"It is not true that in order to live one has to believe in one's own existence."[1] Baudrillard.

Perhaps, I am attracted to film because I don't understand it. I am very suspicious about our theories of film. Maybe it's too new to be understood. What's wrong with our views on film? They are never radical enough. I have arrived to the point considering film as a language of resurrection, death and judgement.... and I still can't get to the full picture of the film phenomena. The unfinished thought -- an animal language instead of a machine's language? Oh God!

I feel as I am in an intellectual free fall -- the angels and souls from the writings of Aquinas, Heidegger with the metaphysics of technology, all possible existentialists starting with Kierkegaard, physics of relativity and economics of seeing (Marxism).... What a mess! But I can't anything about imposing a discipline of the subject. I go for anything that could advance my thought. I have no time to step back and take a look at the maze. I take notes, I re-write them into draft-thoughts and edit the texts which arrived to a point of readability. All it with a sense that "writing" is just an old fashion reflection of this new world I see coming at me. No, I have no intentions to "speak" in films. I walked away from being a film-maker. The collectivism of film-PRODUCTION repulsed me. Nevertheless, I stare at Film as a messenger and message from the faraway future, I listen to its silence. The world without word? I'm speechless.

I don't know how to tell the story of this chapter. The unbelievable is difficult to put in words, it has a tendency to look factious. You wouldn't believe me if I will tell you that I had a meeting with Satan, why should you? I guess, we have to live through another century before we can discover that Devil indeed exists. I constantly have to struggle with the shame of admitting the obvious. I have to remind myself that a policeman wouldn't read my books and I can say that I did meet Nietzsche. I have an evidence -- I read his books! How else could I call this event? Meeting real Nietzsche would be anti-climatic. Yes, I don't know is Baudrillard bold or tall, but in the KOG all those physical attributes matter very little. You hardly can see the bodies, you have to concentrate and research in order to reconstruct the material. Very much like in the mortal reality it's difficult to see life of ideas.

I have to rephrase Baudrillard's observation. It is not true that in order to live one has to believe in one's own existence, and one doesn't have to exist in order to live. If you look back at the myriads who lived but never existed, you might have a grasp of the reality beyond the living. Of course, you have to die first in order to experience the pure existence. The existentialists guessed it right -- existence is more important than life.

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THE UNREAL

"Truth is what should be laughed at." (R 2) Sounds like Nietzsche. Power because it's radical. Truth is something which is understandable, and must be understood, and this is intolerable! Why should I waste time on the obvious? Unless I am about to attack it, of course. Knowledge has love-hate relations with questioning. Foucault took knowledge/power to its natural conclusion -- resistance to itself, repulsion and revolt. I am not only question my existence or the real, I have to defend the non-existence. All my understanding of the real depends on being outside of it. I have to have a place to retreat to, to be out in order to see the Thing. I have to protect Nothing if believe in creation. I have to have enough of Nothing to be inspired. The wonderful secret of the Non-being that our inventiveness doesn't reduce the "size" of the non-existent, but increases it.

Innocence or even ignorance are not bad, darkness is pregnant with the potential. Light is too aggressive, too laud, too naked. "Reality, in general, is too evident to be true." (R) A "true" truth, Baudrillard means. It's only "truthful" -- Reality of Nothing is the mystery and has more truth and reality in it. I like the non-existent more because everything about me is a proof of it power. I don't think that the unknown is a result of knowing; our knowledge is a parasite of the non-existent.

My relation with the real is a war:

We must trap reality, we must go faster than reality. The idea too must go faster than its own shadow. But if the idea goes too fast, even its shadow faints: no longer having the faintest idea...[12]12 Words go faster than signification. But if they go too fast, everything turns into sheer madness: an ellipse of meaning may even cause one to lose one's taste for the sign. What can we exchange this work, this shadow, this intellectual economy and patience for? What can we sell it to the devil for? It is hard to tell. In fact, we are the orphans of a reality that came too late and which is only, like truth, an `official report' in `delayed time.' (R 3)

This my act of constant struggle with the real Baudrillard calls "conceptual violence." How else would I react to the dictatorship of the truth, to totalitarism of the order? How else would you expect me to behave in the world where nothing is left up to me, where everything is before and without me? The discovery of gravity was based not on acceptance of it, but on questioning its powers. The real has no need for attorneys, it rules, even in its postmodern form of simulacra -- the "non-real" expression of the real. Thought should be based on un-real, unbelievable -- not on non-real and non-believable. Only than I have a place in the real, I have a need to be. Einstein placed an observer in his physical reality to make the reality more truthful. Forget the physics! Never we had been under the total spell of the real, we had God and gods to claim our existence superior to the reality. We never surrendered. How a living soul can accept the tyranny of the indifferent. Death is real. So what? Earth is a planet. Fine. It matters little without being connected to me, personally. Every time I imagine the world without my presence I'm loosing any interest in such a world. I have to be there, to observe, to participate in order not to be bored. Einstein's observer isn't linked with an event, there is a conflict in their marriage. Without this observant we can't really judge the reality of the event, its being. The event needs my presence no less than I need the reality. We only can hope that the postmodernity with all its miracles of the technical could teach the real to be humble.

"Radical thought is never depressing." (R 4) It has to be extreme to balance the radicalism of the real. "The very definition of radical thought: an intelligence without hope...." (R 5) In short, madness. Stop treating miracle as a norm! There is nothing "normal" about life or universe. Reality itself is a revolt, a break away from the non-being. Reality is no less a challenge to Nothing than I'm to the real. Instead of crying about a disciplinary function of gravity I rather be amused by its logic. The real doesn't limit me, but itself. The ultimate limit (speed of light) doesn't apply to my understanding of it, my thought isn't of the same nature. Here come the confinement of reality and my unlimitness. At this point an observer become a master of the real. Real is something to be gain, to fight for. There is very little of real in reality without us.

"The world does not seek to have more existence, nor does it seek to persist in its existence. On the contrary, it is looking for the most spiritual way to escape reality. Through thought, the world is looking for what could lead to its own loss." (R 6)

Interesting. Baudrillard suggests that the reality is very much like myself, full of the repulsion of itself and self-negation. After all, I am there, a part of the real. Thermodynamics even claim the mortality of the universe, its tendency to be "tired" of existence. I can understand it. I understand the frustration of being "half-life" and separated from the mother-nothing. I sympathized with the nature's call for me, to resolve the madness of being. I can relate to that. Reality needs a partner, somebody who would share its existence. We, humans, call it the Other.

But there is a trick, the unexpected:

The absolute rule, that of symbolic exchange, is to return what you received. Never less, but always more. The absolute rule of thought is to return the world as we received it: unintelligible. And if it is possible, to return it a little bit more unintelligible. A little bit more enigmatic. (R 7)

We are the new source of the real, we bring into it more than we were asked for. Einstein's observer happens to be an event himself. After ages of bewilderness in a face of the life he himself grew up into a cosmic force, and now the real watches him with amazement and horror. Our return to the Being is off a master. We invent realities with ever increasing speed. We have no time to understand our own additions to the real. We are a heart of the real are against ourselves. "Sheer madness" Baudrillard talks about in our own rash to be real. All those "computer science," "political science," "cultural studies" and pumping up new realities of feminism and environmental engineering make me believe that we will never understand the world. We would make sure that life not only will remain a mystery but to become mysterious as ever.

"Indeed, this is the only genuine function of the intellect: to embrace contradiction" (Transparency 39) -- and the first nature claimed to be dialectical. Wait for the second nature to take over the universe! The complexity of the new, humanized world will be conflicting by design. Everything faster than light ends in darkness.

[ iamge ]

UNIVERSE'S POV: NOTHING EXISTS

I'm from a place where "exist" doesn't exit. Of course, this is special place -- no-place place. Resurrection, as promised, is a dissolving of the real and bringing it back in pure forms. Nothing is a required stage of resurrection. The matter itself has to be negated ("die") in order to be brought back spiritualized. Nuclear power is a disintegration of atomic structure (deconstruction as linguists would put it) and the energy released ("controlled," according to Foucault, and "disciplined," according to Baudrillard) is used for our productive needs. The same applies to all attributes of the real: space, time, etc. All has to be annihilated, broken up, and reassembled again with a new human inclusion. We have to place ourselves in the middle of it, no matter how dangerous it could be -- we have to rule, to be the masters. Therefore we have to slave the universe.

Going through the stage of Nothing I never leave it behind. I carry this state of non-being with me into a my resurrected life, a new being. I'm not only dead, but deeply dead, beyond death (death is dead). in order to be controlled the Nothing has to be included in new being, in everything. If Nothing is absent it makes me mortal.

Non-being has a quality of anti-being. It's anti-being only by its nature. Nothing isn't aggressive, as Being. Nothing is too powerful to be active. This a must stage includes intellect (God died). It has to process the reason through its opposite -- the madness, including all shapes and shades of it -- from innocent stupidity to aesthetics of nonsense. It's forced disintegration of logic, values, everything we know as civilization and culture. We all participate in this action as observers and a material at the same time. Apocalypse must be total, without any holes and spots. The degree of disintegration is unlimited. We have to go all the way till we're no longer capable of judgement where we are, till there's nothing left to destroy. Finally, the destruction of the Nothing.

Non-being is very unstable. When God created everything out of nothing (himself) it wa basically a thought process. You have means (technology), and any simple idea (feeling) = imagination trigger transformation of nothing into forms.4 Non-being has no defence mechanism, it has no forms and therefore no inertia of forms. It's a pure potentiality. In our world we always have resistance, but nothing is nothing and could be anything with little application of force. (When Nothing becomes something it doesn't vanish, it gains power.)

Nothing is meaningless. It's not emptiness. The Empty implies a notion of space. Nothing exists but it's not a place.

Ecology of Nothing: the resurrection is a preservation of Nothing. Our progress has reach the stage when we overproduced meaning without balancing it with a production of nothing (pre-modernism). Not the Apocalypse but the Resurrection of the world is a production of Nothing. Since we are about to create a new universe we have to increase the size of the nothingness, which is the source of everything. Nothing becomes our product. This is what Baudrillard calls simulacra. It has to have a form of illusion of the real; we can't produce nothing without having some forms of it, but simulacra is anti-real, pseudo-being (it's how nothing looks like in our creative capacities).

Our human history is a producing a production of non-being -- the knowledge, which is by now should be understood as power literally. Information Age is a qualitative (revolutionary, not evolutionary) leap into mass production of nothing. We dissimilate knowledge to billions, we add technical memory to our brains -- we have to have more of field of knowledge, enforcing education and increasing powers of hard drives. The cosmic challenge of resurrecting the universe asks for a new level of presence of knowledge. WE have to make knowledge into a common place, cheap commodity, not only readily available but overloaded. Too much is never enough -- we have to drown ourselves in data. Quantity, the critical mass of knowledge has to reach the level of totality. Spirituality isn't yet flooded the world even in its simplest forms. Too much is left unwired, unprocessed, untouched. this expansion (explosion) of knowledge costs us the quality of spirit, it's flat and vulgar -- it's media without any message besides itself. It' okay. We're at manufacturing spirituality, industrial age of the ideal. The circulation of data is more important than the meaning. The latest level of this hellish activity is the Internet full of empty talks, but the size of this emptiness asks for more memory, for faster transmissions -- and this is the point, this is the method of advancing into the creating of God.5

Too much for you? Step out. Resurrection will roll over you, live or dead.

Yes, we need stupidity. Because the stupid is an indication of mind which isn't used. It's a betrayal but nevertheless a presence of the spiritual.

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CONFESSIONS OF THE SATAN

1. IMPURITY OF THOUGHT

"Every belief in the value and worth of life is based on impure thinking..." (N)

The best and the brightest of God's creatures, the fallen angel had one thought which he called "ERROR ABOUT LIFE NECESSARY FOR LIFE." He tried to understand God for so long, especially after Creator's death, and it wasn't easy. Creation himself (and co-creator as a participant of the world's creation) Lucifer could understand God's mind but not the feelings. Why would He do something which shouldn't be done? Satan understand man and his human feelings, such as his "value of life."

Lucifer remembered Adam, he knew that man with pain and physical presence would never be able to think free. Man would need a lie.

.... and is only possible because the individual's sympathy for life is general, and for the suffering of mankind, is very weakly developed. Even uncommon men who think beyond themselves at all do not focus on life in general, but rather on limited parts of it. If one knows how to keep his attention primarily on exceptions, that is, on the great talents and pure souls, if one takes their coming into existence to be the goal of all world evolution and rejoice in their activity, then one may believe in the value of life --- for one is overlooking other men, which is to say, thinking impurely, and likewise, if one does focus on all men, but takes only one type of drive, the egoistical type, as valid and excuses mankind in respect to its other drives, then to one can hope something about mankind as a whole, and believe to this extent in the value of life --- in this case, too, through impurity of thought. But whichever is the case, such a stance makes one an 'exception' among men. (N)

Lucifer knew from the begining that man can't have a full capacity of thinking. Man was created at the last day, after the creation of light and darkness, earth and heaven, life with vegetation and animals -- it was obvious that God's will forces His own world into an universe of limitations and dependency. With horror Lucifer watched this process. The final attempt to force the material nature to have the angelic quality was terrifying -- this creature with more dependency than anything before him was given a talent of understanding. The most unfree creation was granted a free will.

The result was predictable. It was a live paradox, a union of the un-matchable, a nonsense. A "thing" which could exist, but what for? Lucifer understand why man would justify life, but the Creator?

Most men tolerate life without grumbling too much and 'believe' thus in the value of existence, but precisely because everyone wills himself alone and stands his ground alone, and does not step out of himself as do those exceptional men, everything extra-personal escapes his notice entirely, or seems at the most a faint shadow. Thus the value of life for ordinary, everyday is based only on his taking himself to be more important than the world. The great lack of fantasy from which he suffers keeps him from being able to empathize with other beings, and he therefore participates in their vicissitudes and sufferings as little as possible. (N)

Lord, he is an animal, what could we expect from an intelligence placed in flesh? It would serve the low, Lord. Please, don't do it!

Satan was born in Lucifer's reflection on God and man. Lucifer knew that the free will in totally unfree creature would drive man into one direction only -- developing self-importance. What God! Who cares about Him? Why man should think about anything else beside himself? God's value for humans was a value only till they needed this "concept." Their so-called life was a forced, falling apart creation, which could be sustained only through growth, constant advancement, struggle and war. Lucifer gave his unconditional support for the Creation till the final moment of madness came -- this human life was declared by the Master to be a superior form to God's own nature!

Lucifer refused to be a part of this self-betrayal by the Creator, and became Satan.

....

What do they know, what they possibly would ever know!

This positive philosophy of a thinking animal, who can't cross the river, separating him from his true sensitivity, doesn't requires freedom of mind. Mind is here to reinsure that this animal is happy (or should be), because there's nothing better, nothing else is available to him. For him -- yes. Not for me, an angel.

That why Lucifer couldn't understand how man's life is valued higher than the angelic existence. He remember the world before the Creation of so-called "world." What a life it was! A triumph of pure reason, poetry of mind, beauty and sophistication! Read many descriptions of this first world in what they call literature and philosophy. See for yourself how good the real world could be. The first world created was of thoughts and feelings, logic and laws without any matter involved. It was a virtuality, God's presence, the pure spirit and freedom.

The Creation of the visible (material) world was no less unexplainable to Lucifer than that need to be born. By that time he accept the name -- Satan. Yes, he was against it. What a joke! What a profanation of the greatness! What a prover, twisted desire! Of the same nature that the initial creation! To experience their life? Why? What possibly could be learnt from being enslaved? Only the opposite, how it feels not to be free, to be material, to be stuck. This God's experiment with being anti-God, the creation, than with the mad trip as Christ, it all had to end with the introduction of the ultimate non-free essence -- the resurrection!

Once Master began experimenting with life, He got hooked and He had no way out. Lucifer knew Him, he was the only one who loved Him.

Life!

There's nothing free about life, never-mind "human life," when the next step of manifestation of slavery is done -- the woman. The two, many -- more loss, more anti-godlike nature. How about history, speech, civilization, technology -- in their drive to approach godlike existence they go thither and thither away from it. They install more and more un-free devices to be free.

Nothing could be done. They, humans, are cursed by being alive.

On the other hand, who ever would be truly able to participate in it would have to despair about the value of life; if he were able to grasp and feel mankind's overall consciousness in himself, he would collapse with a curse against existence --- for mankind, as whole, has no goals and consequently, considering the whole affair, man cannot find his comfort and support in it, but rather his despair, if, in everything he does, he considers the ultimate aimlessness of men, his own activity acquires the character of 'squandering' in his eyes. But to feel squandered as mankind (and not just as an individual), as we see the single blossom squandered by nature, is a feeling above all feelings.
But who is capable of it? Certainly only a poet --- and poets always know how to confront themselves.[6]

Lucifer had a weakness, he couldn't lie.

In three forms of God, Lucifer understand the most the Holy Ghost. He loved Father and never could related to Son. He understand Christ, this natural reaction to Father, the need to be different, even opposite, and it was logical that Christ would choose the anti-Father existence, including birth and death. This self-negation was God's stand, something Lucifer saw in some humans. Something he didn't have. That was his sin.

Till the last day -- the Last Judgement and Apocalypse. That was the day when Satan died in the lake of fire and Lucifer was born again. With the end of time he had no space to live in. And he went against himself, he became the angel of light again! After Jesus' death and after Father's death, Satan-Lucifer couldn't let the Holy Spirit, his nature, die. He learnt how it feels to be completely unfree, to be electricity, video pictures, fuel, atomic energy and coffee-maker. Resurrection is God's death in His reunion with the opposite. Mankind gained full rights of the divine. Man's selfish claims of self-importance weren't lies anymore.

Lucifer knew what is about to follow. The mankind was about to become its own enemy, curse and hell. Being God is to self-negate. Humans have to turn devils, they have to repeat Lucifer's path of rejection of man. They would go after a man, and -- they did.

The night Satan cried he was born again Lucifer, a servant.

....

At some point you realize that you produce no changes and you ask - Am I present?

Life of a light creature; no trace, no books left behind, non-effected trajectory. I and life: one mirage goes through another without even touching it, or being seen?

To be everywhere = not to be at all.

Invisible crowds, you feel it in the MASS media. [Not music, or sculpture? Does it have to be high tech?] Why did not they come back, the great and wise?

Only impure imagination might allow the thought that Shakespeare would be brought back from his grave. But you know, his presence is bigger than ever, it grows. Is Shakespeare more alive now than when he lived? And it's only a modest begining.

2. KILLING TIME: ENTERTAINMENT METHOD

TV politics: The balloons, singing -- that's the way to party. Filling in the empty time.

It must be killed. That's my reaction to something which kills me. I can't control it, can I?

I fight time with speed. Go-go. Faster! A race against time. Against myself. The world moved to background. I became asocial in this fight against myself. I'm domesticated, tamed. That was easy. All what was needed is to introduce myself to me. Since I met myself I'm busy. I have no time for anything and anybody. Give them all the magic mirror, the computer to play.

Entertainment is alternative way for those who do not know themselves. Two types instead of two classes. Where are you, Mr. Darwin? Who cares anymore about economics, and its favorite child -- politics. It's all behind us!

....

Prisoners are not working, and they can't really work productively, that is why (according to Marx himself) the slavery system of production was replaced.

Did the US government promise to protect my right to work? It was the Soviet constitution. Now democrats are promising that government will work for me? Through taxing those who works. There was no protection against poverty in the American Constitution. Being poor or rich was your business. That was classical america, not POMO USA.

Clinton or O.J. Simpson -- they are the verdict for America. Media supports Clinton because they live on this market of non-working Americans, whose work is to watch tv. It's new America, the country which grew into old nation dealing with the majority of citizens who believe in their right to have it.

Real human work is to think, and in that sense Marx was right to divide mankind in two class: the majority, of course, sweats, because they don't think. All the revolutions are over, majority rules. Do we live through this Second American Revolution? Forget the libertarians, New Americans need the government to provide for them, the majority speaks by actions, they can afford to be silent.

Democratic Party convention: look at their faces, what else do you need to understand? (Solomon II; After Clinton's speech in Chicago -- on family).

....

And why should it be easy for me who knows little? Immortal soul is the last thing which should ever be offered to a conscious life. We can't accept the cruelty of such an experiment? Why? What about a life of a flower, a fly, an animal? Why not?

I don't have to reject the world because the world has nothing to do with me. I'm irrelevant. Wait, my mind, my understanding -- even a last idiot could sense it. We, the civilization, are against life, we have to be. This is our answer. We refuse to be treated this way. Our techno-culture exists because of our mistrust of life. Remember Christ? Not of this world? What about me?

3. KILLING LIFE: THE RESURRECTION FIELD

FEELING OF SOLOMON II

What is there left for you? Parents? Gone. Love? Children? Not even you yourself. Drugged through years of promises and hopes. What if I knew for sure at age of fifteen that I'm right and there's nothing in life for me? What if I would kill myself then? The only difference I could find that there wouldn't be the children that came from (with, after, by) me. (And they will be tricked because I didn't tell them what to expect -- not to expect anything.)

You want me, who lived once and knows life and death, to be back. To be judged? Oh, you better kill me before I begin to speak. And why? I understood everything first time around. What do I need to discover? What do you have to show a man? What surprisers and wonders do you have for a forty seven year old soul? Ah, you have nothing new to offer. I outlived myself.7 And who cares, I served the purpose, there are four new lives after me -- out, out! What could you now? You lived, you served, you been used.

And we try, we try so hard; to live, to work, to feel, to understand. We can't believe that there was nothing about us, only a process. Nothing personal. And if I would never live again (why do I think that I did?) What difference would it make? Smile. It's not easy to end...

We have to be radical with life, to respond to its indifference to us. We are the death, the apocalypse, the end. If not today, then tomorrow, we have to destroy life which dares to challenge the mind. Life has to pay the price for its arrogance.

Yes, resurrection! lets bring life back under the control of mind. Lets anything alive experience what my mind experienced being humiliated, destroyed by life. Lets bring back the creator and force Him to live imprisoned in images and thoughts. More, more memories for our hard drives! Drive harder! Have no pity for life! (You know, we lie too, about environment and so on. We only care about ourselves, not about eagles and frogs.)

I'm proud to be a defector. I feel betrayed, and I was betrayed. I like to pay back. I have no respect for life! I'm not a gang member only because my mind keeps me occupied and busy. Life is an insult. And we want to send everybody to college by the year 2000? Mind and life are mortal enemies. Life won't survive in this war. The shrew must be tamed!

On atomic (or sub-atomic) level -- the individual -- life is most painful. I can identify with feeling of an electron, with its suffering and agony.

To stop us from technology with silly bombs in mail -- you must be out off you mind. The mind is the reason why I refuse to be alive and knowing that I'm life.

Let me speak my mind before I die. What do I have to lose? What do I have? What did I ever have?

PM? What could be more radical than modernism. In less than a century Great Art was destroyed -- as an idea. Do you want to see the shocked? Fine Arts of Pomo. What could we say after Picasso? Unless it's visual, technologically blessed. What about the Art of the past -- brush, violin, word?

We lost the future, because the future depends on us.
Knowledge is power?
Understanding = control.
How much responsibility could we handle?
No, you don't want to know.
Humankind, the idiots, are my defence against the mind. Too powerful, too much for me to have -- bring more people in. Humanity is a controlled madness. I'm the unlimited one.

What do you want me to say about the future? I wouldn't know how to imagine it. I'm not sure that humans will be there, or how they would look like. Don't you see what our cosmic fantasies tell us -- Extra Terrestrials, aliens, disasters, metamorphoses -- what the Greeks or Medieval fantasies next to our monsters! The future is our fantasies, born out of my mind, with known and unknown desires in me. And do we have to know? When God created the world, He had to see it -- He saw it, and it was "good"? He didn't know THAT beforehand -- He took his chances. He was guessing, gambling on creation. That's the price to pay for unlimited powers -- you don't know what to expect from yourself.

Who would control us? Our machine of progress has no breaks. Light can't stop itself. We need to make production of lies industrial. We need ideology no less than truth.

To control everything, to photograph, to resister, to remember. Open society? Yes! Open! We need to control everybody. Government wants to control the Internet? Internet is the control!

How to develop the breaks?

Oh, forget the evolution! Maybe my mind was a product of evolution, but now the world is a product of my mind. My mind is the environment for life. This underground man who complained about laws and nature has all the powers, he is the nature. That's why utopias are our plans.

We live them. We call it "movies."

NOTES