Posts

by on

The recent post by Pseudo Heraclitus strongly reminded me of this (see below) fragment from the Seranoga collection ‘Hidden Cities’. It is unknown if the it is supposed to be part of larger work or not, though much of the contents of ‘Hidden Cities’ seems to unfinished works of one kind or another. The striking features about the fragment are of course the similarity of Irus to Yrus and the mention of walls of great thickness.

Seranoga also seems to intimate a sense of a hidden clergy, or dare we say it, a kind of rhizomatic clergy dispersed through the population in ways he could not understand in his visit. What the nature of this visit actually was of course, we can only speculate -hallucinatory, imagined, spiritual or physical.

by on

by Pseudo-Heraclitus

            For how many generations have the walls of Yrus stood? The old stories tell of kings, of battles, of monsters, and of famines, of the nature of life and the formation of the mountains and the seas; yet there are no stories of the walls. Smooth milk-gloss stone, twenty cubits by twenty, and ten thousand cubits long if it were a hair –  the walls are impressive enough on their own to be sure – but in order to truly know the wall you must feel it. Put your hand against its ancient weight. Pray.

            The city is a wonder in itself, built atop deep springs which spit life from the belly of the earth and from the desert a great flower bloomed, full of all good things like the mythical walled gardens the ancestors spoke of and after such the city of Yrus was named. The people of Yrus are happy and fat. We live without worry of the hatred and discontent that grips the world, and in fact live largely ignorant to it. We go without want for food or clean water, and take our pleasure in art and song and theater.

            On the matter of divine beliefs not a lip will part, for it is well known that anyone who speaks of our religion shall find judgment, although each member of the city still finds themselves well versed in its practice. Piety is observed in the polis through intricate idioglossia made up of cryptic somatic gestures and shibboleths. Priests, and there are thought to be priests, are anonymous even to one another; although be there one, or a dozen, or none at all – none would be the wiser.

            On our holy days we feast (although no one could say why), and, due to the peculiar nature of these holy days, which themselves were subject to a great amount of secrecy and have no known dates, they could be taken at any point in the year. If too few feasts are taken in a year, it is assumed that some of the feasts sufficed for more than one celebration, and if too many it is assumed they were partitioned.

            Our faith has lasted this way for generations untold, as long as stories have been spoken on the earth. Perhaps it is even as old as the walls themselves.

            Outsiders passed periodically through those ever formidable gates. Although Yrus needs not for wealth, the people here have come to crave foreign comforts from the world round. A wine merchant arrived today, bringing the finest of vintages to our fair city by ox-cart. A man well traveled, a man who has sailed seas and seen peoples of a dozen shades – even he gapes at the walls of Yrus.

            The merchant is a man of great wealth, and tells often of his travels in which he had left no luxury unsampled, yet almost at once, as if intoxicated by the smooth milk-gloss stone or the fresh green of the gardens or the old stories of kings and battles and monsters and famines and the nature of life and formation of the mountains and the seas, the man took to the city feverish the way a child might. He loiters daily in the markets asking his questions of the people which they answer with a gentle patience, except those questions which begged word of their faith, to which the citizens would only turn their faces.

            It wasn’t more than a week of searching before he stumbles upon a box hidden flush into a carved hollow in the wall. Inside that ancient box there sat a single scroll and upon it there was script wherefrom he reads aloud the name. He makes his way to the market once more to ask the citizens of the box and its name but when he speaks it the people only turn and leave, each one of them, abandoning their stalls unpacked.

            He loiters in the market like he did in days past, but he cannot seem to hold gaze with a single person. They turn from him, tuck themselves in houses when they see him approach. By the morning, it appeared to the wine merchant as if the city was empty. He approached the gates, fearing this sudden shift in hospitality, but the guards looked around everywhere but to him. He called up to them, but they were silent, and the gates did not move.

            After a few days of wandering alone he slaughters his golden ox and eats it raw. Blood runs over the primordial flagstone. Even still, not a soul moves, and the merchant chews in silence. He goes mad not long after, and dashes himself upon the stone. When he grows still the people emerge and continue their lives without mention of the wine merchant or his curiosity.

            After a long time someone gather his bones, and the bones of his ox, both of which are disposed of somewhere outside the city without ceremony. After a longer time, the wine in his barrels dries, and the wood begins to rot and give. Eventually this too will collapse, and only then can it be recognized and disposed of. Is there any God greater than this one? For of all the ancient powers resting in the walls of Yrus, there is none greater than he; there is no palisade so fast as a God which can say, as this one may: “I am unheard”.

by on

My Encounter with the word pneuma goes back to Nietzsche. These two sections from ‘Human all Too Human’ seem relevant. The first because it includes the very encounter with the word and the second for the view it holds on the metaphysical world.

8
Pneumatological elucidation of nature. – Metaphysics elucidates the handwriting of nature as it were *pneumatologically, -as the church and its scholars formerly did the Bible. It requires a great deal of understanding to apply to nature the same kind of rigorous art of elucidation that philologists have now fashioned for all books: with the intention of comprehending what the text intends to say but without sensing, indeed presupposing, a second meaning. But as even with regard to books the bad art of elucidation has by no means been entirely overcome and one still continually encounters in the best educated circles remnants of allegorical and mystical interpretations: so it is also in respect to nature -where, indeed, it is even far worse.
9
Metaphysical world. – It is true, there could be a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to be disputed. We behold all things through the human head and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut it off. This is a purely scientific problem and one not very well calculated to bother people overmuch; but all that has hitherto made metaphysical assumptions valuable, terrible, delightful to them, all that has begotten these assumptions, is passion, error and self-deception; the worst of all methods of acquiring knowledge, not the best of all, have taught belief in them. When one has disclosed these methods as the foundation of all extant religions and metaphysical systems, one has refuted them! Then that possibility still remains over; but one can do absolutely nothing with it, not to speak of letting happiness, salvation and life depend on the gossamer of such a possibility. For one could assert nothing at all of the metaphysical world except that it was a being-other, an inaccessible, incomprehensible being-other; it would be a thing with negative qualities. Even if the existence of such a world were never so well demonstrated, it is certain that knowledge of it would be the most useless of all knowledge: more useless even than knowledge of the chemical composition of water must be to the sailor in danger of shipwreck.

* pneumatologically: pneumatology is the ‘science’ of spirits and spiritual beings.

A lot of what it says here is relevant to what I try to say in my writings. I use the word pneuma because it does mean spirit, but also because it means air. Those with a cursory knowledge of the western magickal tradition will know that the air element is associated with the mind, the analytic swords of the tarot. It is this double meaning that makes it (to me) suitable as the concept I want.

What is pneuma in the accretive system? Pneuma is said to be the stuff that concepts are made of. Pneuma is sticky and can be made to accrete. The accretions of pneuma follow from the phenomenological lead of the world that is already interpreted. Everything is an accretion of pneuma. This is metaphysics, absolutely. The questions obviously arise: What do you need pneuma for? Why would you want to substantialise conceptuality?

The answer goes back to phenomenology of magick and the agnostic disjunction. Nietzsche thinks the possibility of the metaphysical world is worthless for life. Of course he says this specifically with Christianity in mind but equally seems fairly clear; any kind of spiritual world might be acknowledged yet leaves us with nothing positive to say about it. This is a very reasonable opinion, the problem I feel is that the manifestations of such a world cannot be put to bed. Spectres, UFOs, synchronicities continue to haunt the world and every time these phenomena occur they present to the individual with the agnostic disjunction i.e. was that real or not? The disjunctive question is agnostic because any answer of dismissal is only done on the question begging grounds that such things are not possible because this (solid) world does not admit of them. Equally though if one decides the phenomenon was real, then one must face the incoherent sense of trying to reconcile what it would mean for reality for this to be the case.

Pneuma and its accretions are what I believe to be the best answer for anyone who thinks that the ‘magick obtains’ arm of the disjunction is worth thinking about. It is true that pre-determined harmony of some kind is on the table and partially represents a competing force of the side of actual metaphysical connection. This investigation is for another time. Let’s be clear about pneuma though, on the side of the regular solid interpretation of the world in which these phenomena are coincidences and hallucinations there is no need for pneuma. Pneuma, the conceptual stuff only has work to do on the magick accepting side.

So what does it do? Pneuma is called a substance precisely because it can do things, it is no longer the regular sense of a concept that is just ‘how we understand something’. In the system there are essentially three layers. The pneuminous accretions, the vector field and the umbratic. The accretions are everything we perceive with any sense. Everything is understood as something even when that something is ‘the unknown’, this too is an accretion, a concept. This is pneuma bound into endless blobs, connected in myriad ways by pneuminous fibres: homonyms, metaphors, shared qualities, all these and many more are the ways in which the accretions connect to one another. Temporally they are altering, largely under the sway of the neurotic accretions of pneuma (ourselves) who are also nothing but accretions, yet ones with ability to restructure the pneuma into new forms or keep it stuck in old ones.

The vector field is the transcendental field that we must presuppose in order to say that the accretions are attached to something. The possible field of all perceptions of all kinds is the vector field. It can be glimpsed by imagination/phenomenological reduction as that ‘what things would be if we try to remove concepts’. The blur of stuff, smells, sounds. The vector field is pneuma, but it is pneuma unaccreted (other than as the vector field, or hyle etc.). Pneuma bound into a concepts (accretions) is attached to the regions of the vector field. It is called vector field because the different regions are capable of behaving like vectors for the higher up formed accretions. That is, they play host to them; a certain region plays host to the concept ‘curtains’, another to ‘duvet’ and so on and so on. In this way the concept is not simply in the mind of the neurotic accretion, rather it is in the the vector itself.

The umbratic is the phantasy of everything that cannot be perceived for whatever reason. The notion of the umbratic is generated by attempting to perceive existence when one’s head is cut off, as Nietzsche put it. A similar agnostic disjunctive issue concerns this region of correlationism as it has come to be known. Either science is perfectly good at telling us what existence is like independently of ourselves, or it still remains nothing but prosthetic extensions of our faculties that, whilst assuredly expansive still does not  and cannot totalise the titanic otherness that lurks out there.

The inference in this phenomenology goes that, since this metaphysic accepts a kind of correlate, albeit one that is partially autonomous from us and since things remain solid and reliable most of the time then there must be some structure that maintains this solidity beyond this pneuminous interface. This restraint on the vector field is inferred to come from the umbratic, though its actual nature is unknowable (in these metaphysics). So the implication that comes from magickal phenomena is that conceptuality must be capable of altering the umbratic, or as it is phrased elsewhere ‘the pneuma can affect the umbra’.

Here then we see the point of having pneuma as not purely epiphenomenonal. Magick means that conceptuality alters things. The definition of magick we work with here is ‘a concept that is applied successfully to a vector region that would not ordinarily take it’. Synchronicity is often the appearance of objects, words, numbers, images in places that seem somehow pertinent to the individual. The explanation here is that unlike the ordinary state of affairs in which the regular array of the world (as determined by the umbratic) displays what is on offer, in this instance the autonomous action of the pneuminous accretions has somehow restructured the situation such that now physicality (the umbra) serves the pneuminous action. Magick is just a more active form of the same. If synchronicity is achieved by the accretions acting under their own steam, then magick is the manipulation of the umbratic through the actions of the neurotic accretion (self). The NA desires that a certain region of the vector field which is occupied by a certain accretion should not be occupied by another. For example, that I am poor is a concept applied to a region (myself and my lack of funds). The money hungry magician seeks apply the concept of himself being wealthy to the vector region instead. Magick is the process of trying to make the new accretion stick in such a way that the umbratic is forced to alter at the behest of the accretion.

We do not here, offer how this happens, such descriptions stray beyond the point of such a phenomenology. We only say that under this system, if we do not accept predetermined harmony or the non-existence of the phenomena, this is what somehow must be happening. Pneuma is the concept at the heart of all of this. It is the force required to make it functional.

Nietzsche maybe underestimates the power of the appearance of the metaphysical world. There is not necessity to its incurring notions of guilt. This only belongs to the metaphysical world that instantiates the judging god. The appearance of the metaphysical world of fluid but magickally potent conceptuality opens action up to all manner of magickal beseechings that may or may not be effective (agnostic disjunctive epistemology again). Drawing this conclusion about the metaphysical maybe enables it to be reapplied to life rather than shunning it in favour of physicality. The appearances of the metaphysical world in physical will not go away and our ability to decide upon their truth will not increase -unless it is favour of the metaphysical. Any conception of life needs to take these appearances into account without dogmatising them into a system.

by on

brett-jordan-GQCYOS_MH0w-unsplash

This decade comes to an end in one hour and six minutes. Thank god. I am exhausted. All that pretending. All that working. All that pretending to work to please other people. A performance. I will tell the truth in the next decade. Nothing but the truth. So help me god. I want answers. I feel determined. This is a new feeling for me. Must be the Zeitgeist. Or something beyond the beyond. Three minutes before the hour. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock. 10:57pm. Getting there.

The plastic Lego pieces are far too many. Will the kid ever put the machine together? It is a spacetime machine. I hope it gets him where he wants to go. Deserves it. A determined kid. The bigger kid wants to stay up until midnight. Why? He says everybody is doing it. Says it is a tradition. So what? I want to go to sleep. I want to dream. This piece keeps getting longer and longer. Might be a novel. Might be the Kraken.

Can you imagine the dead calm of the Great South Bay? I can. The murky water. The clam boat. Turbulent black clouds over Fire Island. I must flee. East or West? Towers of a metropolis loom on the horizon. A UFO hovers over the Empire State Building. Using the Zeppelin docking port.

This book must show an agitated consciousness. An agitated state of mind. An agitated being. People are interacting. Everywhere. Always. Until there are no people. What then? Who will write the novels? We must prepare the machines. They must be ready.

I need people to say things to me. Talk. You know. Conversation. Dialogue. Monologue. Anything. Anything to get this machine buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz out of my ears. 

I believe in you. Whoever you are. Things keep getting weirder by the hour. I keep looking out the window. Stir of ink black tree branches. Did the Con Edison guy come in the morning to read the meter? Was that him buzzing the buzzer? He sure comes early. Early in the morning. Early in the year. Everybody wants electric. I keep fighting with my wife over how to raise the kids. Is there a right way? Do people get it right? 

Are we on TV? This might be the craziest novel in the history of Amerika. Might not be a novel. Might be. Is. Must be. Ess Muss Sein. K. and I lay naked on a bed in a rented room on the edge of Prague. We are good friends. We fuck like lovers. I almost make her come. Now, the stakes are higher. Everything is on the line. I am a writer. Sentences and words keep piling and piling on. Are we getting anywhere? Should we be getting somewhere? What are your expectations? Do you have any expectations? Do we surrender yet? Nah. I like this. We can go on forever.

Pages and pages and pages of manuscript in electronic form. What does it really mean, if anything? We scroll through each other’s consciousness. Perhaps too quickly. I remember your eyes. Blue eyes. I remember your eyes. Hazel eyes. I remember forgetting everything I ever remembered. And then waking up, surprised & ecstatic: I remember everything!

I remember the law. I remember the way it kicked my ass. Killed my friends. A machinist must keep going. Running on empty. Whatever the cost. Sell all your books. Keep writing. Ink. Spiral notebooks are sanctuaries. The library is a cathedral. The solitude of a coffeeshop. 

Yeah well yeah, I’m tired. Writing a novel is no joke. So why am I laughing? I have no choice. Spontaneous bursts of laughter. Try it, if your System allows it. Of course, it is unpredictable.

Started reading Gaddis. You ever read Gaddis? JR is a weird book. Starting to think I might like it. A machinist needs a friend. A machinist friend. Even from Farmingdale. Or Levittown. Or Patchogue. Language accumulates. Reaches a bursting point. Spit it out. Talk. Speak. Utter.

Ink is cheap. Blood is not.

Yes well yes, now what? Is Pompeo the Secretary of State? Believe so. Supposed to travel to Ukraine. Postponed as I understand. Looks forward to his visit, if it ever happens. Wait & see.

International affairs are my forte. As you can probably imagine. I am a novelist. I know almost everything. Mystery, however, is important. Intrigue. The unknown unknowns. Etcetera. I once served President Václav Havel as an elevator operator. The elevator was malfunctioning. Havel took the stairs. I remember Peter Sellers in the film Being There. I remember the novel.

The exoplanet K2-18b is a sub-Neptune planet to keep your strongest eyeball on. Astronomers detect water vapor and clouds on this small planet orbiting a nearby M3-dwarf star at a distance placing it “firmly” in the habitable zone. The planet is 124 light-years away from earth. Orbiting a sun every 33 days.

A light-year is almost six trillion miles.

Closer to earth is Proxima Centauri-b. At 4.2 light-years away, it is the closest exoplanet to earth. That is just 25 trillion miles away. It orbits a red dwarf star in a triple-star system. What is perhaps even more incredible is that the closest exoplanet orbits a sun in the habitable zone.

Are you following the footsteps of the ox?

There is a Zen chant:

The whole Universe is an ocean
of dazzling light,
And on it dance the waves of
life and death.

by on

piotr-bene-P3w6VgaRaFI-unsplash

A Machinist I am. I am expected to know everything. Absurd I know. It cannot be any other way. Somebody must do it. Namely: Me. The planet is incorporated. It is me against us. Who is on your team? Are you sure? Time is clairvoyant. Space is murky. Primeval. I try to recharge the charger. Electricity is faster than cash. Nobody gets paid. Except for the Titans at Titanpointe. Sleep, restless sleepwalker. Sleep. You are a computer. You are a cyborg. You are a human being.

I shall remain nameless. Suits me. The namelessness. Perhaps a number is in order. N47. Or something along those lines. We like numbers. The people of the corporation. Z49. The sky is the limit. Do you like hanky panky? People often do. Never get enough. There are special rooms for dreams & nightmares. Anechoic chambers in the great state of Minnesota. Minnesota is an odd state of mind. Not unlike Indiana. California. Utah. The sky is the fucking limit.

We are machine people. Hurtling towards the next Big Thing. Smaller and smaller things. Anything. Scrap metal. Plastic bags. Electronics. Six-pin connectors. Eight-pin connectors. Am I connected? You know how it is. That feelingless feeling. Creeps up on you at the shopping mall. The agora. The supermarket. Pushing a shopping cart across a boiling asphalt parking lot. Yes. You know. Asteroids are grazing the atmosphere. What a perfect O2 bubble. Until it Pops. Explodes. Annihilates.

A machinist cannot speak. A machinist only writes code. You, on the other hand, possess the gift of talk. People say the incredible. Things like Hi Bob. Every Robert in the country is at risk of being called Bob. It is a curious name. A very curious name. Tom Dick and Harry is also a perfect trinity. Where do people get such names? A book of names? I like paragraphs. A man named James said I fail to teach the paragraph. So be it, James. Cast your lure into the breakers at Montauk for striped-bass. Perhaps you get a bite.

I am obsessed with another sea creature. The Kraken. Tentacles in everything we say and do. The Electric Kraken … far deadlier than electric eels. Yes yes. I began to begin at the beginning of the millennium. Before that I was a boy and a girl … I am not sure. Uncertainty is my specialty. I swim in existence as a tadpole in a methane sea under the frozen crust of Saturn’s big moon Titan. The cilia of a cell are like tentacles. I feel everything. The true locomotion of a human being is impossible to describe.

There is the backward-and-forward motion of fucking. Buttocks are muscle engines. Fully engaged. All systems go. Zoë was a perfect fit for Zig. There are Others, of course. Spacetime keeps spiraling. Twists & turns of human flesh. Love affairs in the dragonfire ruins of medieval castles. Gothic grunts & fucks. Heretofore I have remained anonymous. Your story intrigues me more, reader. Scholar of ancient manuscripts. Scrolls tied by serpent’s twine. Unroll your scrolls. Unspool. This text is such that it may break apart at any moment. But you already know that. Ergo the shakings hands. Beads of sweat. Ache in the pit of the stomach. Anxiety. Excitement.

This text folds into itself. Trapping the reader. Forever. In perpetuity. Infinity. Sit back. Relax. I am the co-pilot. This text is on auto-pilot. I wish Carol Maso author of Ava were here. She might know what to do. Where to land. Parachute on her back. I wish Beckett were here. Molloy. Malone. Murphy. This text is peculiar. I did not expect to name real people. André the Giant. René Goulet. The list is getting increasingly bizarre. Is this slipstream? Anna Kavan, are you listening? Ice? What about you Philip K. Dick? Is this getting beamed into your head? Phil?

The space between space is dark matter. So there, I solved it. A Theory of Everything. A novelist must offer no less. Otherwise she is a charlatan. Or he is a warlock. Or a jester. Or a fool. Keep going with all those Os. I had a girlfriend who called it the Big O. Remember? Remember who you are? We dissolve into bubbles. Every bubble is a Cosmos. Every big O pops. Into smaller and smaller Os. The petite O. Earlier I spoke of something. What was it? O…. I forget. I am a forgetter. Forget I ever remembered. Goodbye.

Hello. So much loneliness here. Surveillance capitalism. Capitalist totalitarianism. Where is an anarchist to turn? Deep into literature I suppose. Art. Chaos & disorder. Entropy. We are machine beings. Trying to wall off the internal combustions of the mind. Human emotions & thoughts & feelings. Spark plugs. Carburetors. Transmissions. Sprockets & gears. Exhaust pipes.

Hero. Are you a hero? Are you failing at it miserably? I am a hero. I will lead us Nowhere. Somebody has to do it. The Big Nowhere. Sparkles and glitters. A novelist like me comes along at the end and the beginning of a millennium. Buckle your jockstrap. Clasp your brassiere. Get ready to rocket through a wormhole into Space. Nah. Let’s just stay here on Earth. There is too much to see already. Why impregnate extraterrestrials?

Storytelling is an ancient trick. People sit around campfires of the dead. Looking up at a black firmament of twinkling stars. Now and again, an asteroid crashes through the atmosphere. Somebody holds up a gnarled stick, and dares to speak: “I am Zig.”

Just let your beard grow. People will believe everything you say. If they call you a charlatan, say thanks. I like mint chocolate chip ice cream.

I feel a Harlem breeze on the East River. Things get real. December is here. Tugboats are fighting the current. The Hell Gate Bridge is a neo-Gothic railroad bridge designed by Gustav Lindenthal, a civil engineer born in Brünn (Czechs call it Brno) in 1850 during the Austrian Empire. Emigrated to Amerika in 1874. Impress your friends.

Brush your teeth. Go to sleep. Floss. Why don’t kids listen? Nobody listens to the old man. The machines are taking over. Washing the human brain. Kids watch kids watch kids playing Minecraft Dungeons.

Enough is enough. This is my last stand. I will fight the Kraken. I am a harpooneer. I will stand on the bow of the ship. The fender of a Volkswagen Beetle. Whatever it takes. Strike the Kraken!