Re-run

Memento
June 7, 2008

Memento, n.; A hint, suggestion, token, or memorial, to awaken memory; that which reminds or recalls to memory; a souvenir.
[1913 Webster]

I thought to capture my history but was surprised to find it won't stay put; I'm not sure I recognize it. Sometimes it's a faint image, like a 3-D hologram, shimmying and wavering. I reach for it and it flickers out as my hand passes through. I don't know if it isn't just a composite of experience real and imagined, some mine, some stolen from others, some culled from the cultural commons. There are those moments we all have, of sudden temporary displacement, wherein we do not recognize our surroundings, the life that sprung up around us, that is to say moments when we do not recognize ourselves. These leave behind the residue of doubt. 

I'm having trouble neatly separating the experience from the flotsam trapped in the recesses and eddies of my mind, from the residue still building up about the edges of the endless stream of electronic illusion passing through even now. The sticky fragments of no particular relevance left behind in no sensible order. I can no longer clearly demarcate the boundary between the real and the representational. I see now I never really could. Did I live this life? Perhaps I saw it all on TV.

Nothing is stranger than to look in one's past and ask: did this happen? Am I that child, connected to the present by a chain of heart beats? How in the hell can this all be? How can this world be real? All this time spent no more than a blip; inconsequential, yet everything I know.

The truth is a tear of mercury that resists containment. It cannot be seen head-on or appreciated in full. It will not be drawn in from the periphery. We are all reduced to furtive voyeurs of our own lives in the end. Your history is that light smudge in the corner of your eye, that flits away when you look in its direction.
I haven't done anything here, after all. Skirting the issue always; the story of my life, of all our lives, of humanity. All this supposed revelation just circling the periphery like a basketball "rimming out." Nothing.

The real journey I will not make.
Or maybe not. Maybe we all make that journey within, the only real journey there is, eventually. Maybe that's what death is. Going home. The incoherent babble of death's delirium is the purging, surrendering energy back into the ether, in waves of language by way of dissipating will, a chemical reaction rendering our identities inert and final. Only after it can no longer be known, only after it is lost is it made whole; only then does it lose its contingent nature and become complete. Or not. Who knows?

This, this is all just stalking, lurking about outside the fortress of reality in the forest of illusion.
No: illusion is the fortress, reality the forest.

Life During Wartime

Talking to Luke Ford about white life under occupation in the Current Year and other things.

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Two Goys and a Jew

Good Torah Talk with the irrepressible iconoclast Luke Ford and Casey the Classicist. Prominent guests next week.

0:15 Sukkot.

2:15 The subject today, Andrew Joyce's essay, The Alt Right and the Homosexual Question.

3:05 Luke opens talking about Dennis Prager's essay from 1989, Judaism, Homosexuality and Civilization:

When Judaism demanded that all sexual activity be channeled into marriage, it changed the world. The Torah's prohibition of non-marital sex quite simply made the creation of Western civilization possible. Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.
 This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.

8:10 Is heterosexual marriage the basis of society?

14:00 Sexual rage and its role in society.

16:05 Dennis' sexual rage. White Sharia Now.

18:20 More Prager.

It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of years after Judaism began this process, to perceive the extent to which undisciplined sex can dominate man's life and the life of society. Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society. 

 Human sexuality, especially male sexuality, is polymorphous, or utterly wild (far more so than animal sexuality). Men have had sex with women and with men; with little girls and young boys; with a single partner and in large groups; with total strangers and immediate family members; and with a variety of domesticated animals. They have achieved orgasm with inanimate objects such as leather, shoes, and other pieces of clothing, through urinating and defecating on each other (interested readers can see a photograph of the former at select art museums exhibiting the works of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe); by dressing in women's garments; by watching other human beings being tortured; by fondling children of either sex; by listening to a woman's disembodied voice (e.g., "phone sex"); and, of course, by looking at pictures of bodies or parts of bodies. 

There is little, animate or inanimate, that has not excited some men to orgasm. Of course, not all of these practices have been condoned by societies — parent-child incest and seducing another's man's wife have rarely been countenanced — but many have, and all illustrate what the unchanneled, or in Freudian terms, the "un-sublimated," sex drive can lead to.

Prager is right but in the West chastity and sexual morality arise from the same evolutionary pressures that shaped other behaviors. In the West Christianity developed into a relatively strict sexual morality because of the people adopting it, as of course is true for its other aspects.

20:50 A Surviving Remnant.

36:45 Betrayal as an aspect of American life.

39:00 Shouting Africans.

41:30 The amazing turnabout of the AIDS narrative.

46:20 Bad news in the War on Frapping.

49:55 Our senior masturbation correspondent Casey reports on Harvey Weinstein.

1:26:15 Aunt Mary Wants You. The problem of homosexual recruitment.

1:28:48 Luke riles up the powerful.

1:31:40 Paddock's motivation.

Observation

Our zeitgeist: everything is revealed and nothing is known.

Infernal Refugee Rag

I've got a little time left and nothing to lose. You have too much of both. Everything you do is contingent on your future; I have none. You must take care; I will take advantage. You pay your tithe in hypocrisy. You're invested. I'm busted. But I won't go away. I'm that crank with the uncertain means of income. I'm your village atheist. I won't humor your gods, and I'm ten feet tall. I am familiar and unsettling, something you've heard of but have never seen. I'm always there, in the back, glowering, moving through the dim edge of the mass. My features are never clear to you, always in shadow...

You have bought in, like everyone else, to get by; you have incurred an unexpected debt. I am here to collect. No more payment in the counterfeit that is your condescension--I'll break your legs. We had a trust, you and I. You declared it invalid, and me contemptible; I am the perpetual loser. But what happens when the game is up? I am of the psychic barrens left behind by your rapacious bacchanal. Those wastes are always with me. You don't know shit. I want to bring them to you. You pass me on the street, looking away in distaste; I grab you by the collar, pin you up against the wall; listen here you bastards...

The old neighborhood rises up around us; I am momentarily overcome; you try to break free but I have the strength of the manic and I hold you by the neck at arms length, your legs squirming in air, with one hand while wiping my averted eyes with the other...

You owe me an explanation. I am your incorrigible white trash, your embarrassing relations, your loud neighbors overhead going at it, fighting, fucking, going mad. Trust your instinct; don't come up to complain. I will be gone soon enough. Then you'll miss me. You haven't met my understudy. Just wait...

Yes, wait here a while. I'm just getting started.

Cadence Song

Me? I hope to go out singing, defiantly. Like DeNiro's redneck Nemesis in Cape Fear, warbling in tongues as the rising tide consumes him. I want to play myself over this way, a segue between shows, until the dirty water fills my lungs. It's not bravery, it's denial; and denial gets a bad rap. Denial is essential. Here's to denial! Without it life would not be possible.

I had a moment of clarity--terror, that is--recently, regarding the reality of death. You may know what I'm talking about. These moments when the veil lifts, for no apparent reason. You stumble into the misty vale; you are suddenly lost. The unwelcome result of too much time alone. Solitude is dangerous. Solitude is a faint whiff of death. Solitude is death's annex. I didn't choose solitude, it chose me.

I think about death all the time, but from a cowardly psychological remove; indeed, the thinking and talking about death are just skirting about the reality, as if to appease it, or perhaps find some soft point of entry. We turn a thing over in our mind endlessly, compulsively, as if to discover it anew; we think our gaze has transforming powers. How can a thing be seen, named, obsessed over, so familiar, so present and still taunt us with its opacity and mystery?

Death is an impermeable thing because oblivion, or non-existence, is necessarily beyond comprehension. The mind cannot step outside itself in the end. You can't imagine, much less know, it; we make do with the possibility of a thing called oblivion; an alternative to the fire of redemption, before which we alternately cower or warm ourselves. But then, perhaps non-existence simply isn't possible. If energy never really dissipates, but merely transfers, morphing endlessly in an ultimately meaningless burlesque, why then should we cease to exist? Vapor, too, is a state of existence. Immortality is no less plausible than mortality. But the question cannot be answered. Each will learn--or not--for himself, alone, and only upon passing. Curious? You first.

This is why religion is a necessary constant of human behavior. Death is why the organized atheists can only piss into the wind endlessly. Theirs is a sterile zeal. Death is the darkened face of nature's mocking mystery; death will forever be the abyss, the reason why the Known will always be but a sheen over the far greater Unknown.
Buck up, friend! Come along with me! We'll sing together the tune we know by heart. We'll sing like the hopeless do, like the doomed and the damned will, when there's nothing left but the breath in their lungs. We'll shed our heartaches along the way. Think not of death but life. Death will abandon discretion to reveal himself soon enough. He's already here with us.