Standing on the deck of the ferry to Halhjem she resents the kind of divine intent on display. The sky is opening everywhere around as the boat plows through the shallow sea. The yellow glow of the horizon shrouded by these gates inspires only something too beautiful. Again and again we are showered upon, angle's weeping a joyful sadness for us.
Because the probability of the little miracle of our petri dish world is too lucky. For a time beyond memory clouds and churned and rained and sweated and rained again. No one is ever this lucky; but we are? It's not possible, except if the troglodyte solution for the Fermi Paradox is true.
She has a theory that we might already be dead and this is our hell, this terrible and beautiful life of ours. And it is likely because she doesn't think a non-omniscient god could create this (especially one that does not love us), but maybe an evil demiurge could. A sculptor and a liar could.
The witch's brew of a cocktail in the water bottle (on top of the evil licorice liquor) has put the boy under water. His toes and fingers wiggle but the air is too thick to move through as if what was normative was suddenly transformed into two meters below the surface (not poolside). He pines to lay in the grass and let the whirlpool and vertigo of an addled brain spin. But there is no grass, only wet gravel of the concert venue as the squallish storms pass by. And then suddenly a rim of hair pokes above the water now and the knawing drunk acidic Hamsun like sult coerces him away from any possible purebred interaction. Now, waistheigh and clamoring into shore, he is satiated, sick, and disappointed as the young night wanes without an erotic native beside him, and also doubly in turmoil after groping the faddor so that there isn't a smashed watermelon on the sidewalk. A pathetic code for a blue bellied man, inoculated with the most viral socializing culture and yet its all for not.
In my class we watched a short video of a Sivuqaq elder telling the story of how the missionary Vene C. Gambell and the people St. Lawrence island (some time around late 1890s) would swap stories, they would tell Gambell the Siberian Yup'ik creation story and he would tell them the Christian creation story and about Jesus. And just by swapping stories the people of St. Lawrence island were converted. I think this shows the radioactive brain-worm that we have created. The Abrahamic and Vedic faiths inadvertently have been cultivated and bred to be this super brain bug that is able to convert/assimilate anyone. What is brought to my mind is the start of greek christianization in the 1-2 century AD and how Christian theology borrowed concepts from the Greeks in order to convert them and fundamentally changed what Christianity was up until that point (from a Jewish sect into a more of what we would call Christianity). How many times has Christianity changed in order to convert a population? The people of St. Lawrence island didn't stand a chance with their insular spirituality/tradition against this (at the very least a) 2000 year old super bug.
In Luther's light, we cast off Church's yoke,
Martin's truth revealed, illusions broke.
Our struggle, to save souls from crooked path,
Built church on hill, with God on throne hath.
Heretics' fire once persecuted us,
God's shield saved us, 'gainst Elbe's treacherous fuss.
Now in righteous fire, the black fray bell tolls,
With Luther's howl echoing from distant knolls.
Each village razed upon the path to Rome,
In mirrored visage, we are both and roam.
Air choked, water poisoned, land in ruin's wake,
Three summers lost, yet at Rome's gates, we stake.
In the year 1544 Martin Luther's health severely deteriorated and in this weakened he believed to be receiving divine revelations from god. He soon collected the people of Eisleben and the surrounding area and constructed a church as according to his revelation atop a hill outside Leipzig. Some people were disturbed by the inclusion of a throne instead of an altar in this church's building. After its completion in the winter of 1545 Luther locked himself in the church and would not ever be seen, communications were only passed on by his new and devoted personal guards stationed outside the church. Parallel to these events in the War of the Katzenelnbogen Succession, William II of Hesse with his catholic army and some latin mercenaries for the duchy of Milan (or the Papal States, it is unknown) razed the settlements near the Elbe River. The spring of 1546 it has been said Luther divulged that there would be flooding of the Elbe and it was “God protecting his flock from those heretics who would destroy them” (Ramsauer translation, 1908). As William's forces moved north, they were caught in a flood where much of their equipment was destroyed and many soldiers succumbed to illness in the days after, proceeding this William's forces retreated back to Katzenelnbogen. The people in the immediate area were not as divested by the flooding due to Luther's revelation a few weeks prior, and Luthur's already fanatic popularity only grew. So when it was said that Luther again had a revelation there was to be a crusade against the catholic church and the burning of Rome by righteous soldiers of God, the force mustered by this small region was massive. An army confederation of around 30000 soldiers marched from the center of the Holy Roman Empire to Rome, burning, pillaging, and killing many Catholic's this force came across.
This is a story from a time before we were old enough to remember, before we were even a gleam in our primogenitor's eye.
This slow eye blinks and reflects days long gone. Across the tundra raced a mass of bodies. The herd of caribou trampled and churned around the winter feeding grounds. The land is depleted and starved just as the caribou after winter, yet they won't relent and begin to chew on mud.
Out from the chewed mud and trampled tundra buds a Dryas flower, small and white. From that flower some pollen floated up amidst the frenzy and was subsequently sucked up the snout of a pregnant cow. The pollen was an emanation of something else and not of the body; the cow went into a craze from an itch and an irritation of the pollen and provoked the herd into a stampede north. Pollen from more flowers were kicked up and infected more caribou, they raced faster and tore up the tundra and kicked up more pollen and raced even faster.
A clear moon sat and watched from the mountains nearby.
The herd raced and raced until they broke onto the coastal plain; many bodies started to give out. They had screamed for sleepless nights and days across leagues of tundra. On the coastal tundra they lay and gave birth to their calves.
And the moon slunk behind the mountains.
This is a story from a time before we were old enough to remember, before we were even a gleam in our primogenitor's eye.
In the frigid expanse of a frozen and desolate landscape, swings ethereal ribbons of green light, weaving and swirling ghost lights. Their luminous tendrils writhe and twist across a studded inky sky, casting aglow upon the crusted and silent plains. A performance for only the mountains and valleys and the things that wander in between. A winter reigning as a sleep and death of the world. In the frozen underworld, where the ghost lights shine above the barren landscape, only the immaterial spirits and the lost souls (poor things who stumbled into this realm by accident) roam. Sometimes the immaterial gives in and invades into the real. Maybe these spirits are so close to emerging that we can see them as they press up against the boundary. Little dreams, desires, and emanations become real for the future. And a child wails.
With the ghost lights and little spring sun overhead.
Blue shift reality and chronal smearing; the internet has profoundly changed the way we experience time, it has compressed our perception and now everything is blue shifted. Simultaneously, and I suppose just as any other point in history, the events increasing farther back in the past are “smeared” together. The 60 and 70's dont have the same cultural zeitgeist, the year of '61 doesn't even have the same culture as '62 so why do we group them as such. Because we at this point are so divorced from that time that they all come together in a gaussian blur of the past. Would it be fair to say there was the same zeitgeist from 2015 as 2016? I'd say no. Although, unlike the past's perception of the past, our present is noticeably compressed and blue shifted.
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There is a seep. The virtual is gaining being as it affects time and our body independently/in spite of not being jacked into it. Spread by memetic plague carriers so that even in relation all comes within the bounds and contact with it. Internet chronologies and cultures.
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I think an aspect of being terminally online is that the physical body is obfuscated, the relation to this object and its characteristics become less important when it is never seen by anyone not even yourself (except perhaps quick moments when the screen is turned off and you can see yourself in the reflection). You are able to allow yourself to be disassociated from this physical thing for the idealized simulacrum online (who presents a negative image of themselves online?).
This also leads into a seemingly inversion of physical obfuscation where the self aggrandises, gratifies, and perform “shallow” narcissistic tendencies. But this exhibitionism and infatuation with the self becomes closer to an “objet petit a”, because what is presented is not really you, it is a near sublime form you wish to ultimately be.
It makes more and more sense to me that only now could these psychological conditions arise. We move ourselves to an “objet petit a”, an auto-fetization that works so neatly into a lesser aspect of commodity fetishim. But maybe it's full circle, in our loss of people being the primary force of social relation to objects, that fact that we (people) then have become objects now allows us to again be the principled entity of social relations.
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What happens to a person with sati but no revolution, maybe it's like the radiation of psychologies of people imprisoned, whether it be cognitive or physical. Horror of the body, auto-fetization, and angst of ideology are at work.
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I'm finding myself relating to the protagonist of “The Source of it” by Glen Malin more and more. It's not even that particularly good of a story honestly. By weird fiction standards its cookie cutter, maybe it was good for the 1940s but since then better stories of psychological horror that deals with mental disease have been written. But I'm reminded of it; I think I'm reminded of it because its the time of the year where I start to dissociate from reality and the nausea/dread from whatever is dribbling out of my device is getting to me. (I am not like the protagonist and don't empathize with him) I too “see” the shadows on people. When people open their mouths I can almost see whatever book/video/talking head they are parroting, whatever memetic infected spittle they're spraying on me and it makes me (i guess) irrationally sad and angry and frustrated. The same flavor of every ideology (because everyones an ideologue and all of them are the same) that act as the written rules of people's behavior and thinking. And I am not different, I can tell when I'm parroting and it makes me sick, maybe I should say anything at all. But saying “nothing” is its own ideology.
If you look closely at someone's mouth while they're talking to you, you can see the little ideologic creature in the back of their throat making the actual noises.
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Basking in divine presence of an eldritch Other, will the kernel (of shadow), rust, and plague be cured. Or are we already damned, creatures of no retribution by design of a malevolent and cruel goddess?
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Ecohorror, the word of the day. Ecohorror is the disconnect between us and nature, we have moved so far that the otherness and unhuman of nature gain monstrous qualities, the senseless violence in nature from the need to consume, but in its most broad strokes its horror with ecology or environmentalism being a main topic. Important media I feel and know of in the genre are: Discover My Body, Burden of Dreams, STALKER, Fool Night, Savenerger Reign, Annihilation, and Flesh Pit National Park. What spurred me to type this quip is reading Fool Night. I should not have read this, it made me very sad and anxious. But the story essentially follows a more extreme reality than our own, our future's (it's set in the future but through aesthetic choices and the themes explored the setting is essentially the present) natural conclusion of the systems/institutions in our own time if continued. I don't think the story is even a cautionary tale but an attempt to capture the zeitgeist of our time, and I don't like it. It's incredibly uncomfortable for this story to hold up a mirror and show my own near-reality.
“The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars; The owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab” -Mehmed II, 1453
The context of this quote is after the Ottoman siege of Constatblue, Mehmed II strolled in the Old Palace in Constantinople and said this excerpt from an unknown Persian poem. He was probably just superficially and emotively commenting on the decrepit state of Constapole after its decline. But there is a subnarrative about if not the constant onslaught of nature tearing down the works and histories of man, to reclaiming space that man has previously occupied. That Rome's curtains are now spiderwebs and the towers of Afrasiab are roosts. We are in the jaws of a monster and we are unaware, for one eye has been plucked out and the other is pointed down the gullet, confused at the dark hole we see. And the hot humid stench of acid only tickles the cheek.
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In the membrane of the transcendental/cosmological horizon is embedded the “kernel”, separating man from the unknowable nature and perhaps is the force that is expanding this membrane into the sacred space of nature.
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As I'm listening to the preface of the sublime object of ideology, Zizek briefly mentions in passing how Ernesto Laclou (and some other guy) theorize of a “kernel” of trauma (what does that mean, is it the antagonistic trauma of existing?) that refuses to be conceptualized, symbolized, visualized, and totalization. Simply it is antimemetic, and if the word existed when Zizek was writing this book im sure he would specifically use this word.
This antimemetic kernel exists on the boundary of the transcendental horizon, I can feel it in a hazy way as hole in my brain that has a pressure, but for the life of me no visualization does it justice, no symbol can completely represents it, and any attempt to define it is lacking, it is nebulous, abstract, and unknowable. Yet its there, and on a meta-level i'm aware it's there.
Its this kernel of trauma is pressures and compleys us to act in our most “human” ways and incur the wrath of nature as this pushes the horizon farther within the space of sacreded.
Such eventide black bells of Alagata in contention in the CRUSH; that even graffitied archaeologies of paleo-ontologist derive a supraline connection to a materialistic-sinewn-Other. The toy philosophies for toy artists. I have my suspicions they're augomaniaic of the worst kind, believing in some platonic christian salvation from their appetites in face of their collapsing free will (the 100 year project has been completed off schedule). Another siren appeared to me last night, she was in a blizzard on top of a pile of eroded ultramafic columnar basalt. She gave me just a little peck on the lips before I woke up, that fem fatale skank killed me too soon! There is a black ooze of our eldritch mother, a transcendental Other, a hyperstitious god, enacting some plan of which we are but a derivation. Caretakers of the shining slime in the pipes. A mountain in the sky ethereal or ghost that looms as a palace (or prison) for unknowable spirits drooling to churn our insides and live in a thin layer between the skin and muscle (they collude with a imps of the mouth). Hot socked BWLs (body without land) bastards and ladies eyes grow heavy as they look at the impossibly far twinkles of (most likely) sodium lamps. For now Xenogothic white nailed spooks are at bay. My stigmata isn't wildin' because i'm not qeshqa, but as if I'm Antony, grapes and other watery fruits get crushed in my new prosthetic steel maw. Internal capital markets drive some sort of Oxus valley war chariots between nodes and clusters of labor (or value Magi). It makes the blood pooling in the bottom of my brain feel hot and itch when I see the obligatory nostalgia and anemoic braindead observations of undetermined aged imbeciles listening to Resonance, Memory Reboot, Little Dark Age, or whatever other cultural bait they (and I) lap up. Thou shall, in no uncertain terms, design the bounty of god into a reflection of its unknowing. This in candid pearlessence of decadent class (governors and barons and princes) simply make the grime of the serf-wizards and arch-mages disappear into filth, maybe in hopes that is where they they will end up too, among the wretched and illiterate because they wasn't that much difference at all in the information economy, white centipedes of nill venom scurry under the brief dim glow of a meteor passing overhead illuminating a wretched and frost filled landscape. Undoubtedly there is info pollution in the info ecosystem, but these might be ill suited terms for processes that do not reflect nature in any way and does not respond the same way to pollution as an ecosystem would. Pollution of the most severe kind causes die off and a fundamental change to a system of near/slow balancing. Info pollution disrupts the old archaic harmony of the faux-binary neoliberal machine and its miasma, this pollution agitates and clusters energy in new forms of religious ethno-nationalistic expression. Whether it be deliverance or the wormwood star of the next social/technological development, the old media is out and the info pollution is here. I'm just out here living in a city of man. Its weird that i'd want to be the guy before dad (kinda sorta). Does a rock feel pain as its skin and muscle is eroded and worn away, why do I don't see such pain as my skin sheds itself, where does the bleeding, pink, and raw underskin begin. Exsalt, for they are not a brain in a bucket, but they are heretics and pagans of the worst kind, worshiping some elder demon that propagates itself among the roots of the Ash trees and mycelial networks. And though I'm nauseous, sick, and slick with a cold sweat, the air smells of summer in mid March, as if whatever manner of sublime thing that usually emerges in the time has come early, early for me. Oh wait, totally, the boots aren't quite so grossed up in some prepubescent slime of a vacation bible school. The low land curs with their foul tongue and encrusted yellow grime of a culture know not what is right, and even if they did it would be lost on them, for they are a morose and primitive race. It might be something in the wetlands and ill forests they call home that has bred them this way. In the Dutch, the Danes, and the Swedes you can tell their bastard nature by looking full and closely into the face of a wet lipped, droopy eyed, and hook nosed beak creature. Something to be pitied and ashamed to be called our fellow man. With the whole world in the hand, the god hand, pretty boy said I was just a flash in the pan. Something jealous coils in between the stomach and the diaphragm, an effect carried in Metropark and Penn station. It's doubtful she can see how much I've begun to love her, she only sees it through the pinhole obscura of culture and a language barrier. I will try not to scare her off for this country's temperament is too infantile. But in all honesty it might be me who is so infantile, throwing this serotonin drenched goo in any direction I see fit, as if I was a dog, mutt, and cur. Beat that dog. I am no man, but I am neither a dog. I am closer to an ovomorph. An inverse of the contemporary cultural milieu and logic onto the relation of impressions made to the hegemonic knowledge base propagated of a man, or to put it simply “I'm not sure about this guy”. Warp speed near epileptic flashing lights through a tunnel of trans and turquoise death.
“Now i'm afraid of forever”
Last seen online is an indie video game where after you buy an old computer at a garage sale, snoop through its files, and solve a couple puzzles uncover the previous owner Liz (username alonegirl15), after the death of a classmate named Kev and with the final catalyst of a fight with her mother, decides to digitize herself into a Second Life-esk game called “Otherworld”/the internet through a satanic ritual (with the help of a user named __orion__ and other members in a group called the “Order”) to escape death and the transient nature of life (losing friends and family). She eventually comes to reget this decision, for after the ritual where Liz and the members of the Order are digitized they become borded of their digital existence, and one by one start deleting themselves (suicide) but in doing so they become like a corrupted file and live in agony. Eventually it is just Liz alone in a disco of in one of these Otherworlds, it is at this point through your snooping you have found Liz and she becomes aware of you and attempts to digitize you to in order to not be alone. She begins to monologue how she eventually came to miss the tragic and transient nature of her life, the fights with her mom, the bad grades in school, the disappointment from other people, the sleep over with her friend Em, and talking to her friend/crush Lawson. And at the climax where she's glad that someone could join her in Otherworld so she wouldn't be alone there is an error in the system and you are not able to be digitized. During this attempted forced digitizing event Lawson has been observing how Liz has been apparently online after her disappearance and leaves a final message to Liz's account on how much he missed her, how many years its been, and how he has decided that it's finally time to say goodbye and move one (a pseudo-screaming into the void action). And that's it, the forced digizing ritual failed and Liz continues to be alone in Otherworld.
During 2 portions of the game (Liz's Monologue and the end credits) I had such a feeling of sonder and onism. During Liz's monologue we see screenshots of user profiles of an instagram-like app, in the bio section where people (sometimes) put important information about themselves we see that Em is most likely married at that point, we also see Lawson's bio, (to our knowledge) the only very important thing in his life at the moment is his religious faith. There are also small videos interspersed showing ambient scenes like a flock of birds, the behind view of a moving train, and rain on a windshield(?). The onism in this section was palpable, these characters moving forward with their lives and making important milestones while you (and Liz) are left in limbo of the quickly aging relic of Otherworld in the past.
In the end credits we see how many people it took to make this game (with all of their socials linked), and as if to mirror Liz's monologue and seeing the user bios off her friends we can also see what all these people are doing now and what might be important to them and how they are progressing in their own authentically complex lives after this game.