Cyclonopedia

[IdleRich]

"So.. I've read a few more chapters and maybe I'm just not getting it but I have a distinct feeling that whilst this Emperor may not be entirely naked he certainly isn't as well dressed as some would have us believe."

Yeah, I'm with you. Some good ideas but not well put across or developed into anything more than a rather dry (fake) account.

"Maybe it's a lack of love for Lovecraft et al - lots of his stuff does feel a bit silly. I tend to think he is best read one story in isloation rather than in a collected works - all that does is reinforce the similarities between tales and heighten the creaky and bad bits of writing (and ideas) at work."

Just read a Lovecraft anthology and, while I enjoyed it a lot (more than Cyclonopedia anyhow), I think you're right; some really good stories, some less good and a couple that were plain ropey. As with many things, reading them all together lessened their impact. Probably if I had just read the best three I would have had a higher opinion of the guy.

 

[zhao]

When Reza was writing for Hyperstition, they were always into this weird, hard to understand, ultra-idiosyncratic type of Qabalah (e.g. this or possibly this for an 'explanation').

my copy arrived last week but haven't started. but yesterday me and girlfriend spent the entire morning, and part of the afternoon, completely engrossed in those hyperstition articles... fascinating stuff and as confusing as it all is after a while a fuzzy picture of an underlying symmetry to world religions and calenders and magic and the elements seems to emerge... or maybe i've just become delusional.

 

[Mr. Tea]

or maybe i've just become delusional.

If you read enough of it you risk becoming Deleusional, maybe even turning into a complete Bataille-boy.

 

[vimothy]

Arf arf!

 

[zhao]

If you read enough of it you risk becoming Deleusional, maybe even turning into a complete Bataille-boy.

if you are Saussure about that step up, or else get the Foucault of here!

 

[Pestario]

no not this again!

 

[Mr. Tea]

'Fraid so...it's all Lacan do to stop myself!

 

[vimothy]

The burning corpse of god shall keep us warm in the doom of howling winds

Check this out! Reza is editing an issue of the journal Glossater on Black Metal! Some kind of wet dream...

The editors of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary
(http://glossator.org) seek proposals for a themed issue on Black Metal, to be published in
the fall of 2012. In keeping with the journal’s focus and scope, contributions may take the
following forms, with strict priority given to the former: 1) original commentaries on
music, lyrics, images, or events within the Black Metal genre; 2) articles or essays
investigating relationships between Black Metal and commentary.

 

[vimothy]

Er, actually it doesn't come out until 2012. Damn.

 

[sub-rosa]

Er, actually it doesn't come out until 2012. Damn.

I actually saw another version of this. I don't like Black Metal but the call for papers looks very interesting. Black Metal as an 'inherently problematical music' is an interesting concept.

 

[zhao]

I actually saw another version of this. I don't like Black Metal but the call for papers looks very interesting. Black Metal as an 'inherently problematical music' is an interesting concept.

in my mind the grievances Black Metal harbors with modernity/capitalism/christianity have always been parallel to theoretical critique and discourse... albeit in kind of a stupid way (but much more visceral)

 

[mistersloane]

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.

Less Castaneda but the Kenneth Grant comparison is apt, it's all very Black Snakey.

Haven't finished it yet cos I got stuck into a couple of other books, just come back to it again.

 

[empty mirror]

late to the party, had to finish DFW's IJ and breezed through the Dylan autobiography, now headlong into this one, and scouring the internet, reading up on Hyperstition, and the like. first thing that struck me is that this seems to be the total inverse of gaddis' recognitions that dealt with mithraism---here we are excavating some kind of anti-sun, or sun corpse. i sort of skimmed this thread (overlooking posts that looked like they may contain spoilers [though i have a suspicion that there cannot be any spoilers when there is no conclusion---i suspect this novel will end with more questions than answers]) and i did not see this list (from the hyperstition website) posted here (forgive me if it has already been posted or linked to):

June 27, 2004

Candidates for a top 9

Inspired by k punk - a first stab at a hyperstition best of list (just in alphabetical order for now)
(actually hyperstition doesn't lend itself to this because it is depersonalizing and always taken up by complex lineages, but never mind... )
Madame Blavatsky (for showing the zone of perfect coincidence between hoaxes and religions - table-tapping faker, 'inventor' of the Secret Doctrine, the Tibetan masters and Theosophy)
William Burroughs (for fiction as magical war, time-travel implexion and Lemur-obsession)
Carlos Castaneda (for inventing artificial anthropology and dis/belief in Don Juan)
John Carpenter (for Sutter Cane -'I thought I was making it up but all the time they were telling me what to write' and 'The Thing', which has to exist, even though it's a fiction)
Aleister Crowley (for 'rediscovering' the history of magick, 'reinventing' the tarot and the very idea of the Book of Lies)
Deleuze and Guattari (for reanimating Professor Challenger as schizogeologist, blind doubles, numbering numbers and being 'aided, assisted and multiplied')
Drexicya (for 'marine mutation in the Black Atlantic' and 'fictionalizing frequencies')
L Ron Hubbard (for the preposterous incredibility of a science fiction writer happening to receive a B-movie sci-fi religious revelation)
William Gibson (for 'making up' cyberspace)
HP Lovecraft (for the Cthulhu mythos and the Necronomican)
Ronald Reagan (or is it Bush 41? for voodoo economics)
Jacques Vallee (for applying unbelief to the UFO/alien mythos)
Edward Yardeni (for making Y2K hysteria mainstream)

Honorable mentions
Walter Cannon (for Voodoo Death)
Kenneth Grant (for taking Lovecraft seriously)
Alan Greenspan (for irrational exuberance and the new economy)
Philip L Sclater (for giving Lemuria its name)
Whitley Streiber (for the templex relation between writing pulp horror and being abducted aliens)

Posted by Anna Greenspan at 12:41 PM | On-topic (5)

 

[Mr. Tea]

From what I understand of this Hyperstition lark, a Top 23 would have been more obvious?

The 'exo-spiritual' aspect of Cyclo makes me think of von Däniken, though I've already talked about him in this thread. One for the list, perhaps?

I've been watching a lot of Jonathon Meades lately, and in a two-parter he did recently where he talks about Lithuania (the last country in Europe to officially become Christian) he mentions how the cool, wet, dark, heavily forested north of Europe is naturally conducive to polytheism and nature-worship, and conversely that there's something perculiar about deserts that makes them conducive to monotheism - it was just quite cool to come across this idea that's such a big part of Cycolonopedia.

 

[empty mirror]

i thought of gibson immediately when i was introduced to the idea of hyperstition, especially with respect to the black Buzz Rickson MA-1:

Early in 2003, best-selling novelist William Gibson released a groundbreaking new book, PATTERN RECOGNITION. This absorbing and masterfully crafted novel is set in the period immediately following “9-11”, featuring a high-tech., super-hip, cyber-chic, anti-fashion sophisticate, Cayce Pollard, as the heroine. Brilliantly woven within the many pages of cutting-edge prose Mr. Gibson has crafted is the one object more valued by Cayce Pollard than any other she owns – the Black Buzz Rickson’s MA-1 Flying Jacket.

William Gibson is an author of superior talent and exceptional good taste. Vintage clothing represents an area of personal interest to him, this especially includes wristwatches, MA-1 jackets and the1950 fishtail parka of the U. S. Army. He is a great admirer of the goods produced by Buzz Rickson’s, which is what provided the inspiration for the fictionalized Buzz Rickson’s Black MA-1 Jacket worn by his central character. Mysteriously, in the course of writing his novel, Mr. Gibson forgot that no MA-1’s were ever produced for the USAF in black; unbeknownst to Mr. Gibson, one of those strange twists of fate was now being cooked and a new legend was about to emerge.

The marketing team at Buzz Rickson’s was looking for a very unique and special item to acknowledge their tenth anniversary in 2004. Sometime in 2002, just as William Gibson was simultaneously giving life to the Buzz Rickson’s Black MA-1, Buzz Rickson’s was giving life to their tenth anniversary jacket - a special limited edition MA-1 fabricated in jet black. With the highly successful release of PATTERN RECOGNITION in the early days of 2003 came an unfamiliar swarm of customers here at the offices of Buzz Rickson’s USA agency, all clamoring for non-existent Buzz Rickson’s Black MA-1’s! After contacting our friends in Japan and putting feelers out to Mr. Gibson, the irony crystallized.

to veer back to the book a bit, all this black corpse of the sun stuff brings to mind the "dark satellite" business that is central to freemasonry, though there's that pesky matter about the black sun's interiority (in respect to the earth), whereas the dark star of freemasonry is in elliptical orbit around our earth, its influence depending upon its proximity.

not sure if it is covered later in the book but christianity is polytheism in drag, no? the trinity being the most explicit example. and christianity and its canon of saints being the most extreme expression of this polytheism. is islam the only true monotheistic faith?

 

[Agent]

i wonder if he's referring to Sirius, or the "sun behind the sun" according to Kenneth Grant. Sirius is also important in Freemasonry, and it is frequently referenced in popular culture (Sirius Satellite Radio, Philip K. Dick, Stockhausen, Robert Anton Wilson, David Bowie).

 

[Mr. Tea]

i thought of gibson immediately when i was introduced to the idea of hyperstition, especially with respect to the black Buzz Rickson MA-1:



to veer back to the book a bit, all this black corpse of the sun stuff brings to mind the "dark satellite" business that is central to freemasonry, though there's that pesky matter about the black sun's interiority (in respect to the earth), whereas the dark star of freemasonry is in elliptical orbit around our earth, its influence depending upon its proximity.

not sure if it is covered later in the book but christianity is polytheism in drag, no? the trinity being the most explicit example. and christianity and its canon of saints being the most extreme expression of this polytheism. is islam the only true monotheistic faith?

Hmm, I think in Christianity the emphasis is still very much on there being three aspects of Godhead, not three Gods. The point about saints (and the Virgin, of course) is well made, and it's probably worth mentioning that the emphasis placed on such characters in the Catholic and Orthodox churches is regarded with great suspicion by the Protestant sects, precisely because it seems so close to polytheism (or idolatry, at any rate, given the Catholic and esp. Orthodox love of icons, shrines and so on). But even Islam has 'sacred' figures other than God, even if their divinity is explicitly denied; the Prophet, of course, but also the older prophets of the Old Testament and various saints of the early Islamic period. Jesus and his mum are very highly regarded in Islam as well, in fact.

What I do find fascinating is the degree to which the Catholic veneration of Mary and the saints maps so well onto earlier polytheistic faiths in places like Mexico and South America that were colonised by the Spanish. In fact a similar thing is thought to have happened in Europe centuries earlier (loads of Irish 'saints' are just old Celtic gods re-packaged, for example).

But even if that disqualifies Christianity, surely Judaism is as monotheistic as Islam? I mean, it has prophets and patriarchs of course, but nothing equivalent to saints, as far as I understand.

 

[IdleRich]

"Hmm, I think in Christianity the emphasis is still very much on there being three aspects of Godhead, not three Gods."

That's the main doctrine now but it was a matter of great debate in the early years of Christianity. If I remember correctly it was the alternative version that was the orthodoxy at first.

 

[sub-rosa]

Black Sun is also part of the Aryan occult symbolism. I agree with empty mirror, the concept of black sun depends on its proximity from the earth. Yes, the concept in cyclonopedia is different from Masonic and Aryan symbologies because here the black sun is 'buried within the earth'. In the book, it is referred to as an Insider (treacherous outsider). As far as I can remember, cyclonopedia's concept of the buried corpse of the sun or 'helio-nigredo' has different overlapping meanings/connotations: psychoanalytical (death of God, unconscious of the Earth), Alchemical (Jung, Esotericism), Lovecraftian (resident Outsider), anti-Capitalism ('rebellion against the heliocentrism of the solar economy' as Cyclonopedia puts it) and geophilosophical (weaving the previous connotations together via the middle eastern scenarios of participations between earth and petroleum). I found a few passages throughout the book which explain these concepts and their relations to each other especially in the last chapters/sections and in the endnotes (p.233 n.34). Has anyone here read Negarastani's essay for Collapse IV (The Corpse Bride)? It seems that it explains a great deal about the concept of blackening or nigredo. The essay starts with a fragment from Aristotle about a method of torture for executing people by tying the victim to a rotting corpse and feeding him until he rots too and his body amalgamates with the corpse. The article details that any relationship between mind and body, matter and vitality, being and thinking or an internal necessity in relation to an external contingency works via a mechanism of decay and putrefaction/blackening.

update: black sun (occult, see black sun in popular culture): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_(occult_symbol)
Black Sun (Kristeva's book on depression and Jungian concept of nigredo in psychology): Amazon product ASIN 0231067070

 

[empty mirror]

LOL!
By the way, have you seen Trouble Every Day? From what I have heard it is a brutal cult movie. I watched In My Skin the other night which I enjoyed, very disturbing. It seems people compare these two movies with each other. Plan to watch Trouble Every Day this week.

Sorry, just skimming this thread as I am halfway through Cyclonopedia and I fear the spoilers----but a Claire Denis DVD is mentioned early in the book (it is found in the hotel room where the documents were found), but the title of the film isn't provided; Trouble Every Day is the only one that I've seen. Not sure I follow what it has to do with this book except for the occult atmosphere.

As I've been reading this, I've been digging through Morals & Dogma and Zolar's Book of Ancient and Forbidden Knowledge (while listening to Deathprod, of course) and the resonances are deafening----I keep thinking of EM Forster's Passage to India, where the protagonists are visiting these desert caves and the echoes disorient and bewilder them. That's been my experience reading Negarestani, I can follow him (with an extreme effort) word by word, but the net effect is just decentering and my head feels like it has been excavated by the process.

:slanted: