Sunday, January 14, 2007

Snuff Culture, Part 2

There are a number of sites that feature grisly photographs of the dead and dying in Iraq. This one is particularly gruesome. When we view the slaughtered and the maimed, do we take away more than our own sense of having survived or escaped? Do we consume massacre? Or is violent death the new opiate of the masses?

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Chaos is our Mother

I have always maintained that chaos is fundamental, the state from which all reality springs and the state to which it perpetually returns - the law of its weaving and unraveling. God must needs be come from chaos, which precedes it as origin. God, in fact, is the human spell cast to bind chaos. Reason, instead, tries to harness and direct it, driven to uncovering greater and deeper sources of it, never sated, having once tasted the awesome and demonic power.

Of course, we always conceive of chaos as madness, profusion, and violence. But there is also chaos in absolute uniformity. The heat-death of the universe, when all entropic movement ceases, is as chaotic as the star-birthing convulsions of the big bang, in fact, more so. The random coalesence of matter we call the universe, while formally unpredictable, embodies the chaos of emergent form. The thermo-dynamic end, however, is devoid of form, and inditinguishable from nothingness.

Why do people do wrong?

Are actions wrong in and of themselves, or only contextually? In other words, is there a universal law of value, or merely situational efficacy? The codes of conduct maintained by human beings, must be considered part of the situation. It doesn't matter if they were ordained by god or not. As long as there are humans ready and willing to enforce them, or adopt them as internalized ways of being, they are "in effect," regardless of their providence.
Welcome to snuff culture.

The whole world watching sleazy saddam necro-porn. Low budget home movie of an execution in what looks like a basement by leather-jacketed thugs. It had no trappings of the official or even professional, more like an impromptu.



How many death-scenes can I find on YouTube?

How many watching actually contemplate the reality of their own death? Its inevitability? Not to be avoided, they say. When I die, no one else will live this life. I don't have to believe that I go anywhere or become anything. The earth doesn't believe it, either, seeing in me more material.

And why should we morn the destruction of the biosphere? Oceanic dead-zones, clear-cut forests, extinct species. The human spasm will find its end.

But not the earth's.