Prelude to Note about James Joyce and the Sinthome

„My only misgiving regarding „American Ulysses“ is that its length (864 pages) will scare off all but the most enthusiastic Civil War enthusiasts. I hope as many people as possible read this book“

– I think I will read this book, since I also think it is better than the Irish Ulysses (this is easy; the Irish Ulysses is the greatest shit book of all time, next to Finnegan´s Wake).

We should be grateful to historian Ronald C. White for a thorough and nuanced biography of one of the most consequential figures in American history.
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Philip HautmannThe Irish Ulysses being the greatest shit book of all time seems to confirm that creative endeavour gets spoiled and is doomed, when ego is a primary motive; that might be the case with the ordinary genius; the non-ordinary, transcendent genius will rather strive not for immortality among humans but for an abstract immortality, realignment with spacetime, which is his true element; the psychology of the transcendent genius is NOT very much alike the human psychology but is of a higher order. Thus spake L´Innomable.

Update about the Pathless Path

The true scientist, philosopher, artist – i.e. the truth-seeker – will strive for knowledge about what is already known, but, essentially, strive to look deep into the universe to discover new stars, new galaxies, new worlds. – In doing so, the truth-seeker also looks into himself; a triviality. – New worlds, new illuminations, are to be found in the unexpected, the trivial, on the street, in non-locations (non-lieus, Nicht-Orte) – to which the truth-seeker has a natural bond and solidarity – when the locations of the sublime – to which the truth-seeker also has a natural bond and a natural solidarity -, of course, have been explored as well; the locus of the existential truth is the true individual, the locus of truth of the world is a flower-like domain shifting through totality. – To become the locus of truth the truth-seeker must do what is called to „empty himself“. This means he must study a lot, as much as possible, and then 1) realign it with reality 2) deconstruct it – to gain pure insight, pure perception, pure forms of perception on which he can re-establish pure concepts – therein, he will come into contact with the nullfläche, the primal ground of his own mind, upon which everything else emerges, naturally (the vision of the primal ground is personal and subjective though there are similarities among those visions; it might be a surface of dirty white where no location is distinguished from any other, or, in closer touch with the outside world, an unspectacular ventilation shaft). In an act like this, everything is contained, like in the movements, gestures and actions of children everything is contained about what can ever be said, thought and perceived about those acts, because everything about those acts is authentic, simple and direct, because they incorporate the full potential of the idea of those movements, nothing is hidden, everything is there, such is purity. – This is, then, „the pathless path“. – Some might find a speech like that „a mystery wrapped in an enigma“. That is a good step to begin with. Meditate about that.

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Thomas Traherne

„You must have glorious principles implanted in your nature; a clear eye able to see afar off; a great and generous heart, apt to enjoy at any distance; a good and liberal soul prone to delight in the felicity of all; and an infinite delight to be their treasure. Neither is it any prejudice to you that is required. For there is a great difference between a worm and a cherubim. And it more concerneth you to be an illustrious creature than to have the possession of the whole world.“
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“ You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars; and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world: and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs, as well as you. Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.”
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Centuries of Meditation

About Hell (and Emanuel Swedenborg)

I have read Kant´s Träume eines Geistersehers once again since sooner or later I want to read some Swedenborg. Ahhhh … what an extraordinary stylist Kant was! Yet not as awesome as Hegel! Both, however, are, approximately, the most hilarious stylists in philosphical writing. Swedenborg had a very high IQ, maybe even higher than Kant. Kant, however, claims that Swedenborg is a miserable, drab and dull stylist, and dismisses him all the same. In the appendix of my copy of Träume eines Geistersehers there are some writings also by Swedenborg and I can see that Kant was actually about right, at least concerning the style in those two short passages. But the same thing goes for other illustrious minds of that age, luckily bygone, also quoted in the appendix, including Herder. I like what Swedenborg says about hell. Clever it is. According to Richard Bucke, in his very important but largely forgotten book „Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind“, Bucke surmises that, like Buddha, Jesus, Johannes von Kreuz, Shakespeare, Balzac or Walt Whitman Swedenborg had achieved cosmic consiousness as well. Kant, however, was a man of reason, and someone who solely builds his house on reason („all brains, no heart“) surely is homosexual, if not pedophile in the brain. Emanuel the hero, Immanuel the fag quod erat demonstrandum

In a book by the knowledgable Pickover, A Beginner´s Guide to Immortality, I have read for the first time about hell-like near death experiences. In popular understanding near death experiences are cozy and ethereal, so it was previously unknown to me that not a few people have NDEs which rather resemble a state of hell or at least purgatory. Since mankind is composed of, say, 15 percent of people who are morally superior, 70 percent who are average and another 15 percent who are morally inferior it should not come as a surprise but as something completely logical respectively as an apparent consequence.

In Pickover´s book Swedenborg is also mentioned and it says:

„In his book „Heaven and Hell“, Swedenborg said that there was no devil, no single ruler of hell … Hell exists because it is the only place in which evil people feel comfortable. In heaven, the evil people would suffocate from the love and the goodness. According to Swedenborg, the creation of Hell was not an act of punishment but of divine mercy. When one dies, a person lives forever in the place that best matches the love the person fostered in his heart while on earth.“ (p. 66)

Ahh, the good Lord. Hears everything, sees everything, understands everything.

Sometimes, people who have near-death experiences report going in a different direction.
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Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind is a 1901 book by Richard Maurice Bucke, a Canadian psychiatrist. In this book, he explored the concept of Cosmic Consciousness, which he defined as „a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man.“
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As with heaven, there are various hell realms witnessed by near-death experiencers. We can even see many manifestations of hell right here in the physical realm. There are people in prison, in the Bahamas, in mental institutions, universities, skid row, palaces, crack houses, all kinds of life situa…
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Iron Maiden

25 and a half years ago I bought my first metal album: Iron Maiden´s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. (I came across popular music as a slow learner because I had considered it as vulgar before; then, at 14, I began to listen to Pink Floyd, Kraftwerk and the like, soon became interested in Iron Maiden and other heavy metal bands, because their obscurity attracted me. The first contact I made with Iron Maiden was when I was little and I saw the Piece of Mind LP at the Pro Kaufland when we were shopping, obviously in the early 1980s, the cover with the monster in the rubber room made an impression on me I still remember, ahhhh…) I initially disliked it but soon got into it, and soon got me some other metal records (from Helloween, Motörhead and Iron Maiden, later in 1991 Guns ´n´Roses and Metallica became big shots, etc.). – Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, one of Iron Maiden´s finest works, is a concept album about a person with supernatural powers. The forces of Good and Evil try to manipulate this person and to turn him into an agent for their causes. As it turns out the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son possesses the faculty of clairvoyance and foresees impending doom, yet, like Cassandra, is not taken seriously by people, respectively after the disaster gets all the blame for it. Despite his powers to see through people and through things the Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is not able to foresee his own demise and it remains dubious what he actually has achieved in the human realm – „The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones“, a quote from Shakespeare´s Julius Caesar which serves as a Leitmotif for the whole album. In the end it seems the story of the Seventh Son was only an episode in a seemingly eternal struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. – If we zoom out of this section of the fractal, where Good and Evil are categories of the understanding of man, we progressively refer to the cosmos, of the totality of existence, and their dubious purpose, where it is maybe right to envision forces of constructiveness (energy) and forces of dissolution (entropy) as the deep structure, as the ultimate logos; maybe those forces are conscious and god-like, or they create their own (quasi-) consciousness as they progressively unfold, and who knows if it is not the forces of entropy which guarantee the eternal repetition of the cycle (for instance the Penrosian Cycles of Time)? Or is the state of order we experience just a natural and logical state within an infinite mass of chaos which naturally inhabits finite regions of cosmos, bound to dissolute again? – Such questions are of some interest for humans, and although those interests are usually not very pronounced among people they form the screen on which the shadows of all the other ephemeral interests are projected. It is the call of the genius, who naturally sees all the ephemeral in its cosmic significance, who projects daily struggles into cosmic struggles, who expands finite contexts into the infinite – sometimes for good, sometimes for worse – to establish systems of reference, of meaning. In their final consequences, people will not truly understand them. Apart from that, everyone will understand them. Because they are just natural and soulful, intellectually and emotionally intelligent abstractions of everyday life, of the common life experience.

01 – Moonchild 02 – Infinite Dreams 03 – Can I Play With Madness 04 – The Evil That Men Do 05 – Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son 06 – The Prophecy 07 – The…
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