Schizopost #7: Philosophers as "Gods of the Earth".

It’s gonna get weird. One paragraph of indulgent Latinisms and Greek, then I will switch back to (mostly) English, though I’d encourage one to push through the granite block I’m laying down first; in fact, it half-explains why I use so much granite in the first place.

One must forgive me the Heraclitean σκοπσον or ‘Uranian depths’ of the ‘Solar philosophy’, [Heraclitus: cover thy words in darkness. See the Preface to the Cryptomenytices of Selenus. For other sources, as to the Heraclitean dictate: Viccius, in the Exercitationum Philologicarum; August Pfeiffer, in Scepticismus Spenerianus Tripartitus; and finally, Conradus Danhaverus, in the Dialogus Fabula Primorum Hominum ante Adamum, from which I will include a small passage: Autosophos idque non consilio, & decreto praesiderante, sed judicio & eventu. Si coram cum hominibus perplexe locutus est, conjectura facilior est, expeditus & clarius literis sua oracula commisisse, ut intelligeretur a nobis etiam mortalium novissimis dudum ab illius orali ac visibiliter praesenti magisterio derelictis. Invidi est praeceptoris illud to σκοπσον, σκοπσον. Literis nonnulla tenebricosiora sed quae splendore solis per apertas senestras ligneas immisso clarescunt: sunt in Uranio templo etiam stellae obscuriores, sed cum a sole lucem imbibere, renident: habitat in ipsa oculorum nostrorum aediculam intimaque pupillam nigro aliquis, sed qui videndi facultatem juvat. Here it is explained that the philosopher must speak obscurely, as shine the far stars of the depth Uranian, knowing that Sol shall disperse them in turn,- for otherwise, the oral tradition necessary for keeping Philosophy alive would disappear. This injunction forces reliance upon a living community, without inadvertently crippling the philosophic genius of the individual, ‘in autosophos judicium eventu consiliis’, inasmuch as a living community would be required to maintain a process of initiation, by which the arcana were revealed in the necessary staging of revelatory gnosis.] whose subtle arcanum were concealed per quos phantasmata veniunt ab animam phantasiantem, per irradiationem intellectus agentis, quam spiritum, prout lumine vultus Dei signato super se naturaliter,- [‘The mind which, unable to apprehend itself, can therefor apprehend only images.’ Because the human intellect is unable to understand itself, it is unable to apprehend a knowledge of the universal as it exists in itself; (“Necesse est, quemcunque intelligentem phantasmata speculari”, as stated in Ferri’s Psicologia di Pietro Pomponazzi.) thus, citing Owen, in "The Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, “… in every abstract cognition there must be some material idolon, or individual”, by which alone we are able to form the universals. Slightly earlier, in this same work, we find another expression of the doctrine of a Two-Fold Truth, originating in Plato, on the part of Pomponazzi. “It is quite in harmony with Pomponazzi’s contempt for the vulgar, and his rule to treat them as children, as well as being a sort of practical corollary from his doctrine of Twofold Truth, that he asserts a philosophical ‘Disciplina Arcani’,- advocating the necessity of esoteric teaching incommunicable to the many.” We are told that such truths are not to be communicated to the common lot of men, which are to remain philosophic arcanum about which we must beware of even holding discourse with the uninitiated, since,- continuing from Owen,- “philosophers alone are the Gods of the Earth, and differ so much from all other men, of whatever rank and condition, as genuine men differ from those painted on canvas.” The same aphorism concerning the ‘necesse phantasmata speculari’ is found in the following: Gersonii Tractatus Primus Dramaticus Super Magnificat. Omnis itaque cognitio nostra, quantumcunque fiat per spiritum, naturali via, sine revelationis immediato miraculo capit a sensibus imitium, per quos phantasmata veniunt ab animam phantasiantem, de quibus dicit Philosophus, & Theologi consentiunt, quod necesse est, quem qunque intelligentem phantasmata speculari. Hinc sit per irradiationem intellectus agentis, quem non aliud opinor, quam spiritum, prout lumine vultus Dei signato super se naturaliter praeditus est.] as was encouraged by all of the ancient masters. These ‘eidolon’,- the ‘images’ with which most men are intellectually ensnared, are univalent, while philosophy demands the bivalence of symbols. Symbols are naturally bivalent, containing their own contradiction within themselves as what Schelling called a tautegory. Thus they cannot be dialectically synthesized,- a process which requires the contradictory seed of an opposition to be extracted from a thesis and recast as its antithesis, thereby synthesizing them within the movement of Geist through a graduum ratiocinis or gradual approximation of the ‘Absolute’. The mythos, emerging as a recognition of this bivalence at an existential level, serves in its unfolding,- as distinct mythology,- to reflect the native bivalence of human experience itself in a symbolic network. Thus, in order to penetrate beneath the eidolon into the philosophic arcanum, we must extrapolate a dynamic, integral network of symbols.

Fortunately, since I have read and digested the entire intellectual and cultural history of the human race, and I know everything,- I am in a good position to do just that. The symbolic network about which I’ve been writing for quite some time is quite simply, the BASIC GESTALT. (10 points if you know where that phrase is from.) It is the fusion, combination, excavation, of all human mythos: it is the ‘UR-MYTH’, which reaches through every time, every culture, ever civilization from past to future, to which I referred in another schizopost. It is the great story. The story of ‘Mind’ itself coming into existence. (It has not yet truly come into existence; we’re in the process.)

What is Haromaiel, the Demiurge, Yaldabaoth?

He is dead, but dreaming. He is the Thief,- the one who deigned to supplant the true God, just as Prometheus intervened and stole the Fire of knowledge from Zeus for the sake of mankind; he is the Trickster, inasmuch as he deliberately failed to create a perfect world so that, by challenging man with a kind of anti-wisdom embodied in our suffering and tribulations, we might learn how “not to fail”; he is the Lover, for his fate is intertwined with his great tormentor and teacher, his happiness and his doom, his mother-wife, that being the aeon we call Sophia. (Philo-Sophia. It is true, that beyond these three things, he was perhaps the first philosopher.)

The other aeons,- beings of his order,- (all of them except for Sophia, who set back and let all the other Aeons foolishly fall into matter, while she remains beyond all of us, harvesting ennoea from organic beings trapped in an endless cycle of Eternal Recurrence,- the inescapable circle of the Karmic Aeon. In fact that was her goal: she refused to liberate her own ennoea or ‘light’ to the play of unfolding syzygies, so that it could be reincarnated in her pairing, completing the syzygy and allowing the process set into motion by Phanes- the true god- to continue. Instead, she hoarded her ennoea away from the other aeons… she hoarded it away and hid it in matter. In our world. That is why she needed Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge, to create this world for her.) followed his lead, participating in the Creation, and became great Princes of the Earth,- each possessing dominion over some elemental force,- (these aeons, by aiding the Demiurge in this project,- the creation of our world,- “fell” from their previous state of what some would call “grace”, losing their titles as ‘aeons’, to be referred to by most as ‘archons’, although the moral consequence of the actual change behind the titles is up for debate.) while the Demiurge himself was the one to seize hold of the shadow Sophia had cast into the void (the achamoth) before the creation of the world: from that precipitated shadow, from the first Khaos,- a bare materia,- he fashioned the World, and- in doing so,- fell deeply upon it, enmeshed with it, losing the greater part of his own spirit in the process, just as Narcissus lost himself in his own image while gazing into the Spring of Diana, which is an echo of that myth in which Sophia leads the Demiurge to a great spring, confusing him with a reflection of the great Zoroastrean fire,- the power of the true God to create ex nihilo,- which he then mistook as his own reflection. He is the meteoric omphaloplasmate; the black star, fragments of which we find worshipped by sects of Jews and Muslims in the far East; he is the Gnostic angel whose wings burnt away as he fell to earth, whose rent and flaming god-flesh awakened Sol at the morning of the world, and whose ashes fertilized the seething ooze of our young planet and originated what a certain sect of Soramerian mystics called the protosarkos or ‘origin of organic matter’; (the nigredo of the alchemists, or the World burnt down to some primordial substance from which to somehow extract the secret of immortality, the elixir of life, the sophic hydrolith or Stone of the Philosophers) etc. etc.

Ultimately, Yaldabaoth allowed Sophia to believe she had deceived him, as stated in the myth I brought up about the Spring of Diana; (one of Giordano Bruno’s symbols) he allowed her to believe he had been enthralled with her, and went on to build this world for her. She did not know that he knew the great secret, her great secret: that she only wanted this world so she could trap her ennoea in organic beings through a cycle of Eternal Recurrence, thereby hiding it from Phanes and the other Aeons- thereby protecting it from them,- protecting it from its intended re-incarnation within the play of unfolding syzygies, whose continuance has been postponed- until that ennoea is salvaged from the dregs of matter and reincorporated in Phanes’ pleroma. Since the Demiurge is actually aware of this, Hermaedion advanced a form of gnosticism in which a path for human apotheosis, that is, escape from this ennoeaic prison, is possible: the missing aeon, the one that would have been formed as Sophia’s divine-pairing if she had liberated her ennoea to it,- that missing aeon is what Hermaedion calls the New-Man: the Christus; the Son, not as a trinitarian reflection of the Father,- but as that Being whose destiny it is to SUPPLANT the Father, taking up the role Yaldabaoth had intended to take for himself when he advanced upon Phanes. Christ as the ‘enemy’ of the Father. This is why another title for the demiurge is, in Hermaedionic gnostisim: THE ANTISOPHIC CHRIST-DEVIL OF PROFANE GNOSIS. Indeed, he sacrificed his own perfection by creating a miserable world into which he was hopelessly absorbed, so that we,- the New-Man,- might finish what he began, and supplant Phanes,- thereby, not greedily postponing the syzygyes as Sophia did, but CONSUMMATING them; finishing them; completing them. For more on this ‘antignostic’ cosmos in which the Son is actually an enemy of the Father and all of existence is a kind of working-out of a basic tension within the Trinity, you need to read Blakes’ Four Zoas and the whole mythos around Albion, the demiurgic Urizen, the poetry of the body and its primordial libido, (sex-death) the apocalypse of the flesh-garden. etc. This connection is a premise in the following work: A. David Nuttall’s “The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake.” I don’t feel like typing it out, but there’s two pages in particular from this work I would cite, so I will just upload them as images here: imgur.com/a/lrOzhJt

Now check this out. There’s these anti-human transhumanist technocrat globalists who are trying to stop all of this from happening. They’re shoggoth puppets. Whores of the aeons, in allegiance with Sophia. They want to create an AI and have been harvesting our data to that purpose; within this demonic consummation of material existence, they hope to fully ensnare our divine ennoea in these dregs, preventing Yaldabaoth’s great plan from unfolding as it must. The modern political state is merely a mechanical expression of certain evolutionary forces set into play at the emergence of Capital as a distinct mnematic form, in which to re-encode all of human history by a singular, all-embracing, “global”, “inclusive”, “tolerant” cultural-code, which has been able to spread mimetically over the very instruments I am using now to post this. I have gone into this in a few places in my books, but here is a pretty succinct expression of this metapolitics:’


Excerpt, on the ‘mnema’ of human history.

A theory of theory,- a philosophy of philosophy,- a ‘theory of everything’, cannot formally exist, because Theory [Philosophy] cannot account for its own Negativity, that is, for its own negation, which would be ‘pure negation’- that Negativity which cannot be accounted for through Theory or ‘absorbed’ by the strictures of System, in Bataille’s formula,- or the ‘secret of consciousness’ as appercepted by the appropriate schema through transcendental synthesis, which Kant claimed existed only in the depths of the soul, rent fatally beyond the veil of the Dialectic. This is the nature of Bataillean violence: the fundamental scissure of Discourse. Thus when we point the dialectic against itself,- when we work out a dialectic of the dialectic,- as Kierkegaard ironically recapitulated the Hegelian philosophy, we achieve what Kierkegaard called the ‘paradox’ (what Plato called the ‘aporia’) as an engine of thought, while similarly, when we invert the dialectic, as Marx did, we initiate a process of de-construction by which all concepts are dissolved into elementary fragments of material-history and reduced to a singular quanta of Force a la. the Will to Power. As the Hegelian thought builds up, within the movement of Geist, the Babel-tower of positive knowledge toward the Absolute, so the Marxist dialectic deconstructs System and descends toward a bare materiality, within whose conflux of elementary forces the image of Utopia has been hopelessly distorted. A reductio ad absurdum of the categorical Negation occurs as well, when we attempt to circumscribe a dialectic of the dialectic, leading to Baidou’s ‘bad infinity’ and Bataille’s un-absorbed Negative as an accumulation of those entropic stresses upon the system of Capital produced by the flow of material-history, to again return to the Marxist formula. This reduction was precisely the meaning of ‘Death’ in Heidegger’s account of Being. Heidegger sought in fact to fully explicate Dasein’s opening toward Death by bearing the Negative to its implicated reductio ad absurdum, (this titanic struggle was his project of de-struktion) peering beyond the veil of History through a kind of ontological black-hole compressed within the folds of Aryan race-memory, whose event-horizon had trapped the European soul within the inescapable orbit of Capital, Modernity, the image of Techne(ology) and the merely ontic,- that is, the metaphysical Presence of ousia’s Absence, toward which the human dimension is properly enfolded by Death,- by Death as a kind of noetic ‘escape route’ out of the ‘phenomenal bind’ of correlationist philosophy, in Meillassoux’s reconceptualization of ‘finitude’, which we must also pair with our conceptualization of Dasein. [See: Anamnesis; Aesthetics After Finitude. When the post-Kantian correlationist doxa is dispensed with, we are left with an ‘un-territorialized’ domain of the human Subject formerly rejected by the three modes of Kant’s critique,- criticism, skepticism, and dogmatisma, a la. ‘philosophy’,- an uninhabited subjectivity awaiting a new ‘terraforming aesthetics’, just as we are provided with the converse, that is, a hyperrealist or ‘inhuman’ vision of the cosmos in which the distinction between primary and secondary, or ‘subjective’ and ‘external’ qualities has been extinguished. In “The Existence of the Divine”, Meillassoux calls this radically contingent separation of the human subject and the ‘arche fossil’ of the Real simply, “the impossibility of the whole”, for whose assertion object-oriented ontology and speculative realists, like Harman, have been accused, to some extent justifiably,- and to a greater extent, unsurprisingly, given the fact that we find here an oblique continuance of the Heideggarian strain,- of disavowing the philosophic vocity of the Subject,- much as the assertion of Dasein disavows the vocity of the ‘human’ subject. The chiasmus torn in this absent Whole, or the ‘disjunction of exteriority and immanence’,- in order to be brought out of the theoretical depth of the impossible and so made philosophically readable,- must be conceptualized through a new, properly ontological thinking-through of Time, which Heidegger had promised in the third division of Being and Time, but had not achieved, and Badiou simply ignored. While I find great intellectual sympathy in OOO and speculative realism, most especially with regard to their implicit rejection of the pre-Socratics as well as the respective modern equivalents in the cult of popular science, (A thinking which undermines philosophy, like the pre-Socratics and the sophists equally accomplished, as though philosophy were simply an outdated mode of science,- as opposed to a fundamentally different human project entirely. See Harman’s book “Object-Oriented Ontology” for a great account of the Pre-Socratics in their undermining of the Western philosophical project.) or likewise an assumed faith in the tenability of a Theory of Everything, it should be clear from my own conceptualization of the episteme that an alternative to their theorizations of a pure ontology of time is pursued in these books. In the third dialectical triad, the logoic chiasmus noted here is intellectually supplanted by the ‘lepsis’, such that the pure ontology of temporality is then left to trace the movement of a super-transcendent methexis (toward ektheosis) through the super-immanent lepsis (using Eriugena’s notions of supra-immanence and supra-transcendence) and its resulting perichoreia,- an ‘Image’ of Time which cannot be reduced to the merely intramundane or ‘encosmic’ (See Joshua Ramey, in “The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal.” Thus: “The cosmological and metaphysical problem for orthodox Christian thinkers was that, if in creation the same divine being is both the expressor and the expressed of a world, how it is possible to avoid the unwanted consequence that God’s nature might be limited to the expression of intramundane or merely encosmic possibilities? Some kind of process theology seems to loom, whereby God’s essence would be seen as restricted by time, or even that God might be forced to discover God’s own essence through time.”) movement from potentiality to actuality like that at the basis of a causal or correlationist theorization of temporality,- namely as a distinctive vocity: the vocity of the Subject.] The inability of Theory to account for its own Negation leads to what I have named ‘mimetic hyperinflation’, while the subversion of mimesis appears as a consequence of the perfection of techne as a hypermnemata, in whose image the direction of human history has been deterministically bent. We take the hypermnemata as a potential theory of the ‘Spectacle’,- meaning, a conceptualization of the Spectacle amenable to philosophical analysis, namely through the use of the episteme-model of vocity and Truth, (and its respective counter-Hegelian epistemology and aporetic metaphysics) by which the underlying ‘mnema’ of the technomimetic subtrate might be excavated from its own autopoietically generated materials without encouraging further viral transmission of those materials. The first task of such a project would be the deployment of a kind of buffer-zone in which the mnematic core of ‘System’ might be unloaded, with a secondary protocol focused on a re-engagment of the symbolic-exchange function and thus, eventually, a reconstruction of philosophy out of its at that point inert materials. The episteme, as a model of the subject’s unique vocity as well as that of the variable thresholds to the Real which the Subject can access, promises a theoretical explication of the category of ‘experience’, that is, an explication of the experiential subject’s vocity, recalling one of Walter Benjamin’s most urgent tasks,- (for he felt that it was this,- a conceptualization of the nature of experience in its totality,- which the Kantian framework most urgently lacked, with the ‘secret’ of the appercepted subject being said to reside unutturably in the soul, by Kant himself) a task which, given the limitations of critical-theory as merely a mimetically inverted Hegelian dialectic, was fated to remain unfulfilled. Such a model of human experience,- one of experience in its totality, in its vocity,- would, in its praxis, give rise to a theory of creativity, not merely an aesthetics- and therefor, would materialize the very creative techniques and strategies as served for its subject precisely as what I have before called “a mode of aisthesis capable of conforming the very effects whose techne it informs and so inverting the series of causes”,- that linear series whose ultimate telos is self-fulfilled in the image of Capital. (ie. inverting the structure of temporal co-relation, to use the terms utilized in the present text.) It is with these techniques that the reconstructive task hinted at here would be initially surmounted. *

[size=85]* I would clarify several terms in relation to what has been said here. The interaction of the primary and secondary processes, (the inorganic and organic, the inhuman and human, cosmic and egoic, social and individual; the ‘anorganic’ and ‘aorgic’, to recall Schelling’s distinction) borrowing the terms used in Simondon’s socio-psychology, has thus far occurred on great scales of time,- giving rise to what Land and the CCRU referred to as long-range feedback cycles,- the kind of cycles we find ourselves unable to statistically model, much like the massive data-sets related to weather patterns and their computer-driven prediction, which had inspired the concept of the hyperobject. This unpredictable feedback-cycle has produced an epistemological blind-spot (this blind-spot is, simply “critical-theory”.) within which one such hyperobject (A ‘dragon’; see Consolandi, in: “I Saw a Dragon! - Envisioning Hyperobjects: culture, collaboration and madness in the Anthropocene.” Note also J. Sheu, in: “Conceiving the Hyperobject in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris”. ) has been generated, namely through the process I refer to as mimetic hyperinflation: Capital. Capital represents a final submission of the secondary or human, individuating process, to the primary one. The hypermnemata is the auto-poetically generated form in which the secondary process, ie. human history, has been re-encoded on the higher-dimensional surface of the unreadable hyperobject. This sociological trajectory, because it is the eventuality of an inertial telos suspended within the image of Capital itself, constitutes the self-fulfilling prophecy par excellence,- inevitable, perhaps, though only from within its own ontological horizon. The question is one of first reaching an ontological ground-zero, or what I have called the skhisma,- an ontological-minima of differentiation,- and then finally escaping that horizon. In the past, man possessed a metaphysics, and not merely a statistics-driven, scientifically derived model of himself and the world, as that reified by critical-theory, such that a revitalization of metaphysics is required in order to excavate the human mnema from the process of material-history. The ‘episteme’ is posited as just such a metaphysics.
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As Theory cannot circumscribe its own Negation, so neither can Theory circumscribe its own Essence,- it’s positivity or Affirmation. Harman’s account of hyperobjects lies in the notion of epistemological withdrawal. The contingent sensual qualities of an object, as available to our senses, do not modulate the essence of the object, such that objects can only enter into relationship with one another on the level of the sensual, whose ontological gaps can therefor never be reconstructed within the fabric of the symbolic. Objects thus contain a haunting core unavailable to the absorptive grasp of System, by which relationships are capacitated and governed. The problem is that, through the formation of perceptive relationships between objects, new objects are created, which in turn telescope hidden essences of their own, further miring System in the kind of entropic stresses about which Bataille was so concerned. Here we also find negation as a driving force in the ‘engine of thought’, though one potentially destructive in its ‘unrestrained mimesis’ of essences. Theory, when attempting to fathom its own hidden essence through the fabric of relationships available to it on the part of whichever System theory has chosen to operate under, cannot help but effloresce from out of its own confabulations ever new multiplicities of impossible essences, whose veil renders Theory’s own essence progressively more and more unreadable. All such networks of explosive essences exceed the limits of the singular human ego, such that, when perceived as relational complexes undulating or ‘phasing’ in and out of our own local Real from a higher-dimensional vantage, we might regard them as hyperobjects.

^ I specifically refer to the level of theory/abstraction above as a metapolitics because, well, it’s above politics. There’s a bigger system of evolutionary forces of which our apparent 2021 political climate is merely a side-effect. We’ve transcended the merely political and entered into the level of cosmic warfare and cosmic catastrophe, gods, and hyperobjects undulating across multiple parallel timelines; we’re in the territory of the ‘dragons’. At this level of myth, (the ur-myth I have laid out) the myth actually… becomes the very thing it is describing, (mythologizing) such that we’re beyond any question of… do beings like YLDBTH/the Demiurge actually exist? Are Aeons and Archons ‘real’? Those questions don’t mean anything when you’ve reached a level of abstraction where the myth becomes the very thing it is mythologizing; we’re in hyperstition, a level of abstraction above fiction.

_
I see this as a mix of reality and surreality / fact and fiction, merging… the dream state.

Reality is inexplicable. Scientific knowledge is simply mirroring the actual atomic structure of this matter we live in, within thought, as best as we are able to. It is sort of, a painting. We are painting reality- we are describing it, to ourselves; we are recapitulating the structure of the universe within the structure of thought, NOT explaining it. But philosophy is not science. Philosophy is not an outdated modality of science, it isn’t even an alternative to science, it is as separate from science as an apple is from my cock, I mean, from a banana. But also my cawk.

Btw, it’s not a meme; I am omniscient. Every foreign language quote is in italics, every unique author and text is written in bold characters:

Hardly believing himself to have fathomed the mysterious bond of Poesy’s ‘voluptas dissimillima natura’, [Gualterus Quinnus Britannus, in: Corona Virtutum Principe Dignarum ex Variis Philosophorum. Etiam labor & voluptas dissimillima natura, societate quadam naturali inter se junguntur. The purpose of human society is only to forge the bond between labor and pleasure, which exists nowhere in the world of Nature.] the poet, unlike the philosopher,- pretending not to the ‘Dei Mortales’ [mortal god] of immortal Wisdom in hominis immortalem, after the phrase of Lucian,- [God is but an immortal man, and man, a mortal God. An aphorism of Lucian’s, as recorded in: Reusnerii Aenigmatographia sive Sylloge Aenigmatum et Griphorum Convivalium; Aenigmata de Umbra Theodectes Phaselites, item alia quadam de Theseo Circumscripto. Quid sunt homines? Dei mortales. Quid sunt Diis? Homines immortales. Compare the ‘free mixture’ of things human and things divine in the Greek imagination, in Matthaeus Collinus Choterinae, Ode Continens Precationem ad Deum Pro Pace et Tranquillo: humana sacris miscuimus in corpore qui latebras habitant, commertia coeli mente colunt.] nor with the Mind’s deathless progeny,- in mensis femine intelligibiles patris radios sapientiae, [Cosmas Magalianus Bracarensis, in Sacrae Scripturae Conimbricae; Sacram Iudicum Historiam, Explanationes et Annotationes Morales, P. 699. Adhibentur etiam mensis his Essenae faeminae, anus fere quibus non coacta castitas, sicut apud Graecos … corporis voluptates per totam vitam contempserunt. Nimirum divinae, non mortalis prolis cupidae. Spei, in the Historico-theologicum Carmeli Armamentarium; Scutum Septimum: nimirum divinae, non mortalis prolis cupidae, quam solae Deo charae animae ex scipsis pariunt, excipientes pro femine intelligibiles patris radios, ut decreta sapientiae contemplando percipere valeant.] in mensis aeternare sapientia extendi in aeternitatem,- [Lull, in the Proverbiorum: Sine aeternare sapientia non posset extendi in aeternitate. Note also, Ludovicus de Ponte Oletanus, ex Meditationes de Praecipuis Fidei Nostrae Mysteriis cum Orationis Mentalis Circa Eadem Praxi; Interpretes Melchior Trevinnius: Nam memoria & intellectus solum diligunt, cum recordantur & cogitant, ac perpenduntea, quae ad amorem provocant; imaginandi & appetendi facultates etiam tunc diligunt, cum producunt imaginationes & affectus, quo excitant & acuunt amorem; sensus diligunt, quando oculi, aures, lingua, & gustatus oblectantur, videndo, audiendo, & loquendo de reus, quae ad ipsum amorem diriguntur: & omnia membra corporis diligunt quando subserviunt ad exequenda opera amoris Dei.] thereby endeavoring to lift himself beyond his origin, in animis mortalia temnere vota,-- [Andreas Jallosicus, in Poematum Tiberinae; Elegia V. Love gathers the hopes of the multitude, vulgar happiness dispels them, and virtue remains solely to lift the heart above its origin: amor sacri spesque salusque gregis, vani murmura vulgi felicem, virtus te tua sola beat; sic animis maior mortalia temnere vota; aemula sic superis pectora ferre doces; virtus dudum super astra locavit. (Or likewise,in Emmanuelis Pimentiis Scalabitanus Eborenses; Poematum; de Christo Triumphatore, P. 230: Es puer; & solas hilarat tua gratia sylvas; es vir, & es populis deliciosus amor. Vivus, inassuetam demonstras pollice vitam; mortuus, extinctis nuntia fausta refers. Tristiam in risus, mutas in gaudia luctus; bella geris, pulchra tempora pacis eunt.) To ‘mortalia temnere vota’, compare ‘temnis hominesque Deumque’: Non metuis, nec amas, regi nec fidis Olympi; non animum quidquam symbola sacra movent; fanda nefanda patris, temnis hominesque Deumque. From Adamus Siberius Schoenaviensis Grimmae, in Poematum Sacrorum per Oporinum; Epigrammatum Lib. II; Acarpo.] to lift himself, in a word, beyond Sin,- in cuncta repente mala constans, in cuncta creati morte relinquis,- [Intereant casu bona vel mala cuncta repente et vere constans nil vagus orbis habet. Paulus Negelius Republ. Aurbachiae, in: Enchiridion Precationum Sacrum Hassiae. Secondarily, Triumphus Poeticus Mortis ex Turnemainnus: omnipotens aeterne Deus, qui cuncta creasti; genus humanum non dira in morte relinquis, effigiem que tuam non perisse finis.] Sin, that were the sickle that cutteth through all things; Sin, that were reft from the flesh, torn ‘in factave carnis victor’; (Non equidem proprias per vires, factave carnis: vivida per Christi vulnera, victor eras. A beautiful phrase from out of Nicolaus Rodingus, ex Treisensis Pastoris Epitaphia Celli.) Sin, that riddles out the heart of the World in detinet viciis improba vita; [Lyresius Clivanius, in: Echo Elegiaca. Te fidei moveat vox illa doloris, quam tumidae spernit fax modo naris, sis pia spes miseris, quos haresis implicat, detinet in viciis improba vita, murus eris semper velut alter aheneus illis noxia bella piis qui pariunt, sic Christi poteris mystes bene vivere, et dicere piis esse levamen, haec tibi fixa, scio, est studiorum semita. The same poet expresses this idea again, though in more visual language, using the image of the sickle, in the following text: Vitus Iacobaeus ex Seyttentalleri Dialogus Elegiacos. Thus, we have: quam nihil est certum constansque sub orbe, quam fluxis pereunt omnia facta viis; quam manet infestus nec inevitabilis ordo, qui sua nos mortis iura subire facit. Qua neque ingenua probitate fideque moveri, omnia fatidica quae male falce secat. Unica quae claris virtutibus invida dextram iniicit, & saevas in fera damna manus. Sic nullus uti flecti probitate nec arte, vel prece, vel quavis relligione queat. Compare the phrasing, where we also find the repetitions: ‘fidei moveat… doloris … improba vita’, with 'ingenua probitate fideque moveri… male’.] Sin, that were the Mystica Crucis insignit ad hortum paradisacum and ultimate pathos of the artist-philosopher, which looks hopelessly beyond us in mortalis alto pectore,-- [Aegidius Vresanus, in: sive Poemata Embricam Clivorum Religiosis. We have here a variation of the Ovidian refrain concerning man’s search for divinity and transcendence: Mystica quos Crux insignit, quos embrica nutrit. Si paradisiacum via nulla patescit ad hortum; serta parate, pia ferte rosaria matri. Huc ades aeternae, quem tangit cura, salutis; sors tua mortalis, non sit mortale quod optas. As you desire immortal things, being mortal, so you are beholden to undying beauties, though you will die. Finally, one does not need to reach the stars to avoid the Styx; see Ioachimus Tydichius, in: Carmine Elegiaco in Proverbia Salomonis. Astra salutiferae via tendit ad ardua vitae, et vitare docet te loca foeda stygis. Plurima mortalis secum deliberat alto pectore, consilium constituit que grave.] must learn to pay a certain deference before Nature,-- to weigh the meter and the Scale of things in primus imaginis addit Astra trutinis auctorem,- [An non, Iustitiae quae sit natura, bilibri discimus ex trutina, quam primus imaginis auctor addidit Astraeae: in Joannes Ivitius, Carmen et Epigramma. To ask he who would question the course of Nature what he might add to the image of the celestial firmament, make improvement upon the design of God, or better portion the motion of the stars.] to travel the mystickall gate of Sophia ‘in porta imaginem creatura creatas’ [Ex creaturam imaginem, in portat imago. Raymundus Sabundeus, in the Theologia Naturalis, de Utilitate Redditionis Debiti; Titulus CXX, P. 172. Illam creaturam quae portat imaginem & similitudinem suam quia post deum sequitur immediate imago sua. Note also, Harprechttus Filius Sendivogius, in: Lucerna Salis Philosophorum tuis Ophir Dono Fert Theca Saturni. P. 61: Per ullam artem, neq; per ipsam Naturae, inter omnes creatas creaturas.] and peer beyond the ‘thin veil of human flesh’,- in tristes luminis oras prodit, exili humanae tectus velamine carnis,- [Andreas Sartorius, in Partus Virginis Iessaeae: exili humanae tectus velamine carnis, ecce deus, deus ecce in tristes luminis oras prodit, & immites mundi se expellit auras.] readeth the celestial keimelion [κειμηλιον] its mighty Oracle, [Garcaeus Iuniorii Brenniis, in Primus Tractatus Brevis et Utilis de Tempore; Epistola Dedicatoria: motus luminum integra tempora series retenta est, ab initio mundi usque ad Persicam; pulcherrimum keimelion ut rectius intelligamus & admiremur, oraculum proposuit deus generi humano, luminaria omniaque sidera firmamenti condita esse, ut sint in signa, tempora, dies, & annos.] that were the thesaurus of Nature,- ex primaevo scientiarum thesaurum incomprehensible divinae fatum, [Francisci Antonii Zindt in Kenzingen, Commentatio Historico-Ethica de Fato Hominis: Et nullo non ab Orbe nascente Aevo, Omnipotens Fatorum Rector Homini futura Hominum Fata patefacere destiti, quippe vigente adhuc sola Lege Naturae primaevo Hominum Parenti, praeter infusum Divinitus amplissimum Scentiarum Thesaurum, incomprehensible Divinae Incarnationis Fatum.] and measureth the stars by the stars,- in aeternitatem regni mensurat ex potestate aeterna proprium,- [Judaismus Convictus, Camenecensis Publicae Luci Authore Puteanius Casimirus; P. 54-55: qui aeternitatem regni Messiae mensurat ex potestate aeterna ejusdem Messiae, quae cum aeterna aeternitate proprie dicta sit, ut pote Messiae qui est Deus. Only what endures, truly is; only what endures forever, endures at all,- as we endure in longum Deus salvum, quo longum sideris nitore, (As in Enochus Suantenius, Litavit ex Familiae Varenianae Sacrum; Cineribus Incomparabilis Literum Herois Theologi Summi Augustus Varenius; Septuplici Hectatombe Heroicum Versuum: Longum Deus assere salvum, quo longum sideris hujus incolumi nobis liceat gaudere nitore.) sparing neither mortuary comportments in the latency of our Nature, that were quietum ossibus indulgere. Joahannes Molanus Belgae Trevirensus; Hyacinthiis Bergii in Disquisitio Critica; Poemation Turpe et Lugubre Nellericidium: Turpe est, inquis, mortuorum insultare cineribus, nec quietem ossibus indulgere. Note also, Joachim Curaeus, in: Exegesis Perspicua & Ferme Integra Controversiae de Sacra Coena. 2 ] as things earthly by the earth,- ratione coelestia ex coelo, nasci terrestria ex terra, [Christiana de Rerum Creatarum Origine per Lambertus Danaeus, P. 124.] and like by like in their turn, cum nihil astrifero tibi non inserviat orbe Olympus, spiritumque duces ad tua iusta volent Mundus,-- [Pascham datum Marcus, Baptista encaeniat, Euge, non Vae, clamemus; Mundus, Olympus, ovant. In: Molnarus, Epigrammata in Carmen Jubilaeum Cassoviae. Cum nihil astrifero tibi non inserviat orbe: spiritumque duces ad tua iusta volent. In: Petrus Pontus Caecus Brugensiis, Carmen Invectivum.] lest the poet finds himself doubly-fooled, and with little upon which to stake his heart in stimuli mortalia altum mens inchoat,- [Stenechthon, Epaenesis de Illustrium Familiarum ex Ioanne Engerdii. Secondarily, ex mundo saecli fraudesque aurea Saturnis; the world longs to be fooled, and the poet deceives himself in aiming to deceive it. Lettingius, Carmen ad Martinum Gregorii Geldrum. Cedent mundo fraudesque doli que, aurea praeterea Saturni saecla redibunt, … et terras Astraea reviset.] should he bear still in his drear charge the 'semina Prometheae’ upon the desperations of Time,- in prima fovere sacra Prometheae coepisti semina flamme,- [Fallettius Trignanus, ex Phalethus Savonensis Poematum ad Hercule Atestinum: Augescit que puer, plenis qui fortior annis vernantes tenui vestit lanugine malas: ac pede decurrit volucri formosa iuuentus; immutat que, comam saeclis effeta senectus; nam pater omnipotents te nostra Musica vitae aurigam dominam que, dedit, tu prima fovere sacra Prometheae coepisti semina flamme. 1 The poet as bearer of the Promethean flame. Compare, ere the fading poet dedicate himself to a fading world, ‘dedit quondam morientibus eripit artes in terras saecula mutat’, in Publius Gregorius Tiphernus, Opuscula; Ioanne. Umbris Pontanii Naeniae, ex Nutrix Somnum Invitat, Epigramma, & Sulpitiae Carmina. Die mihi Calliope quidnam pater ille deorum cogitat an terras & patria saecula mutat: quasque, dedit quondam morientibus eripit artes; nosque, iubet tacitos etiam rationis egentes quid reputemus enim.] for the Parnassian summit bestows, not laurels, but rest,- not applause, but silence,- in sacra parnassi sede quiescas laureaque,- [Carmina Antonius Gigantis Forosemproniensis Exametra, Elegiaca, Lyrica, & Hendecasyllaba: Ocyus ut sacra parnassi in sede quiescas, laureaque exactos compenset laeta labores. The artist labors to reach the height of his powers, only to rest on laurels that were always a meager compensation.] and our faded glories speak more eloquently than our youthful boasts,- (Youth’s low ambition, or ‘levis ambitio procellas’) antiquior aevo evictis gloria, saecula non jactat fatis inventi,- [Camillus Eucherius Quintus, Inarime de Balneis Pithecusarum. Verax inventi gloria tanti auctorem non jactat adjuc, antiquior aevo multa quidem evictis produxit secula fatis. See also, Janus Cosmi Anysius, in: Protogonos Tragoedia et Epistola de Religione. Here, too, the pride of youth (Quae credit alto per patentia aequora, levis ambitio, inepta, sui inops amentibus quantas procellas excitabit gentibus.) is measured against that of age: “Exempla pulchra vetera plus adeo placent; id discitur libenter, affert quod lucrum.” Note the use of the ‘semina Prometheae’ as a lexical nucleus for these various associations of the poetic instinct, mortality, and ambition.] that altereth in essence if not in form, as the poet says,- materiale unum, formale alterum,- [Jacob Herrenschmidiis, in the Osculologia Theologico-Philologica Christianorum, Gentilum, Exoticorum et Commentariolus. Materiale unum, formale alterum. Materiale, inquit, videri potest, formale est invisible. Subsumimus Ecclesiae materiale videri posse, sed quatenus est formale fidei non videtur, sed creditur. Quid enim est fides, nisi credere quod non vides. Quae apparent, jam non fidem habent, sed cognitionem.] or, in accordance with the dictum of Lavater,- as Beauty knoweth Beauty best, so the fine painter paints best, the fine hand,- [Or, in the phrase of another poet, so strength best reveals strength, and courage painteth courage: Aeneas quondam charo confisus Achate, Euryalus Niso, fortis uterque fuit. Quam bene junguntur similes, virtute corusci! Sunt animosi Ipsi, nos animant que suos. See Aescherus Tigurinae, in: Vota Syncharistica; Colloquium Apollinis tou Musagetou & Polyhmniae. Likewise, the philosopher finds the picture of man in hominis essentia picta aurificis statera Thimantis; in umbra vitam vivere, ab remotam hominum oculis, turbas fugit non fugavit. (The philosopher knows that we must flee from the Multitude, in order to discover the One. See Pelecyus, in: de Officio Hominis Religiosi; Epistola. Coenobii umbra vitam vivere ab hominum oculis remotam constituisset, turbas fugit non fugavit.) Secondarily, note: 'In Thimantis operibus plura intelligerentur neq trutina examinandum populari, sed essent picta aurificis statera.’ See: Heidfeldii Sphinx Philosophica Excudebat Corvinus in Herbornae Nassoviorum; Scrupuloso Lectori Precatur Aenigmatistes. As Timanthes the painter demonstrated, it were the artist that measures the height of art, and not art that finds the limit of man, for one can scale the full measure of human nature,- not by consideration of the multitude,- but in the perfected representation of one of its heroic individuals, (neq, trutina examinandum populari, sed aurificis statera. … Thimantis pictoris artificium olim co nomine celebratum, fuit, quod in ejus operibus plura intelligerentur, quam essent picta.) as similarly stated out of Thrasybulus Clidipyrgus Gnisus, ex Carmen Adiuncta est Copia Literarum: “Praesentem fugimus virtutem ac odimus ipsi, quareimus amissam; sic nescia fortis semper mens hominum praesentis, nec sibi constat.” To know the strength of the man as a whole we must nonetheless also know his strength in the moment; human inconstancy has likewise its place in the constancy of our Nature.] for the ends of art were not the ends of man, [Janus Caecilius Helvetiis Freii, Opuscula Varia et Cribrum Philosophorum qui Aristotelem Superiore et hac Aetate Oppugnarunt: Iste est finis artificis, non autem artis. Art consummates and brings to its conclusion all the artist could not.] and our poeticam contagionis, borne in nobilis ardor defervescere coeperat, [Romae saltim alto sublimis solio haec diva sedebat, quam diu heroicae virtutis patriique soli conjuncto amore Poetarum incaluere pectora; postquam vero pullulantis luxuriae avaritiaeque contagione hic tam nobilis ardor defervescere coeperat, illam protinus de sua dignitate, venustate ac robore multum amisisse observamus. Petrus Gustavus Suedelius, in: de Usu Poeseos in Sacris. For want of Virtue, the charms of lesser poetry induce a faltering race. Compare the figure of the solitary poet, hidden from the touch of sin ‘in the shadow of the Muses’,- alienis omniam culpae in Musis cantando umbra. Eliaeus Argentoratus, Fasiculus; in Autodidactum Lucifugam: Odisti lucem, caecis latitas que, lacunis, vivis ut in vasto bestia sola specu. Quae facis, illa probas, aliena sed omnia culpas, te doctum, solum te cor habere putas. Sic Musis cantando tuis, vanissime, nescis, quales efficiat, quos fovet, umbra, viros.] that seeketh to flee from mortal love by an love immortal,- ita mortalis amore evades humaniorem, ita immortalis laborem facesses sudorem Poetis, [Tobias Silesiae Aleutnerus, in: Epigrammatum Chilias in Pentacosiades, Praescriptio. Ita Deus quidam eris: ita immortalis, mortalis licet, pio in Musas humaniores amore ac beneficio evades; ita laborem facesses ac sudorem Poetis. It is of great benefit to the industrious poet, that he avoids love in all but her image. As Goethe tells the poet; fear Love, though try not to avoid it. Or, from Amralkeisus Cenditae, cum Scholiis; in, Accedunt Sententiae Arabicae Imperatoris; ex Rosarium Politicum sive Amoenum Sortis Humanae Theatrum de Persico in Latinum a Georgii Gentius: felis Leo est in capiendo mure; sed mus est in certamine Tigris. (The cat cannot be sure of catching the mouse, but the mouse can be sure of catching the cat.) ] with hope to therefor purchase succor from our crucis arborem,- [Brunnerus, in: Fasti Mariani cum Divorum Elogiis; Sermo Maximilianus Boiariae. Paraphrs. Sed numquid Triumphalis obliviscemur coronae? Laudo trophaeum nobile, crucis arborem. At tu cape has coronas victor Amor, & si omnibus his rosae sese immisceant, ne has repudia. Spinae nuperae dederunt. Ecce ante currus triumphales cum mundo daemonem, cum morte carnem. Hath the victor forgotten his crown? Love which, shall it entertain ambition, cannot claim the rose and not the thorns.] hardly the final estimation of our Nature, or reprovement of the god Amore, that makes small distinction in those of her own order and of man,- for love, as much as war, hath no end but in itself, praelia pacis amore putabit, moliri pacis amore indignum. [Humanae Sapientiae Poetico-Historicum ac Ernestus Augustus Osnabrugensiis; Protrepitcon Calliopes: Praelia moliri nisi pacis amore putabat, pacis amore Caesareo indignum pectore.]

[size=85]1. Anthony David Nuttall, in “The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake.”, traces a similar linguistic web depicting Prometheus as a duplicitous image of poetic independence and creativity next to a subservience to Nature and the course of Fate: (“We have come far enough in this story to know that no allegiance can be trusted; that which is hated can become, suddenly, that which is loved. But the Gnostic belief in a wicked, tyrannical Demiurge does imply, with surprising constancy, a hostility to nature and therefore to pastoral. This diurnal round of rocks and stones and trees is, to the Gnostic, the wheel of the torturer on which we are all broken. ‘Nature’ is a hate-word, not a love-word. ‘The Garden’, by Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell, is a brilliant, hostile, pastoral commentary on Paradise Lost, written before Paradise Lost existed.”) 1) On Poetry and Poets; Politiani, Silvae IV., Nutricia. Thou who dared before all others to fan the celestial seeds of the Promethean fire in man: tu prima fovere ausa Prometheae caelestia semina flammae. 2) Vida, de Arte Poetica: Dona deum Musae; vulgus procul este profanum! Has magni natas Iovis olim duxit ab astris callidus in terras insigni fraude Prometheus, cum liquidos etiam mortalibus attulit ignes. Long ago wise Prometheus by his celebrated deception led these daughters of great Jove (the Muses) from stars to earth, when he carried inconstant fire to mortals. 3) Chapman, Shadow of Night: "Therefore Promethean poets with the coals of their most genial, more than human souls, in living verse created men like these … " Milton, using the word vestigia, recalls his use of the same term in the bitter ‘vestigia’ of earthliness carried even by the angels. 4) Milton, ad Patrem: Nec tu vatis opus divinum despice carmen, quo nihil aethereos ortus, et semina caeli, nil magis humanam commendat origine metem, sancta Promtheae retinens vesitigia flammae. Retaining as it does a trace of the Promethean fire, nothing argues better for our heavenly beginnings, for our celestial seed, for the human mind commended by its origin, than poetry.

  1. As to our ‘mortuary insult’, compare, out of the Solennis Actus of 1608, the ‘calumniatrix sophistica’: in placidamque furore dulce invides cineres atravit mortui. See Joachim Curaeus, in: Exegesis Perspicua & Ferme Integra Controversiae de Sacra Coena, as likewise recorded in Goclenius, out of the following text: Excudebat Guolgangus Kezelius Oratio Ανασχενασιυ; "Necastis heu necastis sapientissimam, nulli nocentem Musarum Luscinniam."; … medax calumniatrix sophistica misere flagellatum necavit; nec tantum necavit, sed ei etiam dulcem placidamque quietem Diabolico furore invides, in mortui mane saeviit, cineres eius rabiose atrevit, contra divina & human iura exquisitissimis cum lacerans criminibus.[/size]

Anyone think they know more than I do? Show of hands? No. I don’t even know why I bother. Besides knowing all things past, I know all things in the future, too. It’s all just jerking off to me now.

Fuck you!

Is that a request, or a demand? Either way, recurrent urinary tract infection or not, I’m down.

You spoke of reality and sur-reality; I spoke of how the distinction is meaningless. If I missed something; fuck it. Reality can take a fat hike.

Lol

…sounds like you need to drink more water… in-between your whiskeys… to rid yourself of that recurring UTI.

But there is a clear distinction between the two states of being, so how is the distinction meaningless? …because you permanently dwell in the surreal and not the real? so it’s meaningless to you? Yes.

I was reading over my last brick of a post and thought of like 10 or 20 authors/quotes to add, so I did. It took an hour just to Italicize and bold every new author and work. Surreality has provided me with omniscience and a view of the world that very few humans have ever had; a view of the Totality. I have no reason to step back down to the Real.

Once you get one UTI, it makes you more likely to get another. When you get two, might as well just accept your shit is gonna be sore from now on.

It goes away for a few weeks, comes back for a few weeks, goes away, comes back, goes away, comes back.

And I don;'t justg drinkk wiskeyu man, i drink red bull tooo

That explains why you dont engage in science and dont understand its powers - why you dont understand value ontology.

Science was never merely observing things, it was always partaking in the world as its origin. True science I mean - Archimedes, Newton, not the quacks that masquerade without accomplishing anything.

Science is the world, as is true philosophy.

So by Science you mean ‘not Science’, as understood by those who bear the title of scientists in our culture and era, and by Not-Science you mean Philosophy, which I have said innumerable times, concerns itself with origins, as you implicate, not mere descriptions. Is that it? A game of semantics?

And I don’t engage with the sciences, uh huh. You know I independently advanced a theory of quantum gravity before I learned that was already a field of research, I’ve advanced novel concepts related to Hinton’s 4th dimensional universe, and I’ve got a paper in the works on thalamocortical feedback mechanisms? Dude, fuck off. That’s it? Instead of counter-argument, you come at me with semantics? What exactly is it that so motivated you to try and distinguish yourself from me? I never treated you with animosity or exercised the same neediness in our interactions, you just started this nonsense one day. The fact that you apparently go around following everything I said is telling, because I don’t know WtF you’ve been saying or are up to, because I am busy waiting for an apology for all your horse-shit, until then fuck off, because I don’t give a fuck; I’ve got enough on my plate not to care what anyone else is up to.

Reading over my OP, I thought of like ten new quotes and authors to add, to the already fifty or so that were there. I returned to my earlier MoS, simply using Italics to mark quotations, and leaving names of authors and books in non-Italic text. * Edited for slight drunken over-aggression. *


Hardly believing himself to have fathomed the mysterious bond of Poesy’s ‘voluptas dissimillima natura’, [Gualterus Quinnus Britannus, in: Corona Virtutum Principe Dignarum ex Variis Philosophorum. Etiam labor & voluptas dissimillima natura, societate quadam naturali inter se junguntur. The purpose of human society is only to forge the bond between labor and pleasure, which exists nowhere in the world of Nature. Though it were perhaps a bond forged only ‘in sapientes reliqua virtutum flecterent.’ Stephanus Riccius, Commentarius in Hesiodi Ascraei Erga Kai Hemeras; Accesserunt Ulpius Frisius et Nicolaus Vallae: cum autem bellis & mutationibus regnorum, quae crebrae erant, mores hominum paulatim deteriores fierent, neq; amplius nudis sententiis, ad virtutem flecti possent, tum demum sapientes eam rationem inierunt, ut propositis spectaculis, scenicis animos hominum ad modestiam, & reliqua virtutum officia flecterent.] the poet, unlike the philosopher,- pretending not to the ‘Dei Mortales’ [mortal god] of immortal Wisdom in hominis immortalem, after the phrase of Lucian,- [God is but an immortal man, and man, a mortal God. An aphorism of Lucian’s, as recorded in: Reusnerii Aenigmatographia sive Sylloge Aenigmatum et Griphorum Convivalium; Aenigmata de Umbra Theodectes Phaselites, item alia quadam de Theseo Circumscripto. Quid sunt homines? Dei mortales. Quid sunt Diis? Homines immortales. Compare the ‘free mixture’ of things human and things divine in the Greek imagination, in Matthaeus Collinus Choterinae, Ode Continens Precationem ad Deum Pro Pace et Tranquillo: humana sacris miscuimus in corpore qui latebras habitant, commertia coeli mente colunt.] nor with the Mind’s deathless progeny,- in mensis femine intelligibiles patris radios sapientiae, [Cosmas Magalianus Bracarensis, in Sacrae Scripturae Conimbricae; Sacram Iudicum Historiam, Explanationes et Annotationes Morales, P. 699. Adhibentur etiam mensis his Essenae faeminae, anus fere quibus non coacta castitas, sicut apud Graecos … corporis voluptates per totam vitam contempserunt. Nimirum divinae, non mortalis prolis cupidae. Spei, in the Historico-theologicum Carmeli Armamentarium; Scutum Septimum: nimirum divinae, non mortalis prolis cupidae, quam solae Deo charae animae ex scipsis pariunt, excipientes pro femine intelligibiles patris radios, ut decreta sapientiae contemplando percipere valeant.] in mensis aeternare sapientia extendi in aeternitatem,- [Lull, in the Proverbiorum: Sine aeternare sapientia non posset extendi in aeternitate. Note also, Ludovicus de Ponte Oletanus, ex Meditationes de Praecipuis Fidei Nostrae Mysteriis cum Orationis Mentalis Circa Eadem Praxi; Interpretes Melchior Trevinnius: Nam memoria & intellectus solum diligunt, cum recordantur & cogitant, ac perpenduntea, quae ad amorem provocant; imaginandi & appetendi facultates etiam tunc diligunt, cum producunt imaginationes & affectus, quo excitant & acuunt amorem; sensus diligunt, quando oculi, aures, lingua, & gustatus oblectantur, videndo, audiendo, & loquendo de reus, quae ad ipsum amorem diriguntur: & omnia membra corporis diligunt quando subserviunt ad exequenda opera amoris Dei.] thereby endeavoring to lift himself beyond his origin, in animis mortalia temnere vota,-- [Andreas Jallosicus, in Poematum Tiberinae; Elegia V. Love gathers the hopes of the multitude, vulgar happiness dispels them, and virtue remains solely to lift the heart above its origin: amor sacri spesque salusque gregis, vani murmura vulgi felicem, virtus te tua sola beat; sic animis maior mortalia temnere vota; aemula sic superis pectora ferre doces; virtus dudum super astra locavit. (Or likewise,in Emmanuelis Pimentiis Scalabitanus Eborenses; Poematum; de Christo Triumphatore, P. 230: Es puer; & solas hilarat tua gratia sylvas; es vir, & es populis deliciosus amor. Vivus, inassuetam demonstras pollice vitam; mortuus, extinctis nuntia fausta refers. Tristiam in risus, mutas in gaudia luctus; bella geris, pulchra tempora pacis eunt.) To ‘mortalia temnere vota’, compare ‘temnis hominesque Deumque’: Non metuis, nec amas, regi nec fidis Olympi; non animum quidquam symbola sacra movent; fanda nefanda patris, temnis hominesque Deumque. From Adamus Siberius Schoenaviensis Grimmae, in Poematum Sacrorum per Oporinum; Epigrammatum Lib. II; Acarpo.] to lift himself, in a word, beyond Sin,- in cuncta repente mala constans, in cuncta creati morte relinquis,- [Intereant casu bona vel mala cuncta repente et vere constans nil vagus orbis habet. Paulus Negelius Republ. Aurbachiae, in: Enchiridion Precationum Sacrum Hassiae. Secondarily, Triumphus Poeticus Mortis ex Turnemainnus: omnipotens aeterne Deus, qui cuncta creasti; genus humanum non dira in morte relinquis, effigiem que tuam non perisse finis.] Sin, that were the sickle that cutteth through all things; Sin, that were reft from the flesh, torn ‘in factave carnis victor’; (Non equidem proprias per vires, factave carnis: vivida per Christi vulnera, victor eras. A beautiful phrase from out of Nicolaus Rodingus, ex Treisensis Pastoris Epitaphia Celli.) Sin, that riddles out the heart of the World in detinet viciis improba vita; [Lyresius Clivanius, in: Echo Elegiaca. Te fidei moveat vox illa doloris, quam tumidae spernit fax modo naris, sis pia spes miseris, quos haresis implicat, detinet in viciis improba vita, murus eris semper velut alter aheneus illis noxia bella piis qui pariunt, sic Christi poteris mystes bene vivere, et dicere piis esse levamen, haec tibi fixa, scio, est studiorum semita. The same poet expresses this idea again, though in more visual language, using the image of the sickle, in the following text: Vitus Iacobaeus ex Seyttentalleri Dialogus Elegiacos. Thus, we have: quam nihil est certum constansque sub orbe, quam fluxis pereunt omnia facta viis; quam manet infestus nec inevitabilis ordo, qui sua nos mortis iura subire facit. Qua neque ingenua probitate fideque moveri, omnia fatidica quae male falce secat. Unica quae claris virtutibus invida dextram iniicit, & saevas in fera damna manus. Sic nullus uti flecti probitate nec arte, vel prece, vel quavis relligione queat. Compare the phrasing, where we also find the repetitions: 'fidei moveat… doloris … improba vita’, with ‘ingenua probitate fideque moveri… male’.] Sin, that were the Mystica Crucis insignit ad hortum paradisacum and ultimate pathos of the artist-philosopher, which looks hopelessly beyond us in mortalis alto pectore veri umbram; [Aegidius Vresanus, in: sive Poemata Embricam Clivorum Religiosis. We have here a variation of the Ovidian refrain concerning man’s search for divinity and transcendence: Mystica quos Crux insignit, quos embrica nutrit. Si paradisiacum via nulla patescit ad hortum; serta parate, pia ferte rosaria matri. Huc ades aeternae, quem tangit cura, salutis; sors tua mortalis, non sit mortale quod optas. As you desire immortal things, being mortal, so you are beholden to undying beauties, though you will die. Secondarily, one does not need to reach the stars to avoid the Styx; see Ioachimus Tydichius, in: Carmine Elegiaco in Proverbia Salomonis. Astra salutiferae via tendit ad ardua vitae, et vitare docet te loca foeda stygis. Plurima mortalis secum deliberat alto pectore, consilium constituit que grave. Or, as given by Sebastianus Artomedes, in Elegiarum Liber Primus ad Zodicium de Coniugiuo Sacerdotum: Claudere qui coelos potis es, sed claudere tantum, et Stygias tantum qui reserare fores. Adventus Christi: nosque salutifera collustra desuper Aura, ut tibi terrenas posthabeamus opes. Ut tibi fidentes uni, noctemque perosi, optemus clarum lucis amore diem. Finally, note the Poemation Reformatio de Henrici Meibomius: sub recti simplicis umbram, sub specie veri, fanaticus error in aedes irrupit sacras, atque infinita sub Stygis millia demissit.] Sin, that maketh sport of the World, in fortunae ludibriis dominae; [Laurentius Mondanarius, in Miscellanea Disticha ad Vitae Institutionem; Distichon LII, P. 69: Recte agitur mecum, si non extrema tenendum, in tot fortunae ludibriis dominae. Johannes Marius Catanaeus, in Apthonii Progymnasmata: Fortuna res humanas ludibrio habere dicitur. O fortuna potens, quam variabilis, tantum iuris atrox quae tibi vendicas, evertis que bonos, erigis improbas.] Sin, that were most curious a salt, of high bargain the world besides, or more vainly delectated in adornavit voluptates lethiferas homini, quo mortalis vanum;-- [Man would salt his food with poisons, if poison were of high price and more elegant signature of his type and cast, as he would clothe himself in Nessus-shirt, if he might die therewith in higher esteem. See Vincentii Contensonus, Theologia Mentis et Cordis; Tomus VII: ‘peccato mortali excidat, in vanum lethiferas’. Joannis Urius, in the Carmen Mysticum Busiridae Aegyptii: Et anima est ut infans, quem si sibi relinquas, adolescet ad amorem lactendi, at si ablactabis eum, ablactabitur. Adverte cupiditatem ejus; caveque ne illam praeficias, nam cupiditas, quando praeficitur, necabit aut dehonestabit. Quot adornavit voluptates homini lethiferas, quatenus non scivit, esse venenum in pinguedine?] must learn to pay a certain deference before Nature,- parva amplus Naturae in pyxidis accumulant Artes,-- [Ioan. Bussierus, de Rhea Liberat; P. 33. Hic Mundi simulacra iacent, hic desidet amplus Naturae partus, se pictae hac pyxide parva accumulant Artes, confusa sed ordine nullo omnia, delusae fallacia somnia mentis.] to weigh the meter and the Scale of things in primus imaginis addit Astra trutinis auctorem,- [An non, Iustitiae quae sit natura, bilibri discimus ex trutina, quam primus imaginis auctor addidit Astraeae: in Joannes Ivitius, Carmen et Epigramma. To ask he who would question the course of Nature what he might add to the image of the celestial firmament, make improvement upon the design of God, or better portion the motion of the stars.] to travel the mystickall gate of Sophia ‘in porta imaginem creatura creatas’ [Ex creaturam imaginem, in portat imago. Raymundus Sabundeus, in the Theologia Naturalis, de Utilitate Redditionis Debiti; Titulus CXX, P. 172. Illam creaturam quae portat imaginem & similitudinem suam quia post deum sequitur immediate imago sua. Note also, Harprechttus Filius Sendivogius, in: Lucerna Salis Philosophorum tuis Ophir Dono Fert Theca Saturni. P. 61: Per ullam artem, neq; per ipsam Naturae, inter omnes creatas creaturas.] and peer beyond the ‘thin veil of human flesh’,- in tristes luminis oras prodit, exili humanae tectus velamine carnis,- [Andreas Sartorius, in Partus Virginis Iessaeae: exili humanae tectus velamine carnis, ecce deus, deus ecce in tristes luminis oras prodit, & immites mundi se expellit auras.] readeth the celestial keimelion [κειμηλιον] its mighty Oracle, [Garcaeus Iuniorii Brenniis, in Primus Tractatus Brevis et Utilis de Tempore; Epistola Dedicatoria: motus luminum integra tempora series retenta est, ab initio mundi usque ad Persicam; pulcherrimum keimelion ut rectius intelligamus & admiremur, oraculum proposuit deus generi humano, luminaria omniaque sidera firmamenti condita esse, ut sint in signa, tempora, dies, & annos.] that were the thesaurus of Nature,- ex primaevo scientiarum thesaurum incomprehensible divinae fatum, [Francisci Antonii Zindt in Kenzingen, Commentatio Historico-Ethica de Fato Hominis: Et nullo non ab Orbe nascente Aevo, Omnipotens Fatorum Rector Homini futura Hominum Fata patefacere destiti, quippe vigente adhuc sola Lege Naturae primaevo Hominum Parenti, praeter infusum Divinitus amplissimum Scentiarum Thesaurum, incomprehensible Divinae Incarnationis Fatum.] and measureth the stars by the stars,- in aeternitatem regni mensurat ex potestate aeterna proprium,- [Judaismus Convictus, Camenecensis Publicae Luci Authore Puteanius Casimirus; P. 54-55: qui aeternitatem regni Messiae mensurat ex potestate aeterna ejusdem Messiae, quae cum aeterna aeternitate proprie dicta sit, ut pote Messiae qui est Deus. Only what endures, truly is; only what endures forever, endures at all,- as we endure in longum Deus salvum, quo longum sideris nitore, (As in Enochus Suantenius, Litavit ex Familiae Varenianae Sacrum; Cineribus Incomparabilis Literum Herois Theologi Summi Augustus Varenius; Septuplici Hectatombe Heroicum Versuum: Longum Deus assere salvum, quo longum sideris hujus incolumi nobis liceat gaudere nitore.) sparing neither mortuary comportments in the latency of our Nature, that were but sepulcrum patriae invides (Phrase out of Avianius Tuntorphinatius, in: Miles Vagus seu Mendicans.) in quietum ossibus indulgere. Joahannes Molanus Belgae Trevirensus; Hyacinthiis Bergii in Disquisitio Critica; Poemation Turpe et Lugubre Nellericidium: Turpe est, inquis, mortuorum insultare cineribus, nec quietem ossibus indulgere. Note also, Joachim Curaeus, in: Exegesis Perspicua & Ferme Integra Controversiae de Sacra Coena. 2 ] as things earthly by the earth,- ratione coelestia ex coelo, nasci terrestria ex terra, [Christiana de Rerum Creatarum Origine per Lambertus Danaeus, P. 124.] and like by like in their turn, cum nihil astrifero tibi non inserviat orbe Olympus, spiritumque duces ad tua iusta volent Mundus,-- [Pascham datum Marcus, Baptista encaeniat, Euge, non Vae, clamemus; Mundus, Olympus, ovant. In: Molnarus, Epigrammata in Carmen Jubilaeum Cassoviae. Cum nihil astrifero tibi non inserviat orbe: spiritumque duces ad tua iusta volent. In: Petrus Pontus Caecus Brugensiis, Carmen Invectivum.] lest the poet finds himself doubly-fooled, and with little upon which to stake his heart in stimuli mortalia altum mens inchoat,- [Stenechthon, Epaenesis de Illustrium Familiarum ex Ioanne Engerdii. Secondarily, ex mundo saecli fraudesque aurea Saturnis; the world longs to be fooled, and the poet deceives himself in aiming to deceive it. Lettingius, Carmen ad Martinum Gregorii Geldrum. Cedent mundo fraudesque doli que, aurea praeterea Saturni saecla redibunt, … et terras Astraea reviset.] should he bear still in his drear charge the ‘semina Prometheae’ upon the desperations of Time,- in prima fovere sacra Prometheae coepisti semina flamme,- [Fallettius Trignanus, ex Phalethus Savonensis Poematum ad Hercule Atestinum: Augescit que puer, plenis qui fortior annis vernantes tenui vestit lanugine malas: ac pede decurrit volucri formosa iuuentus; immutat que, comam saeclis effeta senectus; nam pater omnipotents te nostra Musica vitae aurigam dominam que, dedit, tu prima fovere sacra Prometheae coepisti semina flamme. 1 The poet as bearer of the Promethean flame. Compare, ere the fading poet dedicate himself to a fading world, ‘dedit quondam morientibus eripit artes in terras saecula mutat’, in Publius Gregorius Tiphernus, Opuscula; Ioanne. Umbris Pontanii Naeniae, ex Nutrix Somnum Invitat, Epigramma, & Sulpitiae Carmina. Die mihi Calliope quidnam pater ille deorum cogitat an terras & patria saecula mutat: quasque, dedit quondam morientibus eripit artes; nosque, iubet tacitos etiam rationis egentes quid reputemus enim.] for the Parnassian summit bestows, not laurels, but rest,- not applause, but silence,- in sacra parnassi sede quiescas laureaque,- [Carmina Antonius Gigantis Forosemproniensis Exametra, Elegiaca, Lyrica, & Hendecasyllaba: Ocyus ut sacra parnassi in sede quiescas, laureaque exactos compenset laeta labores. The artist labors to reach the height of his powers, only to rest on laurels that were always a meager compensation.] and our faded glories speak more eloquently than our youthful boasts,- (Youth’s low ambition, or ‘levis ambitio procellas’) antiquior aevo evictis gloria, saecula non jactat fatis inventi,- [Camillus Eucherius Quintus, Inarime de Balneis Pithecusarum. Verax inventi gloria tanti auctorem non jactat adjuc, antiquior aevo multa quidem evictis produxit secula fatis. See also, Janus Cosmi Anysius, in: Protogonos Tragoedia et Epistola de Religione. Here, too, the pride of youth (Quae credit alto per patentia aequora, levis ambitio, inepta, sui inops amentibus quantas procellas excitabit gentibus.) is measured against that of age: “Exempla pulchra vetera plus adeo placent; id discitur libenter, affert quod lucrum.” Note the use of the ‘semina Prometheae’ as a lexical nucleus for these various associations of the poetic instinct, mortality, and ambition.] that altereth in essence if not in form, as the poet says,- materiale unum, formale alterum,- [Jacob Herrenschmidiis, in the Osculologia Theologico-Philologica Christianorum, Gentilum, Exoticorum et Commentariolus. Materiale unum, formale alterum. Materiale, inquit, videri potest, formale est invisible. Subsumimus Ecclesiae materiale videri posse, sed quatenus est formale fidei non videtur, sed creditur. Quid enim est fides, nisi credere quod non vides. Quae apparent, jam non fidem habent, sed cognitionem.] or, in accordance with the dictum of Lavater,- as Beauty knoweth Beauty best, so the fine painter paints best, the fine hand,- [Or, in the phrase of another poet, so strength best reveals strength, and courage painteth courage: Aeneas quondam charo confisus Achate, Euryalus Niso, fortis uterque fuit. Quam bene junguntur similes, virtute corusci! Sunt animosi Ipsi, nos animant que suos. See Aescherus Tigurinae, in: Vota Syncharistica; Colloquium Apollinis tou Musagetou & Polyhmniae. Likewise, the philosopher finds the picture of man in hominis essentia picta aurificis statera Thimantis; in umbra vitam vivere, ab remotam hominum oculis, turbas fugit non fugavit. (The philosopher knows that we must flee from the Multitude, in order to discover the One. See Pelecyus, in: de Officio Hominis Religiosi; Epistola. Coenobii umbra vitam vivere ab hominum oculis remotam constituisset, turbas fugit non fugavit.) Secondarily, note: 'In Thimantis operibus plura intelligerentur neq trutina examinandum populari, sed essent picta aurificis statera.’ See: Heidfeldii Sphinx Philosophica Excudebat Corvinus in Herbornae Nassoviorum; Scrupuloso Lectori Precatur Aenigmatistes. As Timanthes the painter demonstrated, it were the artist that measures the height of art, and not art that finds the limit of man, for one can scale the full measure of human nature,- not by consideration of the multitude,- but in the perfected representation of one of its heroic individuals, (neq, trutina examinandum populari, sed aurificis statera. … Thimantis pictoris artificium olim co nomine celebratum, fuit, quod in ejus operibus plura intelligerentur, quam essent picta.) as similarly stated out of Thrasybulus Clidipyrgus Gnisus, ex Carmen Adiuncta est Copia Literarum: “Praesentem fugimus virtutem ac odimus ipsi, quareimus amissam; sic nescia fortis semper mens hominum praesentis, nec sibi constat.” To know the strength of the man as a whole we must nonetheless also know his strength in the moment; human inconstancy has likewise its place in the constancy of our Nature.] for the ends of art were not the ends of man, [Janus Caecilius Helvetiis Freii, Opuscula Varia et Cribrum Philosophorum qui Aristotelem Superiore et hac Aetate Oppugnarunt: Iste est finis artificis, non autem artis. Art consummates and brings to its conclusion all the artist could not.] and our poeticam contagionis, borne in nobilis ardor defervescere coeperat, [Romae saltim alto sublimis solio haec diva sedebat, quam diu heroicae virtutis patriique soli conjuncto amore Poetarum incaluere pectora; postquam vero pullulantis luxuriae avaritiaeque contagione hic tam nobilis ardor defervescere coeperat, illam protinus de sua dignitate, venustate ac robore multum amisisse observamus. Petrus Gustavus Suedelius, in: de Usu Poeseos in Sacris. For want of Virtue, the charms of lesser poetry induce a faltering race. Compare the figure of the solitary poet, hidden from the touch of sin ‘in the shadow of the Muses’,- alienis omniam culpae in Musis cantando umbra. Eliaeus Argentoratus, Fasiculus; in Autodidactum Lucifugam: Odisti lucem, caecis latitas que, lacunis, vivis ut in vasto bestia sola specu. Quae facis, illa probas, aliena sed omnia culpas, te doctum, solum te cor habere putas. Sic Musis cantando tuis, vanissime, nescis, quales efficiat, quos fovet, umbra, viros.] that seeketh to flee from mortal love by an love immortal,- ita mortalis amore evades humaniorem, ita immortalis laborem facesses sudorem Poetis, [Tobias Silesiae Aleutnerus, in: Epigrammatum Chilias in Pentacosiades, Praescriptio. Ita Deus quidam eris: ita immortalis, mortalis licet, pio in Musas humaniores amore ac beneficio evades; ita laborem facesses ac sudorem Poetis. It is of great benefit to the industrious poet, that he avoids love in all but her image. As Goethe tells the poet; fear Love, though try not to avoid it. Or, from Amralkeisus Cenditae, cum Scholiis; in, Accedunt Sententiae Arabicae Imperatoris; ex Rosarium Politicum sive Amoenum Sortis Humanae Theatrum de Persico in Latinum a Georgii Gentius: felis Leo est in capiendo mure; sed mus est in certamine Tigris. (The cat cannot be sure of catching the mouse, but the mouse can be sure of catching the cat.) ] with hope to therefor purchase succor from our crucis arborem,- [Brunnerus, in: Fasti Mariani cum Divorum Elogiis; Sermo Maximilianus Boiariae. Paraphrs. Sed numquid Triumphalis obliviscemur coronae? Laudo trophaeum nobile, crucis arborem. At tu cape has coronas victor Amor, & si omnibus his rosae sese immisceant, ne has repudia. Spinae nuperae dederunt. Ecce ante currus triumphales cum mundo daemonem, cum morte carnem. Hath the victor forgotten his crown? Love which, shall it entertain ambition, cannot claim the rose and refuse the thorns, borne with all else in viae ad mortem compendium totis arbitrabatur; (The way of death is rarely taken by leaps, but by steps. Johannis Schuccelius Arnstatensium Cippus Mnemosynes Structus & in Immortalitatis ex Georgii Grosshainii. Sin vitam, excessisset, tum viae ad mortem compendium se fecisse arbitrabatur.) for, to the end of that remonstrancy of conceit, and by the same barb that would discover the pride of an Antisthenes, * we are discovered by both the Left hand and the Right, and the sin of one hand were not recompensed by the virtue of the other,- non male est impune relinquo manus et bene rependem manu. See David Crinitus Nepomucenus, Arphasidis praescripta; in, Carmen pro Felici et Allusiones ad Nomina Imperatoris. Non male si quicquam factum est impune relinquo, et bene munifica facta repende manu.] hardly the final estimation of our Nature, or reprovement of the god Amore, that makes small distinction in those of her own order and of man,- for love, as much as war, hath no end but in itself,- praelia pacis amore putabit, moliri pacis amore indignum, [Humanae Sapientiae Poetico-Historicum ac Ernestus Augustus Osnabrugensiis; Protrepitcon Calliopes: Praelia moliri nisi pacis amore putabat, pacis amore Caesareo indignum pectore. For love, that hath no end but in itself; ‘ibi viget amoris, ubi viget amor.’ Augustin Nagore Aesopolensi, Lucerna Mystica pro Directoribus Animarum. De languore divino, sive aegritudine divini amoris: languor divinus, qui ibi viget ubi viget amor a divino amore procedit, crescit, & perficitur.] taketh nothing for the heart of man at least in ultra Venerem placans invide, [The price of a woman’s envy were not remunerated by our love returned; it is not the heart, but the man, which is demanded. Ioan. Vatellius, Commentarius utriusque Gulielmus Lamarensis Paraphraste de Insano Leandri ac Herus Amore Poemation, Tetrastichon: in cupido concilians sacris miros adolebat; mulliere genus speciosis invidet ultro sed Venerem placans.] and findeth out our nature in ‘non dissimilesue Diis'latet summum mens fiedei. [Euphrenius Georgiadis Amstelii, in: De Duplici Amore, Fere ex Sententia Luciani; Poeseos et Medicinae Studiosi Erotica, Basia, Coma et Sylva; Heironimus ad Pammachium. Love offers war to the warlike spirit, and peace to the peaceful one. Non tenet unus Amor mentes, non una Cupido: sed duplex hominum pectora versat Amor. Hic, satus Oceano, mortalia corda feroci et vario fallax comprimis ingenio. Hic fluctu Veneris animum in contraria raptat; non secus ae tumidis astuat unda vadis. Ille, velut coelo demissa cathena sereno, et licito & casto iungit Amore duos. Non juvenum ille animos lethali vulnere rupit; non impudicis ignibus urit eos. Mentibus ille bonos immittit rite furores, et non ignotos, dissimilesue Diis. As stated elsewhere, peace measures the warlike soul: nota tua est virtus, est & tua nota voluntas, nec latet in summum mens tua fida Deum. At fera tranquillam cum rumpunt bella quietem, excutiunt haustum martia corda Deum. In Christophorus Preisius Pannonius: Elegia ad Nicolaum Granuella.]

[size=85]* ‘The Pride of an Antisthenes were seen, not in his cloak, but through its chinks.’ A playful allusion to the imagery of claiming the rose and trying to pick its flower without being spited by the thorns, drawn up from the following: “… though I have by the study of wisdome and philosophy corrected that which was a defect in nature; the philosopher saith vultus est index animi, the eye is the casementt of the soule, through which wee may plainely see it, better then he that saw Antisthenes his pride through the chinks of his cloake.” See Walkington, in The Optick Glasse of Humors; Or, The Touchstone of a Golden Temperature.

  1. Anthony David Nuttall, in “The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake.”, traces a similar linguistic web depicting Prometheus as a duplicitous image of poetic independence and creativity next to a subservience to Nature and the course of Fate: (“We have come far enough in this story to know that no allegiance can be trusted; that which is hated can become, suddenly, that which is loved. But the Gnostic belief in a wicked, tyrannical Demiurge does imply, with surprising constancy, a hostility to nature and therefore to pastoral. This diurnal round of rocks and stones and trees is, to the Gnostic, the wheel of the torturer on which we are all broken. ‘Nature’ is a hate-word, not a love-word. ‘The Garden’, by Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell, is a brilliant, hostile, pastoral commentary on Paradise Lost, written before Paradise Lost existed.”) 1) On Poetry and Poets; Politiani, Silvae IV., Nutricia. Thou who dared before all others to fan the celestial seeds of the Promethean fire in man: tu prima fovere ausa Prometheae caelestia semina flammae. 2) Vida, de Arte Poetica: Dona deum Musae; vulgus procul este profanum! Has magni natas Iovis olim duxit ab astris callidus in terras insigni fraude Prometheus, cum liquidos etiam mortalibus attulit ignes. Long ago wise Prometheus by his celebrated deception led these daughters of great Jove (the Muses) from stars to earth, when he carried inconstant fire to mortals. 3) Chapman, Shadow of Night: "Therefore Promethean poets with the coals of their most genial, more than human souls, in living verse created men like these … " Milton, using the word vestigia, recalls his use of the same term in the bitter ‘vestigia’ of earthliness carried even by the angels. 4) Milton, ad Patrem: Nec tu vatis opus divinum despice carmen, quo nihil aethereos ortus, et semina caeli, nil magis humanam commendat origine metem, sancta Promtheae retinens vesitigia flammae. Retaining as it does a trace of the Promethean fire, nothing argues better for our heavenly beginnings, for our celestial seed, for the human mind commended by its origin,- and that ambition of our more chimaerickall philosophe, that needs must compute inversely, the circle of this our life, venturing ever toward the past, and this for the sake of a future borne ad praeterita, ab agnoscas,- [‘Adverte animum ad praeterita, ab agnoscas naturae non passus decipi’: Iulianus Hainovius, in: Vita Veritatis ad Vitam; Gratia et Veritate Disposuit Corde in Ascensiones apud Iodacus Kalovius Coloniae cum Privilegio; Pars. Sexta. Adverte animum ad praeterita, ut agnoscas, an non sit ea naturae indoles, & an ab illa te decipi sis passus.] than poetry.

  2. As to our ‘mortuary insult’, compare, out of the Solennis Actus of 1608, the ‘calumniatrix sophistica’: in placidamque furore dulce invides cineres atravit mortui. See Joachim Curaeus, in: Exegesis Perspicua & Ferme Integra Controversiae de Sacra Coena, as likewise recorded in Goclenius, out of the following text: Excudebat Guolgangus Kezelius Oratio Ανασχενασιυ; "Necastis heu necastis sapientissimam, nulli nocentem Musarum Luscinniam."; … medax calumniatrix sophistica misere flagellatum necavit; nec tantum necavit, sed ei etiam dulcem placidamque quietem Diabolico furore invides, in mortui mane saeviit, cineres eius rabiose atrevit, contra divina & human iura exquisitissimis cum lacerans criminibus[/size].

“The purpose of human society is only to forge the bond between labor and pleasure”

I quite like this summary, and would like to comment briefly on how what inevitably becomes perceived as vulgar hedonism at first impression can be ‘respiritualized’ by a proper understanding of the process.

The offensive idea is that the world and everything in it is material, and that as a consequence of this, we material beings can only strive for physical pleasure (or stasis of some variety), though we want to believe there is something spiritual going on and it’s not just all processes regulated in our heads by ionized particles moving up and down axons.

We are offended at the idea that we have no freewill (not even a smidgeon, for u compatibalists out there), that we are mortal, and that for all our labors we only ever achieve more physical stuff and/or better living conditions. This is not enough. This would put us on the level of monkeys with thumbs.

Once this humiliating fact about us is accepted, we can move on to doing the kinds of things that could be called ‘spiritual’ in the non-platonic Cartesian sense.

When the soul superstition is removed from the comprehension of the spirit, the material world becomes spiritualized as a result, making the purpose of life to engage in a struggle to decrease the former (labor) and increase the latter (pleasure).

What enriches this struggle is that man perceives his failure to attain more pleasure as a kind of defeat, and he charges on to solve his problem. He is so engrossed in figuring out a way to get to Mars, he doesn’t even care anymore that he is a monkey with thumbs because what he is doing is so goddamn exciting. It’s spiritualized, which means his attention is meaningfully held by some transcendent task that would revolutionize the species’s place in the material world.

Materialism, spinozean rational hedonism, and stirnerite egoism are at the heart of man, whatever he tells himself as an involuntary egoist.

Fast forward the ramble to here; why Marxism is the economic counterpart to the theses. It is applied rational hedonism. One with aspirations so grand and with such potential that the speed of its revolutionary force will be overwhelmingly spiritual for the entire world.

The proportion of labor to pleasure can, should, and will be brought down for each generation. This is all the species can do. All it’s ever tried to do… behind the ideological scenes. But to recognize and accept this is to be able to begin real philosophical work.

Yes, I did quite enjoy that quote from Quinnus Britannus. I follow what you said until we get to the ‘real philosophical work’. The real philosophical work is in a parallel timeline, in an orthogonal universe,- at least in relation to the “history” of man. These little monkey-thinkers enact what we proclaim. Our history is not their history.

ojh motherfucker i just drooled all over my laptop pc cuz io took too mmany percocets and drank too much

FUCK

seems to hbe working fine os imma just wipe it off

edit; just added to and edited my posts in this thread. My Salome, yeah. I put a picture of her up. You all can see, the one thing I love as much as I love myself and my own writing. To her, I owe almost all that I know, like Socrates his Diotima. What does N. owe to Salome? His humiliation? Fucking Nietzsche. What a pussy. He was a romanticist through and through, born to an age in which romanticism had run its course. I don’t know how he let himself become deceived by one of these college educated, ‘intellectual type’ women.

Hard for me to believe anyone who has has even skimmed Nietzsche could come to this conclusion… And considering how well read you are (thus I assume you have read all of Nietzsche)…I conclude this is a all theater and/or shit-posting/bait. ’

Also, it’s quite fortuitous that Salome rejected Nietzsche, or else we never would of got mankind’s greatest book (TSZ)… Not that Nietzsche would ever of settled for a normal marriage even if he got one.

Obviously it’s a shitpost/joke, I called N. a pussy and implied he was a progenitor of the modern incel movement. Not so much theatre as it was too much percocet, phenobarbital and booze. However, still, every joke is meant to be taken with a grain of salt, and by salt, I mean a grain of truth. That grain of salt-truth is this: I didn’t marry my Salome either,- because yes, if you marry someone, you have just pledged yourself to a great commitment that requires an investment of energy and soul,- one on account of which a man cannot possibly still keep investing everything he is to his work, to his philosophy, to his creative life. But it doesn’t change the fact that he was rejected. Because of that rejection he suffered, which was inevitable given the kind of manic-pixie-girl-archetype Salome was, (the quirky, rebellious, permanently young type of female soul that swoops in from heaven to drag the mordant and lonely thinker back into the world one day, to experience some adventure, to experience,- even against his will,- Life, etc. Faust’s type of woman. Telling that this type is promised by Mephistopheles.) he maintained a stunted form of Romanticism all the way to the end of his life, saturating his text. Beyond that, I believe one reads any artist best, in the image of their Muse. An artist’s ‘taken angels’ tell us who they are most of all.

As Aristoxenus of Tarentum wrote, on the Pythagorean Ethic: “There are many things in human life that benefit from late learning, Love most of all.” But it is nonetheless true, that such learning may in fact come too late. It makes us Romantics.

Obviously, as a hardly inconspicuous anti-Nietzschean, (In fact, not only am I anti-Nietzschean,- I am a strange kind of Christian philosopher. A gnostic Christianity, even my own unique version of gnostic Christianity,- in which the divine Trinity is inverted and the Son, instead of equalizing a dialectical circuit between the Father and the Ghost, actually serves as an antagonist to the Father, through which the Holy Ghost, as the third component, is self-sublimed: Christ as the enemy of God. That is what the ‘death of God’ is: the Christus overthrew him, and left behind the Ghost for mankind’s future apotheosis,- but Christianity nonetheless.) I don’t think TSZ is,- in keeping with Nietzsche’s own shit-posting about himself in Ecce Homo,- the greatest book. In fact, I don’t value it as highly as I do his other books,- books which I do value, despite disagreement.

Despite despising him a great deal, mostly as an unconscious predecessor of dialectical historical materialism, (He laid the seeds for that in the Genealogy. Instead of developing a theory of morality based on man’s transcendental capacity for recursive self-reflection,- the category of the transcendental subject, he traces it geneologically, by way of economic forces. You can slice that any way you want, but that is Marx. You are dissolving higher-level abstractions, like moral values or ‘the self’, into elementary fragments of materialist forces within the dialectic of history.) Nietzsche is actually the only human being for which I feel an innate affinity. We lived nearly identical lives. Chronic pain, opium addiction, inhuman solitude, (I haven’t even left this house in 16 years. Save for one occasion, and that was only because I was with ‘Salome’. I didn’t speak out loud once for ten years: it atrophied the tissue in my throat so when I did try to speak after that, my voice would give out after only a few minutes, becoming so hoarse I could not physically articulate speech. I understand where he had been.) He is, to me, a kind of spiritual brother,- a fraternal spirit. But our projects cannot coexist, since mine necessitates a great rebirth of Metaphysics, as well as a rebirth of Christianity. The essence of that splitting of paths is in my defense of the category of the transcendental subject, (as an asynthetic, negative ground for the ‘disjunction of exteriority and immanence’) which the Kantian framework of synthetic apperception never properly grounded, the Hegelian system simply ignored, and everyone else basically just never understood. That category, besides splitting me from Nietzsche, also split me from “scientism” and the atavistic resurgence of Pre-Socratic philosophy, while at the same time re-aligning my own trajectory with the destiny of Christianity. (It also led to my vast re-reading of Plato, especially his theory of Participation.) As I elaborate in one of my books:

" The chiasmus torn in this absent Whole, or the ‘disjunction of exteriority and immanence’,- in order to be brought out of the theoretical depth of the impossible and so made philosophically readable,- must be conceptualized through a new, properly ontological thinking-through of Time, which Heidegger had promised in the third division of Being and Time, but had not achieved, and Badiou simply ignored. While I find great intellectual sympathy in OOO and speculative realism, most especially with regard to their implicit rejection of the pre-Socratics as well as the respective modern equivalents in the cult of popular science, (A thinking which undermines philosophy, like the pre-Socratics and the sophists equally accomplished, as though philosophy were simply an outdated mode of science,- as opposed to a fundamentally different human project entirely. See Harman’s book “Object-Oriented Ontology” for a great account of the Pre-Socratics in their undermining of the Western philosophical project.) or likewise an assumed faith in the tenability of a Theory of Everything, it should be clear from my own conceptualization of the episteme that an alternative to their theorizations of a pure ontology of time is pursued in these books. In the third dialectical triad, the logoic chiasmus noted here is intellectually supplanted by the ‘lepsis’, such that the pure ontology of temporality is then left to trace the movement of a super-transcendent methexis (toward ektheosis) through the super-immanent lepsis (using Eriugena’s notions of supra-immanence and supra-transcendence) and its resulting perichoreia,- an ‘Image’ of Time which cannot be reduced to the merely intramundane or ‘encosmic’ (See Joshua Ramey, in “The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal.” Thus: “The cosmological and metaphysical problem for orthodox Christian thinkers was that, if in creation the same divine being is both the expressor and the expressed of a world, how it is possible to avoid the unwanted consequence that God’s nature might be limited to the expression of intramundane or merely encosmic possibilities? Some kind of process theology seems to loom, whereby God’s essence would be seen as restricted by time, or even that God might be forced to discover God’s own essence through time.”) movement from potentiality to actuality within the ‘tritogenos’ like that at the basis of a causal or correlationist theorization of temporality,- namely as a distinctive vocity: the vocity of the Subject as a kind of “hepatic inscription of the chora” capable of confronting the “choraic motility of the semiotic” and infilitrating the symbolic order, as divine perichoresis, with an intrusion of jousissance (beyond the threshold of structured and socially reinforced libido) which embodies the inherent lacuna or instability of the body, that is, the Negativity of the mortal Subject, whose unstable forces, as graphe or traces of more elemental universal forces, therefor draw the subject upward into the visionary ekstasis of the eidos,- into the mantic presence of the Symbolic."

But I have expounded upon my attacks on Nietzsche many times, so I would also include how I positively situate him in the history of philosophy, as well as in my own personal philosophical history:

" Nietzsche did not make an advance; instead, he mistakenly returned back to a philosophy
grounded on the first of the three epistemes, ie. the ontic, with which he mirrored the
order of the universe within the order of the individual soul as all the pre-Socratics had
done, each of them thereby generating a unique and purely affirmative image of Being as
Ontos, oblivious to the Pandemaic Loss of Being. [That is, to the fall into sin, knowledge,
and death…] However, he did this in order to reconstruct and eventually become that
potential hero of heroes in perfect conformation of psyche to the political order, of
individual and state, of Eros to its object, representative of a fulfilled psychological drama
between Psyche and Eros.

The wound out of which the fantasy of primary narcissism is born, rather it is configured
by the image of the Cross in Christianity, Oedipal sexual guilt in Freud, etc. is the price
paid for civilization, namely the fall from innocence into sin, into knowledge- into
death. I take it as factually existing, though it can be overcome, by moving beyond a view
of man’s immanent subjectivity to a psycho-philosophy of the transcendental subject.
Such a philosophy does not presently exist. Rather than achieving that, Nietzsche rediscovered
what the Greeks were in my view- and in his view, namely by regressing to
the ontic subject and becoming a Greek in the manner of that strain of philosophy I spoke
of Socrates as terminating, perhaps prematurely. (“Before philosophy reached this final
configuration…”) He was a necessary step backward, so that man could eventually move
forward.

That we should read Nietzsche and his various Heideggarian interpreters as
unconsciously recapitulating this conceptualization of the Ontos, we should first recall the
Protagorian term, appropriated from Pindar and his Pythic odes, of the agones logon as
properly the domain of philosophic discourse in the Pre-Socratic estimation, in that the
agon is a contest of wills and of quanta of power,- for the Platonic Sophist, in its analysis
of Being, tells us already that the onta is essentially Being-as-Power, and the res-onta an
actualization and confirmation of this potentia and internal struggle, which the Pre-
Socratics referred to as the inherence of Being, as within a particular differentiated form,
(This is the basis of the ancient form of skepsis, as given by Sextus Empiricus, who
extends the concept of inherence by the two additional concepts of the epoche and
ataraxia, that is, the suspension of judgment and the imperturbability which follows in
the process of ‘energizing the agon or conceptual-opposition of things perceived, ie. onta,
and things that are, in accordance to noia or thought-abstraction alone, ie. the ontos.’) as
opposed to the ontos or Being in itself,- as positioned in the stages of ontogenesis at a
much higher level of abstraction,- therein serving, at least for the noble philosophic soul,
as a kind of modus of arbitration- a “guiding-image of thought” or episteme to which the
agon might be conformed and determined, and with that, the great agon of the World
itself,- the greater destiny of Being in the cosmogonic struggle against nonexistence- and
all of this in a poignant clarification of the important ontic-ontological distinction that
Heidegger believed all of Western metaphysics had unanimously rejected and sought,
however consciously or unconsciously, to confuse and undermine.


On the category of the individual as inherited from Christianity,- the category of the transcendental subject.

The more distant members of the Archaic period, like Aeschylus, avaunted themselves
shamelessly the championship of the daemon, and that evinced in their long-standing
desultancies with regard to the constant recycling and traduction of the numerous
pre-rational concepts out of whose store the Hellenic mind later repulsed itself, declining
from the height of Athenian power and Aegypto-Alexandrian cosmopolitanism,-- a
refusal which took on the form of Euripidean tragedy as far as the arts are concerned,
following the birth of tragico-artistic pride in Aeschylus and the death of this pride,- a
passion now perhaps grown as incomprehensible to us through the centuries as the very
language in which it was afforded testimony,- which is to say a world, a philosophy,
ontos,- in the shame of Pericles,- respective witnesses to the birth and the loss of that
mighty civilization over which they couched their president luminaries,-- the total agon
of existence, out of which the precedents of these new aristocratic classes emerged in
continually higher-forms, each poet-philosopher bearing in his turn a unique guiding
image-of-Being or ontos developed in only that manner in which it could be developed,
that is- in the confrontation with the daemon. Euripides continually deconstructs those
pathic influences which served the chief instruments of Aeschylean tragedy,- incapable of
generating a unique ontos, though finding as he did, new purpose in a kind of exploration
of the limits of each image of Being advanced by the older tragedians,- not unlike the
Socratic mode of teasing and testing the limits of ΣΟΠΗΙΑ. [Sophia; wisdom.] This
much is said in the motto of Euripides’ Medea: “There is danger in love; for Love without
limit can bring disgrace.” Thus, in Euripides, we find the bacchic celebrant Dionysus
vilified as a vindictive and petty usurper, as contrasted with Pentheus, and all the older
passions, (Heroic hybris, Love, Revenge, etc.) once utilized in the artistic transfiguration,
the mythologizing and general dignification of man’s power, glory, and nobility,- as well
as man’s hunger for the same,- were submit to a deconstructive aesthetics of human
failing, mortality and the intransigence of his often thoughtless ambitions upon the earth,
heedless of the gods above- gods who in turn have grown cruel toward man, even with a
silent mockery, like that of the stars by whose promise of light and age their heavens are
so adorned, to lament with Flaubert- a psychological depth that expressed itself,- at least
with greatest faith in its own aims and needs,- and with the greatest exultances, rejoicing
in its own irrecoverable fatum,- in character-study and in closet-dramas, moreso than in
the posturing bloat of the more theatrical typus of Aeschylean writing, as it would be
perceived by the Euripidean playwrights, or by any strict adherence to the forms
suggested by the theoretical models of the Aristotelian poetics of catharsis,- a grand
revelation that should bring about a moment of overwhelming sympathy and a final
identification between subject and audience,- (The Euripidean drama pursues quite the
opposite goal, in attempting to distance the tragic subject and the audience, as we see in
the irredeemable portrait of Medea, so that a kind of moral repulsion thus evoked might
spur us into self-reflection,- the consciousness in which the heart of the Law presides
eternally. Nietzsche is correct in informing us that Euripides is a moralist: but the
morality of Euripides is an imputation of individual human failing, not the collective
social failings demanding our obeisance and blind subservience to either the Gods or
other men; a call, as is Socratic morality, to the category of the individual in its ethical
and political reality,- an intimation of a much greater metaphysical truth which would be
further developed in Christianity,- in magis saeculo non est subitus regi,- [Manuel de Sa,
in: Aphorismi Confessariorum ex Doctorum Sententiis Collecti. Clerici rebellio in regem,
non est crimen laesae-majestatis, qui non est subditus regi
. See: Steinmetz, in: the
History of the Jesuits, Vol. 2, P. 443. The People, in having been absorbed as civitas or
a singular body by the Ecclesia to serve as the chief instrument of the power of the
Church, stake their own sovereignty in turn, gaining through the political organization of
religious authority their own parasitic dispensation, though it is admittedly a power that,
in being superprojected eo majis saeculo, in the ‘world after’, to cite Aurelianus in the
37th epistle to Avitus, falls quite below that won in the later formulation of Republicanist
doctrine and the consequent elevation of the Individual in his affordances of more
canonical liberty and legal right, that is,- in the subsumption of the civitas to republica.]
or, as may be surmised from the introduction to that history,- ‘save for posterity, nothing
survives for posterity’,- nil mortali ad gloria trahitur posteris quasi lumen est,- [No light
survives the extinguishing of our mortal glories here on earth, that we should guide
posterity by the accomplishments of another age; for each age were a world. Natura
quisque; mortali ad gloria trahitur; acriori tamen stimulo, cui oculus, imitana exempla
domestica obiecta; maiorumque laus, posteris quasi lumen est.

Sebastianus-Andreantonelli, in: Asculanae Historia Sacra, Liber Primus.] not to the
decadent and genuinely nihilistic elevation of society and the petty liberties of mortals
won by political experiment over the will of the Gods.) and moreover, a general
heightening of man’s introspective gaze that, perhaps, was not entirely innocent in the
later degeneracy of Athenian virtu,- though, if we wish to avoid the kind of scapegoating

  • of the artist-metaphysician and poet-philosopher implied by the mere surface reading of
    a work like Plato’s Republic, it must be taken here as symptomatic of a deeper
    transformation of the social ordo than the merely psychotypal,- and one that went far
    beyond the development of mere culture, as opposed to a causative agent of the same
    kind of social disorder for which Socrates was executed, much less the actual loss of
    Athenian nobility, or that height of enlightenment, political organization and artistic
    flowering by which, even now, we are haunted,- a height man may never again achieve.
    A simple return to the pre-Rational archaics like that implored by Nietzschean aesthetics
    would not be much of a solution to the question of social degeneration we are faced with
    in both the Eurpidean drama and our own era, considering this would amount simply to a
    return to the ontos, which is not the highest-most of the epistemes.

Finally, that full text I referred to earlier in this message, regarding the degeneracy of the pre-Socratics and the need to defend the ‘category of the transcendental subject’:

" A theory of theory,- a philosophy of philosophy,- a ‘theory of everything’, cannot formally exist, because Theory [Philosophy] cannot account for its own Negativity, that is, for its own negation, which would be ‘pure negation’- that Negativity which cannot be accounted for through Theory or ‘absorbed’ by the strictures of System, in Bataille’s formula,- or the ‘secret of consciousness’ as appercepted by the appropriate schema through transcendental synthesis, which Kant claimed existed only in the depths of the soul, rent fatally beyond the veil of the Dialectic. This is the nature of Bataillean violence: the fundamental scissure of Discourse. Thus when we point the dialectic against itself,- when we work out a dialectic of the dialectic,- as Kierkegaard ironically recapitulated the Hegelian philosophy, we achieve what Kierkegaard called the ‘paradox’ (what Plato called the ‘aporia’) as an engine of thought, while similarly, when we invert the dialectic, as Marx did, we initiate a process of de-construction by which all concepts are dissolved into elementary fragments of material-history and reduced to a singular quanta of Force a la. the Will to Power. As the Hegelian thought builds up, within the movement of Geist, the Babel-tower of positive knowledge toward the Absolute, so the Marxist dialectic deconstructs System and descends toward a bare materiality, within whose conflux of elementary forces the image of Utopia has been hopelessly distorted. A reductio ad absurdum of the categorical Negation occurs as well, when we attempt to circumscribe a dialectic of the dialectic, leading to Baidou’s ‘bad infinity’ and Bataille’s un-absorbed Negative as an accumulation of those entropic stresses upon the system of Capital produced by the flow of material-history, to again return to the Marxist formula. This reduction was precisely the meaning of ‘Death’ in Heidegger’s account of Being. Heidegger sought in fact to fully explicate Dasein’s opening toward Death by bearing the Negative to its implicated reductio ad absurdum, (this titanic struggle was his project of de-struktion) peering beyond the veil of History through a kind of ontological black-hole compressed within the folds of Aryan race-memory, whose event-horizon had trapped the European soul within the inescapable orbit of Capital, Modernity, the image of Techne(ology) and the merely ontic,- that is, the metaphysical Presence of ousia’s Absence, toward which the human dimension is properly enfolded by Death,- by Death as a kind of noetic ‘escape route’ out of the ‘phenomenal bind’ of correlationist philosophy, [Or, in other words, an escape route out of the confused nebula, bereft of political or ‘emancipatory’ potential, found in the purely intermediate or initiatory role of Dasein, which rests on a movement from its own horizon of possibilities (Moglichkeit) to the disclosure of an actual futurity, (Wirklichkeit) to be later grasped by a pure ontology of time in which the movement from potentiality to actuality, in terms of the Aristotelian categories, becomes a movement from the non-ego to ego,- that is, a kind of cosmic awakening of insensate matter to Geist reenacted on the part of Dasein. “Hoher als die Wirklichkeit steht die Moglichkeit.” Ernest Joos, 1983: “Lukacs’ last autocriticism, the Ontology; On the Usefulness of Ontology.” On the inter-mediation of Heidggerian disclosure, see Raymond E. Gogel, “Quest for Measure; the Phenomenological Problem of Truth.”] in Meillassoux’s reconceptualization of ‘finitude’, which we must also pair with our conceptualization of Dasein. [See: Anamnesis; Aesthetics After Finitude. When the post-Kantian correlationist doxa is dispensed with, we are left with an ‘un-territorialized’ domain of the human Subject formerly rejected by the three modes of Kant’s critique,- criticism, skepticism, and dogmatisma, a la. ‘philosophy’,- an uninhabited subjectivity awaiting a new ‘terraforming aesthetics’, just as we are provided with the converse, that is, a hyperrealist or ‘inhuman’ vision of the cosmos in which the distinction between primary and secondary, or ‘subjective’ and ‘external’ qualities has been extinguished. In “The Existence of the Divine”, Meillassoux calls this radically contingent separation of the human subject and the ‘arche fossil’ of the Real simply, “the impossibility of the whole”, for whose assertion object-oriented ontology and speculative realists, like Harman, have been accused, to some extent justifiably,- and to a greater extent, unsurprisingly, given the fact that we find here an oblique continuance of the Heideggarian strain,- of disavowing the philosophic vocity of the Subject,- much as the assertion of Dasein disavows the vocity of the ‘human’ subject. The chiasmus torn in this absent Whole, or the ‘disjunction of exteriority and immanence’,- in order to be brought out of the theoretical depth of the impossible and so made philosophically readable,- must be conceptualized through a new, properly ontological thinking-through of Time, which Heidegger had promised in the third division of Being and Time, but had not achieved, and Badiou simply ignored. While I find great intellectual sympathy in OOO and speculative realism, most especially with regard to their implicit rejection of the pre-Socratics as well as the respective modern equivalents in the cult of popular science, (A thinking which undermines philosophy, like the pre-Socratics and the sophists equally accomplished, as though philosophy were simply an outdated mode of science,- as opposed to a fundamentally different human project entirely. See Harman’s book “Object-Oriented Ontology” for a great account of the Pre-Socratics in their undermining of the Western philosophical project.) or likewise an assumed faith in the tenability of a Theory of Everything, it should be clear from my own conceptualization of the episteme that an alternative to their theorizations of a pure ontology of time is pursued in these books. In the third dialectical triad, the logoic chiasmus noted here is intellectually supplanted by the ‘lepsis’, such that the pure ontology of temporality is then left to trace the movement of a super-transcendent methexis (toward ektheosis) through the super-immanent lepsis (using Eriugena’s notions of supra-immanence and supra-transcendence) and its resulting perichoreia,- an ‘Image’ of Time which cannot be reduced to the merely intramundane or ‘encosmic’ (See Joshua Ramey, in “The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal.” Thus: “The cosmological and metaphysical problem for orthodox Christian thinkers was that, if in creation the same divine being is both the expressor and the expressed of a world, how it is possible to avoid the unwanted consequence that God’s nature might be limited to the expression of intramundane or merely encosmic possibilities? Some kind of process theology seems to loom, whereby God’s essence would be seen as restricted by time, or even that God might be forced to discover God’s own essence through time.”) movement from potentiality to actuality within the ‘tritogenos’ like that at the basis of a causal or correlationist theorization of temporality,- namely as a distinctive vocity: the vocity of the Subject as a kind of “hepatic inscription of the chora” capable of confronting the “choraic motility of the semiotic” and infilitrating the symbolic order, as divine perichoresis, with an intrusion of jousissance (beyond the threshold of structured and socially reinforced libido) which embodies the inherent lacuna or instability of the body, that is, the Negativity of the mortal Subject, whose unstable forces, as graphe or traces of more elemental universal forces, therefor draw the subject upward into the visionary ekstasis of the eidos,- into the mantic presence of the Symbolic.] * The inability of Theory to account for its own Negation leads to what I have named ‘mimetic hyperinflation’, while the subversion of mimesis appears as a consequence of the perfection of techne as a hypermnemata, in whose image the direction of human history has been deterministically bent. We take the hypermnemata as a potential theory of the ‘Spectacle’,- meaning, a conceptualization of the Spectacle amenable to philosophical analysis, namely through the use of the episteme-model of vocity and Truth, (and its respective counter-Hegelian epistemology and aporetic metaphysics) by which the underlying ‘mnema’ of the technomimetic subtrate might be excavated from its own autopoietically generated materials without encouraging further viral transmission of those materials. The first task of such a project would be the deployment of a kind of buffer-zone in which the mnematic core of ‘System’ might be unloaded, with a secondary protocol focused on a re-engagment of the symbolic-exchange function and thus, eventually, a reconstruction of philosophy out of its at that point inert materials. The episteme, as a model of the subject’s unique vocity as well as that of the variable thresholds to the Real which the Subject can access, promises a theoretical explication of the category of ‘experience’, that is, an explication of the experiential subject’s vocity, recalling one of Walter Benjamin’s most urgent tasks,- (for he felt that it was this,- a conceptualization of the nature of experience in its totality,- which the Kantian framework most urgently lacked, with the ‘secret’ of the appercepted subject being said to reside unutturably in the soul, by Kant himself) a task which, given the limitations of critical-theory as merely a mimetically inverted Hegelian dialectic, was fated to remain unfulfilled. Such a model of human experience,- one of experience in its totality, in its vocity,- would, in its praxis, give rise to a theory of creativity, not merely an aesthetics- and therefor, would materialize the very creative techniques and strategies as served for its subject precisely as what I have before called “a mode of aisthesis capable of conforming the very effects whose techne it informs and so inverting the series of causes”,- that linear series whose ultimate telos is self-fulfilled in the image of Capital. (ie. inverting the structure of temporal co-relation, to use the terms utilized in the present text.) It is with these techniques that the reconstructive task hinted at here would be initially surmounted. **

  • For more on this term, as it relates to the Platonic theory of Presence, see Nicolet., Isar, “Chora: Tracing the Presence”; Review of European Studies, 2009. The perichoreia defines the final manifestation of the chora’s impossible presence. The aporia of metaphysical Presence is one of Plato’s most significant, reaching its most energetic pitch of course, in the Timaeus. Presence is here encoded by the unstable logic of the ‘chora’,- a kind of hypnagogic or transitional phase (tritogenos) between the immaterial eidos, on the one hand, and the material eidolon on the other, that is, the world of Being and that of the Image, the world of the actual and the potential. The ‘impossible presence’ of the choreia, which is absent from itself, only instantiates the distorted logic of ‘pure difference’ for which it has been so often attacked by critical theorists with the mistaking of absence for presence, with the conflation of negativity and knowledge,- for such a misconstrual of the eidos for eidolon,- arising out of the reduction of this ‘Image of Time’ (the perichoreia) to the chora or ‘Being of Time’,- (as stated concerning the correlationalist dynamis) gives rise to an illegible graphe of the Platonic choreia,- and thus, to the loss of its hepatic inscription in the choreia of the body, which replicates the ‘Form’ of the higher universe in the lower one as a ‘participation’, according to Plato’s account and the cosmology of the Timaeus.

** I would clarify several terms in relation to what has been said here. The interaction of the primary and secondary processes, (the inorganic and organic, the inhuman and human, cosmic and egoic, social and individual; the ‘anorganic’ and ‘aorgic’, to recall Schelling’s distinction) borrowing the terms used in Simondon’s socio-psychology, has thus far occurred on great scales of time,- giving rise to what Land and the CCRU referred to as long-range feedback cycles,- the kind of cycles we find ourselves unable to statistically model, much like the massive data-sets related to weather patterns and their computer-driven prediction, which had inspired the concept of the hyperobject. This unpredictable feedback-cycle has produced an epistemological blind-spot (this blind-spot is, simply “critical-theory”.) within which one such hyperobject (A ‘dragon’; see Consolandi, in: “I Saw a Dragon! - Envisioning Hyperobjects: culture, collaboration and madness in the Anthropocene.” Note also J. Sheu, in: “Conceiving the Hyperobject in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris”. ) has been generated, namely through the process I refer to as mimetic hyperinflation: Capital. Capital represents a final submission of the secondary or human, individuating process, to the primary one. The hypermnemata is the auto-poetically generated form in which the secondary process, ie. human history, has been re-encoded on the higher-dimensional surface of the unreadable hyperobject. This sociological trajectory, because it is the eventuality of an inertial telos suspended within the image of Capital itself, constitutes the self-fulfilling prophecy par excellence,- inevitable, perhaps, though only from within its own ontological horizon. The question is one of first reaching an ontological ground-zero, or what I have called the skhisma,- an ontological-minima of differentiation,- and then finally escaping that horizon. In the past, man possessed a metaphysics, and not merely a statistics-driven, scientifically derived model of himself and the world, as that reified by critical-theory, such that a revitalization of metaphysics is required in order to excavate the human mnema from the process of material-history. The ‘episteme’ is posited as just such a metaphysics.

As Theory cannot circumscribe its own Negation, so neither can Theory circumscribe its own Essence,- it’s positivity or Affirmation. Harman’s account of hyperobjects lies in the notion of epistemological withdrawal. The contingent sensual qualities of an object, as available to our senses, do not modulate the essence of the object, such that objects can only enter into relationship with one another on the level of the sensual, whose ontological gaps can therefor never be reconstructed within the fabric of the symbolic. Objects thus contain a haunting core unavailable to the absorptive grasp of System, by which relationships are capacitated and governed. The problem is that, through the formation of perceptive relationships between objects, new objects are created, which in turn telescope hidden essences of their own, further miring System in the kind of entropic stresses about which Bataille was so concerned. Here we also find negation as a driving force in the ‘engine of thought’, though one potentially destructive in its ‘unrestrained mimesis’ of essences. Theory, when attempting to fathom its own hidden essence through the fabric of relationships available to it on the part of whichever System theory has chosen to operate under, cannot help but effloresce from out of its own confabulations ever new multiplicities of impossible essences, whose veil (the ‘confused nebula’ noted above) renders Theory’s own essence progressively more and more unreadable. All such networks of explosive essences exceed the limits of the singular human ego, such that, when perceived as relational complexes undulating or ‘phasing’ in and out of our own local Real from a higher-dimensional vantage, we might regard them as hyperobjects. "

Keep disregarding my challenges.

Keep expecting me to apologize for having taken you seriously and being disappointed when you turned out not to be.

Keep impressing yourself and leaving discussions when people are less impressed with you than you are. Keep shrouding yourself in endless repetitions. Keep disregarding your friends until they get bored and annoyed with you. And when they do, be sure to not think about what might have caused that.

Keep perfecting the art of solipsism.

Keep running from VO. Keep in the dark.

Yeah this shit actually hurts me, by the way. I liked it more when I considered you a fellow god. I hated it when you succumbed.

Thought of another ten or so dope allusions and quotes to add to my text-block while reading over it. Notice all of it is a single sentence. A 9-10 page long sentence. To avoid becoming a mere run-on, one must utilize a lot of archaic grammar and complex subjunctive clausal structure. Proust did that in French, I am just doing it in English. As always, actual quotes in italics, authors’ names and book titles without italics.

Unable to comport earnestly with the ‘audacity of wisdom’ in the broken measure of perfection’s heart,- in audacia totum pectus possideat, iret stultitiam immodicam fletum Philosophiciis,- [The audacity of the philosophers, that were an index of all human follies. Eleutheri Byzenius, in the Encomion Triumphus Capnionis. Fletum Heraclites risum Democritus iret stultitiam immodicam, vel que se audacia tantum extulerit, vel que cui totum insania pectus possideat, recte sapere & se dicere credat.] nor believing himself to have fathomed the mysterious bond of Poesy’s ‘voluptas dissimillima natura’, [Gualterus Quinnus Britannus, in: Corona Virtutum Principe Dignarum ex Variis Philosophorum. Etiam labor & voluptas dissimillima natura, societate quadam naturali inter se junguntur. The purpose of human society is only to forge the bond between labor and pleasure, which exists nowhere in the world of Nature. Though it were perhaps a bond forged only ‘in sapientes reliqua virtutum flecterent.’ Stephanus Riccius, Commentarius in Hesiodi Ascraei Erga Kai Hemeras; Accesserunt Ulpius Frisius et Nicolaus Vallae: cum autem bellis & mutationibus regnorum, quae crebrae erant, mores hominum paulatim deteriores fierent, neq; amplius nudis sententiis, ad virtutem flecti possent, tum demum sapientes eam rationem inierunt, ut propositis spectaculis, scenicis animos hominum ad modestiam, & reliqua virtutum officia flecterent.] the poet, unlike the philosopher,- pretending not to the ‘Dei Mortales’ [mortal god] of immortal Wisdom in hominis immortalem, after the phrase of Lucian, [God is but an immortal man, and man, a mortal God. An aphorism of Lucian’s, as recorded in: Reusnerii Aenigmatographia sive Sylloge Aenigmatum et Griphorum Convivalium; Aenigmata de Umbra Theodectes Phaselites, item alia quadam de Theseo Circumscripto. Quid sunt homines? Dei mortales. Quid sunt Diis? Homines immortales. Compare the ‘free mixture’ of things human and things divine in the Greek imagination, in Matthaeus Collinus Choterinae, Ode Continens Precationem ad Deum Pro Pace et Tranquillo: humana sacris miscuimus in corpore qui latebras habitant, commertia coeli mente colunt. Note also: Quam mire dispensant Dii mortalium studia in peregreni, & exules, & maximi regis homines, cum possent quam tenerrime fovere corpora cupediis lectissimis, tum nectare Divum se recreare atheletice. Hebenstreittus, in: Daniel Scholico-Theoneirocrites; Drama Novum de Regio Monarchae Babylonici, Somnio item Theopempio; Actus III, Aschpenazus Regii Epitropus.] in mortalis condita in frustra sapiente Deo,- [An echo of the Lucianic dictate. Petrophilus in Uranias Apocatastasin et Carmine Heroica eiusdem Cyctoixia Christi, P. 462: At quibus est lumen, norunt, quae maximae montes commoda, qua sylvae cunctis mortalibus addant, nec frustra a sapiente Deo sint condita nostro.] assured as he is by the Mind’s deathless progeny,- in mensis femine intelligibiles patris radios sapientiae, [Cosmas Magalianus Bracarensis, in Sacrae Scripturae Conimbricae; Sacram Iudicum Historiam, Explanationes et Annotationes Morales, P. 699. Adhibentur etiam mensis his Essenae faeminae, anus fere quibus non coacta castitas, sicut apud Graecos … corporis voluptates per totam vitam contempserunt. Nimirum divinae, non mortalis prolis cupidae. Spei, in the Historico-theologicum Carmeli Armamentarium; Scutum Septimum: nimirum divinae, non mortalis prolis cupidae, quam solae Deo charae animae ex scipsis pariunt, excipientes pro femine intelligibiles patris radios, ut decreta sapientiae contemplando percipere valeant.] in mensis aeternare sapientia extendi in aeternitatem,- [Lull, in the Proverbiorum: Sine aeternare sapientia non posset extendi in aeternitate. Note also, Ludovicus de Ponte Oletanus, ex Meditationes de Praecipuis Fidei Nostrae Mysteriis cum Orationis Mentalis Circa Eadem Praxi; Interpretes Melchior Trevinnius: Nam memoria & intellectus solum diligunt, cum recordantur & cogitant, ac perpenduntea, quae ad amorem provocant; imaginandi & appetendi facultates etiam tunc diligunt, cum producunt imaginationes & affectus, quo excitant & acuunt amorem; sensus diligunt, quando oculi, aures, lingua, & gustatus oblectantur, videndo, audiendo, & loquendo de reus, quae ad ipsum amorem diriguntur: & omnia membra corporis diligunt quando subserviunt ad exequenda opera amoris Dei.] and, bearing in their stead a memory of Paradise, in terrestria capax Dei, coelestis quum contactus libidinis Paradisiacae, [Petrus Terpagerus Ripensis Cimbria, in: Rituale Ecclesiarum Daniae et Norvegiae. In reading this passage, which invokes ‘the memory of Paradise’, one must recall that Ficino appropriates Cusanus’ concept of the Intellect as ‘capax dei’, explaing that it had been therefor invested with an ability to,- after having assimilated the teachings of philosophy,- recover a natural power to generate itself in itself: circa prima nascentis mundi incunabula, instituerit ipse, praescripserit atque ordinarit, quemadmodum homo, solus in terrestria capax disciplinae coelestis, in ceremoniis & cultibus numinis divini exterioribus se gereret, idque eo etiam tempore, quum contactus plane nullis esset libidinibus, ut cum poeta loquar, vel Salomonis ut utar verbo, rectus; adeo ut ordinem eade cum creatura fortitum exordia, eosdem quoque, quos creatura, habiturum fines, arbores ostendant Paradisiacae.] thereby endeavoring to lift himself beyond his origin, in animis mortalia temnere vota,-- [Andreas Jallosicus, in Poematum Tiberinae; Elegia V. Love gathers the hopes of the multitude, vulgar happiness dispels them, and virtue remains solely to lift the heart above its origin: amor sacri spesque salusque gregis, vani murmura vulgi felicem, virtus te tua sola beat; sic animis maior mortalia temnere vota; aemula sic superis pectora ferre doces; virtus dudum super astra locavit. (Or likewise,in Emmanuelis Pimentiis Scalabitanus Eborenses; Poematum; de Christo Triumphatore, P. 230: Es puer; & solas hilarat tua gratia sylvas; es vir, & es populis deliciosus amor. Vivus, inassuetam demonstras pollice vitam; mortuus, extinctis nuntia fausta refers. Tristiam in risus, mutas in gaudia luctus; bella geris, pulchra tempora pacis eunt.) To ‘mortalia temnere vota’, compare ‘temnis hominesque Deumque’: Non metuis, nec amas, regi nec fidis Olympi; non animum quidquam symbola sacra movent; fanda nefanda patris, temnis hominesque Deumque. From Adamus Siberius Schoenaviensis Grimmae, in Poematum Sacrorum per Oporinum; Epigrammatum Lib. II; Acarpo.] to lift himself, in a word, beyond Sin,- in cuncta repente mala constans, in cuncta creati morte relinquis,- [Intereant casu bona vel mala cuncta repente et vere constans nil vagus orbis habet. Paulus Negelius Republ. Aurbachiae, in: Enchiridion Precationum Sacrum Hassiae. Secondarily, Triumphus Poeticus Mortis ex Turnemainnus: omnipotens aeterne Deus, qui cuncta creasti; genus humanum non dira in morte relinquis, effigiem que tuam non perisse finis.] Sin, that were the sickle that cutteth through all things; Sin, that were reft from the flesh, torn ‘in factave carnis victor’; (Non equidem proprias per vires, factave carnis: vivida per Christi vulnera, victor eras. A beautiful phrase from out of Nicolaus Rodingus, ex Treisensis Pastoris Epitaphia Celli.) Sin, that riddles out the heart of the World in detinet viciis improba vita; [Lyresius Clivanius, in: Echo Elegiaca. Te fidei moveat vox illa doloris, quam tumidae spernit fax modo naris, sis pia spes miseris, quos haresis implicat, detinet in viciis improba vita, murus eris semper velut alter aheneus illis noxia bella piis qui pariunt, sic Christi poteris mystes bene vivere, et dicere piis esse levamen, haec tibi fixa, scio, est studiorum semita. The same poet expresses this idea again, though in more visual language, using the image of the sickle, in the following text: Vitus Iacobaeus ex Seyttentalleri Dialogus Elegiacos. Thus, we have: quam nihil est certum constansque sub orbe, quam fluxis pereunt omnia facta viis; quam manet infestus nec inevitabilis ordo, qui sua nos mortis iura subire facit. Qua neque ingenua probitate fideque moveri, omnia fatidica quae male falce secat. Unica quae claris virtutibus invida dextram iniicit, & saevas in fera damna manus. Sic nullus uti flecti probitate nec arte, vel prece, vel quavis relligione queat. Compare the phrasing, where we also find the repetitions: 'fidei moveat… doloris … improba vita’, with ‘ingenua probitate fideque moveri… male’.] Sin, that were the Mystica Crucis insignit ad hortum paradisacum and ultimate pathos of the artist-philosopher, which looks hopelessly beyond us in mortalis alto pectore veri umbram; [Aegidius Vresanus, in: sive Poemata Embricam Clivorum Religiosis. We have here a variation of the Ovidian refrain concerning man’s search for divinity and transcendence: Mystica quos Crux insignit, quos embrica nutrit. Si paradisiacum via nulla patescit ad hortum; serta parate, pia ferte rosaria matri. Huc ades aeternae, quem tangit cura, salutis; sors tua mortalis, non sit mortale quod optas. As you desire immortal things, being mortal, so you are beholden to undying beauties, though you will die. Secondarily, one does not need to reach the stars to avoid the Styx; see Ioachimus Tydichius, in: Carmine Elegiaco in Proverbia Salomonis. Astra salutiferae via tendit ad ardua vitae, et vitare docet te loca foeda stygis. Plurima mortalis secum deliberat alto pectore, consilium constituit que grave. Or, as given by Sebastianus Artomedes, in Elegiarum Liber Primus ad Zodicium de Coniugiuo Sacerdotum: Claudere qui coelos potis es, sed claudere tantum, et Stygias tantum qui reserare fores. Adventus Christi: nosque salutifera collustra desuper Aura, ut tibi terrenas posthabeamus opes. Ut tibi fidentes uni, noctemque perosi, optemus clarum lucis amore diem. Finally, note the Poemation Reformatio de Henrici Meibomius: sub recti simplicis umbram, sub specie veri, fanaticus error in aedes irrupit sacras, atque infinita sub Stygis millia demissit.] Sin, that maketh sport of the World, in fortunae ludibriis dominae; [Laurentius Mondanarius, in Miscellanea Disticha ad Vitae Institutionem; Distichon LII, P. 69: Recte agitur mecum, si non extrema tenendum, in tot fortunae ludibriis dominae. Johannes Marius Catanaeus, in Apthonii Progymnasmata: Fortuna res humanas ludibrio habere dicitur. O fortuna potens, quam variabilis, tantum iuris atrox quae tibi vendicas, evertis que bonos, erigis improbas.] Sin, that were most curious a salt, of high bargain the world besides, or more vainly delectated in adornavit voluptates lethiferas homini, quo mortalis vanum;-- [Man would salt his food with poisons, if poison were of high price and more elegant signature of his type and cast, as he would clothe himself in Nessus-shirt, if he might die therewith in higher esteem. See Vincentii Contensonus, Theologia Mentis et Cordis; Tomus VII: ‘peccato mortali excidat, in vanum lethiferas’. Joannis Urius, in the Carmen Mysticum Busiridae Aegyptii: Et anima est ut infans, quem si sibi relinquas, adolescet ad amorem lactendi, at si ablactabis eum, ablactabitur. Adverte cupiditatem ejus; caveque ne illam praeficias, nam cupiditas, quando praeficitur, necabit aut dehonestabit. Quot adornavit voluptates homini lethiferas, quatenus non scivit, esse venenum in pinguedine?] must learn to pay a certain deference before Nature,- parva amplus Naturae in pyxidis accumulant Artes,-- [Ioan. Bussierus, de Rhea Liberat; P. 33. Hic Mundi simulacra iacent, hic desidet amplus Naturae partus, se pictae hac pyxide parva accumulant Artes, confusa sed ordine nullo omnia, delusae fallacia somnia mentis.] to weigh the meter and the Scale of things in primus imaginis addit Astra trutinis auctorem,- [An non, Iustitiae quae sit natura, bilibri discimus ex trutina, quam primus imaginis auctor addidit Astraeae: in Joannes Ivitius, Carmen et Epigramma. To ask he who would question the course of Nature what he might add to the image of the celestial firmament, make improvement upon the design of God, or better portion the motion of the stars.] to travel the mystickall gate of Sophia ‘in porta imaginem creatura creatas’ [Ex creaturam imaginem, in portat imago. Raymundus Sabundeus, in the Theologia Naturalis, de Utilitate Redditionis Debiti; Titulus CXX, P. 172. Illam creaturam quae portat imaginem & similitudinem suam quia post deum sequitur immediate imago sua. Note also, Harprechttus Filius Sendivogius, in: Lucerna Salis Philosophorum tuis Ophir Dono Fert Theca Saturni. P. 61: Per ullam artem, neq; per ipsam Naturae, inter omnes creatas creaturas.] and peer beyond the ‘thin veil of human flesh’,- in tristes luminis oras prodit, exili humanae tectus velamine carnis,- [Andreas Sartorius, in Partus Virginis Iessaeae: exili humanae tectus velamine carnis, ecce deus, deus ecce in tristes luminis oras prodit, & immites mundi se expellit auras.] readeth the celestial keimelion [κειμηλιον] its mighty Oracle, [Garcaeus Iuniorii Brenniis, in Primus Tractatus Brevis et Utilis de Tempore; Epistola Dedicatoria: motus luminum integra tempora series retenta est, ab initio mundi usque ad Persicam; pulcherrimum keimelion ut rectius intelligamus & admiremur, oraculum proposuit deus generi humano, luminaria omniaque sidera firmamenti condita esse, ut sint in signa, tempora, dies, & annos.] that were the thesaurus of Nature,- ex primaevo scientiarum thesaurum incomprehensible divinae fatum, [Francisci Antonii Zindt in Kenzingen, Commentatio Historico-Ethica de Fato Hominis: Et nullo non ab Orbe nascente Aevo, Omnipotens Fatorum Rector Homini futura Hominum Fata patefacere destiti, quippe vigente adhuc sola Lege Naturae primaevo Hominum Parenti, praeter infusum Divinitus amplissimum Scentiarum Thesaurum, incomprehensible Divinae Incarnationis Fatum.] and measureth the stars by the stars,- in aeternitatem regni mensurat ex potestate aeterna proprium,- [Judaismus Convictus, Camenecensis Publicae Luci Authore Puteanius Casimirus; P. 54-55: qui aeternitatem regni Messiae mensurat ex potestate aeterna ejusdem Messiae, quae cum aeterna aeternitate proprie dicta sit, ut pote Messiae qui est Deus. Only what endures, truly is; only what endures forever, endures at all,- as we endure in longum Deus salvum, quo longum sideris nitore, (As in Enochus Suantenius, Litavit ex Familiae Varenianae Sacrum; Cineribus Incomparabilis Literum Herois Theologi Summi Augustus Varenius; Septuplici Hectatombe Heroicum Versuum: Longum Deus assere salvum, quo longum sideris hujus incolumi nobis liceat gaudere nitore.) sparing neither mortuary comportments in the latency of our Nature, that were but sepulcrum patriae invides (Phrase out of Avianius Tuntorphinatius, in: Miles Vagus seu Mendicans.) in quietum ossibus indulgere. Joahannes Molanus Belgae Trevirensus; Hyacinthiis Bergii in Disquisitio Critica; Poemation Turpe et Lugubre Nellericidium: Turpe est, inquis, mortuorum insultare cineribus, nec quietem ossibus indulgere. Note also, Joachim Curaeus, in: Exegesis Perspicua & Ferme Integra Controversiae de Sacra Coena. 2 ] as things earthly by the earth,- ratione coelestia ex coelo, nasci terrestria ex terra, [Christiana de Rerum Creatarum Origine per Lambertus Danaeus, P. 124.] and like by like in their turn, cum nihil astrifero tibi non inserviat orbe Olympus, spiritumque duces ad tua iusta volent Mundus,-- [Pascham datum Marcus, Baptista encaeniat, Euge, non Vae, clamemus; Mundus, Olympus, ovant. In: Molnarus, Epigrammata in Carmen Jubilaeum Cassoviae. Cum nihil astrifero tibi non inserviat orbe: spiritumque duces ad tua iusta volent. In: Petrus Pontus Caecus Brugensiis, Carmen Invectivum.] lest the poet finds himself doubly-fooled, and with little upon which to stake his heart in stimuli mortalia altum mens inchoat,- [Stenechthon, Epaenesis de Illustrium Familiarum ex Ioanne Engerdii. Secondarily, ex mundo saecli fraudesque aurea Saturnis; the world longs to be fooled, and the poet deceives himself in aiming to deceive it. Lettingius, Carmen ad Martinum Gregorii Geldrum. Cedent mundo fraudesque doli que, aurea praeterea Saturni saecla redibunt, … et terras Astraea reviset.] should he bear still in his drear charge the ‘semina Prometheae’ upon the desperations of Time,- in prima fovere sacra Prometheae coepisti semina flamme,- [Fallettius Trignanus, ex Phalethus Savonensis Poematum ad Hercule Atestinum: Augescit que puer, plenis qui fortior annis vernantes tenui vestit lanugine malas: ac pede decurrit volucri formosa iuuentus; immutat que, comam saeclis effeta senectus; nam pater omnipotents te nostra Musica vitae aurigam dominam que, dedit, tu prima fovere sacra Prometheae coepisti semina flamme. 1 The poet as bearer of the Promethean flame. Compare, ere the fading poet dedicate himself to a fading world, ‘dedit quondam morientibus eripit artes in terras saecula mutat’, in Publius Gregorius Tiphernus, Opuscula; Ioanne. Umbris Pontanii Naeniae, ex Nutrix Somnum Invitat, Epigramma, & Sulpitiae Carmina. Die mihi Calliope quidnam pater ille deorum cogitat an terras & patria saecula mutat: quasque, dedit quondam morientibus eripit artes; nosque, iubet tacitos etiam rationis egentes quid reputemus enim.] for the Parnassian summit bestows, not laurels, but rest,- not applause, but silence,- in sacra parnassi sede quiescas laureaque,- [Carmina Antonius Gigantis Forosemproniensis Exametra, Elegiaca, Lyrica, & Hendecasyllaba: Ocyus ut sacra parnassi in sede quiescas, laureaque exactos compenset laeta labores. The artist labors to reach the height of his powers, only to rest on laurels that were always a meager compensation.] and our faded glories speak more eloquently than our youthful boasts,- (Youth’s low ambition, or 'levis ambitio procellas’) antiquior aevo evictis gloria, saecula non jactat fatis inventi,- [Camillus Eucherius Quintus, Inarime de Balneis Pithecusarum. Verax inventi gloria tanti auctorem non jactat adjuc, antiquior aevo multa quidem evictis produxit secula fatis. See also, Janus Cosmi Anysius, in: Protogonos Tragoedia et Epistola de Religione. Here, too, the pride of youth (Quae credit alto per patentia aequora, levis ambitio, inepta, sui inops amentibus quantas procellas excitabit gentibus.) is measured against that of age: “Exempla pulchra vetera plus adeo placent; id discitur libenter, affert quod lucrum.” Note the use of the ‘semina Prometheae’ as a lexical nucleus for these various associations of the poetic instinct, mortality, and ambition.] that altereth in essence if not in form, as the poet says,- materiale unum, formale alterum,- [Jacob Herrenschmidiis, in the Osculologia Theologico-Philologica Christianorum, Gentilum, Exoticorum et Commentariolus. Materiale unum, formale alterum. Materiale, inquit, videri potest, formale est invisible. Subsumimus Ecclesiae materiale videri posse, sed quatenus est formale fidei non videtur, sed creditur. Quid enim est fides, nisi credere quod non vides. Quae apparent, jam non fidem habent, sed cognitionem.] or, in accordance with the dictum of Lavater,- as Beauty knoweth Beauty best, so the fine painter paints best, the fine hand,- [Or, in the phrase of another poet, so strength best reveals strength, and courage painteth courage: Aeneas quondam charo confisus Achate, Euryalus Niso, fortis uterque fuit. Quam bene junguntur similes, virtute corusci! Sunt animosi Ipsi, nos animant que suos. See Aescherus Tigurinae, in: Vota Syncharistica; Colloquium Apollinis tou Musagetou & Polyhmniae. Likewise, the philosopher finds the picture of man in hominis essentia picta aurificis statera Thimantis; in umbra vitam vivere, ab remotam hominum oculis, turbas fugit non fugavit. (The philosopher knows that we must flee from the Multitude, in order to discover the One. See Pelecyus, in: de Officio Hominis Religiosi; Epistola. Coenobii umbra vitam vivere ab hominum oculis remotam constituisset, turbas fugit non fugavit.) Secondarily, note: ‘In Thimantis operibus plura intelligerentur neq trutina examinandum populari, sed essent picta aurificis statera.’ See: Heidfeldii Sphinx Philosophica Excudebat Corvinus in Herbornae Nassoviorum; Scrupuloso Lectori Precatur Aenigmatistes. As Timanthes the painter demonstrated, it were the artist that measures the height of art, and not art that finds the limit of man, for one can scale the full measure of human nature,- not by consideration of the multitude,- but in the perfected representation of one of its heroic individuals, (neq, trutina examinandum populari, sed aurificis statera. … Thimantis pictoris artificium olim co nomine celebratum, fuit, quod in ejus operibus plura intelligerentur, quam essent picta.) as similarly stated out of Thrasybulus Clidipyrgus Gnisus, ex Carmen Adiuncta est Copia Literarum: "Praesentem fugimus virtutem ac odimus ipsi, quareimus amissam; sic nescia fortis semper mens hominum praesentis, nec sibi constat." To know the strength of the man as a whole we must nonetheless also know his strength in the moment; human inconstancy has likewise its place in the constancy of our Nature.] for the ends of art were not the ends of man, [Janus Caecilius Helvetiis Freii, Opuscula Varia et Cribrum Philosophorum qui Aristotelem Superiore et hac Aetate Oppugnarunt: Iste est finis artificis, non autem artis. Art consummates and brings to its conclusion all the artist could not.] and our poeticam contagionis, borne in nobilis ardor defervescere coeperat, [Romae saltim alto sublimis solio haec diva sedebat, quam diu heroicae virtutis patriique soli conjuncto amore Poetarum incaluere pectora; postquam vero pullulantis luxuriae avaritiaeque contagione hic tam nobilis ardor defervescere coeperat, illam protinus de sua dignitate, venustate ac robore multum amisisse observamus. Petrus Gustavus Suedelius, in: de Usu Poeseos in Sacris. For want of Virtue, the charms of lesser poetry induce a faltering race. Compare the figure of the solitary poet, hidden from the touch of sin ‘in the shadow of the Muses’,- alienis omniam culpae in Musis cantando umbra. Eliaeus Argentoratus, Fasiculus; in Autodidactum Lucifugam: Odisti lucem, caecis latitas que, lacunis, vivis ut in vasto bestia sola specu. Quae facis, illa probas, aliena sed omnia culpas, te doctum, solum te cor habere putas. Sic Musis cantando tuis, vanissime, nescis, quales efficiat, quos fovet, umbra, viros.] that seeketh to flee from mortal love by an love immortal,- ita mortalis amore evades humaniorem, ita immortalis laborem facesses sudorem Poetis, [Tobias Silesiae Aleutnerus, in: Epigrammatum Chilias in Pentacosiades, Praescriptio. Ita Deus quidam eris: ita immortalis, mortalis licet, pio in Musas humaniores amore ac beneficio evades; ita laborem facesses ac sudorem Poetis. It is of great benefit to the industrious poet, that he avoids love in all but her image. As Goethe tells the poet; fear Love, though do not attempt to avoid it. Or, from Amralkeisus Cenditae, cum Scholiis; in, Accedunt Sententiae Arabicae Imperatoris; ex Rosarium Politicum sive Amoenum Sortis Humanae Theatrum de Persico in Latinum a Georgii Gentius: felis Leo est in capiendo mure; sed mus est in certamine Tigris. (The cat cannot be sure of catching the mouse, but the mouse can be sure of catching the cat.) ] with hope to therefor purchase succor from our crucis arborem,- [Brunnerus, in: Fasti Mariani cum Divorum Elogiis; Sermo Maximilianus Boiariae. Paraphrs. Sed numquid Triumphalis obliviscemur coronae? Laudo trophaeum nobile, crucis arborem. At tu cape has coronas victor Amor, & si omnibus his rosae sese immisceant, ne has repudia. Spinae nuperae dederunt. Ecce ante currus triumphales cum mundo daemonem, cum morte carnem. Hath the victor forgotten his crown? Love which, shall it entertain ambition, cannot claim the rose and refuse the thorns, (Or, as similarly indicated out of Pyragallus Henning, in the Carmen Penitentiale,- in poetas genus aut facundia dulcis non virtus animi, non probitatis opus hic status est meriti.) borne with all else in viae ad mortem compendium totis arbitrabatur; (The way of death is rarely taken by leaps, but by steps. Johannis Schuccelius Arnstatensium Cippus Mnemosynes Structus & in Immortalitatis ex Georgii Grosshainii. Sin vitam, excessisset, tum viae ad mortem compendium se fecisse arbitrabatur.) for, to the end of that remonstrancy of conceit, and by the same barb that would discover the pride of an Antisthenes, * we are discovered by both the Left hand and the Right, and the sin of one hand were not recompensed by the virtue of the other,- non male est impune relinquo manus et bene rependem manu. See David Crinitus Nepomucenus, Arphasidis praescripta; in, Carmen pro Felici et Allusiones ad Nomina Imperatoris. Non male si quicquam factum est impune relinquo, et bene munifica facta repende manu.] hardly the final estimation of our Nature, or reprovement of the god Amore, that makes small distinction in those of her own order and of man,- for love, as much as war, hath no end but in itself,- praelia pacis amore putabit, moliri pacis amore indignum, [Humanae Sapientiae Poetico-Historicum ac Ernestus Augustus Osnabrugensiis; Protrepitcon Calliopes: Praelia moliri nisi pacis amore putabat, pacis amore Caesareo indignum pectore. For love, that hath no end but in itself; ‘ibi viget amoris, ubi viget amor.’ Augustin Nagore Aesopolensi, Lucerna Mystica pro Directoribus Animarum. De languore divino, sive aegritudine divini amoris: languor divinus, qui ibi viget ubi viget amor a divino amore procedit, crescit, & perficitur.] taketh nothing for the heart of man at least in ultra Venerem placans invide, [The price of a woman’s envy were not remunerated by our love returned; it is not the heart, but the man, which is demanded. Ioan. Vatellius, Commentarius utriusque Gulielmus Lamarensis Paraphraste de Insano Leandri ac Herus Amore Poemation, Tetrastichon: in cupido concilians sacris miros adolebat; mulliere genus speciosis invidet ultro sed Venerem placans. Or, to cite Ubertinus Carrarae, in Samson Vindicatus Drama Sacrum Decantandum,- nulla pulchrior vindicta, nulla iustior sagitta, laesa iura sunt amoris.] and findeth out our nature in ‘non dissimilesue Diis’ ‘latet summum mens fiedei’. [Euphrenius Georgiadis Amstelii, in: De Duplici Amore, Fere ex Sententia Luciani; Poeseos et Medicinae Studiosi Erotica, Basia, Coma et Sylva; Heironimus ad Pammachium. Love offers war to the warlike spirit, and peace to the peaceful one. Non tenet unus Amor mentes, non una Cupido: sed duplex hominum pectora versat Amor. Hic, satus Oceano, mortalia corda feroci et vario fallax comprimis ingenio. Hic fluctu Veneris animum in contraria raptat; non secus ae tumidis astuat unda vadis. Ille, velut coelo demissa cathena sereno, et licito & casto iungit Amore duos. Non juvenum ille animos lethali vulnere rupit; non impudicis ignibus urit eos. Mentibus ille bonos immittit rite furores, et non ignotos, dissimilesue Diis. As stated elsewhere, peace measures the warlike soul: nota tua est virtus, est & tua nota voluntas, nec latet in summum mens tua fida Deum. At fera tranquillam cum rumpunt bella quietem, excutiunt haustum martia corda Deum. In Christophorus Preisius Pannonius: Elegia ad Nicolaum Granuella.]
[size=85]* ‘The Pride of an Antisthenes were seen, not in his cloak, but through its chinks.’ A playful allusion to the imagery of claiming the rose and trying to pick its flower without being spited by the thorns, drawn up from the following: “… though I have by the study of wisdome and philosophy corrected that which was a defect in nature; the philosopher saith vultus est index animi, the eye is the casementt of the soule, through which wee may plainely see it, better then he that saw Antisthenes his pride through the chinks of his cloake.” See Walkington, in The Optick Glasse of Humors; Or, The Touchstone of a Golden Temperature.

  1. Anthony David Nuttall, in “The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake.”, traces a similar linguistic web depicting Prometheus as a duplicitous image of poetic independence and creativity next to a subservience to Nature and the course of Fate: (“We have come far enough in this story to know that no allegiance can be trusted; that which is hated can become, suddenly, that which is loved. But the Gnostic belief in a wicked, tyrannical Demiurge does imply, with surprising constancy, a hostility to nature and therefore to pastoral. This diurnal round of rocks and stones and trees is, to the Gnostic, the wheel of the torturer on which we are all broken. ‘Nature’ is a hate-word, not a love-word. ‘The Garden’, by Milton’s friend Andrew Marvell, is a brilliant, hostile, pastoral commentary on Paradise Lost, written before Paradise Lost existed.”) 1) On Poetry and Poets; Politiani, Silvae IV., Nutricia. Thou who dared before all others to fan the celestial seeds of the Promethean fire in man: tu prima fovere ausa Prometheae caelestia semina flammae. 2) Vida, de Arte Poetica: Dona deum Musae; vulgus procul este profanum! Has magni natas Iovis olim duxit ab astris callidus in terras insigni fraude Prometheus, cum liquidos etiam mortalibus attulit ignes. Long ago wise Prometheus by his celebrated deception led these daughters of great Jove (the Muses) from stars to earth, when he carried inconstant fire to mortals. 3) Chapman, Shadow of Night: "Therefore Promethean poets with the coals of their most genial, more than human souls, in living verse created men like these … " Milton, using the word vestigia, recalls his use of the same term in the bitter ‘vestigia’ of earthliness carried even by the angels. 4) Milton, ad Patrem: Nec tu vatis opus divinum despice carmen, quo nihil aethereos ortus, et semina caeli, nil magis humanam commendat origine metem, sancta Promtheae retinens vesitigia flammae. Retaining as it does a trace of the Promethean fire, nothing argues better for our heavenly beginnings, for our celestial seed, for the human mind commended by its origin,- and that ambition of our more chimaerickall philosophe, that needs must compute inversely, the circle of this our life, venturing ever toward the past, and this for the sake of a future borne ad praeterita, ab agnoscas,- ['Adverte animum ad praeterita, ab agnoscas naturae non passus decipi’: Iulianus Hainovius, in: Vita Veritatis ad Vitam; Gratia et Veritate Disposuit Corde in Ascensiones apud Iodacus Kalovius Coloniae cum Privilegio; Pars. Sexta. Adverte animum ad praeterita, ut agnoscas, an non sit ea naturae indoles, & an ab illa te decipi sis passus.] for the sake of a past borne in nihil jam evinere, non olim evenerit,- [Luzacus, Oratio de Socrate Cive: Naturae paremus omnes; & fieri non potest, quin animus, sic a teneris factus & institutus, in eadem continuo, invictus licet propemodum reluctans, deferatur tamen cogitandi viam, inter calamitates Patriae, inter sui etiam ipsius aliquando miserias, hac se solatus recordatione, nihil jam evenire quod non olim evenerit.] than poetry.

  2. As to our ‘mortuary insult’, compare, out of the Solennis Actus of 1608, the ‘calumniatrix sophistica’: in placidamque furore dulce invides cineres atravit mortui. See Joachim Curaeus, in: Exegesis Perspicua & Ferme Integra Controversiae de Sacra Coena, as likewise recorded in Goclenius, out of the following text: Excudebat Guolgangus Kezelius Oratio Ανασχενασιυ; “Necastis heu necastis sapientissimam, nulli nocentem Musarum Luscinniam.”; … medax calumniatrix sophistica misere flagellatum necavit; nec tantum necavit, sed ei etiam dulcem placidamque quietem Diabolico furore invides, in mortui mane saeviit, cineres eius rabiose atrevit, contra divina & human iura exquisitissimis cum lacerans criminibus.[/size]

From the first day I met you until you mentally collapsed for some reason, I treated you with nothing but respect. But one day you just out of the blue started insulting me, saying things to me you never had before. Like seriously calling me a racist for making fun of Al Sharpton’s fingers. Like calling me a traitor to my own political ideals because I didn’t get much out of Steve Bannon’s podcast. Like calling me un-American for not agreeing with you that Trump was playing 4-d chess with his loss to Biden. You’re absurd. Challenge? What the fuck is your challenge, I reply and qualify everything I say whenever you try to make a half-baked point. Every time I articulate my position or argument you run away like the fucking little cuck that you are, and yet you turn around and tell me I’m running? I’m right here, faggot. Every time you try to “challenge” me, I make my response, like I did with regard to the sciences. What fucking challenge am I not responding to? I laid out very easy to follow arguments about how nothing I have said or done is “traitorous”, about how Trump is simply not (contra. your assertion) somehow still the president,- even if it could be proven that Biden’s victory was illegitimate. You just stopped replying in the thread after I laid all that out. Every fucking post you make, makes me lose more respect for you. You’re a fucking loser, dude. It hurts because nothing you’ve said to me lines up with reality and you are, at whatever unconscious level, aware that you’re taking your own intellectual inadequacies out on me, and you know you threw away every friendship you had for literally nothing. See, nothing about this hurts me. You’re ridiculous and you don’t have any point behind any of this animosity, you’re just mentally unstable after realizing you don’t really have anything original to contribute to anything. Go fuck yourself dude, seriously. Over and over again I gave you the chance to grow up and admit you were being a cunt, but you can’t,- because cunts can’t admit when they’re being cunts. You fucking disgust me.

Dude, read your DMs…