There is nothing here that has not been explained before
And I have no skill in the art of rhetoric;
Therefor, lacking any intention to benefits others,
I write this in order to acquaint it to my own mind.
(Ch 1.2)
Leisure and endowment* are very hard to find;
And, since they accomplish what is meaningful for humanity,
If I do not take advantage of them now,
How will such a perfect opportunity come about again?
(Ch 1.4)
*དལ་འབྱོར (Dal-‘byor). “This term denotes the perfect condition of human existence, in which one has freedom from eight particularly unfavorable states of being and is endowed with the ten conditions conducive to leading a spiritual life.” – Stephen Batchelor
CODY packs and rolls a cigarette paper with hash and ground cannabis flower. The room is redolent with an oily skunkiness. Curtains drawn. Littering the coffee table are books bearing titles like The Occult and Symbols of Freemasonry. He wets his lips, licks the adhesive strip, twists off the joint, and holds it out to light with a Bic. He takes a deep drag and blows 3-5 smoke rings before exhaling fully.
CODY
Feel like we’re losing the plot a little. You want to do what exactly? A history of monetary policy?
CODY (HASH INFUSED)
Man, d’you know how powerful the Federal Reserve is, man? D’you know about Bretton Woods, man? The petro-dollar? And now with COVID as cover, Jay Powell is letting that money printer just brrrr away, man, infusing the securities market with free cash and no aid given to the Little Guy, man. You don’t think that’s worth worrying about?
CODY
Maybe, but, what, we’re gonna be anti-fiat crypto guys? Goldbugs? I don’t like thinking about the market at all.
CODY (HASH INFUSED)
Man, you need to open up your Third Eye, brother.
CODY
Wasn’t the concept of a Third Eye popularized by Blavatsky’s descriptions of the Lemurians? And we all know who loved Theosophy so much they adopted their little cross symbol.
CODY (HASH INFUSED)
You mean the Hindu symbol for “peace”?
CODY
Don’t play dumb, man.
Another long drag off the joint, with a wistful (suspicious?) glance over the shoulder.
Today, love is being positivized into a formula for enjoyment. Above all, love is supposed to generate pleasant feelings. It no longer represents plot, narration, or drama—only inconsequential emotion and arousal. It is free from the negativity of injury, assault, or crashing. To fall (in love) would already be too negative. Yet it is precisely such negativity that constitutes love: “Love is not a possibility, is not due to our initiative, is without reason; it invades and wounds us.” [Levinas] Achievement society—which is dominated by ability, and where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative and a project—has no access to love as something that wounds or incites passion.
wanna know a secret? well too fuckin bad, cuz I guard mine like they’re the rim and I’m Bill Walton (November 5). admittedly, I don’t really know much about basketball. I am attempting to follow this season, and my Lakers barely squeaked by the 1-and-6 Rockets the other night. I do not understand the Lakers’ offensive strategy. what does Russell Westbrook (November 12) add to the team? again, stupid person talking, but I don’t think his passing game is really making or breaking anything for them. it’s like he’s not even on the same team as everyone else.
A Lakers-colored scorpion
y’all ever very obviously fudge part of a task you’ve been assigned, most of which hums along satisfactorily, but when time comes for the assigner to sign off on your submission, they call you out on the part you’re fudging and make you do it again, so you shuffle it around and send it back promptly but get left watching your email until the assigner finally accepts the very last of the work you need to do to be free? another way of putting this, how do I stop obsessively staring at my email? I feel like I’m being held hostage by my graduate advisor. I’m so fucking close to being rid of this bullshit.
once I am rid of this bullshit, I will, after a brief respite, be diving headfirst into my stagnant art projects. there’s nothing to be said here of the Big Thing I’m working on other than that I have shed all self-defeating hesitation on the matter. this novel is getting written by me one way or the other. other than writing, which I’m stuck doing no matter how much I vacillate on the value of fiction or the novel’s loss of stature in the culture, I’ve been playing the guitar more. I wouldn’t say that I can play the guitar quite yet, but I know how to play the guitar, if that distinction makes sense. I also plan to acquire a MIDI controller keyboard to make music on my laptop with. let me repeat: I barely know the guitar, but I intend to make music in the near future. so stay tuned on how that turns out. JPEGMAFIA, whose bday comes in just short of the Scorpio side of October (the 22nd), and his newest album put that fire under my ass. Adam advised me to keep a journal about my music making attempts, so maybe some of that will appear here at some point. he asked if I felt like I needed to express something that’s better suited to music than to fiction. Sontag argues that modern (ie contemporary) art tends to deal more in the interplay of constituent material, rather than it being an expression something specific through media, and I find it very easy to revel in the possibilities of music making, much easier than I do with language. but like I said, I’m cursed to write, so by altering course I’m not seeking the appropriate avenue to express something specific so much as widening my range of options for aesthetic play. and music is the most mysterious and explicitly occultist of the art forms, since it’s through creating tiny vibrations on the air that emotions aren’t just suggested, but foisted on the audience, as a magical spell. artful writing is also a kind of spell, but it’s easier to get hung up on Ideas with language-based arts, so I’m hoping that by pursuing music I can get some relief from my neurosis.
elsewhere, in an essay titlted “The Pornographic Imagination,” Sontag makes the point that it isn’t clear whether human sexuality ought to be understood as healthy and positive, something I spend a lot of time thinking about, since I’m preoccupied with sex. Colin Wilson, in his seminal work The Occult, argues that sexuality as we understand it now is a result of the sublimation of primitive erotic instincts into the social field created by urbanization millennia ago. he also argues that sexuality is one of the more stubborn primitive impulses, one our progressive domestication has not succeeded in muting. I don’t totally agree with Wilson’s argument, but I’m having a blast reading the book.
Today’s Google Doodle honors Charles K. Kao (November 4), who initiated the fiber optic revolution that allowed the internet to flourish into the Leviathan it is today. What’s more Scorpionic than a cryptic, all-powerful network of interstitial connection, the slow insinuation of which went largely unnoticed until it was too late?
I don’t quarrel with the historical diagnosis contained in this account of the deformations of Western sexuality. Nevertheless, what seems to me decisive in the complex of views held by most educated members of the community is a more questionable assumption—that human sexual appetite is, if untampered with, a natural pleasant function; and that “the obscene” is a convention, the fiction imposed upon nature by a society convinced there is something vile about the sexual functions and, by extension, about sexual pleasure. It’s just these assumptions that are challenged by the French tradition represented by Sade, Lautréamont, Bataille, and the authors of Story of O and The Image. Their work suggests that “the obscene” is a primal notion of human consciousness, something much more profound than the backwash of a sick society’s aversion to the body. Human sexuality is, quite apart from Christian repressions, a highly questionable phenomenon, and belongs, at least potentially, among the extreme rather than the ordinary experiences of humanity. Tamed as it may be, sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness—pushing us at intervals close to taboo and dangerous desires, which range from the impulse to commit sudden arbitrary violence upon another person to the voluptuous yearning for the extinction of one’s consciousness, for death itself. Even on the level of simply physical sensation and mood, making love surely resembles having an epileptic fit at least as much as, if not more, than it does eating a meal or conversing with someone. Everyone has felt (at least in fantasy) the erotic glamour of physical violence and erotic lure in things that are vile and repulsive. These phenomena form part of the genuine spectrum of sexuality, and if they are not to be written off as mere neurotic aberrations, the pictures looks different from the one promoted by enlightened public opinion, and less simple.
