Remembering Nihilism

Picture this - it is fin de siecle, the end of the century, the end of the 19th century. You are coming home from your gentleman's club where you have sipped some cognac from the time Napoleon was scaring the European world with his diminutive posture like some little giant on steroids and everybody was shitting their pants from the Tzar to the Prussian chancellor and the Austrian Kaiser. You have revelled all night in pedantic talk about East Indian Company stocks and the investments one must make in Belgian rubber from the Congo, when all of a sudden all the ash from your smoked cigars comes surging up your lungs and jolts your sedated brain into a strange new posture also known as cognitive thought.

What do I care, you will say, one must expect these things. One will go home and take a sip of the coca wine you and your God loving, excess hating party have banned last week without understanding why. Of course, one such as you can partake because you are above everyone else, and then again, you do not rejoice in excess. You are a very good hypocrite.

Back in your drawing room, the servants, evansecent under the gas light, disappear in the domestic twilight whilst you sip your coca wine, open the Evening Standard and drowse heavily over the ink stained pages smelling of industiral lead.

You remember the thugee rebellion that happened such a long time ago, you remember the soma eaters that take you back to Homer and your ancient European world, your heavy browed school masters and you think to yourself, it is such a wonderful civilisation we live in.

But it is you now, and not Ulysses, that is in the Land of the Lotus Eaters. The time and continent of Stoker`s vampires, one step closer to the Frankenstein monster and an eternity away from the Parthenon in Athens.

And suddenly and out of nowhere you begin asking yourself why? and you find out that there is no answer in you semi-educated mind to tackle that question. You are very rich, probably a little ovewieght, unmarried and what your Eton pairs might tag as a bit of an eccentric. But what exactly you have become you exactly cannot even begin to say.

You start to feel that there is a bit more to life than the European way of living it, hiding behind your unjust and civilised society as if you were putting on a gas mask to steer clear of reality. You are quizzical about things, at 3 am, on a Monday night, somewhere around London's suburbs where Shaliapin is streaming from the gramaphones and underaged street urchins are shovelling horse manure for a shilling at 10 pounds; and for the first time in your well groomed existence you discover life is unjust.

With your mind plunged into the European night you feel it is the time of Walpurgis Nacht, when heirs to the throne are having anal intercourse with the chamber maid and bankers decide the going rate of life depending on the rubber that flows out of primeval forrests somewhere below the Equator. It is your awakening, your personal Apocalypse, your self-made revelation and you are lost in the dead of night, when all the servants are all asleep.

So what now, what now, in the dead of night? Ravaging through your superfluos library you do not turn to the Bible, the Bible did not speak of indusrty, just of big towers that were stabbing at the sky. So you turn to the philosophers but not the Greeks, they did not have pollution, not the Roman historians nor the agnostics from the Middle East. You select a volume with uncut pages of an in vogue German philosopher whose name everyone misspells. It is a copy of So spake Zarathustra, an allegory written by a man so wise he turned the world upside down and started rattling until change came streaming out of its pockets and insanity started seeping out of its head. It is Nietzsche, a man that roamed Karlsbaden naked and drunk screaming onto passers by - I am Dionyssos, bow to me! - a German of all things who found debauchery before any other European, and turned debauchery into consciousness.

What a dark new age you have just awoken to and you haven't even read all the book. At 10 am you remember to move slighlty to your left and get that numb feeling out of your body. It`s alrgiht. While your body went numb, your mind started to wander. You hear youself enunciate - nothing is worh anything anymore.

You start downing sheerys at 12 am and the servants are gasping for air not knowing what to do with master, who seems to have blown a gasket. You get undressed in a haze and in your intimates you pace the manor with the .12 gauge shotgun you used to down ducks with, massaging the cartridges with your moist hand, discovering the possibilities of suicide. And there seem to be many possibilities in suicide as time passes by. You black out.

You awake in a daze. You are at the opera, appreciating Wagner and you think it was only a dream. A smartly dressed gentleman gives a witty remark at the dinner party after the show and you slap him, get up, bid everyone a good night and go home, on foot, sit in your armchair with a loaded shotgun, reading Nietzsche while Shaliapin is roaring his Mephisto out of your exhausted gramaphone. You are naked and you start discovering you are a god.

Bored but born anew, because you have discovered the essence of life - happy insanity.

Aetherial Notions of Batshitterry

This is the age of batshitterry, the age of Babylon fading into spleen filled oblivion. The overview of failed revolution, once the trumpet song hummed the death-rattle of misunderstood perception.

We are heading for the great Age of Unlearning and we do not even know it yet. It will be a very interresting trip.

Not a while ago I crossed paths with the criss-cross forrests we used to cut down before we realized we shouldn't but nonetheless did. Too late to be in the right place at the right time, too early to escape the wrong time and place, this is the epitaph of our generation but who knows anymore anyway. Maybe it truly does not matter anymore.

In the remnants of forrests long cut down and turned into timber, pacing the roads where logs spewed out of the earth, tree bark staining old ground, I had reached that point where you can see your insides clearly and from afar.

"My insides are clean", I could clearly see and in the derelict forrest only the neurotic feeling of enlightenment loomed - the dark beasts of our death we cross paths with in the daylight, like some highlighted passage in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They await all over for our undead spirit, our unliving force. It is they we must conquer in order to conquer ourselves before someone else succeeds through TV.

There on an outcrop I asked myself the questions our civilisation failed to ask before inventing TV and thankfully I got more questions for my questions than answers for my nonsense; and then I knew that even if our planet is sick, the Universe is still very healthy thank you very much.

If you go into the forrest you must become crazy, your brain must turn to stone, your hairs need to stand on end like roots that plug into the sky, you must spread the fingers of each hand, alternatively and you must let everything boil down to chance. It is an esoteric lesson you must learn and nothing but your devoid brain may teach it to you. The rest is up to squirrels and woodpeckers, to grubs that bloom in tree bark and to lake water of dark green.

I plunged in shallow water, on the edge of the lake where dark seeds of unknown trees floated near the surface. The dirt was clean on my skin and the sun less toxic on the water's edge. I have been to the place, now I can say, where religions were possibly invented, where man played hide and seek with the gods, when the world did not know how to keep count and never filled out an application form. I have touched the edges of our dimension and cannot clearly say if there are more dimensions or dementias out there, or just an array of dementions we chose to forget in the name of our half-baked sanity. Now everything seems to be tottering on the edge of things.

As the fires roam the darkness and your vision mingles with whimsical photons you begin to forget what is light and what is dark, you remain in the shadow that the moon and sun project on the earth through their light and you understand that things have no nature, that we are natural things that are just a whole we are so desperately trying to pull apart out of need for an ill sort of gravity. We are behaving like animals in need of tidy little cages. We have forgotten our natural common sense and our mischevious nature and turned them in, in exchange for cell phone bills and internet porn.

We have sold out the outlaws in our souls that high-jack us in the middle of our dreams and scare us half to death because we have forgotten the most important part of our beings, the part that is so desperately screaming in the dead of night, its rumble falling on dead and fast asleep ears. We have sold them out for scraps and our destiny is our own, prisoners of devices we unwittingly chose in exchange for true freedom.

Here on the edge of Batshitterry, where Unlearning begins, the Sunrise of Apocalypse is clearly visible, rising not over the plains of Armagheddon but over forrested mountains of forgotten memories that surge violently out of olden rock to fill the void of our being. We are on a head on collision course with the past. Prepare to be head-butted by revelation.

The old men in the Bible have gotten it all wrong. Bent over old texts they partially understood.

There are no true monsters and demons, just abused energy we spue without knowing. There are only Jack the Rippers, mass-murderers, business men and the unwitting flock, cronic epyleptics and religious bigottry, cutthroat capitalism and misunderstood philosophers from Locke to Marx. Lenin was a copy-paster and Stalin was a thug. Pol-Pot took more souls than the Devil, so stop believing in lies. We are alone. And we are being watched not by the gods, but by ourselves and we highly disapprove, as each day passes.

This is the age of Babylon fading, of Nonsense fading, when Sound and Fury finally dim down after 2000 years, and we must tread carefully, the morning we are waking to is a mischevious one, it rejoices in havoc, it chooses through chance and it preys on the weak.

Welcome to Batshitterry.

P.S. Head-butts not included. If mentally unstable forget what you have read. If mentally stable forget what you have read. If mental, forget. If stable, deny. If forget then read and then forget. If head-butt then remember and then forget. If bullshit then don`t care. If care then be careful. If careful steer clear of the forrest.