A TRUE EXTREMISM

 

Short Prose

 

Copyright © 1984–2012 John O'Loughlin

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CONTENTS

 

1. Free-Electron Sexuality

2. A Vertical Integrity

3. Creative Extremes

4. For Truth

5. Leader's Transcendentalism

6. A True Extremism

7. A Permanent Cross

8. More Plastic

9. Supernatural Upgrading

10. Centrist Sexuality

11. Writerly Print

12. Supernatural Travel

13. Six Thinkers ...

14. Five Speeches ...

15. Thus Speaks the Social Transcendentalist

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FREE-ELECTRON SEXUALITY

 

"I must say, I'm fascinated by this theory of yours, Terry, that homosexuality corresponds to a pseudo-electron equivalent," the professor remarked, turning a pair of seemingly enlightened eyes in my direction.  "A kind of higher materialist petty-bourgeois sexuality."

     The professor's wife smiled deferentially through prim lips.  "And one that apparently compliments the higher spiritual petty-bourgeois sexuality of pornographic indulgence, which corresponds, by contrast, to a free-electron equivalent," she averred, showing herself to be no mean learner either.

     I nodded confirmatory encouragement and waited for one or other of them to continue.

     "A homosexual materialist and a pornographic spiritualist," the professor mused, smiling to himself.  "Why, one might alternatively expect homosexuality to appeal more to LSD trippers and pornography, by contrast, to the practitioners of transcendental meditation, seeing as one can distinguish, in each case, between a pseudo-electron and a free-electron indulgence!"

     The professor's wife cast me an admiring and vaguely expectant look.  "Then one ought to argue that anti-artists who produce a pseudo-electron literature would be partial to homosexuality, while their free-electron counterparts, the pure poets, would prefer pornographic sexuality," she remarked, as though it were an everyday occurrence.

     I nodded again, this time, however, in an attempt to express the most unequivocally tacit endorsement of the good lady's argument.

     "Well, if that's the case," the professor responded, turning towards his wife, "one ought to equate avant-garde classical music with a homosexual bias, since Terry tells us that such music conforms to a pseudo-electron status, while reserving for modern jazz an equation with a pornographic bias in view of the fact that it conforms, so we are told, to a free-electron status."

     The professor's wife smiled her guarded approval of this suggestion through newly moist lips.  "And one might just as well contend that avant-garde painting pertains, in its pseudo-electron status, to the homosexual side of things, in contrast to light art which, through its free-electron integrity, suggests an affinity with pornography."

     I nodded my affirmation of this further contention and remarked: "Yes, there is definitely a logical consistency about all this; though one shouldn't forget that in a relatively post-atomic civilization things are also relative within themselves, not just across the board with regard to, say, the distinction between avant-garde classical and modern jazz.  These two art forms are also relative - as between a steady rhythmic root and notational pitch expansions in the case of avant-garde classical, and between flexible rhythmic accompaniment and improvisatory pitch expansions in the case of modern jazz.  Although we can speak of the one as essentially a pseudo-electron equivalent and the other as a free-electron equivalent, there is a proton side to the first and a pseudo-electron, or neutron, side to the second, in accordance with their respective extreme relativities.  And the same of course applies to the distinction between avant-garde painting and light art, art forms which divide into sub-relativities between canvas and abstract painting in the context of, say, abstract expressionism, and between plastic tubing and neon lighting in the context of light art - in other words, between a subordinate materialistic and a dominating spiritualistic ingredient, the ratio of the one to the other varying with the type of art and/or artist in question.  Needless to say, each art form, whether painterly or post-painterly, is divisible, within relative civilization, into antithetical atomic biases, so that we can differentiate between pseudo-electron painting and free-electron painting in regard to abstract expressionism and abstract impressionism (more usually known as post-painterly abstraction), as well as between different types of light art, whilst at the same time acknowledging that, in the relativity of these things, avant-garde painting as a whole becomes a pseudo-electron equivalent in relation to light art as a whole, which we can have no hesitation in describing as a free-electron equivalent."

     The professor and his wife stared penetratingly into my face, as though at some art object, smiled their gratification for the privilege of receiving such esoteric information, and nodded what appeared to be simultaneous approval of my argument.

     However, I could only continue: "Coming back to sex, we will therefore note that both homosexuality and pornography are relative within themselves, the one materially so, with regard to the relationship of two male bodies, and the other spiritually so, with regard, as a rule, to either two photographed participants of different sex and/or to one participant of female sex whose body is either completely or partly on display, with particular reference to her cun ..., I mean, vagina.  Such is the way of things in an extreme relative civilization, like America.  However, this could not be the way of things in an absolute civilization, the kind of civilization that would stem from Social Transcendentalism, which we must equate with an absolutely free-electron equivalent.  Such transcendentalism is a stage beyond petty-bourgeois precedent, a development from the relatively free to the absolutely free.  This development will apply right across the board, as much in sex as in politics, religion, art, music, literature, science, or whatever.  Obviously there can be no place for pseudo-electron equivalents, and therefore no question of homosexuality being endorsed.  Free-electron sex will require that pornography becomes absolute - in other words, not given to petty-bourgeois relativity but elevated above both the simultaneous employment of two or more models in any given photograph and the all-round visual perspective which places undue emphasis on female beauty, even if such beauty is abstract.  No, the absolute pornography relevant to proletarian civilization will ensure that only one model is on view in any given photo and that this model, whether male or female, is displayed in a context which transcends sexist distinctions in a truly spiritualized unisexual absolutism.  No doubt, those with a materialist bias in their psyche, men who in a former age would have been if not practising homosexuals then at least wife-violators, would be given, in this ultimate civilization, the opportunity of selecting from the available pornographic material a computer disc which employed male juveniles of lawful age, while those with a spiritual bias in their psyche, men who in a former age would have bought relative pornography and/or encouraged their partners to fellate them, would be given the opportunity of selecting from computer discs which employed female juveniles of sufficient maturity in a variety of rump-biased postures.  Either way, this teenage-oriented pornography would be absolutely post-atomic, significant of an absolutely free-electron status, and therefore bearing little resemblance to the types of pornography germane to petty-bourgeois civilization.  It would be on the evolutionary level of social transcendentalism, pure poetry, pure music, abstract holography, and the wavicle theory of matter.  It would, in some sense, have transcended sex."

     Both the professor and his wife appeared quite astounded, their lips pursed and their heads gently shaking from side to side.  It seemed that this speculative declaration was too far above them to be properly intelligible or sympathetic to their manifestly petty-bourgeois mentalities, which, in any case, could only relate to magazines and the employment, therein, of adult models.  Probably they would forget all about it in due course!

 

 

A VERTICAL INTEGRITY

 

Philip Brennan had been standing for over an hour in the company of most of the other guests to a conference of senior Social Transcendentalists, held in the main office of the party's Dublin headquarters, and was beginning to tire a little on his feet, though not without a quiet satisfaction that he had so far avoided the ignominy (as it was fast becoming known to those in the know) of taking a seat in one of the few available upright chairs.  Usually that ignominy was reserved for females and youths, who were regarded as less qualified than men to spend long periods of time in a vertical position.  Had the Leader not himself declined to sit down in order, no doubt, to set an example to his followers?  For, assuredly, most of them were aware, by now, of his views on sitting, which he regarded as a bourgeois habit unworthy of proletarian emulation; though he was hardly a bona fide proletarian himself!  However, his views on sitting, as on lying and standing, were representative of Social Transcendentalism, which sought and adhered to the truth about everything, in the interests of evolutionary progress towards a more absolute society.

     For sitting was relative, a kind of compromise between lying and standing, in which one part of the body, namely the thighs, was horizontal whilst another part, namely the trunk and head, was vertical, this in turn significant of a compromise between the feminine and the masculine, the mundane and the transcendent.  For in case anyone had any doubts on the matter, the horizontal and the feminine were aligned, and sharply contrasted with the vertical and the masculine, which was how they would always remain.

     But not for men, for a society dedicated, more specifically, to revolutionary change in the name of masculine progress!  If the ancients, with particular reference to the pagan Greeks and Romans, spent more time lying or, rather, reclining than sitting or standing, that was because they were essentially feminine in character, a people stemming from nature, like animals, who also spend the greater part of their time - indeed almost all of it - in a horizontal position.  Not having attained to a dualistic compromise, the ancients were content to spend most of their time, days as well as nights, lolling about in pursuit of carnal indulgence.  When not dozing or sleeping, they had been wolfing fruit, swilling wine, and philandering, not to say fornicating.  They had even read scrolls and listened to music in a reclining posture, as often as not dozing off in the process.  So much for the ancients!

     Fortunately, however, man went on to make some progress during the succeeding centuries and, with the rise of bourgeois consciousness, became less a reclining animal than a sitting one - indeed, became properly human.  No longer absolutely feminine, and thus horizontal in his lifestyle, man developed a dualistic compromise between the feminine and the masculine, a compromise reflecting his religious progress towards the transcendent, which necessarily acquired the form of a partly transcendental inclination, as germane to Christianity, that anthropomorphic allegiance between Hell and Heaven, the centrifugal alpha and the centripetal omega.  So now man, properly so-considered, was between the horizontal and the vertical as he sat in his chair, one part of him seemingly stemming from the natural and another part of him seemingly aspiring towards the supernatural.  Of course, this development had passed through a number of stages, from chairs with slanting backs to chairs the backs of which were almost straight and, in some of the more up-to-date examples, totally so.  And, then, the amount of time men had spent in their variously-constituted chairs varied with the individual's social standing and the epoch in question, the European grand bourgeoisie, nominally aristocratic, spending much less time seated than their bureaucratic successors of more recent date.  However, this wasn't because they spent more time standing, but, as the Leader was only too keen to remind us, because they remained enslaved, in varying degrees, to pagan precedent - the early grand-bourgeoisie most especially so!  There were still too many things which could be better done reclining than sitting, and we need not doubt that the people in question had no qualms about thus doing them.  So much for the medievalists!

     When we come to the moderns, as the Leader (having briefly drawn our attention to the bourgeoisie ... with their dualistic compromise reflecting a lifestyle more balanced between horizontal and vertical) referred to petty-bourgeois man, we arrive at a procedure the converse of that favoured by the medievalists, with their grand-bourgeois integrity.  We note a gradual loosening of the connection between men and chairs.  For even though the backs of modern chairs are usually vertical, there is still a concession to the horizontal with the seat, and this concession, though in many instances tempered by diagonally-slanting seats, is precisely what, consciously or unconsciously, petty-bourgeois man happens to be in rebellion against, if only relatively so and, hence, on a rather intermittent basis.  His extreme relativity favours the vertical, so he inclines to spend more time standing than sitting, whereas his class predecessor, the bourgeois, spent as much time sitting as both reclining and standing - indeed, probably spent more time sitting, since that would have accorded with a uniquely bourgeois compromise.  Of course, one can divide the petty bourgeoisie into early and late stages, thereby inferring two distinct classes, and contend that if the late-stage petty-bourgeoisie preferred to spend more time standing than sitting, then their immediate class predecessors probably preferred to spend as much time as possible sitting with a straight back in the straightest possible type of chair.  Moreover, one could argue that the grand bourgeoisie ...

     No, rather than dwell on them, one would do better to bear in mind the Leader's contention that proletarian man, that successor to the moderns, should be prepared if not to completely avoid sitting, during the barbarous phase of his society's evolution, then to completely avoid doing so during the subsequent civilized phase, when all truck with the relative, and hence the  horizontal, would be strictly taboo, man having become so masculine by then as to be indisposed to any degree of compromise with the feminine, society having become absolutely post-dualistic and thus exclusively orientated towards the attainment of a supernatural goal.  Such was the absolute fate in store for proletarians in the civilized phase of their transcendental society, as championed by Social Transcendentalism in general but by the Leader in particular.  In the meantime chairs, although not strictly taboo, would remain discredited objects, things to which one could succumb in the event of physical tiredness, albeit not without a degree of shame!  Gone were the days when chairs could be complacently accepted and utilized on an intermittent basis.  The Leader had ensured that much!

     Well, Philip was still feeling tired and exposed, in consequence, to the temptation to slump into one of the nearby upright chairs which stood against the wall to his right.  These chairs assumed the appearance of ignominious traps at such times, and one of them had already claimed a victim in the form of a young female whose apparent nonchalance suggested the probability that she was less well-informed than most as to the moral nature of her behaviour!  However, whilst a young female of around twenty would have reasons of her own for sitting down, Philip knew that, if he wanted to remain a candidate for promotion in the Leader's eyes, he would do better to gently shift his weight from one leg to the other, as though marking time.... This, to all appearances, was exactly what one or two other comrades were already doing!

     Meanwhile the Leader had taken centre stage, so to speak, in order to address his followers about an innovation which he hoped to introduce into meditation centres in due course.  Clearing his throat with guttural relish, he thus proceeded: "As you all know, the practice of meditation has traditionally been carried-on while sitting cross-legged on the floor.  Orientals have long maintained this practice and, since the introduction of meditation-centred religion to the West, most petty-bourgeois devotees of transcendentalism have likewise been content to sit on the floor or, alternatively, on a bed or a chair.  Now while this mundane habit may be appropriate to Buddhism and other such traditional oriental religions, reflecting the devotee's continuing allegiance to the Ground, that oriental equivalent of the Creator, Social Transcendentalism couldn't possibly endorse it, since we are dealing here not with a continuation of tradition but with a total departure from it, as relevant to an absolutely post-atomic integrity.  Therefore we cannot meditate while sitting on the floor, because such a mundane posture would connote with Buddhist relativity, and we are beyond any such dualism.  Neither can we meditate while sitting on a chair, which, besides bringing us into contact with the floor, would impose a degree of horizontality upon that part of the body resting on its seat, just as the legs of those who sit cross-legged on the floor are far from being in a vertical position.  No, and neither can we meditate while standing on our feet, since, besides tiring us, such a posture would keep us anchored to the floor and detract, moreover, from our commitment to meditation.  So what should we do?  I'll tell you what!  We must meditate suspended in a vertical position a few feet above the ground, as though levitating, and thus free of mundane allegiance.  This is the only acceptable posture for a Social Transcendentalist, and it will reflect an absolutely free-electron status symptomatic of post-atomic civilization.  So, clearly, we must design meditation centres in such a way that people can be hoisted free of the floor when they're due to meditate, a procedure requiring the installation of special chest-to-crotch harnesses suspended from some scaffold-like apparatus under the roof of the building which can be raised or lowered by remote control, according to the demands of the occasion.  Thus instead of squatting on the floor, like primitives, those who practise meditation in our meditation centres will be suspended from aloft in comfortable body harnesses that will enable them both to forget about their body weight and to assume a more transcendent posture - one relevant to the exclusive verticality of a proletarian civilization, beyond all dualistic compromises."

     Ah, how the phrase 'to forget about their body weight' appealed to Philip Brennan at that moment, now that he had been standing on his feet for over an hour-and-a-half!  He was certainly unable to forget about his own, or to completely detach his mind from the tempting proximity of those few straight-backed chairs to his right, which made him slightly envious of the seated young woman whose morals appeared to be less rigorously applied than his own.  If only such harnesses as the Leader had spoken of were to be found in his office!  But, of course, meditation and ideological meetings were two entirely different things.  Perhaps, however, a day would eventually dawn when some scaffold-like apparatus would be installed even for the latter, indeed for any meetings between people, so that instead of standing on tired feet or succumbing to a chair - that bourgeois anachronism - one would automatically step into a body harness and be hoisted aloft, to conduct one's tête-à-tête, or whatever, in a comfortably vertical position, a truly-civilized posture.  Well, there was at any rate a degree of comfort in the thought, and Philip Brennan needed all the comfort he could get, now that the meeting was over and the Leader had left the office, presumably to slump into a chair himself.  It was at least a relief for Philip Brennan to know that he was not the only one in need of a seat at this moment!

 

 

CREATIVE EXTREMES

 

James had loved her passionately as a youth, when they had worked in the same office for a time, but only from a distance, because her love had been bestowed on someone else, a fellow-worker who was either quicker off the romantic mark or just less inhibited than himself.  He suffered his unrequited love for her throughout the years following her departure from the firm, and when he also departed to become an apprentice author, his life had grown accustomed to solitary nights and friendless days.  Being alone in his lodgings was no great burden on him.  On the contrary, it was a logical step from his previous loneliness.

     And so he wrote for years, throughout the greater part of each weekday, until the number of typescripts - writing first, typing later - piled up in his room, and his notebooks, in which the works were drafted, grew to fill a large drawer.  He considered himself, above all else, a philosopher, a seeker after the Truth, a pioneer of new insights into life and the world.  He was too serious-minded to be content with fiction, his solitude and unrequited love not having conditioned him to become an artist in the usual objective sense.  He was resigned to philosophy, even when he realized that it was the most intellectually-demanding mode of writing and the least commercially viable.  Better to be a philosopher, he thought, than to have remained a clerk.  Besides, I'm no ordinary philosopher.  More a revolutionary pseudo-philosopher than a traditional type.... Not that he discovered this fact all at once, but only when the time was ripe.  A pseudo-philosopher was somehow superior to a genuine, or academic, philosopher, more a man of essence than of appearance, a metaphysician as opposed to a physicist, an original writer rather than 'a chair'.  In similar vein, a pseudo-state was somehow superior to a genuine state, a matter of the people rather than either the land or country considered from a nationalist point of view.  Pseudo-democracy could likewise be considered superior to genuine democracy, giving maximum representation to the electorate - a qualitative absolutism.

     Yes, James Riley realized all this and so much else as, year after year, he scribbled the time away in his single room and noted the progress of his work from a bourgeois relative stage to an early petty-bourgeois relatively absolute stage, and even, in due course, to a late petty-bourgeois absolute stage of creative and ideological integrity.  If he had begun as a philosopher or, more correctly, a philosophical novelist and essayist, he had progressed quite some way beyond that point by the time he came to evaluate the ideological/creative status of his various stages of philosophical endeavour.  Why, he had recently abandoned even the pseudo-philosophical in his evolution towards a quasi-poetic integrity, a lower phase of his late-stage petty-bourgeois writings, relevant to a new ideology in the form of Social Transcendentalism, which pertained to the future development of a proletarian civilization.  Gone were the days when he could take academic philosophy seriously!  All that appearance-mongering was not for him.  Even the pseudo-philosophical endeavour was now effectively a thing of his past, a passing phase in his evolution to higher things.  It always amazed him when he looked back over his early work and noted the intellectual distance between that and his latest work.  Was it possible that the same person had written both?

     Ah, but even if such a question had to be answered affirmatively, there could be no denying that the persona relevant to each stage of his creative evolution had continuously changed for the better, for more radically extreme positions.  The persona was not him, no!  But it had developed at his expense and to a degree he scarcely imagined possible.  Certainly there were times when he wanted to disown it, to turn away from and abandon it, like an alienated husband about to divorce a petulant wife.  Was he not, after all, a petty bourgeois, for whom the comforts of the home were more important than the struggles of the street?  He could not deny that fact, even though he was less than confident that he could escape from his persona and return to a more relative style and content.  He found it hard to believe that, with the inevitable termination of his quasi-poetic writings in due course, he could return to being a philosophical novelist and literary philosopher.  Had he not said everything there was to be said within that context?  Besides, wasn't being a philosophical novelist a waste of time these days, an anachronistic grand-bourgeois approach to the novel in an age of petty-bourgeois poetics?

     No, philosophical novels weren't for him, not now!  His revolutionary urban conditioning would never allow him to return to that level again.  Even the poetic novel was beneath him, an early-stage petty-bourgeois art form more suited to the first-half of the twentieth century than to its second.  Besides, he had never been a poetic artist but a philosopher and philosophical artist turned pseudo-philosopher and, more recently, quasi-poet, the latter still being a type of philosophical writer, a continuation of his collectivizing tendencies from essayettes at the beginning to a novelette or, rather, medium prose at the end, as a sort of climax.  Whereas the artist made progress, over the generations, by evolving from the novel to the poetic novelette and even, in a late petty-bourgeois age, to the poetic short-story, the philosopher made progress by evolving from essays and dialogues to philosophical short prose and the philosophical novelette, attained to a petty-bourgeois status with the abandonment of the older genres for the newer ones, used either collectively or separately.  Thus arose the extraordinary paradox that whilst a philosophical novel was a grand-bourgeois approach to literature, an approach more appropriate to a late grand-bourgeois age like the mid-seventeenth century, a philosophical novelette was a petty-bourgeois approach to philosophy, one more relevant to a late petty-bourgeois age like the second-half of the twentieth century.  So the contemporary philosopher, or pseudo-philosopher, was effectively a 'novelettist', just as the contemporary artist, or pseudo-artist, was a short-story writer, both of them co-existent with the modern poet, a largely metaphysical and/or experimental creator, the most representative of the age.

     But James Riley - our mysterious subject of intellectual inquiry - didn't exactly fit into any of these late-stage petty-bourgeois patterns; he was neither a contemporary philosopher, artist, nor poet, but a Western outsider, an Irishman of fundamentally catholic descent writing on behalf of a future civilization and in terms which set him radically apart from all those who fitted into contemporary Western civilization, terms uniquely collectivized, as befitting his assumed Messianic status.  He had always been something of an outsider in any case, even where love and sex were concerned.  Not for him to write philosophical novelettes!  His work had to be both anachronistic and revolutionary at the same time, if it wasn't to be mistaken for late petty-bourgeois philosophy.  Hence his retention of the aristocratic aphorism, the early grand-bourgeois essayette, the late grand-bourgeois essay, and the bourgeois dialogue in the formal composition of his pseudo-philosophical collectivized literature, early petty-bourgeois short prose and late petty-bourgeois medium/long prose usually bringing the volume to a modernistic climax.  Only with his progression to a quasi-poetic collectivized literature did he axe the aphoristic root, thereby symbolically setting his work free from aristocratic moorings.  The other genres had stayed relatively in place, defying petty-bourgeois convention.

     As for the artists with their novels, he knew he would never become one of them, since he preferred extremes, had an Irish bias, one might say, for the absolute.  He would rather become a poet than return to that middle-of-the-road genre more suited to moderate temperaments than his own.  Was not the novel a passé genre compared with film, that late petty-bourgeois/early proletarian successor to fictional literature, as much a successor to that as early grand-bourgeois plays had been its predecessor.  Films were the truly contemporary 'literature', an extension and transformation of fiction co-existent with modern poetry.  However, film - except possibly when conceived in video terms - would not be suited to a proletarian age in a genuinely transcendental civilization.  It was an extreme relativity, not a relative absolutism.  It signified the abstract climax to a fictional tradition.  By contrast, plays signified the concrete beginnings of a fictional tradition, as in Shakespeare, an early grand-bourgeois extreme relativity following-on behind philosophical absolutism, that truly aristocratic mode of intellectual endeavour better suited to the ancient Greeks and Romans than to those fated to develop relative civilization in the Christian West, which has always been primarily a literary civilization, not so much given to philosophic or poetic extremes as finding its golden mean in novel-writing, that quintessentially bourgeois genre - analogous to painting - in between the extreme relativities of plays and films respectively.

     But if novels are passé, plays were utterly obsolete and anachronistic by late-stage petty-bourgeois criteria ... as pertaining to the contemporary West, with particular reference to America, the West's principal producer of films.  Yet as contemporary Western civilization remains relative, plays are tolerated and continue to be produced, even if they're not particularly admired by the great majority of late twentieth-century people, who are more than likely to favour films, the antithetical equivalent of plays.  Indeed, if an antithetical equivalent of Shakespeare were to be named, he could only be a great film producer and/or writer - someone, for example, like Alfred Hitchcock.

     But who would be the antithetical equivalent (if one can speak of such a thing where absolute extremes are concerned) to, say, Thales or Phythagoras or Heraclitus?  Certainly no contemporary philosopher, even if contemporary philosophy, in the strictly academic sense, is antithetical to ancient philosophy ... to the extent that it entails a critique of language as opposed to a critique of nature, and is therefore relatively artificial.  No, the absolute antithesis to such ancient philosophers would only be found in a transcendental civilization, a necessarily poetic absolutism germane to the proletariat.  Certainly, one could speak of certain late-stage petty-bourgeois poets as being antithetical to later Greek philosophers like Aristotle and Plato, who were less absolute or more relative, as you prefer, in relation to the earliest philosophers.  But only in a transcendental civilization would the absolute antithesis to pagan absolutisms emerge, and it would probably take an abstract anthological form, replacing the individual with the collective, and thus contrasting the collectivized poetic with the individualized philosophic, the essential with the apparent, the One with the Many.

     Yes, there poetic endeavour would attain to its climax, transcending intellect.  And James Riley, the creator of a quasi-poetic collectivized literature, was intimating of this transcendence on his own collective terms, interpreting life and art for his future followers in order that they could be completely confident in the correctness and inevitability of their creative predilections.  The modern Irish were nothing if not poets.  Even he had begun his writing career as a poet of unrequited love, the noblest kind of love poetry, he now mused, though he hadn't realized it at the time!

 

 

FOR TRUTH

 

The Leader paced backwards and forwards in front of us, deeply immersed in reflection, and I thought for a moment that he would take the seat offered him by one of our comrades.  But, to my surprise, he turned away and, raising his eyes to survey us all, recommenced speaking, his voice clear and firm, the channel of fresh inspiration from above.  What puzzled him, he said, was how people had come to equate Fascism and its Social Transcendentalist successor with the Extreme Right.  For, in reality, theocratic Centrism (his use of the latter word, which he pronounced Centerism, implied a markedly radical implication which contrasted sharply with the conventional use of the term as applying to moderate democratic positions) was no more extreme right than autocratic royalism had been extreme left or, for that matter, extreme right.

     As expected, there were plenty of smiles in the room with this utterance, and even one or two muffled laughs or would-be guffaws.  Even I was tickled by it.

     No, it was difficult to see, he proceeded, how an extreme movement, one pertaining to the theocratic spectrum, could have anything to do with either left- or right-wing designations, since they applied, after all, to the democratic spectrum.  Probably, he went on, the application of the term 'extreme right' to Fascism was simply in order to distinguish it from Communism as an extreme left-wing ideology, which, incidentally, it was, rather than as a product of logical reasoning.

     Here more amusement broke loose, but he quickly calmed it down by continuing with words to the effect that, objectively considered, the Extreme Right began with the Cromwellian revolt against autocratic royalism, resulting in a form of democratic dictatorship which in turn led to a parliamentary system of government the essence of which was division between the Right and the Left, Tories and Whigs, the one in part stemming from the victorious roundheads, the other in part stemming from the defeated cavaliers, additional bourgeois factors increasingly coming forward to shift the balance of power from a kind of artisanal/feudal opposition to a monopoly capitalist/liberal capitalist opposition, and from that to a small-time capitalist/democratic socialist opposition, with successive evolutionary transmutations from Whigs and Liberals to Fabians in more radically left-wing alignments against a progressively less-extreme right-wing opposition.  The culmination of this gradual shift from an extreme right in Cromwellian dictatorship to an extreme left within a two-party system was, the Leader assured us, the emergence in certain countries of a communist system of one-party rule by the Extreme Left, more extreme by far than the democratic socialists of countries like Britain and France, and necessarily hostile to all such compromises between the Right and the Left.  So if the democratic spectrum began with the extreme right-wing dictatorship of Cromwell, its culmination could only be with the extreme left-wing dictatorship of Lenin, each dictatorship leading, in due course, to democracy, the first to relative, or bourgeois, democracy; the second to absolute, or proletarian, democracy - a progression from liberal to social democracy along a spectrum which, coming in-between autocratic and theocratic extremes, is the only one to which the distinctions of left and right can reasonably be applied.

     So any reference to Social Transcendentalists as extreme right wing could only be subjective and contingent, an expedience, the Leader assured us, on the part of democrats and Marxists alike.  In truth, we were neither right nor left but above any such distinction, just as, prior to the emergence of bourgeois parliamentarianism, the monarchy was beneath it, ruling in an authoritarian manner on the principle, expressed or unexpressed, of 'divine right', a strictly non-sectarian rightness.

     However, such 'divine right' was founded on the galactic-world-order of central star (monarch), peripheral stars (peers), and planets (populace); though the Galaxy, as the Leader had on occasion pointed out to us, was far from being literally divine, that is to say, divine in the sense of pure spirit, as germane to electron-electron attractions.  On the contrary, it signified the proton-proton reactions of pure soul, the central star no less than peripheral ones, such theological abstractions as were subsequently made distinguishing central from peripheral stars in terms of the Creator and the Devil, the latter most especially relevant, so the Leader maintained, to an abstraction from the sun, which is (or was) literally the root of all evil in the world, since the closest star to it.  Not that he made the mistake of confounding theology with science, the abstracted Father with the literal First Cause, the abstracted Satan with the Sun.  Hell and Heaven remained, for him, theological postulates, corresponding to cosmic realities - the nearest thing to hell on earth being a raging fire, the nearest thing to heaven on earth being a profoundly peaceful meditation experience.  But if proton-proton reactions already existed in space in the guise of stars, then it was the business of evolving humanity to ensure that the cultivation of spirit went ahead on earth so that, one day in the distant post-millennial future, electron-electron attractions would arise from the ultimate life form, the new-brain collectivizations of the Superbeings, and proceed towards other such transcendences in space, some of which may well have been there for centuries or longer, presuming upon the existence, elsewhere in the Universe, of more advanced planets than the earth - planets, I mean, where the post-human millennium had been established long before its eventual establishment here.

     But, of course, such transcendences, our Leader had informed us, would no more constitute the culmination of all evolution than planets or small stars constituted its inception.  They would simply amount to contributions of pure spirit - spiritual globes - on route, as it were, to the distant culmination of heavenly evolution in the ultimate spiritual globe ... of the Omega Point, the sum-product of all convergence.  The establishment of God as the Holy Spirit, the ultimate globe of pure spirit, was seemingly too far into the future for us on earth to have any knowledge about or intimation of when it would literally come about.  All we can do as progressive theocrats ... is work towards our own fulfilment in ever-increasing expansions of spirit, of greater awareness, bringing ourselves nearer, by degrees, to the envisaged future goal of all evolution, the quality of which would be ineffable from our point of view, the quantity of which ... an unknown factor because beyond and above all quantification, not really quantitative at all but ... absolutely qualitative in its noumenal perfection.

     Ah yes, I came back from these divine reflections with a near-beatific smile on my face for the man or, rather, divinity who had taught us all this, who was the soul of our party, the guiding spirit of our movement!  There he stood before us, nodding his head at the amused response which his latest wisdom had engendered among his faithful followers, my comrades in arms, despisers of democracy in all its phases.  He was the arch-despiser of democracy, for whom the concept of mass political sovereignty was but a passing phenomenon which would soon be entirely redundant, like, for that matter, public ownership of the means of production, its economic concomitant.  He represented political sovereignty for us, his followers, and we were pledged to obey him, this embodiment of the Holy Spirit, this manifestation of the Second Coming, whose word was Truth.  Superior in wisdom and insight to both Hitler and Mussolini, his crudely theocratic predecessors, his word was Law and we, drawn to the Truth, could not but be eager to implement it, to carry out such instructions as he gave us.  Not for us to impose our will upon him, as if he were merely a representative of our democratic rights and we alone, as people, were politically sovereign!  He led us and we were only too willing to follow, knowing ourselves to be honoured in this way, to work for the ultimate victory of theocracy over democracy, in order that real progress towards a post-human millennium could be achieved, thanks to our efforts.

     Yes, no less than the other comrades gathered round the Leader today, I was eager to serve evolutionary progress by carrying out such instructions or tasks as were received from 'On High'.  Our conviction of absolute rightness gave a certain exuberance and even ruthlessness to our dealings with enemies of theocratic enlightenment, be they bourgeois or proletarian, moderate left or extreme left, moderate right or extreme right.  Political salvation resided in the Leader, and the Way to ultimate salvation from the flesh resided in our following his instructions to the letter.  We were proud of what we had already achieved in this respect and were convinced that, no matter how many obstacles lay in the way of Truth and Progress, we would be capable of overcoming them.  And the Leader, sensing as much, imparted to us his confidence in us as servants of the Truth.  Such Truth, as he had just reminded us, had nothing to do with left or right, but solely with God.  Soon even people's democracy would be consigned to the rubbish bin of history, and extreme left-wingers along with it.  Salvation!

 

                                           All Hail the Saviour,

                                      May His Will be Done,

                                      In Kingdom Come,

                                      This day and evermore.

                                      Amen!

 

 

LEADER'S TRANSCENDENTALISM

 

"Of course, the theocratic spectrum is more complex than I have hitherto let on," I said, turning to party comrades 7 and 22, as we awaited the moment to proceed along the tunnel and climb onto the vast rostrum that awaited me in the stadium tonight, "since there is a lacuna in it between autocratic Roman Catholicism and the inception of democratic Protestantism.  If it began in the former, then the emergence of the latter signified a subdivision of the spectrum, a kind of parallel development to it which, in countries where Protestantism caught on, pushed the Catholic spectrum into a subordinate position, even if, in the relativity of things within an atomic framework, it was permitted or able to continue.  So from approximately a late-stage grand-bourgeois age to an early-stage petty-bourgeois one, from the late-seventeenth to the early-twentieth century, Catholicism survived as the main, or absolute, manifestation of the theocratic spectrum, albeit in a subordinate capacity to this relative manifestation of theocracy which, as Protestantism, continued to dominate the age, being the ideological justification behind democracy."

     As both party comrades appeared to be engrossed in what I was saying, I continued, following a brief glance at my digital watch: "Thus if the main theocratic spectrum is imagined as beginning in blue, it became grey during the age of democratic hegemony, when the relative heresy of Protestantism dominated the West with its pink spectrum.  So the subdivision, running parallel to the main theocratic spectrum, is garishly dominant while the age of democracy holds sway.  But then, as if through Providential intervention, a new age suddenly erupts, what I have elsewhere called a late-stage petty-bourgeois age, and it is fundamentally hostile to democracy because more absolute in character, time having brought evolution closer to a proletarian age.  Now suddenly the main part of the top spectrum comes alive again with the emergence of Fascism, giving it a new look in a navy-blue/black combination, the antithetical equivalent to the royal blue, so to speak, of Roman Catholicism.  No matter if Fascism was eventually defeated by democracy, its emergence threatened the democratic status quo and it went on to defeat certain of the democracies during the high-point of its ascendancy.  At last, after centuries of subordinate status, the main part of the top spectrum had come to life again and, in the guise of Fascism, waged war with the middle spectrum, including the communist tail-end of it.  For even the heretical manifestation of the theocratic spectrum in pink Protestantism is subject to supersession, with the emergence of a late-stage petty-bourgeois age, by a red Marxist-Leninist part, the theology applicable to people's democracy, which extends this heretical spectrum towards absolute criteria while yet opposing its relative predecessor.  As surely as Catholicism led to Fascism, Protestantism led to Communism, whilst autocratic royalism continued to fade and wither into military dictatorships."

     I could tell, as I glanced at my watch anew, that these two comrades were all ears for such information, which was grist to their Social Transcendentalist mill.  One of them appeared to be on the point of speaking, but I cut any prospect of that out by adding: "Yet if Fascism leads, via Neo-Catholicism, to Social Transcendentalism, as germane to an absolute theocracy, then Communism most certainly doesn't lead to anything else, since it signifies the tail-end of that heretical spectrum in the furthermost reach of humanism, devoid of any concerns with an aspiration towards the Holy Spirit, Protestant materialism pushed to its ultimate conclusion in communist atheism.  Thus, on the middle spectrum, a shift from relative to absolute democracy, the inevitable outcome of the Christian notion of the equality of all souls, an attempt to establish a more equal society, with sovereignty alone vested in the proletariat, who are more equal to one another than the people of a relative democracy, divisible between bourgeois and proletarian elements.  Such is life on the tail-end of the middle spectrum, which owes its materialist integrity to the tail-end of the heretical subdivision of the theocratic spectrum in Communism, a necessarily false world religion, being but an expansion of the Protestant faith.  However, no such heresy prevails here, since we're most decidedly on the true part of the top spectrum, no longer as Catholics but as absolute theocrats, idealists with a Social Transcendentalist faith, and harbingers of the True World Religion.  Here political sovereignty is vested in the true Second Coming, who leads from above, dragging the masses after him, bringing them closer to divinity, inspiring them with his teachings, goading them toward higher things, always assisted by his trusted followers, who form an elite of faithful men, serving his Truth in order that the masses may be ennobled and improved in the course of time.  Only democrats serve the people.  They are the people's representatives, for the people are politically sovereign.  Here, however, party comrades serve me, as the embodiment of Truth, and I lead the people as sovereign, the antithesis to autocratic rulers, an aspiration towards the Holy Spirit, not a stemming from the Creator, a spiritual leadership as opposed to a sensual rule.  And those who serve me well will be rewarded!"

     Party comrades 7 and 22 smiled now, and I felt obliged to consult my digital watch again in order to ensure a prompt appearance at the appointed time.  I was in a speaking mood and eager to get out of this room and along the tunnel leading, via the processional stairs that would be flanked by rows of my uniformed followers, to the rostrum, from which I would calmly survey the seething mass of people in the stadium below, their heads bathed in the myriad neon lights which issued from the roofs of the surrounding stands, a veritable cathedral of light in which the whole stadium became an appropriate setting for such spiritual illumination as I would generously bestow upon the near-hypnotized multitude, whose hunger and thirst for spiritual nourishment.... To be sure, I had studied National Socialist precedent carefully and knew just what to do, in this receptive atmosphere, to renew and strengthen their faith! Already the music, processions, and banners would be having an effect, softening them up, lifting them beyond the narrow confines of their individual selves, making them drunk on the mass - the nearest approximation on earth to the indivisible unity of transcendent spirit, the goal of evolutionary striving.

     Yes, I loved the crowd and they loved it too, and loved their Leader and his closest followers and all the banners fluttering in the wind, the black abstract emblem of the Second Coming on a white ground, symbolic, in its Y-like abstraction, its inverted CND-like uprightness, not only of the Holy Spirit, but of Centrist trusteeship of the means of production for the development and spread of Truth.  Social Transcendentalism was by no means socialist, in terms of public ownership of the means of production, as relative to a democracy, though most especially a people's democracy, where the proletariat were sovereign and consequently owned the means of production through the State, the organized bureaucracy of the people.  Not the ownership of the means of production by the people for the people, but the ownership or, rather, trusteeship of those means by the Centre for the Truth, the development and spread of the True World Religion, which could only be to the lasting advantage of what was best in the people - namely their spirit.  Social Transcendentalism was certainly beyond Socialism, not a phenomenon of the middle spectrum, and therefore above criteria applying to democracy.  If it was social, or socialistic, it was in terms of the way it sought to treat people fairly, using such economic wealth as industry produced in the interests of evolutionary progress, which implied a decent standard of living for the people in order that they would be able to take their spiritual aspirations seriously.

     There could be no question, however, of Social Transcendentalism striving to serve the people for the sake of people's service, as if they were politically sovereign and should consequently be served on their own account, divorced from a truly religious perspective or objective.  On the contrary, Social Transcendentalism served the advancement of Truth, and that demanded that the people be led towards a better future, towards the penultimate heaven of the post-human millennium as a prelude to the ultimate heaven ... of the post-millennial Beyond.  Truth had no interest in the people for themselves, only in their spiritual potential.  For that alone pertained to the theocratic spectrum.  That alone would liberate them from the flesh!

     Suddenly a hand on my shoulder startled me out of my reflections and reminded me of the body.  I glanced down at my wrist and saw that it was time to move.  Party comrades 7 and 22 were on their feet and already heading towards the door that led through the tunnel into the stadium.  I smiled my appreciation of this fact, now that the moment had at last arrived, and led the way out of the room.

 

 

A TRUE EXTREMISM

 

Leader's transcendentalism is really more the antithesis of ruler's royalism than its antithetical equivalent, which would have to pertain, by contrast, to the same spectrum, namely the autocratic one.  Yes, Comrade 5, the nearest one gets to an antithetical equivalent of ruler's royalism is with a military dictatorship, where sovereignty is vested in the reigning general or colonel or even, occasionally, officers of inferior rank, and a situation may arise whereby the masses serve an elite ... in a kind of submission to Nietzschean criteria.  That's right, Comrade 10.  Nietzsche's philosophy was partly conceived against the backdrop, as it were, of a military dictatorship, namely Bismarck's, and consequently tends to uphold a kind of neo-royalist position of aristocratic radicalism, with the masses conceived as but means to the nurture and development of the higher men, be they Supermen or whatever.

     I agree, Comrade 23, there is much more than the influence of a military dictatorship to Nietzsche's philosophy.  But, even so, that cannot be discounted!  Anyway, an antithetical equivalent to ruler's royalism will tend to place the interests of a ruling elite above those of everybody else, just as the interests of the king and his nobles took precedence over the populace in the age of feudal autocracy.  Monarchs rule in their own interests.... Well, the antithesis to a ruler is a leader, as pertinent to a fascist or a centrist society, and he exists on the third, or theocratic, spectrum, the spectrum centred on the Holy Ghost rather than, like the autocratic one, on the Father.  He leads the people in their spiritual interests.

     No, Comrade 4, he doesn't serve or represent the people, like a people's representative on the spectrum in-between autocratic and theocratic extremes, which pertains to democracy, and hence to representative's parliamentarianism.  He serves only Truth, and this requires that he leads the people from the Centre.  They do not exist for his own aggrandizement or material enrichment, as in a royalist or neo-royalist society.  On the contrary, they exist to be improved, and this is the antithesis of royalist autocracy - an antithesis only being possible between the first and third spectra, as between the Father and the Holy Spirit.  As for Christ, He pertains, in His humanism, to the democratic spectrum, the tail-end of which signifies a more absolute people's sovereignty in the guise of Communism, the ideology of the Antichrist.  By contrast, the continuation of the true part of the theocratic spectrum from Roman Catholicism and Fascism leads to the Second Coming, and thus to the ideology of the True World Messiah, as appertaining to Social Transcendentalism.

     Yes, Comrade 27, such an extreme ideological position entails an anti-tribal perspective, since there is no contiguity between the first and third spectra, and tribalists - be they Celts, Bantus, Nagas, Bedouin, Gypsies, or whatever - pertain to the first.

     Yes, Comrade 92.  Tribalists, nationalists, and transcendentalists.  No connection between the first and the third, and so, wherever the third emerges, tribalists are beneath the pale.  Only a theocratic society can be truly closed in relation to what is beneath the pale.  A communist society has no anti-tribal policy because Communism is only extreme in relation to the moderate part of the second spectrum, an extreme middle-of-the-road ideology rather than an extreme closed-society perspective, since its allegiance to the democratic spectrum implies contiguity with the bottom one, if from an extreme point of view.

     You're right, Comrade 63, a communist society is more closed at the top, with regard to evolutionary progress towards the post-human millennium - Lenin's 'No God-building, comrades!' comes to mind here - than at the bottom, whereas Fascism and its ideological successor, Social Transcendentalism, is closed at the bottom, to first and second spectra influences, but virtually infinitely open at the top ... with a perspective stretching, via the post-human millennium, all the way to Heaven.  Communism is closed to aspirations towards the Holy Spirit, being but the furthest reach of democratic humanism.  It opens out to democracy and capitalism, if on a negative basis, as an ideological opposition to democratic precedent in the world at large - Communism against Protestantism (Marxism against Calvinism).  It liquidates bourgeois exploiters, but not tribalists.

     That's right, Comrade 14, it culminates in a dead-end of proletarian atheism, an extension of the Protestant heresy of Christian relativity, a more extreme relativity, you might say.  Whereas we Social Transcendentalists are opposed, like our fascist precursors, to everything relative, be it Protestant or Communist.  And opposed, moreover, to absolutism on the autocratic spectrum, not to mention to earlier absolutist manifestations of our own.  It would be ironical for Social Transcendentalism to come to power solely through democratic means when it's a theocratic ideology and therefore not directly connected with the democratic process.  In fact, a veritable contradiction in terms!

     Yes, Comrade 28, Mussolini's ascension to the dictatorial leadership of the Italian people was more theocratic than Hitler's rise to power over the Germans, Hitler being obliged to partly rely on democratic methods - a not-altogether surprising fact, given the Protestant, democratic integrity of most North Germans!  Had he been seeking power in a more ideologically homogeneous state, like Italy, he might not have had to compromise with the democratic process to anything like the same extent.  His earlier, failed putsch in Bavaria was certainly not as illogical or irrelevant as might at first appear, bearing in mind the Catholic theocratic integrity of the South.  Nazism was essentially a South German movement in any case, and Hitler a Catholic of Austrian descent.

     No, Comrade 41, the traditional Provisional Sinn Fein attitude of a ballot paper in one hand and an armalite in the other strikes me as having been significant of a compromise with the majority democratic population of Northern Ireland.  The Social Transcendentalist attitude in the South of Ireland would have to be more representatively theocratic, in my opinion.  After all, how can the people vote to transfer political sovereignty to a Social Transcendentalist leader when the voting process is all about electing representatives to serve on their behalf?  Is it likely that democratically-minded people would vote for the removal of their sovereignty?

     Ah, as you say, Comrade 35!  But those who are genuinely democratic would wish to retain sovereignty for themselves.  Only a people who were essentially theocratic would be prepared to use the democratic system to further theocratic interests, and thus transcend democracy!  Well, none of you need me to remind you of the ethnic essence of the majority population of Southern Ireland.  Perhaps, after all, the paradoxical will come to pass and, thanks to considerable Church backing and pressure, theocracy will replace democracy from within rather than without ... via a putsch or violent revolution.  Ideally one would prefer not to have to compromise with the democratic process, but in a state where there are over 100,000 guaranteed democrats, not to mention a number of Catholic dupes of the British system as well.... Or, alternatively, in a state which is overwhelmingly theocratic ...

     Yes, maybe you're right, Comrade 16!  As long as we know what's best for the majority population of Eire, the minority can go to hell.  Or most probably will be driven there in deference to Last Judgement criteria!  Yes, for he who corresponds to a Second Coming, the leader of Social Transcendentalism, does not intend to save hard-line democrats, but to damn them.  He knows his own, and they are forever theocratic.  Saved!

 

 

A PERMANENT CROSS

 

He remembered his doctor looking at him in sceptical surprise and saying: "Why, you're not a nutcase!  You've got musical taste and culture and ...!"

     Michael had discussed classical music with his doctor on a previous occasion, but had gone along to the surgery, this time, for some anti-depressants in order to combat a depression the doctor knew all about, and the latter had kindly scribbled out a prescription for tryptizol or dothiepin or some such soothing drug.  But he hadn't been encouraged to pay a visit to a specialist at the nearest mental hospital.  Indeed, he had been dissuaded from pursuing a more intensive course of treatment, though, god knows, he knew that something more was needed than recourse to mild anti-depressants!  In fact, he had long been of the opinion that his depression was due to overlong confinement in an urban environment, the city he inhabited more as a foreigner blown in from the provinces than as a genuine native, an outsider as opposed to an insider, and a fundamentally Catholic one at that!  The doctor was clearly an insider, a native Londoner sceptical of depressions caused by environmental incompatibility, doubtless on account of his own environmental compatibility.  A kind of sophisticated proletarian was how he saw his doctor - jolly, rotund, prone to self-inflected accidents, hooked on valium, which he swallowed more, apparently, to keep himself calm than to ease depression; though if he had one it was evidently attributable to some other source than environment - possibly matrimonial or hereditary.

     But whilst, as a patient, Michael was of the opinion that environment was chiefly responsible for his depression, he had never claimed that it was solely responsible.  Simply the root cause that led to certain effects conducive to depression.  Like, for instance, being alone in one's room most of the time because the outside world was too obnoxious to encourage socializing and, in any case, appeared bereft of the types of people who would have appealed to one's sense of friendship, its inhabitants being either mostly of the simple or yobbish proletarian varieties, or of the stand-offish and unintelligible immigrant varieties, with but a scattering of petty bourgeoisie and bohemian intellectuals thrown-in for good measure.  And being alone of course meant that one wasn't talking or copulating, two things which, providing they were indulged in regularly enough, served to release pent-up tensions and keep one relatively free from depression.

     Yet if the environment was a cause of these effects, which stood like a thistle on a jaded stalk, it was also a direct contributory factor to his depression, not only in the sense that it was too artificial and built-up for his liking, or too squalid and ugly, too smelly and polluted, but, worse still, too noisy and thus a constant source of tension - tension which entered his head in the form of noise and stayed there, he having no social or sexual way of releasing it again.  So he was in a kind of tension trap, with noise - in the extremely disagreeable forms of dog-barkings, worker-hammerings, door-slammings, pop-screechings, kid-shoutings, phone-ringings, car-hummings, radio- and/or TV-blarings, etc. - going into his head, but no noise - in the more agreeable forms of speaking, grunting, laughing, singing, etc. - coming out of it.  All one-way traffic, so to speak.  And coupled to this, a lack of deep steady sleep, in part attributable to increased tension and intellectuality within a highly artificial environment, in part doubtless deriving from his solitary and sordid lot, a lot compounded by the poverty of a social security allowance which, to say the least, further inhibited socializing, there being relatively few contexts where one could meet people free-of-charge, and still fewer women who would want to meet anyone who lacked the means to date them regularly, particularly someone whose sartorial appearance left something to be desired on account of his poverty!

     No, Michael knew well enough that females were highly appearance-conscious, linking a smart exterior with financial affluence and an unsmart one with a want of financial solvency, thoroughly worldly in their estimations of men, a consequence, no doubt, of their fundamentally materialistic natures, which induced them to attach greater importance to externals than to internals, to the flesh than to the spirit, to appearances than to essences.  Not all women of course, but still too many of them too much of the time!  And particularly within an open-society context, and one, moreover, that existed in a traditionally materialistic country like Britain, where appearances counted for more than essences on account, in all probability, of the practical nature of the average Anglo-Saxon.

     Well, Michael had not gone along to the doctor in order to lecture him on ethnic characteristics or to give him an unprecedentedly bold lesson in free speech, but simply to acquire some anti-depressants which, from previous experience, he knew would be of minimal avail against the depression that was a permanent aspect of his life and had more than a few cogent causes, not least of all the isolation of an intelligent Irishman in a major English city!  He knew, too, that his writings would never be accepted by the English, since too honest and radical for their middle-of-the-road, bourgeois taste and lack of understanding of anything that transcended the literary mask, like his philosophical collectivized writings and poetic autobiographical writings, not to mention his revolutionary politico-religious ones.  The English were always somehow false and lying, he, a true son of Ireland, genuine and truthful.  They had less capacity, in their pragmatic natures, to bear the cross of authentic spiritual striving, sold out too readily to material gain and bourgeois comforts, signified the oppression of higher idealism, a neutron- if not proton-biased opposition to electron striving, an enslavement to atomic determinism rather than an aspiration towards spiritual freedom.  Very few of them ever had any desire to abandon the World, or worldly lifestyles, in order to aspire towards heavenly redemption.  That was why there had to be a clash between the worldly and the anti-worldly, though not, as yet, the Otherworldly.  And he hoped that his country would be free to champion the Otherworldly in due course, as it had traditionally done on somewhat adulterated Catholic terms, but had yet to do on the purer terms of a Social Transcendental Centre, so much above the wretched natural determinism of the United Kingdom - indeed, its very opposite!

     Ah, Michael had not allowed his depression to prevent him from working on his own, necessarily superior terms - terms which, through various literary or anti-literary or poetic stages, had brought him to Truth while the majority of British writers continued to wallow in illusions and lies, superficiality and dirt, after their commercial fashions!  Unlike them, he had never 'kissed the bourgeois' arse', to paraphrase Goebbels, but gone his own way, the way of Truth.  He had quite admired their better authors, men like Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, Anthony Burgess and Lawrence Durrell, but had never identified with them, preferring to regard most of his work as a continuation beyond Joyce and Beckett, at least technically ... with regard to a developing absolutism in poetic truth.  He could no longer take the novel genre seriously, since he equated it with bourgeois limitations both thematically and technically.  A democratic art-form, lacking the inspiration of true genius as much on account of its pedantic technical considerations as of its restricted subject-matter.

     For true genius of expression demands the maximum concern with content and the minimum concern with style or grammar.  It cannot emerge if there is a lack of inspiration on account of one's being bound to technicalities which necessarily impede the flow as well as inhibit the development of Truth.  Great insights, the product of inspiration, mostly come 'on the wing', not when one is at rest or bogged down in stultifying pedantic considerations!  The more you gain on the grammatical roundabout, the less you can have on the conceptual swings.  The more positive truth you desire, the less concern you must give to technicalities, which merely conform, after all, to the proton and/or neutron side of writing, its materialistic as opposed to spiritualistic, or electron, side.  The British make for good novelists but, contrary to literary myth, relatively poor poets, since they are never sufficiently free from technical considerations to soar to the heights of imaginative freedom.  Having Irish blood in their veins, Burgess and Durrell are less literary than poetic and produce better or, at any rate, more poetic novels in consequence.  James Joyce and Samuel Beckett are more poetic again, and it's unlikely that any major Irish writer could ever be less than highly poetic, granted a free-electron predilection.  He had seen the age of English writing superseded, in Britain, by the age of Irish-British writing, and this despite the literary excellence of novelists like John Fowles and Kingsley Amis.  He soon hoped to see the age of Irish writing in Britain, or of Irish-born writers at work in England, supersede the latter, a trend which would conform to the progress of evolution towards a more genuinely poetic, and hence free-electron, climate - one which should culminate in Ireland itself, after that country had been upgraded to a radically theocratic status under Social Transcendentalism, making for a truly free-electron society in which only poets, and poetry of the highest abstract order, would be published, compliments of a Centrist patronage, whether under his guidance or not ... remained to be seen.  For despite his poetic leanings, he was primarily dedicated to ideological progress and hoped, one day, to play a part in the peaceful transformation of Eire from a Roman Catholic Republic into a Social Transcendental Centre.

     But a revolutionary leader had to write, and Michael had written as much as anyone, Lenin included, on subjects and in a way that Lenin would never have contemplated, being too much the politician for anything so theocratic as poetry.  A Social Transcendentalist leader was an altogether different proposition from a Bolshevik or a Communist one, closer, in essence, to Hitler and to fascist leaders generally - men who scorned mere politics and literary philistinism.  Michael was also a writer in the higher sense, not just a political or revolutionary propagandist.  Probably more a writer, if the truth were known, than a revolutionary.  A writer who imagined himself a revolutionary rather than a revolutionary who also dabbled, à la Trotsky, in writing.  A kind of literary schizophrenia, an illness probably shared by such illustrious writers as Gide and Camus, Malraux and Sartre, Koestler and Mailer, who were expected and inclined to be political but were never quite sure to what extent or exactly where the demarcation line between literature and politics actually stood.  Was it perhaps a failing of a certain type of writer that he imagined himself capable of major participation in revolutionary politics?  Or a madness?  That political participation was a writer's dream, the grass being greener the other side of the professional fence, every profession having a kind of connection with some other, to which one was more than likely to be drawn?  So after a writer, a fascist or communist dictator?  Was that the only way one could, as it were, progress?  He had often thought so, and was still of the opinion that a revolutionary dictator was more likely to come from the intellectual class, particularly on its literary side, than from any other.  Certainly a Social Transcendentalist would have to be highly literate, if his sovereignty as embodied Holy Spirit was to be justified.  No mere labourer or philistine politician!  Michael had no reason to doubt his sanity on that account, even if he wasn't altogether sure that he was sane to imagine himself a potential dictator, when he had spent so much time scribbling literary or poetic truth!

     But was Social Transcendentalism merely a figment of his imagination, a mere literary game?  He didn't think so, couldn't bring himself to believe that he was merely concocting imaginary worlds for literary appreciation.  He had gone too far and in too much depth and earnestness to be a mere purveyor of political fictions.  He knew that what he stood for was the Truth, and that the Truth would have to prevail in the world in future if it was to be redeemed.  He was no fool to doubt the authenticity of his Truth.  But whether or not he would actually implement it ... time alone would tell.  At least he didn't feel that he was in need of a state psychiatrist on account of his uncertainty in this matter, though his mental health might well have profited from some psychiatric attention.  The depression was still there, and if it was a Cross he had to bear on account of his solitary and celibate lifestyle, then so be it!  Writers were more often than not depressive, if not manic, in any case, since too much alone.  It was a professional hazard and drawback, not something of which to be cured if one wished to continue in one's chosen tracks, since writing could only be done in solitude or, at any rate, without professional assistance from, say, a colleague.  Most serious writers sooner or later took to drink as an antidote to depression on a kind of intermittent or temporary basis.  Also tobacco of course, another sensual indulgence to counter the enforced asceticism of solitary intellectual activity, to sensualize the brain, soak it, drag it down from its too tense and rarefied heights, if only to watch the TV or listen to discs.

     Such it was for him, and he didn't think himself altogether unique in this respect, even if there were writers - authors really - who fared better on account of their wealth and social life, always a friend or wife around with whom to talk, not really alone all that much, too bourgeois to want the heights.  But madness, mental illness, depression, delirium - so prevalent these days, and not simply among writers and would-be revolutionaries, either!  He considered himself essentially sane, despite his depression.  But there were others who had regular need of psychiatric attention, were, in fact, more often mentally ill than physically ill.  He had thought about this negatively, in regard to his own problem in the past, but now he was beginning to see it in a positive light.  After all, why had psychology and psychiatry taken so long to materialize?  Why was it only this century that they really came into their own, so to speak, as respectable medical professions?  Surely the answer to these questions had to be: because it was only in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that, in certain parts of the world and in certain individuals, the human psyche had become sufficiently evolved to permit of a looking back and down on the subconscious from the vantage-point of the ego and/or superconscious - in short, because until then humanity had been insufficiently advanced to be either capable of or particularly interested in any such psychic scrutiny.

     Well, what applies to the subconscious may well apply to the brain in general and to mental illness in particular, so that the growth of interest in the former and increasing prevalence of the latter were but reflections of the ongoing sophistication of the age, its coming to maturity on terms that stressed the mental at the expense of the physical, the brain at the expense of the body.  He had little doubt that, paradoxically, the expansion of mental illness was a symptom of evolutionary progress; for if bodily illness had hitherto been the human norm, might we not be approaching a time when it would be the exception and, by contrast, only mental illness be the human norm - a humanity grown beyond the merely physical and become ever-more deeply engrossed in the mental and spiritual, a humanity which had passed from the body to the mind?

     Ah, there were sufficient grounds in this hypothesis for optimism about the future, for seeing in mental illness not a sign of decay and pessimism, but, on the contrary, of growth and optimism concerning the evolution of mankind away from the body and ever deeper into the mind.  Could it be, he wondered, that a day would come when all or most physical illnesses would be attributed to mental causes, to psychosomatic origins?  Would humanity reach such a pitch of evolutionary sophistication that doctors and surgeons would become redundant, their dedication to physical illness no longer necessary, the psychologists and psychiatrists ruling an absolutist roost, and so attending to the prevalent and, in a sense, only morally respectable types of illness of that age?

     Michael wasn't entirely prepared to rule out such a possibility.  For it seemed to him that psychology and psychiatry were complementary aspects of a growth industry, the spiritualistic and materialistic sides, as it were, of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness, and that the ratio of mental to physical illness could only change in the course of time, the former developing at the expense of the latter, in accordance with the evolutionary requirements of a more absolutist age, an age when the representative medical practitioners would be psychologists and psychiatrists, in contrast to the norms of an open society where, to all appearances, doctors and surgeons constituted the medical norm, and to such an extent, in certain countries, that their psychic counterparts were still regarded with if not contempt then, at any rate, deep suspicion, as if their vocations were somehow irrelevant to the established order, beyond or outside the pale of representative medical practice, a kind of emerging poetic threat to a novelistic status quo, not to be taken too seriously, but scarcely to be underestimated, either!

     Perhaps this would apply more in traditionally democratic than in traditionally theocratic societies, where the materialistic was always so much more the accepted norm?  Certainly a closed society derived from the latter kinds of societies would reverse this situation or, at any rate, expand the psychic side, and maybe to a point where psychologists and psychiatrists would greatly preponderate, with but a minimum quantity of bodily doctors to deal, in the main, with accidents and emergency cases, they being regarded as a left-over from bourgeois society, corresponding, in their reformed status, to the 'Social', and hence inferior, side of Social Transcendentalism, the ideological integrity of a truly theocratic closed society, necessarily placing maximum emphasis on the noun.  Probably by then only mental illnesses, he reasoned, would be socially respectable, contrary to the current open-society situation, which inclines to regard mental illness from a bodily, materialistic point of view, and thus to apply such derogatory expressions as 'nutcase', 'fruitcake', and 'lune' to those so afflicted.  Just as his doctor had done with regard to himself, albeit on the assumption that he couldn't possibly be one, since stable and healthy and ... interested in serious music!

     Well, at the time, Michael had been almost relieved to hear this, though he knew that his depression was a kind of mental illness and was more serious than perhaps the doctor, with his limited knowledge of such things, had supposed.  Yet now, when he reflected on his situation from a higher vantage-point, he was almost disappointed in the doctor for not having credited him with more sophistication and thereby acknowledged his superior afflicted status.  Indeed, now he was almost proud to be in some degree mentally ill and thus one of the elect of suffering, no mere physical democrat but a psychical theocrat, as he had long conceived of himself.  He might not be a 'nutcase' in any flagrantly exhibitionist or delirious or violent or deranged or abusive or non-communicative sense, but at least he was prone to mental rather than simply physical ill-health, if on a comparatively low-key and tolerable basis.  This was, he supposed, the price one paid for one's genius as a writer/thinker, the degree of sophistication and spiritual insight to which he had attained being impossible without a commensurate degree of physical solitariness and social simplicity.

     Yet it was also a mark of his inherent sophistication, his status as one of the spiritual elect for whom mere bodily ill-health would have been demeaning, a kind of left-wing affliction more suited, he supposed, to a person of anti-natural inclination and/or temperament.  If he was not mad in any seriously permanent sense, he was yet capable of mental ill-health and not simply on an intermittent basis either!  It was his shadow self, the price he paid for the light of his truth.  Better of course to be mentally well than mentally sick; but if one had to be ill, better to be mentally sick than physically sick.  He was part of a long tradition of great minds whose common lot had been mental ill-health.  Like Nietzsche, Strindberg, Baudelaire, Hermann Hesse, Ezra Pound, and Wilhelm Reich, Michael Somers would carry his cross until the end - the end, in his case, of the World.

 

 

MORE PLASTIC

 

There was too much wooden furniture in his room for Keith Toland's liking these days, now that he was becoming increasingly enamoured of plastic, which, in contrast to wood, he equated with a supernatural bias.  He found himself day-dreaming, on occasion, of a room in which all the furniture was made of plastic or, at any rate, some kind of synthetic material transcending nature.  His room was largely bourgeois, he thought, and lagged behind his ideological development.  Ideally, he would have preferred to bring it into line with his current tastes or, better still, move into an unfurnished flat which he would then proceed to furnish from scratch ... in the most supernatural fashion - plastic everywhere.  The room he rented was fully-furnished, no possibility of the Licensor allowing its wooden contents to be thrown out.  Besides, he knew that, in his current financial position, he couldn't afford to buy the sort of furniture he had in mind.  It was just a pleasant dream, a suggestion of what he would do if given half the chance.

     But there were small things that he had been able to afford, and they were invariably made of plastic - his second-hand portable television, for example.  Not a bad little set, though monochromatic unfortunately, which he associated with an anti-natural and probably bourgeois constitution.  Still, a black plastic exterior was something, better, at any rate, than a wooden one!  Then there was his hairdryer, as plastic as his stereo headphones and, latest purchase of all, headphone radio.  There was a plastic wallet, a plastic comb, pen, typewriter, zipper jacket, pair of moccasins, rubbish bin, shaver, and watch - this latter a black digital.  He ate lunch off a plastic platter with plastic cutlery, and drank milk from a plastic beaker.  His record-player had a predominantly plastic exterior and his LPs were of course vinyl, which is a strong plastic-.  They were beginning to shame him, however.  He wondered whether there wasn't something inherently liberal if not conservative about records as opposed to cassettes, which, on account of their more idealistic constitution, he supposed to have a comparatively radical right-wing essence.  Records were played horizontally, whereas cassettes usually slotted vertically, if sideways-on, into the cassette deck, symptomatic of a masculine bias, he thought.  Probably he would gravitate from records to cassettes, if given the opportunity.  He had enough records anyway, and was fast running out of space.  Cassettes were smaller and ... more plastic; they didn't come in cardboard covers.

     For the time being, however, Keith was resigned to his records, record-player, and headphones.  He preferred listening to music through headphones anyway, and this had led him to the purchase of a headphone radio set, which he considered to be a marked evolutionary improvement on his old radio, even though it was also of plastic appearance.  Probably he would get himself a pair of headphones for his television before long, just to complete things and bring an absolutism to bear on each of his listening habits.  Instead of coming at one from outside the head, as appearance, sound seemed to come at one from inside it, as essence, and this constituted, to him, a far more theocratic way of listening-in, suitable for an ongoing transcendental age.  With people living in ever-closer proximity to one another in large residential conglomerates, it was imperative to minimize noise and thus cultivate a headphone exclusivity.  Probably a time would come when listening to music or speech without headphones would, in any case, be unlawful.  At present, with walls and houses fairly materialistic, it wasn't particularly necessary to put what might be called 'relativistic listening' under ban.  Such a ban would be irrelevant, in any case, to an open society.  But with the future development of less materialistic and more transcendental types of accommodation, with comparatively thin walls, it followed that 'absolutist listening' would become obligatory, in order to minimize neighbour disturbances and, more importantly, encourage an increasingly theocratic lifestyle, suitable to a closed society.  A headphone absolutism would then be the rule rather than, as at present, the exception.

     Keith knew from experience of certain neighbours, past and present, in his own lodgings that there were more than a few noise fools still at large.  Time would eventually catch-up with them, as with everyone.  And as if this thought prompted it, he glanced down at his digital watch in order to consult the time: 11:57 was what he read, before the seconds digits flickered over to the next second.  So quiet and efficient compared with the old wind-up watch he used to own, always stopping and running slow.  It used to have a leather strap, he remembered, which gave it a kind of naturalistic bourgeois status in his estimation.  A right-wing watch, so to speak.  Better, he mused, than left-wing ones, those metal-strap affairs.  For there was something about metal which suggested an anti-natural as opposed to a supernatural status, commensurate with socialist tendencies.  As if metal, even in its modern alloyed guises, was somehow closer to the subnatural than to the natural, like wood or leather.  A kind of proton-biased inorganic opposition to atomic, organic formations; though, of course, this was to exaggerate the point.  At any rate, metal was cold, hard, and impersonal, like minerals and jewels.  Steel, being an alloy, was typically anti-natural, he thought, and thus left wing compared with wood or leather.  He had never owned a ticker in steel but still possessed a digital with steel strap, which he had bought from a street vendor for little under £2 about a year ago.  Now he only wore it in bed because it had a sort of light that enabled one to read it in the dark, should one wish to consult the time at night.  He regarded it as inferior to his black plastic digital and had no desire, in consequence, to wear it during the day.  He supposed it indicative of a communist equivalent - anti-natural steel with a supernatural digital face, something Marxist-Leninist rather than democratic socialist or radically socialist, such as would have stuck to hands and winder, if on the most metallic terms.  His plastic digital, by contrast, was to his mind theocratic and, hence, Social Transcendentalist, the digitals dividing the day into two lots of twelves, with a PM indicator for the afternoon, and therefore suggesting a relativistic absolutism, the forerunner, one could argue, of the super-transcendental twenty-four hour digital watch, the hour digits flickering from 1-24 in an ongoing, absolutist process, the time having to be read in the manner of a train timetable.  Not bad for the late-twentieth century!   For such watches were already on the market, and he had seen one or two intriguing Japanese examples before settling for the twelve-hour digital he was currently wearing, the digits of which kept perfect time.  If the leather-strap winders were democratic watches and the metal-strap digitals ... anti-democratic, then the plastic digital was very definitely a supernatural watch, superior in essence to all the others, the metal and plastic winders not excepted, the latter of which he supposed to reflect a petty-bourgeois, neo-oriental form of theocracy commensurate with Western transcendentalism.

     To be sure, there was a definite evolutionary progression from the plastic winder to the plastic digital, as, on lower terms, from democratic to anti-democratic watches, though perhaps devolutionary progression would be a more applicable description there!  Whatever the case, a watch, no less than outer clothing, could tell one something about a man's ideological leaning and/or class integrity.  The same could even be said of spectacles, which appeared to reflect, in their different constructions, various stages of ideological evolution and corresponding levels of class allegiance.  Why, he himself was - and had long been - the wearer of a pair of round-lens, metal-rimmed glasses which, in spite of the metal, he now supposed to indicate a bourgeois democratic allegiance, to his slight embarrassment.  It seemed to him that opticals had evolved from the absolutist autocratic level of the monocle, a single lens, to the relative right-wing democratic level of metal-rimmed spectacles, from where a further evolution had taken place in the form of plastic spectacles, as germane to a left-wing democratic level, before the emergence of communistic one-piece spectacles, such as suggested a pair of goggles stretching, in a gentle curve, right across the face, and which thus appeared absolutist within a democratic context - both eyes covered, after the fashion of conventional spectacles, the lens plastic, the frame metallic.  Clearly, he didn't want either a pair of plastic democratic spectacles or a pair (if that's the correct word) of plastic/metallic anti-democratic ones.  If he ever abandoned 'granny glasses', it would have to be in a theocratic direction, which of course meant the purchase of contact lenses - something Keith could, as yet, ill-afford.

     However, he could speculate, and did so on the basis that hard-lens contacts were somehow petty bourgeois or neo-oriental, meaning transcendental in a contemporary Western way, whereas the soft-lens variety suggested a more radically transcendent bias appropriate, he supposed, to a Social Transcendentalist allegiance.  Thus, ideally, a pair of soft-lens contacts for someone who dressed in all-black and wore a plastic digital watch, confirming a radically theocratic ideological integrity.  Probably the future would witness the emergence of a one-lens contact fashion; a soft lens, in other words, for one eye only, antithetical, in its interiorized absolutism, to the exteriorized monocle absolutism of autocratic allegiance.  Did not the monocle lead to dual lenses minus wings, to pince-nez, the frame of which had to be clipped onto the nose and held or perched there without reference to ears?  A kind of absolute relativity preceding the development of spectacles-proper, which reflected a more extensively relative, and hence democratic, integrity, a right-angle formed between lenses and wings, the frame no longer simply a support for lenses but embracing, in addition to a nose clip, a pair of metallic wings, one for each ear.  Well, if autocratic precedent was anything to judge by, why shouldn't contact lenses, which simply fit over the eye, be superseded, in due course, by a contact lens ... in response to the requirements of a more absolutist theocratic age?  A progression from the relativistic absolutism, as it were, of a Social Transcendentalist stage of theocratic allegiance to the absolutist absolutism, so to speak, of a Super-transcendentalist stage, when, if justice is to be done, the world will tend towards a theocratic unity, thus completing human evolution not only with regard to optics but to everything else as well!

     Yet that is still a good way off, and most people with a theocratic leaning can do no better, in the meantime, than to purchase and wear a pair of contact lenses, preferably of the soft-lens type.  Keith was looking forward to doing this, in order to be able to harmonize his appearance and essence, or ideological integrity, all along the line.   At present he was thinking as a Social Transcendentalist and looking, with regard to spectacles, like a right-wing democrat!  Something had to be done about this, and the sooner the better!  He was no longer the bourgeois naturalist of some years ago, but a proletarian supernaturalist, for whom the absolute was of paramount importance.

     And what applied to optics applied no less to sex, where, by contrast, a supernaturalism had long reigned supreme in his solitary life in the form of a voyeuristic/masturbatory appreciation of heterosexual pornography, derived from various quality men's magazines, which seemed to constitute a sexuality complete in itself.  His indulgences were, on the whole, very moderate, no more than once a week, and he usually made sure that his concentration was focused on the vagina of any specifically congenial models, in order to keep his sexuality as supernatural as possible.  Deviations embracing the rump and/or anus he regarded as a left-wing form of theocratic sexuality, permissible though not essential to the main supernatural trend.  He knew himself to be predominantly right-wing, and hence straight.  He would occasionally joke to himself that there was only one alternative to being right: namely wrong.  And this applied no less to right-wing communist sex, involving homosexual pornography, than to left-wing theocratic sex, though, obviously, even that was preferable to the left-wing communist variety, such as involved the sodomitic violation of man by man.  If homosexuals were 'bent', then those who used homosexual pornography for voyeuristic/masturbatory purposes were still 'bent', only slightly less so, since given to the appreciation of a perverse theocratic dimension, endemic to this kind of pornography, which suggested a Leninist influence.  Better a right-wing communist integrity, in his opinion, than a left-wing (Marxist) one.  But better by far a right-wing theocratic integrity!  He was glad that his sexuality was supernatural rather than anti-natural, 'hetero' as opposed to 'homo'.

     But he was becoming dissatisfied with pornography alone, which seemed to put too great an idealistic strain on him.  He wondered whether, in view of his other preferences, it wasn't time to purchase a plastic inflatable, a so-called 'sex doll', in order to have access to a more bodily and apparent form of supernatural sexual activity.  Some of the sex dolls on the market were relatively inexpensive, no more than £30, and came with a variety of sexy lingerie to stimulate one's lust and enable one, if desirable, to approach sex with rapist's intent.  Of course, for those who could afford it, there were all sorts of additional qualities, back passage and talking mouth included.  But he knew that he was a long way from becoming a connoisseur in such matters and that a more modest start would probably be to his advantage, enabling him to feel his way by degrees.  There were, after all, certain advantages in possessing a plastic inflatable.  She (it) couldn't turn one away, pleading ill-health or a period or business obligations or an indifferent mood.  There would be no B.O. or farts or back-chat or bad breath or scratchings or bites.  One wouldn't have to worry about getting her pregnant or of contracting a venereal or other disease from her.  There would be no contraceptive expenses and no need to date her on a regular or, indeed, any basis.  In fact, one wouldn't even have to dress her, if fetishism was not in one's line or one regarded clothing as irrelevant to the sexual act, a further unnecessary expense.  And one could make love to her in any old fashion one pleased, never fearing an objection or criticism.

     To be sure, the plastic supernatural was certainly preferable, on a number of counts, to the fleshy natural, and anyone who considered himself a supernaturalist would sooner or later have to come to terms with sex dolls, if he wanted to remain consistently theocratic and not regress to or remain the victim of a naturalistic and democratic mode of sexuality.  There was a place for copulation as well as masturbation in Social Transcendentalism, provided they were artificial and, hence, supernatural.  Artificial copulation would correspond, in a manner of speaking, to the 'Social' side of this radical theocracy, artificial masturbation, or masturbation induced by a pornographic stimulus on computer disc and preferably availing itself of the services of a plastic gadget ... such as would contain the spermatic discharge, to its 'Transcendental' side, no-one required to be absolutist on the higher, or pornographic, side, each man having a personal bias one way or the other, some doubtless balanced between the two sides, himself very much given to the transcendent.  Though, of course, a pornographic absolutism would become the ideal, if not the norm, in the course of time, as Social Transcendentalism was duly superseded by Super-transcendentalism, its more absolutist goal.

     And what applies to men (become supermen) also applies to women who, in a radically theocratic society, would be encouraged (as quasi-supermen) to utilize plastic vibrators as their apparent, bodily equivalent to sex dolls, an essential side of sexual activity, doubtless manifesting on the level of late-teenage computer pornography, co-existing with this lower side and eventually completely superseding it, with the emergence of Super-transcendentalism.  As to communist sex, whether of the Western Left or the Eastern Right, not a chance!  A closed society of Social Transcendentalist integrity would place it under ban.  Only the supernatural would be respectable.  And Keith knew this better than anyone else.  Yes, he would get a plastic inflatable before long, if only for very occasional use.  Then there would be a little more plastic in his room, perhaps even enough, if the lino was also taken into account, to tip the balance away from wood.  At least there wasn't very much steel in evidence, 'granny glasses' notwithstanding!

 

 

SUPERNATURAL UPGRADING

 

You've got this thing about the natural and the anti-natural, not to mention the supernatural and the anti-supernatural, which you equate with moderate right and left wing, extreme right- and left-wing respectively.  Being something of a poet, you like to melt away the borders between subjects and make them overlap, interpenetrate, relate, in a synthetic, and hence theocratic, perspective.  You believe, in accordance with the prevailing Zeitgeist, that everything can and should be politicized, not just sport and religion but ... well, sex, clothing, watches, spectacles, and ... what would appear to be your latest concern - namely food and drink.  You claim that there is an ideological significance to everything, every little aspect of our civilized behaviour conforming to some class and/or ideological position.  Only the philosophical poet would seem qualified, with his supernatural bias, to penetrate the surface of our customs and reveal their ideological depths, their inner essences.  You are such a being and you dig deeper than most in your quest for the essence of things.  Now you are claiming that food and drink should also be scrutinized from a supernatural, or theocratic, point of view, since eating and drinking habits are no less revealing of a class and/or ideological position than ... well, sexual and sartorial ones.

     These days you favour meat derived from birds - turkeys, chickens, capons.  You claim that such meat appeals to a transcendental taste, birds being flying creatures (though doubtfully very gracefully so, in the case of the above-mentioned ones!), whereas lamb, pork, and beef, extracted from sheep, pigs, and cows respectively, suggest a more down-to-earth or stolid quality which you apparently fight shy of in your transcendental wisdom.  For the past year you have eaten virtually no other meat but turkey and chicken, with the notable exception of a little lamb, pertaining to your doner kebabs, on Sundays, and some cod - if fish be meat - on Fridays.  Usually you eat small roast potatoes with your winged meat, not particularly ideal, you claim, but tolerable all the same, since suggestive, in contrast to large roast potatoes, of a petty-bourgeois as opposed to a bourgeois equivalent.  At any rate, still recognizably naturalistic - unlike chips, which are made from lacerated potatoes, or spuds sliced into elongated segments, and which appear, in their fried skins, quite divorced from the natural - indeed, bearing in mind their genesis, positively anti-natural, so many 'proton' segments cut from the 'atomic' unity of a potato, a progressive devolution to separate pieces.  Why, you're so convinced of their anti-natural and hence left-wing status, these days, that you've seriously contemplated giving them up altogether, even though you only eat them once a week, in conjunction with cod.  You feel that, while they may be relevant to industrial proletarians, they're something of a slap in the face to you, a man who is very consciously transcendentalist in his ideological integrity.  You would rather eat something more supernatural, like mashed potatoes, which, in contrast to chips, suggest an 'electron' whole of undifferentiated unity.  Probably mashed potatoes are theocratic, whereas roast potatoes are democratic and chips ... anti-democratic in one degree or another, depending on the size, e.g. length and breadth, of the chips in question.  Clearly, while some are arguably democratic socialist, others, more slender and elongated, could be described as radical socialist, conforming to a kind of Marxist equivalent.  You can abide the former to some extent but not, apparently, the latter.  And not those which have been indented in a wavy fashion either, suggestive of solomonic columns!  You tend to endow them with a Marxist-Leninist equivalent, the waviness bringing them closer, in your estimation, to the supernaturalism of mashed potatoes, as if a theocratic (Leninist?) dimension had been infused into a fundamentally anti-democratic constitution, making them superior to the purely Marxist, or plain, chip, but still inferior, for all that, to mashed potatoes, particularly the most synthetic pre-cooked mash which comes in a plastic packet and only requires to be heated in some boiling water before being eaten.  Now you feel that such take-away mash is the best form of potato, superior to both the natural and the anti-natural in every way.  Eaten in conjunction with frozen food generally, it would constitute a significant ingredient in a theocratically-biased dinner, suggesting a dematerialized spud appropriate to a supernatural requirement, the antithesis to the subnatural, autocratic spud of a jacket-potato menu.  Not for you the jacket potato!  You would probably prefer to eat wavy chips than that, even if they are communist, albeit on seemingly right-wing (Leninist) terms.  Rather the democratic roast potato than the autocratic jacket potato!  Though better again the theocratic mash.  Nevertheless your eating habits don't always keep pace with your ideological development, probably because you tend, in spite of your theocratic ideals, to regard the personal and public selves as distinct, and to a point where the more progressive the latter becomes, the more regressive or reactionary appears the former, as if to compensate you for your professional extremism.  Can you never break away from relativity?  It seems doubtful.

     However, now that you've 'come clean' about your food preferences (at least with regard to meat and spuds), you might as well continue by recording your preferences in drink, attempting, as you proceed, to outline a class and/or ideological position where drinking habits are concerned.  For instance, it is known that you won't drink beer because you equate it with an anti-natural, though specifically Protestant, bias and are inclined, by contrast, to see in wine a Catholic alternative ... suggestive of a natural, or early natural, constitution.  You prefer grapes to hops, the sweet to the sour, a positive taste to a negative one.  But even beer is preferable, in your opinion, to the more extreme anti-natural drinks that seem to derive from it in some way, like ginger beer or shandy or tinned lager.  You find lager even more distasteful than beer, the analogy with fizzy piss always coming to mind when you're induced to drink it.  For you, wine is right wing and beer ... left wing, the one stemming from or endemic to a conservative tradition, the other liberal, if not, in its extreme manifestations, radical socialist.  But you don't much care for cola either, probably because it also suggests an anti-natural constitution, if one that transcends the anti-natural in some degree and which could, in consequence, be accorded a partly supernatural status on the strength, for instance, of the fizzy upsurge of air bubbles.... Would the notion of an anti-supernatural equivalent be totally irrelevant here?  You don't think so, since it seems that some 'super' element, like the fizz, has been brought to bear on a fundamentally anti-natural taste, the artificial concoction of the actual cola drink.  Of course, these artificial drinks are morally preferable to lager and beer, not to mention shandy and ginger beer.  But, ideally, you would rather have a supernatural drink, a natural drink upgraded, as it were, to the fizzy status of the theocratic, like, say, a lemonade or some alternative fruity drink that would seem to have succeeded both lemon and orange squash, which, on account of their naturalism, may be accorded a democratic equivalent.

     Yes, you don't particularly mind these squashy drinks, but are prepared to regard their fizzy counterparts as morally and ideologically superior, suitable to those with a distinctly supernatural bias, for whom lemons and oranges would presumably be taboo.  And that, you would claim, applies to raw fruit in general, apples and pears included.  You always prefer flavoured yoghurt, particularly a strawberry or a raspberry one, which has transcended natural fruit on a supernatural basis.  You don't care too much for anti-natural fruit pies, where the filling, particularly in the case of apple, has been cut into tiny segments, reminiscent of chips.  There are, however, certain contemporary apple pies that appear to be supernatural in some degree, on account of the filling being liquefied, and you regard them as reflecting an anti-supernatural bias, superior to the chunky apple pies.  But while you used to eat such liquefied apple pies, you now eat only yoghurts, which you regard as more suitable to a transcendental taste.  Similarly, you prefer liquefied cheese to either cheese slices or chunks, though you're still occasionally to be found eating slices, as when you buy a doner kebab with cheese.

     But that brings the subject back to food, and you were expatiating on drink, with especial reference to the supernatural and, in the case of cola, anti-supernatural, which you equated with a right-wing communist bias.  You don't care for spirits, like gin and whisky, since they suggest, in their unadulterated constitution, a subnatural and virtually autocratic integrity, beneath the pale of a theocratic taste.  Yet you do like milk and drink it regularly, though it's the most natural of all drinks and somewhat inferior, in consequence, to milkshakes, those supernaturally flavoured milk drinks that you used to guzzle as a boy.  These days, flavoured milk can be purchased in supermarkets, large and small, and you would do well to buy some in future, to complement your yoghurt-eating habits.   It won't be shaked though, so if you want a truly supernatural milk drink, replete with bubbles, you'll have to visit a milk bar or get a mixer in order to shake your own flavoured milk.  If you start to drink lemonade and orangeade, you might as well drink milkshakes too, and so bring all your drinking habits into line on the supernatural level.  Yet you had better avoid the anti-milk drinks like tea and coffee, which dilute the milk to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as milk but subordinate to the tea or coffee - the actual hot drink.  Most such drinks are anti-natural and, hence, left wing in one degree or another; though whipped coffee (with cream) is partly supernatural and therefore of an anti-supernatural equivalent, preferable to plain coffee.  Hot drinks predominantly made from milk are, of course, less anti-natural than those in which hot water predominates.  A cold whipped coffee may also be partly supernatural, like a coffee-flavoured milkshake.  At any rate, the chances are that it will betoken a right-wing communist, as opposed to a left-wing socialist, integrity, preferable to a plain (unwhipped) coffee, but still inferior, for all that, to a genuine milkshake, whether or not coffee-flavoured.  For a cold whipped coffee is still a coffee, i.e. a drink in which milk is subordinated to, and thus diluted by, the coffee, whereas a milkshake is a flavoured milk drink.  You can't fail to perceive the distinction, which is, after all, between the anti-supernatural and the supernatural.  Though it is admittedly less apparent than between the anti-natural and the natural, such as you have been referring to with regard to coffee and milk.

     Certainly, it seems that you prefer the natural to the anti-natural, while reserving a place of honour for the supernatural.  You don't envisage people gravitating from the anti-natural to the supernatural; though it's just possible that the anti-supernatural will bring anti-naturalists closer, in due course, to a supernatural position, from which a transcendental upgrading may be effected ... compliments of the supernatural themselves.  You are probably right about that, as about most other things, Mr. Crosby.

 

 

CENTRIST SEXUALITY

 

A Social Transcendentalist's favoured sexuality is not atomic, as between a proton woman and a bound-electron man, still less anti-atomic, as between two men, but ... post-atomic or, which amounts to approximately the same thing, of a free-electron integrity.  There is, to be sure, a relativity involved, but it is decidedly post-atomic, as between the particle and wavicle sides of the electron.  Social Transcendentalists are absolutist but, paradoxically, in a relative kind of way.  They should alternate between the two sides of the electron, as between plastic inflatables, or 'sex dolls', and computer erotica - the former confirming a bodily (particle) approach to sex, albeit one that is supernatural; the latter confirming a mental (wavicle) approach to it, again of a supernatural bias.  For women or, rather, quasi-supermen, vibrators should be substituted for 'sex dolls' and, in respect of mental sex, masculine rather than feminine erotica, that is to say, erotica involving a male model, should be the order of the day.  Probably late-teenage juvenile erotica will come to replace the adult varieties in the course of post-atomic time, confirming a supra-natural as opposed to a merely supernatural integrity, as appropriate to a Centrist civilization.  It is to be hoped that, with the second phase of the post-humanist millennium ... pertinent to Super-transcendentalism, such erotica will supersede any inflatable/ pornographic relativity, bringing supra-natural sex to a mental (wavicle) climax in ... pornographic absolutism.  Thus whereas supermen will still have recourse to bodily sex, superbeings, their hypermeditating successors, will be above it, though not as far above it, paradoxically, as the superhuman brain collectivizations of the ensuing post-human millennium!

     Be that as it may, the gradual progression away from natural sex will be endemic to theocratic Centrism, which will champion a supra-natural rather than a merely supernatural sexuality.  If there is a link between plastic digital watches and sex, it could only be with regard to a mature teenage erotica, that comparatively new genre - relative to computer disc - succeeding the strictly adult varieties such that utilize persons of twenty-one or over.  Nevertheless supernaturalism is morally preferable to naturalism, being a kind of petty-bourgeois sexuality in contrast to bourgeois sex, a fascistic as opposed to conservative integrity.  It is the antithesis to subnatural sex, such as involves recourse to masturbation in a merely physical context - independently, in other words, of pornographic stimuli.  Such purely masturbatory sex would be deeply frowned upon from a supernatural and/or supra-natural point of view, just as it is avoided, if not frowned upon, by naturalists, with their atomic compromise.  Even the Catholic Church, that grand-bourgeois subnaturalism, condemns masturbation as the sin of Onan; though there are undoubtedly priests who are - or have been - its victims, living, as they do, in a subnatural way in priestly celibacy.  No doubt, this keeps them closer to the Father, as does their ankle-length cassocks, those dress-like garments confirming a superfeminine integrity ... symptomatic of a deep-vaginal symbolism.  Decidedly the proton side of things, against which the state, and hence bourgeois naturalism, rears its atomic head, as particle electrons set about wavicle protons in a heterosexual relativity of give-and-take, the man's penis sexually active within the woman's receptive vagina, corresponding to the DC side of atomic electricity, a direct-current flow of copulation culminating in orgasm.  If subnatural masturbatory sex was (is) DC in reverse, a taking rather than giving, then natural sex most definitely drives it ahead into the woman, who gratefully receives the proffered charge of spermatic release, becoming part of the DC in orgasmic response.

     But heterosexual relationships, like electricity, are relative, as between DC and AC, or alternating current, and we may equate the latter with conversation, that two-way give-and-take, as questions and answers, information and opinions, flow back and forth between partners.  If DC corresponds to the Church, including the Protestant one, then AC is equivalent to the State and, in typical bourgeois relations, it will predominate over the former, cementing the physical relationship with the shared impressions and beliefs of the mental one, the former corresponding to the Protestant Church, the latter to its political concomitance in the Democratic State, itself divisible into give and take, capitalism and socialism, plutocracy and bureaucracy.

     However, as the State evolves, it follows that the AC will increasingly predominate over the DC in marital and other relationships, so that, from a liberal balance between give-and-take, we find, through Democratic Socialism and/or Social Democracy, a progressive imbalance on the side of taking, relative to an escalation of bureaucratic socialism.  And the same applies to sexual relationships, as physical sex goes into decline, one way or another, and conversation becomes increasingly prevalent, even to the point where it apparently necessitates a switch from women and men, in heterosexual relations, to men only, as homosexual criteria take over, with the sexual concomitant of the further decline of physical sex in outright anal violation (assuming any physical sex may still be said to apply at all) with this point of AC hegemony, corresponding to a Marxist bureaucracy of preponderant taking.  Not, in all fairness, that this AC near-absolutism is all-pervasive in contemporary Western or, indeed, any other society.  For while homosexuals very definitely exist, they're not in the majority where sexual and/or social habits are concerned.  If they are equivalent, in political terms, to a Marxist purism, or left-wing Communism, we should not forget that all other shades of political, not to mention sexual, identification still exist in the West, particularly in Britain, with its unbroken democratic traditions stretching back several centuries.  Similarly, Marxist bureaucracy, as applying to the Welfare State, co-exists with Conservative plutocracy, and will doubtless continue to do so until history may decide otherwise.

     However, if the development of alternating current at the expense of direct current has characterized the State's evolution, we will find that the emergence within the modern, pluralist state of Centrist, or supernatural, tendencies has given a new lease-of-life to DC, with particular reference to the sexual use of pornography and plastic inflatables, so that sexual giving has come for some people, still perhaps a minority, to replace either DC/AC relativity or AC absolutism, if, indeed, 'replace' is the correct word.  In other words, they consistently partake of a supernatural giving vis-à-vis the artificial sex-partners of their choosing, whether with regard to a particular pornographic model or, alternatively, their favourite, if not only, plastic inflatable.  Conversation between the supernaturalists and their artificial partners is necessarily ruled out (at any rate, as a rule), and a superior DC absolutism than the subnatural masturbatory purism is the inevitable result, corresponding to a fascistic integrity.  And yet, if a petty-bourgeois folksy integrity suits some people - at present only a comparatively small minority - it should not be forgotten that a specifically petty-bourgeois right-wing sexual integrity will also suit some people, probably not such a small minority, in which DC tends to predominate over AC, or physical sex over conversation, though not simply in terms of coitus but, rather, with regard to oral sex, especially fellatio, which, in contrast to cunnilingus, confirms a masculine bias, suitable to a petty-bourgeois age.  Having one's penis 'sucked off' by a liberated female is not only a pleasurable experience for the person concerned, but one that reflects male domination and, hence, the ascendancy, within a relative context, of the neutron side of an atomic divide, inducing an 'intellectualized' sexuality germane, in all probability, to an Ecological, or 'Green', political integrity.

     Which is, after all, quite distinct from the bisexual anal-violation of a social democratic integrity and, so I contend, antithetical to the grand-bourgeois relative subnaturalism of a bias for cunnilingus, that Whiggish predecessor of heterosexual naturalism.  No doubt, there is still a fair amount of tongue-oriented vagina-grovelling sex going on these days, whether because the people involved are - or consider themselves to be - grand-bourgeois types or whether because, whoever they may be, they are simply ignorant of the ideological implications of their behaviour ... I leave for others to decide.  Suffice it to say that cunnilingus is not indicative of a masculine superiority and/or ascendancy but, on the contrary, is relative to a pre-bourgeois subatomic age, so that its continual indulgence smacks of the anachronistic, not to say absurd.  A truly right-wing petty-bourgeois sex, in a liberal society, will always favour fellatio, appropriate to an Ecological as opposed to a Whiggish orientation.  And it could be argued that a penis in a woman's mouth is a good way of preventing conversation, even if one cannot, in the relative nature of such a sexual integrity, keep it there all the sucking time but must succumb, sooner or later, if not to actual copulation then, at any rate, to actual conversation, whether or not about sex ... I again leave for others to decide.  Only an extreme right-wing petty-bourgeois sex, relative to heterosexual pornography and/or inflatables, will be permanently elevated above AC relativity!

     However, having stressed the fellatio aspect of Ecological sex at the expense of the coital aspect, and the cunnilingus side of Whiggish sex in the same way, I should belatedly point out that coitus is not the only side of Conservative sex, there being an oral side to it as well which, though such an argument may seem academic, we can estimate as approximating a balance between cunnilingus and fellatio, applicable to a bourgeois relativity.  Thus moderate heterosexual sex also has its vaguely supernatural, or wavicle, side, albeit one stressing a balanced dualism appropriate to an atomic integrity ... in which proton-wavicle cunnilingus and neutron-wavicle fellatio complement the particle/wavicle relativity of actual copulation.  Now actual copulation, whether conventional or otherwise, isn't something that can be divorced from other stages and types of 'fringe' sexual activity either, even the most extreme, including the supra-natural recourse to plastic inflatables, which, if it doesn't reflect a fascist integrity in bodily sex, must surely reflect a Centrist one, germane to a new civilization; though if inflatables and soft-core juvenile pornography would co-exist during a Social Transcendentalist  phase of such a civilization, there would be a shift towards a wavicle absolutism with its Super-transcendentalist phase, thus rendering recourse to inflatables obsolete, as hard-core juvenile pornography, still of course relative to computer discs and involving consenting mature teenagers, increasingly came to the fore.  Such supra-natural sex might alternatively be defined as supercultural, and I propose a new terminological strategy for distinguishing between the relative and absolute phases of Centrist sexuality, viz. supra-natural for the former and supercultural for the latter.

     Furthermore, one should distinguish more closely between the supernatural and the supra-natural; for it seems to me that supernatural sex, corresponding to a petty-bourgeois folksy integrity, can likewise be divided into two phases, viz. a supernatural relativity between inflatables and soft-core adult pornography and, again at the risk of seeming unduly academic, a supernatural absolutism involving hard-core pornography alone, this latter tending to induce masturbation and thereby weakening the urge to copulate.  So a classical fascistic sexuality, beyond the relativity of sex-doll copulation.  Could it be, I wonder, that plastic inflatables modelled on adult women, with large breasts, correspond to a petty-bourgeois folksy sexuality, whereas a proletarian folksy or even folkish sexual integrity would require, in conjunction with soft-core juvenile pornography, that inflatables were modelled on teenage girls of between, say, sixteen and nineteen years of age, and thus had small breasts.  Again, the distinction may seem academic, but it is, after all, between the supernatural and the supra-natural.  So I shouldn't be at all surprised if sex dolls came, in the future, to level with supra-natural requirement.

     But if the supra-natural is above and not just beyond the natural, then we need not doubt that it is the antithesis of that which, in pagan civilization, was beneath the natural, viz. the unnatural.  Some people will doubtless be puzzled by such a term, but I use it to distinguish between the subnatural before the natural, pertinent to extreme grand-bourgeois criteria, and the very subnatural sexual behaviour which, with regard to pagan civilization, confirms an aristocratic integrity more beneath than before the natural.  Thus while supernaturalism leads to supra-naturalism, so, at the opposite extreme, does unnaturalism lead to subnaturalism.  Yet, contrary to fascist and centrist integrities, the relative does not lead to the absolute, as from supernaturalism to supra-naturalism, but the absolute leads to the relative, as from unnatualism to subnaturalism, germane to a stemming from the Father rather than, as in the former case, an aspiration towards the Holy Ghost.

     So, to take the grand-bourgeois extremism appertaining to Cromwellian parliamentarianism first, we may note a progression from subnatural masturbation, with or without accompanying fantasies, to subnatural intercourse with young teenage girls ... in a kind of juvenile paedophilia.  But beneath this, and preparatory to it, we will find an aristocratic extremism, appertaining to pagan criteria, of unnatural masturbation ... induced by erotic sculpture, leading in unnatural relative time to paedophilia, or the sexual violation of children, particularly young boys.  Which would probably apply more to the ancient Greeks and Romans than, say, to certain very early pagan peoples, like the Egyptians and Assyrians, who would probably have been more given to bestiality, or intercourse with animals, particularly sheep, goats, dogs, and mules, though still disposed to children on occasion.

     However, whatever the literal case, unnatural sex would have preponderated over natural sex for a majority of men; although, judging by the fact of procreation, they evidently still had time for natural sex as well!  These days, by contrast, such unnatural intercourse (not to mention its subnatural successor) is beneath the bourgeois pale and subject, if indulged, to prosecution.  We cannot reasonably expect either bestiality or paedophilia to be condoned, and it is extremely unlikely that intercourse with children will ever be legalized.  The majority of people may not, as yet, be supernatural, still less supra-natural, but we're heading towards a supra-natural age when 'girlish' sex dolls and mature juvenile pornography will be the rule, as much above natural sex as erotic sculpture and paedophilia ... were beneath it.

     Of course, these days there is quite a lot of left-wing homosexuality about.  But sodomy, or sexual intercourse between men, is distinct from pederasty, or the anal violation of children - specifically boys.  It's an anti-natural, not an unnatural, sexuality, deplorable from a supernatural (not to say supra-natural) point of view, but still relative to the age, and seemingly perfectly permissible within a liberal society.  Only in a Centrist society would it, together with its right-wing counterpart of homosexual pornography, be illegal and subject, if pursued, to suppression.  But, then, so would a number of other sexual integrities, including, ironically, the supernatural.  And as the supra-natural increasingly came to the fore, so, as if to complement it, would artificial means of reproduction, entailing, amongst other things, the use of sperm banks and artificial insemination, thereby permitting adults to live absolutely independent lives on the level of supra-naturalism.  The final sexual revolution may not be destined to occur for some time yet, but when it does ... being revolutionary will entail more than merely political extremism.  The true revolutionary is extreme all along the line, and he must struggle mercilessly against sexual reaction ... no less than against every other kind of reaction!

     Thus speaks Neil Tobin, sexual spokesperson for the Social Transcendentalist revolution.

 

 

WRITERLY PRINT

 

I have to confess that I'm not purely a 'typer', or author who types-up his work without reference to a manuscript, but a writer or, more correctly, scribbler who later types-up what he has scribbled.  Generally, I scribble in the morning and type in the afternoon, typing-up the morning's scribble.  I pride myself on this arrangement, since it makes for variety and is beneficial to my health, particularly with regard to my eyes and stomach, which would become respectively strained and ulcerated, were I to make a point of typing all day, like some authors.  For me, there is too much physicality in the use of a typewriter, even the small portable one I use, so I prefer the usually more relaxing medium of scribble, which I also find more intimate.

     I always scribble with a black felt-tipped pen, not only because I like its facile motion across the page but, no less importantly, because it confers a kind of supernatural bias on my scribbling and is appropriate to such scribble.  Why, you may wonder, do I scribble and not write, meaning to write clearly and carefully, if not beautifully.  The simple answer is that, being a supernaturalist, I prefer truth to beauty, and scribble is the best and most suitable way of conveying the Truth.  In other words, it makes no claim to beauty, to belles lettres in a merely technical sense, but enables one to pursue one's ideas at maximum speed, the very speed necessary for the acquirement and development of a high degree of inspiration commensurate with the rapid flow of one's thought.  Write carefully, with special attention to the formation of the lettering, and you get bogged down in technicalities, sacrificing truth to beauty, or essence to appearance.

     No, I am no 'belle-lettrist', in any sense of that term, but a confirmed scribbler, and have been so for some years now, to the general advantage of the Truth.  Those who pursue truth must abandon beauty, and not merely in their style or technique ... but in their lifestyle generally.  Hence the absence of women in my life and its consequent freedom from enslavement to the Beautiful.  Had I acquired a beautiful woman some years ago, when I almost did, I would never have got to this.  I may not even have become a writer in the first place, or, if I had, it would probably have been on a less supernatural level than that to which I'm now accustomed.  However, speculation aside, I know for sure that the pursuit of truth requires the abandonment of beauty, and the nearer one gets to the Truth, the more must one abandon the Beautiful, since the formless and the formal are ever antithetical.

     You may have perceived, reader, that my work is formless, and this, too, is appropriate to its supernatural status.  Instead of proceeding from A to B or M and back to A again, like most authors, I proceed from A-Z, with little or no hint of a recapitulation.  You can believe me when I say that it took some time for me to get to this level, to completely abandon my starting-point and wind-up my work with an approximately antithetical culmination.  It's as though, having begun in the Father or some diluted equivalent thereof, I must end in the Holy Ghost, maintaining a forward-tending momentum throughout the work's duration.  Such work is not literary, my friend, but poetic, and if I was once a philosopher, I have since veered towards the opposite extreme in accordance with my Irish temperament, which fights shy of literary endeavour, that middle-of-the-road creativity more suited to the atomic British.  For me, it is philosophy or poetry, not fiction, which, by contrast, I equate, whether in the novel or novella, with a democratic proclivity, in contrast to the autocratic and theocratic essences of the extreme disciplines.

     Well, I'm no autocrat, and it is debatable whether my philosophy was ever genuinely autocratic.  Certainly, I now consider myself a theocrat, and theocracy means, besides poetry in an anthological context, Social Transcendentalism, or the ideology of the Holy Ghost.  I have scant regard for autocratic theocracy or for democratic theocracy, just as I have scant regard for the use of crayons or pencils in writing, the first of which I regard as subnatural on account of their waxy constitution, the second of which I regard as natural on account of their lead constitution.  Could it be, I wonder, that, in contrast to pencils, fountain pens conform to an anti-natural constitution by dint of their reliance on ink, which, unlike wax and lead, is an artificial phenomenon?  This would imply that, while pencils were right wing, fountain pens are left wing, albeit of a liberal rather than a radical persuasion.  For if there is one thing more anti-natural, or artificial, than a fountain pen, it can only be a biro, which contains its own synthetic ink and channels it, through a ball-point tip, more sparingly and pointedly, as a rule, than ever the nib of a fountain pen can do, if indeed 'channel' is the correct word here.  At any rate, there is less mess with a biro and, compared to a fountain pen, it is relatively easy and economical to use.  It's also more absolute, in that one doesn't refill the slender container but simply throws it away once the ink has run out.  This saves a lot of time and inconvenience!

     So where does it stand in the evolutionary spectrum - extreme anti-naturalism?  Very extreme anti-naturalism?  Certainly more anti-natural than the fountain pen, but doubtfully of a truly radical or, if a political analogy be permissible here, communist persuasion.  More like a Democratic Socialist vis-à-vis a Liberal distinction, something left wing within a democratic, or atomic, writerly system.  After all, one still writes with a biro, even if in a scribbling fashion, and the same, of course, holds true of fountain pens and, though I loathe to admit it, felt-tip pens, which must also fall within a democratic writerly framework, if on a relatively supernatural and, hence, very right-wing basis.

     Is there not, however, something beyond the ball-point pen which would correspond, in its extreme anti-naturalism, to a communist equivalent?  Doubtless you have all heard of typewriters, and if my logical intuition is anything to rely on, then I think we have hit upon the truly anti-natural, anti-democratic mode of conveying verbal information, which doesn't so much write as print, and thus signifies a 'fall' (forwards) from the joined lettering of natural writing or, for that matter, moderately anti-natural (biro) writing and/or scribbling ... to the disjointed lettering of print.  At least, this is generally the case; though there are, I believe, typewriters which can actually write, albeit in a highly orthodox and stereotypical kind of way, and we may accord them a crudely supernatural significance.  However, the majority of typewriters, including my own, print, as do young children and as adults used to do in comparatively backward times ... such as the early Middle Ages, when writing was unheard of and only a relatively small number of people even knew how to print, that is to say, to write in a disconnected way.  And these were the favoured people, the learned, monied, powerful, and industrious men of a largely subnatural age who, not surprisingly, had access to a subnatural mode of writing, commensurate with the particle side of a proton absolutism, each letter separate and distinct, reflecting this particle apartness - an autocratic norm.

     But, of course, man progressed to joined writing, i.e. to writing-proper, in the course of time, and we may see in this development a naturalism commensurate with the wavicle side of a proton-biased atomic relativity, as germane to the Church and, in particular, the Catholic Church, which conforms to an attractive atomic bias ... in contrast to the reactive proton bias of the preceding particle kingdom.  Wavicles signify an indivisible unity, and words become wavicle equivalents, on the protonic level, when the lettering of which they are formed is joined together in writerly prose.  Obviously, such a procedure must be naturalistic, effected by hand though guided by mind.  There is mind, too, in the subnatural mode of writing, e.g. printing, but such as there is would be more concerned with concentrating attention upon appearances, or the style of the lettering, than on essences, or that which was being communicated through it.  A lot of evolutionary time must pass before men give the greater part of their attention to content, and as we approach the modern age, an age par excellence of scribbling, we can rest assured that concern with essence over appearance has reached a high-peak, if not in the case of scribblers like myself the peak, confirming the utmost writerly decadence.  For writing is, after all, essentially an apparent phenomenon, since it stems from a proton tradition, and whilst appearances have their essences, and hence writing its content, the essence of the proton is ever apparent.  Paradoxical and confusing, I know; but incontrovertible nonetheless!  Much more concern with content over form, and my writing would become illegible and therefore thoroughly decadent from a naturalistic point of view.  Probably it would be illegible to most people now, and even I occasionally have to strain my brain in order to decipher it, assuming my memory is at fault.  Fortunately by typing-up in the afternoon what I have scribbled in the morning, I retain in memory most of what I 'wrote', and this greatly facilitates the deciphering of my text.  Were I to leave a gap of three or more days between scribbling and typing, the latter would undoubtedly prove a more difficult, if not impossible, task than it does at present!

     As a rule, however, my typing is fluent, and this is all the more remarkable in that I am self-taught, not to mention prone to ulceration of the stomach.  Yet the typewriter - and I use the term generically - is in some sense a decadent medium of communication, corresponding to the particle side of an electron-biased atomicity, which signifies an evolutionary 'fall' (forwards) from wavicle precedent, as from the Church to the State, and in particular the republican state, with especial reference to people's republics.  Certainly the production by the typewriter of disconnected lettering indicates a 'fall' from the joined lettering of naturalistic writing, which is the essence of such writing, whilst also reflecting a progression, with regard to appearances, from the natural to the artificial, as from writing to typing and, in a certain sense, the bound to the free, or the production of independent artificial lettering (characters) which are free, as it were, from the constraints of a proton-biased determinism - just as, in a wider context, republican man is free from the domination of the Church, and never more so than in a communist state.  Probably, if ideological inferences or analogies are to be drawn, a manual typewriter corresponds to a Marxist status, whereas an electric typewriter corresponds to a Marxist-Leninist status, as if the addition of electricity conferred a kind of spurious, and hence Leninist, theocracy on the fundamentally anti-democratic, egalitarian nature of the typewriter and, no less importantly, typeface in question.  An improvement, no doubt, on the manual machine, but still leaving something to be desired!

     And what, from a supernatural viewpoint, is that something if not joined artificial lettering, and thus a return to a wavicle status, albeit one antithetical to the proton-biased wavicles of naturalistic writing.  Yes, I am of course alluding to electron wavicles, such as would conform to a radically theocratic status applicable to a supernatural age or society.  Now we may believe that if a manual writerly typewriter corresponds to a fascist status, then an electronic or, preferably, battery-run writerly typewriter would correspond, by contrast, to a Social Transcendentalist status - the use of batteries signifying a more theocratic correlation than electricity by dint, one can only suppose, of the absence of wires, leads, plugs, etc.  So an artificiality that served a higher, wavicle end, the production of the most supernatural lettering, germane to a free-electron integrity.

     Ah, I have to admit that my little manual typewriter is a long way from that!  But perhaps this is another reason why I disdain its use on a full-time basis, preferring to scribble in the morning and type-up the result in the afternoon, as if afraid or unwilling to completely part company with naturalism, and hence my Catholic roots, at the risk of becoming unduly or extensively anti-naturalistic and thus Marxist - a not-untypical Irish position, rarely appreciated by the materialistic British!  Not once, in all these years of scribbling, have I ever entirely parted company with my scribble and proceeded to type from scratch in an absolutely typing framework.  There is nothing of the Shaw or Priestley about me, no left-wing allegiance.  If I prefer to scribble than to write, and to use a black felt-tipped pen instead of a pencil, not to mention biro, it's because I identify more with the supernatural than with the natural and choose to push the natural in a supernatural direction, conscious of the ideological limitations imposed upon one by the inherently democratic medium of writing, which necessarily makes for a constricted supernaturalism analogous, in a way, to the supernaturalism endemic to the use of painterly art for transcendental ends, as in Mondrian, Kandinsky, Rothko, Vasarely, and other such 'supernatural' abstractionists.  Theirs is a transcendentalism within a democratic, or canvas/painterly, tradition, in contrast to the fascistic transcendentalism, as it were, of the light artist or the Centrist transcendentalism, if you will, of the holographer, that ultimate type of visual artist who is destined, one way or another, to dominate the future.  Much as I would like to utilize a writerly typewriter, I have to write with the tools available to me, and I can't say that I particularly mind this, having grown accustomed to the art of pushing a plastic pen, not to say resigned myself to my 'printerly' portable.  I am no slave to electron-biased atomic particles and would rather people know that I also scribble, in a decadent proton-biased wavicle style, than suppose me to be solely a typing author, like the great majority of so-called writers, no matter how ignorant they may be of the ideological implications of a typing absolutism.  I conform, you might say, to the compromise between church and state of the contemporary Irish republic: though while this is so in technical appearances, in conceptual essences I'm all the time agitating against such a compromise in the name of electron-wavicle absolutism ... as germane to Social Transcendentalism.  Such are the paradoxes of which relative lives are made!

     Also paradoxical is the distinction between what might be described as the apparent and the essential means of communication, relative to the dichotomy between, say, speech and writing.  Clearly, naturalism is not simply a matter of writing (I use the term in its classical bourgeois sense) but also, and more obviously, of speaking, and when we speak to another we talk.  As it happens, I talk very rarely, being something of a loner and, hence, supernaturalist.  But talking is as important to most people as writing, and those who write - as opposed to scribble - invariably talk. Talk, then, is the more natural of the two modes of communication, and if a Christian dichotomy between Satan and Christ is in order here, then talk corresponds to the Devil and writing to the Son.  Yet beneath talk - and perhaps prior to it - there is (or was) what you may call speaking to oneself, a subnatural indulgence germane to a proton-particle absolutism, and above talk - and in a sense subsequent to it - there is (or will be) what you may call speaking to an artificial self, such as a tape-recorder or a cassette-recorder, the former equivalent to a fascist mode of supernatural speech, the latter commensurate, so I believe, with a Centrist mode of supernatural communication, whether intended for industrial, commercial, professional, or relaxational purposes.  Such supernaturalism is absolute, a recording of a voice that can be replayed and listened to at a later time, whether by the same person or another.  And it must contrast with the anti-naturalism of relative voice recordings and/or transmissions, as in intercoms and telephones, which invariably transform the natural voice as it is broken up into electronic signals and conveyed along wire to the recipient at the other end of the line.  If a distinction between anti-natural Marxist and anti-supernatural Marxist-Leninist ideological equivalents is to be made, then the dialling phone probably corresponds to the former and the press-button phone to the latter, although the battery-operated digital phone would approximate to the supernatural, being more transcendentalist, irrespective of the relativistic context of phoning which, increasingly these days, acquires a quasi-absolutist character in conjunction with the use of blank cassettes (for absences) and taped recordings (for messages).

     Be that as it may, voice transmissions of whatever kind, including the use of walkie-talkies, correspond to the apparent, superficial side of verbal communication between people.  In contrast to the essential, profound side ... of 'literary' communication, the wavicle as opposed to the particle side.  And we find such a distinction in most other aspects of human experience, including the sexual, where it takes the form of a coital/oral dichotomy, specifically in bourgeois heterosexual relations ... as germane to an atomic age and society.  Elsewhere, in my evolving oeuvre, I have defined the archetypal Social Transcendentalist sexuality as implying a compromise between sex-doll copulation on the apparent, or 'social' side, and mature juvenile pornographic voyeurism on the essential, or 'transcendental' side, this latter, pertaining to computer discs, a late-teenage sublimated oral equivalent intended for the head.  Similarly, I could define the archetypal Social Transcendentalist verbal modes of communication as implying a compromise between cassette and/or digital speech on the apparent, particle side and ... electric and/or battery writerly-typing on the essential, wavicle side, with the emphasis, so far as possible, on the latter.  Could it be, I wonder, that aural communication is destined to wither and die as supernaturalism evolves, in the course of Centrist time, into supra-naturalism?  Yes, I believe so, though this isn't to say there is any guarantee that 'literary' communication will continue throughout the duration of the next civilization either.  Probably it, too, is destined to make way for something higher, born from the essential and completely transcending all appearances, even 'literary' ones.  The ultimate verbal communication between men, the antithesis of early pagan sign language, a developing telepathy as the utilitarian complement to a developing awareness in beatific spirituality.  Now that, after all, is something above all thought, the pure awareness of absolute mind, the wavicle side of the electron, the superconscious at its most refined, a true essence of nonverbal being!

     Yes, even superior to telepathy; though we need not seek to underestimate the direct transference of thought from one mind to another.  For telepathy is not, to say the least, an everyday occurrence, and few of us can lay claim to such an achievement.  Yet is there any reason, on that account, why it should not become a norm of communication in the more advanced future, when appearances, even on the level of writerly typing, should become increasingly taboo?  As far as verbal communication is concerned, telepathy would signify a stage beyond such means to one that completely transcends appearances, even on the most refined wavicle level.  For if writing is intended to be silently read, to be thought through as if an indirect form of telepathy, then the direct transference of thought would likewise maintain a silence, transcending all recourse to speech.  This silence would surely complement the peace of hypermeditation!

     Whatever transpires to being the case, I do know that wavicle communication is going to gain in importance in the decades ahead, and at the expense of the particle side of the electron, with particular reference to printerly typing.  Already one finds, in various contemporary magazines, the use of an italic print as a stylistic mean for certain pages, and if this is not indicative of a transitional status from disconnected print to connected print, or writing-proper, relative to a quasi-theocratic leaning, then I'm at a loss to explain it!  Telepathy may yet have to wait a while, but writerly print is just around the corner.

     Now just as joined natural writing is easier to read, when clear, than subnatural printing, making for a quicker transmission of verbal communication, so joined supernatural typing will be easier to read than the current anti-natural printing of the contemporary book, magazine, letter, etc., confirming an upgrading of intellectual activity, commensurate with the Centre, and the consequent return to a wavicle essence - the true antidote to republican print!

     Thus speaks Shay Griffin, literary spokesperson for the Social Transcendentalist revolution.

 

 

SUPERNATURAL TRAVEL

 

It is said that we live in the age of the train, and, judging by the number of trains on the rails these days, such a claim cannot be far wrong, even though most people would probably give priority to the plane.  At any rate, the twentieth century is the age of the train that runs on two rails, whether across the surface of the land or deep underground, and we may believe this fact is inherent in the relative nature of an atomic society, which likes to do things in pairs.  The monorail, it would seem, is something for the future, since suggestive of an absolute trend more applicable, it may well be, to a Social Transcendentalist age than to a liberal or democratic one.

     I like the idea of the monorail train quite a lot, and I am confident that it will function both above ground, on an elevated line, and beneath ground, like the contemporary underground.  Though not every country will desire the latter, for reasons I shall shortly outline.  It is well known, for instance, that London has an underground system and a very complex one too, while Dublin doesn't.  But it may not be appreciated, least of all in Britain, that the absence of an underground system from Dublin is not simply an indication of Dublin's backwardness, as may at first appear to be the case, but, more probably, indicative of a refusal, on the part of the Irish, to go underground and thus follow in the well-worn footsteps of decadent Britain.

     For what is an underground system?  Not simply a mode of mechanized transport, but, like all other artificial phenomena, a mode of transport corresponding to a specific ideological equivalent, in this case ... a Marxist one.  Yes, the fact is that the underground system signifies a plunge into a democratic or, rather, anti-democratic absolutism, much as submarines signify a like-plunge compared with a surface vessel, such as a destroyer or a cruiser.  We may argue that, to a degree, the one precedes the other, the relative the absolute, and that, just as surface ships pre-date submarines, so trains pre-date underground trains, as a land/air relativity preceding a tunnel absolutism and, moreover, as a relativity between trains running in opposite directions on adjacent, parallel tracks ... preceding an absolutism of independent underground trains running along the single tracks of a given tunnel, isolated from those heading in the opposite direction, which likewise have a tunnel to themselves.

     In the underground, then, we perceive a 'fall' (forwards) from the relative to the absolute, as from above-ground liberalism to beneath-ground radicalism, equivalent to a communist status.  Now when this fact is properly appreciated, it won't surprise us to find that the Irish, with their theocratic bias, do not possess an underground system and probably wouldn't want to build one even if they could afford to, bearing in mind the ideological implications of such a system - implications that may have been grasped intuitively rather than rationally by the modernity-wary Irish!  A fact that would apply no less to the building and staffing of submarines, which are likewise Marxist and also scorned by the Irish, who prefer gunboats and corvettes, corresponding to a petty-bourgeois liberal integrity.

     We may therefore presume that, unless Eire is overtaken by a Marxist revolution, it will continue to scorn submarines and underground trains, as well as anything else that corresponds to a democratic decadence.  Even the nuclear submarine, arguably more relative to Marxism-Leninism, would be unacceptable.  And, by a similar token, we may contend that a monorail underground system would be less than relevant, even if inherently preferable to its Marxist forerunner.  At any rate, whilst Eire will continue to fight shy of Marxism-Leninism and Marxism alike, it is probable that, if London is to modify or expand its underground service in the decades ahead, Britain will introduce monorail transportation as the logical successor to the current and traditional bi-rail underground trains.  Since it already possesses nuclear submarines, there would seem to be no ideological argument in the way of modifying the underground system accordingly.  Though we may surmise that such a process would take time and be introduced only very gradually, affecting first one line and then another, much as the new bi-rail trains were introduced by degrees, with particular reference to the new lines, such as the Victoria and the Jubilee, whilst an older type of carriage continued to function on the old lines.

     These days, however, I dislike the underground on principle and make a point of avoiding it.  I have been on surface trains once or twice in recent years, but would not wish to cultivate a habit with them either, partly, I suspect, because of the expense, yet partly also for ideological reasons.  If I were asked to stipulate an ideal mode of rail travel, I would have no hesitation in replying: overhead monorail travel, as equivalent to a Social Transcendentalist ideological integrity, and therefore applicable not to an anti-natural bias, nor even an anti-supernatural one, but to a supernatural bias, such as I trust Ireland will develop to a greater extent in the near future.

     Yes, for if surface rail corresponds to a liberal, or democratic, ideological position, then air rail, as we may call it, would certainly conform to a radically theocratic integrity, as appropriate to a people who fight shy of democratic and, in particular, Marxist criteria, being heir to a Catholic tradition.  Such a transcendental absolutism would be the logical successor to the current diesel/electric trains, and would doubtless permit of greater speeds, each rail running separate from rather than parallel to another, as in the underground system, with any given train travelling backwards and forwards along its particular rail.  Probably, on second thoughts, the ideal way of designing monorails would be to have one above the other, so that a vertical as opposed to a horizontal arrangement was established, in accordance with transcendental criteria.  Thus neither train on any specific route would ever see the other, since each of them would be on different levels of track, and stations would have to be designed accordingly ... with platforms one above the other, though not necessarily on opposite sides of their respective rails but, to save space and enable stations to be built along the most vertical lines, one directly above the other, with the trains' doors opening on opposite sides, depending on the direction of the train in question, but only on one side in each case.

     Who knows, such suggestions may yet bear fruit, once qualified people get down to working out the details of a viable two-way monorail system of overhead transport, the lower rail itself some yards above the ground, the higher one several yards above that, with no possibility of either train colliding.  Certainly safer than the parallel type of tracks, which more accords with a democratic society, where a horizontal compromise is never far away and collisions are always possible.  As are derailments, a misfortune I can't conceive of happening to a monorail train, sunk deeply onto and around the rail, almost hugging it from either side, as if afraid to part company.  Yet, for all that, more flexible than the conventional twin-track train, which is obliged to slow down to accommodate bends in the track and would almost certainly become derailed if it leant over too far on either side.  There is something ponderous and materialistic about such a train, whereas the monorail alternative would suggest a wavicle lightness and swiftness applicable to the supernatural.  Thus it would form the transcendental complement on land to hovercraft at sea, which skim across the water's surface in a like-supernatural capacity, greatly preferable to surface ships, with their liberal equation.  As yet, however, monorail and hovercraft are, alike, something of a rarity, even in the most advanced industrial/technological nations.  A full appreciation of their significance has still to come, as it surely must during the twenty-first century!

     Thus speaks Peter Sloane, transportational spokesperson for the Social Transcendentalist revolution.

 

 

SIX THINKERS SPEAKING TO SIX LISTENERS

WHO IN TURN THINK ABOUT THEIR SPEECHES

 

"I've gradually come to the conclusion that rock is the European and, in particular, British equivalent of jazz, the nearest most European musicians ever get, or desire to go, to what is, after all, America's principal form of music.  However, unlike jazz, rock is an atomic music, whereby a bound-electron equivalent, viz. melody and/or harmony, is harnessed to a proton equivalent which, as a persistent beat mainly issuing from the drums, tends to impose or maintain a rhythmic bias on the music overall, thereby making for a proton-biased atomicity.  Unlike pop, rock is fundamentally a petty-bourgeois art form and one, moreover, with a high regard for vocals, whether in a supporting or, more usually, a lead role.  Generally these vocals, which pertain to the neutron aspect of its overall atomic integrity, will be dedicated to romantic concerns, sometimes of a reverential nature, more often of a rebellious one, as might be expected from a proton-dominated atomicity in which there is both a straining at the proton leash, as it were, and a simultaneous hint of complicity, partly expressed in the instrumental solos, with this negative atomicity.

     "Rock can, however, extend in two directions - either down towards a classical bias or up towards a bias for jazz.  In the one case we get rock-classical, with its strong melodic and rhythmic integrity, whilst in the other case we get jazz-rock which, though still melodic and highly rhythmic, shows greater respect for improvisation and, thus, intermittent solos from whichever lead instrument.  At best, such jazz-rock becomes a pseudo-electron equivalent in relation to modern jazz.

     "As for jazz itself, that relatively post-atomic music which I tend to equate with a free-electron equivalent, it is unquestionably the highest music of the age, somewhat on the level of American light art rather than, as with rock, closer to European avant-garde painting.  If a political analogy can be drawn, then one could contend that, in modern jazz, a Republican equivalent, viz. the free-electron soloist, 'does his thing' to the deferential accompaniment of a Democratic equivalent, viz. the pseudo-electron percussionist, their co-existence and mutual co-operation confirming the relatively post-atomic nature of mainstream bourgeois/proletarian civilization.  Indeed, one could extend the analogy by contending that the soloist is akin to a liberated male and the percussionist to a liberated female, their relationship mirroring the 'free sex' of a typical unmarried couple.

     "However, not wishing to get bogged down in such analogies, I should add that, while modern jazz is the highest type of contemporary music, there also exists a tendency for certain jazzmen to extend their musical commitments down towards rock and so produce rock-jazz, which, as the American equivalent of jazz-rock, can alternatively be termed 'fusion', to distinguish it from 'progressive', the European extension of rock towards jazz.  Such 'fusion music', it need scarcely be emphasized, will be less free than modern jazz, since more given to vocals and/or melody, harmony, and a monotonously persistent beat.  By comparison with modern jazz, it will be a pseudo-electron music and will approximate, in some sense, to rock.  There is, of course, a co-existence of jazz with rock in contemporary America, just as rock co-exists with jazz in contemporary Europe.  But, in each case, rock is as much unrepresentative of American music as jazz of the European scene.  American rock musicians are no less an exception to the rule than European jazzmen."

 

I like the way the first speaker distinguishes between rock and 'progressive' on the one hand, and ... jazz and 'fusion' on the other - a distinction, in effect, between the European - in particular British - tradition and the American one, which is regarded by him as pertaining to a different integrity - namely a relatively post-atomic integrity rather than, as with Britain, an essentially atomic one.  Thus rock, a proton-biased art form, stands to 'progressive', its bound-electron alternative, somewhat in the order of the Labour Party to the Conservatives in modern Britain, whereas modern jazz, corresponding to a free-electron equivalent, stands to 'fusion', that pseudo-electron development, somewhat in the order of the Republican party to the Democrats in America.  Certainly an interesting theory, if a little rigid overall!  One cannot deny that many 'progressive' musicians in Europe have relapsed, as it were, into rock in recent years, just as many modern jazzmen in America have shown a growing predilection for 'fusion'.  One could speak of 'progressive' as instrumental rock and 'fusion', by contrast, as vocal jazz, which is a distinction, ironically, the speaker failed to make.  Neither did he allude to the fact that in Britain, for instance, musicians can start out 'progressive' and subsequently relapse, so to speak, into rock.  One got the impression that they all started out in rock and progressed to jazz-rock.  Conversely, he made no mention of the fact that American musicians sometimes start out in 'fusion' and later progress to modern jazz.  Probably these two situations are the exception to the rule however, and he therefore felt they weren't worth mentioning.  Certainly he considered American rock and British jazz to be exceptions within their respective cultural traditions, and I have to agree with him.  Needless to say, American rock musicians sometimes play 'progressive', much as British and European jazz musicians sometimes relapse into 'fusion'.  More often, though, I think the two kinds of musicians are quite separate, since the transformation from the one to the other, from rock to jazz-rock or vice versa, would be equivalent to a change of political allegiance, and such a change is certainly the exception to the rule, particularly in class-bound Britain!  So one can conclude, then, that American rock musicians are Europeanized Americans, British jazz musicians Americanized Europeans, their respective status akin to that of cultural outsiders in each tradition - the American one centred in jazz, the British/European one, by contrast, in rock.

 

*

 

"It would be out of the question for quasi-supermen to dress in furs in a transcendental civilization since, unlike liberated females, they will be considered a masculine phenomenon, not be discriminated against as women.  Besides, furs are so naturalistic, so damn pagan!  They make their wearers look like animals, albeit sophisticated and attractive ones.  Certainly quasi-supermen will not be partial to furs, nor to stockings, skirts, dresses, high-heels, necklaces, et cetera.  Nothing that could be considered feminine would be worn by them.

     "Ah, how I look forward to such a post-sexist age!  How refreshingly different it would be from the usual dichotomies of an open society!  There would be nothing stemming from the Diabolic Alpha in that closed society of the future; for it would signify an exclusive aspiration towards the Divine Omega.  Consequently there would be no furs and no ... oh, what a long list one could draw up here!  There wouldn't even be any anti-naturalism.  For the natural world would have been superseded by the artificial, which would serve as a base from which to launch a truly supernatural aspiration, from which the cultivation of pure spirit would proceed as never before!  Yes, instead of a proton/electron antagonism, as in open societies, one would find a pseudo-electron/free-electron co-operation, the artificial being put to the service of the supernatural, or supermen."

 

I used to like furs on women as a youth, because they appeared to denote class and affluence, but these days I think I would be more inclined to sympathize with the second speaker's viewpoint.  He made no mention, curiously, of the moral dimension accruing to the acquisition of fur from various animals - foxes, bears, weasels, etc. - and I can only suppose this subject doesn't particularly interest him, else he would surely have alluded to it.  However, one can't argue with the assertion that fur coats would be irrelevant to quasi-supermen, those civilized proletarian women of the future, since a post-sexist society could not countenance such feminine attire, especially when one bears in mind the degree of its naturalness, about which, curiously, he said scarcely a word!  Though I suspect the likening of wearers of fur coats to animals, the fact that they remind one of bears and things, was intended to imply as much!  No doubt, furs on women are only relevant to an alpha-stemming society, and we need not be surprised by the fact that the majority of fur wearers are bourgeois types.  I liked his distinction between the anti-natural and the artificial, the former being against the natural while the latter is pro-supernatural, a base, as it were, from which to launch a truly supernatural aspiration.  Anti-naturalism would seem to accord more with atomic societies, since effectively a bound-electron equivalent, whereas the artificial, functioning as a pseudo-electron equivalent, seems to accord with post-atomic societies, including the contemporary American.  He lives, it seems to me, for the future development of an absolutely post-atomic civilization, as germane to an omega-orientated society.

 

*

 

"Spectra of evolutionary development in the arts - such a fascinating idea!  Proton philosophers, atomic novelists, electron poets.  Then philosophers who rebel against academic philosophy, becoming anti-philosophers, pseudo-electron equivalents.  They rebel as petty bourgeois against bourgeois philosophy, with its ethical focus: Schopenhauer against Kant, Nietzsche against Schopenhauer, even, in some sense, Marx against Hegel.  They prefer a metaphysical to a physical line, essence to appearance.  They co-exist with petty-bourgeois academic philosophy, which signifies the upgrading of appearances from the humanistic to the artificial, ethics to language, as with Wittgenstein.  But they extend beyond this extreme reach of philosophy, undergoing, in the process, a transformation from negative to positive, from anti-philosophy to pro-poetry.  They become, in the course of time, pseudo-philosophers, bringing metaphysical philosophy to its culmination in a collectivized format, a petty-bourgeois level less stemming from the bourgeoisie, as with academic philosophy and its anti-academic antagonist, than aspiring towards the proletariat on the highest terms, that's to say, in a pseudo-electron context of metaphysical expression, free from the aphoristic root.

     "Yet why stop at philosophy?  Doesn't literature, in the strictly novelistic sense of that word, likewise undergo a parting of the ways and thus witness a petty-bourgeois rebellion against its fictional heritage?  Yes, most assuredly!  This rebellion takes the form of a turning against the fictional on autobiographical terms, is championed by anti-novelists who, like Henry Miller, prefer to tell the story of their lives than to create silly and possibly inconsequential fictions.  Whereas the anti-philosophical development was predominantly a European and, in particular, German phenomenon, the development of anti-literature finds most of its support in America, almost as if it signified a turning against the European tradition, even as affecting American literature.  And like its philosophical counterpart, it co-exists with the end of the bourgeois fictional tradition and the transformation of such a tradition into a uniquely illusory or, rather, illusional guise - co-exists, in other words, with the continuation of literature along petty-bourgeois lines.

     "But just as we can note a distinction between anti-philosophy and its pseudo-philosophical successor, so a distinction soon becomes apparent between anti-literature and its successor in pseudo-literature - the higher, experimental, non-expressive literature of a later and superior phase of petty-bourgeois evolution, such as largely pertains to the mainstream contemporary civilization of America, and which outstrips the illusional tradition stemming from bourgeois fiction.  This higher literature, championed by pseudo-novelists like William Burroughs, aspires towards a proletarian absolutism, brings literature the closest it has ever been to pure poetry while yet still remaining prose.  This pseudo-electron literature of the later petty-bourgeoisie parallels the pseudo-philosophy of the metaphysical collectivist and finds its aesthetic equivalent not in abstract sculpture, as with the pseudo-philosophical, but in the furthest reach of abstract art, particularly with regard to abstract expressionism.

     "That leaves, then, the progression of poetry from a traditional pseudo-poetical bound-electron status, such as continues to apply wherever poetry is conceived in expressively materialist or descriptive terms, to a revolutionary free-electron status via the rebellion of anti-poets who, like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, turned against the pseudo-poetical tradition appertaining, in the main, to Western Europe, with its emphasis on appearance and description, and did so, needless to say, on largely autobiographical and/or occult terms.

     "Such a rebellion, however, was soon to bear revolutionary fruit as the emphasis changed to metaphysics, with the development of a pure poetry along relatively free-electron lines, a poetry which alternated between metaphysical expression and poetical impression, as relevant to the extreme relativity of late twentieth-century America, and which was championed by poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who pertain to the later phase of petty-bourgeois culture.  After such pure poetry, the literary equivalent of light art, the evolution of poetry can only be from the relatively pure to the absolutely pure, as achieved through an exclusive concern with the impressive, with pure impression, a development which should pertain to the next and final civilization in the history of man, which, as a proletarian phenomenon, will avail itself of computer discs."

 

I like the way he speaks of a progression from the 'anti' to the 'pseudo', from anti-philosophy to pseudo-philosophy, anti-literature to pseudo-literature, anti-poetry to pseudo- or, rather, pure poetry, moving all the time from what he considers to be the proton roots of literature to its future climax in the most free-electron terms.  Very systematic thinking indeed!  He doubtless despises academic philosophers, considering that, to him, they are more often than not proton types who pertain to an aristocratic stage and manifestation of literary development.... Though I'm not convinced, myself, that philosophy is as bad, or alpha-stemming, as he chooses to depict it!  The rebellion against bourgeois Kantian philosophy seems, not altogether surprisingly, to have begun in Germany, with Schopenhauer and (later) Nietzsche, and continued to develop alongside a petty-bourgeois stage of academic philosophy until such time, apparently, as pseudo-philosophy came to the fore as the logical successor to the anti-philosophical tradition, a higher type of petty-bourgeois philosophy which leaves the academic tradition behind, since the latter is unable to extend beyond a lower petty-bourgeois stage, being aligned with appearances and, therefore, stemming from a proton root.  It is the furthest straining at the leash, so to speak, of an academic tradition, whereas pseudo-philosophy extends towards a proletarian absolutism from its roots in anti-philosophy, that pseudo-electron equivalent.  Does such pseudo-philosophy become genuinely free, however?  Apparently not, since it must express metaphysical ideas and thus remain intelligible.  Yet when it gets to the stage of abandoning the aphoristic root, as it seemingly does on the level of the highest pseudo-philosophy, then it almost becomes genuinely free, is virtually a free-electron equivalent in relation to anti-philosophy.  Likewise, the progression from anti-literature to pseudo-literature is one that outstrips the tail-end, as it were, of the novelistic tradition, as mainly pertaining to Western Europe, and takes an illusional twist on the level of a bound-electron equivalent.  This progression from autobiographical novels to largely experimental, non-expressive novels signifies a development from lower to higher petty-bourgeois stages of literary evolution, and is especially relevant to contemporary America, with its relatively post-atomic bias.  Apparently, this pseudo-literature, like its negative forerunner, corresponds to a pseudo-electron equivalent, though the third speaker makes no mention of the fact that, like abstract art, it can also entail a free-electron status when primarily concerned with religious issues of a transcendent nature, as in the novels of Jack Kerouac.  But, of course, when one is simply distinguishing between different stages of literary development, from academic philosophy through to poetry via novels, then one's scale of reference necessarily differs from what it would be in the event of each stage being considered in isolation, so that, willy-nilly, pseudo-literature becomes a pseudo-electron equivalent in relation to pure poetry, that ultimate art form, about which the third speaker has some enlightened views.  Certainly, one should distinguish once again between the negative and the positive stages of this largely American development, the anti-poets turning against the European tradition of pseudo-poetry, with its emphasis on appearance and description, as relevant to a bound-electron equivalent.  Whether they should be regarded as pseudo-electron or as free-electron equivalents, however, is not clear, though I suspect he had the former in mind, since he speaks of the emphasis changing, with pure poetry, to a concern with metaphysics, as germane to a free-electron bias - a supposition which would suggest that the later petty-bourgeois stage of poetic development doesn't simply stem from the earlier stage, but pertains to a new spectrum of poetic evolution - one directly leading towards the ultimate pure poetry of an absolute civilization, which would avail itself of computers.  If that is so, then one need not doubt that pseudo-philosophy and pseudo-literature also pertain to separate spectra of literary evolution from their negative forerunners.  Truly a complex affair!

 

*

 

"We should distinguish, I believe, between soul and pseudo-soul, not to say between pseudo-spirit and spirit.  Thus we will be distinguishing, on the one hand, between that which is uniquely soul and that which is basically spirit conditioned by soul, and, on the other hand, between that which is basically soul conditioned by spirit and that which is uniquely spirit.  Soul, as we all know, pertains to the body, is the occult side, as it were, of the physical, the wavicle aspect of the flesh.  Soul is what we feel, and we can feel either negative or positive feelings, depending on the context.  We can describe negative feelings as occult, strictly appertaining to the proton content of the flesh's atomicity, and, by contrast, positive feelings as pseudo-occult, since appertaining to the neutron content of the flesh's atomicity - in other words to pseudo-soul.  However, if soul is never alone in the body, its greatest preponderance over pseudo-soul is in the flesh, where negative sensations somewhat outweigh positive ones in intensity.

     "From sensational depths, however, soul proceeds through emotional middlings in the heart to feeling heights in the old brain, becoming, all the time, more diluted with pseudo-soul until, by the time it reaches the new brain, it is distinctly pseudo itself, functioning on the level of thought, as conditioned and promulgated by awareness, i.e. genuine spirit, and therefore akin to pseudo-spirit.  By contrast, pseudo-soul acquires more positivity the higher it ascends until, by the time it reaches the old brain, it is the strongest feeling, the pseudo-occult preponderating over the occult, whether as happiness or love.  Here soul co-exists with bound spirit as subconscious, as spirit conditioned by and in some degree enslaved to soul.  For whereas soul is feeling and, at least in the old brain, also visionary appearances, spirit is awareness, or consciousness, and the awareness of the subconscious is distinctly sensual, as we discover when we sleep and contemplate dreams through bound spirit.

     "Yet if spirit is bound in the old brain, it's most decidedly free in the new one, where it exists as superconscious, as awareness untrammelled by feelings and/or thoughts, and thus pertains to the supernatural, the psychological side, as it were, of the natural, with particular reference to the new brain.  This free spirit co-exists, as I've said, with pseudo-spirit, the transmutation of soul from the occult in the old brain to the quasi-supernatural in the new brain, where it manifests in thought, as conditioned by the majority electron content, functioning as awareness, of that brain.  Thus soul expands from the flesh to the old brain, pseudo-soul likewise, where it co-exists with bound spirit.  Free spirit exclusively appertains to the superconscious, where it co-exists with the pseudo-spirit of the new brain.  Although existing in the new brain, free spirit is not of the new brain.  Appertaining to the supernatural, it can be cultivated to the point of transcendence and so become entirely free of the natural.

     "Evolution will witness the subsequent detachment of noumenon from phenomenon, of superconscious from new brain.  The reformed neutron content of pseudo-spirit, together with the atomicity of new-brain materialism as a whole, will be escaped from in the course of millennial time, as free electrons emerge from the earth's most artificial (post-human) life-form ... to expand into and converge towards other such free-electron transcendences in space, conceived as the setting for the post-millennial Beyond."

 

I like the distinction the fourth speaker draws between bound spirit as subconscious and free spirit as superconscious, the one enslaved, during sleep, to soul; the other free to condition thoughts, which pertain to pseudo-spirit.  He could have emphasized the fact that such freedom is relative as opposed to absolute, since spirit only becomes truly free when wrapped-up in self-contemplation, as appertaining to meditation.  Nevertheless the use of spirit as will to condition thought, to order and regulate it, bespeaks a freedom of sorts, if only relatively so.  Not surprisingly, this distinction between pseudo-spirit and spirit, thought and awareness, anticipates the social distinction which must soon arise between quasi-supermen and supermen, the former as pseudo-electron equivalents, the latter as free-electron equivalents.  Conversely, at the alpha or pagan end of the spectrum, his distinction between soul and pseudo-soul, negative and positive feelings, calls to mind the pre-atomic distinction he occasionally makes - for I have heard him speak on a number of occasions - between superwomen and quasi-superwomen, whilst in between the two extremes one finds the atomic distinction between apparent soul, as dreams, and bound spirit, as subconscious, mirroring the heterosexual stage of evolution whereby men and women co-exist on separate terms within an open society, in which marriage is the norm.  Returning, however, to his argument, one can understand how in a post-atomic society, whether relatively or absolutely such, the new brain comes to acquire greater importance, since the focal-point of psychic activity has shifted away from both the flesh and the old brain to a mounting concern with the development of spirit.  Undoubtedly, whilst a relatively post-atomic society will place more emphasis on the conditioning of pseudo-spirit by spirit, its absolutist successor will favour the cultivation of pure spirit, as appropriate to a genuinely post-atomic age.  Transcendental meditation will supersede LSD tripping, leading, inevitably, to the post-human millennium and beyond when, as he maintains, free electrons will emerge to converge towards and expand into other such transcendent noumena in space.  Turning right away from pseudo-spirit, genuine spirit will become divine, the superconscious at length escaping from the new brain, the supernatural arising not from the natural but from the most artificially supported and sustained of life forms - the new-brain collectivizations of the superbeings!

 

*

 

"Bourgeois painting, surrounded by and encased within its wooden frame, marks the mid-point in the evolution of art, the dualistic compromise, as it were, between sculpture and holography.  Either side of this representational art-form one finds the largely pagan mural, conceived in naturalistic terms, and the largely transcendental abstract-painting of 'modern art', that antithetical equivalent of the mural which, exhibited against a wall rather than - as with murals - on one, is usually free of a frame.  If the mural is higher/later grand-bourgeois, then 'contemporary' canvas art is very much lower/earlier petty-bourgeois.

     "We have started in the middle, so let us now proceed further outwards to embrace the art forms either side of the above-mentioned ones, which, of course, are vase modelling on the one hand and light art on the other, the former lower/earlier grand-bourgeois, the latter higher/later petty-bourgeois; the one particularly relevant to the ancient Greeks, the other to their antithetical equivalents, the modern Americans.  As vase modelling, even with its painting, is closer in essence to sculpture than to either murals or framed paintings, so light art is closer in essence to holography than to either 'modern art' or framed paintings.  Amphora art stems from sculpture no less than light art aspires towards holography, the aristocratic and proletarian extremes, respectively, in the evolution of art.

     "So that brings us - does it not? - to the beginnings of art in pure sculpture, usually conceived in stone, and to the culmination of art in pure holography, as a projection into enclosed space of an image/design through refracted light.  Whereas the former is utterly materialistic and mundane, standing on the ground or, in its earliest manifestations, carved from the bare face of mountain rock, the latter is utterly spiritualistic and transcendent, seemingly floating free of material connections, suspended, so to speak, in the void as an intimation of pure spirit, such as would be compatible with an absolutely transcendental civilization, the refinement of holography from representational to abstract levels taking place there as a matter of chronological course.

     "Where does one find the earliest manifestations of fine art?  In Egypt, that cradle of pagan civilization, where the largest and most materialistic sculptures were chiselled into existence, carved out of the towering mountain rocks or set free to stand on the ground like a reformed rock, a formful boulder.  And, not altogether surprisingly, such pure sculpture was very often created in animal or semi-animal forms, beasts being closer to nature and therefore closer to the Creator than men, more fundamental than their evolutionary successors.  Ah, such diabolical art!

     "Where, by contrast, will one find the latest and highest manifestations of fine art?  Hopefully, in Eire, should it become the champion of a full-blown transcendental civilization given to the creation of the most pure holography, abstract and transcendent.  Certainly, pure holography must spread from there to every country on earth, as civilization becomes truly universal and all mankind are disposed to contemplation of the ultimate civilized art - that of the people."

 

Yes, one looks forward to the development of abstract holography, that ultimate art, which should be formless rather than formful or, rather, formal, like ancient sculpture.  The fifth speaker is certainly correct to imply that such art could only be championed by an absolute civilization, since contemporary holography, pertaining to the relatively post-atomic societies of the bourgeois/proletarian West (with particular reference to America), is generally representational, and therefore relative.  It's on a level with original anthological poetry and modern jazz, a level contiguous with the finest light art which, ironically, is non-representational or, rather, abstract.  Certainly, at its best, light art is closer to holography than to painting, just as, from a converse viewpoint, the vase art of, for instance, the ancient Greeks was closer, in essence, to sculpture than to murals, even though it involved the painting of tiny figures on the curvilinear surface of the vases.  Such vases stemmed from formal sculptures no less than contemporary light art aspires towards the formless holograms of the future.... As for so-called modern art, I would never have considered it the antithetical equivalent of murals had not the speaker pointed out this fact.  Murals were naturalistic and on a wall, whereas avant-garde painting, by contrast, is non-representational and/or abstract and distinct from a wall, painted on a lightweight canvas which, as a rule, is free of a frame, that wooden surround suggestive of a sculptural connection.  Indeed, bourgeois paintings would seem to stem from sculpture rather than - as with the best and most progressive modern art - to aspire towards holography.  A quintessentially middle-of-the-road development in the history of art's evolution, both materialistic and spiritualistic at the same time.  But then, with modern art, the beginnings of a transvaluation of values, the severance of painting from sculptural/representational connections, as it is conceived, upon a frame-free canvas, in increasingly non-representational terms, becoming, with the transformation to light art (and even a little while before that), an unequivocally abstract intimation of spiritual truth, and the relatively post-atomic forerunner of abstract holography.  Of course, one should not overlook the fact that modern art in Western Europe and modern art in America signify two distinct traditions, nor forget that such art is itself divisible into a kind of higher materialism, or pseudo-spirituality, and a lower idealism ... wherever relative criteria apply, as happens to be the case in the contemporary West.

 

*

 

"How dreadful to behold a man or a woman walking a dog down the street!  How still more dreadful to have to suffer the appalling noise of continuous barking!  How vulgar and demeaning is the spectacle of dog's excrement on pavements and roads!

     "No, a time must surely come when men are freed from this ghastly atomicity, severed from the proton root of a beast and obliged to be not bound-electron but free-electron equivalents.  Dogs can have no place in a free-electron civilization.  They will have to be banished and/or destroyed, along with cats, horses, hamsters, and other unnecessary animals.  The spirit of the Last Judgement must extend to beasts as well as to those categories of human beings which stem from the Diabolic Alpha and consequently oppose evolutionary progress.

     "Truly, there are many who are too corrupt and foolish to take such teachings seriously, people who would oppose their implementation.  But, rest assured, they won't oppose them for ever!  Judgement will be merciless and irrevocable.  He saves, but he also damns; he isn't absolute.  He brings a 'sword' as well as the Truth."

 

No doubt the sixth speaker suffers or has suffered a great deal from barking dogs ... to bring such a mundane subject so callously into his predominantly Messianic lecture.  His suggestion that dogs, together with other pets, constitute the proton side of an atomic integrity involving pet-owners is most interesting, and doubtless true as well!  Clearly, there can be no such atomicities in the absolutely post-atomic society that must one day soon come to pass.  So away with dogs, cats, horses, etc. in the name of free-electron progress!  Curious how he made no reference to the fact that the relatively post-atomic civilization of contemporary America could be regarded as having pioneered, through the development of such animal cartoons as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, a relative transcendence of animals ... suggestive of a transitional stage between the indulgence of pets and their eventual destruction.  There is something agreeably artificial about these animal cartoons, and doubtless the speaker has enjoyed them in the past, even if they only signify a relative transcendence of animals, as applying to the substance rather than to the form.  Still, the absolute transcendence of pets isn't something that I, for one, would greatly regret, since I don't own any.  In fact, I'm fairly confident that the implementation of a banishment and/or destruction order on dogs, cats, horses, etc., would constitute an aspect, by no means the least important, of the Last Judgement.

 

 

FIVE SPEECHES SUCCEEDED BY THEIR SPEAKERS' THOUGHTS, PRECEDING FIVE THOUGHTS

SUCCEEDED BY THEIR THINKERS' SPEECHES

 

First Speaker

 

"Atomic weapons correspond to a later stage of petty-bourgeois military development, the 'barbarous' preceding the 'civilized' in terms of atomic bombs preceding nuclear missiles, the former dropping to earth from a large bomber, the latter hurtling through space once fired from their launch pads.  Thus a distinction, in effect, between the mundane and the transcendent, which accords with that between lower and higher phases of late-stage petty-bourgeois evolution."

 

What makes atomic weapons petty bourgeois is the fact that they correspond to a relatively post-atomic status, a negative dualism implying the splitting of the atom, the severance, through nuclear fission, of electrons from protons and neutrons - an evolutionary stage between bourgeois atomicity and proletarian electron freedom, a kind of transition between the relative and the absolute, part mundane and part transcendent in constitution.  Consequently atomic weapons are the weapons of the late-twentieth century, appropriate to a later petty-bourgeois age on both its civilized and barbarous sides, as mainly applying to the Americans and the Russians respectively.  Because the late-twentieth century corresponds to a 'civilized' phase of higher petty-bourgeois development, it follows that missiles rather than bombs are the relevant weapons.

 

 

Second Speaker

 

"Just as late petty-bourgeois evolution passes through two phases, so proletarian evolution will do likewise, beginning in a 'barbarous' phase and proceeding, in time, to a 'civilized' phase, which will entail a distinction between the mundane use of laser weapons and, eventually, their transcendent use, meaning primarily that whereas during the lower phase of proletarian evolution laser beams will mainly be fired on the ground, either from guns or tanks, they'll be fired from satellites and such-like 'transcendent' phenomena during its higher phase.  Thus we are distinguishing between laser guns and laser satellites."

 

What makes laser weapons proletarian is the fact that they correspond to an absolutely post-atomic status, one in which electrons are free from proton and/or neutron constraint and capable, in consequence, of being fired at any given material target at an incredibly high velocity, a much greater velocity than missiles or rockets, those materialist projectiles subject to the force of gravity, which would be like sitting-ducks to incoming laser beams.  However, one should distinguish carefully between a proton absolute use of lasers and their electron absolute use, particularly in view of the post-atomic status of a Social Transcendentalist society, which must favour the latter, especially during its 'civilized' phase.  While proton beams need not be banned during the preceding 'barbarous' phase, their employment during the higher phase of proletarian evolution would be both morally indefensible and ideologically incommensurable, so that one envisages electron beams alone being fired from satellites in accordance with a free-electron integrity.  Probably electron beams would be employed on the ground during the preceding 'barbarous' phase as well, since - so I believe - more relevant to an incipiently absolute post-atomic society than proton beams, which have the ring of a pre-atomic integrity about them, though, admittedly, not on the low level of fire, that much cruder manifestation of proton negativity!  Certainly there could be no more barbarous weapon than the flame-thrower, and we need not doubt that proletarian society will continue to uphold a ban on its use.

 

 

Third Speaker

 

"Modern classical music is inferior to both jazz-rock and modern jazz on account of the fact that it pertains to an earlier stage of petty-bourgeois development and accordingly employs techniques and instrumental combinations stemming from the bourgeoisie, i.e. from nineteenth-century classical music, which mainly took the form of romanticism.  In its lower or barbarous phase, early petty-bourgeois music is either expressionist or impressionist in character, reflecting a partly atonal revolt against romantic precedent.  In its higher or civilized phase, late petty-bourgeois music is either abstract expressionist or abstract impressionist in character, reflecting an atonal revolution commensurate with the growing entrenchment of petty-bourgeois civilization."

 

By contrast, late petty-bourgeois music signifies a break with traditional media of expression, such as acoustic violins and pianos, by employing electronic instruments in a variety of fresh combinations and in a partly or even largely improvisatory context, depending on the phase in question, that's to say, whether barbarous or civilized.  In the lower phase, we get a revolt against civilized classical precedent in the form of either trad jazz or rock 'n' roll.  In the higher phase, we get a revolutionary attainment via modern jazz or rock classical to a new degree of civilized music, one germane to the late petty-bourgeoisie.  Whereas the barbarous and civilized phases of early petty-bourgeois music are equivalent to early- and mid-twentieth-century painterly art ... from expressionism to abstract expressionism, the barbarous and civilized phases of late petty-bourgeois music are equivalent to mid- and late-twentieth-century light art ... from sculptural to abstract light art.

 

 

Fourth Speaker

 

"Just as late petty-bourgeois music passed through two phases, so proletarian music must do the same, beginning as a largely tonal revolt against civilized late petty-bourgeois precedent, and culminating in an exclusively atonal attainment to revolutionary proletarian civilization - a progression, one might argue, from jazz-rock to pure jazz.

     "The revolt or reaction, already well under way in certain Western countries in the late-twentieth century, employs electronic instruments, particularly synthesizers, in a largely tonal way and generally avoids rhythmic or harmonic accompaniments.  It is not afraid of notation but quite often uses scores or some pre-planned directive, a fact which further confirms its barbarous status - the paradoxical use of a higher medium suggesting a 'fall', as regards content, from civilized precedent.  A music equivalent to representational holography, that paradoxically barbarous reaction to abstract light art."

 

By contrast, civilized proletarian music, pertaining to people's civilization, will be exclusively atonal or, rather, 'pitchful' ... as we should describe an ultra-positive music dedicated to the maximum improvisatory equalitarianism of notes, all of which would be free from rhythmic or harmonic constraints and consequently moving in quick-note successions of free-electron 'runs'.  Such pure music will be programmed for performance by synthesizers and serve as an inducement to self-realization, being associated with people's religion as an aspect of super-transcendentalism, inseparable from religion and therefore truly civilized - the ultimate religious music, corresponding to abstract holography.

 

 

Fifth Speaker

 

"Like art and music, the evolution of religion may be said to pass through phases relevant to a given class integrity ... from a barbarous revolt against some civilized alien-class precedent to the establishment, within a higher phase, of a new civilized level.  In this fashion, we need not doubt that early Protestantism signified a late grand-bourgeois rebellion against early grand-bourgeois Roman Catholicism, the barbarous phase giving way, in due course, to the civilized ... with the entrenchment of Puritanism.

     "Probably the bourgeoisie likewise revolted against early Protestantism before going on to establish what could be called middle Protestantism, Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran, as its civilized successor within the higher phase of bourgeois religion.

     "Similarly one can argue that the early petty-bourgeoisie revolted, in their turn, against bourgeois religious precedent before going on to establish late Protestantism, whether Pentecostal or Unitarian, as the civilized religion relevant to themselves."

 

Of course, religion continued to be relativistic within the context of evolving relative civilization, a kind of spiritual religion co-existing with a material counterpart, though never more conspicuously so than during the extreme stages of relative evolution, as applying to the grand- and petty-bourgeois stages respectively.  If Catholicism was predominantly a soulful religion, then Protestantism signified a shift towards the spiritual, a shift which could only lead to the predominantly spiritual with the development of higher/early petty-bourgeois Protestantism, though not to the same degree as with the introduction of civilized late petty-bourgeois religion in the form of neo-Buddhism, which extended the spiritual bias still further.  Although relative in itself, not to mention vis-à-vis a materialist counterpart in the form of mescaline tripping, neo-Buddhism shifted the emphasis away from the physical exercises of Yoga towards the spiritual contemplation inherent in itself, and thereby affirmed a fresh civilized attainment, one more spiritually orientated than any previous civilized religion, though falling short of an absolute spiritual orientation both in terms of its physical connection with the ground - either directly, through a squatting posture, or indirectly, through the interposing medium of a chair - and, moreover, in terms of its acquiescence in and acceptance of positive feelings like happiness and love - an integrity, in short, not excluding affiliation with pseudo-soul, as derived from the majority neutron content of the old brain.

 

 

First Thinker

 

Late petty-bourgeois religion divides, then, into spiritual and material kinds, the one kind associated with neo-Buddhism, the other with mescaline tripping; the former predominantly appealing to the majority electron content of the new brain, the superconscious; the latter, by contrast, predominantly appealing to the minority proton/neutron content of the new brain, the quasi-superconscious.  These two kinds of 'contemporary' civilized religion signify the higher phase of late petty-bourgeois civilization, the lower, or barbarous, phase having given rise to a Yoga reaction against neo-Catholicism on the one hand, and to a doping reaction against late Protestantism on the other, the reaction of a spiritual barbarism generally being against a materialistic civilized religion and, conversely, that of a materialistic barbarism generally being against a spiritual civilized religion - a procedure generally paralleled by the arts.

 

"Of course, the development of a proletarian religion can also be seen to divide into two phases, viz. a barbarous and a civilized, and we find in the former case a revolt against neo-Buddhism which takes the form of LSD tripping, a relatively barbarous mode of religious allegiance involving the contemplation of the visionary contents of the minority proton/neutron content of the new brain by a majority electron content functioning as awareness.  Such indirect, 'representational' meditation parallels the development of representational holography.

     "Certainly, a reaction against late petty-bourgeois religion and art is not something that a Social Transcendentalist Eire need over-concern itself with, since its principal obligation, once the cobwebs of tradition had been cleared away, would be to prepare the ground for Super-transcendentalism in the name of people's civilization, a procedure necessarily placing emphasis on the introduction of meditation centres, where transcendental meditation or, rather, hypermeditation ... would be carried on both free from the ground, i.e. in a vertical position entailing recourse to special chest-to-crotch harnesses, and in a psychic context free from feelings, including positive ones, and so exclusively concerned with the cultivation of awareness, as applying to the majority electron content of the new brain.

     "If the barbarous phase of proletarian religion mainly pertains to the United States, where LSD tripping is quite widespread, then its civilized phase should ultimately pertain to Eire, which, while not immune to the barbarous, would be primarily dedicated to furthering the civilized."

 

 

Second Thinker

 

In passing from a post-humanist millennium to a post-human millennium, from the superhuman and superbeingful phases of the one to the superman and superbeing phases of the other, we find ourselves concerned with post-human life forms, not with post-humanist life but with life forms which completely transcend man, being as different from that two-legged creature as apes and trees, the two life forms immediately preceding, in some sort of chronological order, his emergence.  Just as trees precede apes and apes precede man, so the supermen will succeed him and the superbeings succeed them.  As human brains artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts the supermen - those antithetical equivalents to apes - will trip on a regular basis, experiencing such artificially-induced visions as LSD, or some such synthetic stimulus, makes possible.  As new-brain collectivizations the superbeings - those antithetical equivalents to trees - will hypermeditate towards transcendence - the goal of late-millennial striving.

 

"Speaking personally, I prefer to distinguish between the twin phases of the coming post-humanist and post-human millennia on the basis of a quasi-spiritual phase from an ultra-spiritual phase, as befitting the distinct psychic preoccupations of the respective post-humanist and post-human life forms - the superhuman men/supermen and the superbeingful men/superbeings respectively.

     "Whereas the former pair would be contemplating the visionary contents of the new brain's minority proton/neutron content from a consciousness not unconnected with feelings, the latter pair would be solely attuned to self-contemplation as superconsciousness of the new brain's majority electron content, being free from old-brain connections and consequently enabled to expand consciousness towards transcendence.

     "Whereas trees directly stem from the Diabolic Alpha, their leaves enslaved both to branches and trunk, the superbeings would directly aspire towards the Divine Omega, the collectivized new-brains served by the artificial support-and-sustain systems which had been engineered by qualified technicians."

 

 

Third Thinker

 

Obviously the support-and-sustain systems of the supermen and the superbeings, respectively, would be created in such a way as to appear antithetical to the trunk and branches of a tree.  Whereas the trunk stems from the ground and then the branches tend diagonally from it, creating the impression of a concession to gravitational force downwards, a tapering down towards the trunk, one envisages the main support apparatus of a superbeing (not to mention the preceding supermen) pending from the roof of a meditation centre, its length stopping well short of the floor, whilst a series of diagonally-slanting arms (reminiscent of branches) tend from it in seeming defiance of gravitational force downwards, those arms directly issuing from the main support slanting gently downwards, those indirectly issuing from the main support, i.e. stemming from the main branch-arms, slanting radically downwards, the resultant impression quite the reverse of anything which could be described as directly stemming from the Diabolic Alpha.  In short, an appropriate arrangement for a life form directly aspiring towards the Divine Omega.

 

"Speaking personally, I incline to regard the superman and superbeing phases of the post-human millennium as equivalent to the barbarous and civilized phases of preceding post-humanist millennial evolution, though as a more intense, because absolute, barbarism and civilization respectively.  After the supermen have had their fill of tripping, the technocratic servants of this post-human life form will doubtless approve their upgrading to the superbeing stage, and thus take measures to free the new brain from its physiological connection with the old one.  The resulting life form will consequently be beyond sleep and therefore disposed to hypermeditate on a permanent basis, a procedure bringing life closer to the absolutism of the pure spirit of heavenly transcendence.

     "From indirectly cultivating awareness through the contemplation of new-brain visions, life will have progressed, in superbeing guise, to directly cultivating awareness through self-contemplation, this absolutism significant of the highest degree of civilized religion, an absolutism inexorably leading to transcendence, and thus to the escape of free electrons from new-brain matter, their escape, or definitive salvation, being facilitated along the hollow interior of the support apparatus, which should lead via the main trunk-like support into the deeps of space, in which setting pure spirit would be free to converge towards and expand into other such transcendences on route, as it were, to ultimate unity, as the envisaged goal of heavenly evolution.

 

 

Fourth Thinker

 

The evolution of literature from the early to the late petty bourgeoisie is, in effect, from novels to poetry, from a genre-type corresponding to painterly art to one which corresponds to light art.  As with music and art, each stage of petty-bourgeois literary evolution passes through two phases, viz. a barbarous and a civilized, which entails a revolt against civilized literary precedent during its lower phase and, by contrast, the attainment to a fresh level of civilized literary achievement during its higher phase.  As the early petty bourgeoisie commenced their stage of literary evolution with a revolt against bourgeois fictional precedent, it follows that the late petty bourgeoisie will commence their stage of literary evolution with a revolt against higher/early petty-bourgeois precedent.

 

"Inevitably, the early petty-bourgeois revolt against bourgeois fiction, corresponding to expressionism and impressionism in art, takes the form of autobiographical and/or realistic novels, the former concentrating on the individual's background and experiences, the latter on the everyday world of societal phenomena; the one subjective, the other objective.

     "Both modes of writing are relatively barbarous because entailing a paradoxical commitment to the novel genre, neither autobiography nor realism corresponding to a strictly literary approach to the novel.  They're not complete in themselves but seem transitional between bourgeois fiction and higher/early petty-bourgeois literature, which takes the form of either experimental, largely non-expressive novels or illusional novels, such as involve completely imaginary worlds and creatures.

     "Both these higher modes of early petty-bourgeois writing, corresponding to abstract expressionism and to abstract impressionism in art, are civilized, because complete in themselves and transcending not only traditional modes of novelistic literature ... but the everyday world of societal phenomena.  With experimental and illusional literature the novel attains to a climax, beyond which literary progress can only be made in terms of late petty-bourgeois poetry."

 

 

Fifth Thinker

 

The revolt of lower/late petty-bourgeois poets against civilized literary precedent takes the form of either revolutionary political writing or writings on the occult, depending on the kind of poet in question and whether he is in revolt against what has been called illusional literature or its experimental counterpart.  Naturally, this revolt signifies a barbarism because, apart from using poetry in an unpoetical way, the content of the poem created falls beneath the level of content attained to by civilized novelistic precedent - political poetry being conceptually inferior to illusional literature, occult poetry likewise conceptually inferior to experimental literature, the revolt of a materialistic barbarism against spiritual civilized precedent paralleling that of a spiritual barbarism against materialistic civilized precedent.  With the development of a higher/late petty-bourgeois poetry, however, literature is surpassed by the attainment of poetry to a new civilized achievement, one that is either experimental, and therefore largely abstract, or metaphysical, and therefore primarily concerned with spiritual truth, particularly as applying to neo-Buddhism.  Whereas experimental poetry corresponds to abstract-expressionist light art, metaphysical poetry corresponds to light art of an abstract-impressionist tendency, an expansion of the spiritual rather than a contraction of the material.  But no sooner does late petty-bourgeois literature attain to a climax in the above-mentioned kinds of poetry ... than a proletarian revolt against such civilized precedent sets in, to signal the commencement of a new class-stage of literary evolution - namely the ultimate stage.

 

"Inevitably, the early proletarian revolt against late petty-bourgeois poetry, corresponding to representational holography in art, takes the form of expressive anthological formats, anthologies of new or unknown poets being the genre relevant to a proletarian stage of literary evolution because collectivized and, therefore, absolute in constitution, signifying a convergence to omega on the level of poetry, the Many having become One, so to speak, in a format which  transcends individual and/or separate publications.

     "But, of course, such anthological poetry as is published in this context generally signifies a conceptual 'fall' from the experimental or metaphysical content of late petty-bourgeois poetry, being largely romantic or autobiographical or realistic or otherwise expressive in a way which falls beneath civilized precedent.

     "Such barbarous poetry is equivalent, consciously or unconsciously, to a revolt against late petty-bourgeois poetry, the lower phase in the evolution of proletarian writing from negative beginnings to a positive ending, such as would apply to a people's civilization, properly so-considered, in which only the most civilized kind of poetry would be encouraged, poetry which was neither experimental nor metaphysical, but totally abstract in character.

     "Yes, it is towards a completely impressive, free-electron status that proletarian poetry will tend, as literature attains to its ultimate climax within the context of abstract superpoems - the literary counterpart to abstract holography.  Thus will higher proletarian literature be born, an abstract literature testifying, in its computer-disc presentation, to the transcendent nature of proletarian civilization.  If literature began in alpha philosophy, it is most certainly destined to culminate in omega poetry - the ultimate civilized achievement and attainment of the goal.

 

 

THUS SPEAKS THE SOCIAL TRANSCENDENTALIST

Five speeches to his friends followed by five speeches to his enemies

 

"Love, my friends, is a Protestant ideal relative to Christ.  Have Catholics ever been Christians?  Traditionally, I don't think so; though these days there are apparently quite a few of them who put Christ before everyone else, including the Blessed Virgin, and are consequently akin to Protestants in Catholic disguise, heretics posing as adherents to the main, or absolute, part of the theocratic spectrum.  I know this isn't simply a failing of the common people.  But a catholic Protestant is not the true Catholic allegiance which, now as before, continues to be the Blessed Virgin, that second deity in the evolution of religion from pagan Creator propitiation to an aspiration towards the Holy Spirit via the Catholic, Protestant (Christ), Communist (Antichrist), and Centrist (Second Coming) 'deities' respectively.

     "Yes, my friends, Roman Catholicism, corresponding, in its prime, to an early-stage grand-bourgeois age, put the relativistic absolutism of the Holy Virgin above pagan absolutism and paid due homage to her as an intercessor between mankind and the Father.  Catholicism was always essentially a religion centred in refined sensation, as with incense, holy water, the mass, et cetera.  Stoicism, or the endurance of pain, had preceded it in absolute pagan times, and Christian love, or positive emotionality, was to follow it, with the development of Protestant civilization.

     "Stoicism pertained to the autocratic spectrum of the God-Kings, but refined sensation, conceived as morally preferable to crude sensation, i.e. hedonistic sin, pertained to the inception of the theocratic spectrum in a grand-bourgeois age.  The subsequent subdivision of that spectrum, relative to the Protestant heresy, ushered in the religion of love, with Christ as the religious cynosure.  This was not only an impersonal love of one's fellow man in humanism, but a personal love for another person as well - the emotional love of the sexes sanctified through marriage.  If the former kind of love is wise for a time, then the latter must fall somewhat short of wisdom, corresponding, as it does, to a fool's paradise.  Wisdom and folly are but two sides of a relative coin."

 

"There are those, my friends, who claim that Hitler was the Antichrist; that the deity which follows on behind the Christian one must be the Antichrist, and, to be sure, there is some truth in that idea.  But Hitler didn't follow on behind Christ for the simple reason that Fascism, to speak in general terms, appertained to the main part of the theocratic spectrum as the enemy of everything democratic rather than to an extension of the heretical subdivision of it from the religion of love, in Protestantism, to the religion of hate, in Communism - this latter germane to people's democracy.

     "No, Marx was the closest approximation to the Antichrist (even closer than Engels), while Lenin was his 'Pauline' disciple, the founder, in effect, of a communist 'church' or, rather, antichurch, viz. the totalitarian state.  Communism is but the logical outcome of the Protestant heresy, the antithesis to Christian love for all men in the hatred of one category of men, namely the proletariat, for another, namely the bourgeoisie.  It would be illogical to think of the Antichrist as pertaining to the true part of the theocratic spectrum, as did Hitler, who, by contrast, signified an antithetical equivalent to the Blessed Virgin, a kind of crude approximation to the Second Coming, necessarily subordinate to the main deity of the age, namely the Antichrist (whose Soviet followers were chiefly responsible for defeating Nazism), and therefore not entitled to consideration in any evolutionary list of principal deities from pagan beginnings in the Primal Creator (Father) to transcendental endings in the Ultimate Creation (the Holy Ghost).

     "So, my friends, we can dismiss Hitler as a secondary god, a failed god, whose eventual eclipse was inevitable, given the heretical status of the age.  He may have been the antithetical equivalent to the Blessed Virgin - Fascism as much post-Protestant as Catholicism was pre-Protestant - but the subdivision of the theocratic spectrum remained dominant over truly theocratic interests in the guise of Soviet Communism, that legacy of Marx.

     "So any list of principal deities would have to proceed thus: The Father, the Blessed Virgin, Christ, the Antichrist (Marx), and, in due course, the Second Coming, as signifying, in the name of Social Transcendentalism, a return of theological primacy to the true part of the theocratic spectrum in the wake of the heretical Antichrist."

 

"If Protestantism was a religion of love, then Fascism, contemporary with the religion of hate (Communism), must be accorded a bias for refined feelings, the antithetical equivalent to refined sensation.  In a word, happiness!

     "Yes, the happiness of the German people was of cardinal importance to Hitler, even if it had to be obtained through force of arms.  There was much positive feeling at the annual party rallies in Nuremberg.  Almost everywhere Hitler went, there were smiles on the faces of the German people.  Even post-war Communism was keen to indulge its citizens in the primary ideal of the age and, when not true to itself (through hatred of the bourgeoisie), be true to the main part of the theocratic spectrum in a kind of quasi-fascist worship of happiness.

     "There is something about the tail-end of the democratic spectrum which intimates of the contemporary (fascist) part of the theocratic one.  In an extreme relativistic age, necessarily late-stage petty-bourgeois in character, overlappings and hybrid interbreedings are less the exception than the rule.  Does not a military dictatorship often appear fascist or even communist?

     "Be that as it may, the extension of the true part of the theocratic spectrum beyond Fascism and its positive feelings can only lead to a more absolute religious ideal, the antithesis to stoicism ... in awareness, the pure awareness of meditation as germane to Social Transcendentalism/Super-transcendentalism (synthetically-induced visionary experience/hypermeditation), the brainchild of the true approximation to the Second Coming, the Messiah long awaited by both Jews and Gentiles alike ... as embodiment and intimation of the Holy Ghost - the ultimate deity of undifferentiated pure spirit at the culmination to evolution.

     "So in a sense this successor to the Antichrist is the real antithetical equivalent to the Virgin Mary, the penultimate deity in the evolution of deities from the Father to the Holy Ghost.  Between the two absolute extremes, that of pure sensuality and pure spirituality, come the two relative absolutes, both celibate in constitution.  And between these come the two relativities of the heretical subdivision of the theocratic spectrum, viz. the moderately relative Christ and the radically relative Marx, Protestantism and Communism, bourgeois democracy and proletarian democracy, liberalism and socialism - from religion and politics to economics, the three forever intertwined throughout a relative age."

 

"Not so in the coming absolute age, when sovereignty would be vested in the Leader and the ownership or, rather, trusteeship of the means of production pass to the Centre, of which the Leader is sovereign.  There politics and economics will be absorbed into the Leader, who will bear these 'sins of the world' in his sovereignty, much as Atlas bore the world on his shoulders in the pagan mythology of the ancient Greeks, and Christ did the same for the ensuing Christians.

     "There theocracy alone will prevail, the relativity of politics and economics becoming a thing of the past, like the democratic and autocratic spectra to which they correspond, economics preceding politics no less than the God-Kings preceded people's representatives, religion succeeding politics no less than the people's representatives succeeded kings, everything passing from matter to spirit, from doing to being.  The Truth alone triumphant, as mankind is set on course for the post-human millennium.  Aesthetics and ethics having faded away or been killed off.  The Leader beyond good and evil, not motivated by ethical considerations, like a democratic politician, but solely by service to the Truth, considering 'good' that which furthers and consolidates the Truth.

     "Yes, my friends, I am beyond good and evil, and I rejoice in my freedom, the freedom of the Free Spirit!  'The Good' are not admirable to me, they are the obverse side of a dualistic coin, striving to combat and counter evil.  They're part-and-parcel of a relative compromise, the existence of the one presupposing that of the other, 'the Good' continuing to exist so long as there is evil, 'the Right' so long as there is 'the Left', private enterprise so long as there is state socialism.

     "But I, who represent the Truth, am beyond good and evil, and my followers would live in a society where there was no compromise between these two adversaries of the ethical spectrum, where evil had been stamped out for all time and 'the Good' ceased to be necessary, there being no good for them to do in a society where 'the Evil' no longer held sway because no longer able to do evil.  Ah, such an absolute society would be free for the Truth, saved from good and evil by the Truth!"

 

"Like the Blessed Virgin, the True World Messiah, loosely corresponding to a Second Coming, pertains to the true, or absolute, part of the theocratic spectrum.  In being the antithetical equivalent of the Blessed Virgin, he, too, is virginal, celibate, pure - a relative absolutism.  Even the crude approximation to this deity, as signified by Hitler, was in some degree virginal or, at any rate, less carnal than the average German.

     "Yes, my friends, he was no great womanizer, being too shy as a youth and too preoccupied with saving the German people from their enemies as a man ... to have much time or inclination for women.  As Leader, he took Eva Braun for mistress, being in theory her lover but in practice somewhat neglectful of her.  He only married her after Germany was lost and his position as Leader no longer tenable.  Their marriage was, as you'll know, but a brief affair, soon to be interrupted, so legend has it, by mutual suicide.  It was an act of charity on Hitler's part to marry this simple girl at the end.

     "Well, my friends, marriage would be quite inappropriate for the more credible manifestation of the Second Coming, so you needn't expect him to get married at any time, even if he were subsequently to take a woman or female companion for domestic help, which is not impossible though, given his celibate past and absolutist integrity, by no means guaranteed!  Rather, he must maintain his celibacy in conformity with his status as embodiment and intimation of the Holy Ghost.  After all, he pertains to the main part of the theocratic spectrum, unlike the Antichrist, Marx, whose status on the heretical subdivision of that same spectrum wasn't entirely incompatible with lecherous proclivities!

     "There is no intimation of the Holy Ghost in endomorphic Marx, simply an extension of Protestant love into communist hate, the hatred of the proletariat for the bourgeoisie, the division of the ethical spectrum into warring factions more sharply polarized than ever before, the former striving for an ultimate victory over the latter, but without the guidance of the Truth, without which no ultimate victory can be achieved, Communism being but an extension of the ethical antagonism of the middle spectrum to a polarized antithesis between private capitalism and state socialism, in which the great world Illusion of Marxism seeks to overcome Ethics.  So not, my friends, 'the Good' against 'the Evil', as in a liberal democracy, but 'the Illusory' against both 'the Good' and 'the Evil' in the name of the Great Illusion of World Communism, that heretical ideology of the Antichrist!"

 

"Know then, my enemies, that the Truth alone will ultimately be victorious!  There can be no question of Illusion triumphing over Truth.  The way to the post-human millennium leads through Social Transcendentalism, that historical successor to Fascism and antithesis to autocratic royalism - the age of leaders superseding that of people's representatives, even those who, in communist states, represent the people dictatorially.  Dictatorial representatives correspond to the Illusion, not an absolute antithesis to Truth, to the theocratic leader, but falling just short of it, a near miss or relative antithesis.

     "You will have noticed, my enemies, how fashionable it has become, in this post-Hitlerian age, to speak of people's representatives as 'leaders', how even bourgeois prime ministers are regarded, if superficially, as 'leaders'.  The age, even now, isn't wholly sympathetic towards mere representatives.  The Zeitgeist increasingly points towards the coming of leaders, the 'Caesars' in Spengler's paradoxical prophecy, who lead the People from above, scorning identification with democratic criteria, knowing themselves to be above and beyond the scope of prime ministers and presidents.

     "What use had Hitler for the Chancellorship or the Presidency?  He absorbed both offices into himself and transcended then in the guise of Führer, the Sovereign Leader of a fascist state.  As Nietzsche to the Kaiser, so Spengler to the Führer.  Away with petty democrats!  The age calls forth theocracy!"

 

"Even the Americans, despite their democratic traditions, have an inkling of the Truth, an interpretation, necessarily bogus, of the Second Coming ... in the guise of Superman, whether on film or in comic books.  This Superman, owing little or nothing to Nietzsche, arrives on earth as a boy from a distant galaxy, like a Christ from 'On High', and is found and raised by latter-day equivalents of Mary and Joseph.  They discover, in due course, that their adopted child has superhuman powers, and he learns from the spirit of his true father - another New Testament parallel - that he must use these exceptional powers for good, not to alter the destiny of the world but to combat evil wherever it may arise.

     "So, my enemies, this bogus Second Coming is implicated in the ethical spectrum and is only marginally wiser, despite his extraordinary powers, than the good right-wingers who, in liberal societies, are accustomed, after their fashion, to combating political evil in the form of the left-wing opposition.  He stands no more chance of overcoming evil, in any absolute sense, than they do, and is all the more bogus from a genuinely Messianic point-of-view, since it is precisely the American way of life, with its liberal institutions and capitalist freedoms, that he wishes to protect.  He's not 'the True' but 'the Good', and if 'the Evil' are among his chief enemies, they certainly aren't the only ones!  He would oppose 'the Illusory' as well, assuming there were any Communists at large in the land of his adoption.

     "Fortunately for America there aren't, since Americans like the good life too much.  They have given the world Superman, but he exists only in the imagination.  Real-life supermen would be somewhat different from him, both in their post-humanist manifestation (as superhuman men) and, most especially, in their post-human manifestation (as human brains artificially supported and sustained in collectivized contexts).  Real-life supermen oppose real-life submen wherever they may be found.  No, my enemies, not simply as criminals - though undoubtedly some of them will be such - but more specifically as tribalists, living as subnationals in a supra-national society.  Hitler was, in his paradoxical way, such a superman, and the closer approximation to the Second Coming should be another!"

 

"Could Social Transcendentalists be statesmen, in any real political sense?  No, my enemies, Social Transcendentalists should never be defined in terms applicable to the democratic spectrum.  Rather, they're theocratic Centrists, for whom the meditation centre takes precedence over any parliamentary assembly.  Indeed, there wouldn't be a parliamentary assembly, since parliaments appertain to democracy as places where people's representatives congregate to do the people's business.

     "If theocratic Centrists were to congregate anywhere, it wouldn't be in a parliament building but in a special Centre, a kind of arch-cathedral equivalent in which they would discuss what needed to be discussed in relation to Social Transcendentalist progress, and where they would listen to the Leader haranguing them on the domestic and global situation, ideological ambitions and obligations, or the finer points of Centrist logic.  They would face the Leader in a kind of semi-circular arrangement, followers in the presence of the ideological cynosure, somewhat along the lines of Mussolini's Grand Council, the Leader and his chief disciples - members of the ruling elite.

     "Naturally there would also be regional Centres, where the generality of theocratic Centrists in any one area could congregate to discuss local affairs and carry on the business of what would formerly have been called Local Government.  Most if not all Centrists should, in addition, have an individual meditation centre for purposes of religious instruction and enlightenment of the masses, their role there akin to that of a priest in a church, being effectively the successors to priests.

     "Unlike in a relative society, however, these theocratic Centrists would not function separately from politicians, since there would be no politics as generally understood within a democratic context.  With the supersession of democracy, legislative and administrative authority should pass exclusively to the theocratic spectrum, as signified by the Centre.  Just as in Catholic Ireland the Church has a powerful influence on politics ... as pertaining to the soft-line republican state, so, my enemies, the Centre would lead in a Social Transcendentalist Ireland.  What we see now is but an intimation of a more absolute situation still to arise."

 

"Of course, I know that you, my enemies, will try to prevent Social Transcendentalism from coming to pass in Ireland, deeming it undemocratic and a serious threat to your vested interests.  As I've said before, the theocratic nature of Social Transcendentalism puts it above and beyond the democratic pale, since democracy is about electing representatives, whereas the Leader of the Movement in question represents only the Holy Spirit and could not be elected on a strictly democratic ticket, even if the majority population of the Irish Republic were to vote for him.

     "But just consider, my enemies, how dissatisfied he would feel if, in being democratically elected, he was duly obliged, along with his chief enemies, to take a seat in parliament, in the dáil, and play the democratic game, co-existing with political parties on the basis of democratic representation, obliged to face the prospect of future general elections and a permanent or intermittent representative status!

     "No, that kind of situation he could never tolerate!  So if he were to be elected democratically - and there is no other way that he would want to assume political responsibility - it would have to be on the prior understanding, backed and sanctioned by the Church, that he intended to abolish the parliamentary system and set up a Social Transcendentalist administration - admittedly a most unorthodox and paradoxical basis for being elected, but not altogether inconceivable in a country where 'God and the Church come first' and a majority of people could therefore probably be depended upon to use democracy in order to vote for a new and ultimate theocracy, even granted hard-line democratic opposition to theocratic absolutism.

     "Yet he knows that even if he were elected in such a paradoxical fashion, there would still be parliamentary opposition to his intentions to abolish the democratic constitution, so that, one way or another, friction would probably break out between those on his side - the true and theocratic Irishmen - and those on the other side - that of the state, democracy, capitalism, private property, petty-bourgeois internationalism.  There is no way that my enemies, a sizeable minority of the population of Eire, would willingly allow me a free hand in revolutionizing the country."

 

"So, my enemies, I take up the responsibility of the Last Judgement and I say: if struggle there must be, then we shall struggle to the end, using the opportunity any such reactionary revolt against majority interests may give us to remove your influence from the land, in order that our people may go forward to a Social Transcendentalist salvation ... free from all alien influences, free to be true to their selves, to develop an absolutely theocratic Ireland.  We would rejoice in the opportunity any such struggle would give us to purge you from our midst!

     "Eventually, my enemies, there would be few if any enemies left on the island, and the Irish people would be free from oppression for all time, free to develop their theocratic potential to its utmost, as they grew into the True World Religion ... of Social Transcendentalism/Super-transcendentalism and paid regular visits to its meditation centres, the future successors to churches.

     "But, of course, the Irish Social Transcendental Centre, as Ireland would then be called, would have more to do, initially, than solely to cultivate the spiritual potential of the Irish people.  It would be dedicated to expanding Centrist influence abroad and helping those who recognize the ideology of the True World Messiah to overcome their enemies, who are also his enemies.  They, too, must be subjected to Last Judgement criteria, in order that the Truth may prevail and his 'Kingdom' come to pass throughout the world.

     "Ah, hear this well, my enemies: we Social Transcendentalists have truly global objectives!  We are no petty-bourgeois internationalists, still less bourgeois nationalists, but proletarian supra-nationalists for whom the existence of nation states is but a passing phase of political evolution, one especially pertinent to the democratic spectrum.  We of the theocratic spectrum know where evolution is tending and, rest assured, we shall know how to further it as well!"

     Thus speaks the Social Transcendentalist.

 

                            

LONDON 1984 (Revised 2012)

 

 

A TRUE EXTREMISM