Night Thoughts

Or, I love insomnia - it makes me feel really intelligent

from JoeUser Forums


The images are Munch's Madonna and his more famous Scream (for the unfamiliar, Madonna is on the left).

Have you ever wanted to scream? Not because something hurts, or infuriates, or terrifies; not for any identifiable reason at all. Unless it's because at any given instant you can suddenly be caught on the twin hooks of the horror and ecstasy of being flesh in a material world. Meat that moves and feels and only after feeling, if at all, does it think.

In one of the later Cantos of the Inferno, When Dante and Virgil are deep in Hell, they encounter a damned soul - the body which had once been his left behind in the world and still alive. The Will and the personality it forged suffer in Hell; but the flesh lives its own animal existence without it, governed (as Dante would have said) by the form of reason divorced from the good of reason. In our terms what he means is either habit or character, depending on whether you want to be determindly materialist or in some sense an idealist. I am an idealist - but only in the sense that I believe in a meat-mind, a dim meat-consciousness that has no need of the soul at all. Dim, yes. But only because we don't develop it.

Perhaps that's what that scream is, in my case. I've certainly been doing my best to partipate in my own meatiness through 'listening-down' and 'body-scrying'. The sensation involved in both is indescribable. So I won't attempt to describe it. But in the former you pay attention to what you actually want; in the latter your flesh sees it - as your eyes move to something that attracts your attention, so the flesh moves to whatever attracts it.

It isn't virtual because it occurs. But it isn't reality because it's envisioned (visions of a meat-mind must necessarily be expressed in the flesh, in its sensation).

It's Abreality. I used to scry using a mirror, and I called that 'Abreality TV'. I've seen odd things - but nothing that might be described in the terms used by Dee, for example. In one sense it's always been far more mundane and bound to me. Intimately bound to me.

Experience and its consequences are chains, convoluted chains and difficult to follow, but chains nonetheless. You can't avoid what you are, and who you become in consequence of it. Which is why I've always liked that image in the Hellraiser movies (it recurs in them all) in which some tormented creature is ripped apart by hooks on long black chains. Life is the instant between the hooks digging in - and the hooks ripping apart.

You might think that's reason enough to want to scream. But it isn't. You don't get to feel that way until you realise how much you want it - sensation so bitterly, bitterly keen, that it can't be described as either pain or pleasure.

You know you want it, meatbaby. You know you do.

And the Madonna? First, you have to realise that under those shadows below that perfect belly is a very large dick and a proportionately sized pair of balls. That the attitude and positioning of the arms are as much a consequence of pain and constraint as they are the consequence of offering and abandonment. Secondly, that the image in its synthesis of opposites (and the ease with which the image can work as a canvas to serve the turn of my lusts) makes it an icon in the full religious meaning of the word. The image is as much saturated in vicious, bloody sex as it is in the numinous, the Other-worldy, the 'spiritual', to the degree that they are one and the same thing - as I said elsewhere, but in a similar context: fucking is the way I worship.

Does she have a name? My name for her is Ligeia.

"There is no exquisite beauty without some strangeness in the proportion."
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Galactic Civilizations III
Reply #3 from JoeUser Forums Top
I remember once, after "close" to a heroic dose (re Terrence McKenna) of mushrooms, what you seem to be describing as the meat-bod . An acute sense of my organicness. I could feel all of the liquid going through my veins; water being distributed to tissue. But it soon dissipated into a fascination with a picture on the wall. Such is the way of the shroom.

I can't add much here. My meatness is now just a resolve as the meat that made my ears fantastic in my youth begins to decompose, and so with my eyes, and my dexterity. Hooks in and a quick ripping might be better in some ways, because I have a fondness for listening to all manner of things, and it's fading. That instant takes a long time when you're inside of it.

Strangely, I've never felt an urge to scream...not that I'm aware of, anyway, but then I've always been pretty good at denial. Maybe I have and don't want to think about it.

The meat-mind and meat-consciousness has a lot in common with Buddhist principles I've read. Where consciousness only arises as a direct result of a sense processed by the brain meating (pun) with an object to be processed. I.E. eyes see a color, and consciousness arises, ears here an aural object, and consciousness arises. They don't attribute consciousness to any soul/spirit stuff...consciousness is just a natural occurrence of our meat makeup and how it functions in an organic way.

Ligeia, eh? I googled it. Poe reference? I never read that one. Read the synopsis though. Who then is Rowena?

Reply #4 from JoeUser Forums Top
Rowena is the narrator's second wife, married after the death of the never-to-be-forgotten Ligeia. As such, she becomes the unwitting (and unwilling) fleshly vehicle for the return of Ligeia from beyond the confines of death. Other than that, within the terms of the story, she isn't anybody at all. Poe was not so sufficiently master of the short story that he knew how to give a secondary character independent life, and Rowena Tremaine is purely a vehicle for the return of the true subject of the tale he tells.