5632  The fight going on here between the put-upon atheists and the strident Christian fundamentalists is fake.  They are both fighting the other-worldly, both adore the natural man, both want freedom from the gods.  For both the divine is in human form.  If you look at the fundamentalist heaven and the atheists’ earthly ideal, they are both just like this place, but fixed up, no beyond in sight.  There is here.  Indeed, neither really understands the meaning of “other-worldly, at all.  Do you?

In the Other-world, the commotion of life has stopped.  Look about to see the youth you once were; where is he?  Remember that time you walked out into the woods alone and heard the rustling.  What about that sound from downstairs?  Why did the boy never come back?  The snow was cold.  No one saw you enter that place.  You touched his leg.  Everyone was asleep and you got up.  The taste was bitter and your stomach hurt.  You jumped from the very top.  He left his watch on your desk.  The past is gone; it is now other-worldly.  It has gone into pure being.  Soon you follow yourself.  And you see perfectly.  Nothing moves.

That is the stuff of poetry and the philosopher knows it as Being, not life’s becoming.  Is it nothing at all? 

5631  Poetry and philosophy are both unnerved by the other-world.  The thought of it, if permitted, is always a frightening thing.  The Moderns become embryonic atheists trying to rid themselves of it.  They are betimes still in the slow process of killing it.  Which is understandable, but useless; it’s still there.  They utter the emphatic, “No, it is only art.”  And they show you the sweat of the demiurgic act.  Today’s artist wants to insist that he is in control, NOT that.  He places himself between that and his poetry, his philosophy, his own, which threatens to become his enemy.  The other-world robs man and it is paralysis to him. 

It is very important that no godly being comes and harms man by draining away his power.  But, of course, that awful thing is there and he is paralyzed after all.  The medusa has him in thrall.  The watery womb/tomb.  The serpentine thing.  The entryway.  The dark horror.  That. 

I believe in the other-world and I too look for an escape from the medusa.  The extravagance of my writing has been nothing else.  It takes a frightening thing to fight a frightening thing.  The Boy, so delicate, so full of light, too terrifyingly smooth, is dancing in the precise.  The rhythm lifts itself.  And he and I are out of here.

To despair is to be in love with that which you hate.  The modern world is in despair.

5631  I always bring my philosophy back to the Boy-god.  Does that mean that my ontology is finally a thing of his mind?  No, that boy is his outward Form.  The Dance and the dancer are one.  Expressionless, characterless, just an entity.  He is a thing.  The time for wavering and consideration is past.  A stark thing after the poetry vanishes.  Past death.  Resolute.  He suffers your analysis.  Broken into pieces.  The Boy is one with the final ontological things.  Unthinkable.  Ontology is incorrigible.  He simply stares at you.  The Gaze.  The Evil-eye?  You are intellectually and bodily paralyzed.  He is Beauty itself.  Live and die with him.  I always bring my philosophy back to the Boy-god.  It means nothing.

5630  Existence, actuality and possibility.  The Hounds of Tindalos, creatures of fantasy.  How should we analyze their ontological status? 

I look out my window; I look all around; I read through history; I look under my bed; they are nowhere, and chances are that they will not be there in the future.  Still, you may know very well what I am talking about which means they are not nothing.  It is the popular way to say that they are “only figures in the Imagination” and leave it at that, not realizing that that is no answer, only an evasion.  Even if there is such a thing as the Imagination and they are there, then they are really there and they exist.  But I see you demure and you are an unbeliever.

Here’s what I think.  The Hound of Tindalos exists.  Every form exists.  The Cats of Plynthos exist.  The Birds of Baktel exist.  The giant yacht moored in my back yard exists.  My supremely beautiful lover exists.  Everything.  But none of those may be actual in my world right now, nor ever will be.  They are possibilities, not actualities.  But they do exist.

I suppose you could say that these existent possibilities could change and take on actuality, but there is a problem with that.  It may be that in my world it does, but in yours it doesn’t.  Is it both actual and not actual at once?  No, the existing Form and its actual or possible obtaining here or there are two, not one.  The Form and the fact of its being exemplified by this or that are different.  I contemplate the Form, just as it is in itself.  I contemplate or intuit the facts as something else entirely.

Being divides.  Form and fact.  Existing Form and actual/possible fact.  We know both.  And that means that the mind is an awareness of that difference.  It knows that Form and fact are other.  It knows that  the two entities actuality and possibility are other.  It knows the existence that is in the Form.  So many things to be aware of.  And then there is the awareness of awareness and the Form of Awareness itself.  Are you able to hold all that in systematic arrangement?  Ontology is a street juggler trying to hold his balls and flaming torch while they are up in the air.  A twisted act.  For what?

All that will be of little interest to most and they will want to get back to the story.  I will tend to the juggler and love him.

5629  At the request of a precocious friend of mine I last time wrote about The Hounds of Tindalos.  And since he is also interested in toxic things, so I will try to unite those two ideas.  I will, of course, bring in Derrida and the pharmakos, the scapegoat, and all the members of that circus.

Those hounds belong to modern mythology, that is to say they are a creation of the Romantic Imagination.  They thus as here to fill in the hole left by departing religion.  It is essential that they do not exist; otherwise they would themselves be religion instead of a substitute.  The Romantics believed the thinkers of the Enlightenment when they so vehemently preached that ALL religion is violence and must be eradicated.  Turning it into art is just the destructive terror that is needed.

Now for pharmakon, which is Greek for drug, poison, philter, charm, spell, enchantment.  Perhaps a bad thing, but as a cure also a good thing—it is a contradiction, and, therefore, it doesn’t exist.  That is very important.  It is the ambiguity that is art, the negligible, the deconstructed, mere mind fumes.  Religion is gone.

Opposed to those who think that such artful things must suffer under the domination of the human imagination, there are the realists, who think they are really there independent of man.  Now then, if the realists are right then we are again back at religion and man is put upon.  Then the Hounds of Tindalos are real beings, hellish beings for us.  Supernatural beings.  The Enlightenment is at an end, violence approaches.  It is just the violence of religion that The Enlightenment wanted to stop.  Therefore, the realists, friends of the violent, will have to be scapegoated.  They are toxic to humanity.  But I am such a realist.  Now what?

5628  The Hounds of Tindalos strike me as a mathematical idea plus X.  I will examine that X in a moment, but for now the mathematics.  As far as I can tell with my limited knowledge of such things, we are here dealing with things cornered in a chaotic iteration of acute angles.  Zillions of sharp-pointed vectors aggregating.  I’m sure there is a precise mathematical definition of all that, which is no doubt fascinating in itself, but for now I am more interested in X.  There is something there that is outside mathematics or belongs to meta-mathematics.  Or meta-meta madness.

These hounds are forms from the mythic transformations of our time.  And they are obviously a part of Romantic Decadence.  Mathematics and Romance.  Reason and art.  The Enlightenment and the return of superstition.

Let me define superstition as paralysis when confronted with a certain algorithmic demand.  One does not calmly and with free-will gaze on that something.  Simply put, you get stuck.  Any action you make becomes incessant.  Like a Buddhist monk you stand and then prostrate yourself, stand and prostrate yourself, stand and prostrate yourself, thousands of times trying to make it turn to meaningless emptiness.  Just as when you repeat as word over and over, its meaning vanishes in monotonous sound—or you hope it does.  You are like a chicken being stared down by a snake.  The evil-eye has you.

Mathematics, the evil-eye, paralysis and the dithering of non-convergent iteration.

The Enlightenment took upon itself the duty of freeing mankind from the horrors of religion.  In the Reign of Terror it began the task of killing anyone who exhibited the marks of that dreadful superstition.  It wanted to free us all of those who would enslave us to supernatural beings.  No more transcendent spooks.  Now only Man and his reason.  But first the hell of extermination.

That, of course, wouldn’t do.  Therefore, the romantics advocated turning religion into art.  That way we could have our cake and eat it too.  The barren emptiness of reason would be filled up with culture’s Imagination.  Not really religion, not really bleak machine materialism.  A half-way house for addicts. 

The Hounds of Tindalos are from the art that came to fill up the hole left behind when religion vanished.  They are non-existent creatures of the Imagination.  Mathematics made quasi-religious.  And somehow partaking of the paralysis of superstition.  We stare at art and dither.  The loop begins to loop incessantly.  Oh, I fear that art has become just as enslaving as religion with its evil-eye.  We gaze at its Gaze back at us.  Medusa.  I sense a new reign of terror is coming.

266  Beyond the dialectic of the Other lies the Simplicity.  Otherness is understanding itself.  It is the essence of understanding.  See how easy it is to say that.  I can take any of the Forms and lead them on to otherness.  But if I think of a Form just as that simplicity, I think nothing, I understand nothing, I am in oblivion.  I can think Otherness, I cannot think the Pure One.  I am otherness, my consciousness is the reaching out. I am intimate with moving away.  I can understand self-sacrifice, but just a simple Form standing before me I must inevitably assault.  I insist that I have propositions to speak, that all my thoughts be of propositional form, that the distance between subject and predicate be with me, and I cannot think a simple universal by itself.  I want to think it.  I try to stare it down, but it just knocks me over.  I know it's there by the effect it has on me.  It is that famous thing that "ravishes me out of my mind."  It is the god without consort.  Just Himself.

Outside the Trinity, away from all the comings and goings of the relations bringing about the persons, away from the traffic, is the simple unthinkable divinity.  Away from the Trinity, but not away from me.  It presents me no otherness.

As it is hard to accept our salvation so it is hard to believe that we know the simple forms.  A knowing outside knowing itself.  A thing too fresh and present, immediately, as sensa are immediate, but nothing like sensa, no longer in the maze of the dialectical.

Mediation disappears and a new immediacy appears.  The Forms are, right there.  The gods have come back.

Here the polemic ends.  The Beautiful One is present; the battle is far away.  I no longer have to hide within a duplicitous conceit.  No longer am I hateful, for His sake.  He is here.  Still love is everywhere.  I'm looking into a magnifying, thick substance that is light and love.  I can see the Forms there as substantial beings, as gods.  I move from the unthinkable, non-propositional to a thing I'm sure I could put my hand in.  So like the material, but transfigured, or of a celestial body or density.  Never like material things.  It did not say, 'this is a flower', but 'this is flowerness.'  Not 'this is a boy', but 'this is boyness'.  The otherness between the individual and the form was gone.  The Form itself is what is displayed.  It was as thickness to me.  It is the true form of logic, so other-worldly.