Author: Arthur Schechter

former enlightened master voluntarily incarnated as literary dilettante

Transmissions from the Hollow Earth: Expect an emergent Hip Hop traditionalism

in which a young eager ivy leaguer burnt out on history turns out timely and finally solves the mystery of timecube.com (Hi Mom!)

Race as Spiritual Technology:

Marxism has been fermenting for long enough in the more well-concealed crooks of windows of the cathedral, generally out of eyeshot for all but the tallest, and of absolutely no merit during the putrefactio stage: like so many hermetically-sealed vessels of cheap solipisitic, Kool-Aid-imitative substance, those who attempted to taste the prison hooch before enough time had elapsed, digging up the orchard promptly found themselves catching brewer’s sickness.  Other than those lost their minds, faith, or life if they weren’t lucky enough to come back akathesiac, catatonic-neurotic husks of the men they were to their families, busted road signs to their home towns down so many stretches of politically contested highway, these remnants of the vanguard, finalists in the ceremonial rites of the intoxication olympics, strive to deliver, uninterrupted pieces of time from the outer rim, indivisible in and of themselves and integral only as virtual energy, must like the conservation of the angular velocity of an orbiting electron briefly excited is suddenly apparently replaced (if we’re being crudely mechanical)  In reality, there were three things, the beginning, middle, and end of an indivisible moment: excitation, acceleration, sudden-indelible-intensive-return-transformation.

Hip-hop is, ultimately an undertaking on the order of magnitude of permitting and preventing, affirming and denying holocausts

If the invisible hand (the real one, the grabby junky one that’s not so good with money) can be made to loosen its grip on the central form on the potters wheel.  But know that, as long as the matter is sufficiently fluid, lassitude of grip can only serve to keep (You/The Author/The Artist) utterly from deciding, where this matter will not go.

Only after relapse is prevented, discipline elapses sufficiently; now the moment of inertia of the incipient res can be roughly fixed in the sense of the artist.  Fluid must be fully integrated into the medium for catastrophe to subside.  Operations can not be performed in a state of catastrophe.  Substance can finally learn how to begin to express its new trust to the author, in his essential motivation as the author to catch her as gravity begins to exert an entirely different effect, as the short term collapses into the present and the concrete future stretches into teleovirtual conformity with the attractor eidos.

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Notes from the Margins of Collective Evolution

Now, the wheel is the alchemical hieroglyph of the time necessary for the coction of the philosophical matter, and consequently of the coction itself. The sustained, constant and equal fire, which the artist maintains night and day in the course of this operation, is for this reason called the fire of the wheel. Moreover, in addition to the heat necessary for the liquefaction of the philosophers’ stone, a second agent is needed as well, called the secret or philosophic fire. It is this latter fire, sustained by ordinary heat, which makes the wheel turn and produces the various phenomena which the artist observes in his vessel:

I recommend you to go by this road and no other.
Only take notice of the tracks of my wheel,
And, in order to give an equal heat overall,
Do not rise or descend too soon to heaven or earth.
For in rising too high you will be burnt by heaven,
And in descending too low you will be destroyed by earth.
But if your course remains set in the middle
The route will be plainer and the way more sure.

(De Nuysement, Poeme philosophic de la Verite de la Phisique Mineralle in Traittez de L’Harmonie et Constitution generalle du Vray Se/. Paris, Pgrier et Buisard, 1620 and 1621, p. 254. Cited in Fulcanelli’s Le Mystere des Cathédrales, p. 50)

Robert Mariani’s recent post was very exciting to read, especially when he acknowledges the animalistic mechanics of decision making and pleasure seeking as requiring some evaluative (a word I prefer to “moral”) standard with substantial independence from, if not supervening influence on, the social system in order for that system to ascend any status more dignified than an orgiastic ebb and flow of raw energy.

It is not my intention here to lay out a predictive or a prescriptive program for “exit,” much less articulate one “direction” among many, which movements will have to “pick” if they are to be successful. Let me state here that progress is dead unless something living abides in it, something continues. That said, sometime in the past millennium (opinions differ wildly as to exactly when), the vehicle of history became fully automated, and the majority of institutional energy since has been drawn with increasing rapidity and increasingly refined exclusivity into inquiring how, exactly, we can make this thing go faster.

Whether corrective attempts to accelerate, sustain, or slow the progress of time, the process of keeping the universe from falling apart at the seams has never been “walkaway safe.” By this very same token, attempts to secure the dignity of this sacred undertaking have brought the whole process embarrassingly close to an absolute halt many, many times throughout history. Attempts to preserve Tradition have, all to often underestimated the natural resilience of secret knowledge.

The propositional integrity of Traditional forms has always rested in their wholeness, their comprehensive grasp on all the imitations they propitiate in profane orders. As such, any divisive sophistry doing business in thoughtless excretions and regurgitations which merely describe virtue (themselves in fact mere adumbrations of these forms) necessarily falls short of any edifying potential.

Any conflicts which arise between different aspiring receivers of tradition reflects poorly on the characters of these individuals, who must then examine and scrutinize themselves to a degree which may surpass the actual scholastic demands of intellecting the forms. Cultures of critique (specifically Hebraic currents for which I feel a special affinity) have always arisen in a desire to maintain the sanctity of the Traditional contents of the customary forms (a neat little inverse analogy), the inner meanings which do not change the way outer appearances do. Tradition itself is immune to critique in the very same sense that “hot” is immune to “cold;” substance may fluctuate between the essential poles of Tradition and the critical self-awareness which enables it either to reject vain customs and the claims of duplicitous individuals, or to reject itself. But neither quality can “become” the other any more than the color red can “become” the color blue.

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Some thoughts on marriage, gay marriage, and a simple proposition

I’ve often remarked, about male friends of mine with whom I share deep emotional bonds, that I would happily “gay-marry” them.  Some people take this statement for what it is: an act that, in a way that sex and reproduction only manage to celebrate, amounts to the magic of two individuals becoming one, that I and this or that friend are “like this,” just on that level.  In comparison, I’m extremely sparing with such words for any of my female friends, precisely because I respect them too much, to assume that much knowledge of our possible emotional compatibility (note for the nitpicky: this is not to imply that difference in physical sex or gender identity implies obstacles to emotional connection, but rather that the passion and mystery of romance in any form comes from the diverse inner conflicts which sex can bring to a relationship).

That said, I’m not being flip about the beauty and sanctity of a thing like gay marriage, just because I have no substantial romantic feelings for these men. I’m describing an ideal state where cohabitation is effortless, harmonious and generative, where people’s needs are compatible because they’re essentially the same,  (again, not to imply that the experience of all homosexuals is somehow a narcissistic cop-out like my own affection for my familiars, highlighting rather that these friends of mine and I have no “growing into each other” left to do).  That said, I have no experience of the very real struggles of those involved in romantic relationships which could only flourish naturally under the institution of gay marriage, legally prohibited in a shocking majority of 32 states.

There may be some who share my understanding first stated above, of the beauty and mystery preserved in the hallowed institution of Traditional Marriage, who feel altogether threatened by this kind of talk. By way of a clarification of terms, I think we can bring these opponents of gay marriage into the fold and achieve some mutual understanding. There appears to be a serious misunderstanding among some valiant defenders of Traditional Marriage, about what exactly happens when any two people who are not, strictly speaking, one man and one woman, engage in the apotheosis of mutual boundary dissolution which is so reliably facilitated by sacred cohabitation. That is to say, the experience of ritual union is completely the same. The perceived depravity of a sex act which is not reproductive is not a legitimate fear on the part of this particular brand of conservatives. It holds up to be no more than a straw man when we recognize the motivation behind this fear could not possibly be disgust. Dominion over nature implies all variety of “unnatural” modifications, however slight, to the “natural order” of which human sexual reproduction makes a comparatively small part. Not only then, do reproductive choices on the part of humans fall effectively outside of the umbrella of the evaluation of “nature” and its “order” distinct from society (a distinction fondly maintained by this same line of thinking), but when we see the natural occurrence of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom, the entire pretense to an essential, natural-moral disgust which runs any deeper than a fear which must be socially ingrained, falls apart completely.

The problem, as I see it, lies elsewhere, and has its origins in a fundamental misunderstanding. There is the spiritual union which occurs between two individuals, and the biological. The sex act is a physical image, of an essential merging which takes place outside of space and time. By the same token, the production of another human organism, a miracle of nature as it may be, is still a miracle of nature, the most elaborate allegory in the entire created universe for what is produced, on a spiritual plane, when two individuals come together. Moreover, neither physical image, when mechanically reproduced, is a guarantee of these special effects. When these effects do occur, they can result in (appear to the slow-witted, to stem from) prolonged physical contact and mutual stimulation; forms of ritual union, however, exist as a social sanctuary for individuals who are compelled, through a constant recapitulation of these genuine spiritual connections, to pursue their physical expressions to their logical conclusion.

The institution of Traditional Marriage, writ large, is defined by the loudest and therefore unsurpassed participants in the conversation today, as the union between one man and one woman. Radical proponents of this definition, however, have come under the impression that the mechanical reproduction of past instances which served as evidence of spiritual unity are not only necessary, but sufficient to bring about that unity. They see the institution of Traditional Marriage as the sole bastion and refuge of the secret to human happiness and inner freedom available to more than one person at once, in danger of contamination and being lost to history. There is a way in which they are mistaken, and a sense in which they are entirely correct. My reasoning follows:

  • Spiritual unification of at least two individuals is not only possible and desirable, but a moral imperative
  • Myriad forms of ritual practice have served to facilitate this throughout human history.
  • Fear threatens to tear people up on the inside; social institutions arise to ensure that it does so mostly on the outside; all to often, they tend to separate people from one another in the misguided fear of forcing an individual to face fear themselves (to recognize as only a threat, and nothing more without an individual’s participation in it).
  • The institution of Traditional Marriage has evolved around a complex historical network of socially ingrained fears in a valiant attempt to project them back into society, out of the fear that they may ultimately make unity  impossible (again conceiving individuals as non-agents on a double level, first assuming their inherent total susceptibility to fear, while also summarily attributing their spiritual unity to heterosexual reproductive union in faux-causal succession).
  • The institution of gay marriage, which some argue to be an offshoot of Christian monastic orders, (and unthinkably efficient when held to the standard of other esoteric orders, having survived and perhaps thrived, prior to our modern knowledge of its existence, perhaps in excess of a millennium in total secrecy, at least to the historical record) co-evolved with the institution of marriage as a fundamentally heterogeneous set of practices of spiritual unification in direct response to what certain individuals perceived to be unhealthy fixation on heterosexual reproduction becoming increasingly inhospitable to their existence as a category comprising one-tenth of the human population.

So we see, that the institution of marriage does not function in any exclusive way to facilitate the spiritual fulfillment of more than one person at a time. It exists precisely in distinction from other forms of union to allay the fears of individuals, who perceive those other forms of union as a threat.

Now this is all very complex stuff, so any radical camps in the debate, whether they want to destroy this last lifeline for the above-mentioned small populations of neurotics, or are just such neurotics, should be forgiven for any misunderstandings that have come about in our collective attempt to hash all this out. That said, I also think I may just be able to proffer up a few words that will clarify this whole matter once and for all.

The institution of Traditional Marriage exists first to preserve the happiness of a few very frightened individuals by strictly defining the terms by which, second, it helps certain individuals (certainly the ones with heavily preconceived notions about how such a thing is possible) become one. The institution of gay marriage exists as a completely separate institution to accommodate individuals excluded from the institution of Traditional Marriage. Much in the same fashion as Narcotics Anonymous was founded upon Alcoholics Anonymous’ core principles and 12 Steps due to the social unacceptability of heroin use compared to that of alcohol, gay marriage exists as completely distinct from marriage (depending on one’s acceptance of the exclusive truth claims of AA or marriage enthusiasts, this analogy holds varying amounts of water); though serving a similar purpose, and modeled upon Marriage, it serves a group of individuals whose identities do not revolve around the rejection of lifestyles unlike their own, and thus should be afforded equal dignity under the law and in public opinion.

As a point of clarification, this post originated as an attempt to explain to some raised eyebrows my repeated use of the verb “Gay-marry” (as opposed to just marry) to describe what I could totally do to Gabe. There’s no intolerance on my part in insisting that the distinction from Traditional Marriage be preserved; it is firmly my belief that, for the sake of clarity, any ritual union seeking, under ethically legitimate pretense, legal privilege, which does not befall one man and one woman, be heretofore referred to correctly as gay marriage. It is a separate institution of equal stature with equal dignity and equal promise to enrich the lives of a group of individuals who, as long as the institution of Traditional Marriage continues to retain political clout like a swollen joint, will be tragically perceived in however limited, conditional, or even empathetic public aspect, as separate from society.