EC 532
Upon Whom the Ends
of the Ages Have Come…
A fantasy for an
Apocalypse
© Ludis Cuckold (2015)
Followup Piece [6]
A long time ago the
author climbed a tree in New Hampshire (US) and thought the event worth
recording in a short column of a once Boston weekly known as ‘The Boston
Ledger’. [No link to such a name can found at Google, whereby the paper is now
gone „Poof!”] I have not yet got into a sandbox or at least have not recorded
it. But there are plenty of issues that have been let slip, that should not
have been. Herewith, one such...
Among the thinkers of our time, Georges Bataille is noteworthy for
his ability to crack open the oyster on behalf of a ‘thingism’ that would belittle
and deny us tens of thousands
of years of experience as conscious human
beings. In effect the thingism of our times denies that we were conscious at
all—until yesterday’s ‘things’ brought us the Thing.
The
statements of Georges Bataille quoted in my previous blog do not exhaust the incisive
depth of his obsidian edged mind-scalpel. The following quotes, too, are noteworthy
for their insight into the modern mindset, even as Bataille reveals (from this
writer’s perspective) a number of his own fallacious assumption. To quote:
“It was
when attention was directed mainly to things (my underline) that general
freedom and the contradiction of judgments became possible. Human thought
escaped the rigid determinations of the mythical order and got down to the work
of science…. The intimate order, fundamentally unreal, adapted its arbitrary mythical representations to the
logical forms of the consciousness of objects. It thus introduced into the
whole domain of knowledge the sovereign decisions that do not express the
intimate order itself but the compromises that enable it to remain intimate
while submitting to the principles of the real order. It was only with the
complete scission of the intimate and the real, and in the world of the
autonomous thing, that science slowly escaped from the hybrid formulations of
consciousness. But in its complete success, it consummates man’s estrangement
from himself and realizes, in the case of the scientist, the reduction of all
life to the real order.”
Of course, today
we know that what Bataille presumes to be the ‘real order’ is but another name
for a virtual order (well underway in his time) that the intimate order (represented
by the figure of St. Christopher) is unable to carry across the river, but with
legs ‘stammering’ (trembling from the weight) the saint with baby Jesus on his
back almost drowns before he reaches the other shore.
Bataille
admits that “…these stammerings still have an uncommon force because they still
have the virtue of generally opposing the reality principle with the principle
of intimacy….”*
*G.B.,
Theory of Religion, Ibid., p. 96.
But is not
the virtue of the principle of intimacy that it is intimate with death? Still,
Bataille claims “Authority and authenticity are entirely on the side of things,
of production, and the thing produced…. ”
If this is so,
then the ‘real order’ is the virtual order of things (and death) created by
science, and is destined to become a supernatural order led by globalized
Catholicism turned doctrinaire and atheist. There is no evidence that such a
conversion is remotely real enough to be possible.
Yet it is
true that in Bataille’s days (1897-1962) China had not yet become the main
producer of ‘things’, and the rich had not escaped taxes and
deposited their wealth in offshore banks and founded an empire sans
the People in its own right.
Nevertheless,
the ‘real order’ of scientists is presently going “poof” and such promoters of
it as are held to be geniuses are in fact hysterical bimbos
whom the ‘real order’ can ill afford to sustain, wherefore for many Siberia
(presumed to be Hell) and not Mars (associated with superintelligence if not Heaven)
is—shockingly—the place they are destined to live out their lives.
That in its
hour of triumph Science should prove to be but another “Poof” informs us that what
decides the issue is its usefulness (and science—no matter how many nuclear
bombs it explodes on Mars--is of little further use) and the contribution it
makes to the continuation of human kind as a practicable enterprise.
This leads
me to the last anecdote of this series of blogs:
A half a
century ago, when this author was a determined underachiever in his early thirties,
and before he went to work for the newspaper chain mentioned in the header, he
worked at a Boston hospital as an emergency ward attendant and a front desk
clerk at night. One of his responsibilities during the night shift was to visit
some of the laboratories and give the rabbits that served as guinea pigs for science
eye drops of unknown medications.
One of the
doctors-scientists offered to train me as a laboratory technician, which honor
I refused for the same reasons why I refused to be persuaded by the usefulness
(to me) of a university education in religious history (specifically). Indeed,
I found that exposure to English literature and pretention to art was more
useful in the long term.
Aside from
the fate of the rabbits, whose frail bodies ended up in a plastic bag, I was given
the opportunity to become witness to the loneliness of the existentially
abandoned medical ‘things’ who were the staff of the hospital.
As I have pointed out in my tale about Daisy (see EC 5-496), humankind deprived of intimate contact with God tends to cover up the deprivation with an overindulgence in sex and when it proves inadequate to perversion of sexuality into pornography. The very doctor who was so generous as to care about securing for me a better profession and livelihood, hid his anxiety about being but a glass marble on a stainless steel laboratory tray, by seducing the nurses in the hospital who he found sexually attractive.
My work
being at night, I soon knew who the doctor’s “Daisies” were. To cover their
guilt about their affairs with the doctor some of them when passing my desk
would exclaim as if to themselves: “I just can’t say no!”
I was too
‘stuck up’ (see EC 12-503 for explanation of phrase) to take advantage of the
intimacies these messages offered me.
As difficult
to believe as some may find it, instead of getting laid on a stretcher in an empty emergency room, I stayed
intimate with God, by pretending to be as dumb as He-and-She. For all I know,
such self-censure of my thingified self may have been s super dumb lie to
myself, while, on the other hand, it may have transformed me from a thing to
the ghost of a
wave.
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Posted April 17, 2016
The twists and turns, which beginning (not really) with the Saudi sponsored attack on 9/11 in NYC, has led to its threat to destroy the U.S. financially, give clear indications that the only solution for the U.S. is to either a) take out Saudi Arabia, or b) return to the radical Christianity of its early days. As for a), no doubt, to take out SA is likely to be a complicated maneuver and an unexpected turn in the New World Order as the consent of China, Europe, and Russia is essential if the war to be pressed is to be successful.
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Posted April 17, 2016
WAR ALERT! (1)
An all too
obvious, yet unexpected twist has appeared:see
article in the NY
Times (April 15, 2016)
The twists and turns, which beginning (not really) with the Saudi sponsored attack on 9/11 in NYC, has led to its threat to destroy the U.S. financially, give clear indications that the only solution for the U.S. is to either a) take out Saudi Arabia, or b) return to the radical Christianity of its early days. As for a), no doubt, to take out SA is likely to be a complicated maneuver and an unexpected turn in the New World Order as the consent of China, Europe, and Russia is essential if the war to be pressed is to be successful.
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