A TRUE EXTREMISM
Short Prose
Copyright © 1984-2009 John O'Loughlin
_______________
CONTENTS
1. Free-Electron Sexuality
2. A Vertical Integrity
3. Creative Extremes
4. For Truth
5. Leader's Transcendentalism
6. A True Extremism
7. A Permanent Cross
8. More Plastic
9. Supernatural Upgrading
10. Centrist Sexuality
11. Writerly Print
12. Supernatural Travel
13. Six Thinkers ...
14. Five Speeches ...
15. Thus Speaks the Social Transcendentalist
_______________
FREE-ELECTRON SEXUALITY
"I
must say, I'm fascinated by this theory of yours, Terry, that homosexuality
corresponds to a pseudo-electron equivalent," the professor remarked,
turning a pair of seemingly enlightened eyes in my direction. "A kind of higher materialist
petty-bourgeois sexuality."
The professor's wife smiled deferentially
through prim lips. "And one that
apparently compliments the higher spiritual petty-bourgeois sexuality of
pornographic indulgence, which corresponds, by contrast, to a free-electron
equivalent," she averred, showing herself to be no mean learner either.
I nodded confirmatory encouragement and
waited for one or other of them to continue.
"A homosexual materialist and a pornographic
spiritualist," the professor mused, smiling to himself. "Why, one might alternatively expect
homosexuality to appeal more to LSD trippers and pornography, by contrast, to
the practitioners of transcendental meditation, seeing as one can distinguish,
in each case, between a pseudo-electron and a free-electron indulgence!"
The professor's wife cast me an admiring
and vaguely expectant look. "Then
one ought to argue that anti-artists who produce a pseudo-electron literature
would be partial to homosexuality, while their free-electron counterparts, the
pure poets, would prefer pornographic sexuality," she remarked, as though
it were an everyday occurrence.
I nodded again, this time, however, in an
attempt to express the most unequivocally tacit endorsement of the good lady's
argument.
"Well, if that's the case," the
professor responded, turning towards his wife, "one ought to equate
avant-garde classical music with a homosexual bias, since Terry tells us that
such music conforms to a pseudo-electron status, while reserving for modern
jazz an equation with a pornographic bias in view of the fact that it conforms,
so we are told, to a free-electron status."
The professor's wife smiled her guarded
approval of this suggestion through newly moist lips. "And one might just as well contend that
avant-garde painting pertains, in its pseudo-electron status, to the homosexual
side of things, in contrast to light art which, through its free-electron
integrity, suggests an affinity with pornography."
I nodded my affirmation of this further
contention and remarked: "Yes, there is definitely a logical consistency
about all this; though one shouldn't forget that in a relatively post-atomic
civilization things are also relative within themselves, not just across the
board with regard to, say, the distinction between avant-garde classical and
modern jazz. These two art forms are
also relative - as between a steady rhythmic root and notational pitch
expansions in the case of avant-garde classical, and between flexible rhythmic
accompaniment and improvisatory pitch expansions in the case of modern
jazz. Although we can speak of the one
as essentially a pseudo-electron equivalent and the other as a free-electron
equivalent, there is a proton side to the first and a pseudo-electron, or
neutron, side to the second, in accordance with their respective extreme
relativities. And the same of course
applies to the distinction between avant-garde painting and light art, art
forms which divide into sub-relativities between canvas and abstract painting
in the context of, say, abstract expressionism, and between plastic tubing and
neon lighting in the context of light art - in other words, between a
subordinate materialistic and a dominating spiritualistic ingredient, the ratio
of the one to the other varying with the type of art and/or artist in
question. Needless to say, each art
form, whether painterly or post-painterly, is divisible, within relative
civilization, into antithetical atomic biases, so that we can differentiate between
pseudo-electron painting and free-electron painting in regard to abstract
expressionism and abstract impressionism (more usually known as post-painterly
abstraction), as well as between different types of light art, whilst at the
same time acknowledging that, in the relativity of these things, avant-garde
painting as a whole becomes a pseudo-electron equivalent in relation to light
art as a whole, which we can have no hesitation in describing as a
free-electron equivalent."
The professor and his wife stared
penetratingly into my face, as though at some art object, smiled their
gratification for the privilege of receiving such esoteric information, and
nodded what appeared to be simultaneous approval of my argument.
However, I could only continue: "Coming
back to sex, we will therefore note that both homosexuality and pornography are
relative within themselves, the one materially so, with regard to the
relationship of two male bodies, and the other spiritually so, with regard, as
a rule, to either two photographed participants of different sex and/or to one
participant of female sex whose body is either completely or partly on display,
with particular reference to her cun ..., I mean, vagina. Such is the way of things in an extreme
relative civilization, like
Both the professor and his wife appeared
quite astounded, their lips pursed and their heads gently shaking from side to
side. It seemed that this speculative
declaration was too far above them to be properly intelligible or sympathetic
to their manifestly petty-bourgeois mentalities, which, in any case, could only
relate to magazines and the employment, therein, of adult models. Probably they would forget all about it in due
course!
A VERTICAL INTEGRITY
Philip
Brennan had been standing for over an hour in the company of most of the other
guests to a conference of senior Social Transcendentalists, held in the main
office of the party's Dublin headquarters, and was beginning to tire a little
on his feet, though not without a quiet satisfaction that he had so far avoided
the ignominy (as it was fast becoming known to those in the know) of taking a
seat in one of the few available upright chairs. Usually that ignominy was reserved for
females and youths, who were regarded as less qualified than men to spend long
periods of time in a vertical position.
Had the Leader not himself declined to sit down in order, no doubt, to
set an example to his followers? For,
assuredly, most of them were aware, by now, of his views on sitting, which he
regarded as a bourgeois habit unworthy of proletarian emulation; though he was
hardly a bona fide proletarian himself!
However, his views on sitting, as on lying and standing, were
representative of Social Transcendentalism, which sought and adhered to the
truth about everything, in the interests of evolutionary progress towards a
more absolute society.
For sitting was relative, a kind of
compromise between lying and standing, in which one part of the body, namely
the thighs, was horizontal whilst another part, namely the trunk and head, was
vertical, this in turn significant of a compromise between the feminine and the
masculine, the mundane and the transcendent.
For in case anyone had any doubts on the matter, the horizontal and the
feminine were aligned, and sharply contrasted with the vertical and the
masculine, which was how they would always remain.
But not for men, for a society dedicated,
more specifically, to revolutionary change in the name of masculine
progress! If the ancients, with
particular reference to the pagan Greeks and Romans, spent more time lying or,
rather, reclining than sitting or standing, that was because they were
essentially feminine in character, a people stemming from nature, like animals,
who also spend the greater part of their time - indeed almost all of it - in a
horizontal position. Not having attained
to a dualistic compromise, the ancients were content to spend most of their
time, days as well as nights, lolling about in pursuit of carnal indulgence. When not dozing or sleeping, they had been
wolfing fruit, swilling wine, and philandering, not to say fornicating. They had even read scrolls and listened to
music in a reclining posture, as often as not dozing off in the process. So much for the ancients!
Fortunately, however, man went on to make
some progress during the succeeding centuries and, with the rise of bourgeois
consciousness, became less a reclining animal than a sitting one - indeed,
became properly human. No longer
absolutely feminine, and thus horizontal in his lifestyle, man developed a
dualistic compromise between the feminine and the masculine, a compromise
reflecting his religious progress towards the transcendent, which necessarily
acquired the form of a partly transcendental inclination, as germane to
Christianity, that anthropomorphic allegiance between Hell and Heaven, the
centrifugal alpha and the centripetal omega.
So now man, properly so-considered, was between the horizontal and the
vertical as he sat in his chair, one part of him seemingly stemming from the
natural and another part of him seemingly aspiring towards the
supernatural. Of course, this
development had passed through a number of stages, from chairs with slanting
backs to chairs the backs of which were almost straight and, in some of the
more up-to-date examples, totally so.
And, then, the amount of time men had spent in their
variously-constituted chairs varied with the individual's social standing and
the epoch in question, the European grand bourgeoisie, nominally aristocratic,
spending much less time seated than their bureaucratic successors of more
recent date. However, this wasn't
because they spent more time standing, but, as the Leader was only too keen to
remind us, because they remained enslaved, in varying degrees, to pagan
precedent - the early grand-bourgeoisie most especially so! There were still too many things which could
be better done reclining than sitting, and we need not doubt that the people in
question had no qualms about thus doing them.
So much for the medievalists!
When we come to the moderns, as the Leader
(having briefly drawn our attention to the bourgeoisie ... with their dualistic
compromise reflecting a lifestyle more balanced between horizontal and
vertical) referred to petty-bourgeois man, we arrive at a procedure the
converse of that favoured by the medievalists, with their grand-bourgeois
integrity. We note a gradual loosening
of the connection between men and chairs.
For even though the backs of modern chairs are usually vertical, there
is still a concession to the horizontal with the seat, and this concession,
though in many instances tempered by diagonally-slanting seats, is precisely
what, consciously or unconsciously, petty-bourgeois man happens to be in
rebellion against, if only relatively so and, hence, on a rather intermittent
basis. His extreme relativity favours
the vertical, so he inclines to spend more time standing than sitting, whereas
his class predecessor, the bourgeois, spent as much time sitting as both reclining
and standing - indeed, probably spent more time sitting, since that would have
accorded with a uniquely bourgeois compromise.
Of course, one can divide the petty bourgeoisie into early and late
stages, thereby inferring two distinct classes, and contend that if the
late-stage petty-bourgeoisie preferred to spend more time standing than
sitting, then their immediate class predecessors probably preferred to spend as
much time as possible sitting with a straight back in the straightest possible
type of chair. Moreover, one could argue
that the grand bourgeoisie ...
No, rather than dwell on them, one would do
better to bear in mind the Leader's contention that proletarian man, that
successor to the moderns, should be prepared if not to completely avoid
sitting, during the barbarous phase of his society's evolution, then to
completely avoid doing so during the subsequent civilized phase, when all truck
with the relative, and hence the
horizontal, would be strictly taboo, man having become so masculine by
then as to be indisposed to any degree of compromise with the feminine, society
having become absolutely post-dualistic and thus exclusively orientated towards
the attainment of a supernatural goal.
Such was the absolute fate in store for proletarians in the civilized
phase of their transcendental society, as championed by Social
Transcendentalism in general but by the Leader in particular. In the meantime chairs, although not strictly
taboo, would remain discredited objects, things to which one could succumb in
the event of physical tiredness, albeit not without a degree of shame! Gone were the days when chairs could be
complacently accepted and utilized on an intermittent basis. The Leader had ensured that much!
Well, Philip was still feeling tired and
exposed, in consequence, to the temptation to slump into one of the nearby
upright chairs which stood against the wall to his right. These chairs assumed the appearance of
ignominious traps at such times, and one of them had already claimed a victim
in the form of a young female whose apparent nonchalance suggested the
probability that she was less well-informed than most as to the moral nature of
her behaviour! However, whilst a young
female of around twenty would have reasons of her own for sitting down, Philip
knew that, if he wanted to remain a candidate for promotion in the Leader's
eyes, he would do better to gently shift his weight from one leg to the other,
as though marking time.... This, to all appearances, was exactly what one or
two other comrades were already doing!
Meanwhile the Leader had taken centre
stage, so to speak, in order to address his followers about an innovation which
he hoped to introduce into meditation centres in due course. Clearing his throat with guttural relish, he
thus proceeded: "As you all know, the practice of meditation has
traditionally been carried-on while sitting cross-legged on the floor. Orientals have long maintained this practice
and, since the introduction of meditation-centred religion to the West, most
petty-bourgeois devotees of transcendentalism have likewise been content to sit
on the floor or, alternatively, on a bed or a chair. Now while this mundane habit may be
appropriate to Buddhism and other such traditional oriental religions,
reflecting the devotee's continuing allegiance to the Ground, that oriental
equivalent of the Creator, Social Transcendentalism couldn't possibly endorse
it, since we are dealing here not with a continuation of tradition but with a
total departure from it, as relevant to an absolutely post-atomic
integrity. Therefore we cannot meditate
while sitting on the floor, because such a mundane posture would connote with
Buddhist relativity, and we are beyond any such dualism. Neither can we meditate while sitting on a
chair, which, besides bringing us into contact with the floor, would impose a
degree of horizontality upon that part of the body resting on its seat, just as
the legs of those who sit cross-legged on the floor are far from being in a
vertical position. No, and neither can
we meditate while standing on our feet, since, besides tiring us, such a
posture would keep us anchored to the floor and detract, moreover, from our
commitment to meditation. So what should
we do? I'll tell you what! We must meditate suspended in a vertical
position a few feet above the ground, as though levitating, and thus free of
mundane allegiance. This is the only
acceptable posture for a Social Transcendentalist, and it will reflect an
absolutely free-electron status symptomatic of post-atomic civilization. So, clearly, we must design meditation
centres in such a way that people can be hoisted free of the floor when they're
due to meditate, a procedure requiring the installation of special
chest-to-crotch harnesses suspended from some scaffold-like apparatus under the
roof of the building which can be raised or lowered by remote control,
according to the demands of the occasion.
Thus instead of squatting on the floor, like primitives, those who
practise meditation in our meditation centres will be suspended from aloft in
comfortable body harnesses that will enable them both to forget about their
body weight and to assume a more transcendent posture - one relevant to the
exclusive verticality of a proletarian civilization, beyond all dualistic
compromises."
Ah, how the phrase 'to forget about their
body weight' appealed to Philip Brennan at that moment, now that he had been
standing on his feet for over an hour-and-a-half! He was certainly unable to forget about his
own, or to completely detach his mind from the tempting proximity of those few
straight-backed chairs to his right, which made him slightly envious of the
seated young woman whose morals appeared to be less rigorously applied than his
own. If only such harnesses as the
Leader had spoken of were to be found in his office! But, of course, meditation and ideological
meetings were two entirely different things.
Perhaps, however, a day would eventually dawn when some scaffold-like
apparatus would be installed even for the latter, indeed for any meetings
between people, so that instead of standing on tired feet or succumbing to a
chair - that bourgeois anachronism - one would automatically step into a body
harness and be hoisted aloft, to conduct one's tête-à-tête, or whatever, in a
comfortably vertical position, a truly-civilized posture. Well, there was at any rate a degree of
comfort in the thought, and Philip Brennan needed all the comfort he could get,
now that the meeting was over and the Leader had left the office, presumably to
slump into a chair himself. It was at
least a relief for Philip Brennan to know that he was not the only one in need
of a seat at this moment!
CREATIVE EXTREMES
James had
loved her passionately as a youth, when they had worked in the same office for
a time, but only from a distance, because her love had been bestowed on someone
else, a fellow-worker who was either quicker off the romantic mark or just less
inhibited than himself. He suffered his
unrequited love for her throughout the years following her departure from the
firm, and when he also departed to become an apprentice author, his life had
grown accustomed to solitary nights and friendless days. Being alone in his lodgings was no great
burden on him. On the contrary, it was a
logical step from his previous loneliness.
And so he wrote for years, throughout the
greater part of each weekday, until the number of typescripts - writing first,
typing later - piled up in his room, and his notebooks, in which the works were
drafted, grew to fill a large drawer. He
considered himself, above all else, a philosopher, a seeker after the Truth, a
pioneer of new insights into life and the world. He was too serious-minded to be content with
fiction, his solitude and unrequited love not having conditioned him to become
an artist in the usual objective sense.
He was resigned to philosophy, even when he realized that it was the
most intellectually-demanding mode of writing and the least commercially
viable. Better to be a philosopher, he
thought, than to have remained a clerk.
Besides, I'm no ordinary philosopher.
More a revolutionary pseudo-philosopher than a traditional type.... Not
that he discovered this fact all at once, but only when the time was ripe. A pseudo-philosopher was somehow superior to
a genuine, or academic, philosopher, more a man of essence than of appearance,
a metaphysician as opposed to a physicist, an original writer rather than 'a
chair'. In similar vein, a pseudo-state
was somehow superior to a genuine state, a matter of the people rather than
either the land or country considered from a nationalist point of view. Pseudo-democracy could likewise be considered
superior to genuine democracy, giving maximum representation to the electorate
- a qualitative absolutism.
Yes, James Riley realized all this and so
much else as, year after year, he scribbled the time away in his single room
and noted the progress of his work from a bourgeois relative stage to an early
petty-bourgeois relatively absolute stage, and even, in due course, to a late
petty-bourgeois absolute stage of creative and ideological integrity. If he had begun as a philosopher or, more
correctly, a philosophical novelist and essayist, he had progressed quite some
way beyond that point by the time he came to evaluate the ideological/creative
status of his various stages of philosophical endeavour. Why, he had recently abandoned even the
pseudo-philosophical in his evolution towards a quasi-poetic integrity, a lower
phase of his late-stage petty-bourgeois writings, relevant to a new ideology in
the form of Social Transcendentalism, which pertained to the future development
of a proletarian civilization. Gone were
the days when he could take academic philosophy seriously! All that appearance-mongering was not for
him. Even the pseudo-philosophical
endeavour was now effectively a thing of his past, a passing phase in his
evolution to higher things. It always
amazed him when he looked back over his early work and noted the intellectual
distance between that and his latest work.
Was it possible that the same person had written both?
Ah, but even if such a question had to be
answered affirmatively, there could be no denying that the persona relevant to
each stage of his creative evolution had continuously changed for the better,
for more radically extreme positions.
The persona was not him, no! But
it had developed at his expense and to a degree he scarcely imagined
possible. Certainly there were times
when he wanted to disown it, to turn away from and abandon it, like an
alienated husband about to divorce a petulant wife. Was he not, after all, a petty bourgeois, for
whom the comforts of the home were more important than the struggles of the
street? He could not deny that fact,
even though he was less than confident that he could escape from his persona
and return to a more relative style and content. He found it hard to believe that, with the
inevitable termination of his quasi-poetic writings in due course, he could
return to being a philosophical novelist and literary philosopher. Had he not said everything there was to be
said within that context? Besides,
wasn't being a philosophical novelist a waste of time these days, an
anachronistic grand-bourgeois approach to the novel in an age of
petty-bourgeois poetics?
No, philosophical novels weren't for him,
not now! His revolutionary urban
conditioning would never allow him to return to that level
again. Even the poetic novel was beneath
him, an early-stage petty-bourgeois art form more suited to the first-half of
the twentieth century than to its second.
Besides, he had never been a poetic artist but a philosopher and
philosophical artist turned pseudo-philosopher and, more recently, quasi-poet,
the latter still being a type of philosophical writer, a continuation of his
collectivizing tendencies from essayettes at the beginning to a novelette or,
rather, medium prose at the end, as a sort of climax. Whereas the artist made progress, over the generations,
by evolving from the novel to the poetic novelette and even, in a late
petty-bourgeois age, to the poetic short-story, the philosopher made progress
by evolving from essays and dialogues to philosophical short prose and the
philosophical novelette, attained to a petty-bourgeois status with the
abandonment of the older genres for the newer ones, used either collectively or
separately. Thus arose the extraordinary
paradox that whilst a philosophical novel was a grand-bourgeois approach to
literature, an approach more appropriate to a late grand-bourgeois age like the
mid-seventeenth century, a philosophical novelette was a petty-bourgeois
approach to philosophy, one more relevant to a late petty-bourgeois age like
the second-half of the twentieth century.
So the contemporary philosopher, or pseudo-philosopher, was effectively
a 'novelettist', just as the contemporary artist, or pseudo-artist, was a
short-story writer, both of them co-existent with the modern poet, a largely
metaphysical and/or experimental creator, the most representative of the age.
But James Riley - our mysterious subject of
intellectual inquiry - didn't exactly fit into any of these late-stage
petty-bourgeois patterns; he was neither a contemporary philosopher, artist,
nor poet, but a Western outsider, an Irishman of fundamentally catholic descent
writing on behalf of a future civilization and in terms which set him radically
apart from all those who fitted into contemporary Western civilization, terms
uniquely collectivized, as befitting his assumed Messianic status. He had always been something of an outsider
in any case, even where love and sex were concerned. Not for him to write philosophical
novelettes! His work had to be both
anachronistic and revolutionary at the same time, if it wasn't to be mistaken
for late petty-bourgeois philosophy.
Hence his retention of the aristocratic aphorism, the early
grand-bourgeois essayette, the late grand-bourgeois essay, and the bourgeois
dialogue in the formal composition of his pseudo-philosophical collectivized
literature, early petty-bourgeois short prose and late petty-bourgeois
medium/long prose usually bringing the volume to a modernistic climax. Only with his progression to a quasi-poetic
collectivized literature did he axe the aphoristic root, thereby symbolically setting
his work free from aristocratic moorings.
The other genres had stayed relatively in place, defying petty-bourgeois
convention.
As for the artists with their novels, he
knew he would never become one of them, since he preferred extremes, had an Irish
bias, one might say, for the absolute.
He would rather become a poet than return to that middle-of-the-road
genre more suited to moderate temperaments than his own. Was not the novel a passé
genre compared with film, that late petty-bourgeois/early proletarian successor
to fictional literature, as much a successor to that as early grand-bourgeois
plays had been its predecessor. Films
were the truly contemporary 'literature', an extension and transformation of fiction
co-existent with modern poetry. However,
film - except possibly when conceived in video terms - would not be suited to a
proletarian age in a genuinely transcendental civilization. It was an extreme relativity, not a relative
absolutism. It signified the abstract
climax to a fictional tradition. By
contrast, plays signified the concrete beginnings of a fictional tradition, as
in Shakespeare, an early grand-bourgeois extreme relativity following-on behind
philosophical absolutism, that truly aristocratic mode of intellectual
endeavour better suited to the ancient Greeks and Romans than to those fated to
develop relative civilization in the Christian West, which has always been
primarily a literary civilization, not so much given to philosophic or poetic
extremes as finding its golden mean in novel-writing, that quintessentially
bourgeois genre - analogous to painting - in between the extreme relativities
of plays and films respectively.
But if novels are passé,
plays were utterly obsolete and anachronistic by late-stage petty-bourgeois criteria
... as pertaining to the contemporary West, with particular reference to
America, the West's principal producer of films. Yet as contemporary Western civilization
remains relative, plays are tolerated and continue to be produced, even if
they're not particularly admired by the great majority of late
twentieth-century people, who are more than likely to favour films, the
antithetical equivalent of plays.
Indeed, if an antithetical equivalent of Shakespeare were to be named,
he could only be a great film producer and/or writer - someone, for example,
like Alfred Hitchcock.
But who would be the antithetical
equivalent (if one can speak of such a thing where absolute extremes are
concerned) to, say, Thales or Phythagoras or Heraclitus? Certainly no contemporary philosopher, even
if contemporary philosophy, in the strictly academic sense, is antithetical to
ancient philosophy ... to the extent that it entails a critique of language as
opposed to a critique of nature, and is therefore relatively artificial. No, the absolute antithesis to such ancient
philosophers would only be found in a transcendental civilization, a
necessarily poetic absolutism germane to the proletariat. Certainly, one could speak of certain
late-stage petty-bourgeois poets as being antithetical to later Greek
philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, who were less absolute or more relative,
as you prefer, in relation to the earliest philosophers. But only in a transcendental civilization
would the absolute antithesis to pagan absolutisms emerge, and it would
probably take an abstract anthological form, replacing the individual with the
collective, and thus contrasting the collectivized poetic with the
individualized philosophic, the essential with the apparent, the One with the
Many.
Yes, there poetic endeavour would attain to
its climax, transcending intellect. And
James Riley, the creator of a quasi-poetic collectivized literature, was
intimating of this transcendence on his own collective terms, interpreting life
and art for his future followers in order that they could be completely
confident in the correctness and inevitability of their creative
predilections. The modern Irish were
nothing if not poets. Even he had begun
his writing career as a poet of unrequited love, the noblest kind of love
poetry, he now mused, though he hadn't realized it at the time!
FOR TRUTH
The Leader
paced backwards and forwards in front of us, deeply immersed in reflection, and
I thought for a moment that he would take the seat offered him by one of our
comrades. But, to my surprise, he turned
away and, raising his eyes to survey us all, recommenced speaking, his voice
clear and firm, the channel of fresh inspiration from above. What puzzled him, he said, was how people had
come to equate Fascism and its Social Transcendentalist successor with the
Extreme Right. For, in reality,
theocratic Centrism (his use of the latter word, which he pronounced Centerism,
implied a markedly radical implication which contrasted sharply with the
conventional use of the term as applying to moderate democratic positions) was
no more extreme right than autocratic royalism had been extreme left or, for
that matter, extreme right.
As expected, there were plenty of smiles in
the room with this utterance, and even one or two muffled laughs or would-be
guffaws. Even I was tickled by it.
No, it was difficult to see, he proceeded,
how an extreme movement, one pertaining to the theocratic spectrum, could have
anything to do with either left- or right-wing designations, since they
applied, after all, to the democratic spectrum.
Probably, he went on, the application of the term 'extreme right' to
Fascism was simply in order to distinguish it from Communism as an extreme
left-wing ideology, which, incidentally, it was, rather than as a product of
logical reasoning.
Here more amusement broke loose, but he
quickly calmed it down by continuing with words to the effect that, objectively
considered, the Extreme Right began with the Cromwellian revolt against
autocratic royalism, resulting in a form of democratic dictatorship which in
turn led to a parliamentary system of government the essence of which was
division between the Right and the Left, Tories and Whigs, the one in part
stemming from the victorious roundheads, the other in part stemming from the
defeated cavaliers, additional bourgeois factors increasingly coming forward to
shift the balance of power from a kind of artisanal/feudal opposition to a
monopoly capitalist/liberal capitalist opposition, and from that to a small-time
capitalist/democratic socialist opposition, with successive evolutionary
transmutations from Whigs and Liberals to Fabians in more radically left-wing
alignments against a progressively less-extreme right-wing opposition. The culmination of this gradual shift from an
extreme right in Cromwellian dictatorship to an extreme left within a two-party
system was, the Leader assured us, the emergence in certain countries of a
communist system of one-party rule by the Extreme Left, more extreme by far
than the democratic socialists of countries like Britain and France, and
necessarily hostile to all such compromises between the Right and the
Left. So if the democratic spectrum
began with the extreme right-wing dictatorship of Cromwell, its culmination
could only be with the extreme left-wing dictatorship of Lenin, each
dictatorship leading, in due course, to democracy, the first to relative, or
bourgeois, democracy; the second to absolute, or proletarian, democracy - a
progression from liberal to social democracy along a spectrum which, coming
in-between autocratic and theocratic extremes, is the only one to which the
distinctions of left and right can reasonably be applied.
So any reference to Social
Transcendentalists as extreme right wing could only be subjective and
contingent, an expedience, the Leader assured us, on the part of democrats and
Marxists alike. In truth, we were
neither right nor left but above any such distinction, just as, prior to the
emergence of bourgeois parliamentarianism, the monarchy was beneath it, ruling
in an authoritarian manner on the principle, expressed or unexpressed, of
'divine right', a strictly non-sectarian rightness.
However, such 'divine right' was founded on
the galactic-world-order of central star (monarch), peripheral stars (peers),
and planets (populace); though the Galaxy, as the Leader had on occasion
pointed out to us, was far from being literally divine, that is to say, divine
in the sense of pure spirit, as germane to electron-electron attractions. On the contrary, it signified the
proton-proton reactions of pure soul, the central star no less than peripheral
ones, such theological abstractions as were subsequently made distinguishing
central from peripheral stars in terms of the Creator and the Devil, the latter
most especially relevant, so the Leader maintained, to an abstraction from the
sun, which is (or was) literally the root of all evil in the world, since the
closest star to it. Not that he made the
mistake of confounding theology with science, the abstracted Father with the
literal First Cause, the abstracted Satan with the Sun. Hell and Heaven remained, for him,
theological postulates, corresponding to cosmic realities - the nearest thing
to hell on earth being a raging fire, the nearest thing to heaven on earth
being a profoundly peaceful meditation experience. But if proton-proton reactions already
existed in space in the guise of stars, then it was the business of evolving
humanity to ensure that the cultivation of spirit went ahead on earth so that,
one day in the distant post-millennial future, electron-electron attractions
would arise from the ultimate life form, the new-brain collectivizations of the
Superbeings, and proceed towards other such transcendences in space, some of
which may well have been there for centuries or longer, presuming upon the
existence, elsewhere in the Universe, of more advanced planets than the earth -
planets, I mean, where the post-human millennium had been established long
before its eventual establishment here.
But, of course, such transcendences, our
Leader had informed us, would no more constitute the culmination of all
evolution than planets or small stars constituted its inception. They would simply amount to contributions of
pure spirit - spiritual globes - on route, as it were, to the distant
culmination of heavenly evolution in the ultimate spiritual globe ... of the
Omega Point, the sum-product of all convergence. The establishment of God as the Holy
Spirit, the ultimate globe of pure spirit, was seemingly too far into the
future for us on earth to have any knowledge about or intimation of when it
would literally come about. All we can
do as progressive theocrats ... is work towards our own fulfilment in
ever-increasing expansions of spirit, of greater awareness, bringing ourselves
nearer, by degrees, to the envisaged future goal of all evolution, the quality
of which would be ineffable from our point of view, the quantity of which ...
an unknown factor because beyond and above all quantification, not really
quantitative at all but ... absolutely qualitative in its noumenal perfection.
Ah yes, I came back from these divine
reflections with a near-beatific smile on my face for the man or, rather,
divinity who had taught us all this, who was the soul of our party, the guiding
spirit of our movement! There he stood
before us, nodding his head at the amused response which his latest wisdom had
engendered among his faithful followers, my comrades in arms, despisers of democracy
in all its phases. He was the arch-despiser
of democracy, for whom the concept of mass political sovereignty was but a
passing phenomenon which would soon be entirely redundant, like, for that
matter, public ownership of the means of production, its economic concomitant. He represented political sovereignty for us,
his followers, and we were pledged to obey him, this embodiment of the Holy
Spirit, this manifestation of the Second Coming, whose word was Truth. Superior in wisdom and insight to both Hitler
and Mussolini, his crudely theocratic predecessors, his word was Law and we,
drawn to the Truth, could not but be eager to implement it, to carry out such
instructions as he gave us. Not for us
to impose our will upon him, as if he were merely a representative of our
democratic rights and we alone, as people, were politically sovereign! He led us and we were only too willing to
follow, knowing ourselves to be honoured in this way, to work for the ultimate
victory of theocracy over democracy, in order that real progress towards a
post-human millennium could be achieved, thanks to our efforts.
Yes, no less than the other comrades
gathered round the Leader today, I was eager to serve evolutionary progress by
carrying out such instructions or tasks as were received from 'On High'. Our conviction of absolute rightness gave a
certain exuberance and even ruthlessness to our dealings with enemies of
theocratic enlightenment, be they bourgeois or proletarian, moderate left or
extreme left, moderate right or extreme right.
Political salvation resided in the Leader, and the Way to ultimate
salvation from the flesh resided in our following his instructions to the
letter. We were proud of what we had
already achieved in this respect and were convinced that, no matter how many
obstacles lay in the way of Truth and Progress, we would be capable of
overcoming them. And the Leader, sensing
as much, imparted to us his confidence in us as servants of the Truth. Such Truth, as he had just reminded us, had
nothing to do with left or right, but solely with God. Soon even people's democracy would be
consigned to the rubbish bin of history, and extreme left-wingers along with
it. Salvation!
All
Hail the Saviour,
May His
Will be Done,
In Kingdom
Come,
This day
and evermore.
Amen!
LEADER'S TRANSCENDENTALISM
"Of
course, the theocratic spectrum is more complex than I have hitherto let
on," I said, turning to party comrades 7 and 22, as we awaited the moment
to proceed along the tunnel and climb onto the vast rostrum that awaited me in
the stadium tonight, "since there is a lacuna in it between autocratic
Roman Catholicism and the inception of democratic Protestantism. If it began in the former, then the emergence
of the latter signified a subdivision of the spectrum, a kind of parallel
development to it which, in countries where Protestantism caught on, pushed the
Catholic spectrum into a subordinate position, even if, in the relativity of
things within an atomic framework, it was permitted or able to continue. So from approximately a late-stage
grand-bourgeois age to an early-stage petty-bourgeois one, from the
late-seventeenth to the early-twentieth century, Catholicism survived as the
main, or absolute, manifestation of the theocratic spectrum, albeit in a
subordinate capacity to this relative manifestation of theocracy which, as
Protestantism, continued to dominate the age, being the ideological
justification behind democracy."
As both party comrades appeared to be
engrossed in what I was saying, I continued, following a brief glance at my
digital watch: "Thus if the main theocratic spectrum is imagined as
beginning in blue, it became grey during the age of democratic hegemony, when
the relative heresy of Protestantism dominated the West with its pink spectrum. So the subdivision, running parallel to the
main theocratic spectrum, is garishly dominant while the age of democracy holds
sway. But then, as if through
Providential intervention, a new age suddenly erupts, what I have elsewhere
called a late-stage petty-bourgeois age, and it is fundamentally hostile to
democracy because more absolute in character, time having brought evolution
closer to a proletarian age. Now
suddenly the main part of the top spectrum comes alive again with the emergence
of Fascism, giving it a new look in a navy-blue/black combination, the
antithetical equivalent to the royal blue, so to speak, of Roman
Catholicism. No matter if Fascism was
eventually defeated by democracy, its emergence threatened the democratic
status quo and it went on to defeat certain of the democracies during the
high-point of its ascendancy. At last,
after centuries of subordinate status, the main part of the top spectrum had
come to life again and, in the guise of Fascism, waged war with the middle spectrum,
including the communist tail-end of it.
For even the heretical manifestation of the theocratic spectrum in pink
Protestantism is subject to supersession, with the emergence of a late-stage
petty-bourgeois age, by a red Marxist-Leninist part, the theology applicable to
people's democracy, which extends this heretical spectrum towards absolute
criteria while yet opposing its relative predecessor. As surely as Catholicism led to Fascism,
Protestantism led to Communism, whilst autocratic royalism continued to fade
and wither into military dictatorships."
I could tell, as I glanced at my watch
anew, that these two comrades were all ears for such information, which was
grist to their Social Transcendentalist mill.
One of them appeared to be on the point of speaking, but I cut any
prospect of that out by adding: "Yet if Fascism leads, via
Neo-Catholicism, to Social Transcendentalism, as germane to an absolute
theocracy, then Communism most certainly doesn't lead to anything else, since
it signifies the tail-end of that heretical spectrum in the furthermost reach
of humanism, devoid of any concerns with an aspiration towards the Holy Spirit,
Protestant materialism pushed to its ultimate conclusion in communist
atheism. Thus, on the middle spectrum, a
shift from relative to absolute democracy, the inevitable outcome of the
Christian notion of the equality of all souls, an attempt to establish a more
equal society, with sovereignty alone vested in the proletariat, who are more
equal to one another than the people of a relative democracy, divisible between
bourgeois and proletarian elements. Such
is life on the tail-end of the middle spectrum, which owes its materialist
integrity to the tail-end of the heretical subdivision of the theocratic
spectrum in Communism, a necessarily false world religion, being but an
expansion of the Protestant faith.
However, no such heresy prevails here, since we're most decidedly on the
true part of the top spectrum, no longer as Catholics but as absolute
theocrats, idealists with a Social Transcendentalist faith, and harbingers of
the True World Religion. Here political
sovereignty is vested in the true Second Coming, who leads from above, dragging
the masses after him, bringing them closer to divinity, inspiring them with his
teachings, goading them toward higher things, always assisted by his trusted
followers, who form an elite of faithful men, serving his Truth in order that
the masses may be ennobled and improved in the course of time. Only democrats serve the people. They are the people's representatives, for
the people are politically sovereign.
Here, however, party comrades serve me, as the embodiment of Truth, and
I lead the people as sovereign, the antithesis to autocratic rulers, an
aspiration towards the Holy Spirit, not a stemming from the Creator, a
spiritual leadership as opposed to a sensual rule. And those who serve me well will be
rewarded!"
Party comrades 7 and 22 smiled now, and I
felt obliged to consult my digital watch again in order to ensure a prompt
appearance at the appointed time. I was
in a speaking mood and eager to get out of this room and along the tunnel
leading, via the processional stairs that would be flanked by rows of my
uniformed followers, to the rostrum, from which I would calmly survey the
seething mass of people in the stadium below, their heads bathed in the myriad
neon lights which issued from the roofs of the surrounding stands, a veritable
cathedral of light in which the whole stadium became an appropriate setting for
such spiritual illumination as I would generously bestow upon the
near-hypnotized multitude, whose hunger and thirst for spiritual
nourishment.... To be sure, I had studied National Socialist precedent
carefully and knew just what to do, in this receptive atmosphere, to renew and
strengthen their faith! Already the music, processions, and banners would be
having an effect, softening them up, lifting them beyond the narrow confines of
their individual selves, making them drunk on the mass - the nearest
approximation on earth to the indivisible unity of transcendent spirit, the
goal of evolutionary striving.
Yes, I loved the crowd and they loved it
too, and loved their Leader and his closest followers and all the banners
fluttering in the wind, the black abstract emblem of the Second Coming on a
white ground, symbolic, in its Y-like abstraction, its inverted CND-like
uprightness, not only of the Holy Spirit, but of Centrist trusteeship of the
means of production for the development and spread of Truth. Social Transcendentalism was by no means
socialist, in terms of public ownership of the means of production, as relative
to a democracy, though most especially a people's democracy, where the
proletariat were sovereign and consequently owned the means of production
through the State, the organized bureaucracy of the people. Not the ownership of the means of production
by the people for the people, but the ownership or, rather, trusteeship of
those means by the Centre for the Truth, the development and spread of the True
World Religion, which could only be to the lasting advantage of what was best in
the people - namely their spirit. Social
Transcendentalism was certainly beyond Socialism, not a phenomenon of the
middle spectrum, and therefore above criteria applying to democracy. If it was social, or socialistic, it was in
terms of the way it sought to treat people fairly, using such economic wealth
as industry produced in the interests of evolutionary progress, which implied a
decent standard of living for the people in order that they would be able to
take their spiritual aspirations seriously.
There could be no question, however, of
Social Transcendentalism striving to serve the people for the sake of people's
service, as if they were politically sovereign and should consequently be
served on their own account, divorced from a truly religious perspective or
objective. On the contrary, Social
Transcendentalism served the advancement of Truth, and that demanded that the
people be led towards a better future, towards the penultimate heaven of the
post-human millennium as a prelude to the ultimate heaven ... of the
post-millennial Beyond. Truth had no
interest in the people for themselves, only in their spiritual potential. For that alone pertained to the theocratic
spectrum. That alone would liberate them
from the flesh!
Suddenly a hand on my shoulder startled me
out of my reflections and reminded me of the body. I glanced down at my wrist and saw that it
was time to move. Party comrades 7 and
22 were on their feet and already heading towards the door that led through the
tunnel into the stadium. I smiled my
appreciation of this fact, now that the moment had at last arrived, and led the
way out of the room.
A TRUE EXTREMISM
Leader's transcendentalism
is really more the antithesis of ruler's royalism than its antithetical
equivalent, which would have to pertain, by contrast, to the same spectrum,
namely the autocratic one. Yes, Comrade
5, the nearest one gets to an antithetical equivalent of ruler's royalism is
with a military dictatorship, where sovereignty is vested in the reigning
general or colonel or even, occasionally, officers of inferior rank, and a
situation may arise whereby the masses serve an elite ... in a kind of submission
to Nietzschean criteria. That's right,
Comrade 10. Nietzsche's philosophy was
partly conceived against the backdrop, as it were, of a military dictatorship,
namely Bismarck's, and consequently tends to uphold a kind of neo-royalist
position of aristocratic radicalism, with the masses conceived as but means to
the nurture and development of the higher men, be they Supermen or whatever.
I agree, Comrade 23, there is much more
than the influence of a military dictatorship to Nietzsche's philosophy. But, even so, that cannot be discounted! Anyway, an antithetical equivalent to ruler's
royalism will tend to place the interests of a ruling elite above those of
everybody else, just as the interests of the king and his nobles took
precedence over the populace in the age of feudal autocracy. Monarchs rule in their own interests....
Well, the antithesis to a ruler is a leader, as pertinent to a fascist or a
centrist society, and he exists on the third, or theocratic, spectrum, the
spectrum centred on the Holy Ghost rather than, like the autocratic one, on the
Father. He leads the people in their
spiritual interests.
No, Comrade 4, he doesn't serve or
represent the people, like a people's representative on the spectrum in-between
autocratic and theocratic extremes, which pertains to democracy, and hence to
representative's parliamentarianism. He
serves only Truth, and this requires that he leads the people from the
Centre. They do not exist for his own
aggrandizement or material enrichment, as in a royalist or neo-royalist
society. On the contrary, they exist to
be improved, and this is the antithesis of royalist autocracy - an antithesis
only being possible between the first and third spectra, as between the Father
and the Holy Spirit. As for Christ, He
pertains, in His humanism, to the democratic spectrum, the tail-end of which
signifies a more absolute people's sovereignty in the guise of Communism, the
ideology of the Antichrist. By contrast,
the continuation of the true part of the theocratic spectrum from Roman
Catholicism and Fascism leads to the Second Coming, and thus to the ideology of
the True World Messiah, as appertaining to Social Transcendentalism.
Yes, Comrade 27, such an extreme
ideological position entails an anti-tribal perspective, since there is no
contiguity between the first and third spectra, and tribalists - be they Celts,
Bantus, Nagas, Bedouin, Gypsies, or whatever - pertain to the first.
Yes, Comrade 92. Tribalists, nationalists, and
transcendentalists. No connection
between the first and the third, and so, wherever the third emerges, tribalists
are beneath the pale. Only a theocratic
society can be truly closed in relation to what is beneath the pale. A communist society has no anti-tribal policy
because Communism is only extreme in relation to the moderate part of the
second spectrum, an extreme middle-of-the-road ideology rather than an extreme
closed-society perspective, since its allegiance to the democratic spectrum
implies contiguity with the bottom one, if from an extreme point of view.
You're right, Comrade 63, a communist
society is more closed at the top, with regard to evolutionary progress towards
the post-human millennium - Lenin's 'No God-building, comrades!' comes to mind
here - than at the bottom, whereas Fascism and its ideological successor,
Social Transcendentalism, is closed at the bottom, to first and second spectra
influences, but virtually infinitely open at the top ... with a perspective
stretching, via the post-human millennium, all the way to Heaven. Communism is closed to aspirations towards
the Holy Spirit, being but the furthest reach of democratic humanism. It opens out to democracy and capitalism, if
on a negative basis, as an ideological opposition to democratic precedent in
the world at large - Communism against Protestantism (Marxism against
Calvinism). It liquidates bourgeois
exploiters, but not tribalists.
That's right, Comrade 14, it culminates in
a dead-end of proletarian atheism, an extension of the Protestant heresy of
Christian relativity, a more extreme relativity, you might say. Whereas we Social Transcendentalists are
opposed, like our fascist precursors, to everything relative, be it Protestant
or Communist. And opposed, moreover, to
absolutism on the autocratic spectrum, not to mention to earlier absolutist
manifestations of our own. It would be
ironical for Social Transcendentalism to come to power solely through
democratic means when it's a theocratic ideology and therefore not directly
connected with the democratic process.
In fact, a veritable contradiction in terms!
Yes, Comrade 28, Mussolini's ascension to
the dictatorial leadership of the Italian people was more theocratic than
Hitler's rise to power over the Germans, Hitler being obliged to partly rely on
democratic methods - a not-altogether surprising fact, given the Protestant,
democratic integrity of most North Germans!
Had he been seeking power in a more ideologically homogeneous state,
like Italy, he might not have had to compromise with the democratic process to
anything like the same extent. His
earlier, failed putsch in Bavaria was certainly not as illogical or irrelevant
as might at first appear, bearing in mind the Catholic theocratic integrity of
the South. Nazism was essentially a
South German movement in any case, and Hitler a Catholic of Austrian descent.
No, Comrade 41, the traditional Provisional
Sinn Fein attitude of a ballot paper in one hand and an armalite in the other
strikes me as having been significant of a compromise with the majority
democratic population of Northern Ireland.
The Social Transcendentalist attitude in the South of Ireland would have
to be more representatively theocratic, in my opinion. After all, how can the people vote to
transfer political sovereignty to a Social Transcendentalist leader when the
voting process is all about electing representatives to serve on their
behalf? Is it likely that
democratically-minded people would vote for the removal of their sovereignty?
Ah, as you say, Comrade 35! But those who are genuinely democratic would
wish to retain sovereignty for themselves.
Only a people who were essentially theocratic would be prepared to use
the democratic system to further theocratic interests, and thus transcend
democracy! Well, none of you need me to
remind you of the ethnic essence of the majority population of Southern
Ireland. Perhaps, after all, the
paradoxical will come to pass and, thanks to considerable Church backing and
pressure, theocracy will replace democracy from within rather than without ...
via a putsch or violent revolution.
Ideally one would prefer not to have to compromise with the democratic
process, but in a state where there are over 100,000 guaranteed democrats, not
to mention a number of Catholic dupes of the British system as well.... Or,
alternatively, in a state which is overwhelmingly theocratic ...
Yes, maybe you're right, Comrade 16! As long as we know what's best for the
majority population of Eire, the minority can go to hell. Or most probably will be driven there in deference
to Last Judgement criteria! Yes, for he
who corresponds to a Second Coming, the leader of Social Transcendentalism,
does not intend to save hard-line democrats, but to damn them. He knows his own, and they are forever
theocratic. Saved!
A PERMANENT CROSS
He
remembered his doctor looking at him in sceptical surprise and saying:
"Why, you're not a nutcase! You've
got musical taste and culture and ...!"
Michael had discussed classical music with
his doctor on a previous occasion, but had gone along to the surgery, this
time, for some anti-depressants in order to combat a depression the doctor knew
all about, and the latter had kindly scribbled out a prescription for tryptizol
or dothiepin or some such soothing drug.
But he hadn't been encouraged to pay a visit to a specialist at the
nearest mental hospital. Indeed, he had
been dissuaded from pursuing a more intensive course of treatment, though, god
knows, he knew that something more was needed than recourse to mild
anti-depressants! In fact, he had long
been of the opinion that his depression was due to overlong confinement in an
urban environment, the city he inhabited more as a foreigner blown in from the
provinces than as a genuine native, an outsider as opposed to an insider, and a
fundamentally Catholic one at that! The
doctor was clearly an insider, a native Londoner sceptical of depressions
caused by environmental incompatibility, doubtless on account of his own
environmental compatibility. A kind of
sophisticated proletarian was how he saw his doctor - jolly, rotund, prone to
self-inflected accidents, hooked on valium, which he swallowed more,
apparently, to keep himself calm than to ease depression; though if he had one
it was evidently attributable to some other source than environment - possibly
matrimonial or hereditary.
But whilst, as a patient, Michael was of
the opinion that environment was chiefly responsible for his depression,
he had never claimed that it was solely responsible. Simply the root cause that led to certain
effects conducive to depression. Like,
for instance, being alone in one's room most of the time because the outside
world was too obnoxious to encourage socializing and, in any case, appeared
bereft of the types of people who would have appealed to one's sense of friendship,
its inhabitants being either mostly of the simple or yobbish proletarian
varieties, or of the stand-offish and unintelligible immigrant varieties, with
but a scattering of petty bourgeoisie and bohemian intellectuals thrown-in for
good measure. And being alone of course
meant that one wasn't talking or copulating, two things which, providing they
were indulged in regularly enough, served to release pent-up tensions and keep
one relatively free from depression.
Yet if the environment was a cause of these
effects, which stood like a thistle on a jaded stalk, it was also a direct
contributory factor to his depression, not only in the sense that it was too
artificial and built-up for his liking, or too squalid and ugly, too smelly and
polluted, but, worse still, too noisy and thus a constant source of tension -
tension which entered his head in the form of noise and stayed there, he having
no social or sexual way of releasing it again.
So he was in a kind of tension trap, with noise - in the extremely
disagreeable forms of dog-barkings, worker-hammerings, door-slammings,
pop-screechings, kid-shoutings, phone-ringings, car-hummings, radio- and/or
TV-blarings, etc. - going into his head, but no noise - in the more agreeable
forms of speaking, grunting, laughing, singing, etc. - coming out of it. All one-way traffic, so to speak. And coupled to this, a lack of deep steady
sleep, in part attributable to increased tension and intellectuality within a
highly artificial environment, in part doubtless deriving from his solitary and
sordid lot, a lot compounded by the poverty of a social security allowance
which, to say the least, further inhibited socializing, there being relatively
few contexts where one could meet people free-of-charge, and still fewer women
who would want to meet anyone who lacked the means to date them regularly,
particularly someone whose sartorial appearance left something to be desired on
account of his poverty!
No, Michael knew well enough that females
were highly appearance-conscious, linking a smart exterior with financial
affluence and an unsmart one with a want of financial solvency, thoroughly
worldly in their estimations of men, a consequence, no doubt, of their
fundamentally materialistic natures, which induced them to attach greater
importance to externals than to internals, to the flesh than to the spirit, to
appearances than to essences. Not all
women of course, but still too many of them too much of the time! And particularly within an open-society
context, and one, moreover, that existed in a traditionally materialistic
country like Britain, where appearances counted for more than essences on
account, in all probability, of the practical nature of the average
Anglo-Saxon.
Well, Michael had not gone along to the
doctor in order to lecture him on ethnic characteristics or to give him an
unprecedentedly bold lesson in free speech, but simply to acquire some
anti-depressants which, from previous experience, he knew would be of minimal
avail against the depression that was a permanent aspect of his life and had
more than a few cogent causes, not least of all the isolation of an intelligent
Irishman in a major English city! He
knew, too, that his writings would never be accepted by the English, since too
honest and radical for their middle-of-the-road, bourgeois taste and lack of
understanding of anything that transcended the literary mask, like his
philosophical collectivized writings and poetic autobiographical writings, not
to mention his revolutionary politico-religious ones. The English were always somehow false and
lying, he, a true son of Ireland, genuine and truthful. They had less capacity, in their pragmatic
natures, to bear the cross of authentic spiritual striving, sold out too
readily to material gain and bourgeois comforts, signified the oppression of
higher idealism, a neutron- if not proton-biased opposition to electron
striving, an enslavement to atomic determinism rather than an aspiration towards
spiritual freedom. Very few of them ever
had any desire to abandon the World, or worldly lifestyles, in order to aspire
towards heavenly redemption. That was
why there had to be a clash between the worldly and the anti-worldly, though
not, as yet, the Otherworldly. And he
hoped that his country would be free to champion the Otherworldly in due
course, as it had traditionally done on somewhat adulterated Catholic terms,
but had yet to do on the purer terms of a Social Transcendental Centre, so much
above the wretched natural determinism of the United Kingdom - indeed, its very
opposite!
Ah, Michael had not allowed his depression
to prevent him from working on his own, necessarily superior terms - terms
which, through various literary or anti-literary or poetic stages, had brought
him to Truth while the majority of British writers continued to wallow in
illusions and lies, superficiality and dirt, after their commercial
fashions! Unlike them, he had never
'kissed the bourgeois' arse', to paraphrase Goebbels, but gone his own way, the
way of Truth. He had quite admired their
better authors, men like Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, Anthony
Burgess and Lawrence Durrell, but had never identified with them, preferring to
regard most of his work as a continuation beyond Joyce and Beckett, at least
technically ... with regard to a developing absolutism in poetic truth. He could no longer take the novel genre
seriously, since he equated it with bourgeois limitations both thematically and
technically. A democratic art-form,
lacking the inspiration of true genius as much on account of its pedantic
technical considerations as of its restricted subject-matter.
For true genius of expression demands the
maximum concern with content and the minimum concern with style or
grammar. It cannot emerge if there is a
lack of inspiration on account of one's being bound to technicalities which
necessarily impede the flow as well as inhibit the development of Truth. Great insights, the product of inspiration,
mostly come 'on the wing', not when one is at rest or bogged down in
stultifying pedantic considerations! The
more you gain on the grammatical roundabout, the less you can have on the
conceptual swings. The more positive
truth you desire, the less concern you must give to technicalities, which
merely conform, after all, to the proton and/or neutron side of writing, its
materialistic as opposed to spiritualistic, or electron, side. The British make for good novelists but, contrary
to literary myth, relatively poor poets, since they are never sufficiently free
from technical considerations to soar to the heights of imaginative
freedom. Having Irish blood in their
veins, Burgess and Durrell are less literary than poetic and produce better or,
at any rate, more poetic novels in consequence.
James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are more poetic again, and it's unlikely
that any major Irish writer could ever be less than highly poetic, granted a
free-electron predilection. He had seen
the age of English writing superseded, in Britain, by the age of Irish-British
writing, and this despite the literary excellence of novelists like John Fowles
and Kingsley Amis. He soon hoped to see
the age of Irish writing in Britain, or of Irish-born writers at work in
England, supersede the latter, a trend which would conform to the progress of
evolution towards a more genuinely poetic, and hence free-electron, climate -
one which should culminate in Ireland itself, after that country had been
upgraded to a radically theocratic status under Social Transcendentalism,
making for a truly free-electron society in which only poets, and poetry of the
highest abstract order, would be published, compliments of a Centrist
patronage, whether under his guidance or not ... remained to be seen. For despite his poetic leanings, he was
primarily dedicated to ideological progress and hoped, one day, to play a part
in the peaceful transformation of Eire from a Roman Catholic Republic into a
Social Transcendental Centre.
But a revolutionary leader had to write,
and Michael had written as much as anyone, Lenin included, on subjects and in a
way that Lenin would never have contemplated, being too much the politician for
anything so theocratic as poetry. A
Social Transcendentalist leader was an altogether different proposition from a
Bolshevik or a Communist one, closer, in essence, to Hitler and to fascist
leaders generally - men who scorned mere politics and literary
philistinism. Michael was also a writer
in the higher sense, not just a political or revolutionary propagandist. Probably more a writer, if the truth were
known, than a revolutionary. A writer
who imagined himself a revolutionary rather than a revolutionary who also dabbled,
à la Trotsky, in writing.
A kind of literary schizophrenia, an illness probably shared by such
illustrious writers as Gide and Camus, Malraux and Sartre, Koestler and Mailer,
who were expected and inclined to be political but were never quite sure to
what extent or exactly where the demarcation line between literature and politics
actually stood. Was it perhaps a failing
of a certain type of writer that he imagined himself capable of major
participation in revolutionary politics?
Or a madness? That political
participation was a writer's dream, the grass being greener the other side of
the professional fence, every profession having a kind of connection with some
other, to which one was more than likely to be drawn? So after a writer, a fascist or communist
dictator? Was that the only way one
could, as it were, progress? He had
often thought so, and was still of the opinion that a revolutionary dictator
was more likely to come from the intellectual class, particularly on its
literary side, than from any other.
Certainly a Social Transcendentalist would have to be highly literate,
if his sovereignty as embodied Holy Spirit was to be justified. No mere labourer or philistine
politician! Michael had no reason to
doubt his sanity on that account, even if he wasn't altogether
sure that he was sane to imagine himself a potential dictator, when he had
spent so much time scribbling literary or poetic truth!
But was Social Transcendentalism merely a
figment of his imagination, a mere literary game? He didn't think so, couldn't bring himself to
believe that he was merely concocting imaginary worlds for literary
appreciation. He had gone too far and in
too much depth and earnestness to be a mere purveyor of political
fictions. He knew that what he stood for
was the Truth, and that the Truth would have to prevail in the world in future
if it was to be redeemed. He was no fool
to doubt the authenticity of his Truth.
But whether or not he would actually implement it ... time alone would
tell. At least he didn't feel that he
was in need of a state psychiatrist on account of his uncertainty in this
matter, though his mental health might well have profited from some psychiatric
attention. The depression was still
there, and if it was a Cross he had to bear on account of his solitary and
celibate lifestyle, then so be it!
Writers were more often than not depressive, if not manic, in any case,
since too much alone. It was a
professional hazard and drawback, not something of which to be cured if one
wished to continue in one's chosen tracks, since writing could only be done in
solitude or, at any rate, without professional assistance from, say, a
colleague. Most serious writers sooner
or later took to drink as an antidote to depression on a kind of intermittent
or temporary basis. Also tobacco of
course, another sensual indulgence to counter the enforced asceticism of
solitary intellectual activity, to sensualize the brain, soak it, drag it down
from its too tense and rarefied heights, if only to watch the TV or listen to
discs.
Such it was for him, and he didn't think
himself altogether unique in this respect, even if there were writers - authors
really - who fared better on account of their wealth and social life, always a
friend or wife around with whom to talk, not really alone all that much, too
bourgeois to want the heights. But
madness, mental illness, depression, delirium - so prevalent these days, and
not simply among writers and would-be revolutionaries, either! He considered himself essentially sane,
despite his depression. But there were
others who had regular need of psychiatric attention, were, in fact, more often
mentally ill than physically ill. He had
thought about this negatively, in regard to his own problem in the past, but
now he was beginning to see it in a positive light. After all, why had psychology and psychiatry
taken so long to materialize? Why was it
only this century that they really came into their own, so to speak, as
respectable medical professions? Surely
the answer to these questions had to be: because it was only in the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that, in certain parts of the
world and in certain individuals, the human psyche had become sufficiently
evolved to permit of a looking back and down on the subconscious from the
vantage-point of the ego and/or superconscious - in short, because until then
humanity had been insufficiently advanced to be either capable of or
particularly interested in any such psychic scrutiny.
Well, what applies to the subconscious may
well apply to the brain in general and to mental illness in particular, so that
the growth of interest in the former and increasing prevalence of the latter
were but reflections of the ongoing sophistication of the age, its coming to
maturity on terms that stressed the mental at the expense of the physical, the
brain at the expense of the body. He had
little doubt that, paradoxically, the expansion of mental illness was a symptom
of evolutionary progress; for if bodily illness had hitherto been the human
norm, might we not be approaching a time when it would be the exception and, by
contrast, only mental illness be the human norm - a humanity grown beyond the
merely physical and become ever-more deeply engrossed in the mental and
spiritual, a humanity which had passed from the body to the mind?
Ah, there were sufficient grounds in this
hypothesis for optimism about the future, for seeing in mental illness not a
sign of decay and pessimism, but, on the contrary, of growth and optimism
concerning the evolution of mankind away from the body and ever deeper into the
mind. Could it be, he wondered, that a
day would come when all or most physical illnesses would be attributed to
mental causes, to psychosomatic origins?
Would humanity reach such a pitch of evolutionary sophistication that doctors
and surgeons would become redundant, their dedication to physical illness no
longer necessary, the psychologists and psychiatrists ruling an absolutist
roost, and so attending to the prevalent and, in a sense, only morally
respectable types of illness of that age?
Michael wasn't entirely prepared to rule
out such a possibility. For it seemed to
him that psychology and psychiatry were complementary aspects of a growth
industry, the spiritualistic and materialistic sides, as it were, of the
diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, and that the ratio of mental to
physical illness could only change in the course of time, the former developing
at the expense of the latter, in accordance with the evolutionary requirements
of a more absolutist age, an age when the representative medical practitioners
would be psychologists and psychiatrists, in contrast to the norms of an open
society where, to all appearances, doctors and surgeons constituted the medical
norm, and to such an extent, in certain countries, that their psychic
counterparts were still regarded with if not contempt then, at any rate, deep
suspicion, as if their vocations were somehow irrelevant to the established
order, beyond or outside the pale of representative medical practice, a kind of
emerging poetic threat to a novelistic status quo, not to be taken too
seriously, but scarcely to be underestimated, either!
Perhaps this would apply more in
traditionally democratic than in traditionally theocratic societies, where the
materialistic was always so much more the accepted norm? Certainly a closed society derived from the
latter kinds of societies would reverse this situation or, at any rate, expand
the psychic side, and maybe to a point where psychologists and psychiatrists
would greatly preponderate, with but a minimum quantity of bodily doctors to
deal, in the main, with accidents and emergency cases, they being regarded as a
left-over from bourgeois society, corresponding, in their reformed status, to
the 'Social', and hence inferior, side of Social Transcendentalism, the ideological
integrity of a truly theocratic closed society, necessarily placing maximum
emphasis on the noun. Probably by then
only mental illnesses, he reasoned, would be socially respectable, contrary to
the current open-society situation, which inclines to regard mental illness
from a bodily, materialistic point of view, and thus to apply such derogatory
expressions as 'nutcase', 'fruitcake', and 'lune' to those so afflicted. Just as his doctor had done with regard to himself,
albeit on the assumption that he couldn't possibly be one, since stable and
healthy and ... interested in serious music!
Well, at the time, Michael had been almost
relieved to hear this, though he knew that his depression was a kind of mental
illness and was more serious than perhaps the doctor, with his limited
knowledge of such things, had supposed.
Yet now, when he reflected on his situation from a higher vantage-point,
he was almost disappointed in the doctor for not having credited him with more
sophistication and thereby acknowledged his superior afflicted status. Indeed, now he was almost proud to be in some
degree mentally ill and thus one of the elect of suffering, no mere physical
democrat but a psychical theocrat, as he had long conceived of himself. He might not be a 'nutcase' in any flagrantly
exhibitionist or delirious or violent or deranged or abusive or
non-communicative sense, but at least he was prone to mental rather than simply
physical ill-health, if on a comparatively low-key and tolerable basis. This was, he supposed, the price one paid for
one's genius as a writer/thinker, the degree of sophistication and spiritual
insight to which he had attained being impossible without a commensurate degree
of physical solitariness and social simplicity.
Yet it was also a mark of his inherent
sophistication, his status as one of the spiritual elect for whom mere bodily
ill-health would have been demeaning, a kind of left-wing affliction more
suited, he supposed, to a person of anti-natural inclination and/or
temperament. If he was not mad in any
seriously permanent sense, he was yet capable of mental ill-health and not
simply on an intermittent basis either!
It was his shadow self, the price he paid for the light of his truth. Better of course to be mentally well than
mentally sick; but if one had to be ill, better to be mentally sick than
physically sick. He was part of a long
tradition of great minds whose common lot had been mental ill-health. Like Nietzsche, Strindberg, Baudelaire,
Hermann Hesse, Ezra Pound, and Wilhelm Reich, Michael Somers would carry his
cross until the end - the end, in his case, of the World.
MORE PLASTIC
There was
too much wooden furniture in his room for Keith Toland's liking these days, now
that he was becoming increasingly enamoured of plastic, which, in contrast to
wood, he equated with a supernatural bias.
He found himself day-dreaming, on occasion, of a room in which all the
furniture was made of plastic or, at any rate, some kind of synthetic material
transcending nature. His room was largely
bourgeois, he thought, and lagged behind his ideological development. Ideally, he would have preferred to bring it
into line with his current tastes or, better still, move into an unfurnished
flat which he would then proceed to furnish from scratch ... in the most
supernatural fashion - plastic everywhere.
The room he rented was fully-furnished, no possibility of the Licensor
allowing its wooden contents to be thrown out.
Besides, he knew that, in his current financial position, he couldn't
afford to buy the sort of furniture he had in mind. It was just a pleasant dream, a suggestion of
what he would do if given half the chance.
But there were small things that he had been able
to afford, and they were invariably made of plastic - his second-hand portable
television, for example. Not a bad
little set, though monochromatic unfortunately, which he associated with an
anti-natural and probably bourgeois constitution. Still, a black plastic exterior was
something, better, at any rate, than a wooden one! Then there was his hairdryer, as plastic as
his stereo headphones and, latest purchase of all, headphone radio. There was a plastic wallet, a plastic comb,
pen, typewriter, zipper jacket, pair of moccasins, rubbish bin, shaver, and
watch - this latter a black digital. He
ate lunch off a plastic platter with plastic cutlery, and drank milk from a
plastic beaker. His record-player had a
predominantly plastic exterior and his LPs were of course vinyl, which is a
strong plastic-. They were beginning to
shame him, however. He wondered whether
there wasn't something inherently liberal if not conservative about records as
opposed to cassettes, which, on account of their more idealistic constitution,
he supposed to have a comparatively radical right-wing essence. Records were played horizontally, whereas
cassettes usually slotted vertically, if sideways-on, into the cassette deck,
symptomatic of a masculine bias, he thought.
Probably he would gravitate from records to cassettes, if given the
opportunity. He had enough records
anyway, and was fast running out of space.
Cassettes were smaller and ... more plastic; they didn't come in
cardboard covers.
For the time being, however, Keith was
resigned to his records, record-player, and headphones. He preferred listening to music through
headphones anyway, and this had led him to the purchase of a headphone radio
set, which he considered to be a marked evolutionary improvement on his old
radio, even though it was also of plastic appearance. Probably he would get himself a pair of
headphones for his television before long, just to complete things and bring an
absolutism to bear on each of his listening habits. Instead of coming at one from outside the
head, as appearance, sound seemed to come at one from inside it, as essence,
and this constituted, to him, a far more theocratic way of listening-in,
suitable for an ongoing transcendental age.
With people living in ever-closer proximity to one another in large
residential conglomerates, it was imperative to minimize noise and thus
cultivate a headphone exclusivity.
Probably a time would come when listening to music or speech without
headphones would, in any case, be unlawful.
At present, with walls and houses fairly materialistic, it wasn't
particularly necessary to put what might be called 'relativistic listening'
under ban. Such a ban would be
irrelevant, in any case, to an open society.
But with the future development of less materialistic and more
transcendental types of accommodation, with comparatively thin walls, it
followed that 'absolutist listening' would become obligatory, in order to
minimize neighbour disturbances and, more importantly, encourage an
increasingly theocratic lifestyle, suitable to a closed society. A headphone absolutism would then be the rule
rather than, as at present, the exception.
Keith knew from experience of certain
neighbours, past and present, in his own lodgings that there were more than a
few noise fools still at large. Time
would eventually catch-up with them, as with everyone. And as if this thought prompted it, he
glanced down at his digital watch in order to consult the time: 11:57 was what
he read, before the seconds digits flickered over to the next second. So quiet and efficient compared with the old
wind-up watch he used to own, always stopping and running slow. It used to have a leather strap, he
remembered, which gave it a kind of naturalistic bourgeois status in his
estimation. A right-wing watch, so to
speak. Better, he mused, than left-wing
ones, those metal-strap affairs. For
there was something about metal which suggested an anti-natural as opposed to a
supernatural status, commensurate with socialist tendencies. As if metal, even in its modern alloyed
guises, was somehow closer to the subnatural than to the natural, like wood or
leather. A kind of proton-biased
inorganic opposition to atomic, organic formations; though, of course, this was
to exaggerate the point. At any rate,
metal was cold, hard, and impersonal, like minerals and jewels. Steel, being an alloy, was typically
anti-natural, he thought, and thus left wing compared with wood or
leather. He had never owned a ticker in
steel but still possessed a digital with steel strap, which he had bought from a
street vendor for little under £2 about a year ago. Now he only wore it in bed because it had a
sort of light that enabled one to read it in the dark, should one wish to
consult the time at night. He regarded
it as inferior to his black plastic digital and had no desire, in consequence,
to wear it during the day. He supposed
it indicative of a communist equivalent - anti-natural steel with a
supernatural digital face, something Marxist-Leninist rather than democratic
socialist or radically socialist, such as would have stuck to hands and winder,
if on the most metallic terms. His
plastic digital, by contrast, was to his mind theocratic and, hence, Social
Transcendentalist, the digitals dividing the day into two lots of twelves, with
a PM indicator for the afternoon, and therefore suggesting a relativistic
absolutism, the forerunner, one could argue, of the super-transcendental
twenty-four hour digital watch, the hour digits flickering from 1-24 in an
ongoing, absolutist process, the time having to be read in the manner of a
train timetable. Not bad for the
late-twentieth century! For such
watches were already on the market, and he had seen one or two intriguing
Japanese examples before settling for the twelve-hour digital he was currently
wearing, the digits of which kept perfect time.
If the leather-strap winders were democratic watches and the metal-strap
digitals ... anti-democratic, then the plastic digital was very definitely a
supernatural watch, superior in essence to all the others, the metal and
plastic winders not excepted, the latter of which he supposed to reflect a
petty-bourgeois, neo-oriental form of theocracy commensurate with Western
transcendentalism.
To be sure, there was a definite
evolutionary progression from the plastic winder to the plastic digital, as, on
lower terms, from democratic to anti-democratic watches, though perhaps
devolutionary progression would be a more applicable description there! Whatever the case, a watch, no less than
outer clothing, could tell one something about a man's ideological leaning
and/or class integrity. The same could
even be said of spectacles, which appeared to reflect, in their different
constructions, various stages of ideological evolution and corresponding levels
of class allegiance. Why, he himself was
- and had long been - the wearer of a pair of round-lens, metal-rimmed glasses
which, in spite of the metal, he now supposed to indicate a bourgeois
democratic allegiance, to his slight embarrassment. It seemed to him that opticals had evolved
from the absolutist autocratic level of the monocle, a single lens, to the
relative right-wing democratic level of metal-rimmed spectacles, from where a
further evolution had taken place in the form of plastic spectacles, as germane
to a left-wing democratic level, before the emergence of communistic one-piece
spectacles, such as suggested a pair of goggles stretching, in a gentle curve,
right across the face, and which thus appeared absolutist within a democratic
context - both eyes covered, after the fashion of conventional spectacles, the lens
plastic, the frame metallic. Clearly, he
didn't want either a pair of plastic democratic spectacles or a pair (if that's
the correct word) of plastic/metallic anti-democratic ones. If he ever abandoned 'granny glasses', it
would have to be in a theocratic direction, which of course meant the purchase
of contact lenses - something Keith could, as yet, ill-afford.
However, he could speculate, and did so on
the basis that hard-lens contacts were somehow petty bourgeois or neo-oriental,
meaning transcendental in a contemporary Western way, whereas the soft-lens
variety suggested a more radically transcendent bias appropriate, he supposed,
to a Social Transcendentalist allegiance.
Thus, ideally, a pair of soft-lens contacts for someone who dressed in
all-black and wore a plastic digital watch, confirming a radically theocratic
ideological integrity. Probably the
future would witness the emergence of a one-lens contact fashion; a soft lens,
in other words, for one eye only, antithetical, in its interiorized absolutism,
to the exteriorized monocle absolutism of autocratic allegiance. Did not the monocle lead to dual lenses minus
wings, to pince-nez, the frame of which had to be clipped onto the nose
and held or perched there without reference to ears? A kind of absolute relativity preceding the
development of spectacles-proper, which reflected a more extensively relative,
and hence democratic, integrity, a right-angle formed between lenses and wings,
the frame no longer simply a support for lenses but embracing, in addition to a
nose clip, a pair of metallic wings, one for each ear. Well, if autocratic precedent was anything to
judge by, why shouldn't contact lenses, which simply fit over the eye, be
superseded, in due course, by a contact lens ... in response to the
requirements of a more absolutist theocratic age? A progression from the relativistic
absolutism, as it were, of a Social Transcendentalist stage of theocratic
allegiance to the absolutist absolutism, so to speak, of a
Super-transcendentalist stage, when, if justice is to be done, the world will
tend towards a theocratic unity, thus completing human evolution not only with
regard to optics but to everything else as well!
Yet that is still a good way off, and most
people with a theocratic leaning can do no better, in the meantime, than to
purchase and wear a pair of contact lenses, preferably of the soft-lens
type. Keith was looking forward to doing
this, in order to be able to harmonize his appearance and essence, or
ideological integrity, all along the line.
At present he was thinking as a Social Transcendentalist and looking,
with regard to spectacles, like a right-wing democrat! Something had to be done about this, and the
sooner the better! He was no longer the
bourgeois naturalist of some years ago, but a proletarian supernaturalist, for
whom the absolute was of paramount importance.
And what applied to optics applied no less
to sex, where, by contrast, a supernaturalism had long reigned supreme in his
solitary life in the form of a voyeuristic/masturbatory appreciation of
heterosexual pornography, derived from various quality men's magazines, which
seemed to constitute a sexuality complete in itself. His indulgences were, on the whole, very moderate,
no more than once a week, and he usually made sure that his concentration was
focused on the vagina of any specifically congenial models, in order to keep
his sexuality as supernatural as possible.
Deviations embracing the rump and/or anus he regarded as a left-wing
form of theocratic sexuality, permissible though not essential to the main
supernatural trend. He knew himself to
be predominantly right-wing, and hence straight. He would occasionally joke to himself that
there was only one alternative to being right: namely wrong. And this applied no less to right-wing
communist sex, involving homosexual pornography, than to left-wing theocratic
sex, though, obviously, even that was preferable to the left-wing communist
variety, such as involved the sodomitic violation of man by man. If homosexuals were 'bent', then those who
used homosexual pornography for voyeuristic/masturbatory purposes were still
'bent', only slightly less so, since given to the appreciation of a perverse
theocratic dimension, endemic to this kind of pornography, which suggested a
Leninist influence. Better a right-wing
communist integrity, in his opinion, than a left-wing (Marxist) one. But better by far a right-wing theocratic
integrity! He was glad that his
sexuality was supernatural rather than anti-natural, 'hetero' as opposed to
'homo'.
But he was becoming dissatisfied with
pornography alone, which seemed to put too great an idealistic strain on
him. He wondered whether, in view of his
other preferences, it wasn't time to purchase a plastic inflatable, a so-called
'sex doll', in order to have access to a more bodily and apparent form of
supernatural sexual activity. Some of
the sex dolls on the market were relatively inexpensive, no more than £30, and
came with a variety of sexy lingerie to stimulate one's lust and enable one, if
desirable, to approach sex with rapist's intent. Of course, for those who could afford it,
there were all sorts of additional qualities, back passage and talking mouth
included. But he knew that he was a long
way from becoming a connoisseur in such matters and that a more modest start
would probably be to his advantage, enabling him to feel his way by
degrees. There were, after all, certain
advantages in possessing a plastic inflatable.
She (it) couldn't turn one away, pleading ill-health or a period or
business obligations or an indifferent mood.
There would be no B.O. or farts or back-chat or bad breath or
scratchings or bites. One wouldn't have
to worry about getting her pregnant or of contracting a venereal or other
disease from her. There would be no
contraceptive expenses and no need to date her on a regular or, indeed, any
basis. In fact, one wouldn't even have
to dress her, if fetishism was not in one's line or one regarded clothing as
irrelevant to the sexual act, a further unnecessary expense. And one could make love to her in any old
fashion one pleased, never fearing an objection or criticism.
To be sure, the plastic supernatural was
certainly preferable, on a number of counts, to the fleshy natural, and anyone
who considered himself a supernaturalist would sooner or later have to come to
terms with sex dolls, if he wanted to remain consistently theocratic and not
regress to or remain the victim of a naturalistic and democratic mode of
sexuality. There was a place for
copulation as well as masturbation in Social Transcendentalism, provided they
were artificial and, hence, supernatural.
Artificial copulation would correspond, in a manner of speaking, to the
'Social' side of this radical theocracy, artificial masturbation, or
masturbation induced by a pornographic stimulus on computer disc and preferably
availing itself of the services of a plastic gadget ... such as would contain
the spermatic discharge, to its 'Transcendental' side, no-one required to be
absolutist on the higher, or pornographic, side, each man having a personal
bias one way or the other, some doubtless balanced between the two sides,
himself very much given to the transcendent.
Though, of course, a pornographic absolutism would become the ideal, if not
the norm, in the course of time, as Social Transcendentalism was duly
superseded by Super-transcendentalism, its more absolutist goal.
And what applies to men (become supermen)
also applies to women who, in a radically theocratic society, would be encouraged
(as quasi-supermen) to utilize plastic vibrators as their apparent, bodily
equivalent to sex dolls, an essential side of sexual activity, doubtless
manifesting on the level of late-teenage computer pornography, co-existing with
this lower side and eventually completely superseding it, with the emergence of
Super-transcendentalism. As to communist
sex, whether of the Western Left or the Eastern Right, not a chance! A closed society of Social Transcendentalist
integrity would place it under ban. Only
the supernatural would be respectable.
And Keith knew this better than anyone else. Yes, he would get a plastic inflatable before
long, if only for very occasional use.
Then there would be a little more plastic in his room, perhaps even
enough, if the lino was also taken into account, to tip the balance away from
wood. At least there wasn't very much
steel in evidence, 'granny glasses' notwithstanding!
SUPERNATURAL UPGRADING
You've got
this thing about the natural and the anti-natural, not to mention the
supernatural and the anti-supernatural, which you equate with moderate right
and left wing, extreme right- and left-wing respectively. Being something of a poet, you like to melt
away the borders between subjects and make them overlap, interpenetrate,
relate, in a synthetic, and hence theocratic, perspective. You believe, in accordance with the
prevailing Zeitgeist, that everything can and should be politicized, not
just sport and religion but ... well, sex, clothing, watches, spectacles, and
... what would appear to be your latest concern - namely food and drink. You claim that there is an ideological
significance to everything, every little aspect of our civilized behaviour
conforming to some class and/or ideological position. Only the philosophical poet would seem
qualified, with his supernatural bias, to penetrate the surface of our customs
and reveal their ideological depths, their inner essences. You are such a being and you dig deeper than
most in your quest for the essence of things.
Now you are claiming that food and drink should also be scrutinized from
a supernatural, or theocratic, point of view, since eating and drinking habits
are no less revealing of a class and/or ideological position than ... well,
sexual and sartorial ones.
These days you favour meat derived from
birds - turkeys, chickens, capons. You
claim that such meat appeals to a transcendental taste, birds being flying
creatures (though doubtfully very gracefully so, in the case of the
above-mentioned ones!), whereas lamb, pork, and beef, extracted from sheep,
pigs, and cows respectively, suggest a more down-to-earth or stolid quality
which you apparently fight shy of in your transcendental wisdom. For the past year you have eaten virtually no
other meat but turkey and chicken, with the notable exception of a little lamb,
pertaining to your doner kebabs, on Sundays, and some cod - if fish be meat -
on Fridays. Usually you eat small roast
potatoes with your winged meat, not particularly ideal, you claim, but
tolerable all the same, since suggestive, in contrast to large roast potatoes,
of a petty-bourgeois as opposed to a bourgeois equivalent. At any rate, still recognizably naturalistic
- unlike chips, which are made from lacerated potatoes, or spuds sliced into
elongated segments, and which appear, in their fried skins, quite divorced from
the natural - indeed, bearing in mind their genesis, positively anti-natural,
so many 'proton' segments cut from the 'atomic' unity of a potato, a
progressive devolution to separate pieces.
Why, you're so convinced of their anti-natural and hence left-wing
status, these days, that you've seriously contemplated giving them up
altogether, even though you only eat them once a week, in conjunction with
cod. You feel that, while they may be
relevant to industrial proletarians, they're something of a slap in the face to
you, a man who is very consciously transcendentalist in his ideological
integrity. You would rather eat
something more supernatural, like mashed potatoes, which, in contrast to chips,
suggest an 'electron' whole of undifferentiated unity. Probably mashed potatoes are theocratic,
whereas roast potatoes are democratic and chips ... anti-democratic in one
degree or another, depending on the size, e.g. length and breadth, of the chips
in question. Clearly, while some are
arguably democratic socialist, others, more slender and elongated, could be
described as radical socialist, conforming to a kind of Marxist equivalent. You can abide the former to some extent but
not, apparently, the latter. And not
those which have been indented in a wavy fashion either, suggestive of
solomonic columns! You tend to endow
them with a Marxist-Leninist equivalent, the waviness bringing them closer, in
your estimation, to the supernaturalism of mashed potatoes, as if a theocratic
(Leninist?) dimension had been infused into a fundamentally anti-democratic
constitution, making them superior to the purely Marxist, or plain, chip, but
still inferior, for all that, to mashed potatoes, particularly the most
synthetic pre-cooked mash which comes in a plastic packet and only requires to
be heated in some boiling water before being eaten. Now you feel that such take-away mash is the
best form of potato, superior to both the natural and the anti-natural in every
way. Eaten in conjunction with frozen
food generally, it would constitute a significant ingredient in a
theocratically-biased dinner, suggesting a dematerialized spud appropriate to a
supernatural requirement, the antithesis to the subnatural, autocratic spud of
a jacket-potato menu. Not for you the
jacket potato! You would probably prefer
to eat wavy chips than that, even if they are communist, albeit on seemingly
right-wing (Leninist) terms. Rather the
democratic roast potato than the autocratic jacket potato! Though better again the theocratic mash. Nevertheless your eating habits don't always
keep pace with your ideological development, probably because you tend, in spite
of your theocratic ideals, to regard the personal and public selves as distinct,
and to a point where the more progressive the latter becomes, the more
regressive or reactionary appears the former, as if to compensate you for your
professional extremism. Can you never
break away from relativity? It seems
doubtful.
However, now that you've 'come clean' about
your food preferences (at least with regard to meat and spuds), you might as
well continue by recording your preferences in drink, attempting, as you
proceed, to outline a class and/or ideological position where drinking habits
are concerned. For instance, it is known
that you won't drink beer because you equate it with an anti-natural, though
specifically Protestant, bias and are inclined, by contrast, to see in wine a
Catholic alternative ... suggestive of a natural, or early natural,
constitution. You prefer grapes to hops,
the sweet to the sour, a positive taste to a negative one. But even beer is preferable, in your opinion,
to the more extreme anti-natural drinks that seem to derive from it in some
way, like ginger beer or shandy or tinned lager. You find lager even more distasteful than
beer, the analogy with fizzy piss always coming to mind when you're induced to
drink it. For you, wine is right wing
and beer ... left wing, the one stemming from or endemic to a conservative
tradition, the other liberal, if not, in its extreme manifestations, radical
socialist. But you don't much care for
cola either, probably because it also suggests an anti-natural constitution, if
one that transcends the anti-natural in some degree and which could, in
consequence, be accorded a partly supernatural status on the strength, for
instance, of the fizzy upsurge of air bubbles.... Would the notion of an
anti-supernatural equivalent be totally irrelevant here? You don't think so, since it seems that some
'super' element, like the fizz, has been brought to bear on a fundamentally
anti-natural taste, the artificial concoction of the actual cola drink. Of course, these artificial drinks are
morally preferable to lager and beer, not to mention shandy and ginger
beer. But, ideally, you would rather
have a supernatural drink, a natural drink upgraded, as it were, to the fizzy
status of the theocratic, like, say, a lemonade or some alternative fruity drink
that would seem to have succeeded both lemon and orange squash, which, on
account of their naturalism, may be accorded a democratic equivalent.
Yes, you don't particularly mind these
squashy drinks, but are prepared to regard their fizzy counterparts as morally
and ideologically superior, suitable to those with a distinctly supernatural
bias, for whom lemons and oranges would presumably be taboo. And that, you would claim, applies to raw
fruit in general, apples and pears included.
You always prefer flavoured yoghurt, particularly a strawberry or a
raspberry one, which has transcended natural fruit on a supernatural
basis. You don't care too much for
anti-natural fruit pies, where the filling, particularly in the case of apple,
has been cut into tiny segments, reminiscent of chips. There are, however, certain contemporary
apple pies that appear to be supernatural in some degree, on account of the
filling being liquefied, and you regard them as reflecting an anti-supernatural
bias, superior to the chunky apple pies.
But while you used to eat such liquefied apple pies, you now eat only
yoghurts, which you regard as more suitable to a transcendental taste. Similarly, you prefer liquefied cheese to
either cheese slices or chunks, though you're still occasionally to be found
eating slices, as when you buy a doner kebab with cheese.
But that brings the subject back to food,
and you were expatiating on drink, with especial reference to the supernatural
and, in the case of cola, anti-supernatural, which you equated with a
right-wing communist bias. You don't
care for spirits, like gin and whisky, since they suggest, in their
unadulterated constitution, a subnatural and virtually autocratic integrity,
beneath the pale of a theocratic taste.
Yet you do like milk and drink it regularly, though it's the most
natural of all drinks and somewhat inferior, in consequence, to milkshakes,
those supernaturally flavoured milk drinks that you used to guzzle as a
boy. These days, flavoured milk can be
purchased in supermarkets, large and small, and you would do well to buy some
in future, to complement your yoghurt-eating habits. It won't be shaked though, so if you want a
truly supernatural milk drink, replete with bubbles, you'll have to visit a
milk bar or get a mixer in order to shake your own flavoured milk. If you start to drink lemonade and orangeade,
you might as well drink milkshakes too, and so bring all your drinking habits
into line on the supernatural level. Yet
you had better avoid the anti-milk drinks like tea and coffee, which dilute the
milk to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as milk but
subordinate to the tea or coffee - the actual hot drink. Most such drinks are anti-natural and, hence,
left wing in one degree or another; though whipped coffee (with cream) is
partly supernatural and therefore of an anti-supernatural equivalent,
preferable to plain coffee. Hot drinks
predominantly made from milk are, of course, less anti-natural than those in
which hot water predominates. A cold
whipped coffee may also be partly supernatural, like a coffee-flavoured
milkshake. At any rate, the chances are
that it will betoken a right-wing communist, as opposed to a left-wing
socialist, integrity, preferable to a plain (unwhipped) coffee, but still inferior,
for all that, to a genuine milkshake, whether or not coffee-flavoured. For a cold whipped coffee is still a coffee,
i.e. a drink in which milk is subordinated to, and thus diluted by, the coffee,
whereas a milkshake is a flavoured milk drink.
You can't fail to perceive the distinction, which is, after all, between
the anti-supernatural and the supernatural.
Though it is admittedly less apparent than between the anti-natural and
the natural, such as you have been referring to with regard to coffee and milk.
Certainly, it seems that you prefer the
natural to the anti-natural, while reserving a place of honour for the
supernatural. You don't envisage people
gravitating from the anti-natural to the supernatural; though it's just
possible that the anti-supernatural will bring anti-naturalists closer, in due
course, to a supernatural position, from which a transcendental upgrading may
be effected ... compliments of the supernatural themselves. You are probably right about that, as about
most other things, Mr. Crosby.
CENTRIST SEXUALITY
A Social
Transcendentalist's favoured sexuality is not atomic, as between a proton woman
and a bound-electron man, still less anti-atomic, as between two men, but ...
post-atomic or, which amounts to approximately the same thing, of a
free-electron integrity. There is, to be
sure, a relativity involved, but it is decidedly post-atomic, as between the
particle and wavicle sides of the electron.
Social Transcendentalists are absolutist but, paradoxically, in a
relative kind of way. They should
alternate between the two sides of the electron, as between plastic
inflatables, or 'sex dolls', and computer erotica - the former confirming a
bodily (particle) approach to sex, albeit one that is supernatural; the latter
confirming a mental (wavicle) approach to it, again of a supernatural
bias. For women or, rather,
quasi-supermen, vibrators should be substituted for 'sex dolls' and, in respect
of mental sex, masculine rather than feminine erotica, that is to say, erotica
involving a male model, should be the order of the day. Probably late-teenage juvenile erotica will
come to replace the adult varieties in the course of post-atomic time,
confirming a supra-natural as opposed to a merely supernatural integrity, as
appropriate to a Centrist civilization.
It is to be hoped that, with the second phase of the post-humanist
millennium ... pertinent to Super-transcendentalism, such erotica will
supersede any inflatable/ pornographic relativity, bringing supra-natural sex
to a mental (wavicle) climax in ... pornographic absolutism. Thus whereas supermen will still have
recourse to bodily sex, superbeings, their hypermeditating successors, will be
above it, though not as far above it, paradoxically, as the superhuman brain
collectivizations of the ensuing post-human millennium!
Be that as it may, the gradual progression
away from natural sex will be endemic to theocratic Centrism, which will
champion a supra-natural rather than a merely supernatural sexuality. If there is a link between plastic digital
watches and sex, it could only be with regard to a mature teenage erotica, that
comparatively new genre - relative to computer disc - succeeding the strictly
adult varieties such that utilize persons of twenty-one or over. Nevertheless supernaturalism is morally
preferable to naturalism, being a kind of petty-bourgeois sexuality in contrast
to bourgeois sex, a fascistic as opposed to conservative integrity. It is the antithesis to subnatural sex, such
as involves recourse to masturbation in a merely physical context - independently,
in other words, of pornographic stimuli.
Such purely masturbatory sex would be deeply frowned upon from a
supernatural and/or supra-natural point of view, just as it is avoided, if not
frowned upon, by naturalists, with their atomic compromise. Even the Catholic Church, that
grand-bourgeois subnaturalism, condemns masturbation as the sin of Onan; though
there are undoubtedly priests who are - or have been - its victims, living, as
they do, in a subnatural way in priestly celibacy. No doubt, this keeps them closer to the
Father, as does their ankle-length cassocks, those dress-like garments
confirming a superfeminine integrity ... symptomatic of a deep-vaginal
symbolism. Decidedly the proton side of
things, against which the state, and hence bourgeois naturalism, rears its
atomic head, as particle electrons set about wavicle protons in a heterosexual
relativity of give-and-take, the man's penis sexually active within the woman's
receptive vagina, corresponding to the DC side of atomic electricity, a
direct-current flow of copulation culminating in orgasm. If subnatural masturbatory sex was (is) DC in
reverse, a taking rather than giving, then natural sex most definitely drives
it ahead into the woman, who gratefully receives the proffered charge of
spermatic release, becoming part of the DC in orgasmic response.
But heterosexual relationships, like
electricity, are relative, as between DC and AC, or alternating current, and we
may equate the latter with conversation, that two-way give-and-take, as
questions and answers, information and opinions, flow back and forth between
partners. If DC corresponds to the
Church, including the Protestant one, then AC is equivalent to the State and,
in typical bourgeois relations, it will predominate over the former, cementing
the physical relationship with the shared impressions and beliefs of the mental
one, the former corresponding to the Protestant Church, the latter to its
political concomitance in the Democratic State, itself divisible into give and
take, capitalism and socialism, plutocracy and bureaucracy.
However, as the State evolves, it follows
that the AC will increasingly predominate over the DC in marital and other
relationships, so that, from a liberal balance between give-and-take, we find,
through Democratic Socialism and/or Social Democracy, a progressive imbalance
on the side of taking, relative to an escalation of bureaucratic
socialism. And the same applies to
sexual relationships, as physical sex goes into decline, one way or another,
and conversation becomes increasingly prevalent, even to the point where it
apparently necessitates a switch from women and men, in heterosexual relations,
to men only, as homosexual criteria take over, with the sexual concomitant of
the further decline of physical sex in outright anal violation (assuming any
physical sex may still be said to apply at all) with this point of AC hegemony,
corresponding to a Marxist bureaucracy of preponderant taking. Not, in all fairness, that this AC
near-absolutism is all-pervasive in contemporary Western or, indeed, any other
society. For while homosexuals very
definitely exist, they're not in the majority where sexual and/or social habits
are concerned. If they are equivalent,
in political terms, to a Marxist purism, or left-wing Communism, we should not
forget that all other shades of political, not to mention sexual,
identification still exist in the West, particularly in Britain, with its
unbroken democratic traditions stretching back several centuries. Similarly, Marxist bureaucracy, as applying
to the Welfare State, co-exists with Conservative plutocracy, and will
doubtless continue to do so until history may decide otherwise.
However, if the development of alternating
current at the expense of direct current has characterized the State's
evolution, we will find that the emergence within the modern, pluralist state
of Centrist, or supernatural, tendencies has given a new lease-of-life to DC,
with particular reference to the sexual use of pornography and plastic inflatables,
so that sexual giving has come for some people, still perhaps a minority, to
replace either DC/AC relativity or AC absolutism, if, indeed, 'replace' is the
correct word. In other words, they
consistently partake of a supernatural giving vis-à-vis the artificial
sex-partners of their choosing, whether with regard to a particular
pornographic model or, alternatively, their favourite, if not only, plastic
inflatable. Conversation between the
supernaturalists and their artificial partners is necessarily ruled out (at any
rate, as a rule), and a superior DC absolutism than the subnatural masturbatory
purism is the inevitable result, corresponding to a fascistic integrity. And yet, if a petty-bourgeois folksy integrity
suits some people - at present only a comparatively small minority - it should
not be forgotten that a specifically petty-bourgeois right-wing sexual
integrity will also suit some people, probably not such a small minority, in
which DC tends to predominate over AC, or physical sex over conversation,
though not simply in terms of coitus but, rather, with regard to oral sex,
especially fellatio, which, in contrast to cunnilingus, confirms a masculine
bias, suitable to a petty-bourgeois age.
Having one's penis 'sucked off' by a liberated female is not only a
pleasurable experience for the person concerned, but one that reflects male
domination and, hence, the ascendancy, within a relative context, of the
neutron side of an atomic divide, inducing an 'intellectualized' sexuality
germane, in all probability, to an Ecological, or 'Green', political integrity.
Which is, after all, quite distinct from
the bisexual anal-violation of a social democratic integrity and, so I contend,
antithetical to the grand-bourgeois relative subnaturalism of a bias for
cunnilingus, that Whiggish predecessor of heterosexual naturalism. No doubt, there is still a fair amount of
tongue-oriented vagina-grovelling sex going on these days, whether because the
people involved are - or consider themselves to be - grand-bourgeois types or
whether because, whoever they may be, they are simply ignorant of the
ideological implications of their behaviour ... I leave for others to
decide. Suffice it to say that
cunnilingus is not indicative of a masculine superiority and/or ascendancy but,
on the contrary, is relative to a pre-bourgeois subatomic age, so that its
continual indulgence smacks of the anachronistic, not to say absurd. A truly right-wing petty-bourgeois sex, in a
liberal society, will always favour fellatio, appropriate to an Ecological as
opposed to a Whiggish orientation. And
it could be argued that a penis in a woman's mouth is a good way of preventing
conversation, even if one cannot, in the relative nature of such a sexual integrity,
keep it there all the sucking time but must succumb, sooner or later, if not to
actual copulation then, at any rate, to actual conversation, whether or
not about sex ... I again leave for others to decide. Only an extreme right-wing petty-bourgeois
sex, relative to heterosexual pornography and/or inflatables, will be
permanently elevated above AC relativity!
However, having stressed the fellatio
aspect of Ecological sex at the expense of the coital aspect, and the
cunnilingus side of Whiggish sex in the same way, I should belatedly point out
that coitus is not the only side of Conservative sex, there being an oral side
to it as well which, though such an argument may seem academic, we can estimate
as approximating a balance between cunnilingus and fellatio, applicable to a
bourgeois relativity. Thus moderate
heterosexual sex also has its vaguely supernatural, or wavicle, side, albeit
one stressing a balanced dualism appropriate to an atomic integrity ... in
which proton-wavicle cunnilingus and neutron-wavicle fellatio complement the
particle/wavicle relativity of actual copulation. Now actual copulation, whether conventional
or otherwise, isn't something that can be divorced from other stages and types
of 'fringe' sexual activity either, even the most extreme, including the
supra-natural recourse to plastic inflatables, which, if it doesn't reflect a
fascist integrity in bodily sex, must surely reflect a Centrist one, germane to
a new civilization; though if inflatables and soft-core juvenile pornography
would co-exist during a Social Transcendentalist phase of such a civilization, there would be
a shift towards a wavicle absolutism with its Super-transcendentalist phase,
thus rendering recourse to inflatables obsolete, as hard-core juvenile pornography,
still of course relative to computer discs and involving consenting mature
teenagers, increasingly came to the fore.
Such supra-natural sex might alternatively be defined as supercultural,
and I propose a new terminological strategy for distinguishing between the
relative and absolute phases of Centrist sexuality, viz. supra-natural for the
former and supercultural for the latter.
Furthermore, one should distinguish more
closely between the supernatural and the supra-natural; for it seems to me that
supernatural sex, corresponding to a petty-bourgeois folksy integrity, can
likewise be divided into two phases, viz. a supernatural relativity between
inflatables and soft-core adult pornography and, again at the risk of seeming
unduly academic, a supernatural absolutism involving hard-core pornography
alone, this latter tending to induce masturbation and thereby weakening the
urge to copulate. So a classical
fascistic sexuality, beyond the relativity of sex-doll copulation. Could it be, I wonder, that plastic
inflatables modelled on adult women, with large breasts, correspond to a
petty-bourgeois folksy sexuality, whereas a proletarian folksy or even folkish
sexual integrity would require, in conjunction with soft-core juvenile
pornography, that inflatables were modelled on teenage girls of between, say,
sixteen and nineteen years of age, and thus had small breasts. Again, the distinction may seem academic, but
it is, after all, between the supernatural and the supra-natural. So I shouldn't be at all surprised if sex
dolls came, in the future, to level with supra-natural requirement.
But if the supra-natural is above and not
just beyond the natural, then we need not doubt that it is the antithesis of
that which, in pagan civilization, was beneath the natural, viz. the
unnatural. Some people will doubtless be
puzzled by such a term, but I use it to distinguish between the subnatural
before the natural, pertinent to extreme grand-bourgeois criteria, and the very
subnatural sexual behaviour which, with regard to pagan civilization, confirms
an aristocratic integrity more beneath than before the natural. Thus while supernaturalism leads to
supra-naturalism, so, at the opposite extreme, does unnaturalism lead to subnaturalism. Yet, contrary to fascist and centrist
integrities, the relative does not lead to the absolute, as from
supernaturalism to supra-naturalism, but the absolute leads to the relative, as
from unnatualism to subnaturalism, germane to a stemming from the Father rather
than, as in the former case, an aspiration towards the Holy Ghost.
So, to take the grand-bourgeois extremism
appertaining to Cromwellian parliamentarianism first, we may note a progression
from subnatural masturbation, with or without accompanying fantasies, to
subnatural intercourse with young teenage girls ... in a kind of juvenile
paedophilia. But beneath this, and
preparatory to it, we will find an aristocratic extremism, appertaining to
pagan criteria, of unnatural masturbation ... induced by erotic sculpture,
leading in unnatural relative time to paedophilia, or the sexual violation of
children, particularly young boys. Which
would probably apply more to the ancient Greeks and Romans than, say, to
certain very early pagan peoples, like the Egyptians and Assyrians, who would
probably have been more given to bestiality, or intercourse with animals,
particularly sheep, goats, dogs, and mules, though still disposed to children
on occasion.
However, whatever the literal case,
unnatural sex would have preponderated over natural sex for a majority of men;
although, judging by the fact of procreation, they evidently still had time for
natural sex as well! These days, by
contrast, such unnatural intercourse (not to mention its subnatural successor)
is beneath the bourgeois pale and subject, if indulged, to prosecution. We cannot reasonably expect either bestiality
or paedophilia to be condoned, and it is extremely unlikely that intercourse
with children will ever be legalized.
The majority of people may not, as yet, be supernatural, still less
supra-natural, but we're heading towards a supra-natural age when 'girlish' sex
dolls and mature juvenile pornography will be the rule, as much above natural
sex as erotic sculpture and paedophilia ... were beneath it.
Of course, these days there is quite a lot
of left-wing homosexuality about. But
sodomy, or sexual intercourse between men, is distinct from pederasty, or the
anal violation of children - specifically boys.
It's an anti-natural, not an unnatural, sexuality, deplorable from a
supernatural (not to say supra-natural) point of view, but still relative to
the age, and seemingly perfectly permissible within a liberal society. Only in a Centrist society would it, together
with its right-wing counterpart of homosexual pornography, be illegal and
subject, if pursued, to suppression.
But, then, so would a number of other sexual integrities, including,
ironically, the supernatural. And as the
supra-natural increasingly came to the fore, so, as if to complement it, would
artificial means of reproduction, entailing, amongst other things, the use of
sperm banks and artificial insemination, thereby permitting adults to live
absolutely independent lives on the level of supra-naturalism. The final sexual revolution may not be
destined to occur for some time yet, but when it does ... being revolutionary
will entail more than merely political extremism. The true revolutionary is extreme all
along the line, and he must struggle mercilessly against sexual reaction
... no less than against every other kind of reaction!
Thus speaks Neil Tobin, sexual spokesperson
for the Social Transcendentalist revolution.
WRITERLY PRINT
I have to
confess that I'm not purely a 'typer', or author who types-up his work without
reference to a manuscript, but a writer or, more correctly, scribbler who later
types-up what he has scribbled.
Generally, I scribble in the morning and type in the afternoon,
typing-up the morning's scribble. I
pride myself on this arrangement, since it makes for variety and is beneficial
to my health, particularly with regard to my eyes and stomach, which would
become respectively strained and ulcerated, were I to make a point of typing
all day, like some authors. For me,
there is too much physicality in the use of a typewriter, even the small
portable one I use, so I prefer the usually more relaxing medium of scribble,
which I also find more intimate.
I always scribble with a black felt-tipped
pen, not only because I like its facile motion across the page but, no less
importantly, because it confers a kind of supernatural bias on my scribbling
and is appropriate to such scribble.
Why, you may wonder, do I scribble and not write, meaning to write
clearly and carefully, if not beautifully.
The simple answer is that, being a supernaturalist, I prefer truth to
beauty, and scribble is the best and most suitable way of conveying the
Truth. In other words, it makes no claim
to beauty, to belles lettres in a merely technical sense, but enables one to
pursue one's ideas at maximum speed, the very speed necessary for the
acquirement and development of a high degree of inspiration commensurate with
the rapid flow of one's thought. Write
carefully, with special attention to the formation of the lettering, and you
get bogged down in technicalities, sacrificing truth to beauty, or essence to
appearance.
No, I am no 'belle-lettrist', in any sense
of that term, but a confirmed scribbler, and have been so for some years now,
to the general advantage of the Truth.
Those who pursue truth must abandon beauty, and not merely in their
style or technique ... but in their lifestyle generally. Hence the absence of women in my life and its
consequent freedom from enslavement to the Beautiful. Had I acquired a beautiful woman some years
ago, when I almost did, I would never have got to this. I may not even have become a writer in the
first place, or, if I had, it would probably have been on a less supernatural
level than that to which I'm now accustomed.
However, speculation aside, I know for sure that the pursuit of truth
requires the abandonment of beauty, and the nearer one gets to the
Truth, the more must one abandon the Beautiful, since the formless and the
formal are ever antithetical.
You may have perceived, reader, that my
work is formless, and this, too, is appropriate to its supernatural
status. Instead of proceeding from A to
B or M and back to A again, like most authors, I proceed from A-Z, with little
or no hint of a recapitulation. You can
believe me when I say that it took some time for me to get to this level, to
completely abandon my starting-point and wind-up my work with an approximately
antithetical culmination. It's as
though, having begun in the Father or some diluted equivalent thereof, I must
end in the Holy Ghost, maintaining a forward-tending momentum throughout the
work's duration. Such work is not
literary, my friend, but poetic, and if I was once a philosopher, I have since
veered towards the opposite extreme in accordance with my Irish temperament,
which fights shy of literary endeavour, that middle-of-the-road creativity more
suited to the atomic British. For me, it
is philosophy or poetry, not fiction, which, by contrast, I equate, whether in
the novel or novella, with a democratic proclivity, in contrast to the autocratic
and theocratic essences of the extreme disciplines.
Well, I'm no autocrat, and it is debatable
whether my philosophy was ever genuinely autocratic. Certainly, I now consider myself a theocrat,
and theocracy means, besides poetry in an anthological context, Social
Transcendentalism, or the ideology of the Holy Ghost. I have scant regard for autocratic theocracy
or for democratic theocracy, just as I have scant regard for the use of crayons
or pencils in writing, the first of which I regard as subnatural on account of
their waxy constitution, the second of which I regard as natural on account of
their lead constitution. Could it be, I
wonder, that, in contrast to pencils, fountain pens conform to an anti-natural
constitution by dint of their reliance on ink, which, unlike wax and lead, is
an artificial phenomenon? This would
imply that, while pencils were right wing, fountain pens are left wing, albeit
of a liberal rather than a radical persuasion.
For if there is one thing more anti-natural, or artificial, than a
fountain pen, it can only be a biro, which contains its own synthetic ink and
channels it, through a ball-point tip, more sparingly and pointedly, as a rule,
than ever the nib of a fountain pen can do, if indeed 'channel' is the correct
word here. At any rate, there is less
mess with a biro and, compared to a fountain pen, it is relatively easy and
economical to use. It's also more
absolute, in that one doesn't refill the slender container but simply throws it
away once the ink has run out. This
saves a lot of time and inconvenience!
So where does it stand in the evolutionary
spectrum - extreme anti-naturalism? Very
extreme anti-naturalism? Certainly more
anti-natural than the fountain pen, but doubtfully of a truly radical or, if a
political analogy be permissible here, communist persuasion. More like a Democratic Socialist vis-à-vis a
Liberal distinction, something left wing within a democratic, or atomic,
writerly system. After all, one still
writes with a biro, even if in a scribbling fashion, and the same, of course,
holds true of fountain pens and, though I loathe to admit it, felt-tip pens,
which must also fall within a democratic writerly framework, if on a relatively
supernatural and, hence, very right-wing basis.
Is there not, however, something beyond the
ball-point pen which would correspond, in its extreme anti-naturalism, to a
communist equivalent? Doubtless you have
all heard of typewriters, and if my logical intuition is anything to rely on,
then I think we have hit upon the truly anti-natural, anti-democratic mode of
conveying verbal information, which doesn't so much write as print, and thus
signifies a 'fall' (forwards) from the joined lettering of natural writing or,
for that matter, moderately anti-natural (biro) writing and/or scribbling ...
to the disjointed lettering of print. At
least, this is generally the case; though there are, I believe, typewriters
which can actually write, albeit in a highly orthodox and stereotypical kind of
way, and we may accord them a crudely supernatural significance. However, the majority of typewriters,
including my own, print, as do young children and as adults used to do in
comparatively backward times ... such as the early Middle Ages, when writing
was unheard of and only a relatively small number of people even knew how to
print, that is to say, to write in a disconnected way. And these were the favoured people, the
learned, monied, powerful, and industrious men of a largely subnatural age who,
not surprisingly, had access to a subnatural mode of writing, commensurate with
the particle side of a proton absolutism, each letter separate and distinct,
reflecting this particle apartness - an autocratic norm.
But, of course, man progressed to joined
writing, i.e. to writing-proper, in the course of time, and we may see in this
development a naturalism commensurate with the wavicle side of a proton-biased
atomic relativity, as germane to the Church and, in particular, the Catholic
Church, which conforms to an attractive atomic bias ... in contrast to the
reactive proton bias of the preceding particle kingdom. Wavicles signify an indivisible unity, and
words become wavicle equivalents, on the protonic level, when the lettering of
which they are formed is joined together in writerly prose. Obviously, such a procedure must be
naturalistic, effected by hand though guided by mind. There is mind, too, in the subnatural mode of
writing, e.g. printing, but such as there is would be more concerned with
concentrating attention upon appearances, or the style of the lettering, than
on essences, or that which was being communicated through it. A lot of evolutionary time must pass before
men give the greater part of their attention to content, and as we approach the
modern age, an age par excellence of scribbling, we can rest assured that concern
with essence over appearance has reached a high-peak, if not in the case of
scribblers like myself the peak, confirming the utmost writerly
decadence. For writing is, after all,
essentially an apparent phenomenon, since it stems from a proton tradition, and
whilst appearances have their essences, and hence writing its content, the
essence of the proton is ever apparent.
Paradoxical and confusing, I know; but incontrovertible
nonetheless! Much more concern with
content over form, and my writing would become illegible and therefore
thoroughly decadent from a naturalistic point of view. Probably it would be illegible to most people
now, and even I occasionally have to strain my brain in order to decipher it,
assuming my memory is at fault.
Fortunately by typing-up in the afternoon what I have scribbled in the
morning, I retain in memory most of what I 'wrote', and this greatly
facilitates the deciphering of my text.
Were I to leave a gap of three or more days between scribbling and
typing, the latter would undoubtedly prove a more difficult, if not impossible,
task than it does at present!
As a rule, however, my typing is fluent,
and this is all the more remarkable in that I am self-taught, not to mention
prone to ulceration of the stomach. Yet
the typewriter - and I use the term generically - is in some sense a decadent
medium of communication, corresponding to the particle side of an
electron-biased atomicity, which signifies an evolutionary 'fall' (forwards)
from wavicle precedent, as from the Church to the State, and in particular the
republican state, with especial reference to people's republics. Certainly the production by the typewriter of
disconnected lettering indicates a 'fall' from the joined lettering of
naturalistic writing, which is the essence of such writing, whilst also
reflecting a progression, with regard to appearances, from the natural to the
artificial, as from writing to typing and, in a certain sense, the bound to the
free, or the production of independent artificial lettering (characters) which
are free, as it were, from the constraints of a proton-biased determinism -
just as, in a wider context, republican man is free from the domination of the
Church, and never more so than in a communist state. Probably, if ideological inferences or
analogies are to be drawn, a manual typewriter corresponds to a Marxist status,
whereas an electric typewriter corresponds to a Marxist-Leninist status, as if
the addition of electricity conferred a kind of spurious, and hence Leninist,
theocracy on the fundamentally anti-democratic, egalitarian nature of the
typewriter and, no less importantly, typeface in question. An improvement, no doubt, on the manual
machine, but still leaving something to be desired!
And what, from a supernatural viewpoint, is
that something if not joined artificial lettering, and thus a return to a
wavicle status, albeit one antithetical to the proton-biased wavicles of
naturalistic writing. Yes, I am of
course alluding to electron wavicles, such as would conform to a radically
theocratic status applicable to a supernatural age or society. Now we may believe that if a manual writerly
typewriter corresponds to a fascist status, then an electronic or, preferably,
battery-run writerly typewriter would correspond, by contrast, to a Social
Transcendentalist status - the use of batteries signifying a more theocratic
correlation than electricity by dint, one can only suppose, of the absence of
wires, leads, plugs, etc. So an
artificiality that served a higher, wavicle end, the production of the most
supernatural lettering, germane to a free-electron integrity.
Ah, I have to admit that my little manual
typewriter is a long way from that! But
perhaps this is another reason why I disdain its use on a full-time basis,
preferring to scribble in the morning and type-up the result in the afternoon,
as if afraid or unwilling to completely part company with naturalism, and hence
my Catholic roots, at the risk of becoming unduly or extensively anti-naturalistic
and thus Marxist - a not-untypical Irish position, rarely appreciated by the
materialistic British! Not once, in all
these years of scribbling, have I ever entirely parted company with my scribble
and proceeded to type from scratch in an absolutely typing framework. There is nothing of the Shaw or Priestley
about me, no left-wing allegiance. If I
prefer to scribble than to write, and to use a black felt-tipped pen instead of
a pencil, not to mention biro, it's because I identify more with the
supernatural than with the natural and choose to push the natural in a
supernatural direction, conscious of the ideological limitations imposed upon
one by the inherently democratic medium of writing, which necessarily makes for
a constricted supernaturalism analogous, in a way, to the supernaturalism
endemic to the use of painterly art for transcendental ends, as in Mondrian,
Kandinsky, Rothko, Vasarely, and other such 'supernatural'
abstractionists. Theirs is a
transcendentalism within a democratic, or canvas/painterly, tradition, in
contrast to the fascistic transcendentalism, as it were, of the light artist or
the Centrist transcendentalism, if you will, of the holographer, that ultimate
type of visual artist who is destined, one way or another, to dominate the
future. Much as I would like to utilize
a writerly typewriter, I have to write with the tools available to me, and I
can't say that I particularly mind this, having grown accustomed to the art of
pushing a plastic pen, not to say resigned myself to my 'printerly'
portable. I am no slave to
electron-biased atomic particles and would rather people know that I also
scribble, in a decadent proton-biased wavicle style, than suppose me to be
solely a typing author, like the great majority of so-called writers, no matter
how ignorant they may be of the ideological implications of a typing
absolutism. I conform, you might say, to
the compromise between church and state of the contemporary Irish republic:
though while this is so in technical appearances, in conceptual essences I'm
all the time agitating against such a compromise in the name of
electron-wavicle absolutism ... as germane to Social Transcendentalism. Such are the paradoxes of which relative
lives are made!
Also paradoxical is the distinction between
what might be described as the apparent and the essential means of
communication, relative to the dichotomy between, say, speech and writing. Clearly, naturalism is not simply a matter of
writing (I use the term in its classical bourgeois sense) but also, and more
obviously, of speaking, and when we speak to another we talk. As it happens, I talk very rarely, being
something of a loner and, hence, supernaturalist. But talking is as important to most people as
writing, and those who write - as opposed to scribble - invariably talk. Talk, then, is the more natural of the two
modes of communication, and if a Christian dichotomy between Satan and Christ
is in order here, then talk corresponds to the Devil and writing to the
Son. Yet beneath talk - and perhaps
prior to it - there is (or was) what you may call speaking to oneself, a
subnatural indulgence germane to a proton-particle absolutism, and above talk -
and in a sense subsequent to it - there is (or will be) what you may call
speaking to an artificial self, such as a tape-recorder or a cassette-recorder,
the former equivalent to a fascist mode of supernatural speech, the latter
commensurate, so I believe, with a Centrist mode of supernatural communication,
whether intended for industrial, commercial, professional, or relaxational
purposes. Such supernaturalism is
absolute, a recording of a voice that can be replayed and listened to at a
later time, whether by the same person or another. And it must contrast with the anti-naturalism
of relative voice recordings and/or transmissions, as in intercoms and
telephones, which invariably transform the natural voice as it is broken up
into electronic signals and conveyed along wire to the recipient at the other
end of the line. If a distinction between
anti-natural Marxist and anti-supernatural Marxist-Leninist ideological
equivalents is to be made, then the dialling phone probably corresponds to the
former and the press-button phone to the latter, although the battery-operated
digital phone would approximate to the supernatural, being more
transcendentalist, irrespective of the relativistic context of phoning which,
increasingly these days, acquires a quasi-absolutist character in conjunction
with the use of blank cassettes (for absences) and taped recordings (for
messages).
Be that as it may, voice transmissions of
whatever kind, including the use of walkie-talkies, correspond to the apparent,
superficial side of verbal communication between people. In contrast to the essential, profound side
... of 'literary' communication, the wavicle as opposed to the particle
side. And we find such a distinction in
most other aspects of human experience, including the sexual, where it takes
the form of a coital/oral dichotomy, specifically in bourgeois heterosexual
relations ... as germane to an atomic age and society. Elsewhere, in my evolving oeuvre, I have
defined the archetypal Social Transcendentalist sexuality as implying a
compromise between sex-doll copulation on the apparent, or 'social' side, and mature
juvenile pornographic voyeurism on the essential, or 'transcendental' side,
this latter, pertaining to computer discs, a late-teenage sublimated oral
equivalent intended for the head.
Similarly, I could define the archetypal Social Transcendentalist verbal
modes of communication as implying a compromise between cassette and/or digital
speech on the apparent, particle side and ... electric and/or battery
writerly-typing on the essential, wavicle side, with the emphasis, so far as
possible, on the latter. Could it be, I
wonder, that aural communication is destined to wither and die as
supernaturalism evolves, in the course of Centrist time, into
supra-naturalism? Yes, I believe so,
though this isn't to say there is any guarantee that 'literary' communication
will continue throughout the duration of the next civilization either. Probably it, too, is destined to make way for
something higher, born from the essential and completely transcending all
appearances, even 'literary' ones. The
ultimate verbal communication between men, the antithesis of early pagan sign
language, a developing telepathy as the utilitarian complement to a developing
awareness in beatific spirituality. Now
that, after all, is something above all thought, the pure awareness of absolute
mind, the wavicle side of the electron, the superconscious at its most refined,
a true essence of nonverbal being!
Yes, even superior to telepathy; though we
need not seek to underestimate the direct transference of thought from one mind
to another. For telepathy is not, to say
the least, an everyday occurrence, and few of us can lay claim to such an
achievement. Yet is there any reason, on
that account, why it should not become a norm of communication in the more
advanced future, when appearances, even on the level of writerly typing, should
become increasingly taboo? As far as
verbal communication is concerned, telepathy would signify a stage beyond such
means to one that completely transcends appearances, even on the most refined
wavicle level. For if writing is
intended to be silently read, to be thought through as if an indirect form of
telepathy, then the direct transference of thought would likewise maintain a
silence, transcending all recourse to speech.
This silence would surely complement the peace of hypermeditation!
Whatever transpires to being the case, I do
know that wavicle communication is going to gain in importance in the decades
ahead, and at the expense of the particle side of the electron, with particular
reference to printerly typing. Already
one finds, in various contemporary magazines, the use of an italic print as a
stylistic mean for certain pages, and if this is not indicative of a
transitional status from disconnected print to connected print, or
writing-proper, relative to a quasi-theocratic leaning, then I'm at a loss to
explain it! Telepathy may yet have to
wait a while, but writerly print is just around the corner.
Now just as joined natural writing is
easier to read, when clear, than subnatural printing, making for a quicker
transmission of verbal communication, so joined supernatural typing will be
easier to read than the current anti-natural printing of the contemporary book,
magazine, letter, etc., confirming an upgrading of intellectual activity,
commensurate with the Centre, and the consequent return to a wavicle essence -
the true antidote to republican print!
Thus speaks Shay Griffin, literary
spokesperson for the Social Transcendentalist revolution.
SUPERNATURAL TRAVEL
It is said
that we live in the age of the train, and, judging by the number of trains on
the rails these days, such a claim cannot be far wrong, even though most people
would probably give priority to the plane.
At any rate, the twentieth century is the age of the train that runs on
two rails, whether across the surface of the land or deep underground, and we
may believe this fact is inherent in the relative nature of an atomic society,
which likes to do things in pairs. The
monorail, it would seem, is something for the future, since suggestive of an
absolute trend more applicable, it may well be, to a Social Transcendentalist
age than to a liberal or democratic one.
I like the idea of the monorail train quite
a lot, and I am confident that it will function both above ground, on an
elevated line, and beneath ground, like the contemporary underground. Though not every country will desire the
latter, for reasons I shall shortly outline.
It is well known, for instance, that London has an underground system
and a very complex one too, while Dublin doesn't. But it may not be appreciated, least of all
in Britain, that the absence of an underground system from Dublin is not simply
an indication of Dublin's backwardness, as may at first appear to be the case,
but, more probably, indicative of a refusal, on the part of the Irish, to go
underground and thus follow in the well-worn footsteps of decadent Britain.
For what is an underground system? Not simply a mode of mechanized transport,
but, like all other artificial phenomena, a mode of transport corresponding to
a specific ideological equivalent, in this case ... a Marxist one. Yes, the fact is that the underground system
signifies a plunge into a democratic or, rather, anti-democratic absolutism,
much as submarines signify a like-plunge compared with a surface vessel, such
as a destroyer or a cruiser. We may
argue that, to a degree, the one precedes the other, the relative the absolute,
and that, just as surface ships pre-date submarines, so trains pre-date
underground trains, as a land/air relativity preceding a tunnel absolutism and,
moreover, as a relativity between trains running in opposite directions on
adjacent, parallel tracks ... preceding an absolutism of independent
underground trains running along the single tracks of a given tunnel, isolated
from those heading in the opposite direction, which likewise have a tunnel to
themselves.
In the underground, then, we perceive a
'fall' (forwards) from the relative to the absolute, as from above-ground
liberalism to beneath-ground radicalism, equivalent to a communist status. Now when this fact is properly appreciated,
it won't surprise us to find that the Irish, with their theocratic bias, do not
possess an underground system and probably wouldn't want to build one even if
they could afford to, bearing in mind the ideological implications of such a
system - implications that may have been grasped intuitively rather than
rationally by the modernity-wary Irish!
A fact that would apply no less to the building and staffing of
submarines, which are likewise Marxist and also scorned by the Irish, who
prefer gunboats and corvettes, corresponding to a petty-bourgeois liberal
integrity.
We may therefore presume that, unless Eire
is overtaken by a Marxist revolution, it will continue to scorn submarines and
underground trains, as well as anything else that corresponds to a democratic
decadence. Even the nuclear submarine,
arguably more relative to Marxism-Leninism, would be unacceptable. And, by a similar token, we may contend that
a monorail underground system would be less than relevant, even if inherently
preferable to its Marxist forerunner. At
any rate, whilst Eire will continue to fight shy of Marxism-Leninism and
Marxism alike, it is probable that, if London is to modify or expand its
underground service in the decades ahead, Britain will introduce monorail
transportation as the logical successor to the current and traditional bi-rail
underground trains. Since it already
possesses nuclear submarines, there would seem to be no ideological argument in
the way of modifying the underground system accordingly. Though we may surmise that such a process
would take time and be introduced only very gradually, affecting first one line
and then another, much as the new bi-rail trains were introduced by degrees,
with particular reference to the new lines, such as the Victoria and the
Jubilee, whilst an older type of carriage continued to function on the old
lines.
These days, however, I dislike the
underground on principle and make a point of avoiding it. I have been on surface trains once or twice
in recent years, but would not wish to cultivate a habit with them either,
partly, I suspect, because of the expense, yet partly also for ideological
reasons. If I were asked to stipulate an
ideal mode of rail travel, I would have no hesitation in replying: overhead
monorail travel, as equivalent to a Social Transcendentalist ideological
integrity, and therefore applicable not to an anti-natural bias, nor even an
anti-supernatural one, but to a supernatural bias, such as I trust Ireland will
develop to a greater extent in the near future.
Yes, for if surface rail corresponds to a
liberal, or democratic, ideological position, then air rail, as we may call it,
would certainly conform to a radically theocratic integrity, as appropriate to
a people who fight shy of democratic and, in particular, Marxist criteria,
being heir to a Catholic tradition. Such
a transcendental absolutism would be the logical successor to the current
diesel/electric trains, and would doubtless permit of greater speeds, each rail
running separate from rather than parallel to another, as in the underground
system, with any given train travelling backwards and forwards along its
particular rail. Probably, on second
thoughts, the ideal way of designing monorails would be to have one above the
other, so that a vertical as opposed to a horizontal arrangement was
established, in accordance with transcendental criteria. Thus neither train on any specific route
would ever see the other, since each of them would be on different levels of
track, and stations would have to be designed accordingly ... with platforms
one above the other, though not necessarily on opposite sides of their
respective rails but, to save space and enable stations to be built along the
most vertical lines, one directly above the other, with the trains' doors
opening on opposite sides, depending on the direction of the train in question,
but only on one side in each case.
Who knows, such suggestions may yet bear
fruit, once qualified people get down to working out the details of a viable
two-way monorail system of overhead transport, the lower rail itself some yards
above the ground, the higher one several yards above that, with no possibility
of either train colliding. Certainly
safer than the parallel type of tracks, which more accords with a democratic
society, where a horizontal compromise is never far away and collisions are
always possible. As are derailments, a
misfortune I can't conceive of happening to a monorail train, sunk deeply onto
and around the rail, almost hugging it from either side, as if afraid to part
company. Yet, for all that, more
flexible than the conventional twin-track train, which is obliged to slow down
to accommodate bends in the track and would almost certainly become derailed if
it leant over too far on either side.
There is something ponderous and materialistic about such a train,
whereas the monorail alternative would suggest a wavicle lightness and swiftness
applicable to the supernatural. Thus it
would form the transcendental complement on land to hovercraft at sea, which
skim across the water's surface in a like-supernatural capacity, greatly
preferable to surface ships, with their liberal equation. As yet, however, monorail and hovercraft are,
alike, something of a rarity, even in the most advanced
industrial/technological nations. A full
appreciation of their significance has still to come, as it surely must during
the twenty-first century!
Thus speaks Peter Sloane, transportational
spokesperson for the Social Transcendentalist revolution.
SIX THINKERS SPEAKING TO SIX LISTENERS
WHO IN TURN THINK ABOUT THEIR SPEECHES
"I've
gradually come to the conclusion that rock is the European and, in particular,
British equivalent of jazz, the nearest most European musicians ever get, or
desire to go, to what is, after all, America's principal form of music. However, unlike jazz, rock is an atomic
music, whereby a bound-electron equivalent, viz. melody and/or harmony, is
harnessed to a proton equivalent which, as a persistent beat mainly issuing
from the drums, tends to impose or maintain a rhythmic bias on the music
overall, thereby making for a proton-biased atomicity. Unlike pop, rock is fundamentally a
petty-bourgeois art form and one, moreover, with a high regard for vocals,
whether in a supporting or, more usually, a lead role. Generally these vocals, which pertain to the
neutron aspect of its overall atomic integrity, will be dedicated to romantic
concerns, sometimes of a reverential nature, more often of a rebellious one, as
might be expected from a proton-dominated atomicity in which there is both a
straining at the proton leash, as it were, and a simultaneous hint of
complicity, partly expressed in the instrumental solos, with this negative
atomicity.
"Rock can, however, extend in two
directions - either down towards a classical bias or up towards a bias for
jazz. In the one case we get
rock-classical, with its strong melodic and rhythmic integrity, whilst in the
other case we get jazz-rock which, though still melodic and highly rhythmic,
shows greater respect for improvisation and, thus, intermittent solos from
whichever lead instrument. At best, such
jazz-rock becomes a pseudo-electron equivalent in relation to modern jazz.
"As for jazz itself, that relatively
post-atomic music which I tend to equate with a free-electron equivalent, it is
unquestionably the highest music of the age, somewhat on the level of American
light art rather than, as with rock, closer to European avant-garde
painting. If a political analogy can be
drawn, then one could contend that, in modern jazz, a Republican equivalent,
viz. the free-electron soloist, 'does his thing' to the deferential
accompaniment of a Democratic equivalent, viz. the pseudo-electron
percussionist, their co-existence and mutual co-operation confirming the
relatively post-atomic nature of mainstream bourgeois/proletarian
civilization. Indeed, one could extend
the analogy by contending that the soloist is akin to a liberated male and the
percussionist to a liberated female, their relationship mirroring the 'free
sex' of a typical unmarried couple.
"However, not wishing to get bogged
down in such analogies, I should add that, while modern jazz is the highest
type of contemporary music, there also exists a tendency for certain jazzmen to
extend their musical commitments down towards rock and so produce rock-jazz,
which, as the American equivalent of jazz-rock, can alternatively be termed
'fusion', to distinguish it from 'progressive', the European extension of rock
towards jazz. Such 'fusion music', it
need scarcely be emphasized, will be less free than modern jazz, since more
given to vocals and/or melody, harmony, and a monotonously persistent
beat. By comparison with modern jazz, it
will be a pseudo-electron music and will approximate, in some sense, to
rock. There is, of course, a
co-existence of jazz with rock in contemporary America, just as rock co-exists
with jazz in contemporary Europe. But,
in each case, rock is as much unrepresentative of American music as jazz of the
European scene. American rock musicians
are no less an exception to the rule than European jazzmen."
I like the
way the first speaker distinguishes between rock and 'progressive' on the one
hand, and ... jazz and 'fusion' on the other - a distinction, in effect,
between the European - in particular British - tradition and the American one,
which is regarded by him as pertaining to a different integrity - namely a
relatively post-atomic integrity rather than, as with Britain, an essentially
atomic one. Thus rock, a proton-biased
art form, stands to 'progressive', its bound-electron alternative, somewhat in
the order of the Labour Party to the Conservatives in modern Britain, whereas
modern jazz, corresponding to a free-electron equivalent, stands to 'fusion',
that pseudo-electron development, somewhat in the order of the Republican party
to the Democrats in America. Certainly
an interesting theory, if a little rigid overall! One cannot deny that many 'progressive'
musicians in Europe have relapsed, as it were, into rock in recent years, just
as many modern jazzmen in America have shown a growing predilection for
'fusion'. One could speak of
'progressive' as instrumental rock and 'fusion', by contrast, as vocal jazz,
which is a distinction, ironically, the speaker failed to make. Neither did he allude to the fact that in
Britain, for instance, musicians can start out 'progressive' and subsequently
relapse, so to speak, into rock. One got
the impression that they all started out in rock and progressed to
jazz-rock. Conversely, he made no
mention of the fact that American musicians sometimes start out in 'fusion' and
later progress to modern jazz. Probably
these two situations are the exception to the rule however, and he therefore
felt they weren't worth mentioning.
Certainly he considered American rock and British jazz to be exceptions
within their respective cultural traditions, and I have to agree with him. Needless to say, American rock musicians sometimes
play 'progressive', much as British and European jazz musicians sometimes
relapse into 'fusion'. More often,
though, I think the two kinds of musicians are quite separate, since the
transformation from the one to the other, from rock to jazz-rock or vice versa,
would be equivalent to a change of political allegiance, and such a change is
certainly the exception to the rule, particularly in class-bound Britain! So one can conclude, then, that American rock
musicians are Europeanized Americans, British jazz musicians Americanized
Europeans, their respective status akin to that of cultural outsiders in each
tradition - the American one centred in jazz, the British/European one, by
contrast, in rock.
*
"It
would be out of the question for quasi-supermen to dress in furs in a
transcendental civilization since, unlike liberated females, they will be
considered a masculine phenomenon, not be discriminated against as women. Besides, furs are so naturalistic, so damn
pagan! They make their wearers look like
animals, albeit sophisticated and attractive ones. Certainly quasi-supermen will not be partial
to furs, nor to stockings, skirts, dresses, high-heels, necklaces, et
cetera. Nothing that could be considered
feminine would be worn by them.
"Ah, how I look forward to such a
post-sexist age! How refreshingly
different it would be from the usual dichotomies of an open society! There would be nothing stemming from the
Diabolic Alpha in that closed society of the future; for it would signify an
exclusive aspiration towards the Divine Omega.
Consequently there would be no furs and no ... oh, what a long list one
could draw up here! There wouldn't even
be any anti-naturalism. For the natural
world would have been superseded by the artificial, which would serve as a base
from which to launch a truly supernatural aspiration, from which the
cultivation of pure spirit would proceed as never before! Yes, instead of a proton/electron antagonism,
as in open societies, one would find a pseudo-electron/free-electron
co-operation, the artificial being put to the service of the supernatural, or
supermen."
I used to
like furs on women as a youth, because they appeared to denote class and
affluence, but these days I think I would be more inclined to sympathize with
the second speaker's viewpoint. He made
no mention, curiously, of the moral dimension accruing to the acquisition of
fur from various animals - foxes, bears, weasels, etc. - and I can only suppose
this subject doesn't particularly interest him, else he would surely have
alluded to it. However, one can't argue
with the assertion that fur coats would be irrelevant to quasi-supermen, those
civilized proletarian women of the future, since a post-sexist society could
not countenance such feminine attire, especially when one bears in mind the
degree of its naturalness, about which, curiously, he said scarcely a
word! Though I suspect the likening of
wearers of fur coats to animals, the fact that they remind one of bears and
things, was intended to imply as much! No doubt, furs on women are only relevant to
an alpha-stemming society, and we need not be surprised by the fact that the
majority of fur wearers are bourgeois types.
I liked his distinction between the anti-natural and the artificial, the
former being against the natural while the latter is pro-supernatural, a base,
as it were, from which to launch a truly supernatural aspiration. Anti-naturalism would seem to accord more
with atomic societies, since effectively a bound-electron equivalent, whereas
the artificial, functioning as a pseudo-electron equivalent, seems to accord
with post-atomic societies, including the contemporary American. He lives, it seems to me, for the future
development of an absolutely post-atomic civilization, as germane to an omega-orientated
society.
*
"Spectra
of evolutionary development in the arts - such a fascinating idea! Proton philosophers, atomic novelists,
electron poets. Then philosophers who
rebel against academic philosophy, becoming anti-philosophers, pseudo-electron
equivalents. They rebel as petty
bourgeois against bourgeois philosophy, with its ethical focus: Schopenhauer
against Kant, Nietzsche against Schopenhauer, even, in some sense, Marx against
Hegel. They prefer a metaphysical to a
physical line, essence to appearance.
They co-exist with petty-bourgeois academic philosophy, which signifies
the upgrading of appearances from the humanistic to the artificial, ethics to
language, as with Wittgenstein. But they
extend beyond this extreme reach of philosophy, undergoing, in the process, a
transformation from negative to positive, from anti-philosophy to
pro-poetry. They become, in the course
of time, pseudo-philosophers, bringing metaphysical philosophy to its culmination
in a collectivized format, a petty-bourgeois level less stemming from the
bourgeoisie, as with academic philosophy and its anti-academic antagonist, than
aspiring towards the proletariat on the highest terms, that's to say, in a
pseudo-electron context of metaphysical expression, free from the aphoristic
root.
"Yet why stop at philosophy? Doesn't literature, in the strictly
novelistic sense of that word, likewise undergo a parting of the ways and thus
witness a petty-bourgeois rebellion against its fictional heritage? Yes, most assuredly! This rebellion takes the form of a turning
against the fictional on autobiographical terms, is championed by
anti-novelists who, like Henry Miller, prefer to tell the story of their lives
than to create silly and possibly inconsequential fictions. Whereas the anti-philosophical development
was predominantly a European and, in particular, German phenomenon, the
development of anti-literature finds most of its support in America, almost as
if it signified a turning against the European tradition, even as affecting
American literature. And like its
philosophical counterpart, it co-exists with the end of the bourgeois fictional
tradition and the transformation of such a tradition into a uniquely illusory
or, rather, illusional guise - co-exists, in other words, with the continuation
of literature along petty-bourgeois lines.
"But just as we can note a distinction
between anti-philosophy and its pseudo-philosophical successor, so a
distinction soon becomes apparent between anti-literature and its successor
in pseudo-literature - the higher, experimental, non-expressive literature of a
later and superior phase of petty-bourgeois evolution, such as largely pertains
to the mainstream contemporary civilization of America, and which outstrips the
illusional tradition stemming from bourgeois fiction. This higher literature, championed by
pseudo-novelists like William Burroughs, aspires towards a proletarian
absolutism, brings literature the closest it has ever been to pure poetry while
yet still remaining prose. This
pseudo-electron literature of the later petty-bourgeoisie parallels the
pseudo-philosophy of the metaphysical collectivist and finds its aesthetic
equivalent not in abstract sculpture, as with the pseudo-philosophical, but in
the furthest reach of abstract art, particularly with regard to abstract
expressionism.
"That leaves, then, the progression of
poetry from a traditional pseudo-poetical bound-electron status, such as
continues to apply wherever poetry is conceived in expressively materialist or
descriptive terms, to a revolutionary free-electron status via the rebellion of
anti-poets who, like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, turned against the
pseudo-poetical tradition appertaining, in the main, to Western Europe, with
its emphasis on appearance and description, and did so, needless to say, on
largely autobiographical and/or occult terms.
"Such a rebellion, however, was soon
to bear revolutionary fruit as the emphasis changed to metaphysics, with the
development of a pure poetry along relatively free-electron lines, a poetry
which alternated between metaphysical expression and poetical impression, as
relevant to the extreme relativity of late twentieth-century America, and which
was championed by poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who pertain to
the later phase of petty-bourgeois culture.
After such pure poetry, the literary equivalent of light art, the
evolution of poetry can only be from the relatively pure to the absolutely
pure, as achieved through an exclusive concern with the impressive, with pure
impression, a development which should pertain to the next and final
civilization in the history of man, which, as a proletarian phenomenon, will
avail itself of computer discs."
I like the
way he speaks of a progression from the 'anti' to the 'pseudo', from
anti-philosophy to pseudo-philosophy, anti-literature to pseudo-literature,
anti-poetry to pseudo- or, rather, pure poetry, moving all the time from what
he considers to be the proton roots of literature to its future climax in the
most free-electron terms. Very
systematic thinking indeed! He doubtless
despises academic philosophers, considering that, to him, they are more often
than not proton types who pertain to an aristocratic stage and manifestation of
literary development.... Though I'm not convinced, myself, that philosophy is
as bad, or alpha-stemming, as he chooses to depict it! The rebellion against bourgeois Kantian
philosophy seems, not altogether surprisingly, to have begun in Germany, with
Schopenhauer and (later) Nietzsche, and continued to develop alongside a
petty-bourgeois stage of academic philosophy until such time, apparently, as
pseudo-philosophy came to the fore as the logical successor to the
anti-philosophical tradition, a higher type of petty-bourgeois philosophy which
leaves the academic tradition behind, since the latter is unable to extend
beyond a lower petty-bourgeois stage, being aligned with appearances and,
therefore, stemming from a proton root.
It is the furthest straining at the leash, so to speak, of an academic
tradition, whereas pseudo-philosophy extends towards a proletarian absolutism
from its roots in anti-philosophy, that pseudo-electron equivalent. Does such pseudo-philosophy become genuinely
free, however? Apparently not, since it
must express metaphysical ideas and thus remain intelligible. Yet when it gets to the stage of abandoning
the aphoristic root, as it seemingly does on the level of the highest
pseudo-philosophy, then it almost becomes genuinely free, is virtually a
free-electron equivalent in relation to anti-philosophy. Likewise, the progression from
anti-literature to pseudo-literature is one that outstrips the tail-end, as it
were, of the novelistic tradition, as mainly pertaining to Western Europe, and
takes an illusional twist on the level of a bound-electron equivalent. This progression from autobiographical novels
to largely experimental, non-expressive novels signifies a development from
lower to higher petty-bourgeois stages of literary evolution, and is especially
relevant to contemporary America, with its relatively post-atomic bias. Apparently, this pseudo-literature, like its
negative forerunner, corresponds to a pseudo-electron equivalent, though the
third speaker makes no mention of the fact that, like abstract art, it can also
entail a free-electron status when primarily concerned with religious issues of
a transcendent nature, as in the novels of Jack Kerouac. But, of course, when one is simply
distinguishing between different stages of literary development, from academic
philosophy through to poetry via novels, then one's scale of reference
necessarily differs from what it would be in the event of each stage being
considered in isolation, so that, willy-nilly, pseudo-literature becomes a
pseudo-electron equivalent in relation to pure poetry, that ultimate art form,
about which the third speaker has some enlightened views. Certainly, one should distinguish once again
between the negative and the positive stages of this largely American
development, the anti-poets turning against the European tradition of
pseudo-poetry, with its emphasis on appearance and description, as relevant to
a bound-electron equivalent. Whether
they should be regarded as pseudo-electron or as free-electron equivalents,
however, is not clear, though I suspect he had the former in mind, since he
speaks of the emphasis changing, with pure poetry, to a concern with
metaphysics, as germane to a free-electron bias - a supposition which would
suggest that the later petty-bourgeois stage of poetic development doesn't
simply stem from the earlier stage, but pertains to a new spectrum of poetic
evolution - one directly leading towards the ultimate pure poetry of an
absolute civilization, which would avail itself of computers. If that is so, then one need not doubt that
pseudo-philosophy and pseudo-literature also pertain to separate spectra of
literary evolution from their negative forerunners. Truly a complex affair!
*
"We
should distinguish, I believe, between soul and pseudo-soul, not to say between
pseudo-spirit and spirit. Thus we will
be distinguishing, on the one hand, between that which is uniquely soul and
that which is basically spirit conditioned by soul, and, on the other hand,
between that which is basically soul conditioned by spirit and that which is
uniquely spirit. Soul, as we all know,
pertains to the body, is the occult side, as it were, of the physical, the
wavicle aspect of the flesh. Soul is
what we feel, and we can feel either negative or positive feelings, depending
on the context. We can describe negative
feelings as occult, strictly appertaining to the proton content of the flesh's
atomicity, and, by contrast, positive feelings as pseudo-occult, since
appertaining to the neutron content of the flesh's atomicity - in other words
to pseudo-soul. However, if soul is
never alone in the body, its greatest preponderance over pseudo-soul is in the
flesh, where negative sensations somewhat outweigh positive ones in intensity.
"From sensational depths, however,
soul proceeds through emotional middlings in the heart to feeling heights in
the old brain, becoming, all the time, more diluted with pseudo-soul until, by
the time it reaches the new brain, it is distinctly pseudo itself, functioning
on the level of thought, as conditioned and promulgated by awareness, i.e.
genuine spirit, and therefore akin to pseudo-spirit. By contrast, pseudo-soul acquires more
positivity the higher it ascends until, by the time it reaches the old brain,
it is the strongest feeling, the pseudo-occult preponderating over the occult,
whether as happiness or love. Here soul
co-exists with bound spirit as subconscious, as spirit conditioned by and in
some degree enslaved to soul. For
whereas soul is feeling and, at least in the old brain, also visionary
appearances, spirit is awareness, or consciousness, and the awareness of the
subconscious is distinctly sensual, as we discover when we sleep and
contemplate dreams through bound spirit.
"Yet if spirit is bound in the old
brain, it's most decidedly free in the new one, where it exists as
superconscious, as awareness untrammelled by feelings and/or thoughts, and thus
pertains to the supernatural, the psychological side, as it were, of the
natural, with particular reference to the new brain. This free spirit co-exists, as I've said,
with pseudo-spirit, the transmutation of soul from the occult in the old brain
to the quasi-supernatural in the new brain, where it manifests in thought, as
conditioned by the majority electron content, functioning as awareness, of that
brain. Thus soul expands from the flesh
to the old brain, pseudo-soul likewise, where it co-exists with bound
spirit. Free spirit exclusively
appertains to the superconscious, where it co-exists with the pseudo-spirit of
the new brain. Although existing in the new
brain, free spirit is not of the new
brain. Appertaining to the supernatural,
it can be cultivated to the point of transcendence and so become entirely free
of the natural.
"Evolution will witness the subsequent
detachment of noumenon from phenomenon, of superconscious from new brain. The reformed neutron content of
pseudo-spirit, together with the atomicity of new-brain materialism as a whole,
will be escaped from in the course of millennial time, as free electrons emerge
from the earth's most artificial (post-human) life-form ... to expand into and
converge towards other such free-electron transcendences in space, conceived as
the setting for the post-millennial Beyond."
I like the
distinction the fourth speaker draws between bound spirit as subconscious and
free spirit as superconscious, the one enslaved, during sleep, to soul; the
other free to condition thoughts, which pertain to pseudo-spirit. He could have emphasized the fact that such freedom
is relative as opposed to absolute, since spirit only becomes truly free when
wrapped-up in self-contemplation, as appertaining to meditation. Nevertheless the use of spirit as will to
condition thought, to order and regulate it, bespeaks a freedom of sorts, if
only relatively so. Not surprisingly,
this distinction between pseudo-spirit and spirit, thought and awareness,
anticipates the social distinction which must soon arise between quasi-supermen
and supermen, the former as pseudo-electron equivalents, the latter as
free-electron equivalents. Conversely,
at the alpha or pagan end of the spectrum, his distinction between soul and
pseudo-soul, negative and positive feelings, calls to mind the pre-atomic distinction
he occasionally makes - for I have heard him speak on a number of occasions -
between superwomen and quasi-superwomen, whilst in between the two extremes one
finds the atomic distinction between apparent soul, as dreams, and bound
spirit, as subconscious, mirroring the heterosexual stage of evolution whereby
men and women co-exist on separate terms within an open society, in which
marriage is the norm. Returning,
however, to his argument, one can understand how in a post-atomic society,
whether relatively or absolutely such, the new brain comes to acquire greater
importance, since the focal-point of psychic activity has shifted away from
both the flesh and the old brain to a mounting concern with the development of
spirit. Undoubtedly, whilst a relatively
post-atomic society will place more emphasis on the conditioning of
pseudo-spirit by spirit, its absolutist successor will favour the cultivation
of pure spirit, as appropriate to a genuinely post-atomic age. Transcendental meditation will supersede LSD
tripping, leading, inevitably, to the post-human millennium and beyond when, as
he maintains, free electrons will emerge to converge towards and expand into
other such transcendent noumena in space.
Turning right away from pseudo-spirit, genuine spirit will become
divine, the superconscious at length escaping from the new brain, the
supernatural arising not from the natural but from the most artificially
supported and sustained of life forms - the new-brain collectivizations of the
superbeings!
*
"Bourgeois
painting, surrounded by and encased within its wooden frame, marks the
mid-point in the evolution of art, the dualistic compromise, as it were,
between sculpture and holography. Either
side of this representational art-form one finds the largely pagan mural,
conceived in naturalistic terms, and the largely transcendental
abstract-painting of 'modern art', that antithetical equivalent of the mural
which, exhibited against a wall rather than - as with murals - on one, is
usually free of a frame. If the mural is
higher/later grand-bourgeois, then 'contemporary' canvas art is very much
lower/earlier petty-bourgeois.
"We have started in the middle, so let
us now proceed further outwards to embrace the art forms either side of the
above-mentioned ones, which, of course, are vase modelling on the one hand and
light art on the other, the former lower/earlier grand-bourgeois, the latter
higher/later petty-bourgeois; the one particularly relevant to the ancient
Greeks, the other to their antithetical equivalents, the modern Americans. As vase modelling, even with its painting, is
closer in essence to sculpture than to either murals or framed paintings, so
light art is closer in essence to holography than to either 'modern art' or
framed paintings. Amphora art stems from
sculpture no less than light art aspires towards holography, the aristocratic
and proletarian extremes, respectively, in the evolution of art.
"So that brings us - does it not? - to
the beginnings of art in pure sculpture, usually conceived in stone, and to the
culmination of art in pure holography, as a projection into enclosed space of
an image/design through refracted light.
Whereas the former is utterly materialistic and mundane, standing on the
ground or, in its earliest manifestations, carved from the bare face of mountain
rock, the latter is utterly spiritualistic and transcendent, seemingly floating
free of material connections, suspended, so to speak, in the void as an
intimation of pure spirit, such as would be compatible with an absolutely
transcendental civilization, the refinement of holography from representational
to abstract levels taking place there as a matter of chronological course.
"Where does one find the earliest
manifestations of fine art? In Egypt,
that cradle of pagan civilization, where the largest and most materialistic
sculptures were chiselled into existence, carved out of the towering mountain
rocks or set free to stand on the ground like a reformed rock, a formful
boulder. And, not altogether
surprisingly, such pure sculpture was very often created in animal or
semi-animal forms, beasts being closer to nature and therefore closer to the
Creator than men, more fundamental than their evolutionary successors. Ah, such diabolical art!
"Where, by contrast, will one find the
latest and highest manifestations of fine art?
Hopefully, in Eire, should it become the champion of a full-blown
transcendental civilization given to the creation of the most pure holography,
abstract and transcendent. Certainly,
pure holography must spread from there to every country on earth, as
civilization becomes truly universal and all mankind are disposed to
contemplation of the ultimate civilized art - that of the people."
Yes, one
looks forward to the development of abstract holography, that ultimate art,
which should be formless rather than formful or, rather, formal, like ancient
sculpture. The fifth speaker is
certainly correct to imply that such art could only be championed by an
absolute civilization, since contemporary holography, pertaining to the
relatively post-atomic societies of the bourgeois/proletarian West (with
particular reference to America), is generally representational, and therefore
relative. It's on a level with original
anthological poetry and modern jazz, a level contiguous with the finest light art
which, ironically, is non-representational or, rather, abstract. Certainly, at its best, light art is closer
to holography than to painting, just as, from a converse viewpoint, the vase
art of, for instance, the ancient Greeks was closer, in essence, to sculpture
than to murals, even though it involved the painting of tiny figures on the
curvilinear surface of the vases. Such
vases stemmed from formal sculptures no less than contemporary light art
aspires towards the formless holograms of the future.... As for so-called
modern art, I would never have considered it the antithetical equivalent of
murals had not the speaker pointed out this fact. Murals were naturalistic and on a wall,
whereas avant-garde painting, by contrast, is non-representational and/or
abstract and distinct from a wall, painted on a lightweight canvas which, as a
rule, is free of a frame, that wooden surround suggestive of a sculptural
connection. Indeed, bourgeois paintings
would seem to stem from sculpture rather than - as with the best and most
progressive modern art - to aspire towards holography. A quintessentially middle-of-the-road
development in the history of art's evolution, both materialistic and
spiritualistic at the same time. But
then, with modern art, the beginnings of a transvaluation of values, the
severance of painting from sculptural/representational connections, as it is
conceived, upon a frame-free canvas, in increasingly non-representational
terms, becoming, with the transformation to light art (and even a little while
before that), an unequivocally abstract intimation of spiritual truth, and the
relatively post-atomic forerunner of abstract holography. Of course, one should not overlook the fact
that modern art in Western Europe and modern art in America signify two
distinct traditions, nor forget that such art is itself divisible into a kind
of higher materialism, or pseudo-spirituality, and a lower idealism ...
wherever relative criteria apply, as happens to be the case in the contemporary
West.
*
"How
dreadful to behold a man or a woman walking a dog down the street! How still more dreadful to have to suffer the
appalling noise of continuous barking!
How vulgar and demeaning is the spectacle of dog's excrement on
pavements and roads!
"No, a time must surely come when men
are freed from this ghastly atomicity, severed from the proton root of a beast
and obliged to be not bound-electron but free-electron equivalents. Dogs can have no place in a free-electron
civilization. They will have to be
banished and/or destroyed, along with cats, horses, hamsters, and other
unnecessary animals. The spirit of the
Last Judgement must extend to beasts as well as to those categories of human
beings which stem from the Diabolic Alpha and consequently oppose evolutionary
progress.
"Truly, there are many who are too
corrupt and foolish to take such teachings seriously, people who would oppose
their implementation. But, rest assured,
they won't oppose them for ever!
Judgement will be merciless and irrevocable. He saves, but he also damns; he isn't
absolute. He brings a 'sword' as well as
the Truth."
No doubt
the sixth speaker suffers or has suffered a great deal from barking dogs ... to
bring such a mundane subject so callously into his predominantly Messianic
lecture. His suggestion that dogs,
together with other pets, constitute the proton side of an atomic integrity
involving pet-owners is most interesting, and doubtless true as well! Clearly, there can be no such atomicities in
the absolutely post-atomic society that must one day soon come to pass. So away with dogs, cats, horses, etc. in the
name of free-electron progress! Curious
how he made no reference to the fact that the relatively post-atomic
civilization of contemporary America could be regarded as having pioneered,
through the development of such animal cartoons as Donald Duck and Mickey
Mouse, a relative transcendence of animals ... suggestive of a transitional
stage between the indulgence of pets and their eventual destruction. There is something agreeably artificial about
these animal cartoons, and doubtless the speaker has enjoyed them in the past,
even if they only signify a relative transcendence of animals, as applying to
the substance rather than to the form.
Still, the absolute transcendence of pets isn't something that I, for
one, would greatly regret, since I don't own any. In fact, I'm fairly confident that the
implementation of a banishment and/or destruction order on dogs, cats, horses,
etc., would constitute an aspect, by no means the least important, of the Last
Judgement.
FIVE SPEECHES SUCCEEDED BY THEIR SPEAKERS' THOUGHTS, PRECEDING
FIVE THOUGHTS
SUCCEEDED BY THEIR THINKERS' SPEECHES
First Speaker
"Atomic
weapons correspond to a later stage of petty-bourgeois military development,
the 'barbarous' preceding the 'civilized' in terms of atomic bombs preceding
nuclear missiles, the former dropping to earth from a large bomber, the latter
hurtling through space once fired from their launch pads. Thus a distinction, in effect, between the
mundane and the transcendent, which accords with that between lower and higher
phases of late-stage petty-bourgeois evolution."
What makes
atomic weapons petty bourgeois is the fact that they correspond to a relatively
post-atomic status, a negative dualism implying the splitting of the atom, the
severance, through nuclear fission, of electrons from protons and neutrons - an
evolutionary stage between bourgeois atomicity and proletarian electron
freedom, a kind of transition between the relative and the absolute, part
mundane and part transcendent in constitution.
Consequently atomic weapons are the weapons of
the late-twentieth century, appropriate to a later petty-bourgeois age on both
its civilized and barbarous sides, as mainly applying to the Americans and the
Russians respectively. Because the
late-twentieth century corresponds to a 'civilized' phase of higher
petty-bourgeois development, it follows that missiles rather than bombs are the
relevant weapons.
Second Speaker
"Just
as late petty-bourgeois evolution passes through two phases, so proletarian
evolution will do likewise, beginning in a 'barbarous' phase and proceeding, in
time, to a 'civilized' phase, which will entail a distinction between the
mundane use of laser weapons and, eventually, their transcendent use, meaning
primarily that whereas during the lower phase of proletarian evolution laser
beams will mainly be fired on the ground, either from guns or tanks, they'll be
fired from satellites and such-like 'transcendent' phenomena during its higher
phase. Thus we are distinguishing
between laser guns and laser satellites."
What makes
laser weapons proletarian is the fact that they correspond to an absolutely
post-atomic status, one in which electrons are free from proton and/or neutron
constraint and capable, in consequence, of being fired at any given material
target at an incredibly high velocity, a much greater velocity than missiles or
rockets, those materialist projectiles subject to the force of gravity, which
would be like sitting-ducks to incoming laser beams. However, one should distinguish carefully
between a proton absolute use of lasers and their electron absolute use,
particularly in view of the post-atomic status of a Social Transcendentalist
society, which must favour the latter, especially during its 'civilized'
phase. While proton beams need not be
banned during the preceding 'barbarous' phase, their employment during the
higher phase of proletarian evolution would be both morally indefensible and
ideologically incommensurable, so that one envisages electron beams alone being
fired from satellites in accordance with a free-electron integrity. Probably electron beams would be employed on
the ground during the preceding 'barbarous' phase as well, since - so I believe
- more relevant to an incipiently absolute post-atomic society than proton
beams, which have the ring of a pre-atomic integrity about them, though,
admittedly, not on the low level of fire, that much cruder manifestation of
proton negativity! Certainly there could
be no more barbarous weapon than the flame-thrower, and we need not doubt that
proletarian society will continue to uphold a ban on its use.
Third Speaker
"Modern
classical music is inferior to both jazz-rock and modern jazz on account of the
fact that it pertains to an earlier stage of petty-bourgeois development and
accordingly employs techniques and instrumental combinations stemming from the
bourgeoisie, i.e. from nineteenth-century classical music, which mainly took
the form of romanticism. In its lower or
barbarous phase, early petty-bourgeois music is either expressionist or
impressionist in character, reflecting a partly atonal revolt against romantic
precedent. In its higher or civilized
phase, late petty-bourgeois music is either abstract expressionist or abstract
impressionist in character, reflecting an atonal revolution commensurate with
the growing entrenchment of petty-bourgeois civilization."
By
contrast, late petty-bourgeois music signifies a break with traditional media
of expression, such as acoustic violins and pianos, by employing electronic
instruments in a variety of fresh combinations and in a partly or even largely
improvisatory context, depending on the phase in question, that's to say,
whether barbarous or civilized. In the
lower phase, we get a revolt against civilized classical precedent in the form
of either trad jazz or rock 'n' roll. In
the higher phase, we get a revolutionary attainment via modern jazz or rock
classical to a new degree of civilized music, one germane to the late
petty-bourgeoisie. Whereas the barbarous
and civilized phases of early petty-bourgeois music are equivalent to early-
and mid-twentieth-century painterly art ... from expressionism to abstract
expressionism, the barbarous and civilized phases of late petty-bourgeois music
are equivalent to mid- and late-twentieth-century light art ... from sculptural
to abstract light art.
Fourth Speaker
"Just
as late petty-bourgeois music passed through two phases, so proletarian music
must do the same, beginning as a largely tonal revolt against civilized late
petty-bourgeois precedent, and culminating in an exclusively atonal attainment
to revolutionary proletarian civilization - a progression, one might argue,
from jazz-rock to pure jazz.
"The revolt or reaction, already well
under way in certain Western countries in the late-twentieth century, employs
electronic instruments, particularly synthesizers, in a largely tonal way and
generally avoids rhythmic or harmonic accompaniments. It is not afraid of notation but quite often
uses scores or some pre-planned directive, a fact which further confirms its
barbarous status - the paradoxical use of a higher medium suggesting a 'fall',
as regards content, from civilized precedent.
A music equivalent to representational holography, that paradoxically
barbarous reaction to abstract light art."
By
contrast, civilized proletarian music, pertaining to people's civilization,
will be exclusively atonal or, rather, 'pitchful' ... as we should describe an
ultra-positive music dedicated to the maximum improvisatory equalitarianism of
notes, all of which would be free from rhythmic or harmonic constraints and
consequently moving in quick-note successions of free-electron 'runs'. Such pure music will be programmed for
performance by synthesizers and serve as an inducement to self-realization,
being associated with people's religion as an aspect of
super-transcendentalism, inseparable from religion and therefore truly
civilized - the ultimate religious music, corresponding to abstract holography.
Fifth Speaker
"Like
art and music, the evolution of religion may be said to pass through phases
relevant to a given class integrity ... from a barbarous revolt against some
civilized alien-class precedent to the establishment, within a higher phase, of
a new civilized level. In this fashion,
we need not doubt that early Protestantism signified a late grand-bourgeois
rebellion against early grand-bourgeois Roman Catholicism, the barbarous phase
giving way, in due course, to the civilized ... with the entrenchment of
Puritanism.
"Probably the bourgeoisie likewise
revolted against early Protestantism before going on to establish what could be
called middle Protestantism, Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran, as its civilized
successor within the higher phase of bourgeois religion.
"Similarly one can argue that the
early petty-bourgeoisie revolted, in their turn, against bourgeois religious
precedent before going on to establish late Protestantism, whether Pentecostal
or Unitarian, as the civilized religion relevant to themselves."
Of course,
religion continued to be relativistic within the context of evolving relative
civilization, a kind of spiritual religion co-existing with a material
counterpart, though never more conspicuously so than during the extreme stages
of relative evolution, as applying to the grand- and petty-bourgeois stages
respectively. If Catholicism was
predominantly a soulful religion, then Protestantism signified a shift towards
the spiritual, a shift which could only lead to the predominantly spiritual
with the development of higher/early petty-bourgeois Protestantism, though not
to the same degree as with the introduction of civilized late petty-bourgeois religion
in the form of neo-Buddhism, which extended the spiritual bias still
further. Although relative in itself,
not to mention vis-à-vis a materialist counterpart in the form of mescaline
tripping, neo-Buddhism shifted the emphasis away from the physical exercises of
Yoga towards the spiritual contemplation inherent in itself, and thereby
affirmed a fresh civilized attainment, one more spiritually orientated than any
previous civilized religion, though falling short of an absolute spiritual
orientation both in terms of its physical connection with the ground - either
directly, through a squatting posture, or indirectly, through the interposing
medium of a chair - and, moreover, in terms of its acquiescence in and
acceptance of positive feelings like happiness and love - an integrity, in
short, not excluding affiliation with pseudo-soul, as derived from the majority
neutron content of the old brain.
First Thinker
Late
petty-bourgeois religion divides, then, into spiritual and material kinds, the
one kind associated with neo-Buddhism, the other with mescaline tripping; the
former predominantly appealing to the majority electron content of the new
brain, the superconscious; the latter, by contrast, predominantly appealing to
the minority proton/neutron content of the new brain, the
quasi-superconscious. These two kinds of
'contemporary' civilized religion signify the higher phase of late
petty-bourgeois civilization, the lower, or barbarous, phase having given rise
to a Yoga reaction against neo-Catholicism on the one hand, and to a doping
reaction against late Protestantism on the other, the reaction of a spiritual
barbarism generally being against a materialistic civilized religion and,
conversely, that of a materialistic barbarism generally being against a
spiritual civilized religion - a procedure generally paralleled by the arts.
"Of
course, the development of a proletarian religion can also be seen to divide
into two phases, viz. a barbarous and a civilized, and we find in the former
case a revolt against neo-Buddhism which takes the form of LSD tripping, a
relatively barbarous mode of religious allegiance involving the contemplation
of the visionary contents of the minority proton/neutron content of the new
brain by a majority electron content functioning as awareness. Such indirect, 'representational' meditation
parallels the development of representational holography.
"Certainly, a reaction against late
petty-bourgeois religion and art is not something that a Social
Transcendentalist Eire need over-concern itself with, since its principal
obligation, once the cobwebs of tradition had been cleared away, would be to
prepare the ground for Super-transcendentalism in the name of people's
civilization, a procedure necessarily placing emphasis on the introduction of
meditation centres, where transcendental meditation or, rather, hypermeditation
... would be carried on both free from the ground, i.e. in a vertical position
entailing recourse to special chest-to-crotch harnesses, and in a psychic
context free from feelings, including positive ones, and so exclusively
concerned with the cultivation of awareness, as applying to the majority
electron content of the new brain.
"If the barbarous phase of proletarian
religion mainly pertains to the United States, where LSD tripping is quite
widespread, then its civilized phase should ultimately pertain to Eire, which,
while not immune to the barbarous, would be primarily dedicated to furthering
the civilized."
Second Thinker
In passing
from a post-humanist millennium to a post-human millennium, from the superhuman
and superbeingful phases of the one to the superman and superbeing phases of
the other, we find ourselves concerned with post-human life forms, not with
post-humanist life but with life forms which completely transcend man, being as
different from that two-legged creature as apes and trees, the two life forms
immediately preceding, in some sort of chronological order, his emergence. Just as trees precede apes and apes precede
man, so the supermen will succeed him and the superbeings succeed them. As human brains artificially supported and
sustained in collectivized contexts the supermen - those antithetical equivalents
to apes - will trip on a regular basis, experiencing such artificially-induced
visions as LSD, or some such synthetic stimulus, makes possible. As new-brain collectivizations the
superbeings - those antithetical equivalents to trees - will hypermeditate
towards transcendence - the goal of late-millennial striving.
"Speaking
personally, I prefer to distinguish between the twin phases of the coming
post-humanist and post-human millennia on the basis of a quasi-spiritual phase
from an ultra-spiritual phase, as befitting the distinct psychic preoccupations
of the respective post-humanist and post-human life forms - the superhuman
men/supermen and the superbeingful men/superbeings respectively.
"Whereas the former pair would be
contemplating the visionary contents of the new brain's minority proton/neutron
content from a consciousness not unconnected with feelings, the latter pair
would be solely attuned to self-contemplation as superconsciousness of the new
brain's majority electron content, being free from old-brain connections and
consequently enabled to expand consciousness towards transcendence.
"Whereas trees directly stem from the
Diabolic Alpha, their leaves enslaved both to branches and trunk, the
superbeings would directly aspire towards the Divine Omega, the collectivized
new-brains served by the artificial support-and-sustain systems which had been
engineered by qualified technicians."
Third Thinker
Obviously
the support-and-sustain systems of the supermen and the superbeings,
respectively, would be created in such a way as to appear antithetical to the
trunk and branches of a tree. Whereas
the trunk stems from the ground and then the branches tend diagonally from it,
creating the impression of a concession to gravitational force downwards, a
tapering down towards the trunk, one envisages the main support apparatus of a
superbeing (not to mention the preceding supermen) pending from the roof of a
meditation centre, its length stopping well short of the floor, whilst a series
of diagonally-slanting arms (reminiscent of branches) tend from it in seeming
defiance of gravitational force downwards, those arms directly issuing from the
main support slanting gently downwards, those indirectly issuing from the main
support, i.e. stemming from the main branch-arms, slanting radically downwards,
the resultant impression quite the reverse of anything which could be described
as directly stemming from the Diabolic Alpha.
In short, an appropriate arrangement for a life form directly aspiring
towards the Divine Omega.
"Speaking
personally, I incline to regard the superman and superbeing phases of the
post-human millennium as equivalent to the barbarous and civilized phases of
preceding post-humanist millennial evolution, though as a more intense, because
absolute, barbarism and civilization respectively. After the supermen have had their fill of
tripping, the technocratic servants of this post-human life form will doubtless
approve their upgrading to the superbeing stage, and thus take measures to free
the new brain from its physiological connection with the old one. The resulting life form will consequently be
beyond sleep and therefore disposed to hypermeditate on a permanent basis, a
procedure bringing life closer to the absolutism of the pure spirit of heavenly
transcendence.
"From indirectly cultivating awareness
through the contemplation of new-brain visions, life will have progressed, in
superbeing guise, to directly cultivating awareness through self-contemplation,
this absolutism significant of the highest degree of civilized religion, an
absolutism inexorably leading to transcendence, and thus to the escape of free
electrons from new-brain matter, their escape, or definitive salvation, being
facilitated along the hollow interior of the support apparatus, which should
lead via the main trunk-like support into the deeps of space, in which setting
pure spirit would be free to converge towards and expand into other such
transcendences on route, as it were, to ultimate unity, as the envisaged goal
of heavenly evolution.
Fourth Thinker
The
evolution of literature from the early to the late petty bourgeoisie is, in
effect, from novels to poetry, from a genre-type corresponding to painterly art
to one which corresponds to light art.
As with music and art, each stage of petty-bourgeois literary evolution
passes through two phases, viz. a barbarous and a civilized, which entails a
revolt against civilized literary precedent during its lower phase and, by
contrast, the attainment to a fresh level of civilized literary achievement
during its higher phase. As the early
petty bourgeoisie commenced their stage of literary evolution with a revolt
against bourgeois fictional precedent, it follows that the late petty
bourgeoisie will commence their stage of
literary evolution with a revolt against higher/early petty-bourgeois
precedent.
"Inevitably,
the early petty-bourgeois revolt against bourgeois fiction, corresponding to
expressionism and impressionism in art, takes the form of autobiographical
and/or realistic novels, the former concentrating on the individual's
background and experiences, the latter on the everyday world of societal
phenomena; the one subjective, the other objective.
"Both modes of writing are relatively
barbarous because entailing a paradoxical commitment to the novel genre,
neither autobiography nor realism corresponding to a strictly literary approach
to the novel. They're not complete in
themselves but seem transitional between bourgeois fiction and higher/early
petty-bourgeois literature, which takes the form of either experimental,
largely non-expressive novels or illusional novels, such as involve completely
imaginary worlds and creatures.
"Both these higher modes of early
petty-bourgeois writing, corresponding to abstract expressionism and to
abstract impressionism in art, are civilized, because complete in themselves
and transcending not only traditional modes of novelistic literature ... but
the everyday world of societal phenomena.
With experimental and illusional literature the novel attains to a
climax, beyond which literary progress can only be made in terms of late
petty-bourgeois poetry."
Fifth Thinker
The revolt
of lower/late petty-bourgeois poets against civilized literary precedent takes
the form of either revolutionary political writing or writings on the occult,
depending on the kind of poet in question and whether he is in revolt against
what has been called illusional literature or its experimental
counterpart. Naturally, this revolt
signifies a barbarism because, apart from using poetry in an unpoetical way,
the content of the poem created falls beneath the level of content attained to
by civilized novelistic precedent - political poetry being conceptually
inferior to illusional literature, occult poetry likewise conceptually inferior
to experimental literature, the revolt of a materialistic barbarism against
spiritual civilized precedent paralleling that of a spiritual barbarism against
materialistic civilized precedent. With
the development of a higher/late petty-bourgeois poetry, however, literature is
surpassed by the attainment of poetry to a new civilized achievement, one that
is either experimental, and therefore largely abstract, or metaphysical, and
therefore primarily concerned with spiritual truth, particularly as applying to
neo-Buddhism. Whereas experimental
poetry corresponds to abstract-expressionist light art, metaphysical poetry
corresponds to light art of an abstract-impressionist tendency, an expansion of
the spiritual rather than a contraction of the material. But no sooner does late petty-bourgeois
literature attain to a climax in the above-mentioned kinds of poetry ... than a
proletarian revolt against such civilized precedent sets in, to signal the
commencement of a new class-stage of literary evolution - namely the ultimate stage.
"Inevitably,
the early proletarian revolt against late petty-bourgeois poetry, corresponding
to representational holography in art, takes the form of expressive
anthological formats, anthologies of new or unknown poets being the genre
relevant to a proletarian stage of literary evolution because collectivized
and, therefore, absolute in constitution, signifying a convergence to omega on
the level of poetry, the Many having become One, so to speak, in a format
which transcends individual and/or separate
publications.
"But, of course, such anthological
poetry as is published in this context generally signifies a conceptual 'fall'
from the experimental or metaphysical content of late petty-bourgeois poetry,
being largely romantic or autobiographical or realistic or otherwise expressive
in a way which falls beneath civilized precedent.
"Such barbarous poetry is equivalent,
consciously or unconsciously, to a revolt against late petty-bourgeois poetry,
the lower phase in the evolution of proletarian writing from negative
beginnings to a positive ending, such as would apply to a people's
civilization, properly so-considered, in which only the most civilized kind of
poetry would be encouraged, poetry which was neither experimental nor
metaphysical, but totally abstract in character.
"Yes, it is towards a completely
impressive, free-electron status that proletarian poetry will tend, as
literature attains to its ultimate climax within the context of abstract
superpoems - the literary counterpart to abstract holography. Thus will higher proletarian literature be
born, an abstract literature testifying, in its computer-disc presentation, to
the transcendent nature of proletarian civilization. If literature began in alpha philosophy, it
is most certainly destined to culminate in omega poetry - the ultimate
civilized achievement and attainment of the goal.
THUS SPEAKS THE SOCIAL TRANSCENDENTALIST
Five speeches to his friends followed by five speeches to his
enemies
"Love,
my friends, is a Protestant ideal relative to Christ. Have Catholics ever been Christians? Traditionally, I don't think so; though these
days there are apparently quite a few of them who put Christ before everyone
else, including the Blessed Virgin, and are consequently akin to Protestants in
Catholic disguise, heretics posing as adherents to the main, or absolute, part
of the theocratic spectrum. I know this
isn't simply a failing of the common people.
But a catholic Protestant is not the true Catholic allegiance which, now
as before, continues to be the Blessed Virgin, that second deity in the
evolution of religion from pagan Creator propitiation to an aspiration towards
the Holy Spirit via the Catholic, Protestant (Christ), Communist (Antichrist),
and Centrist (Second Coming) 'deities' respectively.
"Yes, my friends, Roman Catholicism,
corresponding, in its prime, to an early-stage grand-bourgeois age, put the
relativistic absolutism of the Holy Virgin above pagan absolutism and paid due
homage to her as an intercessor between mankind and the Father. Catholicism was always essentially a religion
centred in refined sensation, as with incense, holy water, the mass, et
cetera. Stoicism, or the endurance of
pain, had preceded it in absolute pagan times, and Christian love, or positive
emotionality, was to follow it, with the development of Protestant
civilization.
"Stoicism pertained to the autocratic
spectrum of the God-Kings, but refined sensation, conceived as morally
preferable to crude sensation, i.e. hedonistic sin, pertained to the inception
of the theocratic spectrum in a grand-bourgeois age. The subsequent subdivision of that spectrum,
relative to the Protestant heresy, ushered in the religion of love, with Christ
as the religious cynosure. This was not
only an impersonal love of one's fellow man in humanism, but a personal love
for another person as well - the emotional love of the sexes sanctified through
marriage. If the former kind of love is
wise for a time, then the latter must fall somewhat short of wisdom, corresponding,
as it does, to a fool's paradise. Wisdom
and folly are but two sides of a relative coin."
"There
are those, my friends, who claim that Hitler was the Antichrist; that the deity
which follows on behind the Christian one must be the Antichrist, and, to be
sure, there is some truth in that idea.
But Hitler didn't follow on behind Christ for the simple reason that
Fascism, to speak in general terms, appertained to the main part of the
theocratic spectrum as the enemy of everything democratic rather than to an
extension of the heretical subdivision of it from the religion of love, in
Protestantism, to the religion of hate, in Communism - this latter germane to
people's democracy.
"No, Marx was the closest
approximation to the Antichrist (even closer than Engels), while Lenin was his
'Pauline' disciple, the founder, in effect, of a communist 'church' or, rather,
antichurch, viz. the totalitarian state.
Communism is but the logical outcome of the Protestant heresy, the
antithesis to Christian love for all men in the hatred of one category of men,
namely the proletariat, for another, namely the bourgeoisie. It would be illogical to think of the
Antichrist as pertaining to the true part of the theocratic spectrum, as did
Hitler, who, by contrast, signified an antithetical equivalent to the Blessed
Virgin, a kind of crude approximation to the Second Coming, necessarily
subordinate to the main deity of the age, namely the Antichrist (whose Soviet
followers were chiefly responsible for defeating Nazism), and therefore not
entitled to consideration in any evolutionary list of principal deities from
pagan beginnings in the Primal Creator (Father) to transcendental endings in
the Ultimate Creation (the Holy Ghost).
"So, my friends, we can dismiss Hitler
as a secondary god, a failed god, whose eventual eclipse was inevitable, given
the heretical status of the age. He may
have been the antithetical equivalent to the Blessed Virgin - Fascism as much
post-Protestant as Catholicism was pre-Protestant - but the subdivision of the
theocratic spectrum remained dominant over truly theocratic interests in the
guise of Soviet Communism, that legacy of Marx.
"So any list of principal deities
would have to proceed thus: The Father, the Blessed Virgin, Christ, the
Antichrist (Marx), and, in due course, the Second Coming, as signifying, in the
name of Social Transcendentalism, a return of theological primacy to the true
part of the theocratic spectrum in the wake of the heretical Antichrist."
"If
Protestantism was a religion of love, then Fascism, contemporary with the
religion of hate (Communism), must be accorded a bias for refined feelings, the
antithetical equivalent to refined sensation.
In a word, happiness!
"Yes, the happiness of the German
people was of cardinal importance to Hitler, even if it had to be obtained
through force of arms. There was much
positive feeling at the annual party rallies in Nuremberg. Almost everywhere Hitler went, there were
smiles on the faces of the German people.
Even post-war Communism was keen to indulge its citizens in the primary
ideal of the age and, when not true to itself (through hatred of the
bourgeoisie), be true to the main part of the theocratic spectrum in a kind of
quasi-fascist worship of happiness.
"There is something about the tail-end
of the democratic spectrum which intimates of the contemporary (fascist) part
of the theocratic one. In an extreme
relativistic age, necessarily late-stage petty-bourgeois in character,
overlappings and hybrid interbreedings are less the exception than the
rule. Does not a military dictatorship
often appear fascist or even communist?
"Be that as it may, the extension of
the true part of the theocratic spectrum beyond Fascism and its positive
feelings can only lead to a more absolute religious ideal, the antithesis to
stoicism ... in awareness, the pure awareness of meditation as germane to
Social Transcendentalism/Super-transcendentalism (synthetically-induced
visionary experience/hypermeditation), the brainchild of the true approximation
to the Second Coming, the Messiah long awaited by both Jews and Gentiles alike
... as embodiment and intimation of the Holy Ghost - the ultimate deity of
undifferentiated pure spirit at the culmination to evolution.
"So in a sense this successor to the
Antichrist is the real antithetical equivalent to the Virgin Mary, the
penultimate deity in the evolution of deities from the Father to the Holy
Ghost. Between the two absolute
extremes, that of pure sensuality and pure spirituality, come the two relative
absolutes, both celibate in constitution.
And between these come the two relativities of the heretical subdivision
of the theocratic spectrum, viz. the moderately relative Christ and the
radically relative Marx, Protestantism and Communism, bourgeois democracy and
proletarian democracy, liberalism and socialism - from religion and politics to
economics, the three forever intertwined throughout a relative age."
"Not
so in the coming absolute age, when sovereignty would be vested in the Leader
and the ownership or, rather, trusteeship of the means of production pass to
the Centre, of which the Leader is sovereign.
There politics and economics will be absorbed into the Leader, who will
bear these 'sins of the world' in his sovereignty, much as Atlas bore the world
on his shoulders in the pagan mythology of the ancient Greeks, and Christ did
the same for the ensuing Christians.
"There theocracy alone will prevail,
the relativity of politics and economics becoming a thing of the past, like the
democratic and autocratic spectra to which they correspond, economics preceding
politics no less than the God-Kings preceded people's representatives, religion
succeeding politics no less than the people's representatives succeeded kings,
everything passing from matter to spirit, from doing to being. The Truth alone triumphant, as mankind is set
on course for the post-human millennium.
Aesthetics and ethics having faded away or been killed off. The Leader beyond good and evil, not
motivated by ethical considerations, like a democratic politician, but solely
by service to the Truth, considering 'good' that which furthers and
consolidates the Truth.
"Yes, my friends, I am beyond good and
evil, and I rejoice in my freedom, the freedom of the Free Spirit! 'The Good' are not admirable to me, they are
the obverse side of a dualistic coin, striving to combat and counter evil. They're part-and-parcel of a relative
compromise, the existence of the one presupposing that of the other, 'the Good'
continuing to exist so long as there is evil, 'the Right' so long as there is
'the Left', private enterprise so long as there is state socialism.
"But I, who represent the Truth, am
beyond good and evil, and my followers would live in a society where there was
no compromise between these two adversaries of the ethical spectrum, where evil
had been stamped out for all time and 'the Good' ceased to be necessary, there
being no good for them to do in a society where 'the Evil' no longer held sway
because no longer able to do evil.
Ah, such an absolute society would be free for the Truth, saved from
good and evil by the Truth!"
"Like
the Blessed Virgin, the True World Messiah, loosely corresponding to a Second
Coming, pertains to the true, or absolute, part of the theocratic
spectrum. In being the antithetical
equivalent of the Blessed Virgin, he, too, is virginal, celibate, pure - a
relative absolutism. Even the crude
approximation to this deity, as signified by Hitler, was in some degree
virginal or, at any rate, less carnal than the average German.
"Yes, my friends, he was no great
womanizer, being too shy as a youth and too preoccupied with saving the German
people from their enemies as a man ... to have much time or inclination for
women. As Leader, he took Eva Braun for
mistress, being in theory her lover but in practice somewhat neglectful of
her. He only married her after Germany
was lost and his position as Leader no longer tenable. Their marriage was, as you'll know, but a
brief affair, soon to be interrupted, so legend has it, by mutual suicide. It was an act of charity on Hitler's part to
marry this simple girl at the end.
"Well, my friends, marriage would be
quite inappropriate for the more credible manifestation of the Second Coming,
so you needn't expect him to get married at any time, even if he were
subsequently to take a woman or female companion for domestic help, which is
not impossible though, given his celibate past and absolutist integrity, by no
means guaranteed! Rather, he must
maintain his celibacy in conformity with his status as embodiment and
intimation of the Holy Ghost. After all,
he pertains to the main part of the theocratic spectrum, unlike the Antichrist,
Marx, whose status on the heretical subdivision of that same spectrum wasn't
entirely incompatible with lecherous proclivities!
"There is no intimation of the Holy
Ghost in endomorphic Marx, simply an extension of Protestant love into
communist hate, the hatred of the proletariat for the bourgeoisie, the division
of the ethical spectrum into warring factions more sharply polarized than ever
before, the former striving for an ultimate victory over the latter, but
without the guidance of the Truth, without which no ultimate victory can be achieved,
Communism being but an extension of the ethical antagonism of the middle
spectrum to a polarized antithesis between private capitalism and state
socialism, in which the great world Illusion of Marxism seeks to overcome
Ethics. So not, my friends, 'the Good'
against 'the Evil', as in a liberal democracy, but 'the Illusory' against both
'the Good' and 'the Evil' in the name of the Great Illusion of World Communism,
that heretical ideology of the Antichrist!"
"Know
then, my enemies, that the Truth alone will ultimately be victorious! There can be no question of Illusion
triumphing over Truth. The way to the
post-human millennium leads through Social Transcendentalism, that historical
successor to Fascism and antithesis to autocratic royalism - the age of leaders
superseding that of people's representatives, even those who, in communist
states, represent the people dictatorially.
Dictatorial representatives correspond to the Illusion, not an absolute
antithesis to Truth, to the theocratic leader, but falling just short of it, a
near miss or relative antithesis.
"You will have noticed, my enemies,
how fashionable it has become, in this post-Hitlerian age, to speak of people's
representatives as 'leaders', how even bourgeois prime ministers are regarded,
if superficially, as 'leaders'. The age,
even now, isn't wholly sympathetic towards mere representatives. The Zeitgeist increasingly points
towards the coming of leaders, the 'Caesars' in Spengler's paradoxical
prophecy, who lead the People from above, scorning identification with
democratic criteria, knowing themselves to be above and beyond the scope of
prime ministers and presidents.
"What use had Hitler for the
Chancellorship or the Presidency? He
absorbed both offices into himself and transcended then in the guise of Führer,
the Sovereign Leader of a fascist state.
As Nietzsche to the Kaiser, so Spengler to the Führer. Away with petty democrats! The age calls forth theocracy!"
"Even
the Americans, despite their democratic traditions, have an inkling of the
Truth, an interpretation, necessarily bogus, of the Second Coming ... in the
guise of Superman, whether on film or in comic books. This Superman, owing little or nothing to
Nietzsche, arrives on earth as a boy from a distant galaxy, like a Christ from
'On High', and is found and raised by latter-day equivalents of Mary and
Joseph. They discover, in due course,
that their adopted child has superhuman powers, and he learns from the spirit
of his true father - another New Testament parallel - that he must use these
exceptional powers for good, not to alter the destiny of the world but to
combat evil wherever it may arise.
"So, my enemies, this bogus Second
Coming is implicated in the ethical spectrum and is only marginally wiser,
despite his extraordinary powers, than the good right-wingers who, in liberal
societies, are accustomed, after their fashion, to combating political evil in
the form of the left-wing opposition. He
stands no more chance of overcoming evil, in any absolute sense, than they do,
and is all the more bogus from a genuinely Messianic point-of-view, since it is
precisely the American way of life, with its liberal institutions and
capitalist freedoms, that he wishes to protect.
He's not 'the True' but 'the Good', and if 'the Evil' are among his
chief enemies, they certainly aren't the only ones! He would oppose 'the Illusory' as well,
assuming there were any Communists at large in the land of his adoption.
"Fortunately for America there aren't,
since Americans like the good life too much.
They have given the world Superman, but he exists only in the
imagination. Real-life supermen would be
somewhat different from him, both in their post-humanist manifestation (as
superhuman men) and, most especially, in their post-human manifestation (as
human brains artificially supported and sustained in collectivized
contexts). Real-life supermen oppose
real-life submen wherever they may be found.
No, my enemies, not simply as criminals - though undoubtedly some of
them will be such - but more specifically as tribalists, living as subnationals
in a supra-national society. Hitler was,
in his paradoxical way, such a superman, and the closer approximation to the
Second Coming should be another!"
"Could
Social Transcendentalists be statesmen, in any real political sense? No, my enemies, Social Transcendentalists
should never be defined in terms applicable to the democratic spectrum. Rather, they're theocratic Centrists, for
whom the meditation centre takes precedence over any parliamentary
assembly. Indeed, there wouldn't be a
parliamentary assembly, since parliaments appertain to democracy as places
where people's representatives congregate to do the people's business.
"If theocratic Centrists were to
congregate anywhere, it wouldn't be in a parliament building but in a special
Centre, a kind of arch-cathedral equivalent in which they would discuss what
needed to be discussed in relation to Social Transcendentalist progress, and
where they would listen to the Leader haranguing them on the domestic and
global situation, ideological ambitions and obligations, or the finer points of
Centrist logic. They would face the
Leader in a kind of semi-circular arrangement, followers in the presence of the
ideological cynosure, somewhat along the lines of Mussolini's Grand Council,
the Leader and his chief disciples - members of the ruling elite.
"Naturally there would also be
regional Centres, where the generality of theocratic Centrists in any one area
could congregate to discuss local affairs and carry on the business of what
would formerly have been called Local Government. Most if not all Centrists should, in
addition, have an individual meditation centre for purposes of religious
instruction and enlightenment of the masses, their role there akin to that of a
priest in a church, being effectively the successors to priests.
"Unlike in a relative society,
however, these theocratic Centrists would not function separately from
politicians, since there would be no politics as generally understood within a
democratic context. With the
supersession of democracy, legislative and administrative authority should pass
exclusively to the theocratic spectrum, as signified by the Centre. Just as in Catholic Ireland the Church has a
powerful influence on politics ... as pertaining to the soft-line republican
state, so, my enemies, the Centre would lead in a Social Transcendentalist
Ireland. What we see now is but an
intimation of a more absolute situation still to arise."
"Of
course, I know that you, my enemies, will try to prevent Social
Transcendentalism from coming to pass in Ireland, deeming it undemocratic and a
serious threat to your vested interests.
As I've said before, the theocratic nature of Social Transcendentalism
puts it above and beyond the democratic pale, since democracy is about electing
representatives, whereas the Leader of the Movement in question represents only
the Holy Spirit and could not be elected on a strictly democratic ticket, even
if the majority population of the Irish Republic were to vote for him.
"But just consider, my enemies, how
dissatisfied he would feel if, in being democratically elected, he was duly
obliged, along with his chief enemies, to take a seat in parliament, in the
dáil, and play the democratic game, co-existing with political parties on the
basis of democratic representation, obliged to face the prospect of future
general elections and a permanent or intermittent representative status!
"No, that kind of situation he could
never tolerate! So if he were to be
elected democratically - and there is no other way that he would want to assume
political responsibility - it would have to be on the prior understanding,
backed and sanctioned by the Church, that he intended to abolish the
parliamentary system and set up a Social Transcendentalist administration -
admittedly a most unorthodox and paradoxical basis for being elected, but not
altogether inconceivable in a country where 'God and the Church come first' and
a majority of people could therefore probably be depended upon to use democracy
in order to vote for a new and ultimate theocracy, even granted hard-line
democratic opposition to theocratic absolutism.
"Yet he knows that even if he were
elected in such a paradoxical fashion, there would still be parliamentary
opposition to his intentions to abolish the democratic constitution, so that,
one way or another, friction would probably break out between those on his side
- the true and theocratic Irishmen - and those on the other side - that of the
state, democracy, capitalism, private property, petty-bourgeois
internationalism. There is no way that
my enemies, a sizeable minority of the population of Eire, would willingly
allow me a free hand in revolutionizing the country."
"So,
my enemies, I take up the responsibility of the Last Judgement and I say: if
struggle there must be, then we shall struggle to the end, using the
opportunity any such reactionary revolt against majority interests may give us
to remove your influence from the land, in order that our people may go forward
to a Social Transcendentalist salvation ... free from all alien influences,
free to be true to their selves, to develop an absolutely theocratic
Ireland. We would rejoice in the
opportunity any such struggle would give us to purge you from our midst!
"Eventually, my enemies, there would
be few if any enemies left on the island, and the Irish people would be free
from oppression for all time, free to develop their theocratic potential to its
utmost, as they grew into the True World Religion ... of Social
Transcendentalism/Super-transcendentalism and paid regular visits to its
meditation centres, the future successors to churches.
"But, of course, the Irish Social
Transcendental Centre, as Ireland would then be called, would have more to do,
initially, than solely to cultivate the spiritual potential of the Irish
people. It would be dedicated to
expanding Centrist influence abroad and helping those who recognize the
ideology of the True World Messiah to overcome their enemies, who are also his
enemies. They, too, must be subjected to
Last Judgement criteria, in order that the Truth may prevail and his 'Kingdom'
come to pass throughout the world.
"Ah, hear this well, my enemies: we
Social Transcendentalists have truly global objectives! We are no petty-bourgeois internationalists,
still less bourgeois nationalists, but proletarian supra-nationalists for whom
the existence of nation states is but a passing phase of political evolution,
one especially pertinent to the democratic spectrum. We of the theocratic spectrum know where
evolution is tending and, rest assured, we shall know how to further it as
well!"
Thus speaks the Social Transcendentalist.
LONDON 1984 (Revised 1985-2008)