I have been re-reading Letter to mom Medusa by César Tort. I decided I had not read it closely enough the first-time around. That terrible pain - it is a great piece of work for me. I appreciate the new words I learn also. I empathised when I read of his childhood maths struggles, on account of the stress distraction. I shall have it finished by tomorrow, I imagine.
Despite my rather large library (a portion in extended articles and papers, and PDF downloads, and scans and e-book rips - Who We Are by William Luther Pierce being one of those, and a lot of the cryptography pieces) I do have to admit that I haven't read all of them yet, and of those I have, much could be read again in closer detail, and some have been forgotten, or misunderstood I expect, or dog eared (a terrible habit of mine). I tend to buy in advance, large second-hand tranches at a time, or go out and browse charity shops, boot fairs, and small family bookstores and rare items depositories, scouring any new town I visit, always looking for the cheapest deals, sometimes happy to pick up the older works for only a few pennies, much as Amazon is not always too pricy if one tries hard. The worst in cost are the modern physics tomes. And of course I have some childhood books, and some borrowed from my father's library in their old house outside Chelmsford.
I am obliged to constantly re arrange my upstairs rooms to make space. I piled up some cash and ordered a last gasp of them recently. I hope my book encourages others to look for them also, knowing time is short enough. It's a bit of a pipedream, but I always thought it useful to have a samizdat physical storeroom, akin to something from The Turner Diaries (or just what Roger Scruton did in Czechoslovakia), for others to utilize for reference in good time, if they should wish (and one would hope they would).
I wouldn't imagine my own rented property would be suitable for that venture, but I have other ideas on storage, just in case. One will have to see if the Neochristians will burn my 'Alexandria' again, I suppose. More likely their wet hands will pay for others to do so, as with the acquisition of their meat.
***
Just back from truncated walkies. Unfortunately, it has rained heavily and the paths into the forest are now a quagmire, a Somme quality mud, impossible to navigate, dug up further by tyre treads from oil industry vehicles and the dirt bikes of local teenagers. I reluctantly turned back with him to the village and thought up a new proxy route. Walking down the tarmac perpendicular to the very end of our cul-de-sac, I encountered a group of six young teenagers walking down the centre of the road towards me, a cluster of girls in their tracksuits, and three boys strolling behind, similarly clad.
"We like your dog, Mr!" one of the girls called out. "Thank you" I replied. "Yes, his name's Skyler. I hope you have a good day!" They didn't reply, but turned and laughed among themselves, a subtle lowered voices murmur of shared remarks, somehow embarrassed by my cordial exchange, and a faint hint of mockery. I didn't really pay attention to them after that and resumed my pace. A Middle Eastern worker passed me from behind, in port security uniform.
At the corner to one of the streets back down the hill to Garland Road, a small girl called to me. Blonde, and quite sweet looking, her hair in European braiding. She'd seen the other pass. "It's a shame you've got no friends round here," she stated to me, more matter of fact than sympathy. "I know" I replied, and continued to walk on, wondering if any of them had noticed my best friend Skyler at all. Somehow disappointing a little. I haven't let it get to me. I wondered how she knew about me at all, as we've never met before. It's not a pleasure to walk round these people. It hurts me to see it in the youth.
I finished Letter to mom Medusa the night before last. A very good read. I empathise again over the strange Catholic necessity to involve priests as a first port of call. Many were presented to me between 15 and 16, as honorary holistic therapists more than anything. I thought they were quite pleasant people compared to my obsessive ‘Catholic fangirl’ attitude mother, more of a socialite for the congregation and their approachable shepherds - and especially the pope - than one who has ever considered the nature of Catholic faith from a genuinely metaphysical standpoint.
I noticed, as a child devoted to Catholicism that still, despite the altar server roles, and regular Sunday school, and the excited preparations for the taking of traditional sacraments, and the Walsingham pilgrimages, and confessions, and the trademark wanting to be a priest, not once did I ever pray at home to Christianity's Jesus, or really acknowledge him at all, much as I was not too moved by the Virgin Mary, although when I was small my Mum would say my prayers with me every night and tended to mention them both, and follow common Catholic prayers she’d learnt by heart as a child, more recitation than my personal ‘silent apologetic politeness’ inner conversational tone, always struggling in my head to wonder if I was being formal enough, or using the right words, so I didn’t ‘come across’ as a feckless timewaster, some juvenile idiot.
I could get very neurotic about it on the spot, worried that my silent prayer discussions were stilted and faltering, and I ran out of things to say coherently, so more apologies at that point too, just for catching myself at that. Later, my Mum bought me a set of tiny, black glass five-decade beads, with a black crucifix, so I could say my Rosaries, but I didn’t commonly engage in that, not for more than a handful of separate instances. Very genuinely, I believed in the Jews’ god though, and I felt awful before him, terrified of a lapse in piety, or of being a bad person. Perhaps this early disinterest in Jesus saved part of my mind in a way, much as my initial loss of faith was an excruciating experience over the course of which I blamed myself most heavily, inflicting atrocious regular pain. What a terrifying, gross religion of hell.
I think the first antitheist humanist I ever encountered in print was Christopher Hitchens, and they very idea of not believing in this god had never occurred, a ‘truth’ obvious to me at the time, in the pious environment of the only people who did go out of their way to talk to me.
Those priests were kind enough, in a doddery, naive, genuinely pleasant manner, with the polite reserve of old English dons (although two were Irish and one was Italian). They drew back in shock knowing, not long after my sixteenth birthday, that I had taken the cartilage jawbone from a Tiger Shark personal 'ornament' and snapped it, and slit my throat in suicide, across the right of my neck above a carotid artery which, thankfully, I did not quite reach. Thankfully that wound's healed now, and nigh on indistinguishable.
I miss my friend Nigel. Unfortunately, he killed himself a while ago, unable to face a 10-year sentence, an elderly man with not so much luck. He used to come over to my house almost every day, always excited and engaged, and we’d sit in my back garden, or in the bedroom, and chat, and laugh, and discuss books and philosophies and local events and past times from life experiences, in huge, rambling, high-energy conversations over much of the day, and recite poetry (he liked my own also), or go for an afternoon walk together into the countryside, or on a bus out of town down to Manningtree, or spar in the evenings, his Mixed Martial Arts against my Wing Chun Kung Fu and up close street-fighting preferences, or explore the night-time woods at three in the morning, him lending me his spare torch.
We watched storms together, in lightning, thunder, high winds and pouring rain, energetic, awed out on the deck, overjoyed. I regularly traded with him, and shared food and small supplies, and mutual money offers, and he’d buy me thoughtful gifts now and again, or share his own written words and doodled sketches. I miss his little elderly terrier-cross dog, Mr. Bones.
I remember the time Nigel arrived in a taxi with his friend, whom I’d been asking after for a while, a jolly ex-Bosnian War mercenary with a little home-made karambit hanging around his neck on a chain beneath the heavy jackets, barrelling in with a remaining four-pack of Fosters for an impromptu evening of f**ked-up people (as he himself expressed rather wearily later), myself thoroughly unprepared and out of it, having had a bad week, him quite tolerant of my strange, fraught eccentricity, sat beside me complimenting a work in progress from the Bleach For The Stars Celtic violin and emulated bagpipes album I was composing at the time, and then rolling off a bit later, totally hammered, the eerie modern Gothic strings music of Nigel’s neoclassical Goëtia album choice (released by Peter Gundry), continuing after him down the stairs, me retreating to the downstairs sofa to curl up.
He saw me again a few months later, glad that I looked smarter in presentation, and more with it, beaming out a “hello again young man! You look much better!” with the usual kindly grandfather tones, that regular chuckle, jumping out of his driver’s customised van, that very Yugoslav presentation again somehow, the 1993 rough and ready chic, not a great much having changed. There are, inevitably, a plethora of highly grim details, but I know they haunt him privately in a few highly personal places, sorrowful, drinking them away, and I would never raise the memories of those events and actions to him, not that he knows me very well anyway. I regard him in my mind softly, remembering he exists, thinking of him now and again, and memorizing the address he wrote down for me, but I don’t go out of my way to get in contact.
Nigel reminded me so much of Mick, dead a decade before by brutal and railroaded overdose, abused to death by his parents and his lifelong adult decline, dead before his 60s. My only two friends ever in this country. Mick saved my life once too, as a black gangster in London was stabbing at me and kicking me to death for 'disrespecting' him (by attempting to stop him brutalizing my female friend, herself routinely gang-raped by her father and his social worker colleagues).
I estimate that nigh-on 100% of my creativity is instigated by a stressful life, bar some of my paintings. The only negative being that, conversely, toxic stress can impede concentration and quality, wearing me out very easily, despite providing me with many new ideas. To reiterate a lovely, straight forward heuristic by César Tort, there seems to be a kind of directly proportional physical law to this: l = w/s (with l being learning, w being will, and s being stress). If s is too big, w is overpowered. That's an analogy to Ohm's Law.
I'm quite pleased I’ve written a proper book now. It doesn't mitigate the fierce charges I'm facing for September, but it does provide some meaning, and a handy stimulant for others in case they'd like counterpoint to what the system thinks of me, much as I feel, on instinct, that the British media will latch onto the news with greater cruelty and vindictiveness once they find out also. I think it's quite informative regardless of that, on quite a few other topics bar my life.
My next project is to design some covers for a friend's series of e-books, and reformat them, to upload them for printing with Lulu also. He's offered to trade me the royalties from their sales in return for this action. I'm not sure if I'd feel morally comfortable accepting that, as I didn't write them, but I'm happy to pursue the project regardless. It’s good for someone elsewhere in the world to have access to the print-copy supply account, just in case. Aside from this, I have a large stack of half-done acrylics paintings to finish, some realist, some stylised, and some abstract. I'd like to get a bundle ready so I can put them on Etsy. There are loads more unfinished, but I try not to work on more than two at once.
One of those is a fantastical coral reef work, all bright, stylised fauna, and a particularly toothy red snapper lunging for some invertebrates, a little like the style of Ernst Haeckel, yet exaggerated, and needing quite a lot of work still on blending, highlighting, texturing, detailing, and contour marking, and the other is a portrait of an Aryan warrior, from the Indus Valley period of 6000 BC, Nordic looking and Romanesque, clutching a sauvastika* (the Sanskrit term for a counter-clockwise swastika, the latter a Solar symbol indicating good-luck and wellbeing, but the former symbolizing night, and Kali). I was thinking of the Hindu concept of Kali Yuga, the fourth (final) age in the cycle of history described in the Mahabharata, the "age of darkness" where the Bull of Dharma is reduced to a single leg, that of truth, all else fallen and despoiled.
As it stands, he's seized the totem and is gazing at it, his arm weak like pale gold, holding a lit torch in the other hand, a stronger musculature to that arm, taking his fire to the Gods, so to speak, perhaps to restimulate the Sun, and the golden age. I'd deliberately made the icon lop-sided in weighting, some quarters larger than others, as if the very metal had been looted or chipped at hoping no one would notice, a gold icon in need of restamping. There's quite a lot I need to do to finish it, filling in a proper background instead of my basic delineation of shapes (a whirl of pale green mist, dark green smoke, and, eventually, planned forest), texturing the musculature properly, filling in the face shading, and otherwise tidying up the leg-plate armour, tabard, and the totem itself. I'd say the first picture is about 1/3 finished and the second is about 2/5 there. The rest are pretty much done, bar a few brief checks.
Eventually I might return to writing music. I keep my violin still, and a selection of Classical sheet music, so I may just practice for a while in the background unrecorded, playing for pleasure with other people's (proper) work.
*Now changed back to a Swastika, just to avoid confusion, and in subtle mimicry of the folkish art posters of the 1930s, albeit not so good.
***
I've been reading Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail in the background (another wretched e-book - the paperback is over £100 on Amazon, a common occurrence there with 'controversial' tomes, surely some sly means to keep them out of public hands) and going over Savitri Devi’s Impeachment of Man in more detail. I've put science on hold for a while.
After all, the last textbook I was reading, Kaori Fuyuto’s research on Electroweak Baryogenesis and its Phenomenology, will take quite a while to consider. On that first point, it's very rare I read a novel. I think one of the last on that theme that I went through was Hold Back This Day by Ward Kendell. I've got a couple on punitive medicine lined up next, by Alexander Podrabinek and Thomas A. Oleszczuk, plus a re-read of Drawings from the Gulag by Danzing Baldaev (if only to practice my Russian comprehension). Recently I'd been appalled to read of the treatment of dissident students in Communist Romania, in a book titled Anti-Humans: Student Re-education in Romanian Prisons, by Dumitri Bacu, despite the emphasis on their predominant Christianity.
All I'm really doing currently in the background is a bit of carpentry, reinforcing the walls of a lean-to shed, making some proxy fence panels, and upping the gardening for planting season.
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