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Silenus

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Spinal Catastrophism
« on: September 10, 2020, 09:56:59 am »


Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History by Thomas Moynihan

Quote
Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal.

Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and "organic memory" that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from "railway spine" to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought.

Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.


A review from Goodreads that particularly piqued my interest:

" [...]Moynihan exhumes the forgotten progenitors of speculative philosophy of the spine whose corpses were retroburied by their posterity from the future, in the process recapitulating Intelligence's torturous odyssey towards more sublimated forms of self-torment. The more complexified and ramified Intelligence becomes (life is nothing other than self-collapse), the more it accelerates into the future--the future arrives sooner. And the spine, well, the spine is "agglutinated Time", the crowning of which is the hominid brain, at which point the internal states and simulations start to spill and leak into the 'external' environment. Until at long last, intelligence becomes indistinguishable from the environment (incidentally, this is a solution to the Fermi's Paradox).
Can any of us go to bed at night knowing that our waking and even sleeping life is a traumatic and delusional dream-flower of our spinal nerve-tree?
"
« Last Edit: September 10, 2020, 09:58:53 am by Silenus »

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

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Holden

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #1 on: September 10, 2020, 04:52:42 pm »
That's a great piece of information.Thank you very much. Please do keep them coming. I really do wish there were more people like you, Mr.Silenus, I mean, people who are not careerists.

Unfortunately, there are very,very few such men.I must look this up.

Take care.
« Last Edit: September 10, 2020, 05:09:56 pm by Holden »
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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #2 on: September 11, 2020, 07:47:25 am »
I will also look into this.  I think it has the potential to gel harmoniously with Holden's ideas about viewing our own existence once removed, that is, witnessing our own organic machinery as something alien to that which perceives/experiences.

How can we view ourselves as anything other than vulnerable, considering we are consciousness at the mercy of being in the world?

Just to continue with one's own scholastic interests while throwing hospital, doctors, or ambulence bills in the trash bin, there is something of Kafka's Metamorphosis about it.  While we may not be giant insects, when one begins to dwell for long periods of time in that private subjective realm, life becomes very weird.   One must embrace this weirdness of our Creaturely Presence.

I think that this book Silenus suggests may also offer a kind of "intoxicating" edge to our moment to moment existence.  Maybe there is part of our internal wiring which appreciates any such attempt at some kind of "breakthrough."    What the fuck are we?
« Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 03:00:27 pm by Sticks and Stones »
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Silenus

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A Cosmic Trauma
« Reply #3 on: September 11, 2020, 10:40:35 am »
This is available on Library Genesis in a pdf format. I've just begun to dip my toes, but decided to step back and find a solid introduction of some sorts.

Apparently this book relates to a theory from a fictional character created by philosopher Nick Land: The Geocosmic Theory of Trauma: the unconscious trauma of every (geological) strata and every (geological) era is always there, permeating the entire body of matter.

This seems to be an adequate introduction of ideas and worth a slow read: https://underworldsblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/06/cave-art/

The internet still has it's cavernous charm, if one can claw through it's corporate veneer. :)
« Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 10:42:43 am by Silenus »

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

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The meaning of life is to waste energy?
« Reply #4 on: September 11, 2020, 04:23:40 pm »
This is connected to the work of Nick Land?

The meaning of life is to waste energy?  It all sounds so tongue-in-cheek, so all-too-intellectual, and yet there is something ever so intoxicating about considering such extreme notions:

Quote from: Yuxi_Liu
I took note of the philosopher Nick Land from reading about posthumanism on Wikipedia.

I was intrigued, so I read more. And turns out Nick Land's writing is sometimes easy to read but most of the times extremely hard to read, and probably garbage. I wrote this post so that you don't have to waste time wading through the garbage, looking for fragments of good poetry.

    Nothing human makes it out of the near-future. -- Nick Land

First of all, Nick Land was obsessed with hating Kant, loving Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and their philosophical style (called schizoanalysis, related to schizophrenia). He likes to think about the world from very nonhuman viewpoints, such as other animals, robots, computers, machines that humans made, earth, the universe, etc. He likes capitalism and technological revolution, as fast as possible, without regard for its goodness.

Recently there's some mainstream reports on his philosophy of Neoreactionism ("Dark Enlightenment"), the idea that democracy sucks and monarchy/CEO-president works better. This philosophy has gained a bit of following, but uninteresting to me, so we won't review that. I'd simply note that the phrase "Dark Enlightenment" really should be "Delightenment". Really missing out such a pun.

Schizoanalysis

The idea of schizoanalysis just means that there's a lot of ways to make a theory about the world, and make philosophies, and there's no one way to do it, and further, there could be genuine conflicts that cannot be resolved by appealing to a higher standard.

In mathematics, there's some fringe movement of this style. Most mathematicians are in favor of logical consistency, but some are okay with controlled inconsistency (paraconsistency). Most mathematicians are in favor of using infinities, but some are finitists who think that infinities don't exist, and a few are ultrafinitists who think that there are finite large numbers (such as e^{e^{10}}) that can be assumed to not exist.

Coincidentally, these fringe mathematicians tend to be obnoxious and argumentative (Doron Zeilberger is a prominent example). Maybe there's such a thing as an "obnoxious fringe personality"...

Schizoanalysis uses an analogy for how to think about theories: the rhizome. A rhizome is a bunch of underground roots, touching each other in a messy network. This is in contrast to a tree, from a big trunk going up to little branches.

rhizome

Traditionally, stories about the world are told like a tree: there's a great principle of the world: be it God, Existentialism, or Absurdism, and the story gets more and more details as it explains the smaller things like how to treat other people.

But maybe there are many stories just messed up and knotted, without any way to unify them in a single principle. I make stories about Infinities and you about Ultrafinitism and there's no way to unify us. Two powerful countries with incompatible philosophies go to war, unable to unify their stories.

Really obscure style


Kant is hard enough, Deleuze and Guattari's books are unreadable (I tried). Nick Land, being immersed in such kinds of books, often wrote in the same extreme obscure style. For example, Machinic Desire (1992):

    The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the production of production, so that for schizoanalysis there is the real exactly in so far as it is built. Production is production of the real, not merely of representation, and unlike Kantian production, the desiring production of Deleuze/Guattari is not qualified by humanity (it is not a matter of what things are like for us)...

Don't bother trying to understand that. A big part of reading philosophy is to ignore real nonsense while still spending time on apparent nonsense that is actually sensible.

Earth

Another paper/fiction, Barker Speaks, develops the theory of "geotrauma", a story about how the Earth feels, and it feels endless PAIN. This is my most favorite story so far, just because it's easy to picture (especially if you know Gaia theory).

    Deleuze and Guattari ask: Who does the Earth think it is?... during the Hadean epoch, the earth was kept in a state of superheated molten slag [from asteroid impacts]... the terrestrial surface cooled, due to the radiation of heat into space... During the ensuing – Archaen – epoch the molten core was buried within a crustal shell, producing an insulated reservoir of primal exogeneous trauma, the geocosmic motor of terrestrial transmutation... It’s all there: anorganic memory, plutonic looping of external collisions into interior content, impersonal trauma as drive-mechanism.

Basically, do psychoanalysis on geology. The center of the earth is full of heat, and tension, leftovers from its early pains of being hit by asteroids. This trauma is being expressed in geological phenomena like earthquakes, volcanoes, and continental drifts.

    Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream.

Further, even biological creatures should be thought of as one kind of geological phenomenon. This isn't complete nonsense, considering that we have possible clay-life earlier on Earth, and the fact that biological lifeforms have shaped geological strata.

    Geotrauma is an ongoing process, whose tension is continually expressed – partially frozen – in biological organization.

In this story, biological creatures are just one way for Earth to express its trauma. We are the skin-crawls, manifestations of Earth's inner suffering.

Materialistic nihilism

    No one could ever ‘be’ a libidinal materialist. This is a ‘doctrine’ that can only be suffered as an abomination, a jangling of the nerves, a combustion of articulate reason, and a nauseating rage of thought. It is a hyperlepsy of the central nervous-system, ruining the body’s adaptive regimes, and consuming its reserves in rhythmic convulsions that are not only futile, but devastating... An aged philosopher is either a monster of stamina or a charlatan.

    What matters is the violent impulse to escape that gives this book its title. The thirst for annihilation.

This section is based on his book The Thirst for Annihilation (1992) that I have been reading on and off sometimes. This book is a collection of essays on George Bataille, a very weird writer that I encountered twice. The first time, I encountered him during my research on lingchi, as he wrote about it in a really hard to read book (Tears of Eros) that sexualizes violence.

The second time, it was in this book by Nick Land.

Basically, George Bataille wrote a lot, and his writing about materialistic nihilism, death, ****, vomit, garbage, and all that's ugly about life. (He also wrote a lot of sexual fetishes, but it's not very interesting.)

He wrote about them repetitively, not because he wanted to repeat himself a lot, but because to write was to howl in pain. We scream when we are burnt, no matter how many times it happens. Bataille wrote ugly despair whenever ugly despair hit his brain like a tsunami.

The meaning of life is to waste energy

Bataille thought Life is evil and ugly and meaningless. Life doesn't try to conserve energy, instead, life is about wasting energy. The Sun is a giant source of energy, and all the excess energy has to be used up somehow... hence life! Life appears when the blind materials of earth become overheated by all the energy of the sun, and shaken into more and more complicated shapes, in order to consume all the excess energy.

    All energy must ultimately be spent pointlessly and unreservedly, the only questions being where, when, and in whose name... Bataille interprets all natural and cultural development upon the earth to be side-effects of the evolution of death, because it is only in death that life becomes an echo of the sun, realizing its inevitable destiny, which is pure loss.

The Sun is the source of energy. All the energy ends up being wasted, turned to "zero", nothing. Life is a thin, fragile, and very complex middle-layer between the Sun and the zero.

This is a great contrast to the rigorous and ultra-formal mathematics texts I have devoted my energies to.  In fact, the formality in the "explanations" is almost maddening; one wonders how we are to be taken seriously by any possible student.   The students would also have to be mad.   :P
« Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 04:40:56 pm by Sticks and Stones »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #5 on: September 11, 2020, 05:10:44 pm »
There is a saying George Carlin might have used.   Pulling my chain.   I am weary of those influenced by "French intellectuals" of the sort who might expect an audience receptive to their style; as opposed to a grouchy and bitter old Steppenwolf trying to be honest about his lack of skill in writing the most fundamental of mathematical proofs.

I do explore this literature.  Hell, I had been an enthusiast at times ... [see AntiOedipus Revisited] ---- much research has been lost in the Seattle area ... there is mention of my encounters with schizoanalysis in I Don't Exist ...

Schopenhauer must have spoiled me for any other writer.  Even Cioran and Ligotti can be all-too-obscure, where one must have access to a thesaurus in order to interpret the lines.  And yet I also struggle with the rigorous attention to the most minute detail in the proofs as presented in the Dolciani classics from 1960's and 1980's.  There is a "lazy" component of my brain which may be vulnerable to ultra-scientific jargon - all the combinations with Latin or Greek prefixes and suffixes. 

I wonder what the Buddha of Berlin would have had to say about it all.  I recall something about this notion where people may tend to think the latest and newest is cutting edge, as in neuroscience; whereas Schopenhauer believed that the most very ancient nearest the origins of our species had greater wisdom and clarity as far as "how to live" or "what we are facing upon being born sentient lifeforms."

I am struggling with the concept of intellectual honesty these days.  It has always haunted me as regarding the retaining of mathematical knowledge.  I am constantly referring to notes, which in turn refer to still more notes.   Pages of symbols ... words ... statements ... then there is the toothache pain forever threatening to GET MY FULL ATTENTION.   How can a writer remain honest and yet still maintain some composure.

It takes me days to complete an exercise, but, on paper, there is no way to relay to the receiver how much time and thought goes into the solution or explanation.  One has no control over how one's "documentation" will be received, or whether it will be honored by anyone other than an aged version of oneself.   

And yet, keeping an open mind, this Spinal Catastrophism does invite the use of precise expression of unpleasant brute facts:  ... that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal.

traumata with car keys  ::)

we are a pitiable lot  :(
« Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 06:23:56 pm by Sticks and Stones »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Silenus

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #6 on: September 11, 2020, 07:48:10 pm »
I sympathize with trying to wade into a text with as much flowery language and terminology. I cannot read Derrida. All I've read of Heidegger is "Parmenides" and that's because it was more a lecture than an expose of his thought with his own definitions, descriptors, symbols. I don't know how I will read this, but I'm curious about the central idea. The trauma of time and event on biological life.

I can't say much about searching for "truth;" I'm interested in a creating a synthesis of interpretations and representations to shine some strange light on the little we know about ourselves. I hope I will always learn in some capacity, as long as I may live.

Speaking of Heidegger, he too said to look at the ancients. I agree with the opinion. Just how much more can we know that they didn't? Their symbology was filled with meaning and many lived in a temperate climate where they thought under the stars rather than a musty church/temple, or stuffy academy. :)

Hercalitus thought that fire is within everything. That's a fair way to describe Thermodynamics, of which Land seems to interpret in his own way. It seems appropiate to say "waste" with him, as he has an (in my opinion erroneous) opinion that capitalism must be pedal-to-the-medal. Waste away!

The Maximum Power Principle of Thermodynamics, however, says that complex biological life is an efficent agent of entropy, as life strives to maximize the flow of energy within itself. Hence the Will-to-life: the drive and striving for things, generates energy consumption.

https://www.ecologycenter.us/ecosystem-theory/the-maximum-power-principle.html

http://jayhanson.org/loop.htm




"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

Nation of One

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #7 on: September 11, 2020, 09:24:11 pm »
Yes, after Schopenhauer's direct style, I found most the "revered" philosophers to be pompous and all-too-enthusiastic about their mental powers.   I'm afraid the greatest philosophers and thinkers must end up living out their lives either in total despair or with a minimalist lifestyle where they merely require of themselves that they endure their own existence.  I'm all for harm reduction and lifelong learning.

I wish to honor my own traumatized nervous system by giving great attention to the material theat most baffled me as a young adult, and which have never been adequately presented to me in such a manner ever since, even at the age (53) of an aging Steppenwolf; that is, a Steppenwolf who has not had an accident while shaving around his 50th birthday.

Maybe my subjective consciousness is too much of a perfectionist, and there is a way some of this "science-fiction philosophy," which may tend to glorify the horrific Thing-in-itself as trapped in its own unfolding agonizing growth, that may gel with the kind of honesty I am trying to nurture in attempting to at long last master specific material (about writing proofs) which I have long since craved to at least deepen my understanding and appreciation of.

Something in this restless flesh is drawn to the notation of set theory ... I know there exist intellectuals in and out of Academia (Universities) who have far deeper understanding, but I am only concerned with my own, and I do not wish to be instructed so much as to refer to my own notes and carefully scribbled solutions, many of which have evolved in notebooks with unlined blank sheets.

We are these weird creatures, that's certain.   We are, as a species, Freaks of Nature, no?

I hear the United States military is some kind of Prison Zoo Farm Circus Nightmare.

There are days I cringe at being so very dependent upon what appears to be a Ship of Helpless Fools.

There is a false sense of security even in the mathematics texts I study (that is, have made into some kind of quasi-religious relic).  They assume an endless amount of time and tranquility for cognition, rumination, meditation, serious problem solving ... and thinking through logical proofs.  On what soil is such material to be presented?   For now, it happens within the mind of the One Who Seeks and FInds.

Our lives, our narratives, must be more dream-like and Kafkaesque/sci-fi than those who believe in an "Objective World" would like us to admit.   Is there a Natural History, or is all time and space cyclical?  Will not all our words and symbols and statements and theorems be eaten by the void in the end?

« Last Edit: September 11, 2020, 10:31:40 pm by Sticks and Stones »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Nation of One

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #8 on: September 12, 2020, 10:46:27 pm »
From a link left by Silenus (Underworlds) :

Land in effect pushed Deleuze’s and Guattari’s writing on in A Thousand Plateaus to the limits of philosophical discourse (and when he broke down with the strain, and, by informed accounts, actually “went mad,” he carried their theoretical posture of schizoanalysis into a lonely place  far outside the academic comfort-zone.

    Trauma is a body… an iron thing… Cthelll: the interior third of terrestrial mass, semifluid metallic ocean, megamolecule, and pressure cooker beyond imagination. It’s hotter than the surface of the sun down there, three thousand clicks below the crust, and all that thermic energy is sheer impersonal nonsubjective memory of the outside, running the plate-tectonic machinery of the planet via the conductive and convective dynamics of silicate magma, bathing the whole system in electromagnetic fields as it tidally pulses to the orbit of the moon. Cthelll is the terrestrial inner nightmare, nocturnal ocean, Xanadu: the anorganic metal-body trauma howl of the earth.

    Nick Land “Barker Speaks,” 498

Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Ibra

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #9 on: November 13, 2020, 04:39:52 am »
Quote from: Silenus
I can't say much about searching for "truth;" I'm interested in a creating a synthesis of interpretations and representations to shine some strange light on the little we know about ourselves. I hope I will always learn in some capacity, as long as I may live.

well said, Silenus about synthesis. It reminds me of Schopenhauer essay about Writing in his distinction of the "matter vs form".

Quote from: Schopenhauer - On Authorship and Style.
A book can never be anything more than the impression of its author’s thoughts. The value of these thoughts lies either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form in which he develops his matter — that is to say, what he has thought about it.

The matter of books is very various, as also are the merits conferred on books on account of their matter. All matter that is the outcome of experience, in other words everything that is founded on fact, whether it be historical or physical, taken by itself and in its widest sense, is included in the term matter. It is the motif that gives its peculiar character to the book, so that a book can be important whoever the author may have been; while with form the peculiar character of a book rests with the author of it. The subjects may be of such a nature as to be accessible and well known to everybody; but the form in which they are expounded, what has been thought about them, gives the book its value, and this depends upon the author. Therefore if a book, from this point of view, is excellent and without a rival, so also is its author. From this it follows that the merit of a writer worth reading is all the greater the less he is dependent on matter — and the better known and worn out this matter, the greater will be his merit. The three great Grecian tragedians, for instance, all worked at the same subject.

So that when a book becomes famous one should carefully distinguish whether it is so on account of its matter or its form.

Quite ordinary and shallow men are able to produce books of very great importance because of their matter, which was accessible to them alone. Take, for instance, books which give descriptions of foreign countries, rare natural phenomena, experiments that have been made, historical events of which they were witnesses, or have spent both time and trouble in inquiring into and specially studying the authorities for them.

On the other hand, it is on form that we are dependent, where the matter is accessible to every one or very well known; and it is what has been thought about the matter that will give any value to the achievement; it will only be an eminent man who will be able to write anything that is worth reading. For the others will only think what is possible for every other man to think. They give the impress of their own mind; but every one already possesses the original of this impression.

I am with Mr. Hentrich that I prefer the direct style. I tried to read many works of the "French" academics but I find it not a smooth experience. besides becoming more muddle-minded than before.
I wonder why authors do not combine a direct style with new synthesis.

I hope you are getting by.


« Last Edit: November 13, 2020, 08:22:32 am by Ibra »
Suffering is the only fruit of human race

Silenus

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #10 on: November 15, 2020, 12:28:40 pm »
Hello Ibra,
  I do wonder about the lack of synthesis. Here in the U.S. I think that our universities ENCOURAGE a lack of synthesis. Not only are the academic subjects/majors confined within a prescribed path, but the schools/universities go so far as to have seperate buildings for separate fields of study. A student may never understand the potential to connect, say, a study in anthropology with a study in evolution. There are connections to be made, but they may never be recognized. How many syntheses may go undiscovered because of this? Do the corporate and academic heads not want us to be able to synthesize fields, to think across a spectrum, because they may point to problems and solutions which go against the grain of "normality?"

No, they want us thinking in black and white. Good guys vs. bad guys, us vs. them. This is just my speculative opinion, of course.

I hope you are getting by OK as well.

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

Holden

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #11 on: November 16, 2020, 02:40:20 pm »
Nice to see your message,Mr. Silenus.

I find this world very ugly. People who slave their whole lives away, seem to have just one wish-produce more slaves for the system.Unlike Che, I feel no kinship with the working class.

They think their child will be the millionaire they could never be.But it hardly ever works out.The kid grows up and become a slave and shifts all the  hopes and dreams over to his own child.

Paul writes as if he expects Jesus to come back in his lifetime. He seems  disappointed that his friends are dying and yet Jesus has not returned yet.Its the same thing with the parents who want to have a kid ,because, HE will finally cure cancer.
(But what if the child IS the cancer?)

Take care.


La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Silenus

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A Vast Pit of Fertilizer (for Holden)
« Reply #12 on: November 24, 2020, 09:00:56 am »
"...Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness."

 - Ernest Becker

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

Ibra

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism
« Reply #13 on: November 24, 2020, 11:49:16 pm »
Thanks, Silenus, for posting this quote.
I remember when reading Ernest Becker "Denial of Death" I was almost highlighting every passage of his book, what a lucid prose he can muster!

more seminal works of synthesis I came across
- Persuasion and Rhetoric by Carlo Michelstaedter  (mentioned here elsewhere)
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
-  Empire V, a novel by Viktor Pelevin.  firs part he discusses his theory of  "Glamour vs Discourse" to explain the modern consumerist society and culture. here is a related video on the same theme.





« Last Edit: November 25, 2020, 02:08:16 am by Ibra »
Suffering is the only fruit of human race

Holden

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Re: Spinal Catastrophism( For Mr.Silenus)
« Reply #14 on: November 26, 2020, 12:54:51 pm »


Mr.Silenus,

I hope you are doing well.

But the sun distracts our attention-Becker/Mr.Silenus
It reminded me of how Camus describes the Sun in The Stranger:

I knew it was a fool thing to do; I wouldn't get
out of the sun by moving on a yard or so. But I took that step, just one step, forward.
And then the Arab drew his knife and held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight.

A shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade
transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated in
my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of
moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was conscious
only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less distinctly, of the keen
blade of light flashing up from the knife, scarring my eyelashes, and gouging into my
eyeballs.

Then everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea,
while the sky **** in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured
down through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed
on the revolver. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged my
palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my sweat
and the clinging veil of light. I knew I'd shattered the balance of the day, the
spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired four shots more
into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. And each successive shot was
another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing


I have often felt like Meursault. Days,weeks go by without my having exchanged more than a few words with anyone.
People have described me,like Meursault, indifferent and without emotions.Weather here is very close to how it is in Algeria.

I am afraid I might end up like him too.

Take care.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.