20-24/02/13

When I reluctantly picked up my pen to write something this morning, it was not because I was sceptical of the veracity of the idea that had occurred to me during the night (though that can be a good enough reason for scepticism), nor that I had nothing particularly new or original to say, but, rather, because my fingers were numb from cold compounded by a degree of alcoholic self-abuse the previous night, which made it difficult for me to grip the pen. So I put it down again and got on with something else. Other things intervened, and I was reluctant, even after my fingers had kind of thawed out, to return to my writing pad, having, in any case, forgotten what I had earlier intended to write.

The other day I picked up my pen and put it down again pretty sharpish, not because I was reluctant to write so much as because I was reluctant to write with the black biro that lay across my notebook, for all the world like a love-sick cuckold or, more to the point, a social democratic arsehole awaiting some anti-stigmata, so to speak, or maybe even the coup de grace that I could be depended upon, sooner or later, to grant it.

Usually I unthinkingly (for a thinker) have no hesitation in picking up a biro – any biro that happens to lay conveniently to-hand – in order to scribble some thoughts into a notebook. The other day, however, was different, and I am reluctant to say if the fault lay with me or with the ballpoint pen. Either way, it was a day that passed unremarked upon, even though it probably contained one or two remarkable events or, at any rate, thoughts.

Today, thank goodness, I have no such scruples, but have scribbled away as though my life depended upon it; which, in a sense, it does, even if that makes me, by association, a bit (you thought I was going to purposely pun that with a 'c' instead of sticking to the 't' on the end, didn't you? Well, though!) of an arsehole myself or, at the very least, somehow social democratic, too. At least I will have the consolation of keying-in all this to my laptop later-on today and thus, as it were, over-typing anything I may have scribbled this morning.

Incidentally, I would never use – and to the best of my recollection have never used – a fountain pen. Nor, for that matter, would I use a pencil (better suited to sketching) to write or, in my case, scribble. My thoughts are way beyond the parameters of pencils and fountain pens alike, requiring the services of black biros whose ink – rather akin to blood – can be seen through the transparent plastic tube or container with which one grips the pen, holding it, as I do, between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand at a point just above the ballpoint's metallic funnel tapering down towards the ballpoint itself, so that the upper end of the pen nestles against the outer side of my forefinger in what is, by any standards, a firm grip. This has been the case longer than I can or care to remember, and I would be most reluctant to change my writing habits or, more correctly, the method by means of which I set about the often perplexing task of conveying my thoughts to paper.

Seeing these thoughts of mine in the light of day, so to speak, they are exposed to view in more than one sense, enabling one to subsequently clarify or modify notions that would otherwise appear indecent in their naked, or unrevised, presentation. To hell with scribbling for scribbling's sake and all that spontaneous writing rubbish! At the end of the day you still have to read what has been written, for better or worse.

My motto has always been: revise, revise, and revise again. Sometimes I can't revise enough, being most reluctant to allow anyone to read anything of mine that I am not satisfied or happy with having read in the first place. I am my own sternest critic who censures himself left, right, and proverbial centre in the interests of a more focused presentation of my thought such that will do maximum justice to my philosophy and, correlative with that, to my various experiences in and conclusions about life and the world in general. It is only through painstaking revision that I overcome my initial reluctance to publish and face the prospect of people reading what I had earlier written.

Degeneration is a natural process that affects all life forms over a period of time, as they draw towards the end of their lives. Old people degenerate as a matter of natural course, and so, in a manner of speaking, do civilizations, Western civilization not excepted.

Much of so-called Modern Art has been described as degenerate, not least by the Nazis and even the Soviets. But that could only be expected from fundamentally barbarous and, certainly in the case of the Nazis, inceptively global ideologies which regarded themselves as existing beyond the parameters (one might almost say 'pale') of Western civilization, with its petty-bourgeois departure, in much modern art, from the representational and still concrete norms of the more conventional or traditional kinds of Western art, a departure often taking the form of abstraction in one way or another, such that the more enlightened would view less as symptomatic of degeneration than of a progression towards a kind of metaphysical omega point commensurate with an aspiration towards or even, in a limited sense, achievement of Eternity.

But one can see how, from a fundamentally barbarous (militaristic) point of view, such idealism in much modern art could be interpreted as degenerate or, more correctly in the case of art that was still representational to a degree, if within distorted parameters, as degenerating from the representational traditions, since an inceptively global civilization, beholden to a new form of concretion, will not be partial to the abstract, in whatever form, whether expressionist or impressionist or some combination or derivative thereof, such so-called non-representational art may take.

Therefore in resurrecting a kind of pagan approach to art in which, when not overly social realist, the 'body beautiful', whether clothed (militaristically) or unclothed (pantheistically), becomes one of the chief vehicles of ideological expression, the Nazis upheld a new alpha orientation appropriate to their militaristic agenda and to the crude, even barbarous beginnings of a new civilization, namely the global civilization with which we are more familiar these days in what is, by any accounts, a post-Western age, in which any form of modern art on canvas, no matter how abstract, could only be regarded as a petty-bourgeois anachronism in a more openly proletarian age, an age still struggling with barbarism and philistinism (not least in the sphere of popular culture) within a global context that has yet to transcend its own concretion through a new kind of abstraction comparable, though synthetically superior to, the so-called 'degenerate' art of the bourgeois West.

When such a time will come, I cannot of course say. But until it does, the addiction to all things concrete, not least on account of female domination, will doubtless continue, and global civilization will be insufficiently mature to have 'degenerated' towards true culture in the most synthetically artificial of abstract creations, whether in the guise of art or music or whatever. For the abstract only comes, like a psychic resolution to life, with old age, not with youth and not to any perceptible degree with middle age either, whether of the individual (a dirty word from a concrete standpoint beholden to the dragooned collective) or of society in general.

When life is young (and pagan) it generates, as in reproduces and expands. When it is old (and Christian) life degenerates, as in being unreproductive and contractive, more typified, in other words, by the centripetal than by the centrifugal. An omega point is, by definition, the product of a degenerative process likely to culminate in the utmost centro-complexification (a de Chardin-esque term for contraction) of a society or individual or, better, a society given to individualism orientated towards if not actually in Eternity.

But when the individuals are given to society in the collective, we find not Eternity but Infinity, coupled to the indefinite expansion of peoples at other peoples' expense in a context typified by competition, the corollary of concrete expansion through generation.

Hence whereas the omega is co-operative and abstract, the alpha is competitive and concrete, particles as against wavicles, collectivity as against individuality, and the Infinity of spatial space (Hell) as opposed to the Eternity of repetitive time (Heaven).

Generation is natural, even supernatural in its flirtatious inception. Degeneration or, rather, what emerges because of degeneration is, to coin a word, nurtural if not supernurtural. For whereas the one is apparently female and objective, or female in its objectivity, the other is essentially male and subjective, or male in its subjectivity – at least in respect of whatever, as free psyche, accompanies the degeneration of soma and could not arise without soma having degenerated or become otherwise bound rather than free.

Alpha and omega, beginning and end, concrete and abstract, will and soul, competition and co-operation, beauty and truth, drama and philosophy, science and religion, the loving Clear Spirit of Hell (within the beautiful context of Devil the Mother) as opposed to the truthful God the Father (within the joyful context of Heaven the Holy Soul), the absolute alpha and omega of Devil the Mother and Heaven the Holy Soul, noumenal objectivity and noumenal subjectivity, absolute concretion and absolute abstraction, the generative free will of beauty and the degenerative or, rather, cadent (but that, to anticipate another theory of mine, has still to be broached) free soul of joy.

If youth is given to Infinity and old age, by contrast, to Eternity, then middle age is perforce torn between infinity and eternity in the world of finite and temporal relativity. A kind of regenerate, as opposed to either generative or degenerative … leading to cadent, norm.

Generation/decadence; degeneration/cadence. Two sides of the same coin? Degeneration of soma, cadent ascension of psyche.

The degeneration of soma vis-a-vis the cadence of psyche – a declining alpha and a rising omega (resurrection of psyche as soul?).

There is (was) a degenerative process at work in Modern Art, but it would largely have applied to the degeneration of the concrete rather than to the emergence, like a resurrection (to use the religious term) of the abstract as a psychic alternative to declining soma, only made possible by the decline of soma. Therefore just as one must die to the body (the crucifixional paradigm) in order to be reborn into the mind, so art had to die (degeneratively) to soma in order to be reborn (via abstraction) into psyche, dying to representational concretion in order to be reborn into non-representational abstraction (or even, certainly in the case of Surrealism, into a kind of representational abstraction), thereby achieving an apotheosis unprecedented in Western art and significant of a kind of omega point of canvas-based art commensurate, so I contend, with petty-bourgeois criteria.

Today I have to confess that I only wrote the above entries with the greatest of reluctance, insofar as there would seem to be insufficient gender differentiation, quite uncharacteristic of my writings generally, between the generation/decadence and cadence/degeneration antitheses. The notion that the bound psyche of metachemistry should be identified with decadence in relation to the generative status of free soma now seems to me, after a day or two's reflection, logically unsustainable and therefore philosophically spurious. And the same would go for the distinction, in metaphysics, between free psyche as cadent and bound soma as degenerate, although there would seem, on the basis of the crucifixional paradigm, to be some justification for such a theory.

On deeper reflection, however, it seems to me that the distinction between metachemistry and pseudo-metaphysics at the northwest point of the intercardinal axial compass, which is after all essentially one of gender, should parallel that between generation and decadence, irrespective of whether with regard to free soma and bound psyche in metachemistry or, on the male side of the gender fence, with regard to pseudo-free soma and pseudo-bound psyche in pseudo-metaphysics, so that the former pairing is to be associated with generation and the latter pairing with decadence, that being a retreat from metaphysical cadence, so to speak, which, at the northeast point of the intercardinal axial compass, would be – or have been – hegemonic over pseudo-metachemistry, as over a degenerate retreat from, or contrast with, the generative impulse, founded on free will, of metachemistry.

Hence generation/decadence would be equivalent to metachemistry/pseudo-metaphysics, whereas cadence/degeneration would be equivalent, by contrast, to metaphysics/pseudo-metachemistry. That, I have to say, better suits my philosophy than does the initial theory, and I believe it can also be applied 'downstairs', as it were, to chemistry and pseudo-physics at the southwest point of the intercardinal axial compass and to physics and pseudo-chemistry at the southeast point thereof, if less in relation to the above terms than, in the former context, to what could be called pro-generation (relative to progeny) over anti-pro-cadence, and, in the latter context, to pro-cadence over anti-pro-generation, the pro-cadence of physics no less diagonally removed from the anti-pro-cadence of pseudo-physics …than the pro-generation of chemistry from the anti-pro-generation (anti-progeny relative to recourse to contraception) of pseudo-chemistry, so that we have parallels, in relative or phenomenal (corporeal) terms, to the absolute or noumenal (ethereal) distinctions between generation/decadence on the one hand and cadence/degeneration on the other.

This, I must say, is a theory I believe I can live with, even if it will require some fine-tuning, as it were, and even modification in the days or weeks to come. Certainly, I am less reluctant to go with this argument than with the one I opened the discussion with a couple of days ago, since it neatly complements the gender differentials that are characteristic of my logical structures.

Therefore the noumenal male is decadent when no longer cadent, whilst the noumenal female is degenerate when no longer generative, that is, given to generation.

Likewise, the phenomenal male is anti-pro-cadent when no longer pro-cadent, while the phenomenal female is anti-pro-generative when no longer pro-generative, or given, in chemical vein, to progeny.

But, of course, none of this would accord with my axial theorizing in relation to church-hegemonic (southwest to northeast points of the intercardinal axial compass) and state-hegemonic (northwest to southeast points of the said compass), since the salvation of the pseudo-physical to metaphysics on the church-hegemonic axis would parallel a deliverance from anti-pro-cadence to cadence, whereas the correlative counter-damnation of the chemical to pseudo-metachemistry would parallel a deliverance from pro-generation to degeneration.

Contrariwise, the damnation of the metachemical to pseudo-chemistry on the state-hegemonic axis would parallel a deliverance from generation to anti-pro-generation, whereas the counter-salvation of the pseudo-metaphysical to physics would parallel a deliverance from decadence to pro-cadence, neither of which kinds of state-hegemonic deliverance would be sustainable, in consequence of which at some point they, or their adherents, would have to opt for lower-tier positions on the church-hegemonic axis in order to avoid the ignominious decline or slide into radical social democracy (communism), and thus a fate merely regenerative in character, which is to say, neo-generative and characterized by state-absolutist criteria inimical not so much to democracy (scarcely representational) as to plutocracy. Enough for now!

The word 'cadence' is normally only used in connection with music, where it signifies a close, the resolution to a musical phrase and/or movement, like the 5:1 'perfect cadence' (G to C in the key of C) or the 4:1 'imperfect cadence' (F to C in the key of C), to take but a simple example in each case. But I have used it, above, in connection with philosophy, and more precisely in relation to free psyche as a 'coming out' with, or following, the decline or degeneration of bodily soma, like 'life after death' (presupposing the almost cannibalistic self-consuming of the central nervous system to a point of permanent incandescence), or the prospect, in other words, of what Christians might equate with eternity.

I was, to be sure, most reluctant to use the term 'cadence', not to mention 'cadent' as its adjectival counterpart, in this novel way. But sometimes you have no choice, the language lets you down and either you invent a new word or modify an existing one or, indeed, use an existing one, as here, in a new way, with implications that go beyond what convention or tradition, conditioned as much by ethnic as by grammatical or environmental factors, would have allowed. Common usage is all very well, but anyone who wishes to expand knowledge towards the possibility of Truth, or metaphysical truth, must be willing to take up the challenge of finding appropriate terminology, however reluctantly.

Thus 'cadence' as the opposite of 'decadence', and 'cadent' as the opposite of 'decadent', the latter term having nothing to do with 'decade', a period of ten years, but implying a falling away from previous higher standards, whether moral or otherwise, as a consequence, I would contend, of generative pressure from a contrary order of perfection, as of beauty to truth or even strength to knowledge.

Likewise, 'degeneration', the opposite of 'generation', implies a falling away from the previous higher standards, not necessarily moral in the Christian sense but arguably moral in their own (pagan) right, of 'generation', largely in consequence, I suspect, of cadent pressures from a contrary order of perfection, as of truth to beauty, and not simply in relation to the ageing process (which in any case affects both genders pretty much alike).

So we have, contrary to what convention would allow, a parallelism of sorts, with opposite gender implications, between generation/decadence on the one hand, and cadence/degeneration on the other, to take but the noumenal antithesis of space and time, both in terms of metachemical space (spatial) and pseudo-metachemical pseudo-time (sequential) and, by contrast, metaphysical time (repetitive) and pseudo-metachemical pseudo-space (spaced), the latter coupling of which would accord with the symbolism, I believe, of Saint George and the (neutralized) Dragon or, for that matter, with the proverbial lamb and lion and/or wolf that only 'lies down' with the aforesaid lamb, in pseudo-metachemistry under metaphysics (or pseudo-space under time) because it has been neutralized (rendered degenerative) and in no position to assault it from a predatory (generative) point of view.

The decadent is as much a 'falling away' from the cadent on the male side of noumenal life … as the degenerate a 'falling away' from the generative on its female side, and whereas decadence approximates to the 'Prodigal Son' (or 'sonofabitch' sucking-up to metachemical somatic licence in the guise of the will to generate), cadence is that which, symbolizing a conclusion or resolution to life (as to music), is beingfully aloof, in metaphysics, from any such pseudo-metaphysical 'falling away' under the vacuous influence of metachemical generation. Quite the contrary, cadence is what lies beyond the crucifixional paradigm of bound, or degenerate, soma – namely, the resurrection of the soul to Eternal Life.