Christ's Onkos

Like Origen, that brilliant theologian of the 3rd century Alexandrine church, I'm not much enamoured of a 'birth day' for the baby Jesus. Saying that only sinners like Herod and Pharoah celebrated their nativity is perhaps a little too harsh, and when Christianity went calling in Rome it could perhaps not escape one of the more innocuous facets of pagan culture - the Natal Day. The Emperor had his games, and we have ours. Pin the tail on the donkey, or dress the Christian in a deerskin and release the lions. You get the picture. Perhaps this why I always preferred the just-the-(disputed)facts Gospel of Mark and the majestic Heraclitian Logos of John to the Nativity scenes of Matthew and Luke. Lest I risk being called a heretic, this preference is purely aesthetical. To my eternal shame I never was much of a diaper changer.



The Comet Lovejoy appeared in the East yester-eve like some latterday Star of Bethlehem. It is itself a miracle which should have been vaporized in its close passage to our Sun (which it passed within less than half the distance to our moon). Astronomers were amazed when it resumed its trajectory towards the outlands of the solar system, probably quite smaller in it's mass but no less spectacular in it's tail. Proofed by the refiner's fire, it endures - a symbol perhaps of a remnant Christianity and its founder death and resurrection. Soon, Christ will be a Christmas day black hole whose existence can only be discerned only by observing the bodies that have fallen into his intense gravitational pull until even their light cannot escape. Perhaps that is the way it was meant to be.

Folks increasingly seem unable to get beyond the natural and moral theodicies that run interference between them and God. But the Light that came into the world was always in a Superposition in which the humanity and divinity of the Crucified were there all along. Like the two-slit experiment in quantum mechanics, there is always interference, but the light always shines somewhere.

Suffer the Turkeys

As Thanksgiving Night passes into Black Friday, I pause and reflect upon the proto-holiday as celebrated at the Plymouth Colony in 1621, and it's intitutionalization by Lincoln smack in the middle of this nations bloodiest chapter, the Civil War. I think of President Obama's pardoning of the two turkeys (one is a 'second', should the first one die of natural causes before somebody had the opportunity to chop its head off), which naturally leads to Ben Franklin's musings on the turkey being a more appropriate symbol for the newly minted nation than the bald Eagle (and here I second him). Finally, I think of Thomas Granger.

Poor Tom Granger was born into the Plymouth Colony some four or five years after that proto-Thanksgiving. Sixteen or seventeen years after that he would become the first person hanged in the Plymouth Colony, on or about September 8th, 1642.


He [Thomas Granger] was this year detected of buggery, and indicted for the same, with a mare, a cow, two goats, five sheep, two calves and a turkey. Horrible it is to mention, but the truth of the history requires it. He was first discovered by one that accidentally saw his lewd practice towards the mare. (I forbear particulars.) Being upon it examined and committed, in the end he not only confessed the fact with that beast at that time, but sundry times before and at several times with all the rest of the forenamed in his indictment. And this his free confession was not only in private to the magistrates (though at first he strived to deny it) but to sundry, both ministers and others; and afterwards, upon his indictment, to the whole Court and jury; and confirmed it at his execution. And whereas some of the sheep could not so well be known by his description of them, others with them were brought before him and he declared which were they and which were not. And accordingly he was cast by the jury and condemned, and after executed about the 8th of September, 1642. A very sad spectacle it was. For first the mare and then the cow and the rest of the lesser cattle were killed before his face, according to the law, Leviticus xx.15; and then he himself was executed. The cattle were all cast into a great and large pit that was digged of purpose for them, and no use made of any part of them.

from Bradford's Of Plymouth Colony

In an act of speculative anthropology on the origins of turkey pardons in the Americas, I must note the date September 8th, and the fact that while all the cattle were paraded before the condemned teenager, no mention of fowl is made. That turkey got eaten. Count on it.

As for myself, I'll take a Honeybaked ham anytime.

My Raptorially Splendiferous Left Arm

In August 991 the English led by the Earl Brythnoth suffered a defeat at the hands of Viking raiders at the Battle of Maldon. Brythnoth was an old man and his rag-tag militia stood no chance against the Vikings, professional killers and extortionists one and all. What survives of the anonymous early English poem begins with Brythnoth, presumably, ordering his men to drive off their horses in preparation for pitched battle against the raiders as they came across the causeway from Northey Island on the Blackwater River, then almost as an afterthought:

Whereat one of Offa's kin, knowing the Earl
would not suffer slack-heartedness,
loosed from his wrist his loved hawk;
over the wood it stooped: he stepped to battle.

(Translation from the old English by Michael Alexander, from the Penguin book of The Earliest English Poems.)



Offa will lead the Angles after Brythnoth falls, but it is his anonymous kinsman who lets his hawk fly free that foreshadows the disaster that will befall. To drive off the horses is a military expediency, to let fly the hawk is an acceptance that death comes stalking the battlefield. Offa's kinsman must have really loved that hawk to ride with it onto the brink of battle. After it ends badly for the English, the old Heroic Faith is roused by Bryhtwold, himself almost as old as Brythnoth, as he stands near the body of his Earl: "Courage shall grow keener, clearer the will, the heart fiercer, as our force faileth. Here our lord lies levelled in the dust."








One thousand and seven years later Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen conducted a famous experiment at the University of Pittsburgh wherein healthy subjects experienced a artificial arm made of rubber as being their own. The subjects felt the stroke on the artificial right arm while their own real arm was hidden from view. The phenomenal self-model has long been know to expand our sense of ourselves into space (think of driving a car, riding a skateboard, skiing etc...wherin you experience those things as an extension of self) but in the experiment the mind was tricked into expanding its PSM into a discrete, seperate physicality. And so we come know that a hawk on the fist is no different for Offa's kin. Even so, the hawk is on the fist. There is a contiguity that is not there in the Botvinick and Cohen experiment. Yet I conjecture that Offa's kinsman, if he had an out-of-body experience upon his death at Maldon, watched it through the eyes of his loved hawk

Two nights ago, after an intense manning session with a Red-tail hawk wherein you perambulate about house and yard, introducing the hawk to things it would rather not see (humans, dogs, daytime television) I fell asleep on the couch after I had put the hawk in its mews. I fell into that twilit world while reading my Amazon Kindle, and it was poised in my left hand some inches above my chest and equidistant from my face. On that cusp between consciousness and unconsciousness, I had the distinct feeling that the hawk was on my wrist. I was consoled that as he looked down he could not help but see a human dead to the world, like those hundreds of corpses on the Blackwater River. But I woke with a start before I could fly off in him.

Who Told Thee Thou Wast Naked?

Chapter Three of Genesis relates the Fall of Man from that prelapsarian state of innocence and grace of Eden into sin and enmity betwixt man and his Creator in the World. An understanding according to the Letter, the literal proposition that Man purchased death with his transgression, is merely the other side of the eliminative materialistic coin. Let us call it reductionist religion, and leave the Fundamentalists to toss rocks back and forth with the Scientific Atheists who for their part are just as willfully ignorant of the anthropological insight that is at stake here. The anthropomorphic God who walks through the Garden in Eden during the breezy part of the day searching for the proto-man and finds him ashamed of his nakedness knows that the real sin is the first Self-Conscious Being has come into the world. Clearly, Yahweh's anger is such that we must acknowledge that this is something He might have believed should not be. Consciousness as epiphenomenon - a clear concordance between Scripture and Evolution.

Real German Genius

It's no surprise that it is impossible to find a serviceable English translation of Philipp Mainlander's Philosophy of Redemption. Americans are only too happy to flirt with Schopenhauer, to get randy with Nietzche, to fake it with Heidegger, but Mainlander's theology of the God who wants to die...well...it's really too much. Mainlander believed that un-created God grew weary of contemplating his own beatus and created the world in time in order that he might extinguish himself with it. Mainlander mounted to the self inflicted hangman's noose in his own quarters on a stack of copies of the recently published Philosophy of Redemption. Let no one say he lacked the courage of his convictions - or the will to follow his Christology to its logical conclusion.

Why Obama Should Tell Bibi Netanyahu to go Bugger Himself

Ah, good times. A time to throw red meat to the Neanderthals parked round their infotainment centers. A time for former house painters, CBS flunkies, and mean reverting oxycontin addicted Top 40 radio station DJ's to cry "Ecce Homo" - yes behold the Man-President who would trash the Zionist-American relationship. Throw in the Mormon whose college career consisted in dropping out of a Christology class at Yale Divinity School and the zoo keepers shine forth in all their populist 'fair-and-balanced' integrity and concern for Israel.

What the rabid right shares with Osama Bin Laden is the view that the President is somehow an apostate Muslim. Just look at that name for Chrissake. Yet this is important. It is an ingress for us into Girard's Mimetic Theory of Violence - a characteristic of which is that the antagonists increasingly resemble each other and mirror the others' hatred. One of my reservations about the Girardians, however, concerns how little space they've devoted to comparing the similiarities in the bizarre love/hate triangle of the three great monotheistic faiths - except to hint at some vague triumphalism for Christianity and its concern for the victim.

On first glance at the picture above it would perhaps be easy to mistake it for one of Al-Queda's 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania or Kenya. In fact, it is a picture of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem after it's bombing by the Irgun in 1946 with the tacit knowledge of the Haganah and the Jewish Agency. Irgun and the JA would of course, produce two Israeli Prime Ministers - Menachem Begin and David Ben-Gurion, the former actually being in on the plot and the latter having knowledge of it. Yet Americans could gnash their teeth and wring their hands over the likes of Arafat, who merely mirrored Begin's and Irgun's 'freedom fighting' tactics. Incidentally, the King David Hotel bombing still has the distinction of being the single deadliest act of terrorism inside of Israel, and it was committed by Jewish terrorists. But one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, as Bibi Netanyahu was still eager to point out when he attended a 60 year anniversary of the bombing in 2006 and sought to morally differentiate the Irgun, Israel, himself, from equivalency with the Palestinean (as in ARABS) 'terrorists'. Bibi and all the rest of the Irgun apologists truly think they did nothing wrong. By the logic of Irgun and Israel, which commemorates the site with a plaque not as a tragedy, but as a stepping stone to Israeli statehood two years subsequent, every Palestinean (ARAB) act of terrorism that might eventuate in a Palestinean state is LEGITIMATIZED. If Obama is to be an honest broker, he must rub Netanyahu's face in the shit-stew no less than Hamas or the figment that remains of the PLO.

An Exasperating White Dwarf

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven of afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people who are afraid of the dark."
Stephen Hawking (2011)

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships...having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonize whatever planets they might reach."
Stephen Hawking (2010)

I get it. In Stephen Hawking's worst dreams anthropomorphized aliens engage in acts of terrorism equivalent to British Soldiers handing out smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans. How scientific. We must brush aside Paul's seventh heaven and make elbow room for Hawking's umpteenth universe. At the same time, like a little child, he is half afraid of what he might find out there in dark.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Debt Bomb

Sure, I wouldn't run my household finances that way, but I don't have the ability to borrow money from foreigners for thirty years at 4.27%. As usual, Americans got it bass ackwards, they have their panties in an uproar, they have a wild hair up their ass, their right hand doesn't know what their far right hand is doing, they don't know where their children are, they can't see the forest for the trees, etc etc etc. They piss into the wind and complain when it sprinkles their Reeboks, they shit in the river and complain its too polluted to swim in, they are bigger drama queens than Hamlet, and not half as well spoken.

What about our children? We can't leave them all that debt.

Sure we can. We've been doing it for thirty years. If you owe a bank ten grand and you can't pay, you're in trouble. If you owe a bank a million dollars and you can't pay - the bank is in trouble. Old Wall Street adage. Adjust numbers to your heart's content for inflation. Their future monetary hegemony is assured with each incremental increase in the national debt. We are the terrorists, and we have a debt bomb.

The Chinese and other foreigners own so much of our debt. So what. Are those T-Notes, bills, and bonds secured by real property? No, just the full faith and credit of the US government. Was the phrase caveat emptor ever more appropriate? Nobody is being fooled here. If they want a real return of less than 200 basis points for loaning us money that doesn't have to be paid back for thirty years, well, then let them have at it, and let us spend it on Social Security, Education, Medicare, Universal Healthcare, National Public Radio, etc etc etc. The Federal government is not required to balance its budget like the states, and that is its virtue. Unfathomable for a nation that threw itself a back to back stock market and housing bubbles to suddenly behave like pikers.

The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

Milton Rokeach's 1964 classic, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, has been reprinted by New York Revew of Books Classics. It comes with a pedestrian foreward by Rick Moody, and a mea culpa afterword of sorts that Rokeach wrote a couple of years before he died. The premise of Rokeach's two year experiment is to the challenge the primitive (foundational from the perspective of the Self) belief of three men who all think they are the Christ/God. Rokeach believed that the cognitive dissonance created by confronting this primitive belief might point a pathway towards altering the delusions of the psychotic.

There are great laughs a-plenty, and hilarity reminiscent of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. In fact, it would be difficult to dismiss intertextuality if Kesey hadn't been composing his novel at the same time Rokeach was still running his experiment. But the laughs prove a guilty pleasure, and the pathos that is mostly borne out of the experimenters interference in the lives of the three Christs offers no catharsis. Rokeach understood this twenty-two years after the fact in his Afterword. The experiment was a failure. Primitive delusions were merely exchanged for other primitive delusions. The Virgin Mary was deposed by a Yeti Woman. The ethical lapses that are glaring to the sensitive reader, but not, apparently, to Rokeach at the time, pile up one on the other until you wonder who is the real Dr. Dung (the youngest Christ, Leon Gabor, after altering his Christ delusion, however impermanently, starts referring himself as Dr. Dung).

But it is Leon Gabor who propels the narrative forward to the bitter end. Despite his delusion, there is still a moral center buried under all those psychotic defenses. He alone of the Christs knows what Rokeach is doing is wrong. He alone speaks far truer than he knows when he calls Rokeach the High Priest Caiaphas. Rokeach glosses it, hearing everything with his tape recorder, but never understanding. To those outside Christ was fond of speaking in parables.

Idle Thoughts

• Helen knew herself to be a whore, but neither the Argives nor the Trojans believed her.

• Moses Maimonides wouldn't accept money for being a Torah sage, saying the prophets and sages were hewers of wood and drawers of water and that was how they got their living. Maimonides himself was in pharmaceuticals.

• Lady Liberty's Las Vegas doppleganger has a postage stamp. Botox was used to eliminate the old whore's verdigris. Another argument for iconism in meaningless abstractions.

• Gas at four bucks a gallon. An apocalypse for the consumer! Today I laughed at a woman driving a Hummer. I made sure she saw me.

• Walt Disney has eight times as many Facebook friends as Jesus.

• There are hardly any people in the Georgics. They all went to hell with Virgil.






• Listened to a couple of hayseeds who will be suckled cradle to grave on the government teat prattle on about fiscal responsibility. A couple of parricides.

• Led Zeppelin IV is still one of my favorite album covers. It has Cain with his bundle of thorns and The Hermit (would that it were from the Marseille Tarot!). The world and the proper response to it.

The Pause that Refreshes

"On the outskirts of the city they came to a supermarket. A few old cars in the trashstrewn parking lot. They left the cart in the lot and walked the littered aisles. In the produce section in the bottom of the bins they found a few ancient runner beans and what looked to have once been apricots, long dried to wrinkled effigies of themselves. The boy followed behind. They pushed out throught the rear door. In the alleyway behind the store a few shopping carts, all badly rusted. They went back through the store again looking for another cart but there were none. By the door were two softdrink machines that had been tilted over into the floor and opened with a prybar. Coins everywhere in the ash. He sat and ran his hand around in the works of the gutted machines and in the second one it closed over a cold metal cylinder. He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.

What is it, Papa?

It's a treat. For You.

What is it.

Here. Sit down.

He slipped the boy's knapsack straps loose and set the pack on the floor behind him and he put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. Go ahead, he said.

The boy took the can. It's bubbly he said.

Go ahead.

He looked at his father and then tilted the can and drank. He sat there thinking about it. It's really good, he said.

Yes, it is.

You have some, Papa.

I want you to drink it.

You have some.

He took the can and sipped it and handed it back. You drink it, he said. Let's just sit here.

It's because I wont ever get to drink another one, isn't it?

Ever's a long time."

Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

A Wilderness of Mirrors

What you are most afraid of is losing your-self in such a place. The neuroscientists say there is no self. They say the self is a figment of synapses and neurons, environment and genetics. Smart fellows to say there is no self, yet still silly to puff themselves up with the conceit that they are actually saying anything. The self that is born of human generation is useless - little more than the personality we attribute to a dog. This is how Celine can say Love is the infinite placed within the grasp of poodles. This self that attaches to a person through his consumer activities, the 'work' he does, the education he has acquired (for most, this is essentially a trade school education - designed to get them out in the world and making money, hence we differentiate little between the Phd-ed Bio-engineer and the little tart who went College to be a Beauty Consultant) is the life of the self that Christ asked us to leave behind and follow him. Almost all of us are whores though. We wait for advent of a propitious time of year for the throwing over of things that we ought not do or desire in the first place. We delude ourselves. We are little puppies who pretend to forget their bones until they want to chew on them again. This is the self the neuroscientists mean.

But the true self that is born not of human generation is incapable of such self delusion. It sees its fellows preening in the wilderness of mirrors. lording it over others with the impestuousity of a child, preening like a little organ-grinder monkey. This self cannot envy these hominids, debased as the day they wandered out of Africa, or Cain slunk off after murdering his brother. The self of the neuroscientists is the one that plays to the crowd in the funhouse mirror. The mimicking and aping of TV shows and insipid self-actualization books, 'management' techniques, NETWORKING. Those who put their faith in the immortality project of homo economicus must necessarily perish without any reference to a self that is before God. Like those in the deepest pits of Dante's hell their names will not pass on in the upper worlds. Unlike those in Inferno, they'll die incapable of any shame that their self can't rationalize away.

Jumper

They'll spend most of their time in the weathering yard on a bow perch. You give them four to six feet of leash (you learn to tie the falconer's knot real quick - controlling the bird with gloved hand and tying the leash to the bow perch with the other). This is their world for a week or two: They've fed on your gauntlet; now they must jump to it for the priviledge. The first jumps are little more than a foot or two - a nightmarish void for a hawk that not a few days ago was soaring hundreds of feet above field and wood. This is where you laugh at them. They'll bob and weave and crane out to try the snatch the tidbit so as you'd think they couldn't fly at all. Sometimes they do the splits. But once that first jump is done you can move out relatively quickly until you get to the end of the leash. Then jumping will no longer suffice.

The Sellout

The first time they eat in your possession is on your gloved hand. A day or two is normal, but five or six gets to be nervewracking. They stand there on your glove and you work a piece of beef or chicken up through fingers and thumb with your ungloved hand. You wiggle the meat around, brush it up against their talons. Eyes drift down, but the head is still looking at you. This can go on for a long time. It's boring at first, then you think you're starving the hawk. You get a little panicky. Maybe you cheat- pick off a little piece of chicken and rub it along their beak to give them just a taste. You never look them in the eye. It is a sign of moral superiority and they know it. But your goal is always to get them to sell out. You'll proceed no further if you don't get them to bend over, expose the back of their neck to you, and eat off your gloved hand. A hawk is down with a field mouse in a dusky field at the edge of a wood in late summer. A Great Horned Owl comes swooping out of the trees...puff of feathers, it is over quick. This is what the blood remembers when the hawk bends over and exposes the back of his neck. They have nightmares about it.

Manning the Hawk

They come off the trap with the posture of a miniature dragon. God do they hate you. You get them home, put jesses and anklets on them, attach to these with a swivelled leash, and make them stand on your gauntleted fist. Their greatest virtue is that they detest homo sapiens, not to mention the few remnant humans. They will drop and hang upside down like a bat, or bate - try to fly away with four feet of leash before they drop and hang again. You disgust them, and you can't blame them. They'll do anything to get away from you. This goes on for however long it takes for them to stand there without bating...usually a day or two. In Medieval times and somewhat beyond they used to have waking parties for hawks. Falconers believed that you could not let the hawk sleep until it was manned, or inured, to your presence. We are much more enlightened these days, and have no illusion of inducing Stockholm Syndrome in our subjects. In the evening they go into the dark mews, and they have nightmares about you.

Red-Tail Hawks

They get bored, moody, resentful. The negative anthropomorphisms apply, the positive ones don't. They never liked you. They never liked anyone except their mate, and when you trap them by definition they haven't had one yet. They run off their young months before Arcturus sinks on their first summer. They get electrocuted, shocked, hit by cars, and shot by dumbasses. If you free loft them in their mews they bounce off the wall when they hear you coming - sometimes damaging tail feathers. They projectile shit, mutes it is called, and you get sick of warning people not to stand behind them. Throw them in the direction of the tallest tree and they'll land on a fencepost. They'll make a fool of you in front of your friends, land on your head, try to kill your dog. It's sublime watching them soar, but there are the times they run along the ground with all the ignominy of a dirt farm chicken. They sleep with their heads craned back into their wings, looking almost headless. They can't see any better than us in the dark, but watching them like that you know they don't dream. They have nightmares.

Eight Dead in Mazar-i-Sharif

The fifth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell was generally reserved by the great Dante Alighieri for politicians. So it is not apparently aesthetically consistent that I consign the Reverend Terry Jones of the Christian Dove World Outreach Center in Jacksonville, Florida to that blasted place. I admit that it is purely an emotional response. The image of the Malebranche using their tines to keep the Reverend submerged in boiling black pitch has me positively awash in seratonin - I blush lest this betrays me on the threshold of psychopathology - and I even imagine that in heaven I will commission Gustave Dore to make an engraving of the scene.

The cause of the grief in Mazir-i-Sharif was the belated news (Good Morning Afghanistan is not on the twenty-four hour news cycle) that Reverend Jones, after much dallying, publicity mongering, faux handwringing - and probably a concluding circle jerk with his congregation - did, finally, burn a Koran. Yes, it is America, and he does have the right to burn all the Korans he wants to. But in doing so Jones betrayed two words in the name of his church - Christian and Outreach - and revealed himself to be another Prince of the Air - no less so than the Afghan 'insurgent' who masterminded the Mazar-i-Sharif riotous attack. Just another asshole hijacking religion for quasi-political purposes.

Kierkegard's essay The Crowd is Untruth presents an apparent paradox when considered alongside Christ's injunction that where two or three are gathered in his name, "There I am." But it is only apparent. Terry Jones did not gather his flock in Christ's name. The megalomaniac can never be alone before Christ, which one must be, even in a crowd. Jones first allegiance is the crowd. It is the same crowd that Apollonius of Tyana riled up. It is the crowd that shouted 'Crucify him!" It is the crowd that seeks out a mirror of its own violent heart and finds it on talk radio, Fox News, apostate Presbyters and Priests, Reverends, Imams, terrorists - Princes of the Air one and all. Hot air with the stink of death on it.

But here we are only concerned with the crowd that Reverend Jones plays before and not that of the Afghan insurgent. For how is it possible to remove the speck from your brother's eye when you have a knot of wood shaped like a monocle in your own? To listen to an Islamophobe with their rantings about Wars of Civilisation and Sharia Law coming to America and 9/11 Mosques you'd think that Mohammed had just left Mecca for Medina sometime during the Carter Administration. A hysterical lot, the lot of them, and hence a dangerous crowd. But as I sit dreaming of Reverend Jones boiling in black pitch in the fifth bolgia of the eighth circle of hell, I recall that back in Canto Four or Five(?) in the first circle of hell, Dante seeing the shade of Saladin. That the great Muslim Caliph should share limbo with other 'righteous pagans' foundational to Western Civilisation like Socrates and Aristotle is testimony to how degraded Christian generousity of Spirit has become. Dante lived in far greater temporal and spatial proximity to the great expansionary era of Islam and he marched in the Third Crusade, yet he could place Saladin on the rim of Hell while consigning several Popes and many of his fellow Florentines and their descendants farther into the abyss. The view he took was sub specie aeternitatis, which, pretty much by definition, is untenable when two or three gather to ape the discourse of the twenty-four news cycle. For the immediate man, the world will always be a scary place.

Notes on an Anti-Natalist

"One night in long bygone times, man awoke and saw himself. He saw that he was naked under the cosmos, homeless in his own body. All things dissolved before his testing thought, wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind. Then woman too awoke and said it was time to go and slay. And he fetched his bow and arrow, fruit of the marriage of spirit and hand, and went outside beneath the stars. But as the beasts arrived at their waterholes where he expected them of habit, he felt no more the tiger's bound in his blood, but a great psalm about the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive. That day he did not return with prey, and when they found him by the next moon, he was sitting dead by the waterhole. Peter Wessel Zappfe (The Last Messiah, 1933). _________________________________________________________________ A preponderance of black bile muddying the earth. Autumnal blood. This is the disease Hippocrates surely would have diagnosed in homo economicus were he around today. Men go mad as a herd, the old saying goes, but they only come to their senses one by one. Too late, too late. Were it a matter of Melancholy on a grand scale Zappfe's anti-natalist apocalypse might come to pass. In highly westernized industrial societies we flirt with zero population growth as it is. Yet still, that nagging doubt. The virtue of that child you didn't have vs. the little monsters of homo economicus - Justin Bieber and Will Smith's little brats for instance. No, Zappfe and his followers are deluded to believe that mankind would ever voluntarily excuse itself from the earth. I remind myself when I become entranced with the arguments of Zappfe or Ligotti that Christendom has seen this before with the Encratites, of whom Hippolytus estimated them as being more cynics than Christians. Narrow is the way.

Monsters

Yesterday three workers at the Fukushima Dai-Chi Nuclear Power Plant were burned by radioactive water. Brave men, heroic men, to wade through Godzilla's irradiated spittle like that. Dr. Daisuke Serizawa would have approved. Fifty-seven years after the night attack on Tokyo the insidious monster snorts in its sleep, breathing steam and smoke - the nuclear stuff of Godzilla's breath.

Like a prophet in-breathed with the word of the God(s) comes Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara calling the earthquake and tsunami that awoke the monster tembatsu (divine punishment) for Japanese egoism. It is endearing that the Governor of the largest city in Japan should be so naive - imagine Mayor Michael Bloomberg being outraged that General Electric would avoid paying taxes and cleaning up the Hudson River. These are Western Industrialized Societies after all, and the works of Ayn Rand are widely available to all. It only took two days for Ishihara to tone down his act and exchange his outside prophetic voice for a sotto voce apology - he wants to run for Governor again. Politesse trumps Prophethood and the lesson that reflexivity extinguishes the political star is not lost on Ishihara.

Yet I understand Ishihara's pain. That a country with the Buddhist tradition of Japan should find itself steeped in Egoism(according to Ishihara) is no small contradiction in the national psyche. It is in that chasm that monsters are born. If Godzilla is the avatar of Little Boy and Fat Man, rising from the sea and slouching towards Tokyo, he is also a sleeping giant that was best not nudged towards wakefullness. Japan and America huddle around the campfire warming themselves over the flames of modernity, the agreed upon 'myth' of the monster's origins, wherein the former deserved the latter's nuclear rage. It's the only way they can go back to their respective tents and get a decent night's sleep undisturbed by conscience. And so all is right with a world in which Ishihara says Japan deserved tembatsu and an army of not-particularly-bright anonymous American xenophobes pepper the Newsvine with anti-Japanese rants in agreement. The triumvirate disaster of tsunami, earthquake, and possible reactor meltdown is cheered on a being payback for Japanese behavior in China, Japanese aggression during World War Two, Japanese having the nerve to build a better car, and declining Pokeman card values. The American idiot bears witness while watching his Sony, surfing the net with his Toshiba, and heading over to Applebee's in his Honda Accord to trade populist inanities over dinner- all done with no sense of the irony involved (Ishihara also mentions a degenerate populism in addition to egoism).

The monster sown in the radioactive dust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, courtesy of the US of A and its phallically named Little Boy and Fat Man, is accepted as necessary and right. If not the tembatsu of the Japanese, then the wrath of THE God and his agent on earth, America. The essential argument is made from Utilitarian principles. If Truman had not dropped the bomb, then multiples of X amount of US armed forces and Japanese soldiers and civilians might have died. In the speculative utilitarian argument, it is best to massage the numbers a bit - as indeed the Generals and Admirals did, and make appeals to God. Yet the smell of this argument has always made my eyes water. To want to incinerate people is one thing, but don't drag God into it lest you discover the moral equivalency that was lost over that dinner at Applebees.

You've just ordered several entrees from the Jack Daniels Grill (yes, even the kids...hey they give their kids wine in France goddamnit) and you're trying to watch Cabrera torch yet another top-notch reliever on the one of the big screens to tie the game. The truck driver sitting one table over sees the ticker at the bottom of the screen and sighs that yet another terrorist has tried to blow up himself and others with explosive material in his Hanes or Nike's or whatever. They ought to turn the whole goddamn place into a parking lot, he says, meaning the Mideast. Ah, the easy apocalypses of Christendom, as distinguished from authentic Christianity. Did not Caiaphas tell the Sanhedrin that it were better that one man (Jesus Christ) die than the whole nation perish? And yet the One died and was risen and the Nation of Israel perished anyways. I believe St. John includes this detail as a warning against speculative utilitarian murder. And in a curious inversion the truck driver will murder the many for the sins of the few. It is an easy habit to fall into, this sociopathy on a grand scale, and by projecting it onto a giant reptilian monster, a leviathan of dumb destruction, it is also easier to deny our own monstrousness.

(The image above is of the Marian statue of Urikami which 'survived' the Nagasaki atomic bombing. Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan and possibly the gateway to Christianity in Southeast Asia.)

In the next installment America gets its own monster in the wake of the September 11 attacks of 2001. His name is Cloverfield.

The Floating World

Seiji Sano's A Moment of Silence (2004)

If Everything were turned to smoke, the nose would be the seat of judgement. Heraclitus, Fragment 37, translated by Brook Haxton.

Thus in the abysmal dark the soul is known by scent. Heraclitus, Fragment 38, translated by Brook Haxton.

___________________________________________________________________

The demiurge carved the world in relief out of cherry woodblocks and set about printing an unlimited edition. Soon enough, however, he ran out of inks. The impressions degraded, the colors faded...

Glory to the man who dies wearing earthtones. It would be indecent to call attention to your corpse with pastels or neons. The earth would sooner recieve pink styrofoam.

Cephalophores

St Denis (Third from left, with head in hands)

Patron Saint of Paris, and oft conflated with Dionysius and Psuedo-Dionysius.

_______________________________

The Angels look on approvingly. A bit disorienting as Denis has his head in his hands. He's just walked six miles to Montmartre in that condition preaching a sermon all the while. The Angels have a smile on their lips, knowing he has discerned a secret. The scientific materialists will sneer...that old battle of Faith vs. Reason is a stumbling block for them. But Denis knows what he knows. The vertigo that comes with carrying your head in your hands like Diogenes of Sinope's lantern, looking for a real human being being before God as Kierkegard might say. I imagine his sermon being like one of Meister Eckhart's (the German sermons, not the Latin) or the conspiratorial teachings of the 14th century anonymous English monk who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing. He would have told St. Anselm to knock it off with the attempts at ontological proof, taking the side of Guanilo and Kierkegard (and here I must make it clear that Guanilo's argument may resort to empiricism, but actually shares the Great Dane's abhorrence of arguing one episteme in the language of another). No, Denis knows that the head goes on speaking logos as the body collapses on a crummy Paris hill.

Pissing at the Moon

Pieter Brueghel the Younger's Pissing at the Moon

Tonight the moon will appear larger than is has in 19 years. Last night I stayed up to 4:30 A.M. writing and engaging in guerilla warfare with a raccoon who has been raiding my garbage cans. I never howled, though I've been prone to it from time to time. It is certain that Pieter the Younger's man pissing at the moon used to howl too. But he got older, got a nice overcoat and nifty hat, and matured a bit. Pissing at the moon is much more sublime. I believe that Brueghel still subscribed to Dante's notion (actually a common one in the middle ages) that the man on the moon was in fact Cain with a bundle of brush on his back. The pisser's act of relieving himself thus becomes a subversion of the Cainite culture at large. It echoes Louis Ferdinand Celine's desire, reportedly expressed to Allen Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac, to figuratively piss on homo economicus. Along with the Glanton Gang, we must piss for our very lives.

They Don't Put Imbeciles on Dimes, Do They?

In 1968 J.G. Ballard (known to most as the author of Empire of the Sun. later filmed by Spielberg) published the short story Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. It was a speculative piece that would have faded into obscurity had Reagan not went on twelve years later to become President of the United States.



"Slow motion film of Reagan's speeches produced a marked erotic effect in an audience of spastic children."



This is perhaps one of the most chilling pieces of prophesy produced in the second half of the twentieth century.



"Studies were conducted on the marked fascination exercised by the Presidental Contender's hairstyle. 65% of male subjects made positive connections between the hairstyle and their own pubic hair. A series of optimum hairstyles were constructed."



In fact, the most optimum hairstyle was modeled after the Big Boy restaurant chain's mascot. It was unfortunate that Ballard, an Englishman, was not able to make the connection between repressed homoerotic patriotism and the hamburger culture. Thus I do it here for him. If Plato's Socrates could find virtue in the Spartan's Guardianship class, man-boy love and all, America as self -declared inheritor of the Judeo-Christian tradition must bury its pederastic fantasies in the beef. Subconsciously, the country and it's Madison Avenue high-priests understood this and in early 1984, during the ramp up for Reagan's re-election campaign, Wendy's hamburger chain roled out it's "Where's the Beef?" campaign.

At the 1980 Republican Conventon in Detroit copies of Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan were printed up and imprinted with the seal of the RNC by some political pranksters. It was accepted at face value for what it purported to be - a paper on the candidate's subliminal appeal.
That no one at Cobo Hall would even blink twice nor blush at reading Ballard's fiction should come as no surprise as the subliminal appeal was already a resounding success. Ballard died in 2009, his lips sealed with a coal by an angel of the Lord like the old-timey prophets. Or at least l like to think so.

Defacing the Currency

One of my favorite scenes in The Fight Club is when Tyler Durden, working in the projection room of a theatre, stitches some footage from a porno movie into the broader tapestry of a Disney-style family film. The audience is not quite sure what it has seen, but it suspects that something is not quite right. In an age of fiat currencies and electronic debits and credits, Durden's little act of rebellion will have to stand in for the old Cynic Diogenes of Sinope's original defacing of the currency.

I'm a consumer pariah. I don't use debit or credit cards to purchase a Hostess Fruit Pie down at the Speedway. Every time I dare pull out a twenty for gas or possibles my paper is subjected to an eraser test. Meanwhile, somebody is probably driving off without paying at all. Gasoline at $3.45 a gallon is a crime against humanity for most Americans, though they have no problem paying $3.99 for two ounces of 5-Hour Energy Drink. It's a Bear Market for Dog Philosophers all around.