Universal Slave Society and its Malcontents

The following is only one way of interpreting the historical movement of the west in general, of exploring the conditions that have led to the formation of capitalism in this our modern age. Allow me to shine a light down a path through history, one which may illuminate that path’s immediate surrounds and thus – through this narrow focus – allow us to begin to grasp the larger picture.

Shame and guilt in having to, for instance, tick the yes box on some form where said form enquires about the form-filler-inner’s criminal record, is largely derived from injunctions of the modern nation state. It is not to be denied that there is an in-built faculty for things such as shame and guilt, but the measures imposed by the state on the individual have an effect upon those of society who are more inclined towards such emotions of pushing them towards those emotions; that is, the effect of the state upon susceptible individuals is tendential; the internal rebellion against a will to break the law is more the result of social conditioning than it is in the nature of the modern human.

Past the Symbol

Past the Symbol #1

What hypnotic processes govern the anti-Ahriman
Teller of lies, cast about him a prison of gloam?
Accidental cries from verandas seeping with gold
Eyries and wheeling stars, the ice chasm’s contorted span

Lifting the tumult of dazed skies and petrified space
To the ornament on the shelf, a ticking reminder
The Real’s catechism, belonging to only a few
Nests of disturbed avians preside over meadow’s lace

Greetings on a winter’s morn, a dishevelled lie
Prances its merry way along ice-sheet paving stones
Melded with minds wont to the dagger of drive
A last womb, from it the cry over all the universe of I

Immanent nature poem

In the Waters

The mind cackled,
the avian upon its perch pawed the air,
the jungle let loose its steam

He saw the river
Now dry and decrepit, now gushing with new life
The waves lapped… El El, El El, El El…

Star peaked scraping scratchy sky,
frosty mountains their mass sliding by,
rays upon them illuminating
the peaks’ mists, those bundles high,

regarding the city, its pleasant vintners
and black-helmeted Enforcers,
about that central megaplex,

translucent walls multilevelled games rooms

and the mystic anti-logic of bureaucracy given
its perfect form by the rows
upon rows
of officials and their platforms,

their gears
their joys
beneath the friezes
their rushing by

Star cast down its light, not troubled by dark Galilean,
and the waves whispered, El El, El El, El El…

Manhattan

Here’s a review of Manhattan by Woody Allen. I watch films from time to time and had some thoughts on this one, having had the (perhaps dubious) pleasure of viewing it earlier this month or perhaps in March.

Well. I was I have to say quite disappointed. Having watched Blue Jasmine and having been extremely impressed, I decided to embark upon an Allen-watching spree, someone I knew as a comedian and a television personality, but less as a filmmaker – I was vaguely aware of his career in that area but it was something the particulars of which had sadly passed me by until earlier this year. From there I watched Annie Hall and was of the immediate opinion that this was one of the true classics (I’d like to say this is a minority opinion however I’m not quite so deluded as to think that the objects of my refined taste don’t in fact have a much larger audience than one might suppose I may believe of them).

So Manhattan was the logical next stop, and… Now, in some ways, it is quite similar to the preceding watch – Diane Keaton the ever-present co-star, a relationship between her character and Woody Allen Allen’s character, the latter’s occasionally strikingly familiar quirks and sense of humour (not familiar enough; the viewer’s (or this viewer’s) search for that sense of familiarity is one of the film’s problems, but not the main one).

We have here a movie similar in some respects to the movie Annie Hall (which I had just watched). I am thus able to compare the two with reasonable ease.

One may use the analogy of a peak followed by a trough: in hindsight… and I’d recommend this to anybody yet to see either of these two films, I should say do not watch them one after the other, but if you must, watch Manhattan first and, as long as that hasn’t turned you off Allen completely, then watch Annie Hall. The other way around is a definite no no. Suffice to say, Annie Hall is by far the superior film, a superiority that is only accentuated by the number of comparisons that may be drawn between this and that element common to both films.

Before moving on, there are some obvious differences between the two that should be here considered. Annie Hall uses this – if not revolutionary – unconventional narrative technique with near-constant breaking of the fourth wall, metanarrative after metanarrative and so on and so forth (it brought to mind for me Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, except that film takes the metanarrative idea and stretches it as far as it can possibly go, to the point of incomprehensibility, though I do think more fondly than not of that film and generally appreciate Kaufman’s work). Manhattan on the other hand is (ultra-)conventional in its narrative structure, the token romance plot acting as a sort of glue for the evocation of the spirit of NYC which the movie is ostensibly a celebration of – the photography, the soundtrack, etc., seek to capture the life of Manhattan, NYC, and takes or I think should take precedence over the narrative. The problem is, the conventional plot is not far enough in the background; the photography and soundtrack aren’t brought far enough into the foreground – the whole film falls flat, giving neither enjoyment to those who love the cinematography, nor pleasure to those who seek something in the desperately boring romance of the plot which also has its continuity issues.

This may seem to be going into unnecessary minutiae, however two plot points may here be considered. 1) the cinema scene after the ‘first meeting’ of Keaton’s character and Murphy’s character’s wife, great cringeworthiness, excruciating, something that can certainly be identified with, destroyed, disregarded in the following scenes; the characters don’t build, are wooden, boring, you wouldn’t want to be around them; it’s more about the backdrop, scenery, music, etc. 2) the reading of Allen’s character as depicted in Streep’s character’s book: now the character there described is someone I would much prefer to see, and is in fact a more-or-less exact description of Allen’s character in Annie Hall; I’d like to think Allen knew this, that Streep’s character would exaggerate Allen’s in her book as he had feared, that this was his intention, to contrast the routine behaviourisms seen in this film with the – in a sense – larger-than-life, ridiculous nature of the characters in Annie Hall (characters which, however, through their own ridiculousness and that of the situations in which they found themselves, were paradoxically all the more real for it); while he intended for the characters of him and others in Manhattan to approximate more closely what’s found in real life and/or allow the backdrop of Manhattan, New York to rise to the surface more, given the irritating characters and intentionally flat, formulaic, old-fashioned romantic plot, which fails to approximate real life for those reasons.

Poetry collection from recently written trilogy of short stories

Let his soul wither
Let his mind die
See the maple leaf quiver
Let his pearl eye
Break a thousand wonders
In his blundering sigh
Bring a thousand snipers
Not one jealous eye
Dusk on San Jose
Sex and drugs a lie
Yet never does [U.R.] say
I shattered your mind’s eye

Chintkletko – 2265

* * *

Chronos On A Hysteric’s Grave

Oh, for a glass of Courvoisier, old dead Earth
Oh for a cup of Peretè, in its purest
Ah to witness sudden light, another day
Oh before past and time itself –
Like Chronos on the hysteric’s grave
Laughing and flapping his wings –
Take flight,
And in grey mists, fade away

Eerinyae – 2107

* * *

On caustic lakebeds,
Bare-treed forest-beds,
The diamond snakes
Their wretched forms know
Only of desire
And how to awaken the fool

To some end the end must come
Cries of a mystic touch the air
To some end the wealthy must come
That which was stripped bare
And has gone,
Yet will return,
Punisher of the strong
Avenger of the weak
Diffuser of the invincible

– Mikhail Andreich Samidov (1889)

* * *

Beautiful garden, be forever cast away
No longer to be hypnotised by your wracking spray
Lost on an island, a stop on the way to Sicily
I saw embroidered Chaos incandescent in Hemera –
Her worldly presence pronounced by Gaia –
And knotted matter masking infinity

– Anaxatorokas (circa 520 BC)

* * *

Beached
Maimed
And gagged before the tempest,
After the calm river is hooded
By the bridge of slaughter, peace,
Marooned forever

* * *

Visions of mastery,
Echoes of Chaos,
Enclosing upon thee
Are vicissitudes of Kos

– Hirretikei (2048)

A march amongst the ferns

“It was in the direst of circumstances that he recognised the slavish preoccupation embodied in that higher duty; it was, he realised, a false duty; only then did he take on the mantle of the righteous“

In the commercial sector of this middle-man overrun United Kingdom a cancer festers, a rank baseness, a malignancy systemic in the lower echelons of our society’s class hierarchy. With all the ills at its disposal society has deigned to raise such craven people who yet paradoxically are of a domineering nature: people from but not limited to impoverished backgrounds, unstable families, whose intelligence – if it exists in such petty minds as I will expound upon here – was and has not been given a chance to flourish.

Such a state of things is of course deplorable, and it is something that society as one consciousness needs to recognise and rectify; it is a challenge facing us all. However, given the current domination of private sector interests, especially, as regards our case here, the business of independent recruitment companies/agencies providing workers at a fee (for both the receiving business and the worker) to employers in need of cheap services in the form of human labour, such people, of questionable intelligence, who were deprived in their youths and found the only way they could assert themselves was in the form of adolescent faux-authority, have found the ideal growing (I use the term generously) conditions in the business of recruitment consultancy.

Recruitment consultancy businesses are a plague upon the nation and in every country in which they are allowed off their leash into those states’ private sectors. Of all highly professional businesses administered out of offices, I cannot think of another that is more vacuous, more populated by the unaware of the well-dressed business folk of the working class spitting their drivel down telephone lines and, when not acting out their own poor layman’s unaware theatre performances of vulgarity in the presence of innocent clients who, heads bowed, wish only to be treated with the semblance of respect they deserve as human beings, sitting dumbly, in rush-automatic akin to mechanised mannequins bursting out of shop windows in dash-indigo neon streets of the legless black stalks rising to heaven.

People most at home in Rome 44 BC, knives in hands approaching the rostra – the rotten folk of boredom, of narrow-mindedness, those who think small and do not know it, those whose ambition is ambition only insofar as it brings them power – these people rise to the second tier and will go no further. In supermarkets and warehouses, they are called supervisors; in offices, they are called line managers; in society, they are called the mindless dregs of the near-underclass; in the work place in general, such a person is called by his slaves a presumptuous cretin on a power trip.

His limited vocabulary is made to seem larger, his knowledge and intelligence greater, when he blindly stumbles into the lexicon – a mold to shape his speech after that peculiar dialect ubiquitous in all offices; a whole language devoid of meaning outside of grey office towers off which sunlight breaks into thousand colours that fill the eyes of onlookers with joyous and despairing tears. The beauty of architecture and high emotion; the grey of dull plodding, inescapable nightmares.

Present such a person with another of learning, that is to say with someone who knows how to use language; then our ignorant illiterate is quite suddenly lost. In realisation that this learned fellow of true language speaks in a manner and of things beyond them, our poor despot of the automatons is stranded in a sea of knowledge which they cannot recognise. Now let it be imagined that this learned person has occasion for modesty, supplication and even, if the situation calls for it – say when he is smote with the blunt hammer of our dimwitted reprobate’s authority – apology; then our castrated tyrant is rendered mute, he flounders, a pathetic scrap on the sea of a crystalline landfill shone on by a mercurial moon.

No longer can he use the blunt instrument, or say, the piercing blade of the power-hungry ham-fisted degenerate, of his imagined control (for be reminded that no true power flows from this person, yet he believes it is so because of the dark tunnel he has willingly taken). He is embarrassed; where should the hammer come down? Do not ask him! Wherever and whatever that noumenal place may be, it can only be arrived at, in an even more witless act, through the application of undue and abysmal force.

In Celebration of Panmisotheism

Time for the thermonuclear weapon dance
The thermonuclear weapon dance
Putin is dancing a sorry grave about the bones of live gods
Time for the thermonuclear weapon dance

Time for the thermonuclear weapon dance
The thermonuclear weapon dance
Grey splits the sky with silver, dashing angels in wigs
Time for the nuclear fission nance

G.W. Bush is eating live penguins
Crossed with brushes from the tip of a master
In the chock-a-block traffic of Indian heat devices
Meretricious infanticide is the way

Of the thermonuclear weapon dance
The thermonuclear weapon trance
Obama is shaking his mane in dismay as fishes jive
To the thermonuclear weapon dance

The writer of the Internal Cosmogony blog asserts his right to be identified as the sole author of this work. Please reference your source if you wish to make use of any of its content.

Horror at the Exit

Finding myself beset on all sides by foes of duplicitous and pernicious intent, I scribbled the following in erudite fury astride my trusty steed during the UK election results broadcast on BBC Radio 4, in the early hours of that fateful day of 8 May 2015, before I was dragged from my horse by the murderous enemy and my parchment drenched in my blood trampled into the dust:

This swing to the SNP from Labour – seeming like a grasp of power in its totality in that northern state – has, I would propose, extremely dangerous implications pertaining to the processes of government in Westminster. While these supposed, perhaps probable, 58 Scottish Nationalist MPs in the impending new Commons is reason for enthusiasm due to the SNP’s ostensibly progressive policies which may be able to influence overarching policy in the UK, the root causes and influence from the electorate in Scotland on the election of SNP candidates must be looked upon extremely sceptically with regard to their merit as an, on-the-whole, politically-aware voting base.

There has been talk of the SNP’s potential ‘clean sweep’ in their country being a revolutionary movement, yet if it is, it might be said, that it is a mindless nationalist movement of almost zealous fervour that originated in the marginal split from the Union referendum of the previous year. The people of Scotland seem to have voted on nationalist principles only, with no idea of policy – as if it isn’t even an issue for discussion, something they haven’t even considered – or the workings of government or what this ‘victory’ might mean for their country (victory emphasised for it’s unlikely, given the expected near Conservative majority, that the SNP representing the left will be able to exert much influence over the process of government in Westminster).

“Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious” – O. Wilde

Nationalism is racism with an excuse, murmured through gritted teeth, and while no greater cause of war in the history of humankind lies in the lap of religion, a close second is that equally close-minded concept and mental delusion of national pride.

The progressive leaders – with a broad base of policies in this regard across all contemporary issues – of the SNP in the new parliament will, in addition to attempting to implement these progressive policies be as matter of course obligated to represent the nationalist tendencies of the Scottish voting base that voted overwhelmingly in their favour (at least, as it would appear in the framework of the current voting system).

Perhaps more important and more significant than this is the emerging sociopolitical situation in the new Scottish ‘state’. Incidentally, that higlighted term may no longer need to be highlighted in the coming parliaments, considering the very possible split with the EU in the near future if the Conservatives remain in power and, subsequently or perhaps before, a breaking up of the Union with Scotland building greater ties with the EU and England becoming isolated. The possible total capture of Scottish constituencies by the SNP, driven by a somewhat politically-unaware or ‘uncaring of policy’ voting base, does not seem dissimilar to, I say with ‘some’ reservation, a one-party state in the making, an autocratic regime de facto. Political elites with progressive goals leading unaware nationalists – a recipe for single-party rule in a split British Isles. Driven by blind nationalism – rather than astute political thinking, awareness of the reality of their socioeconomic conditions – the Scottish nation hastens its separation from the Union, and while moving towards an in-theory progressive political ideology, nonetheless must in a sense pander to the unaware masses members of which are in no small part driven by ignorance and bigotry, intolerance of other nationalities.

What puzzles me is the swing so absolutely from the marginal victory of the ‘Unionists’ in the Scottish referendum, 55% to 45%, to the seemingly overwhelming success of the Scottish nationalists less than 8 months later in this General Election. During that period, was there such a degree of change in support for the Labour Party, towards the SNP, that the results of the aforementioned referendum was not in fact an accurate reflection of the opinions of the Scottish people at the time? Or were there internal machinations within the party politic, the geopolitical circumstances, the stirring up of nationalist fervour, that swayed support towards the SNP? – a tide of hate-filled nationalism.

To summarise the at first seemingly inexplicable indications of the exit poll and the subsequent election result: the SNP took most Scottish votes away from Labour; UKIP supporters lost heart and switched their vote to the Conservatives, who, they may have – according to Cameron at least – greater confidence in leading Britain through continuing times of enforced and supposedly necessary austerity. UKIP may also have gained votes from disillusioned Labour supporters, and indeed from people across the political spectrum. These are the reasons as I see them – at this early stage of election results evaluation – for Labour’s losses in this campaign and for the Conservatives’ unexpected (on the evidence of the exit poll) gains.

The Wretched In the Wake

“… When he fawns, he bites; and when he bites,
His venom tooth will rankle to the death:
Have not to do with him, beware of him…” – Richard III, Act I, Scene III (W. Shakespeare)

The common free markets are the ravenous dogs fighting over the scraps of the technological product of our society. At the cutting edge of science is where our advancement of knowledge takes place, that which is of interest to the human species in its continuing development and evolution of its surroundings while its current form persists. The technology available to the market is the science that has been worked out, that is no longer of interest to the frontier of human scientific learning; this science, now technology is junk, pushed into the market for mainstream consumption by the common masses; this science, now technology is flotsam in the wake of science’s achievements, its advancement and continuing discovery that is the ally of the human spirit of curiosity.

Are we experiencing a degradation of western culture, or of western society? We have our rich cultural background, its history that will remain for as long as this civilisation endures; what of its future? What area, or line of our civilisation will our culture follow? Will it advance along political lines, on the republics and democracies that have held sway for two hundred years? Will it advance along technological lines? The latter question intrigues.

Beyond the mainstream of consumerist technology dissemination, the spread of junk information facilitated by the means we now possess to allow for it, our many divergent strands of culture may find a path of progression along lines of frontier, perhaps rapid scientific discovery and the conversion to technology that will rapidly follow it, with the necessary absence of a free market behind it – or perhaps in place of it – such that culture and technology subsume one another. If such culture is allowed to influence the course of politics, such a fusion opens the door for the possibility of a technocracy.

Action and Critique

I am forced to wonder how the Russians will commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution in 2017. There will surely be some sort of service; we can be certain the Communist Party will hold a very serious service. I believe they are still led by Gennady Zyuganov… This is the type of party one should not wish to come to power in Russia. Zyuganov and the members of his Communist Party are Stalinists – we don’t want this kind of communism.

One would prefer a form of – and I hate to use the term – ‘Left’ Communism, such as that of Rosa Luxemburg or Guy Debord. Although in the case of these two, Luxemburg presented an alternative communism for Germany and criticised the approach of the Bolsheviks in Russia pointing out what she perceived as their mistakes, while Debord in his works was more of the pure critic. The Society of the Spectacle for example, his most famous and enduring work, was more a critique of late-stage capitalism than it was a postmodern Communist Manifesto. This is to say that Luxemburg would’ve had a practical alternative of communism to put in place in Germany (if such a revolution were to have occurred there) to Russia, while Debord may only have been able, or would’ve only wished, to offer critiques on bourgeois culture and its power structures.

Indeed, The Society of the Spectacle is an anti-capitalist polemical work, however there is the backdrop of the Situationist International and their ideas of how to create conditions that are free from the all-pervading consumer world – the ‘construction of situations’ being the primary of these. Such ideas are difficult to pin down in terms of an ideology of a socialist/communistic state however. The Situationist International’s fusion of politics and art originated in surrealism and other movements of the early 20th century. It and other such movements in France (and elsewhere in Europe) drew off post war philosophies – in the case of the situationists, surrealism, connected contemporaneously and as part of the broader philosophical movement of the time which included existentialism, the philosophy espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre, who was a Marxist for a time, went into and beyond that doctrine – as such doctrines are laid down by communist states – to even greater radicalism, for the reason that he was perceived to be advocating a form of ‘perpetual revolt’. His saying, ‘Think against yourself’ – a play on words the original phrase of which is of course ‘Think for yourself’, the inviolable right of the individual – means to say that one should perpetually be evaluating and re-evaluating one’s philosophical position: one’s beliefs, thoughts, ideas; ensuring that one has not slipped into dogmatic thinking, a state of indoctrination. It cannot be over-emphasised the need to examine one’s own viewpoints on a regular basis, to criticise one’s own thoughts and convictions and to amend if necessary.