Russell can only wait for those final threads of emotional attachment to wither on the vine, so to speak.

Predicted Outcome.

As Thom says on one of those PH-era songs, it's inevitable, it's inevitable.

And one gets the sense that this patchwork of increasingly-permanent failure is part of an unconscious process, a preparing-of-the-field for what is seen, again, as ultimately Inevitable.

Perceptual Fail.

I can sustain some semblance of the "mystical perspective" for roughly five minutes, before being again subsumed by base emotion, *negative* emotion, ***NEGATIVE FUTURE VISION.***

Predictor.

Let's remember that Russell predicted that his life and his tentative ambitions would all fall into disrepair if the cellmate chose to keep the fetus.

Russell knows his limitations. He knew this would happen.

Scrap.

When you feel that your basic core dignity has been eroded, it's important to go to your little bag of shit and pull out that philosophical defense you once scribbled down, something about American success being lacquered with blood. Make sure to keep that piece of paper handy, make sure to read it obsessively to try and arm yourself against your darker leanings.

Mayhap.

Perhaps we understand the indignity of the situation now.

Pressured to clean more adequately to prepare for the arrival of someone else's lover.

You yourself seemingly forever consigned to a basement somewhere.

Absolutely dependent.

Yes, we can get a sense for a certain grave loss of dignity.

None.

Disgrace.

'How humiliating,' he says finally. 'Such high hopes, and to end like this.'

'Yes, I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing. Not with nothing but. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.'

'Like a dog.'

'Yes, like a dog.'

My father, who throughout his adult life was severely manic depressive
and constantly checking himself in to mental hospitals,
where he craved and received dozens of electroshock therapy
treatments, died a few years ago at ninety-eight. I’ll never forget
his running back and forth in the living room and repeating, “I
need the juice,” while my third-grade friends and I tried to play
indoor miniature golf.

‘If only a rock would fall and kill me,’ wrote Kierkegaard, ‘at least that would be a way out.’ I doubt if there is anyone today who has not been touched by the horror of a thought of that kind. Inertia is the surest killer, the inertia of those who settle for senility at eighteen, plunging eight hours a day into degrading work and feeding upon ideologies. Beneath the miserable tinsel of the spectacle there are only gaunt figures yearning for, yet dreading Kierkegaard’s ‘way out’, so that they might never again have to desire what they dread and dread what they desire.

In our universe of expanding technology and modern conveniences we see people turning in upon themselves, shrivelling up, living trivial lives and dying for details. It is a nightmare where we are promised absolute freedom but granted a miserable square inch of individual autonomy—a square inch, moreover, that is strictly policed by our neighbours. A space-time of mean-spiritedness and low thoughts.

Art can never be so well
served as by a negative thought. Its dark and humiliated
proceedings are as necessary to the understanding of a great work
as black is to white. To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture
in clay, to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s
work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this
has no more importance than building for centuries—this is the
difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these
two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and
magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He
must give the void its colors.

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely,
that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted
them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something.
A man who has be-come conscious of the absurd is forever bound
to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased
to belong to the future. That is natural. But it is just as natural that
he should strive to escape the universe of which he is the creator.

--

 The important thing, as Abbe Galiani said to Mme
d’Epinay, is not to be cured, but to live with one’s ailments.

--

I ask what is involved in the condition I recognize as
mine; I know it implies obscurity and ignorance; and I am assured
that this ignorance explains everything and that this darkness is my
light.

In this ravaged world in which the impossibility of knowledge is
established, in which everlasting nothingness seems the only
reality and irremediable despair seems the only attitude, he tries to
recover the Ariadne’s thread that leads to divine secrets.

Does the Absurd dictate death? 

As the spectacular system falls apart, it scrapes the barrel: trawling the most deprived areas of society, it is reduced to feeding on its own refuse. Thus tone-deaf singers, talent-free artists, reluctant laureates and pallid stars of all kinds periodically cross the firmament of the media, their rank in the hierarchy reflected in the frequency with which they achieve this feat.

Health Tip.

If you spend enough time repeating the word "dead" over a simple piano loop, you may be able to induce some slight sobbing.

Vaneigem

The only thing that can be expressed in the mode of the spectacle is the emptiness of everyday life. And indeed, what better commodity than an aesthetic of emptiness? Has not the accelerating disintegration of values itself become the only available form of entertainment?

Siren.

the punishment for suicides in Dante is to be turned into a tree.

thom yorke is turned into a tree at the end of the "there there" video.

is "there there" about suicide?

Russell's Masochistic Mechanisms, Volume 88.

Doesn't this blog just worsen Russell's agony with regard to the yawning blankness with which everything is (not) received?

Yes, interesting.

But see, Russell has attempted to express all of this privately, in the solitary sanctity of a word processing program, but for whatever reason, the seclusion provided by this method affects his (self-)communication in a corrosive way. A sentence cannot finish before it has to be interrupted for contradiction, for self-heckling.

Everything is killed mid-birth, there in the solitude.

Russell can carry on a little better in public forums, can hold the threads together a bit longer. But of course this also means he exposes himself to the anti-chorus of DOT-DOT-DOT in (non-)response. With this in mind, may we suspect that a bit of the ol' masochism is at work here?

In light of this, we are left only to hope that some sort of gods do indeed exist, and that they are an eager and ever-present audience for Dear Russell's catastrophic attempts to come to terms with himself.

$2700 + 33%

A doctoral dissertation examining why some mentally troubled persons insist on expressing themselves in the social media environment when it is painfully obvious to them that nobody particularly cares.

Fallen Apart.

ha ha, see how things corrode?
ha ha.

The Book of Disquiet.

Slavery is the only law of life, there is no other, because this law must be obeyed; there is no possible rebellion against it or refuge from it. Some are born slaves, some become slaves, some have slavery thrust upon them. The cowardly love we all have of freedom - which if it were given to us we would all repudiate as being too new and strange – is the irrefutable proof of how our slavery weighs upon us.

What He Means, Right.

"It's sort of like suddenly in life you realize that all of your worst suspicions about the world are confirmed. And maybe that's the day you really become an adult, or a sadder person, I don't know. You know what I mean, right?" 

Guide 2.

Unlike leninism, Dada promised nothing, no utopia, but also no end to strife, no rest. The work of Dada is interminable, consisting inevitably of change. If Tzara and his fellow dadaists had been motivated by anything other than being, they would have promised something at the end of Work. Something, anything: immortality, a better society, an escape, a half-life after death, a lazy pantheism. They promised nothing, but in so doing they discovered the secret of putting the “people of the future” to work, so that that they might reinvent Dada every time they felt the unbearable pressure of “reality” closing in, the boot of techne on their neck.

Wittgenstein

"An image held us imprisoned. And we could not get out, for it lay in our language which merely seemed to repeat it to us, inexorably."  

A Word Virus.

Random Kitchen-Strike.

Unintentional.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Voidal

Baudrillard 5

Existence is something we must not consent to. It has been given to us as a consolation prize, and we must not believe in it. The will is something we must not consent to. It has been given to us as the illusion of an autonomous subject.

filmmmmm.

FAMILY FRIENDLY FILM ABOUT A QUIXOTIC FATHER WHO STUMBLES AROUND THE GARAGE TRYING TO BUILD A ROBOT. AWWW DAD, YOU'RE SO WEIRD, ETC. ETC. BUT FINALLY, NEARLY TWO DECADES LATER, HIS CREATION IS COMPLETE, A ROBOT APPEARING STRIKINGLY SIMILAR TO THE FATHER HIMSELF, AND THIS ROBOT ANNOUNCES ITSELF AS SURROGATE PERMANENT, FOR THE FATHER WILL NOW TAKE HIS LIFE, WHICH WAS HIS WHOLE REASON FOR SPENDING YEARS ON THIS PROJECT, TO COVER THE RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE EVENT OF HIS EXIT.

FAMILY FRIENDLY.
MORAL AND REAL.
REAL REAL REAL.

Cauzz Is.

...crisis is always a matter of causality, of an imbalance between cause and effect to which a solution will be found (or not) by attending to causes. In our case, by contrast, it is the causes themselves that are tending to disappear, tending to become indecipherable, and giving way to an intensification of processes operating in a void.
--J. Baudrillard

[Do not feel any sense of bother RE: we know not the exact causes of such-and-such and yet still feel confident enough to prescribe/proscribe thus and thus, if you were properly trained in the appropriate sciences you would be able to perceive that this contradiction is in fact not a contradiction at all, in fact is no-thing, a nothingness, a gap, see, you're hallucinating phantom "contradictions" in these various "gaps," do you need an increased dosage?]

Why Don't See A Thing

I get an impulse to add something new to LOOKING FOR LEVI but then I end up feeling that it's in a state of perfect completion with nothing to be added.

R.C. Fuckfest

If RAPID CYCLING is our sole determinant, then let's carry on getting entangled wherever we end up, sleeping or not sleeping, sober or otherwise.

The RAPID CYCLING is all, every, anywhenever ok ok.

Rapid Cycling is New Divinity,

Rapid Cycling is Old Demiurge.

Diamond Rings.

Freud saw suicide as a great passion, like being in love: 'In the two opposed situations of being most intensely in love and of suicide the ego is overwhelmed by the object, though in totally different ways.' 

A. Alvarez, The Savage God

Beckett

...my notes have a curious tendency, as I realize at last, to annihilate all they purport to record.

Hot New Amateur Diagnosis

No but really, this is the good shit this time, not exactly doctoral but this is on the level, BA degree level level level, ok?

So we're upwardly mobile here, we're flagged under Type 1 Bi-Polar now, and see, the key to this whole thing is the *RAPID CYCLING.* See, now listen, this is a causeless domain here, the triggers are not triggers and the wounds don't sting, ok? It's just this textually placid smoothness of description now, RAPID CYCLING is your tone, your celestial harmonic, it's YOU by which I mean ME and it puts all the wondering to rest, see, it's just this wavelike rhythm coming in, moving out, nowhere and no-thing, just black black black and blameless forever.

T1.

RAPID

CYCLING

RAPID

CYCLING

Counter--

Against Blogging:
 If with each word we win a victory over nothingness, it is only the better to endure its reign. We die in proportion to the words which we fling around us . . . Those who speak have no secrets. And we all speak. We betray ourselves, we exhibit our heart; executioner of the unspeakable, each of us labors to destroy all the mysteries, beginning with our own.
E.M. Cioran

Messianic.

The longing to become a source of events affects each man like a mental disorder or a desired malediction. Society—an inferno of saviors! What Diogenes was looking for with his lantern was an indifferent man. . . .

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world. . . . The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. He has a voice: that is enough. It costs us dear to be neither deaf nor dumb. . . .
E.M. Cioran

But the underlying oneness in all confusions.

Baudrillard 4

...what lends writing, fictional or theoretical, its intensity is the void, the nothingness running beneath the surface, the illusion of meaning, the ironic dimension of language, correlative with the facts themselves, which are never anything but what they are. That is to say, they are never more than what they are and they are, literally, never only what they are....Reality itself is too obvious to be true.

Baudrillard 3

The Ancients were cleverer than we are. They had bestowed responsibility for the world--for its chance happenings, its whims--on the gods, which left them free to act as they saw fit. The gods were the incarnation of the play, chaos and illusoriness of the world, not of its truth.

Fixed.

There are moments in the course of readings when perception seems to undergo a slight twist, so that a novel and superior alternative to this personal status quo reveals itself, in terms of the moment by moment approach to lived reality. 

This is almost always temporary, however, for the baseline inertia of the Fucked-Up Deathtrip is seemingly too immense to be overcome by mere text.

How does this reading comprehension differ from that of a religious person daily consulting a particular Sacred Text? Compare and contrast with raw experimental data and ship us the findings.

Baudrillard 2

The aura of our world is no longer sacred. We no longer have the sacred horizon of appearances, but that of the absolute commodity. Its essence is promotional.

Baudrillard

There is, at any rate, no possibility of being oneself. There is no possibility of ideas being themselves. If they come to pass, they do so disavowing themselves. Everything which becomes reality runs counter to its own concept.

Policy of Self-Policing.

The attempt to police one's thought.

Standing in the kitchen, apropos of nothing, I should kill myself.

Question being, with regards to, the source, of, and....

For increased titillation, presume the source to be a disembodied intelligence. Ghost, demon, what have you.

Or otherwise, just the same tired circular loops of self-contained thought, birthed sometime in the mid-90s and now refined into solid, well-furrowed habit.

For no legitimate reason.

All of the time.

Policing the dumbest of phantoms, especially for one who is afraid of death.

Plot.

White Noise (Don DeLillo)
- Highlight Loc. 345-49 | 

When the showing ended, someone asked about the plot to kill Hitler. The discussion moved to plots in general. I found myself saying to the assembled heads, “All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?

Nope.

Social Media as Activism: Whenever Power is in danger of exploding, it opens a safety-valve to lower the pressure. At such times it is said to have changed hands, but in fact it has merely adapted, thus resolving its difficulties.
--R. Vaneigem

Hairy

"...almost every stunt staged by Houdini represented a form of pseudo-suicide."

R. Vaneigem

Desperate fellowship in sickness is the worst thing that can befall a civilization.

So that, when you ask, as per your personal tendency, if this person to whom you speak is typically battling suicidal urges, you, as a perma-case in that regard, should hope like hell that the answer is somewhere along the lines of, well, yes, but then I turned sixteen.

Because the alternative is, what, counterproductive?

It is not so much death that terrifies twentieth-century humanity as the absence of real life: the lifeless gestures, the mechanized, specialized gestures that steal portions of life hundreds, thousands of times a day until mind and body are exhausted, until an end comes that is less the end of life than an absence at saturation point.

You Can't Win (This Way)

The paradox here is similar to that faced by the climbers: even by rebelling against a failing social order, the enforcer winds up reinforcing it. Their anti-social behavior—their insubordination, their betrayal of their families, their violence and law-breaking—is all reabsorbed into the social order, just as the sociopathic social climber becomes the most powerful and dedicated servant of the social order. Both the climber and the enforcer have escaped the trap of the schemer, who can have no meaningful goals, but the price they’ve paid is that their goal is ultimately defined by the broader social order.
--A. Kotsko