Under-World

[Dæmon]

Index


Hannibal - Gotham - Witches - Cyborg - Jekyll & Hyde - Middle-Earth - Frankenstein - Werewolves - Vampires - Zombies -

This can be included in the gene/meme context as well as with the A War Like No Other subject.

The Under-World is a world overshadowing reality, taking its place. A proverbial Platonic cave, where it is mistaken for the complete world when it is but a subterranean space, space of darkness where artificial lighting is mistaken for sunlight, and creatures roam in its cavernous, buried world of the living dead, and other such fantastic, creatures – creatures used as metaphors for psychological, memetic types.  

The Under-World will be used not as a reference to some crime establishment functioning on the peripheries of society, or to some ancient-Greek or Christian hell.
Here, it will be used as a reference to the nihilistic civilization constructing an artificial, underlying, reality, which parallels but does not totally adhere to nature; a supernatural world, created by manmade artifices, and producing, as a collateral effect, all sorts of weird psychological types.  
“Super,” in that it exceeds, exaggerates, represses, and redefines, reality, creating a hyper-real landscape populated with creatures that evolve within it, as a reaction to its premises and inescapable ubiquity.

This hyper-real, super-natural, environment, is a metaphorical way of describing the nihilistic world this dis-ease, of the mind, is now producing.
A dis-ease spreading to global proportions, as the contagion becomes viral, joining with other strains and adapting to the host-body by masking itself as another part of it.  
The virus is memetic, though the examples that follow explore the many physical manifestations of this mental dis-ease; mind, and body, after all are part of the same emergent unity, the same self-organizing, self-sustaining, life-form.

Under-World is an exploration of the psychological types, emerging in a Modern world dominated by Nihilism, in the west; how genetics, as have been established through thousands of years, readjust to a meme that does not permit their full development, or does so selectively; how sheltering and specialization produce a reduction in overall awareness while, at the same time, also producing focused intellectualism, localized, and funnelled, ironically, emerging as obsessive, codependent, genius.
The method will be a Bottom<>Up advancement, as would be expected.
From the repressed personae,  producing internal stresses, expressed as subconscious libidinal drives, going upwards towards the characters/caricatures this produces, as conscious expressions of these subconscious energies, and then further, when consciousness projects itself towards exaggerated idea(l)s, represented metaphorically, as the connecting nexus of mind/body, meme/gene, the demi-gods of ancient times, and our  Modern super-heroes/super-villains.

The realm of the personae/personality Under-World (private self) giving way to the character/caricature of the implied Middle-World (public self), inspired and guided by a projected idea(l) Over-World (ideal self).
Where each realm begins and ends is a vague crossover, from instinct to reason, merging, coextensive; one bleeding into the next, overlapping coexisting, using symbols/words, techniques/technologies to become present/presence.

The extraordinary, surreal, supernatural creatures described are a mix of genes/memes; metaphorical descriptions of this obscure mingling of human past/nature and human present/culture.
Different "uni-verses" provide different symbolism, directing the metaphorical choices.
Image, names, dynamics adjust, but what is being exposed remains as it has always been - memetics, and their semiology, overlapping genetics with their established processes.

Nihilism imbues the individual caricature with the powers to fly above past/nature, and settle upon the earth selectively, choosing what place/time (s)he wills as his primary identifier - his costume.
But the choice is not his/her own. It is limited by the uni-verse, the metaphorical box of symbols, and costumes and monikers - avatars.

Middle-Earth: midway between the Under-World and the Over-World, where the first is confused as being above, and the second as being below.
The state of consciousness; the lucid state.
Middle-Earth the plane of human cognition, bound by the limits of human sensual acuity: the perceptual-event-horizon.
Encompassed, in the visual, by the infrared, ultraviolet electromagnetic spectrum; the spectrum man uses to see (light), and in the sonar by the ultrasonic and infrasonic Hz range.

Under-World = Ultra.
Over-World = Infra.

What exceeds the limits of perception may be perceived on a sub-conscious level, depending on how close to the edge of the event-horizon it, this phenomenon, is (Under-World), and it will be processed in dream, or as extrasensory visions, and paranormal activity.
The projected (Over-World), and how the conscious mind relates to it, will be affected by this sub-conscious data; the sub-conscious affecting the hyper-conscious.

From a psychological perspective:

Under-World = Genetics, Instinct, Impulse, Emotion, Feeling: reality bubbling up from past.
Over-World = Memetics, Ideals, Principles: reality projecting as Object/Objective, as future.

[Dæmon]

When we begin relying on the Internet for all of our news and information we will turn into a nation of zombies.

A Zombie is a made-up creature characterized by insatiable appetites and governed by a monomaniacal, brainless, obsessiveness.
Its goal is immediate and constant gratification – a hedonistic nightmare.
It is neither male nor female, because its sex is nothing more but a decaying remnant of a previous persona, resembling the tattered clothes falling off of its putrefying, rambling, form.  
We cannot call it human, because it is not identifiable as anything reproductive. Calling it a “thing” should suffice.
It is a monstrosity, infected by some kind of modern disease which has overturned death and made it animated, in imitation of life.
This is why it serves as the perfect caricature, metaphor, symbol, for the common every-day, western, Americanized, feminized, man.  

 

They would call me “old” and “outdated”, these children of backwards dreaming “progressiveness” and self-denying anabasis, towards self-annihilation; they would call me “primitive” and “stagnate”, these idealistic naïve hypocrites, of reverses and decline.
Their adolescent, uncomplicated, vacuity is now calling itself the height of human development, when it dreams of returning to the mud and it hopes for a reversion back into a state of unconscious invariance.
Those who have been stunted, from birth, taught to associate “maturity” with compromise, been made to believe that all change is an ascension, and all tolerance a virtue, now present themselves as the flag bearers of a coming “glorious” age where neither, nor anything else, will be distinguishable apart from the emptiness of words describing an ideal to end it all in a sudden paroxysm.
If anything, it is my message of continuing fragmentation towards greater and greater distinction, my desire to separate and distinguish, that should be called progress …for they only preach a return to some idealized past state of imagined unity, an affirmation of a singular thingness, pretending to be enlightenment, and whose only promise is an avoidance of reality and the sensation of existing as an ongoing process, which is truly primitive and backwards looking.

What is rotting is this not so youthful fatigue with reality and this desperate need to be re-assimilated within a pool of romanticized dirt.
But where does one end with the deconstruction?
If not the individual, then the species.
But why stop there?
If not the species then why not life, as a general common ground?
But why stop there?
Why not follow this string all the way out of this labyrinth and back, way back, to the absolute nothing or something?
If the denial of self is all these “young” revolutionary minds want, then why not just annul themselves and be done with the bullshit?
Let us “progress” backwards into the nothingness/somethingness which never was and never will be.
Let us imagine our own suicide as some moment of divine grace and call it inspiring.
No, I will only allow these rotting shells to “progress” all the way back to non-existence.
My own road takes me onward, into increasing fragmentation and distinction and discrimination ...into consciousness.
I resist this tide of conformity and self-negation, pushing onwards and onwards to an unknown and forever incomplete individuation.
I am more than self?
No, I am irrelevant without self.
The species is not the end of the line; otherwise it would be the end of all lines.
The species is merely a distinction, a type of life …as the individual is a distinction, a type within a type.
It is these types that are selected ...naturally…and through this selection higher types are formed …onwards and onwards, towards growing separation, growing distinction, growing discrimination, growing individuation…increasing entropy.

It isn’t I who is old and backward …it is they, with their tired ideals of uniformity and total assimilation.
They dream of the Big Bang as if it were a paradise, when it is a distancing from it which is what existence is …and the very concept of a Big Bang, scientifically speaking or not, is based on no absolute state …but on a near state.
It is this away from, which identifies; this rejection of, which characterizes.

No, no, no, dear nihilists, I embrace change, for without it I would not exist, and I embrace separation, for without it I would not be perceived or even be considered or even be.
It is you, you pretentious, artificial, youngsters, you zombies of hope, who have mistaken stupidity for progress, who hope for an end and no self, who are old and decrepit and cowardly and ...already beyond age ...for you are half-dead.

This is truly your time, your land ...your modern age of the living dead.
Your uniqueness is in how desperately you wish to be anything but different; anything but separate and other than ...and conscious of it.
Do you see yourselves?
How magnificently "free" you all are, roaming the urban landscapes, feeding on each other, mindlessly mumbling the same groans and tearing pieces from one another with your tender loving embraces and jagged-toothed smiles.

You will kill for this New World Man ...this enlightened Man who awakens to the "illusion" of self and conveniently finds himself reflected in void eye-sockets and repetitive drones.
Murder self, to save Self ...the New-Aged idol, for the needy heart who has "overcome" worship.
Your romantic ideal has shrunk, somewhat.
From a transcending God it is now an idealized Man, and from idolaters you have turned into humanitarians.

Now that is progress.

 

All is swept away in the cleansing tides.

The exceptional no less than the conventional linger, but for a time, languidly being turned into fine dust from which all impurities are deliberately taken out and anamnesis is turned to notoriety; more obviously so, the notable are sanctified, in this manner; their intolerable and so less useful parts thrown away and forgotten.
The remainder is then chiseled into desirable shapes and finely polished into shiny decorative icons for mass consumption.
The final product is then sold to desolate hearts wanting to weigh themselves down with mass, feeling the pull of the current, or wanting to be lost beneath the distractive effect of adornments so that they too may linger in memory, but for a while longer.

 

The slow deterioration of the living experience has this result.
All is notched-up in severity to deal with the loss.
Things have become so safe, so comfortable, that one needs to emulate risk, re-inject pain, exaggerate the sexual practice, to feel anything.
This is a consequence of numbness.

No fear, no risk, no price, no sacrifice ...all is made mute and the body falls into inebriated bliss. It shuffles, hungrily towards its next fix, consuming, consuming, consuming to fill in the void in its decaying flesh; wishing to quell the ache of existing.  
Suffering and pain are turned into sensations to be avoided when they are nothing more than the sensation of existing.
But then the mind rebels against this zombification where flesh rots or is petrified so that it can no longer feel anything beneath a certain grade; it wants to feel what it means to be alive, knowing that soon this will no longer be an option.

The proverbial movie zombie, is a mindless, automaton, governed by pure hunger (need), deteriorating, rotting, driven to find healthy flesh to consume and replenish itself, in an ceaseless struggle to procure material so as to satisfy a hunger it cannot control nor escape.
It is now (2013) a popular symbol, constantly coming-up in modern art, for it so perfectly reflects the modern man.

A Zombie is all about hunger, hedonism, feeding, corporeal compensation for a decaying body, and a rotten brain.
It has no historical background, no past. It is all about the immediate, the gratifying, and the shallow. It can only stumble towards some future; it drags itself towards any sound, any movement, promising action, a source of material fulfillment.
It congregates on mass, and feeds.

Zombies are individualistic, in that they follow their own need/hunger, towards the intended source of satiation, but their behavior is uniform, in that it is predictable and shared.
They are identities who adhere to a common behavioral patterns, which may, or may not, take a different path but, in the end, is headed towards the same, the common, the shared, object/objective.
In isolation, the Zombie is easily dealt with, because of its mindlessness, and slowness. Slow is what defines this creature – slow and methodical.
It is when zombies become part of a group, attracted by a shared stimulation, when they become a force to be reckoned with.
Zombies, much like simple organisms, animals, need not have a sense of self, a shared identity, nor even come from the same background, wear the same rags, or have to have experienced the same things in the same ways, because it is their shared hunger, the binding need, the lack, which makes them a singular category.

[Dæmon]

What herd would be complete without a predator?
Kidding aside the vampire metaphor is about the emotional kind of feeding.
I draw from popular lore and make parallels with general personality types:  
Emotional Vampires are those elites who having identified the living-dead – the proverbial brain-dead, hedonistic, Zombies – feed off of their emotionalism, exploiting it and the need it is founded upon.

There are many versions of the vampire caricature, but the modern version has a distinctly erotic flare.
The brain-dead Vampires are easy prey, so this elite type tends to toy with their insatiable hunger, finding very little emotional nutrition in their decaying sensibilities, and growing detachment from reality.
As a result the emotional vampire will turn on his own, forcing internal ruptures that separate this kind into factions.    

The immortality of the vampire represents this type’s connection to its past, creating a long, undisturbed lineage, which, compared to the immediacy of the zombie, can be considered timeless.

Eroticism is the undeniable characteristic of the Vampire.
(S)He is a predator of emotion and lust/love is the king of all emotions; it is the emotion of unbridled hunger indicative of a zombification.
With lust/love the need, hunger, takes over, and nothing else matters.
Fear would cause a pause, a moment of restraint, before the flight/flight mechanism takes over, but with love the organism is drawn forward, uncaring, unconcerned, totally given over to the object/objective of his desire.
 
When a Vampire sucks the blood, he is absorbing the heart’s essence, the body’s need, its lack, its hunger, spilling out of the organism as a grasping, a clutching.
The seductive allure of the vampire, its eroticism, is a mechanism to draw the victim towards him/her.
Need feeding on need.
The Zombie is blind, brainless, unrestrained need.
The Vampire is focused hunger.
The Zombie feeds on matter, on the substantial, on the physical.
The Vampire feeds on emotion, on thoughts, on the abstract.

These creatures coexist but occupy different spheres of existence.

The Vampire comes out at night, it is conspicuous and shy.
The Zombie, in most variants, is a day and night feeder, and is mostly found in urban environments where masses of people congregate.
The Vampire enters the city only because that is where its prey can be found in large numbers.    

Vampires prefer the warm-blooded, the ones still full of vital energies, but the world has changed and Zombification has made warm-bloodedness increasingly rare. Coagulating blood, barely flowing within decaying veins, is all which is available in these modern times.

Both these creatures of the modern, nihilistic, Dark Age, have shared behavior. They prefer to feed on human flesh and drink human blood, and by “human”, and in line with the theme, I mean virile, healthy, natural, man.
We may call him a Pagan, an Aryan, a European.
The type is in decline and is nearly extinct due to this predation.
As a consequence these Zombies and Vampires turn on each other, finding there a lower grade prey, because the undead cannot be invigorated by another undead.

In its original conception a Vampire had distinct Semitic features.
A frail, ugly, hunched-over, caricature, with long fingers, a big nose and ears, and fangs covered over by thin lips.
A bloodsucker, a miser, a collector of virility.
He organizes into a subversive, ancient, clan around a shared covenant. They have their own rules, and live a hidden life.  

In our time the bloodthirsty, night crawler has become sexy.
A metrosexual male, a vixen, feeding on the libidinal energies of its prey.
And if resources have now been abstracted into monetary units, then the feeding takes on different characteristics.

What differentiates the Vampire from the Zombie, or the Werewolf, for that matter?
Both Zombie and Vampire are immortal, if they are not beheaded; both are defined by hunger; both prefer the dark and are creatures of the supernatural, the underworld.
It is awareness and connection to the past.
A Zombie is totally in the present. It has no conception of past, or of future.
Its entire existence is dominated by its need/hunger, and the object of tis desire, the moving, acting, thing that it feels it needs to devour to keep on going, to deal with its own decay.  
The Vampire, on the other hand, has a clear and well-defined, sense of identity.
So much so, that it now organizes itself into clans, governed by specific rules of conduct and hierarchies – different than those governing the prey they feed on, but, nevertheless, just as stringent.
In a sense Vampires have their own morality.
What they show the world, when they do, is very different from what they are, in the dark, and among their own kind.

A Vampire sucks the living essence out of a life form, its virility, whereas a Zombie feeds on the flesh.
There is very little life force in a Zombie and so it makes a poor meal for a Vampire, yet, in an ironic twist of fate, the viral agent that turns the healthy human into a brain-dead, decaying, mound of flesh and bones, comes from the Vampire, and is spread into the prey in an earlier encounter.
If the prey is fed Vampire blood before it perishes, it turns into another Vampire, adding itself to the clan, if not it becomes a member of the walking dead Zombies.
The ritual of “turning” involves a turning of the tables, where the prey drinks of the predator’s essence.
With Zombies the virus is transmitted by a bite, if the prey is not totally consumed.
The Werewolf is an altogether other matter. It is mortal, and motivated by sheer rage. The Werewolf gene is transmitted through the normal human reproductive methods, and it is triggered by specific events and natural cycles.

A distinctive feature of the Vampire is its secrecy.
It comes out at night, it mingles with its prey, it participates in underground covenants and in secret rituals.
The feeding on blood is a metaphor for money, the blood and sweat of the individual, the product of its labor, and/or of the essence of the other, its emotions, its reactions.
In both cases we are dealing with (inter)activities.
The Vampire feeds on the byproduct of the other's (inter)activity, its relating and relationships, and the many forms these take.

The emotional-Vampire, related to the internet Troll, is an individual hungering for passion.
Reason, rationality, objectivity only matter if they promise a passionate outcome.
There are different types of emotional-Vampires each corresponding to the different emotions, the different passions, each ha a taste for.
There is no reasoning with such creatures.
They are blood-thirsty.

[Dæmon]

Another creature of the night.
This one is a creature born of cycles, environmental conditions stimulating an internal rage.
A Werewolf will appear normal, most of the time, even timid, kind, submissive, a dog wagging its tail, but inside another beast is churning.
It collects its humility, its repressed sexuality, its hidden pain, until, under the right circumstances – some full moon or some such event – it unleashes its fury into the night.
Bipolar may be the psychological term for it, except for the fact that this kind is mostly male.  

It would not be uncommon to find Werewolves amongst the addictive personality type. In their fits of irrepressible rage, they find ways to numb their affliction down to a session of binge drinking, or to a daily routine of self-medicating numbness.  

A Werewolf is still a canine, at heart.
A social creature prone to assimilate, easily, within groups.
The werewolf is the result of this disparity between the current nihilistic, anti-natural, milieu, and the nature of the organism being forced to assimilate within it.
This disparity creates frictions, above and beyond the usual self-repression and emasculation, involved in integrating within a social hierarchy where the dominant position is already occupied.
The organism is forced to integrate within a social structure which is totally alienating; abstracting its contexts to the point where they lose all reference to the real.
This alienation, this out of place, out of sorts, feeling builds until it explodes as rage. The beast awakens, in the dark, and it must be released, to run and to feed.
But it cannot, and so it inebriates itself. It must find a way to calm those parts down, contain them, make its self artificially happy, wag the tail, to get along.    

[Dæmon]

Louis: You see that old woman? That will never happen to you. You will never grow old, and you will never die.
Claudia: And it means something else too, doesn't it? I shall never ever grow up.

A Vampire lives in a state of temporal suspension.
Within this culture of perpetual adolescence, the caricature/creature reflects the eternal youth worshiping its own condition.
Beneath God, the children of the Book, the covenant of Darkness, are promised eternal life, and an eternity of childish dependence.
All they must do is sacrifice light.
Their decrepit misery has now become sexy; their rage has been turned to the erotic.
They offer it as a salvation to those who share their hatred of life.

Lestat: You are a vampire who never knew what life was until it ran out in a big gush over your lips.

The Judeo-Christian-Islamic ideal: you must die before you can appreciate life, and experience a higher existence; the triad of spiritual nihilism.  
Life leaves through the mouth and an eternity is spent sucking it out of others.
Resentment finding satisfaction in its eternity of vengeance.
It spends eternity, as a god, taking from mortals what he could never appreciate and have in himself.
Having sold his soul, he condemns himself to a timeless childish ennui.
His knowledge, his experiences, possesses no substance in him.
He is aloof, disconnected, detached.
His existence an endless wandering within a world he cannot relate to – having become ethereal, supernatural, and other-worldly.

The God of death, the life hater, is reborn through a messiah.
Nihilistic role reversals.
The life spirit, the Daemonion, becomes Evil, Satanic, associated with the goat, the sacrificial symbol of human fear.
Nature is turned into Lucifer: the illusion, the fake.
Nature is turned into Lucifer: the illusion, the fake. Darkness is the new light; the under-world is now the real world; the supernatural replaces the natural.               

Louis: I'm flesh and blood, but not human. I haven't been human for two hundred years.  

The Vampire knows he is not human, that he is inhuman, but humans have what he need: vigor, a connection to reality, to nature.
He needs this to invigorate his dead blood, to transfuse him with new living energy, more spirit.
Unlike Zombies, who are totally given over to the need/hunger, Vampires have a clear sense of identity: as the chosen ones.  
Chosen by others like them, and after a ritualistic denial of life, they are reborn amongst the living dead.  

Armand: The world changes, we do not, there lies the irony that finally kills us.

The final nihilistic realization. Only a lucid living-dead, can come to it.
The Nihilistic dilemma.
The world in Flux and they? A meme that has remained in opposition, outside its temporal and spatial boundaries, desiring to escape its suffering.
The nihilist discovers the irony and so discovers the comedy in the tragedy.
In the real world the nihilist is always comical, cynical, always laughing at his own condition, and at those light dwellers …those delightful, delicious, energized by the sun, those warm-blooded humans.
He has excluded himself form the world, denounced it as unsatisfactory, and therein, as Armand says, lies the irony of his coming demise.  
 

Lestat: Evil is a point of view. God kills indiscriminately and so shall we. For no creatures under God are as we are, none so like him as ourselves.

The chosen people are now the agents of God.
They kill those who live under the sun, feeding on the energy of light, they being creatures of darkness, of the cave, of the underworld, of the inconspicuous underhanded hidden world.

Louis: That morning I was not yet a vampire, and I saw my last sunrise. I remember it completely, and yet I can't recall any sunrise before it. I watched the whole magnificence of the dawn for the last time as if it were the first. And then I said farewell to sunlight, and set out to become what I became

Louis speaks of light.
Apollo has been denied.
He enters the caverns of Hades, and stops before the river Lethe, denying himself a drink. No, those who must drink are those who shall become the chattel, the mindless Zombies.  

Armand: They had forgotten the first lesson, that we are to be powerful, beautiful, and without regret.
Louis: And you can teach me this?
Armand: Yes.
Louis: To be without regret?
Armand: Yes.
Louis: Then what a pair we could make, but what if it's a lesson I don't care to learn.
Armand: What do you mean?
Louis: What if all I have is my suffering, my regret?
Armand: Don't you want to lose it?
Louis: Why? So you can have that too? The heart that mourns her, her that you burnt to a cinder.
Armand: Louis, I swear that I...
Louis: Ah, but I know you did. I know. You who regrets nothing, you who feels nothing, if that's all I have left to learn, I can do that on my own.

The older Vampire has a new solution.
No regret, meaning no guilt.
The vampire is secularized. He wishes to lose that primordial guilt and that inherited shame.
He will be proud of his death, and exist as if he were another animal; another hunter of the night.
He wants to reconnect with what he detached from.

Louis senses that this loss entails a loss of identity.
He will no longer be true to what he is.

[Dæmon]

Where else but in jerusalem, could this wall have been erected, to keep out the rabble?

They preach about tearing down walls, acceptance, tolerance, and they only sell it to others.
Who is left outside the chosen perimeter?
Who, but the Arabs chanting, creates the problem?

The Zombie does not see, does not discern anything other than movement, and disease.
Sensing the death, in the other, he recognizes his own kind.

The dying only feed on the healthy.
They tear them to pieces.
The dead, the living dead, like themselves, they do not bother.
Once the other is part of the living-dead, the brain-dead, the nihilists, the dis-eased ones, he does not see him.

The Zombie hungers for health, because that is what he lacks; he covets what he cannot find in himself.
Look around you, on these ILP forums, on the streets, what do you see?

What are Zombies a metaphor for?
Pure need.
No sex, no race, no past, only hunger, hedonism: fucking, eating, drinking, defecating, breathing, moving.
Rotting flesh looking for a substance.
They are future, always moving forwards, directed by need/hunger.
Brain-dead, where all cognitive functions are taken over by the need to satisfy hunger immediately.

It has no sense of self.
It does not recognize itself as what it is.
All it does is consume, act, fuck, move ...constant activity.
Left alone it begins smashing into walls.

How many Zombies do you see?

The infection is transmitted orally ...through the mouth.
Verbally.
It is a memetic virus.

Once infection is inserted within a population it takes over on its own. No further intervention is required.  
One transmitter ...one Messiah.

[Dæmon]

Rage is the emotion that transforms the Werewolf.
It sheds its human form, casting it off like a cover, and an inner beast emerges.

A Thymotic psychological metaphor, comparable to the Eroticism of the Zombie and the Vampire transformation, due to a virus.

The Werewolves are always male supporting the thymotic rage perspective, and it is not permanent.
Regressing, reverting, back to "normal" follows.
The rage subsides, is repressed, hides beneath the surface.

[Dæmon]

There are variants in the vampire type of psychology, each corresponding to a particular emotional energy: envy, anger, sadness, and so on.
Although any emotion will do, a specific type of emotion is the most tasty to this type of psychology; the separation between positive and negative emotions represent a (re)action to existence, or otherness, or a (re)action to the (re)action to existence, or otherness.
Any emotion will do, if it falls into the general category of positive/negative energy, because an emotion is essentially rooted in need/suffering, and the primary emotion of anxiety/fear - either as a different form/degree of it, finding its place within a particular context, or as a (re)action to it, an antidote to it.

Such an emotional Vampire feeds on variants of anxiety.
Its own is placated in the process, reduced in degree; turning need/suffering into pleasure.
Essentially the, so called, "negative" emotions are what are most often hungered for, but in some rarer cases the "positive" ones might be preferred.
The taste depends on the particularities (nature/nurture) of each specific Vampire, and how these determined the taste its need acquired.

The reaction does not only decrease need/suffering in such a mind, but it validates it.
It is a form of distancing, by unloading the anxiety/fear upon the other, manifesting in the variants of emotional reactions – more than the (re)action itself, it is the attention this necessitates.
The mind feels alive by making the other emote, and the emotions produced alleviate the anxiety/fear in self – its mind is calmed.

Although, one thing should be noted here...

Where the Zombie is a mindless feeding machine, only interested in the sensation of feeding, the pleasure of it, and being brainless enough to not know why - just because -  for the Vampire a self-consciousness must be present.
The Vampire knows what it is and why it hungers for blood. In modern representations the Vampire chooses to become a Vampire, might even ask to be converted - baptized or circumcised into the covenant.
The Zombie remains oblivious: pure feeding, for the sake of feeding.
It tears its victims to pieces, infecting them, if they manage to escape.

The Vampire drains them of their vital energies, leaving their flesh and bones intact; it can mingle among its victims, pretending to be one of them.
The Zombie cannot, its hunger for flesh dominates it - pure hedonist/materialist.
It is naive sensation.

We can think of the Zombie/Vampire metaphor as variants of the same memetic construct, connected to the Judaism/Christian/Secular-Humanist types...variants of the Modern type.

Both are animated-dead, lost to the world of nature - supernatural.
Both with insatiable hungers, utilizing different methods of predation produced by their different degrees of self-awareness, or self-identification.
Both feeding on virile, healthy, organisms, compensating for their own congealing vitality.

The Metaphorical Supernatural triad goes like this:

Vampire - covert, sexual/seductive, Dandy/Metrosexual, feminine - erotic  Modern >>> Zombies mindless, emotionless, witless, asexual/multisexual - emotionless/detached, Modern <<< Werewolves - overt, sexual/dominant, masculine - thymotic Modern

All coexist, and are part of the same infectious memetic paradigm, and it is obvious that they find in each other an inferior prey.
They prefer natural, healthy, warmblooded vigorous prey.

All three go through a transformation due to the infection, the memetic virus.
The first two experience it as permanent, the last as a ephemeral transformation triggered by rage.
This also corresponds to the fact that the first two are dead, animate dead, exhibiting little emotion themselves - they feed upon what they lack.
The last is alive, warmblooded - feeds and on emotion but also expels it in the form of rage.
All emotions are converted in it, through it, into Thymos.

All three are products of human urban environments.
They are psychological types functioning on an insidious level, as all appear human, in the natural sense, but are not.  

In a world populated by infected ones the non-infected one will be the one considered "ill".

It is normal to expose your preferences when describing a phenomenon as objectively as possible.

Is masculinity becoming obsolete, and morphing into some version of a female, or becoming asexual?
Yes.
Is sex becoming in human environments about relating, communing, hedonistic escapism, and increasingly less about reproduction?
Yes.

Some find this a positive development, because they live in a win/win lose/lose world view.
For me every change entails a gain and a loss.
Sometimes the potential gain, most focus on because that's how stupid most people are, is outweighed by the potential loss, which people minimize and or dismiss or deny.

The decline of masculinity will have a cost...which, as always, will force mankind to adjust by using techniques and technologies.

Look at what man does:
He intervenes upon natural processes to change the world to satisfy his needs, to create his ideal world - which is often contrary to the natural world - then when he realizes that his interventions besides the 'positive' aspects have produces 'negative' collateral effects, (in effect he has unbalanced natural processes with his interventions) he dedicates resources to deal with those.
Then that creates more cascading collateral negative effects, forcing him to dedicate more resources to deal with those...and so on.

This continuing intervening upon the side-effects of earlier interventions, is what makes artificial environments what they are.
This is called "progress".
Man is now calling it an advancement when he deals with the side-effects of his previous side-effects of his past interventions.

Feminization is one such side-effect.
One of many....pollution is another, both environmental and genetic.
Man is becoming genetically weaker and more dependent on medicines and technologies to survive...and this is increasing yearly.

Now, one of the effects of declining masculinity, which technologies will have to compensate for, is declining creativity.
The masculine spirit is one of breaking boundaries, challenging authority and the norms, being innovative...because a male's sexual success is dependent on this...
Whereas a female is passive, and selective, and does not need to develop these traits to stand-out and be chosen.

We see a hint of this decline in the arts.
Creativity now is about sampling and recombining older creativity into new ways.
Art sampling art...
Reality is being pushed back into the periphery.

So we see this increasing navel-gazing.
Artificial world within an artificial world.  
Simulated environments within a simulation of an environment...read Baudrillard.
Solipsistic, self-referential, me-me...escapism.

If you pay the price you can live in whatever reality you choose, and define yourself as anything you like.
Because the world is excluded, not allowed to correct your delusions - to give you a reality-check.
Money can now correct, compensate for all genetic weaknesses.
If you've got the cash you can be anything, and others will play along.
Your inferior genes will be returned into the mix, to be added to other inferior genes...later requiring medicines to remain alive in a world that does not give a shit about what you think of yourself or how much money you have.  

This is perfect for controlling masses of heterogeneous populations.  

Like a canary in the mineshaft...only here it is the mind-shaft.

Things are so bad that the moment you critique human artificial environments this is the same as critiquing life.
The memory of environment is now dominated by human contrivances...just as the original purpose of art, or sex, is lost in a haze of human delusions.

This is cocooning...Institutionalization.
A mind raised in an institution, surrounded by walls and electric bulbs and fences, has no concept of nature, of reality outside these manmade premises.
This world is THE world.

[Dæmon]

Alienated from nature/past, a mutation that is unfit, and cannot relate to the world outside human artifices, it thrives in manmade environments, seeking identity within its metaphors, seeking an appropriate name to describe itself, seeking a place to belong, to fit into.

Such a creature is committed to fashion, and style, because it has no other source for an identity.
It uses it to hide the scars, and the disharmony of its form and mind.
The pieces fit, but they do not fit symmetrically.
The asymmetry exposes its freakishness, its internal disharmony.
It prefers the dark because there shadows warp form, and can be used to create illusions.  

The Frankenstein.
Pieces, collected from the recycling bins of humanity, put together in strange combinations.
Mutations shaping a type that could only survive in urban environments, its techniques, and purchased technologies used to blend in where it feels it is exposed if one turns to gaze carefully.    

Such a by-product of Modernity is struggling to come to terms with its need to be seen, as it wishes to be seen, and to not be seen, as it is.
Pretense is its mask, as it buys time to weigh the costs and benefits.
With no internal harmony it lurches from option to option, collecting more pieces to amalgamate into its deformity.
It considers itself a work of art, in the making, but with no sense of self, and no past to connect with, to guide its stitching, it rummages through modern consumer imagery, sewing together a quilt which is not always aesthetically appealing.

The more talented piece-together a character with some cohesive style, and play out the role each alludes to.
The style dictated by pop-culture, or modern symbolism, it has collected through movies, musicals, pop-music videos, magazines.
The outcome is distinctly erotic.
A symptom of feminization to contrast with the more thymotic earlier representations of the type.  
It repeats the script, and when it moves a soundtrack accompanies its movements.

It is a caricature of caricatures, and in a feminizing nihilistic environment it recycles effete, Dandy-type, hermaphrodites, transvestites, homoerotic icons.
 

[Dæmon]

Searching for new parts to integrate into its character the Frankenstein recycles and includes the most recent with samples from the past, creating this strange mix of styles it has put-together, but not fully understood separately.
Its understanding being superficial and only going deep enough to appreciate aesthetic qualities, such as texture, color, rhythm, tone, fabric, cannot find a central theme, and it has no past to discriminate and harmonize, so the outcome is a hit or a miss.
Recognizing no restriction in its style choices, its lifestyle options, it appears in tune with the anti-race, anti-sex, gender-breaking, symbol recycling culture-of-no-culture, which is the perfect social milieu for it, offering consumption as this throw-away trendiness of mixing and diluting.

Sometimes the result is appealing, offering an avant guard trendiness, and other times it produces gaudy monstrosities - but there is no long term cost, since the self-creation is an ongoing process that can quickly change, adopting more aesthetically harmonious mixtures of the past and of the more recent past (present).
We see this trendiness in the convergence with masculinity which we now call metro-sexuality, or with its expression of the unisex, leaning distinctly towards the feminine, character, in fashion today - the current transvestite/hermaphrodite, gender ambiguous mutation of the type.

To speak of male/female in its case would be a misunderstanding of what it is.
It is beyond organ utilities, surrendering only to the most inescapable natural functions.
For this creature organs are accessories it is forced to integrate into its style, or ignore if it cannot.
In modern times these organs can be altered, making this type a frequent customer of surgical interventions.

It is a confusion of styles, which considers this confusion its mystique - its uniqueness.
It finds itself mysterious, being unable to find an underlying identifier - since it has detached from nature/past.
It refuses to accept any interpretation of itself, since it cannot settle on one itself.
It accepts its own ambiguity as part of its "freedom" to reinvent itself continuously, making it the perfect Modern type; a consumer of goods, fashions, and ideas; a consumer of recycled, music, art, commodities and styles.

It is no more than loud packaging with nothing inside.
It laughs when it tricks you.

The inescapable irony of the most abnormal wanting to appear as the most normal, if not desiring to redefine, or to abolish the meaning of normal, is at work here.
The monster begins to desire to appear as hyper-human, perhaps challenging the word "human" so as to detach it from its genetic meaning, its phenomenal references, and turn it into a free-for-all concept, or a meaningless word.
We see the same happening with words such as superior/inferior, or intelligent/stupid, or strong/weak, or anything having to do with quality, and qualifiers.
By disconnecting the words from natural/past reference points the individual can continue feeling superior, despite evidence to the contrary, and ironically, despite challenging the concept itself.

The word refers only to feeling, sensation, which is the typical method for the more sophisticate nihilist to avoid standards outside itself, while, at the same time, preserving ego, and that sense of self.
Again, it is the "sense" of self, the feeling, not any cognition, or any clear definition of self which may use time/space, or nature/past, because then the "individual" would have to face reality.
It would be unable to simply declare itself this or that, but would be forced to face itself in relation to otherness.

Integrity, seriousness, is lost, in self-valuing, using personal standards shaped in a past it refuses to acknowledge, or to face honestly.
For such a monstrosity ridiculing all standards, finding the flaw in all definitions, is a way of preserving its comforting commitment to self; its cynicism is the expression of a predetermined rejection of anything other than its sensation, feeling.

Materialism and hedonism are the normal attitudes for such creatures because its the only way they can find some possibility for pride.    

He's part this, and part that, contributing to his selective reasoning and his compartmentalized sense of self - he is quintessentially schizophrenic, and the sampled patchwork he adorns himself with reflects this internal fragmentation.

With no cohesion, no connecting thread to his past/nature, he feels free to be anything, at any time, for any one, in any place.
A "free-spirit" meaning free from past/nature, to invent himself as if from a virgin birth, into a coming New Age, where every morning promises a new discovery to inspire a rebirth.
This is why his understanding of the deep past is selective, as well, and why he lives in the shallow past, the present, projecting its recycled imagery as potential futures, all of which are as shallow as the sample he used to construct his abstractions.

The simpler of this type surrender to an external absolute, lumbering on towards its discovery, and their hoped-for fulfillment, salvation, and final harmonization; the more demanding only accept the absolute so as to pursue their immediate interests focused around self: self as the shallowest representation of past/nature, when it has been disconnected from what preceded it and made it possible.
Unlike the Zombie-type who stumble about in a constant hunger, a feeding frenzy, an erotic paroxysm, that dominates what mind is left to them, the Frankenstein has pulled back from the sensation of need and has made self his object/objective, his shallow ambition/goal.
With no heritage to direct his work he scavenges in the garbage piles of Modern decadence for bits and pieces to slap unto the quilt he calls "self", and makes of himself a walking rubbish-heap, lumbering to and fro, as bits and pieces fall off, forcing him to gather more, and more.

His internal structures is no different.
He has no principles, no values, beyond the immediate.
For him idea(l)s are pieces of thought he can stitch together, without having to harmonize them (compartmentalization), making him elusive: one moment he is defending this concept, the next he has abandoned it and is defending another which is in opposition to the earlier one.
It does not matter to him.

With no cohesive central theme, in his thinking, in his Becoming, he is only interested in appearing substantial, formidable, superior, in gaining a momentary advantage, in overpowering other by finding the inevitable weakness in all positions.
He suffers from no such threat, since he has nothing to lose, having never stood for anything except this ongoing construct of self, and the fragile ego that supports it internally, like a matchstick skeletal frame barely supporting the accumulating rubbish heap.
It's why light, and flimsy, is preferred to massive and thick.  
For him ideas are like the patchwork he calls "I": a sampling field, to recycle, combine in monstrous ways - pick up, use, and then discard, as he lumbers on to the next one.
Ideas are like toys, or fashion trends.
He can wear them for a while, and then include them in a personal style to stand out, and to hide his shoddy stitch-work under covering rags and distracting bright colors.

And because he is a fragmented construct he can build himself up to appear large and intimidating, compensating for how slow and flat-footed he is.
He cannot dance, he stumbles, and shakes, claiming he did it on purpose - inventing a new dance-move.
And when he speaks he whistles, and grunts, making sure the few word-samples he uses to impress will sound loud and clear, as they fade out into mumbling chatter.
Then he makes a joke, in agreement with the popular sentiments, and guffaws, releasing tensions, suddenly forgetting that his thoughts were as fragmented as everything else about him.            

When the dead are living we have entered into a new realm of existence.
None of the previous rules apply.
Death is but another kind of living.
Suffering a negation of an ongoing universal orgasm.
Words can be places in any sequence.
Time is irrelevant.
Decay is sublime.
Being is Existing.
An assertion is an argument.
Sickness is health – weakness is strength - ignorance is evidence – stupidity is genius.

You can't kill this multi-headed, brainless monster.
This modern Hydra just comes at you, in slow, scratching, biting, consistence – in waves of rotting flesh, hungry, swallowing, licking, tearing apart and recombining.
A new definition of beauty is constructed to make this filth aesthetically pleasing.
Eyes where cheeks were, tongues coming out of the belly, vagina where the anus was… words jumbled, mumbling, pointing and shifting, like sand, gurgling, spitting, liquid infested, polluted mucus, sounding like a brook.
Organs are recombined, some missing.
No cripples here, only different.
No teleology of human, only manifestation of the divine, mixing and mingling, creating unique creations of the unifying One.

Make yourself ill to not be eaten - assimilated in bits and pieces, in soundbites, in selective quotes.  

A new man is on the loose.

One stomach, many heads.
Each head with its own tongue to taste.    

Strange creatures roam these manmade streets.
Bizarre combinations, mutations that were not culled out of the bloodline now develop into monstrosities.

And to bind them as a oneness, the lowest-common-denominator, before sex, is found in the survival instinct: the need to consume.
Hunger becomes their shared value, and in the other they see another source of nutrition - to heal that which is lost in (inter)action, in the friction of ordering with flux.

On these leveled and paved streets all reality is changed to accommodate these necessary monstrosities.
The one who declares self as central, the subjectivist, calls the objectivist a narcissist; the schizophrenic, identifying with other, accuses the self-knowing of self-hatred; the one surrendering to need and calling it strength, calls the ascetic a coward, or a degenerate; the drug addict calls his drug an epiphany and the one who refuses to share it a repressed spirit.
 

Monsters think their monstrosities are part of a divine plan.
They reject chaos as a necessary part of their appearance, preferring to associate what they've become with a sacred template and not the end-result of Flux, (interacting patterns and chaos, swirling into combinations within which life emerges as a binary self-preserving ordering within this ceaseless fluctuations of increasing randomness.
The monster is shaped by the chaos it denies in itself.

Everywhere it turns it sees reflections of its own ordering.
Everywhere otherness it can assimilate into its self to heal its wounds, and grow its talons.
The cosmos becomes its mother - a monstrosity and its stomach where these lesser creatures live.

When all the world becomes a stomach each head connects to the divine plan, and consumes itself in otherness.  

[Dæmon]

Bottom<>Up thinking unlike Top<>Down thinking descends from the middle ground down to the darkest levels it can endure before starting the slow process of climbing out of it.
 Doc: MANifesto - Nature – Top<>Down Thinking
One is born into middle-earth, to use another pop-cultural reference, halfway between absolutes when the center is taken as being the observer, awakening consciousness.
The temptation to start from there and climb upwards is always dominant.
The path-of-least resistance chooses the easiest route, succumbing not only to the need to start from the self-evident but t start from the end, from the desirable conclusion, and to work, think, backwards trying to justify its descent back towards the middle-ground.
This projected ascent, using imagination which disconnects from reality to ascend to the highest extreme the absolute, and then descending is what is called Top<>Down Thinking.
The average mind begins from the middle ground, the self-evident perceived and settles there.
It takes a priestly sort to offer him the absolute as an end, a comforting destination which is now presumed to also be self-evident.
For the average mind this replacement of one self-evident fact with another, even though it be fantastic, is an easy process, particularly when this end, this absolute given is painted by the priestly kind, the marketing guru, as positive, and utopian, and easy.
The Hero, the honest noble spirit, the restless mind, does not succumb to such easy temptations.
For him the voyage begins with a descent into the darkest places, the vilest underbelly of the world where he may be taken-over.
If he survives and possesses the energies he may then begin his ascent upwards, first towards the middle-world where the average remain, and then still more upwards towards the realm of holy men, the Brahmin, most of which have never been to the places he’s been but have taken the easy route from middle upwards, or from a projected height downwards, surrendering to gravity.
They are grave spirits, in appearance, though inside they remain infantile, whereas the hero begins with the world upon his shoulders and slowly ascends, casting it off himself as he climbs upward.      

The descent into the Under-World where reality alters and time no longer applies, is a descent from the emerging consciousnesses of world inwards, towards the sub-conscious, from infancy towards self-knowledge, self-consciousness.
For the majority this process is shallow, and they quickly flee from whatever depths they've managed to enter.
With no self-awareness they begin climbing upwards from their infantile middle-earth towards the heights.
With nothing below to draw inspiration from, to construct a foundation upon, they imagine the height by sampling their middle-earth infantile world.
Most are quickly seduced by charlatans offering an end, a peak to fantasize themselves upon, from where they can just abandon themselves to the natural flow downwards.

This seductive peak is always an exaggeration of the middle-earth infantile world, and when it detaches completely it may contradict it, offering a relief even from this determining level.
The pinnacle becomes as absurd, or surrealistic, hyper-real, metaphorical as the Under-World, only it is bathed in light to blind the senses to its absurdity.  
Let us not forget that the Middle-Earth as it first came into our consciousness was a creation of a Christian (Tolkien) who wanted to deal with the absence of mythologies, and the disillusionment of the average mind within a world that had lost its absolute anchor in the Mono-Deity.

His structures were Christian based and hyper-real, offering the infantile psyche a good/bad universe, or a pinnacle, a projected absurdity which could then be mistaken as being literally so.
He, too, began with a self-evident middle-ground, and then offered a hyperbolic image which he placed in the past, or in the Under-World where anything goes.
His creatures mirroring human types, his quests implying human struggles, his races reflecting human ones.
His myth ends with the slow advancement of the "Age of Men", which is the middle-world itself.
His Middle Earth was really an Under-Earth projected as a self-evident end from where man had tumbled down, not ascended out of.
The "Age of Men" is our Modern Age, the age of infantile sensationalism, and child-like beliefs.

Tolkien inverts the process, as a Christian would.
He places his “middle” on top, and speaks of the Age of Men as a descent towards the middle.
This is typical of Nihilistic Top<>Down thinking.
In Tolkien myth the end is given, and he recedes down, back, to the present, the average man’s middle-earth.
He places his world in the past when it is really a future.

Tolkien begins with an end.
A world bathed in light, populated by pure, noble, kind, courageous, creatures.
Men in his world are complex.
All other creatures are good or bad, with no ambiguities.
He, like a true Christian nihilist, begins with the positive, into which darkness enters, causing the descent towards the Age of Men.
Goodness, purity, exit his Middle-Earth, towards some mystical other realm beyond the seas, beyond space/time.
Only the pure can follow.  
His “middle” is a self-evident top, from where man descends: backwards thinking.
The Hero’s quest begins in the middle-ground, descends into the darkness where he attains nobility, courage, self-worth, before he can ascend back to the middle and then begin the arduous climb upwards, towards an unspecific, non-existent peak.
Hero's Labors

The coward, the nihilist, the imbecile, begins with a pinnacle, an end attained and lost, forgotten, the chosen who has fallen off of the peak.
He descends, from top to bottom, downwards, and he calls this "progress".
He begins with an absurd certainty, a given, and then descends trying to explain it, define it, justify it, so as to return to it.

Typically, the nihilist is narcissistic, a braggart, an imbecile who believes of himself what is least evident.
To explain why his present, his appearance, is not what his words claim, what his behavior indicates, he splinters himself into two - schizophrenia, to cast the bad, evil side as the mask hiding his pure, noble, absolute self.
He is not ascending towards nobility, with courage, he is descending from a pinnacle of nobility, explaining why he is increasingly decrepit, self-flattering, seeking desperately for others to affirm his image so as to justify his declarations.
The Modern is a King who has lost his kingdom, and will win it back.
He is already royalty, unrecognized, pretending to be, like Aragorn, a mere drifter, a nobody.

Like true royalty, secure on his throne, he shows the kingly benevolence of a master to his minions, who still have not acknowledged him as their lord.
To the one who has been into Hades and returned this "Lord" of the lights appears like a pretentious hypocrite, full of hot-air and naive grandiose plans.

The pretentious self-declared lord of men, will come in many forms;a priest, full of more than shit, but God's grace; a wise shaman, declaring his inanities drops of pure noesis, though they be covered in the emotional urine of a woman seeking attention and love and appreciation...to be valued no matter what.
If not a miser, a swine, wallowing in his own excrement, his own symbols, money, things, he is a spiritual guru, breathing in his own mind-farts, unafraid to declare them rosy, taunting his lessers that they cannot understand the delicate odor he emits.

From gray to white, the magician exposes to the world his true, whiteness, his true internal motives, his purity of hearth.
Worship him if you can recognize value, followers of goodness.
He is good, though beyond Good and Evil he states, to act as if he's surpassed his idolization.
His descent is a gift to the lowest – he has come down, like Zarathustra.
He is not like other priests. He is friendly, down to earth, down to middle-earth, stern but kind.
He is not light, he simply exudes it - he is massive, heavy, full of gravitas.
Only a few know of his powers, and those who come to know him like him, and respect him.
His message is positive, and he gathers to his robes the needy.
Hobbit and Orc all have their role, their value.

What does the Hero know of such liars, such acts taken literally?
He has descended, alone, to do battle with himself, not for recognition, for accolades, for acknowledgment, but for the opportunity to be taken, to see self before it is gone.
He ascends requiring no followers, no appreciating audience, not even companions.
He is no King of men, nor would he degrade himself with such pitiful ambitions.
He is only master of himself, and if this mastery is perceived as power by those who have none of it, then he is unconcerned, but toys with them because he can, because weakness always offers itself up for manipulation and exploitation, and he, having descended to the Darkness has not left behind that part, but has carried it with him.    

[Dæmon]

Jekyll & Hyde

Part man, part beast, the civilized and the primal, representing the private personality, inner psyche, and the public man, the character, the socioeconomic actor.
The public man can be taught.
He learns his role in the many institutions created for this very purpose.
To be “educated” is to admit to a training that has been completed successfully. The uneducated man remains the uncertain; a beast untamed, that has not been tested, by the appropriate authorities, and, for this reason, cannot be fully trusted to remain true to the shared training, the allotted roles.

 Schizophrenia made into a social necessity.
Self-repression a new health standard.
How much of the beast, in you, can you control?

More than bipolar.
The schism slowly develops into a complete split, to where the character is unconscious of the personæ, to the point where he will deny its presence, will become angry at the slightest insinuation that this hidden self exists, considering his character his true “self”, and all else dreams, sensations, a secret evil, a hidden sin he prefers not to admit to.
Such a man can hold in himself two contrary positions.
He can say one thing, and act in opposition to it; he can declare himself genius, a lover of life, an enlightened open-mind, and then exhibit the traits that expose these declarations as hypocritical.
The inner inherited spirit denied, when it confronts his projected idea(l), his object/objective, with which he identifies, despite failing to live up to its most basic traits.
Such a man can compartmentalize, and fake it.
He can learn the words associated with the type he wishes to be, but detached from reality, as they are, his (inter)actions will let him down.

After a while he will begin to believe in his own act, explaining his slip-ups as a result of his human weakness, his sinful soul, his animal nature which still lingers in the basement dungeon, denied access to the surface.
And why would such a man not be able to pull off the pretense, when he’s received the best education, and he has memorized the proper words, from the proper authorities, and has access to the most current advancements in science and art and culture?            

The miser masks his true self in philanthropy; the nihilist pronounces, with words, his love of life; the hater uses words of compassion; the world hater denounces reality and then offers a new world, of words, which he calls “true”.
The civilized man appears to be a monster, and the monster civilized.
The apparent is hidden, and the hidden is revealed.

With potions, with chemical alchemy, he concocts brews to kill the monster in him; to finally become One with the pretender, the artifice, the actor.
A technological solution to his binary mind – a technique.
He wants to poison his nature, allowing his caricature to dominate, once and for all time; the castrated man, the lobotomised human, the man of artifices and fashion trends and symbols.

No more to be “incredible” but to remain common, forever the same, ordinary, with an extraordinary secret…normal.

The inner personality overwhelms the man of reason, in times of stress.
Passion takes over and that secret comes out.

The unrefined berserker who having been forgotten for so long rages, rages against the night.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Green with envy, for his other half, how incredible he would become if he could stay, and learn to funnel that rage.

   

The artificial, homogenized, uniformed, perfumed, and groomed, man of Modernity, hiding this inner creature, from a long forgotten, denied, past, who comes out with pent-up energies after being incarcerated in the psyche.
He’s learned his lessons, bought the books, has a dictionary with an easy to use thesaurus, and he repeats the phrases, trying to remain civilized, trying to equate knowledge with understanding, memetic memory with genetic memory, the trained homogeneous man with that heterogeneous inheritance.

He hangs around the right people, with the right networking credentials, refers and defers to the proper authorities, attempting to imply parity by association, but that creature lies in there, waiting to come out, to reveal the true inner qualities, and their correct fluctuating quantities.  
Watch him when he is agitated or aroused - thymotically and/or erotically stimulated.
See his true self.

But, what if this secret private-self is not much more incredible than his public self?
What if there is not much to this secret?
Then, would not this poor shallow man, cultivate his public self, his character, train and educate himself to compensate?

Would he not adopt the public, trained, character as his one and only "true" self?
Would he not find in this a hope, and would not this secret become shameful?

Denied and shamed, not allowed to grow - atrophied.
Born of poor stock, the incredible is not so incredible.

The creature hides not because he is not permitted to come out, but he fears exposing how small he is, in relation to his now inflated public self, his character.
You know him.
He's the one who never breaks character, and no matter how intimate a setting, or how passions rise, he will never divert from the popular narrative.
He is, shallow, and dull.
He has an unimpressive personality.
Nothing to him but this constructed appearance; this fabricated self, which he put together like he would a Frankenstein, from bits and pieces he found lying around,  or he dug up from graveyards.

He will quickly bore you.
For one such as him, being “honest” means being in-line with his hypocrisy.

Victor Frankenstein is a failed Jekyll; compensating for his own unimpressive Hyde.
He tries to fabricate one, to keep his own secret.
Jekyll is Dr. Frankenstein who has managed to hide the monster, because it is impressive, terrifying, and incredible.  
Frankenstein is the monster unleashed...and exposed as being other than its creator.
The uncontrolled monstrosity.
The mad scientist constructs a creature, from parts of others, to compensate for his own unimpressive private self; he reproduces externally for what he lacks internally.
 
A caricature made real, from unreality; made to exist from selectively sampling the dead – the experienced past, recombined into a new form.
The nil substituted by a combination and turned into a monstrous, disharmonious, one.

Victor exaggerates his private self, constructing what he wishes his inner beast were like.    
 

[Dæmon]

Cyborg

Post-Modern equivalent of Frankenstein.
Parts combined over a frame, the spiritualists call it soul, or spirit; a mainframe, manufactured to a common design.
Additional parts are interchangeable and purchased at will, for a price.

The body ceases to have a history, it has a version, to be updated when new parts are invented.
The parts are not the Cyborg, like the organs are not the organism in our Nihilistic times.
The parts are add-on, over a basic model, to be renewed, every so often, as advancements in techniques/technologies arise.

Each part has a numerical designation, which identifies the Cyborg.
The parts only have purpose in relation to work; an object/objective shared
Choosing the parts the Cyborg expresses its subjective judgment in relation to the shared object/objective, and finds its place among other Cyborgs in relation to this labour.

The only distinguishing marker is the Cyborg's particular specialty, its expertise, in relation to this shared object/objective, this shared work. Each Cyborg acquires the part necessary to carry out it specialized function....no other distinction is permitted.
All Cyborgs can change vocation, specialize and alter their function.
All they need to change their identity is training/education, reprogramming.  

The mainframe connects all Cyborgs to a shared pool of data, and parts.
All parts are purely cosmetic, and different only in relation to the task each one was designed to carry out.
All Cyborgs are manufactured using the same base model.  
All Cyborgs can upgrade at will, if they carry out their tasks efficiently, and are rewarded for their work.
The Cyborgs advancement can be gauged by what version its parts are.
Older, outdated parts, designate inefficiency.

After a while one forgets what pieces were added on to the flesh, and which ones were of the original.
The utility of the parts is also lost in time.

Each organ, now a part, can be given its own function, as it pleases the Cyborg, and in relation to its work, its productivity.  

Penis/vagina go the way of the appendix.

They begin to atrophy, hormonal drops (feminization) after a long period of gradual loss of the original function.
The intermediate stage is one of play, creativity, like one plays with one's hair now that it is no longer required for warmth.

When nature/past is no longer relevant, and pleasure is the only objective, the "individual" can be mechanical - a fabrication, as all Modern identifications are supposed to be.
Why not a could not a machines call itself woman, or man, when the word has lost all natural identifiers and is now associated with pleasure giving?

Technology, as extension of man, makes the robot a device for self-referential pleasure - masturbation.  

The only criterion is that the one purchasing the device, the service, remain convinced, be fooled, tricked by the artifice - being fooled means to remain in his daydream.
Even the word "species" is being redefined - this is "progress".
A relief for the majority, who want to detach, escape from nature/past, from self, and want to immerse themselves in otherness, become other.  

[Dæmon]

Although there are many different definitions of Witch and Warlock there is one central idea that connects them all: the word.
Difference between Warlock and Witch, other than their usage of evil, rather than good magic, is their sex – usually Warlocks are associated with the male and with the evil, and when females are called Warlocks it is because they evoke the masculine and dark magic.
For the purposes of this exposition warlock will refer to a male and Witch to a female practitioner of magic, of both the good and the evil, the light and the dark.
Using incantations, verbal spells, accompanied with gestures, ritualized movements, looks, dances, sounds, smells, textures, the Witch casts her spells.
Her power is found in the words themselves, for they are produced by a human brain and they are effective only within a human brain.

We can trace this effect back to the animal world where a grunt and a growl transmits to another creature, even one belonging to another species, the sense of pain and the insinuation of a threat.
To grunt or growl to a plant will have no effect; to scream at a worm or a butterfly will do nothing but expel gusts of air and vibrations that may have a slight effect.
The similarity of the nervous system is what is important.
Among higher life-forms, that share a common ancestry and so have developed a similar nervous system, a grunt, a growl, and a scream are easily understood, but use a more sophisticated form of a sound, like one that produces a pattern, such as a word, and the effect is lost, unless you accompany it with a gesture, a tone, or some other primitive form of expression that will send the message.
Say, in a soft voice “I will kill you” to a dog and it will wag its tail and lick your hands, accompany the words with a forced air explosion from your lungs, and a violent gesture, and a look, and the message is received.

The medium must be one shared by the ones involved in the information exchange, otherwise the effect is minimal.
The magical power of the chant, the word, the symbol, is really one of transmitting an effect from one living organism to the other, from one nervous system to the other, and since nervous systems connect the organs to the brain, the effect flows from brain through nervous system to every cell in the organism’s body.
This is what a spell caster does.
(S)He transmits a desirable effect, using a medium the other can process, in humans a shared language, accompanied by primal gestures, sounds, tonalities, crescendo, and accentuating the effect with smells, the burning of incense, with textures, a carpeted room in red, or a stone grey floor, with symbols, some mysterious, menacing, mystical, and the appropriate lighting for the shadows to produce the required state of mind in the primal part of the other’s brain, and, then, repetition: the continuous, ritualized, evocation, similar to commercial, and brainwashing practices.
From the brain of the Witch the sensation, has been transplanted into another’s brain, and through the brain it can have an effect upon his entire body – psychosomatic effect, and placebo effect.
Hypnotists, a form of witchcraft, employs this method, first by choosing, from the audience, those who seem susceptible, and impressionable, and then by convincing them that the hypnotist, does indeed, possess the power (s)he professes to possess.
Same thing with “faith healers”, and all types of sorcery.
The effect is temporary, and only lasts as long as the conviction remains in the “victim” nervous system, as a residual effect.  This fades in time, and along with it the… magic.






As with all human practices there are those who occupy themselves with a more legitimate form of magic – one where the Modern definition would require a revamping, and a rescuing of the word from the clutches of the Nihilists who only wish to discredit all natural forms of spirituality, to leave behind their disconnected, surreal, unreal, nihilistic Abrahamic staples, as the best of all “possible worlds”.  



Of these we can say that they are a more visceral variant of the scientific method, once producing alchemy, as the precursor to chemistry, and astrology, as the precursor to astronomy.
The difference gradually developed, as the Nihilistic dis-ease morphed from a religion, reliant on the super-natural, to an ideology, reliant on the worship of futurism, the yet to be, the immanent – we can include the worship of youth, and the immediate, the superficial, as part of this development; from Paradise, in the beyond, to Utopia, in the soon to be, in the coming.

Now the Witches, Warlocks, Wizards, Sorcerers, Shamans become different variations of the tribal spiritual leader - the pagan variant of the Abrahamic priest.
As a practitioner of magic such a man or woman, would look for patterns in the world, in nature, to represent as symbols, words, in the hope of finding the underlying essence of the relationship between man and cosmos.
A discipline seeking signs, out there in the world, that correlate to human processes; the externalization of internal ordering.
Numerology, semiology, all hermeneusis of natural patterns into human codes - to facilitate the processing, and to find a cosmic pattern to bind it all into a whole.
The risk of misconstruing the method for the fact remains, as a human weakness, seducing many a mind to its calling.
This is how the honest magician is transformed into another "grifter", and exploiter of human ignorance, and frailty, and another manipulator of human need, and the nature/past most deny as being relevant, and present.  







When the power of words was appreciated some turned to the beyond, time and space, to base their claims, and became priests, while others, the few, insisted on basing them in nature, and became pariahs, caricatures to be laughed at, and dismissed as children's tales, when the truth was that the former only mattered within human systems, reliant on infecting as many followers as possible (quantities) to construct and maintain their fabrications, whereas the latter's magic was independent of human agreement, and quantities, because their source came directly from natural patterns (cycles, rhythms, vibrations...), which they emulated symbolically and verbally.  







Nature has always mystified the common man.
All the way back to the time when fire was made, those who knew how to control the forces of nature, were held in high esteem – of holding onto great powers and magical forces they were accused of; often feared and killed, to deal with their own fear.
They were the original scapegoats, the ones burned and tortured to appease some incomprehensible reality, out there, and all around them.
Perhaps it was these magi who convinced the people to direct their fears upon animals and inanimate objects, so as to save themselves from their wrath.

Counter-Intuitive reality, and the inescapable, and unpredictable, forces of nature, had to be dealt with, and a killing, the ultimate display of cost, the price of being conscious of existence, was the only method.
The gods, would take them seriously then, the ignorant primitive thought.
But to no avail, so then the solution was found to explain why these calamities happened during certain periods in time and space, and why a cycle was being followed – the scapegoat, as the seasonal sacrifice, to calm the unruly forces of nature, was the best alternate solution to man’s desire to control himself and the world he was forced to exist within.
But that didn’t help for long, when seasonal cycles were not followed and calamities occurred at random, and without warning.
Man, came up with another solution… the pattern was beyond time/space, in the unreal, where no man, except the worthy could see, and only they could read and decipher.  The Priest was that man of “God”. He could not be blamed, as his ancient predecessors were, not would he lose credibility, being only a go-between, a humble servant of a mysterious, Divine entity, not even he could adequately define and explain.
Witchcraft became religion and was institutionalized, to give it that added communal acknowledgement, that self-serving manmade credibility.
All calamities, all incomprehensible forces, could be blamed on a beyond, which, by being beyond, required no further explanation, or justification – it was the “Will of God” and that was enough.



But time changes everything, and along with it the power of the word, the magic, had to change to meet the need of different minds, existing within different, from the past, environments, and the “Word of God”, delivered by his worldly messenger and “humble” servant, had to morph, once more.
The “Word” was now delivered by a sanctioned practitioner of the mystical arts, and miracles became technologies, and words became numbers, and rituals became techniques, and the witch became the scientist – a more humble variation of his predecessors, no doubt, but no less convinced that he, with his methods, can uncover the deepest mysteries of existence and deliver a paradise on earth, step, by progressive step.



Witchcraft, has come a long way.
The mind of God, His divine Will, could now be reduced to a formula, a numerical algorithm – a formula representing a pattern, but with the same promise.
Would not these new, more sophisticated shaman, not be seduced by the promise of their communal standing?
Would they not fall prey to human hubris and vanity, and the needs of the socioeconomic environment they found themselves in?

The ancient ones promised a successful hunt, health, a good harvest, and their reputations were built upon how well they could read the signs.
These, new ones, had more tangible representations of their "insights" and their powers - machines, as extensions of human body, predictions shrunk down to the millisecond, and that promise of abolishing the mystical, the intangible, the counter-intuitive.  
these new magicians promised that all is driven by a central will, a pattern, not to be called God, to avoid the older to the older - here, too, as with everything, the continuity between past and present had to be cut.
Evidence of commonality, severed, erased, like cleansing a crime scene.

But the evidence cannot be erased completely.
The idealist, who spews words with no reference outside human systems, like class, like bourgeoisie, like equality, fairness, justice, reminds us that the Witch and the Warlock still walk among us, only now they've changed gear, garments, they've adopted different tools, rituals, and call themselves by different names.
They cannot escape detection, because they remain dependent on words, and their neurological magical effects on the masses.
You can still smoke them out of the multitude, discover which ones are legitimate, and which are illegitimate con-artists and self-deceiving, snake-oil salesmen and women, who have had to believe in their own lies to make them more convincing to a more sophisticated populace.
All you have to do do distinguish who is who, is follow the word, as one would follow the money.
If their words lead back to their own, or to an other's mind, or to a multiplicity of minds, a collective hive mind, then they are selling empty words, with a neurological effect, and nothing more besides that.
If their words connect to nature, to perceptible patterns outside human minds and independent of human vanity, and egotism and fear, then they must be legitimate, at least in motive.
 




Distinguishing the illegitimate, from the legitimate Witch, or magic user, is as easy as discovering the connections of the words (s)he uses, in her spells.
If the magic only has a neuro-biological effect, and no effect outside the human body, or the community of bodies we call a tribe, or a society, then it is nothing more than a religion, an idea(l), a political dogma - a Nihilistic tool of seduction and manipulation.
The magical effect has a human boundary.
It is only influential within the confines of human artifices, and the particular forms, symbols, linguistics, of the ones that manufactured them.

If the effect exceeds the boundaries of human constructs, are independent of human existence and consciousness, then they are, temporarily, legitimate.  



Words in a book, by the book, for the people of the book, remain just that: ink on paper - effective because many have been enchanted, placed under a spell which is pleasing, numbing, comforting.  

[Dæmon]

We ought to be grateful to the virus for keeping our immune system fit, and relevant.
The current, Modern, dis-ease, will separate the wheat from the chaff, after decades of uncontrolled reproduction, and nature excluded from returning things to a balance.

Those who can recognize the dis-eased, in their many forms, and who can "fake it", making themselves partially or temporarily ill, by smelling like the zombies that surround them looking for fresh blood, will be the ones who preserve what is being consumed by the memetic virus, now, also, manifesting as genetic mutations.

[Dæmon]

Exploration of the Batman universe...another chapter in the Under-World.

The Joker: Oh, you. You just couldn't let me go, could you?
This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.
You truly are incorruptible, aren't you?
You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness.
And I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.
Batman: You'll be in a padded cell forever.
The Joker: Maybe we can share one. You know, they'll be doubling up, the rate this city's inhabitants are losing their minds.
Batman: This city just showed you that it's full of people ready to believe in good.
The Joker: Until their spirit breaks completely.
Until they get a good look at the real Harvey Dent, and all the heroic things he's done.
You didn't think I'd risk losing the battle for Gotham's soul in a fistfight with you?
No. You need an ace in the hole.
Mine's Harvey.
Batman: What did you do?
The Joker: I took Gotham's white knight and I brought him down to our level.
It wasn't hard. You see, madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little push!
[The Joker laughs hysterically as Batman races off and the cops come to take the Joker into custody]

Gotham’s Nihilism is expressed as its corruption – a city built on lies, where different characters can dress up as supernatural creatures and call themselves by any name.
Batman’s represents positive/masculine Nihilism with its childlike hope, founded on no more than a naïve, superficial, intention to do, and be, good. Joker is its opposite, in the Nihilistic binary paradigm, untainted, or honest, true negativity, pure Nihilism, exposing the lie for what it is.
Both are part of the same nihilistic paradigm, like 1/0.  
Batman comes out at night when dreams awaken – Joker follows as the nightmare that breaks all experiential rules of nature; he’s the dreamer whose dream follows no order ever perceived.
One needs the other and this is why they never kill each other, despite numerous opportunities.
Without the self-deceiving, naïve dreamer, Joker has no reason to exist.
He constantly evades death because he is part of the same nihilistic order – all would be unbalanced without his presence.
Batman’s’ duplicity, his mask, and those he protects, despite themselves (weakness sheltered form itself) would be exposed without the presence of the Joker, who acts as a cleansing force, keeping the lie convincing, and the liars good actors.
Joker is dead without Batman.
He is not really the same character, but different manifestations of the same insanity – those who having discovered the duplicity go mad.
It’s not that the Joker thwarts his numerous suicidal tendencies, but even when he dies, from his own hand, another takes his place. The story of his existence changes every time a new individual wears the same painted-on smile – an exaggerated happiness reflecting Gotham’s corruption, its duplicity. Joker can never die because it is Gotham that constructs him continuously.
The Joker needs Batman just as much as Batman needs him.      

Batman: Then why do you want to kill me?
The Joker: [giggling] I don't, I don't want to kill you! What would I do without you?
Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No, no, NO! No.
You... you... complete me.
Batman: You're garbage who kills for money.
The Joker: Don't talk like one of them. You're not! Even if you'd like to be.
To them, you're just a freak, like me! They need you right now, but when they don't, they'll cast you out, like a leper!
You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke.
Dropped at the first sign of trouble.
They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you.
When the chips are down, these... these civilized people, they'll eat each other.
See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.

Batman is like Joker in that he stands above the common man’s understanding of what is going on.
He is Apollonian, knowing full well that those he protects from chance, from the cruelty of chaos, are part of the problem.
They follow blindly and, like Joker says, would turn on him if the “chips are down.”
Who lays down his chips but a gambler; a believer in chance, a blind fatalist?

The "freaks"...multiple manifestations of nihilism when there is no natural corrective process, or it is excluded from the city's domain.
Gotham's protection is what breeds this multiplicity. Outside of it it would be weeded down to those who could see, and adjust to the world as it is.
Nihilism multifariousness, allowing different mutations, unfit genes, to identify with human constructs of their own choice - identity crisis of Modernity.

From the corruption, of lies, to those whose identity confronts these lies, and becomes a danger to the system that permits them to rise up, and to exist.
Each new "villain" and "vigilante" another mutant who would not be born, nor survive long, outside the city's domain. Within Gotham these unfit mutants indulge in political, spiritual, moral warfare - memetic battle; not wanting to destroy Gotham, the protective domain, but to control it, spread within it, master it.

Every character/caricature in the Gotham universe, represents another genetic mutation, fit only for urban living, adorning itself with the masks, fashion, make-up, cosmetic surgery, he considers representative of what he is: freaks of modern settings, most demented, others confused seeking their place in a world disconnected from past.
The mundane rabble are those "innocent" and, often, corrupt citizens with no sense of self – a uniformity of non-distinctness, used as pawns in the battles between these others, these mutant, self-identifying, super-humans, because human, as a designation, no longer has meaning here… all is noetic.

Weirdos, degenerates, and desperate souls trying to stop the madness, all coexist within Gotham’s artificial realities; dark, and decaying, reflecting dreamlands of modern Dystopia, nightmares harassing the inner child.  
With no correction for nature, these urban dwellers can take infinite forms, because the only restriction is noetic, the human imagination, inspired by genetics that have been left rampant.
Gotham is nature's correction.

Without wanting to get too far into the Gotham Dystopic world of artificial (Modern) urban, sheltering environments, we can find parallels, though not as dramatic and impressive, between Gotham "freaks" and the Modern psychologies accessible to all of us who live large cities, in nations using Nihilism as a form of mind-control, a political tool to placate, redirect libidinal energies, create self-induced placidity (self-medication) and harmless cynicism.
Characters (exoteric - public/memetic face) burying personalities (esoteric - private/genetic disposition), building their social character upon the unifying, uniforming, ideologies of Nihilism.
It is here, where appearances are indeed social constructs, superficial displays meant to impress or to display, passing no a desirable message to the observer, where the popular delusion that appearances are all superficial and mean nothing, no more than an expression of personal taste/choice, finds its place.

Sampling a few of the most popular mutations we can recongize individuals in our own urban expriences:

Riddler:

We've all experiences this type as the one who uses words to confuse, create an impression, cause a stir. He is not interested in the world, suing words to connect to reality, but is directed, by an internal psychosis, to linguistically express his cynicism, confusing all who come under his explosive spell.
Words are a game, for him. A game exploiting the common man's ignorance about what words are, and how the majority use them literally.
Illiteracy in literality confusing noumenon with phenomena – the people can read and write but all they can do with this technique is serve, becoming mere extensions of it: recite, repeat, and seek an escape in the symbols.
You are what you say you are; you are what clothes, work, service you provide, what words/symbols you build your public self with.  
Magritte’s surreal no-man, with a linguistic fetish, and a propensity to shock and awe.
His power resides in the Modern mind’s weakness with language.


Penguin:

A more classic Modern, western figure, he has become a popular character antagonizing Batman's idealism.
He is Judeo-Christian/Islamic Nihilism made secular - God of fame and fortune.
A miser, hoarding, collecting, living in the underbelly of the city where he gathers his minions into a criminal (unsanctioned, secretive) organization (clan), feeding on the city's refuse.
He sells what he does not, having acquired a different appetite, a unique taste, and consumes what he does not sell.
The people's shit are his bread and butter; their garbage are his wealth – it all has value.
In the catacombs, of the sewers, he hides and collects.  
Having discovered that money cannot buy you respect, let alone love, the miser settles for respect based on fear.
Penguin’s exploitation of Modern materialistic greed, seeking salvation in symbolic god, the token of appreciation, is his power.

The tragedy of The Joker, contradicting his appearance, creating a disharmony, deformity, that hits us like a slap, is that he fears others laughing at him rather than with him, and so he makes sure his jokes are cutting and, unlike comedy, they hurts more than just feelings, and are more than metaphorical in their impact.
With comedy the disparity between what is said and how it is delivered, and the impact of the surprise, is released with hyperventilating spasms we call laughter.
The audience is relieved the tragedy described does not affect them, at least not directly and not immediately – the distance of space/time the sheltering buffer they are more than happy about – ecstatic, actually.
But the Joker does not allow the audience such common comforts.
He follows the "joke", shallow and lame as it may be, with an immediate, and direct taste of the tragic, evaded in performance comedy.
He is Gotham's wake-up call, and along with Batman fights to heal, to awaken Gotham from its lethargy, numbness, naiveté, allowing corruption to be its inevitable Dystopic outcome.
If not heal, then, and this is where he antagonized Batman, take advantage of it.

He needs Gotham, and he knows it.
An ready audience waiting to be shocked with a punch-line that actually shatters their jaws and darkens their eyes; forced to endure his childlike, cynical, wit.
Without it he would be just another failed genetic mutation.

Joker feels his similarity to Batman (they are both freaks - mutations awakening to their condition), and he also feels their superiority over the citizens of Gotham, who are beneath them both, because they take themselves, and their city, seriously, unlike the cynicism required to cope with what man has wrought, and now cannot live without.



Joker wants to break Batman out of his seriousness, so they can both, along with all other mutants, laugh together at those who are sheltered but fail to take advantage of this nurtured inter-subjectivity, and construct a superb, fantastic, unique, caricature to identify themselves with - let the imagination go wild, and create a character to hide within.
Gotham's lack of creativity irks Joker. Nihilism lost on them... or they lost within Nihilistic Modernity: Metropolis of Gotham.
Despite being protected from the world, they remain as they were, as if nature/past still mattered, not having grasped the liberating opportunity of the circumstances.  

Joker knows he is a monster, though he is clueless as to how he was born and why he was permitted to live (the story changes from event to event, or with his every reincarnation, beneath the mask – Is it always the same man, or the same insanity taking over different men?).
monster defined as unfit genetic mutations, compounding from generation to generation, until the original product of natural selection is buried in time/space - there's no going back, to trail to follow back to a lost inheritance.
The citizens of Gotham, he despises, live in ignorance, actually proud of themselves – and that’s where the laughter begins, ending with a cry, or a scream.  

Batman is more than a story about a vigilante, fighting against evil, on the side of good.
It is a tale of a city, standing in for all urban environments, and consequently, representing Modernity and its fabricated worlds – its nihilistic sub-cultures, driving away culture and past/nature; covering it up with asphalt realities, and electric sunrises casting a pale hue in the gloom; artificial light, imitating the sun, en-lightening a darkening esoteric world of subjective surrealism.
It's a tale about sheltering and mutations, unchecked naturally, forcing some to cull using their own whims - idea(l)s, motives.

A tale about human intervention and the pollution it produces, not only material and genetic, but of the spirit - corruption.  

Nature keeps man humble and honest, or he dies.
Past reminds him of this.
Without these controlling factors man becomes a lunatic, a schizophrenic, wearing gaudy outfits, pretending he is god - what would control such genetic/memetic dis-ease but an equal and opposite force, a toxic pharmakon.

Gotham is a tale of the west in the fevered throws of the Judeo-Christian virus, slowly declining towards death.

What hero will save it?
What mortal man can save it?  

The villains, despite their pure negation of world, are, at least, more authentic with their desires, whereas the heroes are struggling with their own integrity, their conscience.
This is what Joker wants to snap Batman out of – this lie he has convinced himself of.
See, Joker knows there is no rehabilitation – he has himself as evidence.
There is too much damage to repair, too many mutations to compensate for, too much has already been lost, too much past to be un-covered from its burial depths, by those who would go criminally insane by the prospect, just as The Joker did.
The only solution, for him, is extermination – an Orthodox Jewish solution {one of the three types of Zionism: spiritual, political/social, and cultural}, now transformed into Christian and Islamic sects, political movements, secularism – Modern Triad.
If we analyze deeper we may even manage to divide each character by evaluating to what degree each Zionist type participates in his psyche, in the character type’s super-powers: powers to exceed past/nature, using words.
All this is about word-wars. Teenager stuff.

Back to the narrative…    
Batman, and the "good guys", are more romantic, more idealistic. Still clinging on to hope, they dream of an electrically manufactured sunrise, a Utopia, where all will be made “right", and the artificial surreal will finally completely replace the real, and the natural will become a uniform supernatural.

Rehabilitate back to what?
When past/nature is annulled what is left are variations of human artificiality.
Rehabilitation in Gotham means returning the villains back to functionality, back to an acceptable pretense, and what self-respecting narcissistic egomaniac would settle for such a dull act?
Past/Nature being denied their power of limiting options, leaves Gotham open for business – a vast expanse of manmade possibilities – which is another way of describing chaos.
Gotham's order is founded on untruth, and Joker knows it, as do all the villains who have become too cynical to pretend that things are otherwise.
But, Batman also knows that without these pretenses, there is no more Gotham.
The shared space/time of surreality is only possible if all play their part, within law and order boundaries – natural law replaced by human law, and the past, replaced by the future.
The struggle is over this positive and negative Nihilism – a potential honest, and total destruction of past/nature, or its happy replacement with alternatives – winner gets to decide Gotham’s artificiality.

Who is more mad?             

Ra's al Ghul: An amalgamation of Egyptian cult of death, and Zoroastrianism’s reduction of life/death into good/evil dichotomies, representing the historical plight and rebirths of spiritual Zionism.
Exodus from Babylon births Israel – Linguistic play with the concept Gothic, where past and present converge (space/time implosion).  
Egyptian death cult, the “chosen” liberate themselves from, then lost in spiritual limbo (desert) for a period of time, then rejected and cast out from Babylon, Zoroastrianism and its binary spirituality – later to evolve into Islam via the chosen one’s linguistic inversions - cross contamination.
The chosen projects their God, over Mazda, as God of gods – the nameless one – refusing salvation to all other tribes – Gotham is the place of no salvation, the desert of the real, the surreal to annul the real (hell on earth).

Zoroastrianism has no major theological divisions, though it is not uniform; modern-era influences having a significant impact on individual and local beliefs, practices, values and vocabulary, sometimes merging with tradition and in other cases displacing it. Liberality is emphasized in the scripture, and—like the Roman religion—the religion was generally inclusive, with Cyrus the Great annexing Babylonia in the name of its God Marduk.
In Zoroastrianism, the purpose in life is to ‘be among those who renew the world...to make the world progress towards perfection’.
Its basic maxims include:
Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta, which mean: Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds.
There is only one path and that is the path of Truth.
Do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, and then all beneficial rewards will come to you also.

Deontological morality: Goodness a value independent from (inter)actions (deeds).
He confronts Batman’s social Zionism, his Modern Nihilism – his Christianization.  
Modern = positive, masculine Nihilism, relegating all under its spell into feminine followers: zombies, dull, consuming entities with no past/nature (brain dead): citizenry of Gotham

Zoroastrians believe that there is one universal, transcendent, supreme god, Ahura Mazda, or the "Wise Lord". (Ahura means "Being" and Mazda means "Mind" in Avestan language). Zoroaster keeps the two attributes separate as two different concepts in most of the Gathas and also consciously uses a masculine word for one concept and a feminine for the other, as if to distract from an anthropomorphism of his divinity. Some Zoroastrians claim Ahura Mazda as the uncreated Creator to whom all worship is ultimately directed, thereby formulating a panentheistic faith with a transcendent divinity, widely believed to have influenced the theology of Isma'ilism. Zoroaster claimed that Ahura Mazda is almighty, though not omnipotent.
Other scholars assert that since Zoroastrianism's divinity covers both being and mind as immanent entities, it is better described as a belief in an immanent self-creating universe with consciousness as its special attribute, thereby putting Zoroastranism in the pantheistic fold where it can be easily traced to its shared origin with Indian Brahmanism. In any case, Ahura Mazda's creation—evident is widely agreed as asha, truth and order—is the antithesis of chaos, which is evident as druj, falsehood and disorder. The resulting conflict involves the entire universe, including humanity, which has an active role to play in the conflict.
In Zoroastrian tradition, the "chaotic" is represented by Angra Mainyu (also referred to as "Ahriman"), the "Destructive Principle", while the benevolent is represented through Ahura Mazda's Spenta Mainyu, the instrument or "Bounteous Principle" of the act of creation. It is through Spenta Mainyu that transcendental Ahura Mazda is immanent in humankind, and through which the Creator interacts with the world. According to Zoroastrian cosmology, in articulating the Ahuna Vairya formula, Ahura Mazda made His ultimate triumph evident to Angra Mainyu. As expressions and aspects of Creation, Ahura Mazda emanated the Amesha Spentas ("Bounteous Immortals"), that are each the hypostasis and representative of one aspect of that Creation. These Amesha Spenta are in turn assisted by a league of lesser principles, the Yazatas, each "Worthy of Worship" and each again a hypostasis of a moral or physical aspect of creation.
Zoroastrian theology includes a duty to protect nature. This has led some to proclaim it as the "world's first ecological religion." Scholars have argued that, since the protections are part of a ritual, they stem from theology rather than ecology. Others have responded that, since the scripture calls for the protection of water, earth, fire, air, as once of its strongest precepts, it is, in effect, an ecological religion: "It is not surprising that Mazdaism (another term for Zoroastrianism) is called the first ecological religion. The reverence for Yazatas (divine spirits) emphasizes the preservation of nature.

Ahriman = Ra's al Ghul, slightly modified.
Preservation of nature = preservation of balance, pagan principle.
Batman's manmade law & order is challenged by past/nature, continuously brought back to life - mummy rising from the grave refusing to be buried.[/b]

[Dæmon]

In my view one of the best iconic depictions of a human forced to live within these Modern circumstances.

There are three versions of Harrison's representations each with its flaws and perspectives.

Manhunter...

...a more realistic representation of a manipulative genius with no great part in the events, other than an insightful interpreter.
The character, in this version, holds no big role in the story being told.
He is subdued, captured, a caged potential, having squandered its promise, and now lashing out from within its containment.  

But, someone out there thought the character held a promise worth releasing from the cage to watch him run free on the screens of our projected discontent.

Hannibal Rising...

...a last moment insertion that demystifies the character for a modern audience.
Here the character is given a motive, reducing his supernatural appeal.
He becomes another "victim" of Naziism, here given an indirect cause.

The young Hannibal falls in love, and is hurt, offering us the typical version used to explain that which goes beyond the "normality" of the "healthy" mind.
A female, is once more, the underlying reason, that pushes the immature mind over the edge, where Naziism had palced him.

But, at least, we get a glimpse into the nature of a mind that bullies bullies, as a burgeoning aesthetic taste, feeling disgust towards the vulgar - what later is to be called the "rude".
The wounds are anesthetized with a thickening scab.
Hannibal's unemotional empathy is rising to confront the cultural anesthesia of culturally produced dullness.  

Silence of the Lambs...

...the first in the trilogy that would revamp the Manhunter themes.
Where Manhunter remained realistic, the Silence of the Lambs version of Hannibal enters the realm of the extraordinary, the fantastic.

Red Dragon...

...completes the trilogy.
Hannibal is a mature bon vivant; both hunter and hunted.
The story reduces the character to something the audience would consider palatable.
Not only is he given a typical justification, along the lines of those used to dismiss racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-semitism, but he is amputated as a message of cost/benefit.

In the Harrison story Hannibal escapes into the masses, having seduced the girl. He lurks amongst us, wearing many faces.
In this variation Hannibal is marked for life.
He wins by losing.

His supernatural condition, marking him with six digits, is finalized with the loss of the entire hand, and of the girl.
Loneliness, amputation, the high price of being extraordinary and unwilling to serve, to direct your gifts towards helping the masses, the herd.
A wolf if it does not become a dog, must be disabled, and castrated.

The loss of the hand is the symbolic disability; and the loss of the female a castration.

The trilogy leaves us with a sense of loss: a story unfinished, an anti-hero marked but out there, somewhere, taunting us, threatening our contentment, our dull appreciation of aesthetics.

This brings us to the most recent reincarnation of the caricature, the personality with a new character.

Hannibal...

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...enters into the mythological.
Young Hannibal and old Hannibal are refurbished, into a svelte, handsome, symbol of the ideal Demon.

All retain a continuity of personality with only the character shifting according to the producer/director understanding.
Hannibal, the T.V. series inserts the personality into a world of symbolisms: role reversals, mystical world, extraordinary circumstances.
A world of ideas...memetic landscapes.

Hannibal as the overman.

An exploration of the character, using all three variations, but focusing on the latest, will help us delve into the underlying ideas being symbolized.

Hannibal is the Demon, the Daemon...a Pagan monster, challenging our Judeo-Christian world views.
as a Demon he resides in all men and women: imprisoned, retarded in his development, in hiding.
The greatest trick played by the Devil, as someone said, is convincing the world he does not exist.

Hannibal as a representation of a personality resides within us all, as the untamed, the natural, the private man.
He is not as sophisticated in all his manifestations, but he is always present.

 

 

The two parts of man: the ying/yang...the natural and the artificial, the ideal and the real....the private and the public.
In the image above it is the public face that remains in shadows, and can be anyone.
The private, secret part is illuminated, brought into the light with that glaring smirk.

Muzzled, but not silenced.
Teeth give way to words, and feminine tactics.

Mediterranean goat horns giving way to North American elk...tree roots growing upwards, into the space of possibilities: seeking, hungry, cutting into crevices, exploiting fissures.  

The civil, uncivilized.
The domesticated untamable.

Hannibal does not implant ideas into those he "manipulates," he exposes them to possibilities their nature implies but were buried beneath social pretences.
He pulls out of them what he (re)congizes, and does not deny, in himself.
He seduces the need in all of them.

The multifarious gift of unity - We are Legion.
A controlled schizophrenia - the masculine dominating the feminine, holding it together, taming it, with memory(experience, knowledge); order in the chaos, authority an arche, in the anarchy.
The past is never overcome, it is forgotten, denied.  

This bringing together, is this bridging of distances, an increasing internal cohesiveness, harmony in selfness.
The true schizophrenic remains divided, unknown to himself, he indulges in compartmentalization where one part always remains out of tune with the others, out of touch, under no central control (lucidity) - no cohesiveness - or it contradicts the others, as in the case of Nihilism and its demands upon the mind to adhere to its anthropomorphic rejections of the world as it is.
The "civilized" man, in this latter instance, is a man divided in himself - his personality other than his character (the private other than the public), the idea(l) in conflict with the real.  

The experience similar to that of 'lost time' as in lost awareness of self (lost self) - temporal being another word for Becoming.
This "being" in the moment a metaphor for the shrinking of distances between one abstraction and the next, which constitutes the linear experience of reality as a chain of instances.    

When this is intentional, or is known, then no schism is present - only control - but when the schism is actual, then the mind remains confused, unable to harmonize the different standards, the diverging world-views, into one entirety.
It's impulses cannot be focused.
It is duplicitous in itself - convinced by its own ruse - it says one thing and does another, justifying it after-the-fact with imaginative word-games.
It is in a state of internal antagonism - personality versus character.

The detachment of the word from the world, the noumenon from the phenomenon, lends itself to this practice.  
The word referring to the book, the code, which may or may not refer back to a concept the mind is clear on...and it most certainly does not refer to anything sensed in the world if the concept is nihilistic.
Once this detachment is achieved, the instances create voids...fissures into the emptiness, demanding linguistic salves, words of salvation.

The spirit is ripped out of the body, as a thing-in-itself, and the ephemeral finds comfort in the fabricated eternal soul.  

The thinker knows the other because he (re)cognizes him in himself - he is a representation of existence, of life.
The thinker is a hunter of the real - a destroyer of forgetfulness, of lethe. He is the one discovering aletheia.
The other is known more than (s)he can know self, if self is not as self-conscious...if self is not forgotten. He finds the other familiar.

A martyr, as in the Greek μαρτυρας: the witness who experiences an event; the phenomenon being witnessed - it then retains in memory (genetic/memetic code), conjuring it up, at will - remembering, reliving...using/manipulating/exploiting.
Mind as pure observer, detached from what is being witnessed, clarifying the imagery, purifying the memory, the (re)cognition.  

Hannibal: I've always found the idea of death comforting. The thought that my life could end at any moment frees me to fully appreciate the beauty and art and horror of everything this world has to offer.

The overman celebrating his victory over his own nature...as temporal becoming.
He no longer resents his nature, his temporal essence, but is comforted by it, because it opens up vistas of perception denied to others.
Existence as an opportunity to see.

The martyr, bears witness to the exposed, the revealed - to revelation.
He is existence witnessing itself in the midst of its existing.

His six digits a sign of his overcoming of the human: higher intellect, higher sensual perception...higher tastes.
The vulgar is rude, in that it disturbs his aesthetics, not his morals, for he is above those as well; the primitive, the base, assaults his tastes, like a bad odour.

He does not pass a moral judgment on it, because morality refers to a common taste.
He passes a personal judgment on it, as it has been determined by his inherited past, as it was shaped by his personal experiences.

 monster (n.) Look up monster at Dictionary.com
early 14c., "malformed animal or human, creature afflicted with a birth defect," from Old French monstre, mostre "monster, monstrosity" (12c.), and directly from Latin monstrum "divine omen, portent, sign; abnormal shape; monster, monstrosity," figuratively "repulsive character, object of dread, awful deed, abomination," from root of monere "warn" (see monitor (n.)). Abnormal or prodigious animals were regarded as signs or omens of impending evil. Extended by late 14c. to imaginary animals composed of parts of creatures (centaur, griffin, etc.). Meaning "animal of vast size" is from 1520s; sense of "person of inhuman cruelty or wickedness" is from 1550s. As an adjective, "of extraordinary size," from 1837. In Old English, the monster Grendel was an aglæca, a word related to aglæc "calamity, terror, distress, oppression."

The distinction of the Hannibal caricature from the real-life manifestation of this same personality, is one of inflated proportions.
He does not fear the consequences, in the way a normal man would, because he exceeds the norm to a degree which makes him immune to them.
Still, the definition of a psychotic is not the thought, the motive, the potential, but the acting out of it, despite the possible price.
He acts out his nature, because despite the socioeconomic price inflations, he is willing to pay it, or is confident that he will avoid payment.

A real psychotic never considers the costs, or overestimates his own talent of evading payment.
He is psychotic in his hyperbole.  

The Hannibal Lecter caricature becomes a venting vehicle for all those repressed intentions.
The masculine having become illegal, is forced to use only feminine methods.
The act is priced out of his range, leaving him with words.
he can only become aggressive using them.
This is also being restricted now.
The words must become evermore artistic, metaphorical...evasive.
He must hide, deeper and deeper, increasing his isolation - he is quarantined with peer pressures and with social condemnation.  

Only the most out-of-control, those who have too little will or too great a masculine drive, unleash this Thymotic energy...and pay the price for it.
The rest content themselves with these artistic expressions of rage.
They are allowed so as to depressurize the increasing pressurization.

The simple use athletics (sports as a vehicle of vicarious playing on a high level), pornography  (sports as a vehicle of vicarious fucking on a higher level), to release the masculinity they are not permitted to express.
as repression persists, the level of vicarious depressurization must be raised proportionally.
Time is on the side of the socially eugenics enforcer: slowly feminization will eradicate the elements that made the man what he was, leaving behind a female with a penis, with only a slight difference in behavior.
Along with it all that man creates, innovates, as a byproduct of his libidinal need to dominate, to control, to use.

Will technologies and techniques compensate for this masculine loss, as they have with other aspects of masculine superiority, through the usage of weapons and tools and machines?
We cannot know.

Machines and mechanics have already made the masculine obsolete in the area of procreation...can it do the same for creation, creativity?

Of all the actions that reveal how human, all too human, Hannibal is, is his desire to make of his killings a symbol.
A symbol sophisticated enough to be read by a sophisticated mind.

His "design" is only valuable if an other, on his level, can share in it, and read it.
Dialogue is sought, among the dull.
He does not want to converse with the masses, but with that one who sees beyond the blood and the brutality.

Loneliness still pulls upon him.
He is not yet god, but a fallen angel.

And by "human" Hannibal understands something more than the sexual, the procreative, because he shows a distinct indifference towards sexual intercourse, and for using his talents to seduce females into his bed.  
He is beyond Freud, and his Jewish decadence.
Sex, for him, is but another tool, another insight into the prey, to be used to accomplish his goal.
Sex as a means, not an end in itself.

Harrison's Hannibal Lecter caricature represents a surrealistic depiction of a world underlying the "real" everyday one.
The events depicted, and the characters populating its world, are extraordinary extensions of the ordinary; an internalized reality, warped, and moody, reflecting self in a shimmering lake, that distorts everything into monstrosities.

Hannibal, in the movies - the Hopkins version - is the inversion of the Hannibal, in the television series - the Mikkelsen version.

Hopkins/Hannibal is expressive, passionate, over a cold, calculating, controlled internal psychological structure.
Mikkelsen/Hannibal is cold, reserved, calculating, controlled exterior, over a passionate psychological structure.

The evolution of the character, besides being a different interpretation, reflecting the creator's own relationship with the Harrison character, represents a natural growth process: the younger Mikkelsen/Hannibal growing into the the more mature Hopkins/Hannibal.
The growth reflects the natural process of confidence, and indifference, which accompanies maturation.

We witness here a slight reversal between the public and the private man.
The private man, in Mikkelsen/Hannibal, becomes the public man in Hopkins/Hannibal...without there ever being a complete reversal.

Factoring in the unleashed passions of the young/Hannibal, with his reckless abandonment to his passions, we find in Mikkelsen/Hannibal, a young man's willful attempt to gain control over them - resulting in an over-compensating external control, hiding a pressurized internal private man, revealing himself in those acts of brutality.
Hopkins/Hannibal, after years of cooling down the volcanic eruptions of his past, is now able to express his passions, albeit in subtle ways, because he has gained control of them.

Mikkelsen/Hannibal is Narcissus peering into the distorted, by the reflective pool, image of his own private face; his internal world is a product of the real world, witnessed by a pure, noble young heart.
Hopkins/Hannibal has become the reflecting pool, now mirroring the distorted world back to any eyes that might see it - bear witness to it, be the martyrs of its reality; an mature man who remains indifferent to the outcome.

Why does the herd not kill the predator, once it has gained control over its fate?

1- It goes against the shared principles/ideals, that keep the multifarious herd identifying itself as one.
To kill the killer requires a special decree; a significant excuse.

2- It needs to preserve hope, implied by the belief in the uniformity of "goodness" within its numbers.
The predator can be rehabilitated back to being a herbivore. It is a predator because it is ill/traumatize/afraid.
It can be healed, comforted, made to feel safe.

3- Although differences in appearance do not matter, similarities are exaggerated to the point where everything that appears to be the same, on a very superficial basis (more so than when dismissing divergence as superficially biased), must be assumed to be the same.  
The herd oscillates between genetic and memetic criteria - the deciding factor being what it intends to do.
Appearances do not matter only in regards to differences.

The Hannibal Trilogy, as written by Harris, represents a revelatory movement.

An unraveling of modern mythologies.

To unravel what lies twisted and coiled, concealed in its Gordian knot - a knot that refers back to itself, creating a loop that must be severed - an act of violence, of violation - an intrusion.
An undesired perpetration being rape.

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Ethical standards prevent such acts, forcing the actor into an assertion of will - the rude, in their concealment, and trickery, considered polite and proper, must be unraveled by an act of rudeness, by one who lives outside their social evaluations of propriety.

Their shamefulness, their feigned humility, a ruse to remain tangled and concealed.
Their are ethical in impolite ways. The act replaced by words of violence.
The knot must be cut by Alexander who has been placed in a predicament - the impropriety of the hypocrite other, offering a ruse of politeness, is unraveled by the blade that cuts through the pretentious complexities - right down to the heart of the matter - revealing, uncovering, exposing, disclosing...remembering.

The violence of the many upon the one, is confronted, in this series with a response.

The individual, retaining "innocence" in his ignorance, participates in the mechanism, in the shared identity which forces repression and pretense, as a survivals strategy, upon the individual.
The individual, through professing to be complex and unique and special, and an individual, remains trapped in the shared idea(l), the abstracted identifier - whether it be God or Humanity or some vague abstraction he cannot fully define or describe.

His "individuality" passes through the communal standards, and is confronted, in Hannibal, with an authentic manifestation of what it never dares to consider - it calls it a monster.

To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both -- a philosopher.

But the individual's ignorance cannot support his presumed innocence, by the common laws it adheres to.
The "victims" of 9/11, participating and enjoying the benefits of living within a system that exploits other nations, cannot claim innocence, when their cars are fueled and their fridges are full and their fees are paid from this exploitation.
Their ignorance cannot save them from the repercussions of their actions - as no benefit is without a cost.
Ignorance only protects the individual from the awareness that might cause it stress, anxiety/fear - modernity is characterized by the worship of childishness; citizens living in perpetual adolescence, oblivious to all except immediate gratification of needs.
Unfortunately, for them nature, the world, reality, call it whatever you like, cares not about human contrivances, such as justice, fairness, innocence, shame, good/bad intentions...

An "individual" participating within a group that depends on exploiting and manipulating resources should not seek refuge in ignorance or some well-intended motive.
Stupidity is not a defense.
And if one identifies with a communal abstraction, giving it a name within which "individuality" is permitted to express itself in superficial symbolism, then along with the power through association one must also accept the costs of such an association.
The violence, bullying, done upon an individual participating in a group, is not excused by his/her declared ignorance or good intentions.

This is what Hannibal forces upon each member of the altruistic society to confront: their denied, forgotten culpability.
Their "purity" is uncovered, their knots of complexity are unraveled, their lies are exposed.

I can feed the caterpillar, I can whisper through the chrysalis, but what hatches, follows its own nature and is beyond me. - [season2 ep.8]

What they dream of, the impotent, is a penis of infinite proportions, so that no other that was, is, or can ever be, could ever compare to.
The hungry man’s dreams of food cannot be matched by a full-bellied man’s, and the sexually frustrated fantasize extreme sexual encounters in proportion to the sexual frustration they are enduring.  
It’s the typical magnification of the weakling, exposing his inexperience with the real-deal, inflating the idea(l), lacking in him, using his imagination.
The imagination always uses what it has an experience with, and then exaggerates, or combines in fanciful ways, to compensate for what it has minimal, or no experience with.
The weakling having minimal or no experience with strength inflates strength by using his/her minimal experiences with it to a degree that would compensate for its absence in him/her.
(S)He exposes his weakness when (s)he does so.
The outcome is always so unrealistic and exaggerated that it can turn out to be a ridiculous caricature of what is possible – the impossible, or improbable, dealing with the present, and/or the possible.

This is, actually, a perfect gauge of the others essence: the more unrealistic and fantastic the projections, declarations, posturing, signalling the opposite as being present and possible.

Consider Hannibal’s honest expression of the limits of his own powers under that light.    
The superior mind never claims to have absolute control, nor would he claim that he is capable of attaining it.
Such a mind would know the extent of his powers within the world, and in relation to humanity.
Only a weakling would imagine a power it has no experience with in an either/or, absolutist, manner.
Hannibal, the caricature, admits, through the writer, or on behalf of the writer who is expressing his essence, the limits of his manipulative talents.
He is not conjuring up the other, and forcing him to behave in a way that goes against his nature, but he’s (re)cognized, seen, what is hidden, and pulls it out, not knowing what will happen when it comes out.

The key factor that determines the essence of the Hannibal caricature, besides his many extraordinary talents, is the fact that he is without a family.
He has no direct connection to his past, and so he becomes a wandering character, detached from the world, but with an insatiable appetite to reunite with it.
His Epicureanism is linked to this hunger for a connection, and it is also expressed in his search for kindred spirits: for friends.  
He is the opposite of the Abrahamic man.
Hannibal is lost but he wants to be found, whereas they are found and they want to be lost.
In the absence of any direct connection he, Hannibal, uses the only vehicle at his disposal: himself.
His body, mind, actions, are all directed towards this desire to (re)attach, to (re)connect from what he was violently pulled away from.
The tragedy is that he is too rare to find this connective tissue.
Those around him are like animals in comparison.  
He is like Tarzan, amongst the apes, living in a jungle full of beasts and feeling alone amongst them.
For him killing, and even eating, one of those other apes is not cannibalism, nor evil. He is not bound by their social dynamics, nor can he relate to their morality.
He hides, lies, toys with them, and none of it affects him on any level they would relate to – he is of another species; in this case a memetic designation.
Hannibal can afford to humble himself amongst them, because he has brutality to remove the insult, the “rudeness”; he, then, consumes it, absorbing the rudeness into his own Becoming.
Each morsel savoured and digested, then broken down, de-constructed, and copiously selected for usable parts – the rest are defecated back into the cesspool from where it came.

The absence of a family eliminates seriousness from his options.
He is a child playing with manimals, and his only motive is self-serving.
There is no one left in the world for him to care for; to limit his choices.
He is his own.

Ready to move-on at any moment, Hannibal acquires a provisional application for his sophisticated tastes.
He places nobody above himself, and suffers no one there.
When he does sense a shadow looming overhead he seeks to disperse it with his breathe, or to escape its rude presumptuousness.
He is second to nobody, and he will not accept another placing him there.

This makes his every choice a whimsical experiment and all his relating dances on the edge of a blade.
He is injured, but he is never dealt a deathly blow.
One moment he is totally immersed in the pleasure of a dish he diligently prepared himself, in his well-stocked modern kitchen, and the next he’s leaving behind the paraphernalia and embracing months of living on-the-run – because what truly matters is not left behind by him; it is never forgotten.
Everything he needs, he already has.

[Dæmon]

There is very little of human liquidity, in Hannibal, except for the blood and the gore.
No anality, and very little of human liquid discharge outside of the vengefulness against it; reflecting, I suppose, the creators and writer's own dispositions.
A distaste for the out-come, and a romanization of the in-come.
The faeces are left on the slab.
Only choice morsels are selected and digested.
The rest is left to rot.

The erotic scenes, the sex-scenes, themselves are clean, pristine, dry, like Hannibal's kitchen.
All refuse is left behind, or included in the brew and ingested, out of sight.
Everything is "clean", though what precedes and what follows is full of excrement and filth.

Hannibal assimilates the liquidity, turning it into form and function, and what he cannot he leaves behind to "let nature sort it out".

It is why Hannibal appears a-sexual.
You are never sure about what sex he prefers, if he does have a preference.
His tastes are left on the dinner table, where he transforms them, after he's selected the parts, into a form he considers idea(l).
The nastiness, vulgarity, osmotic dissonance of humanity is left outside his pristine memory palace.

He smells, with his sophisticated palate, and then digests the prey before he ingests it.
Swift's coprophilia is never a part of the process.
One is left to believe that Hannibal himself never defecates.
He has externalized this digestive process.

With Hannibal the protestant metaphors are inverted, de-bowled, skinned and displayed.
The devil's anal liquidity, his odoriferous nastiness presents itself as dry, contained, secret, unmoving.
This external dryness contrasting against the organic mess he leaves in his wake; his delicate palate and sensitive nose an instrument of releasing the most terrible smells and dirtiest parts of the hidden human body.

Hannibal is encased within a living sarcophagus (Greek for "flesh eater"), containing a churning, bubbling internal liquidity – an Apollonian image keeping secret a Dionysian essence.
He, literally, consumes, the metaphorical flesh of the already dead and rotting, encasing it within his own mausoleum - his "memory palace".
The internal bad smells/tastes seek external perfumes and delicacies to deodorize them.
The rude are exposed for what they are, by spilling their guts for all to see; revealing the hidden truth beneath the charming exteriors, the social faces.
Hannibal does not deny his internal nature; he hides it, using it to uncover the nature of others when they begin to believe in their own pretences.
He feeds (s)wine to swine, knowing they cannot tell the difference; knowing they cannot (re)cognize in other what they've denied in self.

The good Christians, the secular humanists, the Protestant, hard-working, capitalists, are revealed.
The inversion of Christian Protestantism... where it is the ones who reject liquidity (Flux), who hate life, who admit that Satan is ruler of this world casting, as saviour in their play, an immutable, static, God as the annihilating first-responder, who are the ones being forces to see, to taste, to bear witness to what they are beneath the shallow veneer.
Through the reality-principle, death, Hannibal affirms life, and the pleasure-principle; he puts it in its rightful place, giving it a perspective that has been forgotten.
He is the stoic grim-reaper, sphinx-like ripper, cutting away the brain-dead brush to make way for new seedlings to emerge, feeding on the carcasses and entrails.

Who are the rude?

The ones who have been protected from the cruelty of nature, growing an untested arrogance within a insecure soul; the image-makers covering up the essence of their own depravity; the ones with an undeserved sense of entitlement, demanding of others what they could never provide for themselves; the ones who have found in the neurotic schizophrenia of modern nihilism a safe-heaven to express their illness, packaging it as a new kind of health - a progress in what health ought to be.

Who are the rude?

Those who under fake smiles snip and covet, and cast needles to bleed-out what makes them see themselves; those who learn words, parrot ideas, mimic behaviours, attempting to wear an others skin, as they would any other garment, to pretend that what is covered no longer exists - it has been overcome; those who in their desperation to deal with their inheritance purchase blades and learn techniques, to silence and forget; those who in their thick insensitivity practice delicacy, and adopt good tastes, which they could never appreciate.

Hannibal Lecter does not hunt for sport.
He is the opposite of a sport-hunter.
His kills are chosen and planned carefully, and each one is staged; displayed in a particular manner, sending a particular message.
Each one has a purpose and a meaning.
None of his victims are random.
The pleasure of the kill is not the central motive. Killing is not a hedonistic obsession, for him.
It is a side-effect of his main purpose.
Like his cooking, it is ritualized because the pleasure of eating, of satisfying a need, is not the main goal.
Killing, for him, is also a ritual with a design in mind.
The design, as Will calls it, is the object/objective.
He selects the victims with this design in mind
He does not kill just anybody, for the sake of killing, for the thrill of it, and when he consumes parts of his victims it is also a ritualized homage to them.
Each part selected to be consumed is not accidental.
He tells Will, in one scene, how he is careful about what he eats.
Eating is not for the sake of eating.
It is meaningful, for him.

Despite being mocked for my "obsession" with this Harrison character Ι proceed, knowing that art, in this Μodern Αge, must use ambiguity to express truths the masses cannot stomach nor comprehend.
I consider Harrison's Hannibal a Modern Age Hamlet, an Atigony....full of metaphorical significance the simpleton cannot perceive because of the blood and gore he is represented with, to make the tale popular to the many - to make him marketable.
The Modern is only interested in popular narratives and so the only artistic caricatures he can accept, because they are presented to him with a definition, are the older ones.
He can use those to pretend to be intelligent and sophisticated, because he is truly simple and dull.

He turns to the quirky to pretend he is not like the others, the shock and awe tactic, or he settles for the academic, the culturally accepted, to regurgitate, indicating his own quality, and in the meantime, as with philosophy in general, the world passes him by and he remains blind to it.
It is right there, and all he can do is discuss about it through an other; experience it via a proxy.

And so what is the central attribute of this Hannibal character?
The special abilities are symbols of his difference, but the singular trait that distinguishes him is his willingness to be alone.
He is among the herd and yet not controlled by herd instincts.

Only a "monster or a philosopher..." and Hannibal is, most certainly, both.

endlessly fascinated

W: They tell me you were hard to find.

B: That was the idea.

W: Thank you for visiting me in the hospital, and for what you said.

B: I didn’t say enough.

W: Now’s your chance to say it all. (You’ve been granted immunity, blah blah.) Let’s talk about Hannibal Lecter.

B: Some psychiatrists are so hungry for insight that they may try to manufacture it. How deadly that can be for the patient who believes them.

W: You were Dr. Lecter’s psychiatrist; he wasn’t yours.

B: I told myself that. But I was under Hannibal’s influence, and what he did to you made that abundantly clear.

W: You were attacked by a patient who was formerly under Dr. Lecter’s care. That patient died during the attack. The report said he swallowed his tongue.

B: It wasn’t attached at the time.

W: How exactly did your patient die?

B: I killed him. I believed it was self defense, and to a point it was. But beyond that point, it was murder. Hannibal influenced me to murder my patient. Our patient.

W: You weren’t coerced?

B: What Hannibal does is not coercion. It is persuasion. Has he ever tried to persuade you to kill anyone? He will, and it will be somebody that you love, and you will think it is the only choice you have.

W: How would you catch him?

B: Hannibal can get lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning. Whimsy. That will be how he will get caught.

And between Jack and Bedelia:

J: So you managed to avoid prosecution.

B: Sure did, bitch. (I’m pretty sure I heard her say this.)

J: I gave you every opportunity to tell the truth. But you ran.

B: How do you think the FBI could have protected me? You couldn’t protect Will Graham. You still can’t. Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, Agent Crawford.

J: Will’s not alone.

B: No, he’s not. Hannibal thinks Will is a killer. Do you still believe he is your killer?

J: I have to believe.

B: Hannibal’s only crime I witnessed was influence. Influence works best when we’re unaware. Will Graham has been very aware.

J: Meaning?

B: Meaning maybe Mr. Graham doesn’t know himself as well as Hannibal does.

J: Will has more reasons to see Hannibal caught than any of us.

B: If you think you’re about to catch Hannibal, that’s because he wants you to think that. Don’t fool yourself. Don’t fool yourself into thinking he’s not in control of what’s happening.

Hannibal Lecter is the quintessential hyper-empathic.
He lives in the other’s mind, and is in-tune with his prey, before he makes of it his prey.
He experiences the terror and the pain, of his own attacks.
He is a master of fifth-level, perhaps sixth-level, intentionality, keeping him one step ahead of those who are hunting for the hunter.

A supposition of the other's intentions, based on his actions...based on (inter)actions/behaviour.


First-Level of intentionality: PersonA intends to eat, because he reaches for a cookie, and as he licks his lips.
A direct, primal relationship between actor and object/objective.

Second-Level intentionality: Persona A intends to let PersonB know he is going to eat, because there is only one cookie left.

Third-Level intentionality: PersonA intends to let PersonB think he is going to eat, because PersonC is watching, and he wants PersonC to know what PersonB thinks in relation to PersonA.
Perhaps because he wants him to intervene in the case that PersonB intervenes.

Fourth-Level intentionality: PersonA intends to let PersonB think he is going to eat, because PersonC is watching, but PersonC. knows PersonA is faking hunger.

Fifth-Level intentionality: PersonA intends to let PersonB think he is going to eat, because PersonC is watching, but PersonC knows he is faking hunger, but believes PersonB is convinced and wants to see what is going to happen.

It is a empathic web.
What Evolution Psychologists call a mental map.
Humans can reach level 5, and geniuses go further to Lever 6...animals are stuck on level 1, and some go as far as level 2.

In Nihilism this intentionality is ascribed to inanimate objects, to unconscious, un-living, (inter)actions.
It is anthropomorphizing taken to the next level.
One uses other to reflect upon self, which is then projected upon other as intent.
So, a rock (inter)acting with water becomes a self-valuing, or a self-loving, or a wilful act.
The world is full of intentions, which are projected by the observer.

The beginning of religion is here.
All is intentional, ergo all has a purpose, a meaning, it is rational.
The hypothesis becomes a projection of personal motives.  

This is where morals are founded.

What is lost and Hannibal has, is empathy that exceeds the family unit.

He is empathic but this does not make him positive towards the ones he empathizing with.
His empathy is that of a hunter, a warrior.

With moderns empathy crumbles the ego, and he is absorbed by otherness.
Judeo-Christian Morality.

Hannibal's ego, his sense of self, is so powerful that ti remains intact, unmoved, by the empathic experience.
He can enter the other's mind and be disgusted by the contact.

Will exhibits this ability but for him it results in a gradual confusion between who he is and who the other is.
He can empathize, as well as Hannibal, but his ego is too fragile, too Christian.

Hannibal wants to teach him how to remain distinct during the empathic experience.
To feel what the other feels, and see what the other sees, and still remain aloof towards it.

A growth from younger to elder Hannibal.
Younger Hannibal cries at the recital. His external coldness, control, is revealed as holding back an internal passion.

The elder, Hopkins character, is the reverse.
He can display his passion, because internally he is detached, cold, unmoved.
He appreciates the recital academically.

There is a scene in Hannibal, the TV series when he is asked "What have you done?"
He answers..
"I took my person suit off."

The private personality and public character, interchanging...
The latter existing among characters, caricatures, most of which have no sense of the personae, their own repressed, denied, personality.
The former, risking itself every time it exposes itself in public, and even in private among others of its own kind - intimacy. The private space becomes another public space, of (inter)active identities, imposing themselves upon other; forcing a limit upon the others choices.

Hannibal feels the pressure, but does not give-in to it.
He chooses why and when to impose these limits upon himself, knowing he can escape, flee, disappear.
How many, of us, can do the same?

What I envy about the mythological caricature of Hannibal is that his blade can never be doubted, the manimals can never mock and jeer him for long; their (c)rudeness does not go unpunished, nor is there anyone left to accuse him of resentiment and the "projection" of insecurities.

He is calm, stoic, controlled; a rubber face over a volcano, because he knows.

He convinces, he does not coerce, does not debate, does not argue, because the reality, he represents, is inescapable, undeniable.
Those remaining unconvinced he consumes, in tasty morsels, selectively harvested.

Alas, we mere mortals, cannot make his grand symbolic exits, taking off his "person suit".
We can only exchange it for a new one, and hope nobody noticed.

Alana, the Modern professional career woman, discovers a way to put her learned insights to work for her, so that she can stop working herself.
Allying herself with the institutional powers, the sickly and demented, even laying next to a female, does not make her ill, what sickens her is the non-conformist man of honour and dignity; the one who rejects her, and tricks her, by manipulating that part she pretends she's risen above.

With no dependence upon the man, now inheriting what others have made for her, the only thing that insults her is the presence of an old masculine trait...the one that seduced her, and rejected her.
That dignity she will crush, day by day.
No, not kill it, as a man would.
She will make it suffer - keep him alive to torture.

The monster of woman outperforms that of any man.

Han(nibal) transforms everyone (s)he comes into contract with.
The Modern, rational, Apollonian types, are transformed as they try to absorb his/her chaos, his/her madness into themselves, and order it, rationalize it, or as they try to embody it, so as to understand it.
They want to change him/her, and are transformed themselves.

Rebirth through eros.
Giving birth, in the form of inspired reasoning, or changed, as Red Dragon/Jacob when he is consumed by the one he wanted to devour.

The tools of transformation also transform from thymotic blades to erotic penises, slicing, penetrating, spilling blood - the soul is cut to pieces or fertilized.
Male penis wanting to make her his muse, his vehicle is changed by contact - she engulfed him and when he pulls out he is no longer the same.
Wounds transform to vaginas, to orifices, gushing out, painfully, pleasure - the essence of life.
To make her orgasm, or to make her bleed, convulsions of his effect, his hardness.

A cut is an intrusion upon the organism's unity.
It bleeds out its essence.
Thymos.

A penis is an intrusion upon the female organism's unity.
It inserts a genetic-program which makes the bleeding turn inwards.
Eros.
A female's menstrual cycle is redirected inwards, towards the new unity instigated by the man's sperm, which now has to be protected from the female's own autoimmune system.
Internal hemorrhaging; internal conflict.
The woman glows, with the addition, the collection and preservation of her own blood.

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