REMEMBERING

Recently - yesterday actually - I suffered a betrayal, and it traumatized me. For the entire evening and throughout my attempt to sleep during the night, I experienced the phenomenon that Freud described so well in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. I kept spontaneously rehearsing the betrayal and the events leading up to it, re-imagining them in different forms that would have led to different outcomes, fixating on a person to blame. Something that I was unable to bear entered my psychic system, and because it was a shock, and because I lacked the resources to easily categorize it, something within me was working intensely to create a narrative, to develop a new concept so as to be prepared in case the same shock would happen again.

It times like this that the arcanum of Apocalypse is especially valuable. When betrayed, the obvious choice is to react, to play the hand you’re dealt with, to take action in a way that will satisfy the temporary discomfort - but this is a hyperborean approach to life. It’s better to remember during these times what it is that one is seeking to achieve, and to remember to aim for the highest goal, which is the resolution of the antinomy between fact and value, or between existence and essence.

The capacity to imagine ‘what’s best for humanity’, to desire it, to yearn for it, to see, feel, and reason about it, is one and the same as the capacity to break free from the fate legislated by a trauma, and therefore to break free from the power of the person by whom it was wreaked. Wounds are terrible things, but they also constitute a kind of basic building block of reality.

It can be wagered that any one wound that I myself experience relates back to a series of wounds that refer back to a primordial virtual wound that constitutes my very essence; and it can further be wagered that the sum total of these essence-constuting wounds lived by human beings constitutes an ur-wound constitutive of human civilization as such.

Part of the value of savoring the ur-wound is simply that the pain of one’ immediate wound pales in comparison - it is practically nothing compared to this constitutive wound.

THE SPACE OF APOCALYPTIC VISION

Every important event in the world happens for multiple reasons that are in no way coordinated with one another.   There is never a single cause, and, in part because of this, there is never a single correct action to take in response to whatever event has taken place.   It takes a bit of imaginative gnosis to grasp that what's being described here is the true fabric of reality.   We like to think of reality as something solid 'out there', the universe, an abstraction that we imagine to be ontologically fundamental,  and as a result  we fail to see the reality of these 'overdetermined' events right under our noses.   Every person who reads this is in the midst of some kind of event of this kind - worrying about what the correct next step is, wondering why this or that happened, wishing it hadn't, perhaps, deliberating and ultimately deciding (with a wide range of potential coherence or incoherence).   They simply appear, and we have no choice but to respond to them, without fully understanding them, and without fully understanding what will come of our response.  

I've put a fair amount of work into crystallizing an articulate apocalyptic vision - the vision of Haelegen, the Sovereign Hierarchico-Emancipatory Individuation Municipality.   But my own vision will always be provisional (which doesn't mean I don't think it is the best and clearest).   To some degree, any apocalyptic vision will do.  The key is to be able to take action in the name of something.  Otherwise one simply reacts.   One is either ruled by the terms of the event itself (Hyperborean) or one takes up one's own law, understood and obeyed privately, and takes an experimental step in its name.   Those are the only two choices.  The latter choice always means war, because one's own vision is intrinsically at odds with whatever field of meaning one is embedded in.   

Apocalypse as the activity of a faculty, which is what the term is meant to designate here, specifically refers to the practice of strengthening one's power of imagination so as to be able to see the world through the lense of one's own vision more and more often.   It simply isnt possible to carry out an Endeavor (the pursuit of a path in the name of the apocalyptic vision across a series of events) unless one also engages in an entirely separate exercise of making and maintaining contact with one's own vision.

JOY

Most satisfaction of desire that is possible in this world has the effect of putting desire to an end.  But this supposed satisfaction is actually the opposite of what it appears to be.    Ascetics understand that their practice of renunciation or abstention from certain pleasures has nothing to with turning away from desire - on the contrary they are enhancing and intensifying it by not allowing it to discharge.   When desire is torn away from its lower objects, freed from them, it rises like a tide, pulling awareness up with it.  At a certain point one grasps that none of the objects that seem able to fulfill desire really do - all they're really doing is nipping it in the bud, preventing its true satisfaction, which is intensification and expansion.  And what would the true satisfaction be?  Joy, which is desire without an object, which is music.   The desire for true fulfillment is the  true fulfillment of desire - this formula explains how cessation and expansion could be one and the same.

THE NAME

It is very difficult to do anything without doing it "in the name" of something.   This is the meaning of Lacan's motif of "the name of the father".  Agency breaks down and collapses in on itself without a name - an act has to both have immediacy qua act and also represent some additional outcome for which it is undertaken.   For many people a name of this kind is installed early in life and lived unconsciously.  But more and more there appears to be no legitimate name.  But maybe a name can be constructed - a name better than the name of the father, absolute instead of arbitrary.  "Apocalypse", then, is the ultimate name.  The redemption of human history qua transformation of human nature.  There can be no higher name than this.

WIDE CONTEXT

Apocalypse is nothing other than awareness and corresponding desire across the widest context - from the prehuman past to the posthuman future.   Desire and awareness with this wide span has a generative capacity - it is causal.     The only possible act is an apocalyptic act.  Any other kind of act is secretly passive - secretly acted from the outside.  But the apocalyptic act does not even require action - it is already active insofar as it is a clear vision.  Clear vision and intense desire cascade into materialization.

PAST AND FUTURE

The true past is an immemorial event that took place infinitely long ago.  It bubbles over with shadows and polysemy.  At some point the world's past - the blistering singularity from which the fabric of our universe blossomed - and my own shadows of obscure and mutely important grounding and traumatizing events merge together.   Wasn't there a time before the dew began dripping down my stem?  Isn't there a perspective from which the coordinates of my practical existence shine through the crystals as a silky crosshatch?  Apocalypse is knowledge of this past - real, embodied, emotive and imaginative knowledge - to the point of weeping with joyful sorrow.  

And just as much, it is knowledge of the future:  the glorious vision of God.  Ecstatic self-sacrifice, ground down and rent by the jaws of becoming, hugging its molars, caressing the ridge of its mouth.  Wading through the stars of the transcendental, where thought's determination has no owner, where lava shoots through soundless space.  The radical freedom and power of Haqq commands suicide - obedience to the command entails dissolution of the very self that finally became equal to the act at the very moment of its execution.  

DESIRE FOR APOCALYPSE

Every decision I make has as its backdrop a horizon of meaning - it is for the sake of an outcome that will affect my social relationships etc.   The horizon itself is sustained by desires and habits which are not readily visible from within the horizon.    

Obedience to transcendental Law entails taking Apocalypse to always be the horizon for conduct.  To follow the if-then chain of reasoning all the way to the end.  "What does this act do to serve the transformation of the human race into its progeny?"

FULL THOUGHT

How is it possible to conceive of a future that is not inconceivable but very difficult to conceive?   Not strictly unimaginable or unthinkable, but seemingly laughable from the standpoint of the current cultural chaos - blocked from view by shame, scorn, half-believed-in cultural convictions,  loose threads of prejudice and habit. That is the challenge of apocalypse: to think the thought of divine self-overcoming.   But this must be a thought that is conceived, imagined and lived.   An awakening not to a false god of consolation or an origin myth, but future union of existence and essence, of a nearly unbearable degree of emancipation,  already potentially present as prophecy 

FAITH AND REASON

These two have stood opposed ever since the collision of Platonism and revealed religion.  The solutions have always been to order these two modes of access to truth in some kind of rank or relationship - certain things can only be revealed, others must be cognized, so it's a category mistake to see them as opposed.  Or they are opposed, but one ultimately trumps the other - whatever.   

But now it is easy to see that faith simply is  reason.  Faith is reason all at once  .   Inasmuch as reason is active, autonomous and affective, it is simply a sort of locality within the fabric of faith.   Renunciation, transfiguration and love:  these are the highest operators of cognition. 

A reasoning capable of thinking all the way to the beginning and the end, situating the evolution of human life within the natural history of matter, and determining the precise nature of affect, habit and communication: all it is able to see is universal love  

COHERENCE

Nothing is coherent except for apocalypse.  Apocalypse is the whole, it is the truth.  Nothing has any value beyond its power to yield apocalypse.  Everything can be referred to apocalypse and everything should  

OLOLON's Descent

The most rational desire that is humanly possible is the desire for 01010n to send its daughter OLOLON down to earth so that she can remove S/HE/IM's slashes and replace them with periods, which is to say to found the Sovereign Hierarchico-Emancipatory Individuation Municipality (S.H.E.I.M.)

Rational desire:  on the one hand, it is a matter of unflinching rationalism.  Reason has logical limits, but it also has libidinal limits: the distortion of reasoning about that which is too much to bear; rationalizations, neurotic compulsions, the turning away from transcendental power.   If the unfolding of reason's power - as will to truth - has been an engine of global development, the Ark Work has as its task the affirmation and continuation of the project of reason, which will always tend towards emancipation ideally even as it produces instrumental horror, and especially as it destroys religions and cultures.

Desire can only manifest itself fully with the help of reason.  Desire needs a trellis to cling to so that it can coincide with reason at the highest level, where reason and desire are one and the same - not by being rational and modest in one's desires as a sort of utilitarianism, though.  Rather there is a transcendental point at which reason and desire are the exact same thing:  the point beyond the pleasure principle at which the closed circle is cracked open and 'transcendent' axioms lose their power.  Desire is ultimately the thirst to destroy axioms, and reason is ultimately the same thing.

So it is as the ultimate conjunctio oppoistorum - the philosopher's stone, as it has been known - between reason and faith - because faith is nothing other than pure desire - that The Ark Work stokes desire for the object of ultimate concern:   yearning for the descent of OLOLON 

SUBJECTIVITY IS INHERENTLY APOCALYPTIC

The subject is a question.  The human being is not an animal: it is a question.  Its sickness and struggle is a breach in an otherwise smooth-functioning system of command.   This is well known.  What is more difficult is to keep the attention focussed on the fact that the human subject is more than one question.  It is a question that leads to more questions, like the kingdom of ends in Aristotle, or like the famous Burroughs quote about problems:  no problem is ever solved; all solutions lead to more problems.   The fact is, maintaining a certain rationalism would entail recognizing that the question of the human sends the questioner along a chain of questions that demands an ultimate payoff at the end: an ultimate satisfaction that, although it is abstract in a sense, can be conceived as something quite concrete.  A state of affairs such that things have turned out to have been worth it. 

TO CONCEIVE OF APOCALYPSE

It is difficult to conceive of apocalypse seriously - not apocalypse as environmental catastrophe, but apocalypse as revelation.   It requires an engagement with sincere eschatology, even if it it not possible to engage in a completely sincere way.   I am especially interested in Moltmann right now.  Eschatology has to be thought of as something literal - not just the realization that the kingdom of god is already here or some reinscription of the idea into psychology or personal ethics.  The world is capable of it - the world is capable of anything at all.  So why not the best conceivable outcome?  That is the task for eschatology: to visualize and yearn for the most desirable outcome for humanity conceivable.  It is not completely obvious what this would be, but it would certainly be something that, although most people think it would be impossible, is not impossible - or rather its impossibility is the condition of its possibility