/ must do better.

today should be a short one. I am reading The Coming Race by Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, P.C., written in 1871. I am about a third of the way through, and he has begun to discuss the concept of vril. some believe it to be based partly on occult truths, with some esotericists thinking that vril, or something similar, is a real, fluid concept, & has led to breakthroughs in the past; most notably within Nazi Germany—popularised in media such as Wolfenstein and that film about Nazis on the moon—but that's not what I found interesting. in speaking of vril in a very 19th century mystic sort of way, Baron Lytton seems to stumble upon a perfect analogy for that tired subject—nuclear weapons. bear in mind he was writing more than twenty years before Mr & Mrs Curie began to poison themselves with radium, and more than forty years before H.G. Wells' The World Set Free.

the book describes a young adventurer who stumbles into a subterranean civilisation of peaceful, technologically superior beings which seem to have broken from the mainland at a time lost to history, during a geological shift. they toiled as the "barbarians" aboveground did for some time, until eventually discovering vril, which is a mysterious fluid-like energy which exists in everything and can be used for seemingly endless purposes, including weapons of mass destruction, motionless flight, empowering automata, & gently lighting their enormous underground domes the size of cities with tens of thousands of inhabitants. about a third of the way through, the history of their race is explained to the narrator, and they discuss vril:

As these effects became familiarly known and skilfully administered, war between the Vril-discoverers ceased, for they brought the art of destruction to such perfection as to annul all superiority in numbers, discipline, or military skill. The fire lodged in the hollow of a rod directed by the hand of a child could shatter the strongest fortress, or cleave its burning way from the van to the rear of an embattled host. If army met army, and both had command of this agency, it could be but to the annihilation of each. The age of war was therefore gone, but with the cessation of war other effects bearing upon the social state soon became apparent. Man was so completely at the mercy of man, each whom he encountered being able, if so willing, to slay him on the instant, that all notions of government by force gradually vanished from political systems and forms of war.

this is not only a near-perfect analogy for nuclear weapons, but even further than that, it provides a possible answer to the simulation hypothesis. generally stated, it exists thus:

one of three things are true:

1. there is something intrinsic in the journey towards creating the technology necessary for simulations that leads to the end of civilisation, or

2. there is something intrinsic in the journey towards creating the technology necessary for simulations that leads to a lack of interest in the creation of them (moral, &c.), or

3. we are in a simulation.

so Baron Lytton's vision for the future seems to fit into the first and second possibilities. if something like vril is discovered—& humanity develops the ability to potentially end civilisation—our morality will gradually change so that both: we are uninterested in ending civilisation, and we would not be interested in creating simulations.

this is fairly unintelligent rambling, but I thought it was interesting how these ideas crop up, likely because Baron Lytton—much like another hero Samuel Taylor Coleridge—was hopped up on one "potion" or another for much of his writing career.

earnestly, Elliot

found myself embarrassingly taken by Byron's Don Juan, so taking some time out to reapply myself to a little more reality, as it's seeping into my prose and personality. the first time I comment on the blackness of someone's eyes, or note how fast the sun is moving, I'm going to take a step back from reading the Romantics. such dense ideas and symbolism are scattered throughout the stanzas, but also are a lot of subtle (and less than subtle) attacks on other poets, or other vague "celebrity" figures of the time, one stanza commenting on death, or the affect a teacher has on a young mind, the next making a strange joke about wanting to have sex with a woman he met at a party. it's altogether too genius and too stupid for me.

this diary entry's poem is the first part of Choruses from 'The Rock' by T.S. Eliot, which I was reading aloud until he began to talk of knowledge, and then I fell out of all sorts and into my own mind, and shocked still.

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of ideas and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

this was not at all like my reading of Coleridge, which was stunted and stopping and stumbling over the verbiage and meaning of older words, and the forgotten rhymes, and the background and culture from which it sprang, and the deeper meanings therein. this was a more visceral reaction, as all of Eliot's poems seem to have, against a problem which he identified almost a hundred years ago. it is simple to say that his idea simply had not gravitas, and therefore was not picked up by the morays of better or more influential thinkers, but it is also not too conspiratorial to think that the notion that a free and wild pursuit of knowledge could lead to issues in the world that some wish to create.

the popular culture's understanding of and reaction to S C I E N C E is herdlike and damaging. it is a problem that has only compounded since Eliot's time; that Nietzschean (but of course some ways removed) idea of state of spiritual nihilism brought on by faithlessness has in a pathetic and shameful way been overcome by a new worship: that of knowledge and scientism. in some circles this observation is quaint and almost self-evident, but it remains that among my more deracinated or culturally isolated colleagues and friends, it is a seemingly harmless thing to pour time and effort into.

why do I say seemingly harmless? because the outcome of pouring time and effort into something—and as you well know, this applies to video games, team sports, gambling, politics, fandom—is that you become invested in it: in its existence, and in the way that you want it to progress. for a man who is invested in something, if it looks like its foundations are going to be shattered, or its largest figures are being attacked, or its premises are failing, or especially if one of his friends insults the thing, then he must take it as a personal slight against all the time and effort he has poured into it. this necessarily is an insult, and he defends the thing in insulting riposte, no matter how meaningless—in most senses of the word—the thing is.

I don't like Rick & Morty.

earnestly, Elliot

I've been attempting to consume more writings by the Romantics, it's a neglected period of European, and in more particular terms, English, writing—by this meaning that curricula needs must perhaps focus on Enlightenment the Modernism. much of it is surprisingly thorough and soulful inspections of metaphysics-as-it-approaches-the-physical. I love mentions of animus and longing, of goodness, greatness, and depth—the Romantics made headway in understanding these things, which were then thoroughly destroyed by the modernists, and now mocked. or that is how the culture is taught, but there is truth in the words that even as a fairly well-educated man, I had never considered.

this is an excerpt from Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, which I have been struggling with the past few days.

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.

at first read I could not follow the words at all; music in the background, thought lucid but fairly confused, moving at a pace too excited by stimulus to inspect the words. I made it some ways through the poem without any sort of meaning reaching me, accepting the nice words and letting the timbre and weight and muscle and sinew of the poem wash over me, but anything higher—or deeper—escaped me.

the image of being alone in a silent room, and your only companion being the fire, is beautiful, of course, and immediately evokes that dichotomy of creation and destruction of flame, the Sun's life-giving and a wildfire's wrath. but in the same breath he evokes this terribly lonely idea of the Spirit. I say lonely because it is apart from him, and in my reading, yearning for meaning. Spirit seeks an echo or mirror, it seeks a confidant and connection, an identity it can recognise—something we lack. it was imagined, perhaps, that by removing the spirit from man, or at least stripping it of its primary importance, that we would no longer have this dysfunction. the common refrain of those conscious people racked by postmodernism—some call themselves metamodernists—is that we have had meaning stripped from us, and only the last few generations have done, and it has been gradual, and now we are so isolated from history and people and spirit, and so connected globally and blurred to one entity, that we have become dysfunctional.

this is on my mind often, though it was the end of the excerpt that stopped me in my second reading. in the presuppositionally and propositionally rational world we have no choice but to inhabit, Thought cannot be mocked. not until we reach the very edges of the postmodern do we find those who deny thought its emphasis. in fact the mainstream of the new science movement deifies thought in an almost unsettling way. but in this, Coleridge writes that in searching for meaning, the Spirit makes a toy of Thought. that is my reading of it. and this sent a chill down my spine.

earnestly, Elliot

over the weekend I read Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and much of Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Steppenwolf is terrifying and nihilistic and at the moment speaks to quite a few different things that I am attempting to understand / ignore.

of Tropic of Cancer, though, I enjoyed the modernism in abstract, which reached to surrealism at points. some passages were a little caustic for my taste. it's well written, of course, and there seems to be some real heart and passion there. overall, it was a fun read, though the themes don't gel with the type of man I'm trying to be, and some of the really long stints of dialogue—between or about characters who are never explored—are boring.

after reading the first few "chapters" I knew I had to rewrite the beginning of my novel. there's a similarity in the context, and though we have entirely different perspectives on how to live, there was a passive rationality in my character—useless and flaccid. it comes to be about the explosion of spirit within a deracinated man, through to its inevitable end. one cannot tell the story of a man coming to understand himself—becoming himself—from such a dull and logical place.

it's often peurilely said that change is the only constant in our lives, but I feel like—even more so than in university—my view on life and understanding of 'being' has been thrown around so rapidly from month to month that just staying upright is difficult; contorting these notions into a coherent narrative seems impossible.

fiction has been commercialised and so split up into such standardised categories that I feel forced to create a novel, however, finished, it barely comes to one hundred pages. this makes it a bloated story, and also makes it feel, to me, unfulfilled—but I also think it means that it is without fluff. the piece started as something that I can spit out quickly; something to peddle to publishers which would be commercially relevant but also unimportant to me.

earnestly, Elliot

we don't go from ignorant childhood to adult individualism, we go from wild child to a disciplined adulthood. we have to make ourselves slaves to our disciplines, and these are cultural, national or racial; all have differing levels of clarity and justifiability; all cannot be true at the same time. I'm not sure I know the question that follows this revelation; I know that Nietzsche ended his investigation shortly after bringing this to a civilisational level;

how are we to live when God is dead?

in bringing the revelation to this level, it becomes (certainly for me) impossible to tackle. he famously prophesied that we must either drift toward nihilism or totalitarianism without God. now it certainly seems that the culture we inhabit has fallen very close to nihilism, as in the middle of the last century we fell sway to totalitarianism and it left such a scar, such a terrible taste in the mouth, that any step towards that direction again has become impossible, and so the slippery slope in the other direction, that heedless crashing towards liberty in itself, which every method of thought, every religion, every ideology, has warned against; has become synonymous with the good.

the limping, tragic figure of the culture we inhabit is open to searing critique from within, and joyfully, and open to existential threats from without, and blindly. if Nietzsche was correct, then it seems we've chosen nihilism on a civilisational level. diagnosis is vulgar, vapid and on the whole unhelpful—it is made of the same spirit as anarchic revolutions which have no solution at the other side.

so instead I can try to focus on just what it means for the individual. I don't know the answer to this question either. how can cultural norms affect an individual? isn't it paradoxical, or at least offensively generic, to be able to investigate an individual by the cultural norms? but clarity of being requires that we do just that, or at least live as though we do. the distinction between people has necessarily become clearer in society as it becomes more diverse. in perhaps its most obvious forms it's the unfeeling nature of perusing foreign news;

I receive BBC Breaking News Twitter notifications. I will read many killed and wounded in explosion in... and my heart will race, but then I'll read Mosul, or eastern China, and I'll almost automatically swipe the notification away. the constant bombardment of news that one is expected to undertake on a daily basis so as to remain up-to-date, is partly to blame—we have only enough minutes in the day to mourn—but if it's twenty-two dead in Manchester, it can affect me for days.

we've been thrust into an uncaring world, goes the cynical and overplayed idea, and brought up by people who barely even know themselves, but then we're taught that to look to the future means destroying the past. I wonder if the ramblings of my millennial peers are just the sensationalism of youth; reactionary views in those who will grow out of them. I'm in two minds, as a conflict within my generation between the alt-right and the communist youth would probably be quite productive.

earnestly, Elliot

I think sometimes—often, some seasons—that I have reasoned myself out of my fear of death. this issue of the fear of death has of course compounded since losing my faith, and I can no longer envision how I felt when I still had a sense of the eternal. I think sometimes that I have outgrown my fear of death, that it's only a part of reality; and perhaps even that it is the existence of death that gives meaning to everything that precedes it. but this ultimately ends up feeling more like ignorance, and thinking on it for any amount of time in an emotional way has me terrified again.

so either we can live in constant fear of death, or we can live in ignorance. being self-conscious has two distinct meanings, one negative and one positive. either it means Someone who cares too much about his body or spirit or Someone who is aware of his body or spirit. maybe these meanings are contradictory and only a slip of language, but in both meanings, if someone stops being self-conscious, they lose and gain something. the negative meaning; they gain confidence but may lose modesty and the ability to police oneself. the positive meaning; they gain a connectedness—enlightenment, perhaps—but lose the sense of time.

from a Western perspective, our sense of time can be understood as The I which continues to exist. of course we can only be aware of time in the form and speed in which we experience it, and therefore it can only be understood self-referentially. my fear of death rears its head when I think of things emotionally, which paradoxically seems to be happening more as I become more of an adult. I'm 26 now, and even two years ago I was militantly rational, of the dogmatic opinion that reason is the way we understand the world, but now my opinion is much closer to believing It is impossible to understand the world with reason.

since my last blog post, I have visited Germany for a celebration of my great aunt's eighty years, and for a relaxed blood-get-together. the place I took the above photo, Römerberg, is a beautiful historical village, a set of houses in the old style. it was completely destroyed by Allied (British) bombshells during the Second War, and so what stands there now are a modern reimagining. this knowledge didn't make them any less beautiful, but it did make the experience more melancholic. no, what made the experience less-than-beautiful was the anti-Erdogan rally (understandable, I'm sure) which disrupted the whole of Frankfurt and then settled inside the square. the cropped bottom of the photo shows shaken pedestrians and military police.

and of course yesterday, the attack on Manchester happened. I'm not using this blog as a news journal, or a way to convey political beliefs, so I'll speak of things through my new emotional lens, which is inherently self-focused, but hopefully it won't seem too narcissistic. when I first heard the news of the explosion (at that time it was thought to be either a balloon that burst and caused a confused stampede, or a speaker that exploded), I lamented at the tragedy in a detached way, thinking of all the ways the facts could be relayed, and interested to learn more. it was not until midday today, when they announced the first few names of the deceased, including an eight-year-old girl, that the other, much older, part of my brain took over; what in times prior we would have called Heart. the news stopped me, I was unable to talk to my colleagues more than grunts, and I couldn't concentrate on work. I became unfeasibly sad at the news, as I was very aware that either I would become very sad or very angry, and anger wouldn't have been 'helpful' in my situation. even now I can't stop thinking about the lives lost.

wow, a very disjointed and hastily-written post this time.

earnestly, Elliot

to a large extent I have given up on trying to understand the world, and therefore have given up on trying to explain myself within the world. if I do not understand where the world is, and certainly not where it is heading, then I do not know my own place in it. this is an easy conclusion to come to, and perhaps it's cowardly, but I certainly don't think it's something tired and overused. there is something inherently surreal about the world, and perhaps it is some kind of lazy historicism to call the current age 'the end of history', but it certainly makes sense. Kurt Vonnegut wrote,

I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. the best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. this theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. they are super-sensitive. they keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realise that there is any danger whatsoever.

I think those words now aren't only prescient but quite intelligent. but in its prescience it also has a time-specific quality to it. there are many adventures that mankind have undertaken; some damaged us more than others, and some seemingly tore us apart that we might not heal, but this might be 'the end of adventure'. the idea that we may have had our day—that man reached a pinnacle and thereafter can only fall—is one that every day has more weight. a man must be very careful when he makes these sorts of proclamations; as doomsayers have been proven wrong almost every time they have sprung up, but we also can't lose ourselves in the colourful blur of meaningless optimism that post-modernity promises.

so the picture above showed two tips jars at a coffeeshop. the idea was that you were casting your vote with your change. the coffeeshop sits on the crossroads which ties together four worlds. one way takes you to the East Asian (Chinese, mostly) campus of the university, one way is to the Magistrates Court, one way is to the degraded part of the centre of the city, and the last way is to the arts school. the clientele is therefore quite a comprehensive selection of the modern city society, and yet the change was not evenly distributed. it's harder to tell from the picture, but there was three or four times as much change, and with more valuable coins, in the glass titled "Platitude & Happiness". the glass titled "FREE will", before I put my change into it, was nearly completely empty.

either this says something important and worrying about humanity, or it says something terrifying about humanity. either, it is simply the richer people who want Platitude & Happiness, because they have already made their money, they spend their money well and they tip well. this means that they have more purchasing power, which means that society is damned to go down the road of meaningless consumerism. or, it means that there are simply more people who value Platitude & Happiness than people who value FREE will—that the British penchant for sarcasm has become fully, and with self-awareness, nihilistic—and this means that we're already at the end of that road.

earnestly, Elliot

P.S. on the website that I found this quote (while looking it up for the exact wording), the quote underneath it is "from a withered tree, a flower blooms" - Buddha. so maybe all isn't lost, and all we have to do is make it through the hard times that I see coming.