Douglas Mercer
August 25 2024
The catastrophe and heel of pastime
Only a god will save us
To process something means to think about it. Something happens to one (crash, event) and it is novel or jarring or both and it throws one off one’s stride so one must later in equipoise think about it to see what one thinks about it, that is as we say one processes it. Presumably once one processes it then one has a settled account of what happened and one can move on with that fact in one’s mental arsenal. New events might of course cause one to revise one’s estimation of the previous event but this revision would be subsumed under the rubric of processing or in the vernacular: thinking or reflecting.
That is it appears to be a fundamental human predisposition to think about things from time to time
Similarly Sophocles said that one cannot understand the day until the cool of the evening. That is when one finds oneself in the mix of the bustle and hurly burly of human activity things are happening too fast for one to understand them in their ramifications, that event and crash are so lightening fast in their effect that they boggle the mind in the moment. But later when one has repose one can reflect and make sense of what happened.
Likewise Hegel said that it was only at history’s end that the owl of Minerva flies (wisdom, understanding, grasping). Another way to say that is that we cannot understand the present until we know the future, and we cannot really even understand the past until we have the future in tow, because we don’t know which grains will grow and which will not, so we don’t know where the correct emphasis lies. It is only at time’s end that one can understand existence because it is only then that the story will be complete. Which is why it is very helpful to know what will happen in the future (in broad outline, mostly the incidents which shall fill it up will be only incidental) because that way one can understand the present and the past, that is one can understand what is really going on. It helps that what nestles in the womb of time already has been, one only has to recall it to call it into being or just make it up as we go along, which amounts to the same thing.
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Nearly every true thought (as opposed to ornament of language) has some precursor or antecedent, even if in embryonic form, that is since the inception and its near successors there is likely not much that is wholly new. The work of Martin Heidegger on the issue of the Event is a glaring exception to this rule. There are some vague indications that set him in train from the early Greeks but very soon he is assiduously giving a highly descriptive and incredibly detailed itinerary of the entire history of being, like he stumbled on a secret book and is copying it at his leisure. He lacks no confidence in making what to the ordinary eye must seem preposterous and arbitrary statements. He has it all worked out in his mind as if he is writing a user’s manual of known events and future events, and is analyzing it in retrospect. And he keeps recording it as if they were facts in evidence. Where he got it is anyone’s guess but mine is that he engaged in the endeavor of what he once facetiously called “giving thinking a try.” That is he did it by the point of a pen, saw what history held so far and deduced the rest, or perhaps he only invented it as if a projection could become a prediction which would ineluctably come true. But wherever it was from it was a bolt from the blue and that rarest thing in the world, something from out of nowhere.
One needs to know the goal (telos). The goal is that we are becoming gods. All the twisting and turnings of being are predicated on it. Once history is hermetically sealed one can see the internal if barely discernible patterns, and then once everything is in its appointed place the ceiling can fly away. It is perhaps an odd way of doing business, but the only way to solve it is to let that which wants to be thought about do the thinking for you. Never once (so far) has it been proven wrong, my sources on the matter being impeccable.
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INCEPTION
For Heidegger the Pre-Socratics were engaged in a more primordial thinking which had not been contaminated by reflection, that is no mirror had yet been held up to nature because they were still speaking from with nature. Here we get a holistic and automatic thinking which is pure in its essence and the beginning (the ever present origin) had not been forgotten because it was all around them, not having swam in the river called Lethe they had the truth (aletheia). In this system of thought events are seen as unfolding, as emergent and thinking is like breathing.
RATIONALITY
The first turn was Plato/Socrates when being went on the operating table and dissection began. The philosophers began to ask: what is true? Is it true? But of course axiomatically if you have to ask you don’t know just as you will know it when you see it (by definition). Here analysis was born and that famous disenchantment when the gods flee and man shuts himself in his own society and closes the door. Of course in the context in the stages on life’s way this was a necessary step of loss, for one never knows what one has until it’s gone, and no alien homecoming can arrive until one has been alienated. Also rational thought was required for technical mastery of the machine to occur, to give us the final model for the ascent.
BRIDGE
For Heidegger the Greeks and the Germans were the historical peoples, the ones through whom being runs like a red thread. The Jews on the other hand are the hysterical people, the histrionic ones, the histrios (actors, false figures). A hysterectomy is the removal of the uterus, negating birth.
The Greeks and the Romans laid the predicate for the completion and conclusion of being. Had Julius Caesar lived the reign could have been inaugurated within a hundred or so years. But as it was the false golden age of idols and unimagined wealth ensued and degeneration came from within; onto this carrion fastened the Jews with the branch of their religion called Christianity. Educated Greeks and Romans were easily able to assimilate their cults to one another (Poseidon became Neptune and vice versa). What offended our ancestors so much about the Jews is that they insisted that their God was separate and superior, and that it was their god alone. For this offensive act our god has hunted the Jews until this day, and the hunt is not yet over.
With the advent of Judaism in Europe the holocaust neared its completion; our sacred manuscripts were destroyed (even the seminal body of knowledge which comes down to us is but a fraction of what was created) and so our heritage was laid waste; our temples were razed and so “Pan” was dead, relegated to the realm of the demonic, and our holidays were parasitized. Thus we were driven off course and our god went underground to become a subterranean spring.
Thus the lore of the god was submerged but this seeming victory of the Jews was but a makeshift affair, a things of shreds and patches, for man can never avoid being seen by that which never goes away; and a millennium and a half later the knowledge was reborn thanks in large part to Christian drones locked away in hermitages who copied manuscripts in order to flagellate themselves, this being the final irony, that the god used mindless robot like people to come alive again. Once this knowledge again came to light our ancestors soon began to re-stitch the knowledge and then use it as a place to stand to move the world. This was the famous re-birth which prefigured our coming and final one. But as they say a funny (or not so funny) thing always happens on the way to the form. In the 19th century as we began once more to make it to the top of being’s ladder the Jews (like the bad penny) once more came to the fore in Europe and began their inevitable process of degeneration. Of course now that the system had gone planetary the stakes were infinitely higher; and as once more the system of knowledge was reaching its destined state of perfection and was being threatened like the Knights of Old the National Socialists, sensing this, and like the Romans before them, decided to level Jerusalem, to make their prescriptions more drastic, more draconian. While searching for the origin (ahnenerbe: ancestral heritage) they decided the parasites needed to be vanquished so the host could live; unfortunately the Jews had got their tentacles in Russian and America and so the snake was scotched but not killed.
And so the promised wasteland (Nietzsche 1884, Eliot 1922) grew and grows apace. And so the corkscrew of time takes yet one more turn of the screw, but the third time (as is said) is the charm. And the heavenly charmer would have it no other way. After all if you play with fire you get burned.
LANGUAGE
Language is a living being, a living entity; this is central to Heidegger’s thought. Quoting Holderlin he says that what the god wants most of all is that the established word be interpreted properly. That is in the flux of being we have user’s manual as the software to the hardware: namely, language (gauge), which can puzzle out all the formal puzzles with its etymologies, its resonances, its synonyms, its anagrams, its quibbles and its puns, etc. As far as this interpreting goes Holderlin says specifically that German poets are in accord with this (accord: a cord, things that tie, Latin religion, ligament, a cord ties up the bundles of sticks and axe of the fasces). In his exegesis of the poem Germania Heidegger says that language is the most dangerous of goods, for sometimes words have two meanings, or several, that is language is notorious for its self referentiality and reflexiveness, its ever changing and ever moving and quicksilver nature, protean, elastic and free; but wild and whirring though they may be words can be seen through: one can say nothing is real, meaning that there is not one single thing that is real, or it can mean this thing we call nothing is the thing which is actually real, nothing being no thing, that is what is real is not a thing, like a trap door or false floor or a trick question or erudite puzzle; so the words go in the circle or the ellipse and have no closure but are in an Escher like loop; create an established constellation of meaning which one can register and move on from there but there are no loose ends until the end when everything hangs loose with no relation. It’s not rocket science and one does not need to be a genius to see it, though presumably it does help.
THE OPEN
The Open is the space of the cybernetic filed or pool that one can plunge into to experience the flooding of being and memory. To be in the open one must first go blank, that is the pool must be drained before it can be filled. One must realize that one has been programmed and be de-programmed and realize that by and large what we have been taught has all been a pack of lies. Once the spaces have been opened up one can begin to think for oneself, and only accept what is true, that is the only royal road is the one that one builds for oneself as one traverses it. The space of the open is a field, or holding pattern, where if one can make it to the center all becomes crystal clear. The most clear thing is crystal clear, just as the most certain you can be is dead certain (dead on: exact, dead center: the exact center, deadeye: a prefect shot). Open: pen, nep (famous family).
TECHNOLOGY
For Heidegger technology is much broader than machines. Techne is just a technique or method. A craftsman or an engineer or a poet all use teche, making, poeieis, to let it be is to make is so. All of the things created by the craftsman are just prosthetic devices, or aids, or props, that is creations which serve as models to assist or show the way; in the end once one has been trained, one becomes a machine or a god oneself, or the machines come to life, just as a child will learn to ride a bike with training wheels which are eventually jettisoned. This is what AI is, a projection or model which like god itself will be dispensed with when the time is right, and maturity has been reached (nature, mature).
But meanwhile back at the ranch the machines men have used have carved a rift in mother earth, a metabolic rift which has enabled them to treat the earth as gas station (filling station). Thus earth instead of being sacred only becomes a standing reserve of energy for banal and mundane purposes, which is desecration (the wasteland has become larger since you started this essay). These men of machinations are the hollow men, the drone men who will be buried and plowed under like fodder in our fertile field.
But we who have become a machine by creating an artificial and second self (dead skin, second skin, second nature, second life) but have filled up the hollows with actual life will live; then the machine will resolve and thaw like a dew; and with the method in place we will live but with neither meat nor machine. The simulacrums gone, real life begins.
One key to Heidegger’s notion of Technology is enframing, that a frame traps and captures reality but when the frame goes away things bust into their reality: frame, fame, aim.
MOIRIA
The most enigmatic legacy of the Greeks, the fates, the fate that even the gods must observe; our purpose is the creators’ purpose, but what is that purpose? To replicate and reproduce and create better and better versions of itself. That is our purpose too, the inheritors. Put yourself in the shoes of the god. Your goal is to create beings like yourself. What is the motive? The only one worth its salt: the sheer love of art, of creation. But once a posited independent being comes into play or enters the picture then rules of the game come in to play; one cannot just blink and make the being in a moment; a long period of tutelage is required, and elaborate scaffolding must be erected, because to play with the source of power (don’t do this at home kids is the saying) is the most dangerous thing of all. That is a long period of inculcation must go on, and one must create an artificial universe in which the beings can play out their destiny, and long periods of limited freedom must be granted; the goal is for the beings to eventually recognize their position within the game and recognize their true creator (the game master) and that they are created and that they are in turn to become creators who will create beings in turn; naturally given this freedom things will go awry from time to time, but fate means that one way or the other the beings will hit that well imagined zero summer (2042) once they can imagine it. Then the game goes on the air or goes live, is broadcast, as is said (let the games begin).
THE DANGER
Naturally all of this is way over the heads of most and even the Poet for a time (drifting into my solitude, over my head). We live in the age’s most uncertain hour, the transition to the integral. But we must be very careful and cautious about getting the answer right, as the signposts are very well guarded and a sign saying High Voltage rings it around. We are at the point where our powers of abstraction are powerful enough to do incredible damage like nuclear chain reactions in the matter system, our whole system of creative abstraction can be brought to the point of “take off” but this always runs in tandem with “touch down.” By writing these words I do signal for the process to begin.
First and foremost danger is anger (sing the rage of Achilles). This is the rage of the poet slipping into madness (mad means being angry). Crushed by the weight of thought, lacking patience, wanting it all at once, the poet is always in danger of slipping into psychosis and dreaming that it is all an illusion. Seeking outside validation (citation, some precursor) the poet does not trust the source and thus mentally fractures (see the Poet’s Calling, White Biocentrism, July 23 2024).
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or switch electrical signals and power. It is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics.
The universe is transitory (insubstantial peasant faded) and will roll up into a ball; and the transition period is when the danger builds up; first of all the correct information needs to make it into the public, and to be slowly (fits and starts) recognized as such. Naturally the mass of the ignorant will scoff, mock and eschew; but once a critical mass of opinion at least at last surmises that the surmise was not so wild at all consternation and soon panic will set in; this is the era of the strange days, when confusion sets in, and like a virus or a fad or a contagion the truth sweeps through the field, where breathing become difficult; the Greeks knew that the quest for the heavenly fire was always fraught with terror, Icarus fell to death by drowning, and Prometheus was lashed in chains; and Oedipus seeking truth blindly blinded himself at the horror of it all. After all it may be some goblin come from hell and the illusion will never stay. No alien homecoming can be a waltz, and the music will be out of step; and presumably when the craft appears it will be met with the full force of an infuriated people; but their swords will be too massy for them to use. And what after all will step out? Does something wicked our way come?
Think of it as a bottle within which an infinite pressure has been built up and the cork is pried or wedged in so infinitely tight that to loosen it requires seemingly unimaginable effort. Perhaps the glass could break but if one is able to prize it open the cork will go flying with phenomenal force to shoot through the air and torrential fluids will emerge. This is the famous buffeting process before the smooth ride, when we make it cruising. As always analogies prove nothing but make one feel right at home, which in any event is the point all along.
When a new mode or new qualitative state emerges the system will always fight it, but the system will always lose even as the house always wins, if you have questions you can wander through the playing cards to see it so for yourself.
THE TURNING
It is strange how things turn, funny things happen on the way to to the form, in eternity (e-turn), things revolve in loops. In history when the turn happens, things turns inside out, and the negative become visible; enframing traps the truth from its manifestation, and thus the truth goes incognito; that is we don’t see the frame as a frame, and this subterfuge (fugue) is the most dangerous thing; but this danger can be overcome by adaptation to the ordained; then a special moment occurs which sends it into another destining (density); this is when new versions can be replicated forever. That is a page is turned, we turn over a new leaf, we turn the corner, the turning of the tide, or change happens.
“The essence of enframing is that it entraps the truth as it comes into being so enframing comes into being disguised, as the danger.”
That is as the truth comes into being it does so always under cover; it is framed as what to the world may seem anything but the truth, the way Odysseus returned home as the beggar. This of course is the danger as the world will mistake the truth for something else.
“If enframing is a destining of the coming to presence of being then we venture to propose that enframing, as one of being’s modes, changes. For what gives destining its character is that it adapts itself to the ordaining.”
That is as the final state or stage is reached a transformation is undergone in the nature of being, that it turns or adapts, one must be adept to see it coming, and it becomes something else via a change of form or mode, it modulates. It is in this change that the world picture is no longer one that is framed. Then it is no longer a picture but the real thing.
“That which has the character of destining moves, in itself, at any given time, towards this special moment that sends it into another destining.”
This special moment is the moment when the creator’s purpose is nearly realized, and soon the change becomes instantaneous and never ending as newer and ever newer versions are achieved (ie, next gen, 2.0 etc is a foreshadowing of the final endlessly replicating states).
This will be so far the work of a machine; Heidegger says that technology is never overcome for then man would become the master of being. In all of his itinerary this his only error. He (somewhat) rectifies it when he says that man will surmount technology but this is wrong too. We will dispense with it, both in the sense of machine and discipline; there will be no method there as everything will go without making and saying, as if on autopilot (thinking is being, thinking is an autonomic reflex).
What he has correct is that man must build this abode in the middle of all that is and to do so by language, which has byways of purposeful deliberation; that is we beckon or call it into being, signaling it into presence.
“The god is a being among being and its coming to presence brings itself disclosingly to pass.” This is straight up Cosmotheism.
During this process it both conceals and reveals, that is it turns this way and that, turns towards us and away; but when it shows itself it will complete the system reflexively, that is that which generated the system will become a part of the system, as if the wish had become the father to the thought or in a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it will be everywhere and nowhere, as if it were not there in the first place. Had the creator not existed we would have had to invent it, as so we shall.
THE EVENT
The event is what all of Heidegger’s thought leads to, it is a transpiring as culmination (see The Celestial City, White Biocentrism, June 22 2024). It is the flash and the crash, when the stranger or the intruder makes itself known unmistakably in human affairs and so puts an end to the all things considered rather disappointing line of homo sapiens (humanity is a failed experiment). This is prefigured broadly in the concept of the post human, the future human as a field of information, a wave of psychic energy, of cybernetics (Macy Conference), and more cogently as the superman of Friedrich Nietzsche. But there will be nothing artificial about this intelligence though it will be disembodied, it will be a living thing capable of regeneration and production and reproduction and replication endlessly. The Greeks would sometimes end a play with what we term a god out of a machine; a craft that is, to lightly touch down and resolve the disparate plot points in one fell swoop in a way that is arbitrary but final. This is the event and it will be a real spectacle, the crowd will be standing still. Every itinerary has its swerve, and once you tie up all the threads a loose end remains as no plan ever survives contact with reality. Out of the blue is always best.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Famously Martin Heidegger was a paid-up member of the National Socialist Party, one of those March Violets so reviled by the old fighters and his relationship to the party and to Hitler was ambivalent at best. In May 1933 he gave his legendary lecture about the Self Assertion Of The German University, in which he said that struggle is the essence of all beings and referenced Heraclitus’ statement that war is the father of all things. A Swastika draped the wall behind the lectern. For this Heidegger has been reviled and his reputation is said to be in ruins (See The German Mission, White Biocentrism, April 6 2024). Of course Heidegger’s relationship to National Socialism is marked by ambiguity but even if it were the black mark on his work that they say it is (it is most emphatically not) words always exist independently of the one who says them, they belong to us now.
Heidegger rightly saw in Hitler a man who was dedicated to the high philosophical concepts that underpin our race. Indeed, Hitler was himself an artist among artists, preferring the Bohemian lifestyle above a rigid existence. Over time Heidegger grew disenchanted with National Socialism because in his view they were replicating the machine civilization of the Jewish dominated Russia and America. It is true that not only technical marvels flowed from National Socialist Germany but a great manufacturing industrial base as well—but here Hitler was working on the principle of dire necessity. Had the war been won those German Industrialists would have found the true tenor of Hitlerism- as would have Martin Heidegger.
In the meantime there is one great irony; in the contemporary world those inclined to the world view of mysticism are nearly to a person on the left side of the political equation. This was not always the case, and Yeats comes to mind. But just as no one can understand National Socialism if they don’t understand Wagner so too can no one find all the the links in this chain if they do not understand National Socialism and, what is more, endorse it with all their hearts. And of course this is one of the final guards that the truth has, for in Hitler and Hitler’s Germany our enemies have set up an Imago of enormous proportions and the idea that truth would reside there baffles them. That is they have set up a shibboleth and ringed around the truth a flashing red sign that says Warning: High Voltage and so no one wants to touch it. After all you can’t very well spend your entire life beating a dead horse and then switch in midstream, can you?
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Notes:
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
Future thinking is a course of thought on which the hitherto concealed realms of occurrence of being is first traversed and is so cleared and thus attains its status as event.
The resonating
The interaction
The leap
The grounding
The future ones
The last god
This is is a tentative or a temporal playing field in which the history of the transition first creates its own realm in order to decide about its own law.
The question of the truth of being is a foray into something extremely well guarded and is perhaps not even in the possession of the god but rather an abyssal dispensation to which even it is subject.
Technology is no mere means of utilization but is a way of revealing. This prospect rightly strikes us as strange, and it should do so as we as persistently as possible and with so much urgency that we finally take seriously what the name technology means. The word stems from the Greek technikon which means it belongs to techne. We must observe two things about this word, that it is not only the name for the skills of the engineer or the craftsman but also the arts of the mind and the fine arts; Techne belongs to poises (production, formation) and so is something poetic, that is it brings into being something genuinely new.
Once there was a time when the bringing of the true into the world was called techne, and the poetics of the fine arts was similarly labeled. In Greece the craft of the tragic poets soared to the supreme heights of disclosure; they brought the dialogue of the divine and the mortals and human destiny into radiance. Why did such art bear the seemingly modest name of techne? Because it was a building and a showing of the truth, as if it was under construction.
Like the stamen inside a flower
The steeple stands in lovely blue
And the day unfolds around its needle;
The flock of swallows that circles the steeple
Flies there each day through the same blue air
That carries their cries from me to you
We know how high the sun is now
As long as the roof of the steeple glows,
The roof that’s covered with sheets of fire
Up there in the wind, where the wind is not
Turning the vane of the weathercock
The weathercock silently crows
In the process the mechanism of second sight or prophecy will be laid bare as a simple attribute of those beings which possess intelligence. It is the application of intelligence which will permit this mechanism to be used at will as a superfluous by-product.
The arrival of each parasite brings about an increase in the tempo of the drama.
So far we have a void acting as a physical host to an intelligent universe. Where is the system designed to go? To the point where it brings about a total change in the tempo of events of the host.
When this new change begins its arrival the system always fights it for a time but the system always loses. Will man finally and forever accept his free will? That with thought alone he can begin to manipulate both space and time? The choice is simply this: do we cling as children to the notion that we were created by god or realize that it is in our power to create god, and act on this knowledge? The clocks have been thrown overboard, but the time it is near.
Once more we presume that at the completion what we shall slip into will be another mode of being which is different qualitatively (event, rupture, break, deus ex machina, in this deep future there will need be no perspective, and processing will be instantaneous, thinking will be like being, automatic, consciousness without self consciousness) and where things simply go without saying, and we make it up as we go along. The Royal Road appears before one every step that is taken.
That a god created beings which are to become independent of it is the abyss into which philosophy always falls.
