An Infinite Regress In the Eternal Return.

king_felix @ 2009-11-15T20:53:00

2009-11-16T01:53:09Z

This, in the end, will stop nothing.

Technology is an unstoppable force. Where can anyone draw the line? It's the only God we know, and as with any other god, It is both beautiful and monstrous. We fashioned It from our fears, the label of God, we will apply retroactively. Asimov, for his part, called it as he saw it.

The Body Electrified

2009-11-16T00:53:09Z

In discussing O'Connor's Wise Blood with her class, Amy Hungerford separates the depiction of body, specifically the female body as being a thing all parts and no whole, from a Christian framework and places it within a feminist one. I think this is a grave mistake. They are related, but the feminist view needs to be rooted within the staunch Catholicism that O'Connor espoused. This depiction of grotesqueness, as something which causes aversion, that makes us want to shrink away, that in certain cases conjures the images of parts on the floor of butcher shop or a murder scene is a sort of warning about sexual power. Sexual power, within the context of art, culture and religion, is something that has historically been almost exclusively female. It's why in Christian Evangelical revival communities, women wear shapeless sacks, or why Muslim women cover themselves up -- the power of their figure to excite is something both selfishly cherished (to be shared only with the husband) and something to be feared, because it leads down the devil's path. A women doesn't lead an army, but lust can make a general do crazy fucking things. So we're getting a viewpoint of the body, as say, Pope Innocent III would have us view it:

Man was formed of dust, slime, and ashes: what is even more vile, of the filthiest seed. He was conceived from the itch of the flesh, in the heat of passion and the stench of lust, and worst yet, with the stain of sin. He was born to toil, dread, and trouble; and more wretched still, was born only to die. He commits depraved acts by which he offends God, his neighbor, and himself; shameful acts by which he defiles his name, his person, and his conscience; and vain acts by which he ignores all things important, useful, and necessary. He will become fuel for those fires which are forever hot and burn forever bright; food for the worm which forever nibbles and digests; a mass of rottenness which will forever stink and reek...

----------

Man is conceived of blood made rotten by the heat of lust; and in the end worms, like mourners, stand about his corpse. In life he produced lice and tapeworms; in death he will produce worms and flies. In life he produced dung and vomit; in death he produces rottenness and stench. In life he fattened one man; in death he fattens a multitude of worms. What then is more foul than a human corpse? What is more horrible than a dead man? He whose embrace was pure delight in life will be a gruesome sight in death.

Of what advantage, then, are riches, food, and honors? For riches will not free us from death, neither food protect us from the worm nor honors from the stench. that man who but now sat in glory upon the throne is now looked down on in the grave; the dandy who once glittered in his palace lies now naked and vile in his tomb; and he who supped once on delicacies in his hall is now in his sepulcher food for worms...

This, I think, is how we should look at O'Connor's work, and not, at least primarily, through the lens of myriad ritual and abuses to which southern women had to subject themselves to in order to attain the cultural trappings of beauty.

I think Hungerford gets back on track when she starts talking about O'Connor's fight with lupus, and the distortion of her own body.

Blah blah blah.

If that made any sense, I'll give myself a star sticker later.

Sacred Heart, Wise Blood

2009-11-15T23:53:46Z

The manifold narrative of our lives isn't so much composed of threads but long, perilous branches spiraling incomprehensibly helix-like, narrowing here, widening there, forcing us into uncomfortable, and more importantly, uncontrollable situations.

I'm twenty-seven, older now than I was yesterday, and more ignorant yet than when I was five. I think I understood more then, and there certainly was a hell of a lot more magic in the world. That magic's now governed over by some shadow council of unseen mages, for I still understand little, and have no one to petition for the redress of grievances other than the impotent core of some dimly seen and only half-asserted self.

But I guess there's always the Ellsworth philosophy: Here I am, beholden to no human cocksucker.

Had the single most disturbed night of sleep in ages. Going mad at work. Re-reading old entries from a year ago. Here's one.

Also: Modern American Novel.

Chi-City Christmas Giveaway!

2009-11-15T16:59:45Z

Planetwalker

2009-11-15T14:19:21Z

king_felix @ 2009-11-15T08:20:00

2009-11-15T13:20:17Z

The word crosswise has a cameo.

2009-11-14T15:58:36Z

Tired at work. Feel really out of it. Trouble focusing, definitely not at the top of my game. But, in the intermezzos of boredom, I occasionally will shit something out, for no reason other than a shameful love for an ignorant internal voice:

Mental boundaries
collapse
are redrawn
Strangers become lovers
Hometowns
lathe-worked by time
worn to vestigial impressions;
dust-clad backwoods
besotted memory
poverty religion
greedy ambivalence
and huts husked of humans
like corn
Nanking
Oreos
sleevelessly spent
Nintendo cartridges
where no spiritual exhale
can resurrect knock off
duck plumbers
in the curves of your father’s face
the Roman Empire rising
from the ashes of
time’s arrow, crosswise
Saint Peter vomiting
anti-gravity ochre
dust
the Gehenna of endless
tummy aches
Angels sing
jazz hands
ShamWow
chalk wafting from brittle bone
mouths open
tuna breath
understanding nothing
Having eternity in constant view
what do they know of human things:
love, hate, fear, greed, lust and
The balkanizing force of
Unstoppable technology:
Canard Digérateur, player pianos
horseless carriages, pet rocks,
The Constitution, cell phones,
pocket pussies that tweet
baby-pink Barbies
How can they understand
not having been
Womanborn
Womanloved
Womanworn

(Really thrown together, so, if I feel like it in a few minutes, it'll probably change, a lot, become unrecognizable, or, I'll lock it up in a basement like an unwanted child and starve it of attention, affection, and the faculty of human speech, until its a full grown mockery of something that passes for human.)

Brazen Copyright Violations.

2009-11-14T12:43:32Z

The other day toddzombie recommended the David Young translation of the Duino Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke. I'm sure most of it is being lost on my excessively dull mind, but I'll share the bits of it that strike me. The first I'll share (Elegy #10) is my favorite thus far (though it is only so by a very slim margin when compared to certain segments of the other elegies.)

Pardon, but there's no way for me to retain the form of the poem here, so just having the line breaks will have to do. I've also added an extra break between the periods, because without the format, and without breaks, it'd be a gigantic block of texts that would be much harder on the eyes.

That someday
at the close of this
fierce vision
I might sing praise
and jubilation to
assenting angels.

That the heart's
clear-striking hammers
might not falter
from landing on
slack or doubtful
or snapping strings.

That my face, streaming
might make me
more radiant
that this homely weeping
might bloom.

Oh you nights
that I grieved through
how much you will
mean to me then.

Disconsolate sisters
why didn't I kneel
more fully
to accept you
and lose myself more
in your loosened hair?

How we squander our sorrows
gazing beyond them
into the sad
wastes of duration
to see if maybe
they have a limit.

But they are
our winter foliage
our dark evergreens
one of the seasons
of our secret year
-- and not only a season
they are situation,
settlement, lair,
soil, home.

It's true, though:
how strange are the back streets
of Pain City
where, in the false silence
created from too much noise
there swaggers out
the slop that's cast
from the mould of emptiness
the gilded hubbub
the bursting monument.

Oh how an angel
would stamp out their
Consolation Market
leaving no trace
-- the church beside it too
bought ready-made
as swept and shut tight
and disappointed
as a post office
on Sunday.

Out further, through
there are always
the rippling edges of the Fair.

Freedom's swing-rides!
Zeal's divers and jugglers!
And tarted-up Good Luck's
lifelike shooting range
where the tin targets
ring and flop over
when a better shot hits them.

From cheer to chance
he lurches on
since booths
to please all curiosities
babble and drum
and tout their wares.

Special Attraction for Adults:
How Money Reproduces
Anatomically Valid
Not Just Entertainment
Money's Own Genitals
Nothing Left Out
The Act Itself
It's Educational
and It Helps
Make You Potent...

Oh, but just outside
beyond the last
billboard plastered
with ads for "Deathless"
that bitter beer
that tastes sweet
to its drinkers
as long as they keep chewing
fresh distractions --
just behind that billboard
right there
everything's real.

Children play there
and lovers embrace
off to one side
so seriously
in the sparse grass
where dogs do doggy things.

The young man is drawn
further -- maybe he's fallen
in love with a young Lament...
He follows her into the meadows
she says:
It's a long way.

We live out there...
Where?
And the young man follows.
Roused by the way she moves.

Her shoulder, her neck --
maybe she comes from
a splendid race.

But he leaves her
goes back, turning
to wave... What's the use?
She's a Lament.

Only those who've died young
in their first state
of timeless calm
-- their weaning --
follow her lovingly.

She waits for young girls
and befriends them.

Gently she shows them
what she wears.

Pearls of pain
and the fine-spun
veils of Patience.

With young men
she walks along
in silence.

But there where they live
in the valley
one of the older Laments
answer the youth
when he questions her:
We were once
she says,
a great race
we Laments.

Our fathers worked the mines up there
in the mountain-range
sometimes among men
you'll find a polished
lump of primeval Pain
or the petrified slag
of Anger from
an old volcano.

Yes, that came from up there.
We used to be rich.

And she leads him lightly
through the broad
landscape of Lamentation
shows him the columns of temples
or ruins of castles
from which the Lords of Lament
once ruled the land wisely.

Shows him the tall tear trees
and the fields of sadness in bloom
(what the living now only
as tender foliage)
shoes him the herds of grief
pasturing
and sometimes
a bird startles
and writes
as it flies flatly
through their field of vision
the image of its solitary cry.

In the evening
she leads him to the graves
or the ancients
of the race of Laments
the sibyls
and the lords of warning.

But when night comes
they go more slowly
and soon there looms ahead
in the moonlight
the sepulcher
that watches over everything.

twin brother to the one on the Nile
that tall Sphinx
the silent chamber's
countenance.

And they marvel
at the regal head
that has silently
and forever
set the human face
to be weighed
on the scale
of the stars.

His sight, still dizzy
from early death
can't grasp it.

But hers
frightens the owl
from behind the rim
of the crown.

And the bird
brushing with slow
downstrokes
along the cheek
-- the one
with the roundest curve --
inscribes faintly
on the new sense of hearing
that follows death
an indescribable outline
as if on the doubly opened
page of a book.

And higher up, the stars.
New ones.
Stars of the Painlands.

Slowly, the Lament
tells him their names:
"Here -- look:
the Rider
the Staff
and that dense constellation
they call the Fruitgarland.

Then further up
toward the Pole:
the Cradle, the Path
the Burning Book
the Puppet, the Windows.

But in the southern sky
pure as within the palm
of a consecrated hand
the clear, shining M
that stands for Mothers...."

But the dead man
must go on
and silently
the older Lament
takes him as far as the gorge
where the spring
the source of Joy
shimmers in moonlight.

She names it with reverence
saying:
"In the world of men
this is a life-bearing stream."

they stand
at the foot
of the mountain
and there
she embraces him
crying.

Alone, he goes off climbing
into the mountains
of primal Pain.

And not even
his footstep
rings from this soundless fate.

Yet if these
endlessly dead
awakened a simile for us
look, they might point
to the catkins
hanging from empty hazeltrees
or else they might mean the rain
that falls on the dark earth
in spring.

And we
who always think
of happiness rising
would feel the emotion
that almost startles us
when a happy thing falls.

Pomplamoose

2009-11-14T11:10:53Z

Nature Boy.

Mouse, Ever Popular Cat Drama.

2009-11-14T05:25:25Z

Assenting Angels.

2009-11-14T03:07:26Z

Blood Meridian;

The old man didnt answer. He turned his head suddenly aside and seized his nose between his thumb and forefinger and blew twin strings of snot onto the floor and wiped his fingers on the seam of his jeans. I come from Mississippi. I was a slaver, don't care to tell it. Made good money. I never did get caught. Just got sick of it. Sick of niggers. Wait till I show ye something.

He turned and rummaged among the hides and handed through the flames a small dark thing. The kid turned it in his hand. Some man's heart, dried and blackened. He passed it back and the old man cradled it in his palm as if he'd weigh it.

They is four things that can destroy the earth, he said. Women, whiskey, money, and niggers.

They sat in silence. The wind moaned in the section of stovepipe that was run through the roof above them to quit the place of smoke. After a while the old man put the heart away.

That thing costed me two hundred dollars, he said.

You give two hundred dollars for it?

I did, for that was the price they put on the black son of a bitch it hung inside of.

He stirred about in the corner and came up with an old dark brass kettle, lifted the cover and poked inside with one finger. The remains of one of the lank prairie hares interred in the cold grease and furred with a light blue mold. He clamped the lid back on the kettle and set it in the flames. Aint much but we'll go shares, he said.

I thank ye.

Lost ye way in the dark, said the old man. He stirred the fire, standing slender tusks of bone out of the ashes.

The kid didnt answer.

The old man swung his head back and forth. The way of the transgressor is hard. God made this world, but he didnt make it to suit everybody, did he?

I dont believe he much had me in mind.

Aye, said the old man. But where does a man come by his notions. What world's he seen that he liked better?

I can think of better places and better ways.

Can ye make it be?

No.

No. It's a mystery. A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it. You believe that?

I dont know.

Believe that.

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, give a man religion and he'll pray for fish until he dies

2009-11-08T23:36:40Z

In 1852, half of the population of New York and Boston were foreign born. Three million people were coming in by the year. There has been a cycle of hysteria as regards newly arrived immigrants in this country. We've had problems with Irish, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Mexicans, Muslims, homosexual Morlocks, etc. I'm not about to put in the work right now, but I'd like to know the present demographic break down of New York and Boston, and what three million people would be if adjusted for current world population. I know that the roughly 1,030,000 that would perish in a little over a decade later (from 1852) equates to nearly ten million by today's reckoning.

A specific, vociferous portion of the Western world needs to learn some moderation, and find a way to temper its vice of doom-and-gloom hysteria. For a people so amorous of tradition as a check on others, they are unabashedly blind to their own past.

The Crazed.

2009-11-08T21:08:27Z

king_felix @ 2009-11-07T17:11:00

2009-11-07T22:28:08Z

TV news media in America has become a pimp whose chief product is dolled catharsis aimed at necrophiliacs.

I don't know the rest of the world. Maybe they're already there, or following. It's insulting, and I don't know who watches this shit, or why for that matter. What I do know is that they're probably retarded. If they also happen to read the newspaper, then they're well-informed retards.

O Dead! O Fallen! O Bereaved! O America! O Freedom! O spilt blood! O Child-rape! O missing women! O Constitution! O Disease, death, despair, destruction, Socialism, Islamofication, pop stars, celebrities, cellulite, fat, epidemics, tidal waves, hurricanes, tsunamis, O Lord, Your Mighty Vengeance!

king_felix @ 2009-11-07T13:48:00

2009-11-07T18:48:55Z

The British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History (1961), theorized that all civilizations pass through several distinct stages: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration.

Toynbee argues that the breakdown of civilizations is not caused by loss of control over the environment, over the human environment, or attacks from outside. Rather, ironically, societies that develop great expertise in problem solving become incapable of solving new problems by overdeveloping their structures for solving old ones.

The fixation on the old methods of the "Creative Minority," leads it to eventually cease to be creative and degenerates into merely a "Dominant minority" (that forces the majority to obey without meriting obedience), failing to recognize new ways of thinking. He argues that creative minorities deteriorate due to a worship of their "former self," by which they become prideful, and fail to adequately address the next challenge they face.

king_felix @ 2009-11-07T13:46:00

2009-11-07T18:46:20Z

10 And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; 11 And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

Baron Sengir.

2009-11-07T06:43:44Z

king_felix @ 2009-11-07T00:33:00

2009-11-07T05:33:33Z

Obscure, Abstruse, Recondite, Bullshit.

2009-11-05T09:13:44Z

Old doubts returned home having traveled abroad for a classical education. In those strange, dark places they mastered the trivium, tasted snake blood, prayed to odd gods with stranger supplications, and recovered from exotic diseases. I don't know what this phase I'm going through is, but the off days are more frequent than the on, and I worry that my best years have past me, that my mind is in rapid decline (here and there, my internal monologue is full of words reached for and not found). And then I feel this subtle tinge of shame at this pretension to knowledge, this aspiration for the arts, juxtaposed with all my talk, all my failures, and my background in general. Shame is a terrain I'm familiar with; I've been there, camped, vacationed, and finally sagged into a sedentary, high fructose-fed existence. But this, this is something altogether fresh.

Dude, that's my couch.

2009-11-04T20:08:57Z

The Parson and the Pardoner.

2009-11-03T07:19:51Z

The satire and complaints survive because they are written down. They leave an impression of a Church so pervaded by venality and hypocrisy as to seem ripe for dissolution, but an institution so in command of the culture and so rooted in the structure of society does not readily dissolve. Christianity was the matrix of medieval life: even cooking instructions called for boiling an egg "during the length of time wherein you can say a Miserere." It governed birth, marriage, and death, sex, and eating, made the rules for law and medicine, gave philosophy and scholarship their subject matter. Membership in the Church was not a matter of choice; it was compulsory and without alternative, which gave it a hold not easy dislodged.

As an integral part of life, religion was both subjected to burlesque and unharmed by it. In the annual Feast of Fools at Christmastime, every rite and article of the Church no matter how sacred was celebrated in mockery. A dominus festi, or lord of the revels, was elected from the inferior clergy--the cures, subdeacons, vicars, and choir clerks, mostly ill-educated, ill-paid, and ill-disciplined--whose day it was to turn everything topsy-turvy. They installed their lord as Pope or Bishop or Abbot of Fools in a ceremony of head-shaving accompanied by bawdy talk and lewd acts; dressed him in vestments turned inside out; played dice on the altar and ate black puddings and sausages while mass was celebrated in nonsensical gibberish; swung censers made of old shoes emitting "stinking smoke"; officiated in the various offices of the priest wearing beast masks and dressed as women or minstrels; sang obscene songs in the choir; howled and hooted and jangled bells while the "Pope" recited a doggerel benediction. At his call to follow him on pain of having their breeches split, all rush violently from the church to parade through the town, drawing the dominus in a cart from which he issues mock indulgences while his followers hiss, cackle, jeer, and gesticulate. They rouse the bystanders to laughter with "infamous performances" and parody preachers in scurrilous sermons. Naked men haul carts of manure which they throw at the populace. Drinking bouts and dances accompany the procession. The whole was a burlesque of the too-familiar, tedious, and often meaningless rituals; a release of "the natural lout beneath the cassock."

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

...Very devout like his great-grandfather St. Louis, though not his equal in intelligence or will, Philip [VI] was fascinated by the all-absorbing question of the Beatific Vision: whether the souls of the blessed see the face of God immediately upon entering Heaven or whether they have to wait until the Day of Judgment.

The question was of real concern because the intercession of the saints on behalf of man was effective only if they had been admitted into the presence of God. Shrines possessing saints' relics relied for revenue on popular confidence that a particular saint was in a position to make a personal appeal to the almighty. Philip VI twice summoned theologians to debate the issue before him and fell into a "mighty choler" when the papal legate to Paris conveyed Pope John XXII's doubts of the Beatific Vision. "The King reprimanded him sharply and threatened to burn him like an Albigensian unless he retracted, and said further that if the pope really held such views he would regard him as a heretic." A worried man, Philip wrote to the Pope that to deny the Beatific Vision was to destroy belief in the intercession of the Virgin and saints. Fortunately for the Kind's peace of mind, a papal commission decided after thorough investigation that the souls of the Blessed did indeed come face to face with the Divine Essence.

A Distant Mirror, Barbara W. Tuchman

Most fun I've had reading a book of history in a long time. I had to share these two passages. The first, because it sounds like an amazing display, and reminds me simultaneously of aspects of Black Mass as well as Bosch. The second, because I am astounded at how man has tilted at windmills through the course of our short, civilized history.

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky...

2009-11-03T05:59:51Z

That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.

Original, just as hilarious.

Unrelated, but someday, when I dare attempt to make a movie again, this will be my color palette.

king_felix @ 2009-11-02T04:44:00

2009-11-02T09:49:12Z

The troubadour Bertrand de Born, himself a noble, was more explicit.

My heart is filled with gladness when I see
Strong castles besieged, stockades broken and overwhelmed,
Many vassals struck down,
Horses of the dead and wounded roving at random.
And when battle is joined, let all men of good lineage
Think of naught but the breaking of heads and arms,
For it is better to die than be vanquished and live...
I tell you I have no such joy as when I hear the shout
"On! On!" from both sides and the neighing of riderless steeds,
And groans of "Help me! Help me!"
And when I see both great and small
Fall in the ditches and on the grass
And see the dead transfixed by spear shafts!
Lords, mortgage your domains, castles, cities,
But never give up war!

Dante picture Bertrand in Hell, carrying his severed head before him as a lantern.

A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, Barbara W. Tuchman

Dreams.

2009-11-02T09:33:59Z

me: This sounds a lot like a fucked up session of D&D presided over by Terry Gilliam.

Kevin: If my mind does this on simple heart meds, i should never be allowed near acid

me: I imagine you'd just dream of two chairs on endless rolling plains. You're in a white summer suit, and Mary Wollstonecraft is holding a parasol made of a human femur, and mammoth fur, reciting broken gibberish composed of Blake and Ginsberg.

Kevin: That sound like a dali painting

me: Fucked up, but in a way that is absolutely fucking bewildering. More so than a cartoon come to life.

Watch this commercial, or don't, I don't care.

2009-11-02T00:45:57Z