MAY 2021 UPDATE

I haven’t written a confession in over a year. The last post on this feed was from February 2020. I just read it. To some extent it reads as from a different life. A month later the coronavirus lockdowns began, two months after that I announced my transition and began hormone therapy, two months after that the George Floyd protests began, a few months later Liturgy released Origin of the Alimonies. My life was extremely online during most of that year, in part because of the lockdown, in part because that’s where I was able to feel a strong sense of trans community. Despite that, I completely ignored this website, maybe because at this point a ‘website’ or ‘blog’ seems like such an archaic form of existence on the internet - but also perhaps because I really lost interest in philosophy during that time, especially in its written form. It was my first opportunity in life to feel happy about my body - it’s difficult to put in to words how much I hated my body before, how clenched, contorted, mangled I was physically. I have absolutely no doubt that my mysterious and fervent lifelong passion for philosophy had a profound relationship to my hatred of my body. Once given the opportunity to adorn myself the way I really wanted to, watch my body begin to transform into its proper shape, and spend time taking pictures of myself and so on, the thirst for philosophy really diminished. I always felt a sense of cognitive and affective perplexity which drove me to think and read - the perplexity itself was always so bewildering to me (what’s wrong with me? Why am I so confused? Why do I care so much about making sense of things?) - I imagined that it would never go away, that perhaps it was simply my signature as a true philosopher. But then it essentially evaporated when I simply accepted my gender and took on the lifestyle and medical regimen I needed. So much for Heideggerian angst and ekstasis as transcendence, I guess. I’m exaggerating, but there’s really something true in what I’m saying.

I also used the lockdown time to be productive with other things - composing a new album and getting it ready with the band to record (and recording it), honing my video and video editing skills, making a new Origin of the Alimonies film (which I’m still working on and is almost done), developing some animation and game design skills which are still too rough to be put to use in a serious work, but they’re getting there, beginning to make sculptures again. The compulsion to be rigorous and methodical as a total artist, in contrast to the compulsion to read, has not diminished with my transition - on the contrary, I feel like I have a whole new kind of access and like usufruct with regard to the aesthetic domain which I’d closed myself off to, like its censorship was collateral damage from the psychic repression of my gender.

Well, to clarify, I was extremely online through November of last year, but then after Origin came out I pretty much dropped off the map. That was partly due to more personal things in life, and partly because perhaps my soul knew that it was time for a detox from ‘twitter consciousness’ or however you want to put it, sort of that state of constantly presenting and examining little statements and images with a virtual collective, really being online, living and breathing online interaction. I had no conscious intention of allowing six months to elapse with almost no online presence - on the contrary, my intention was to use the release of the opera to anchor a very involved online philosophical and dramatic practice that would sustain and supplement it - so I’m actually a little disappointed in myself for shirking that, or something, but at a deeper level I think my soul can feel that it was the right thing.

Anyway, I think I’m starting to come back online just a bit - well, actually, that brings me to an interesting point. Like, I re-read the posts in this particular feed before starting this one, and it reminded me of how important I take the status of this project as being something that is culturally illegible. When I started this website in 2016 the illegibility was unmistakeable, and even now ultimately I and Liturgy exist on a cultural fringe, but various events of 2019 and 2020 have changed that in a way, which scares me a little bit. In a previous post I refer to a thesis of Nick Land that once anything begins to succeed, it becomes capital. I think I’m wary of being seduced by little lures that would pull Liturgy back into the commodiified sphere that it could have entered back when Aesthethica was released, which I aborted at the time. I’m intent upon keeping the field of love that now surrounds the band to remain an authentic love - I don’t want to compromise to reach ever larger audiences and so on - but I guess I don’t fully trust my ability to not be seduced into that, or something. I suppose part of me feels that a return to philosophy is in order because philosophy is just so inherently illegible, as compared to music, images and videos.

To finish this post I’ll just mention a few texts that I have spent time with in the past year. The three main ones are Schelling’s treatise on human freedom, Cyril O’Reagan’s Gnostic Return in Modernity, and, most recently, Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency. These books all deal in different ways with the connection between pre-critical dogmatic theology and the current of philosophy that passed from German Idealism through French poststructuralism. O’Reagan produces a truly excellent genealogy of the late 19th century cultural field as a hybrid of various themes from neoplatonism, gnosticism, Christianity and kabbalah, although his basic thesis that ultimately both Protestantism and secular continental philosophy effectively are a hidden variant of Gnosticism (which from his point of view, as a practicing Catholic, amounts to a condemnation of both) seems ridiculous to me. Schelling’s conception of the trinitarian Godhead is a nice materialist contrast to Hegel’s; however, I’m still on the fence with regard to the topic of whether it is sinful to imagine that God is fundamentally at war with himself, as Schelling suggests (as opposed to the Christian dogma that God is perfectly self-sufficient by himself, and just happened to choose to create a void and then create the world out of it, without needing to or experiencing any intrinsic lack of his own). Klossowski’s use of Sade and Fourier to analyze the 1970s-era entertainment industry against a backdrop of Freudo-Marxist kabbalistic cosmology has been a delight to unpack. Although his edgy utopian vision of a communism where people pay for goods with their own bodies and souls rather than money is obviously ironical, there’s something in his vision that I find utterly fascinating and useful - I kind of want to try to re-articulate what it seems to me he’s trying to say and do so in a non twisted-sounding way.

NARRATIVE, PHILOSOPHY, GENDER IDENTITY

I’m acutely aware of the power that I have - that everyone seems to have - to creatively construct the past.   In particular I mean I’ve been acutely aware that my sense of the past, which one usually or naturally takes to not be created, but rather to exist objectively, is, in fact, a creation, and that I have the power to recreate it.   I think this is in part because my life to date has been difficult to make sense of, so the breaches in the narrative make its artificial nature obvious, like glitches on the holodeck.   I suppose you might say that I’ve been met with enough incomprehension that I’ve had to question my sanity quite often.    I’m not explaining this very well.  Although I’m probably doing a better job than I think - one usually is.   

In any case.   I’ve put a few philosophy videos on the internet in the past few weeks.   I consider these most recent ones to be ‘official’, because they usually refer back to the H.A.Q.Q. album cover in some way, and because I put a little bit of effort into the A/V setup - I got a capture card to connect my Canon camera to the laptop as well as a shotgun mic.   Anyway, in my personal opinion, the videos are horrible.   They’re boring and unclear, and they don’t gesture enough towards existing philosophy to command respect, to like earn the benefit of the doubt.   They lack style, edge, confidence.  Compared to what they could be, given how interesting my key ideas are (in my opinion, anyway), and given that my rhetorical talents are actually pretty strong, they are a disaster.  

But, I find that the only way to really do something well is to do it badly for a while first.   ‘Badly’ isn’t even a fair adverb here, it’s an exaggeration.   What I mean is something different.   It’s that I still haven’t found a way to convey even a gist of the richness and depth of my system.   Like, this is something that I’ve been developing for a third of my life… in a lot of ways it is more precious to me than the music of Liturgy, or at least I’ve put more work into it and consider it to be more unique and powerful.   Liturgy is obviously very special, and I cherish playing the music with my incredibly talented bandmates.  But the philosophy system…

Hm, I’m trying to get at something here that I’m still not getting at.   It’s something about my method - the sincerity of it I guess.   I suppose my attitude towards philosophy is quite similar to my attitude towards music, in that I simply despise anything other than direct contact with the Absolute.   Any mediation by genre, style, scene, presupposition I consider to be like corruption or compromise.  I absolutely refuse it.   As soon as I can smell that there’s some theme of some kind that a group of other people take pride in presupposing, together as a group, so that a sense of identification is involved in being on the inside, and outsiders are to be shamed - as soon as I can detect that, I want to be outside.   Being on the inside makes me sick.

I’m sure this is sort of a psychic disposition - it isn’t really a matter of being more virtuous or authentic, in case it sounds like that’s what I mean.   You could just as easily call it a failure at socialization.   Its far more common for socialization to more or less succeed, and then the socialized person’s struggle is to make contact with their unique drive, which is difficult because their unconscious is ‘tuned’ to the group; they feel what they unconsciously calculate that they should feel, and block out their real feelings.   For me, and for a lot of people who might be designated ‘schizotypal’, it’s the other way around.   My relationship to my own chaos is quite intense, to the point that I can barely pick up the implicit cues that others use to unconsciously bind themselves to one another.    

Anyway, I’m still diverging from the point I felt I was aiming for, which was specifically about my first few philosophy videos:  Haelegenic Vision, The Four Arenas and The Four Cardinals.   It’s that when I’m speaking in my own voice, I can’t bring myself to refer to anyone else’s ideas, or use language that is supposed to situate my ideas as a response to a person that people identify with or not.   “As Nietzsche says”, and so on.   The degree to which I have scoured all corners of the philosophy tradition - the sheer time I’ve spent, all these journeys of agony and ecstasy with individual philosophers, books and intellectual scenes…it doesn’t get communicated.   An insight that I feel I’ve gleaned is that there is a pandemic of obscurantism, dog-whistling and cloudy presuppositions in all corners of philosophy, and I want no part of it.   But I’m left stranded with a fear that I seem naive - especially since I have characteristics that at first glance disinclined the average viewer from taking me seriously -  I’m a guitar player, and I project a femininity which seems to stir up hate crime energy, or at least contempt, in people who don’t know what to do with it.

My effeminacy is another topic that’s very much been on my mind.  In part this is because I was asked to write a text for a collection on black metal theory and queer politics, and have taken the opportunity to formulate the relationship between my own gender identity - which is far more trans that most people seem to suspect - and my music and philosophy.    I’ve always been pretty gender non-conforming, and pretty restless about the whole topic; I’ve had waves of passionate desire to be either stable binary gender for years at a time at different points in my life.    In my early and mid twenties I knew I was not a man, and was determined to become one, which actually worked out to a degree - like I did make contact with a certain masculine principle within my soul, which has been absolutely crucial to arriving at a degree of stability and equanimity.  A synthetic nom du pere, if you will.   More recently, both of the norm-approved cis genders seem utterly absurd to me, but I’m also allowing myself to accept my femininity to a degree that I really haven’t since high school - presenting as feminine more often - and there’s something wonderfully nourishing about it.   I could not care less what other people see me as, but I know my feelings are those of a woman, and I strongly prefer to be treated like one.  Not as a cis woman - and this is what I feel distinguishes me from a large portion of trans women, probably the majority, who want to be seen as an actual woman, as though they were cis.  I, for my part, take pride in being a queer, feminine being.  To me, it seems enlightened to step away from the entire dialectic of heterosexual gender and sex, which, in can be argued, is really holding humanity back from its highest potential, tethering it to sexual reproduction, the family and so on.  

I’ve always had the sense that if I ‘came out’ as trans or even was more vocal about being gender nonconforming that it would make my life easier, since people already give me such a hard time.  I think some category would make things easier than none.   In fact, the fact that it would ‘make things easier’ has been a major factor preventing me from doing so, since, just like choosing a genre or scene, it would feel like a compromise.   

My new thought is that maybe this notion that it would be a compromise isn’t really so honorable or authentic at all - like it’s actually a rationalization for the fear and shame I have around coming out as female, or as gender nonconforming with a very strong feminine emphasis.   The more I dress and act in a feminine way, the more happy and comfortable I am, and at the end of the day, it’s probably healthier to not over think things.   

How can I tie things up and end this reflection?   I began by discussing the power to construct and re-construct autobiographical narrative, floated into the controversy and incomprehension I’ve encountered, and landed in a discussion of my psychic state and gender identity in the context of my philosophical output.   The last thing I’ll say is that I’m glad this feed is here on my website, because it feels important to have a place to express thoughts and feelings that are personal, and which have neither a philosophical nor a poetic voice.   I’m keenly aware in this moment of the way that we are always fooling ourselves in the moment, and at the same time leaving clues for ourselves to solve the riddle.   I wonder what fact I’m dancing around and avoiding here will be obvious to me in six months when I read this again.  

GENERAL UPDATE

Why don’t I give an update. The main news, I suppose, is that Liturgy is going into the studio in August. We’re going to make a studio recording of Origin of the Alimonies along with a new album. I’m very excited about this. This past Thursday we played at St. Vitus in Brooklyn, and we performed four of the new tracks. I find that, especially with this project, you don’t really know how to play a song until after you’ve performed it live, ideally more than once. Anyway, the show was really wonderful. I hate being sentimental or kind when communicating publicly, because I hate the culture industry and false tribal identification with pseudo-values and so on - but - that said, I am so appreciative of Liturgy’s fans. The energy at this show, and also at our show in May at the Glove (also in Brooklyn) was just incredible. We’ll perform in Baltimore in a few weeks, and then in Boston on our way up to Providence to record the new LPs at Machines with Magnets.

Philosophy has somewhat taken a back seat during this time. I led a reading group on Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit that began in January and ended a few weeks ago; quite an important book, I think. Really something special. Beyond that I’ve been reading some Evola here and there along with Rowan Williams’s book Christ: The Heart of Creation. I’ll definitely have a tight account of my Transcendental Qabala system ready to publish in time for some activity this fall (which I guess I shouldn’t say too much about yet). But the most notable item regarding philosophy during the past six months is actually how much less time I’ve been devoting to it than usual. I have the sense that I don’t need to read much more. Oh, I almost forgot that I was developing an interest in the red-pilled fringe philosophy culture on Twitter during the past few months, especially during the time that the “Nina Power scandal” was unfolding. There’s definitely a lot of interesting and rigorous thinking going on out there in the dregs, and a lot of it connects with interests of mine like black metal theory, cyber-Catholicism, entrepreneurial Marxist religion and so on. I don’t really feel comfortable interacting very much, because there is so much crossover between this world and genuinely incorrigible Alt-Right thought. But I do think it’s really cool that there’s a kind of steamy, transgressive philosophical energy somewhere in the world that has its own infrastructure cut off from academia.

I’m inching towards developing an online philosophical presence, which means releasing philosophical videos, launching a Patreon and perhaps a podcast. I’m quite aware that very few people are aware of this site, and they typically have no idea that I have a system of concepts that means a lot to me and has been incubating for many years. Anyway, there will be more soon there.

Also, my new band with Dion Olivier and Tyler Thacker have played a few shows now, and we put a track called “Seraphim” up on the internet. We’re called Ideal. I’m looking forward to doing more with this band, it’s a really enjoyable collaboration.

Maybe the main ‘thing’ I have to say right now is that I have a renewed sense of commitment to majestic, sincere, disciplined ecstasy. I love Liturgy so much, and I respect the uniqueness and power of this music more than I ever have. I firmly believe that it is an important energy to be sending into the world, and the musical dynamic among the current lineup feels kind of sacred. The career of this band has been so turbulent, but I don't currently wish it to be or have been any different. As I’ve been writing the new record, I find myself with little interest or curiosity about breaking new ground or exploring cultural fault lines. I just want to make more music that sounds like Liturgy, and that sounds better than ever.

MEMORY

I’ve posted somewhere between three and five texts this week, but if you asked me what I said, or even which feeds I posted them on, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Memory is a strange and fascinating thing, especially when it comes to the kind of sprawling systematic philosophy that I’m attempting here. I simply do not, and cannot, have the entire system in my head all at once, and I am frequently negotiating the relationship between its parts - the species and genii, the connections and disjunctions between different aspects. Part of what I love about having precisely dated posts, which I return to from time to time, is that I discover - quite often - that what feels like a new insight this month is something I conceived of and elaborated thoroughly a year or two ago. At times as though I feel I am tending to a garden that is growing according to principles I don’t really understand into something I’m unable to conceive and may well hardly want. I make sense of what I’m expressing after the fact, ascribing intentions or motives to phenomena I am emitting, if I’m being honest with myself, for reasons that are totally obscure to me - or perhaps for no “reason” at all.

Someone pointed out to me recently - a kindred spirit - how rare it is for a philosopher (I don’t entirely want to actually call myself by that name, but it’s a decent placeholder) to actually try to be making sense of things from the ground up, to really be wrestling with the nature of knowledge, being, truth, history, subjectivity, creation and politics all at once while being unwilling or unable to accept a firm foundation for conceptual creation in terms of any of them - to not be speaking in anyone else’s name, and to not be limiting one’s self to a topic that has built-in presuppositions. I was touched and inspired upon hearing this - which is in itself a fascinating phenomenon, the way threads of mutual transference braid together as an engine of heterogeneous creation.

At the end of the day, though, it takes effort to remind myself that a cloudy memory is not a deficiency, and that perfect consistency between the various moving parts of a system and even the various expressions related to the same topics is a somewhat illusory ideal, given that we don’t really know what consistency is or what value it really has.

TO RETURN

Currently this is practically the only feed I contribute to. It’s my go-to feed for when I’m feeling resistant towards writing anything (quasi-)publicly, so as to get the wheels turning - but I’m posting so rarely that the engine just turns right back off anyway, and the next time I post I end up right back here. I’m devoting a fair amount of time to writing privately, trying to consolidate my system of ideas into something fully coherent and beautifully polished. For me, however, writing and thinking always constitute essentially an affliction, especially when I keep what I’m writing to myself. “Always” is the wrong word. I really don’t know what to write right now. You're just reading me fish around for coherent sentences to begin, pass through, and end.

I’m reading hardly anything at the moment - I swore to myself that once I finished Reza Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit I would no longer allow myself to dive deeply into any book, because clearly at this point reading anything at all is a rationalization (i.e. occupying myself with another’s thoughts amounts to avoidance, a waste of time). I know just what I want to say, or I know it as exactly as one can without having actually fully said it, and I don’t need help from any other voice ancient, modern or contemporary.

One book I have been reading, however, despite my prohibition (but not really, because I’m not reading it systematically and taking notes etc), is a text by Jean Wahl, a French philosopher who was quite prominent during the heyday of existentialism and phenomenology, but who is not currently discussed in any philosophical circles I’m aware of. Partly I think his current neglect is explained by his perhaps being too clear in his writing, making it seem facile and fashionable or glib. But it’s also partly - and this is what I’m attracted to - because his stance on the relationship between philosophy and theology was so level headed and reasonable. Unlike so many continental philosophers, he doesn’t contort and mangle his words so as to appear to not be talking about God while manifestly talking about God.

Of the many interesting points he makes, I’ll just list one here: he’s critical of Heidegger’s insistence upon secularizing the concept of transcendence. Heidegger asserts, as though it were a fact, that humans are faced with essential finitude (this awareness of finitude thus becoming a liberating transcendent experience). According to Wahl, this declares far too much about the nature of the Absolute than any honest philosopher has a right to - namely declaring that it certainly does not exist. It would be more philosophically rigorous (because more skeptical, more open to the alterity) to allow the Absolute to have theological meaning, namely to allow it to perhaps not exist, but to perhaps exist, or even to alternate between seeming to exist and seeming not to (what Lacan calls “insistence”). This idea was taken up by Marion and the other theologically-inclined French phenomenologists like Jean-Yves Lacoste and Michel Henry (the idea that the idea of God can’t be bracketed out of phenomenological experience).

Anyway, as I write this out more, I see more clearly that by reading Wahl I really am simply avoiding working on my own text (as much as I could be), because hardly any of the ideas I’ve encountered his book have surprised me, they simply resonate with me - they’re ideas I’ve already had or encountered. I think the fact of the matter is that - given that my formal education in philosophy ended long ago, and given that very few people who are acquainted with Liturgy have any inkling of the depths to which I’ve gone in my study of philosophy, psychoanalysis and religion - I am in fact deeply afraid to consolidate what I’m trying to say in my own voice, because I am unconsciously anticipating showing it to ‘the world’ and being unjustly scorned for all my sincere hard work. I’ve had scorn hurled at me for even making the gesture of philosophizing at all, in the context of being a musician, not just by message board trolls but also by powerful journalists - these latter have actually done a great deal to harm to whatever I have of a ‘music career’ - this fact more than any of the others makes me extremely reticent to articulate myself.

Everyone pays lip service to the idea of going against the grain, of being so uncool for a time that you then turn around and are extremely cool once society catches up, of being ‘untimely’, the Nietzschean term, but my experience is that in the current era it is almost impossible to be truly untimely rather than pseudo-untimely. Shaming and ostracization have more power to cut to the quick in the present than they once did, because the would-be ‘alternative’ world is just as rigidly codified as the supposedly more conformist world to which it is an alternative (and, according to my theory, this is a symptom of the fact that capitalism simply extracts pseudo-transgression from the young in order to trick them into sacrificing themselves at its altar via confused self-expression and render them incapable of discursive reasoning. Discursive reasoning is the major requirement for achieving ‘post-Capitalist desire’, so the market will work hard to suppress it).

The thing is, I really can't blame it on the journalists, because all this time I’ve known precisely what I’m doing and the effect it would inevitably have. This point reminds me of something Nick Land said in a recent podcast interview I listened to this weekend: part of why he’s so sure that every humanist attempt to defeat Capital will fail, no matter how ingenious or radical, is that as soon as you start doing anything well, it becomes capital. You get attention, produce value, expand in complexity in some way, and (he didn’t take the point in this direction, but this is the way I see it) soon your own desire changes, you’re infected with the will to grow your brand and derive rewards. Basically you either have the choice of growing or of staying true to what you were doing and not growing. But if you’re using the analytics and making deals with the gatekeepers, you’ve just expanded Capital’s reach. I can confidently say that given how thwarted, broken and bizarre the ‘career trajectory’ of Liturgy has been, that this bullet has been dodged! And I am hoping that the next round of activity will have a thorough enough philosophical architecture that it might be possible to move forward with enough self-awareness that a certain success can go hand in hand with actually fostering concentration, focus, reasoning, a coherent narrative of world history together with a highly crystallized and coherent desire for an astonishingly different and better future era for civilization, and tactics for working towards this vision which are both explicitly elaborated and rigorously performed. My goal is to try to live a future mode of production and inspire others to do the same, basically. In any case, there really will be a book coming later this year. It really is close, and I actually have a sense that the world is fairly ripe for it (for a book that endorses rational theology and a religion conceived as a coordination between both the transgressive and the conservative tendencies in various domains of the humanities).

RUST

Sharing ideas with a community is a beautiful thing, especially when you pay close attention to precisely what takes place when the sharing occurs.   I have a social constellation embedded in my mind that is only loosely correlated with any real constellation in the world.   Once sharing and recognition begin to unfold, desire gets raised.   A single word, glance, depending on who it’s from, can suddenly re-animate an entire body of work that was beginning to seem stale.   

THE WOUND

I have yearned to develop an original philosophical system ever since I was a teenager.   My primary motivation was not interest in philosophical questions or the work of existing philosophers.  Rather, it was emotional:  pain and confusion in alternation with a sense of cosmic wonder.   If I’m being honest I suppose there was also a strong desire to be  someone who knows, to pass judgment on the world - some kind of identification with the greatness of Nietzsche, a grandiosity fueled by its opposite, low self-esteem, the sense that I was a monstrosity or a freak.     

As my System continues to incubate, there’s always a barrier preventing me from producing a concise exposition:  I lose confidence in the integrity of my starting point.   The question of where to begin or of how to philosophize in an immanent way is, of course, a major topic in modern philosophy, addressed in different ways by different thinkers in different traditions.   

One idea is that thought is driven by the unthinkable.  It requires contact with an outside which eternally resists symbolization but responds to symbolizing efforts by coughing up fundamental ideas (ones that are axiomatic, aesthetic, lacking discursive foundation) that can be built upon.   

If I accept this premiss, then I am essentially allowed to construct whatever system I want - or rather, on the contrary, I have no choice but to solve the unique problem that I am, the wound that came before me and afflicts me.    To some degree I think this is true:   I can sense that I wouldn’t be motivated to philosophize in the first place if I didn’t have such an unusual experience of class, sexuality, religion and gender, that I have something true to offer the world because of a particular experience of chaos unique to me.   

But there has to be an additional requirement involving breadth and depth of scope, and some kind of criterion for rigor.  Or it seems there has to be, although what is meant by ‘depth’, ‘breadth’ and ‘rigor’ can’t be taken for granted - again, a foundation is needed. In other words, I’ve never been able to take seriously the idea that philosophy is simply a unique work of art. There must be a criterion for universality. Maybe part of what this criterion is difficult for me to establish is because it would (arguably) depend on a community, and I know of no community that would take my basic philosophical axioms seriously (I’m thinking of the thirst to unify dogmatic theology with psychoanalysis, Marxism and pragmatism in particular).   The fact that I have never had a mentor is what requires me to make contact with God, an imaginary mentor who blesses and authorizes my work.  

MOMENTUM

The problem with not expressing one’s thoughts regularly is that they begin to swirl around in one’s head half-formed, but become so familiar that they no longer seem worth expressing. That leads to a sort of noetic clogging. To start thinking and expressing again requires that the abortive or stale thoughts be flushed. But for that to happen, they have to be expressed.

NEW ADDITION

Most of the RSS feeds on this sites are meant to be a venue for me to communicate flashes of insight on topics contained within the architectonic of Transcendental Qabala.   I often find myself wanting to comment on the process as a whole, however - how I'm feeling, the gist of what I'm trying to communicate - and I hesitate to do this because I don't really have a place for it.  Sometime I make comments like that in the "ENDEAVOR" feed, but that one is really supposed to be articulating a theory, not giving a personal account.  

An issue I'm having right now is one that has plagued me for a long time but is particularly intense at the moment:  as soon as an idea I have becomes fairly clear to me (or an idea in a book I'm reading), I'm not motivated to express it any longer.   It's only the half-formed and inconsistent that can hold my attention.    I do an enormous amount of tortured-and-ecstatic work making my way towards consistency, but then just as the fully articulated structure comes into focus... I passionately shift my attention to some other badly-posed question or cloudy, dubious formulation.   

On the one hand, sure, the unclear is inherently more interesting, because it has a mysterious ‘not-yet’ quality to it.  But I am beginning to detect that there is a certain weakness, passivity, even fearfulness in the attraction to the unclear.   Never fully rendering something in an obvious and digestible form is akin to never making a firm decision - i.e. it is akin to what I designate "the hyperborean".    This is very essence of the pathology of the control society: unable to will clearly, to elaborately imagine goals, to focus and concentrate, distracted by casino rewards from social media, lacking a coherent narrative, the very schizophrenized dissolution of time that leads to all the political apathy or self-righteous extremism that is in fact a smokescreen used by capital to cloud our souls so that we cannot see God and act in the name of the Eschaton!

I owe it to other people, and to a future generation which will hopefully surpass my abilities and perhaps surpass what I’m able even to conceive and desire, to deal with this issue methodically, work through it, and create what I am driven to by whatever multiplicity of drives constitutes my True Will.