caTs

 

to change a

“How many woke popes does it take to change a lightbulb?”

“I don’t know. It’s not a question I’ve ever asked myself. Well how many does it take?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know either. It just came to me to there for some reason - you know, like in a moment of illumination, but with the answer remaining in the darkness, so to speak. So whether there’s some depth to it or it’s just nonsense I have no idea.”

“It’s interesting though. Maybe it’s got something to do with the spiritual world needing to become more practical.”

“Maybe.”

The Collapse of Language

 

Dostoevsky, Liberal Love, the United States of Europe/European Union

One of the traits of ‘liberal, leftist, progressive’ is obviously enough to hate one’s own nation - the national is a painful insult to their sensitive and vulnerable psyche (I won’t say to their soul, that word might wound them also). With that in mind, I think this is interesting from Joseph Frank’s biography of Dostoevsky where, in a letter from 1867 to the writer Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky writes:

All those trashy little liberals and progressives find their greatest pleasure and satisfaction in criticizing Russia. They openly wish for its collapse, whilst adding that they ‘love Russia’. But meanwhile not only is everything at the slightest originality in Russia hateful to them, so that they deny it and immediately take enjoyment in turning it into a caricature, but that if one really were to present them finally with a fact that they could not overturn or ruin in a caricature, but which they definitely would have to be reconciled. I think they would be unhappy to the point of torture to the point of pain to the point of despair. 

One other detail from this period. Dostoevsky was living in Geneva at the time, and when there attended a congress under a group of progressive and radices called themselves the League of Peace and Freedom who had appointed the celebrated revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin to represent their native land. Bakunin made a stirring speech calling for the breakup of the Russian empire and expressing the hope that his armies would be defeated in the future. He also assailed the principle of nationality as a tool of reaction, and called destruction of all centralised states to make way for the formation of the United States of Europe.

shOre

 

450,000 Kids

 Open borders. This is the kind of stuff it’s all about.

Twilight of the Antichrists

I’ll try to make this short rather than any kind of argued out esssay. An antichrist phenomenon can be human but also of course ideological, or the two more or less coinciding - a person spearheading a mode of thought that is spiritually an antichrist. 

As ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now there are many antichrists.

John 2:18

Two of the most potent ‘antichrists’ in the relatively modern era are Nietzsche and Lenin. I think Lenin could be said to be a more potent figure here than Karl Marx given Lenin managed to turn Marx’s ‘communist manifesto’ into political and totalitarian reality. Communism is of fiercely materialistic nor atheistic in doctrine, and Lenin said for example that “Every socialist is an atheist as a rule,” also that “There is nothing more abominable than religion,” and “All worship of a divinity is necrophila”. Merriam-Cambridge Dictionary defines necrophila as: being sexually attracted to dead bodies, or sexual activity with dead bodies.

A crude narrow mind is of course its own defence - the hard crudeness of this egotistical state appears to this self as the obvious ultimate truth of life, and anything supposedly beyond itself, like the spiritual, is inconceivable and so effortlessly dismissed as deceit or delusion.  The dogmatically atheistic ideology of totalitarian socialism/communism was in very safe hands with someone as narrow as Lenin. 

Nietzsche was obviously a far deeper man intellectually  than the far more worldly Lenin, who rather than expound on the nobility of power, like Nietzsche, wanted it very much in the raw, so to speak. But whoever you are, however brilliant, thought is a means of temptation, and particularly if pride is involved,  one can open oneself up to increasingly dark ideas, which intoxicate one at a virtually sensual level as their megalomaniacal element increases. The very fact of ‘stepping over’ morality - of justifying sin as the highest virtue proves to oneself one’s own brilliance, this superman soaring above the ignorant masses. Nietzsche even wrote a book The Antichrist, and more or less randomly opening it yields for example:

One does well to put gloves on when reading the New Testament. The proximity of so much uncleanliness almost forces one to do so. One would no more choose to associate with ‘first Christians’  than one would with Polish Jews . . . Neither of them would smell very pleasant. I have looked in vain for so much as one sympathetic trait in the New Testament; there is nothing, free, benevolent, honest in it. Everything is self-deception.

As said, that really is a random opening of it, and there is no need to go deeper into the matter here. It’s pretty self-evident that Nietzsche is not being unfairly maligned as an antichrist.

And now from the Orthodox Christian anthology, The Philokalia, Vol. 4, Theoleptos of Philadelphia (1250-1325) writes:

When the sun sets, night comes; when Christ leaves the soul, the darkness of the passions envelops it and incorporeal predators tear it asunder.

These are deep matters and certainly can’t be reduced to any obvious reductionist logic, but think of a damaged immune system, and its openness to attack. And in terms of the Christian/antichristian dichotomy, this line from 1 Peter 5:8:

 Your adversary the devil prowls like a lion seeking someone to devour. 

The very ideas from the likes of Lenin and Nietzsche are very much of the adversary, and they have pushed away a spiritual defence of which affairs they are catastrophically ignorant. The ‘incorporeal predators’ may happily use their human allies or receptacles for many years to come, or they may simply tear these spiritually undefended souls asunder. There is no loyalty here! (Just to add, I’m not in the remotest, arguing that some kind of deeper deductions can be made about ailments and struggles - I’m just dealing with these two larger than life figures.)

And so I’ll end with a few images of these two potent antichrist symbols:

Above Lenin in 1920.

Lenin in 1923.

“The invalid is a parasite on society. To vegetate on in cowardly dependence on physicians and medications ought to entail the profound contempt of society.” Again from literally at random opening a page of The Antichrist - and to add, this above is the catastrophic and catatonic state in which Nietzsche saw out his days.
 

laMp

 

1305

 

Dance Songs at Bon in Hokkaido

 From a recording of Japanese music released in 1961.

between the lines

 

Pool

“If you fell into a pool of water you’d get wet, wouldn’t you?”

“Obviously.”

“Ah but what if there was no water in it?”

“Well then it wouldn’t be a pool of water, would it?”

“I suppose not, no. It would just be a pool.”

“No it wouldn’t. It would just be a hole.”

Ink2804

 

Sleepless

 There is nothing a sleepless night cannot wring from a soul in distress.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle.

Actors

“You know why it can be a good idea not to trust actors?”

“No. Why?”

“Because they’re actors.”

Burri

 

Alberto Burri, Nero 1, 1948.

Ave Donna Santissima

 

Red Seat Independence - Tucker and the Gang

“Look, I know you say you avoid the mainstream media like the plague, in terms of the biggest issues anyway, and you should be wary of anyone in that world, however comparatively decent and even off-script from the establishment they may seem with some issues.”

“Well yeah. That hasn’t changed. Even apart from all that, I think wallowing in news is fairly disastrous as say a spiritual mode of being - oneself at a kind of core becomes a fluctuating mess. There’s also a line from Jesus: ‘Come out from among them and touch ye no unclean thing.’ I think as a whole the media is a very unclean thing!”

“But that’s what so great about people like Tucker Carlson - he had too much truth in him to be allowed remain in the system. So now he’s unshackled. He’s independent of all that!”

“Oh yeah. Have you heard of Red Seat Ventures?”

“No, what’s that? Is it something Tucker has talked about.”

“I wouldn’t know what he’s talked about, but it’s something he’s part of. I’ll show you. It’s owned by Fox Corporation - you know, the organization people like Carlson are supposedly free of.”

“But they got rid of him cos they couldn’t control him!”

“Oh right yeah.”

(Tap on the image to enlarge and read easier.)

The Ayatollah’s Conundrum - Virgin Women in Iran Facing Execution, Best Practice

This below is from a 2002 article I came across when I searched the related issue. As should be obvious from the title, this isn’t light reading. I heard of this in the same interview where I heard mention of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Little Green Book, which I then dipped into online and wrote about here. I was probably doing art while I had that interview playing and so wasn’t fully paying attention. The mental shorthand that my distracted mind filtered through was that under the Khomeini/IRGC rule, if a virgin Iranian woman was facing execution, according to their religious beliefs, in her virginal state she would go straight to heaven after her death. And so they would consider her execution to be a kind of benevolent act in terms of her salvation, apart from the good her execution would effect in terms of ridding Allah’s earthly realm of evil impurities. A very warped sense of virtue but anyway.

Along with checking out the Little Green Book though, I did subsequently look up this half-heard executing of virgin women, and the reality turned out to be a little less ‘benevolent’. The apparent reality is that the Khomeinian regime mindset was appalled at the idea of sending such a death deserving virgin woman to heaven, and so instead the solution to the spiritual conundrum was to rape her so she would now be free to be sent to hell unimpeded. But, and here the religious virtue comes back in, to have sex or to rape her outside of marriage would be sinful, and so the regime would marry her to her executioner, then this holy marriage could be consummated, and then she could be executed, following which impeccable spiritual procedures she could, oh joy, go straight to hell for eternity.

Besides the seriously extreme thoughts by the regime’s leader in the Little Green Book, I’ve seen plenty witness accounts by Iranians that very much validate the plausibility of all this. And just as an illustration, one the more ‘sane’ quotes from the Little Green Book:

The person who governs the Muslim community must always have its interests at heart and not his own. This is why Islam has put so many people to death: to safeguard the interests of the Muslim community.

The relevant extract from the 2002 article below,:

  https://aljadid.com/content/caskets-and-rape-prison-irans-islamic-republic-review-chahla-chafiqs-new-islamist-man-politi

A woman's rape is frequently the last act that precedes her execution. This is explained by the rule in Iranian political prisons that the sentence of execution cannot be carried out if the woman is a virgin. Since there is a theological belief that if a woman dies a virgin she will go to heaven, the politically active virgin is forced to "marry" before her execution and thus to insure she will go to hell. She is forced to "marry" the hangman who will carry out her execution.. This marriage is conducted as a legitimate and official contract which includes, among other things, an estimated dowry. This "dowry" is subsequently paid to the family of the victim; it simultaneously becomes the equivalent of an official notification that she was executed.

 

Translated from the Arabic by Elie Chalala.

 

This article appeared in Al Jadid Magazine, Vol. 9, Nos. 42/43, Winter/Spring 2003.

Window

 

Choose

 “If you had to choose between the light and the dark, which would you choose? You could only have one of them.”

“Well, it can be hard to sleep in the light, so I’d probably choose the dark.”

“Right.”

Erring

A distracted mind cannot help but erring. And wisdom will not open its gate before it.

St Isaac the Syrian

Jube Domine

 

Changes Everything

“I was thinking of starting a Youtube channel so I can post this video I thought of doing. I think it could make a big impact. Globally.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And what’s the video?”

“Well, I think I’ll title it This Changes Everything!!!”

“Sounds exciting. So what’s the video itself?”

“Well, it’s about a slightly different way of tying your shoelaces. How you move your fingers during the manoeuvres. At a couple of moments, instead of going the usual way, they go a bit of a different way.”

“And it changes everything?”

“Well yeah, basically. I think it might improve the knot.”

Beginning With Ourselves 2, Contend

Just re-reading the post Beginning With Ourselves, I see, however I managed it, through predictive text or solely my own careless efforts -  and obviously not reading what was being posted - I completely mangled the presented quote by Sophrony of Essex from his book The Monk of Mount Athos. I’ve corrected it there in that original post, and here it also is the sake of anyone who saw and struggled with the meaning of the mangled version I presented then!

According to the second commandment, Love thy neighbour as thyself, each of us must and can comprise all mankind in his own personal being. Thus we shall accept all the evil in the world not as something extraneous but as evil in which we too have our part, and contend with evil, with cosmic evil, beginning in our own selves.

 

Knife, Butter

“You know what I’ve been thinking a lot about?”

“What?”

“You know that phrase - ‘Like a knife through butter’?

“Yeah. What about it?”

“Well, you know it’s supposed to signify something happening very naturally and easily, but what if the butter is hard, and the knife is hardly going through it at all. You might even need the microwave to soften the butter before you can get anywhere. Well then, in that scenario  - with the hard butter and the knife struggling to go through it - the expression doesn’t ring through at all, does it, in terms of what it’s meant to mean?”

“I suppose it doesn’t. I can see where you’re coming from. So what do you want to do about it?”

“I don’t know. But it’s been bothering me.”

“I can empathise with you.”

Stalin’s Most Creative Hours

Stalin’s most creative hours were the hours of darkness.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The First Circle.

Amusingly or tellingly, earlier in the book the mass-murdering totalitarian communist icon Stalin is referred to as ‘The Leader of All Progressive Mankind” - just to remind one of where this wonderful progress led back in the day. Just because you’re progressing somewhere doesn’t mean it’s somewhere you might particularly want to end up.  

I wrote about Progress in the ideological sense here, and how the meaning of that word got itself very confused.

out of time

Somewhere in Cork.

 

creature 4

 

Still not quite finished.

tinkering

 

I could have gone on tinkering with this forever, but it’s gone to be framed like this so no more tinkering.

Straight Lines

“What would you do if you could only think in straight lines?”

“What do you mean what would I do?”

“Would you revolt?”

“You mean, revolt against the limitation of only being able to think in straight lines?”

“Yes, exactly!”

“Well, if I could only think straight lines, I probably wouldn’t even be able to think of having a revolt. I’d just keep going in the direction I was pointed.”

Mindscape/Soulscape 1303

Trying to finish this which I’ve not managed to do yet.

Obama’s $1.7 Billion in Cash to Iran - What Do You Think That Was All About?

WashingtonCNN — 

The Obama administration secretly arranged a plane delivery of $400 million 

The money was procured from central banks in Switzerland and the Netherlands, official said, and an unmarked cargo plane loaded with Swiss francs, euros and other currencies were flown to Iran.

Screenshots from mainstream media sources back a few years. Was this one of the weirdest and dodgiest financial transactions in history? Secretly flying out $400 million in hard cash to the Iranian regime, followed by 1.3 billion more, also in hard cash. That’s a pretty big amount of cash to get hold of. If you walk into your average bank, you might struggle to get hold of those kind of sums. You’d probably have to do a fair amount of running around, you know, to different banks, to get it together. And then you’d have figure out what you put it all into. It wouldn’t fit in your pockets anyway, that’s for sure. They flew it out secretly on pallets on a plane apparently!

The justification for the sums involved was they had decided this was interest on money owed to Iran going back a few decades. Oh right yeah. A nice unexpected windfall for the Ayatollah and the gang to receive. And why was it all in physical cash again? Ah the Ayatollah liked the old ways. He liked the feel of western money in his hands.

“Have you ever heard of state sponsored terrorism, deep state terror networks and all that kind of stuff?”

“No, never. I don’t think I have. What is it? Tell me all about it.”

“Ah there’s no need to worry yourself about it. I’d say it’s all made up.”

“That’s a relief.”

Beginning with Ourselves

Our starting point is always wrong. Instead of beginning with ourselves, we always wanted to change others first and ourselves last.

Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

According to the second commandment, Love thy neighbour as thyself, each of us must and can comprise all mankind in his own personal being. Thus we shall accept all the evil in the world not as something extraneous but as evil in which we too have our part, and contend with evil, with cosmic evil, beginning in our own selves.

 

Sophrony of Essex

fireplace