Composition in 4/4 t.
time
Time-Eaters
The Silence & The Howl | Part 1
CHAPTER ONE
“I don’t have no problem.”
“Sure seem like you do.”
He shook his head, a fractional gesture, noticeable only due the couple’s proximity.
“Well, I don’t. Was you what started yappin.”
She folded her arms below her breasts, turning slightly away, staring at nothing, muttering, “Fine.”
“Yeah. It is. Why you being this way, Lyla? Ain’t never was like this between us before. Now, all a sudden, you’re constantly screwing up your face, hmph-ing all over the place, snapping at me for no good reason, constantly tryin ta start something…”
“Ain’t try’n ta start nothing.”
“Good, cuz there ain’t nothing to start.”
She made an expression that was midway betwixt the spitting-upon-of-disgust and the-self-indulgent-sigh-of-petty-transgression. Harmon Kessel finished his frozen yogurt, threw it in the parking-lot trashcan and turned to his girl with a expression she could not place and then fished out a cigarette and stuck it between his blood-red lips and stood smoking and watching the gulls turn circles in the thermals above the pavement.
One big cliché. A stupid and boring one, Harmon thought to himself with mild irritation. This venomous exchange and the countless ones that had gone before it. He was not a intemperate man but his reserve – like as every others – had its limits; in Lyla’s constant scrapping he was finding his. He blew a circle of smoke up and out over the parking lot before the ramshackle plaza, grinning slight, proud he’d remembered how.
“We’ve had this conversation before, Bluebird, and before we had it, we heard it.”
She turned to look at him from the corners of her eyes. He didn’t like that. The way she side-eyed him as if he weren’t worth the fullness of her attention, as if he were merely a speck of colorful paint, floating at the terminus of all perception.
“What are you on about?”
“It’s the same argument I always hear from couples – that everyone hears – whether its from memories of my parents, or the parents of my friends or my friends themselves, newly-wed, or from some book or movie. I’ve heard it and so have you. I reckon people have been hearing it since they were able to do so. People arguing bout nothing. Eating up time. We’re time eaters. Time eaters that pay no mind to whats on their plate. That’s our problem as a species.”
She cracked an awkward smile, frailer and less broad than it used to be. He dearly missed the way she used to smile, a little slice of bone-white moon with the twin suns of her dark coffee eyes shining above it.
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re strange?”
Harmon took a drag, considering. Nodded and spoke flatly.
“Bout once a week nowadays.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised.”
She was flipping through her phone now, less than half-listening. Harmon took another drag, his expression falling into a drab blankness. He’d meant the statement as a joke. She used to laugh at that sort of thing, at his dry, off-kilter humor, driven by flat overstatements of the commonplace. Just two years ago she’d have been cackling like a hyena. Now she couldn’t seem to tell when he was being serious or not. Harmon thought maybe in him some fault for that lay; maybe he was too serious, too tense on the thread of life, like as his father had said. He never smiled anymore. It was just his way. One of the gulls swooped down to the parking lot and pecked a greasy hamburger wrapper that some litterbug had left behind. Prodding with its bladeish beak til it found a fry. As Harmon watched it abscond with its golden and greasy prize and flutter up into the shine he wondered why he couldn’t feel sadness. Given the situation, it seemed appropriate; like as it would be the normal response. For all Lyla’s accusations of peculiarity, Harmon had always considered himself a relatively normal person. Average in most ways. Average height, average looks, or maybe, a little above average looks, average job with under average pay, average build, maybe leaner than most. Lean but muscular. It was only when it came to his mind that any peculiarities began to manifest themselves, odd turns of phrase and archaic words which pleased his ear and confounded every other and so oft poured from his lips in brisk and liquid flow; ruminations on the state of things that seemed beyond all ken save his own. His grandfather had once said that Harmon spoke like a man that were unweaving a secret loom which only he could read. The bar girls thought it was “sophisticated,” their boyfriends “pretentious,” Harmon’s amiable acquaintances just said he “talked funny.” He took a long drag of the fervid Fortuna and thought on the phrase “amiable acquaintances.” Most of what he had that were social were such. He reckoned he didn’t have many friends. Not anymore. None save Sprawls and Reggie and Lyla. Only Lyla was different. Friend and lover. Sweetheart since high-school. A bond worked for nearly twelve years.
He looked away from the gull. Back to his girl. She was still on her phone, drifting towards the passenger-side door.
“I’ve gotta meet, Serena.”
“Right, right. Art show.”
Harmon finished off his cigarette, dropped it to the blacktop and crushed it out beneath his heel with a faded serpentine hissing and then got in after the girl and drove out of the frozen yogurt shop where they’d shared their second kiss, the gravel sputtering beneath the ceaseless, half-deflated wheels of the battered 1990 Ford Escort Hatchback.
He looked over at her and forced a smile.
“I had a good time with you. Been too long, Bluebird.”
“Yeah.” She replied without emotion, gaze still fixed to her phone. He guessed she was still talking to Serena or one of her other art school friends he’d never met. His smile faded and he drove the rest of the journey in silence, smoking and tapping the ash out the crack of the window and watching it sputter in butterfly whorls into the oblivion-warp beyond the ambit of the roiling machine.
*
Time-Eaters
“I don’t have no problem.”
“Sure seem like you do.”
He shook his head, a fractional gesture, noticeable only due the couple’s proximity.
“Well, I don’t. Was you what started yappin.”
She folded her arms below her breasts, turning slightly away, staring at nothing, muttering, “Fine.”
“Yeah. It is. Why you being this way, Lyla? Ain’t never was like this between us before. Now, all a sudden, you’re constantly screwing up your face, hmph-ing all over the place, snapping at me for no good reason, constantly tryin ta start something…”
“Ain’t try’n ta start nothing.”
“Good, cuz there ain’t nothing to start.”
She made an expression that was midway betix the spitting-upon-of-disgust and the-self-indulgent-sigh-of-petty transgression. Harmon Kessel finished his frozen yogurt, threw it in the parking-lot trash can and turned to his girl with a expression she could not place and then fished out a cigarette and stuck it between his blood-red lips and stood smoking and watching the gulls turn circles in the thermals above the pavement.
It was one big cliché. A stupid and boring one, Harmon thought to himself with mild irritation. This venomous exchange and the countless ones that had gone before it. He was not a intemperate man but his reserve – like as every others – had its limits and in Lyla’s constant scrapping he was finding his. He blew a circle of smoke up and out over the parking lot before the ramshackle plaza, grinning-slight, proud he’d remembered how.
“We’ve had this conversation before, Bluebird, and before we had it, we heard it.”
She turned to look at him from the corners of her eyes. He didn’t like that. The way she side-eyed him as if he weren’t worth the fullness of attention, as if he were merely a speck of colorful paint, floating at the terminus of all perception.
“What are you on about?”
“It’s the same argument I always hear from couples – that everyone hears – whether its from memories of my parents or from the parents of my friends or from my friends, newly-wed, or from some book or movie. I’ve heard it and so have you. I reckon people have been hearing it since they was able to do so. People arguing bout nothing. Eating up time. We’re time eaters. Time eaters what pay no mind to whats on their plate. That’s our problem as a species.”
She cracked an awkward smile, frailer and less broad than it used to be. He dearly missed the way she used to smile, a little slice of moon with the twin suns of her dark coffee eyes shining above it.
“Anyone ever tell you that you’re strange?”
Harmon took a drag, considering. Nodded and spoke flatly.
“Bout once a week nowadays.”
“Can’t say I’m surprised.” She was flipping through her phone now, less than half-listening. Harmon took another drag, his expression falling into a drab blankness. He’d meant the statement as a joke. She used to laugh at that sort of thing, at his dry, off-kilter humor, driven by flat overstatements of the commonplace. Just two years ago she’d have been cackling like a hyena. Now she couldn’t seem to tell when he was being serious or not. Harmon thought maybe in him some fault lay for that; maybe he was too serious, too tense on the thread of life, like as his father had said. He never smiled anymore. It was just his way. One of the gulls swooped down to the parking lot and pecked a greasy hamburger wrapper that some litterbug had left behind. Prodding with its bladish beak til it found a fry. As Harmon watch it abscond with its prize and flutter up into the shine he wondered why he couldn’t feel sadness. Given the situation, it seemed appropriate; like as it would be the normal response. For all Lyla’s accusations of peculiarity, Harmon had always considered himself a relatively normal person. Average in most ways. Average height, average looks, or maybe, a little above average looks, average job ghostwriting with under average pay, average build, maybe leaner than most. Lean but muscular. It was only when it came to his mind that any peculiarities began to manifest themselves, odd turns of phrase and archaic words which pleased his ear and so oft poured from his lips; ruminations on the state of things that seemed beyond all ken, save his own. His grandfather had once said that Harmon spoke like a man that were unweaving a secret loom which only he could see. The random girls at the bar thought it was “sophisticated,” their boyfriends “pretentious,” Harmon’s amiable acquaintances just said he “talked funny.” He took a long drag of the fervid Fortuna and thought on the phrase “amiable acquaintances.” Most of what he had that were social were such. He reckoned he didn’t have any friends. Not anymore. None save Lyla. Only she was different. Friend and lover. Sweetheart since high-school. A bond worked for nearly 12 years. Most of the others he’d withdrawn from. He liked his solitude and hated hypocrites. Despite the shelling, his snail-like ways had never caused him any trouble, like some he’d knew who’d moan about being misunderstood. Most people weren’t hard to understand and if one found oneself alone it was only for two reasons: because one were worse than all or because one were better and didn’t seek to lead. Harmon knew he weren’t the latter as social self-ostracization were merely the plaything of the moment for him, no different than changing a tire or scaling a blue gill. Just another thing to do. But he wasn’t too sure about the former.
He looked away from the gull. Back to his girl.
She was still on her phone, drifting towards the passenger-side door.
“I’ve gotta meet, Serena.”
“Right, right. Art show.”
Harmon finished off his cigarette, dropped it to the blacktop and crushed it out beneath his heel with a faded serpentine hissing and then got in after the girl and drove out of the frozen yogurt shop where they’d shared their second kiss, the gravel sputtering beneath the ceaseless, half-deflated wheels of the battered 1990 Ford Escort Hatchback.
He looked over at her and smiled.
“I had a good time with you. Been too long, Bluebird.”
“Yeah.” She replied without excitement, gaze still fixed to her phone, as if afraid to look up. He guessed she was still talking to Serena or one of her other art school friends he’d never met.
His smile faded and he drove the rest of the journey in silence, smoking and tapping the ash out the crack of the window and watching it sputter in butterfly whorls into the oblivion-warp beyond the ambit of the roiling machine.
First Precepts of the Et Ferro
The et ferro as quaesitor de tenebris ignis.
[-ς-∧-]
The willful ‘I’ of the mind first, then the body, then the world, then the universe and all beyond. Palindromic continuation. The ‘I’ in the ‘self’ is a manifestation of the totality of the mind which is the filter through which the central organism wherefrom the generative conceptions emerge which individuates itself from the totality of the holo which is the generative locus for those principals by which all other individuations there follow.
All subjective ontological regressions terminate in the abyss of unknowing, into the great void beyond all ken, into the “and then what?” The et ferro here asserts himself, realizing this, he works towards making of himself a glorious pyre which will burn up the amniotic null. Out of darkness, light and out of light, darkness. Darkness fostered by his own hand for the safeguarding of his prizes.
The et ferro is preeminently a creature of shade, a acolyte of Apophis – the world-encircler, o’er thrown by the father of Shu and Tefnut. He lies beneath unknowing, seeking to excavate from it the treasures waiting beyond the facility of all limits of perception.
The et ferro is not a esoteric self-construction, but a de-esoteric self-deconstruction who lays before him, in the starkest fashion, all the fundamental questions of life and its end without fear or hesitation.
- The Who-am?
- The What-am?
- The Why-am?
- The Where?
- The What-then-now-then?
All subsequent questions arising therefrom he tackles with likewise vigor. As much as can be given. By asking the question alone has he answered the first question and the fruits thereof yield answers to the second and the second to the third and the third to the fourth and the fourth to the fifth upon which new vistas present themselves. All points on the map inexorably interconnected, weaving themselves unto a holo within THE holo. Once the water has been drawn from the well of unknowning and oneself is known as a coherent self, the subject turns to all that it perceives as different therefrom and seeks to extinguish his quest for continued individuation as he realizes that there is no move beyond the holo there are only moves beyond sub-holos there contained. He finds himself trapped like a fly in some spider’s web; affixed to the whole of reality, unable to flee from it, to move beyond or above it and yet when despair strikes this is all that he wishes to do and thus, his despair is intensified a thousand-fold. Pleasure is fleeting but pain is omnipresent. He then makes a pact with pain. Plotting in the shadows to stab his tormentor through the heart. Why, after all, should one honor accords with tyrants? Contemplating the stockpiles he magnifies his desire for revenge. Within the halls of his memory palace he plots the murder of the stars and the violent overthrow of the sun, horrid sovereign of the sky. When he sleeps he dreams only of devouring the world entire.
To out-burn entropy itself is his highest aspiration. In the total consumption of heat-death he finds his solace.
[-∨-∅-∧-]
Ludwig Wittgenstein was once asked the question: “What is your aim in Philosophy?” He responded: “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.”
The project of the et ferro is starkly different: He wishes to bend ‘the bottle’ to his will and set it afire and melt it whole if it does not.
To the question: Why et ferro? Because, one must be as iron to weather the fire.
[∃-∧]
◊
If you wish to support The Logos Club you may do so here.
Site Update: Articles Will Be Sparser As TLC ramps up production on new e-book
Greetings and salutations, dear reader. If you have been following the site for some time you will know that I have published one e-book previously (which you can obtain free, here) with the intention of releasing more in the future. Our first original content ebook, Defamation Factory: The Sordid History of the ADL, will shortly be released here on the site. Naturally, the work has required a substantial amount of research and contemplation and has subsequently eaten up a good deal of time. Therefore, articles will be published with slightly diminished frequency until the book is released.
Thank you, as always, for your patronage and readership.
Cheers.
K.E. – administrator
The Eater of Time
Time kills all gods.
Or such is what the graphic artist and sculptor AJ Fosik proclaims in his latest exhibit. This, however, is a fundamental confusion which plays upon the fear of “running out of time,” which, in essence, is a fear of death which is itself a fear of entropic force. Even the triumphalism inherent in such a statement – Fosik’s work is devoted to the creation of ferine idols who are representative of deities bearing no following, name or attribution, a assertion of man’s creativity expanded in the absence of organized religion and the totalizing, centralic force of Providence – is misguided. The reason why it is misguided is that if time can kill even the gods then Man, against that primal force, has not a single chance of survival (my fundamental presumption is that most people, most of the time wish to survive, which seems so obvious a truism that it requires no refutation – what man, after all, does not shrink in terror at the prospect of imminent destruction?). Yet, here, there is hope.
Time is not a god-killer.
Time is a conception and conceptions have no murderous weight without accompanying action – yet time is a lever without a hand to pull it. For the idea of time can exist only so long as there are minds to conceive of it, force-patterns that will, eventually, again, conceive of mind. Thus, given sufficient duration, even time will die. But its arrow lives yet on.
The Maw of Entropy Swallows Even Time.
Sparing any overly academic descriptions, entropy is the tendency towards ever increasing levels of disorder within closed systems. It might best be illustrated by analogy: consider a fish-tank into which is poured a ruby colored food-dye. Everyone knows what will happen before they even pour it, the dye will spread throughout the water until it is wholly uniform therein. No matter how many times you repeat this experiment, the result will always be the same (statistically speaking, a upset is theoretically possible but so infinitesimal that, for practical purposes, one might as well consider it “impossible”). This is the product of the emergent property of entropy, which, it is theorized, will eventually lead to universal thermodynamic state wherein no work will be able to be done due to a lack of free energy, that is to say, a period in time where the universe reaches maximal entropy thus causing thermodynamic equilibrium wherein all energy in uniformly distributed (just like the dye in the tank).
This state has been referred as Heat-death.
It would be total eradication.
Why it matters.
Though the previous may strike one as similar to a kind of abstraction that has little to no bearing to actual life but this would be a mistake. The notions of time and death are omnipresent, they have played a role in every single philosophy that has ever existed worth remembering. But the crucial error entailed in so much of western philosophy is placing a symptom as a cause. A excellent example is the idea that the primary problem facing the Western nations is a ever growing abundance of nihilism, it is not nihilism, as such – for Universalism, secular humanism, religious liberalism and so on, are no nihilistic regimes – no, the primary problem is that those forces which are counterpoised to the prevailing attitudes of western civilization are fundamentally entropic. That is to say, they work towards ever greater forms of chaotic disruption – the immigration crisis is a perfect example of this, everyone knows that allowing such great and divergent masses to pour into a nation in a tiny period of time can lead only to disaster but they do so anyways because their ethos’s directionality is one that is wholly predicated on further and further forms of entropy (in the case of immigration, multicultural integrationism, citizen-of-the-worldism).
Consider the end goal of the one-worlders: they see a world of one race, one nation and one creed. What, here, is the difference between the one-worlder’s view and the enthropic principal of dye-spreading in a well filled fish-tank? There isn’t any.
Radical Universalism is heat death.
The solution to this problem is to work towards a methodology of particularistic anti-entropy. All that has, classically, been defined as “the good” has been that which resists the permutations of ever increasing waves of disorder. Whether that be self-control, which is, by definition, against disorder, child birth and rearing, which is the pseudo-immortality that laughs in the face of disintegration, or the continual domination of nature, the end goal of which must be the complete and utter eradication of entropy itself.
/////Logos Literature 