Armageddon

They want to fuck up our hippocampuses. The ability to learn. Our emotional stability. That’s what they want to target. To create a new neural network in the brain. Rewiring the human nervous system. To trap us in Hell.

It’s neurodegeneration everywhere. All around us. It’s all conformity, obedience. People are turning into zombies. Their frontal lobes are fucked. The high centres of the brain. All the fine tuning’s gone. All the subtlety. Humane thinking. Empathy. All going. Love – the capacity to love. Civilization’s the central cortex. That’s what they’re demolishing.

They’re creating the kind of masses that they want.

This is Armageddon. This is the apocalyptic battle. Taking evil to a level never before seen.

Satan is behind this. Someone who hates the world as it is. Who hates creation as it is. Where it’s not enough to own everything living, but to take possession and control living things in their essence.

It’s out in the open. They’re not trying to sneak up on the herd anymore.

There’s aluminium, barium, strontium in rain. The rain, like, foams.

They don’t need us to make money, they don’t need our taxes, they print money for whatever they want.

The mercantile era is coming to an end. This is the neo-feudal era.

They’re breaking in the new system. Everything’s lined up – every major logistical element.

The population is a liability. They want to thin out the herd.

It’s cognitive infiltration. They’re letting the IQ points fall.

We’re being prepped. They’re programming us – remote controlling us.

It was a slow-kill programme. Now it’s a fast-kill programme. Things are speeding up.

They’re going to modify every species on the planet.

We’re in tune. We sense things. The shifting narratives. There are so many battle fronts. So many battle lines.

The ownership of humans: that’s what they’re aiming at. The ownership of the entire world. The digitalisation of everything that can be traded or used as a medium of exchange.

— Lars Iyer, from a novel in progress

Every leaf seems to speak

Hermeneutical thinking in general is focused on the human being “hearkening” to other human beings and engaging in “dialogue,” in good faith, in the pursuit of a (finite and fragile) shared understanding. Yet Heidegger is clear in this lecture course (and in many other places) that our legein, our “gathering” (the “knowing” and “wisdom” spoken of in Heraclitus’s sayings), is first and foremost a matter of the silent (and obedient) hearkening to “the voice” of Being as the primordial Logos, “the primordial fore-gathering” (242–6, 383). It would seem, then, that from his perspective the primary focus in Hermeneutics on “dialogue” among human beings (as constitutive and important as this surely is) is misplaced because such conversation cannot have the proper depth and discovery unless we have first listened attentively to the “saying” of the Being-way itself. It is our attunement to Being that matters in the first place, and – let us put this plainly – this does not require social or communal discourse. As he remarks in the lecture course, our “highest possible relation” is with Being, a relation that “grounds all other human relations to human beings and to things” (294). For the later Heidegger in particular, the rich solitude of silent listening to Being-physis-Logos as it unfolds is the primary way. Yet paradoxically, it is also the way that leads to perhaps the richest kind of community – the “community” of all mortals and beings and things as they come forth from out of the Being-way and go forth the same way. Arriving, lingering, departing; everything “breathing in and out.” We might add, and only gently so, that this meditative way appears to be increasingly lost or forgotten in the contemporary world, not only in our intensely “connected” culture, but also in the various recent versions of hermeneutical thinking that focus almost exclusively on the linguistic, the social, and the political.

[…] We may move closer to Heidegger’s way of thinking by considering the ways of those who have been imbued with a deep reverence for Nature, someone like the great American naturalist John Muir:

When one is alone at night in the depths of these woods, the stillness is at once awful and sublime. Every leaf seems to speak.

Every leaf seems to speak. In stillness, we “hear” the leaf and the flower, the wind and the rain, the sun and the moon “speaking.” Muir’s words resonate with us, but more often than not our way to a fuller understanding and appreciation of them is blocked because we are so accustomed in the contemporary world to think that the human being is the source and measure of all “saying.”

— Capobianco, Heidegger’s Way of Being

Like a python swallowing a pig

For skandinaviske laesere: Essays af Alexander Carnera

‘Being is still waiting for the time when It itself will become thought-provoking to the human being.’

— Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’ (tr. Capuzzi)

Objectifying

Our everyday experience of things, in the wider sense of the word, is neither objectifying nor a placing over against. When, for example, we sit in the garden and take delight in a blossoming rose, we don’t make an object of the rose, nor do we even make it something standing over against us in the sense of something represented thematically. When in tacit saying we’re enthralled with the lucid red of the rose and muse on the redness of the rose, then this redness is neither an object nor a thing nor something standing over against us like the blossoming rose. The rose stands in the garden, perhaps sways to and fro in the wind. But the redness of the rose neither stands in the garden nor can it sway to and fro in the wind. All the same we think it and tell of it by naming it. There is accordingly a thinking and saying that in no manner objectifies or places things over against us.

Heidegger, ‘Phenomenology and Theology, Some Pointers with Regard to the Second Theme’, tr. Hart and Moraldo

Øjeblikket

For skandinaviske læsere: min bog Øjeblikket er udkommet på dansk ved Det Poetiske Bureau.

Beskrivelse

Peter Holm Jensen er noget så sjældent som en dansk forfatter der har fået sit gennembrud på engelsk og derfor nu er blevet oversat til dansk af Alexander Carnera, med støtte fra Statens Kunstfond. Løsningen på gåden er at Holm Jensen er et ægte verdensbarn vokset op i Tanzania, Canada, Indonesien og Danmark – og som senest har boet mange år i Norfolk, England, hvor han har ernæret sig som oversætter, fra hvilken periode hans debut, dagbogsromanen Øjeblikket (en. The Moment) om en freelanceoversætter der flytter på landet, stammer.

Øjeblikket er en dagbog over et dybsindigt og bevægende foretagende; forsøget på at genskabe troen på livet gennem det at skrive. Idet han reflekterer over hverdagslivet på bøhlandet i Norfolk såvel som over nogle af de seneste århundreders righoldigste litterære, filosofiske og teologiske idéer, søger fortælleren at arbejde sig ud over sin fortid ved at åbne sig for det ukendte, og måske for det evige… Dette er en visdomsbog, tyst og intim, som det vil betale sig at kontemplere koncentreret over.”

— Lars Iyer, forfatter til Spurious-trilogien, Wittgenstein Jr og Nietzsche and the Burbs  

Peter Holm Jensen, Øjeblikket, paperback, 138 sider, udgivet 2022, støttet af Statens Kunstfond

A text from a friend

‘Well, I don’t have that temperament either. Nevertheless I can see what’s needed, and the thinking we have to get away from. I think poetry, literature and thought can show a kind of “world birth” in the midst of this apocalypse. They can reveal our connectedness – and that’s also a kind of ‘community’, isn’t it? I see our time as the age of the apocalypse, not in a Christian sense, but apocalypse understood as revelation: everything is being revealed in these times, stripped naked so the ugly sides are really allowed to shine. I see this as an absolute necessity – The Great Undressing – for us to progress at all in our development as humanity. That’s why I’m not depressed about the “current situation”. Actually, it’s a positive thing, since all births are hard, I suppose not least ‘world births’. This age of the apocalypse is the time when things are revealed anew. The earth trembles, we tremble, especially the sensitive, seismographically oriented thinking person, but unfortunately not most people. They behave as usual, as if nothing’s happened. As if they’ve come to terms with their comforts and technological devices, as if things can’t be different, as if they live in the last times. But unlike the early Christians, for whom time itself was about to end, and who felt doubt and worry and sadness about their time – but also hope for something other, some new coming – the neo-liberalist approach is to put plasters on everything: it’s all patchwork, not an actual world birth or world event or transformation, just more of the same. Artists and thinkers nowadays work under the sign of Crisis. The awareness of crisis calls for new images, other narratives, other forms; other signposts and torchbearers in the dark. The overhanging prospect of collapse is a crisis that exposes the hegemony and limitations of the whole matrix of Western, Christian, capitalist-industrial civilization. We’re facing a spiritual crisis that requires a different description of reality. And in an apocalyptic time, it’s art that can help give birth to new worlds.’

Det Vanskabte Land

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