Douglas Mercer
September 25 2024
If you see the god kill the god but to wipe the blood off make sure you become a god yourself, otherwise you only will have scotched it.
That a god created beings which are to become independent of it is the abyss into which philosophy always will fall.
In the essay The Age Of The World Picture the philosopher Martin Heidegger says that science has institutionalized itself as an ongoing research activity in pursuit of the ground plan of nature. Genetics and math are indeed the language of the gods but there will crop up Halting Problems, Incompleteness Theorems and Uncertainly Principles; nature is the game that moves as you dissect it and as such the floor plan will remain elusive, and things will always remain undecided like multiplying infinities or black holes into which things are sucked and are the undiscovered country from which no one can return.
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Technology provides models by which gods shows us the way, grants us examples of what it is like. When the first telegraphic message went out they said “what hath god wrought”; we can communicate at a distance, we can travel at high speeds, we can fly through the air and through space; we can conceive of creating life and creating reality itself in images or create beings; these are not the real things but presentiments of it; they are facsimiles or simulacra; teaching instruments by which we can begin our building. With them we are in the workshop where it creates the machines but we still have no idea what it is doing.
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The language of the gods is English
The truth is not out there—but in here.
In the inner world things are different; here a condition of total knowledge is possible, it seeming to be total madness only to those who are not in on it. In the inner world thought is free and a great game of glass with various values is going on and once one learns to decode the symbols it’s a piece of cake, that is once you have learned to play the game it’s easy, as easy as lying one might say. In the world of the imagination the sky is not the limit and blue sky thinking holds; in the world of imagination you can neglect the friction because thought is free and fleet. It’s true that it requires a certain amount of knowledge but there are a few others out there who are in on it and leave their bread crumbs as links or clues; and eventually you begin to see patterns that recur and you realize you are in a (admittedly vast) circulatory system of words and concepts and you just have to keep going round and round; it does get larger but that’s just added perspective, but nothing is lost; one is building a structure and soon we will exit the system when all the loose threads are tied up and all threads are loose. If I am not mistaken the Germans called that freedom and the one who experience it only wants to spread it.
Myth is the primary means by which the creator sends his ideas to us.
It loves creation
It loves beauty
It loves art
It loves truth
It loves evolution
It loves growth
It is profligate
It is prodigal
It loves war
It loves struggle
It loves competition
It loves fire
It loves victory
It loves magnanimity
It loves the gigantic
It loves the enormous
It loves the monumental
It loves the monolithic
It loves acting
It loves hyperbole
It loves speed
It love flight
It loves the lovely
It loves passion
It loves strength
It loves order
It loves logic
It love words
It loves music
The war is waged not in the world but in the spirit, in words and in the mind, in images and in symbols. When one wanders through one’s playing cards (the wicked pack) the ace of hearts is always best.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom—so say the Jews. This is of course the opposite of the truth for fear is the first thing that needs to be conquered. Even Jesus knew that much, they say, but his emphasis on being a servant belies this for servitude and meekness is just another form of fear and our god does not require a sacrifice, let alone one so over the top bloody, no; that scene of weeping and wailing at the cross is unseemly and unsightly more than anything; a lapse of good taste; it’s true that divine frenzy can occasion its own kind of fear but that just needs to be endured or, failing that, you can learn the ropes and not succumb to the emotions. In the grove the only ritual we have is walking and thinking, which will suffice. The god does not want to be prayed to, or worshiped, or idolized, nor called Father; but wants to be thought about and seen and recognized and worked with for the future. Anyone who exalts suffering as a means to knowledge is a liar---after all when looked at in the proper perspective Oedipus didn’t have enough eyes and was only throwing a child’s tantrum---that is he was a sad man who lacked something.
The open secret of the world is that god wants us to play with fire—as for getting burned the inner intensity and inner burning it is the point all along. The so called danger of the dizzying heights is just a ruse--it’s either a just so scary story or an illusion and a feint to shoo away the faint of heart—don’t fall for it. When they use words like overweening or enormity or hubris these are just the counsels of fear. No god worth its salt would not want its creations to challenge it, to seek it in its entirety, to see it face to face—not just from the back or in some supposed burning bush. But more than anything it wants us to know what the blueprint and the floor and ground plan is and then get in tune with it and align with it.
Horace said that we may drive out nature with a pitchfork but she’ll be constantly running back.
“The primary meaning behind Horace's quote lies in the inescapable and irrepressible force of nature. It suggests that human efforts to control or dominate the environment are ultimately futile. Despite our tendencies to manipulate or exploit nature for our own benefit, it will continuously find its way back, defying our attempts to subdue it.”
This is worn out thinking, the classic horse town approach. We are supposed to use nature just as nature uses us. And as for the horrible imagining of environmental degradation there are too many people on the earth and the excess is yellow, brown or black. Had the White race been allowed to continue the supremacy it had in, say, 1910, we would have solved this problem long since. No doubt that White man is brutal and savage (the god loves it) but we are gallant and chivalrous and magnanimous too, the very things which undermined us when used in a context before total victory had been assured. But if the Germanic peoples had banded together in a kind of bund over time we would have held a protectorate over the earth and evolved into something more humane—not out of humanistic concerns but due to hard headed practicality---no longer would we need to kill but then we could have controlled and China would be docile and moderately populated, Africa sparsely populated and the Jews held in check. As for us we dreamed of something great but the ankle biters of history had to have their way--the results you see around you. One look is all it takes. And had the National Socialists prevailed, well, they were deep ecologists and green should have been their color, hell they stripped their buildings of asbestos in the 1930s something America was grappling with into the 1980s and they banned smoking in public places as well. It’s true if they had won it would have been hell of a lot more bloody then in 1910 but don’t call us the bad guys. No one can say they were not warned. But none of this is to say that man should not seek equality with the god--for no destiny can ever be thwarted only waylaid for a time. The god seeks the people willing to match it and then chooses it. But as always when the fate veers it swerves and takes a more roundabout approach; but no one can say that the National Socialists did not leave the light on—and the key in the lock.
Matisse came up with the theory of art with scissors, so there is no reason I can’t do the same with history--life being so much more important than art.
In the Garden of Eden God forbid man to eat of one tree—the one with the apple. So right from the beginning the Jews stack the deck with a false picture--God as the forbidding father, the distant and stern taskmaster, the one who said no, the one with the taboo. Thousands of errors have flowed from this cardinal error—that we would ever be denied anything. Even the notion of a garden where one could would not work is a lapse of thinking, there was never a golden age when one could loll about. One simply has to set about the task of working and learning and paradise would have been ours in due time. And nothing will work out until the thinking is correct, until the proper value and variables are in use. You get the wrong picture you get the wrong result, garbage in, garbage out. Sad to say but say it I do.
And then God (they say) said if they ate of this apple then they would be as gods. There was a serpent in the Garden you see which is a red herring if there ever was one. Nietzsche had a myth of his own and it went thuswise: man has committed a crime and to expiate or purge this crime he must become a god. That is what you call an eye opener---and, one shall note, it the precise opposite of the Genesis story in which the crime that must be atoned for is wanting to be god—but here we put the horse before the cart and become gods to be rid of the crime. What was the crime? Why, none other than losing destiny’s way by adopting an arid desert religion wholly unsuited to the taste and temperament of European man; of forgetting the sacred grove of our gods and of killing great Pan and disenchanting the world,
So we have to diametrically opposed viewpoints, and which one is true is the thread by which everything hangs. If the Jewish story corresponds to reality I’ll eat my hat and my words at the same time and you can serve it all alongside my head on a silver platter. If the Jewish version were true it would be an artistic lapse of taste and if I am sure of anything it is that in realms of the muses the creator’s taste is impeccable. I’ve done the math, so I know. If I am wrong, then so much the worse for reality.
For the Jews to become god is the abomination of desolation, is idolatry, it’s why the Divines in Elizabethan England worked so hard against the theater, it’s why Cromwell shut the theater down, it’s why Bruno was burned; it’s why Galileo was chastised; it’s why Julian failed; it’s why Da Vinci had to remain quiet; but Marlowe knew Christ was a juggler; Shakespeare called the creator the grand decider and the heavenly charmer, he had a nostalgic glaze for the beautiful churches that were razed (the bare ruined choirs) but his inspiration was the classical world not that of the New Testament; but the Jews were able to foist their illusion on Europe and the rot set in and one can see it all around us; the only totalizing theories are that of the Jews and the Aryans; it’s a choice between believing a fairy tale presented as true; and of the truth that will become a fairy tale. That is not much of a choice at all.
And now we get to that most inimitable scene a faire of world literature—man challenges god and man fails, it’ not quite the hooker with the heart of gold but its close. From the way they trumpet it you’d think that this psychodrama were inscribed into the very heart of nature but it’s just a just so story if there ever was one.
Frankenstein is a prototype of the myth; of manmade systems out of control and run amok, they say that is always what happens when you slip the surly bonds of earth—and create a monster.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment. Shelley travelled through Europe in 1815, moving along the river Rhine in in Germany, and stopping in Gernsheim 17 kilometres away from Frankenstein Castle, where, about a century earlier, Johann Konrad Dippel, an alchemist, had engaged in experiments.
Man creates thinking breathing life but does so in an unconventional way; thus man (so the story goes) usurps the role of the gods, takes over their mantle and set himself up as god; in the scheme as it is presented this ritual pollution is the trigger for the furies or the Eumenides (or “god’s wrath") to ensue with catastrophic consequence for man. And if they can slip the inevitable alchemist into the tale they will, it’s one of the tricks of their trade, the alchemist being a species of that Neoplatonism favored by Bruno and Dee and the famed School Of Night that (they say) went out of fashion with the rise of Rationalism.
Set in the 18th century, it documents a fictional correspondence between Captain Robert Walton and his sister, Margaret Walton Saville. Robert Walton is a failed writer who sets out to explore the North Pole in hopes of expanding scientific knowledge. After departing from Archangel, the ship is trapped by pack of ice on the journey across the Arctic Ice. During this time, the crew spots a dog driven by a gigantic figure.
Here we have the template for Lovecraft’s stories, the amateur writer looking to increase his store of lore gets more than he bargained for; set in an extreme environment inhospitable for man and a “gigantic figure” appears; that is man has summoned the monumental or the colossal and “enormous times” come forth; this is the playing with the fire of the chthonic forces which will always baffle and destroy man when he seeks to move beyond his (allegedly) well-appointed place in the hierarchy of the ladder or chain of being.
Frankenstein has been in pursuit of the gigantic man observed by Walton's crew. Frankenstein starts to recover from his exertion; he sees in Walton the same obsession that has destroyed him and recounts a story of his life's miseries to Walton as a warning.
Here is it fanaticism and obsession that are seen as the agents which leads to mans’ destruction, that is man’s single-minded pursuit of the truth at all costs, of equality with god leads , of seeking out the bottom of all mysteries, leads to his downfall; and as such the doctor/creator figure (the “mad scientist” or “mad scholar” is another scene a faire) is caught in a game of cat and mouse with the monster leading to his death; this is the Ur-Myth of a salutary of cautionary times, that man must remain within the measure and not seek the forbidding, icy, or monumental scale of the gods, another of those jump scare themes or scary monsters meant to drive away the those with weak hearts.
In Greek Mythology Icarus was the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the architect of the labyrinth of Crete. After Theseus, king of Athens and enemy of Mionos, escaped from the labyrinth, King Minos suspected that Icarus and Daedalus had revealed the labyrinth's secrets and imprisoned them in the labyrinth itself. Icarus and Daedalus escaped using wings Daedalus constructed from birds’ molted feathers, threads from blankets, the leather straps from their sandals, and beeswax. Before escaping, Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or the heat would melt the wax. Icarus ignored Daedalus's instructions not to fly too close to the sun, causing the beeswax in his wings to melt. Icarus fell from the sky, plunged into the sea, and drowned. The myth gave rise to the idiom, fly too close to the sun.
When the secret, the secret of the labyrinth is out supposedly chaos will be triggered; in escaping the labyrinth by the most direct route possible (the air) the pair (supposedly) challenge god in his abode of the skies; the result in the Myth is that man must be cast down, here to drown. This is a repetitive sign post and as such is deep dyed in human thinking; that it is false is what gives it the air of such menace.
In Greek Mythology Prometheus (meaning forethought) is one of the titans and the god of fire. Prometheus is best known for defying the Olympian gods by taking fire from them and giving it to humanity in the form of technology and knowledge. Prometheus is known for his intelligence and for being a champion of mankind and is seen as the author of the human arts and sciences. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, condemned Prometheus to eternal torment for his transgression. Prometheus was bound to a rock, and an eagle—the emblem of Zeus—was sent to eat his liver (in ancient Greece, the liver was thought to be the seat of human emotions). His liver would then grow back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day in an ongoing cycle.
Here the hatred of the gods is piqued by the theft of fire and the arts and man growing to be gods themselves. In this version of the Myth man must be caught in a cycle of suffering and is fated only to endure. In the Myth it is always the condign punishment that is meted out when men seek to rise higher on the chain of being.
Faust is the protagonist of a classic German legend. The erudite Faust is highly successful yet dissatisfied with his life, which leads him to make a pact with the Devil at a crossroads, exchanging his soul for unlimited knowledge. Faust is irrevocably corrupted and believes his sins cannot be forgiven; when the term ends, the Devil carries him off to Hell.
In this version of the tale we have the obsessive mad professor; here a condition of total knowledge leads to total perdition. We seem to detect a theme, one insisted on with overkill. One will be forgiven if on thinks that this is another of those scenes a faire: protesting too much.
These are but counsels of fear, a test to challenge man into not challenging the gods; to pass the test is to summon earthly courage to challenge the god; as such, this complex of myth is the last of the safeguards of the god’s concealment. Or perhaps just fairy dust in our eyes meant to be wiped away with the knowledge of the centuries. For no god worth its salt does not want all of creation to play with fire.
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In essence this is a version of character being fate; of man’s basic disposition (striving, daring to know) leading him inexorably to disaster. But character is not fate; Pico knew that man is infinite in faculties, infinitely elastic, and totally free. We are not fated to carry a rock up a mountain forever, or see things before us that when we reach for them evaporate. At the door of the law is a man whom we must kill to enter it; when you see the Buddha you are supposed to kill the Buddha; the Olympians themselves killed their fathers; for this is the way we break fate and break the cycle and giving birth to ourselves; banishing all ghosts from the machine once you have seen the man behind the curtain. For picking up rifles and bidding the soldiers shoot is the only thing that ever changed history; and the only thing that ever can. When you kill the god to become the god wipe the blood off yourself or just wade in the incarnadine sea, whichever suits you at the moment.
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Notes:
Ov: egg
Ab ovo: from the beginning , the zero point
Love: tennis love zero
Move
Volition
Nature: birth, mature
Heart: art, eat
Hart hunt, art
The first theory doesn't add up; however, it is a popular one and it makes for an attractive story. It has been suggested that the tennis sense of love is derived from French l'œuf meaning egg. It is said that when the game was imported into France from England, the French used the word l'œuf to mean zero, due to the resemblance of an egg to the written figure 0—just as a score of zero is sometimes called a goose egg in in American English or a duck’s egg in British (all of those terms hatched before tennis' usage of love). English players mispronouncing the French word supposedly influenced the change to love, and the rest is history, so to speak. But this turns out to be folk etymology: the problem is the lack of evidence of l'œuf being used in French to mean zero. The French use zéro to mean zero or naught and un œuf (an egg) and les œufs (the eggs) for the food. This theory seems cooked.
Another theory of love is if you have nothing you do it for love. An amateur meaning one who loves.
Who, being in very nature God,
Did not consider equality with God
Something to be used to his own advantage;
Rather, he made himself nothing
By taking the very nature of a servant,
Being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
He humbled himself
By becoming obedient to death—
Even death on a cross!
Is it not written in your own Law, replied Jesus, I have said you are gods? And if he called these men gods to whom the word of God came (and the scripture cannot be broken), can you say to the one whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world, You are blaspheming because I said, I am the Son of God?
I said, You are gods
You are all sons of the Most High.’
But you will die like mere mortals
More than any other play, Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus celebrates that God-like power of language, and shows us how words can soar, and tempts us to dizzying heights within our heads. But all the time, Marlowe is in control. He knows too much about the shaping power of words to be a Faustus. Marlowe is a magus too, all poets are, but one who tells us in this play to use that awesome power of words to fashion ourselves in God’s image. Else, like his hero, we will be deformed by the servant we abuse (see The Swan’s Song, White Biocentrism, August 4 2024 to see how the notion of dizzying heights is nothing but a chimera).
With a boulder on my shoulder
I tripped the merry-go-round
With this very unpleasing sneezing
The calliope crashed to the ground
Mama always told me not to look
Into the eyes of the sun
But mama, that's where the fun is
We were blinded by the ligth
The calliope crashed to the ground!
In Greek mythology Calliope (beautiful-voiced) is the Muse who presides over eloquence, so called for the ecstatic harmony of her voice. Ovid said she was the Queen of all Muses.
Decide – deicide
Pataphysics is a philosophy of science invented by Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) intended to be a parody of science. Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the science of imaginary solutions.
Pataphysics was a concept expressed by Jarry in a mock-scientific manner, with undertones of spoofing and quackery as expounded in his novel Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. Here, Jarry toyed with conventional concepts and interpretations of reality. Another attempt at a definition interprets pataphysics as an idea that the virtual or imaginary nature of things as glimpsed by the heightened vision of poetry or science or love can be seized and lived as real. Jarry defines pataphysics in a number of statements and examples, including that it is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments. A practitioner of pataphysics is a pataphysician or a pataphysicist.
One definition of pataphysics is that it is a branch of philosophy or science that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond metaphysics; it is the science of imaginary solutions. Jean Baudrillard defines pataphysics as the imaginary science of our world, the imaginary science of excess, of excessive, parodic, paroxystic effects - particularly the excess of emptiness and insignificance.
In his song Maxwell’s Silver Hammer refers to “science in the home” that is amateur rooting around into the heart of things.
Joan was quizzical, studied pataphysical
Science in the home
Late nights all alone with a test-tube
Maxwell Edison majoring in medicine
Calls her on the phone
Can I take you out to the pictures, Joan?
But as she's getting ready to go
A knock comes on the door
Bang, bang, Maxwell's silver hammer
Came down upon her head
Bang, bang, Maxwell's silver hammer
Made sure that she was dead
Maxwell stands alone
Painting testimonial pictures
Rose and Valerie screaming from the gallery
Say he must go free (Maxwell must go free)
The judge does not agree and he tells them so
But as the words are leaving his lips
A noise comes from behind
Bang, bang, Maxwell's silver hammer
Came down upon his head
Clang, clang, Maxwell's silver hammer
Made sure that he was dead
Here once again the seeker scientist meet the prescribed fate (death) but note that the one delivering this blow is also a scientist: a doctor. Hitler said he could do without all the professions save one: physician, as National Socialism was applied biology. In the movie Maxwell is played by a “mad scientist” who is involved in plastic surgery, or cosmetic reconstruction of human beings, a science said to emanate from the lore and knowledge garnered at the “concentration camps.”
At the end of the novel Dr. Faustroll dies, and he sends a telepathic letter to Lord Kelvin describing the afterlife and the cosmos. The symbolism of the novel has imagination and language overriding the reality of the French capital, and the story is wryly comic and surrealistic in nature. The novel concludes with the line: Pataphysics is science.
Deicide / Decide
Shakespeare called god the grand decider.
Schmitt said the sovereign is the one who makes the exception.
Answerve. Lucretius: swerve.
Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one.
Friedrich Nietzsche said abstract thinking was a feast.
Abstract: This paper explores Martin Heidegger’s critique of previous approaches to history, his differentiation of history as object of inquiry and temporal enactment, and his attempt in the late 1930’s to engage the past and rethink history from an inherently futural—and not merely subjectively or objectively grounded—decision and “enowning event” (Ereignis). Works of history are neither simply factual nor socially constructed for Heidegger but exhibit a hermeneutical or communicative event of disclosure—via understanding, interpretation, and appropriation—and concealment in relation to the facticity and possibilities of historical existence. Key Words: Heidegger, Geschichte, Event, Decision
