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n
E exponentiation ezine [1.0]
http://www.anus.com/zine
To live in this time is to recognize the law of inevitability: we
consume resources we cannot renew, we make social structures we
cannot sustain, and we live empty lives in worlds of either material
or mystical or political products. To resurrect the eternal spirit
of heroism is to accept the whole as one, obliterating the
illusory divisions of subject/object and appearance/structure, and
thus to embrace the cosmological tradition of great cultures both
ancient and future: this is the goal of exponentiation ezine.
CONTENTS
I. News
II. Culture
III. Features
IV. Literature
=-=-=-=-
News
-=-=-=-=
Government Reveals Five-Year Plan to Utopia
February 2, 2005
American States Press Service
WASHINGTON, DC (ASPS) - At a candlelight ceremony to remember the
victims of September 11, President Bush announced that the United
States will realize Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia within five years.
"America will be a shining beacon to the world of personal liberty,
freedom, individuality and comfort," he said. "We will conquer hate,
despair and inequity, and will create a new Utopia."
Speaking from the heavily-guarded podium in front of the gaping pit
where the World Trade Center towers once stood, Bush pledged to end
four years of infighting that have prevented the reconstruction of
what he called "a symbol of our country, and what makes it great:
our freedom." He delivered his forty-minute speech before going
indoors after high winds began blowing garbage and crack cocaine
paraphrenalia from the nearby Freedom Park.
Bush continued, "Not everyone will immediately desire personal
freedom and the liberation of women, minorities, the oppressed, the
retarded and the insane, but if they want to live in some backward
feudal state of idol-worship and primitive toilet conditions, we
will crush them like the evil they are. Utopia has conquered such
backward superstitions and paranoid, deluded religious fanaticism."
Darla Hofheiser, president of the dissident group Wiccans for
Abortion and Medical Marijuana, held a protest sign bearing the
words NO FUTURE WITHOUT ABORTION, said she was disappointed in the
president's speech. "If this is to be Utopia," she said, "Everyone
must be represented, and -- how is that possible, when he won't
allow abortion and medical marijuana? We have to agree to disagree."
American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Roger Cardozas expressed a
contrary sentiment. "The right wing will always justify itself in
terms of freedom, but where is the freedom for a Mexican-American
superstate within what is erroneously called Texas and New Mexico?"
Cardozas then departed for a keynote speech to the Association of
Mexican American Students, entitled "Aztlan - Our Right and
Destiny."
Further down the street, protestors from NAMBLA voiced a similar
sentiment. "How is it that in this grand scheme, men who like to
share their love with young boys and their peachlike buttocks are
not included? Freedom means freedom for everybody," said NAMBLA
protestor Jorge Rosenberg, who was joined by a crowd of every race,
ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation in chanting "Freedom for
everybody."
In the promenade across the way, however, emotions ran high in a
different direction. "I won't feel free until I know I live in a
country ruled by Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior," said Theresa
Baxter, founder of Methamphetamine Addicts for Christ. "He is
everywhere, if you look for him - in the heart of every human being,
in the kindness of strangers, and in the tiny people who run under
the table when I'm cranked."
Speaking from the White House, Attorney General John Ashcroft
responded: "There are people out there who fear our Utopia, and we
will take each one and using modern military hardware, send him back
to his primitive gods in pieces, so that our democracy cannot be
threatened by those who hate our freedom." He was promptly chastised
by the National Organization for Women (NOW), who characterized his
speech as "sexist" and "denying the right to women of being freedom
fighters for the backward, primeval regime of their choice."
On the street outside the press conference, Joe "Wipers"
Washington-Perez was gathering half-eaten hot dogs from a trash can
while proposition cars stopped at the light for a windshield
cleaning with a greasy rag. "Freedom ain't free," he said. "Takes
two hours to find a full pork hotdog in these dumpsters, and I'm
caught between the horsehead nebula and the Yeast God."
Speaking the dwindling crowd, as nightfall arrived and the city area
outside White House security bastions became an unstable war zone
between drug dealers, SWAT teams, skinhead gangs and rapists from
every ethnic group and gender-orientation, Bush continued. "Once
Utopia is established," he said. "We will live in peace and
prosperity forever, unless evil is destined to thwart our progress."
"We cannot tolerate evil," he continued. "If they insist on fighting
us, it will touch off a war between Utopia and the empires of evil."
After a momentary interruption as iconoclastic rally racers crashed
into the crowd of Falun Gong protestors outside, Bush was asked for
his contingency plans for that event. Looking startled, the
president said quickly, "Well, it will bring about the apocalypse,
and all the good people will be called home to God, of course."
-=-
Israeli scientist invents cure for death
January 31, 2005
El-Shaddai News Services
GAZA CITY, ISRAEL (ESNS) - The remarkable announcement was made
today that yet again, modern science has triumphed over nature, and
this time conquering an age-old fear: Israeli National University
scientist Haim Vorenberg has invented a cure for death. The cure,
administered through a machine in which the user sits, makes use of
a new subatomic particle discovered by Vorenberg, the vader.
"Vaders are the complement to free radical particles, which occur
naturally in our flesh through the process of aging, as we become
older and get closer to death, which reduces us to dust and ruins
all we have done," he said in a thick German accent. "What our
machine does is to replace free radicals with vaders, so forever we
are free from the curse -- of death!"
Vorenberg previously worked on missile design systems and was
responsible for the remarkable Israeli "Tikkun Olam" missile, which
during the first Iraq war shot down one Scud, four Piper Cubs and
uncountable pigeons brainwashed in the suicidal death religion of
Islam. His list of accomplishments is long, including honorable
service in the US Army Intelligence division before the Tet
Offensive, Director of Safety Regulations at Three Mile Island, and
Environmental Regulator at Love Canal.
"The machine is very fragile, very expensive," said Vorenberg. "It
requires rare materials, like South African diamonds and white
Russian gold," he said.
Interviewed in the Vatican, Pope John Paul II expressed solidarity
with Vorenberg. "This ingenious man of God has invented the ultimate
fulfillment of man's dominion over nature," said the Pope.
"Blessings upon him and his kin, who are blessed in the eye of God,
who up till now alone has held back death."
The machine was demonstrated on dissident Eli Al-Rafal, who shouted
"Free Palestine!" before being strapped into the apparatus, at which
point the heavy door lined in lead and gold was closed upon him.
"Notice how we convey the blessing of Immortality on even our
enemies," said Israeli government press officer Christian Horowitz.
"Our God, who we share with Christians, is indeed merciful even to
His worst enemies."
After humming for several minutes, the machine began making cyclic
static discharge sounds. Vorenberg quickly adjusted a dial on a
console that looked suspiciously like one borrowed from a US-made
F-16 fighter. "We are now aligning the positrons and neutrons and,
ah, magic particles in his body," said Vorenberg. "Soon the free
radicals will be gone, and he will be free from death forever."
With an immense electric crackling roar, the machine fully energized
and lit the room with an incomparable glow, leaving a faint odor of
ozone and hair standing on end for the straight-haired among the
observers. Vorenberg, his curly mop untouched, turned back the
machine. "Success!" he said. "Another soul saved, and nature's vile
death is removed, thus zee triumph of mankind is assured."
When he opened the machine, however, Al-Rafal had vanished, leaving
behind a single red rose.
-=-
Los Angeles Annexes South Korea
February 4, 2005
Christian Thought Monitor
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA (CTMN) - Today Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger and Mayor Dick Riordan made a joint announced that
Los Angeles, the nation's fastest growing city, had annexed South
Korea. "In LA, we are proud to be a tolerant and diverse community,
and as a result we keep growing," said Riordan. "I'd like to welcome
our newest outer suburb, Seoul."
Schwarzenegger weighed in by noting that California "has always
prospered from the diversity and hard work of immigrants such as
myself," and promised the South Korean suburb would be no different.
"You can now participate in the Los Angeles Dream," he told them.
"You will be able to have entertainment jobs, medical marijuana, and
drive in rush-hour traffic to cultural events like Linkin Park and
the Vagina Monologues."
Sung Pak, leader of the California Korean-Americans Association,
said, "Today is a brave new world for the Korean-American community,
as we put our best foot forward to be the largest minority group in
Los Angeles." He scanned the crowd for a minute, and then said,
"That is, if our daughters do not continue to insist on dating white
and Hispanic guys who dress and behave like gangsta rappers."
South Korea, a nation of 48 million Koreans, has struggled for
wealth and independence in the highly competitive South Asian region
for many centuries, being tossed about between China and Japan like
an inflatable love-doll. "We decided, at last, to go to the source
of business knowledge in Asia: Southern California," said President
Roh Moo-hyun. "Since over a third of Los Angeles is owned by Asian
businesses, it is hard to say yet who is annexing whom."
Riordan dismissed fears that the new suburb would be too different
to integrate into LA's famously uniform escapist suburban culture.
"Nonsense," he said. "Los Angeles supports many kinds of diversity,
and we're sure South Korea will fit in just fine, as long as they
don't mind gated communities, noise regulations and numbering their
freeways according to our system."
Longtime LA resident Sarah Snyder expressed her surprise. "Well, how
about that," she said. "I guess the suburbs just keep expanding, so
it's bound to happen one of these days," she said, having a cup of
joe after her African-style pilates workout and positive thinking
orientation session at the New Wiccan Buddhist Temple in downtown LA
(next to the Scientology building and two doors down from a Tantric
chiropractor). Snyder said she welcomed the Koreans to LA, and hoped
that some of them would show up to make her congregation more
diverse.
Beaming with confidence, Schwarzenegger expressed faith in the
process of assimilation. "People come here from all over, but pretty
soon, they've got Zen gardens next to the Chicken McNuggets and a
therapist session that evening, like everybody else," he said,
noting that although plans to open a "Mann's Chinese" theatre in
South Korea had met with rioting, there were no objections to
installing the world-famous "In-N-Out" burger chain next to temples
made seven millennia ago by ancient cultures. "It all just mixes,"
he said. "We are all immigrants here."
Not all residents were as concerned with welcoming the newcomers.
"Fucking Koreans," said Rufus Watanabe, who scrounges garbage cans
at roughly Wilshire and Mulholland, "We kicked their asses in that
war, even if the god damn politicians tied our hands. But if they
bring me discount AZT, or at least a 40, I'll be the welcome wagon."
-=-
Organized Crime Calls it Quits, Becomes Credit Reporting Agency
Russian-American News Service
20 January 2005 8:36 PM PST
Hoboken, New Jersy (RANS) - The once-mighty American organized crime
empire has called it quits, citing the increased bureaucracy
required to maintain a clandestine operation, and has turned over a
new leaf as a credit reporting agency. Boss Dymitry "Sonny"
Kaganovitz summed it up in his characteristic style: "We lost some
deductions with the last tax code, so now we're going for the fat
and putting the protection racket on the back burner."
According to Kaganovitz, while business in prostitution and heroin
trafficking increases under Republican administrations, the
continuing decline of America's economy to third-world levels has
caused a plateau effect. "We're used to this from the old country,"
he said. "Big leaders, oil prices ain't good, so we gonna hit 'em
where we're protected, and that's in credit reporting."
Credit reporting agencies are regulated minimally under federal law,
but are the primary source of information for lenders, renters and
arranged-marriage services. They track individuals by their Social
Security numbers, originally an identification reserved for
government use only in the process of taxation, and keep a "credit
rating" on each individual according to the number of debts owed on
that account. "There's almost no accountability, and if there's a
problem, it's up to the individual to contact us and pay us an
hourly to fix it. Beats pimpin' on the margins, and there's only one
level of government to bribe," said Kaganovitz.
Associate Ivan "Crusher" Sternovitch agreed. "All we gotta do is put
what businesses send to us inna the computer, and we got a whole
employment service of solid citizens for that," he said. "With the
national identification coming, and prolly linked through credit
cards, we're just on the up and up." Mentioning a frustration with
the intricacies of deducting machine gun parts and backstreet whore
abortions, he cited the pure legality of the enterprise as a
positive factor: "We've got the law on our side now," he said, "so
if you whisper about us, we fucking sue you. Simple and legal. Can't
beat it."
While Sternovitch denies that mob profits from traditional outlets
like gambling, protection services, drug running and child
pornography are down, Federal Bureau of Investigation special
detective Frank Rosales disagrees. "We're really putting the hurt on
these guys," he said. "Last month, we intercepted a record twelve
tons of marijuana, and we cleaned all the call girls from Central
Park," he said, from the four thousand square foot, waterfront
Victorian house in Connecticut he affords through "really watchin'
my pennies and dimes."
Although the federal government is proud of these figures, Bill
Cartwright at the National Organization for Reform of Marijuana
Laws, or NORML, disagrees. "Twelve tons? That's nothing," he said.
"If it were legal to have here at the office, and it's not so we
don't, we'd have at least that amount for staff meetings. They
always get the crappy weed, too, all bricked-out with the crushed
seeds that make bad smoke, like someone just left it out for them to
get and call it a day," he said, munching Fritos as he maneuvered a
digital car in a video game called "Grand Theft Auto III: Sodomy and
Lust."
Kaganovitz laughs off such criticism. "First and foremost," he said,
"I'm a businessman, and I act on opportunity. We've got no
regulation, no accountability, and all we gotta do is answer the
phone when some idjit calls about a social, then give 'em the stuff
we have in our computers." He inhaled deeply from a Cuban cigar.
"Piece of cake, really."
-=-
Books: Looking Busy and Getting Ahead
by Lawrence Turnrist, New York Daily Book Review
Normally, I eschew the species of books that increasingly populates
the mahogany at even the best uptown bookstores, the somnolent
"self-help section." There is only so much one can tell those who
cannot tell themselves, says Maya Angelou, and I'm inclined to agree
with the greatest of African-American feminist poets on that one.
The field of literature is diminshed already by those who insist on
writing books about character and adventure long after such things
are irrelevant; today, art is in the individual, and for me to like
a book, it has to have a unique setting and direction, like Aleister
Shabaz Otuku's "The Birds of Parody Avenue," an uplifting tale about
Asian youth with African-American fathers learning to succeed in the
competitive pencil design industry despite being addicted to MDMA,
individualistic iconoclasts and delightfully bisexual. No self-help
book will reach that height of ingenuity and uniqueness!
However, "Looking Busy and Getting Ahead" is, above all else, a
practical self-help guide. There are millions, just millions, of
self-help books about succeeding at work, and they all have the same
advice, like make contacts, communicate, and take responsibility for
your work. This book however takes a more practical approach,
because we all know that these days, jobs are just wasting time
until you can go out at night (don't miss "Ladies Night" at the
Ecclectic Flamingo on Tuesdays, boys - "women" should just stay
home!). Chapters are organized by what you'll actually be doing
during the day, such as Chapter Seven, "Ways to Stay Awake," which
goes beyond just counting paperclips and stealing office supplies;
it has useful exercises you can do with common office objects, tips
for building electroshock sequencers to keep you on your toes, and
tips for masturbating under a desk without giving the wrong
coworkers a free show. Not only that, but in Chapter Ten, there is a
handy guide to making up a language of your own, using common words
in business phone calls, to arrange meetings with associates and
paramours.
In depth evasion gets big in Chapter Fourten, "Ten Thousand Things
to Xerox," which tells you how to find meaningless documents that
look important and require hours of photocopying, stapling and
filing, with appropriate pauses between, of course. As an Appendix,
there's a section on business laws, by state, regulating mandatory
break time and phone rules. My favorite chapter was the second,
which gets into the nitty-gritty of a filing system based on ancient
Egyptian astrological signs, but there's good detail all around for
today's busy modern employee.
What I like best is that none of the methods mentioned in this book
will disrupt business in any way, because they take advantage of the
lack of productivity expected from a modern faceless drudge in an
office full of non-productive people; of course, they won't enhance
business either, but they'll protect your most important asset:
being inoffensive and following the rules, as that means,
eventually, you'll get promoted, and need volume two, "Looking
Proactive and Getting Ahead." It isn't what you normally expect from
this column, but try something new, and give it a read.
-=-=-=-=-=-
Culture
=-=-=-=-=-=
=- Music -=
Blood Axis & Les Joyaux de la Princesse - La Folie Verte (Athanor,
2002)
"I Am The Green Fairy My Robe Is The Color Of Despair I Have Nothing
In Common With The Fairies Of The Past What I Need Is Blood, Red and
hot The Palpitating Flesh Of My Victims Alone, I Will Kill France,
The Present Is Dead, Vive the Future..."
As shocking or confusing may it be for a Blood Axis fan to listen to
Michael Moynihan introducing their latest album with the exact words
"I Am The Green Fairy", this is quite indeed the case. The forbidden
beverage of the damned romanticist artists of pre-war Paris,
absinthe - the Green Madness, inspires Blood Axis for a fast trip,
along with their French collaborators Les Joyaux De La Princesse,
into the emerald abyss of a world wrapped up and drowning into
decadence. Diverging from the Nietzchean, will-to-power aesthetic
and musical explorations of their first album, The Gospel of
Inhumanity, this particular album will suprise and bring forth a lot
of questions to the listener. However, such is the virtue of great
artists; their unexpectedness and unwillingless to conform shall
always be the backbone of their success.
The bitter drink of Absinthe, also called artemisia absinthium
(apsinthion = undrinkable in Greek), is mainly wormwood, a poisonous
herb that was mixed with wine and given to Olympic winners long ago
to remind them of the biterness of defeat. Not to mention, of
course, the 80% alchohol. Absinthe's effects are brutally
intoxicating and hallucinogenic; many absintheurs described their
experience in terms of opium or cocaine usage. As a result, this
drink first brought to France by troops who fought in Algeria and
used it as a pain-reliefer, was popularized in Paris during the
years 1880-1914 and quickly become the favorite of avantgarde,
bohemian, or disaffected artists that found in it a source of
inspiration. Van Gogh's dazzling, trembling pictures were inspired
in part by the liquor's effects, along with the blackened visions of
Edgar Alan Poe, Verlain and many others.
The album's first sounds are as peculiar as one would expect;
Moynihan declaims the poem which opens this very article while a
heavy echo effect causes the verses to clash with one another; a
violin steps in to comment with a tragic melody, but it is played in
a manner reminding of an drunk absintheur trying to put some notes
together moments before passing out in a Parisian bar of ill repute.
As this fades, a chaos of various sounds of singers in crescendo,
war drums and orchestras all passed through reverb and echo filters
emerges, but slowly the chaos is organized and the samples are lined
up correctly so that the first industrial track of the album is
produced. At this point, an experienced listener of neo-classical
industrial music will recognize the dreamlike soundscapes of the
album as the work of the French avantgardist in charge of L.J.D.L.P.
While there is no mention over the (luxurious and exquisitely
adorned with old absinthe advertisements and even government flyers
showing alcoolique degenerres types) booklet over who is responsible
for the music, the resemblance between this recording and "Die
Weisse Rose" and "Croix De Feu" is striking, not only in the use of
samples and keyboards, but in the general longing for 1900-40 music,
ideas and ideologies (a characteristic of Blood Axis and the other
bands in the neofolk/industrial scene).
To portray in a poetic but also realistic way the influence of
absinthe into the psychic world of its fanatical consumers, the
collaboration chooses poems from artists of the time that provide an
insight from a personal view to the delights and horrors of being
addicted to the drink. Moynihan's voice is crucial to this effect,
as he retains the vigorous and epic quality characteristic of all
Blood Axis recordings, while its fierceness makes an interesting
antithesis to the tragical, self-destructing tales of the poets.
Moreover, popular music of the 1900s is used throughout the album,
either performed as small piano interludes, or directly "borrowed"
from LPs. There lies a defect of not only this disk, but of most in
its category; the fact that a great deal of the music is being
ripped off from other recordings may annoy some listeners, but we
must understand that the artists here function as a radiophone of
some kind; they exhibit the atmosphere and the "soundcolours" of the
time, in the same way as a documentary or a radio show would.
The best parts of the album are the long industrial/ambient tracks,
in which the talent of both bands is unfurled. The dismal, noisy and
crowling Absinthe (D' Apres Emile Duhem), the nightmarish Poison
Vert, consist of repetitive sampled melody, noisy loops in the
backround and long keyboard notes drowned into multiple layers of
effects. The keyword describing this style is Ambience, in part
because the concept is a hallucinogenic drink.
After the singing of the tenor in the last song fades out, the
initial question is left unanswered: What prompted these particular
artists to undertake such a project, especially when it is
associated with the fall rather than with the rise of spirit? Apart
from the obvious fact that the artists are themselves are
absintheurs, whatever opens new borders for human thought can be
studied, not embraced but looked upon. Artists are necessarily not
philosophers or politicians, but mostly storytellers; they depict
elements of thought we may have not experienced by our own, and
sometimes no judgement or aphorisms are needed from their side; what
we shall gain from them is our own matter. It seems, one can sing
warmongering praises to the Pan-Germanic spirit and at the same time
hold a bottle of glowing opaline in his right hand... - Lycaon
-=-
Biosphere - Cirque (Touch, 2000)
From Norwegian ambient artist Biosphere comes this follow-up to the
heavily acclaimed 1997 album "Substrata." As in that release, a
naturalistic theme pervades this work although this time it is based
on a story of a man making an ill-fated venture into the Alaskan
wilderness. With no lyrics or text, the story is more something to
be musically alluded to than told in any concrete way. That being
said, Biosphere's characteristic style works well with the subject
material.
It is a depiction of lone human elements journeying through a vast,
desolate and gently chaotic world only to find harmony and
transcendence within it. A surging pattern falls within a
deceptively complex texture of fragmentary, subtly divergent melody.
Thematically conflicting two and three note figures may come
together and pull apart in repeating cycles as one asserts itself
over the other to disorientating effect and then fades and echos
into the other melodic idea.
The use of found sounds from nature and modern technological life is
a frequently used device in Biosphere pieces, and "Cirque" is no
exception. They are the alienated traces of technological
civilization existing within naturalistic landscapes of sound. While
some things have stayed the same, other things are different than
the last album.
Keyboard lines have a definite rhythm as opposed to the liquid
divisions of notes heard on "Substrata," and to some people's
disappointment, there are actual beats. This criticism is relevant
for some tracks. While the percussion can be tasteful, understated
and even musically essential, other instances use more conventional
drum and bass and house beats that would have better been left out
because of their intrusiveness.
Fortunately, this complaint is a minor and should not detract the
listener from the excellent taste in melody, tone color and
arrangement displayed here. If unpretentious, spirited ambient music
that is actually musical is your thing, this release may appeal, as
will "Shenzou," a reworking of ideas from Debussy pieces into
Biosphere's characteristic ambient form. - Sothis
-=-
Tangerine Dream - Phaedra (Virgin, 1974)
The 1974 album from the German electronic legends Tangerine Dream
broke ground and still stands as an example of a controlled and
visionary work, proving itself with each passing year to be an
eternal art work of high importance. This is high art in every way,
influential beyond words, bringing with it a whole slew of creations
that had bands in the electronic fields playing catch up and
following in line. "Phaedra" is a passionate sound stream from
idealistic visionaries, which explores experimental realms with the
new electronic sequencers that were new to the decade. Where "Atem"
established the band as a visionary force willing to explore the new
synthesizer and electronic musical tools that were emerging
throughout the 1970s, "Phaedra" established the band as a perennial
and everlasting musical force and logically picks up the soundscapes
laid out by "Atem" and helps further develop what would become known
as the classic Tangerine Dream sound.
Four tracks lasting a total of 38 minutes comprise this album, which
takes one on a celestial voyage through art and time. Recurring
conceptual sound motifs weave their way into the blend of electronic
sound mastery, along with harmonic innovation making this album a
complete conceptual piece broken into four tracks, much like
Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" or Gustav Holst's "The Planets" in those
respects. The sounds of this album wander into the paradoxes of the
surrealists, grasping their sense of absurdity and ability to evoke
a dream state and Tangerine Dream extract these things with the
focus of a Zen warrior.
The production is clear and roomy, reminiscent of a crystal ballroom
or an underwater aquarium. Listening to the sounds of the album is
like dipping one's head into a cold water and listening to the
dinging of chimes. The synth work creates a cosmic condition, a
whole universe in which the music echoes and explores itself freely.
The listener becomes like the astronaut floating in the void of
space. At times during this album it is reminiscent of sonic
interpretations of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey." At
times it feels like what it must be like to sit on the edge of a
glacier as it starts to crack and slip into the ice, since a
chilling mood chips away at the subconscious and then finally breaks
away entirely into a world of its own, a dreamlike condition.
"Phaedra" effectively suspends the listener gut wrenching state in
which transcendental emotions arise.
The album induces translucent trances where the primordial meets the
cosmic, which is perhaps not too far from William Blake's visions
when he stated "eternity knows not the production of time." That is
the essential paradox of Tangerine Dream: a symphonic bliss that
both emanates traditional tribal elements along with progressive
musical elements and in doing so screams out that history is an
organic system in which the past is the future and the future is the
past; time is not a factor to these sounds, they are somehow
otherworldly and transcendental. "Phaedra" is a piece of musical art
that will withstand the test of time. When trends and music that is
merely social entertainment fades into dust with the coming of the
winds, Tangerine Dream's masterworks will stand strong in the vast
abyss like the Sphinx out of the timeless desert sands. - phantasm
-=-
Allerseelen - Gotos=Kalanda (AOR, 1995)
Few bands have showed originality in industrial music matching the
Austrian masters of (in their own words) technosophic avantgarde,
Allerseelen. Headed by the charismatic Kadmon, an occultist
researcher (whose zine, Aorta/Ahnstern, covers pagan Europe and
religion) and experimentalist musician, Allerseelen broken through
with an album that has initiated them into the elite company of
neoclassical/traditionalist/ethnocultural industrial bands.
"Technosophic," imbuing techno(logy) with sophia (wisdom) by using
the inner soul (Aller - Seelen), making ends meet, tradition and
technology, the achievements of the present age and the ideology of
the past: in this album it is manifestated thematically by the
writings of Karl Maria Wiligut, an Austrian poet, mystic and runes
initiate of the second world war era. It is a collection of twelve
(as many as the tracks of the album) symbolic, almost codified poems
dedicated to the twelve months of the year, an apotheosis of
nature's eternal and cyclical form. No wonder the pagan symbol of
the black twelve-rayed sun adorns the cover.
Consequently, the Austrians gradually underline the passing of the
seasons in the mood of their music and convey the spiritual and
mainly, mystical value of the poems. A demanding challenge, indeed,
as the reader could observe the similarities of the case with
Stravinsky's "Rite of the Spring" and apparently the precedent under
which the artist's work could be judged.
Contrasting the typical industrial formula of structuring music in
layers of noise loops or melodies replacing each other randomly for
the sake of rhythymic variation, Allerseelen maintain either a
steady but compound and intricate drum beat that is reminiscent of
trance music, or more simplistic patterns of traditional techno when
the rhythym reverts to "austere", typical Indo-European ritual or
marchlike cadences. Under it a series of events take place, either
providing the musical element of the tracks in the form of ambient
keyboard melodies, sampled strings or with Kadmon's characteristic
bass and voice, creating impressionistic soundscapes of aggresive,
psychedelic, trancelike sounds coming from a variety of samples of
natural sounds (frogs croaking, thunders striking and the like),
human voices, distorted loops of orchestra instruments or even
metal/hardcore guitars utilized as noise sources rather than
structure. Harsh production focusing on high frequencies enhances
the anti-commercial quality of the album and further expands the
occult and, often, militant feeling.
Allerseelen's main characteristic is the true folk (and apparently,
Germanic) character that heavily marks the spirit of the work and
its themes, not a stagnant imitation of certain melodies or use of
instruments but the transfiguration of the folkish soul to the
present age and its representation to the modern, alienated public.
Kadmon uses for such a goal simplistic and harsh melodies of an
adolescent, dionysian character that sometimes range only a semitone
back and forth, while the violent noisy backround pins down and
makes the listener subjective to the message, yet awakens and
activates in the way all non-decadedent and prolific art should
affect its subject. The best (among equals) part of the album lies
in the winter - beginning and end - sections; it is also easy to
observe that Kadmon keeps his coldest/harshest material for the
equivalent sections, while the spring/summer ones have a more
blooming, youthful, abrupt feeling.
As a whole, the work is representative of the German traditional
romanticist spirit; rather than adapting the rational, progressive
approach of classicism (in terms of structure) Allerseelen instead
choose to stress the boundaries of expression; not in the usual
subjective, random manner of "avant-garde" but with the strict,
disciplined and focused dedication to small parts of music that are
completed by all means of aesthetic and psychological development.
They are minimalist in a classical, adventurous and non-stagnant
way. This album may not be the least-affronting introduction to the
style of which Allerseelen are leaders, but it is their artistic
peak and defines it as the continuation of the spirit that pionners
of electronic music like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream have
introduced. - Lycaon
-=-
Regan, High Priestess - Sellisternia (High Priestess Productions,
2002)
Dropping into the unsteady fusion between modern electronic music
and remnants of dark ancient cultures, this release from High
Priestess Productions is musically powerful when it escapes the
confusion of wanting to be both ritual music and pop at the same
time. Generalizing about these songs is not accurate, as they range
between degrees of the manifold styles comprising their complexion,
but the basic elements are a collision between Aphex Twin and Dead
Can Dance, with 1940s lounge music hiding in the wings. Showcased
most elegantly is vocalist Regan's singing, which is alternatingly
smoothly ascendant and breathily timbral, creating a rough edge
which bites into the smoother synthesizer sounds used as the melodic
basis of the music. Percussion of a digital nature provides
understructure in the way a techno band might use it, with layers of
accent within the same tempo structure zooming into and out of view
as each song moves through its sections.
Sequenced digital instruments fit tightly to this framework or
almost completely deny it, roughly echoing the two major motifs of
this band. One is the earthy and sensual, beat-fixed driving pop
music that alleviates any sense of pretense to the record, and the
other is the Dead Can Dance portion of its primal build, which is
wafting cloudbursts of slowly changing notes which sustain a somber
but gaily mysterious mood. Where this band is strongest is in
writing the hook-laden keyboard riffs that propel its more energetic
works, and in weaving together the darker melodic constructions that
give it some space for tantalizing obscurity; its weakness relates
entirely to its division between pop and something perhaps more
ambitious, as the drumbeats are too busy and altogether too present
to avoid interrupting the music. Often, some shortcuts are taken
that conform to existing styles of songwriting; while these aren't
incompetent, they aren't necessary either, and here is why: the
second half of this album is where the band shows an unbroken
stamina and latent creativity, writing songs in the style of lounge
acts from the first half of the last century, completed cryptically
with sultry but aggressive female vocals.
These songs break from the verse-chorus mold entirely at times, and
use both rhythmic and textural interludes to create a vacuum ahead
of the arrival of each section, so that the listener is kept
suspended from anything finite as a full-on pop band would deliver.
Sometimes even the insistent percussion slacks off a bit, and
keyboard phrases get sparser, as if given a new sense of meaning and
cause in song. These are the works from this band that are openly
approaching excellence, and suggest a hybrid style that invokes the
mystery of both recent and far past, as Eastern scales and dissonant
vocals bend around lush yet realistic work. "Sellisternia" is a
first effort, and shows some struggle over defining sound, but as
the second half of the album illustrates, when its wide-ranging
parts synthesize a sublime power emerges. - vijay prozak
-=-
Hekate - Sonnentanz (Well of Urd, 1999)
Hekate is a German neo-folk project masterminded by Axel Heinrich
Menz and Achim Weiler and backed by a generous staffing of
musicians. Hekate set themselves apart from a genre often
distinguished by mediocrity dressed up as "epic" moodscapes.
Eschewing academic pretensions for heartfelt musicality and tasteful
"filler" parts, this album merits a listen on artistic grounds
alone.
"To Break A Heart" lets synth, flute and acoustic guitar set the
mood for a spoken poetry recital. A seemingly personal grief is
transformed when the militant melody and snare cadence come in to
transfrom the feeling into a mixture of national lament and
warrior-like determination.
"Findhorn" is a haunting ambient piece. Eerie, simple melodies
harmonize and grow off each other from the two note phrase at the
beginning, to the flanged-out vocal line subtly making its presence
known. Percussion keeps a tasteful distance but is effective in
adding an ominous element.
"Fatherland" is probably the most overtly nationalistic tune on
here. Each stanza of vocal melody suspends itself into space and
leads back into itself for a reiteration of an increasingly
desperate tone. On the last stanza it concludes with a stable
cadence, but suddenly the song breaks into a triumphant celtic folk
romp. The unique tension reminds me of hearing someone lost in a
state of sad recollection of their world and reaching a profound
conclusion of its signifigance. In essence, it is the confronting of
loss and confusion to find something in it joyful and transcendent.
"Danse de l'obscurite" may be the best song on the album. Male and
female vocals trade parts while an underlying melody is given
periodic room for development between singing. Inventive chord
progressions are simple but give a nice harmonic backing to the
compelling melodic interplay. Strangely enough, college-town REM
comes to mind hearing this.
This is one of the rarer Hekate releases, but it is worth the
search. "Sonnentanz" is an absorbing drama with a knack for hooking
the listener in with inspired, melodic songwriting. - Sothis
-=-
Sol Invictus - Lex Talionis (Tursa, 1989)
It is not easy to ascertain what in the aesthetic of early
industrial music triggered the neo-folk movement; how could the
aggresive, anti-moral and nihilist nature of that music appeal to
the same artists who appreciate gentle and modest traditional music?
Sol Invictus answer that question as not only adepts but for the
most part innovators of the neo-folk style.
Sol Invictus mastermind Tony Wakeford already had a history in the
underground London scene before forming his own band; anarchist punk
band Crisis and neo-folk pioneers, Death in June, formed his basic
ideogical and thematic principles: a dissident, furious opposition
to the modern world and its values on the one side and the embrace
of the wisdom of tradition and tribalism on the other. The title of
his first album with Sol Invictus serves as a declaration, as it
invokes the title of Baron Julius Evola's cornerstone book on
traditionalism and re-introduction to the archetypal spiritual and
societal forms of the Indo-European people.
The third Sol Invictus album defined the genre and caused the
explosion of numerous similar bands and a whole new aesthetic for
the industrial scene beyond doubt. The cover of the 1989 "Lex
Talionis" album would disturb the uninitiated: four figures of men
with a large phallus and a club in their right hands placed
anti-diametrically so that limbs and clubs form a swastika. The
meaning can be easily derived, since the phallus and the club
symbolize the eternal archetypal forms of power and their
conjunction forms the symbol of the Sun, the symbol in common among
Indo-European people worldwide who retain the ancient pagan
tradition of Sun worship, from the Roman Empire (Sol Invictus) to
the Norsemen and the Hindu Indo-Aryans. The symbolism is a rough
reminder of the ancient ways and principles of our tribe, however
foreign and repulsive to the modernized, decadent people of
humanitarian society (a society morally enslaved by a foreign,
desert religion and a political system that devours its best
elements, dissolving the most fundamental instict, that of
self-preservation).
The music of Sol Invictus attempts to materialise in sound all these
aspects, the grief and pain for the loss of the pagan spirit, the
hate for the massacres that followed the Christian domination of
Europe, the longing for the old times. Wakeford's former involvement
with industrial is still obvious, especially in the begining of the
album, while the basis of Sol Invictus is the acoustic guitar and
voice, fortunately accompanied through the album by other musicians
who offer a variety of instruments such as cello and piano to build
instrumentation on which ideas can unfold. Sol Invictus choose
simple foms of songs to allow lyrical messages to be expressed
clearly, not to make an impression of technical virtuosity. However,
integrity and passion characterise this band. Combining the warm,
introvertive quality of the acoustic instruments and the agressive,
distorted sounds and samples, the band succeds into creating unusual
intensity.
The album starts with a dark, minimalist piece on a piano that soon
gives its place to the title track. A ghastly noise loop with a
vibrato effect continually increasing in volume sets its, soon to be
followed by melodic bass, piano and a low pitched war drum. "The
world is full of Gods and Beasts, some to serve and some to feast,"
"And even forests once lush and green, have the stench of murder and
children's screams," Wakeford comments on the eternal power struggle
in nature, the conquering of the European lands by Christians, and
finally fortells the bleak future of them. "But bird of prey in your
eyes is where our future lies" - the tragic destiny of fighting each
other throughout all history at the delight of their enemies ("No
more wars amongst brothers...," he says later) in the darkest song
of the album. "Black Easter" in contrast is an Dionysian, almost
orgiastic call to the pagan spirit; the noises, the melodic guitars,
the cellos, the samples, all reach a ritualistic frenzy in which Ian
Read (of Fire and Ice) triumphantly cries the Nietzchean aphorism;
"God is Dead!"
The other songs of the album have a more rationalistic, calm
approach in which Sol Invictus release their more melodic,
melancholic material. From ballads to slow pieces with an ambient
flow like "Tooth and Claw," "Abbatoirs of Love" to aggresive, epic
songs like "Hero's Day," this album justifies its impact on the
neo-folk scene of the 1990s.
"Lex Talionis" is more than music alone; it is a statement of an
intent toward ideological awakening. Sol Invictus revive the heroic
ethos of the European spirit, wake up long forgotten memories of
pagan imagery and religion, mourn the decline of its values and
finally foresee the rising of the phoenix from the ashes. Those than
saw in it just a collection of romantic, "gothic" tunes made to fill
out the repertoire of "dark" nightclubs must have been badly
dissapointed. - Lycaon
-=-
Kraftwerk - Paris 1981 (Undead Silence Records, 2003)
This recording from the beginnings of their elusive middle period,
in which they first mimicked bisexual British electropop and then
became dysfunctional over the issue of technology in their music,
reveals Kraftwerk caught in internal conflict and electing for a
course of quality tinged with popular appeal; however, this appeal
is degenerative to the core of the music, and thus for those who
depend on such things it does not have enough novelty, and for those
who seek content independent of aesthetic, it is too humbled. It
shows us muses without Viagra attempting to reconcile their success
with their ambitions, and in the confusion, holding ground and
waiting out the changes in the world of music that appeared around
them; once one becomes famous, it is impossible to see the world as
one did as an anonymous struggling, because suddenly one is titled
and everyone either filters what they tell you or only markets
themselves. You cannot walk the same streets, have the same
discoveries, or even browse without calling attention to yourself,
thus you are cut off from the raw feed of data that tells you what
occurs in the world of music, and dependent upon contacts and (ew)
record labels for information.
This recording is bouncy and vocals have become contorted to give
added emphasis and stylized drama to the lyrical presentation, like
a Hollywood musical. One can sense a pandering to the crowd, but
also a mastery of it, and a sense of a strong desire to make a
normal version of what the British bands had for the most part both
successfully promoted to wide audiences and retained its essential
character. Kraftwerk have changed their character here: showmanship
is not their forte; that is the logical and robotic math-pop that is
both mechanistic and brilliantly soulful in its composition and the
insights it has on the core of our human qualities in the situations
of which it writes, brilliantly, without propaganda or moralizing or
really ego. The result is a distortion of music that is so
well-staged it is horrible to say an error of aesthetic judgment
brings it down, as this band hams it up just a little bit too much.
Instrumentalism is near-flawless as usual and selection of songs is
good, moving through the classics to newer material, but its
over-emphasized energy and stylized percussion and production gives
it the feel of an American stadium concert. Maybe they should have
sent the robots instead. Regardless, the songs are brilliant and in
the strain of a band pushing for clarity in vision, one can sense
history. - vijay prozak
=- Food -=
NORSE SPICED CIDER
This is a variation on a traditional beverage to keep drinkers
warm during the small ice age that is a Nordic winter. For a
garnish, add fresh or dried mint to each mug.
1 gallon apple juice
2 cups white vinegar
3 cups honey
2 tbsp spearmint
2 tbsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tbsp ground cinnamon
1 lemon, cubed included rind
Lightly boil apple juice while adding honey until all is dissolved.
Cool for five minutes, then add vinegar and spices. Simmer for
ten minutes and serve hot.
For the alcoholic version of this drink, use real cider instead
of apple juice. - Hieronymous Botch
-=-
SLAYER CURRY
An Italicized version of an Indian red curry, this recipe was
designed for those hungry moments after a Slayer concert; not
surprisingly, in spice and heartiness it also resembles the pounding
speed/death metal of early Slayer (coincidentally, "Hell Awaits"
provides a perfect background timer for the preparation process).
It's easy to prepare once you've done it before, and can serve as
the perfect conduit for any number of vegetables or meats.
INGREDIENTS
Sauce:
1 stick butter
1 head garlic
1 large white onion
1 tsp red pepper flakes
1 large green apple
1/4 cup white vinegar
1/2 cup whole milk, yogurt, sour cream or cream
2 tbsp brown sugar
Payload:
This is whatever you want to curry, and it is a flexible category.
Our sample payload here is designed to give you a quick and easy
recipe that feeds people on a minimal budget.
2 lbs frozen peas and carrots
16 oz chickpeas, canned
2 large tomatoes, chopped
Spices:
Prepare a mixture of 2-4 tbsp according to these proportions. It is
easiest to use powdered spices, which you can acquire at your local
import store or Whole Foods grocery by weight at minimal cost.
5% cloves
2% nutmeg
2% cardamom
12% fenugreek
7% turmeric
7% chili powder
15% paprika
15% black pepper
5% cayenne pepper
20% corriander
10% cumin
Stages
I. Oils
II. Spices
III. Cook/Rice
IV. Sauce
You will first prepare the oils, then add ingredients and mix in
spice mixture. While that is cooking, you will prepare rice and
finalize the sauce, then serve. Total time should be under 1/2 hour.
I. Oils
Heat 1 stick butter in small saucepan at medium simmer; it will
begin bubbling, and a layer of residue will form at the top and
bottom of the pan (it is best to keep the pan still, and not stir).
Turn off heat, and when butter has partially cooled, scrape the
residue off the top and pour the oil into your large saucepan;
discard the milky residue at the bottom of the oil.
In large saucepan, heat oil to simmer and add chopped garlic and
onion, sprinkling red pepper over it. Cover pan and let simmer for
five minutes. This will create the essential flavor base of the
recipe.
II. Spices
Mix spices according to the formula outlined above. Depending on
your tastes, you can balance the amount of pepper with corriander
and cumin, with more of the latter giving the recipe a sweeter and
broader taste in contrast to the sharpness of pepper and turmeric.
III. Cook/Rice
Add vegetables and chickpeas, sifting the prepared spice mixture
over them, and then add vinegar. If necessary, add water, but keep
to a minimum to avoid a watery sauce. You will cook this mixture for
roughly fifteen minutes, uncovered, depending on what's in your
payload and how frozen it is.
It makes sense at this point to start your water boiling in a
separate saucepan for rice; when water is at a boil, uncover
saucepan, add rice, and turn heat to medium low, then cover. If you
have mixed 3:2 water to rice ratio, it will cook off in ten minutes
and leave you with dry and slightly chewy rice.
IV. Sauce
Reduce heat to low medium; add brown sugar and cubed, cored green
apple. When mixture looks cooked to satisfaction, stir in
milk/yogurt/cream and remove from heat; serve. This recipe will feed
2-4 hungry Slayer fans, and probably six of anyone else. Dedicated
to Mom, for years of cooking instruction! - vijay prozak
=- Books -=
The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. 144 pages,
Penguin Books, New York (1989).
Picked up on a whim whilst perusing dusty shelves of dog-eared,
forgotten and oft-maligned second-hand books, I came to Werther
totally oblivious to its historical impact in the genre of Romantic
literature. I figured it might give me a small doorway into a better
understanding of Goethe's writing style and thought before tackling
his deeper works. I ended up flying through this book in a few
whirlwind hours - it was utterly captivating.
The resonance that echoed in the hearts of those who read this book
upon its initial publication in the late eighteenth century was
widespread and overwhelming; a rash of suicides (which were never
truly linked to the subject matter of the book) followed in its wake
as it crossed national and cultural boundaries. The book is equal
parts a cathartically autobiographical recounting of certain events
in the author's life, and the incorporation of the tale of an
individual and the events which prompted him to commit suicide, a
story that had become widely known at the time: it follows the
(modern-day) cliched story of a young man (Werther) who, in his
written correspondence with a close friend, relates his sudden
evocative infatuation and developing love for a woman (Lotte), one
who is unfortunately promised to another man. A friendship between
them arises nonetheless, and due to the hopelessness of Werther ever
realizing his desired outcome of their deepening companionship, he
eventually flees the town; unable to sufficiently distract his
heart's yearning for long, he returns, albeit to a dual joy and
despair - ecstasy at her returned presence in his life, coupled with
his renewed dejection at his powerlessness to change the fate which
kept her outside of his embrace. Suicide becomes his only hope of
release from the self-destructive cycle.
This scenario has been played out innumerable times, both in
literature and real-life; the differences which allow Goethe's tale
to stand out from his predecessors and imitators are significant.
Much depth of philosophical interest can be found within Werther's
narrative of the lengthy arguments carried on between himself and
the other characters concerning the epistemological, religious and
metaphysical issues of the day; the other difference lies in the
format of the writing itself - it utilizes the character of a
fictional "editor" who has posthumously compiled the letters sent by
Werther to his friend into what constitutes the main body of text
for the book, with some follow-up commentary describing what
happened to Werther once the letters cease their recitation of his
life events. Ostensibly, this would create the impression of nothing
more than a lengthy newspaper article, but the way in which Goethe
manipulates the text brushes such irrelevant categorizations aside,
and draws you into the sentimentalized reality that gnaws at
Werther's soul.
It is a beautifully written work (the author was only twenty four
years old at the time of writing), one which set a large precedent,
not only for the literary genre it spawned, but also for the way in
which the form of the novel was approached by future authors. An
enchanting read, and an insightful glimpse into Romantic literature
and thought, I recommend this novel highly for a view into how
something as simple as the form of a novel can be treated in the
hands of a master. - blaphbee
-=-
The Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe. 240 pages, Bantam Doubleday Dell,
New York (1992).
Recommended to me by a friend with no prior introduction to the plot
given, The Butcher Boy left me with a mixed bag of reactions. I took
the plunge and started into the story: Francis Brady, only son of
his remote, alcoholic father and neurotically unhinged mother,
dealing with the trials he faced while growing up in a rural town in
Ireland around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, as narrated by
himself much later in the future. It centers around perception,
specifically how a young boy with no father figure to learn from
copes with the pretense of his peers, the dynamics of friendship,
and growing up in a social world, a world Brady largely ignores as
unnecessary.
Many people seem to make a great fuss over the apparent onset of
psychosis in the main character, but I never noticed it until
someone pointed it out, that the thoughts and patterns that emerged
from Brady's mind were typically taken as encompassing the
conventional definition of "crazy." To me, they seemed more like the
thoughts and reflections of someone who lived in a world of memories
and fantasy - memories which meant more than worthless social
play-acting, fantasies which fired the intellect and let the
imagination soar - who used these methods to cope with a town which
had branded him as an outsider, but one whom they pitied,
impotently, all the same.
The plotline of the story itself is rather simple, and executed in a
very adept, if easily predictable fashion. Brady's behaviour is
related in a detached manner by the narrator; no moral judgments or
over-emotional sentimentalizing colour the events where one would
expect them to be present; the only emotion that occurs is when
Brady experiences something "beautiful." The text is written
strangely - a great deal of slang is incorporated into sentences
which do not distinguish between characters speaking, acting or
thinking. It took a couple of pages to catch up, but once one falls
into its rhythm the book becomes quite easy to read, and it fits the
identity which is conjured of Brady relating these stories to the
reader through a haze of cigarette smoke. The ending was seen coming
for miles.
This book gave an illuminating look into the mind of a young boy who
behaved and acted the way he did because certain things mattered
more to him than what everyone else valued in life; there could be
no moralization of his actions, as they fit into his system of
valuation in an integral manner. Trivial things like death didn't
mean much to him, but the friendship he so desired from his friend
Joe meant the world - he was prepared to give anything to lead the
simple life they shared when they were younger. Brady's mental space
is atypical for certain, but this is in no way an anomaly of his
possession alone; look no further than the values which rule the
town for insight on how Brady ended up where he did. When that is
understood, Brady's thoughts become quite understandable, and the
story becomes something more than a punctuationally-challenged
vehicle for provoking moralizing shock in a reader. - blaphbee
-=-
Underworld, Don DeLillo. 827 pages, Simon & Schuster, New York
(1997).
It's fortunate that DeLillo gives a nod or two to Melville, deep in
this labyrinthine text, with a white whale reference, because
really, I blame this whole genre on Melville: the religious
unification of all disciplines of information into a belief system
tied around a symbol, perhaps even a white whale meaning the purity
of personal dominion over reality. After that came James Joyce, who
really nailed the technique, and following the brief interlude of
actual writers in the heroic sense of the word "artist," we had
Nabokov and Pynchon. The latter produced his epic "Gravity's
Rainbow," which tied together every type of learning known to man in
a spiritual metaphor which got hazier as the pages went on and the
author inhaled more of that Northern California hybrid.
DeLillo's book is very much in the tradition of "Gravity's Rainbow,"
even down to a lap-compacting page count, winding together personal
stories in the full-blown neurosis that only a fin de ciecle
civilization can provide, and tying them to large, emotional events
such as baseball and nuclear warfare. As such, the book isn't
"about" anything; it's about everything, in the theme that while
politics occupy the powers that be, there is an entire underworld of
life in opposition to these empires of death, as told through the
lives connected to two people who had brief, meaningless, vindictive
sex back in the 1960s. Are you excited yet? Neither am I.
Although it's a well-written book, in parts, and as a whole, it
conveys a good deal of learning on many topics, mostly it's fluff
designed to hide the author's opinions "artfully" between a raft of
metaphors related to its main symbol. Naturally, it being a product
of our modern time, it can have no other ground of theme than the
elites versus the masses, and per the postmodern dictum, it looks
behind the text of all events for subtext and thus finds conspiracy
an easy friend. It's saturated in racial inequity, drugs, authority
figures confusing penises with power, unfaithful partnerings and the
lives of Italians, Jews and Irish in the New York ghettoes. So far,
very straightforward, which is why one wonders how it took 827 pages
to convey what slides very neatly forth from 300.
Where DeLillo triumphs is in the deep-reading sense of the
postmodern genre; he gets into every detail, and has text to match,
bringing out a richness in vocabulary that is normally unseen, and
like an acidhead bending his metaphors to the solos on forgotten Led
Zeppelin albums. That the contortions of the text seem at all
logical is a tribute to his artistry, and he includes every
large-headline event related to his thesis with a relish that
sometimes drowns the content in its own lack of relevance. As with
any good postmodern text, metaphor is free, freer than free jazz,
and no topic or diction or style can constrain the elements to which
he reaches. Back in 1997, the Internet was new, so there's some
awkward mention of that at the end. There's some fine text here, and
that's why one reads it, although I heartily recommend skimming much
of the pointless dialogue and tangential stories which reveal
nothing an experienced reader couldn't already guess.
If you want to plot this book's course emotionally, turn to
"Ulysses" and "Gravity's Rainbow," both of which feature the
downtrodden everyman fragmenting his ego and "transcending" his will
to power, eventually becoming submissively at peace with a world
which is still as diseased as his own neurotic mind - and, come to
think of it, his author's neurotic prose. As such, the philosophical
content of this novel is really friggin' forgettable, and we're left
thinking DeLillo would have been better off hammering some of his
themes from "White Noise." Like the white whale, every aspiration in
this book that isn't submissive brings its characters to somnolent
decay, and so there's really no hope in it, nor any iteration of
themes outside counterculture versions of the dominant idea of this
past millennium. Still, if you don't mind skimming five pages for
every one you read, there's some phenomenal prose in here. - vijay
prozak
-=-
Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon. 773 pages, Henry Holt & Company, New
York (1997).
Pynchon is truly a great writer, when he's on, because he cuts past
the illusion of a modern time to point out that most people are,
underneath the web of justifications and power structures that
justify and thus "fulfill" a life in this era, miserable and
searching for something which is not recognized in public.
Addressing hidden mortality: good. Also good is his extensive use of
occult and Eastern and transcendentalist knowledge to suggest where
an alternative might lie, as a way of saying "look within, not
without." Also good, as are his inventive sentences and specialized
research manifesting itself in an uncommon richness of vocabulary.
Good, good. Where he falters is by writing to an audience that has
traditionally supported him, and in doing so, restraining himself
from fully indicting the emptiness because he has already selected a
certain perspective within it and embraced its psychology. Thus,
much as Joyce met a fate of futility and sublimated mental
instability, Pynchon is locked in a cage of his own creation,
pleasing the crowd of cosmopolitan, hip, leftist readers but failing
to simply spit out what he means as if he did, he'd come into
conflict with his audience. The other grim side effect: endless
pages of clever and cute puns and conventions and "in depth"
explorations of small metaphors linked in suite to his overall
motif, proving him witty and cultured and in possession of the right
opinions to socialize in upper Manhattan's rough-looking village
crowd, but neutralizing any point he was going to make with the
burden of a giant tome that, while amusing page to page, gets lost
in its own cleverness and thus dissipates its point.
Mason & Dixon, being among the later works of this author, is a step
up from the cartoon/sitcom-like Vineland, but does not reach the
heights of Gravity's Rainbow, which was helped mainly by (a) its
topic matter, the prediction of death and our attempts to evade it
through grand political schemes disguising business as usual, and
(b) the time in which it was written, when there was a clear "evil"
that wasn't a country (say, the Soviet Union) or a belief system,
but the condition by which modern politics held us all hostage to
death-fear and uncertainty. It also falls short of his least
competent but most enduringly popular work, "The Crying of Lot 49,"
which directly attacked the loss of mystery and meaning in modern
life, and therefore speaks most directly to his readers.
Written in the metaphorical experience of the famous journey across
America undertaken by British explorers Charles Mason and Jeremiah
Dixon, the book contrasts their individual spiritual outlooks with
the task before them, which is to survey the land so that it can be
sold and conquered and politicized by a bureaucratic system that
even antagonizes them as they attempt to do this. It's an insightful
metaphorical setup, and as Pynchon writes in the style of his
once-instructor Vladimir Nabokov in constructing an unreal book
around a hidden central symbol, it affords him room to tie in the
elements of his thesis, namely the certainty of death and the
ambiguity of life, the human spirit as affected by pacifism and
anger in contrast, and other delvings into the varied paths of a
philosophical labyrinth. However, to see this, the reader must
assume a populist-utilitarian viewpoint, which places this book
beyond the tolerance of most of those who would understand it fully.
It effectively makes his point, however, that in fear of an Absolute
death humankind has gridded and divided up the earth into cause and
effect, subject and object, owned and owner, and thus is spreading
destruction wherever it goes without facing its own mortality. In
this, Pynchon is savant, because such a thing needs to be said, and
at that level of abstraction, before the cancer of humanity entirely
consumes its environment and its own culture and people, leaving
nothing but wasteland, as elegeically portrayed in certain parts of
this novel. The characters are cariacatures; while they have
complexity, they lack depth, in part because they are like all
things in this novel almost pure allegory, and pure symbol. The rest
is Pynchon the man exerting his strong personality upon us, and we
get glimpses of an everyman character who has the wit of an
archacademic but none of the spirit to go further.
With that expression, the novel is weakened, and seems more like
propaganda couched in the elaborate symbols and social references,
like marijuana smoking or hilarious sexuality or the repugnance of
slavery, and thus preaches to the converted and fails to articulate
the far side of the issue he raises, namely how to get over this
abyss without giving in, making token nods to eastern philosophy and
continuing our paths as good hipster liberals just trying to earn a
living, get laid and have a good Saturday night. Although the
journey he makes through the characters of Mason and Dixon is a
profound one, the sidetracking of playing his audience makes it a
long and ultimately tedious one; if you get through this book, there
is little reward that cannot be had from thinking on the concepts
raised in chapters one and two. In that spirit, a great author
passes from relevance to a neat pigeonhole, dividing himself from
the rest of philosophy much as his characters slice up America.
- vijay prozak
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Features
=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"On the concept of God"
I neither will nor can deny that this is partly a religious writing;
however, it differates greatly from what we label as "religion" or
"spirituality" in modern society. I attempt to capture some
universal truths about the cosmos and thus aim for its totality as
scope of this writing. As one aspect of this quintessential sphere
is irreversibly bound to another, interconnected and flowing through
each other, I will both aim for both spirituality and
intellectuality, although without dividing this thought into
dualism. Categorization and generalization is the foundation of
intellectual realization, but I don't construct abstract terms of
convenience to suit my ideology or convictions; I seek reality as it
is in itself: Hegel's "Wie es eigentlich geweisen," to use a
philosophical language of higher culture. Hence, generalization is
to say something about a set of events, or phenomenas, without
having to dwell into the irregularities of deviance. Categorization
is simply a way to arrange our thoughts in these regards. It can be
argued that my inductions are colored by myself as an individual,
but this as such should not hinder men in interpreting their
surroundings based on knowledge on the world as it steps forth,
understandably not influenced by any predetermined social constructs
based on emotionalism and generated convictions after being exposed
to dualist dogmatism.
Let us first approach the concept of God, the notion of an absolute
being as the source and maintainer of totality, the universe as a
whole. We know that everything that has a physical manifestation
also has a causal origin, that is, a cause other than itself from
which it necessarily springs. God as such is explained to be the
source of everything, but is at its essence an uncausal being. From
this follows, that God cannot be a manifested entity, and rather
exists as a potential for perfection, that is unreachable at the
essence of reality. It is a natural law that perfection in one
direction negates perfection in the other: you cannot be the perfect
man and the perfect woman at the same time, you cannot be warm and
cold at the same time, and you cannot be truly benign and truly
malignant at the same time, as different creatures would be
subjective in these regards. As a consequence of this realization,
it dawns that the Divine cannot be personified without being
limited, and thus not divine. Not personified, not manifested.
For this reason the Judeo-Christian concept of Jehovah, an allegedly
all good, all powerful entity must be faulty, and his struggle with
Satan bordering on the ridiculous for this omnipotent creature. Yet
we still have the notion of this divine being, on an abstract,
spiritual level, as a potential unreachable for a limited creature
with a will. A will is the direction of a matter, the basis of
totality embrace all aspects of being that can be reached, and must
thus be without will in itself. As for the basis of having knowledge
of a will outside of your own intellect, it would suffice to say
that your intellectualism is only a small part of your existence,
what defines the self. One might say that rationality is but an
island floating on top of a sea of instincts, external prospects,
and pre determined destiny, and as such, one cannot doubt the
reality of a world outside one's own senses. Since external
prospects such as mechanical damage, experiences, chemicals and the
like effect your brain and thus your mind, there can be no doubt as
to their actual existence independently of your mind.
Onward to the world of representation that takes form as time, space
and matter, conceived by the senses and interpreted by them, yet
existing independently from them. The matter can be seen as a
manifestation of totality; let me attempt to categorize these
aspects in a basic manner. The totality as such is divided into
living material and dead material, the first standing out as it has
a will, on the most primitive and foundational a will simply for
life, and without this will to life, the material would be dead.
Also flowing through in interconnection with these aspects are the
absolute, Brahman or Tuisto of Indo-European tradition, that was
approached above, and we have thus a categorized quadrualism to deal
with. As a given creature dies, his living material returns to dead
matter, and his will, his direction returns to the all potential.
All that is living takes this course, and all that is dead and
undirected, namely matter and the absolute, will again take new form
as a living entity.
This metaphysical understanding come as a supplement and a
furtherment of the lessons taught in physics, in that energy can
neither be created nor vanish, only take different forms, and it
should be quite obvious for any properly schooled person that this
knowledge based on reason also can be found in various Indo-European
religions, and that philosophy as such is related to this ancient
lore. All ages have a level of wisdom, and all ages are close to
spiritual understanding and close to God in these regards.
Furthermore, there are two basic forces that move the represented
world in terms of space and matter, those being expansion and
contraction. The being of the universe is still in a state of
expansion after the big bang, and it's a strong theoretical
possibility that once this working power has ceased to propel the
matter away from each other, the pull of gravity will work as a
catalyst for bringing the matter back together again. As such, one
must take into account of there being a third state of being the
universe can descend into, that is namely total stasis, there being
a perfect harmony between the forces of expansion and contraction.
This state would in practical terms only be possible at two given
stages, namely when the universe has expanded to it's full
potential, and the pull of gravity comes into play to counterbalance
the expansionist force perfectly.
In such an event, one might say that the universe, the absolute, has
reached its most abstract level, the matter is spread out in vast
distances, and the direction of the matter, the will, is at its most
limited level. The Indo-European concept of Brahman or Tuisto can be
best used to describe this stage, for the absolute has no physical
totality, only potential for being, stardust floating across the
vast seas of space. More so, living material would long have ceased
to be, as it's conceivable that the atoms themselves would be spread
out to thin for life to take form, in addition to there being no
warming sun to ignite the spark of life in the first place. To
clarify, this state of complete expansion before the pull backwards,
would move God (previously explained) to its most abstract level on
our table shown here:
The state of Brahman:
Dead material (y) . Living material (n) . Will (n) . The all
potential (y)
Irrevocably, however, the basic forces of the universe would again
come into play. Contraction, that is, the gravity of each object and
every matter would start working on each other, pulling the matter
back together. The process would accelerate, until all the matter in
the universe was gathered at one point, a sphere of absolute
totality. Needless to say, this would again lead to a return of the
big bang, when all the matter is hurled out in different directions.
When the force of gravity in this stage is in harmony, stillness
with expansion, before the plunge, we are at yet another stage. The
absolute would be at its most total physical manifestation, that is
to say, a manifested entity at one given location, containing all
the aspects of the matter unlimited by space and time. Space outside
this sphere would be void, and time would be irrelevant as nothing
came to pass. Life as we know it would be impossible, as all such
life would have direction within the matter. The matter here would
be whole, or "Heil," with no potential nor need for deviance.
I would label this stage as the state of Ymir, to use yet another
concept from Indo-European mythology. The absolute would be
manifested, but for it to become life, to become directed, it would
have to spread out. For the will is manifested in all it's totality,
but cannot become directed before being hurled out in the cycle of
time and space again. Thus, as the gods of Norse mythology created
life through the body of Ymir, the possibility of existence and
development comes through the terrible power of expansion that yet
again disrupts the manifested totality.
The state of Ymir:
Dead material (y) - Living material (n) - Will (y) . The all
potential (n)
Let us now delve deeper into the concept of time. Time can per
definition only be a valid tool when events take place in cosmos.
Deprived of this, time becomes irrelevant, but in between the two
stages of harmony, namely Brahman and Ymir, Potential and matter,
time comes into play. Time develops is a single, progressing line,
what is done cannot be undone, and one cannot move in any direction
but forward. Time is also the prerequisite for life, without time,
one would have no movement at all. It's an interesting knowledge
that the passing of time can be bent by speed, curved so to speak,
however, this will be explored later. I will on the other hand
approach the subject of a mathematically pre determined universe.
Past, present and future are bound together with the strongest seals
of cosmos, without it, the universe would have had to entered stages
of Nirvana. Events in the past effect the present, and that again
will effect the future, all has it's casualty.
Thus it is a given, that once the linear time has been launched, the
universe is mathematically predetermined, conceivable only for a
mind of the greatest magnitude, the universe itself that embrace it.
Destiny, it seems, is in us all, and as such, in the span of the
lifetime of a universe, we shall go through ages both of grandeur
and the greatest shame. An age of greatness is reached when the
collective will, society or the tribe, works towards a higher end,
whatever that end might be. An age of decay comes when the pleasure
and comfort of the individual is put before anything else, as such
individualism negates a collective direction except the seeking of
pleasure, and thus, little can be achieved. Different culture groups
have had varying ways to tackle the realization of a destiny once
they have developed sufficiently to grasp it. Eastern cultures have
tended to stagnate into fatalism, and passively accept whatever ills
and joys that come over them.
Western cultures, at least during the last millennia, have attempted
to tear from this realization by introducing free will, as if man
was in complete control of his surroundings and the past before him.
While such a mentality leads to a more active approach to the world,
it completely defies the laws of nature that we are bound to, as we
attempt to assert our will and dominance over it regardless of the
consequences outside our own constructed, moral world. In all
simplicity, this free will has lead to the wishy wishy fantasy world
that a society is successful that produces the greatest amount of
happy individuals, that needless to say, all wills for happiness.
These individuals together have a limited base of resources, and to
pursue such happiness each moment would lead to a neglect of the
concept of necessarily ills to reach a higher end. Creatures would
thus dance, feed and multiply merely like the grasshopper, not
realizing that winter is approaching, and winter is coming fast.
The wise ant, however, prepares and is thus capable of existing even
in the harshest climates. Likewise, a bread, cheese and some wine is
all that it takes to make a small group of friends happy, but if you
share it with a thousand uncontributing outsiders this little joy is
split up into irrelevancy. Indo-European groups of the past had a
third approach to this philosophical problem, namely a heroic spirit
and an accept of fate as it is. Such as the ant doesn't know wether
or not he, or in a greater view the hive will endure winter, he
works hard nonetheless, and in the same way, the Germanic warrior
faced the previously unbeatable Roman legions on the battlefield.
The course of history was made by men and women of such courage.
For the feeble mind, such predeterminism would discourage the
deployment of constructive action, and lead to only the endorsement
of comfort in the longing for better times. Know this, that if the
path of sloth is chosen, it becomes your destiny, if cowardice takes
hold, it becomes your faith. On the other hand, when the longing for
betterment becomes great enough, creatures of consenting will shall
come together and form new ages, a resurrection from the ashes of
the ancient times. For the cycles of microcosmos go faster than the
macrocosmos, the universe as a whole.
Two thousand years of Christian hegemony, the furtherment of the
individual into lesser thought, lesser blood and lesser being,
stands on the brink of a cataclysm. Even now, we consume 20% more of
the resources than the earth can replenish each year, and the world
population is expanding in an almost linear graph year by year.
Roughly around 1940, there were 2,5 billion people on this planet.
By 1990, these were doubled, as we had 5 billion humans to feed,
consume and rape our mother. As this is written, we are closing in
on having seven billion people. Even the most anti-alarmist
professors acknowledge that this planet as a maximum can hold 12
billion people, if they only eat rice and have as many belongings as
an average peasant at the Chinese countryside. Clearly, the first
world is consuming much more than that, and combined with the
explosion of the population in the third world, this day and age
will be brought to its knees.
But out from the ashes of our failure, something new shall arise,
something stronger, something that has flowed through the waves of
folly that have washed over us the past 2000 years. Where Christ
brought us equality, we shall have inequality, where Christ brought
us mercy, we shall be merciless, where Christ gave us quantity over
quality, we will see that only the strong and intelligent survive
the hard times that are over us. A new society must be built, where
renewable energy sources fuel technology only used for higher aims.
An agricultural existence will be the fate of the common man, where
small communities come together to defend their interests, grow
their crops and rule themselves as they see fit.
Those of the highest genetic quality will either become warriors or
the ruling thinkers. Warriors, naturally, are to defend the
establishment against insurgents, maintain order, and perhaps even
hunt down the remnants of the Judeo-Christian internationalist
anticulture, that in their bitterness would tear at the very fabric
of the social structure. The thinkers on the other hand, would be
only the select few with largely superior intellects, living
separated lives while guiding the masses on a greater scale than
petty politics, and working towards goals of bettering the human
race and furthering technology towards altruistic goals, such as
space travel and eventually space colonization. Electric power would
only be available to this caste, as only decay and unnecessary
luxury would be the result if the short sighted mob took hold of
this. Membership of this high ranking order would have to be earned,
and even though their sons and daughters would be favored
genetically in such regards, they would have to prove their worth
before ascending in rank.
We now find ourselves at the stage of motion, when the universe
moves from one stage to another, and as the quadrualism of the
universe is expressed to it's full extent, the possibilities are
many and the potential endless. As we ascend in spirituality, our
understanding of cosmos, the totality will increase. Spirituality
here is not the faulty belief of a personified, dualist God, an
unmoving mover behind the stage, but a realization what the universe
is, and what it can become. Still, divinity is a concept to explore,
let me elaborate this a little. If I were to travel thousands of
years years back in time, and bring along a helicopter, a TV, and an
assault rifle, the primitive tribes would surely think of me as a
god. For to the lesser mind, any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic, and for the lesser creature, a higher
form of life is terrible to behold. Imagine how an ape views a human
wielding a rifle, or how a dog views a human wielding a whip.
Mankind as a whole is at a stage of growing toward something greater
to ourselves, when we are able to breed fourth humanoids with vastly
superior intellects, and vastly superior bodies, they will become
the new gods for us. Not some abstract punisher looming behind the
clouds, but a god in flesh and spirit, just as the olds gods were.
Odin, Thor, Hercules and Apollon were all human prototypes of
something greater than ourselves, and we can make them walk this
earth once more. It is in the individuals interest to see this done,
for through the blood we are passed on, and only a higher form of
man can escape the warm embrace of our earth mother into the vast
emptiness of space. Immortality can only be reached if we evolve, if
our blood somehow endure tests unimaginable today. Finding ourselves
capable of utilizing the resources of space, we would have billions
of years before the end came in form of a collapse, and it is then
conceivable that there can be found ways to avoid it.
When a star collapses inward, it often forms a black hole, a field
of concentrated gravity that all matter is drawn to. Such phenomena
would Irrevocably lead to the contraction of space, given there are
enough and arguably powerful enough black holes. However, theories
have been conceived that this matter again can be distributed in
space by utilizing white holes, or wormholes, where the represented
world is curved and distances as such is of little concern. Imagine
a piece of paper, travel from point A to point B would necessarily
have to be done in a linear pattern, at least in conventional
wisdom. But if the paper is curved, point A and B would be merged,
and the matter the black hole attract to itself could be poured into
a new location. As such, the universe might be given eternal life
beyond its cycle of creation and the undoing of creation.
Only by utilizing our direction, our will, this can be done, a will
not to become everything, as in the contracted sphere before the big
bang, but a will to be what we are. "Thou shall," those cursed words
that has haunted us since the fall of our civilization, shall be
answered with, "I will." For the path of Jehovah is to deny life, to
long for one's direction to become equal to and thus similar with
totality and yet again be thrown into the circular pattern of
existence. Our Nirvana would be to balance the worlds perfectly and
unrelentlessly, to thus exist forever. - GarmGormius
-=-
"Clashing Steel: The Myth of Conan the Barbarian"
Clashing skulls, crushed bones and shimmering crimson blood on cold
steel, truly a spectacle to be beheld by eyes ravished with the
fires of battle's passion. It's the fiery battle-ridden epic of
Conan the Barbarian that mirrors these spectacles, much as the eyes
that are ravished by the gleam of battles flare. It is an arcane and
immortal tale, which forges its themes in a Hyperborean world; it is
a feral habitat fit to temper Conan with the values of Nietzsche's
overman and of Zen's spiritual focus and discipline.
Many a tale has been told that coincides with the principles of the
overman and of Zen, but few of them crash down on it so perfectly as
Conan the Barbarian. Conan is the self actualized man, the vehical
in which, much like Nietzsches Zarathustra, promotes the values and
the ideals of the Ubermensch, the new man. The quest of Conan mimics
that of classic western myth it is laced with battles and it
exemplifies the individuals journey into the realm of
self-actualization and self mastery and it does so with the nod
towards Nietzsche and bow towards the Samurai.
Conan began as a series of short pulp fiction stories created by
Robert E. Howard during the 1940s that writer/director John Milius
converted into a movie concept in the early 1980s. It is
specifically Conan's journey taken in the film by Milius that will
be focused on in regards to its Nietzschean and Zen themes.
Sometimes it would appear when viewing Conan the Barbarian as though
Nietzsche sat down with a Zen philosopher and etched out the script
to a film. Utilizing both the themes of the will to power and
combining it with a Zen sense of honor and discipline, Milius' Conan
is one of unparallel will, honor, and strength and is of
disciplined, spiritual supremacy like that of the a Samurai warrior.
The movie opens with a black screen inscribed with the ponderous
words, "what does not kill me, makes me stronger," a paraphrase of
one of Nietzsche's great mantras. Truly that small but heavy phrase
is the backbone to Milius' version of Conan, as that which tests
Conan to the brink of death only makes him stronger and more
disciplined. This hero's tale follows in the vein of the epic heroic
structures of grand tales such as Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, and other
fantastic hero journeys. Conan is the tale of one mans journey for
redemption, one mans journey into becoming the overman, using what
Nietzsche called "the will to power." This is the tale of an iron
will forged in a blistering flame, freely from the hands of God;
this is the tale of a man birthed and nurtured by the earth and
swept into the enigma of the cosmos; this is the tale of a man whose
personality and character are forged like a sword in the fire and
cooled into unbreakable strength by an unbending desire into the
journey for self supremacy.
While Conan was a child of nine his town and people were slain by
the Snake Cult led by Thulsa Doom, a spiritual leader in search for
the answer to the riddle of steel. It is Thulsa Doom who represents
the spirit of the mob and the spirit of the Abrahamic religions
which promote the herd mentality philosophers like Nietzsche fought
against. He is the spiritual sage who realizes the void of existence
and attempts to blind others of that reality, feeling that man can
not obtain value in a valueless world withtout the illusion of a
grand, all powerful god figure. Thus is the nature of Thulsa Doom
and it is Conan with his journey into self actualization who will
prove the spirit of the ubermensch can overcome the herd and
establish grand value in a world and universe feral and cold. Doom
then represents passive nihilism and Conan represents the anthesis
in active nihilism.
When the Snake Cult sacked Conan's village, Conan witnessed his
mother and father driven down before him in pools of blood by the
hands of Thulsa Doom. This moment marked the first step into Conans
journey as it was his summons to action, the begining of his great
quest for redemption in which his will and courage would be forged.
This concept is also illustrated by Joseph Campbell's traditional
hero path as it was the moment that marked Conan's summons to action
and began his journey into the abyss. The abyss marked by
Nietzsche's words, "when one stares into the abyss the abyss surely
also stares into them," is the void in which one can either be
consumed or where one can rise to the task and establish ideals and
dreams in a tangible way. Conan is the man who's journey actualizes
his dreams and ideals and thus revamps the pagan sense of spirit and
honor. This is a quest as old as the earth itself and as eternal as
the night sky; from it there is something for us all to learn and
for us all to extract, somthing pagan, something immortal.
As Conan's eyes witnessed his peoples life soak into the snow, the
marble of his eyes reflected back the birth of his will, his will
for revenge; it was the birth of his will to power and the start of
his journey. From this summons came a series of tests that would
help to forge his being into a Nietzschean hero for he was alone
with nobody to help him and he had to overcome the struggle within;
his alienation would help birth his will and would help him create a
new moral code away from the standard and the bourgeois. The first
grand test came as Conan was enslaved by the Snake Cult and sold to
the Mongol warriors who led him to the wheel of pain, a mammoth
structure with no purpose other than to serve as a form of laborous
torture. For ten years Conan pushed at that wheel until he grew into
a man all the while child after child, man after man, dropped from
the wheel from exaustion and fatigue, but Conan mustered the
strength and will to overcome the conditions and rose to success.
When he achieved the state of physical manhood he was like an
innocent child in spirit, born fresh to the world, inquiring of what
it had to offer and teach him. The wheel had acted like a mother
towards Conan's spirit, it was his teacher and one of his great
tests in the Hyperborean world. The willingess of Conan to surive
the ordeal of the wheel of pain echoed to the world that he had the
nature of a champion and his courage helped him accomplish great
tasks. He had the spirit of a Samurai and the strength of the
Ubermensch.
Conan the Barbarian is a story that takes a step back in time and
dives into the pagan sense of being and consistantly furthers itself
from the Judeo-Christian moralism that has filled the world. Conan
is a man endowed with the spirit and soul of a pagan warrior; he is
a demigod, a man who attains the strength to mold his ideals into
reality. Pity is not a concept known to Conan, neither is weakness.
Conan never gives up on an idea, he never slips from his goals, and
he follows through his quests with great prudence and dignity. Never
is he afraid to try a new means to obtain his goal and never does he
exhibit fear and weakness. He is a man driven by a fire unseen by
the common eye; he is a man propelled by the fuel that ebbed the
essence of creation. The story of Conan does not soften the blows or
turn the quest for redemption into a martyrs pity ridden journey.
Conan the Barbarian is ebbed with valor, honor and the strength to
succeed. This is evident in Conan's ability to rise to the test of
each trial he faces without fear and witout complaint. Never does
Conan moralize an action, or pity a cause, for he always rises to
the occassion with strength and ferver all the while staying true to
his code of honor.
A new and higher morality is embraced by the spirit of Conan and it
is a spirit and code that orbits first and foremost around action.
Conan is a man of few words and is instead a man with many modes of
action. The redemption of Conan is pursued in full glory and is not
left to the action of gods to decide the outcome, it is left to the
hand and breast of Conan. This revelation is realized in the film as
Conan called to Crom during a final battle and said, "battle pleases
you Crom, so grant me one request. Grant me revenge. And if you do
not listen, then to hell with you!"[2] Conan refuses to yield to the
fates and instead carves his own destiny. God or no God, Conan sees
that destiny must be siezed by his hand and should not be left to
the suppositions of a God figure fufilling those dreams and ideals.
Conan breaks from the common morals and codes of living which
embrace passivity and yield to a godhead to heal and take care of
all dreams and ideals. Instead Conan sees that active disipline
helps man forge his destiny and obtain his goals and to be passive
in action and towards one's ideals rarly allows ones goals and
dreams to see fruition.
Whereas the Judeo-Christian codes yield to faith and the intervetion
of a supreme being to yield results the pagan essence of Conan the
Barbarian is one of self-actualization and self-determination, free
from the constraints of an instinsic metabeing who is active in
controling this world. This pagan concept is also a foundation of
Nietzsche's self-created ubermensch and is also apparant in Zen's
spiritual self-actualization. Conan holds no abosolute moral dogma,
but instead acts doing what is necessary to obtain the goals and
ideals he has set. For example Conan will not moralize the act of
killing, he sees no intrinsic evil in the action and to kill is
somthing that is a part of life, but Conan goes about killing only
when necessary and when warranted; he would not go around killing
men, women and childeren blindly; this shows he is a man with a code
of honor, the code of a warrior, as opposed to a code of absolute
morals; in Conan there is no moralizing of the action.
This is the aspect of the new morality as espoused in the
philosophic texts of Nietzsche and it was also the code of the
Samurai warrior. Another aspect that seperates Conan from the herd
mentality is his vieying for redemption without pity or moralizing.
He goes forth in full stride to obtain redemption for the killing of
his family and village when he was a young boy. Whereas the
Judeo-Christain act of revenge is stooped in bitterness and
self-rightousness, the revenge saught by Conan is cloaked with honor
and self-control. He has not twisted himself into a pitiful wretch
of anger and resentment, but instead has transfigured the pains and
strifes into an armor of inner strength which he brandishes with
pride. Conan strives to create and self-actualize, whereas the
Judeo-Christian revenge seeker strives for equalization and is
commonly fueled by pity, morals and bitterness, quite often towards
one who does not fall into line with their belief; the inquisition
and the Crusades serve as twoexamples amongst many.
Many tests were presented to Conan which probed his might and helped
forge his desire and will. They helped carry him beyond good and
evil. The fighting pit introduced Conan to his ability to overcome
strife in a heartbeat, as it was an arena where the most ponderous
and strongest slaves fought to the death. Conan's first journey into
the pit saw him with the spirit of a child; he carried with him a
spirit like Enkidu of Gilgamesh, innocent, feral and awaiting
experience so as to be molded. Conan took the journey from pure
innocence to heroism. In the pit Conan grew stronger and he crushed
his opponent, and in that moment Conan knew that which did not kill
him surely would make him stronger; Conan had in those moments
learned to tune his will, he learned to fight and win, he learned to
master the tests of a hero. He went on to kill many men and he
learned to do it very well, so well that the Mongol warriors who
held him as a slave embraced him. They taught him the art of Kendo
and the spirit of Zen; they taught him sword fighting, and they
taught him how to attune his will through discipline, and served as
his teachers on his quest. The warriors served a purpose suited to
express the Niezschean and Zen values of the story as they believed
in honor, duty, individual strength and the power of the will to
overcome all adversity in order to obtain a sense of higher being,
free from the hand of a supernatural being. Man is left free to mold
his destiny.
Upon absorbing the skills that the masters had to teach him Conan
enters the feral world for the first time, breaking the chains of
his slavery and entering the abyss. Conan entered the abyss of the
earth and was chased by wolves in a primordial, prehistoric and
lawless land; he had crossed the threshold of the hero and had
entered a state of nihilism where the world was void and his will
was what would allow him to become king to make his own values.
Weaponless and defenseless against the barren landscape around him
all Conan could do was run into the night until he was able to find
a shelter; that shelter came when he fell into a cave embedded in a
rock in the middle of the desert. What Conan found in the cave would
be what would take him through his trials and tests and it would be
like a brother to him on his quest. Conan found a dead warrior
sitting on a throne and in his hand he was holding a rusted sword, a
sword that Conan grasped and from which he chiseled the rust. It
became an extension of his inner self and was wielded by his side as
his most faitful companion. That sword represented Conan's manhood
and Conan's strength, it was the one thing he could trust, and it
was infused with his strength and will. Steel was his first and
greatest helper on his quest.
Flesh, like steel, can be molded and tempered into strength; thus is
the nature of Conan. He is the blacksmith of his soul and of his
will, always tempering himself in the fires of strife so as to forge
the ultimate self, which embodies his ideals and dreams and goes
beyond good and evil. Conan had crossed the abyss and stared it
streight in the face. He realized that the world would have to be
commanded by his will and could not be left to the will of others,
or even worse, the will of a false god. Many trials and test saw
their way to Conan, and each one served to temper a new element of
his personality and character and they help him distance himself
from the herd.
Conan's trials cut right down into the depths of his soul; they
challenge him mentally, physically and spiritually. It's the will of
Conan's spirit that is tested on his quest for Thulsa Doom and it's
Conan's strength of body and mind that helps him to get there. There
is much sorcery that meets Conan on his journey and it is this
sorcery that serves to represent the ways of the old order and
lesser spiritualisms that must be overcome in a new area and the new
area of man would be the ones to rush out the weak spiritualism and
embrace instead the strong and perinneal mysticism abound in the
feral landscapes of the earth and within the vast abyss of the night
sky.
Conan is the new man rushing in these new concepts and higher
principles. He is strong and in his ability to overcome the sorcery
and manipulation that he finds in the world around him he learns to
better harmonize himself with nature and he learns to better attune
his will so that he may obtain his goals for redemption and for a
higher self. Conan tunes his mind and his spirit in order to become
just like the overman that Nietzsche talked about in his philosophic
texts. The quests in Conan's adventure serve to show his
transformation from child to man to overman.
The journeys of Conan are not done fully with sole independence, as
he dwells in solace and he is alientated from the normal man, but he
does engage with higher spirits like his own and they help his
quest; these principles embody a Samurai sense of community. Upon
first coming out of the cave with his new sword, Conan quickly
encounters companions who assist him on his journey. These
companions do not stay with him through all aspects of his journey,
particularly the climax, but they offer him aid that helps him
conquer his foes and accomplish his goals. The ability for the
companions to come and go allows the deeper themes of the Conan
legacy to seep though. This is a man of self-reliance, he
self-actualizes and has the ability to handle his own, but he
accpets help when given and he takes it when it helps his goal, but
there comes a time where he must part company to continue to strive
for the goal and this marks Conan's Zen disipline and his ability to
alienate himself so as to mediate and self-actualize like the
Nietzschean overman.
The companions Conan meets with are two thieves, Valeria and Sabotai
and from them he learns many things. From Valeria he learns the art
and values of companionship and from Sabotai he learns of the
loyalty in close friendship and what it means to have an ally.
Eventually Conan breaks from their companionship for a time for he
must seek his own spiritual quest in much the same way Sidhartha did
in Hermen Hesses novel of the same name. This point of companion
parting came when Conan and his companions had received gold from
King Osric for promising to find his daughter for him. Valeria
wanted to take the money and split but Conan had a deeper more
spiritual mission to fulfill, that of avenging his boyhood and
coming into contact with Thulsa Doom, the leader of the Snake Cult.
Conan took the path of the hero and stayed true towards what his
higher goals were, this is somthing very present in classical myth.
In the sense of how Conan engages in friendships he exhibts his
personality that vies for efficiency, sincerity and minimalism.
Conan surrounds himself with a few close allies who remain deeply
loyal to him and his cause, they would ride with him into the bowels
of hell and he would do the same for them. This ability exhibits a
prinicple of the higher man to decree his own values and live by
them with honor and integrety. Conan has a sense of duty and
obligation, but it is a duty he set forth for himself, not one that
was forced upon him by a supernatural abstraction. There is an
ability in Conan to blend both idealism and physicality, as he is
rooted in the material world yet is able to embrace the mystery of
the cosmos and create concepts and dreams. The character of Conan is
very much like a romantic in that light, as he is passionate about
existence and the things that fill it but he is also able to be
passionate about his conceptions and his abstractions. He is not
consumed by adherence to a false or weak dogma and he does not give
in to being consumed by the abstractions of a supernatural godhead
as the Snake Cult has.
This spiritual and more conceptual side of Conan is exhibited in the
Zen aspects of the Conan film. Conan is very much like a samurai,
bonded to the world and he has deep sense of spiritualism, a
transcendental spiritualism that, and this is key, self-actualizes
and materializes as opposed to dematerializes into an abstraction
that never sees fruition. Conan's spiritualism is linked to his body
and it is linked to his passions, ideals and dreams in which he
seeks to see them forced upon the world to create change. The Snake
Cult on the other hand deals in nothing but lofty abstractions that
do not see fruition in the material world. They are willing to see
the material world as an illusion and will create principles based
upon the illusion and this is exemplified by Thulsa Dooms calling to
a maiden high on a cliff to come to him and she obeys, falling to
her death for nothing.
Conan roots his values, spiritualism and ideas within the physical
world and sees value in decreeing his own value. The Snake Cult are
slaves to abstraction and abstracted ideas that hold no merit in the
physical cosmos. Thus Conan embraces a pagan idealism which
self-actualizes and embraces the physical world and creates its
romanticism around it, whereas the Snake Cult represents those who
have created a lofty ideal and serve to represent the Christian form
of passive idealism. Finally, Conan is unfocused on obtaining the
good will of a non-existent diety though applying a code of morals,
or a standard of living, much like that of the pious Snake Cult who
are latched to the ideas of an allmighty godhead.
In Conan the Barbarian there is a sense of a father figure in Thulsa
Doom that is recognized throughout the film. This father figure is
something that pops up often in classic myth. It was Thulsa Doom who
killed Conan's parents and it was Doom that Conan sought revenge
upon. It was also Doom, however, who fathered the will of Conan, for
if he did not slaughter Conan's village and Conan's parents there
would be no quest for Conan and no current goal for him to strive
for. The pain and strife is what created meaning, not pleasure, this
is somthing that is also embedded in the philsophy of Zen. It was
also Doom who sent Conan to the wheel of pain and sold him as a
slave to the Mongol warriors and it was the wheel that had acted
like a mother to Conan. A sense of the spiritual father figure
liters Conan's adventures and it is a vehicle to push forward the
themes of obtaining atonement and redemption. Eventually Conan would
stare his father figure Thulsa Doom in the face and overcome him and
the restraints he imposed, thus making the full break from man into
overman.
There is a moment in the film where Conan is faced with the father
figure atonement of a traditional hero's journey. The father figure,
Thulsa Doom, had captured Conan and brought him on his knees
bleeding before him. Conan vocalizes to Doom, "you killed my
parents," in which Doom replys that the action was a phase of his
youth. Doom then goes on to explain how he has fathered Conan by
sending him to the wheel thus instilling in him the fire for revenge
that has driven him over the years. Thulsa Doom tells Conan what he
has discovered to be the riddle of steel, he says to Conan, "what is
steel compared to the hand that wields it? It's nothing. Flesh is
power, flesh is strength."[1] In that moment it is recognized that
Conan is strength of flesh and he is what Doom can never be; Conan
is beyond Thulsa Doom, for Doom relies on magic and Conan relies on
his will and the strength of his own hand. Doom then crucifies Conan
in the desert, symbolically representing the enlightening
death/rebirth apparent in classic myth. Conan is sent to the gates
of death out in the desert but he is rescued by his old companions
and brought back into the world of the living. When he is
resurrected he arises as a full man of pure will and power, and he
has recieved a sense of psychological atonement for addressing Doom
in person. The only thing left to do for Conan is to fulfill his
quest for redemption and then only would he have crossed fully into
the realm of the overman.
After Conan's revivification he bashes forth to accomplish his goals
and ends up doing more than he had set out to do when he began his
journey. After being revived by his companions Conan sets out to the
lair of Doom and his followers and rescues the King's daughter. Time
and time again Conan managed to thwart Doom and his minions and this
proved to show the heroics of Conan; he never stopped, he never gave
in, he was pure will and he was driven by his passion, his spirit
and his mind and he overcame adversity at all odds. Even when it was
magic being tossed at him, Conan found a way to out strength it.
Adaptation is one of Conan's greatest virtues and it is a virtue of
the overman. Along the path to retrieving the princess Conan lost
Valeria and he experienced loss once more, but he converted it into
more will and desire to obtain his goal for revenge against Thulsa
Doom; these are the many tests of the traditional hero and Conan met
them aptly.
Conan took down Doom's challenges one by one. When Doom came to
collect the princess Conan outwitted him and set traps; when Doom
lost his best men to Conan and was defeated, he attempted to kill
the princess from afar with an arrow, but he once again failed as
Conan managed to thwart him. This is, again, the spirit of the
overman, it is determination, skill in many areas of life and the
ability to adapt to the situation quickly and efficently. After
being defeated Doom retreats to his followers who still collect en
masse and Conan follows him to his palace. When Doom is giving a
speech to all his followers up on the balcony of his tower, Conan
approaches him out of the shadows so as to represent his coming out
of the darkness, his prevailing over the threshold and the
stranglehold Doom has held on his soul. Doom sees Conan and knows
his time is coming to an end and says to Conan, "my son come to me,
join me and we can rule the world!"
The eyes of Conan reflect the fire of the torches in this moment so
as to symbolize his passion and desire. Conan knew not to be
manipulated by Thulsa Doom's hypnotic words and eyes, he was seeing
at that moment though his heart, and these things saw the truth
clearly, thus allowing Conan to lift his sword from his side to lop
off the head of Thulsa Doom, thus vanquishing himself from the
father figure and marking his return from the threshold of the hero
journey. In this moment Conan overcame his last and greatest
obstacle, he became the true overman.
Conan had come out of the quest's abyss a whole man, the overman, a
heroic man and he not only had vanquished himself he had also
vanquished the souls of the followers who had become captivated by
Doom; this was his gift to the people which he gave upon his return
from the threshold. Each follower one by one extinguished their
torch and wandered into the black horizon, free from the cult, free
to self-actualize and embrace the void. Conan was a hero to the
people and put an end to the Snake Cult for good by throwing a grail
of fire into the temple, allowing it to burn to ashes. The new man,
the overman, towered above the flaming tower supreme in will and
spirit.
This climax of Conan the Barbarian served as Conan's greatest test,
as it was the overcoming of the father figure and the releasing of
the people into the abyss, away from the false security offered by
the Snake Cult. Over and over again the character of Conan proves
the strength of his heart and will are able to overcome all odds and
all challenges thrown at him, even when he should lose he conquers.
Conan's journey taught him the will to survive, the will to succeed,
and the will to power. He learned the value of the opening mantra,
that which does not kill him only makes him stronger. He learned to
overcome the superstitions of the common man and he arose to the
spirit he created for himself. At the end of his journey in Conan
the Barbarian, Conan learns that it is he who is the answer to the
riddle of steel, it his he who is strength and forger of his
destiny. Conan learned the arts of Zen, strength, and thought from
the Mongol warriors and he learned the art of his will from his
journey and from his quest for redemption from the psychological
father figure that was Thulsa Doom. Conan was a silent intellectual,
pondering but never getting into tangles over his thoughts, instead
he took action upon them. He is an archetype of strength and
discipline, he is the overman. Truly, rare a story these days so
perfectly embodies the principles and philosophies of the overman
and of Zen, but Conan the Barbarian does, andit does so with the
flare of the battles flame. - Phantasm
Works Cited
[1] Conan the Barbarian. Dir. John Milius. Perf. Arnold
Scwarzenegger, James Earl Jones, Max Von Sydow, and Sandahl Bergman.
Universal, 1982.
[2] Smith, David C. "A Critical Appreciation of John Milius's Conan
The Barbarian" The Barbarian Keep Oct 28 2004
http://www.barbariankeep.com/ctbds.html
-=-
"What Dualism?"
Dualism - or a metaphysic that divides reality into two distinct,
often oppositional states - has recently been subjected to an
astonishing array of criticism within contemporary intellectual
circles. The popular embrace of relativism and subjectivism as
applied to cultural studies, the paradigm shift away from
Aristotelian logic and towards "fuzzy" multiple-truth value logics,
and the widespread death of Romanticism in the arts have all played
their part in developing a new taboo against binarism and related
modes of philosophical understanding. Yet not all dualisms are
created equal, and it would be foolish indeed to categorically
denounce all such systems of thought offhand. In the present essay I
aim to consider three different perspectives on dualism - the
Kantian, the Christian, the Nietzschean, and the "Pagan"
(traditional Indo-European) - and in so doing offer my thoughts
regarding the intricacies of each and their place within an emerging
ontology of man's relationship to natural reality.
The modern revolution against dualism can be traced directly back to
Nietzsche's philosophy of value. Nietzsche attacked Christianity's
division of reality into the earthly and the divine; more than this
he attacked the assignment of positive value to the divine and
negative value to the earthy, a valuation that he saw as
representative of weakness, resentment, and cowardice. His
criticisms however were not limited to theology, and Nietzsche is
only slightly less famous for his denunciations of Schopenhauer,
Socrates, and Kant on similar grounds. It is Nietzsche's treatment
of Kant that interests us here, in which the claim is made that
Kant's critical theory is, in essence, merely a watered down version
of Christianity's spiritual dualism.
Nietzsche's account of Kant is enticing and, as is often the case
with Nietzsche, astonishingly poetic, but it is also highly flawed.
Whereas Christianity draws a distinction between the
symbolic-spiritual (divine) and the literal-physical (earthly),
Kant's distinction is oriented towards an altogether different set,
namely the objective-external (metahuman) and the
subjective-internal (human). The difference is subtle but crucial.
Christian dualism posits two external realities - the physical and
the metaphysical - in which the latter is to be equated with truth
and the former with a distortion of truth (or at most a pale echo of
truth). Kant posits only one external reality, identified as
objective and non-human, which he contrasts with an internal
reality, identified as the subjective human realm of thought and
perception. The difference is not between physical and metaphysical,
natural and supernatural, real and ideal.which is what Nietzsche
railed against.but between reality as it is and reality as it is
perceived.
At the heart of Kant's thought is the conviction that reality as
conceptualized by the human mind cannot be equated with the true
nature of existence. His distinction between the thing in itself and
its appearance does not denigrate earthly existence or do idealists
any favors. It simply asserts that the mind imposes form and
structure onto sensory data and thus constructs what man perceives
as external reality (which, as Kant correctly recognized, is not
"external" at all, but rather an internal subjective structure
masquerading as an objective one). In different language, it might
be said that human beings never interact with existence directly,
but only navigate reality by way of a mitigating symbolic realm
consisting of mentalist abstractions. The notion that the mind is
more than a reflective mirror and in fact participates in actively
coloring what it beholds strikes me as an almost intuitively obvious
conclusion.
When Nietzsche wrote, "The 'true world' and the 'apparent world' -
that means: the mendaciously invented world and reality," he
revealed quite plainly the problem inherent in his own thought. The
"mendaciously invented world" - what is this but an incorrect
perception, in Kant's language an inaccurate appearance? If it is
admitted that human beings are capable of perceiving "reality"
incorrectly, then surely the distinction between perceiver and
perceived, from which the bulk of Kant's critical theory is derived,
must also be valid.
Nietzsche's position is, characteristically, too anthropocentric for
its own good, and I do not share his faith that our human powers of
observation are so finely tuned as to be wholly accurate, or that
the problem of differentiating between objective reality and the
perception of that reality is invalid; I also hold to my conviction
that there is a difference between being-in-the world and
being-the-world, the significance of which I cannot stress enough.
To be in the world is to have a limited comprehension of the greater
existence to which one is bound. To be the world is to posses a
one.to-one, total comprehension of said existence.s raw essence and
all interaction within it. The latter gives humanity far to much
credit. We are error-prone and have proven it countless times
throughout our brief history on this earth.
At the same time however I find myself unsatisfied by Kant's
assertion that perceived existence is not merely incomplete, but
fundamentally arbitrary and necessarily incorrect. It is probably a
sound statement that "True Knowledge," which is to say knowledge
uninfluenced by the active structure of the human mind, can never be
attained and is futile to pursue, but perhaps there is some kind of
representational understanding that communicates an approximate, but
never complete, portrait of external reality. This might explain
what is meant when people refer to the "kernel of truth" sitting at
the heart of otherwise improbable or skewed concepts.
Darwin alone should serve as proof that not all our knowledge
regarding the external world is purely arbitrary. How else does one
explain a theory such as Evolution? To be sure, the language used to
describe evolutionary processes and the conceptual framework upon
which the perceived structure of genetic mutation sits must be
severely colored by the mind of Darwin and the subsequent
interpretations of scientists and laymen, but only a fool would deny
that the theory of evolution describes, however distantly, something
that is occurring consistently, externally, and as far as we can
feasibly determine, independent of human interference or
observation.
Such a view no doubt emerges from precisely the kind of dogmatic
empiricism that Kant sought to transcend and that Schopenhauer
sought to deny. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to escape the
feeling that external reality must resemble, if only in a distant
fashion, the mentalist representations we use to navigate it - even
the immaterialist Berkely had to find some way of dealing with
reality's consistency and relative stability; in any case, there is
no obvious reason why one should give serious consideration to the
notion that this is not so, all (mandatory) respects paid to
Descartes and his tricky evil demon. If I am critical of Nietzsche's
rendition of the Kantian dilemma as a non-issue than I am even more
displeased by modern man's persistent refusal to lay trust in common
sense, observation, and intuition.