas literary quiz. From which well-known play have I excavated the following quote:

Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep.

Merchant of Truth- Rupert Murdoch

The mainstream media on the grand scale can be summed up by the fact that perhaps its most powerful individual, Rupert Murdoch, is also the world's most powerful ever pornographer, through, at least this side of the Atlantic, his Sky television network, proudly flooding the ordinary home with his many adult channels. Which contains more truth- Mr Murdoch's 'news' or pornography disseminations is a difficult question, but the answer by default probably the porn; it not making much in the way of claims to being anything more than itself, whereas the truth versions of his news distributions alleging to reflect reality in quite a real manner.
Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony anointed the great fascist pornographer Murdoch and his wife as members of the Pontifical Order of St. Gregory the Great in January, 1998. This knighthood, bestowed on behalf of the pope, is given to persons of "unblemished character" who have "promoted the interests of society, the [Catholic] Church and the Holy See [Vatican]."
We understand it wasn't so much his services to fascism or pornography that earned Murdoch the great honour, but his religious faith and subservience to that faith in both thought and action. One also assumes his sex-shows mustn't do anything in the way of encouraging the use of contraceptives.

In the Act

You are reading this sentence. You are now reading this one. And now this is exactly where your mind is located, inseparable from the mental activity in which it is engaged.
"Ah but what if I am not reading any of the above, or for argument sake lets say I am reading the third sentence. This makes a lie of the first two claims. They can't all be true simultaneously." 

But they don't exist simultaneously. They exist as intellectual phenomena in the act of being read. For a baby, for example, whose attention is fixed on the writing, the words only exist as visual phenomena, and that is their full existence if only witnessed by that baby in that period. As intellectual phenomena, rather than simply visual, they require a compatible intellect to inhabit so as to exist as the intellectual phenomena that they are. Try to think of a sentence that is not being thought of. Tautologically impossible- it only exists when it is being thought of, and is real in the moment of thinking it.
The existential nature of a closed book is enough to drive a mind, sufficiently dogged in the pursuit of its elusive reality, mad.

So each of the three sentences are perfectly true statements - more of a mental achievement than might be imagined though there might be an argument for replacing you with I: ie "I am reading this sentence", etc. They are mind substances and cannot have a reality independent of the human mind, though of course the mind can have a reality independent of these effluences.

Perhaps the individual intellect can be seen in a very similar light to all of this, in the sense anyway of kind of static reality, to which experiences happen or converge. And unlike intellectual phenomena, one can't even point at an individual intellect as an object. So is the "individual intellect" simply an intellectual phenomenon? 

That, come to think of it, is what I have a feeling much supposed psycho-analytical theories simply amount to: rather than standing at the summit of a hierarchy of thought uniting all the other thoughts, simply the, more than likely delusional, thoughts produced at that moment, then falsely treated as anchors upon which to found a notion of self, and to bind the full self, falsely convinced these are its parameters, within those imprisoning parameters.

Observation

There is a certain type of person for whom life affords no greater pleasure than to watch other people working. For some unknown reasons, the most devoted instances of this species within a species are to be found in and around gaelic football and hurling pitches in rural Ireland when said pitches are host to fairly large and new-fangled machines engaged in drainage work.
Balancing this, there is also a type of person for whom life affords few greater irritations than to be watched while working by the first type.

Night & Water

An occasional, unfortunate and awkward by-product of a liking for night-time walks along and gazing into the many waterways of Cork city, particularly along the main docklands area, is to be accosted by a well-meaning type of soul who seems absolutely convinced that gazing into a city river by night must denote a suicidal desire to jump into said river. And maybe I shouldn't complain as just such interventions by strangers have surely salvaged quite a few momentarily broken human soldiers from such desperate actions. On the once or twice occasions when just such events have happened nothing I can say seems to convince the good Samaritan that suicide is not on my mind, and a somewhat comical passage of interaction occurs- one trying to convince the other not to kill himself, the other vainly trying to explain that there is an aesthetic pleasure to gazing into moving water, which is the full dynamic of the events the other mistakenly construes as verging on the imminently tragic. Perhaps it all comes from at source a certain type of person brought up in the heart of the country transplanted to the strange urban landscape, and its more unnatural and neurotic relationship with the natural world.

Anyway, no such event quite occurs on the following evening when, smoking a cigarette in a particularly remote spot, looking across at a ship in time-slowing manner ponderously turn and face out towards sea, I was thinking- and I think I really was- how much of a Tarkovskian scene it was, and if I were a filmmaker...when I belatedly noticed rapidly approaching footsteps. A haggard and feverish looking man grabbed me by the arm, fixed his highly charged, at least half-mad eyes on me, and demanded, "What is your wisdom?"
I quickly understood the nature of the scene and, perhaps out of an intermingling mixture of sympathy and self-preservation, imparted the following: "Life is the incarnated space between appearance and disappearance; that is to say, birth and death. Appearance in this realm coincides with disappearance from another, whilst disappearance from this realm is instantly followed by appearance in another."
This, as I must have intuitively divined, proved to be especially helpful to the distressed man, whose taut features softened and gaze became becalmed. He thanked me, gaze me a cigarette and walked off, heading away from the city, while I turned back towards it.

Another Dialogue

"There are many wonderful books that have never been written, some, naturally, greater than others."
"Show me these wonderful books."
"I can't. They've never been written."
"Then how do you know they exist?"
"They don't."
"Then how do you know they don't exist?"
"By their absence."
"But if you only know they don't exist by their absence, why are you talking of them as if they do exist?"
"I'll put it this way. If in 1850 someone had said that Crime and Punishment is a great book, would be have been lying?"
"But it wasn't written yet."
"So would he have been lying?"
"But it is a great book."
"So prior to its existence did it exist?"
"No, of course not."
"And did it not exist."
"Well I suppose for 'it' to not exist, it would have to be an it in the first place, in which case it would exist."
"Not bad. You're a far higher class of conversationalist than those that Plato employed."
"Yes men?"
"The worst."
"Anyway, have we come to some kind of philosophical conclusion, or is this all some Gogolian nonsense?
"I've no idea."

Wordy Endeavour

"You're writing a book? What kind of book?"
"Well, it's got real people in it."
"Real people? But they're made of language, aren't they?"
"Well, yes of course."
"And real people aren't made of language."
"Well, that's debatable. Some people think they are."
"They think they're creations of the words in their own heads? Lunatics. Anyway, tell me about these 'real people'."
"There's one I'm very happy with, who I think is very relevant. He's a great critical thinker of the modern age and the times we live in now."
"He sounds like a right asshole. Anyway, what of him? What are his conclusions, how does he reach them, et cetera, et cetera?"
"Well, he reaches them like everyone else of course. He reads the newspapers and watches the television."
"So he's handed a very crude jigsaw puzzle, assembles it, and then calls the resulting structure his own creation. I congratulate you on your realism. He sounds exactly like the kind of thinker who thrives in 'the times we live in now.'"

Free-Will & the External Seer

Consider a video recording of a football match. As the game was actually played the players have absolute freedom to act of their own volition. However, watching this later their actions obviously will not change, which is not to say that they were deprived of free will as they acted. Similarly we could talk of God as an observer of life existing free of our notion of time, knowing exactly what happens within our time, but this not contradicting the freedom of movement of people within time and earthly life.

Overheard in a Petrol Station

"Modern Western film amounts to mediocre literature with a camera added."
"Modern Western literature amounts to mediocre literature without a camera added."

Logic of Monarchy

Within a monarchy the general populace are 'subjects' to a monarch, who, generally by virtue of bloodline, is intrinsically superior to the people. And so the British national anthem is God Save the Queen, not God Save the People. The people find their validation before God in the person of the monarch.
And since no human can be more than human, and the monarch is human, the necessary logic here is that Britons are, within the framework of the State, subhuman; intrinsically lesser than, 'subject' to, another who contrarily is human.
Knighthoods and the like can be seen as conferred blessings from above where the subhuman subjects ascend towards the highest ideal of human existence, though since this state is unique to the monarch, in the absence of becoming monarch oneself, becoming human cannot be attained. Servility is one's natural and rightful state of being.

A different starting-point takes us a similar route, and that is the notion that the royalty are indeed more than human, which seems to have been often the ancient use of kingship. The same dynamic of ascendancy reigns, with the people as centres of consciousness less real than the monarch, but here the people are granted the status of human, but to be human is itself as a biological condition to be a slave species and there is no route upwards to the throne of existential creation.
Which of the two variations is more traumatic to the subjects is debatable.

One might say this is archaic and fantastic; that now we have full rights and all the rest of it, but this is to view the human condition very superficially. For one thing, subconsciously the self understands the implied truth of all the above, even if it is rare that it will bubble up into conscious awareness. This intrinsic servile mental software has been part of the human condition for vast stretches of time and won't disappear overnight, or even over a century or two. Though of course it could disappear in an enlightening flash for the individual. Progress here consists not in an expansion but an unwriting or vanishing of the software.

Acolyte

"The system is collapsing into chaos."
"Yes, perhaps, but I still have perfect faith in it."
"You moron."

Jim Marrs- Rise of the Fourth Reich

Part One here. Part two. Part 3. Four. Five.
"The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.” Mark Twain

Wisdom of The Man on the Street/ Nature Abhors a Vacuum

"Human nature abhors a vacuum. If man doesn't fill his head with one form of nonsense, he'll most likely fill it with another."

MSN

I take that previous post back- there are clearly not processes trying to turn humanity into a species of infantilised morons, as shown by the most prominent lines on the homepage of MSN, which also show how democracy has poured itself into such vibrant forms of choice:

MSN Battles: Which celebrities are in and which are out
Who is hot and who is not
You decide - On MSN Battles

Also the important selection of recent human phenomena:

Madonna watched by Rodriguez from front row
Spears 'ready to get started' with career, says mum
Carey's acting skills praised by co-star

And also the joyous news that "MSN has just made life easier." A key moment in human evolution.

Biblical Oath

Regarding the practice of swearing an oath on the bible in a court of law it would seem only natural to refer to the attributed words of the central human figure in that book, he being Jesus:

I say unto you, Swear not at all;
neither by heaven; for it is God's throne:
Nor by the earth; for it is his footstool; neither by Jerusalem...
Neither shall though swear by thine own head, because thou canst not make one hair white or black.
But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.

So it is perfectly clear that to swear on the bible is an absolute transgression of the book, and that in essence the word of anyone under oath to the bible is according to Jesus' words intrinsically worthless and a mockery of that book in its Christian essence. Given that the legalistic world is supposed to excel specifically in its use of logic this is all so blatantly obvious that it's hard to understand what to make of it. The obvious implication is that all testimony in all court cases so far taken under biblical oath should be struck out as inadmissible.

Caravaggio- Narcissus, Egon Schiele- Die Tote Stadt

Fuse

"The universe can be compared to a television programme playing in a house. If a fuse blows, the programme vanishes, and all who dwell in her. And so if a fuse blows...that's all folks. "
"Ah but if there is someone in the house, the fuse can be replaced and transmission resumes."
"Yes but we're within the programme. How do we know there's anyone watching?"
"Perhaps some of use are within and without."
"I don't understand."
"I know. That's because you're too lost in the programme."

Freudianism

The Freudian vision of the human condition arose from the cocaine using Freud probing the minds of cocaine using mentally unwell bored rich folk, and then pronouncing the thoughts and imagined unifying theory that made sense of the diseased mental emanations to be the normal human condition. Some might imagine that the marriage of a highly neurotic psychiatrist, extremely neurotic client, and cocaine would most likely produce anything but sanity, but this would be a naive view. It also might be harsh to view the Freudian archetype as a pornographer of the psyche, engaged in a deeply incestuous relationship with himself.
It is surely no coincidence the nature of the very word psycho-anal-yst: the marriage of mind and arse.

Council on Foreign Relations

First the repetition of a few relevant quotes:

"We shall have world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or consent." Statement by Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member James Warburg to The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17th, l950

"The New World Order will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down...but in the end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece will accomplish much more than the old fashioned frontal assault." CFR member Richard Gardner, writing in the April l974 issue of the CFR's journal, Foreign Affairs.

David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, head of CFR, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.
"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

From linked site here, dating back to Clinton Presidential era:

The CFR's claim that "The Council has no affiliation with the U.S. government" is laughable. In reality, CFR members are very tightly affiliated with the U.S. government. Since 1940, every U.S. secretary of state (except for Gov. James Byrnes of South Carolina, the sole exception) has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and/or its younger brother, the Trilateral Commission. Also since 1940, every secretary of war and every secretary of defense has been a CFR member. During most of its existence, the Central Intelligence Agency has been headed by CFR members, beginning with CFR founding member Allen Dulles. Virtually every key U.S. national security and foreign policy adviser has been a CFR member for the past seventy years.

Almost all White House cabinet positions are occupied by CFR members. President Clinton, himself a member of the CFR, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group, employs almost one hundred CFR members in his administration. Presidents come and go, but the CFR's power--and agenda--always remains.

Boethius wrote: "In other living creatures ignorance of self is nature: in man it is vice." And perhaps the same could be said of the political worlds we inhabit. Little point in reading this without going to the link, but another extract as a very brief introduction to the CFR:

The Council on Foreign Relations, housed in the Harold Pratt House on East 68th Street in New York City, was founded in 1921. In 1922, it began publishing a journal called Foreign Affairs. According to Foreign Affairs' web page (http://www.foreignaffairs.org), the CFR was founded when "...several of the American participants in the Paris Peace Conference decided that it was time for more private American Citizens to become familiar with the increasing international responsibilities and obligations of the United States."

The first question that comes to mind is, who gave these people the authority to decide the responsibilities and obligations of the United States, if that power was not granted to them by the Constitution. Furthermore, the CFR's web page doesn't publicize the fact that it was originally conceived as part of a much larger network of power.

As should be perfectly obvious to anyone, the CFR and Trilateral Commissions are completely contrary to Jeffersonian type democratic government. Why does one read so little about them, such as for example the great off-white hope Barrack Obama's membership of the CFR? Well, when at the site one sees the bounteous selection of mainstream media members of the CFR, itself leading to David Rockefeller's quote above about the media's discretion about the organisation and its goal of a New World Order, the question becomes a bit of an insult to the intelligence.

Language, Utilitarianism, Beckett, Borges

Excuse the sketchbook format of thought due to limits of interest in literary matter at hand.

Utilitarian language- where purpose is all-important. A path to freedom. However, the mind, or an aspect of the mind, in mistaking its produce for itself, through that very seeking fails to find itself. Being itself, why should it need to find itself in the first place? So the very seeking is self-defeating.
In time, within this self-perpetuating, self-defeating process, lost in language, with the inevitable non-appearance of the hazily imagined goal of reality and happiness, many come to be disillusioned and to doubt the very existence of the exalted goal, but hold fast to the process, but since there is no energy to fuel the process, it all grinds towards a self-consuming halt, with Samuel Beckett being the most obvious incarnation of such proceedings.
Borges as shown in the paradox pieces is an example of the gnostic position, where in the literary field, the mind is lost in the matter of words, but seeks a way out, and the schizophrenic escape route being the falsehood of language itself. Both positions arising from a self trapped within language and a false understanding of that language, and all this completely unnecessary- the mind having no reason to have to entrap itself within one of its emanations.

Jefferson & Corpocracy

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Thomas Jefferson

Victor Pelevin on the Media

"The dog watches the stick, but the lion watches the person who threw it. By the way, when you understand that, it makes it much easier to read our press."
Sacred Book of the Werewolf

Mind & Produce

Which would be considered more of an existential reality- a work of art or the mind which produced it?

Honesty & Language

If language possessed a self-awareness and sense of honour, then the endless insults to her integrity would surely have culminated in catastrophe long before now- the mad-house or suicide being the obvious destinations of the outraged sensibility.
One sample outrage being "The Christian Right."

Cynicism

"You're very cynical."
"You mean I'm honest about the nature of false, cynical forms."
Emm...perhaps."

Literary Assignment

A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-K-L-M-N-O-P-Q-R-S-T-U-V-W-X-Y-Z

Rearrange the above letters to create a literary work of some 500 pages about the human condition and the act of literary creation itself. Individual letters may be used more than once.

Genre

"I'm thinking of becoming a genre writer."
"Really, what kind?"
"Neurotic."

Vanity

Where the mind creates two imaginary selves, and one admires the other.

Progress & the Word

Just in my local library and a thought must have wafted its way from the numerous tomes, and that thought or vision was of a world where, on a variation of the traditional olden monastery where a monk as penance might be given the task of writing out the entire bible several times, a modern such spiritual environment where the god-seeking but stumbling soul is given the penance of creating several manuscript copies of David Beckham's autobiography, or some such.

Infinite Thought Again

Obviously I can't see into the minds of any of my hypothetical readers, except perhaps my own, and even that is debatable, and so maybe I should expand a bit on the Infinite Thought post, and its claims to include exactly that- a thought whose logic cannot be constrained within the finite, even though capable of expression, and that thought being:

This is a translation.

The idea being to treat this as a logical statement...There is an infinite regress here if one tries to pin down the thought to a definite starting point, where, like the paradoxes, the statement can then be examined and found to be false, as in, for instance, "this statement is false" which is obviously not a meaningful line- if unaccompanied by an actual statement- as it isn't a statement. There seems to be nothing, however, in the line, "This is a translation," that contradicts linguistic truth. The line can exist existentially as a meaningful sentence. But it is in treating it as a logical truth and searching for itself at its original source that it becomes so interesting. If it is as it claims a translation, we go to a language- say French- and have the identical statement stating itself to be a translation, and so to a previous language with the same result, and on if desired in a loop of all the human languages ever conceived and back to English again and endlessly onwards. Given its nature we cannot get to a starting point or linguistic first cause, where we then say, "Now it is not a logical statement, as it is not in fact a translation." In response: "Show me that first point." This point, reiterating, can never be reached.

With any rational line the mind attempts to rest on it, to view it as a static form. "This is a translation," however, eludes such a form of mind that regards the external world and its forms from its own static point of perspective. The line and its meaning slips away from it, evaporates at the touch.

But, just in case, it is not a paradox, which is simply a meaningless concept whose existence would imply the falseness of reality and language within it. There is nothing being contradicted with "This is a translation," and is an endlessly more subtle thought. With the paradoxes, which are simply errors of thought, the mind gets to reach a conclusion and satisfy its rational nature, and while it may superficially seem that the conclusion is to damn reason and this its anti-rational substance, it is still an exercise of the reasoning mind which lives on, its processes uninterrupted. Whereas there is no such point of rest with this thought. The reasoning mind itself dissolves if able to properly view this thought and melt into its substance, though, of course, all this explanation is as likely more self-defeating than anything else.

Obama & the Council on Foreign Relations

Short video here, obviously relevant to the recent posts on Machiavelli. For anyone gullible enough to imagine cracks in the edifices of political control permitting liberators to seep through, anyone remember the naive and embarrassing euphoria that greeted man of the people Tony Blair's triumph over the Conservatives in the 90s?

Greek Chorus

A useful literary device- long unfashionably unfashionable, though given the Heraclitean nature of fashion, not unlikely to become fashionably unfashionable, and even moving onto fashionably fashionable, before once more returning towards the present state of affairs- is the use of the Greek chorus who can add their collective voice to proceedings at highly charged moments, thus adding an unusual point of perspective to the unfolding literary events.
However, it should be borne in mind that if one isn't relatively fluent in Greek oneself one should make use of a reliable interpreter, as otherwise, in your ignorance, your Greek chorus may be spouting utter and inappropriate nonsense.

The Neurotic

Neuroticism is where the mind becomes a vortex of trapped false thought, and can afflict individuals and cultures to greater and lesser extent, modern imposed mass "culture" having particularly parted ways with reality. The collision of such vortices tends to be the domain of 'history'; ie the abstractions or alleged abstractions from reality that become the subject matter of the history books, which, given the sanctified hallucinations of today's public realm, are often alot more self-contained in their abstractions than imagined. In other words, as expected, just extensions of the applied neuroticism that is the natural domain of power-politics.

Economics of Literature

The great thing about literature is of course in relation to the economics of scale. It is just as cheap to write a great battle-strewn epic involving the displacement of entire peoples as it is to write a minimalist work of an elderly woman living at home with her two cats. Special-effects simply the cost of ink and paper, or perhaps of electricity. A truly democratic art-form.

Infinite Thought

This is a translation of an imaginary work by a fictitious author in a non-existent language. It is self-evidently a very short work, which, even if it did exist, would most likely achieve little renown.


More prosaically:

This is a translation.

Hole

"There's a hole in my sock."
"Of course there is. Otherwise you couldn't get your foot into it."
"No, I mean a second hole."
"A second hole? Then throw it away."

Parodox Parody?

Below might seem a parody of the recent debunked paradoxes, but is in fact entirely faithful to the spirit and standard of reasoning in Zeno's and Epimenides' famously alleged paradoxes, where the intelligent understanding of words and what they stand for breaks down.

"I am here. You are there."
"No, I am here. You are there."
"No, I think you'll find that I am here while you are most certainly there."
"Bullshit. I am definitely here, while you are there."
"Are you calling me a liar? I am most certainly here, while you are without a sliver of doubt over there."

And so on.

Waiting For Moro

A man at a crossroads, shabby, impatient yet bored. Waits.
Enter another man, equally prosaically insignificant.

First Man: I thought you'd never get here.
Second Man: Sorry bout that. I got delayed

Exeunt.

Perhaps the Final Paradox Piece

As said at some point in the earlier posts, the mental urge towards the existence of the paradox or/and the worldview arising from belief in its existence amount to gnosticism, reality divided against itself, and as Borges says, false, though the very word 'false' should have told Borges all he needed to know about the falseness of this vision. Ultimately a schizophrenic universe. But as shown all the given paradoxes are not paradoxes at all, but are either illogical at source or seen as paradoxes as a result of false views of the reality mirrored by the logic of a mental set-piece.
The paradox is itself, obviously enough, an exercise in language, and here the senselessness of the very concept of the paradox becomes clear. The entire basis of the correct use of language is its meaningfulness, and as a reasoning tool all language properly used must be meaningful. The paradox seeks to meaningfully use language to create a meaningless result. This is self-evidently impossible, and makes as much sense as to imagine one can get a wrong answer within mathematics. And if you do apparently get a wrong answer, then that's the problem. You've gone wrong.

And knowing there must simply be an error, the given paradoxes were shown to be childishly easy to unravel. The error people make is to leap aboard what is imagined to be the ensuing logical train, rather than looking closely at the alleged paradox precisely as an existential language construct. If an example of the simply meaningless construct, there is no way out of the resulting train of logic. Being meaningless it contains no meaning, and one is lost within the enclosed loop of the labyrinth.
The most elegant 'paradox' I've come across and the most subtle to unravel is below, and its elegance of construct and deconstruction lies in its being so purely a matter of language.

A famous idea or paradox is that God could not conceive of something of which he could not do. God of course being used here in the sense of an all-powerful entity, and so since he could not do the above, then he cannot be all-powerful.
I have no idea to what extent this notion has been examined and what excursions of reason it has involved, but a possibly unexamined view is that the thought is being looked at from the wrong linguistic angle. The usual emphasis being that God could not conceive of something of which he could not do.
However, the same sentence can be looked at from a slightly different perspective offering a radically different significance.
God could not conceive of something of which he would not be capable, and he achieves this by not conceiving of it. Thus an all-powerful entity's absolute mastery is maintained.

Again, the error we make is to rush to examine the logic, while it is in the linguistic structure where the truth lies.
Though come to think of it, this will probably not be the last paradox post, since as reason, or what is imagined to be reason, is usually set in motion in the service of already imagined and desired 'truths,' then why this gnostic divided worldview occurs in the first place should be looked at.

Nabokov's Aesthetic of Literature

Nabokov's aesthetic of the novel is shown in his words on Gogol:

His work, as all great literary achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not of ideas.

A very brief summary of the butterfly killer Nabokov's feeling for literature and aversion to the dark matter of ideas entering this domain which, it is claimed, is purely a phenomenon of language. Dostoevsky, for instance, especially met Nabokov's disdain. Well, it is self-evident that literature is a phenomenon of language, but rather than simply stop there, the issue then becomes what is language. Language is something which intrinsically involves the creation of meaningful structures, such as sentences, and which sentences may transmit the substances called ideas. Nabokov's notion that language is something distinct from what language creates and embodies is nonsensical.
Here someone will say, perhaps, that Nabokov is talking of the aesthetic grace of language, and the point of the superiority of good over bad writing obviously needs no debating.
Another point, however, is that if one pulls back one's view far enough, Nabokov's "non-utilitarian delight" in pure aesthetic form is itself an example of the novel of ideas he disdains. This aesthetic self-containment being an idea of a novel, of which persumably his own work is an imagined example. It's the application of an intellectual concept, though this overarching idea involves a schizophrenic and castrated understanding of what language is.

The earlier mention of Nabokov's pathological addiction to the killing of butterflies and preserving their now dead forms was not meant to suggest that his sense of literature could in any way be equated with this preference for beautiful dead simulations over messy truth- elegant sterile abstractions pinned harmlessly on a page.

Progression of the Real

It has come to my attention, by what means is irrelevant, that a certain Plato is arguing that this world is but an imperfect 'digital' copy of another universe- an analogue being of far greater authenticity, though this analogue version is in itself not entirely a true representation of the Absolute Truth. This 'universe' by contrast is hardly worthy of the name, so degraded a simulation is it.
Others claim that yes, this is a poor copy of a copy, but an almost perfectly faithful one of the analogue, and only the most refined of perceivers could notice the difference.
Another view is that such is the resolution being employed in this version of reality that this copy is a positive improvement on the analogue, while later versions of same will come ever closer to the perfect truth, with some extremists even claiming that eventually simulated reality will come to replicate Reality with absolute authenticity.

Perpetual Motion

Scientists have been surprised by new images obtained from their technological instruments of perception which appear to explain the massive clockwork mechanism of the universe's refusal to show any signs of winding down. Where is all the energy coming from, accelerated expansion of said universe, etc.
It appears that all the fibres of existence do converge upon an ultimate centre of energy, and in this centre appears to be, surprisingly but unmistakeably, a rather small middle-aged man, respectably but a little shabbily dressed, seated upon and pedalling a bicycle. He, and this has upset some of our scientific minds, doesn't seem to be particularly exerting himself, sometimes even free-wheeling while he rolls himself a cigarette. Whether the man and his bike are actually in motion or static, as with an exercise-bike, is as yet uncertain, but evidence is starting to hesitantly lean towards actual motion. What motivates this individual is pure conjecture.

Spirals Good and Bad

Genuine healthiness and sanity of mind is a virtuous spiral extending outwards- rather than a circle of fixed diameter, while unhealthiness and insanity of mind is a vicious spiral narrowing inwards. The spiral inwards contracts ultimately to an insupportable point of concentration, while the spiral outwards is infinite. And so, on a simple intellectual level is seen the truth of an opened mind and love and the falseness of ignorance and hatred. One leads to greater and greater reality, the other to a finite point and self-annihilating unreality.

An inevitable metaphysical question then becomes how long this concentration, which is the existence of evil, can be sustained. Can it be infinitely extended, just this terror-stricken side of total annihilation? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that it doesn't exist within infinity. That is the very reason it 'exists', or sustains the illusion of itself. It can only exist within the temporal domain.
And so maybe the troubling answer is evil will exist as long as time exists- which isn't as absolute a statement as might seem to those who imagine time and reality are inseparable. It is outside of this matrix that one experiences the living answer. But the man trapped within the matrix, again as with the 'paradoxes' lately discussed, imagines there is no truth outside the matrix.
An interesting line from the Book of Revelations goes:

Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.

To leave the matter in suspension, it is perhaps an insoluble question as to whether intentional evil exists as long as time exists, or whether it has a finite duration within the temporal. And the question also would need specifying, as in the above quote what is referred to is the conscious union of men specifically devoted to the 'good' of evil, or ego worshippers, such as these men of worldly power. In any case, the idea of a Manichaean struggle between good and bad, light and dark, is ultimately a bit of a non-starter, as how can unreality battle reality, which is what this can be genuinely reduced to on an mental level. What is it unreality or insanity could win, even if it could win, but itself? But even that, pushed to its logical destination, must be lost.

Unhappiness Versus Happiness

We have all heard the line about how it only takes so many muscles to smile, but quite a few more to frown- forgive the mathematical imprecision. The point presumably being made that frowning is greater exercise for the face. There is more to life than optimum biological fitness, however, and not all facts are equal, particularly not in the inner domain, where it should be realised that as an existential experience smiling is of a higher order than frowning, taking us closer to the truth of ourselves, with the qualification that it should be married to the correct situation- no need to pretend there's virtue in smiling in inappropriate circumstances like an idiot. But otherwise- smile away.

Capitalism and Capital

Poker is capitalism in something like its pure form: the only product being exchanged is money. And if a game of poker is indefinitely continued, all the money will find its way progressively into fewer and fewer hands.

The idea of capital or money is that of a symbol that permits the flow of products of mutual benefit to peoples engaged in different, perhaps very different, activities, and inhabiting even very different parts of the planet. Originally the fundamental reality of money was of its being a precious metal, and the form or symbol into which it was moulded was a very secondary issue. And so one was in possession of something of intrinsic value, which for whatever reasons man commonly seems to regard as 'precious.' The individual within this system held a strong, stable position. Gold, for example, wasn't suddenly going to depreciate madly.

In time the secondary symbolic state has come to have prominence over the first- what it means more important than what it is- and now the existential reality of money is worthless, comprising paper or very unprecious metal, and the symbol is the fundamental truth; ie what the money means. So one is in possession of an ascribed value, rather than a thing in itself. Naturally this is an extremely powerful and potentially corruptible position for those in charge of the money at something like source, if inclined at all towards temptation, given the wholly symbolic nature of the money substance.
Another way of phrasing this is that if psychological realities like greed, love of power and dominion over others are indeed psychological realities, then we can expect pretty much as a matter of course the enormous temptation to corruption to find practical results. If however greed, love of power, etc are not psychological realities, then we have little to fear, and the possibility of the given scenarion little more than a conspiracy theory arising from an erroneous and cynical view of the landscape of human reality. However, most will agree such inner landscape is indeed real. And so, in the words of Josiah Charles Stamp, President of the Bank of England in the 1920's:

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented. If you want to continue to be slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit.

The utter defencelesness of the ordinary individual's position with modern money shown most spectacularly in Germany between the Great War and the rise of the Nazis, when inflation snowballed to the point where again the intrinsic worth became greater than the symbolic worth; ie the paper was worth more than the 'money'. The intrinsic unreality or worthlessness of the symbol became something close to absolute.
One might say money realised its own non-existence, and so dissolved into nothingness, but at the expense of such elegance we probably have to rather consider the perennial activity of human manipulation, conscious and unconscious, intentional and error-strewn, where at the very least the Allied victors by their victory terms ensured the first German economic chaos.
Now in the comparatively cashless society the money relationship is even more abstract, where that which is symbolised doesn't even exist as a tangible symbol-object, but almost purely as numbers on computer screens, and so the power dynamics in this system have become ever more centralised towards the bankers and creators of the money symbol.

And so is amply shown the danger of an economic system wholly in thrall to the fluctuations and manipulations of a symbol of no intrinsic substance. With today's crisis no crops are failing, plagues striking, etc. Just a purely mental substance depreciating in value in terms of itself, or/ and disappearing into unknown avenues. See poker analogy. All reminiscent of the paradox examples recently shown, where the mind rushes to board the train of logic ensuing from what are at source unrealities.

The Epimenides Paradox/ Liar Paradox

A re-post of what lies beneath:

On the continued theme of the paradox, I saw mentioned last night in a television programme on mathematics the alleged paradox "This statement cannot be proved." And this apparently a tangent of what is called the Epimenides Paradox, which seems to go in something like its pure form:

This statement is false.

So do we have here what Borges described as a crack in the architecture of reason where we see that the world is false? The supposed logic going, "Well, if it is true that it is false, then it is true. Which means it is false. Which means it is true." And so on. A unsolvable paradox. Logic has been breached. We are free!

The vital essence of language in the form of reason, rather than say poetry, is that at every level what one says is reasonable- makes sense. And here, as should be immediately obvious, is where this paradox gets in trouble. "This statement is false." What statement? There is no statement here, simply the referring to one which does not appear. The sentence, without the accompanying statement, is linguistically meaningless. And so it is of course meaningless to describe a non-existent statement as true or false.

"My dog is black" is a statement which may be true or false, depending on the colour of my dog, and in this correct understanding of what a statement is, no paradoxes occur. The statement exists- refers to something. "This statement" is not however a statement, and so the supposed paradox is simply resting on a foundation of gibberish. And so, alas, no paradox.
Identically- "This statement can't be proved." What statement?

Even if, and here I am giving far more respect and time to this nonsense than it merits, "This statement is false" wasn't meaningless and actually made some kind of sense, the moment it is false it makes no more sense to apply logic to it. It is illogical to treat illogical statements as logical- you don't build and form deductions from a foundation of "Two plus two equals five." Logic doesn't apply. You don't apply rational conclusions to irrational statements. That is simply, and literally, insanity: take meaningless nonsense and run with it. Logic applies to the logical implications of true statements, not false ones.

So summing up, "This statement is false" is linguistic nonsense as it isn't a statement, but in any case a logical train should not follow illogical statements. Or as written in a separate post, "Just because words combined may make what appears a proper sentence doesn't mean the structure is a legitimate one, i.e. language isn't simply a matter of structure but of course meaning also, and here the meaning is absent."

The Writer

"And you are a writer?
"Yes, when I write."
"And what do you write?"
"I write whatever I happen to be writing at the moment I am writing it."
"And what do you happen to be writing at the moment."
"This."

Naked Dialogue

Two figures on a white page.
"The central character is fucked in the head."
"What central character?"
"The one in the story."
"What story?"
"This one."
"But we're the only two in it."
"That's right."
"So one of the two of us is fucked in the head?"
"At least one."
"Well, which of the two of us is the central character?"
"That's for the reader to decide."
"Right. One final question."
"What?"
"Is this modernist or post-modernist?"
"Fuck knows."

More on Machiavelli & the Dynamics of Power

Earlier short piece here. Machiavelli is famous for writing in The Prince on the prudent methods a political ruler must use in order to attain, maintain and strengthen his political power. The very idea that 'Machiavellian' refers to some exceptional and cynical mode of political behaviour rather than a reflection of the norm would presumably have been incomprehensible to Machiavelli as, rather than an instigator of some new ruthlessness, he is simply an observer and adviser of strategy within this field of human conduct and invariably conflict. That politics is a strategical game with the ends being raw power, and since there is nothing moral about power then this is a value that has no meaningful place within this game, just as for instance goodness has nothing to do with breaking a land-speed record. So more or less goes the thinking.

Politics however, unlike the land-speed record and most other 'games', is not self-enclosed, directly affects the wider world, and so this amorality, or often immorality is a very serious issue, and it's best for those liable to be affected by the actions of its players, which is to say all of us, to realise that such a game is being played in the first place and to have some idea of its modus operandi.

As said, Machiavelli when expressing the desirability of deviousness and ruthlessness as practices within this 'game' is simply reflecting a reality rather than particularly instigating anything new. Once however Machiavelli has given his views in his book of ideal if general method, these notions of best practice enter more profoundly into the world of politics as conscious general method to be emulated rather than as accidental and intuitive understandings by various individuals in particular circumstances. The Prince is also a lens through which the more disinterested observer can look upon historical and present-day realities and perhaps discern the methodology behind 'random' events, unseen by the unsuspecting and gullible.

And so the idea that 'Machiavellian' refers to some unusual form of political practice rather than the norm is either an instance of uneducated naivety, or itself an instance of Machiavellian duplicity by those playing the game - that as a virtual matter of course at the other end of government is someone or, more plausibly, some body of people acting to cement and increase their power over their subjects. As quoted in the earlier short piece, "the people are everywhere anxious not to be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles are out to dominate and oppress the people." This tension is for Machiavelli an unquestionable, fundamental truth. The ruling elite will always want to oppress the people, to further their control, and by simple logic the ultimate desired destination is absolutism, the totalitarian state. This leap to absolute power is dangerous for the rulers however, as the people are great in number and have no wish to be the subjects of outright tyranny. To excessively act on this urge for such total mastery is to gamble with what they already possess.

Principalities usually come to grief when the transition is being made from limited power to absolutism. Princes take this step either directly or through magistrates.

At the moment in the comparatively free West, it is via the use of the magistrates, or legal 'reform', that the desired movement towards absolutism is being conducted, but this must be justified, if noticed at all by the people, by deception: because of say a perceived external threat [perhaps even a virus], intentionally created or/and hyped up by the nobility's means of public propaganda. He writes:

We must distinguish between....those who to achieve their purposes can force the issue and those who must use persuasion. In the second case they always come to grief, having achieved nothing; when however they can force the issue, then they are seldom endangered.
The populace is always fickle; it is easy to persuade them of something but difficult to confirm them in that persuasion. Therefore one must usually arrange matters so that when they no longer believe they can be made to believe by force.

So they must be made to believe what the rulers want them to believe, which is the necessity of an increase in centralised state power. But greater forces than persuasion must be used. Persuasion simply appeals to the limpid reason. To be made believe by force the far more powerful, primal aspects of human nature must be attacked and harnessed - fear and hatred. And so the application of this being, for example, the Gladio network of terror earlier described here, on which the BBC did a detailed 3-part documentary. In the words of its director, Allan Frankovich:

This BBC series is about a far-right secret army, operated by the CIA and MI6 through NATO, which killed hundreds of innocent Europeans and attempted to blame the deaths on Baader Meinhof, Red Brigades and other left wing groups. Known as 'stay-behinds' these armies were given access to military equipment which was supposed to be used for sabotage after a Soviet invasion. Instead it was used in massacres across mainland Europe as part of a CIA Strategy of Tension. Gladio killing sprees in Belgium and Italy were carried out for the purpose of frightening the national political classes into adopting U.S. policies.

As one of the key pariticipants in the Gladio network describes in the documentary, methods included not just by perpetration of acts and blaming them on others, but also infiltration of these groups, and leading them to perpetration of the desired terrorist acts. People who imagine themselves to be well-informed about political realities continue, however, in their naivety to consider such simple tactics of control as mentioned by Machiavelli to be the province of the mentally unhinged, to be conveniently scorned and without differentiation as "conspiracy theories."
Machiavelli also says, and he makes no moral judgement here, simply states as a fact:

Princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and who, in the end, have overcome those abiding by honest principles.
Because all men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your word to them.
One must know how to colour one's actions and to be a great liar and deceiver. Men are so simple, and so much creatures of circumstance, that the deceiver will always find someone ready to deceive.

This low, depraved notion of humanity is perfectly normal amongst those living within this field of life, the world of power politics, as naturally enough for those within this reality, this is a kind of norm. They are realists within their domain. Also, the perceiver himself is central to that which is perceived, and the individual is simply making of his debased self a general rule of humanity. Thus the influential thinker within the American neo-conservative movement, Leo Strauss, mirrors Machiavelli: "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed." Conscience presumably is never wholly absent in anyone, so even these manipulators must convince themselves of their realism and virtue.

More Stairway

What may be described as metaphysical pressure has been exerted towards myself by obscure persons to add to my earlier piece Stairway To..., but sure as I am of my intimate entanglement with the divine mind, such pressure, dependent for success on fear of the future beyond, is futile. However, due to a mix of compassion and maybe even personal pleasure, I will add a little to what could be said to have been adequately self-contained and complete in its previous form. That piece should be read before what follows.

It should be borne in mind by the conscientious reader that I have ceased to exist as an empirical observer of the scene, and what follows is mere artistry, or lack of, or, as some would say, lies, though by coincidence may coincide with "truth", in both its prosaic particular and exalted general forms.

Our hero began to ascend, and while there was nothing to measure the passage of time it seems certain much of it passed, perhaps even millennia. His mind oscillated between expectation, irritation, despair, hope, terror, boredom and even a form of tension that bordered on the ecstatic, as well as some other forms of psychological terrain it would be too tedious, for all concerned, to continue to mention. He had wondered from his initial starting point whether to go up or down the stairs, and, though not a superstitious man, he thought perhaps, all in all, considering the circumstances, maybe upwards was safer; the lower regions of theoretical afterlife visions tending more towards the dystopian than the utopian. True, at times, following great stretches of time, he did sometimes wonder if he had blundered. "Perhaps a few steps downwards and I'd have got somewhere. A door would have opened and voila! Maybe this is all a mockery - a test to see would I turn coward and avoid the dangerous descent into the nether regions."
Such thoughts were more in the way of keeping himself company than a matter of serious belief however. And upwards he continued.
Finally a change- a flickering of light. A torch. He rubbed his eyes. He glanced below. There was no staircase. He fell into the void.

Though perhaps he came to a door. He opened and once again...life.

Machiavelli and Democracy

These two different dispositions are found in every city: that the people are everywhere anxious not to be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles are out to dominate and oppress the people. These opposed ambitions bring about one of three results; a principality, a free city, or anarchy.
When the nobles see that they cannot withstand the people, they start to increase the standing of one of their own numbers, and make him a prince in order to be able to achieve their own ends under his cloak. Similarly, the people start to increase one of their own and make him a prince in order to be protected by his own authority.
Machiavelli, The Prince

One might imagine the progressive increase of the people's power will inevitably lead to true democracy, but Machiavelli makes the important if obvious point:

The people are more honest in their intentions than the nobles, as the latter want to oppress the people, whereas the people only want not to be oppressed.
The nobles have more foresight and are more astute; they always act in time to safeguard their interests, and take sides with whom they expect to win.

And so ideally - for the nobles - the people think they are in power, as in a democracy, but the nobles, or aristocrats of worldly power, ensure that it is they who covertly maintain power, by secretly manipulating the democratic process, placing in power one of their whom the people imagine to be one of their own, and so "achieve their own ends under his cloak." A particularly crude example being the ecstatic foisting of the declared messianic figure of Barack Obama on the people as this wonderful antidote to that pleasingly obvious villain George Bush and his gang. Or prior to him for instance Tony Blair.

Naturally, a political or revolutionary body calling themselves "the People," or the Will of the People or some such- even if the people are unaware of this wonderful fact, need not be, and generally are not, in truth anything of the kind, but a new nobility of power, or, perhaps more likely, a tangential offshoot of some sector of the existing nobility. See the work of Anthony Sutton.
And while since the times of Machiavelli the people clearly did greatly grow in power, the tension between them and those who would oppress them is a perennial fact, of which the movements towards absolutism of the moment are obvious symptoms.

Follow-up post.

More on the Paradoxes

Another mentioned paradox by Borges is that if one continuously halves the distance between oneself and the object approached, then one will never arrive at one's destination. Again, however, there is no paradox here. This is simply the internal logic of this mental set-piece. It is simply another way of saying, If you continually get closer to something, you will never reach it. Nothing is being contradicted as the mental framework simply refers to the dynamics of itself.
If movement were made to mirror the given thought of halving teh distance between one point and another, then, yes, the destination would not be reached. But this is movement made to follow the logic. This logic does not mirror movement where the object point is actually reached, but refers to a situation where the object is not reached; and so there is no paradox here. Just childish reasoning.
It is in no sense a rational representation of ordinary external movement for the same reasons given earlier; ie by the specifics of time and distance, as in a simple car speedometer where one travels at fifty miles per hour.

Zeno's Paradox, Borges

We have dreamt the world...but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices which tell us it is false.

Borges is writing here of the implications of logical paradoxes where reason betrays its connection to reality; irrefutable logic leading to conclusions contradicting the reality logic purports to reflect.
Borges doesn't quite seem to understand the implications of the paradox correctly here. If logic leads to falseness then the entire edifice of language as an instrument of truth falls apart. There can be no cracks in 'truth', else there is no truth. Nothing is left us which can be intelligently said, including 'the falseness of the edifice.' In other words, nihilistic chaos.

Borges mentions 'perhaps the most elegant of all' paradoxes is where William James denies that 14 minutes can pass, "as first seven minutes must pass, then three and a half minutes, then half this figure, and so on until the invisible end, through tenuous labyrinths of time."

So it is imagined that there is a transgression of truth here, as time- specifically fourteen minutes- most certainly does pass. The 'paradox' here is all rather embarrassing, however. Time passes at the rate of itself, and of course will effortlessly pass all demarcations within the segment being measured. James and Borges are simply confusing - and misusing - the organ of measurement for that which is being measured. All the 'paradox' amounts to is that if one were to count all the imaginable fractions between one whole number and another, this could and would literally take forever as the possible demarcations are infinite. This is the nature of numbers. It bears no relationship, however, to the passage of time. So all this 'paradox' amounts to is a meaningless misuse of logic or reason.

Earlier Borges mentions Zeno's Second Paradox, where Achilles runs ten times faster than a tortoise, giving it a start of ten metres. It proceeds: For every measurement the tortoise travels, Achilles travels ten. Achilles runs ten metres, the tortoise one; Achilles a metre, the tortoise ten centimetres; Achilles ten centimetres, the tortoise one; a centimetre to a millimetre, and so on to infinity without the tortoise ever being overtaken. There is always a gap that cannot be overcome. But in external reality, Achilles does overtake the tortoise, and so logic is seen to be inconsistent with reality.

Is this an intelligent question? Is it an intelligently framed mirror of reality? To measure comparative speed, it is useless simply to say that one is travelling ten times faster than another. It is essential to be specific, and the moment this scenario is specific about the distance travelled, then we find the paradox to fall apart. For if every second, or specific time segment, the tortoise travels one centimetre and Achilles travels ten, then Achilles will, by simple mathematics, overtake the tortoise. And of course the same will occur if the length travelled is a millimetre to ten, or any specific distance. Zeno however keeps changing the terms of reference, leaping from metres to centimetres and so on, with again the more or less identical statement being made as in James' example; ie that one can if one wishes keep splitting the numerical demarcations into smaller and smaller fragments. Again, all the 'paradox' amounts to is faulty reason; the unintelligent framework of a scenario mistakenly imagining the internal logic to refer to something beyond itself.

Borges' position is that of gnosticism or at least gnosticism in the negative sense where, I would say for reasons of timidity before frightening immense and messy reality, a negative value judgement is imposed on life, and this when closely examined, as in the examples, simply amounts to flawed reasoning.

Natural Enquiry

It is usually imagined a question like "Who am I" is a philosophical enquiry. In truth, it is a more a matter of linguistics: what is the agreed nature of this concept "I"?
It seems a simple truth that the idea of the fullness of the mind which produces thought being capable of being meaningfully encompassed within a form of this thought- "I am..." is a simple absurdity, comparable to the idea of the entire ocean being capable of containment within a bucket floating on that ocean.

Chinese Landscape

Though as with all such great Far Eastern images, entwined with the spaciousness of the kind of Zen No-Mind awareness, it could as easily be called a mindscape.

The Realists

One particularly charming and effective path in the direction of what may be broadly called a totalitarian state is the one most obviously being employed in Britain: that is foist a degraded tabloid, tower-block 'culture' upon people and then reap the inevitable rewards. In other words, having treated people as subhuman and gotten the results, one then says "What are we supposed to do with such scum, we need strong measures!" Though in more prettified and reasonable language. Such realists.
Or to put the phrasing of such an advocate slightly differently- "Man when left to himself is evil. We must deal with the reality." Except man here certainly hasn't been left anything like to himself. Though here if one talks of treating people with the dignity of humans, one would be met with a response like "We must deal with the reality as is. You're talking about pie-in-the sky idealism." Except- all these excepts- they are the idealists. It's just that the ideal happens to be a sick one. (The mere existence of an ideal doesn't mean the ideal is in any real sense ideal.)
As usual, whether this is a conscious, unconscious, or mixture of both, process is irrelevant to the outcome.

Naomi Wolf- "Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries"

Interview here on how to respond to America's totalitarian coup.
"Once you yield to the first threat, instead of arresting the leader who has staged a coup(enforcing a police state), you see more and more serious incursions, exactly as with Mussolini in 1920.
"The army under Rumsfeld changed its oath recently, a completely new oath 'The Warriors Creed'- to the Commander in Chief rather than to the Constitution, and completing 'the Mission' rather than serving the Constitution."
Of course, exactly as dictatorships do; ie the first duty of the organs of state, and specifically military organs of state, is to the head of state, rather than to the state. Though the quoted sample little more than a random extract, rather than any hyperbolic highlight. Also to add, coups don't require external takeovers; the more famous European examples being coups from within , using and abusing the parliamentary framework to install the desired totalitarian regime.

Stairway to...

A dead man found himself in pitch blackness on what appeared to be a staircase. "What now?" he asked himself.
We would be happy to leave this at that, but perhaps should indulge in what could be described as a psychological glance at our protagonist. He was surprised. In short, he had expected the total absence of light but not the awareness of that absence. He felt it to be somehow personally insulting, but perhaps more so the staircase...though the two together...the surreal banality of it all. Surely if there was to be an afterlife, as there evidently was, he deserved something more... more what? More in keeping with his dignity, importance. If reality had the temerity to continue to exist, it should at least present itself in some more exalted form.
What happened next, if anything, is a mystery.

While the above may seem to have been an opportune moment to close the doors on the above as a whole, we might observe that while it would perhaps be indecent to allow ourselves too easy access to the private thoughts of this, our central and only figure, still it is at least possible that he wondered if the position in which he found himself didn't have similarities to a passage from The Brothers Karamazov, and if so whether this was derivative, even if only subconsciously so, or coincidental- owing simply to the common human origin of these creations' creation, and the the not unlikely similarites of certain of these humans' thought processes, and the imaginative channels into which they flow. Though whether he did ponder this, and if he did, whether it would have been of any use to the situation, is again a mystery. Perhaps a kind of mythic Sisyphus situation arose of perpetual movement upwards, or downwards, depending on inclination, through the darkness. Perhaps he stayed where he was, in moral and intellectual indignation. Perhaps through, I don't know, faith, he finally arrived somewhere.

In the Room...Michelangelo

"Don't you think Michelangelo is the Charlton Heston of painting?"
"Oh yes. But in what sense?"
"The best sense."

Artifice- Hesse on Dostoevsky

There is nothing more explicit of an artificial sense of life and inner unreality, than the compartmentalising of that life(Nothing?). As Marcus Aurelius puts it, "The integrity of the whole is mutilated if thou cuttest off anything." Or, tangentially and by natural extension, Jesus: "He that is not with me is against me," translated here that each moment that is not with truth is against truth. You cannot slice reality up into various distinct components to suit oneself, as naturally, and by simple law of reality, you don't end up with reality but unreality.
Or Hermann Hesse on Dostoevsky's The Idiot: "Dostoevsky's Myshkin is one who no longer separates thinking from living, and thereby isolates himself in the midst of his surroundings and becomes the opponent of all." Surroundings here being the mental surroundings of existentially confused others, and their ensuing unreal "real world."
And to continue Hesse's drift a little:

This gentle "idiot" completely denies the life, the way of thought and feeling, the world and the reality of other people. His reality is something quite different from theirs. Their reality is in his eyes no more than a shadow, and it is by seeing and demanding a completely new reality that he becomes their enemy.
For them the co-existence, the equal validity of both worlds(material and spiritual) is a principle and an idea, for him they are life and reality! But this child is not as innocent as he seems. His innocence is by no means harmless, and people quite properly fear him.

Overheard Conversation in Hell

"New here. Is it always this hot?"
"More or less. But you'll find it's the humidity that really gets to you."

From Ignorance to Truth

"We seem to be talking for hundreds of years and getting nowhere, or worse, getting somewhere that's worse than nowhere."
"Yes, what we need do is define the meaning of the words we are using, and then we'll start to get somewhere."
"Of course, but we must first decide the meaning of the words that the words mean, and then we'll really start to get somewhere."
Right, lets get down to it. Lets start from the beginning and define the word word."
"Right. Word is a word that means word."
"Excellent."

Master & Pupil

"People don't like being told they're gutless, servile lackeys."
"Not even when it's true?"
"Especially not when it's true."

Tintoretto- The Crucifixion

One of the most fascinating of paintings by one of the most individual of artists; one in whom merged the fruits of Renaissance scientific method with the genius of a unique sensibility. Click to see properly.

Structure, Tarkovsky

An intelligent structure is not capable of understanding a structure of greater intelligence than itself. So how is a structure like the individual self supposed to evolve towards an order of greater refinement since the only real knowledge is that which moves us beyond the limits of our selves? How are the manifestations of a greater intelligence, in the broadest sense of the wisdom of the whole being, to work on a lesser self?
Humility is the simple answer. The personality is defined by its own limits, and is so a rigid structure incapable of intelligent advancement. "I lay down my life that I may take it up again." The personality lays down its own self, and into this open space can flow the life beyond the old self. This being the principle upon which art works, and in which lies the vastness of its importance.
For instance, a narrow self resists the open spaces of a Tarkovsky film, and this shallow, hard entity sustains itself by means of its cynicism. By contrast, mainstream Western televisual art sustains this artificial entity by feeding it an unceasing stuttering flow of camera angles and shallow excitements, where the viewer is narrowed to a point of hypnotic concentration, as opposed to open awareness.
The person who surrenders to works such as Nostalgia and Mirror ideally becomes allergic to the ordinary 'artistic' effluences, as why should an order of intelligence be attracted towards an order of intelligence of lesser refinement than itself?
An excerpt from Mirror here.
And re-inforcing the earlier points, from Tarkovsky's Stalker:

When a tree is growing, it is tender and pliant, but when it's dry and hard, it dies.
Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.

Papal Infallibility

For whosever exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.
Gospel of Luke 14:11

In the First Vatican Council of 1870, the Roman Catholic Church produced their declaration of Papal infallibility, which "is the dogma in Catholic theology that, by action of the Holy Spirit, the Pope is preserved from even the possibility of error[1] when he solemnly declares or promulgates to the Church a dogmatic teaching on faith or morals as being contained in divine revelation, or at least being intimately connected to divine revelation."(Wiki)

Words can be the most obscure and treacherous of substances, so first what is signified by 'the Church' here, which declared itself infallible, is not some organic spiritual entity but certain human beings acting for what they perceive as a common goal. The psychological fact of a perceived common goal among individuals does not of course mean that the common cause is an independent living being, such as a 'nation state' or here 'Church'.
And so the existential nature of what occurred here was that certain individuals declared themselves infallible.
"In certain matters" qualifies a constraining and reasonable voice. But what is it to be infallible and "preserved from even the possibility of error"? It is to be tautologically utterly perfect; to be God, regardless of whether 'God' exists. This absolute perfection is the nature only of such an absolute divinity, and not even that of a god, such as exists within the pantheon of the Greeks' wilful, quarrelsome deities. No, infallibility is the preserve of only an absolute divinity, in whose mind life is born, preserved and may dissolve at will- to digress a little into such a nature.

Back to the papacy's declaration of infallibility. One cannot choose one's moments of infallibility. To be infallible is not a quantifiable state, applicable only at certain moments. To declare oneself as infallible at certain times requires infallibility in the first place to produce the infallible declaration.
And this is where the crucial aspect of Papal Infallibility lies. As shown, for a flawed entity to pronounce one's occasional, yet absolute perfection is an innate absurdity. Only a perfect being could know itself to be perfect. So what is going on? To understand requires treating the declaration specifically as a statement of logic, and treating it not simply as absurd reasoning, but accepting it as wholly true and justified.
That the declaration of their infallibility is, as it logically must be, an emanation of their infallible nature. They have, to use appropriate terminology, set themselves on the throne of existence, exalted themselves to the pinnacle of creation. They are God. And rather than dwelling humbly within a Christian brotherhood, they are absolute rulers over a hierarchy of lesser beings, who exist beneath them.

Whether the full implications of Papal Infallibility were understood by those individuals who pronounced it is largely irrelevant; that is, whether it was a fully conscious, or somewhat unconscious act. Either way, it is the real meaning of the declaration, and its subsequent subconscious life-force as an idea, though these were not, and are not, stupid people, and it is hard to see that they could not have understood the implications of the declaration of their infallibility.

Is What Is

"The self is infallible. You are exactly as you are."
"And so are you."
"You seem to be taking that as as something of a personal attack."
"And wasn't it?"
"Emm...no."

Wine Human

"Like a good wine, human beings need to breathe."
"Very true."

Island

A note within a symphony was heard in a loud and pompous voice to say, "Where is this composer? I see no sign of him."

Mysticism

The essence of true mysticism is where the mind does not lose itself in external thought-forms, but experiences itself as is. Thus the ultimate nonsense of trying to reason oneself towards truth or progressing towards truth through levels of ascension, such as in the occultic paths of freemasonry and many other such Tower of Babels doomed to self-collapse.

Hamlet

As all know, except, needless to say, those who don't, in the opening scene of Hamlet, Marcellus, Barnardo and Horatio gather at night in fearful expectation of the arrival of the dead king's ghost, which duly arrives. Upon the ghost's appearance, Marcellus says to Horatio: "Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio." Which Horatio duly does, though he admits that the ghost "harrows me with fear and wonder."
Most will agree Horatio would have been fully entitled to ask what particular difference his being a scholar made. It is doubtful the dead king's strange and recurring appearance was provoked by a special desire for learned discourse.
As for the ghost, when a scene or few later he speaks to his son, Hamlet, and incites bloody revenge on his murderous brother, his fears should have been raised as to Hamlet's prospects in the task when his startlingly immediate plan for killing the new king, utterly vague but for this point, is to decide to pretend to all to have gone mad. Hamlet's father should have asked what bloody good this would do.
Naturally, Hamlet's subsequent mad behaviour achieves nothing but for driving the wholly innocent and cruelly treated Ophelia genuinely mad with confused grief, and onwards to a suicidal, pitiful death. What else Hamlet supposed this display of madness might achieve is anyone's guess.

If one were so crude as to reduce Shakespeare's most famed work to a moral, it would be that if when entrusting some important task to someone his immediate instinctive suggestion towards completion of the task is to pretend to be insane, chances are you are backing a loser. More than likely he's simply looking for an opportunity, however inappropriate, to pretend to be mad, and doesn't merit much trust.

Luminary

If light began to worry about the depth of darkness it needed to conquer, it would fade.

Personal Relations

"No, I'm not calling you an asshole. I'm just saying you have a marked tendency to behave exactly in the manner of an asshole."
"And you want me completely out of your life?"
"Yes, but it's nothing personal. It's just that I find you psychologically repellent."

The Stream of Language

What may be called the particular formal structures of a language are intrinsically connected to how a consciousness that uses that language sees itself, or has the capacity of seeing itself. And also connected to the previous post on a culture's inseparable entwining within its own language, to look at the simple expression of basic emotional experiences as expressed in the Irish and English languages.
In English one says "I am happy," or "I am sad." In Irish these would most simply be said, "Tá áthas orm," and "Tá brón orm." These are however far from parallel senses of being. In the English, such expressions begin infallibly with "I", and this I is then happy, sad, etc. In the Irish language, consciousness pours itself into a linguistic form of very different significance. To truly translate to English, "Tá brón orm" is to mean "Sadness is upon me." Here the self is placed within life and in a humbler more unified relationship to that life as a whole, as opposed to the narrower English form that begins with a solid entity of a self that is placed at an artificial centre of of the world, rather than dwelling within and part of that world. In English, everything reaches out from this centre of the individual ego, whereas in Irish this self is a far more passive aspect of existence.

Here the Irish is a much more satisfying form by which the human consciousness understands its place in life. There is then, of course, the question as to the sensibility- Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, etc- that forms the language into which it then flows in the first place, but what is clear is that when a culture loses its language and has an alien one grafted into itself, as in Ireland, what is occuring is far from a superficial window-dressing of the soul.

Cultural Immunity

The greatest immune system protecting a culture is its own language.
If the immune system of a culture is too protecting, the culture becomes a stagnant monstrosity; the solidification of certain energies in time. Loyalist marchers come to mind.
If the immune system is too weak, then the culture is liable to be overrun. If a country- say Ireland- had its own language, then it should prove much more resistant to, for example, the invasion of the worthless tabloid and celebrity 'culture' springing primarily from Britain and the US.
Though of course, the benefits of a culture's own language go far beyond merely defensive merits. That culture's whole historic sense is bound up in its language- think, if in England everyone spoke French for the last hundred years and English was little known, how much of the cultural reservoir would simply vanish from the common memory? This naturally explaining the heavy priority placed by experienced colonising powers on erasing the colonised's language and subsequent sense of self.

Moral Teachings

Poverty is a vice as it encourages destitution. Poverty should be discouraged and destitution avoided.

Odilon Redon- La Cellule d'Or 1892

Recently attracted by this painting by Redon, which coincidentally transpires to be the cover of Tolstoy's What is Art, which I just received. Redon an artist whose naive images often tread a thin line between charming and somewhat off-putting.

Positive Negative

The idea of nihilism contradicts the idea of nihilism.

Linguistics

An important new document by some of the world's leading linguists has declared that words are "imaginary." This, they admit, leaves them in a somewhat embarrassing situation, both linguistically and otherwise.
"It's hard to know what to say," said an academic.

Isaac Newton and the Defeat of Doubt

Isaac Newton is famous for discovering that the apparently unrelenting consistency with which things fell downwards from above, even if having been propelled from below, was a result of more than mere chance, and so was a set of pracical affairs set to continue beyond the horizons of all conjectured human futurity. This certainty in the ongoing downward pull of objects was of great help to man's progression as a rational animal on this earth, enabling him to plan ahead and to act in the sure knowledge that the earth was the natural and inevitable habitation for earthly matter, and apples and the like could continue to be harvested without fear of their escape into the further reaches of unattainable space. A great period of uncertainty had closed.

Victory for the West- US Troops Successfully Murder 61 Afghanistan Children

Story here. Sixty-one children who won't grow up to threaten our freedom, which they surely would have learnt to hate if they hadn't been blown to shit by high-powered modern weaponry, fired from a safe and abstract distance.
A military spokesman or intellectual lackey might, and surely would, question the linguistic legitimacy of 'murder' in this situation; that the deaths accruing from firing highly destructive missiles into large gatherings of civilians in their own village are incidental, not intentional. Naturally this is simply an example of the maxim that all evil needs is an excuse, however meaningless, to become respectable.

Spin

A fascinatingly vital work, using satellite feeds, documentary filmmaker Brian Springer captures the behind-the-scenes maneuverings of politicians and newscasters in the early 1990s, especialy focused on the Clinton won Presidential campaign against the elder Bush. Spin as described "is a surreal expose of media-constructed reality", where with behind the scenes footage of people like Bill Clinton, Larry King and Bush, reality is shown to be far stranger than fiction, and what people imagine to be reality pure fiction. For instance, between the ads, King tells a strangely zombie-like Clinton that media tycoon Ted Turner "would serve you... I'd call him after you're elected." See also how, if you're not approved from media figures on high, like Democrat candidate Larry Abraham, you don't get to exist. Manufactured 'democracy'. Watch https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/spin/

Vehicle

Two figures crawl out of a hole.
"A work of art is a vehicle containing truth."
"And the more truth, the greater the work?""
"Yes."
"But a vehicle goes somewhere. Where does the work of art travel?"
"Through time."

Rembrandt- John the Baptist Teaching

Light & Shadow

The brighter the light the more clearly delineated and dark the shadows of that which is out of that light. The murkier the light, the more uniform all appears.
To unfortunately make the analogous nature of this all a bit too obvious, there are certain false notions of spirituality that imagine that the brighter the light the more all is embraced as one, whereas in reality the more in truth the more clear that which is out of truth. This idea itself of all being accepted into one Truth is simply an emanation of the murkiness where vision is clouded and ultimately becomes the mandate of Hasan bin Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

The Will To Truth

"People tend to be only interested in as much 'truth' as confirms them in their ignorance."
"Yes."

Self-Contained

A leading figure has described literature's great mission being to create a literary language devoid of all external reference. Thus will literature finally become a pure art-form, he said.

Subjectivity Overcoming Of

Subjectivity requires the thought of subjectivity, objectivity, etc. All amounting to the ever shattering fragments arising from this self-imagined universal dualism. In silence all this intellectual artifice disappears, or rather fails to emerge. And since in silence it cannot emerge, it then doesn't exist as a reality or problem."

US Anthrax Murders Sourced from US Bio-Defense Program

See short clip from History Channel here. "All the spores were sent for immediate forensic testing. The bacterium that killed Robert Stevens was identified as the Ames strain. A strain long favoured by and under the near total control of the US Bio-Defense Program."
Terrorism emanating from the authorities fighting the terror are actually the ones creating the climate of terror? How astonishing. Admittedly it would be slightly more astonishing were not this terrorising tactic such a standard controlling mechanism of government. Though there is always the get-out clause of the lone nut theory for those so inclined.
Naturally it is very easy to govern someone in the absolute sense of control over their consciousness if you are intentionally triggering states of fear and anxiety. Such a mind isn't not free in some dreadful future, but unfree in that present, and such fettered consciousnesses extremely easily manipulated from that state of fear into acquiescing to necessary measures the state is wessentially claiming necessary to alleviate that insecurity and fear; while also feeding off the attendant ego lusts of hatred and love of bullying violence. The vicarious triumph of one's self through the bloody, high-tech victories of the state. Though as some may realise that alleviation never quite arrives. For example, hot on the heels of WW2- the Cold War, and hot on its heels the War on Terror. Which isn't to say the grand stand spectacles of terror don't exist occasionally to justify the hype. They are vital creations and components of the media industry, where news and entertainment are manufactured for the pleasure of all, and the lines between the two are blurred for the benefit of the loyal citizens. As when CNN had the line "The Empire Strikes Back" underlying their 'news' programmes while covering the exciting attacks on Afghanistan after the even more exciting events of 911.
As Thomas Mann wrote in Dr Faustus:

...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.

Stream of Consciousness

The stream of consciousness in literature, as is often called, should rather be described as a stream of words. Only a lunatic, much learned though he may be, could imagine consciousness is identical to the transmutation of the flow of sense-perception and feeling into a more or less elegantly succession of those peculiar substances, words. Whatever consciousness is, it most definitely can't be reduced to this babbling onrush of language. A succession of words should be content to described themselves simply as a succession, or indeed a stream, of words.

Caravaggio- St Jerome, Death of the Virgin

What especially prompts the posting of the two paintings are the folds of cloth; on the left of the St Jerome, and the drapery hanging from above in the Death of the Virgin, particularly the noumenous power and solemnity of the canopy in the latter.

The Point of Perspective & the Search for Truth

What is the reality of the point of perception from which one observes oneself within disciplines such as philosophy and psychology?
Is the fullness of the reality of a sphere comprehensible to a point within that sphere, or is this an absurd proposition, and the only way a sphere can know itself fully is existentially as a sphere?
One might argue that the point of perspective expands with knowledge, though one might as easily argue that the point contracts with 'knowledge', since knowledge amounting to the notion of the point within the sphere actually knowing itself as that sphere is an absurdity.
Thus the immeasurably more satisfying indirect, analogous, artistic forms of talking about truth that actually shake the foundations of the point of perspective, rather than the rational abstract means which serve to solidify the illusion of the point, convinced it is growing in knowledge, heading for truth, just around the corner.
The more falsely sure the point within the sphere of its intellectual knowledge, the more abominable the intellectual and ensuing practical results. Thus materialistic communism, fascism/neo-conservatism, etc and a myriad of less obviously insane insanities.
Another variation is the neurotic, where the point's self certainty is undermined, but it has no faith in the sphere within which it has its existence.

The Usurper

There is the belief that Christianity grafted itself onto this anciently celebrated period around the Winter Solstice, chose this period as the opportune time to celebrate Jesus' birth, and so gradually effected the passing from one faith to another relatively seamlessly. Attempting to to do otherwise would be an act of cultural crudeness doomed to failure. Now we have the same process of a new faith being grafted onto an old, and in this case the orgy of consumerism at Christmas and New Year's marks the new god of human materialism. 'Human materialism' as it as nothing to do with faith in the natural world which could theoretically amount to a kind of materialism. This modern religion is specifically restricted to the materialism of human imagining and creation in the form of consumerism. So the new faith of materialism/consumerism, which is a kind of anti-faith, as it is ultimately truthless, effects a coup d'etat and usurps the celebratory season by imposing its values onto that time, with the core rituals now involving maximum consumption of consumer goods by consumers. Out with the old, in with the new.

A Good Alibi

All evil generally requires is a good alibi to become respectable.
All evil requires is a very good alibi to become virtuous.
All one needs generally do is examine the alibi to be back with naked evil.

The Birth of Man

Through use of remarkable imaginative powers, where I coalesce my being with the great psychic forces that lie hidden from the eyes of the profane, I have recently witnessed the great moment in time when we can truly be said to have become human; this moment being the formation of language by our upwardly mobile ancestors.
The scene: A cave somewhere in the Eastern Europe. Four hairy, smelly individuals; animal of strength & stupid of expression, gazing with all the rapture of dumb beasts at another being, but this one endowed with the faint but unmistakable signs of a deeper intelligence. He has a piece of flint held purposefully in his right hand, & emanates an air of somewhat hesitant pedagogical authority. He bursts forth into speech:
"First what we have to establish are the rules of grammar. Otherwise, all will be shapeless chaos & the darkness of utter nebulosity. If we want to make ourselves understood we need to have a firm & vigorous grasp on the subtle intricacies of our tools of communication. Grammar is the bedrock. Our language must be a perfect instrument for both the utilities of everyday living and the abstractions of philosophical discourse; able to probe & discern the subtlest shades of consciousness, and yet perfectly attuned to the rudimentaries of day to day living. One must not scorn the prosaic."
At this point I was called back to the concerns of this world, but, and with a feeling of pride, I quickly scribbled the lines,
"Rousseau, Rousseau.
More true than you did know."

Soul Discovery

Scientists are claiming to have located the precise location of the mythical philosophical entity known as "the soul," which they say they discovered while investigating a hitherto scantly explored region of the brain near the right ear. This discovery proves that the soul doesn't exist, said the scientists.

The Individual

"The individual is a self-sustained imaginary point oscillating between two oblivions, one of which is also imaginary."
"I find that an unsettling thought, though I haven't the faintest idea what it means."

Tolstoy & the Great Lie

He told himself that before proclaiming an unreasonable thing to be unreasonable one must first study the unreasonable thing. This was a trifling falsehood, but it led him to the great lie, in which he was now stuck fast.
Tolstoy, Resurrection

Most people are, obviously enough, less intelligent intellectually than the intellectuals who have attained some measure of public acclaim, however petty and ultimately false such figures might ultimately be. Even with ample forewarning of, for argument sake, the bigoted fascism of one such figure- perhaps even a favoured author- the individual tells himself, "Yes, but I will be fair and judge for myself." However, like the crowd in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, he is very far from being able to judge for himself, and carried away by the eloquence, or simply appearance of eloquence, of the favoured author, he comes away happily reassured that the dreadful things said of the author were unwarranted, and can continue with an easy conscience in the direction he was steering himself, wholly unaware of the great vines of lies entangling that self.