afh blog

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Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall save you.

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Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

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I bit the bullet and signed on for a year of subscriptions for the four AFH Nings, mainly in order to keep them as placeholders until they can be integrated into the new AFH/4DPop architecture. Some new developments involving the Monster Collective in particular necessitated the decision. More on this soon.

Dreams and water abide, like the Dude. Antony Gormley has entered the picture for the Matterhorn Project, and [we don’t yet know] this may or may not be significant. Motivation matters. Or impetus. Since the issue may be more about force as much as choice. Motive and opportunity. Points of origination. Ingredients, since the medium is material.

I suppose these are [NOTATIONS]. “WE ARE COME TO A WORLD WITHIN THE WORLD.” [CM - EMPHASIS ADDED - MGT]. Transactional. Or transactive/-actionable/-acted… Sleep. / Awake.

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In this world, the rich and their proxies are destroying America, and much of the “civilized” part of the civilized world and celebrating the victories of the past three decades, and not suffering the brutality of the wronged, yet. It IS a temporal phenomenon, and temporary, and nature does attach. The stupid extraction and exploitation - creative destruction - of human nature is triangulating into a mandalic configuration of consequential convergences from which none will be immune. Oh, ah. It’s already happening. In the burning of Russia, the kill zone of BP’s Gulf of Mexico spill, in melting glaciers and strange heat waves and so on. Perhaps science has been enlisted secretly, weird and criminal, mad science, to serve as the means to an eugenic end for a giant proportion of human life, a vast population control machine switched to “ON.” Maybe some fundamentalist-type like BUSH, praying at night for the Apocalypse, for a savior’s return, will reverse engineer the power-down effect of the planet, aided and abetted by the paranoid, the tribal haters of other, now ensconced in thousands of years of artificial managerial domination. Who knows for sure? The SHADOW. Who can save us? SUPERMAN. Now that the aliens do not appear capable of the Martians’ 1938 successes, and countless other mediated invasions have come and failed, the imagination of the mob is no longer captured and enslaved by the dread of the technologically advanced squid-like other from another point of origin in the celestial soup. What to do, what to do? Since the manipulated realism must cover the inequity of the top-down hierarchy of ownership society, the lineages of liens, connected by wireframes of artificial personages. The coats of arms now are disguised by logos [both kinds]. What is the force the Superclass [SUCK] sprays like a water cannon on the neo-serfdom? Try smoking a cigarette naked and saying the N-word while making wedding vows with a person of the same sex of another religion and race at the gazebo downtown on a busy Sunday morning/early afternoon - and be POOR. Make it your fourth marriage. Make it a joke. Videotape it and broadcast it, sell the rights, make it reality TV for digital video. Invite your Facebook friends. Use the material in your thesis in Anthro or Socio or Poli-sci, or Psych or Cult studies/Gender/SEx or do it as negation propaganda. Then run for office.

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MILO: The question #38 posed is, “Then, is there hope?” I would offer the table a conjecture as a response, which is, “Are there times during which the most useful person is the one who does not need hope as a precursor for correct [or realistic] action?” I bracket realism [or pragmatic] or relational terms - I mean, relative - because the Real is not an -istic entity, anymore than Time is a father. The layering modality of dimensional time is in the presentation phase capable of flattening, or compression, the discarding of data without loss of data, in the back-up sense. What is man’s back-up sense? Probably, the tachy- modes provide a vital clue. Default is forever, in that consideration, a violence, or a facility or proclivity for violence, of the unmanageable genus. The canker boils over, an eruption, like Pele, a Vesuvian conflagration, of the kind geology reveals from the planetary past, if you happen to be other than a literal Christian epistemologist, of the anarchic definition - a Manager, in a word, a de-finer or decider - whether the impression is in paint or finely wrought in sandstone. The physics will not be on their side, nor the scalable chronology, pre-dating the mind of Descartes, and his natural studies. Prior to Kant’s taste, in the ordinary. The topology is not reducible to surface concerns, nor is it necessarily prone to the immaterial beyond, as the military sandbox of imagined wars in a child’s game conjecture both bloodless and dire. The Armageddon of tomorrow is wired, but we shouldn’t forget that electricity, managed lightning, falls into the proprietary realms of many a formidable god and goddess, whose thunder may or may not have ceased its endless echo, its duration echoing unfathomably [to human ears and fearsome thoughts] in greater waves, dwarfing the scale of SUCK man’s contemporary - meaning only a few thousand years - fabrication of ENDLESS WAR. Wars always end, whether war does or doesn’t, in a sphere governed by the likes of Mars, who is only one, and as far as history is concerned, fairly recent, for an immortal. Wars are beloved of the infinite, at least insofar as the human mind can perceive it.

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‎”There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy says philosophically. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

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- "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" [New York Times, April 19, 1992, by Richard B. Woodward]

ZEELIO: Another commenter [#251] wonders about pollution and its effects on the governors of human relations. Governance is not personified in this usage. The people are natural, which is not true of the thought of them, either as a set or a particle. Definitely not true of the effect, amigo. Cormac’s prose is powerfully effective in representing the hopeless as a pollutant. When has karma been better exposed? To my knowledge, never. That the polluters dimensionally are so easily traceable to their artificial proxies, and the spiraling constellations of karmic debt are substantively verifiable is to this date as far as I can tell lost on the philosophers of the age. Perhaps not. We won’t know for sure, since the monopolized and artificial media is dead-set against the free transmission of the wisdom-lovers and their most-valuable findings. The pollution is not reducible to a singular manifestation, which is certainly by design. The lens of risk aversion will never find Truth. It will only distort or obfuscate Truth, like a funhouse mirror. Comedy of the artificial kind - not the Greek - is scripting a situation of Truth’s distortion in that funhouse mirror, and laughing at the monster staring back at the subject. Personally, I see nothing funny in it, but then, why should I? I have lived through war and pollution, in their meaningless and artificially contingent, decadent iterations. Dying in such an era, in the time of organization man, is by definition its own kind of pollution.

ART: There is no art in Hell.

V: Which begs the question [#85’s], “If that’s so, why are there so many ‘art stars,’ or at least ‘artists, emerging or established’ [artificial, anyway, every one of them, everything they do], and so many managers, concerned about creativity, innovation, and the application of “art” as a logo[s] on all that they imagine or see, or believe they have manifested [which in truth is more infestation]?” Is Sotheby’s right, my fellow travelers? Is Sotheby’s the best design fiction, and the greatest media philosopher of the age an auction barker with a foreign accent? Is this the logic of Hell, or nothing so brutally contrived, but rather a by-product, a waste material, a pollutant, celebrated and gilded by the karmic polluter class, the SUCK, who revel in shit, whose wealth is made of it, then gilded, and donated to museums, bloody fecal matter, as that expelled at an execution of the untouchable or the heretic, the slave-rebel or the bandit - the throwaway human, in other words, which is only “real” in the top-down hierarchical perspective, which is skewed by distance and atmospheric distortion, by lack of air, oxygen, not like the mountaineer’s sickness, but like Ayn Rand’s imaginary executive, in his penthouse high above humanity, Ayn Rand who is nothing more than a tyrant’s whore, who has pleased her master sufficiently with clever wit, to gain a seat at court, where she is permitted to hold forth, entertaining the entitled and inciting revulsion simultaneously, as an exotic beast on a leash among the so-called civilized, who must be entertained to combat the boredom that tyranny engenders amongst its beneficiaries, especially after the transmission of their faulty blood over a few incestuous generations. Beware, though, all y’all, when this entertainment becomes boring to the SUCK, as it inevitably will, for the Coliseum is the next arena, and its carnage.f Is this the SUCK’s future ‘art?’ What it will pass on, like a virus, borne by carriers through [free] spaces where life is too strong to be the host for such degradation, wanton filth. Is this the fascination of this SUCK ‘contemporary art’ with the body, in decay, post-mortem, and can you imagine the mind that collects it, like a tinker amassing rubbish? Is this the dream of Apocalypse - that all else be doomed, and nothing but the precious pot of stolen river gold hoarded and cached, which is to say the dredge of the slow-moving river, painted in shiny hues? The anti-prayer, the artificial - and by older terminologies so defined as the lust of the demonic possessed, the great hatred of life and beauty, and the fear of life’s end made king of all, by subterfuge, by force of tyranny. I will not submit.

ALL: WE WILL NOT SUBMIT! FUCK THE SUCK!

[Transmission interrupted][Working offline][Trans-ops-sys][AUTHOR]

PJM: At Heartless, the lovely child amazed at the appearance of the redeemed and real dark-wing’d angel, Jared, whose supplication for forgiveness folds him and again, he walks among us. Only one must see, for the ripples to emanate endlessly, perpetually in the universe and of it, reflecting like sound encountering a rock face, without diminishing, in the space between temporarily enclosed sentience, things, all of us related. This is nothing the artificial can obstruct or annihilate. Forego the promise of hope, for it is absolutely unnecessary. The outcome is forever assured, and the good guys will always prevail, the good guys always win. All that’s requisite is Choice. Now. In the middle of the sideways 8. The past rolling up on you from behind, the future from before you. As you walk forward backwards, looking over your shoulder, with your eyes behind, you will twist into that shape, that form, and all who see you will rejoice, or at least laugh, and Terror will dissolve, and the work of building can once again and always commence. We have a good fire, with which to forge this moment of freedom, same as it ever was, is and will be, until that day.

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OEDIPUS
Say a slight service may avail him much.

STRANGER
How can he profit from a sightless man?

OEDIPUS
The blind man’s words will be instinct with sight.

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- Sophocles

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CHAPTER 57. Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars.

On Tower-hill, as you go down to the London docks, you may have seen a crippled beggar (or KEDGER, as the sailors say) holding a painted board before him, representing the tragic scene in which he lost his leg. There are three whales and three boats; and one of the boats (presumed to contain the missing leg in all its original integrity) is being crunched by the jaws of the foremost whale. Any time these ten years, they tell me, has that man held up that picture, and exhibited that stump to an incredulous world. But the time of his justification has now come. His three whales are as good whales as were ever published in Wapping, at any rate; and his stump as unquestionable a stump as any you will find in the western clearings. But, though for ever mounted on that stump, never a stump-speech does the poor whaleman make; but, with downcast eyes, stands ruefully contemplating his own amputation.

Throughout the Pacific, and also in Nantucket, and New Bedford, and Sag Harbor, you will come across lively sketches of whales and whaling-scenes, graven by the fishermen themselves on Sperm Whale-teeth, or ladies’ busks wrought out of the Right Whale-bone, and other like skrimshander articles, as the whalemen call the numerous little ingenious contrivances they elaborately carve out of the rough material, in their hours of ocean leisure. Some of them have little boxes of dentistical-looking implements, specially intended for the skrimshandering business. But, in general, they toil with their jack-knives alone; and, with that almost omnipotent tool of the sailor, they will turn you out anything you please, in the way of a mariner’s fancy.

Long exile from Christendom and civilization inevitably restores a man to that condition in which God placed him, i.e. what is called savagery. Your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an Iroquois. I myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the King of the Cannibals; and ready at any moment to rebel against him.

Now, one of the peculiar characteristics of the savage in his domestic hours, is his wonderful patience of industry. An ancient Hawaiian war-club or spear-paddle, in its full multiplicity and elaboration of carving, is as great a trophy of human perseverance as a Latin lexicon. For, with but a bit of broken sea-shell or a shark’s tooth, that miraculous intricacy of wooden net-work has been achieved; and it has cost steady years of steady application.

As with the Hawaiian savage, so with the white sailor-savage. With the same marvellous patience, and with the same single shark’s tooth, of his one poor jack-knife, he will carve you a bit of bone sculpture, not quite as workmanlike, but as close packed in its maziness of design, as the Greek savage, Achilles’s shield; and full of barbaric spirit and suggestiveness, as the prints of that fine old Dutch savage, Albert Durer.

Wooden whales, or whales cut in profile out of the small dark slabs of the noble South Sea war-wood, are frequently met with in the forecastles of American whalers. Some of them are done with much accuracy.

At some old gable-roofed country houses you will see brass whales hung by the tail for knockers to the road-side door. When the porter is sleepy, the anvil-headed whale would be best. But these knocking whales are seldom remarkable as faithful essays. On the spires of some old-fashioned churches you will see sheet-iron whales placed there for weather-cocks; but they are so elevated, and besides that are to all intents and purposes so labelled with “HANDS OFF!” you cannot examine them closely enough to decide upon their merit.

In bony, ribby regions of the earth, where at the base of high broken cliffs masses of rock lie strewn in fantastic groupings upon the plain, you will often discover images as of the petrified forms of the Leviathan partly merged in grass, which of a windy day breaks against them in a surf of green surges.

Then, again, in mountainous countries where the traveller is continually girdled by amphitheatrical heights; here and there from some lucky point of view you will catch passing glimpses of the profiles of whales defined along the undulating ridges. But you must be a thorough whaleman, to see these sights; and not only that, but if you wish to return to such a sight again, you must be sure and take the exact intersecting latitude and longitude of your first stand-point, else so chance-like are such observations of the hills, that your precise, previous stand-point would require a laborious re-discovery; like the Soloma Islands, which still remain incognita, though once high-ruffed Mendanna trod them and old Figuera chronicled them.

Nor when expandingly lifted by your subject, can you fail to trace out great whales in the starry heavens, and boats in pursuit of them; as when long filled with thoughts of war the Eastern nations saw armies locked in battle among the clouds. Thus at the North have I chased Leviathan round and round the Pole with the revolutions of the bright points that first defined him to me. And beneath the effulgent Antarctic skies I have boarded the Argo-Navis, and joined the chase against the starry Cetus far beyond the utmost stretch of Hydrus and the Flying Fish.

With a frigate’s anchors for my bridle-bitts and fasces of harpoons for spurs, would I could mount that whale and leap the topmost skies, to see whether the fabled heavens with all their countless tents really lie encamped beyond my mortal sight!

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- Moby Dick; Or the Whale, by Herman Melville

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TR: [“Change is mandatory. Growth is optional.” (#141)] …I would not name a Beast “Change,” nor an artificial a person, and if you meet a corporation on the Road from the East, kill him, and hang his proxy from the nearest tree or light pole or windmill. Fertilize the fields with its blood and entrails, and do not consume the dank crop that grows of it, pretty though the fruit may be, but burn it, sending foul smoke to Heaven with hearty song of glory, of freedom and joyful mirth. When the ceremony is complete, bring forth beautiful new children into this world, this paradise, restored, and you redeemed.

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Was he crazy?
Who?
The murderer.
I don’t know. He didn’t kill him to rob him. I guess he was a little bit crazy.
Would you have killed him?
I don’t know. I reckon I would if that how he’d wanted it.
Suttree took a sip of his beer. He could hear Smokehouse in the outer room again, puttering about, glass clinking. He looked at Jones. Have you ever killed anyone? he said.
Not on purpose, said Jones.

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- Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

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R WOODY: I can paint 1000 landscapes with slight variations, like John Henry and the steam-motored cutter, for every house in the subdivision, one to match every couch, competing with the printer at WalMart for the living room wall of the foreclosure-threatened American dream, as imagined by SUCK proxy, to ownership tunes, and derivative melodies, and harmonious post-urban modern designed mobile society, rich with knowledge workers and all manner of strangers and migrants, ID or no, with gas and oil-fueled transit lines and cloverleaf turns, a strip mall and big box for every neighborhood watch, where on the parking lot you’ll find yours truly, presenting a stack of affordable but  unique painted artificial depopulated topologies, as good as a Kinkaid, hand-framed in old Mexico, along the blood meridian, speckled with bone.

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[Transmission interrupted]

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CLAREMONT, CA
MONDAY, AUGUST 9, 2010 15:11