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the soy face and mortal salience

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The soy boy grin has been around for a good few years. Typical characteristics: facial hair and glasses; eyebrows lifted, mouth agape:

 

I was always disturbed by this affectation of amazed jollity. I don’t remember anyone ever posing like this 20 years ago, when I was at university; or 15 years ago, when I was doing office work in England, or any time over the last decade in Germany and Italy. The closest I’ve come to witnessing this grotesque phenomenon was on the Facebook pages of my American colleagues: the men almost invariably sported a dead-eyed grin; I was a little freaked out by the utter lack of expression in the eyes but just put it down to Americans being American – back in the 1940s or 50s, WH Auden noted that Americans seem weirdly unaged and adolescent in their physiognomy, as if they all get plastic surgery in their late 20s. For example, compare a typical American face with a European; the American Matt Damon, in his boyish late 40s:

and the European man, Ernst Jünger:

There’s something smooth and unimprintable about the average American face, perhaps a reflection of the country’s relative youth. There are exceptions, but they are precisely that, exceptions. Perhaps it’s not so much the genetics as the land: for expatriates like Ezra Pound ended up looking as gnarly and engraved by fate & suffering as any European; it’s as if, living in Europe, palimpsest of battlefields, one naturally ends up looking like a warzone:

 

A far cry indeed from the soy boy look:

The soy boy face takes the ahistorical American look to its extreme: these grown men affect neotenous characteristics, attempting to look like surprised infants. Perhaps it is a sexual signal to dominant, paedophiliac homosexuals; or perhaps it is a submission signal, as it were saying “I’m just a baby, I pose no threat!”. The underlying cultural force is, I feel, even more disturbing: it isn’t merely an r-selected mannerism, or an attempt to retreat into infancy; it’s an attempt to retreat from life itself, to neuter & emasculate our mortal existence, to render both life and death meaningless, matter for frivolity, for a blank gaping rictus (the second skeleton from left):

The old Europeans faced death like Max von Sydow’s knight in The Seventh Seal, ready to play chess with the devil himself, almost unsmiling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDZccLLzJL4

Anonymous Conservative recently wrote, in a comment on his blog:

John Jost showed in studies, mortality stimuli ignites K in the brain. Even a picture of a grave stone or a hearse makes people turn more conservative on questionnaires taken right after them. 

Death and pain are the great, unavoidable, tutors of our existence. The fact that the soy face looks so much like a grinning skeleton suggests, to me, something coming full circle in our culture. Mortality salience will bear upon the soy boy very differently to Von Sydow’s Antonius Block; Block coolly challenges Death to a game of chess:

Block knows death well, having fought in the Crusades, having killed. And even for him, the prospect of death is unwelcome, disconcerting. For the soy boy, the exemplar of our modern, degenerate post-civilisation, full mortal salience will come as a mind-shattering terror, as the approach of an unpropitiated god.

book report: Advanced Magick for Beginners (Alan Chapman)

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A quite enjoyable introduction to chaos magic. I feel now, having read a few books & watched a dozen Youtube videos on the subject, that I more or less understand the topic. It’s an interesting discipline, though I feel it is not for me: perhaps my aversion arose at a Rune Gild conference some years ago, where one of the speakers began: “Any chaos magicians here? Any wiccans?” and I started laughing, assuming it was a joke; to the first question, a couple dressed all in black, with purple dye in their jet-black hair, raised their hands with a superior look; to the second, a chestnut-haired woman in green, wearing wooden earrings. The person I was sitting next to later said, “did you notice how they looked exactly like you’d expect?” I asked him: “what exactly is a, uh, chaos magician?” and he to me, “someone with purple dye in their hair.”

One should not judge based on such a small sample size, of course; however, chaos magic feels dangerously superficial & solipsistic to me. My perspective is too strongly religious to accept that one can arbitrarily create a god and then pray to it for practical results. I assume the universe to have an implicit order, manifesting both in us and in the vast non-human reality; so some symbols (runes, for example) stick, however arbitrary their origin, because they resonate with something in us, and hence with something in the cosmic core from which we were birthed (and so they were never arbitrary).

There is however much of interest in the book; especially Chapman’s chapter on initiation: unlike the traditional account, in which one undergoes a single, transformative ordeal, Chapman argues for a process of constant unfolding:

It is customary in all magical approaches, traditional or otherwise, for the aspirant to undergo initiation. The word itself can be traced to ancient Greek where one of its many meanings was death. [I could find no evidence for this and think it’s probably false]. Initiation usually involves undergoing some kind of ordeal in a ritual setting, sometimes with a death/rebirth element, that marks a definite step away from what you were, and a step towards what you want to be. 

In magical terms, you cease to be an ordinary human and become a magician.

The benefits of undergoing initiation are numerous. As stated earlier, in magical tradition this will usually involve access to previously hidden techniques or ‘secrets’ that the teacher or guru will hand down to the initiate, and more often than not functions as a formal recognition of some kind of attainment. It is not necessary to belong to an occult body in order to be initiated; however it can be beneficial to undergo an initiation ritual regardless of whether or not you do. This can be as simple or as complex as you like, and it is probably a good idea to incorporate a symbolic discarding of old, outmoded habits or ways of being, and an acceptance of new characteristics you wish to have.

Initiation can best be summed up as a transformation of the self. 

Chapman takes issue with the standard model:

[…] if initiation is transformation, then you underwent initiation the moment you performed your first magical act.

Furthermore, every revelatory or transformative experience, from the moment you first used your lungs to the reading of this sentence, must be part of an initiatory process. As an exercise in revelation, the practice of magick can be considered an acceleration of this process. However, due to the very nature of revelation, initiation never ends.

I would tend to agree, having repeatedly undergone transformative ordeals, mostly near-death; after each I felt altered and saw things & myself differently, but then the bustle and banality of the everyday exerted itself once more, and I found I could barely even remember the momentous event of my near demise. I sometimes read over my old journals and am amazed at the clarity & vision I had then, and forgot since. That is, I think, the difficult lesson for the magician or religious seeker: to maintain a regular pattern of initiatory experience, rather than assuming it’s a one-time deal and you can get fat and relax with your occult groupies.

film report: Roadhouse

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Being on something of a Swayze bender, I decided to rewatch the 1989 throat-ripping classic, Roadhouse. Let’s see how much of the plot you can deduce from these screenshots:

 

So basically, Dalton (Patrick Swayze) is a cooler, a lead-bouncer, who is propositioned to sort out a violent shithole called The Double Deuce, “the kind of place where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing”. He immediately fires a bunch of degenerates, including an amusing character who fucks a 80s blonde in the backroom, “you gonna be my regular Saturday night thing” and then protests “I’m on my break!” when Dalton sticks his head in to fire him. Dalton rents a room in a farm and does tai chi style exercises half-naked, but also immediately lights a cigarette upon awaking,

because this is a 80s action film. The farm is opposite a villa owned by the villainous Brad Wesley

– one of the greatest of 80s villains – played by Coach Red Pill:

There are loads of 80s titties and 80s blondes, and Coach Red Pill’s henchmen are an assemblage of fired maths teachers, fat American slobs, and homosexual rapists. One of them drives a monster truck.

So anyway, Coach Red Pill demands tribute payments from local store owners and Dalton ends up fighting his various henchmen and saving the town. CRP makes a great villain, one of these bad guys who simply enjoys life and enjoys his villainy – he has no rancour, no ill will, he’s just a local kingpin and relishes the role. Dalton calls in assistance from the legendary cooler Wade Garrett,

played by Sam Elliott. I believe we have here the key to 80s splendour – the supporting cast must be at least as good as the supposed protagonist.

The script is particularly memorable, with zingers every couple of minutes, and a great deal of homoeroticism. The film closed out the 80s, the greatest decade known to man.

It might just become your regular Saturday night thing.

time travel and memory

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Big Dick Anon has been delving into time travel:

Good to be back in the jungle. Folks are really excited and the wood chipper has been tested on several of Maduro`s followers.The Gold Miners and Crime lords have split up many of the spoils and interestingly enough they plan on fixing the country and helping a lot of people Maduro has been fucking over for a long time. They really hate the Iranians and the Cubans. Suspect the oil seizure will set things off. With the Capital going dark soon there after and Maduro being well dealt with. China is fucked. They are trying to flood the country to save the dam but they have made mistakes in their diversion systems and with pending earthquakes well enjoy the ride. Time travel, the beginning point is to understand the underlying meaning of Aristotle`s discussion of time in his work. “The Physics”. From here realize time is an internal issue as much as an external one. And there are a number of ways to make the journey. Also consider that language is a complete failure in dealing with time and to look beyond language and simply gaze into the darkness. For example there are individuals who have made the journey by overcoming the limitations that many folks place on themselves. Think in terms of the imagination as the trigger added to stimulation. For example Patton well these comments are simply a statement of fact.

Others have been known to have an inclination to time travel. There is something inherently in their chemistry that triggers a rip in space and time that allow them to move in time much the same way most folks simply move in the present. There exists in a Cherokee family several folks who have this gift. In fact one member was a pilot in WWII and at the Battle of Midway simply disappeared in mid-flight to reappear in California in 1849. And later recruited at Harvard by a very special group. And the gates. Later with photos of this family. Business calls.

–

Well, that’s a lot to digest. It occurs to me, what if memory is essentially time/space travel? – that we are not accessing a record stored in the brain, computer-style, but rather the brain using stored traces as a jumping-off-point to time/space travel, so we actually witness e.g. our first day at school once more? If we can take the present as the atomic moment in which our entire spiritual being & force is made physically real, so our physical reality is a taut concrete blip in the ocean of the immaterium, then future projection and memory enact a commerce with spiritual realities.

In which case, a traumatic memory still stings because you are actually literally moving in time & space to the original moment & location, and as it were through a glass darkly perceiving & experiencing that grief once more. You are not merely “remembering”, but re-experiencing.

When we remember, do we retroactively alter? Is the original experience coloured by the superimpositions of futurity? Could there be moments when we feel not merely the experience itself, but also how we will remember it? – a question to some degree touched upon in Geoff Dyer’s magnificent The Missing of the Somme. Could there be a numinous quality to our pivotal experience? – especially in my first year at university, I lived a double life, richly, feeling very much that the people I met, the situations in which I found myself, the daily beauties & splendours & miseries of my first maturation, were already written in a novel that many would read and re-read. I felt to be living within a grand story.

In this manner, one could perhaps engineer events to attract future remembrance. For example, 9/11.

The event will both generate & absorb imaginal force, in the form of attention, intense emotion, remembrance, speculation. This may well be the purpose of ritual – to consciously create a nexus. By this means, you attract & exploit human imaginal power, extending into the far future; you alter the weave of reality itself: presumably it would be possible to create an inner architecture to the event, to use that imaginal power to specific ends, to exalt a specific non-human intelligence if so desired.

For the evil elites, the figure known as Satan has long been one such entity.

But if there are such evidently malign entities and ceremonies, there must be a contrary.

I think this is one purpose of Q-anon: to craft a benign, alternate event, a “great awakening”. There is an imaginal, one could say “magickal” quality to Q, a sense of the spiritual significance to our times. I would love to know if someone in Q-team has delved deeply into chaos magick; if the American military have, in fact, been experimenting with the immaterium for some time, and identified a malignant non-human sentience (Satan) as an active agent within the Cabal’s machinations & workings. If so, one could hardly pick a better figure than Donald Trump to create a benign counter-narrative & imaginal reality; a man deeply aware of corruption & creation, a man in some ways so utterly ordinary as to be incorruptible, so utterly egotistical as to be always independent of the kind of influence wielded by evil, so utterly humorous and ironic, so like a child in some respects, a true innocent though wise.

film report: Point Break (1991)

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I was surprised how well this early 90s action flick held up; I would now regard it as one of the best action films I’ve seen. Keanu Reeves is the star, a FBI agent called Johnny Utah going after a gang of bank robbers; he is here very much in his 90s role as a kind of blank, a “neo”, likeable enough but not to be compared to his profoundly human old dog John Wick; the real power of the film is from the perfect balance of the almost-not-there Reeves and the brilliant supporting cast, e.g. Mister Joshua himself, the excellent Gary Busey as Utah’s older partner who theorises that the bank robbers are in fact surfers, leading to Utah embedding himself in the surfer community.

And then of course there is Dalton, Patrick Swayze, surely one of the most beautiful men, the most poetic, sensitive, violent, spiritual. Here he’s actually called Boddhi and is the head of the surfers, full of gems of hippy wisdom but also perfectly capable of delivering the meritorious beatdown.

There are also little cameos, e.g. Tom Sizemore as an undercover DEA agent, Anthony Kiedis (Swan from the Red Hot Chili Peppers) as a belligerent surfer, and a great John C McGinley (Sgt O’Neill from Platoon) as a the obligatory 80s stupid police boss.

It is wonderfully directed by Katherine Bigelow, with adroit and imaginative camerawork. She has the sensitivity to let the characters breathe and be complexly human & brutal. There is a rich humanity to the film, with even quite minor characters given a convincing, individual presence & magic.

The whole hippy surfer thing, about escaping, Matrix-like, from the workaday system is well-handled; for all its evident silliness, somehow it seems plausible here, with Patrick Swayze talking the talk and surfing the surf. In these moments, you can believe in the Männerbund, in the conflict & confrontation of a man with his fate, and his eventual enlightenment & release, even if in death.

a mask in time of plague

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Coronachan has withdrawn but people still wear masks here in Italy, often as a fashion accessory. I hate the mask. Perhaps in time people will choose to wear the mask at all hours, even when the government admit there is no further risk of contagion.

I readily imagine a future where everyone wears the mask, all the time. What special etiquette and caution must attend the removal, to eat and drink, to kiss. How to die in a mask. A city of men & women who wear increasingly decorative masks, ingeniously adorned & festooned; and then there will come the time when the masked citizens adopt a sponsor, when Audi or Bacardi or Siemens will pay people to wear a branded mask, when one can make a living walking about all day with a corporate insignia covering one’s mouth.

so hard

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Classic Pet Shop Boys: angelic vocals from Neil Tennant, and strong but not too strong hints of depravity in the lyrics:

I’m always hoping you’ll be faithful

But you’re not, I suppose

We’ve both given up smoking ’cause it’s fatal

So whose matches are those?

–

“Fatal” is very fine: it gives hints of drug overdoses and AIDS, of the wages of sin. A modern song would most likely eschew even the hint, and go into sordid, tedious detail. I also like the “I suppose” – a little overly polite, as if in discomfort.

the habitations

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O deliver not the soul of thy turtledove unto the multitude of the wicked: forget not the congregation of thy poor for ever.

Have respect unto the covenant: for the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.

(Psalm 74. 19-20)

 

the ghost books

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Having almost no work, I have taken to strolling into the town centre to partake of an Aperol Spritz in the afternoon. Provided one brings a good book, and one is not molested by African or gypsy beggars, or pigeons, it is a highly civilised pastime. I was reading Sun Tzu today and there was (inevitably) mention of Clausewitz in the introduction; I remember reading Clausewitz a few years ago on my now-defunct Kindle, being very impressed, but I now recall almost nothing. There is a strangely spectral quality to the books I have read on a Kindle, the memories more like distant dreams than lived remembrance & experience.

I ordered a new Kindle, having accidentally broken my last. When it arrives, I want to continue with some of the books I was only part-way through (Know no Fear, Mein Kampf, Target Patton, among others). I wonder if instead of just highlighting passages, I should laboriously copy the best out by hand, or by typewriter. I have, after all, two broken Kindles loaded with inaccessible highlights, but ink on paper is fairly enduring. If so, my reading practice would be returning to something of the more distant past, when commonplace books were, well, common.

If so, at the end of my largely misbegotten & ghastly life, I shall have a literary memory of vast, spectral libraries, shelves of books with faded titles, books you open and as in a dream there is only a smudged, faded letterage; and then there will be a few handwritten books of mine, where in rollerball or fountain pen or biro or pencil, I have preserved an incoherent, disjointed substance, lines from poems without attribution, paragraphs from Technological Slavery right next to passages from Evelyn Waugh and Plato – and these shall be bright & solid.