/lit/ - Literature

>>17545938
We cannot say that modern technology is beautiful on the surface, there is little of the Persephonic quality we see in the Roman aqueducts. Rather, we can imagine that no reconciliation between Hades and Zeus ever came to fruition. The torture which goes into the creation of steels and all types of alloys is of this impossibly divided world, the world of the chasm. There is something in this even higher than the festival atmosphere: the monstrosities of steel and plastic are of a vision of the world being torn apart. This is the precise opposite picture of what is imagined with the "anthropocene". One image is of a man so impoverished that he dies in paradise not knowing the abundance which surrounds him; another that of a theology which defaces the humiliating creation of a God who had abandoned man, exiled him from the apocalypse. The most subtle torture exists at the boundaries of life and death, and the elemental man wants to see everything behind creation, the underworld from which all things arise. This is an opposite movement to the Roman myth of creation, but nonetheless equal in its power. One may think of the hero of our age as the only dead man of the Battle of Anghiari, wounded and torn to shreds as an Actaeon figure, one buried beneath the piles of horses who will rise from his death when the continents merge.

There is also the fall of Syracuse in this, the blindness of the festival and the victory atmosphere quickly turned to defeat. The end to the technological order will likely come about in this way, and there are signs it is already happening. We no longer see the Archimedean points, yet they are everywhere, and when they begin to take form one will come to know the convergence of the continents. The formulas will be forgotten but we will see their end as a great vision of colour and light.