/lit/ - Literature

If, according to the elders, the monk must emulate the seraphim and cherubim in becoming "all eye" - an uncontaminated visual field - then we can extrapolate from this formula the nature of demons, who are, without a hint of irreverence, all anus: or, all cloaca, in which the genitalia and rectum coincide: the demons of the Manichees are like this, Cheshire jaws without the cat: I should say: a tear in the fabric of divine reality that is a mouth and its other end overlapped in a single, molecularly thin slice: it's with the "rules of construction" embedded in the synthetic a priori structure of space that input and output are distended into the temple of the human body, anagogically programmed in the image of God but now corrupt: Crystalman's grin in Lindsay's Arcturus is both the skull and the stench of the corpse, which surrenders its pollutants to the atmosphere as food for the spirits of the air: if your body does not emit the "odor of paradise" after death, ya dun goofed: compare the formula of 'all eye' to Nietzsche's doctrine of proportionality: everywhere he is an advocate of measure, and the monk a martyred food-body; he puts to death the body in himself compatible with a universe of mutual lacerating bodies; if the demon is a superposed mouth and cloaca, the Angel is a divine model of the monk aspiring to become a vigilant Wound, a vulvic rent in the heart doubling as an eye: Nietzsche is a lover of the auto-regulating harmony of the universe that abhors excess as much a vacuum, teleologically allergic as it is to extremes: but the spiritual world is the domain of extremes, and the Angels are patrons and agents of vertical tension. The priestly beyond which Nietzsche despises so much is an internal Beyond, the recovery of Adam's prelapsarian majesty, before the serpentine 'floaters' of his eye taught him how to consume and copulate. Ascetic vigilance is a crucifixion of the unconscious 'interest' we have accumulated in our flesh through sleep, food, and the hydra of greed. The sleep cycle is actually what sustains and replenishes the unconscious force of waking life. Doesn't the desert agree with Zoroaster? The body as a soteriological instrument, a hammer wielded against the forces of darkness - by itself. Evil, on the other hand, is a knife incessantly trying to cut itself - recall the Buddha's argument for the inaccessibility of the aggregates. We are far from Gnosticism now (for the time being). We are in the ethical domain of the ancient Albanian guest, whose unmitigated solitude is deifying, who only has to knock to be waited on by the divine family. "A greater democracy has never been envisioned."

It's with Lacan's conception of sexuality that he intersects with the desert: again, the point isn't that everything reduces to sex, but that sex reduces to everything: the sexual fantasy is symptomatic of what Peter Brown dubs that kernel of 'unsurrendered privacy' in the fallen heart; it's why redemption seems to so beautifully coincide with sociability in the Apophthegmata: there is nothing covert in the pure heart, no onanistic for-itself that enjoys in an obscene loop (the Gnostic analogue here is the charnel 'House of Secrets' in Scott Fincher's comic, that first primal veil drawn between the self and its community; Nietzsche's whinging about the Socratic rationalist split was too little, too late): we are sexual beings because we are private beings, or rather, sexuation is a deep correlate of the Pauli exclusion principle which we, as beings incarnated in a world of punitive limits, have elected to enjoy: a "spirit of the air" is a demon because it is a denizen of the Unlimited: it knows hunger without the digestive tract to act as a teleological check on that hunger: "bloat for the sake of bloat", per Bakker: we should say disembodied spirits are victims of a Pauli inclusion principle, where, crudely put, instead of two objects being forbidden from occupying the same point in space simultaneously, we have two objects forbidden from occupying anything other than that single point for any value of time: the fallen man is incarcerated in his body after death for what feel like subjective eons: this is what Gurdjieff means by the slug-man being interred in moon matter: he is buried in the solitude he fed with (his) life: it's funny how we hit on something like an inverted omniscience with Yaldabaoth and his planck eyes iterated endlessly throughout space and as space, a false god that wants to be everywhere and everywhen so as to be loved by everything, but continues to produce this world as his monument to unlove: we should curse this creature for making us notice our bodies: it's how we read those stories of monks tormented by their consciousness of some luxury in their cells that was pointed out to them, or otherwise blissfully ignorant of these same luxuries they were too pure to notice: the pristine Alyoshas of this world are the latter, the defiled the former: and it's maybe why the desert with its doctrine of so-called 'anteversive' salvation, a salvation that 'leans forward', has a leg up on the pagans with their retroversion to the One: the only way out is through, towards something like an impossible, futural virginity: it's on me now to notice a God for whom nothing is irrevocable precisely because everything is, a God of abject loserdom, the small bed in the corner, now seen: "I know a brother who spent a long time his cell using a small bed who said, 'I should have left my cell without making use of that small bed if no-one had told me it was there."

The contemplation of a woman's entrails is the only real application of the transcendental method: what are they but the literal condition of possibility of beautiful skin: a direct attack on the kundabuffer remnant and its privileging of the image over depth? Outside the world there are only demons. The name of the true God is pain. Don't be a grumbler. Pain is the limit that shields us from the evils of the air. In hell you're omniscient. "Prayer is warfare to the last breath."

The contemplation of a woman's entrails is the only real application of the transcendental method: what are they but the literal condition of possibility of beautiful skin: a direct attack on the kundabuffer remnant and its privileging of the image over depth? Outside the world there exist demons. The desert spirit has fled into outer space. Like the first Christian monks who only wore the hair on their bodies. Pain is the only thing that makes life real. Don't be a grumbler and eat whatever's on your plate. Pain is the limit that shields us from the evils of the air. In hell you're omniscient. "Prayer is warfare to the last breath."

The contemplation of a woman's entrails is the only real application of the transcendental method: what is it but the contemplation of a body's transcendental backstage: the literal condition of possibility of beautiful skin: a direct attack on the kundabuffer remnant and its privileging of the image over depth? Outside the world there are only demons. The evil spirits of the desert have fled into outer space. If you want to be an ascetic today you have to sing psalms on a dead moon. Like those first monks (the only ones deserving of the name) who only wore the hair on their bodies. Don't be a grumbler and eat whatever's on your plate. Pain is what makes life real because pain is the limit that shields us from the debauchery of (the demons of) the air. The Pauli inclusion principle. Inverse omniscience, everywhere to be but no one to love. Tranny spirits splayed like gravity across the universe. "Prayer is warfare to the last breath."

The contemplation of a woman's entrails is the only real monastic application of the transcendental method: what is it but the contemplation of a body's transcendental backstage: the literal condition of possibility of beautiful skin: a direct attack on the kundabuffer remnant and its privileging of the image over depth? Outside the world there are only demons. The evil spirits of the desert have fled into outer space. If you want to be an ascetic tonight you have to sing psalms on a dead moon. Become like those ancient monks (the only ones deserving of the name) who only wore the hair on their bodies. Don't be a grumbler and eat whatever's on your plate. Pain is what makes life real because pain is the limit that shields us from the debauchery of (the demons of) the air. The Pauli inclusion principle. Tranny spirits splayed like gravity across the universe. "Prayer is warfare to the last breath."

Compare the addict who compulsively repeats himself with St. Anthony's "I don't believe the Devil has ever tempted me with the same sin twice." The difference is conscious suffering. A genius isn't Schope's fruit (lol) but more like a monstrous egg, he has more white or 'inheritance' to burn through: so the founder of religion is a prodigal genius, the latter do struggle with darkness but never has their evil cornered them to the zero-degree of their good: birds are as pure as they seem and there's a Neoplatonic reason for why creatures in the ocean get more hideous the further down you go: belong to a world ruled by death, like the Comanche or under the Kanun: civs that question the blood law of "a head for a head" diminish the sheer transcendental mystique of being anthilled out of nothing and alive with other people. So one of the best arguments for how we used to love people before objects became a vaster information environment is the ethical category of the Albanian guest. Lonely families can make you a god ... Man isn't the subject but it's the subject which is the humanization of man: what is inaccessible to you is what is sexuating: not even feminism can think the split between Man ("Uni-sexed Identity") and subject and man and woman within the subject: eyes are cheating: "He who endures to the end will be saved."

Another point of difference between Gnosticism and desert spirituality has to do with the nature of salvation: is Gnosis primarily a nostalgia of a time when men still "spoke with the spirit of the apple tree", per Perlman, that is: is Gnosis a memory of Adam's condition before it was coarsened by food and armored over by the Law of the Marcionite demiurge? Or is it as otherworldly as we are typically led to believe. At least save us from the coomer gardens of Reichian paradise, where man is a star-like "point-of-orgasm": No, Adam was a 'retainer', because he was a Namer, an enclosed pneumatic circuit not unlike a star, but unlike what makes it hellish to be a star: just as Anthony emerged from the outer space of his solitude glowing with life, pre-emptively btfo'ing Nietzsche's facile critique of asceticism as well as Voegelin with his techno-""""gnostic"""" cartels and their horror of nature's causal sloppiness, hereditary imperfections, i.e the Problem of Harlequin Babies: it's here that the desert intersects with eco-gnosticism and its love of our lost natural condition, even with the "And it was good" of Genesis: but we can't forget Nimrod's demiurgic hominid, the argument that it's a Good Thing we have crawled out of the mud and are so steeped in sublunar complexity, that the local coherence of the brain crashes the global incoherence of the world and our immersion in the "darkness of paganism" and prehistory: but Christ on the Cross emerges from the heart, as Ahriman (Father of Autism) emerges from the brain: it is the heart which is a black hole that opens into universe white, and it is the brain which the kindly architects of the Manichaean cosmos constructed as the Bōlos of the flesh (to disastrous results - you can thank Descartes and his thinking = I, blind to the need for discerning pure and impure logismoi, for turning us all into sausage men): In any case, Anthony was the springhead of Christian asceticism, unless Jerome with his Paul of Thebes is to believed: when Paul and Anthony first met, they would refuse to eat or drink unless the other had first done so, considering it a matter of rank: two old men eating plates of camel dung straw outside the pornography of History: "PATIENT ENDURANCE IS THE HIGHEST AUSTERITY."

The Gnostic true God is the God of Adam, per Sloterdijk's formula: "[He is] the unwounded that does not wound." While the God of the Cross is the God of the self-hating Cainite/dog-man, the God of non-tautological salvation: the God of weepers shown up by greengrocers in the village - see: the great Macarius himself one-upped by two lowly peasant women in a nearby village: we think this is a far more compelling description of the difference between the ariyan and Christian temperaments than anything the Nietzsche thru Crowley strain has ever cooked up: by the way, if your grand system happens to be contiguous with 'butt stuff', ya dun goofed: maybe we see this typology reproduced in the difference between martial Zoroastrian dualism vs. the Manichaean who winces stepping on grass (water is sentient, etc.). Anyways, the skeleton key here is the desert formula that goes: "He who is wounded and wounds belongs to the Devil. He who is unwounded and does not wound belongs to Adam. He who is wounded and does not wound belongs to Christ." The gnostic Reasons himself out of the world, the desert saint Weeps himself out of it: Arsenius whose tears channeled a hollow in a chest, so intense was his terror of the "diabolical inner figure" that sent him wailing into the desert: Judas' weeping in the Book of Judas refutes the naive Hegelian knowledge of the limit that places one beyond that limit: Judas' agony over his own condition only ends up confirming it, confirming PKD, who says: there is a knowledge that makes you a part of it the more you grasp it vs. the hyper-ignorance of the child, and so forth. What causes a man like Arsenius to say on his deathbed: the fear that is with me now has been with me always? But it's still true that the Desert Father and the Gnostic both share an aversion towards food and drink, at least if we take Lacarriere at his word. Both are pleasing to God. The weeper reposes in perfect, paradoxical peace. The gnostic eats honey-cakes with all the angels of symmetry. "HE WHO DOES NOT WEEP FOR HIMSELF HERE BELOW WILL WEEP ETERNALLY HEREAFTER."

The would-be anchorite's flight to the desert isn't motivated by a horror of sin so much as it is a horror of the fact that everything is forgivable: just as it is health, and not sickness, which is the condition of sin: a horror of the 'empty tomb', the radical distinction between life and the world which forecloses all possibility of contamination: that my generic and so unfallen 'human' identity forgives and accommodates all contaminations, it is as indifferent to Evil as the Real is to thought, or the sky is to the lightning bolt, etc. That the murderer has as much a right to seek God in the cell of his heart as his victim, should he be so willing - see: Secret Sunshine (2007). Hegel kidnaps life in order to offer it up, bound and gagged, to the world's drama of sin and redemption. In other words, we're talking about a horror not so much of the 'placelessness' of Evil but of the Good itself, that which Shinji tries to strangle out of Asuka for being more real than she herself (and so more real than him): but it isn't Logos that rapes the Ground, it is that latter matrix which swallows the green sparks of the non-ontological like a phagocyte. Like woman that is the backseat passenger of the Paglia's cthonian machine; 'man' is something alien to the 'human': "The subject needs the human, but the human does not need the subject ... THE NAME OF GOD IS GOD, BUT GOD IS NOT THE NAME."