(no subject)
ATTACK THE STORY LIKE A RADIANT SUICIDE
Franz Kafka, from "Paradise":
Since the Fall we have been essentially equal in our capacity to recognize good and evil; nonetheless it is just here that we seek to show our individual superiority. But the real differences begin beyond that knowledge. The opposite illusion may be explained thus: nobody can remain content with the mere knowledge of good and evil in itself, but must endeavor as well to act in accordance with it. The strength to do so, however, is not likewise given him, consequently he must destroy himself trying to do so, at the risk of not achieving the necessary strength even then; yet there remains nothing for him but this final attempt. (That is moreover the meaning of the threat of death attached to eating of the Tree of Knowledge; perhaps too it was the original meaning of natural death.) Now, faced with this attempt, man is filled with fear; he prefers to annul his knowledge of good and evil (the term "the fall of man" may be traced back to that fear); yet the accomplished cannot be annulled, but only confused. It was for this purpose that our rationalizations were created. The whole world is full of them, indeed the whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.
William Burroughs, from Nova Express:
What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: "the word." Alien Word "the." "The" word of Alien enemy imprisons "thee" in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word forever.
...
Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer-- I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine-- Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit-- Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens-- Stay out of the Garden Of Delights-- It is a man eating trap that ends in green goo-- Throw back their ersatz Immortality-- It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store-- Flush their drugs down the drain-- They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs-- learn to make it without any chemical corn-- All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangement so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.
Antonin Artaud, from "To Have Done With The Judgment of God":
they were words
invented to define things
that existed
or did not exist
in the face of
the pressing urgency
of a need:
the need to abolish the idea,
the idea and its myth,
and to enthrone in its place
the thundering manifestation
of this explosive necessity:
to dilate the body of my internal night,
the internal nothingness
of my self
which is night,
nothingness,
thoughtlessness,
but which is explosive affirmation
that there is
something
to make room for:
my body.
...
but there is a thing
which is something,
only one thing
which is something,
and which I feel
because it wants
TO GET OUT:
the presence
of my bodily
suffering,
...
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally.
Franz Kafka, from "Paradise":
Since the Fall we have been essentially equal in our capacity to recognize good and evil; nonetheless it is just here that we seek to show our individual superiority. But the real differences begin beyond that knowledge. The opposite illusion may be explained thus: nobody can remain content with the mere knowledge of good and evil in itself, but must endeavor as well to act in accordance with it. The strength to do so, however, is not likewise given him, consequently he must destroy himself trying to do so, at the risk of not achieving the necessary strength even then; yet there remains nothing for him but this final attempt. (That is moreover the meaning of the threat of death attached to eating of the Tree of Knowledge; perhaps too it was the original meaning of natural death.) Now, faced with this attempt, man is filled with fear; he prefers to annul his knowledge of good and evil (the term "the fall of man" may be traced back to that fear); yet the accomplished cannot be annulled, but only confused. It was for this purpose that our rationalizations were created. The whole world is full of them, indeed the whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. An attempt to falsify the actuality of knowledge, to regard knowledge as a goal still to be reached.
William Burroughs, from Nova Express:
What scared you all into time? Into body? Into shit? I will tell you: "the word." Alien Word "the." "The" word of Alien enemy imprisons "thee" in Time. In Body. In Shit. Prisoner, come out. The great skies are open. I Hassan i Sabbah rub out the word forever.
...
Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer-- I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine-- Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit-- Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens-- Stay out of the Garden Of Delights-- It is a man eating trap that ends in green goo-- Throw back their ersatz Immortality-- It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store-- Flush their drugs down the drain-- They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs-- learn to make it without any chemical corn-- All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangement so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.
Antonin Artaud, from "To Have Done With The Judgment of God":
they were words
invented to define things
that existed
or did not exist
in the face of
the pressing urgency
of a need:
the need to abolish the idea,
the idea and its myth,
and to enthrone in its place
the thundering manifestation
of this explosive necessity:
to dilate the body of my internal night,
the internal nothingness
of my self
which is night,
nothingness,
thoughtlessness,
but which is explosive affirmation
that there is
something
to make room for:
my body.
...
but there is a thing
which is something,
only one thing
which is something,
and which I feel
because it wants
TO GET OUT:
the presence
of my bodily
suffering,
...
Man is sick because he is badly constructed.
We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape off that animalcule that itches him mortally.