mythology

Where sags the sun in its refrain
To pour its gleam on glassy sea;
Where lacteal pink in sky and deep
Will merge upon the doubling main;
Where plaited at the circlet fringe,
Twin orbs will sear where one had sunk,
A storm released one day in fury,
Diffusing in its neutral hue
Across the orbs and dappled gloss,
Advancing from the horizon.

Barrows upon the ocean swelled,
Cresting to spill sea back to sea,
Which, heaving, mounted higher,
Each wave then birthed of wave before.
A breath over the brine exhaled,
As spread the brume from sea to shore,
Dispensing of itself the while,
Drawing adown in languid threads
To dissolve to the seaway grey.

And at a promontory
Where wave upon wave lashes rock,
The wind began to moan and rush,
Disturbing trees to shudder,
Then swept from headland down to plain.

Observing the vale in winter luster,
As eddied wind through grasses sighed,
There sat young Himinglæva
Within her home upon the hillside,
Lonely above the lowland vale.

And ever-lonely dwelled the girl,
Idly awaiting a reprieve
From her exacting mother,
Impoverished and husbandless,
And from the ceaseless burdens
And elder sister always bears.
But few idle and lonely pleasures
Did she take, walking where a stream
Through the forest coursed in summer
Toward the solitary marsh,
Alighting in winter
What places apart she may find
Within the home her mother made.
And neither would she take a husband,
Though all attractive men of youth
Would offer her their eager hand;
And each careful entreaty
By such men all girls have desired,
And each appeal her mother offered
To return her to the travails
Daily compelled by home and hearth,
Each of her sisters’ needful pleas,
All only served to agitate
The thunderous pounding within,
Where longed her vestal heart for flight.

So sat she near to the window,
Housework undone and spindle shunned,
When the wind came to murmur.
A grey lament suppressed the twilight
As the vast storm outstretched its hand
From the sea through the frigid plains,
And what birds, wintering, remained,
Dusted the snow in their retreat
To refuge in the storm-braced firs.
All of the vale at once was livid
In an anticipation.

And the wind glided to the girl,
Approaching her home on the hillside,
Longing with soft words to be near,
To toss amongst her flying hair,
And caress down her pearly skin.
Though her coy fingers to the pane
approached to graze a biting frost,
A flame had lit within her heart
When the voice of her mother called,
“Himinglæva, come from there;
The house must now be readied.
A storm is blowing from the sea.
The shudders must be latched and braced,
The chickens gathered to their coup!”

The words upon her fell like stone,
As from her life’s horizon
Advanced the days ahead her,
When never again would the woman,
When woman at last she would be,
Never would she elated dance
Amongst the springtime blossoms,
Artless and free as when a girl;
When never song would sing of spring,
To draw her to the florets near
As the clean breeze blew through her hair;
When no more would life as a song be;
When she would clean, and cook, and care,
And at days end at last would breathe,
Only to sleep a dreamless sleep.

Fury within her chest came swelling,
And a truth exhaled over her heart.
Then away from the window
She turned to face her mother,
And looked upon her sisters,
As pity then at last released
In tears for those she’d ceased to love.
With one last look did she flee.

III

The shutters of her home slammed shut
In the wind’s frenzied buffeting.
The sky was now beyond a glimpse,
Obscured within the quickened snow.
Not a voice could she distinguish
As scrambled she down from the hillside
Within the storm’s subduing clamor,
Shaken and lost so near to home.

Yet as she ran into the field
A calm awakened in her heart,
When waves of wind around her teased,
Ascending in a hurried joy
To billow and to pull her dress;
To caress and lash at her face;
To rebound and tug her flowing hair.
Her pallid arms began to hover,
Gliding to dance like rushing water,
As she began to turn in fearful
Rapture, releasing with the wind
Over the prairie to the sky,
Like water from an amphora pouring;
And gossamer became her skin,
As the tossed snow upon the plain;
And light as air became she then,
Diluting in the rushing gale,
Until at last her spirit thinned,
And vanished was her body;
Vanished in wind to flow at last,
As the release of rising smoke
An offering will issue
Through the sun-door of a longhouse,
Himinglæva was no more.

Fermentation of Organon

Ra straddles the celestial-array like a colossus. Look how unhinged the old god has become! Intoxicated with the ostensible progression of his creation, he twines wildly about the horizon in spastic, shuddering bounds, caring not who is bathed in his fiery effulgence. The charred bones of his victims shine off the creaking charnel barge, its shimmering hull, once a beacon of hope, now a harbinger of terror. A lighthouse of despair. The shadow of the ship, blotting out the celestial rays meant to nourish the soil and water below, now frothing in a cascade of roiling disruption. Now the plants wither and a cold wind blows over the skulls of the dead. The brave viri lapis, those crafty escapees of the dread Sun Cult, hide in hollows, primitive huts and forgotten caverns, hunched, gaunt and feral of eye, ceaselessly conspiring against the hegemony of the great solar disk, knowing that should they emerge from their solitude they’d face the blazing rays of Ra’s fell light, which would burn any mortal man a’cinder. Nothing but a skeleton would remain, the only alcahest, screams lost to sky. His parts would be taken to the grand temple and there placed in immaculate assemblage, a offering to the all-seeing providence and a warning to the survivors that day-running was anathema. The only vector of escape was neath the breezy shade of the god-ship, too fleet for humanid velocity.

A most intolerable situation, but a intoleration which is exasperated by ingenuity and understanding, both qualities which have transformed the fallow ground of our innermost thoughts into fertile soil, rich with the oxygenating force of abundance which bred a thoughtless proclivity towards decadence and with decadence comes detachment. The industrial pioneer and rogue philosopher, Boyd Rice, wisely notes, “–with detachment comes perspective. The less you care, the more you know, and the more you know the less you care.”¹

Since ages immemorial Man as concept and Nature as concept have been considered two parts of a whole which make up something akin to “proper existence,” the “way of the world.” Yet by Man’s recognition of his placing therein he has – by, not just his consciousness, but recognition of his consciousness – of necessity, removed himself from any semblance of harmonic acquiescence. The only harmony is in struggle. In death. The forced forms which under-gird even our conscious minds. As McCarthy’s Judge Holden reminds us, War is God². The clashing of one force against another with the ultimate result of one emerging supreme is the end result of entropy and the fueling fire of the universe and thus, nature. The topography of the universe is one of constant twining, collision, fold and explosion. The glaring heat of grand solar bodies, the black and airless vacuum of space, the eruption of volcanoes, deathly gyres of the hurricane and the disemboweling larvae of the ichneumon wasp do not portend a past of harmonic unity but rather a pitched-battle in which the very fabric of existence turns upon itself with horrifying and thoughtless intensity. Such vision; a stark contrast to the humanising conception of genderfication which is so characteristic of all too much of modern philosophy. The moon as nourishing mother, the sun as patriarchal overseer, the earth as Gaia and so on and so on. A conceptual anthropomorphic topographical overlay foisted without much forethought; a masking idea-layer which is born out of desire, the desire of significance and reciprocal emotional interplay. A balancing of co-dependent states. Make no mistake, this is not a question of pedantic quibbletry but rather a foundational concern for the entirety of humankind. One day the sun will move into it’s late-stage cycle, become a red giant and engulf the entirety of the earth. Long before the earth is swallowed up in Ra’s bountiful flames, every single speck of life will boil. Even should we escape that fate, the remains of the dying star will eventually burn out in totality and bring utter darkness to the entirety of the galaxy and send all hither-connected planets sailing off into the limitless void. Due these facts, we must hastily sever the umbilical cord which anchors us to the Mother Goddess, slaughtering her mercilessly if she resists, else suffer the fate of the dodo. Thus, nature as concept must be purged of imposed desire (if possible by thought, if not then by breed-engineering), for it is the generative machine of corrosive and leveling fantasy, for the anthro-primeval liminality of the shaman. The source of animistic fancy, sacred geometry and the pantheon of the gods – clamoring and gaudy -who rob Man of his upward drive, his trajectories of ascent, spiral and spread. A curious condition wherein the human animal thrusts his face into the muck and the mud and spits on his selfsame and filthy image for its grotesqueness as if no such other outcome were possible. This denaturing of hubris may, one day, itself become the nail which utterly seals us within the frigid and celestial coffin of galaxial extinction.

We must lay something out quite solidly here, that there can be no value nor trajectory of action which supersedes survival, firstly of the species, then of the race, then of various concentric groupings within, moving ever smaller until one reaches the bedrock of the individual. The “why?” is very simple, without the continuation of the organism there can be no value given the lack of a valuer. More importantly is the “to us,” should there be other variations of self-aware lifeforms – deities or aliens or some consciousness embedded into the very architectuality of matter itself – matters not to the purposes of all that matters to us. Away with all your cry’s of “anthropocentrism” if one is care one MUST care, principally, about things which CAN CARE. Who among this passage’s readership is like to sacrifice his life for a river or a stone? Or even a insect?

He who believes that there are no values outside of survival itself is imminently superior to the man who holds all values save for survival itself, for as he perishes, so too shall those values perish and even should his genes survive, in the form of his immortal clones, his children and their own, how many of them will assimilate their progenitor’s suicidal tendencies?

Nearly all the profligate religions of the world hold fast to the importance of survival; there is always some essence, typically a soul, which survives the death of the body, which transcends and escapes off from the physical realm into some kind of afterlife or ultra-dimensional flux (and numerous injunctions against suicide to mitigate the temptation to depart from the port of temporality earlier than was scheduled). However, for these star-seekers, this soul-escape is conceived of as part and parcel of “the natural.” Yet the natural as line-of-desired-action prepossesses the “unnatural,” a fundamental quandary for which there are no objective answers and no logically accessible subjective answers either; only the vagaries of intuitions (a unreliable metric). For if all that is known is “the natural” world, then that which is “unnatural” is unknown by definition. One here then becomes trapped in a glue of useless pedantry-become-moralizing; “We cannot do that, it is unnatural!” Rarely is the question asked, “But is it bad?” A prohibition without justification is justification for further prohibition. When coupled with afterlifeism this prohibition without justification is intensified for in breaking with it, one threatens one’s very immortality, that is to say, one’s survival (whether corporeal or incorporeal, it is continuance of the being all the same). No matter how much the holy man may detest materiality he still feels the compulsive urge to survive, so much so that he codifies them in his sacred tomes. Never mind the how and why. It just “is.” The naturalists ever conflate “the good” with “the natural” yet they are irrelevant distinctions to those without heads. If the dead are terribly concerned with “the natural,” or “the good,” “the gods,” or some other such anthropomorphic imposition upon the clockwork of the cosmos they haven’t been particularly vocal about it. Furthermore, the lines of desired trajectory which are extrapolated by misbegotten exegesis from the extant world are utterly inapplicable to the forces which under-gird the world itself. That is to say that if the natural be the good then the uninterrupted motion of matter is also good but no one takes up in defense of the leptons which make up the stones. Here we find a conception which has gone largely unexamined, if the more a thing proceeds upon “its own line” of entropy is greater in its “goodness” than a thing which is disrupted by a conscious agent one is implicitly placing entropy as the good. The “natural good” then is really just a mask for the worship of disorder, the acceptance of entropy. This is platonic insanity, the realm of forms invading the mental fortress and tearing it apart from within. Instead of withstanding the slings and arrows of the invading hordes of phenomonology, we’ve opened up the gates to the barbarians! The conception-outside-the-conciever now becomes like a ontological compression module which refuses to assimilate any and all new discoveries and theories. A reactionary idol worshiped by those who are infected with the incorrigible disease of sentimentality and “history.”

The reactionary³ proclivity towards the conception-outside-the-conciever presents innumerable intellectual problems, the first and foremost being that it’s myraid claims are wholly unfalsifiable. It is Quantum theory without the methodological verifiability. It is not just that reactionary transcendentalism is barren of verifiability, it lacks even a path to move towards it. To address those who would here enjoin, “There is more to life than logical and falsifiability!” Certainly, we would agree, but if one is building a ontological-organon then it its preferable that it be falsifiable, provided one’s principal concern is survival, in whatever variation.

One can already hear the obnoxious screeches of “Nihilism.” Let us address this as we bring our ideas to their logical conclusion. “Nihilism” is best summarized by Brassier when, in Nihil Unbound, he described nihilism as the belief that, “existence is worthless.”⁴ Brassier states that this is a “naive” conception which has become “hackneyed” and we would agree. Nihilism would best be described as the belief that the universe does not care about you; the fundamental mistake was in anthropomorphizing the universe to such a degree to begin with. Perhaps it was unavoidable but it certainly is not now. Agents and objects, humans and stars. Another crucial problem plaguing “philosophy” is the idea that nihilism is a thing to be overcome, as if a erroneous induction can be conquered like a foreign kingdom! Who can subdue a ghost or wrangle a kheft? The solution to the Ding an sich is not ontological cop-outs via flowery and obscurantist prose but rather, The Machine. Where sense-perception fails better senses are required and sense perception IS required for the perception of consciousness. Creation here suggests itself. Viri lapis must become et ferro to conquer the sun, to build up the bulwark against its searing rays. Woodwork to clockwork, man-power to machine-power in a hundred thousand variations. A skittering sprawl of thoughts crystallizing across Ra’s domain, subsuming and subverting it, for never forget, Ra deigns your death. Best to kill him first. Shorn of Set, he is powerless before Apophis.

For the good of our species we must swallow the sun.

♦

Footnotes

1Boyd Rice, NO (Createspace Independent Publishing Platform, 2017)

2Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Vintage Publishing) Chapter XVII

3Reactionary here meaning, “Knee-jerk,” or “A action done without due thought or contemplation” not, specifically, the political tendency/philosophy(ies).

4Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) Preface, x

/////Logos Literature

Ἄποφις II

Ἄποφις

Ysatters-Kasja

Swallow the Sun