Author Topic: A Weird Man in a Weirder World  (Read 2656 times)

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Holden

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A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« on: April 17, 2017, 01:15:45 pm »
This Will that I personify-what does it want? Everything. All the time. Every to draw breath  requires effort. This is darker than any novel,any movie. The drive for wealth,for sex. I must say no to it all. The Will must be pacified.
They call me names,call me an extreme introvert. Don't they realise that they'd be better off if they just let me alone?
Heck,I don't care. They can call me what they like. Sure,they  can go ahead and call me a bad man.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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raul

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #1 on: April 18, 2017, 09:37:27 am »
Herr Holden,
They can call you a bad man or evil man but if you were really bad or evil man they would be peppered with bullets. They forget they could be your prey. We forget in this wretched world that not everybody comes to this planet with ambition or with the goal of attaining fame, wealth, ladies, babies, etc. Not many come to be born with skills and abilities. Therefore all this is what makes the world irrational. In a way those who attack you also need in you in a strange way. As long you mind your own business, they are safe. Stay safe. Raúl   

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #2 on: March 28, 2018, 08:22:23 am »
While searching for clarification on why I value this idea of scorning the universe, why I value Thomas Ligotti's validation of my own well documented praise of Schopenhauer and Cioran, I literally stumbled upon an essay I found worth bringing to your attention (your being Holden but also Senor Raul).

As Zamyatin said, the best novels he never wrote, but lived.  Our own subjective experience of lived reality will never be reproduced by art or literature - yet there are some whose attempts at describing the world as their representation appeal to us more than others.

Before I get side-traked by the chaos inside my own head, I will attempt to follow through and post the intended link, maybe even copying and pasting an excerpt.

Essays on the Weird : What impressed me was The Trauma Factory

How I stumbled upon the board:  I was drawn to an essay called F_ck You America, which I am unable to link to since the annoying-as-hell NannyAutoPolice prevent me from typing the url address which contains, as George Carlin would say, a BAAAAAAD WORD, namely the word f-u-c-k.  Kurt Vonnegut warned us not to use "naughty words" as it gives people a reason not to read us.   I beg to differ with Herr Vonnegut.  How many readers does one really need?  Do we really need everyone in our family to want to read our real thoughts?

We need one reader, only one.  That's all it takes in order for us to be read. 



I tracked down the author's name here, S.C. Hickman (Craig?)

____________________________________________________________________

THE FOLLOWING IS THE EXCERPT
_____________________________________________________________________

The Trauma Factory

“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal…”     – H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb

Behind our eyes are those of the tiger, wolf, dolphin, elephant, and mustang and all those animals and insects of the terrestial dream; the shifting gazes of a million life-forms spread their light among the dark contours of this sensible self. The mutable surface of skin hides the innumerable macrophages who defend the black inner realms like the militia of a defensive army, engulfing the cellular debris and pathogens of a terrible desire; and the bacterial denizens of this wet oceanic life in symbiotic resistance break down the ancient predatorial and vegetal vitality that invades the blood and acidic cavities, each mobilizing its own secret agenda without benefit of agent, goal or purpose beyond the sacred power of teeth chittering in the hive. The inertia of metalloid biotics collides with the fractured resilience of this strange flesh like a musical score played upon some stellar harp spread across transfinite dimensions, bleeding into this space of time giving birth to the shape of a spectral delusion that is beyond the human form.


Over the years wandering the sub-cultural delirium of dark alchemical mutant dataclash like ccru, conspiracy theory, bizzaro, weird tales, horror, gothic, noir, pulp etc. one gets the feeling that what is being related, although not empirically true nor part of some vast collective reading of the unconscious psyche of the planetary psychosis, is rather the notion of a world-wide Trauma Factory. As if there is a productive system of necrotic knowledge systems producing cosmic nihilism and despair, nightmares and consensual hallucinations; populist narratives gathering threads from every form of deranged mediatized corruption and fetid unknown shadow world; absorbing, collating, revising, narrativizing and republishing for mass consumption the fears and geotraumatic events of our age. Theory-fictions: all the subtle horrors and aberrations, sociopathic and/or psychopathic invasive natural and transnatural installations from the great Outside. Broadcasting not the actual but rather the virtual inlays of a traumatized civilization and species as it faces absolute extinction at the hands of its own secret death-drive toward apocalypse and annihilation.

Maybe this dark gnosis from the collective delirium is a message from the hinterlands of Non-Being, a fragment of that forbidden knowledge we’ve needed for so long but were unable to accept nor fathom, but now that it has arisen from the dark portals of our own being like a murderous passion we can begin to register the truth of our inhuman nature, accept the challenge of knowing for the first and last time who and what we are, wherefrom we’ve been tossed, into what we’ve been thrown, and whereto we are speeding like so many daemons on a runaway train to oblivion…

« Last Edit: March 28, 2018, 09:03:43 am by Non Serviam »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

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Holden

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2018, 11:14:12 pm »
Life is like an electric chair with floral-print cushions, a bad joke.Most people are naive-they accept the natural world.
They accept that they ought to study to get a "good job".Matrimony ,for all the puerile fantasies,is big business,-a trillion dollar industry.
The thought that I would someday be no more actually improves my mood.
They gorge on junk food and soda.They are fact and addicted to the telly.


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

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Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument
« Reply #4 on: May 15, 2019, 10:24:25 pm »
I think the following article would be of interest to Holden.  (from HORROR STUDIES Volume 8 Number 1)

"No, everything is not all right": Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument.

Here is a direct link to download


Teaser:  The paper explores how the weird is related to the uncanny, and how weird fiction may be used to create a disturbing feeling of dread which might be equivalent to philosophical pessimism.   We are wired for optimism as we are "goal oriented."    Goal-orientation implies optimism.    Why would we want to feel this dread or grasp the futility of all goals?   Well, because we can.  There is a bug in the system, and that bug is our consciousness.   

Honed over thousands of years, the very structure of information transfer and persuasion simply does not lend itself to pessimistic messages.

While philosophical pessimism’s rhetorical prospects are, for these reasons, rather unpromising, a viable alternative is afforded by a less philosophically discursive mode of creative expression, namely, weird fiction, a relatively neglected subgenre of supernatural horror.  Although early writers of weird fiction such as H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe were no strangers to pessimistic sentiments (and in Lovecraft’s case philosophical pessimism), Thomas Ligotti is perhaps the first of his kind to make an explicit contribution to the philosophy of pessimism. In his book The Conspiracy against the Human Race (2010), Ligotti explicitly describes his own brand of weird fiction, and weird fiction in general, as constituting a strategy by which to spread pessimistic ideas.    Building on that insight, this article maintains that weird fiction is uniquely situated to convey the spirit of pessimism while avoiding the pitfalls of anchoring: like a pessimistic Trojan horse, weird fiction promises a simple, scary tale while surreptitiously working to invoke in the reader a sense of uncanny fear and in ways that call into question the very nature of reality.   Rather than presenting well-reasoned arguments in support of pessimistic claims, weird fiction manifests or enacts pessimism, aesthetically, through the clever deployment of a range of stylistic devices and rhetorical manoeuvres.

What is more, by eliciting the sense of the uncanny, such rhetorical tactics work to undermine the common psychological defences of anchoring, thereby disrupting our ability to comprehend the world in terms of a coherent narrative. In so doing, they transform what would otherwise remain merely strange into an effective hostility against the world, against life, and against meaning.   Weird fiction’s monstrous aberrations destabilize the conceptual-ontological categories of space and time, knowing, and performing, all of which serve to anchor human beings’ feelings of existential security, both in the world and in their own skin.


My take on this is that The Thing That Should Not Be is our consciousness, and the conspiracy against us is our very silence about all life as perpetual misery machine.

I am still in the process of reading the article in between these living days.

Note:  The author ascribes to Schopenhauer as having referred to this world as a "perpetual misery machine."

I would like to use this phrase on this site somehow, whether it is in the title or description or even my own damn user-id.
______________________________________________________________________________________________

The following links are for my own amusement.  Please do not feel obligated to listen to them.







In madness you dwell.




"Schopenhauer the ultimate horror writer."  ~  Holden
« Last Edit: December 08, 2019, 04:25:13 pm by Kaspar Heinrich »
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

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #5 on: May 16, 2019, 07:20:51 pm »
Thanks for  the links,Herr Kaspar.I visited one of the elite clubs of the  city yesterday with one of my  superior officers  as  he  has just joined  it and needed  my  help with the joining formalities. The membership fee  itself is close to half  a million rupees. I  saw  people wearing  coat    and tie and imitating  the British (who had originally founded  the club)  in extreme summer heat. Some of them  were  grotesquely obese,other were  almost senile and yet  seemed to me  to be obsessed  with pomp and show.

All of this  extravagance  and for   what  exactly?  I do not think that they  represent  any kind of  brotherhood.In fact,I am quite certain  that most of them must be very,very  jealous  and   contemptuous of each other covertly( and  overtly).
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Holden

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #6 on: May 17, 2019, 07:16:20 am »
The latest trend here is  to call  one's lover ,one's partner in crime. Little do  they know how grave the crime really  is, the  crime, namely, of procreation.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #7 on: May 17, 2019, 07:00:48 pm »
Quote from: Holden
I visited one of the elite clubs of the  city yesterday with one of my  superior officers  as  he  has just joined  it and needed  my  help with the joining formalities. The membership fee  itself is close to half  a million rupees. I  saw  people wearing  coat    and tie and imitating  the British (who had originally founded  the club)  in extreme summer heat. Some of them  were  grotesquely obese, other were  almost senile and yet  seemed to me  to be obsessed  with pomp and show.

$7000 membership fee?   Is this club "for gorts only"?   :)   

Blessed are the poor?   Maybe.

Maybe some of them have bred offspring who will participate in future "Tours of Outer Space."   

I am sorry you have to be subservient to such "Lords and Ladies," but at least you do not have to defer to their values.

If I were born into the moneyed class, I'm afraid I might succumb to severe substance abuse.   

Again:  blessed are the poor?   Not too damn poor!   

I've never envied the rich, but I can't deny a little envy for Arthur Schopenhauer's "trust fund."   Trust fund babies who do not reproduce and live humbly, stretching their inheritance over their lifetime?   More power to them.   Maybe I do envy them.

I do not envy those who find themselves controlled by their obsessions with making an impression on others.   They are totally consumed by the image made in the heads of others.   Or maybe they enjoy expensive foods, oils and herbs and massages and all that jazz.

I do not wish to give the moneyed class the satisfaction of thinking I might want what they have.   It is ostentatious consumption, where much of the pleasure they experience is in imagining their possessions make those without such resources envious.

What we are in ourselves is what matters most.  We each will face our deaths alone.  In fact, our entire lives are just a prelude to the climatic moment of realizing we are actually nothing, that the entire world is phantasmagoria.   

But none of that matters to us as long as we are these tubes, these feces-filled intestines on wheels.

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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Holden

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #8 on: May 18, 2019, 02:48:25 am »
The horror is everywhere.In the subway station today I saw a kid of about 3 years laying in the middle of the station and folks were all going about their business as usual.A little girl of about five,the boy's sister, I guess, was dancing at a distance of about 2 yards from the boy.

The boy,due to malnutrition,I suppose, had lost patches of his hair.Both of them were unwashed and wearing rags.
It a common enough sight in the city.No one bothers,no one cares.
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #9 on: May 18, 2019, 09:05:09 am »
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

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Silenus

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #10 on: June 05, 2019, 10:27:24 pm »
The secret death-drive towards our own extinction. It's interesting to observe, as all things are. Chaos begets chaos, and as much as I want to figure out the why, it's probably more realistic to understand it as the unexplainable irrationality (madness) of existence.

"Death maintains all the cafes." - L.F. Celine

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

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Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument
« Reply #11 on: December 08, 2019, 04:14:27 pm »
Has anyone, in the midst of the mental chaos which is "lifeworld" or Lebenswelt, had a chance to investigate "No, everything is not all right": Supernatural Horror as Pessimistic Argument by Ethan Stoneman?

I am going to "shoot it into a Kindle" and try to get to it during the Nietzschean hours.  I'm afraid I am not as disciplined as the Great Teacher, S, and suffer nervous anxiety, unfortunately more akin to Broken Brother Friedrich.   I will try not to hug any harnessed animals sobbing in public ... I think I have my head wrapped around things a little more clearly than Nietzche due to my lack of "education" in the "classics" as well as being spared the experience of being the son of a pastor.   

By the way, as Holden knows, I'm not really much of a fan of Nietzsche, although I have nothing but compassion and sympathy for "the animal man," the suffering ego disintegrated in the flesh.  Having been dragged through the mud myself, I can easily empathize with his deep persecution complex - the philosopher in rags mocked by the philistines, parading around with the ornaments, trophy wives, and status symbols.

Holden, I think that mathematics - for you, in your situation - is in a similar position that Nietzsche's "philosopher in rags" is in, mocked by those whose lives are entangled in some status-symbol based hierarchy, where those who purchase the credentials (status symbols) will hallucinate their "power trip."

When you value understanding algebraic symbols and arithmetic operations more than you value the status symbols used to keep the gorts running in their hamster cages, you will have at least, for a brief hour or so, have transcended this mad world of upside down and backward values.

All the mockery you can withstand might eventually make you quite indifferent to the opinions of others, others who will hate you for your "strangeness," your "oddness."

Stare into the clouds, into the red glowing night-light if need be.

I have been doing some reading on the side, seeing where supernatural horror and philosophic pessimism are symbiotic: case in point : Thomas Ligotti's philosophical treatise is one of a kind.  I felt my brain getting a grip on itself realizing Ligotti was acknowledging Schopenhauer with such emphasis.  I now do believe that the conspiracy against us by other human beings (their acting as though they're in Walt Disney Land) is horrifying, and it is exactly the same society John Kennedy Toole was aiming against, with trashy humor of a particular area in Amerika, New Orleans.  I mean, the Confederacy of Dunces is the entire society.  Ignatius's mother is nuts!  The girl-woman who rescues Ignatius from his mother is even more nuts and volatile than his mother!   Toole would have loved just to have Ignatius Reilly create an id, such as "Holden," and go on a tirade against the phony Middle Class. 

Down with the [always upper] Middle Class!  15% of population!  Lapdogs of the oh-so-very rich.

You see, a fictional character such as Ignatius or Henry (Fool) or Jasper Dean, well, they can say and write things (and even DO things) that MWH would be crucified for.

« Last Edit: December 08, 2019, 04:26:01 pm by Kaspar Heinrich »
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

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #12 on: December 09, 2019, 11:53:46 am »
Quote
I'm afraid I am not as disciplined as the Great Teacher, S, and suffer nervous anxiety, unfortunately more akin to Broken Brother Friedrich.
-Herr Hauser

I have a hunch that Schopenhauer ,mentally,suffered as intensely ,as Nietzsche, if not more.Any man who writes as he does, must have suffered a great deal of mental anguish.Sure, he had the money which Nietzsche did not have and did not suffer from an obvious physical malady unlike Nietzsche .
From biography by Cartwright- In an entry to his private diary,dating around 1833,Schopenhauer reflected critically on his character -He writes:Nature has done more than is necessary to isolate my heart,in that she endowed it with suspicion,sensitiveness , vehemence and pride in a measure that is hardly compatible with the mens aequa of a philosopher.

But after noting the conflict between his character and the equanimity of a philosopher,he notes an example of the terrible grip of anxiety,which he attributes to an inheritance from his father: Even as a six year old child,my parents,returning home one evening from a walk found me in the depths of despair since I suddenly imagined myself to be forever abandoned by them.

If one to gets to read his" private diary" ,I am quite sure, it would put Job to shame.

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

Holden

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #13 on: December 09, 2019, 11:57:18 am »
A man finds himself, to his great astonishment, suddenly existing, after thousands and thousands of years of non-existence: he lives for a little while; and then, again, comes an equally long period when he must exist no more. The heart rebels against this, and feels that it cannot be true.

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

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Re: A Weird Man in a Weirder World
« Reply #14 on: March 09, 2020, 10:14:36 pm »
The thought that I would someday be no more actually improves my mood.    ~ Holden of India

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

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~