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.

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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.

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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.