Emerged

Unusually quiet for a while, Deep State Cabal have emerged from hibernation with a new song, We Own Your Children (And We Own You). Lead singer and principal songwriter Klaus SSchwab describes this as “a love song to humanity.”

Breath

“If you were under water and you ran out of breath, what would you do?”

“Drown.”

“We’ll I suppose of course you could drown, obviously, but maybe first you should probably try coming up and getting your head out of the water and so you could breathe again.”

Woman with Basket

 Georges Seurat, c.1881.

Leaving

I’m not quite sure how anyone decent and sane could have stuck it out this long with the deranged and pathetic current version of the US Democratic Party, but regardless of the full inner substance of anyone in the public eye, this was certainly pretty powerfully put. 

Just to mention one very obvious point - we just went through the incessant hysteria about Covid and vaccines, but simultaneously to this, the woke Democrats also pushed completely open borders for illegals entering the US, and who would not have to do anything about their Covid status. A legal person could lose his or her job if unvaccinated - this was such an unbelievably serious situation and which had justified, nay demanded the most authoritarian powers and measures by the authorities to control - but simultaneous to this millions of non US citizens could just pour into the country as if in a completely parallel world where there was no pandemic issue whatsoever going on.

How can anyone have so little character as to somehow dwell happily within this kind of schizophrenic reality, and accept it as somehow sane and plausible?

Breton Woman and Goose by the Water

 Paul Gauguin, 1888.

Parody

The devil, or the demonic energies, are said to be lacking in all creativity, but instead to create parodies of truth, to copy truth and make a mocking version of it. Socialism can be seen in this light as a parody of the democratic ideal. Instead of the elevation of the individual level upwards, it seeks to unify by degradation downwards, the unity of reduction to a lowest common denominator, and in which absolutist system all individuality, creativity, is denigrated as “capitalist individualism” or some such category of negation. No one is allowed to be free of the all powerful State control. You step beyond its bounds, you get “cancelled.” The nature of the cancelling depends on its attained level of absolutism, rather than a restraint based on any adherence to morality.

The response of the religious authorities, the Pharisees, to Jesus - their hatred of his setting people free on the Sabbath. The Sabbath had nothing to do with it, what they hated was the setting free. The underlying psychology is the same regardless of the superficial variation in the forms or systems of control.

Two Words

 

The ability to accurately count beyond one has always been a highly esteemed intellectual faculty or gift. Some stumble in the midst of those dizzy heights.

More Corot

In the Forest of Fontainebleau, Camille Corot, c. 1860-1865.

More Ink

 

Gnomic Anthology

These deep and poetic excerpts from A Gnomic Anthology by Ilias the Presbyter are included in Orthodox Christian collection of texts mom The Philokalia, Volume 3.

27. When the ship of sinfulness is overwhelmed by the flood of tears, evil thoughts will react like people drowning in the waves and try to grasp hold of something so as to keep afloat.

28. Thoughts gather about the soul according to its underlying quality: either they are like pirates and try to sink it, or they are like oarsmen and try to help it when it is in danger. The first tow it out into the open sea of sinful thoughts; the second steer it back to the nearest calm shore they can find.

Corot

 

A drawing by 19th century French artist, Camille Corot.

Zelensky, Mr Dignity, the New Nobility

 

Not just good for being a comic actor playing a President of a country for a tv channel owned by a Nazi, and then becoming the actual President of a country known for being utterly corrupt, and then becoming fabulously wealthy whilst in this role looking after the Ukrainian people. What a guy. A man who carries himself like a true statesman. You may incidentally have also seen footage of him giving all the signs of being out of his degenerate mind on cocaine, but don’t let that colour your vision. No one’s perfect, not even politicians who may be portrayed as messianic saints within the popular culture. And anyway, all this - the corruption, inane comedy acting, cross-depressing and erotic dancing, being a Nazi puppet, the cocaine addiction, and so on - all in all perhaps we should see this as the modern equivalent of the noble, multi-faceted type of the renaissance man.

Flight into Egypt

 Jean Francois Millet from sometime in the 1860s. Judging from the amount of copies of his works he did, an artist who very powerfully affected Van Gogh, especially presumably because of the mature, emotional power and dignity much of Millet’s work carries, and for which sense of life Van Gogh himself likely yearned.

The Towers of St. Sulpice

 

By Albert Dubois-Pillet, 1888.

Pastoral

 

Reason and Faith

I’ll try to be very brief and abrupt here. There is the thought huge dichotomy between reason and faith - faith is faith in life as a whole, and of course beyond biological, physical life and existence onto the divine. There has then been the supposed opposition of this if a sense of the world built on reason, we build up our map of existence through reason and observation, and progress onwards in an ascending curve of mastery over surrounding reality.

Thus dichotomy is in fact absurd for the most intellectually primal reason, and that is that reason can only extend from faith, and here that means faith in language, that as a matter of course meaning and language are intrinsically entwined. If I doubt that meaning, my language will fall to pieces in my very hands, and if true to my lack of faith, then we will quickly find we can’t say a single thing about anything. The whole edifice crumbles.

Where this is actually being acted out is maybe most obvious with all the gender stuff that all of a sudden, became so seminal an issue. So here a man decides to identify as a woman. Intellectually what is actually happening here? It’s exactly what I talked about above: the faith that is inescapable to our connection to language has been minused out of the equation, and so the meaningfulness of language falls apart. That invisible and mystical meaningfulness of language is taken away, faith is gone, and words can mean anything, which is to say they don’t mean anything. This is the consequence of a reason actually removed from faith. It leads to total intellectual collapse, seeing as you’re now disengaged from intellectual reality, which extends from faith to begin with - the same as mathematics rests on the exact same foundation of faith in the language of mathematics. If someone here started saying things like, “How do we know two is two? Maybe two isn’t two,” - and this kind of crap was taken seriously, here also, faith removed  mathematics would crumble as a meaningful phenomenon. Reason without faith disintegrates.

More Ink and Water

 Another thing from messing about with ink and feeling my way around with it. I’m not making any great claims for these kind of things!

Charles

Prince Charles, no sorry King Charles, has been one of the champions of The Great Reset, and stated that Covid was a great opportunity to push this Great Reset through that would create this wonderful future. This presumably deeply linked in with his great concern for the environment, that requires and will ever more require, according to such benevolent forces as Charles and the folks he hangs out with, very strong, probably kind of totalitarian, measures to save the planet. 

Lifting the following from elsewhere: “June of 2020, Prince Charles launched #TheGreatReset, tweeting out: 'As we move from rescue to recovery, therefore, we have a unique, but rapidly shrinking, window of opportunity to learn lessons and reset ourselves on a more sustainable path. It is an opportunity we have never had before and may never have again.”

 Here below we see some of this passionately concerned and benevolent personality in action. A word of warning: even the most benevolent of life’s guardians may sometimes, under the stress of unbearable provocations, become a bit tetchy, and appear as a result maybe a little malevolent and deranged.

And to add, if someone gets this upset over I think it is pens being a little in his way and which he lacks the strength or will to move himself, imagine how intensely he suffers over the imperfections of the world as a whole. And perhaps that’s the point: I don’t think we can imagine it.

bird man

With this for me new medium I don’t think I was taking this too seriously in the messing about that produced it last night, but seeing it now I’m a bit surprised that I kind of like it. More usual is the taking seriously of something and not liking it at all the next day!

More Ink

 

Water, City

 

Heart

“Would you prefer to be at the heart of things or at the periphery of them”

“It depends on what they are.”

Beyond Parody

 

Way beyond. In fairness though, “Which focused,” is one of the greatest sentences ever uttered by anyone, in or out of the public arena.

Jan Mankes

 

Forest Road Near Oranjewoud (1912).

Docks

 I’ve just gone back to doing a bit of art, and started trying out using inks for the first time - which is great for how quick and loose you can work with that medium, whatever about the quality and of the results. The above - not much more than, I dunno, maybe 10 or 15 minutes’ work to the above point, and not that I’m making any great claims for it - gives me a bit of a shipping vibe. Though to add, how long it took to make something doesn’t actually make it any better or worse than if it took a different length of time!

“What do you think of this - it only took me ten minutes.”

“It’s crap.”

“Yeah but it only took me ten minutes!”

“Oh right yeah, I suppose it’s amazing when you think of it like that.”

Self-Righteousness Again, Tantrums

Why are what we call liberals so incapable of dealing with adversity or contradictions to their will? There’s loads of videos I could pick as undignified examples of this, but I’ll just make do with the assertion of this as truth. Because - and this is very much related to the last post on self-righteousness ( https://wwwinabstentia-andrewk.blogspot.com/2022/09/self-righteousness.html ) - the ideology as a whole it is an ideology of the exaltation of the self’s personal desires; rather than the humbling of self in the search of deep truth, the exaltation of self, its desires, its search for pleasures. 

Think of a toddler or young child throwing a tantrum. Why this awful performance? It’s a response to the failure of his will to be the dominant mover of reality - and it seems to me it generally is much more likely to be a boy than a girl, probably as the exertion of the will is much more the archetypal masculine energy than the feminine. So the child’s parents haven’t succumbed to his holy will, and took him home from the playground, didn’t buy a bar of chocolate, whatever, and thus the awful screaming. . . His self should be exalted as the highest value in life, and the tantrum is the enraged reaction to reality not bending to his will, which he feels is and of course unquestionably should be the highest value in life. He also hopes that through the awfulness of the tantrum, making life hell for those around him, he may yet gain victory and be given in to. The sulk, and this kind of behaviour obviously can go on right through life, is another potential step in this process. “I’ll make life miserable for . . . (whoever is denying my will), and perhaps eventually I willwear them down and triumph.” And the willingness to keep this behaviour can go on a hell of a long time!

So with liberalism, especially as it gets ever more pathetic and toxic, there most certainly is no God or ascetic ideal to succumb or attain towards; instead this ideology’s legions are subconsciously fed the relentless idea that the self and its pleasures is the highest value, and obviously enough given the very people and traits all this is appealing to is to is narcissistic, self-absorption, well then here we meet again essentially the response again of the toddler to his will not being placated to as the centre of the universe.

A follow-on question is if the selfhood and its will is the highest value, why the seemingly intrinsic phenomenon that people of this ideological spectrum are typically so servile when it comes to the powers that be imposing restrictions on the individual’s will and rights: perfectly willing compliance to lockdowns, masks, forced “vaccinations”, etc. I might have a look at that another time, but just to mention Aldous Huxley seems to have covered this very thing in Brave New World, where in that projected future society, the desires of the self are wholly related to the physical and especially sensual self, whereas the desire for spiritual or inner independence from society is usually and ideally non-existent.

Self-righteousness

It’s generally accepted as a criticism or unpleasant phenomenon for someone to be very self-righteous, but actually here I’m going to try to get at this at a deeper level. Jesus obviously stresses again and again that the self must be humbled, that by definition if by contrast we are “self-righteous” about the state of ourselves, then we are at enmity with the spirit. So through humility and self-discipline is aided the loosening of the binds to the perpetual psychic swarm of ourselves, this self or inner shape which exists as a consequence to and in tandem with our behaviours, physical and mental.

 Self-righteousness though is the exalting of this individual selfhood, we have no need to humble ourselves, rather ourselves in this mode of desires, passions, pride, self-love, etc is good; thus self-righteousness. There is no need for any humbling, this self is righteous, and the more of it the better.

Messenger of Autumn

 Paul Klee, 1922.

Poisoning

“Do you know what’s important if someone say has poured poison into their victim’s glass?”

“What?”

“That the victim doesn’t notice there’s anything wrong with what they’re drinking. And even if it tastes a little bit off, it’s only enough that they can explain it away and not mind too much, maybe it’s even nicer! - and so it would be too much bother, maybe too rude, to ask for a different glass.”

“And I suppose over time, if there’s only very small doses of whatever poisonous crap is in the glass, if they’re not trying to do it all in one go, the amounts can be built up as the person becomes used to the taste and thinks it’s normal.”

Spirituality Doesn’t Mean It Must Be Good Spirituality!

 I thought this snippet contains a good response from Fr Peter Heers, an Orthodox priest, to a very awkward question to have to deal with. And also of course as the answer deals with, if one is wide open to phenomena on the simple basis that they are spiritual or supernatural, well then you’re wide open to whatever may be approaching. In the human domain, it would be bizarre to be wide open and defenceless to anyone’s approach, so this applies all the more when in deeper waters.

Who Needs

Toxic Blandness aired a new song last night on MTV Live, Dangerous and Vaccinated, titled Who Needs Women When You Can Have Pregnant Men (Nine Months to Freedom). A quick sample of the lyrics below, presumably written by lead singer, Charles Manly:

Just passed my first pregnancy test 

The first one’s the best

We’ve been enslaved too long

But now those days are gone 

Nine months to freedom . . .

I’m afraid that’s as much as I was able to decipher at first listen.

Dostoevsky, The Adolescent

“Egoism has replaced the former binding idea, and everything has broken down into the freedom of persons. Set free, left without a binding thought, they have finally lost all higher connection to such a degree that they have even stopped defending the freedom they obtained.”

. . . “Develop?” he said. “No, better not develop, and what’s more it’s my passion - to speak without developing. That’s really so. And here’s another strange thing: if it happens that I being to develop a thought I believe in, the result is almost always by the end of the explanation I myself have ceased to believe in what I’ve explained. I’m afraid I’ll fall into that now, too.”

Spoken by the character Versilov in Dostoevsky’s The Adolescent.

Coincidentally

“Ok class, can someone show me the meaning of the word “coincidentally” by appropriately using it in an everyday sentence? Harry?”

“Coincidentally, at the exact same time Covid went rampant, the flu figures seemed to more or less disappear.”

“Yes Harry, that’s an excellent and strikingly illustrative example. The flu, which has been around in human terms pretty much forever, did coincidentally disappear right when Covid appeared. What a coincidence that was. Hello Covid, goodbye flu. Wearing masks and lockdowns, though not effective in making Covid disappear, did wipe out the flu just like that - and maybe even before they came into use. How fragile an illness, which had been around forever, turned out to be.

And so anyway for our next word, which is “gullible”. Can anyone put that in a sentence for me, please? Extra points if you can combine it with “servile”. Sorry Harry, no. I’d like someone else this time.”

Xtal

 

By Aphex Twin.

Pleasure, Pain, More on the Bourgeois Soul

Some thoughts below a bit thrown together.

The self apart from spirit ends in complete failure, i.e. it dies physically. The nonsense of a pleasure based sense of self where sensually one’s pleasures is greater than one’s pain or suffering. However much pleasure one affords oneself, in the sense of a contest between pleasure and pain, with death pain “triumphs” absolutely on this plane. “Yes but until death, whilst alive, one’s pleasure outweighed one’s suffering.” Ok, but it still ends in total defeat of the sensual self.

 So the self defining itself on this plane is underneath everything very insecure, because however much pleasure it tries to afford itself, the ultimate defeat of the physical, sensual self is certain. If only something like a vaccine could keep death at bay . . .

The bourgeois essence as a lived ethos is that on the material plane, one is part of a successful group of society where pleasure outweighs suffering. As far as one is or becomes a pure member of this class, one does not think independently but from this communal spirit or bourgeois soul, and the core here is self-perpetuation and self-exaltation. It’s not enough to simply be winning sensually, living in luxury, etc, however much we try to reduce things, we also need to believe in one’s virtue also. So it’s a combination of pleasure and a sense of virtuousness and self-righteousness, and all the veneers of elegance help lend credence to this virtuous nature. The short story, After the Ball by Tolstoy is very much about this phenomenon of veneer versus essence. 

One of the key traits of bourgeois-ism is the exaltation of sensual pleasures as if they were even intellectual truths or spiritual essences. One is exalted by for instance by the refinement of one’s tastes regarding coffee. So this is the underlying essence of pleasure on the sensual plane being played out, and where the sensual pleasures are supposedly imbued with some sense of higher values also! The refinement of one’s tastes mark one out as truly of the victorious bourgeois class which is triumphing on the sensual field of existence over suffering! 

So remember this is where it all goes back to: life on the plane of pleasure versus suffering, and one’s partaking of a class that is here winning. It’s not enough to experience sensual pleasure; one also has to believe in the exaltation of this essence and class as a whole. Doubts after all bring suffering back into the equation. So of course one has to be fully imbued with a sense of virtue also, and thus the importance of the convincing and elegant veneers. The veneers also serve to conceal the sensual essence, as for example, watching pornography is also within this world of sensual pleasure, but it’s very hard to convince oneself this is also somehow virtuous! Thus the need for polished veneer and refinement so we can get beyond any thoughts of crudeness regarding this all!

To add, there of course may be nothing wrong with something like good coffee, but it’s the “spiritual” exaltation of sensual pleasure and one’s ability to experience such refinements that it is the kind of bourgeois essence I’m talking about here.

 The communal spirit is the self-perpetuating of the class, and of course one’s membership of it. Thus if it appears deeply conservative, this isn’t actually in terms of values but simply of self-preservation of oneself and one’s successful position within the structure of society. Thus it is deeply amoral in essence, and so the bourgeois class is only accidentally moral - depending on the ruling ethos of society. If for instance that society, in terms of its ideological engine-room starts becoming infected and deranged - “birthing persons”, etc - then the bourgeois soul will effortlessly adapt to be in sync with this, and will convince itself that, just as with sensual pleasures and their refinement, their ability to believe the new values is a mark again of its own refinement. In terms of susceptibility to spiritual temptation in the negative sense therefore, it is wide open to willingly receive concealed but pretty bloody obvious inner darknesses.

One other thought is that presumably one of the principal facets of fasting as a spiritual discipline is the deliberate undercutting of our inclination and even enslavement to sensual pleasure.