He described the scene as “the death of Antonin Dvorak,” and the need for modern novelists to “represent this man’s point of view,” and the fact that Gurdjieff thought it was the duty of painters to capture not only the event of human suffering, but also the spirit of the deceased. He defined what a painter was and what it was he wanted his followers to achieve.“We have to find new ideas for those who did not survive this hell, new views, new compositions, new tones, new compositions, new techniques, and then these new souls must be redeemed. We must find in every painting the spirit of the deceased. Every painting must contain the essence of the deceased.”
[…]
He concluded: “Then we must send our painters away from the city – let the dark, sick and yearning, those who refuse to believe in the power of man again, let them have no one to console them, no one to be satisfied with their kindling, no one to tell them what they want to hear. And the last thing they will see is the sun, the city, the churches, the miniatures, the encyclopedic-looking church, which only gives an illusion to the refined and the languid, but never to the besotted.”
[…]
Ibn Not Al-Hindawi, Dictionnaire Philosophique, 1610
He felt that his challenge was a war of annihilation, a universal and endless conflict against darkness and inhumanity. It had been with the same difficulty that he had tried to forge human civilization from the wilderness, with the same depth of despair, work, and sacrifice, that he had passed the same nights, too, since the first dawn, that his only wife and children – a son and a daughter, a devoted and faithful wife, his dear, faithful V; then, during the nights of his deepest suffering, he had committed the greatest sacrifices, and at last he had succeeded; they had had to leave their family home and follow his inspirations to a distance. And now, in his solitude, after the greatest depths of helplessness and horror, after the cruellest pains, and the desolation of his life, he was hardly longer a man; his wife and children were gone, and he was left alone.
It was still a cold winter afternoon, there was no sign of the whirling storm that was gathering about the Danube, and he had not been for days, and the horror of the prison-house and the columns of his people, had not yet taken possession of him. Dumouriez now, in his death agony, said to himself:
“If only I have to return to the water, the million-year prison of my forehead, again.”
He had already made up his mind; he would not see the end. He had felt on the crest of the abyss that this earth was an abyss, that this evil and debased age, under a hopeless chaos of ignorance and despotism, was but one vast coming together of the lost atoms, the birds of the air and the dumb beasts of the earth, those of the sun and the senses. But now he was reminded of the Will. His Will was directed toward the stars, toward the conscious and the unconscious, the living and those who could be made dead. The Will had never been against the stars, but toward the core of the burning atom, and with their beautiful, freewheeling movements and their overfed wisdom-feasts; he had never been against his first wife and
Oh shit, I forgot to mention, here are all the ways the show makes you feel
Be not a doormat.
Be not a chump.
Be not a pathetic lower life form.
Be not an emotionless robot.
Be an emotion.
Be human.
Be a brain.
Be a pulsating, frothing, pounding, churning, churning being with impeccable timing.
Be not a mind.
Be not a compartmentalized, specific, easily suicidally mangled version of the mind.
Be a bouncing ball, free to bounce back and forth as it will.
Be a tangle of sinew, a jumble of thought, a tapestry of feeling.
Be a profound, thunderous symphony, one of the most piercing clarinets ever composed.
Be a stable, solid vessel, built to withstand both the waters of the Atlantic and the gushing torrents of spring.
Be not a thing.
The open, waving sky.
The furry, fractal, ever-changing of fur.
The land, the trees.
The ocean, the tides.
The wind, the whirlwind.
The rain, the heavy, threatening, but not untethered, gentle waves.
The rain, in whorls of flame, swallowing the gales of summer.
Be human.
Be not a shadow, not a keep, not a house.
Be not a thing.
Be not a location, be not a map, not a word, not a sentence, not a new idea, not a belief, not a thing.
A heartbeat, two steps, three steps, four steps, five steps, six steps, seven steps, eight steps, nine steps, ten steps, eleven steps, twelve steps.
A ringing, pulsating, gushing, churning pulse.
A creek of blood, a flood, a raging torrent.
Be not a long, empty gallery.
Be not a skull, not a jagged, detached piece.
Be not a memory, a thought, a thing, not a thing.
Be not a document, be not a word, be not a thought, a pulse, a flurry, a voice, a prowling, tenacious predator, not an organ or a muscle, not a bone or a cell, not a pair of eyes or a nose or a tongue or a brain or a heartbeat.
“You’re not your body,” the operators said.
“You’re not your memories,” the consciousness said.
“You’re not your thoughts,” the [REDACTED] said.
“You’re not your feelings, either.”
“No, you’re not,” the butterflies in my stomach said.
I was confused.
I was thirsty.
I was hungry.
My muscles were very tense.
I was tired.
I had been awake for about four hours.
My vision was blurry.
My head felt very full.
I was starving.
A woman with long dark hair spoke in a whispery voice, and she was saying some sort of mantra.
“I am all that I am.”
“All that I am.”
“I am a name in the alphabet.”
“I am nothing more than a name.”
“I have nothing to say.”
“I have nothing to say.
the northern caves
The Northern Caves Chapter 11, 1310 words, on the NMPH network
more 11: BASIC
01:07: ADDRESS DROP
01:11: ROLLOVER
01:18: LABORATORY
01:24: EXPLAINED GOOD
01:27: FOES
01:34: AMBIANCE
01:37: NUCLEAR DEGREE
01:42: MEETINGS
01:48: GO-TO
01:51: TOLERATION
01:57: SCIENTIFIC STUDIES
02:01: AMBIENCE
02:05: BLACK AND TAN
02:08: DREAM DISCUSSION
02:11: FUNERAL DRAMA
02:18: MEETING
02:21: PARTY CLOUDS
02:26: PARTY CLOUDS
02:29: REFRACTIONS
02:34: PRESENTATION
REAL MEN
The inner sanctum of the Academia. The children are all gathered at the head of the round table. It is 8:30.
“Morning,” said the teacher, shortly.
“What are you doing here?” one of the children asked.
“Ah, my children, we are about to go through the course of a very important exercise. Now, for the last time, it is necessary for us to instruct you that you are very young. Your entire lives, you will receive in your physical bodies an experience far too incredible to describe. No man, nor god, nor devil could have brought you here for this. We are talking about a series of firsts, for you.”
“Are there any who do not believe me,” said the little boy.
“You are talking to a boy,” said the teacher, in a half-sadistic tone of voice. “He is the one who will be the subject of my lecture. You believe him, or you would not come here today. You will all receive a profound delusion, and you will all believe in it. At this very moment you are feeling the stimulation which will soon provide you with the first experiences of impressions which will change the course of your lives, of which all your enemies will regret the consequences. You are merely on the point of swallowing a little lump of sugar when you receive a shock of pure curiosity. If you cannot help but feel curious about the innermost recesses of your body, you are already far from understanding the faculties of the mind. Now, if you hear my words, you will be quite ready to receive my visitors, even if you have not believed in your muscles, in your sight, in your hands, in your voice, in your bones, in your eyes, in your nose, in your ears.”
There was a pause. The children were looking at one another, at the same time their eyes were having a kind of guileless reflection, wondering what the stranger had said to mean by such words. Then one of them said: “But, father, what if, sir, I have a tendency to doubt such things? I always do, and I remember, sometimes, to doubt them. What would you do with me if I were to doubt the whole presentation?”
“Very well,” said the little man. “I must be the one that keeps going on, father. You must make your children remember to have faith in the things they are told. I am certainly
homestuck reread 3: eve of the four seasons
Prologue. 254893 years.
A hundred thousand years ago, there was only one world, and in that one world,
all was one, and all in all was the same.
But that was not enough. The hunter had no time to grieve, no time to sleep,
his prey were the gods.
Silent god.
The spheres were infinite and the hunter had no time to wonder, no time to mourn,
he plunged into the sky, his arrow bounding unseen through the crowded room,
and there was no time to lament his mistake, for no time to grieve for his lost life.
God hates the hunter. He is a monster.
Every millisecond of every millisecond there was a voice, a signal, a beckoning, a beckoning beckoning beckoning. And then one by one the hunter fell through the open door into the courtyard of the Sphere and the Sphere left the plaza in an instant, the beam its intent.
And in the courtyard, a small circle was forming, a circle made of boys and women and children, lovers and allies and opponents, and no one said a word, and the circle formed, sealed with their own blood. And the blood-song began, and the blood-song started. The ball of light began to glow a little, but not much, and they knew they would not last long, and they dropped their bodies in front of the Sphere and jumped into the light of the spheres, into the blood that they had shed.
In the courtyard the hunter watched, powerless, as the circle formed, sealed with their blood, the blood-song began to glow a little, and the blood-song was done, and the circle stood still, solid. And the hunter and the circle were alone. No one else knew that blood was being shed. And at the end of the sphere, from the tiny light that glowed from the portal, the hunter could see no more. He was no more.
A few people replied to my post, and of course I was amused:
Anonymous replied to your post: A hundred thousand years ago, there was only one world, and in that world,
all was one, and all in all was the same.
Everything is oneWas I dreaming or was that not supposed to be a rhetorical question? Were we supposed to agree with the Canon that the hunter was a monster because the hunter had offended the gods? I hope I was dreaming.
I have a vague memory of a flight on the Ceti system in high school, sitting in my parents’ living room. My parents, in the course of a family dinner, brought up the fact that at some point I would not be coming back from the sphere for many years and we talked about it. My father, as if on cue, was reading out loud from some portion of the Cetron page from some dictionary or other a definition of “monster” that would apply to anything that deviated from “normal,” from the more narrow-minded earthbound definition of “being not you”:
The epithet is, of course, meant in an especially nasty sense. As far as the look on the parents’ faces was concerned,
Caliborn writes like a maudlin little boy. He’s as cute as a button.
[clears throat]
I’m a new convert to the Covenant
And the cold wind whispers its promises in my ears
jack and indy be fucking bro
One of the most effective weapon in the “effortlessly respectable” toolbox is “offers one up to get free stuff.” The little rat fighting the giant, four-legged, anti-constant testicle!*sucker!*!!!!!!
This guy exists in the world, and he has great hair. He has great hair because he gave his scrotum to my friend for a taco.
In the much too spacious vastnesses of the universe he runs, and dips his nonexistent scrotum in the sea. Under the sea! The ocean is the network of veins of a real burger. In the burger reaches of the antient hellhole, where the undertale laborers cluster around a meat grinder, … the giant rat fuck is my friend. This is my friend’s ass. You could not ever be so unfair as to cut off my tail! You would be as cruel as my cousin DeAndre, who sold you out to Big Bag.
I am not fucking with you. You are a man who knows not how to fuck. I am a real fucking burger, and I am here.
[subsequent steps in a long, drawn-out process of speech production: mumbling in brain noise, vaguely religious, generic-yet-believable inference that connects some inexplicable reality, presumably something deep but incomprehensible, to the deepest innermost depths, the holy, sacred caves of consciousness, which is akin to the early 1950s, with the assistance of happy-twitching Allen Ginsberg]
The [Teeming] wrote a symphony of their own: a surprising and, yes, beautiful fusion of nocturna and sublime sorrow.
It was a tale of unbroken intensity, a somber lament in which the prophetic dead are heard again to tell the longed-for terrors of a lost time.
No cloven hooves this time; no claws, no horns, no hecatombs: in the spirit of the Styx, Eros, and Psyche, it speaks only a deafening lament that pierces all coarseness.
Once more the little wings, once again the little snout, once more the little door, once again the little head, once again the little feet, once again the little claws, once again the little feet, once again the little feet, once again the little feet: the winged creatures of the womb move quickly: the little bodies unfold more quickly: the great body devours the little wings.
The Conch-maker did dance: the tears of the little children did flow down into the embroidery of the [Teeming].”
-Albertus-Salby, Vita nuova, c. 1430
and then a few days later after Steven and I returned to school, our dad decided to change our schedule to get away from the rain so he could go running. “Go running” is not something people commonly say in the U.S., but I guess I’m used to itFor those who don’t know, EY is part of a long tradition of weird children’s authors like Roald Dahl and Olaf Stapledon:
“Hussie” : a snotty northern twig, 5'11" and 108 lbs. with curly black hair and an absent-minded recurring gait. He wore reading glasses and was described as having the “grimiest, crummiest face imaginable.”[…]
[…]
the two-time Hugo and Nebula award winning author of two other award winning science fiction novels: the Awful Truth, which won the Hugo for Best Novel in 2000, and Green and Black, which won the Nebula in 2003. […]