a series of things

"No matter how you dress it up, that's what the world is. A community of idiots doing a series of things until the world explodes and we all die."

--Daniel O'Brien, "5 Things They Never Told Us," Cracked.com, 2011 March 25

Straw Dogs --> Laozi's reference --> and elucidating commentary

"Heaven and Earth are heartless
treating creatures like straw dogs"

--Laozi, Tao Te Ching


"Heaven and Earth are not partial. They do not kill living things out of cruelty or give them birth out of kindness. We do the same when we make straw dogs to use in sacrifices. We dress them up and put them on the altar, but not because we love them. And when the ceremony is over, we throw them into the street, but not because we hate them."

--Su Ch'e, as quoted in Lao-tzu's Taoteching: with Selected Commentaries of the Past 2000 Years, translated by Red Pine

The Sedlec Ossuary

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The Sedlec Ossuary is a small Roman Catholic chapel located in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people.

"Henry, the abbot of the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec, was sent to Palestine by King Otakar II of Bohemia in 1278. When he returned, he brought with him a small amount of earth that he had removed from Golgotha and sprinkled it over the abbey cemetery. The word of this pious act soon spread and the cemetery in Sedlec became a desirable burial site throughout Central Europe. During the Black Death in the mid 14th century, and after the Hussite Wars in the early 15th century, many thousands of people were buried there and the cemetery had to be greatly enlarged.

"In 1870, František Rint, a woodcarver, was employed by the Schwarzenberg family to put the bone heaps into order. The macabre result of his effort speaks for itself. Four enormous bell-shaped mounds occupy the corners of the chapel. An enormous chandelier of bones, which contains at least one of every bone in the human body, hangs from the center of the nave with garlands of skulls draping the vault. Other works include piers and monstrances flanking the altar, a large Schwarzenberg coat-of-arms, and the signature of Rint, also executed in bone, on the wall near the entrance."

The Great Wave

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji

Katsushika Hokusai

1760-1849 Japanese

#25 of 25 Runes

“25. The Unknowable

“THE BLANK RUNE

“Total trust,
surrender,
relinquishing control--
all this is only words.
Look into the night sky.
Tell me what you see.

“Blank is the end, blank is the beginning....

“The Blank Rune often calls for no less an act of courage than the empty-handed leap into the void.”


--Ralph Blum, The Book of RuneCards, 1989

www.TheSteppe.com

into myth

“He had never seen the sea. The real sea, the thunder sea that went black at night like a pane of glass. The sea that could summon and the sea that could kill, that could swallow whole cities and turn them into myth. He wanted to go to California.”

--Harlan Ellison, “At the Mouse Circus,” 1971

Close At Hand

I keep a bust of Death on my desk: literally keeping Death close at hand always, to remind me that death is close at hand always.

up over yawning emptiness

"Beneath me, there is the crust of the earth. Beneath that, magma. Go far enough, through the core, eventually there will be crust again, and the bottom of the ocean. Then sea water. Then air. Then the edge of the atmosphere. Then infinite nothingness, directly beneath my feet. The entire earth is a little trapeze, holding me up over yawning emptiness. And space extends to either side of me, in front of me, behind me, and above me as well, forever."

--Michael Cisco, "Machines of Concrete Light and Dark" in Lovecraft Unbound: Twenty Stories, 2009

Awesome Captured on Film: Orson Welles as Father Mapple in the 1956 movie *Moby Dick*

The sermon scene ends halfway through, and the following isn't worth watching, but this is the best-quality clip of Welles' performance on YouTube.

The set was reproduced from Melville's description, including the memorial plaques of the whalers lost at sea and the pulpit like a ship's prow.

"Delight is to him who against the proud commodores and gods of this earth, stands forth his own inexorable self...

"Yet this is nothing."

past and gone

“Life continues interesting though I find it hard to realize that this--breakfast, dinner, lessons, mending, writing letters, arranging flowers, with a little visiting and reading is actually my life with a capital L. One waits for it to begin and will be waiting perhaps when it is past and gone.”

--Emily B. Trevett, journal, 1894 August 6

collected in Talking on Paper: An Anthology of Oregon Letters and Diaries, 1994

ARMISTICE DAY WAR POETRY READING

Australian soldiers in Ypres, Belgium, 1917

photo by Frank Hurley

At 11:00 on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, “The War to End All Wars” came to an end.

Designated Armistice Day, it is still commemorated as such in France and Belgium, as Remembrance Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries, as Volkstrauertag in Germany, and as Veterans Day in the United States.

In World War I, on the Western Front, a years-long stalemate between the German, French, and British armies would see millions of men die pointlessly in the living horror of trench warfare.

Out of this colossal tragedy arose poetry that is among the most beautiful, disturbing, and compelling poetry ever written.

“These men are worth your tears.”
--Wilfred Owen

Classic World War I Poetry

read by Radigan Neuhalfen

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, Cafe Amsterdam

2010 November 10, Wednesday

20:00 (8:00 PM)

Halloween Reading - H.P. Lovecraft - Mongolia

“I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumored and evilly-shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination. It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me...”

--H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”

Unnatural sex acts, a dangerous secret cult, and one very long night...

H.P. Lovecraft's

“The Shadow over Innsmouth”

read by Radigan Neuhalfen

Cafe Amsterdam

Wednesday, 2010 October 27

8:00 PM

In the shunned New England seaport town of Innsmouth, something is very much not right, as one unfortunate traveller discovers on one unforgettable night.

Written and published in 1936 during the worldwide Great Depression, this popular and provocative classic of cosmic horror treats themes of economic collapse and desperation, miscegenation, racism, fear of the foreign, and humanity's wilful though perhaps necessary misinterpretation of the nature of the universe and our own role within it.

The subject of ever-increasing academic and mainstream attention, H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) stands as the most influential American horror writer since Edgar Allan Poe.

Radigan Neuhalfen is the author of the novel The Steppe and the blog The Crush of All Things.

Cafe Amsterdam

Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar

Influenza Pandemic, World War I, mass death is individual loss multiplied many times over, cosmic horror

"Elizabeth had fallen victim to the greatest cosmic prank of all time, the flu that had swept across the world in the spring and summer of 1918, as if the bloody abattoir in the trenches hadn't been evidence enough of humanity's divine disfavor. That's what Elizabeth had called it in the last letter he'd ever had from her: God's judgment on a world gone mad. Garner had given up on God by then: he'd packed away the Bible Elizabeth had pressed upon him after a week in the field hospital, knowing that its paltry lies could bring him no comfort in the face of such horror, and it hadn't. Not then, and not later, when he'd come home to face Elizabeth's mute and barren grave."

--Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrud, "The Crevasse," Lovecraft Unbound, 2009

"enormous moral energy": Bataille on de Sade

"We know what men are with their particular circumstances and limitations. We know in advance that generally speaking they cannot fail to judge de Sade and his writings in the same way.

"Lack of understanding is in the order of things; it is that of mankind in general; it comes from their lack of strength and their feeling of being threatened.

"The criticisms that de Sade defied were well founded. He was not against the fool and the hypocrite as much as against the decent man, the normal man in all of us, so to speak. He was less concerned to convince than to challenge.

"Certain minds are fired by the thought of turning the most securely established values topsy-turvy. They are thus able to say gaily that the most subversive man who ever lived--the Marquis de Sade--was also the man who rendered the greatest service to humanity. Nothing to their mind be more certain; we shiver at the thought of death and pain (even the death and pain of other people), tragic or unspeakable events cut us to the quick, but that which inspires us with terror is like the sun, no less glorious if we turn our weak eyes away from its blaze.

"Like the sun at least in being intolerable to the naked eye, the figure of de Sade fascinated and terrified his contemporaries: was not the very idea that the monster was alive revolting? In our day and age, however, an apologist for his ideas is never taken seriously, and no one thinks them at all significant.... That would not matter if only de Sade's ideas did not lose their essential value: namely, that of being incompatible with the ideas of reasonable beings.

"De Sade asserted these unacceptable values in book after book. Life, he maintained, was the pursuit of pleasure, and the degree of pleasure was in direct ratio to the destruction of life. In other words, life reached its highest intensity in a monstrous denial of its own principle.

"Such a strange doctrine could obviously not be generally accepted, nor even generally propounded, unless it were glossed over, deprived of significance and reduced to a trivial piece of pyrotechnics. Obviously, if it were taken seriously, no society could accept it for a single instant. Indeed, those people who used to rate de Sade as a scoundrel responded better to his intentions than his admirers do in our own day: de Sade provokes indignation and protest, otherwise the paradox of pleasure would be nothing but a poetic fancy.

"In one way it is easier to be be receptive to de Sade's eroticism than to the religious demands of old. No-one today could deny that impulses connecting sexuality and the desire to hurt and to kill do exist. Hence the so-called sadistic instincts enable the ordinary man to account for certain acts of cruelty, while religious impulses are explained away as aberrations. By describing these instincts in masterly fashion then, de Sade has contributed to man's slow-growing awareness of himself--in philosophical terminology 'consciousness of self'; The expression 'sadistic', in universal use, is in itself clear proof of his contribution.

"The cruelty of de Sade's heroes should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are bound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are building, we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. But there remains this question. Is our being ineluctably the negation as well as the affirmation of its own princple?

"One cannot fail to observe mankind's double nature throughout its career. There are two extremes. At one end, existence is basically orderly and decent. Work, concern for the children, kindness and honesty rule men's dealings with their fellows. At the other, violence rages pitilessly. In certain circumstances the same men practise pillage and arson, murder, violence and torture. Excess contrasts with reason.

"These extremes are called civilisation and barbarism. But the use of these words is misleading, for they imply that there are barbarians on the one hand and civilised men on the other.

"Common language will not express violence. It treats it as a guilty and importunate thing and disallows it by denying it any function or any excuse. If violence does occur, and occur it will, it is explained by a mistake somewhere, just as men of backward civilisations think that death can only happen if someone makes it by magic or otherwise. Violence in advanced societies and death in backward ones are not just given, like a storm or a flood; they can only be the result of something going wrong.

"But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, not time and not violence.

"Useless and dangerous violence cannot be abolished by irrational refusals to have any truck with it, any more than the irrational refusals to treat with death can eliminate that.

"The characters of de Sade's novels do not speak to man in general, as literature does even in the apparent discretion of the private journal. If they speak at all it is to someone of their own kind. De Sade's twisted libertines talk to each other. But they indulge in long speeches to show they are right.... What they insist upon is the overriding value of violence, excesses, crimes and tortures. In this way they fall short of the profound silence peculiar to violence, for violence never declares either its own existence or its right to exist; it simply exists.

"These disquisitions upon violence which keep interrupting the accounts of infamous cruelties that make up de Sade's books do not belong to the violent characters into whose mouths they are put. If such people had really lived, they would probably have lived in silence. These are de Sade's own ideas, and he uses this means to address other people.

"A paradox underlies his behaviour. De Sade speaks, but he is the mouthpiece of a silent life, of utter and inevitably speechless solitude. The solitary man for whom he speaks pays not the slightest heed to his fellows; in his loneliness he is a sovereign being, never called to account, never needing to justify himself to anyone.... All this calls for enormous moral energy, but such energy is in fact the point at issue.

"The solitary man proceeds step by step towards total negation: denial of other people first, and then by some monstrous logic denial of himself.

"It may be that de Sade's language is not common parlance, not addressed to all comers, but intended for those rare spirits capable of attaining to superhuman solitude in the very bosom of humanity.

"The man who speaks has nevertheless broken out of the solitude to which his condemnation of other people has condemned him.

"This monstrous anomaly hardly seems to correspond with the intentions of a man who, as he spoke, forgot the solitude to which he was condemning himself more unreservedly than other people had done, for he was betraying this solitude. Normal men, standing for common necessity, obviously could not understand him. His plea could not have any meaning, so that this enormous work taught solitude in solitude; a century and a half passed before its message was spread.

"Misunderstanding and revulsion from the generality of mankind are the only results worth of de Sade's ideas.

"De Sade's philosophy is not to be classed as madness. It is simply an excess, an excess to make our heads reel, but the excess of our own extravagance. We cannot ignore this without ignoring our own nature--and it is our nature that makes us tremble with fear.

"For the sake of greater satisfaction de Sade strove to infuse violence with the orderly calm of awareness.

"De Sade's writings, and this is their peculiar value, tend to bring men back to an awareness of something they have almost completely turned their backs on, looking for loop-holes and postponing the moment for coming to terms.

"They bring to man's thinking on the subject of violence the slow pace and the spirit of observation that characterise the conscious intelligence.

"In this way we reach a violence possessing the calmness of reason.

"The fact is that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted the mind.

"It is only today we realise that without de Sade's cruelty we should never have penetrated with such ease the once inaccessible domain where the most painful truths lay hidden.

"And if today the average man has a profound insight into what transgression means for him, de Sade was the one who made ready the path. Now the average man knows that he must become aware of the things which repel him most violently--those things which repel us most violently are part of our own nature."


--Georges Bataille, "De Sade and the normal man" in L'Erotisme (Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo), 1957

www.TheSteppe.com

The dog

El perro

Francisco Goya
1746-1828 Spanish

Every Last One

"Eventually, every fetish will be commodified and every commodity will be fetishized."

--A.S. Hamrah, "A Better Mousetrap," Hermenaut, 2000 March 1

shared between ourselves and death

"We do not suddenly fall on death, but advance towards it by slight degrees; we die every day. For every day a little of our life is taken from us; even when we are growing, our life is on the wane. We lose our childhood, then our boyhood, and then our youth. Counting even yesterday, all past time is lost time; the very day which we are now spending is shared between ourselves and death. It is not the last drop that empties the water-clock, but all that which previously has flowed out; similarly, the final hour when we cease to exist does not of itself bring death; it merely of itself completes the death-process. We reach death at that moment, but we have been a long time on the way."

--Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Ad Lucilium epistulae morales, ca. 65 CE, translated by Richard M. Gummere

a grandeur, and unnecessary duplicates

“Seat thyself sultanically among the moons of Saturn, and take high abstracted man alone; and he seems a wonder, a grandeur, and a woe. But from the same point, take mankind in mass, and for the most part, they seem a mob of unnecessary duplicates, both contemporary and hereditary.”

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

Because if, maybe

Do you know how long you'll live, how long you'll tell them what filth they are, how long you'll sway here in this cage?

Yes.

But you'll still do it?

Yes.

Why? Do you like being pointless?

It isn't pointless.

Why not, you said it was. Why?

Because if I do it forever, maybe at the end of forever they'll let me die.


--Harlan Ellison, “Silent in Gehenna,” 1971

Lyrical IIII

Marilyn Manson
I don't like the drugs
But the drugs like me

Orgy
Message from Opticon
Guess what? You're out of time

Mark Chesnutt
And then if she's still on my mind I'll try to drink enough to drown the hurt
And if that don't work
I'll think of something

John Denver
Come let me love you
Let me give my life to you
Come love me again

Rolling Stones
I'll be in my basement room
With a needle and a spoon
And another girl to take my pain away

Shakira
Solo tu sabes bien quien soy
Y por eso es tuyo mi corazon

Strong Bad
Oh that skinny blonde girl
And the circles and the ages and the ages

K's Choice
I'm not an addict (maybe that's a lie)
Nothing means a thing to me

Coheed and Cambria
Bye bye, Beautiful
Don't bother to write

All Lyrical