When the world has ended, I shall lie down to rest... and then I can die into a peace eternal. But! I am afraid I have forgotten to bring an obol for the ferry-man. Or, forgotten... rather I am too poor. I have not an obol. And how may I solve this problem, a decisive issue: how may I cross this river without jobbery? Because I have no coin, I really have not. And I am not too good of a thief... my nerves twitch easily. I had to use my very last ones to bribe my way down here, to these cavernous lands and dead subterranean marshes. I had found a passageway through a system of catacomba purposefully hidden in the sylvan country somewhere in the land of Arcas, but to my great dismay I found that it was also controlled by bandits who conventiently charged every traveller and pilgrim zealous enough to have found the tunnels... And whatever the reason, the mission, the rationale for their departure down there, a coin was to be paid. And that was how they made a living, they said. They would never hurt you or even harass you. Either you pay and descend to the river, or you do not pay, and then you will be forcibly but respectfully ejected from the mysterious burrows, and forget that anything of it even ever happened. So, I paid. But what now? Can I talk my way with Charon, the ferryman? Will he listen?  Is it impossible for me to bypass somehow, to evade and elude, or am I doomed to the shore forever? Am I and my pennyless pockets to be rejected by even the boatkeeper of death? Is this what monstrous language money talks? It is, seemingly. Maybe I can lure behind the stones of the ragged Styx-beaches as if a lion in ambush? And painted in camouflage with the war-paints, the ochre of Dysnomian menses! Might I drown enraptured Narcissus in his own mirror cowardly, to search his purse and his cloak for any last single coinage?

VI : An Obol for the Ferry-Man

Sometimes I want a respite from the ever awareness of death. I want a hole to retreat to, an opium embrace, a careless void in which to ever take refuge. n these moments I want to become a hermit of emotional reclusiveness, a stranger to angst, a prodigal son of hedonism. But that is a strange enterprise of a life, and certainly no healthy approach to dying. Sometimes it is so easy to become the cistern of human sin, to drink from oneself, to host feasts of indulgences in one's own very personal honor... to suck, taste the marrow of virtue, but to spit it out. To become disgusting and weak but for a moment, to incarnate the spirit of lazy, uncultured gluttony, and to give oneself the luxurious, self-coddling privilege of simply ignoring what should not be ignored. Sometimes I want shout as if a child: “you, go away, wicked one!”, for I don't want to be reminded all the time that human life is weird and absurd and, on top of that, dark and nefarious and mischievous... I am very well aware already, and I just want a breather, a break, a short pause sometimes. But a short break easily becomes long then longer, when you despise what you ought to return to. But however much this inclination of escape and this vulnerable call to spiritual shelter pumps my heart and coarses through my veins, explodes in my mind, I cannot close my eyes to what I want hiding from, however much I want it closing these eyes. Truly, one has to find a cave obscure, a Hira of one's own, in order to flee the ever presence of the false kings, the doxies for celebrity and power, the thieves and those cold of heart, the dishonest jesters, the propagators of sin and evil, the molesters and tormentors, the wicked influencers and corruptors sermoning their pugnacious histrionics, and all the floggers and strikers and intruders and attackers moving about in the dead of our nights. But whenever I feel this need to escape, and when I so do, when I allow myself to get stuck in these morasses of self-pity and sloth masqueraded as moral indignation, afterwards I feel a heavy feeling of guilt, of shame and of vitriolic self-contempt. Because I am not some lazy, torpid person or some promulgator of limp, idle ideals - my eye is fixed on the sun! And as a pinch of salt into the sores of a world stricken aburst, I continue my rogue spiritual terrorism: God condemned me hereto, and I shall raise a living hell just for that very reason.
 

When, some time, the endless tirade of foeti clog the mother-womb to cause its final, inevitable corruption, and when the buried nobilities of our ancestral dead arise from the crust of the soil we trample, then I might find a great and sullen repose... then might I renounce my faith in extremism, this polar star of radical individuality growing about on the firmament like a rapturous aurora or some phantasm of hope and fire, the bejewelled chariot of Gods thundering about the starry sky after a hundred and hundred somber moons! 

ill say it - this is beautiful to me

it can well be the case
that the spiritual contract between man and his beatitude
is contigent on the clause of celibacy;
is foreboding on the matter of lust and onanism
and is adamant on the aversion to material affluence;

if this is true, I will die a pig or a dog,
not worthy of Holy Mary's gentle grace
nor of any other blessing care or repose;

another lifeless, sinful, contaminated piece of flesh
I become

just throw me on the heaps after the world is done with me

here is no grace; here is no absolution;
the maggots burrowing their way through my gut
have more dignity than i ever had;

at least they do not know their filth;
i knew my filth, and i tolerated it.

when my moments came, i chose sin
and that is altogether the fruit
of my own doing
 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 THE NEW YEAR IS THE YEAR OF THE AUTIST

CONGRATULATIONS & CELEBRATIONS!!!!!

 

 

Personal memory-note about the Tocharians

 Taiysu pälskanoym sanai ṣaryompa śāyau karttse-śaulu-wärñai snai tserekwa snai nāte.

"Thus did I always think: "I will live well, the whole of my life, with one lover: no force, no deceit."

Excerpt from Tocharian love poem, ca ~500 AD. The Tocharians were something as unusual and counter-intuitive as a Indo-European, light-skinned, fair-haired, often blue-eyed people (i. e. "European" looks) living in western China in antiquity. Since early antiquity and before the Turko-Mongolian expansions of the first millenium AD, the great Eurasian steppe was to a large degree filled with various Indo-European ("Aryan") peoples, from the Scythes and the Sarmates of the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian all the way to these Tocharian peoples of north-eastern modern China.  Nurtured by the ever-so-vibrant Silk Road, the steppe peoples saw great trade and were exceptional - historically unsurpassed by far - in the art of mounted (equestrian) warfare. This is a characteristic shared by all folk of the steppe, not just the Indo-Aryans; it is hard to imagine the Mongolian conquests without their outstanding mounted archery).

This Indo-European expansion probably originated in the European parts of the Eurasian steppe: the prevailing hypothesis describes the northern Black Sea coast as a plausible urheimat.  However, from the first millenium AD, the ethnic-genetic make-up of the great Eurasian steppe shifted into becoming predominated by Turkic and Mongolian peoples. The Indo-european steppe peoples were conquered, assimilated or otherwise neutralized by the successful campaigns of conquest by, among many others, Huns, Oghuz Turks and, lastly, Mongols. After the Mongol empire disintegrated in the 14th century and the Oghuz became the Ottomans and settled permanently in Anatolia, no serious military threats have been presented to neighboring nations of the steppe from within it, and the age of the steppe empire is since then shrouded in mysterious history, never to come back.

Today,  the steppe is vastly dominated by Slavic, Turkic and Mongolian folk.

Crescent mooon in the rearview mirror,
Faravahar in the glove compartment!!!

SS - Make Persia Great Again 7" 

 

Operation Nostalgi 2020-2022

 

fas I: Sword of Angst (2020)

fas II: Slutet - Begynnelsen vinyl edition (2021)

fas III: Southern Spruce - Weird Moons over Uppsala LP (2021)

fas IV: Det stora owäsendet - en dikt i många delar (2021)

fas V: Southern Spruce - Train to Istanbul EP (2022)

fas VI: To Meditate on the Carcass of a Deer - My Meeting with... (2022)

fas VII:  From Amsterdam to Ramallah (2022)

a few ruminations on hiroshima, nagasaki and the empire of japan

 "Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?"

- Korechicka Anami, Japanese Minister of War, right after the Nagasaki atomic bombing, making clear his intention of wanting to sacrifice Japan and the Japanese people as such, instead of suffering national humiliation and disgrace through surrender. 

In World War 2-era Japan, many senior officials and soldiers and ordinary civilian folk alike opined it was utterly unthinkable to surrender to any kind of enemy, be it a Chinese, a Soviet or an Anglo-American one. Until 1945, Japan had never, through its history thousands of years old, lost a war or even been successfully invaded. It was not to even to be bothered with, the idea of capitulation, many stressed. It was simply and soundly unjapanese; repugnant to the Japanese spirit. In the 1940's, military surrender was as Japanese as communism was American. It was considered an unspeakable abomination, and this idea was fully in accord with traditional Bushido ("Samurai") morality which had pervaded Japanese culture and society for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years already. 

And the Minister of war, Korechika Anami, was far from alone in this sentiment; most senior leadership insisted honor was the only thing able to save Japan, and they simply refused to surrender even as they themselves were absolutely positive they would lose the war. They were for the most part - mid-1944 onward - very unconfident about the war effort. The war was lost no doubt, and honor surely was not to be found in capitulation. Only sub-human races wilfully lose a war, it was said. The idea that a kind of "Japanese apocalypse" was the only reasonable way forward was widespread. As far as I know, and at the behest of my historical sources, there is not a single documented case of a surrendering Japanese soldier, although I find that extremely hard to believe; a bit sensationalist it sounds. What is nevertheless indeed true is that individual Japanese soldiers surrendering was practically unheard of, and unseen: an act of surrender would not only bring shame to the soldier, but to his family, his nation, his ancestors, his Emperor, and everything else that was Holy in the eyes of the Japanese.

Let us also note, for the sake of context and of historical anecdote, that the last Japanese warrior was honourably discharged by his commander in the Philippine rainforests in the mid-1970's; he had been actively continuing the war ever since 1945, killing many people in jungle before people understood what the fuck was going on. Japanese "hold-out cells" after the war was widespread, and many boldly defied their emperors' order of capitulation. 

I think never in history has old-age fervour, fanaticism, extremism and patriotism concocted with new-age weaponry, industry, logistics and technology to such a rabid, intense degree. And that is extremely fucking fascinating... and for this reason, Japan between ca 1860 and ca 1950 is a unique phenomenon in world history, and it is with that backdrop one ought to think about the atomic bombs and the ever-relevant discussion of ethics surrounding them. 

But we must understand that key figures within the Japanese military high command literally refused to stop even at the prospect of being effectively wiped off of the world map. They refused to stop even at the thought of their whole nation, their whole culture reduced to nothing but shards of history. Some of them opted to stop their ever-maddening imperial craze to no price. Literally to no price. Honor in victory or honor in death - nothing in between. Surely the atomic bomb is a cruel, heinous and diabolically destructive device but the Empire of Japan likewise was a cruel, heinous and diabolically destructive regime. The atom bomb was a very, very radical response to a very, very radical regime in a very, very radical time and it was, after all, in my view, an ethically justifiable military action, even though radical elements in the Japanese military high command still refused a surrender after the bombs. 

Just a few thoughts. 

"The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder."

 said by V. Woolf
 

it is a culture erected on the hills of skulls of heroes, but a culture completely inept to foster any new ones. they despise history and do not want to learn it, because history is a bright white light, a blinding, brutal radiance.

those who neither rebelled against
nor were faithful to God
are the worst of the worst
of all scum

the wounds the world cure it also inflict
with its sword of great contradictions.
 

"My dearest wish would be to be able to wander about in Italy as an unknown painter." 

Adolf Hitler, June 21, 1941.