tell the truth

can we only tell the truth while masked? while hypnotized? unconscious?

"before too long then I was looking good, man, I was beautiful/i made believe that I could tell the truth to the whole wide world"

the truth is only make believe

the truth is always exactly what you think it is

the really real truth is more like the "ding an sich" - unknowable, by definition, ineffable, inescapable

are we capable of the truth, or incapable of it? incapacitated by it?

like I said, we always know exactly what the truth is

we never know

pure, uncut, the real deal, accept no substitutes - the uncanny connection between the truth and what is.

what is the truth? the truth is what is

Models of Enlightened Behavior

If you drop something, pick it up.

When the bill comes, pay it.

When the phone rings, answer it.

When the light turns green, go.

One Definition of Enlightenment

To be the same person in every situation, whomever you meet, wheresoever you go.

To be the same person, without masks, without ruses, without guile, without anxiety or greed, without schemes, agendas, or goals.

To be the same person you were before you were born and after you're dead. A carbon atom doesn't change when it belongs to a carrot or a rabbit or a hawk. Neither should you so change.

Ethics Are the End of Reason

When someone deems your actions "unethical," they generally mean, "does not conform to a certain ethical standard which separates actions into 'right action' and 'wrong action'." When you ask them the basis for their ethics, they will have two possible answers: On the one hand, they will refer to an authority who has established the ethical code and infer that you should abide by the code out of respect or obeisance to said authority. On the other hand, and this is the post-enlightenment tendency, they will justify their ethical standard in terms of practical or utilitarian concerns regarding the outcome of actions deemed wrong.

Here is where conflict arises. No ethical standards can be immediately or unproblematically derived from the world of phenomena, particularly when the phenomena in question are social in nature. The ethical conclusions drawn in this way from or against any particular act are dependent both on knowledge and depiction of the human situation concerned - both areas in which certainty is, for the most part, provisional.

Dispute is always possible when we are describing situations in human life and particularly when we are claiming that, "given situation x, action y, will lead to outcome z." In the realm of science, the experimental method stipulates that exceedingly rigorous conditions be met if someone is to even make the claim, let alone experimentally verify, that, given x, action y leads to outcome z. In fact, the experimental situation is intentionally artificial, the connections between x, y, and z demonstrably tight, and the conclusions peculiarly modest.

Unfortunately, in human life, given the number of variables involved in even the simplest interaction between two people, let alone the complexities inherent in the multiple, both highly interdependent or very weakly linked, interactions that compromise any social process, ethical standards that are justified in terms of "inevitable" outcomes of specific actions are either trivially few or unquestionably questionable.

Yet, herein lies the conundrum. If you question the ethical standard, you are pointed to the utilitarian reason behind it. If, however, you question the utilitarian reason, you are quickly accused of questioning the ethic.

It becomes clear that the ethic itself is not seen as the product of social consensus and open to revision or dispute. The apparent argument from utility reverts to an argument from authority. Thus, if you are questioning the ethic, you are implicitly questioning the authority. If you are questioning the authority, you are in opposition. If you are in opposition, you are an opponent. If you are an opponent, you must be overcome.

Any conflict that cannot be resolved via dialog and compromise, must be resolved by force. While such a resolution may be "comprehensible," to the extent that if follows the laws of physics, for example, it will not be "reasonable."

Disputes over ethics are sad and the sadness stems from weakness. The proponents of a particular ethical standard resort to force in order to silence opponents because, sadly, they do not possess the power that could transmute their ethic into law.

There is no God, but God

Grim: The only thing I care about now is God.

World: But you said God didn't exist.

Grim: You're not fucking listening to me.

Intestine Baalism - Bad Name/Good Music

Been on a heavy metal kick of late. Told everyone I was re-dedicating my life to metal. So, I go to Newbury Comics and scrounge through the "[insert letter of choice] Misc" bins looking for metal cds - the semiotics of extreme metal are pretty well-defined, it's hard to know what will succeed, however, within the discipline and rigor of the genre - and buying anything that looks obscure and cheap. Thanks to this aesthetic foraging, I've come across some great stuff. Right now, I'm listening to Intestine Baalism. It's totally awesome!

Death metal, of the Swedish variety, but from Japan, and broken up by epic "melodic" moments - which are more psychedelic than anything, and Maidenish - then back to thrashing death. The 1990s were THE decade for death metal (this one comes from '97), a time of purity and simplicity. A time of honor and focus. Truth.

Everything now is an adventuresome and reverent pastiche (I'll write about Hammers of Misfortune later), not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyway, I had already flipped by this one a few times in search of Inquisition or something, now that I have all the Immortal cds I could ever want, when I saw it today. I almost bought it and I didn't (though I did pick up something by Blood Ritual that was quite impressive, albeit from the 21st century).

I wasn't sure. I'll bet a few bucks ($4-ish) on music I've never even heard of if there is the chance that it will be surprisingly awesome. Anyway, this cd on that score is amazingly brilliant. Crushingly brutal, death-grunt morphing into blackened, tortured screeches. Then, and this is what all the Amazon reviews tell you, it veers into a grungy take on NWOBHM.

But also like I said, the melodic parts sound more progressive and psychedelic than metal. There's even a really spacey acoustic intro on one cut.

Bottom line, the thing is this: as I type these words, and listen to this music, it consistently catches my attention, surprises and astonishes me. Intestine Baalism, extreme and sublime masters of this weird art.

I bow to their excellence.

Ripping Corpse, "Dreaming With The Dead"

Saw Ripping Corpse listed on some death metal lists and got their amazing Dreaming with the Dead.

I was expecting something heavy, but not exactly this. The highly processed/phased guitar reminds me of Euro-metal like Coroner, but the drums have some real thrash elements, and the vocals are fairly hardcore. Maybe it qualifies this as grindcore, I don't know.

I do know it's good. Real good. Strange chaos moments, heavy moments, psych-wank soloing, and those vocals. I guess the mainstream version of this would be Pantera, if that makes sense.

I was intrigued by the participation of Erik Rutan, who has played off and on with Morbid Angel and co-founded (founded?) Hate Eternal (in which Ripping Corpse guitarist Shaune Kelly now plays. If I'm not mistaken, the first album was recorded with one of the guitarists from Suffocation, Doug Cerrito). I'll address the question of Morbid Angel in another post.

Final Analysis: Dreaming with the Dead is an artefact of a bygone era, the sign-post to a path not taken by metal, and by extension, the world.

Should your Fantasy become a Reality?

In our culture of indulged, individualized experience, a certain perfection of life is ascribed to that moment in which your fantasy becomes reality. The idealized human life culminating in the realization of fantasy, in other words.

Accordingly, it is assumed that everyone wants their fantasies to become reality. For example, I have a friend whose life plays like a never-ending letter to Penthouse Forum. To many, his life embodies an (pornish) ideal. I myself am not above admitting to have looked upon his life from time to time with eyes greened by envy.

Nevertheless, I do not hold reality to be the perfection and natural destiny of fantasy. I want many of my fantasies to go unfulfilled because they are fantastic, outlandish, or impossible. More importantly, I'm glad that they do not contain the weight and persistence of reality. I am nurtured by their unreality and, in many ways, dependent on it.

Reality does not lie on a continuum with fantasy, but unfolds rather as an autonomous zone. Fantasy can, and should, guide and inform our actions. It should not, however, be revered as the measure of our actions.

Personally, I am drawn to reality precisely because it is beyond my control and intent, because it surprises and startles, and because it does not wholly conform to my expectations. Reality attracts me, ultimately, because it does not seem to be me.

castration

sitting with my laptop on top of my lap - connected to the interweb via wireless, wondering if I was castrating myself with radio waves....

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?

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.

i've never believed in reincarnation. the human soul is too obviously contingent, a product of its physical substrate and environmental pressures, and famously instable. at the "pulse of life" level, it is too generic and thoughtless, too deinviduated for a linear, body to body, journey. for this reason, a karmic doctrine asserting that the conditions for this current life have been set or in any way influenced by behaviors and preoccupations in a previous life have always struck me as either absurd or as an ideologically motivated ruse, one which paints the current situation as somehow pre-determined by the irretrievable, and thus unchangeable past. however, it is not unreasonable to claim that the lives we live have been set in motion by the actions of others, parents, grandparents, etc. and that we are carried along by the momentum of their dreams, their successes, their failures. we act out and out of their passions and, unless we take the time to consciously recollect our origins, or the origin of our origins, we do indeed live lives of a blind, karmic pre-destination.

On the other hand, karma is really just a doctrine of cause and effect. the entire universe is a complex chain reaction that goes on and on and on and, at least theoretically, there is a continuous chain of cause tying all current being to every other state of being, in its totality, stretching back to the primordial, original cause. There is no doubt that my behaviors, my actions, even my intentions, are part of an unbroken chain of physical events reaching back from this moment to the beginning of time, criss-crossing with innumerable other chains of discrete events, and carried along by the wave of all things happening forever. Reincarnation may simple mean that a particular chain, or more likely, complex of chains, has once again attained personhood. The exploration of past lives is always only an effort to understand this life and capture, in a highly symbolic narrative, the forces which have shaped both our proclivities and experiences.

apparently blogging is about updating content with an alarming frequency

i'm eating pretzels and am getting fatter by the minute

when i am living in the woods, fleeing authority, reflecting on the decisions that led me to commit the regrettable, the forever undoable (what can ever undo the done?) and wondering if, though i am at large, i will ever feel free (for the hunted live in the shadow of pursuit - never resting, only hiding), i will thank the Utz company for their manufacture of these salty carb sticks, which my body thoughtfully converted to fat in anticipation of this now inescapable eventuality.

in five minutes i've got to do something

awoke this morning thinking about the alt-rock indie underground - can't explain why -

mind too prone to relativize, to absolutize, in an ascending and descending sequence - a genetic code of culture, but in reverse, an entire universe of individual entities (that means "beings") that don't matter to anyone - since "things"
only matter to "someones" - or so I'm told

if someone said, "I saw Julia Roberts yesterday," and you asked, "Where?" and they said, "On TV, they were replaying "Pretty Woman,'" you would think that odd. "Seeing" someone is supposed to be different from seeing a picture of them. But for movie folk, they mainly exist for us as images. Real images, in other words. (Thoughts I had after seeing a man who looked like Tom Cruise and wondering what it would be like to be a recognized image, like him, but then walk anonymously down the street in a Boston city. If you are used to being recognized, and then are not recognized, does this cause pain? Does this cure pain?)

i'm going to return to this blog and let the world know what i think

WORLD, YOU ARE OFFICIALLY ON NOTICE!

What if a god, instead of creating the universe, merely found it? And then, what if he lost it?

some recent thoughts:

1. was the past better or worse than the present? recent discussions with friends uncover a consensual belief that all valorization of the past over against the present are delusional and regressive fantasies. Two hundred years ago, the population of Europe was roughly 11% literate, the majority of people were peasants (soon to become industrial laborers), and cities stank running with filth in the streets (since plumbing in the modern sense did not exist). While I have tended to agree that worship of the past was generally motivated by politically conservative interests and relied on a purely constructed version of "what was," I've now decided that it all depends on your perspective. In this regard, I've been primarily influenced by Mike Davis' "Victorian Holocausts" book in which he demonstrates how colonial policies and practices turned drought conditions from Brazil to China into humanitarian catastrophes of biblical proportions, thus creating a long-lasting divergence between the conditions of the poor in the 1st World (Europe and North America) and the poor in the 3rd World. In the case of the latter, it cannot be asserted that the present is better than the past since, as Davis shows, imperial policies in china, as well as practices of the moghuls in India, were geared to prevent exactly the kinds of disasters that the colonial policies produced. Of course that may beg the question of the present present vs. the past past - that is, for example, are the inhabitants of modern day China, or India for that matter, "better off" than their ancestors. Conditions are better, certainly, than they were 100 years ago, but are they better than they were 200 years ago? 10,000 years ago?

2. liberalism and America. Lieberman claims that a "swing to the left" - whatever that would mean in America - would mean certain defeat for the Democratic party. I would instead wager that a further commitment to centrism would further the party's demise. Americans are extremists by nature, not moderates, and appreciate high contrasts. The larger problem for the Democrats is actually producing a worldview that is as simplistic and stark as that propogated by the Republicans, a worldview with a clear division between the good and the evil, and easy to understand solutions to the problems currently facing America (unemployment, "terrorism," etc.) This would involve a reclamation of the concept of America itself. The Republicans, while actually serving the interests of a small minority of extremely wealthy Americans, have successfully marketed themselves as the embodiment of America. They are the flag wavers. They are the patriots. Etc. Their idea of America, however, is Christian, conservative, and plutocratic. Because they mobilize fundamentalism in all its forms on their behalf, they have successfully projected the message that any opposition to this concept of America is opposition to America itself (as one conservative put it, "Life is a living hell for liberals because they hate America but don't hate it enough to leave"). America should mean, is supposed to mean, was intended to mean: FREEDOM, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, DEMOCRACY. If the image of Republican community par excellence is the Christian fundamentalist revival meeting - which is about submission to an absolute authority, then the image of Democratic community par excellence is the old-style Dead show/Woodstock/ Lollapalooza-type rock festival - which is about the celebration of freedom, enjoyment, and self-expression.

3. But it's not just about the battle of worldviews - on the one hand, the monolith of Republican fundamentalism, on the other, a polyglot bazaar of Democratic pluralism - it is about power: the power to tax, the power to legislate, the power to mobilize, etc. The Republicans are all about power, taking power, and using power to benefit specific special interests. They do not want to change the world or social system. They want to control the government to fulfill certain personal and business interests. They do not say this. Instead, they say they want to protect America, keep the streets safe, etc. The democrats, on the other hand, at their best, would like to create a better, different world on behalf of a generalized human interest involving the right to education, healthcare, income, welfare, shelter, security, etc. Because they do not serve specific financial interests, and instead want to promote a diffuse interest inherited from and invented by the humanist enlightenment, they have a harder time of it. In a sense, they have no center of power, no specific interest unified enough and identifiable enough to mobilize and direct the actions of the party. This results from their celebration of diversity, in part.

I gave a talk at harvard the other day at a conference on terrorism (specifically, that of the Red Army Faction - they didn't call themselves "terrorists" of course, though, as one participant asserted, "the society saw them that way." - now why would that be?). I talked about consciousness. Any organism that uses a mental picture to interact with and manipulate the world would require that this mental picture have two characteristics: it must be relatively stable, otherwise action over time and remembering where you left your food would become difficult, and it must be essentially fluid, otherwise it would be incapable of adapting to the shifting form of reality itself. Fundamentalism is rooted in the stable aspect of consciousness, and liberalism, understood as a relativistic formalism, is rooted in the other. Come to think of it, liberalism combines both aspects, in the formalism of law's rule, and in the tolerance and freedom of thought that it encourages and protects. Truth, I claimed, resided in the fluid adaptability of consciousness, in the movement from one stable state to another, and not in any particular stable state that consciousness adopts in order to negotiate a particular configuration of the real. Pedagogy should encourage this transversal movement, should teach it as the form of truth, rather than teach a specific or particular proposition. In doing so, pedagogy fulfills the Enlightenment's vision of a free humanity, a humanity made free by the truth. This is, however, the devil's pedagogy - for the devil, in the gnostic schema, frees humans by revealing to them the truth of this world's imprisoning deception. The devil, who only exists for fundamentalists after all, is not evil because he does bad things, but because he is a relativist, and thus attacks fundamentalism at an ontological level, at its foundation, just as the chaotic flux of reality itself does.