Wrist work, casting spells, demon bitch straight from hell, RCB Sick Gang, powered up, can't you tell?
Fours up, gold slugs, in the sky like chemtrails, sacrificed a bitch still got blood under my fingernails.
I steal everything. Even things I shouldn't. Lately I've been rereading some of the works of an ostensibly militant esoteric organization called the Satanic Front. Reading their writings has given me ideas of my own. I consider this a good thing. One of the things I've been struggling with lately is I think my physical health has been slightly deteriorating, but not to a level that's particularly concerning, it's just that I'm getting older and I can no longer get by having the incredibly unhealthy lifestyle that I've had since my teenage years and early 20's. Thus, I need to start fixing my posture and exercising regularly. Physical exceptionalism is one thing the Satanic Front recommends in their writings, but so does Mao Zedong.
Lately, I haven't been reading much. I've spent the past month and a half studying Czech on a near daily basis and I already have about 20 hours of listening practice and 190,000 total words of reading practice with around 16,000 unique words. The only theoretical text I've been reading lately is the Geology of Morals from A Thousand Plateaus but before I went to bed yesterday I tried a couple paragraphs of their Treatise on Nomandology. It was there that I realized that I was absolutely correct about all of the writings in the book being interconnected, with arguments from one Plateau being necessary for a more complete comprehension of others. It makes me wonder if anything I'll write will ever take on a similar structure (or stratification) in the future. Maybe it already has. Recently I've been getting much more comfortable with the idea of working on multiple different manuscripts of books at the same time, and through my reading of the works of the Satanic Front, I've birthed another which I'm calling for now: Conspiratorial Diabolism: Theory and Practice, but I expect the name to change in the future.
I haven't really broken it up into manageable sections yet so it's still just an amorphous blob in my head. I think the main idea that I have at least right now is that I want the organization responsible for the writings in the book to be a continutation of the Temple of the Red Lodge after its dissolution, but this time with a different character from the original order being the guiding thrust behind its theoretical trajectory and activities. I haven't decided which. I think, but I'm not certain, that I want the writings of this new esoteric order to be based off of the Satanism of my character Dr. Nicholas Bodin, the great rival of my Dr. Jonathan Hubbur who both worked at the Selven Institute on the Vindex Protocols. More than likely to workshop other ideas for which short stories/theoretical writings that I'll want to include in it, I'll have to read more of the public documents of the Satanic Front, at least as much as I can stomach. The only writing in particular that I can think of is that I'd like to write a piece on theoretical and philosophical writings themselves as a form of esoteric initiation. The three writings that I think will help me the most should hypothetically be the Treatise on Nomadology, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines from Manuel DeLanda, and weirdly enough, Lifting the Absolute from Bronze Age Collapose within the writings of Revolutionary Demonology.
The other writing idea that I've been workshopping in my head is a post-apocalyptic novel which picks up from the ideas I started to germinate in my writing Liber 303 at the very end, where I came up the idea of a sort of communist inversion of Joshua Sutter's novel Iron Gates, the one I've been slowly outlining on my website. The name that I have for it in my head, at least for now, is Gates of Moss, which was intended to capture an image of the penitentiary headquarters of the Organization overgrown with vines and other plants, as nature starts to reclaim the region where they once dominated. I don't know how long I want it to take place after the events of Iron Gates, which I'm likely to retcon heavily based on my various misgivings with Sutter's writing and the various gaps and inconsistencies I see with his worldbuilding. Much like everything else I want to write, there's a few books I'd like to read first. I don't know if either of these two projects will end up maintaining the realism that I have as my initial guiding intention, in the sense that although I write about esoteric and occult orders, I want to try to avoid any kind of supernatural plot points or scenarios and stick to only what the known laws of physics allow. But, I think when I finally get around to reading Ribofunk I might start getting ideas for how to turn the first idea mentioned here into some kind of biopunk or body horror monstrosity similar to the visual aesthetic of Cruelty Squad. I'm undecided. Maybe I'll find a way to do both.
I missed two months of blog posts because I've been struggling to write them lately, probably because I rarely if ever take notes on anything and unlike previous times in my life I haven't really been keeping a consistent journal or diary so all of my thoughts lately feel very loose and freeform, as if they're mere impressions. Thinking is hard and I can only spend so much time doing it. Sometimes I feel as if I'm only ever really thinking when I have a book in my hands, and sometimes I question whether or not I'm doing a particularly good job at thinking at all even when one's between my fingers. There's four books in particular that I see as my current goals but it'll take me a very long time to get to them, as they're called Tisíc plošin, Fenomenologie Ducha, Etika, and Kritika čistého rozumu. Czech translations of either books I've read before or books I've yet to read. Unfortunately for myself, or perhaps fortunately, the first two books in Czech that I'm likely to read are the Czech translations of the first Harry Potter book and Neuromancer respectively, since I already have the .epubs for them. I think I'll also finally be able to get around to the Eastern European science fiction classics Solaris and Roadside Picnic since I managed to find Czech translations of those as well. I'm hoping they'll help with Gates of Moss.
Another reason it's been harder to write blog posts lately is because I think of them differently now than I did when I started working on this website, whenever I go back and read through some of my own blog posts each one feels like a snapshot of either my philosophical trajectory or reading habits at that very precise moment, and then by the time I get to one either a couple months after or a few months before I realize that my own trajectory is all over the place and scatterbrained. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it made me think of Deleuze's idea of rather than having one big Subject or big 'I' that we all are, we're instead a collection of larval selves that move and grow in different directions simultaneously. Some grow larger, fatter, like Duriel in Diablo 2, and others merely die after being stepped on, squishing underneath one's foot with the satisfying squirm of pus and blood. Every time I write a post it's as if I'm rewriting everything, if only for those brief hours where I can actually manage to sit down and write. I know I don't do it enough. I know I don't work as hard as I should. I get distracted by all sorts of things. Momentum is hard to keep. Promises, even to myself, are hard to hold. I know that even if I wrote enough, I don't revise enough. At the sentence by sentence level, or even just agonizing over a single word. It's silly because I read so much bothersome material, whether from the Satanic Front or the Tempel ov Blood and think of myself as so far beyond it, but the challenge, the real problematic, is simply putting words to the page while I interrogate how deeply invested, perhaps libidinally invested, I really am.
Reza Negarestani, please forgive me. This is very much a potentially unrelated tangent but I've been reading A Thousand Plateaus and for whatever reason the very first Plateau that I felt I really connected with and that I've reread the most is still The Geology of Morals. In it, Deleuze and Guattari decide to use the character Professor Challenger as a mouthpiece for some of their ideas. When I first read it, I genuinely had no idea who the hell Professor Challenger was and I thought it was somebody they made up the way Nick Land made up Dr. Barker or Reza Negarestani made up Dr. Parsani. Come to find out, Professor Challenger is a character from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's science fiction works, which is rather bizarre and interesting to me because within Difference and Repetiton, Deleuze remarks that philosophy must serve as both a detective story and as a kind of science fiction. It only occured to me recently that Deleuze's idea of science fiction is probably closer to something like the 1925 adaptation of Doyle's story The Lost World or Jules Verne than it is something like Terminator, Predator or Neuromancer. It was Land's and Negarestani's honor to bring Deleuze's impression of philosophy as a kind of detective story or work of science fiction to the late 20th century rather than the late 19th century. As far as philosophical detective stories are concerned, a good friend of mind recently recommended that I read The Name of the Rose which I've unfortunately yet to start.
An odd thing I've been considering lately is that I wonder what exactly it is that contributes to the raw density of one's thought. Heraclitus was the first philosopher that I've ever felt like I've truly read and it's only because all we have are around 140 fragments. One paragraph of either The Phenomenology of Spirit, Difference and Repetition, or A Thousand Plateaus feels as if it takes 30 minutes of explanation. Getting through the entirety of any one of these is an object lesson in mental exhaustion. I mention this because one particular work of similar length that, although comprehensive, doesn't seem to take on a similar level of structural density (or perhaps obscurity), is Pliny's Natural History. A rather fine book. I have nothing against it. Does all of this trace back to the Critique of Pure Reason? Is that the star which collapsed into a brilliant supernova that provided all of the necessary elements for even brigther, more luminous, more complex stars in the Western philosophical galaxy to flourish and develop from the clouds of Kant's stellar dust? I don't know. When I die, I hope my afterlife is an infinite School of Athens, where every philosopher from every continent comes for discussion and debate after their mortal passing, where Socrates can speak with Nezahualcoyotl, Hegel can speak with Bodhidharma, Marcus Agrippa with Georges Bataille, Hermes Trismegistus with Lao-Tzu, Marx with Brihaspati, and every student can learn, in some small way, from every teacher, and every teacher from every student, until the end of all.