And the silliest of all convictions, the one which says, look! See! Believe!

Odious, yes odious, in its very nature , its presence feels us out as a tongue feels for the groove in the toothless hollow.

jrnl 2020

Thomas Ligotti's philosophical arguments revolve around the paradoxical nature of our existence, summarized by three facts;

 Human existence is pointless.

Our existence is preceded by billions of years of non-existence and followed by the same.

Whatever we do is absolutely meaningless.

As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change.

Thoughts from 2009

De-evolution is the only course. Not a course of action consciously chosen, but the final end-result of the human story. A story, which by all rights should never have had to been told at all. The aberration that is us is an anomaly. If only there was a god to wipe us from the canvas, to recognize the error and begin anew. But alas.

So how to live a life not only insightfully and mindfully, attempting to be uninvolved to the point of culpability? By being dead, of course. Nothing else stops a cell in this microcosm of disease than to cease its aberrant behaviors. Even in comas we suck up huge resources. 

The scourge that is humankind has got itself so tightly wound into the fabric of the Earth, that we must take it with us, in a sort of murder-suicide parody, that only ends when the last of us have been sloughed off the Earth’s ruinous skin.

The pox, the cancer that now lives in vast arrays of vicissitudes, on land as well as the seas and oceans, will eventually become unwilling to carry us upon its diseased pores and carrion-ridden shores of polluted pus. Thus shall we be finally expelled, albeit too late, from the Eden, the garden who housed whores and artists, rapists and ethics-professors, mad children and disabused octogenarians alike, in these psychologically embryonic human forms, maturing too slowly to find a better way.

In progress.

'The view from the mountain. Zapffe commits a murder of necessity over yak-milk tea and pointless discussion.' OR 'Two old, useless intellectuals both die of exposure.'

“This world,” mused old, sad Horace Walpole, “is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” And even though he shrugged and hid behind his steaming mug of tea, Peter concurred silently for wasn’t Walpol after all, only quoting his old Philosophy teacher verbatim? Flattering, in a way, although the wild eyes and flecked spittle which rested upon his former students mouth was less than dignified. We humans are condemned to do both, he knew, having once been Walpole’s professor. We have evolved a yearning for metaphysical purpose, for intrinsic justice and meaning in any earthly event and that is destined for frustration by our real environment, thinks Z sadly. And now apparently its all coming to an end rather unceremoniously, either by freezing to death with his learned student or falling off this Nepalese horror of a mountain.

Walpole shifted his voluminous bottom on the rock upon which he sat and glared at his old teacher. “Nothing to add, old thing? No new admonitions that might save your useless old life today? Or shall I just get on with it and chuck you over the mountainside?”

 The process of life is oblivious to the beings it makes and breaks in the course of its perpetuation. And while no living creature escapes this carnage, only humans bear the burden of awareness. An uninhabited globe, argued Zapffe, would be no unfortunate thing.

He says none of this aloud for his former student has clearly taken it all too seriously over the years, thinks Z, and best to say no more. Look at the mess truth-telling and realism has got him into this time. “And however did we get on top of this hideous mountain?” he wonders.

He thinks back upon his own biography as a way to pass the time while they await the return of the sherpa. Born in the arctic city of Trumbo, in Norway, Zapffe was a luminous stylist and wit, whose Law examination paper written in rhyming verse  remains on display at the University of Boote. Following some years as a lawyer and judge, he had a revelatory encounter with the plays of Ibsen and reentered university to attack “the ever burning question of what it means to be human.” The answer he reached was an original brand of existentialist thought, which, unlike the more optimistic views of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, concluded in a minor key. It was widely praised, he thought, at least by my peers and my lecture hall seats filled in such a lovely fashion! Among its earliest airings was a little essay he privately referred to as his ‘calling card’ and simply adored and preened over called ‘The Last Messiah’. Z sighs deeply into his tin mug of steaming yak milk tea and allows himself reverie. For it is just this piece that apparently has driven Walpole quite out of his senses.

The piece begins with a fable of a stone age hunter who, as he leaves his cave at night, is stricken by pity for his prey and has a fatal existential crisis. This is a parable resonating with two archetypical tales of Western culture. Firstly, it recalls the Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s Republic, which also relates the eye opening exit of a cave; secondly, it alludes to that origin myth of moral sentiment, the Fall of Man in Genesis. Z had chimed in with a new eye-opening conclusion to the effect that his caveman was a man who knew too much. Evolution, he had brilliantly argued, overdid its act when creating the human brain, akin to how a certain Nordic deer misnamed the ‘Unstoppable elk’, became moribund by its increasingly oversized antlers. For humans can perceive that each individual being is an ephemeral eddy in the flow of life, subjected to brute contingencies on his or her way to annihilation. Yet only rarely do people lose their minds through this realisation, as clearly his former student, Walpole had done, as our brains have evolved a strict regime of self-censorship – better known as ‘civilisation.’ Betraying a debt to Freud, Zapffe expands Freud’s claim on how “most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.” So, ‘isolation’ is the repression of grim facts by a code of silence; ‘anchoring,’ the stabilising attachment to specific ends; ‘distraction,’ the continuous stream of divertive impressions; and ‘sublimation,’ the conversion of anguish into uplifting pursuits, like literature and art. The discussion is sprinkled like a donut with allusions to the fate of Nietzsche: the poster case, as it were, of seeing too much sanity.

Lastly, Zapffe warned that civilisation cannot be sustained forever, as technology liberates ever more time for us to face our demons. In a memorably ironic finish, he had completed the tribute to tormented existence and self-actualization by foretelling a ‘last Messiah’, to appear in a tormented future in the very near future. He had loved writing this bit, but now admits to being not too super aware of the negative effect it seemed to have upon his students as they too caught a glimpse of the ever darkening situation their living-selves were born into. ‘Ah, too late now’, Z had thought on his podium, or from his overstuffed armchair in his study. Far too late, what's thought and written can only go forth into the void and empty these young and hopeful souls of their purpose! He had found it wryly amusing if not totally probable. He was not an egomaniacal madman after all. He just hated them all, including himself. 

He concluded thus on his future Messiah;

This prophet of doom, an heir to the visionary caveman, will be as ill-fated. For his word, which subverts the precept to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,” is not to please his fellow man: “Know yourselves – be infertile, and let the earth be silent after ye.”

 The work is rigorously argued, yet so suffused with carnivalesque humour that one critic acclaimed its author as ‘the Chaplin of philosophy.’ Z had quietly preened at that and lifted his glass of sherry in acceptance to the tribute, however absurd. Nor is there want of poetic imagery; at one point, for instance, an eagle bred in a cage is evoked as an analogy to the human predicament. While unable to manifest its potential in captivity, such an eagle should doubtless perish if released into the open sky.

COMING SOON

The Godly Idiot, Job.

Ligotti sent me, and now I send you.

The Last Messiah

by Peter Wessel Zapffe
Translated by Gisle R. Tangenes
From Philosophy Now, Issue 45



I

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 these thoughts and wonder above wonder, horror above horror unfolded in his mind.


II

Whatever happened? A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily- by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn the one edge toward himself.

Despite his new eyes, man was still rooted in matter, his soul spun into it and subordinated to its blind laws. And yet he could see matter as a stranger, compare himself to all phenomena, see through and locate his vital processes. He comes to nature as an unbidden guest, in vain extending his arms to beg conciliation with his maker: Nature answers no more, it performed a miracle with man, but later did not know him. He has lost his right of residence in the universe, has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and has been expelled from Paradise. He is mighty in the near world, but curses his might as purchased with his harmony of soul, his innocence, his inner peace in life's embrace.

So there he stands with his visions, betrayed by the universe, in wonder and fear. The beast knew fear as well, in thunderstorms and on the lion's claw. But man became fearful of life itself- indeed, of his very being. Life- that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. Even as the child sets out on the river of life, the roars from the waterfall of death rise highly above the vale, ever closer, and tearing, tearing at its joy. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future's curtain unraveled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. The suffering of human billions makes its entrance into him through the gateway of compassion, from all that happens arises a laughter to mock the demand for justice, his profoundest ordering principle. He sees himself emerge in his mother's womb, he holds up his hand in the air and it has five branches; whence this devilish number five, and what has it to do with my soul? He is no longer obvious to himself- he touches his body in utter horror; this is you and so far do you extend and no farther. He carries a meal within him, yesterday it was a beast that could itself dash around, now I suck it up and make it part of me, and where do I begin and end? All things chain together in causes and effects, and everything he wants to grasp dissolves before the testing thought. Soon he sees mechanics even in the so-far whole and dear, in the smile of his beloved- there are other smiles as well, a torn boot with toes. Eventually, the features of things are features only of himself. Nothing exists without himself, every line points back at him, the world is but a ghostly echo of his voice- he leaps up loudly screaming and wants to disgorge himself onto the earth along with his impure meal, he feels the looming of madness and wants to find death before losing even such ability.

But as he stands before imminent death, he grasps its nature also, and the cosmic import of the step to come. His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologico-cosmic terms: He is the universe's helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities.

From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.

Such a feeling of cosmic panic is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish insofar as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual's attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.

The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by over-evolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.

In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.

III

Why, then, has mankind not long ago gone extinct during great epidemics of madness? Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living- because cognition gives them more than they can carry?

Cultural history, as well as observation of ourselves and others, allow the following answer: Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

If the giant deer, at suitable intervals, had broken off the outer spears of its antlers, it might have kept going for some while longer. Yet in fever and constant pain, indeed, in betrayal of its central idea, the core of its peculiarity, for it was advocated by creation's hand to be the horn bearer of wild animals. What it gained in continuance, it would lose in significance, in grandness of life, in other words a continuance without hope, a march not up to affirmation, but forth across its ever recreated ruins, a self-destructive race against the sacred will of blood.

The identity of purpose and perishment is, for giant deer and man alike, the tragic paradox of life. In devoted Bejahung, the last Cervis Giganticus bore the badge of its lineage to its end. The human being saves itself and carries on. It performs, to extend a settled phrase, a more or less self-conscious repression of its damaging surplus of consciousness. This process is virtually constant during our waking and active hours, and is a requirement of social adaptability and of everything commonly referred to as healthy and normal living.

Psychiatry even works on the assumption that the 'healthy' and viable is at one with the highest in personal terms. Depression, 'fear of life', refusal of nourishment and so on are invariably taken as signs of a pathological state and treated thereafter. Often, however, such phenomena are messages from a deeper, more immediate sense of life, bitter fruits of a geniality of thought or feeling at the root of anti biological tendencies. It is not the soul being sick, but its protection failing, or else being rejected because it is experienced- correctly- as a betrayal of ego's highest potential. The whole of living that we see before our eyes today is from inmost to outmost enmeshed in repressional mechanisms, social and individual; they can be traced right into the tritest formulas of everyday life. Though they take a vast and multifarious variety of forms, it seems legitimate to at least identify four major kinds, naturally occuring in every possible combination: isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation.

By isolation I here mean a fully arbitrary dismissal from consciousness of all disturbing and destructive thought and feeling. (Engstrom: "One should not think, it is just confusing.") A perfect and almost brutalising variant is found among certain physicians, who for self-protection will only see the technical aspect of their profession. It can also decay to pure hooliganism, as among petty thugs and medical students, where any sensitivity to the tragic side of life is eradicated by violent means (football played with cadaver heads, and so on).

In everyday interaction, isolation is manifested in a general code of mutual silence: primarily toward children, so these are not at once scared senseless by the life they have just begun, but retain their illusions until they can afford to lose them. In return, children are not to bother the adults with untimely reminders of sex, toilet, or death. Among adults there are the rules of 'tact,' the mechanism being openly displayed when a man who weeps on the street is removed with police assistance.

The mechanism of anchoring also serves from early childhood; parents, home, the street become matters of course to the child and give it a sense of assurance. This sphere of experience is the first, and perhaps the happiest, protection against the cosmos that we ever get to know in life, a fact that doubtless also explains the much debated 'infantile bonding;' the question of whether that is sexually tainted too is unimportant here. When the child later discovers that those fixed points are as 'arbitrary' and 'ephemeral' as any others, it has a crisis of confusion and anxiety and promptly looks around for another anchoring. "In Autumn, I will attend middle school." If the substitution somehow fails, then the crisis may take a fatal course, or else what I will call an anchoring spasm occurs: One clings to the dead values, concealing as well as possible from oneself and others the fact that they are unworkable, that one is spiritually insolvent. The result is lasting insecurity, 'feelings of inferiority,' over-compensation, restlessness. Insofar as this state falls into certain categories, it is made subject to psychoanalytic treatment, which aims to complete the transition to new anchorings.

Anchoring might be characterised as a fixation of points within, or construction of walls around, the liquid fray of consciousness. Though typically unconscious, it may also be fully conscious (one 'adopts a goal'.) Publicly useful anchorings are met with sympathy, he who 'sacrifices himself totally' for his anchoring (the firm, the cause) is idolised. He has established a mighty bulwark against the dissolution of life, and others are by suggestion gaining from his strength. In a brutalised form, as deliberate action, it is found among 'decadent' playboys (“one should get married in time, and then the constraints will come of themselves.”) Thus one establishes a necessity in one's life, exposing oneself to an obvious evil from one's point of view, but a soothing of the nerves, a high-walled container for a sensibility to life that has been growing increasingly crude. Ibsen presents, in Hjalmar Ekdal and Molvik, two flowering causes ('living lies'); there is no difference between their anchoring and that of the pillars of society except for the practico-economic unproductiveness of the former.

Any culture is a great, rounded system of anchorings, built on foundational firmaments, the basic cultural ideas. The average person makes do with the collective firmaments, the personality is building for himself, the person of character has finished his construction, more or less grounded on the inherited, collective main firmaments (God, the Church, the State, morality, fate, the laws of life, the people, the future). The closer to main firmaments a certain carrying element is, the more perilous it is to touch. Here a direct protection is normally established by means of penal codes and threats of prosecution (inquisition, censorship, the Conservative approach to life).

The carrying capacity of each segment either depends on its fictitious nature having not been seen through yet, or else on its being recognised as necessary anyway. Hence the religious education in schools, which even atheists support because they know no other way to bring children into social ways of response.

Whenever people realise the fictitiousness or redundancy of the segments, they will strive to replace them with new ones ('the limited duration of Truths')- and whence flows all the spiritual and cultural strife which, along with economic competition, forms the dynamic content of world history.

The craving for material goods (power) is not so much due to the direct pleasures of wealth, as none can be seated on more than one chair or eat himself more than sated. Rather, the value of a fortune to life consists in the rich opportunities for anchoring and distraction offered to the owner.

Both for collective and individual anchorings it holds that when a segment breaks, there is a crisis that is graver the closer the segment to main firmaments. Within the inner circles, sheltered by the outer ramparts, such crises are daily and fairly painfree occurrences ('disappointments'); even a playing with anchoring values is here seen (wittiness, jargon, alcohol). But during such play one may accidentally rip a hole from euphoric to macabre. The dread of being stares us in the eye, and in a deadly gush we perceive how the minds are dangling in threads of their own spinning, and that a hell is lurking underneath.

The very foundational firmaments are rarely replaced without great social spasms and a risk of complete dissolution (reformation, revolution). During such times, individuals are increasingly left to their own devices for anchoring, and the number of failures tends to rise. Depressions, excesses, and suicides result (German officers after the war, Chinese students after the revolution).

Another flaw of the system is the fact that various danger fronts often require very different firmaments. As a logical superstructure is built upon each, there follow clashes of incommensurable modes of feelings and thoughts. Then despair can enter through the rifts. In such cases, a person may be obsessed with destructive joy, dislodging the whole artificial apparatus of his life and starting with rapturous horror to make a clean sweep of it. The horror stems from the loss of all sheltering values, the rapture from his by now ruthless identification and harmony with our nature's deepest secret, the biological unsoundness, the enduring disposition for doom.

We love the anchorings for saving us, but also hate them for limiting our sense of freedom. Whenever we feel strong enough, we thus take pleasure in going together to bury an expired value in style. Material objects take on a symbolic import here (the Radical approach to life).

When a human being has eliminated those of his anchorings that are visible to himself, only the unconscious ones staying put, then he will call himself a liberated personality.

A very popular mode of protection is distraction. One limits attention to the critical bounds by constantly enthralling it with impressions. This is typical even in childhood; without distraction, the child is also insufferable to itself. "Mom, what am I to do." A little English girl visiting her Norwegian aunts came inside from her room, saying: "What happens now?" The nurses attain virtuosity: Look, a doggie! Watch, they are painting the palace! The phenomenon is too familiar to require any further demonstration. Distraction is, for example, the 'high society's' tactic for living. It can be likened to a flying machine- made of heavy material, but embodying a principle that keeps it airborne whenever applying. It must always be in motion, as air only carries it fleetingly. The pilot may grow drowsy and comfortable out of habit, but the crisis is acute as soon as the engine flunks.

The tactic is often fully conscious. Despair may dwell right underneath and break through in gushes, in a sudden sobbing. When all distractive options are expended, spleen sets in, ranging from mild indifference to fatal depression. Women, in general less cognition-prone and hence more secure in their living than men, preferably use distraction.

A considerable evil of imprisonment is the denial of most distractive options. And as terms for deliverance by other means are poor as well, the prisoner will tend to stay in the close vicinity of despair. The acts he then commits to deflect the final stage have a warrant in the principle of vitality itself. In such a moment he is experiencing his soul within the universe, and has no other motive than the utter inendurability of that condition.

Pure examples of life-panic are presumably rare, as the protective mechanisms are refined and automatic and to some extent unremitting. But even the adjacent terrain bears the mark of death, life is here barely sustainable and by great efforts. Death always appears as an escape, one ignores the possibilities of the hereafter, and as the way death is experienced is partly dependent of feeling and perspective, it might be quite an acceptable solution. If one in statu mortis could manage a pose (a poem, a gesture, to 'die standing up'), i.e. a final anchoring, or a final distraction (Aases' death), then such a fate is not the worst one at all. The press, for once serving the concealment mechanism, never fails to find reasons that cause no alarm- "it is believed that the latest fall in the price of wheat..."

When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

Only a limited part of humanity can make do with mere 'changes', whether in work, social life, or entertainment. The cultured person demands connections, lines, a progression in the changes. Nothing finite satisfies at length, one is ever proceeding, gathering knowledge, making a career. The phenomenon is known as 'yearning' or 'transcendental tendency.' Whenever a goal is reached, the yearning moves on; hence its object is not the goal, but the very attainment of it- the gradient, not the absolute height, of the curve representing one's life. The promotion from private to corporal may give a more valuable experience than the one from colonel to general. Any grounds of 'progressive optimism' are removed by this major psychological law.

The human yearning is not merely marked by a 'striving toward', but equally by an 'escape from.' And if we use the word in a religious sense, only the latter description fits. For here, none has yet been clear about what he is longing away from, namely the earthly vale of tears, one's own inendurable condition. If awareness of this predicament is the deepest stratum of the soul, as argued above, then it is also understandable why the religious yearning is felt and experienced as fundamental. By contrast, the hope that it forms a divine criterion, which harbours a promise of its own fulfillment, is placed in a truly melancholy light by these considerations.

The fourth remedy against panic, sublimation, is a matter of transformation rather than repression. Through stylistic or artistic gifts can the very pain of living at times be converted into valuable experiences. Positive impulses engage the evil and put it to their own ends, fastening onto its pictorial, dramatic, heroic, lyric or even comic aspects.

Unless the worst sting of suffering is blunted by other means, or denied control of the mind, such utilisation is unlikely, however. (Image: The mountaineer does not enjoy his view of the abyss while choking with vertigo; only when this feeling is more or less overcome does he enjoy it- anchored.) To write a tragedy, one must to some extent free oneself from- betray- the very feeling of tragedy and regard it from an outer, e.g. aesthetic, point of view. Here is, by the way, an opportunity for the wildest round-dancing through ever higher ironic levels, into a most embarrassing circulus vitiosus. Here one can chase one's ego across numerous habitats, enjoying the capacity of the various layers of consciousness to dispel one another.

The present essay is a typical attempt at sublimation. The author does not suffer, he is filling pages and is going to be published in a journal.

The 'martyrdom' of lonely ladies also shows a kind of sublimation- they gain in significance thereby. Nevertheless, sublimation appears to be the rarest of the protective means mentioned here.

IV

Is it possible for 'primitive natures' to renounce these cramps and cavorts and live in harmony with themselves in the serene bliss of labour and love? Insofar as they may be considered human at all, I think the answer must be no. The strongest claim to be made about the so-called peoples of nature is that they are somewhat closer to the wonderful biological ideal than we unnatural people. And when even we have so far been able to save a majority through every storm, we have been assisted by the sides of our nature that are just modestly or moderately developed. This positive basis (as protection alone cannot create life, only hinder its faltering) must be sought in the naturally adapted deployment of the energy in the body and the biologically helpful parts of the soul(1), subject to such hardships as are precisely due to sensory limitations, bodily frailty, and the need to do work for life and love.

And just in this finite land of bliss within the fronts do the progressing civilisation, technology and standardisation have such a debasing influence. For as an ever growing fraction of the cognitive faculties retire from the game against the environment, there is a rising spiritual unemployment. The value of a technical advance to the whole undertaking of life must be judged by its contribution to the human opportunity for spiritual occupation. Though boundaries are blurry, perhaps the first tools for cutting might be mentioned as a case of a positive invention.

Other technical inventions enrich only the life of the inventor himself; they represent a gross and ruthless theft from humankind's common reserve of experiences and should invoke the harshest punishment if made public against the veto of censorship. One such crime among numerous others is the use of flying machines to explore uncharted land. In a single vandalistic glob, one thus destroys lush opportunities for experience that could benefit many if each, by effort, obtained his fair share(2).

The current phase of life's chronic fever is particularly tainted by this circumstance. The absence of naturally (biologically) based spiritual activity shows up, for example, in the pervasive recourse to distraction (entertainment, sport, radio- 'the rhythm of the times'). Terms for anchoring are not as favourable- all the inherited, collective systems of anchorings are punctured by criticism, and anxiety, disgust, confusion, despair leak in through the rifts ('corpses in the cargo.') Communism and psychoanalysis, however incommensurable otherwise, both attempt (as Communism has also a spiritual reflection) by novel means to vary the old escape anew; applying, respectively, violence and guile to make humans biologically fit by ensnaring their critical surplus of cognition. The idea, in either case, is uncannily logical. But again, it cannot yield a final solution. Though a deliberate degeneration to a more viable nadir may certainly save the species in the short run, it will by its nature be unable to find peace in such resignation, or indeed find any peace at all.

V

If we continue these considerations to the bitter end, then the conclusion is not in doubt. As long as humankind recklessly proceeds in the fateful delusion of being biologically fated for triumph, nothing essential will change. As its numbers mount and the spiritual atmosphere thickens, the techniques of protection must assume an increasingly brutal character.

And humans will persist in dreaming of salvation and affirmation and a new Messiah. Yet when many saviours have been nailed to trees and stoned on the city squares, then the last Messiah shall come.

Then will appear the man who, as the first of all, has dared strip his soul naked and submit it alive to the outmost thought of the lineage, the very idea of doom. A man who has fathomed life and its cosmic ground, and whose pain is the Earth's collective pain. With what furious screams shall not mobs of all nations cry out for his thousandfold death, when like a cloth his voice encloses the globe, and the strange message has resounded for the first and last time:

"- The life of the worlds is a roaring river, but Earth's is a pond and a backwater.

- The sign of doom is written on your brows- how long will ye kick against the pin-pricks?

- But there is one conquest and one crown, one redemption and one solution.

- Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye."

And when he has spoken, they will pour themselves over him, led by the pacifier makers and the midwives, and bury him in their fingernails. He is the last Messiah. As son from father, he stems from the archer by the waterhole.

Peter Wessel Zapffe, 1933




   

Hello.

There is a war inside you which is coming to its end. Don’t ask me about time.

It is inconsequential now. Days or decades.

Moments. Everything but eons. You do not have eons.

Did you do the things? How many of them?

Did you count them? A small joke.

No matter. Whatsoever.

You do not win or lose this war, this battle.

You are nothing but the field itself covered some decades in blooms and others in bile and blood.

See if you can do the one impossible thing.

See if you can love somebody just the way they are. Trying to influence no change, nothing aside from embracing them in all their glory, their fields of flowers, the bloodshed in their hearts and bellies.

Connection. True connection. This is the most rare of things. You think you have it? You do not. Let your blood boil with lust, marry, tarry with others in flirtation of the hint of ever new connection, dissolve unions, create new dichotomies where once you thought true connection resided within you.

Now prepare for the juice of what your flower truly has in store to expel into the rarefied air of true connection and breathe it deep.

Hello.

This is the Universe calling.

The Lucidity

I woke up saying “ I can relax, I understand everything”, then of course the mornings song starts
and I begin to forget but that’s ok.

I have just told myself to remember that I have more in my head, more endless galleries, huge endless
rooms of art and everything in the world on display really, more than LACMA by a thousandfold.
And I have all those little birds coming to me letting me pick them up, putting them in the truck of the fiat,
in coffee mugs, in the trunk of the fiat. And then of course, from earlier in the dream,
I have the Dude, who was with me, as Inanna was with Dumuzi, and we were as one,
and when I left, (through a window for his mother had come to hassle us) he gave me his wallet,
and there is a note inside telling me I was the only one besides him needing that wallets contents,
and he sent me to go shopping, to look for…..I don’t know know what,
but instead I wandered into ‘the galleries, the endless galleries’ thinking it was a one-room junk shop,
poorly lit, mattress' dirty on the floor you had to step on, a pile of old hotel pillows and then the clerk said,
’Keep going, down that way, there is more’ And I saw! Or rather, I began to see, I saw the universe’s
contents, opening up, the endless galleries, some with modern art, some with flea-market junk
and all of them telling me that everything was there, in those endless enormously high rooms
of that seemingly endless gallery. And then I awoke, and realized all of that is in MY head? My silly,
slipping, worthless little noggin? ALL of those treasures, and so I say to myself,
“It’s ok. I understand all of it now. I don’t have to be afraid of growing senile or even dementia for I have
the worlds bounty all within my head". And now as I write this, the music starts again and I begin
to forget as we all must upon awakening, our common human curse. This mornings music
is Rufus Wainwright singing, ‘Hallelujah’ and that’s just fine by me.

The perfect 'cocktail' perhaps is opening my mind? The dolls, the iphone game,
the reading of the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna and her consort( the Dude and me?),
the little titmouse who visits the house and looks me in the eye everyday, the one I call Buddy,
having Audrey sleeping next to me with her youthful soul, the dog who was also with us last night,
a few moments of that dreadful movie Dom Hemingway, which while I chose not to watch
after 20 minutes and which might still might have had a moments impact upon
that which was needed to reach the dreams treasure-trove? Who knows?
The ‘cocktail’ cannot be turned into a recipe, but I know this will happen again,
For in my dreams I am no longer lost,stuck and wandering alone and miserably unable to find my car,
or escape the dull endless rooms and malls I keep finding myself in.
Now I have the realm of the sublime. Maybe not at my nightly disposal but again, that’s ok.
I will now go listen to the music in my head which erases the nights' prior dreamworld
and hope this rambling will give me even a tiny bit of something that might help me reconnect, say,
in the middle of the most mundane and mind-numbing of times, which we call the ‘afternoons’.

FOUND THREE YEARS LATER AND IT TRANSPORTS...

The laughing duck of this horror shop of suburbicon.

the child speaks saying: the house of the laughing duck is not a nice place to live. you would think it would be since there is an actual duck, (as of yet unseen, just behind the trees in the dank little sewer pond who laughs in a most authentically amusing fashion. parental addition)

but it isn’t.

the genius stairwell looks over the top of his glasses and squints at me as if i am some dull urine-soaked piece of crockery being handed to him as a unexpected gift.
“awake again?” he drawls while giving me the once over twice, “awake again and freshly bathed, it seems,” he adds looking at my thinning hair wet with greasy water.

from the very first the house of the laughing duck had ominous signs, tiny but persistent, hovering about the periphery of my vision and always within the parameters of the street itself. whatever curse is upon us, it seems to be concentrated on this particular avenue.
i walk about on rare occasions when inertia doesn't reign and notice a less than subtle shift in air-clarity, light, sense of well-being and general happiness on other blocks.

this could be an error on my part due to my inclination towards the dramatic. but so it seems.
the house has a crispiness to it that tends to echo.
it is a suburban bump pimpling the area surrounded by almost identical and close-set homes all with similar latitudes and angles, all filled with great big loads of this and that, the stuff of whiteheads and disease.

the house of the laughing duck is ridiculously stuffed full in every nook and cranny with various manifestations of buddhas.
it does not help. it is not helpful, here, in the house of the laughing duck.
symbolism comes to this ‘hood to die. so very, very emptied of meaning.

The short story that chills and thrills me. The Clown Puppet by Thomas Ligotti.

In such a world as this, we can wonder what horrors are in store, but we might not need to look too far for my favorite human-loathing author Ligotti shows us a universe that is dysphoric and nihilistic, one that is fascinatingly revealed in the story of The Clown Puppet, where the protagonist receives certain visitations from a puppet clown at different junctures in his life. None of these strange encounters is every very revealing, instead they seem to be both banal and utterly absurd in their marked propensity to undermine any meaning whatsoever. The protagonist is working in a medicine shop one night when the clown suddenly appears handing him a small book, a passport - the passport of his boss, Ivan Vizniak. This intrusion surprises him because he had never thought that anyone else would become a part of the visitation. The puppet floats before him with its dead eyes hollowed out of some hellish mind, bound to strings that vanish in a blur above it in the ceiling where some invisible puppeteer of the abyss hides, withdrawn in his dark object-hood, while the clown puppet like some sensuous artifact of wood and string dances on the hollow thoughts of a mad god. Just as protagonist is about to lose his mind and do something rash, the puppet turns its head toward the back of the store where a curtain covers a small store room. The puppet moves off in that direction just as the proprietor who has been sleeping above raps his knuckles on the front door of the shop. The protagonist startled opens the door letting in the old proprietor, Vizniak. Vizniak wanders around in a stupor pointing to the ceiling and reddish-glow that myst-like hovers over everything and says, "The Light... the light" The protagonist unsure if the visitation is over or not trys his best to get Vizniak to return to his room, but the old man refuses and seeks out the bathroom behind the curtain at the rear of the store. After a while the protagonist realized that Vizniak is not coming back. He'd always assumed that he was alone, that he'd been singled out, "cultivated for some special fate. But after Mr. Vizniak disappeared behind the curtained doorway I realized how wrong I had been".
He reflects on this, saying,
"Who knows how many others there were who might say that existence consisted of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense, a nonsense that had nothing unique about it at all and had nothing behind it or beyond it but except more and more nonsense - a new order of nonsense, perhaps an utterly unknown nonsense, but all of it nonsense and nothing but nonsense"

The Happy Cage

Fortification seems complete. Bunker in the form of a sun-filled little house. Protective-energy-bombs in myriad forms protect vital corners and entry-spots from outside influences and bring some semblance of sustainable sanity that might not otherwise make it when through the front door comes the residual madness of the world clinging to the shoulders of us all as we return from foraging or toiling in the gorgeous, ever-maddening muck of 'Out-There.'
I sleep with a phantom quartz wand under the pillow and my dreams become free of menace. Just as seemingly pointless, but at least a sense of place. The ground beneath my feet seems more solid when I am inside. Or my legs are thicker. Or both. Depending on my mood I might lose my balance a wee bit in the parking lot and threaten to topple over in those days where speaking coherently at the market is hard, and I say 'You're Welcome' instead of 'Thank You' to the clerk and stumble out the door. The other mood is where I can speak and smile and connect and glow with everybody, every car, every bird above, every inch of the road as I drive home with my figs or my four dollar succulent from Trader Joe's, which have for some reason made the world unutterably beautiful and approachable and solid yet again. 
Seemingly thus equipped with the sanctuary, the hibernaculum, the personal spa also known as 'the house' in order I allow my maladies free reign in hopes they will express themselves as needed and then subside.
From head to toe, I am paying all the pipers who have their hands out for all the years of ease and comfort. I have saved my shekels for just this time and have no complaint in paying the bill. I've been saying it was coming and that's not a psychic gleaning, but simply the consciousness of knowing that age brings dis-ease and the boredom of aches and pains, decay, decay, degeneration and decay. It's beautiful in buildings, less so in skin, tissue and bone.
All issues focus on my right side. (Remind me to ask some sort of new-age Reiki empath or whatever about this.) List as follows of negative energies manifesting themselves as debilitating(to some degree) degradations of the flesh:
Mouth and tongue ulcers, open and stinging, right side.
Right shoulder, torn muscles, no more ping-pong in this lifetime. No more scratching the center of my back with my right hand. No more reaching.
Right hand, from dull ache to sharp agonizing jolt of surprisingly intense pain from muscles surrounding the thumb. Hair ties, opening jars, and so forth.
Right heel. My fifth month of hobbling like an octogenarian. MRI results to come this week. If karma was more accurate it would be bone cancer and I'd have three days to live. However, it will only be some ridiculous soft tissue damage with little to be done, and so my body says, 'Get it? See? Here we are. Relax' and so I will.
There is much to do inside the nest, but the time for attempted introspection and finding my inner independence is past. It is found, it is here. It is a disappointment and a relief at the same time. It is as middle-class consumer ravaged as ever it was, maybe more so. But it is sincere, it is me, and in my mediocrity, my humor, my small compassions, my wit, I can thrive anywhere, as long as I can still complain, bitch and moan in my spoiled little life, in my fortress by the road, in the bunker rental house surrounded by life itself, in all its simple sweetness (the parents walking by the window with the stroller laughing in the after-dinner twilight) and its annoyances, (the ongoing crash of bottles as the recycling center gets more and more business, not for the sake of the environment but because people need the money!) And lastly, and most poignantly, its absolute deadening and rotten vitriolic and apathetic modern energies that pervade everything, even the trees. See how the branches rot and fail? And yet who can deny the beauty that continues? Not me, not me, not me.