The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution/ Part 5

By Brian George

Below, you will find the revised and expanded version of a comment that I posted yesterday on the Reality Sandwich forum for Joscelyn Godwin's "Atlantis and the Cycles of Time." This article prompted me to go more deeply into a concept that I've been exploring--that of "the infinite recession of a landscape." The short post has now turned into a mini-essay, and I have decided to use it as section five of "The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution." With the introductory comments to Joscelyn removed, the piece now reads:

The Infinite Recession of a Landscape

"These, your family, are already dead, and so press on in the fight.”—Krishna to Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra

__

From the age of 18 or so I have been convinced that human history was far older than the mainstream model would allow, and I have felt and known this with a kind of physical certainty—as though a respected academic had informed me that there were no such thing as “Feet,” but I knew, from my own experience, that there were. Details were somewhat out of focus, however; to bring the image into focus I eagerly sought out books on “Atlantis.” For the most part, I was very disappointed.

I kept looking for new ancient source material, as well as for fresh archeological research, but it seemed as though writers were only quoting other writers, and then going on to improvise their own set of variations upon a set of established themes.

More recently, however, I believe that we may be moving into a more mature understanding of “Atlantis”—a word that I most often go out of my way not to use. If you were to substitute the phrase “world seafaring culture” for “forest” and the word “culture” for “trees,” then the problem has perhaps been one of “not seeing the forest for the trees.” Quite simply, it is possible that we have dramatically underestimated the vast breadth and depth of human history. Surrounded by the almost infinite recession of a landscape that seems too overwhelming to even begin to comprehend—or rather would if some past trauma had not struck us almost blind—we allow ourselves to become fixated on each individual tree.

So too, with each new discovery, this or that culture comes to occupy the foreground of our attention.

A Talk With Clark About Tantra, India, Hinduism, and Cannibalism

Many months ago, when The Immanence of Myth was still begin written (now it is in copy editing), I recoded a series of conversations with my friend and roommate William Clark. 
Since then, of course, some of you may know we've shot the Gonzomentary series Clark with Daniel Warwick of Exodus Films, and some of his hand-drumming appear on HoodooEngine work, which was also mostly recorded in this apartment. 
We will be cutting Clark into a movie-length version sometime this summer or into the coming fall. I wanted to share this interview with you again, because the many conversations that William and I have had here in this apartment, at all hours of the day and night, have helped me gather some of the thoughts that you will find in the book (IoM), which will be released in July. William talked about writing a piece on Kali, and though I mention him in the book in a few places, he never did get around to writing that piece. However, like many of of my other friends, his influence still exists within the work, and certainly every project I've released has the fingerprints of friends and contributors all over it. 

At the end of May, Jazmin and I will be moving out of here - we're not sure exactly where to, yet - and William will shortly thereafter be returning to India. So, I guess you could say this is the end of an "era" and the beginning of a new one for all of us, though none of us know what the new one will be yet. 
It seemed a timely thing to share this conversation with you. I hope you enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed these conversations... of course, the bulk of which were between us and not recorded. But you can imagine that conversations like this have happened, between him and I and many other people, almost every day over the past crazy year or so that we've called this weird basement hideout our home. It has been at times chaotic - crazy parties, mood-swings amongst all of us moody artists, an incredibly difficult and exciting and tedious and mind-opening and altering time. I'm quite sure that in years to come I'll come to look back on it as a time of great gestation, hopefully for all of us. I hope you have some more incredible experiences while you're there, William. 
Download the mp3 directly or listen to the podcast on Alterati.com 
An addendum to this podcast: the release is through Weaponized, not Hukilau. Please pre-order below or sign up to be notified on Amazon, especially if you're in the states and don't want to pay for UK shipping! 
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Myth as a Weapon: PsychoDrama

Dr.Adventure!

What would you do if you walked outside one day and saw something you KNEW, with absolute certainty, was imaginary, something impossible? Would you cry with sadness or delight? Would you scream or run or fight? Would you make friends?

Every-day the world is getting stranger. The rules we have been taught govern reality and life and circumstance have long fallen, useless and wheezing, to the ground. Fuck knows if I’ve been alive before but


I’m here NOW and this place is WEIRD! I wouldn’t have it any other way really.

As the yarn begins to unravel (“as the sheep is sheared" may be more appropriate), the various social, economic, political, educational, emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual frameworks that have up till now defined our existence will begin to dissolve. Due to an odd quirk of the human cognitive apparatus (wink wink), this phenomenon also has certain quantum level repercussions that actually destabilize various elements of local reality. FUCK!
(If you don’t believe me ask a physicist that isn't a chicken-shit)







And here we stand, on the edge of this wild future, with the Towers crumbling, the robots taking up arms, aliens visiting several major cities in broad daylight, prehistoric toxic ooze poisoning the ocean (not to mention garbage CONTINENTS!) and Godzilla rising from slumber.







Can you look me in the eye and tell me these things can be handled using "Conventional" means? No. Not without me calling you a goddamn liar. Humanity has used the subterfuge of conventionality, as well as forced ignorance to disguise the fact that most of the people in charge haven’t a fucking clue what should actually be done to make the world a better place. Which is fine, they’ve been consumed by their own machine which has defined their limitations. The machine however, lives in the real world, the one carved in stone and blood. They, often, do not.

If the drive to be legendary is innate, then the mass hysteria caused by the pressure of denying it makes a lot of the turmoil in the world makes sense. As usual, humanity has been playing in gods tool shed without reading any of the instructions. (Like giving a shotgun to a pissed-off blindfolded 6 year old on WAAAAY to much soda and adderall. Bad news all around.)
Still, the fruits of these bumbling attempts to make the world better have resulted in entities and mechanisms of titanic and horrific scale. They ate their creators long ago.

But, what about those that have always peeked behind the curtain? Throughout human history, and I mean right back to day-fuckin-one, there have been stories about people that were MORE than people. Some stories say they’re on their way, others that they left long ago, and some very popular ones about their return. These stories emerge in times of struggle.
Forged like diamonds under the stress. From these myriad and tremendous pressures are heroes and legends distilled. Like I said before though, this place is WEIRD! The tools we have to reshape our perceptions are powerful, prevalent and cheap. The tools we have to reshape the world around us are staggering in their scope and precision. What happens when you
throw THAT into the mix? All of a sudden you’ve got real live mythic super-people running amok on a planet where most folks are living in a goddamn video game and shitting themselves in terror at every other thing.

I’m talking the whole nine yards by the way; trip-headed telekinetic bodhisattvas, Super-Heroes and Villains, trans-dimensional hyper intelligences, cyborg call girls, mutants, ancient monsters and the undead. Scary as it is, they’re humanity's only hope at not completely and utterly fucking themselves into oblivion. Also, far as I can tell, they're US.

We stand poised and ready to strike at the heart of the beast with weapons forged from Science and Art, ancient magic, Hardcore hyper-space drugs and the Heat from the heart of the sun.
But, are we starting a fight or playing a game?

If you haven’t noticed, I’m not talking about protest or war. I’m talking about solving the problems that need to be dealt with, setting an example on a grand scale and providing working alternatives. The hard part of course is how the hell do you figure these things out?
Play.


The inherent biological mechanism for discovery and expression is PLAY. As serious as Life and Death, made of dreams, and the closest to reality that most come, Play teaches us what we are, what we could be and how the fuck to get there. Making a game that everyone can take part in is the trick, and always remember that the rules are just there to make things more interesting. And that we make them.

We are the players; the cast and crew. We set the stage, prepare our roles, build the props, paint the sets and become the Story. Go do something impossible.

Welcome to the Future!

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Atlantean Hermeneutics - A Review of Jocelyn Godwin's Atlantis & the Cycles of Time

by David Metcalfe

“Yea, on all the divisions of the earth have there been great cities and nations, and men and women of great learning. And as oft as they are raised up in light, so are they again cast down in darkness, because of the great desire of the spirits of the dead to return back to the earth.”
- Oahspe, Kosmon Bible (1882)

When straight history doesn’t provide the right set and setting to explain archetypal interplays of force visionaries seek elsewhere to embody their ideals. Atlantis has been a rich receptical for such ruminations since Plato first penned the Timaeus. His enduring image of that fallen civilization “between the Pillars of Heracles” has become the perfect place for all our Golden Age dreams to foment. In Jocelyn Godwin’s latest book from Inner Traditions, Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, the eminent scholar of esotericism examines the continuing fascination of this myth and the surprising effect it has had on the Western world’s intellectual history.

Godwin gives us more than just an extensive survey of various theories of Atlantis. Through examining the numerous alternatives to the Atlantean question we find an in depth study of amateur archaeology, occult politics, trance channeling and the interstices of mythopoeia and culture. Notably absent are the more reasoned Atlantean musings of philosophers such as Francis Bacon in his political allegory New Atlantis. In Atlantis and the Cycles of Time we find a feast of error prone visionary fruit from the investigations of thinkers often radically separated from the mainline historical narrative.

The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution/ Part 4

By Brian George

At Fukushima, in his almost non-protective suit, a volunteer from the cleanup crew surveys the uncertain outcome of his work. As the representative of an industry that I hate, he is one out of a long list of potential enemies—and yet. My attitude is little more than a mechanistic program. He is one of the “Fukushima 50,” who, as he struggles to prevent a total meltdown of the fuel rods, will sleep on a blanket on the concrete floor, and will almost certainly die. His hands are clean, as are those of any servant of a cause.

He did not intend to send free energy in a cloud that with its glow would power the factories of the Northwest USA, there to prompt a boom in sunglasses, and to circulate throughout the udders of all cows. If only in terms of the logic of the Hypersphere, each cause can then be made to correspond to an effect. Beam technology from a lab in the Northwest USA can then be bounced from a great height down to Libya—in the latest of anti-terrorist experiments.

There, even as we speak, a fault-line has just started to crack open. And from there, after being dropped on chutes, droids will transmit geothermal data to the engineers who dream about a pipeline to Afghanistan—an archeological relic, dead from the word “go.”

The five media conglomerates have decided to join forces. Their goal: To preserve our Way of Life. There is no reason for the phrase “military contractor” to be used. Nor will there be “collateral damage.” It is perhaps no one group’s fault that the time-cycle is indifferent to our safety and our comfort. Learning nothing from their experience in the Gulf, a small oversight by BP on an offshore rig will soon turn the Atlantic black.

(Illustration: Brian George, Girl underwater with turtle, photograph, 2004)
 
New posts every 2-3 days on my blog Masks of Origin
 
http://masksoforigin.blogspot.com/

Is Myth Dead?

Image by P. Emerson Williams

An excerpt from the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology:

It may seem that the word “myth” has lost its meaning to us as a psychological or spiritual term. No, the situation is more drastic than that. Myth has become the opposite of fact, something that is generally accepted but untrue; “it is a myth that reading by flashlight ruins your eyesight.” The popular television show on the Discovery Channel, Myth Busters, uses this definition, attempting to disprove “myths” with something vaguely resembling science. The myths of antiquity are looked upon as quaint stories, despite the fact that they have shaped our cultural history. It is neatly overlooked that myths remain at the center of the bloody stage of modern religious, national, economic or ideological dynamics, not to mention our personal and everyday lives.
The fact that the word “myth” has become synonymous with untruth belies an underlying shift in the Western epistemological focus over the past several thousand years. This is clearly a sweeping generalization, and in these we are also inventing a myth, but bear with me. We have become, in this juncture of time and culture, a great deal more concerned with verifiable facts and less concerned with existential experiences which have little relation to fact. This progression ties into the Enlightenment focus on rationality and the scientific method, but perhaps more pervasively, we can see this following from the needs of industrialization.
This shift, though not concocted as some conspiratorial scheme, does serve a purpose. As we will see, fundamental business principles rely on actions that are easy to reproduce, and which produce similar (if not identical) results with each repetition. This cultural homogeneity promotes an economy of scale that is absolutely necessary for so-called big business. Similarly, the myths of a culture must ultimately serve the best interest of industry. The evolution of such co-related myths is often symbiotic, for instance, it is through the spread of industry as the backbone of a civilization that myths which better serve it spread. These in turn effect the further growth and spread of an industrialized infrastructure.

(Read full article on Weaponized)
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

The Obscene, Transformations, and Art: A Non-Monologue

Greetings from St. Stephen

Today I want to present you with a small video on the subject of the obscene and art, as it concerns transformations. So, and perhaps, a little background is in order.

For about 5 years or so now, I have been making little video presentations as part of my academic work. Either of the last two words from the previous sentence, "academic" and "work", as such could be set in scared quotes, as these are simply questionable notions. In part, academic work is a struggle against these very notions. As such, and finding oneself at a college or university, in whatever position, does one want to be academic? And work, what is work? What does the university do besides normalize and promote some tired Protestant Work Ethic? 

I am being one-sided and flippant, but there is much truth to my last remark, I think. That is why we are here; we are the gonzo of the university, we have come... to find that there is no exit. So we must change from the only place we can, not from the outside we can never get to, but from the within of where we already are.

My video, The Obscene, Transformations, and Art: A Non-Monologue, is basically an edited version of the Nineteen-Seventy-One film, directed by Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange, with a non-monologue read "over-top" of it. A non-monologue is a monologue which recognizes the plurality of speech, a matter I will get back to in a moment. Perhaps in time I will release my essay under the same name, depending on interest. So input is very important to me, as it lets me know what you, the reader, like and dislike, and I even dare say, desire more of.

Continuing my thought on what it 'is' to be academic, I just want to say, that at one point in the video, I give a harsh critique of what the University and academia has done (not all my categories are not monolithic) to the legacy and work of Michel Foucault.

Foucault grabbing them by the balls

Continuing my explanation of a non-monologue, I feel the need to speak a bit about Maurice Blanchot, and his text, The Infinite Conversation, which is not a direct part of the video. Perhaps its enough to note that the first chapter of his text is translated as "Plural Speech: the speech of writing." Since I do not believe that I can do justice to his work in just a few brief sentences, I will simply quote, "The neutral, the neutral, how strangely this sounds for me" (Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 1993, Translation by Susan Hanson, page xxi).

a TOPY alter

What you will find in the video is my critique on what is obscene, its place as art, as transformational experience, and as a catalyst for exploring the limits of thought, of language, of experience... as such I speak of the work of Georges Bataille (here you can find the television appearance I referred to in my video), as well as the Chaos Magic Group, Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (TOPY). The original incarnation of TOPY is defunct, and probably deserves a blog post of their own. Let St. Stephen know if this is something that interests you. As such: I invite one and all to comment on both the video, as well (and hopeful more so) on the content of the reading or whatever else comes to mind.

This video was shown at an upstate New York University, 2010. So here is the link to the video:

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution/ Part 3

By Brian George

Okantomi—you wrote (about "Four Scouts to the New World," just before the election in 2008), “It is pretty clear that your tongue is planted firmly in your cheek, but were you inspired somewhat prosaically by those ‘little red book’ waving Maoists of the late 60s and their latter-day wanabees? Were you maybe also casting an eye about over the political landscape of the last several years as you formulated this imaginary epic? The ‘revolutionary purity’ of the carefully chosen scouts is creepily reminiscent of a current ‘perpetual revolution’ in the making.”

Yes, events that we thought long and safely past have a way of circling around and reemerging—with all of their elements subtly rearranged. But who can tell if we are seeing the same thing in a somewhat different form or a different thing in a somewhat similar form? My head spins as I examine the most recent crop of slogans. For example: "Change we can believe in." “Yes We Can.” “Our Time for Change.” “’Change’ versus ‘More of the Same.’” “Stand for Change.” “We are the change we’ve been looking for.” “Change can’t happen without you.” “A leader who can deliver change.” “It’s about Time. It’s about Change.”

And yet all of this is somehow contrary to the magical power of the word. The word can also kill, and perhaps all of this talk about change is designed, as I have said, to lead us in a circle. Then again, we must also ask: Are those who believe themselves to be leading us in a circle also pawns in a projected mass-hallucination, from which the living—upon pain of death—are no longer allowed to exit?

For the exit always seems to be somewhere else. Signs point to a multitude of sharp turns in a labyrinth—a centrifugal one—which, as it spins, stretches far beyond the edge of the known world. The true exit is no different than the entrance, and opens out beyond the circuit of the stars. Or, in other words, to a place no bigger and no smaller than one atom.

A friend said yesterday that “Four Scouts” reminded him of some utopian literature that he had read, without quite fitting into that category. You speculate that my “tongue is planted firmly in (my) cheek,” and ask if “Four Scouts” should be read as a critique of current politics. A second friend asked why I couldn’t speak more directly about the issues that I raise.

All of these statements point to a mode of argument that is complex in its movements, a kind of verbal capoeira, which attacks by indirection, and presents a different face to every reader.

As in Mesoamerican myth, an act of creation is simultaneously an act of destruction. I set up a vision to knock it down, not in favor of skeptical reductionism, but from the vantage point of a larger and even stranger reality. As a child who flirted with concepts of revolutionary violence in the latter days of the counterculture, and who, luckily, did not act on the more extreme of his views, I have ever since been cautious about being swept away by enthusiasm. Bad eyesight can be contagious. Enemies are not obstacles to be eliminated, and means have a way of turning into ends. It is important for us to embody at each moment the end we would pursue.

Going non-verbal: Art Break!

It's been established that I'm one verbose and sometimes abstruse motherfucker.What's less known is that sometimes I cast off the verbal and just art. Here's the latest: art with meta-meanings.

Fallen Nation Party At The World's End Free Chapter

Fallen-Nation_Party At The World's End



Fallen Nation: Party At The World’s End is a mad ride past the event horizon of sanity with a group of young, escaped mental patients that come to realize – or believe – that they are demigods. They form Babylon, a band that captures the spirit of the age as sex, drugs, and chaos reign in the final years of the American Empire. Also a great novel for your teenage kids if they're smart and you want to set them on a life of philosophy, debauchery, and petty larceny.

 
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution/ Part 2

By Brian George

2

Below—in sections three and five—you will find two comments that are connected with the posting of my essay “Four Scouts to the New World.” The first comment is from “Reality Sandwich” forum for the essay, just before the election of President Obama in 2008, and the second is a reflection on why I chose to re-post it on “Modern Mythology,” just after the earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent atomic disaster in Japan in 2011.

In 2008, I could not help but wonder: How is it possible for so many well intentioned people to not see that Barack Obama is just another actor—a kinder and gentler apologist for Wall Street and closet advocate for the Military-Industrial Complex—onto whom a part of the American public had projected its own dreams?

Do the crowds at an Obama rally not know that they are intoxicated—with an energy more appropriate to a televangelist’s studio—or see the glazed eyes of other members of the crowd, or hear that they are chanting to give birth to a savior? Why do his supporters not pause to notice that he has no actual record, that he went out of his way to be absent for key votes in Illinois? Do they not hear when he speaks in glowing terms of Reagan, or see that, on those few occasions that he does speak truth to power, it is only so that he can substitute speech for action? As with the wave of a magician’s hand, an incandescent city has appeared upon a hill.

It is now 2011, and I cannot help but wonder: How is it possible that, in the 1960s, GE didn’t realize that there might be earthquakes in an earthquake zone, and went full-speed ahead to build a chain of atomic power plants on a fault line? Since then, why has no one stopped to think that an earthquake might knock out both the power plants and the backup systems, and why were the spent fuel-rods stored underneath the plants?

Then too, when radiation levels of 1000 millisieverts per hour have been detected 50 miles from the Fukushima plant—i.e., four times the maximum safe level of exposure—why have people only been evacuated throughout a radius of 20 miles? So far as I understand it, this is just the level that is judged to be safe per hour.

As Kurt Nimmo points out, “A year has 365 days, a day has 24 hours; multiply 365 by 24, you get 8760.” And finally, if you multiply 1000 by 8760, you get 8,760, 000 times the normal dose per year. If the total projected yearly dose is not yet so astronomical, neither could it be regarded as anywhere close to safe. The exact figures could be debated, and keep changing hour by hour and depending on the source of information—but you get the general idea.

And so, we must ask: Could the Japanese government be driven by an agenda beyond that of the well being of its citizens—an agenda of which even the key actors may, at best, be only partially aware? On what ring of an interdimensional theatre are the benches on which the audience for the current play is seated—calmly staring out of eyes that do not close, and with their thumbs poised to flip up or down?

To ask these questions is not to assign blame—whether to the overly idealistic supporters of Obama, or to Obama himself, who probably has far less actual power than we think, or to the brightest of the brightest in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and on through to the present decade, who failed to anticipate and then prepare for a disaster that was 100% predictable, and certainly not to bureaucrats without backbones. No, I am pointing to these things in order to highlight their peculiarity.

Capitalism Five Ways

I'm not normally inclined to use this site just to point people's attention to something without providing some extensive unique commentary. However, I think this content stands on its own and is worth checking out:

(Capitalism Five Ways) 
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

A Rupture in the Continuum of Time: To Transcend Without Transcendence (kairos)

The essay entitled “In the Time of Fascist Desire,” written during my first semester of graduate study, was not only significant as the first time the problematic of kairos took center stage in my work. Rather,  the task of “the constructing a secular concept of kairos” answered to the exigency of proposing an answer to the following question posed by Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus:

What makes fascism dangerous is its molecular or micropolitical power…only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? ...It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective.[1]

Thus, from the outset, kairos had to be thought in connection to desire – eros – a conceptual linkage for which there is much support – for the answer was to claim that the experience of time toward which all desire tends is the interruption of indifferent, chronological time, by a qualitatively distinct moment, kairos. Furthermore, in Eric Michaud's “Nazi Architecture as an Acceleration of Time” (1993) and The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (published in French as: Un Art de l'Eternité: L'image et le temps du nationale-socialisme: 1996;  English translation: 2004), and in Klaus Theweileit's Male Fantasies (Volume 1: 1977; English translation 1987), there was much to be found that suggested a linkage to the domain of aesthetics – art, architecture, photography and film appeared to be instrumental in evoking such an experience of time and in providing some amount of satisfaction to desire. According to the logic of kairos, first presented in the essay in question, this evocation can only ape kairos, for the architecture of Nazi Germany, for example,“ made the monument as messiah for an impatient community, the heralded new man who came when summoned to liberate the community from time, who came to put an end to its waiting.” [2] If, however, a moment worthy of the name kairos cannot be objectively distinguished from any other time, how then can it be distinguished with certainty from pseudo-kairos? The true from false messiahs? Furthermore, this indicates that kairos is not only emergent but effective in history and in politics, as Paul Tillich writes:     

Kairos ...was used not only by the religious socialist movement in obedience to the great kairos... but also by the nationalist movement, which, through the voice of Nazism, attacked the great kairos and everything for which it stands. The latter use was a demonically distorted experience of a kairos [3] and led inescapably to self-destruction. [4]

Incunabula vol III: Necropolis, Necromancy and the Walking Dead

By Mr. VI

'I am the police, and I say, "Don't move" Snow White. You move, you're dead. Eric'
'And I say, "I'm dead," and I move.' - The Crow

(This is the third of a series of linked posts - one and two.)

A necropolis is a city of the dead; it is a settlement and home for those who have undergone a shift from the processes of life into the processes of unlife. Make no mistake, just as the living have their movements, their currents, so do the dead. They shift from the movements of life to the apparent stillness of death.

In truth that stillness is a lie, and we know that deep down in our hind-brain. That stillness is a counterfeit thing, wearing the face of someone we once knew. Bacterial replication and liquefaction, putrescence and decay – all these occur under the guise of the still, until we are forced to acknowledge the alien nature moving under the skin of familiar features.

Is any wonder we transport the dead, either literally or figuratively? If they remain amongst us, they become possessed, animated by a kind of inhumanity. But if we send them on their way, they settle with their new kind, joining with the rank upon rank of serried ancestors.

Or so we hope.

The necropolis is a place where they can move how they like, doing their dead-things. They're not possessed there, they're in the right place, slowly descending downward, settling out. Maybe, just maybe, if they want another chance at life, they mix into the underground flows of the Deep Below and emerge as part of the welling stream that gives us new life.

It's the same with a graveyard – a bounded space that is the place of the grave. The dead exist; it's only modern Western culture that says you cease post-mortem. I'm not even talking about some metaphysical afterlife – quite simply, in Western culture, the dead as a conceptual idea and/or space have become something to be ignored and deliberately avoided because of the implication that you *will* become one of them; your life and all its important constructions, shall pass away, all your investment is hence more than a little foolish.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust – if you don't take it out and use it, it's going to rust.

And that is what has happened to the dead as a concept. As a mythological space, they have atrophied, and I believe our culture is poorer for it. Sure we have vampires, the walking dead and shambling zombies – but the zombie is purely a shambling unstoppable thing, an expression of unending consumption and the vampire now a glamorised sexual predator.

Our culture is obsessed with the notion of remaining vital; with husbanding the resources that make us prime physical specimens, and yet because of this, the population of the elderly is steadily increasing. More humans are thinking about their impending doom than ever before, and yet it is a blank wall. What could be a creative space enabling society to evaluate and learn from its experiences is, in essence, a no-go zone.

But for those in crisis conditions, the veneration of the dead and death itself provides a grounding which allows a re-apprehension of life – for example the cult of Santa Muerte in Mexico, supposedly a fusion of Mesoamerican and Catholic belief.

This of course makes sense because for those under relatively affluent conditions, the status quo perpetuates the myth that it it is unceasing, and that change and transition are threatening.

In actuality, this produces a climate of denial – the dead are denied because they illustrate transitions and enable the thought that everything is precarious. Indeed, our bodies are filled with the furious replication of bacteria when we are alive; the flesh is a veritable ecosystem of strange organisms – just see James' post on the strange world of the Puppet Masters for examples.

The dead are not seized by an alien external unlife - they merely reveal what was already present within us all along; the skull as momento mori, the caput mortuum or death's head.

Strip away the pretty flesh, the rouge, the make-up; the muscle, the manicure and the moisturiser and you have the slick grin that never shifts in its mirth, the shining glory that is your essence.

And here's where we bring in the incunabula again. I bet you were waiting for them, no?

Because the incunabula use myth like ordinary humans use food – it is broken down and rearranged to incorporate it into their bodies, cut into their texts. So the dead actually provide them with sustenance; they make them stronger and more vital.

“More Human Than Human.” to quote White Zombie!



After all, the larger one's hunting ground, the more chance of gaining the necessary resources for existence – this is the essence of hunter-gathering; to move on before things are depleted. What then stops you from arriving at the necropolis and feasting with the dead?

Imagine this:

Kairos: Complete Podcast Version

By Prof Rowan

Hot off the microphone, the entire Kairos series in podcast form. Including a short introduction. Comment, criticize, etc. Please!

Rowan G. Tepper - Introduction to kairos by rowan-g-tepper

Kairos I: Exemplary Acts by rowan-g-tepper

Kairos II: Kairos at the End of Modernity by rowan-g-tepper

Kairos III: La révolution post-historique by rowan-g-tepper

Kairos IV: The Whatever Messiah: We're Who We've Been Waiting For by rowan-g-tepper

Parts I and III have previously been posted. Enjoy! Discuss! Goddamnit! You don't have to read, just listen!
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