It's time to bid all my LJ friends adieu. This little experiment has outlived its usefulness, and in fact is daily taking on the characteristics of the "ossifying provisionalisms" with which I expressed a fascination on my info page. Apologies to the few folks who have friended me lately :p

Anyone wanting to keep in touch may of course feel free to do so via my email address, anarktika@yahoo.com.

A short note for those 3 or 4 of you living in Portland, OR: I may be relocating there next year, so gods willing maybe we'll meet in the flesh someday; and to bring this full circle I'll just here give a shout out to Portlander 31seel whose own journal was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, and was the final thing that made me decide to try the LJ thing for myself. I'd also like to thank negation1 for having planted the LJ meme in my head initially.

I've tried it, it worked for a time, and -- part of the fractured crystalline that is 'life' being possession of a fine-tuned discernment of the right time for beginnings and endings -- it's time to move on. I've strayed sufficiently far, both from the purpose I articulated to myself at the start of this, as well as from the proper purpose of a journal of any kind, that I think the broken horse now needs to be dismounted and dispatched with all due haste. It's now time to retreat to a respectful and responsible silence. For the second and final time this journal will witness the scalpel.

I'll leave this up for a few days to try to maximize the number of my LJ friends who see this note, thus hopefully minimizing the number of those who will scratch their heads at the line through my ID on their info page sometime next week.

Sincere wishes for the best for each and every one of you reading this, and be sure to catch the lunar eclipse tonight.

Ciao,
Michael.



Edit: out of respect for anyone who added any of this journal's entries to their memories, and at daoistraver's suggestion, I've decided not to delete the journal. Take it for what it's worth.

"You’re talking about something that’s a direct analogue of a volcano, just in reverse," Professor Stevenson said. "It’s like plunging a huge knife of molten metal into the Earth’s surface."

...Jesus says "No one comes to the Father except by me." What are we to make of this? It seems that this is the ultimate tribalistic, exlusivist claim for Christianity, but it need not be so. We only run into trouble if we consider the speaker to be Christ in the historic person of Jesus of Nazareth. But just as Christ Jesus is the result of the union of God's Spirit with a specific human body, so also is the Cosmic Christ the result of the union of God's Spirit with the cosmos, all of physical realty. If we are willing to consider Jesus as speaking in this verse from the perspective of his eternal Incarnation as the ground of all being, we hear a very different message, indeed: salvation apart from the physical, the body, is impossible.

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The path to liberation is the Self. All true gods know this. No other route exists; the only question remains in the mapping of the road and its shape, its breadth, the measure of the distance it shall unfurl into infinity.

The single question presupposes the answer to a previous inquiry: will the Self be little more than an impenetrable Gordian Knot, an eternal trap for the pettiest motivations which course through it; or shall its trajectory illuminate -- as Nietzsche might say -- an arrow, a straight line, a goal? For even the best among us, the path through these woods is obscure, overgrown, riddled with stinging nettles, littered with deadfall.

A paradox is inherent here, as it must be -- such is natural order. The Self is all, alpha and omega, and for those who allow themselves to be cast about by temporal events as a rudderless craft on the tumultuous oceans, there will be no substantive difference in their own ignoble beginning, middle, or end. But there are the few -- the doomed ones perhaps -- whose awareness of Self is likewise an awareness of steel: malleable amidst the correct circumstances and temperatures. Nietzsche again: ‘In times of peace, the warlike man attacks himself.’ The Self must be mined from the depths of the universe, baptised in flames, liquefied to molten form, cooled by deliberation, hammered and disciplined into shards and later precise pieces to be examined under blacklight and assembled into a machine of perfection: a tool of willpower and action.

Setting sail aeons ago from Thule, Avalon, Shambala, one reaches the shore without having arrived. The last engagements are the most unyielding -- terrifying precipices before the final ascent to the heights of Asgard, Montsalvat, paradesha, or other Olympian realms yet uncharted and unnamed. Thus the mountain is conquered, the abyss traversed, the grand entrance to a world of gods gained.

Destiny lies within. This is the beauty and higher purpose, the greatest and gravest gift.

Verily, the path to liberation is the Self.


-- Occultist, journalist, and musician Michael Moynihan

"In life -- as has been pointed out, since Nietzsche, by Simmel -- humans have a strange and almost incredible power to reach certain existential peaks at which "living more" (mehr leben), or the highest intensity of life, is transformed into "more than living" (mehr als leben). At these peaks, just as heat transforms into light, life becomes free of itself; not in the sense of the death of individuality or some kind of mystical shipwreck, but in the sense of a transcendent affirmation of life, in which anxiety, endless craving, yearning and worrying, the quest for religious faith, human supports and goals, all give way to a dominating sense of calm. There is something greater than life, within life itself, and not outside of it. This heroic experience is valuable and good in itself, whereas ordinary life is only driven by interests, external things, and human conventions. I use the word experience, because this state is not connected with any particular creed or theory (which are always worthless and relative); rather it presents itself in a most direct and undoubtable way, just like the experiences of pain and pleasure."

- Julius Evola, Meditations on the Peaks

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Some of the most advanced examples of order come to resemble chaos, so much so that they become more than casually indistinguishable from one another - I'm thinking of the frenetic and esoteric scales employed in certain forms of jazz and the "avant-garde" in instrumental/'classsical' music, as well as certain examples of modern and contemporary fine art; in particular the Ligeti opus "Symphonic Poem for 100 Metronomes" immediately comes to mind: imagine the cacophony of 100 metronomes set to different tempos all going off simultaneously, but each according to a rigorously worked-out and implemented prior plan (the score, in fact), such that the apparent web of noise can be as nearly exactly duplicated for repeat performances as any other performance of a symphony, perhaps even moreso. Chaos does not carbon-copy nearly so well.

What separates order from chaos, as precisely as an incision, is not any property inherent in the apparent structure, or lack thereof, of the object of investigation, but rather the presence or absence of intent. This, of course, immediately poses certain philosophical and ontological quandaries, but books have been written on much less.

So I'm trying to shop around for a Pink Floyd DVD, specifically "Live at Pompeii," and I've come to find out that it's only available in a crappy VCD format and -- PAL! No NTSC version is evidently to to be had of this particular item. How bizarre. In the process of educating myself on the distinctions between the two formats and looking for ways to bridge the gap (nothing short of buying a new DVD player, unfortunately), I learned that NTSC displays up to 525 lines of resolution, whereas PAL, which is used almost everywhere else in the world save for the US and Japan (arguably the two most industrialized countries and economies on the planet), displays up to 625 lines of resolution. (A third, SECAM, is used sparingly outside of the US as well.) That means that DVD viewers (those who can afford to watch DVD's) in, say, Iraq, are watching better-quality video than I imagine just about anyone reading this who is an American.

Oh my goodness... I think I've finally found the perfect icon now.

"Rationalism is at bottom nothing but criticism, and the critic is the reverse of the creator: he dissects and he reassembles; conception and birth are alien to him."

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision

"Extraordinarily, this single passage in Lange-Eichbaum's obscure book is the chief foundation, cited again and again, that Nietzsche had syphilis."

Thanks to caitlin2 for the heads up.

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For anyone interested, an ebook I made a year and a half ago from the above-mentioned opus:

When one dances or otherwise moves in tempo, and gives oneself, to a received rhythm, it's far less likely that the nuances and intricacies of that rhythm will be picked up on and consciously registered.

Stop dancing, step back, and listen - just listen - and don't move. The rhythm now registers as a series of patterns, patterns available for a conscious tracing, and the craft behind the construction can perhaps slowly unfurl itself like a pennant.

And once one has discerned craft, one is that much closer to discerning intent, as devices on a distant standard glimpsed through the fog of war.

"The danger with enthusiasts is that they envisage the situation as too simple. Enthusiasm is out of keeping with the goals that lie generations ahead. And yet it is with these that the actual decisions of history begin."

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision

As early as 1968, the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Israel possessed nuclear weapons. According to records of a 1976 classified briefing given by Carl Duckett, the CIA's deputy director for science and technology from 1967 o 1976, the agency informed President Johnson of this in early 1968. Johnson's response was to order the CIA not to inform any other members of the administration, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

"For those too are triflers who have wearied themselves in life by their activity, and yet have no object to which to direct every movement, and, in a word, all their thoughts."

-- The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

In 1228 Frederick II decided to make a Crusade to Palestine. He did it his way. It was the only historical Crusade without bloodshed. He met in Cairo with the Egyptian Sultan Malik al-Kamil. They talked about poetry and philosophy, and played chess. Frederick II gave to the Sultan one of his beloved falcons and received in exchange an elephant. They arranged an armistice and agreed that the holy sites Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth should belong to Frederick II. The treaty was signed on 18 February 1229 - a bloodless victory that accomplished more, with an excommunicate pen, than forty years of legal crusading had ever done.

When one moves laterally, in a trajectory perpendicular to the poles, the most one can hope to gain or lose is a matter of hours.

Move longitudinally, along the path of polarity, and whole seasons are at stake.

I just killed an ant over the Pacific Ocean, east of French Polynesia.

In other news, I've come to realize there's precious little that can't be turned into a delectable joke (for me at least) by somehow alluding to eating it. In particular those things for which I have particular fondness have consistently proven the best fodder.

Apologies to tangyapple.