Potentially Suicidal Gods?

Nemonymous

Nemonymous

Grimscribe
I've now reached reading to the end of 'Thinking Horror' and I see I shall have to re-read the whole magnificent tour de force one day, but, meanwhile, to comment as I promised: piecemeal ...
I'm currently unsure whether we are being made to imagine the most selfless numinous (nemonymous) self (in connection with the Proustian selves described in this section of CATHR) or to affirm one's identity so that one can doff it with grander effect!
E.G., by wearing identity one becomes even more identiless when one does become identiless after having an identity once (a single self not doffed in favour of separate selves within the same headlease (if powerless) self but in favour of the non-technological 'singularity' of an unself) ... and writing fiction is thus the identity (or job) one shall later doff in this way??

Is the fiction writer the potentially suicidal God?

PS: Meanwhile, I hang my head (with its self snailed within it) in confused dismay for having been a 'breeder' during my lifetime.
 
Thanks again to Dr B for peeling off these strands...

I have now reached the end of 'Intolerance' in 'Facing Horror'.

This rings loud bells with me for my relationship with blood relations and even chosen friends vis a vis conflicts of religious temperament. I am not even on the same map of (non)-belief as most people I know. It is a hard cross to bear. Pretentious, too.

I see CATHR is subtitled 'A Short Life of Horror'. This is reflective, I feel, of Peter Ackroyd's history of London entitled LONDON: A BIOGRAPHY. This is the essence of it (so far): we are talking about life, a biography, an overview by the life itself of itself. An eternal philosophical dilemma of a mind examining itself with unknown and unknowable filters between. This is how TL is so clever in bringing puppetry into the equation. But as yet I fail to see how TL will eventually solve this conundrum. He may have of course even cleverer prestidigitations up his sleeve as I read on.

I think 'potentially suicidal gods' (the thread title given by Dr B to my original post) sums it up neatly .... but will they remain for ever 'potential' suicides as most reckonable suicides are, because they are not suicides ... yet? And to 'reckon' a true suicide one would indeed need to be a God to come back and tell us about a true 'happened' suicide. (All other sucides are just hearsay). And without a 'true' God in the equation, the whole CATHR falls apart. But it also falls apart with a God in it, of course.

des

addendum: here: http://weirdmonger.livejournal.com/2007/03/27/ are my own gauche thoughts that were published in 'Roadworks ' (1999) under the title 'Beyond Death' as gathered and trimmed by exegesis frm my earlier wildly immature thoughts in several 'Tentacles Across The Atlantic' columns in 'Deathrealm' during the mid-nineties. (Zencore has column inches.)
 
My first readng of CATHR has now reached the end of 'Fictions' in 'Consuming Horror', with some disconnnected notes ....

I am beginning to wonder if the nemophile and nemophobe are the same person.

Did you know that on the Titanic there was a musical band that continued to play in the lounge right up to the very moment of the ship's final sinking?

Is there such a thing as a gratuitous act?

And if one takes the thrust of CATHR (so far) to its own rational conclusions, would a mass killing (or mass suicide pact) in the ultimate (if hopeless) hope that universal cleansing would then ensue - even within the constraints of an ostensibly logicalised philosophy - be untouchable by laws that were intended to prevent such events? This may be something that any publisher of this work would have to be wary of. But, of course, anyone studying CATHR should finish it before making any such judgement of speculation.

The Suicide of a God by writing philosophy about its Godhood?
 
DF Lewis said:
The Suicide of a God by writing philosophy about its Godhood?
Click to expand...
Or autoeroticism? A mentality which tells itself, "God, I'm good at what I do." Perversely, I was suddenly reminded of "The Ruling Class" starring Peter O'Toole and Alastair Sim, a wonderfully dark 1972 British film which pokes fun at (and/or reveals) the conventions of manners, morals, and religion. Truly a treat for the sincere Thomas Ligotti disciple!
 
Indeed, GSC.
Overnight I've wondered if the title - Conspiracy Against The Human Race - is double-edged (whether intentional or not, multiple bluff or not), inasmuch as CATHR itself is to become a conspiracy against the human race and/or, even, the author's own conspiracy against himself.
I intend to have a short break from reading CATHR today as it is, I feel, the sort of work from which the reader needs respite - a respite from its headiness of texture and its cocktail of shadows. However, I may be tempted back into its enticing maw sooner rather than later.
des
 
well, I couldn't keep away for long from this unique reading experience that is CATHR. It is both deeply serious and laced with a deep cynical humour (I sense), a humour which does not relieve the dark seriousness but alters it like a pungent spice would make a stew a curry.

I have now reached reading to the end of 'Consuming Horror' - 'Style'.
Lovecraft is not a writer, I feel, but a phenomenon that is his writing. If you read his letters to Kleiner, you might not wonder how he needed his future reputation as a person to be blotted out by cosmic horror! His prose style is aso blotted out by the same cosmic horror; so his style autonomously creates the cosmic horror with blatant over-dramatic coagulants of semantics, graphology, phonetics and syntax ... indescribable reams of adjectival feasts ... a lurking fear that outdoes its style by, paradoxically, being outdone by it! And this paradox relates to the cocktail of shadows that is CATHR. It is more than its parts. And I genuinely believe (and I repeat) (with the sole current reservation that I have not yet finished my first reading of CATHR) that we have a God here who is destroying Himself by writing a cogent work of Philosophy to prove His own non-existence*. As Lovecraft needed to do, whether intended or not.

Edited for this footnote:
*And this is the prestidigitation I predicted earlier, perhaps, whereby the author of CATHR is solving the conundrum of a mind examining its own mind...
 
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I have now completed my first reading of CATHR up to the end of 'Sickness' in 'Living Horror'.

Maybe I can be forgiven being a 'breeder' during my lifetime, by having named my daughter B in 1974. :-)

Under this thread title, I think it appropriate to quote this extract from Stefan Grabinski:

"Wrzesmian wasn't too popular. The works of this strange man, saturated with rampant fantasy and imbued with strong individualism, gave a most unfavourable impression by inverting accepted aesthetic-literary theories and by mocking established pseudo-truths. His output was eventually acknowledged as the product of a sick imagination, the bizarre work of an eccentric, maybe even a madman. Wrzesmian was an inconvenience for a variety of reasons and he disturbed unnecessarily, stirring peaceful waters. Thus his premature eclipse was received with a secret sigh of relief." FROM "THE AREA" BY STEFAN GRABINSKI.


Re Nabokov and metaphor, is it a metaphor that what I consider to be his greatest novel is entitled ADA but pronounced ARDOR?
 
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I have now finished my first reading of CATHR. I can't tell if I am a changed man as a result of reading it other than, perhaps, by having the foresight to record my initial thoughts piecemeal during the reading! Is this a new way to review books - a whole review spread in time split between two electronic threads, i.e. this thread and the other entitled (What is Natural is Futile), both of which badly need other posters than me to complete the Jungian circle, the universal review in time and electronic space. But these spaces (infinitely wide threads?) have remained merely fallow...so far.

I am enormously impressed by CATHR as a whole. It is original and thought-provoking, encouraging the readers to become even more original in their reactions. It is a template for us. The author of CATHR calls us you in the long seemingly heart-felt Shakespearean soliloquy at the end of 'Plot' which is about losing the plot. You to us to them. How do we know we are the only creatures on Earth who are aware of our future death?

Death is Natural. But we are Supernatural, immune within our body-car, till it crashes...

If there is the sense of the Supernatural which is tantamount to the Supernatural itself, why can not there also be a sense of our immortality, where we learn all the mistakes of life and become essentially happy forever? A sense of fiction. A sense that is magically stronger than reality. A regaining of the lost plot. A regaining of Proustian lost time. A casacade of selves that is us.

I am, however, ominous:

How can CATHR infer a mind that writes CATHR as well as being the same mind examined within CATHR? Perhaps by disassociation created by word clones and word clowns. Puppet strings tied to the letters before the post-performance letters become indelible insects squashed to the page in deceptively neat ranks ... and by brilliantly 'anchoring' (to recoin that word) the thoughts in CATHR to a learned array of references elsewhere in the literature of morbidity.

Would this also solve the danger of CATHR - in some hands - becoming its own Bible of multi-destruction?

Is CATHR a conspiracy against the world, rather than a description of that conspiracy.

Is it ontologial suicide?

des

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Addendum:

Something I wrote some years ago below. It's a bit dated. Now I'm gone neo-ominous!

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The Ominous Imagination

My greatest love in fiction is the 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' core that I find in most sorts of literature, old and new, literary and otherwise.

For me, this core should be and is being expanded by the current vogue in fiction genre-crossing and genre-betweening (Interstitiality), i.e. acting like a magnet, and making other fiction traditions conducive to the 'Horror' spirit or, as I would like it to be called, The Ominous Imagination. Indeed, I believe, most good fiction is (and has always been) imbued with and steeped in this type of imaginative spirit, in any event.

Those who publish genre-specific outlets in the Horror fiction field, for example, perhaps allow the hard-fought beach-heads of 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' to crumble and separate out, thus allowing these particles of fiction already gathered for the 'Horror/Dark Fantasy' core to escape from that core because such genre-narrowing outlets tend to crystallise that core AS a core rather than as a magnet.

===

I hope Thomas Ligotti will accept being the high priest of the magnet, not of the core.
 
DF Lewis said:
How do we know we are the only creatures on Earth who are aware of our future death?
Click to expand...
Humans are not alone. Animals, too, can interpret the existential punctuation which follows every life sentence. My elephant friends have made a ritual out of the sadness. Period.
 
Rover said: Humans are not alone. Animals, too, can interpret the existential punctuation which follows every life sentence. My elephant friends have made a ritual out of the sadness. Period.

Thanks, Rover. Your evidence vouching for your knowledge of your future death seems to a be a thorn in the foot of one of CATHR's premises. :-)
 
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