Buxtehude

 Dietrich Buxtehude, 1637-1707

Forwards

“If you were going forwards, wherever you were going, or thought you were going, and the road, the pathway, whatever led straight into this big pit, what would you do?”

“And the pathway didn’t go round it?”

“No, no. Straight into it.”

“Well what kind of pit is it?”

“Impossible to know. It’s deep anyway, and it’s very dark. You can’t make it out.”

“I suppose I’d take my chances and have myself drop away into it. Progress is everything after all.”

“You wouldn’t turn back?”

“I couldn’t do that. That would be a refutation of everything I believe in.”

“Going forwards?”

“Exactly!”

Eternal Recurrence

“You know that idea of Eternal Recurrence? What do you think could be seen as a good example of it in history?”

“The Temptation in the Garden. It’s a phenomenon that endlessly recurs, though with a lot of fluidity to the form of the temptation!”

“And this happens to famous figures in history?”

“Well yeah, but to everyone all the time. But it’s a dynamic phenomenon or recurrence though rather than a static one.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because there’s freedom involved.”

swaNs, eVenIng

 

yesTerdaY

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised Precursor

“The Revolution will not be televised” is a famous line from the song of the same name by Gill Scott-Heron from 1971. This line has a precursor though which many of us may be less aware of.

When the writer Maxim Gorky, a supporter of the Bolsheviks, went to plead with Lenin that, amidst the  mass executions of ‘class enemies’ being carried out by the regime, the life of a Romanov Grand Duke be spared since he was a fine historian, Lenin responded with the catchy line: “The Revolution needs no historian.” 

He was a very inclusive man. He would execute anyone.

Solzhenitsyn, Loving One’s Country, Lenin

                                        My people perish for lack of knowledge.

                                         Hosea 4:6

From D.M. Thomas’s biography on Alexander Solzhenitsyn where Solzhenitsyn, having survived life in the gulags and a recent failed assassination attempt on his life by the KGB and now expelled from the Soviet Union, in defending himself from various attacks, wrote to the New York Times explaining that:

. . . “what he opposes with every bone in his body is the belief that nationhood does not matter. Socialism’s aim, said Lenin, was to abolish the distinction between nations, to bring them into fusion. And Vadim Borisov observed in his essay ‘From Under the Rubble’, severe moral censure was addressed to Russian writers who could not overcome the ‘base instinct’ of loving their country.

Shortly before deciding on his expulsion, the Politburo (the highest centre of executive power in the Soviet Union) met specifically regarding how to deal with this impermissible intellectual dissident, and in the recorded minutes of the session “Brezhnev warns against nationalism as a breeding ground for anti-Communism. Victor Grisham, First Secretary in Moscow describes Solzhenitsyn as “a true degenerate”; this from a bureaucrat who liked to have a fully equipped brothel connecting with his office. Mikhail Solomentsev supported the call for more ideological warfare against nationalism, while long term Secretary of Ideology and Second Secretary of the Communist Party, Mikhail Suslov added his warning against bourgeois nationalism.

Which all explains why a few decades on, good, obediently indoctrinated citizens of various western shores should be ashamed of their own nations and their nations’ flags as hateful far-right emblems! Down with nationalism! Onwards the ideology! I previously posted on this here: Bourgeois Missionary on a Bike. 

Another extract from the biography while we’re here, on Lenin from that book. Solzhenitsyn, born in 1918 into that communist era was himself, prior to ending up in the gulag, an ardent believer in both the ideology and in Lenin. He believed Stalin was polluting these pure waters, but he later came to completely revise that opinion of both, as he called it ‘the cult’ and of Lenin :

Against enormous odds, Lenin achieved his vision: Persuading a nation a seventh of the earth’s surface that any moral law could be broken in the interest of one class (back when the Left was seemingly all about the class struggle and the triumph/dictatorship of the proletariat and the defeat of bourgeoisie). Within a few years Lenin had prefigured all the evils that Stalinism would consolidate: unlimited power of the Party and the bureaucracy; total regimentation of public life and taught as a substitute for religion; the liquidation of alien elements; and all embracing organ of state terror with a vast system of slave labour camps throughout Siberia and the North.

If the people threatened this happiness he planned for them, they would have to be punished. Scores of peasant revolts were extinguished. The vast unpopularity of the Bolsheviks shook Lenin and forced him to reintroduce private enterprise on a small scale under the NEP (New Economic Plan). But he had no intention, had he lived, of letting this compromise continue indefinitely. As he wrote to Kamenev: “It is the biggest mistake to think that NEP will put an end to the terror. We shall return to the terror and economic terror.” 

This use of terror as a tactic of control was a staple of revolutionary ideology ever since the Reign of Terror  of the early 1790s in the aftermath of the French Revolution, seen as a shortcut to crushing all opposition - by definition evil - to the revolution and its leaders - by definition good. Responding to criticism from Boris Souverine, who had known Lenin, following Solzhenitsyn’s book Lenin in Zurich, he wrote:

How can anyone blacken Lenin’s name more than he himself did by ordering the execution of peasants for failing to clear away snow? . . . What can anyone say about Lenin and Trotsky . . . that would be worse than simply recalling how they created the first and greatest totalitarianism the world has seen, and how they devised the methods of mass terror, including the technique of drowning people imprisoned in barges (thus anticipating the gas chambers)?

Anyway, just to repeat the link to Bourgeois Missionary on a Bike

Return to Babylon - Transhumanism

 

A very interesting talk on the technological cult of transhumanism at Orthodoxy Ethos. The video in effect starts at about the 6 minute mark.

On its way

Whether this is on its way to a successful incarnation of itself or not I don’t know, but this is it as of now.

along the path

Outskirts

jackdaws, sky

 

Whether

 Whether it’s been worth trying to sort this out or not, I don’t really know.

night couple

 

Through a bus window (through a glass darkly)

 

Ink 1511

 Not sure how I feel about this or whether I can do a whole lot more with it.

evenIng

 

true

True humility is born from knowledge, and true knowledge is born from trials.

St Isaac the Syrian

Sumi e 0611

 

Macbeth Death Remix

A thought relating to Macbeth and his demise in Shakespeare’s play came to mind earlier, and so hopefully quickly I’ll relate said thought. In the play near its end, Macbeth encounters Macduff, eager to rid the land of Macbeth and his murderous tyranny, but Macbeth, owing to an earlier prophecy given him by three unsavory witches, is confident he cannot be defeated by any rival:

Macbeth: I bear a charmed life that must not yield
To one of woman born.
Macduff: Despair thy charm
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee Macduff was from his mother's womb

Untimely ripped. 

And so, because Macduff was born of a caesarean birth, very dubiously this is meant to imply he was not of a woman born, and so Macduff then kills Macbeth. My modern take on this episode though is as follows:

Macbeth: I bear a charmed life that must not yield
To one of woman born.
Macduff: Despair thy charm
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee Macduff’s birthing person was 

A man!

And then Macduff, having been not of a woman born but instead birthed by a man, slays Macbeth whose complacent failure to be progressively aware can genuinely be said to cost him his life.

St Gabriel of Georgia

 

A film on the life of this incredible 20th century figure from Georgia during the time of the Soviet Union, and also incidentally the homeland of Stalin.

buiLdIng

 

Nisi Dominus, Cum dederit - Vivaldi

 

Unfortunately, I see the above clip can only be seen by following the link to YouTube, which I highly recommend so doing. A different more sparse recording of it instead below. I’ll try to stumble my way to elucidating how it feels to me . . . There’s this real depth and tension within the piece, but simultaneously this great restraint of staying and dwelling within that spiritual density, and not releasing from it.

Illegally

“You know if I was intentionally going somewhere illegally - as in it would be illegal for me to be there - you know what I’d be thinking beforehand?”

“What?”

“I’d probably be thinking, insofar as I’d be doing much thinking, that if I get caught being in this place illegally, I’ll probably get kicked out of there.”

“You’d imagine that would be part of the deal all right.”

“And if I did get kicked out after intentionally being there illegally, I don’t think I’d be doing much complaining about it. I think I’d look on the kicking out as fair enough.”

“Yeah, I suppose. Unless maybe you were some kind of undignified, narcissistic half-wit.”

twO

 

difficult

 

Quite a difficult piece I’m trying to sort out.

Lenin vs Stalin - Did Stalin Spoil the Beautiful Dream?

A common idea held by those enamored by thoughts of beautiful communist utopias is that the Soviet Union unfortunately became, instead of a beautiful utopia, a totalitarian nightmare due to Stalin diverting it from the true path which the purist Lenin had set in motion. How true is this notion of Stalin corrupting the Marxist-Leninist path, once all human impediments had been removed, to social justice and everlasting bliss?

Well, I’ve started reading a biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famously persecuted writer, and there’s a quote therein of Lenin’s which is pretty enlightening, I think. Just to fill in a little background first - after the October Revolution of 1917 where Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power, Lenin showed his reassuring commitment to democratic ideals by allowing general elections to the Constituent Assembly the following month. The more moderate Socialist Revolutionaries won 41% of the vote, Lenin's Bolsheviks gained 23.5%. Lenin's response was to dissolve the assembly, and begin the "dictatorship of the proletariat", i.e. dictatorship under Lenin.

And now the quote about this rule by dictatorship by Lenin:

The dictatorship means - learn this once and for all - unrestrained power based on force, not on law.

And so now, looking at Stalin, what did Communist rule under him embody? A dictatorship of unrestrained power based on force. I don’t see a whole lot of parting of the ways there. Maybe I need to squint my eyes.

Figures 1910

 

Something previously shown but a little bit altered.

Indigenous Peoples Anomaly

 “You know how the liberal Left, progressives, whatever we call them, well you know anyway how they love standing for the rights of the indigenous peoples, their rights to their land being returned and all that. So why are they also in favour of mass immigration, which is obviously an absolute contradiction to all this!? If you stand up for the indigenous peoples, like say the Irish in Ireland, or whoever wherever in the West, the same champions of the indigenous peoples will call these native peoples, whose rights they seemed to be championing a minute earlier, racist, bigots, fascists or whatever slur if they have any resistance to these synchronized and politically pushed policies of mass immigration into these various lands - and where those being brought in are often treated far better than the native peoples. I can’t make sense of it. The ideological totem of the sacredness of the indigenous peoples vanishes just like that! How are we supposed to understand it?!”

“It’s quite simple actually.”

“But how can it be simple?! It’s so confusing! I can’t make any coherent intellectual sense of it!”

“This is the intellectual sense of it: they’re total hypocrites.”

“Oh right. I didn’t think of that. Yeah, it is simple after all. I was making it much too complicated.”

UK Bravely

Music news and UK prime minister Keir Stalin . . .  sorry, Keir Starmer, is bravely attempting to launch a successful musical career in tandem with his successful political one, and his debut recording is apparently  refined, oiled and primed for release upon the global citizenry. The song, harking back to the glory days of 20th century communism, is called: If I Had a Personality, Maybe Then I Could Have My Own Personality Cult.

There is also, we are told, a b side: Maybe if I Had My Own Personality Cult, Then It Wouldn’t Matter if I Didn’t Have a Personality.

Poured

 “If darkness is poured into you, it will pour out.”

“But maybe it’s good that it pours out.”

“Maybe.”

Dixit Dominus

I’ve been listening to the album this is from by Ars Choralis Coeln on Spotify - and which I like quite a lot, otherwise I’d probably not be listening to it. The whole album through their channel, along with the above piece, is also incidentally on YouTube.

Brand

 Word from the ever expanding entertainment industrial complex informs us that Bourgeois Intelligentsia have just recorded a new song: Papa’s Got a Brand New Face Mask.

A second song was also tentatively explored during the same sessions: Proximity to the Plebs Makes Me Feel Uncomfortable (I Wish They’d All Go Away).

Man of letters negative

 

Pain or Pleasure

This I suppose is broadly about the ‘carnal-minded’ sense of life, a life without the spirit, and what is the ultimate hierarchy of values in practical terms regarding this sensual based life.Which is greater: pleasure or pain? Well if  pain pushed to its limit ends in death. Pleasure at the physical level pushed to or beyond its limits passes eventually over to pain - for example, for a child being remorselessly tickled by a powerful adult, this becomes genuinely torturous. This the inevitable process of any physical pleasure pushed to an infinity.

So summing up, pleasure pushed ever onwards becomes pain, while pain pushed ever onwards ends in death. So a carnal-minded culture focused on the body and its gratification could reasonably be described as a death cult.

The negative

 The negative of a picture I’m trying to finish.

Until death

 Thoughts will battle you until death.

Saint Cleopa.

From the book below on this 20th century Romanian figure:

Machiavelli and the Instrument of Ideology

A thought I’ve meant to express is how the use of leftist ideology fits into political dynamics as described by Machiavelli in his famous book The Prince from the early 1600s.

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. 
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. 

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.

Machiavelli takes it as a given that this dynamics is in play, that there is an inner drive by the nobility or ‘ruling elites’ towards oppression and ultimately, if completely successful, totalitarian and unthreatened power over the masses. And Machiavelli offers his intellectual services in detail.ing how best to go about the process! Everything is a tool to this end, be it military force or use, corruption of the judiciary, illusory threats to people’s safety and so on, but the bit I want to draw attention to is:

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.

Lifting from something I wrote years ago: 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, almost out of nowhere, the crassness of the ecstatic foisting of the declared messianic figure of Barack Obama on the people as this wonderful antidote to the obvious villain figure of George Bush and his neocon gang. Or prior to him, for instance, Tony Blair, who was also ushered in in Britain in a similar spirit of ecstatic optimism. 

What I want to add here though is that the leftist ideology itself can take the place of the person the nobility use to achieve their ends under his cloak. Obviously it is the will to power that is the crucial element, and an ideology is just a tool towards that end. And thus the ideology of our times is made a prince to achieve the elites’ ends under its cloak. Going back to the nineteenth and some of the twentieth centuries, socialism in its various manifestations appeared to be an ideology of the people, and fits within Machiavelli’s dynamic of the general populace pushing back against the oppression by the nobility.

You’d have to be some idiot to still see things in that light now though, and now that ideology is blatantly the instrument or ‘prince’ used to achieve their ends under its cloak. We’ll erode your right to dissent with Hate Speech Laws and so on, ideally you can’t even think thoughts contrary to the nobility/ruling elite. Thus arrest for silent prayer in Britain. And to finish with Aldous Huxley’s line: 

Idealism [Ideology] is the noble toga political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

wrestling

 It’s been a bit of a wrestling match trying to get something to emerge from this piece I began yesterday, and I have no idea if I’m winning or losing.

Woke King

 Just came across this channel, The Crewkerne Gazette on YouTube, and partly posting this in response to the strangeness of how few views they seem to be getting. Keir Stalin . . . I keep making this mistake . . . I mean Keir Starmer gets a few videos in his honour also. So anyway, a Keir Stalin one below. I did it again, didn’t I? Just in case anyone is offended, I better stress that I’m not seriously trying to make out that Starmer is remotely in Stalin’s league yet as one of the cult’s great leaders, but give him time and who knows - he could be right up there. 

Man of letters

 

Trying to tweak this into something I can like more, but I’m not too confident it’ll happen.

Built this city

“You know that song?”

“What song?”

“Ah you know the one I’m talking about - ‘We Built This City on Rock n Roll’. If that’s the actual title of it I’m not sure, but you know the one I mean.”

“I do yeah. It’s a great song. What about it?”

“How did they do that?”

“Do what?”

“Build a city on rock n roll.”

“I’ve no idea.”

“It was some achievement though, wasn’t it?”

“It was yeah. It should be replicated.”

“Well, as long as it wasn’t just a dump of a place.”

“That’s true too. There isn’t much point in replicating a dump.”

Out the road a bit

 

Rise Up, Pump

Some happy source, embedded deep within the entertainment industrial complex, informs us that Bourgeois Intelligentsia have recorded a new song: Rise Up Victim Warriors. Our source describes the song as confrontational, yet gentle and encouraging.

A second song was apparently also recorded during the same sessions: Just When I Think I’ve Had All the Education I Can Take, You Pump With Me Some More.

skeTch

Another very quick piece, for what it’s worth.

Some kind of scene

 Nothing great but anyway.

Vehicle 2

 

A very small bit of tidying up of this and I think it’s pretty much done. 

Different Stuff

 

[The original video I posted is unavailable, so this a shorter version]

Seems to be made of very different stuff than what we’ve come to expect from our political elites - who I think could more generally be described, certainly once they’ve reached the highest levels, as devious, bought-and-sold, misanthropic bullshit artists. There’s no way I ever thought I’d see this level of brutal, unadorned and unapologetic truth come out of the mouth of a head of the US or pretty much any prominent Western nation.

So of course the establishment hates him. 

Something funny too about it is the journalist, at a guess, imagined this would be an awkward banana skin of a question for Trump to try to dance around and justify himself . . . But no, didn’t get any embarrassed evasiveness. A very different kind of energy from the norm going on here!

vehiclE

 

Whether I do more to it or not, something from last night.

Fruit

Bourgeois Intelligentsia have been back in the studio, and the fruit of their efforts is a new song: The More Deranged We Become, the More Sure We Are You’re the Problem. The future destiny of the song - to be released as a single, to end up on an album, to be farmed out to some other act - is as yet unknown.

gaThering

 

Something from last night.

Difficult Times

 

Saint Paisios (1924-1994).

Freer than Ever UK Free Speech

UK Prime Minister Keir Stalin . . . sorry, slip of the tongue, I of course meant to say Starmer . . . but anyway, he (Starmer) recently responded to Donald Trump’s ludicrous question about the supposed troubling situation of free speech in the UK, by eloquently stressing that the UK has a very proud tradition with regards to said issue of free speech, and would safely continue onwards in the vein of said upstanding and proud tradition. As if anyone seriously thought this was a question that needed asking . . . Ridiculous.

And below is a man being arrested by UK police for saying he likes bacon:

To add, I’ve seen the UK police sometimes be affectionately described by members of the grateful British public, in honour of their present and inspirational leader, as Starmtroopers. Oh and also a reminder that Bruce ‘The Boss’ Springsteen during recent concerts in the UK interrupted the wonderful rocking music to helpfully inform the UK public that, four thousand or so miles away, Donald Trump was a threat to free speech. Thankfully I don’t think Bruce (The Boss), during one of these educational interludes, made any public mention of liking bacon, which would have put the UK legal system in a very difficult and potentially embarrassing position with regards of what to do next. 

Below, more Starmtroopers arrest a man, this time for calling someone a muppet. So, just to clarify, you can now be arrested for the thoughts or emotions that someone else says they didn’t enjoy experiencing, and which they say you influenced or induced. Or, as with the earlier video, even if someone else and their possibly vulnerable feelings isn’t there, you can still be arrested for the perhaps distressing feelings that this imaginary person might have experienced if they had been there after, for example, hearing you say that you liked bacon. Protect the vulnerable.

I’d say there’s almost no chance whatsoever of airtight hate speech protocols like those being used by the wise and benevolent ‘ruling elites’ in - how shall I put this - an unintentionally bad way.

Just noW, haphAzArd

Whether it’ll be refined a bit or not - and acquire a bit more pleasing and unified form - something quick and a bit haphazard from just now.

Crass and Obvious - Police Me Please in the UK

 

An American guy succinctly and brilliantly points out the ugly and obvious in the UK. 

And with this short clip of the policing of free speech/hate speech/ thought crimes in the UK, where a woman is asked by the policeman was she praying, as in silently praying. Her answer is basically yes, and so she is arrested. As leftist ideology extends towards its destination of absolute control by the agents of the ideology, you’re not even allowed think contrary thoughts. Almost amusingly, because she was praying for the women and their babies near an abortion clinic - not even talking to anyone - because her thoughts were out of alignment, she is targeted and arrested. It’s specifically an antichrist ideology, and to put this in more dramatic lighting, if she had said she was imagining conducting witchcraft rituals on the aborted babies, perhaps even devouring them, this would not for this system be a cause of offence or arrest. It would simply be a matter of the strange but private thoughts in her head, that didn’t threaten the ideology. Silent prayer though did get her arrested. 

To add, whether the totalitarian forces manage to push it past all legalistic boundaries and effect a successful prosecution of the silently praying Christian is besides th point, not of course in the sense of her wellbeing, but in the sense that it is perfectly obvious this is what they desire. You will know them by their fruits and actions.

And this brings to mind seeing Bruce Springsteen ranting at audiences in concert in the UK about Donald Trump being a dreadful threat to free speech. That level of wilful ignorance of the real situation is to be honest pathetic to the point of disgusting.

forms

 

Nourish

 If we continue to nourish the demons, when will we slay them?

Theolopitos of Philadelphia

At Least

 Deep State Cabal have a single coming out: If You Don’t Quite Bow Down, At Least Don’t Speak Up . . . 

Bourgeois Missionary on a Bike - and a little Dostoevsky and Nietzsche

 “Serviltiy creeps into the very soul of the bourgeoisie and is increasingly taken for virtue.” Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions.

I’m tempted to just leave this post with the video and Dostoevsky quite, but add a bit to it . . . (And to add, the use of bourgeois in a descriptive sense below will be much more about being mired in a certain inner state than simply being middle class.)

In the video above, having experienced an allergic reaction to seeing an Irish national flag, or Tricolour as it’s known, a well-educated middle or upper middle class Irish citizen tries to awaken and educate the working class people he is faced with, and raise them up to the more refined level he thankfully inhabits. If they allow themselves to be raised up by the agents of progress, they are justified, if not they will be absolutely vilified.

 Alas, after the missionary efforts of the perfectly obedient and right-thinking bourgeois on the bike, who in fairness is quite pleasant and well-intentioned, the native Dubliners in the video perversely choose to behave as living individuals possessed of free will, rather than as abstract digits in an academic textbook, and so don’t give up on their national flag and their sense of being a people - in this case Irish. For the ‘progressive’ person however, now so bloodless and abstract, just a receiver of thoughts to conform with, this more primal state of being a people, as felt by these working class folk, now induces an allergic reaction to his fragile, conditioned self. This sisn’t simply about opinions, but the national flag is experienced on this general abstract person as an aggressive force. It’s too real! And here there is a very telling quote from Nietzsche in the Of the New Idol chapter of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: 

Where a people still exists, there the people do not understand the state and hate it as the evil eye.

And so here the working class guys here are not ashamed to exist as a people, and are out of step with the ever-expanding bureaucratic behemoth of the state, while the bloodless bourgeois experiences no such aversion to its dictates. Remember for the progressive ideology, the nationalist sense of identity is seen as an antagonistic rival force of allegiance, and thus the national flag and sense of identity are to be attacked. Thus the progressive man on the bike’s automatic response to his national flag, and which inner reflex he imagines to be a manifestation of virtue. And while I’m here, this from the same passage by Nietzsche: 

Confusion of the language of good and evil; I offer you this as the sign of the state. Just see how it lures them. How it devours them, and chews them, and re-chews them.

Finally, to point out the line by one of the Dublin working-class guys, showing he perfectly understands this progressive dynamic of condescension invisible at play, when he says, “Can you explain it to me like I’m a two years old please.” What a brilliant line from someone possessed of a vitality this obedient bourgeois soul has no idea of.

ofFering

 

Purity is Hidden

 Purity is hidden in the peace that comes after battles.

Isaac the Syrian

Fr Josiah Trenham on Charlie Kirk

I saw this earlier with Orthodox priest Fr Josiah Trenham.

red again

 

started, red

Whether it goes any further, and however it might end up if it does, something from last night.

Another Song

Not long after their last single release, Bourgeois Intelligentsia apparently have another song which they are dying to let loose: Don’t Even Think of Trying to Deprogram Our Offspring.

Another image

 

framed

 I wouldn’t say I was fully happy with the above as a finished picture, but I think in continuing on I maybe was as likely to harm it as improve it, so I handed it in to get framed. I think it’s the picture in the same state in the two photos, but quite different looking due to slightly different lighting conditions.

Theolopitos

 If you do not put an end to delusions prompted by external things, you will not overcome those that ambush you from within.

Theolopitos of Philadelphia (1250-1322)

quick and random

 

However it might end up as, something pretty quick and random from last night.

Ideological Cornerstone of Totalitarianism

Free will is an illusion. Therefore we don’t have to worry about violating it. 

(Not that it likely really needs any ideological cornerstones, but still it’s nice to have a few of them at the same time.)

Here it is anyway

 Don’t know how I feel about this, but here it is anyway.

oisseau ?

 

About to

Bourgeois Intelligentsia are just about to release their newest single: Educated Past the Point of No Return. The song is said to be evocative of the great power ballads of the late 1980s, and is intended to induce in the discerning consumer both a dopamine hit of nostalgia as well as an urge towards positive action.

The song is also graced with a b side: Wish I Was Born in the Ghetto.

at the moment

 

Something I’m doing, and wherever it’s going, at the moment.

Lucy

 

‘Lucy’ by William Wordsworth put to music by The Divine Comedy back in the early 1990s, and which group is pretty much the efforts of Neil Hannon from Derry in Northern Ireland.

Hannon, for the sake of the song, changed around a little the order of the poem, which is in itself four shorter poems together comprising ‘Lucy’ as a whole, and the lyrics of the song below, which I’d suggest reading along in time with the song:

Lucy

The Divine Comedy

by W. Wordsworth

I travelled among unknown men, 
In lands beyond the sea; 
Nor, England did I know till then 
What love I bore to thee.

'Tis past, that melancholy dream! 
Nor will I quit thy shore 
A second time; for still I seem 
To love thee more and more.

Among thy mountains did I feel 
The joy of my desire; 
And she I cherished turned her wheel 
Beside an English fire.

Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealed, 
The bowers where Lucy played; 
And thine too is the last green field 
That Lucy's eyes surveyed.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways 
Beside the springs of Dove, 
A Maid whom there were none to praise 
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone 
Half hidden from the eye 
-Fair as a star, when only one 
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know 
When Lucy ceased to be; 
But she is in her grave and, oh, 
The difference to me

A slumber did my spirit seal; 
I had no human fears; 
She seemed a thing that could not feel 
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force; 
She neither hears nor sees; 
Rolled around in earth's diurnal course, 
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Transposition

Scholars who become politicians are usually given the comic role of having to be the good conscience of a policy.

Nietzsche wrote this in his book Human, All Too Human in the late 1870s, and to transpose to our own times: 

Entertainers and celebrities who align with politicians and their ideologies are usually given the comic role of having to be the good conscience of a policy.

Go, go, you countercultural rock stars and icons of the entertainment industry! 

Not to add, lest the implication be too absolute, that scholars need feel too left out or aggrieved - they still have their role to play, and a not insignificant one. Though it simply must be understood, and most of all by the scholars themselves, that as we stride forwards in triumph and certainty, our Noam Chomskys are now a step or two below our Bruce Springsteens.

Sometimes for the cause, even pride must be tempered by humility.

Trafficker Interview Excerpt

Below is an excerpt from a fascinating interview with a child trafficker and sex/slave trafficker in general -  and who also indulges in some traditional drug trafficking on the side - and which interview in full might or might not appear in full somewhere, sometime:

Interviewer: What do you think of open borders?

Trafficker: I love them.

Germans, Dostoevsky

 I nourish the profound conviction that one has to practice getting used to Germans, and without such practice it is hard to tolerate them in large doses.

Dostoevsky, Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863).

Uncanny

“It’s great when you realise that your deepest convictions correspond exactly to policies being pushed by the political elites and the attendant or parallel power structures like the media, entertainment industry and so on.”

“And what’s interesting and gratifying is you often didn’t even realise they were your deepest convictions until the elites started pushing the policies that correspond to them.”

“Yes, that’s uncanny.”

watery

 

A piece from a while back I’ve gone back to working on a bit.

Soulscape 3

 

Something I’ve shown at least a couple of times, and which I still fiddle with hopefully towards a finished state I’m comfortable with. This with the tablet camera which gives a quite coarse look to it, like a filtered effect - which can be not unpleasing in itself.

Ascetic Principle

Indulgence in one thing will lead to indulgence in another.

The Moment We Lost the War

 

This was the very instant when it all went wrong. 

Higher and Lower Intelligentsia

“I’m not sure how true this is, and of course there’s going to be all kinds of shades of grey between the lines, but a thought came to me in terms of dividing up our modern intelligentsia into two groups.”

“Very interesting. Tell me.”

“Well, let’s say there’s the higher intelligentsia and the lower intelligentsia comprising the intelligentsia as a whole.”

“And how do you divide them?”

“Well, the higher intelligentsia believes their own bullshit.”

“And the lower intelligentsia?”

“They believe someone else’s bullshit.”

If not completely finished

 

A picture I’ve shown before, and here again, though now I think if not in its completely finished state, it’s probably very close to it.