Watching The Detectives Part 3: No Noose is Good Nous

The Hanged Man of the Thoth Tarot still symbolizes the descent of the light into the darkness in order to redeem it, but the word "redeem" no longer implies an existing debt that needs to be paid.  Instead, redemption in the Aeon of Horus is the noble duty of the enlightened to bring enlightenment to the unenlightened.

Lon Milo Duquette

The Hanged Man:  Noose

"I saw you in my dream.  You're a priest too.  I know what happens next, you're in Carcosa now."

Reggie Ledoux

In the Old Aeon of Osiris, The Hanged Man represented the dying God, the formula of the crucified Christ, signifying sacrifice and redemption.  

"I contemplate the moment in the Garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion."

Cohle

Lon Milo Duquette writes that "the gesture of Sacrificial Suicide is not only obsolete, it is counterproductive".  This is what keeps Cohle asleep at night:  not only will suicide not work, it is a step backward.  He has no choice but to forge ahead.

The Yellow King:  Nous


In the New Aeon of Horus, The Hanged Man is a card of sacrifice and duty.  On the Tree of Life, The Hanged Man falls on the 23rd Path, that of Mem, the path of the mystic, the annihilation of self.   This is not a journey to the great beyond, but rather a journey inward.

Mem-Brain Theory

We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, this accretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each 
somebody when, in fact, everybody's nobody.

Cohle

The formula of the old Aeon is LVX as found concealed within the keywords INRI-IAO… LVX, lux, the Light of the Cross: the dying and resurrecting god-trip, which formerly opened the Gates to the Temple of Initiation, as seen in the Adeptus Minor ritual of the Golden Dawn. It has been superseded by a new formula: NOX, the Dark Night of the Soul, the Night of Pan…

L.V.X.

“The Night of Pan is the Annihilation of All.”

Further still…

“This is the Night wherein I am lost, the Love through which I am no longer I”

Beth Kimbell

Along the shore the cloud waves break,

The twin suns sink behind the lake,

The shadows lengthen

In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,

And strange moons circle through the skies,

But stranger still is

Lost Carcosa.

"You're a Priest too."

Redemption is a bad word; it implies a debt.  For every star possesses boundless wealth; the only proper way to deal with the ignorant is to bring them to the knowledge of their starry heritage.  To do this, it is necessary to behave as must be done in order to get on good terms with animals and children: to treat them with the absolute respect; even, in a certain sense, with worship.  Note on the Precession of Aeons:  "The Hanged Man" is an invention of the Adepts of INRI-IAO formula; in the Aeon previous to the Osirian, that of Isis (water), he is "The Drowned Man".

Aleister Crowley

Watching The Detectives Part 2: Form and Void

"People out here, it's like they don't even know the outside world exists.  Might as well be living on the moon."
"Can I ask you something?  Are you Christian?"

"No."

"Well then what do you got that cross up there in your apartment?"
"That's a form of meditation."
"How's that."
"I contemplate the moment in the Garden, the idea of allowing your own crucifixion."
"But you're not a Christian.  So what do you believe?"
"I believe people shouldn't talk about this shit at work."

"I tell what I have seen and what I believe; and whoever shall say that I have not seen what I have seen, I now tear off his head.  For I am an unpardonable Brute, and it will be thus until Time is no longer Time.  Neither Heaven nor Hell, if they exist, can do anything against this brutality which they have imposed on me, perhaps so that I may serve them….Who knows?  

In any case, in order to lacerate me.

What exists, I see with certainty.  What does not exist, I shall create, if I must."

Antonin Artaud

HBO's True Detective premiered on January 12, 2014, 42 days before the 25th anniversary of Laura Palmer's death on February 24th, 1989.  This is appropriate because True Detective works like the magical child of David Lynch's strange and mystifying masterpiece.  And just like Twin Peaks, everything that happens in True Detective takes place within a dream.  A nightmare.

The mystery before us then is whose dream is it?

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake

James Joyce

Why should I live in history, huh? Fuck, I don't want to know anything anymore.
This is a world where nothing is solved.  Someone once told me, "Time is a flat circle.
Everything we've ever done or will do we're gonna do over and over and over again."   

Rustin Cohle

in eternity, where there is no time, nothing can grow.  Nothing can become.
Nothing changes.
So death created time to grow the things that it would kill and you are reborn but into the same life that you've always been born into.  I mean, how many times have we had this conversation, detectives? Well, who knows? When you can't remember your lives, you can't change your lives, and that is the terrible and the secret fate of all life.  You're trapped by that nightmare you keep waking up into.    

Rustin Cohle

In 1995, a young woman is found murdered, and two CID homicide detectives are called in to investigate a crime scene that suggests ritualistic intent.  The case of Dora Kelly Lange is officially opened.

Our first clue that we are in fact in the world of the dream is that the case of D. Kelly Lange is reopened 17 years later.  This not only mirrors the 17 years it took James Joyce to write his epic book of dreams Finnegans Wake, it also mirrors the structure of the book, as the final sentence on the last exhausting page of FW does not bring closure, it simply reopens.

Coincidence?  

Our second clue is embedded in the title of the first episode,  "The Long Bright Dark".  This is a pretty decent description of a dream.  It also includes the last name of our victim, as "Lange" is German for "long".  "The Lange Bright Dark", maybe this is simply Lange's dream (maybe TP was Laura's dream?).  If I was murdered, I would hope that my life warranted a thorough investigation, and that brave individuals would risk their lives to bring my killer to justice.  Let's look a little closer before we close this case.

Our next clue is the spiral symbol painted on the body of the deceased.

Grand Guignol

Where else have we seen that symbol?

Log Boy

The spiral symbol painted on the body is the same spiral symbol we find in front of another haunted detective (also hunting an underground chemist), and is utilized as a kind of logo for the 'Pataphysics of Alfred Jarry.

This term 'Pataphysics first appears within the text of Jarry's play Guignol, and the most direct definition is "that which is above metaphysics" (or shit you don't talk about at work).  The killer's use of the symbol is odd.  The murder scene suggests the use of sympathetic magic, a work that is "below metaphysics" (below not in a critical sense, but in a directional dense).  Something very bi-polar is going on here.

From Antonin Artaud's The Alfred Jarry Theater:

Our inability to believe, to accept illusion, is immense.  Dramatic ideas no longer have for us the brilliance, the bite, that quality of something unique, unprecedented, whole, that continue to characterize certain ideas in literature or painting.  The moment we introduce this idea of pure theater and try to give it concrete form, one of the first questions we must face is the question whether we will be able to find an audience capable of giving us the necessary minimum of confidence and trust, capable, in short, of joining forces with us.  For, unlike writers, or painters, we cannot do without an audience; indeed, the audience becomes an integral part of our undertaking.

To entertain pataphysically, to take an audience's thinking beyond metaphysics, requires an absolute shit-ton of confidence.  This is why I consider David Lynch to be the consummate pataphysician of our time.  He bravely recognized that the American television audience was ready for the pataphysical mind-fuck of Twin Peaks (bi-polarity) in 1990.  If True Detective really is the magical child of Lynch, it makes sense then, at least for me, that the best way to approach True Detective is pataphysically.  Like a true detective.

In The Alfred Jarry Theater, Artaud insists that the audience plays an integral role in the success of the show.  He demands that for the theater to work, there must exist at least a "minimum of confidence and trust" within the audience.  The bare miminum of this confidence and trust is represented in the character of Detective Martin Hart.  His shallow, hypocritical defense of the sanctity of marriage and his eye-rolling disdain for anything beyond his ken will clearly not solve the case, but his participation is still essential.  As much as they would like to believe, pataphysician's do not exist within a void, even they require someone with heart, someone a little more grounded in "reality" to make sure that they don't go too far off the rails, and Woody fulfills his role admirably.

The person closest to our Tall Man, our true detective, is the one with the tall boy, a Lone Star trekking across the desert abyss with his trusty Camel.

"I don't sleep.  I just dream."

Detective Rustin Cohle can't sleep.  He can't sleep because he already knows he is in a dream ("a jury rig of presumption and dumb will . . . it was all . . . a dream you had inside a locked room.  A dream about being a person").   He continues to search for clues because he isn't quite sure the dream is his or the killer's, or someone else entirely.  If he was sure it was his dream, he would just put a bullet in his head and end it.  But if it is indeed the killer's dream, a bullet in his head won't solve a thing.  The nightmare won't end until he puts a bullet in the killer's head.

As Cohle searches for the killer, we realize what he is really searching for is salvation.  Not the kind that is promised by ordinary metaphysics, and not the kind delivered by sympathetic magic, but the kind that promises the total annihilation of doubt.  The answer not to "what?" but to "why?".

We are told that you're supposed to fit your experience into the model which science gives you, which is probabilistic, statistical, predictable, and yet it's…..The felt datum of experience is much more literary than that.  I mean we fall in love, make and lose fortunes, we inherit houses in Scotland, we lose everything, we get terrible diseases, we're cured of them, or we die of them, but it all has this sturm und drang aspect to it that physics is not supposed to have but which literature always has and I think, I don't know if it's true, but what I think Joyce believed and what I'm willing to entertain at some depth is the idea that salvation is somehow an act of encompassing comprehension.  That salvation is an actual act of apprehension of understanding.  And that this act of apprehension involves everything.

Terence McKenna

Dale Cooper played the role of our true detective in TP.  He spent two seasons searching for the killer of a young woman.

Salvation?

There was also a physician in TP, Dr. Lawrence Jacobi, played by Russ Tamblyn.  

RussT.

It is no coincidence that Dr. Jacobi looks like Terence Mckenna, because the character was based on Terence McKenna.  McKenna is most widely known for his views on psychedelic drugs, but for those who really spend time with his work, you will find him to be one of the more astute pataphysicians around.  His examinations of Joyce, coincidence, and the plain old weird happenings of life in the twentieth century led him to a pretty bold conclusion:

I think that the whole of the twentieth century is informed by this hyper-dimensional understanding, and that, you know, Jung tapping into it in the twenties, the Dadaists in 1919 in Zurich, the surrealists, even earlier the Ecole de Pataphysique, Lautréamont, Jarry, all of these people…it’s what it’s about.  

Terence McKenna

We are asleep in a nightmare called history.  We will never achieve wake up until we solve the mystery before us, until we catch the killer whose crimes keep happening over and over and over again.  Joyce, Lynch, McKenna, and now Nic Pizzolatto, are compelling us to join forces with them, because even they can't do it all by themselves.

A.A.:  Lone Star In Sight

For a long time I have felt the Void, but I have refused to throw myself into the Void.  I have been as cowardly as all that I see.  When I believed that I was denying this world, I know now that I was denying the Void.  For I know that this world does not exist and I know how it does not exist.  What I have suffered from until now is having denied the Void.  The Void which was already within me.

Antonin Artaud

"You ever heard of something called membrane theory, detectives?" 

 "It's like, in this universe, we process time linearly.  Forward. But outside of our space-time, from what would be a fourth-dimensional perspective, time wouldn't exist. And from that vantage, could we attain it, we'd see our space-time look flattened, like a seamless sculpture. Matter in a super-position—every place it ever occupied. Our sentience just cycling through our lives like carts on a track. See, everything outside our dimension—that's eternity. Eternity looking down on us. Now, to us, it's a sphere. But to them, it's a circle."

Meta-Memetic Mamafesto

William S. Burroughs was scheduled to give a lecture at a small college in the midwest just before he died.  He was rather ill, and unfortunately had to cancel.  Thankfully some notes scribbled down for that lecture survived and have recently been floating around on the Internet in some of the more obscure corners of 4chan and other weirdo blogs.

The theme of the lecture was to be the Immediacy of Writing.  Burroughs has often stated in the past that "Writing is remembering accurately," alluding to the fact that writing exists solely in the past.  To be more explicit, he states "Writing will never catch up to the present".  Despite this reality, Burroughs felt it shouldn't keep us from trying.

"There is music in the written word, an improvisationally erect tone, but it has been choked off by an unknown extraterrestrial viral infection."

One way to effect a cure is the cut-up technique, a unique and extremely powerful attempt to heal the sickness.   But it is such a fragile technique that it quickly falls apart if abused.  In the mid nineties Burroughs became intrigued by the emergence of the Internet and it's ability to "cut-up" the globe, offering "meatier ribs" for reanimating if not capturing the elusive present.  He envisioned the evolution of a cybernetic window into the trending present, where the dominant memetic winds of the whole globe could intersect in one plane.  The applications of this window were limitless in his estimation, affording anyone the uncanny ability to forecast and resculpt the present moment at will.  He then suggested that no intelligent government would ever allow this "wishing machine gone wild" to fall into the hands of the populace.

Obviously this "wishing machine gone wild" now exists.  Just how powerful it can be and just how long it will remain is not yet known.

"So ya thought ya might like to go to the show?"

The above is a screen capture of the top ten "trending" memes on Yahoo as of 1:30 pm on January 21, 2014.  Amazingly, Burroughs lecture notes also allude to a foreseeable "top-ten list", and includes many techniques to achieve the temporal transcendence possible with such meta-materia.  Suggestions include weaving together all ten memes into a short story written within one hour (suggested time limit by Burroughs), sigilizing the totality, or assigning Tarot cards to each meme through an obscure process that was unfortunately left out of the notes.  These are a few of the more specific applications, but I'm sure Burroughs would invite a healthy bit of improvising in this area.

Does it work?  This is the wrong question.   From my own personal experience, how soon does it work and how strong is the result is is a much better query.  My personal advice for approaching this work for the first time is to do either one of two things:  set a specific target date and time in which to capture your trends or try to forget you ever read this post and then wait for that particular type of energized inspiration that only arises at the most curious of hours.  Lucky for you, the materia will be ready and waiting.  Be ready to attack the work with intention and focus.  And make sure you have a strong sense of humor. 

Nu-Beta Blues Part 4: Chymical Empire

Blue meth is literally IN the fast food.  Ricin is literally IN the cigarette.  The gun is literally IN the Coca-Cola.  What is this saying?

If I abused Heisenberg’s blue meth, smoking, snorting, or shooting it several times a day, it is pretty much guaranteed that my physical and mental health would go to shit.

If I abuse fast food, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola, eating, smoking, and drinking them several times a day, it is pretty much guaranteed that my physical and mental health would go to shit too.   But there's a huge difference between smoking blue meth and eating fast food, right?

Heisenberg's product is addictive, meaning users of his product are technically victims.  They are helpless to stop using once the drug enters their body, once it affects their brain.  Once it takes over their mind.  This is why meth, which used to be LEGAL, is now ILLEGAL.

Fast food, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola are LEGAL because they are not addictive (well, cigarettes are addictive).  But processed junk foods high in salt and fat and beverages loaded with high fructose corn syrup aren't, right?  Because if they were, they wouldn't be LEGAL, would they?  

What if we found out that consuming fast food, cigarettes, and Coca-Cola had a synergistic affect?  What if when all three were consumed, they became as addictive and damaging to your mental and physical health as blue meth?  If this was true, would we make sure they become ILLEGAL too?  

The empire business sure has a lot of competition.  And really, who wants to live in a world without Coca-Cola?  Or diabetes, heart disease, obesity.  And cancer.

Cereal Killer/Gateway Drug

Alamagordo, NM:  Da Bomb

Nu-Beta Blues: Through a Glass Grade Darkly

"Break, break, break

At the foot of thy stones, O Sea!

And I would that I could utter

The thoughts that arise in me!"

52

{Kappa-Epsilon-Phi-Alpha-Lambda-Eta Nu-Beta}

THE BULL-BAITING

Fourscore and eleven books wrote I; in each did I

expound THE GREAT WORK fully, from The

beginning even unto The End thereof.

Then at last came certain men unto me, saying:

O Master!  Expound thou THE GREAT WORK

unto us, O Master!

And I held my peace.

O generation of gossipers!  who shall deliver you

from the Wrath that is fallen upon you?

O Babblers, Prattlers, Talkers, Loquacious Ones,

Tatlers, Chewers of the Red Rag that inflameth

Apis the Redeemer to fury, learn first what is

Work!  and THE GREAT WORK is not so far

beyond!

[114]

COMMENTARY ({Nu-Beta})

52 is BN, the number of the Son, Osiris-Apis, the

Redeemer, with whom the Master (Fra. P.) identifies

himself.  he permits himself for a moment the pleasure

of feeling his wounds; and, turning upon his generation,

gores it with his horns.

The fourscore-and-eleven books do not, we think,

refer to the ninety-one chapters of this little master-

piece, or even to the numerous volumes he has penned,

but rather to the fact that 91 is the number of Amen,

implying the completeness of his work.

99.1 %

In the last paragraph is a paranomasia.  "To chew

the red rag" is a phrase for to talk aimlessly and per-

sistently, while it is notorious that a red cloth will excite

the rage of a bull.

The Book of Lies

35 + 56

As Leon’s interrogation continues, Holden poses to him a scenario, “You’re in a desert. You’re walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise…” Leon interrupts with questions like, “Which desert?” and “How come I be there?” To his first question, Holden answers, “It doesn’t matter”, pointing to the truth that there is only one desert, the vast expanse that separates Tiphareth from Keter, along which the 13th path of wisdom runs. To Leon’s second question, the blade runner replies, “Maybe you’re fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself”, alluding to the environmental prompting that drives consciousness across that expanse to Keter. This “wanting to be by your Self” is the chief motivator for all actions.

The Blade Runner Bible

The phrase, “Early in the 21st Century” provides us with a clue. Tarot Key 21 is The World in most tarot decks. Aleister Crowley names it The Aeon. It symbolizes the cosmic mind forever dancing at the heart of creation, but it also signifies the entirety of our age, our eon. Identification with this cosmic mind is often referred to as enlightenment, though this rude generalization hardly addresses the nuance of identification with the Cosmos itself. So it is that our story is one of ancient origins. It occurs early in the life of the Universal Mind.

The Blade Runner Bible

21 Days

Through a glass grade darkly…

51

{Kappa-Epsilon-Phi-Alpha-Lambda-Eta Nu-Alpha}

TERRIER-WORK

Doubt.

Doubt thyself.

Doubt even if thou doubtest thyself.

Doubt all.

Doubt even if thou doubtest all.

It seems sometimes as if beneath all conscious doubt

there lay some deepest certainty.  O kill it!  Slay the

snake!

The horn of the Doubt-Goat be exalted

Dive deeper, ever deeper, into the Abyss of Mind,

until thou unearth the fox THAT.  On, hounds!

Yoicks!  Tally-ho!  Bring THAT to bay!

Then, wind the Mort!

[112]

COMMENTARY ({Nu-Alpha})

The number 51 means failure and pain, and its

subject is appropriately doubt.

The title of the chapter is borrowed from the health-

giving and fascinating sport of fox-hunting, which

Frater Perdurabo followed in his youth.

This chapter should be read in connection with "The

Soldier and the Hunchback" of which it is in some sort

an epitome.

Its meaning is sufficiently clear, but in paragraphs

6 and 7 it will be noticed that the identification of the

Soldier with the Hunchback has reached such a pitch

that the symbols are interchanged, enthusiasm being

represented as the sinuous snake, scepticism as the

Goat of the Sabbath.  In other words, a state is reached

in which destruction is as much joy as creation.

(Compare Chapter 46.)

Beyond that is a still deeper state of mind, which is

THAT.

The Book Of Lies

I am the Snake that giveth Knowledge & Delight and bright glory, and stir the hearts of men with drunkenness. To worship me take wine and strange drugs whereof I will tell my prophet, & be drunk thereof! They shall not harm ye at all. It is a lie, this folly against self. The exposure of innocence is a lie. Be strong, o man! lust, enjoy all things of sense and rapture: fear not that any God shall deny thee for his.

Liber AL vel Legis

LoG Lit 🔥