Now, since even by daylight he could have seen no boundaries, the last place under the sun (or the streaming sky rather) he would have suspected himself to be would have been a river; if he had pondered about his present whereabouts, about the geography beneath, he would have merely taken himself to be traveling at a dizzy and inexplicable speed above the largest cotton field in the world; if he who yesterday had known he was in a river, had accepted that fact in good faith and earnest, then had seen that river turn without warning and rush back upon him with furious and deadly intent like a frenzied stallion in a lane—if he had suspected for one second that the wild and limitless expanse on which he now found himself was a river, consciousness would have simply refused; he would have fainted.
-from “Old Man” by William Faulkner
The blasted anthropologist and imperialist helpmate James George Frazer wrote about the myths and religions of the primitive world, weaving stories of distant magics and castigating Catholicism in ways that fascinated and horrified the British public, so curious about the activities at the far ranges of their empire. His work in turn inspired generations of anthropologists, novelists, and thrill seekers. Such studied academic mysticism is the gas of an entropic empire. Taking into account all he had learned, Frazer postulated that sun worship was the sign of Progress, as it took the pyramid and dynasty to truly appreciate the sempiternal march of our fiery orb. The calendar, the plastic arts, mathematics were all results of the ascension to being attuned to this.
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We have forgotten what the sun is. Like Thomas Mann’s bourgeois Aschenbach we are enamored with a limited vision on the edges of a sinking city. (For more on Thomas Mann, bourgeois individualism, the sun and realism, check out my last essay)
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A desire for a stable truth of existence originating from being itself is a conceit of philosophers of the perennial, some Hermetics, and comparative anthropologists. It should be considered an austerity of the soul, a minimalism of the spirit akin to the bald and vulgar aesthetics of the pre-fabricated postmodern apartments drooled over by the horde-emotions of consumerisms fulfilling, pleasurable apoplexy. The perpetrator of the coupe who desires stability rarely has any style at all. Stability is a style-less god.
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Pyramids are built on the bones of horses and the carcass of the promise of plentitude. Stability is not pleasure or even safety. It is a Machine with one purpose but one purpose is already too much.
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From the portico onto a mezzanine overlooking a vast open square where all pleasures are available, the emperor looks away, over the walls of the complex and out onto the rich, dripping plain of our species’ stone blossoming. Beyond, his great public works shore up the great river, controlling the floods for crops. Three generations ago the levees failed, silt layered the fields, and his family took over, promising to restore the flow and truth of the millennium empire. With his deep eyes in oiled, consecrated skin he looks up at the sun and winces in anticipation, like a child looking at his provider who at any minute might strike out for reasons beyond the child’s understanding—strike out in violence or in love; the reaction is the same.
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Heraclitus is famous for saying that one never steps into the same river twice. He’s right but was right enough. Diogenes Laertius thought Heraclitus arrogant because he accused Hesiod and Homer of being pretenders who should be ejected from the canon for their banal images and ideas, which is cool. But Heraclitus also said many stupid things that could pass for meme poetry like, “a dry soul is wisest and best” and “a man’s character is his guardian divinity.” The ultimate digression is seeing Heraclitus as an edgy teen writer saying at once things like “The Ephesians had better go hang themselves, every man of them, and leave their city to be governed by youngsters…the finest man among them, declaring ‘Let us not have anyone among us who excels above the rest’” and otherwise inane things like “thinking is common to all.” He also disdained the Mysteries as affronts to the true gods, the Logos stable in the ever changing tide of matter. His idea of the flux was the same one today, a fear of it, inaugurating a theory of the Great One to stem the tide.
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After an unspecified and terrible accident in 1930 where his eyes inexplicably filled, flooded, with blood leaving him blind, Frazer, then almost 80 and enthroned at a position at Cambridge, relied on a series of helpers to do the work of his eyes and hands. The western trends of paganism that has sprung from his study, which was always a eulogy of sorts to the colonized epistemes, functions similarly in that it maintains the mysticism of the un-empire, the conquered peoples who held some fetishized connection to a deep history, while blinded by the conceit of organization, greatness, and capital’s great entropic machines. Everything done in the name of preservation works to speed entropy and enlarge the myths of totality.
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Immemorial deep time does not mean no change. Only the milennium empire disdains change and trend and efflorescence.
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In J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, the earth’s atmosphere has thickened and the sun has intensified because of some climatic perversity. It was “no longer a well-defined sphere, but a wide expanding ellipse that fanned out across the eastern horizon like a colossal fire ball.” In this novel the remaining humans, fleeing continental Europe, are driven mad by this sun that calls to some repressed drive contained in the ancestral genetic shadow from the sun-bleached protozoa. They call it “Total Beach Syndrome,” and it drives the still-living human to their deaths trying to reach southern climes through some unexplainable vestigial drive. In The Drowned World, the earth as we know it still ends from the sun’s capriciousness, its dispassionate flares baking the earth based on some cycle the scale of which extends far past our lives into the depths of space mirrored in the deep pits of our genetic history.
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The leathery oiled men and women spend time around the pool. To say they are resting would be to misunderstand the language and rhythm of chlorine-soaked heat, or to know the silent tingle that drives them to these afternoons. They bake their feelings, their days, into crisp outlines. Memories become like salty potato crisps. “Sweet and easy, baby.” he says, one eye on his phone, gulping. It would be to misunderstand what’s happening here.
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What did Heraclitus think about the flood? His river depended on the levees of kings and the stability of Logos; we have never tasted such a millennium empire, only brief gasps of a similar desire enthroned in cultural studies and architecture.
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In 2021 a “heat dome” moved over British Columbia, where I live, evaporating cells and lives and setting the forests on fire. The town of Lytton appeared to spontaneously combust. Now, a few weeks before writing this, an “atmospheric river” moved through the sky, as if animate, to soak the sotted hills and drown the Sumas Valley where once there was an ancient lake, cleared under colonialism for agriculture. Bridges, main veins of our infrastructure were washed away in a confluence of events and matter that can only really be described as “biblical.” Such a flood is the direct response to the hubris of the stable
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Unstable does not mean violent or dispossessed. Only the emperor of the coupe needs to tell this falsity. Such a realization drives our political system, which is built for change, into a perpetual coupe by different provisional rulers who represent dynastic desires. The provisional ruler who yearns for the millennium empire, a fascist concept.
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We live under Ballard’s sun, not Frazer’s.
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Photo realism too relies on a stable sun. Its works are fossils of a different light from a different sun. Of empire and empiricism. Its time is past. As a child, I heard often that the light from distant stars is years old, and like any common phrases in a culture, this statement hints at something": a certain anxiety about the instability and entropy of our system—that what we are seeing is the result of a false and ordered perception that relies on a distant, capricious source. Most art is riddled with this anxiety and so tends towards realism—as far as possible from “the real” which is the flood—to convince the maker and the viewer that reality is indeed stable and shareable, that the upper and middle class can continue to build their Venices without thinking about the destitute living secretly in the foundations.
Maybe the great floods of antiquity were not at all punishment but a passionate overwhelming. Maybe the truth of being is in our drowning in beauty—a through line of the Neo Decadent aesthetic approach and name of their anthology. The river is a threat and a source of constant beauty: the flood. The building of pyramids and empire acknowledges and dismisses the terrible potential of the sun, its maximum as doom, could be considered a perennial truth, if such a thing didn’t induce vomit in those who have been burnt. Reprisal, not survival, the theme of our species.
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Somewhat ironically, the great materialist anthropologist Marvin Harris says that capitalism developed in Europe precisely because there were not proper conditions for a millennium empire because there were no river plains like in Egypt or along the Ganges. Of course, commerce became the river to control—think “Amazon”— and the dreams still convulse the body of the born-dead American empire. This new stability without stability that is technocapitalism has incurred the wrath of the “real” of legend, the reprisal, the flood. Americans have borrowed the aesthetics of the old empire because they rightly feel that theirs is a rather artificial one, different from the old millennium empires.
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Some may say that through commerce and libidinal networks we have become the river; but this is only symbolic and we’ve overrun our shores long ago, to the glee of the agents of the coupe and the occult. The degradation of the environment and the resulting floods, the real floods, are easier to assign a moral negative because of the loss of life, an easy indicator; but the flood of consciousness released by the lifting of the levees of being—tradition, the church, the totalitarian empires—are impossible to qualify. This question is the hardest one for any contemporary “leftist” to answer. That of culture. Again, realism works to try and shore up this flood of psychic energy.
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Cratylus retorted, in response to Heraclitus’ claim, that one never steps into the same river even once; but if I am washed out by reality, by the blaring omniscience of screens and being, do I become the river, or am I negated by it? Taken away? Obscured? Just as the sun surely obscures us from the rest of the universe except as the whisper of a shadow waiting to be perceived, the photograph pulls us out of such diluting being but the Internet, especially the image apps, reintroduces the flood of matter and sends the fossils back into motion. Like the courtyard of the empire, photo realism and much of modern plastic art is a holy pause kept, walled, in by delusion at a fear of the sun and its love. But the levees are crumbling. Everyone looks nervously at the sky and the place where the emperor should be, now nothing more than one of those blow ups with the head hole cut out that tourists can take pictures in.