First impressions matter, right? The funny thing about that overdone saying is that it's true! Think of the first time you've met someone. The good impressions. And the bad ones. How hard was it to shake that first impression? No matter how untrue you felt it was.
You may have met someone on a good day. You were creative and witty. And in top form. Is that your true self?
Or think of another first meeting when you were sad or tired or otherwise miserable. You may have met someone you would have otherwise instantly clicked with. Instead, you came across as dull and sluggish and slow-witted. Is that your true self?
And what about those times you tried to manage first impressions. The job interviews. The first time with the lover's family/friends. At these times, you want to put your best traits forward. And keep your worst ones firmly in check. Were you tricking people? Hiding your true self behind this carefully assumed self?
How do you even know what your true self is? We all have this idea of who we really are. The self we want to project out onto the world. Except, not always. Sometimes we only want some parts to come out. Other times, other parts. What does that tell us about our true selves?
What if 'you' don't exist as a constant, definable and true entity? What if that sense of self and meaningful identity is false? An illusion. What if you aren't a 'you' but a constantly shifting process that deludes itself into thinking it's a 'you'? Wouldn't that explain why pieces of 'you' come out depending on the circumstances...?
The contingency of first impressions provides evidence for the non-existence of a real self. The ability to represent the self differently under different conditions provides further evidence that 'we' as an indivisible and complete unit do not exist. Our selves are multi-faceted. A face for every face we face, to paraphrase 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. And if that is the case, then which face is the true face?
All of our faces may be equally untrue. And we may very well not be masters of our own domain. Thomas Metzinger is a philosopher who explores the nature of consciousness and the self. His work argues that 'no such things as selves exist in the world: Nobody ever was or had a self [italics in original] (p. 186).' We are an illusion of our brain and we can't even see it! So we go about our business assuming that 'we' are going about our business when instead something completely different is actually going on: 'The phenomenal self is not a thing, but a process--and the subjective experience of being someone [italics in original] emerges if a conscious information processing system operates under a transparent model...All that exist are specific information processing systems engaged in self-modelling, but whose models cannot be correlated with any ostensibly 'real' items in the world (p. 187).'
We feel like we are selves, so we assume that we as a self exists. But this sense of self is false, we 'possess 'self-models' which cannot be recognised by the system that employs them (p. 187).' How does this happen? How can we be so deluded by our own bodies? According to Metzinger, 'we do not experience phenomenal states as phenomenal states...[we] look through them [italics and ellipses/brackets in original] (pp. 189-190).' We then live in a 'fully immersive virtual reality' which Metzinger likens to 'cyberspace': 'We do not experience our conscious field as a cyberspace generated by our brain, but simply as reality itself, with which we are in contact in a natural and unproblematic way (p. 190).' It would seem then that The Matrix is not science fiction at all but a good picture of the kind of world we actually inhabit as self-models constantly tricked into taking 'appearances' literally.
Of course, that is only partially accurate. The true horror of reality is that you cannot wake up. Choose the red pill, choose the blue pill. It doesn't matter. You have no choice. There is no 'you' to choose. You can't wake up. You can only dream. But maybe dreaming is a comfort...
Dream on, my dark comrades.
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Happy Vampire's Day
Yesterday was Valentine's Day and I was too busy to post. So I am only now making my belated V-Day post.
Holly Horrorland has invited all of us Goth bloggers to a Sanguinary Soiree for V-Day. So this post will be about the hominoid leeches of the night. Specifically since it's Valentine's Day, I'd like to ask: Are vampires sexy? Why or why not?
Vampires definitely weren't sexy before the 19th century. They were little more than reanimated corpses returned to haunt and decimate their families and loved ones. Ghoulish revenants. Impure but simple.
Then the Romantics did what Romantics do and romanticized them. Turning the creepy grave crawlers into dashing and debonnair and terrifying blood-sucking men of quality. Vamps became tramps. Undead sexy. And that is now the norm.
An exception is 30 Days of Night. These vampires are truly horrifying. Not just plain vanilla scary. But scary in a completely unearthly and inhuman way. These vampires aren't sexy at all. And that representation suggests something about the twisted sexiness of vampires in general. And us, as we shall see...
Are any of the other vampires in our Gothic multiverse sexy either? Dracula and Lucy Westenra sure weren't in any normal human way. Indeed, Dracula is often read as a psych eval of Victorian sexual hang-ups. Like it is all about the fear of sexuality. All-consuming and implacable lust. Are vampires then representations of the dark side of sex?
That would seem neatly Gothy, wouldn't it? Vampires as explorations of forbidden sexual urges and practices. But that doesn't quite fit...? It is too human, all too human. Too warm and soft and yielding still.
Sex and sexiness have a definite social context. These most private of acts are very much social acts. We don't decide how to have sex on our own. We learn how to do it. Just like sexiness is a collective product, a collaborative project. Sex and sexiness are about human connection and the production of humans both directly through actual physical reproduction and spiritual reproduction. Sex makes us 'humans' in all kinds of ways.
But vampires are something else. Something other. Something, even totally Other. And that's where the disconnect begins...
Vampires seem to ooze sexiness. But the context is all wrong. The vampire isn't sexy like a person because the feeling and presence isn't there to liven up or inspirit the performance or the body. Vampires are just body. Purely physical unending mortal flesh. But cold cold cold reanimated flesh.
This reanimation breaks the link between the body and the human. What returns isn't human at all. The vampire looks human. And even acts human. But it is an uncanny imitation. It's just not right. And we know it isn't right. And that's what's so terrifying about them. They aren't alive but they appear that way. And mere appearances are very deceiving. And unsettling.
Horror writer Thomas Ligotti explains why supernatural creatures like vampires are so terrifying in his nonfiction book of philosophy titled The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. He uses vampires as an example of the 'uncanny', that eerie sense of pseudo-familiarity that is so alienating, 'because their intrinsic supernaturalism as the undead makes them objectively uncanny things that generate subjectively uncanny sensations. They are uncanny in themselves because they once were human but have undergone a terrible rebirth and become mechanisms with a single function--to survive for survival's sake (p. 91).' Reduced to mere 'mechanisms' they are terrifying in themselves but it is their effect on us that is truly horrifying: vampires 'also inspire a subjective sense of the uncanny in those who perceive them because they divulge the "dark knowledge" that human beings are also things made as they are made and may be remade because they are only clockwork processes, mechanisms, rather than immutable beings unchanging at their heart (p. 91).'
Vampires reflect our worst fears about ourselves. That we don't exist as selves at all but as zombies or 'human puppets--things of mistaken identity who must live with the terrible knowledge that they are not making a go of it on their own and are not what they once thought they were (italics in original, p. 84)' or...that we are just like vampires ourselves. Empty husks fulfilling externally imposed drives without purpose or meaning. Lust and hunger. Lustand hunger. Lustandhunger. Hunger-lust.
And what does that say about sex? Ligotti writes: 'As uncanny mechanisms, vampires...usually perform the mechanical act of reproduction with no weighty deliberation, or none at all--the replication [of] their kind being epiphenomenal to the controlling urge that drives them (p. 91).' Which also tells us way too much about human sexuality, too. Through the 'sexy' image of the vampire, the human gloss over sexuality is sucked right off of it, as it were, and replaced with the purely physical mechanism of bumping and grinding. And the alienating feeling porn often produces--that the sex is nothing but geometry, physics and motion--is here repeated in the vampire whose sexiness and sexuality is nothing but mindless and mechanical repetition in the pursuit of mindless and mechanical repetition indefinitely as it was, is and ever shall be.
Sex is no longer sex. It is no longer human. It is no longer intimate or spiritual or even pleasurable. It is something terrible. Destructive of selfhood in a completely negative way. And its relentless and compelling nature makes it only more terrible. The vampire and its horrible drives as representative of our secret nature turn pleasure into jouissance and sex into a living death.
So vampires aren't even a parody of 'sexiness' because they reveal the very non-existence of 'sexiness'. There's nothing there to parody.
Happy belated V-Day, my pretties!
Holly Horrorland has invited all of us Goth bloggers to a Sanguinary Soiree for V-Day. So this post will be about the hominoid leeches of the night. Specifically since it's Valentine's Day, I'd like to ask: Are vampires sexy? Why or why not?
Vampires definitely weren't sexy before the 19th century. They were little more than reanimated corpses returned to haunt and decimate their families and loved ones. Ghoulish revenants. Impure but simple.
Then the Romantics did what Romantics do and romanticized them. Turning the creepy grave crawlers into dashing and debonnair and terrifying blood-sucking men of quality. Vamps became tramps. Undead sexy. And that is now the norm.
An exception is 30 Days of Night. These vampires are truly horrifying. Not just plain vanilla scary. But scary in a completely unearthly and inhuman way. These vampires aren't sexy at all. And that representation suggests something about the twisted sexiness of vampires in general. And us, as we shall see...
Are any of the other vampires in our Gothic multiverse sexy either? Dracula and Lucy Westenra sure weren't in any normal human way. Indeed, Dracula is often read as a psych eval of Victorian sexual hang-ups. Like it is all about the fear of sexuality. All-consuming and implacable lust. Are vampires then representations of the dark side of sex?
That would seem neatly Gothy, wouldn't it? Vampires as explorations of forbidden sexual urges and practices. But that doesn't quite fit...? It is too human, all too human. Too warm and soft and yielding still.
Sex and sexiness have a definite social context. These most private of acts are very much social acts. We don't decide how to have sex on our own. We learn how to do it. Just like sexiness is a collective product, a collaborative project. Sex and sexiness are about human connection and the production of humans both directly through actual physical reproduction and spiritual reproduction. Sex makes us 'humans' in all kinds of ways.
But vampires are something else. Something other. Something, even totally Other. And that's where the disconnect begins...
Vampires seem to ooze sexiness. But the context is all wrong. The vampire isn't sexy like a person because the feeling and presence isn't there to liven up or inspirit the performance or the body. Vampires are just body. Purely physical unending mortal flesh. But cold cold cold reanimated flesh.
This reanimation breaks the link between the body and the human. What returns isn't human at all. The vampire looks human. And even acts human. But it is an uncanny imitation. It's just not right. And we know it isn't right. And that's what's so terrifying about them. They aren't alive but they appear that way. And mere appearances are very deceiving. And unsettling.
Horror writer Thomas Ligotti explains why supernatural creatures like vampires are so terrifying in his nonfiction book of philosophy titled The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. He uses vampires as an example of the 'uncanny', that eerie sense of pseudo-familiarity that is so alienating, 'because their intrinsic supernaturalism as the undead makes them objectively uncanny things that generate subjectively uncanny sensations. They are uncanny in themselves because they once were human but have undergone a terrible rebirth and become mechanisms with a single function--to survive for survival's sake (p. 91).' Reduced to mere 'mechanisms' they are terrifying in themselves but it is their effect on us that is truly horrifying: vampires 'also inspire a subjective sense of the uncanny in those who perceive them because they divulge the "dark knowledge" that human beings are also things made as they are made and may be remade because they are only clockwork processes, mechanisms, rather than immutable beings unchanging at their heart (p. 91).'
Vampires reflect our worst fears about ourselves. That we don't exist as selves at all but as zombies or 'human puppets--things of mistaken identity who must live with the terrible knowledge that they are not making a go of it on their own and are not what they once thought they were (italics in original, p. 84)' or...that we are just like vampires ourselves. Empty husks fulfilling externally imposed drives without purpose or meaning. Lust and hunger. Lustand hunger. Lustandhunger. Hunger-lust.
And what does that say about sex? Ligotti writes: 'As uncanny mechanisms, vampires...usually perform the mechanical act of reproduction with no weighty deliberation, or none at all--the replication [of] their kind being epiphenomenal to the controlling urge that drives them (p. 91).' Which also tells us way too much about human sexuality, too. Through the 'sexy' image of the vampire, the human gloss over sexuality is sucked right off of it, as it were, and replaced with the purely physical mechanism of bumping and grinding. And the alienating feeling porn often produces--that the sex is nothing but geometry, physics and motion--is here repeated in the vampire whose sexiness and sexuality is nothing but mindless and mechanical repetition in the pursuit of mindless and mechanical repetition indefinitely as it was, is and ever shall be.
Sex is no longer sex. It is no longer human. It is no longer intimate or spiritual or even pleasurable. It is something terrible. Destructive of selfhood in a completely negative way. And its relentless and compelling nature makes it only more terrible. The vampire and its horrible drives as representative of our secret nature turn pleasure into jouissance and sex into a living death.
So vampires aren't even a parody of 'sexiness' because they reveal the very non-existence of 'sexiness'. There's nothing there to parody.
Happy belated V-Day, my pretties!
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Graceless still undead!
Oh joy! Oh bliss! Graceless: a Journal of the Radical Gothic is still undead. And apparently they are still taking submissions for the next issue, even if it is an old post. So if you have some gothy or radically or anarcho-gothy to say, well send it on down to them.
Write on, my dark comrades!
Write on, my dark comrades!
Graceless...but beautiful
Surfing through BoingBoing this morning accompanied by my third or fourth coffee like I do every morning at work, I always expect to find something intriguing or amazing or interesting. But not like this! Today I experienced untainted serendipity. The remarkable combination of my two most favouritest things in one: goth and radical politics. Together in Graceless: A Journal of the Radical Gothic. Bliss. Pure bliss. Admittedly, it looks like a one hit wonder but still...bliss. Pure bliss.
I haven't had time to read through it yet but I just couldn't wait to share it with all my dark comrades! So enjoy, gothlings!
I haven't had time to read through it yet but I just couldn't wait to share it with all my dark comrades! So enjoy, gothlings!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The Wicker Man and Role Reversal
One thing I forgot to mention in my last post about The Wicker Man is its central plot device of gender role reversal. Just another way that movie walks the line between weirdness and absurdity...
Sgt. Neil Howie, the main character, comes to Summer Isle to investigate the disappearance of a local girl. The islanders act in a very peculiar and mysterious way while indulging in various pagan rites. Including orgies. Oddly, gosh, the strange island is blessed with unusual fertility. Except that something is very very wrong...oh my...
To fix the problem, Lord Summerisle (the antagonist...anti-hero...secret hero) and the islanders have decided that they need to sacrifice a virgin. That hoary jab at paganism. But...
Surprise. Surprise. Instead of the standard nubile young female virgin. The sacrifice is Sgt. Howie!
It's a good little twist on a tawdry old tale. The horror version of the 40 Year-Old Virgin. Finally, a man is killed to placate the deities. And finally the sacrifice is middle-aged and average. Unexceptional, except for his virgin status and his prudish Puritanism.
And the burning of the pagan's arch-enemy inside the Wicker Man marks the end of this weird and wacky film. Ah! Delicious contrast...
Sgt. Neil Howie, the main character, comes to Summer Isle to investigate the disappearance of a local girl. The islanders act in a very peculiar and mysterious way while indulging in various pagan rites. Including orgies. Oddly, gosh, the strange island is blessed with unusual fertility. Except that something is very very wrong...oh my...
To fix the problem, Lord Summerisle (the antagonist...anti-hero...secret hero) and the islanders have decided that they need to sacrifice a virgin. That hoary jab at paganism. But...
Surprise. Surprise. Instead of the standard nubile young female virgin. The sacrifice is Sgt. Howie!
It's a good little twist on a tawdry old tale. The horror version of the 40 Year-Old Virgin. Finally, a man is killed to placate the deities. And finally the sacrifice is middle-aged and average. Unexceptional, except for his virgin status and his prudish Puritanism.
And the burning of the pagan's arch-enemy inside the Wicker Man marks the end of this weird and wacky film. Ah! Delicious contrast...
A Muppet Wicker Man
Let's come up with the weirdest combination of seemingly unrelated ideas and see what happens...And it is. Utter and stupendous perfection.
The Muppets do The Wicker Man. And they do it better than the original.
The Wicker Man just didn't cut it as a horror movie. Something was just askew the whole time. Like an art movie gone wrong. Silly. Contrived. Embarrassing. Awkward. And then omg!!! Horror ineffable.The horror was real but it was hard to tell whether the gawky pretentiousness was a set-up for the climax. Or a cheesie sex comedy attached to the wrong ending...? The Wicker Man worked if the film makers wanted to keep us on that uncomfortable edge between nervous laughter and terrified screaming.
Probably the most awkward moment was the scene where the landlord's daughter Willow flings her naked body against the bedroom wall between her and the main character Sgt. Neil Howie over and over again. All the while singing in an attempt to seduce him. Ok, is this supposed to be sexy? Or a turn-off? Kind of like when an attractive drunk drools endearments all over your ear at the end of a party...?
But then you twist the gawkiness up a bit with the addition of a few Muppets. And you have a mash-up of monstrous magnificence.
Puppets are the perfect uncanny vehicles to maintain the kind of unease that The Wicker Man aims for. Psychological anxiety that keeps getting ratcheted up until its comic-horror denouement. Contrasted so brutally and effectively with a happy harvest song. Or in this case, 'The Muppet Theme Song.'
The final scene of The Wicker Man was always brilliant horror. But it's better with Muppets.
The Muppets do The Wicker Man. And they do it better than the original.
The Wicker Man just didn't cut it as a horror movie. Something was just askew the whole time. Like an art movie gone wrong. Silly. Contrived. Embarrassing. Awkward. And then omg!!! Horror ineffable.The horror was real but it was hard to tell whether the gawky pretentiousness was a set-up for the climax. Or a cheesie sex comedy attached to the wrong ending...? The Wicker Man worked if the film makers wanted to keep us on that uncomfortable edge between nervous laughter and terrified screaming.
Probably the most awkward moment was the scene where the landlord's daughter Willow flings her naked body against the bedroom wall between her and the main character Sgt. Neil Howie over and over again. All the while singing in an attempt to seduce him. Ok, is this supposed to be sexy? Or a turn-off? Kind of like when an attractive drunk drools endearments all over your ear at the end of a party...?
But then you twist the gawkiness up a bit with the addition of a few Muppets. And you have a mash-up of monstrous magnificence.
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| Source: Coilhouse |
The final scene of The Wicker Man was always brilliant horror. But it's better with Muppets.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Cthulhu watch: underground lakes in Antarctica!!!
HP Lovecraft would love this story. Except for the lack of mountains, it almost reads like a report from the Antarctic geological expedition covered in his one novel, At the Mountains of Madness.
...wait...weren't there underground lakes in Lovecraft's story? Wasn't that where the Elder Things went to escape the changing climate, the rebellion of the shoggoths, endless wars with the Great Race and the star-spawn and the destruction of their civilization?
What do you think the Russians are going to find when they drill through that last layer of ice? And break through into the true netherworld of an ice cold subterranean lake that hasn't seen the sun or felt the air for 20 million years?!!!
Do you think they will find the Elder Things?
Or the shoggoths? Their rebellious and malleable servants?
Or their enemies? The Mi-Go?
Imagine being at the edge of the ice when the drill bursts into the "pristine" water? I can almost here the sound...
Tekeli-li...
Tekeli-li...
Tekeli-li...
...wait...weren't there underground lakes in Lovecraft's story? Wasn't that where the Elder Things went to escape the changing climate, the rebellion of the shoggoths, endless wars with the Great Race and the star-spawn and the destruction of their civilization?
What do you think the Russians are going to find when they drill through that last layer of ice? And break through into the true netherworld of an ice cold subterranean lake that hasn't seen the sun or felt the air for 20 million years?!!!
Do you think they will find the Elder Things?
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| Source: henning.deviantart.com |
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| Source: toyvault.com |
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| Ruud Dirven Source: wikipedia |
Tekeli-li...
Tekeli-li...
Tekeli-li...
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