Bizarre sex, bizarre religion, bizarre life
Or, why normal is a town I'll never visit
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JoeUser Forums
Somewhere in the first hour of Matrix, Morpheus says to Neo something to the effect that he (Neo) has always been aware that there is something wrong with the world, something that doesn't fit, doesn't add up, doesn't make sense. To Morpheus, Neo (and the unspeakably delicious Trinity), presumably, this 'doesn't-add-up-ness' of the world is something to be fixed, a problem, a disease in consciousness for which the only cure is the christlike self-sacrifice Neo makes at the end of the third movie.
Putting aside any question of the deeply dubious theology and the fake, transparently fake, self-satisfied pseudo-philosophizing of all three of the movies, in which a ruined reality can only be restored through the sacrificial death and (presumed) resurrection of a Blind Hero (which is a motif straight out of the oldest pre-christian mythologies and sits very badly with the insistence that only the mind is real and only the mind can determine the reality it chooses to exist within) there is another and more basic question to be asked:
so fucking what?
It's the very fuckedup-ness of things that makes them interesting - and not just to me.
Look back over your life. Which of its passages and episodes do you remember with the greatest clarity, the greatest insistence? There have been moments in my life when I have been simply and unequivocally happy. I remember them - but not what led up to them, not the process of their coming into being, not even the particular details of what constituted that happiness. By contrast I can remember in vivid detail everything that led up to and motivated my moments of despair, the periods of seemingly interminable bleakness and want, that have largely characterized my life. And, based on everything I've experienced in my 44 years, based on everything I've read, based on everything I know of the lives of friends, lovers, family-members, spouses present and previous, it's the same for everyone else.
It's the fuckedup things in our lives that abide with us, things that are strange, contrary, uncanny; the darker moments of our days that remain in glaring detail, while our moments of happiness are lost in the simple fact of being happy.
I've always been drawn to what others shun, and it is a maxim of my life that while what hurts us is real, what pleases us is usually a delusion. Never trust a sunny day, because all sunny days are liars.
It's been my experience that those who know the strange and the painful things of life are (even when horribly damaged by them) at the very least more interesting than those who've largely known nothing but happiness. Such people are often dangerous (like my schizophrenic friend Freddy, who regularly saw Satan looking out from behind any glass surface he came into contact with and always reacted violently; or my friend Tim, who bathed his testicles in Chlorox, trashed his home and those of his friends, and regularly beat his girlfriend to a bloody pulp for not being clean enough) but they're always interesting.
And what interests me in such people is the extremity of their lives, their perpetual and irreducible conflict with the world. Like a lot of people, I don't handle boredom well (though I can if I absolutely must - as witness this wretched but well-paying job I have entering GPS X/Y coordinates into a geospatial database) and, like many others, I'm more easily bored by happiness than by stress and difficulty and pain.
What such experiences provide, what happiness cannot provide, is an overwhelming investment of the personality in a situation - a situation which, because it consumes the attention totally, obscures from us the passage of time. It's time which is our enemy, because every second that passes takes us inevitably to a state which we can't comprehend - the state of being dead. Tick-tick-tick... and every tick is one less heartbeat left to us and one breath closer to the grave. And as Marlowe wrote, 'The grave's a fine and private place but none, I think, do there embrace'.
Sex is the pre-eminent means by which human beings disguise from themselves their own infallible, inevitable, unavoidable mortality. Through the processes of pregnancy and birth we assure ourselves of three things which are fundamentally untrue. The first is that we can bring something new into the world (when in fact all we're doing is introducing another bag of useless flesh into somewhere already choked with them, which will inevitably reproduce the mistakes we've made while adding a few of its own); the second is that 'something of us' will survive our own dissolution.
And the third is that sensation is the pre-eminent good, the most powerful incentive, and that anything capable of feeling so good must be capable of living forever.
I have news for you, fuckers. You, your kids, everything you love most dearly, is going to die. And you, and they, and all the subsequent generations that succeed from your union, will come to exactly the same fate: you, and they, will pass out of the world, be forgotten, and leave no lasting memorial of any kind. Your life, my life, and the lives of almost every member of every generation yet to come, will pass into oblivion, be utterly forgotten, and have less meaning or worth than the waves which wear away rocks and turn them into sand.
I came to this conclusion when I was 14 or 15 and I've yet to see or experience anything that's likely to change my mind.
So what remains to a mind convinced of its own ultimate futility? Humor, irony, laughter, and sensation.
Which is why normal is not a town I'll ever visit. 'Normality ' is a term for the crushing weight of the everyday, the grey burdens that bend our necks every time we think of them; for the sad delusion that anything done, said, aspired to, dreamed of, hoped for, by the vast majority of us has some real worth, some real meaning.
This is where being a Sadist helps. If a Sadist understands anything he understands the concrete reality of flesh and its importance in a world of abstractions, and he also understands the necessity for struggle if that reality is to be manifested in such a way that it distracts from, obscures, hides away, the operations of time upon the body: decay, decrepitude, death.
Sadism is always sexual even when it contains no overtly sexual component because its basic impulse is the same as that of sex: a large 'Fuck YOU' thrown in the face of time. Sadism, like sex, is an immortality, an invincibility, solely of the moment.
So much for bizarre sex, and a life that, to date, has contained within it more than the usual share of bizarre encounters with bizarre people.
What of bizarre religion?
Those of you who have read my writings here will know that I am a Ritual Magickian. You will also know that I was at one time a devout, even zealous, 'fundamentalist christian'. The great difference between christianity and Ritual Magick is that Magick has no god as its source. No anthropormorphic surrogate Daddy who will make things better when bad stuff happens and can be bribed or bargained with through the self-centered whining that passes among christians for prayer.
The god of the Magickians is amoral, nihilistic, the enemy of ultimate meanings and explanations of the universe that do nothing but make it over in our image and place us at the center of things. This god made the darkness as well as light, made men to hate each other just as much (if not more than) it made them to love each other. It has no sex, no gender, no interest in its creations other than the degree to which they serve its ultimate ends (if it has any, in the sense in which we understand such words).
But that doesn't mean you can't get its attention, or that, once gained, that attention is easily shifted to something else when, in its demands upon those to whom it gives its attention, it becomes unbearable.
Be careful what you wake up. You may not be able to put it back to sleep again.
But the very fact of the unbearability of this attention, its excess, its madness-inducing Otherness, is what holds me to it in a way that the self-indulgent, self-serving hypocrisies of christianity could never do. Christianity promises unalloyed bliss to its believers in the after-life. Magick introduces bliss, and terror, and power over the reality of life in this world, into the here and now.
And the fact that this attention, once gained, produces a Faustian bargain that can lead only to what most would describe as damnation is integral to its appeal. I don't have to please god to get what I want from life: i'm already damned, and damned by my own desire and choosing, as we all are. The difference between a Magickian and a christian is that he knows that his heaven is also his hell and welcomes it with open arms when it finally arrives on his doorstep to claim him.
And if my heaven is my hell, my hell heaven, then my god is also my satan, just as satan is also my god.
Neither one nor the other but both at once - and without the love of sycophancy and fear that characterizes the god of the christians; and the menial, petty-minded ambition, the fishwife haggling after souls, that characterizes their satan.
Like the song says - I'm wicked and I'm lazy. Don't you want to save me?
As a response to this (Link) greywar wrote something like this:
Bizarre, as always...BR>
Which is why I wrote this. It got me thinking.
Putting aside any question of the deeply dubious theology and the fake, transparently fake, self-satisfied pseudo-philosophizing of all three of the movies, in which a ruined reality can only be restored through the sacrificial death and (presumed) resurrection of a Blind Hero (which is a motif straight out of the oldest pre-christian mythologies and sits very badly with the insistence that only the mind is real and only the mind can determine the reality it chooses to exist within) there is another and more basic question to be asked:
so fucking what?
It's the very fuckedup-ness of things that makes them interesting - and not just to me.
Look back over your life. Which of its passages and episodes do you remember with the greatest clarity, the greatest insistence? There have been moments in my life when I have been simply and unequivocally happy. I remember them - but not what led up to them, not the process of their coming into being, not even the particular details of what constituted that happiness. By contrast I can remember in vivid detail everything that led up to and motivated my moments of despair, the periods of seemingly interminable bleakness and want, that have largely characterized my life. And, based on everything I've experienced in my 44 years, based on everything I've read, based on everything I know of the lives of friends, lovers, family-members, spouses present and previous, it's the same for everyone else.
It's the fuckedup things in our lives that abide with us, things that are strange, contrary, uncanny; the darker moments of our days that remain in glaring detail, while our moments of happiness are lost in the simple fact of being happy.
I've always been drawn to what others shun, and it is a maxim of my life that while what hurts us is real, what pleases us is usually a delusion. Never trust a sunny day, because all sunny days are liars.
It's been my experience that those who know the strange and the painful things of life are (even when horribly damaged by them) at the very least more interesting than those who've largely known nothing but happiness. Such people are often dangerous (like my schizophrenic friend Freddy, who regularly saw Satan looking out from behind any glass surface he came into contact with and always reacted violently; or my friend Tim, who bathed his testicles in Chlorox, trashed his home and those of his friends, and regularly beat his girlfriend to a bloody pulp for not being clean enough) but they're always interesting.
And what interests me in such people is the extremity of their lives, their perpetual and irreducible conflict with the world. Like a lot of people, I don't handle boredom well (though I can if I absolutely must - as witness this wretched but well-paying job I have entering GPS X/Y coordinates into a geospatial database) and, like many others, I'm more easily bored by happiness than by stress and difficulty and pain.
What such experiences provide, what happiness cannot provide, is an overwhelming investment of the personality in a situation - a situation which, because it consumes the attention totally, obscures from us the passage of time. It's time which is our enemy, because every second that passes takes us inevitably to a state which we can't comprehend - the state of being dead. Tick-tick-tick... and every tick is one less heartbeat left to us and one breath closer to the grave. And as Marlowe wrote, 'The grave's a fine and private place but none, I think, do there embrace'.
Sex is the pre-eminent means by which human beings disguise from themselves their own infallible, inevitable, unavoidable mortality. Through the processes of pregnancy and birth we assure ourselves of three things which are fundamentally untrue. The first is that we can bring something new into the world (when in fact all we're doing is introducing another bag of useless flesh into somewhere already choked with them, which will inevitably reproduce the mistakes we've made while adding a few of its own); the second is that 'something of us' will survive our own dissolution.
And the third is that sensation is the pre-eminent good, the most powerful incentive, and that anything capable of feeling so good must be capable of living forever.
I have news for you, fuckers. You, your kids, everything you love most dearly, is going to die. And you, and they, and all the subsequent generations that succeed from your union, will come to exactly the same fate: you, and they, will pass out of the world, be forgotten, and leave no lasting memorial of any kind. Your life, my life, and the lives of almost every member of every generation yet to come, will pass into oblivion, be utterly forgotten, and have less meaning or worth than the waves which wear away rocks and turn them into sand.
I came to this conclusion when I was 14 or 15 and I've yet to see or experience anything that's likely to change my mind.
So what remains to a mind convinced of its own ultimate futility? Humor, irony, laughter, and sensation.
Which is why normal is not a town I'll ever visit. 'Normality ' is a term for the crushing weight of the everyday, the grey burdens that bend our necks every time we think of them; for the sad delusion that anything done, said, aspired to, dreamed of, hoped for, by the vast majority of us has some real worth, some real meaning.
This is where being a Sadist helps. If a Sadist understands anything he understands the concrete reality of flesh and its importance in a world of abstractions, and he also understands the necessity for struggle if that reality is to be manifested in such a way that it distracts from, obscures, hides away, the operations of time upon the body: decay, decrepitude, death.
Sadism is always sexual even when it contains no overtly sexual component because its basic impulse is the same as that of sex: a large 'Fuck YOU' thrown in the face of time. Sadism, like sex, is an immortality, an invincibility, solely of the moment.
So much for bizarre sex, and a life that, to date, has contained within it more than the usual share of bizarre encounters with bizarre people.
What of bizarre religion?
Those of you who have read my writings here will know that I am a Ritual Magickian. You will also know that I was at one time a devout, even zealous, 'fundamentalist christian'. The great difference between christianity and Ritual Magick is that Magick has no god as its source. No anthropormorphic surrogate Daddy who will make things better when bad stuff happens and can be bribed or bargained with through the self-centered whining that passes among christians for prayer.
The god of the Magickians is amoral, nihilistic, the enemy of ultimate meanings and explanations of the universe that do nothing but make it over in our image and place us at the center of things. This god made the darkness as well as light, made men to hate each other just as much (if not more than) it made them to love each other. It has no sex, no gender, no interest in its creations other than the degree to which they serve its ultimate ends (if it has any, in the sense in which we understand such words).
But that doesn't mean you can't get its attention, or that, once gained, that attention is easily shifted to something else when, in its demands upon those to whom it gives its attention, it becomes unbearable.
Be careful what you wake up. You may not be able to put it back to sleep again.
But the very fact of the unbearability of this attention, its excess, its madness-inducing Otherness, is what holds me to it in a way that the self-indulgent, self-serving hypocrisies of christianity could never do. Christianity promises unalloyed bliss to its believers in the after-life. Magick introduces bliss, and terror, and power over the reality of life in this world, into the here and now.
And the fact that this attention, once gained, produces a Faustian bargain that can lead only to what most would describe as damnation is integral to its appeal. I don't have to please god to get what I want from life: i'm already damned, and damned by my own desire and choosing, as we all are. The difference between a Magickian and a christian is that he knows that his heaven is also his hell and welcomes it with open arms when it finally arrives on his doorstep to claim him.
And if my heaven is my hell, my hell heaven, then my god is also my satan, just as satan is also my god.
Neither one nor the other but both at once - and without the love of sycophancy and fear that characterizes the god of the christians; and the menial, petty-minded ambition, the fishwife haggling after souls, that characterizes their satan.
Like the song says - I'm wicked and I'm lazy. Don't you want to save me?
As a response to this (Link) greywar wrote something like this:
Bizarre, as always...BR>
Which is why I wrote this. It got me thinking.
