{∅, {∅}, {∅, {∅}}} :: Resisting Mind-Fuckery

You might wonder why I am working with the Spanish translation rather than the original which I presume was written in French.  I know a small amount of Spanish and would most likely enjoy the process more if I am also developing familiarity with Spanish while trying to read Albert Caraco.    I first wanted to learn Spanish so as to be able to write poems to a young woman who I was "stalking" - err, I mean - "interested in speaking to/with".   Now, as most of my romantic aspirations have been nullified by my almost religious devotion to "math skills drills", it is rather comical that I am going to interact with Spanish to English translation software in my quest to read something worth reading ... as opposed to reading the front page of Yahoo News and the barrage of Celebrity News, Trump/Media controversies, etc ...

In between the doses of MSD (math skills drills), I can peck away at a paragraph from Chaos Breviary

Albert Caraco (8 July 1919 – 7 September 1971) was a French-Uruguayan philosopher, writer, essayist and poet of Turkish Jewish descent. He is known for his two major works, Post Mortem (1968) and posthumously published Bréviaire du chaos (1982). He is often compared to the philosophers and writers such as Emil Cioran, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Nicolás Gómez Dávila and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Turkish-Jewish descent?   This reminds me of the following lines by William Blake:

    The only man that e’er I knew
    Who did not make me almost spew
    Was Fuseli: he was both Turk and Jew
    And so, dear Christian friends, how do you do?

In 1939 Caraco and his family fled to South America due to Nazi threat and approaching World War II.

That is the extent of my biographical research.  Now, on to the Very Slow Reading of Caraco's Book of Chaos!

First, about this title: Breviario Del Caos

Definition of breviary
    1  a :  a book of the prayers, hymns, psalms, and readings for the canonical hours
        b :  divine office

    2
    [Latin breviarium] :  a brief summary

I am in no position to ascertain which meaning to apply, hence I call it a handbook of chaos, or Book of Chaos, or simply Chaos Breviary.

Right Turn

I guess I will only be working with excepts and snippets.

Thanks for the translations.Greatly appreciated.I don't think anyone is happy-they may appear to be so,they may even tel that to themselves.Kant concludes in the Critique of Pure Reason that we create the laws of nature . Adding to this, Schopenhauer concludes in The World as Will and Representation that we create the violent state of nature, for he maintains that the individuation that we impose upon things, is imposed upon a blind striving energy that, once it becomes individuated and objectified, turns against itself, consumes itself, and does violence to itself. His paradigm image is of the bulldog-ant of Australia, which when cut in half, struggles in a battle to the death between its head and tail. Our very quest for scientific and practical knowledge creates a world that feasts upon itself.

This marks the origin of Schopenhauer's renowned pessimism: he claims that as individuals, we are the unfortunate products of our own epistemological making, and that within the world of appearances that we structure, we are fated to fight with other individuals, and to want more than we can ever have. On Schopenhauer's view, the world of daily life is essentially violent and frustrating; it is a world that, as long as our consciousness remains at that level where the principle of sufficient reason applies in its fourfold root, will never resolve itself into a condition of greater tranquillity. As he explicitly states, daily life “is suffering”  and to express this, he employs images of frustration taken from classical Greek mythology, such as those of Tantalus and the Danaids, along with the suffering of Ixion on the ever-spinning wheel of fire. The image of Sisyphus expresses the same frustrated spirit.

Thanks Raul.  I will edit it.

As long as I move slowly, this could be fun.   

It is worthwhile for me to peck away at reading Caraco.   Thanks for pointing me to the PDF.   This makes it easier.   If I had to track down the hard copy, then I would have to type every word into translator.

I guess we "moderns" are spoiled.   The ancient scribes and even in the not too distant past were lucky to have access to dictionaries.

The monks must be having a field day with computer technology!

Well, maybe we are pseudo-monks of the dark side .... we are drawn to truth.  This leads us away from the crowds, away from the parades and sporting events, away from the horns and "illusion" of crowds having a "good time".   These are the gorts who conspire to fool themselves and others about the nature of reality. 

Each is existentially alone in the crowd, alone even as they lay in bed that evening next to their beloved. 

This world of books is like a separate universe from the world of parades and the like ... awards ceremonies ... competitions ... cakes and circuses for the masses.

And yet look at the kinds of books that are mass produced by the modern publishing industries!

We are fortunate to have been to find another intellectually honest man.  I certainly will try to get the gist of what he is saying ... in between the math drills ... at my leisure, of course.

Thanks for your help.

Yes, Holden, I don't believe anyone is happy for long either.   It has less to do with character and temperament and more to do with how we are wired as organisms, with tubes, stomach, nerve endings, fluctuating in cycles as we seek satisfaction of our most primal demands ... 

Schopenhauer considered optimism to be simply wicked as it is basically an insult to our intelligence.   "Don't **** on my leg and then tell me it's raining" is a statement expressing this sentiment.  What I found so unique about Thomas Ligotti's CONSPIRACY ATHR is how he pointed out just how this conspiracy plays itself out in our daily lives in our various societies.   Nobody wants to be around "Debbie Downer". 

Well ... There are those who prefer to focus on how tasty their meal is and do not want to "kill their buzz" by considering the slaughterhouse or the horrific screams of the large-eyed cow having its throat slit by a machine on a conveyor belt.

I am not condemning those who eat meat.  I myself am about to fry a slab of ground beef.  I just prefer to reflect upon the process I am involved in.   

Page 10

El mundo se cerro, como lo estaba antes de los Grandes Descubrimientos, el ano 1914 marca el advenimiento de la segunda Edad Media y nos encontramos en aquello que los Gnosticos llamaban la prision de la especie, en el universe
finito, del que no saldremos nunca. Se acabo ese optimismo que fue la suerte de tantos europeos durante cuatro siglos, la Fatalidad regresa a la Historia y nos preguntamos de siibito hacia donde nos encaminamos, nos preguntamos sobre el
porque de aquello que nos pasa, la hermosa confianza de nuestros padres en un progreso sin limites, acompanando una vida siempre mas humana, se ha desvanecido: damos vueltas alrededor del circulo y no alcanzamos siquiera a concebir nuestras obras. Es decir, que nuestras obras nos rebasan, y que el mundo, transformado por el hombre, escapa de nueva cuenta a su inteligencia, mas que nunca edificamos bajo la sombra de la muerte, la muerte sera la legataria de nuestros fastos y la hora del desnudamiento se aproxima, donde nuestras tradiciones iran a caer una despues de la otra como vestimentas, dejandonos desnudos a fin de que seamos juzgados, desnudos por fuera y vacios por dentro, el abismo bajo nuestros pies, el caos sobre nuestras cabezas.

The world closed, as it was before the Great Discoveries, the year 1914 marks the advent of The Middle Ages and we find ourselves in what the Gnostics called the prison of the species, in the universe Finite, of which we will never leave. That optimism is over which was the fate of so many Europeans for four centuries.

Where we are going, we ask ourselves why these things happen to us, the beautiful trust of our parents in a progress without limits, accompanying an ever more human life, has vanished: we give round the circle and we do not even reach the Cebir our works.

We are under the shadow of death. 

We are judged, naked on the outside and empty on the inside, the Abyss under our feet, chaos over our heads.

I have to confess I have not been able to motivate myself to read Caraco in Spanish.

I have come to accept that my brain is more wired for mechanical mathematical computations ...

I hope you are safe and not suffering too much.

One day we will all be dead and have no more goals or worries. 

Senor Raul,
   Thanks for the suggestion to give myself more time to investigate Caraco's words.  I had used software to try translating from French to English.   In the French edition, there was some kind of introduction, by a  Marc Schweizer.

Litany inspired and sumptuous baroque poem, the Breviary of Chaos brings us evidences that, too frivolous and too cowardly, we dare not look in the face.   The author, thinker, prophet, universal spirit of a vast culture,  Albert Caraco was born on July 10, 1919 in a family Sephardic of the Levant.  He will migrate with his parents through   Central Europe (Vienna, Prague, Paris), and took refuge in  Uruguay, South America, on the eve of the Second world War.

... Delayed his suicide only out of regard for his parents.

 While awaiting the end he had set for himself,  the day after his father's death, he passed several
 Hours each day to complete writing books

Mechanical and hieroglyphic, without erasures.

 The unclassifiable and gigantic work of Albert Caraco is still partly unpublished. 

 Currently being published are twenty-two volumes.  Among them Le Breviaire du Chaos, one of the shortest pieces, may be the quintessence.

Albert Caraco will remain the unavoidable prophet of the twentieth century.

 The Chaos Breviary
 Testimony

 During the 1980s, I wrote twenty letters to the magazines and newspapers to report the magnificent work of the last prophet of the twentieth century:   Albert Caraco.

 However, no chronicler has dared to take up the challenge of this immense writer, of this imprecator, of this astonishing prophet with sparkling style.  Never since Nietzsche - there was no philosopher of this magnitude.  Next to Albert  Caraco, our greatest authors are dwarfs!

 It is absolutely necessary to read his Breviary of Chaos, 128 pages of dynamite and intelligence, a firework of pessimistic, lucid and disturbing truths.


 A prodigious author, a magnificent classical style,  the French language brought to its perfection, ideas for the least disturbing, a rocket of intelligence for save the planet or a simple time bomb.

 Text to read aloud in all schools:

Quote from: Caraco

"The world we inhabit is hard, cold, dark, unjust and methodical, its rulers are pathetic idiots or profound scoundrels, none of them is any longer the measure of this age, we are surpassed, whether we are small or large, legitimacy inconceivable and power is only a de facto power, to which one resigns oneself.

 If one exterminated, from pole to pole, all dominant classes, nothing would be changed, the order established here in fifty centuries would not even be moved, the march to the death would not stop a single day and the triumphant rebels would have only the choice of being the gateholders of the obsolete traditions and imperatives   Absurd.

 The farce is over, the tragedy begins, the world will always be harder, colder, darker and more unjust, and despite the invasive chaos, methodical: it is even the alliance of the spirit of system
 And the disorder which seems to me its least questionable, there will never be more discipline and more absurdity, more calculation and more paradoxes, finally more problems resolved, but resolved in pure loss.  "

Thats a precious gem you have unearthed.Thanks for going through all the trouble translating it & putting it here.

PAGE 12

en espanol:

Nuestra juventud se siente condenada, y por ello las universidades se agitan, esta tiene razon, nosotros estamos equivocados y le preparamos una nueva guerra. El orden y la guerra
estan ligados, nuestra moral no lo ignora, basta con remitirse a la ensenanza de los grandes moralistas: esa es la unica certeza y no imaginamos el estado de paz perpetua, el orden
no lo resistiria. Nuestra juventud ha penetrado esta relacion de conveniencia, ha comprendido el encadenamiento de nuestros valores y de sus infortunios, es un descubrimiento
irresistible en lo sucesivo. La paradoja es que, teniendo razon, nuestra juventud esta equivocada pues en este universe, que la uniformidad amenaza, los pueblos no son contemporaneos los unos de los otros, hay todavfa bastantes naciones donde la juventud esta presta a inmolarse.

Creen nuestros jovenes que aqui en la Tierra es suficiente declarar la paz al mundo para que el mundo los escuche? Nosotros estamos en el Infierno, y no tenemos otra eleccion mas que
la de ser condenados atormentados o ser los diablos encargados de su suplicio.

Our youth feels doomed, and universities are shaken by this, this is right, we are wrong and we will prepare a new war. Order and the war are linked, our morality does not ignore it, simply refer to the teaching of the great moralists: that is the only certainty.  Do not imagine the State of perpetual peace, do not resist the order (the system?). 

[[[ NEEDS WORK ]]] Our youth has penetrated this relationship of convenience, it has understood the chain of our values and of their misfortunes, is a discovery irresistible hereinafter. The paradox is that, given reason, our youth this wrong as in this universe, that threatens the uniformity, the villages are not contemporaries from the other, still enough Nations where youth this lends to self-immolation. [[[ NEEDS WORK ]]]

Do you believe our young people here on Earth is sufficient to declare peace to the world so that the world can hear them? We are in Hell, and we are condemned to be tormented or to be the Devils responsible for this ordeal.