Friday, November 26, 2010

Saturday, October 16, 2010

True Heart, Cruel Heart

Only the ultra-sane can afford reality. Only the sane, with that manic edge that depressives would insist on calling psychopathological, can withstand, while maintaining a position of pure faith, determinate reality. That which we call the 'self' is purely the product of neurological activity in the brain, an epiphenomenon. Consciousness is to the brain as the shadow is to the body. However, because consciousness can influence itself it transcends the deterministic barriers of pure materialism.

Consciousness can crawl back through the mirror and truly inhabit the paradox of double being, of self-consciousness. Our consciousness, perceived as immaterial and able to engage in the most ironic of self-speculations, is at root composed of the same infinite energy and light which fuels the heart. As the brain is to thought and the genitals are to sex, so is the heart unto truth.

When we know this, our natural empathy for other human beings is increased exponentially, for we can totally identify with their existence relative to an absolute reality. We are all the products of a miraculous evolution whose engine was cosmic chance. For when you have stripped yourself down to your original self the universe will become a lattice of information, in every part consistently different from itself, where you need look for miracles no further than your own hands.

You will see everything as an occasion, all object will become events, a rock or planet merely occupying a location and volume for a period of time. You will be able to apprehend the entire being of the men and women you meet. If you look into their eyes you will see everything they have done and who they are. And some eyes will appear like fractured glass, impervious to your gaze. And others will be sensual ports on beings you will instantly love.

- Christopher Dewdney

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Thee Psyckikal Astral Art of OWLEYES




@CRYPTK MSSG from owleyes: owleyes images contain psychic powers with the intent of creating artificial reality vortexes, electromagnetic signatures, a spectral embrace. Our attachment to virtual space is penetrating deep into our psyche as a result we are leaving residue traces of our self behind, we create doppelgangers of our self in this virtual domain, i am one waves of light reach deep , use the images have they eaten yet? the snakes? the chains are gone children …

More about the art of OWLEYES at Immortal Mortal

Via: Pendu Mag

Monday, September 20, 2010

Mark Twain's "Mysterious Stranger"

“In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!”

“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago - centuries, ages, eons, ago! - for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.”

“Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!” …

“You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.”

“It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!” -- Mark Twain in Mysterious Stranger

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

The Living Language As Agent of Ascension by Steve Venright

A thirst for the infinite. A longing for the absolute. Lautreamont banging ou sentences on the keys of a piano, the eyes of Maldoror blazing in his head. Rimbaud and his sad ecstatic synaethesia; the poet as seer in the unchaining of the senses. Christopher Smart, again, and that virtuous multi-talented cat of his, Jeoffry, the angeltiger; the two of them channeling ontological thunder from a god much holier than the usual bearded sourpusses propped up on clouds by guilty Western romantics. Leonora Carrington in her hospital prison, down below everything in this world, below rape and war, below incarcerated love, reflecting Twentieth Century hell in shards of exploded-mind - a sorceress in the underworld who heals herself and emerges triumphant and beautiful alchemist. Baudelaire and his hospital prison where the soul cries to be "Anywhere! Just as long as it is out of the world!" John Uri Lloyd's alchemical hollow earth odyssey. Michael Dean's transcendent-textual gardens and lawns. The poignant Terra erotica of Nabokov as revealed in Ada. Joyce's ultramythic polyverse and its endless recorso. Dewdney's concordant proviso ascendant. Nichol's alphabetic hagiography. The transdimensional emancipation pirates of Burroughs. Coleridge's pleasure dome. Nerval's ivory tower. A lust for freedom and ascent.

From Spiral Agitator

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Black Metal For Cuddling? Yeeeaaaahhh....



It's nice to know that after a hard day of immolating and eviscerating with the black hordes, you can come home, curl up in a pile of warm skulls and just soak in the sweet, eternal necrotic bleakness of it all with this non-metal black metal mix from the fine post-human types over at Dublab. Hail Satin!

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Art-Chance-Risks (Excerpts) by Odysseus Elytis

There are, in a human life, moments that, by a sole, hasty, inconceivable opening and shutting, show the world around us washed in a strange light and revealed in another - could it be its real? - countenance, one seen for the very first time. There are moments when objects and facts abandon their orbit to shine with a different meaning and a different destination; moments when man suddenly sees himself walking on paths he has never chosen, under boulevards he cannot recognize, beside people standing to the full height of his own manifest emotions, people who become the friends, his friends, such as he always wished existed, expecting him there, at a bitter corner of his life. No foreign element, no extrasensal presence comes to justify this strange turn that the world assumes at moments such as these. Simple, earthly, human, it is the same things, the same situations, presenting themselves in a second condition, more real than the first, a condition we would have to distinguish by calling it "surreal."

In an era when any intellectual movement necessarily proceeds from a basis of incessant actions and reactions, comparative study alone is in a position to yield significant results. The retrospective view of the pulse pertinent to a historic epoch, the resurrection of a past longing, the pattern assumed by the briefly recurring chilly breeze of a youth in revolt, all the disputes, even the most don quixotesque ones, restored to the proscenium, all the naive or hateful stances, all the big words, are not the vainest rudimentsm of a critique; at least of a critique that purports to conceive its topic, not solely by intellectual exercise, but also by emotional contact, by a biological, almost bodily, assertion. Nothing could uncover more completely the causes of surrealism's success with our generation, justifying our adherence to that movement despite and beyond personal misgivings, than the careful recounting of all - even the most minute - pulsations undergone by our bodily and psychic organism during the long, dictatorial imposition of a disastrous state of affairs: mechanization, petty bourgeois-ism, self-satisfaction, distortion of all moral concepts, rationalization.

Yet it is now time to deal with that which remained in the history of poetry under the heading "automatic writing." There is no definition that may boast of its self-suffiency, and action almost always discourgaes verbal precision; it deforms, forsakes, exceeds the framework that tends to immobilize it. In theory, the unhindered recording of psychic associations is up to everyone, for everyone contains a hollow flow of image-bearing words when awake, and administers a disinterested action of the world when asleep. However, the question remains: to what extent is such a peculiar incarnation really feasible? And if it is, why should it also be desirable? How could beauty and human emancipation, these twin aspirations of Lyricism, be served by it?

Proud rebels as they were, those present at the birth of surrealism took care to reinforce it with dictums that would exclude inconsistency effectively and unfailingly. They said:

- Beauty does not seem necessary to us.

- There is in the mind a point at which all contradictions are resolved.

- The poet does not impose his own voice but conveys the voice that exists always and resounds for all.

- A deepest understanding of dream and of its meaning imposes the transformation of the world.

- Aesthetics is not the viewpoint of our critique.

- Poetry must be made by all, not by one.

After all that, would not the defense of certain ideals that represent nothing to others appear pointless? As for me, I know another path, and I shall take it without caring too much about the commotion I may cause to some. The solitary walker's whistle in the dark does not always signify fear.

At a time when the first bunch of European surrealists met with general disapproval on all sides, I, alone in my modest room in Athens, was accompanying their action with a stubborn admiration that I have never since renounced, nor do I intend to. Behind the rages, exaggerations, blasphemies, and naivetes that so shocked the bourgeois at the time, I saw neither a fashion nor the advertised vanity of a School. I left those clumsy accounts to many critics, both here and abroad, who thereby washed their hands of the whole business, but also turned their backs in relief on everything that might bear to them the painful reminiscence of profound truths, long concealed with special care.

Rejection of all illusions, unimpeded knowledge and taste of all the nuclei of life, thirst for a free morality, emotional evaluation of the world, faith in the absolute power of the spirit - those were the most distant, but also the most constant, ridges of the surrealist horizon I contemplated. One day, when those are certified by history, we shall be able to see who it was that waged war on two fronts, liberating art from suffocating rationalism, infertile and static idealism, and directions from above. Not one surrealist ever thought of immobilizing life. The same mouths from which the above proud phrases emerged also emitted others, whose sole aim was to consolidate the capacity for evolution and readjustment of a theory destined by its very nature to always turn into action - irrespective of whether it will be backed by a faction, a School, a slogan of the day.

Careful study of each surrealist teaching may easily uncover the secret of its always dual significance, just as a confrontation in good faith with each of its practical applications will readily grant the researcher the revelation of its two - always two - sides. Absolute expression, as a polemical necessity of a particular historic moment, justifies the one side, the most ephemeral but also most persuasive, whose intransigence conceals another side, destined for a more permanent life.

If, on the one hand, automatic writing was revelaed under the colors of the unleashed unconscious, realizing itself outside personal will and intolerant of aesthetic judgment, on the other hand it declared the poet's innermost desire to force inspiration (the latter being at once chance and excessive sensibility) into a ruthless and swift advance beyond all moral, social, or aesthetic obstacles. Nothing but true spirituality is contained in this intention, whereby human, solely human, morality overthrows its bourgeois idol. Habit, that which extinguishes the poet's innate inclination to set foot where no one else has been before, was struck down along with the world's dullest portion, the one most worn out by the rust of the commonplace. It was a matter of releasing man from the fear that always stopped him before, what a false education had led him to regard as "anti-aesthetic," "immoral," "absurd," "harmful." For the proportion of human experience that had up to then been excluded from poetry, and which was without a doubt fully entitled to expression, all those passionate human emotions, the most terrible desires, had been waiting impatiently for too long before all kinds of prohibitive signals, those that a specific society, along with its art, had hung over useless and conventional frontiers.

Speech, at once a transmitter and a receiver of life, this time marched forward. The public's surprise upon the sensitive and indeterminate point of transformation was so intense that, even before realizing it, the virgin expression was forced to spell out its first sentence, while automatic writing - repulsing calculation and restoring imagination to its very source - became its best instrument.

Now, if not all people were capable of using this instrument as the theory had promised, that was certainly because they did not all possess the same power of repelling calculation by neutralizing the defense of their reason, just as they do not all possess the same psychic overflow and quality of imagination. Something similar happens with the flucuations of poetic wealth that we may come across in a text written by different people, or by the same person over several distinct moments. Yet, as soon as some begin to outshine others, thanks to their special qualities, the concept "poet" becomes meaningful again. The analyst's good faith henceforth ought to search and locate that which - from the viewpoint of general art theory - is the sole profit that automatic writing brought to the affairs of lyrical poetry.

Philosophically speaking, one could argue, with Roland de Reneville, that thought, in its auspicious ride across fields of such absolute freedom, manages to conceive at an incredible speed all, even the least suspected, relations between things, so convincingly as to signal the revelation of their unity. And also this, which is even more important: that, in order to cover the entire circle of the spirit, the right way is not necessarily to expand, thanks to intensive concentration, the point of the consciousness that lies at its center, as "Pure" poetry would have it; we can also abolish it, which is equivalent to placing it, at any moment, on any point of the psychic circle, as surrealism maintained. Yet the movement of this thought, drunk with itself, has also given us (de facto, as one might say) certain other results, which may show us, if translated into points of our recognizable intellectual function, the role played in the revelation of the perpetual becoming of life by the lightning-like speed of thought, as it found a way of being effected in the heat of automatic writing. That heat, which is at bottom an overstrain of the will to life, and which made Professor Gaston Bachelard cry: "L'ardeur est un temps, ce n'est pas un chaleur [Ardor is a time, it is not a warmth]." gives a truly new dimension to the meaning of time.

Having instantaneously taken incredible distances in its stride, poetic metaphor ended up expressing the actual physignomy of things upon their very birth. And as a plant about to bloom never offers, even to the most patient observer, the phenomenon of its growth, while, if filmed and projected at a high speed, it reveals to us, compressed within a few seconds, the history of dozens of its hours, so it is that any secret, a secret of the world that logical surveillance cannot conceive, is set into motion by falling within the space of human emotion, and thus appears, visible, like a new poetic image, within a few seconds. So, even if this instrument is never again put into action, it is enough that it has opened our eyes to three fundamental truths: the absolute reality of the spirit, the incessant transformation of life within its own movement, and the existence of disinterested relations between the elements of the world, relations that not only put an end to a quasi-slavish conception of life, but also offer to lyrical confession the chance of achieving a more accurate and integral formulation.

Eventually, it became evident that a different order of the world, one governed by sensibility, reigned in each emotion; and that, in order to express emotion more directly, one was entitled, indeed, obliged, to pursue the combinations of words proper to this new order, the images proper to a bliss of fantasy. A new kind of psychic function was born out of the experience of automatic writing. The latter equipped, not only the surrealist, the poet, once and for all, with the possibility of being realized directly and essentially, by means of what I have once named the transparence of emotion. Iam referring to the courage of attempting the most improbable marriages between the elements of the world, knowing - and here is where the entire supremacy of Poetry over Science may lie - that two simple things, however humble in their everyday function, may, by exiting their slavish orbit and developing a sudden affinity, approach the dramatic human enigma through the entire weight of our substance. From now on, whatever the youngest poets may do or think, however, they may realize themselves, they will naturally possess a new way of interpreting the world and must therefore acknowledge that they operate within fields conquered by surrealism; and also, that it would not be vain if they took the trouble, before putting its orders aside, to turn them around and see their permanent side, to hear, behind the timely, their timeless message.

They would then see that behind the declaration "poetry must be made by all, not by one" lay the abolition of the theocratic conception of the poet's nature and destination; behind the words "beauty does not seem necessary to us" lay the replacement of the established notion of beauty by a new one; behind the view that "the dream must announce the transformation of the world' lay the certainty that the artist must impose a new order on the elements offered by the perceptible world; finally, behind the utterance "there is a point of the mind where all contradictions are resolved" lay the faith in surreality and, through it, in the desired unity of all things.

It is not a conservative tendency that dictates the above reflections; neither is it my purpose here to soften a rough line or blunt a protruding edge on the curious surrealist edifice. I only wished, even by recourse to exaggeration, to highlight some of the scattered snatches that this modern activity succeeded, without doubt, in craving on the large body of poetry. And if it is best for a poet to give only a personal impression of a long-lasting experience, I shall only say, on the subject of automatic writing, that my first impression of it resembles strongly the expression of gratitude felt by man toward the wealth, both inner and outer, that he was given to take advantage of; in other words, the practical recognition of the adequacy of this world, in the infinite combinations of its goods.

I have already had the opportunity to note, a propos of painting, and in particular of artists such as the douanier Rousseau or the fustanella-wearing Theophilos, whose work was motivated solely by the passion of plastic expression, and who transubstantiated the spirit and the material object into one and the same artistic event, how deeply imbued they were by that sacred sensation of the infinite natural wealth within their works.

By transposing systematically this kind of disposition onto the mind, the modern poet and artists (who attempted to reach by the opposite route that pure psychic condition of primitive man before the spectacle of life and nature), walked along a common path, thereby creating works are more or less as follows:

(1) The external and internal world, in their infinite combinations, constitute a reality, whose motherland is the mind.

(2) The concept of illegality does not exist in the district of the mind.

(3) Poetry expresses directly the mind, whose circumference is incredibly longer than that of consciousness.

(4) A considerable part of life is unable to find its expression in that area of consciousness.

(5) The cooperation of all the world's elements is possible, probable, and desirable.

(6) Objects must be incorporated in the necessity of human desires.

(7) The emotional assessment of the world assigns a different content to the concept of life; in fact, it restores the source of human freedom at the center of humanity.

In the spring of 1935, with the help of Andreas Embrikos - who also had eagerly placed his large library at my disposal - I slowly, and somewhat awkwardly at first, became the astonished spectator of a strange world that sprang from within me, even without my fully realizing it. How many times, sitting in the cosy apartment on Queen Sophia Avenue, smoking innumerable cigarettes and surrounded by the paintings of Max Ernst, Oscar Dominguez and Yves Tanguy, or, at other times, in some relatives' villa in Lesbos, facing the sea and the Eastern mountains, we wrote a multitude of poems and other texts within five or ten minutes, poems and texts of which we were later accused by writers and critics of having supposedly spent several days of hard intellectual labor! A few days earlier, with a young painter friend of mine, we had tried for the first time to visit the unpredictable in the form of a game, giving each other questions and answers whose content we mutually ignored. The basis of this game concealed, not merely the same mechanism, but also something else that was of particular value to the novice, in helping abolish resistance. I remember that, on a number of cases, the result was spot-on as to the associative cohesion and individual originality of images.

Q.- What is the color red?
A.- A slap-ful of poppies!
Q.- What is glory?
A.- A mountain to be watched by the centuries!
Q.- What is a crysanthemum?
A.- A good-hearted day in the glass.
Q.- What are the Pleiades?
A.- The poets' hiding place.
Q.- What is poetry?
A.- Fornication ad infinitum.
Q.- What is the eagle?
A.- That which we place high above our head.
Q.- What are the four seasons of the year?
A.- A peacock, a calandra, and two great seas.


Or, again, in a variation of the same game:

- When the bows of the day are untied
- The arbute berries shout their name out loud.
- When the goby muddies its waters
- The cat's flag changes three colors
- When the girl catched a May-bug
- The noon's spinning top shines inside her head.
- If we had no young children
- Our fields would be orphans.
- If we were content with the cherry tree's buzz
- The one the two the three would refresh us.
- If Chance unloaded carobs
- A thousand sailboats would be crossing the oceans.

No one will be justified in laughing, in saying that these are not serious things but games. Apart from the fact that there is no harm in playing from time to time, the truth is that the principle concealed in these games is very serious indeed: they knock on the door of the Unknown, entrust the value of Chance, create a new perspective, untie the poet's fingers, kept for so long apart from the wealth of the world of assimilation. Now, returning to my forgotten notebooks, which contain about a hundred poems, divided into series, I get lost in a multitude of titles, which I enjoy even today, on account of their chromatic quality, or even - why not? - their very prodigality. In some of them, the image attains an objective value: Disappointment below zero. The bay and its pulse. Unhooking of summer hour. Theneighbouring lighthouse as a lenient dive. Assisted by daffodils. Pastoral ark. In the interior of the shiver. Warm fold construction of woman. Replacement of destiny. Azure waste. Like a foliage beside her. Ms. Aprils. Angelousa. On the head of a NW wind. Elsewhere, I discern titles full of humor, with a disposition for irony or caricature: Husbands in chiaroscuro. The proverbial r. On the superfluity of everyday existence. In the refreshments room of illegal delight. Finally, there are other titles in which the unpredictable, the magical reign supreme: 789 B.C. Aerodynamic. The stones of noise. The historical crutches. At the haven of our little desires. Journal of the simplest midday. The two-topped ledger. Color collection. Clever outlet feather of matter. Alsing.

Before this kind of orchid, more than a few will halt, overtaken by a sense of comedy or futility. "In the refreshments room of illegal delight." - truly, what a silly title to those who were never granted the pleasure of visiting it and tasting its strong drinks! How stupid these titles are, to all those stupid enough to have never dared enter the interior of the shiver, to pass by the pastoral arks on the head of a NW wind, or in the company of Ms Aprils, to succeed, in an azure waste, or in unhooking the summer hour, in throwing the stones of noise, while writing a journal - the journal of the simplest midday!

Well, then, those too shy of entering a world that represents the mystery of their own creation by a poetic, that is, a vital act, had better not proceed to texts from which all aesthetic concern has been exiled and through which all the education heretofore obtained will be subjected to trial and strife. My first texts are very much reminiscent of Embirikos's. This is not only due to the "literary" language, which should only be expected to expand in an area devoid of will, but also to the difficulty I had in repelling the introduction of exterior impressions, that is, let myself free to train of phrasal associations. Here is an example:

At the bottom of whimpers beaches grow to be disastrous precipes, where virgins naked from the waist up walk on tiptoe. How we dived into these blue flakes, how we passed through these deep-colored films, how we plucked the heads with their celebratory nods, we do not know, nobody knows, except perhaps the headache of a stork raised by the other seas. Once more silence follows silence. Colossi of trees reduce the vision nestling like a warm animal on the pitchforks of their fairy tales. Flying-flashes of lightning and thundering leaps fill our palm with a rainy smell.

The knots of joys are panting and from each one's throat unfolds a white-blonde falsehood.

-----------------------------------("The neighbouring lighthouse as a lenient dive")

There would follow just a few sentences from other texts, whose complete transcription here would be tiresome:

In the final analysis, roses are nothing but tears. Nothing but the whistle of the leaving train and the breach of a promise. Sorrow, too, is nothing but an evening leaning on April.
-----("Disappointment below zero")

The sun would be most delighted to offer his seat but a laughter charms him by tracing a curve that entertains foliages. It supervises his route. He melts of immortality and takes into his cradle the whole vegetation that has become a landscape and the whole landscape that was created after the image of his own emotions.
-----("789 B.C.")

On the 23d kilometer you stopped and inflamed my ears. For a long while afterward I was running (now without you by my side) and hearing your voice that said: me, I love the sun! the sun!
-----("Aerodynamic")

Yet it is not only the influence of Andreas Embirikos, but also that of Nikitas Randos that becomes apparent in my early attempts. It would not be out of place here to copy some excerpts from the series 14 agile poems:

IV
The day turned her face immense heliotrope
And suddenly I found myself on the rear of so many horizons
Like her I would like to be the pride of light
Not to yield anymore to the cup-bearers of wishes
I would especially like each night-reveler to be my opponent
Yet his alliance already disarms me
Forcing me to imagine phials of many colors
In the form of the mouth of liquid girls a wreath
Made of the victories and defeats of the imprisoned time.


VII
In the erotic shadow in the weedy devotion of our two joined hands
And beyond the agility of paths that appropriate all steps
Beside the fire's easy prey and the touch of sunrise
I annoint emotion with time to render it deathly
I fornicate with inspiration to endure for infinity.

XII
All the butterflies inversely proportionate to the colors of flowers
Kidnap my calmness on asymmetric circles
Try it on while time flows carelessly
Amid its agile osiers
Those that have sometimes trained me to adjust to the world
To what answers with no
When the eyelids of chance liberate silence once and for all.

XIV
The alarm clocks of pigeon houses amid your despairs
And the fountains of crysanthemums in the raisings of thoughts that take
--your head
So that time is not wrapped in any wish
That insects feel the earth
And that the sky's back derives pleasure from vision
That falcons baptized by silence clang in magnanimity
The diffused meaning of your old small worlds.


The second part of this period comes to an end with poems written a little later, at the beginning of 1936. In these, a certain hint of aesthetic care is evident:

REPLACEMENT OF DESTINTY

Sensitive as the leg of a girl
Searching for her canaries
Time blows amid geraniums in the yard
Her eternal interview is an ocean

Extracted from ivies
From the mountain of dew
It enters woman
And she caresses the uncombed wind
She runs beside it while stripping naked
So that it does not fall upon her dawn
To bear the fingerprints of destiny

The gaze alone lays down the flowerbeds
Love holds her hand up high
Even above her breast
Wet nurses of so many dreams
And on that very point her lovers die


AZURE WASTE

On the twigs of dew that lives out its secrets
The peacocks of our rays open
Ears of wheat
Dreams of many hours
And the order of words when traced
Like a doves' orbit gleaming with ignorance.


The last automatic texts I wrote, more regular in their linguistic expression and almost thoroughly deprived of foreign influences, are, I believe, those that highlight more clearly my authentic face. The three poems that follow are the only ones I managed to save.

QUARTER TO SIX

As the melancholic voice came out of the well
The white buzzard and the visible sign of the willow
Hours changed the dresses at the garden's corner
The deepest-colored bird asked of berries and ether
Time quarter to six carnations were pleased
One - could not but vanish in the big girl's breast
Another - washed in the water became a nightingale
But the poor man who was holding the wire
Had now lost his hands - a big insect was trimmed
The feast passed by replete with fire
It was a village woman living on butterflies
A fat shepherd full of snow
And a rain-watch with no shadow...
Those who loved the sky's depths are still gazing
And it is truly worth wondering at these snails
Perhaps girls are not visible from the coast
The rainbow is the ease of seeing dreams
Even two days ago little children saw them
The begonias and fruits of the nearby window
Ah how beautiful peacocks are
They cry - and the day unfolds in bliss
You can just about discern the small carriages on the seabed
Even when a violet stays open at sunset
The world leaves with a complaint like a brook
And once again I see my girl I loved so much...

Inside the grass calmness is visible
Only the gardener gets scared and whispers
"Quiet kids - let no clouds perceive us..."


PENTABRINE

So this year too the wood of swallows smelled
Of small talk in churches
The day stood at the threshold - her apron swollen by mulberries
Even with nothing inside you can feel their sweetness
And the sea of sun in the large bedrooms
There you see the water bubbles play on the ceiling
There you lay your pillow and listen to those weeping...

Such big eyes how can they have no room for
The sky's mushrooms - they will all leave fast
And the hair on rocks and windmills
Will begin to blow and clang
A ship coming from afar - entered the roofed balcony
It smells of green soap and mopped floor
Where to hide - it is better to scream
For people to gather everywhere for one to hang one's life - thus
Like a clean cloth in the sun by two pegs.


IN THE SOUTH WIND"S MIST

The windows were shining with bee's joy
Around the meal children were sitting
On the street innocent talk flew from a fountain
Finches deafened the highest branches
"Why children what is it you want so early in the world"
Springtime is not adorned with rains alone
A light wind enters from the iron doors
On the upper part of town shutters are creaking
"Ia...iow...eeeh... - and the echo: owowow...eeeh..."
Passengers opposite a blue peninsula
Came from the Pleiades asking for bread
So let the river flow some more
Let the sea stir some more
Let falcons ascend the enormous mountains
Outside coaches are passing singing in the south wind's mist
The coachmen stand and shout
"Today children today."
At that moment a carnation explodes in the wind
Many weep and converse
Others go silently and lay grass on the ground
So the sun may finally sleep
So the sun may finally sleep.


Techne-Tyche-Tolme, no others, only those three illustrious words (but are they words?) which, with the deep-green ink of grass, the deep-red ink of love, and the deep-blue ink of the sea, adorned the pages of a year, if not the inauguration of a youth. The reduction of truth to a simple, to a profound birth of a living organism, was its sole philosophy. Truly, nothing concerned me more in mid-35 than a vigorous, healthy existence, which might freely extend to the ultimate extremes of a catholic freedom. All else that was to come, of course, came later...

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Paleo-Future Stories (Slightly Abridged) by Panos Koutrouboussis

Here are a few words which may or may not be pertinent to the Historias. I imagine the following possibility:

One day, humans will discover that they are incapable of producing individuals or maintaining "undeveloped" societies with the gift of the particular temperament that is essential for the creation of myths and poetry. This sterility will be the result of the increase and acceleration of cerebral activity, as of the entire rhythm of human life. Of the "overpopulation" of natural knowledge via technology. Of the increasing all-encompassing interest in wealth and power at the expense of creativity. And - closely related, although inversely proportional to the above - of the near-disappearance of the external psychic environment and of the internal psychic personality; those that we heretofore called belief, imagination, humor, heart.

Nevertheless, these future humans will be well aware, by the epistemological studies they will have accomplished, of the cosmic role played by myth and archetypes for all creatures that have intelligence and consciousness of the absolute necessity of the existence of myths for the spiritual and physical health and survival of a conscious Species - for, as usual, when something has all but disappeared, it is only then, at the very last moment, and if we are lucky enough, that we realize its great value.

Until recently, the dominant belief was that the human communities-tribes developed separate "alphabets" of symbols and myths, depending on the conditions under which each one of them had come about. Now, however, new evidence shows that there are common sources of psychic symbols in the unconscious mind of all tribes and peoples. Thousands of myths taken from numerous cultures of the Earth reveal enormous, radical similarities; the archetypal symbols are thus the same for all. A pair of psychologists, Tiger and Fox, established the term "Biogrammar" to designate those common psychic archetypes which are deeply engraved in the spirits of all peoples and all eras of Humanity, unchanged from the primitive eras until now, irrespective of the language and linguistic structures of each people.

So, when people lose their power of myth-making, they will be forced to construct an electronic machine Poet, whose aim will be to undertake the transmission of ancient archetypes and symbols and their rearrangement for the creation of new Myths for humanity; and its name will certainly be Mythographer.

Yet when they do construct this machine, they will have to program it and then keep updating this program with new input. Many of the things they will teach the Mythographer we cannot know as yet. But, along with all the existing evidence concerning the raw materials of all tribes, ranging from myths, epics, beliefs, religions, fairy tales, stories, songs etc., and all the treatises written about them, there are certain recent "lessons" and instructions which are impossible not to include in the Mythographer before it starts its creative work.

On the work of Carl Jung on Archetypes, Symbols, and Dreams, and the work of Einstein and Heisenberg on the laws of relativity, probablity, uncertainty, and chance.

On the fact that the phenomenon called "the cause temporally precedes the effect" is valid only in statistical terms - as revealed by research in the inner microcosm of the atom, where everything is possible - and thus the relations between events, the very nature of time and space, may in several cases not be Causal. For example, a girl may have brown eyes because that will be the favourite color of the man she will meet when she grows up. Or, something may occur today that influenced one's behavious last week.

On the fact that the extent of a Probablity can never be verified. It is, by definition, a forever-unknown quantity, always in a state of uncertainty. Everything in the universe, from the inner world of the atom to the cosmological scale, time and space, the past, present, and future, morality, human relations, all things we know around us are constantly Relative. And...relatively constant.

On the fact that mythic events, by their very nature, often do not obey the various rules we impose on objective (?) reality or the rule of Cause and Effect.

On the fact that it is best to consider the universe as a psychic phenomenon.

On the fact that two or more opposite realities may be equally true.

On the fact that one plus one is not always two.

On the importance of Belief and its relation to knowledge.

On the importance and the activation elements of the Marvelous and the Enchanting.

On the intoxication of unknown pasts.

On the work of Dada and Surrealism.

Let us, however, allow the future to sleep. Many of these Historias Bizarros are closely related to all of the above (the hyper-three dimensions; the past-in-the-future or the future-in-the-past; the present mixed up in both; the machines; the dematerialization; the beyond of reason). Others have almost nothing to do with the Mythographer; they are but a mere facade, a tissue of images aiming at the reader's pleasure.

Yet they are all related to the influence of the "unprecedented" on the "everyday." They all live around a nucleus of para-time. We know them all, yet they are always elsewhere in time and space, like the phantom images which appear sometimes on TV screens. There is something very odd which is never localized, but which may not even exist. Like fairy tales told to children who believe everything they hear.

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Metaphor Templates by Christopher Dewdney

By disengaging a metaphor from its original application and then applying it to a novel setting one can fast breed hypercognitive structures. Conversely, by applying the laws of the metaphor throughout the systemic permutations of that metaphor; eg., if history is a book then limestone must be the pages of that book and fossils the writing on those pages, etc., one can generate novel associative binaries throughout the 'field' of which the original metaphor is but a minor component.

By reversing the causal flow of analogy language becomes a procedural system for generating hypercognitive structures.

As if, like hopeless delusional paranoids with delusions of reference, we couldn't help reading sense into any sequence of words due to the referential bias of language, and that this paranoia of reference is itself the engine of invention.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Some incredible psychedelia via Antony Milton...


“My name is Antony Milton. I am 37 years old and you catch me at the end of one chapter of my life in music. I am writing this in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand where I have lived for the last 9 years. In a couple of weeks time I will be leaving New Zealand for a years travelling in South America. I am at once sad and excited about this change. I am leaving behind people and places I love and putting many projects on hold, but I am also looking forward to a new adventure and to see what happens. I am not even sure whether I will be returning to this city…”

There is a free album download, as well as a bunch more information about Antony and his various projects over at WeHaveNoZen blog.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Thursday, August 5, 2010

The Island of Xiphos by Paul Valery

The Last Atlantis

I am at present in Firgo. It is an island. Or rather, it was an island but today it is joined to the mainland by two tongues of fine sand which year by year are broadening more and more into beaches. The peak of this island is some six hundred feet above the sea and from its topmost rock one sees, or rather used to see, or perhaps used to think one saw, further land upon the south horizon. Actually, those who said they had seen it added that they had never seen it again. They called it Xiphos, and according to them it was the last remaining fragment of the world that preceded ours. They spoke (but in bated breath) of a thousand marvels in it -- marvels such that the chief end of our modern human intellect should be (if there were in existence minds able to tackle it!) to sift out the true from the false in these whispered legends, and with the utmost application to reconstruct the knowledge, the powers, and the desires of those who once lived there. They say they knew a thousand thousand times more than we, or knew something altogether different, and for that reason I wonder if they are really to be called Men. They would refuse us the name, no doubt; so perhaps we should speak of them as angels or as demi-gods. Our relative situation is barely analogous to that which subsisted between Europeans and the most primitive savages encountered in exploration.

After all why should not the irradiated generative surface of the earth have brought to being species as superior to man as he is to the other mammals?

Gozon remarked in good faith: "They possessed every sort of morality, and I possess every sort of morality. I am wicked and I am virtuous and both to excess. There is no one more impious or more devout than I feel myself to be. Truly, my nature defies definition. It pushes me to extremes -- contradictory ones! So that I feel that I am quite literally nothing. Perhaps I am some lone survivor from that era in which the sexes were not yet separate, nor was science yet divorced from art, nor strength from grace, nor freedom from the knowledge of law, nor even vice from virtue? A whole species possessing the protean properties of mind. Their god was like no other. Their dreams were part of their waking, and their waking was busy about more dreams, that were to react upon it at their next waking; or rather to develop in total freedom new combinations, new and rare simultaneity's of sensation."

The most famous of our chess players, those who play ten games blindfolded at once, and win them; our greatest mathematical prodigies: compared with most of those islanders they would be of no more than children counting on their fingers.

It appears that their senses were as superior to ours in their powers of analysis as in their powers of combination. They say some of them had never heard two sounds that were identical: they distinguished two notes of the same pitch sounded upon the same instrument under the same conditions....

Love. There are only two things the living have to do: to feed and breed. All else is inconsequence, meaningless, luxury, perversion, distraction.

THE ISLAND OF XIPHOS
...There stood in a little square, surrounded by houses with curious ornaments, of fresh or of faded guilt, a pedestal bearing a woman of flawless beauty, clean-cut as a statue, in a noble pose. Several times a day she was to be heard speaking or declaiming poetry at length. Then she would begin to sing. There was so perfect and so elemental a consonance between the tone, the inflections of her voice, and the successive positions of her body answering from head to ankles to every variation in her breath, that one stood arrested in submission to the power of Purity.

Her function was to fix the language of the country and to sound, as a clock sounds true hours, the most desirable accent and the most elegant syntax of the tongue.

On certain days she would speak the truth to whoever wished to hear it; and she spoke it with so lucid a diction, so searching a cadence, so bewitching a harmony between the expression of her face and the perfection of her speech, and above all with so plenary a concord of her entire body whose least parts in their slightest tensing or most delicate ripple or muscle evidenced that nothing was withheld, no lies whispered aside, that in general everyone was too frightened to question her. It seems that the whole body is incapable of maintaining a lie, and that is why Truth is represented naked. However, I was informed that some persons had protested against using so beautiful a woman so, alleging that Truth is far more often ugly, indeed may be the hideous truth. But no account was taken of this.

She held the rank of priestess. Whether a virgin, is uncertain. Daughter of whom and of whom? I have no idea.

Toward sunset she fell upon her knees....

II

And there was also a grotto scooped out of the mountain by some unknown hand and whose entrance, facing the sea, was shaped to symbolize woman. [Only men would enter it, anointed with unguents, the face veiled.] There, at the brim of the cavern, stood a sort of isolated column, erected in the shadow's cool--yet it was itself always almost red-hot. Whoever touched this fetish was turned into a bull....Groups of girls hung about outside for those who came forth. Etc....

Island of Xiphos (or the place of wicked thoughts)

...At Xiphos there was a god who rejected not merely prayers but even those inward posturings that other gods appear to exact from their creatures. "With the most part of your pretended believers," he would say to the other gods, "what they call their 'faith' is constriction, a craning of the neck, a struggle painful to see, which may become a mere nervous tic; it is something contagious, imitative, born of fear, even of boredom sometimes, and only too often the result of a crude attempt to deceive you. They say to you what they have been taught to say and do not and could not think, but are substituting speech for thought....And what they say to you is pointless. Do they imagine they have something to teach you?

"But I," he added, "I am the god of those who resist me in so far as I am and desire me in so far as I am not. Ah!, they say, if only there were a god! They are not afraid to deny or remain ignorant of such things as they can neither see, nor conceive; or to reduce whatever is offered to them as 'holy', or which they feel to be such, to its true status as a product of their own nature--a product often full of beauty or of power but which can never be of a different substance and modality from the other constructs of their intelligence. In such an attitude there is something I esteem, which is their attempt to abstain from creating and universal lord, and so on."

(The philosophers.) One who took time literally as a Heraclitean flux, and set himself to scientifically investigate the hydraulics of the events and states of that river, attempting to deduce the equations of flow, of pressures, of eddies--of effects of rams.

This approach, applied to impressions, ideas, sensations, actions and reactions of every sort--as though to floats--should yield singular principles and laws.

Effects of relative motions.

How to explain our impercipience of this flux?

Flux as substance (in fact, an unperceived sense-datum because INVARIABLE. Cf. radio-telegraphy, the "carrier-wave").
And flux as alteration--the senses fluctuations of the "modulating-wave"--
Perhaps it is from the interference-beats set up by these two waves, these two aspects of flux, when their ratio is consonant, that we derive our sense of rhythms?

Crystal song of the statue of Memnon.

A--when the sun first shows and the ray strikes.
B--when the sun leaps up--
I, washed in dew--at first I murmur, faintest cries, then sing
--Substance: noise of cracking--Source: sun, on eyes that are blind--and finally the radiance has dried the dew.
I sparkle dumb--

Marriage in Xiphos

...Young marriageable men were shown, one by one, a company of young girls who did not know they were under observation and of whom each wore some token or hair style that would distinguish her from the others.

They said which they preferred, and this was noted.

The same experiment was tried with each girl selecting from among the boys. Comparing their choices yielded various results.

The Temple of Fear

Fear, essential--the basis of every society.
There is no society of heroes. However, a very early attempt at Xiphos.

In the island of Xiphos there was a district in which were confined all those suffering from the disease called Anastrophe. After performing any action its victims immediately performed its opposite--or else its simulacrum: a thing terrible to be seen rather than merely absurd. Other lunatics repeated each action many times over.

--There was a sort of house of Egophobes, where those lived who never spoke of themselves. The words I and Me were never heard there.

The Beggars Oh yes, they had beggars! Some begged for love. Others for esteem. Others for glory. And they looked down upon such as demanded food or money. Some put out their hands for an idea, God bless you kind sir, or a good couplet--or a style that could be called "original."

The Mutes

"All that issues from man is impure" was their view, and so they kept as silent as possible.

They were bursting with love and ideas bottled up inside the precincts of their superstition against all outflowing.

The restorer's philosophy.

"Moral" tale, or prose poem with a refrain.
The restorer of pottery, porcelain, marble, alabaster....Such beautiful words. And then one discovers this man seated upon the steps of the church. He lists his pleasures--one cannot stop listening.

Accident assumed. Philosophy of the broken vase--game of Patience.

Anecdote. A strange torture:

The king ordained ("I condemn you to death, but only in so far as you are Xios, and not in so far as you are You") that Xios should be taken into quite another part of the country. His name to be changed, his features cunningly altered. His new neighbors to be obliged to attribute to him a past, a family, abilities, altogether different from his own.

If he mentioned anything of his former life, they would deny it, tell him he was mad, etc....
They had a family all ready for him, a wife and children who said they were his.
In a word everything assured him that he was who he was not.

A man was certain of something. No one could think what to do with him. They put him in turn into prison, into a pulpit, onto the throne, into a lunatic asylum; they thought of killing him. Others wished to force him to fertilize a thousand chosen women. In the end, weary of all these metamorphoses, he announced that he was certain of nothing, and was left in peace. He took this opportunity to write an "Ethics," which is one of the most influential books in the world. For everybody speaks of it and quotes from it, but no one has read it.

The temples of the true gods:

Fear, Hunger, Desire, Diseases, Cold....
The true gods are the powers and potentialities of the senses.

Monuments. INSCRIPTIONS.
Style.
Treatment of the Sun--colloquial
Worship. The god visible but dazzling.
"With us, god is essentially deniable."

Life was found in the island of Xiphos as copper is at Tharsis, incense and cinnamon at....

Life of a find and potent quality, the product of exceptionally favorable conditions.

Their instincts formidably keen; their sensibility extraordinary. Their intelligence both simple and disciplined--and all these combining or remaining distinct according to simple laws....

In one of the squares of Xiphos was to be seen a flat surface of polished agate, watched over by one who was scholar rather than sage, and upon which rolled endlessly from face to face a strange polyhedron cut in such a manner that it could find no position to rest.

Elsewhere a strange egg danced as if alive at the crest of a jet of water.

The fountains were ingenious and set problems. Some sang.

Motto
That what is may be

This would be one of the inscriptions over one of the gates, literally but not well translated:

Go out to come in

(concern yourself not to know what you know, in order to know how you know it and to know your knowing)

An island without shame--where all go naked, and not merely naked but as free with the body everywhere as we are with our uncovered faces, our mouths, our hands.

A monument all of whose successive shadows, and all the shadows of whose parts, were beautiful, making changing designs. A sort of building casting a silhouette.


This solitary tried out upon himself all the poisons of abstract language. Upon others he tried out the word God. Xiphos, isle of ? simplicians.

Medicine at Xiphos:
Longevity--with preservation.
Prolongation of life with prolongation of the values of life
The wise men. Marriage--after training.
The synthetic animals.

Justice:
Politics and Economics. People who could not agree were shut up together in the same prison until they could.
This worked wonders.

Isle found by chance, floating, repelled by every other body.

Energy:
They had a special sort of electricity.
Religion, mysteries.
Ways and Means.
"A shipwreck put us in possession of your sciences, our own are entirely different."

Monday, July 12, 2010

The Flaming Lips Are My Favourite Band I Don't Really Like All That Much


To be fair, I've never heard an entire album by them, just a bunch of random Youtube videos. And I really do heart their overall presentation, the whole thing where Wayne Coyne is the MC of a neverending New Years Eve party, everyone is blitzed on LSD, and it's all gotten a wee bit weird.

From the little I've managed to wrap my ears around, though, all I can say about their brand of lysergic, slightly discordant and clangy pop is that it's just stunningly okay. (And Mercuy Rev do it better)

I just CANNOT, however, for the life of me see an interview with Wayne Coyne and not only read it once, but usually several times, and some bits repeatedly, just to make sure I truly got that. Almost everything he says is pure gold, like the following bit I culled from this week's Eye Magazine, in which he talks about the "accidental" musical/artistic journey he has found himself on with The Flaming Lips:

"I see this thing unfolding, and I don't know where it's going...I don't know whether if, at the end of this - or if there is an end - we won't just say, 'Wow, the world is more horrible than it is beautiful and I wish I didn't know that.' But I guess we don't really have a choice. We have to be curious andkeep searching, and we don't know what we're going to find."


Yeah. Wayne Coyne. Poet laureate of those who are still wowied by the holy what-the-fuckness of it all. Fuck yeah...

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Have a drug-free psychedelic experience via Toshio Matsumoto’s Atman (1975)

“Toshio Matsumoto’s early 1970’s feature length film Funeral Parade of Roses is widely cited as a big influence on Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange but today we have a truly mad short subject by said director, a simple yet brain-frying (epileptics, beware !) infrared study of a lone, masked subject in a landscape, replete with a chaotic electronic score by Toshi Ichiyanagi. Dizzying and possibly bad for you!”





Thanks Dangerous Minds!

Monday, July 5, 2010



Rammellzee passed away yesterday. Rammellzee is probably best known for Beat Bop, the above record that Basquit did the cover for. He was also in Stranger than Paradise. Rammellzee bboyd, wrote graffiti and rapped. You might remember him as the dood freestyling with a shotgun at the end of Wild Style.

He became a scuplter, painter and performance artist. Or maybe he always was.
Bboy, graffiti and rapping could all fall into those categories.

He was big on the idea that letters were symbols in a intergalatic war of language.
Regardless Rammelzee was one of the orginal weirdo’s in Hip Hop so put him in a cannon that includes Sun-Ra, MF Doom and the Rza. He was assicioated with Afro-Futurism, but he called himself a Gothic Futurist..

I high suggest you listen to this podcast Uncommon Radio did with a very throurough interview with Rammelzee. He talks about the history of hip hop, method acting/skitzophrenia, being self-taught, creating mythology and tons of other uber-interesting things.

Think Sugarhill Gang Meets Philip K Dick.


Scroll down her and click to hear the interview at Uncommon Radio

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Friday, July 2, 2010

A Brave New World

“Tomorrow you’re all going to wake up in a brave new world, a world where the Constitution gets trampled by an army of terrorist clones, created in a stem-cell research lab run by homosexual doctors who sterilize their instruments over burning American flags. Where tax-and-spend Democrats take all your hard-earned money and use it to buy electric cars for National Public Radio, and teach evolution to illegal immigrants. Oh, and everybody’s high!"
— Stephen Colbert
"New thoughts are rare to me now. Thoughts that are worth dancing with in my mind. Thoughts I want to buy a drink, that I want to ask home, that I want to seduce and be seduced by me. That I want to be brave for. Thoughts that scare me..."

Monday, June 21, 2010


"But in reality, it is the inherent failure of representation, both in the visual and the political sense, that continually leads activist-artists to abandon their works and their familiar skills, and to dissolve once again into the intersubjective processes of society’s self-transformation.

This moment of dissolution is where one could locate exodus, not as a concept, but as a power or a myth of resistance. On the one hand, exodus is a pragmatic response to the society of control, in which any widespread political opposition becomes an object of exacting analysis for those who can afford to invest major resources in the identification, segmentation and manipulation of what we naively call the public. In the face of these strategies, exodus is a power of willful metamorphosis: the capacity for a movement to appear, to intervene and to disappear again, before changing names and recommencing the same struggle in a different way..."

The rest is here, at Fugutive Philosophy

Litmus: Here You Are



I'll put this is as simply as I can. If you like wooshy Hawkind-style space-rock, you need to head on over to Gary waterworth's blog and download this album right now.

You are most welcome...

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Death Metal Classic!


"James Murphy is (a goD), and one of the founding fathers of classic Florida Death Metal as far as guitarists go.
Stints in Death & Obituary (amongst others) proves his legacy.

On this here beast of a record, Mr. Murphy played everything except drums.
He didn't sing either, but his six-string efforts certainly do.
James drives the tempo & atmosphere of each song with tasteful & memorable riffs that are still unique to this day.

If you haven't heard this, now is the time to be blown away..."

You can download it and listen here at the mighty Lo-Res Viscera

Henry Avignon



"These images are wrought from fierce energy transfer of metals forced to corrode; metal of the earth, alchemical combinations of nickel, gold, copper, iron, zinc, and various alloys first forged to suit the needs of men as second skin and skeletal extension. To captu...re the transformation of such materials is to document the profound process of life cycle and metaphorical death..."

Henry Avignon

Monday, June 14, 2010

The Next Great Discontinuity

"To say writing is artificial is not to condemn it but to praise it. Like other artificial creations and indeed more than any other, it is utterly invaluable and indeed essential for the realization of fuller, interior human potentials. Technologies are not mere exterior aids but also interior transformations of consciousness and never more than when they affect the word." (Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy)

...Kilobytes were stored on floppydiscs. Megabytes were stored on hard discs. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to - well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simply three-and-four dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics...

...Out with every theory of human behaviour from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity...

...In only a handful of years the human has gone from merely dipping into the database to becoming an active component in a human-cloud of data. The interface has begun to reflect back upon us, turning each of us into a node in a vast database bigger than any previous material object. Gone are the days when clusters of galaxies had to a catalogued by an expert and entered into a linear taxonomy. Now, the same job is done by the crowd and the interface, allowing a million galaxies to be catalogued by amateurs in the same time it would have taken a team of experts to classify a tiny percentage of the same amount.




...In the era of The Data Deluge science has become more cloud-like, as theories for everything from genetics to neuroscience, particle physics to cosmology, have shed their linear constraints. Instead of seeing life as a branching tree, scientists are now speaking of webs of life, where lineages can intersect and interact, where entire species are ecological systems in themselves. As well as seeing the mind as an emergent property of the material brain, neuroscience and philosophy have started to consider the mind as manifest in our extended, material environment. Science has exploded, and picking up the pieces will do no good...

...Through the topology of the network we have begun to perceive what Michel Serres calls, 'The World Object,' an ecology of interconnections and interactions that transcends and subsumes the causal links propounded by grapholectic culture. At the limits of science a new methodology is emerging at the level of the interface, where masses of data are mined and modelled by systems and/or crowds which themselves require no individual understanding to function efficiently. Where once we studied events and ideas in isolation we now devise ever more complex multi-dimensional ways for those events and ideas to interconnect: for data sources to swap inputs and output; for outsiders to become insiders...Thought has finally been freed from temporal constraint, allowing us to see the physical world, life, language and culture as multi-dimensional, fractal patterns..."

Thanks Space Collective!

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Fell Voices September 24th, 2009 Live at Thee Parkside

More Max...

"So long as man is entangled in the movements of the world and embarrassed by relations to the world -- and he is so till the end of antiquity, because his heart still has to struggle for independence from the worldly -- so long he is not yet spirit; for spirit is without body, and has no relations to the world and corporeality; for it the world does not exist, nor natural bonds, but only the spiritual, and spiritual bonds. Therefore man must first become so completely unconcerned and reckless, so altogether without relations, as the Skeptical culture presents him -- so altogether indifferent to the world that even its falling in ruins would not move him -- before he could feel himself as worldless; i. e., as spirit. And this is the result of the gigantic work of the ancients: that man knows himself as a being without relations and without a world, as spirit..."

Max Stirner, The Ego And Its Own

Monday, June 7, 2010

"If the child has not an object that it can occupy itself with, it feels ennui; for it does not yet know how to occupy itself with itself. The youth, on the contrary, throws the object aside, because for him thoughts arose out of the object; he occupies himself with his thoughts, his dreams, occupies himself intellectually, or "his mind is occupied."

The young man includes everything not intellectual under the contemptuous name of "externalities." If he nevertheless sticks to the most trivial externalities (e.g. the customs of students' clubs and other formalities), it is because, and when, he discovers mind in them, i.e. when they are symbols to him.

As I find myself back of things, and that as mind, so I must later find myself also back of thoughts -- to wit, as their creator and owner. In the time of spirits thoughts grew till they overtopped my head, whose offspring they yet were; they hovered about me and convulsed me like fever-phantasies -- an awful power. The thoughts had become corporeal on their own account, were ghosts, e. g. God, Emperor, Pope, Fatherland, etc. If I destroy their corporeity, then I take them back into mine, and say: "I alone am corporeal." And now I take the world as what it is to me, as mine, as my property; I refer all to myself.

If as spirit I had thrust away the world in the deepest contempt, so as owner I thrust spirits or ideas away into their "vanity." They have no longer any power over me, as no "earthly might" has power over the spirit.

The child was realistic, taken up with the things of this world, till little by little he succeeded in getting at what was back of these very things; the youth was idealistic, inspired by thoughts, till he worked his way up to where he became the man, the egoistic man, who deals with things and thoughts according to his heart's pleasure, and sets his personal interest above everything. Finally, the old man? When I become one, there will still be time enough to speak of that..."

Max Stirner, The Ego And Its Own

Thursday, June 3, 2010

The Solar Anus
By Georges Bataille


It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne's thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.

But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.

Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.

Gold, water, the equator, or crime can each be put forward as the principle of things.

And if the origin of things is not like the ground of the planet that seems to be the base, but like the circular movement that the planet describes around a mobile center, then a car a clock, or a sewing machine could equally be accepted as the generative principle.

The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive's wheels and pistons.

These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other.

Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus.

It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements that the alchemists sought as the philosopher's stone.

It is through the use of this magically valued combination that one can determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements.

An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality.

An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love.

A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love.

A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others.

In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches.

Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

Love or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager's vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments.

They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors.

The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass.

I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens.

It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting.

The planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return it, completing their rotation.

Movement is a figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another.

But the forgetting that determines it in this way is only a subterfuge of memory.

A man gets up as brusquely as a specter in a coffin and falls in the same way.

He gets up a few hours later and then he falls again, and the same thing happens every day; this great coitus with the celestial atmosphere is regulated by the terrestrial rotation around the sun.

Thus even though terrestrial life moves to the rhythm of this rotation, the image of this movement is not turning earth, but the male shaft penetrating the female and almost entirely emerging, in order to reenter.

Love and life appear to be separate only because everything on earth is broken apart by vibrations of various amplitudes and durations.

However, there are no vibrations that are not conjugated with a continuous circular movement; in the same way, a locomotive rolling on the surface of the earth is the image of continuous metamorphosis.

Beings only die to be born, in the manner of phalluses that leave bodies in order to enter them.

Plants rise in the direction of the sun and then collapse in the direction of the ground.

Trees bristle the ground with a vast quantity of flowered shafts raised up to the sun.

The trees that forcefully soar end up burned by lightning, chopped down, or uprooted. Returned to the ground, they come back up in another form.

But their polymorphous coitus is a function of uniform terrestrial rotation.

The simplest image of organic life united with rotation is the tide. From the movement of the sea, uniform coitus of the earth with the moon, comes the polymorphous and organic coitus of the earth with the sun.

But the first form of solar love is a cloud raised up over the liquid element. The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a storm and falls back to earth in the form of rain, while lightning staves in the layers of the atmosphere.

The rain is soon raised up again in the form of an immobile plant.

Animal life comes entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside bodies, life continues to come from salt water.

The sea, then, has played the role of the female organ that liquefies under the excitation of the penis.

The sea continuously jerks off.

Solid elements, contained and brewed in water animated by erotic movement, shoot out in the form of flying fish.

The erection and the sun scandalize, in the same way as the cadaver and the darkness of cellars.

Vegetation is uniformly directed towards the sun; human beings, on the other hand, even though phalloid like trees, in opposition to other animals, necessarily avert their eyes.

Human eyes tolerate neither sun, coitus, cadavers, nor obscurity, but with different reactions.

When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.

It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.

For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are expressed only by the JESUVE.

The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus.

Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails.

Those contents shoot out with a racket and fall back, streaming down the sides of the Jesuve, spreading death and terror everywhere.

In fact, the erotic movements of the ground are not fertile like those of the water, but they are far more rapid.

The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its surface.

The Jesuve is thus the image of an erotic movement that burglarizes the ideas contained in the mind, giving them the force a scandalous eruption.

This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below.

Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.

The erotic revolutionary and volcanic deflagrations antagonize the heavens.

As in the case of violent love, they take place beyond the constraints of fecundity.

In opposition to celestial fertility there are terrestrial disasters, the image of terrestrial love without condition, erection without escape and without rule, scandal, and terror.

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.

I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.

The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.

The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.

Thanks so much to The Grey Lodge Occult Review!

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