If, for Decades, an Anchor Served a Ship, Which One Day Decided to Cut its Chains and Sail Away, Can the Drowning Anchor Grow Wings? And if So, Will the Anchor Always be Burdened by the Weight of Having Been Used? “My wish for you, my friend — and all the other abandoned anchors that write to me from the ocean floor — is that a time will come when you can reimagine yourself, not as the poor old stalwart anchor rusting on the sea bottom, but as a fucking ship and get back on the surface of the water and do what ships do — venture forth and begin again the strange, dangerous, glorious, storm-tossed voyage of life!” Red Hand Files
Mediatic Facts and Controlled Demolitions From Across the Rubicon: “Conflict is deeply ingrained in the human mind. Like a cloud of electrically charged particles, it remains potential and shapeless, in an ideal resting state. When it is given ideological meaning, however, it’s as if the particles were suddenly exposed to an electromagnetic field. The latent conflict acquires a memetic nature, and animosity becomes orderly, vectorial. Ideological meaning works as a framework which allows hostility to be interpreted rationally by those who partake in it. It provides a cultural scaffold, a channel for violent impulse to develop and become political. It is through this process that the primal, schmittian distinction between Friend and Enemy is born. In other words, political conflict cannot be deducted from ideological contradictions and divergences. On the contrary: ideology is induced from conflict, which is ontologically previous to it and which arises from real events, which are physical phenomena. We can observe how the parts in a conflict perform their confrontation, and after identifying the ideological differences found among the parts, we place said differences at the root of the conflict.” The Outpost
On Paranoia: “…all popular media, insofar as it is easy to consume, or capable of passive ingestion, is dishonest. This does not surprise anyone, only when they realize what they too consume lies. Any media that does not challenge you with its intake is likely a form of propaganda, because it is impossible to approach anything vaguely resembling the truth with standard media.” Sukhavati
The Four-Fold Imagination — William Blake Saw Angels and Ghosts and the Hallelujah Sunrise, Even on the Darkest Day. We Need to Foster his State of Mind: “Many of Blake’s contemporaries regarded him as eccentric or mad. But a different mood prevails today. Busts are as evident as booms. Civilisation itself can feel as if it teeters on the brink. Blake’s critique of ‘dark Satanic Mills’ now appears prophetic; his advocacy of the need for ‘Mental Fight’ to liberate the imagination sounds like a calling. When, on a damp Sunday in 2018, a substantial slab of handsomely engraved Portland stone was unveiled to mark his burial place at Bunhill Fields in London, hundreds gathered, having heard about the occasion by word of mouth. They were addressed by Bruce Dickinson, the lead singer of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, who described Blake as one of the greatest living English poets. And he meant ‘living’. Blake never really dies, the rock star insisted.
“This sense of his immortality arises with a recognition of the conviction upon which Blake bet his life: the human imagination is not only capable of entertaining fantasy. When coupled to creative skill and penetrating thought, it reveals the truths of existence and life. It converts everyday incidents into rich perceptions that might amount to a revolution in experience. It underpinned Blake’s vocation as a visionary and a thinker, as Northrop Frye stressed in his study of the man, Fearful Symmetry (1947). And it promised the gift of what Blake called ‘fourfold vision’, a taste of which can be gained by considering what it allowed him to perceive when observing the sunrise. ‘When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?’ he has an interlocutor ask him in an imagined exchange. ‘O no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty!”,’ he replies.” Mark Vernon
The Simulation of Violence After 9/11: [Jean] Baudrillard’s symbol of the world of pure simulation was none other than the one targeted by the 9/11 terrorists: the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In Symbolic Exchange and Death (published in 1976, just three years after the completion of the towers), Baudrillard asks, ‘Why has the World Trade Center in New York got two towers?’:
The fact that there are two identical towers signifies . . . the end of every original reference . . . For the sign to remain pure it must become its own double: this doubling of the sign really put an end to what it designated. Every Andy Warhol does this: the multiple replicas of Marilyn Monroe’s face are of course at the same time the death of the original and the end of representation. The two towers of the WTC are the visible sign of the closure of a system in the vertigo of doubling. . .
“In other words, all the elements in the self-contained system of representation (simulation) point not to external entities but only to other elements within the system. The vertigo of two identical towers that mirror each other ad infinitum reveals the instantiation of the logic of the self-contained ‘third-order simulacrum’ in the physical world. The logic of the built environment and that of the virtual or representational now fully coincide. The simulation is not confined to what we consume through our screens: it pervades ‘meatspace’ too. (This is where The Matrix misleads: the escape it offers is far too easy.).” Outsider Theory