Theme Park at its Darkest

2.

I feel responsible. I feel that I must do something like Flanagan, or Tolstoy. Anything less is a waste of everyone’s time – both yours, and mine. If I think about it too much, there’s not even time enough to go to work.

I am aware that I am not a genius. I am well aware that I have limited talent. Just as Hemingway drove an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War and Hunter S. Thompson joined the Hell’s Angels, so too must I journey outwards to find something new and interesting.

There is a certain conceit in even writing this blog; who the hell am I to make a claim on your attention? A claim on your time? The point of reading is to discover something you didn’t know before. Short answer: I must explore my own frontiers in order to deliver you to yours.

And there is nothing fake or impersonal here, reader. This cut-throat honesty is not an act. These words contain the taste of my blood. When you cut yourself, you’ll find it tastes exactly the same as your own. And as long as you want to stay we will be locked here together, knuckle-on-bone and eye-to-eye, hammering out the truth on the anvil of one another’s minds as surely as if we fell out of a ruptured jet airliner, locked together in freefall.

According to Albert Einstein, the most ‘remarkable experience we can have is of the mysterious. It stands at the cradle of all true art and true science. In this sense, and this sense only [he] is a profoundly religious man.’

I find modern atheism effete and irritating. Personally, I think religion, particularly Christianity, because it’s the religion I was raised inside of, is a primitive technology for reaching out to all that’s best in us. It’s the motherboard in which most of my mythology is installed.

I guess one of the principal drawbacks of it is that the polar opposite of good is evil. The ‘Evil’ Milton sensed, charging his poetics with it, which Blake afterward clearly understood and articulated, became a receptacle for all kinds of qualities that the modern church has deemed undesirable.

Whether it’s William Blake or Nikos Kazantzakis, many artists have fought to reclaim those darker facets because they are necessary for the spiritual health of man. In a similar way, Lucien Greaves, in his blog, ‘Letters to a Satanist’, defines Satanism as “embrac[ing] the spirit of free inquiry and celebrat[ing] “blasphemy” as a declaration of independence from superstitions of old.”

There’s a potency in the Sigil of Baphomet.

While the church is almost obsolete, the sigil exerts a kind of magnetism very few icons still carry. It exerts a dissonance; attracting and repelling at the same time. This may very well be because of the positive and negative connotations it carries from the way Christian culture has shaped it, as the misshapen counter-image of itself.

In the ‘master of cruelty and pain’ sense, in the ‘Linda Blair green vomit and rotating head’ stakes, I’m not a Satanist at all.

However, according to Blake’s ‘Voice of the Devil’…

In this sense, and this sense alone, I am a profoundly religious man.

This entry was posted on December 15, 2014 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Journalism, Observation, Pretensions toward cultural theory, Reading, Real Men, Statement of intention with tags Albert Einstein, blasphemy, Christianity, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S Thompson, John Milton, Letters to a Satanist, Lucien Greaves, mysterious, mythology, Nikos Kazantzakis, Oklahoma Satanic Temple, Paradise Lost, religion, Salman Rushdie, Satan, Satanic Verses, sigil of Baphomet, Spanish Civil War, The Last Temptation, William Blake. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.