Cyclonopedia

[mistersloane]

I think you'd really enjoy it nomad.

Nearly finished it now, my interest at this point is how it describes the Qulipoth, the dark side of the Kabbala, and how alot of its themes can be seen as another way of describing this system.

"The Tree of Death consists of ten sephiroth in opposition to those of the Tree of Life, representing the misunderstanding of God or the abuse of divine principles. The ten qlipothic sephiroth are Thamiel, "duality;" Chaigidel, "confusion;" Sathariel, "concealment;" Gamchicoth, "waste;" Golab, "destruction;" Togaririm, "grief;" Harab Serapel, "death;" Samael, "desolation;" Gamaliel, "pollution;" and Nehemoth, "fear."

The obsession with nine numeric system is correct if you take the access point to this 'world of shells' as not being a sephiroth (one of the points on the Tree) but as being what Crowley describes at the Abyss, which leaves nine sephiroth and one gateway to the world of shells.

Anyway it's a load of hokey but it's interesting that - I personally think - they've taken that as a form for writing their book/system. It's a really good idea.

 

[IdleRich]

"Imagine a beautiful field of sunflowers and some insane person comes and tells us that they are diagrams of petroleum and clues of something which is buried inside the earth and has something to with the sun and then tries to demonstrate it with numbers. Because people usually believe in numbers and simple calculations."

I love this image and I love the idea of the insane person going one step further and seeing them as not just diagrams of petroleum but as actually literally oozing with and covered in the black glistening substance under a suddenly evil dark sun - unfortunately I think that you (Sub-Rosa?) made me visualise this much more than the book itself did.
I liked that description early on in the book of Parsani as a bulging brain with... what was it now, I can't remember actually but it was good. Also the stuff when he starts going on about letting each other's diseases burn them up. I wish there was more of that and more footnotes to break up the dryness of the text and inject a human angle to the deranged matter of factness.

But does no one else feel similar to this?

"I was longing for the character from the first chapter to re-emerge and to be somehow tied into all the stuff in the Encyclopaedia."

I was hoping that it would cut back to the woman who arrived at the airport and some of this stuff would start dribbling into her world. I know that might have been a bit too predictable but I think it could have been enjoyable.

"actually i'm excited to read this
seems kind of like calvino meets borges meets burroughs meets 2008"

Not too far from the truth I'd say but not as good as that sounds unfortunately (for me).

 

[mistersloane]

I wish there was more of that and more footnotes to break up the dryness of the text and inject a human angle to the deranged matter of factness.

But does no one else feel similar to this?

Yeah I think you're totally right about that, it would have been more exciting as a book if they'd switched between narratives more. Maybe they felt the absence of the human/singular voice after the introduction said more than carrying it on, I'm sure there were reasons why they left it out, but it felt like a cop out to me.

Maybe we should all remix it and carry on the narrative element. CCRE-RU or summat.

Having said that, the footnotes when they do come in are superb.

 

[IdleRich]

"Yeah I think you're totally right about that, it would have been more exciting as a book if they'd switched between narratives more. Maybe they felt the absence of the human/singular voice after the introduction said more than carrying it on, I'm sure there were reasons why they left it out, but it felt like a cop out to me."

Maybe they thought that the relentlessly dry presentation of twisted nonsense as scientific and political fact would serve to hammer home how far Parsani had departed from normality - and this may well be true but I think that a human voice and a switch between narratives would have made the book a lot more fun. Maybe that's missing the point.

 

[sub-rosa]

I finished the book and am quite satisfied with it.

Strangely I had the same feeling about characters. At first I kind of missed the promising sense of storytelling but once the true oil madness broke out and all those underground things started to surface, I forgot the characters and the narrative.

Actually I found the abrupt disappearance of novel/story/characters intriguing. It gives the book a very spooky feel. I mean the idea of writing a book or creating a world in which characters mysteriously disappear rather than appear is more exciting to me. This idea ties in well with the ending sentence of the preface:

It’s true that the Middle East is the best place to go missing … the best place to get lost.

there is also another one [p.xv]:

everyone in this manuscript seems to disappear without a trace, I noticed this after reading a note on one of the page margins...reminded me of the ancient greek and latin scripts for plays in which the names of characters are attached to the text with their roles and the moment they should leave the stage by different means. In medieval theater, they called it Exeunt or "they go out". Characters were characterized by their exit-level. Pulp horror takes this stage-flight to its full-fl edged extremes. All that comes in must go out by any means possible.

Middle East as a place which swallows characters/people?!! Also the book gives this impression that in a place as diseased as the middle east characters don't need to be human. They can be numbers, artifacts, demons, diseases, etc. This I believe is very Lovecraftian in that HPL stories always tend to eliminate the characters with cosmic forces. This idea projects in the overall style of the book. The characters (RN, Kristen Alvanson, ...) are literally forced to the bottom of the book (the footnotes/plot holes).

Will write some more of my thoughts soon.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I love this image and I love the idea of the insane person going one step further and seeing them as not just diagrams of petroleum but as actually literally oozing with and covered in the black glistening substance under a suddenly evil dark sun...

It's funny, the area of France my parents have moved to is a big sunflower-growing region, and they tell me the flowers aren't harvested until they've fully ripened and then gone over a bit, so when you're out on the road in late summer/early autumn you can just see miles and miles of dead, brown, wilted sunflowers in all directions. It sounds like a rather gothic vista.

I liked that description early on in the book of Parsani as a bulging brain with... what was it now, I can't remember actually but it was good.

"A bulging syphilitic brain with a fleshy pink tube dangling underneath" or somesuch - yes, it was a great line! I also loved the mention of how Parsani's students had noticed his skin disease was getting progressively worse, and that this coincided with the endnote about 'inorganic demons' extracting a 'price' from humans that use them.

I was hoping that it would cut back to the woman who arrived at the airport and some of this stuff would start dribbling into her world. I know that might have been a bit too predictable but I think it could have been enjoyable.

Yeah, that would have been quite good. I'm kind of intrigued by the way Negarestani himself features as a character but not the central character (to the extent that the book can be said to have 'characters'), in that he's the guy who's written the manuscript seemingly based mainly on Parsani's writings, but it's the American woman who finds it and has it published. So he's a sort of intermediary - perhaps a bit like Austerlitz's anonymous narrator?

 

[IdleRich]

"Yeah, that would have been quite good. I'm kind of intrigued by the way Negarestani himself features as a character but not the central character"

He nicked that idea from Money by Martin Amis - apparently Negarestani is a huge fan.

 

[Mr. Tea]

He nicked that idea from Money by Martin Amis - apparently Negarestani is a huge fan.

Well until Negarestani gets his house in order I thing he should go back to - oh, he has. Excellent.

I remember the non-central-author-character being used in a Paul Auster story, too.

 

[sub-rosa]

seems kind of like calvino meets borges meets burroughs meets 2008

Calvino, no I don't think so, maybe a bit of Invisible Cities.
Borges and Burroughs, some of the concepts and styles, but not that much.
I personally think more of Deleuze and Guattari but even that similarity is limited to some shared concepts and the supposedly rhizomatic text.

If anything, the sun's activity viz. constantly pouring forth free energy in expectation of nothing in return seems rather un-capitalistic to me. Does Bataille deal with this?

I think the sun/capitalism thing is more post-Bataille (Lyotard, Baudrillard and even a bit Zizek) although I am not sure. The sun gives energy, but in return it creates a life that is dependent on the affirmation of the sun as the source of life (hence a biopolitics organized on the sun as the center of life). In a sense, sun has a monopoly on desire. No to the sun = impossible/(death?). The term "heliocentrism" in the book.

After reading the last chapters about how oil can be interpreted as the sun becoming earthly: has anyone got this wacky idea that the cross of akht also looks like a Lascaux version of a shooting/descending star? I mean that kind of primitive or cartoonish drawing which you can see in ancient reliefs or Walt Disney cartoons?

Skin disease: another footnote says that Akht had a similar skin disease (pp. 226-227).

 

[IdleRich]

"Calvino, no I don't think so, maybe a bit of Invisible Cities."

Well, superficially I think you could say that the way the first chapter just stops and never comes back is quite similar to If On A Winters Night....

"Borges and Burroughs, some of the concepts and styles, but not that much."

I think that the way it matter of factly describes the way things are(n't) with a lack of a narrator - the kind of pseudo-encyclopaedia style - is quite comparable to some Borges stories - say the one where they find that encyclopaedia of another world or whatever it is amongst others. Borges writing is obviously a lot clearer and less fussy though.
Burroughs, I think that the concepts may be similar in some ways but not the way that they are presented.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Calvino, no I don't think so, maybe a bit of Invisible Cities.
Borges and Burroughs, some of the concepts and styles, but not that much.
I personally think more of Deleuze and Guattari but even that similarity is limited to some shared concepts and the supposedly rhizomatic text.

It seems to me that most of the (fairly frequent) mentions of these guys' work are negative comparisons, as in "Unlike D&G's conception of [idea], Parsani thinks [something else]...".

I think the sun/capitalism thing is more post-Bataille (Lyotard, Baudrillard and even a bit Zizek) although I am not sure. The sun gives energy, but in return it creates a life that is dependent on the affirmation of the sun as the source of life (hence a biopolitics organized on the sun as the center of life). In a sense, sun has a monopoly on desire. No to the sun = impossible/(death?). The term "heliocentrism" in the book.

Not quite true - there are those communities of various Lovecraftian creepy-crawlies that live on those hydrothermal vents on the sea floor and derive all their sustenance from heat and chemical energy from the earth's interior. Quite appropriate to some of the ideas in the book, really.

After reading the last chapters about how oil can be interpreted as the sun becoming earthly: has anyone got this wacky idea that the cross of akht also looks like a Lascaux version of a shooting/descending star? I mean that kind of primitive or cartoonish drawing which you can see in ancient reliefs or Walt Disney cartoons?

Hmm, kinda, but surely it's ascending, rather than descending? Not the sun coming to earth, but a blasphemous, oily Earth-Sun leaping to the heavens? A bit like the cartoon oil-spurt I suggested when I'd just started the book.

 

[vimothy]

I think the sun/capitalism thing is more post-Bataille (Lyotard, Baudrillard and even a bit Zizek) although I am not sure. The sun gives energy, but in return it creates a life that is dependent on the affirmation of the sun as the source of life (hence a biopolitics organized on the sun as the center of life). In a sense, sun has a monopoly on desire. No to the sun = impossible/(death?). The term "heliocentrism" in the book.

Dunno about the "sun/capitalism", but the sun is Bataille's metaphor, no -- The Solar Anus, etcetera...?

 

[vimothy]

After reading the last chapters about how oil can be interpreted as the sun becoming earthly...

That sounds Qabbalistic as well -- Malkuth is the manifestation, "The Bride" of the previous names of God. Dione Fortune: "God is pressure". And Malkuth is directy above the Qlippoth -- The Kingdom as gateway to the infernal...

 

[Mr. Tea]

Dunno about the "sun/capitalism", but the sun is Bataille's metaphor, no -- The Solar Anus, etcetera...?

So the sun shines out of where the sun don't shine?

 

[mistersloane]

The idea of a black sun keeps popping up, Gerard De Nerval is my first known mention of it :
(Ma seule étoile est morte, et mon luth constellé / Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie : El Desdichado in Les Chimeres),

later popping up as Harry Crosby's press that printed Ulysses etc, then Crowley and later Coil popularised it up, then Kristeva, see also the kabbalah and the opposite of Tiphareth....kingdom as entrance to the world of shells? Interesting.

Wiki black sun and it gets all nazi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(occult_symbol)

 

[sub-rosa]

the kind of pseudo-encyclopaedia style - is quite comparable to some Borges stories - say the one where they find that encyclopaedia of another world or whatever it is amongst others. Borges writing is obviously a lot clearer and less fussy though.

Yes you are right about the encyclopedia motif. But Borges mainly hints at them or talks about 'the ideas' of these objects. He rarely explores the possibility of making or writings one these books. I think Guattari mentions something mean about Borges regarding that Borges is only interested in the titles of imaginary books not the books themselves. Naipaul also criticizes Borges for a similar reason. He says something like Borges' fiction and style cautiously stay distanced from the contents which might otherwise look very crazy. I can't remember but he says something about Borges stories always taking side with the sanity of daily life rather than the supernatural or the mysterious appearing in his fiction. Strangely Luis Bunuel had the same idea about Borges. I personally think Borges' success and drawback lie in keeping a distance from the alien world. This is what makes him different from someone like Lovecraft or a book like Cyclonopedia which willingly give themselves to the madness of the world. I think for the same reason, Borges' few Lovecraftian attempts in fiction fail disastrously because he is too calm and cautious to cope with the idea of cosmic horror (I love his other stuff though). I think that's the reason Borges is very appreciated and his fiction is more or less a form of entertaining but 'high' literature, whereas the mad lovecraft could only work as a pulp writer. Because once you write pulp fiction, readers don't expect calm mannerism and can deal with the insanity issue.

This is also right about an erudite book like Erasmus' In Praise of Folly and something like Artaud's works, there is a difference between talking about madness and delving into it.

I am with Mr. Tea because when I am thinking these comparisons don't look very plausible.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Wiki black sun and it gets all nazi

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(occult_symbol)

Ahh yes, I knew I'd heard/read the phrase somewhere before (apart from the aforementioned Soundgarden lyrics ), I looked at that Wiki page a few months ago. It's all tied in with runic symbols and the swastika, isn't it? Which has been a symbol of the sun since the stone age.

Edit:

I am with Mr. Tea because when I am thinking these comparisons don't look very plausible.

Not sure what you mean here - the only one of those I've mentioned here (or even read) is Burroughs.

 

[poetix]

The Cult of the Black Sun are the Lloigor-incarnating baddies in the first series of Zenith. I get the impression Grant Morrison would enjoy Cyclonopedia.

 

[IdleRich]

"I think Guattari mentions something mean about Borges regarding that Borges is only interested in the titles of imaginary books not the books themselves. Naipaul also criticizes Borges for a similar reason. He says something like Borges' fiction and style cautiously stay distanced from the contents which might otherwise look very crazy."

I think that sounds about right. For me, sometimes it's best to keep something like that slightly at arms length as some kind of black box within the story where what goes on inside the box is not explained. The reason for that being, what goes on inside the box is inexplicable and impossible within our world and if you do attempt to describe it you are bound to fail. That was my problem with some of the bits in Cyclonopaedia, I felt that it was trying to apply some kind of rigour to something where rigour didn't work because the point that was being backed up just didn't make sense. I tried earlier to draw an analogy with science fiction, if you say that there is a hyperwhatever drive that makes the spaceship go faster than light then great, but if you spend ages describing precisely how it works then you have a problem because the description is of necessity wrong (unless you really have created a way of going faster than light). Probably the more detail the wronger as well.
Of course this may be deliberate on the point of the author. The larger the amount of time expended in describing some nonsense the greater the derangement of the narrator.
What did you think of Begotten by the way? Only just realised that the director gave some positive blurb to the jacket or at least to some websites recommending Cyclonopedia - very cosy.

 

[vimothy]

It's makes me think of Kenneth Grant or that Carlos Castenada chap -- imaginary history of religion/anthropology... I like the sound of it: like finding the book from Dorian Grey.