Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

The statement "Things are the way they are because you want them to be that way" strikes a clear, intriguing note in me, much more than "Why does it have to be this way" or somesuch. It seems a premise worth playing with, sort of fresh. And if the statement is true, think of the responsibility and sense of power it might bring as a useful mental attitude: I can now set about finding what's possible to change, create, etc. St. Francis's Serenity Prayer is a damned clear bell to hear now and again.

I think the dark secret of Thomas Ligotti is that he is standing in front of the light. (As in the silhouette photo of him at the back of IAFTIAFL; thus he is in darkness, his back to any light-source.)

The above comment is something that came to my mind a few weeks ago and I've hesitated to use it. What it means is that the worldview of malignacy may be just another one to adopt among many, but we like to forget how and when we make our choices. And if this is the condition of things, why, I can already hear someone saying, "Then, you see? It's not worth it, 'cause that sucks." Great! I, for one, might like to read a book set in a world where everything sucks...(!)

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

Yes, I think our worldview depends largely (if not entirely) on our point of focus at a given time. Look at a photograph under a magnifying glass, and you'll see a bunch of dots, and you might say, "This is nonsense," and nonsense might be undesirable to you. Or, you might say, "There's a pattern emerging from the spatial relations of these dots," though it might strike you as being purely impressionistic, since you still wouldn't be able to see the, erm, big picture. (The cheap and easy metaphors are sometimes the best. :P )

To a certain mind, though, an abstract series of dots can be just as valid and as interesting as what the photograph represents when taken as a whole. Furthermore, from such a perspective, there would appear to be "accidents of perception," but not "accidents of composition."

re: Ligotti "standing in front of the light"... well, obviously, eclipse imagery comes to mind. (Time for another convenient metaphor.) The darkness falls at midday, the animals go quiet and we worry that the world might even be coming to an end, but we can still see the penumbra, and if we were only to change the position of the occluding body slightly, then it would reflect the light.

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

Above all, I'm pretty sure we don't want to be bored.

Ahhh...so it's all settled.

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

"...a blinding eclipse of the many terrible shapes of this world."

The only escape is denial, the only way to deny is to ignore totally. Experience is a drug, slowly hissing into your veins from an unseen needle. The sensory apparatus is merely a wall with an aperture.

"And I swallowed the one yew berry..."

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

Funny -- I've been very absorbed in the world of Dark Shadows the past month on DVD. But I don't think I'd quite call it escape. DS was the daytime melodrama that ran on ABC-TV from 1966 to 1971.

--Barnabas

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

"Experience is a drug."

That reminds me of something an acquaintance of mine once said, which was funny to me because he's a bit of a "lad," in the sense that he's basically an English equivalent of a stereotypical American frat boy. Anyway, he's a chemistry student, and he was talking about how people shouldn't worry so much about doing drugs, since it's "just good chemical reactions," and we are, after all, just series of chemical reactions that happen to think of themselves as humans. I thought it was an admirably expansive rationalization for all those spliffs and rolls.... (speaking of potential escapes....)

...and that, in turn, makes me think of how people sometimes talk about psychedelics, i.e., the experience of "seeing through the (whichever plant/fungus/chemical)'s eyes," which sounds less like metaphor if we consider these experiences in terms of a dialogue between organisms.

Of course, I think if we were to see who was administering the proverbial needle, then we'd see an astonishingly familiar face... does your right hand know what your left hand is doing?

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

Your friend is a cool guy.

Speaking about drugs, anyone here familiar with Terence McKenna? Search for his Timewave Zero theory and see what a great acid trip that is. I was going to post a three part video of it that I found on Youtube, but I just found the whole thing was removed for Copyright infringement. : o

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

I know some McKenna. I once had a theory that we all (the race) set up certain drugs in like manner to an alarm clock ages ago in our history -- to awaken us here, now, whenever... I don't know; seems a tad facile nowadays. But again, if there's such a place as "the god part of the brain" (see book of same title), anything's posssible.

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

Yeah, McKenna speculated that magic mushrooms were extraterrestrial in origin, which even explained the purplish hue and high electron density of the spores (so they could travel through space and absorb UV radiation!)

And, of course, he also posited that we made the leap from proto-human to human by munching on a bunch of mushrooms in the African wilderness, sort of an internalized, organic equivalent of the monolith in "2001." It doesn't seem wholly far-fetched, especially when we think of the mystery schools of Egypt and Greece, the use of cannabis and hashish in the Mid-East and the Asian subcontinent, peyote and ayahuasca in the Americas, etc. -- it seems that the meat of most spiritual traditions can be traced back to someone doing drugs somewhere!

Anyway, I don't buy into a lot of McKenna, especially the Timewave/novelty theory. I'm skeptical of all this "2012" stuff; it seems like more wishful thinking for people who don't want to accept their complicity in the (apparent) dissolution of civilization. Better to leave our fate to the aliens or some other agent of Apocalypse. Of course, we might have to do so, since we can't get our collective act together enough to do deceptively simple things like preventing genocide or poverty. It's why I'm a humanist in spirit and a misanthrope in practice. :wink:

Re: A Malignant Universe?
 

Hahahaha -- I love that last line!

Listen: I've never heard that theory about MMs being extraT in origin, and check this out: the first time I did them -- back in 1992 -- things started getting a little dark and paranoid after an hour or so. Well, I close my eyes and I see in my mind these purplish UFOs zooming in from who-knows-where, up above me/us...and it's only when I hear something from them like "Let us take over..." that I really thought this may be some malevolent astral force out there. It sounded like a benevolent dictator about to stage his cosmic act for us, but damn, did it feel evil. Mushrooms were my most diffcult trips.