"The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill."
-Robert Anton Wilson
Meat Machine
Friday, December 21, 2012
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Bears that dance, bears that dont.
Clark, who led last year’s expedition to the Afar region of northern Ethiopia, and UC Berkeley colleague Tim D. White, also said that a reexamination of a 300,000-year-old fossil skull found in the same region earlier shows evidence of having been scalped–The Yuma Daily Sun, June 13, 1982
From Blood
Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West,
by Cormac McCarthy
"And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.
The judge looked about him. He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and his hands rested palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping.
by Cormac McCarthy
"And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.
The judge looked about him. He was sat before the fire naked save for his breeches and his hands rested palm down upon his knees. His eyes were empty slots. None among the company harbored any notion as to what this attitude implied, yet so like an icon was he in his sitting that they grew cautious and spoke with circumspection among themselves as if they would not waken something that had better been left sleeping.
…
The judge wrote on and
then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands
together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down
on his knees.
Whatever exists, he
said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my
consent.
He looked about at
the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens
he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing
in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath
yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the
existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him
will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
What's a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or
overlord.
Why not say keeper
then?
Because he is a special kind of keeper. A
suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands
local judgements.
Toadvine spat.
The judge placed his
hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said.
And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order
for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my
dispensation.
Toadvine sat with his
boots crossed before the fire. No man can aquaint himself with everything on
this earth, he said.
The judge tilted his
great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever
hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain
will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of
singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone
have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he
will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
I don't see what that
has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds
is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell
of a zoo.
The judge smiled.
Yes, he said. Even so.
…
It
makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well
ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war
waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is
the way it was and will be....
War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.
...
Men
are born for games . . . Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all.
Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the
humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake
because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of
chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that
which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.
…
Moral
law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in
favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.
...
...
A man seeks his own destiny and no other, said the judge.
Will or nill. Any man who could discover his own fate and elect therefore some
opposite course could only come at last to that selfsame reckoning at the same
appointed time, for each mans destiny is as large as the world he inhabits and
contains within it all opposites a well. The desert upon which so many have
been broken is vast and calls for largeness of heart but it is also ultimately
empty. It is hard, it is barren. Its very nature is stone.
…
I tell you this. As war
becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men
who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which
is the warrior’s right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the
dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true
dancer and can you guess who that might be?
You aint nothing.
You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of
the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his
inmost heart, only that man can dance.
Even a dumb animal can dance.
The judge sat the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said.
There is room on the stage
for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is
eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness
before the floodlamps.
Bears that dance, bears that
don’t."
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
can't lose what what you lacked at conception
"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on
the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from
grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you
lacked at conception. Mass market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that
never existed. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and
hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight...It’s
time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars.
It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their
time."
- James Ellroy, American Tabloid
Monday, January 16, 2012
Ancient human burial site shows evidence of mass cannibalism: Slaves were skinned and butchered like animals |
"Admission to them is through election and they are generally limited: they are not for all... [They reach] beyond the local tribe seeking out friends and members among alien peoples... a particular stress is given in these secret men's societies to a skull cult that is often associated with the headhunt. Ritual cannibalism and pederasty are commonly practiced and there is a highly elaborated use made of drums and masks."
-Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology
Monday, January 9, 2012
Sunday, January 1, 2012
"Your servant here, he has been told
to say it clear, to say it cold:
It's over, it ain't going
any further
And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder"
-Leonard Cohen, The Future
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