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Flotsam 3

Posted by Ken Smith on September 23rd, 2010 at 12:01 AM

As they should say (but don’t), dissatisfaction with life is one of the soft signs for sanity among one’s higher-order powers.

Flotsam 2

Posted by Ken Smith on September 16th, 2010 at 12:01 AM

Karma — to some a burden as unfelt as the weight of the column of atmosphere over their head and shoulders, and to others (Sophocles’ Oedipus for example) a crushing boulder of ruinous self-necessitation — is quite oppressive if one can relate to it only mechanically and intellectually, as something one “knows” to be true about oneself and must connive to suppress.

Flotsam 1

Posted by Ken Smith on September 14th, 2010 at 12:01 AM

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the career of Dr. Mabuse illustrate the grave but transitory realization of early 20th-century European society that the inmates had mutinied and control over modern science’s continent-wide asylums had been usurped by the pathological: “Modern literature — prescriptions written by patients,” remarked Karl Kraus.: Mein Kampf, The Ego and Its Own, The Third Reich, and the murderously wicked fraud Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

THE CAVE OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS, IX of IX

Posted by Ken Smith on July 23rd, 2010 at 12:01 AM

Every consumerist or self-willful desideratum is felt to be absolute, a divine passion or vital addiction; and from this blind madness of telegenic cravings, moderns proceed to extrapolate their life’s geometry, their putative “freedom” calculated from the axiomatics of their wholly controlled and slavish appetites. The more intellectualized moderns grow, the less reflective they become, confirmed in their ever-hardening conflation of pathos for will, of marketworld for ego and heteronomous capitulation for self-assertion.

THE CAVE OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS, VIII of IX

Posted by Ken Smith on July 21st, 2010 at 12:01 AM

In our collective and personal vices we are merely living up to what is anonymously, ambiently or mass-expected of us: we wallow in our “own concerns,” our petty and deformative idiotia or private-consumerist-retardate priorities that blithely eat away the wholeness of the world like myopic termites at work on a decadent old mansion.

Fantasy’s Michelangelo: An Appreciation

Posted by Ken Smith on May 14th, 2010 at 2:47 PM

Ken Smith’s 1994 (TCJ #174) appreciation of Frazetta examines the artist in the larger context of fantasy illustrators and his heritage.

THE CAVE OF FALSE CONSCIOUSNESS VI of IX

Posted by Ken Smith on April 17th, 2010 at 9:00 AM

Moderns are unaccountably surprised by the generally submerged or masked forms of vicious hostility that underlie even the most innocuous, trivial or mundane issues; but the problem is not the irremediable differences of perspective but rather the entirely misconceived or suppositious impression of congeniality.

The Cave Of False Consciousness, V of IX

Posted by Ken Smith on April 15th, 2010 at 10:00 AM

For Nietzsche it took a “madman” to declare the most blatant of modern actualities, “the death of God.” For archetypal truths demand anomalous heralds, most of all they demand original minds bearing the least burden of institutionally conferred respectability and authority. Count on it that moderns as moderns could never comprehend what “God” ever actually signified in human consciences or cultures…