Mandate of Heaven
Connor Campbell
“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. […] He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”
- BLAISE PASCAL
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At the end of their track ‘Made Me Realize’, the band My Bloody Valentine flies into what is called the Holocaust section[1]. The screeching guitars become fuzzed out beyond recognizability, all instruments swirl and meld together in the same wall of noise. Drones and oscillations and feedback blurs into an amorphous beast that works its way through the audience. Pushing through all, flooding every crevice, the entire crowd falls in on itself, the ego collapses into Godhead.
Disruption:
wherein the metaphysical moves its ephemeral hand and grasps the material.
Ripping and tearing at the cotton-thin fabric of reality,
resulting in penetration.
Rupture.
How can you go back to who you were when you realize what you are. When you’ve come face to face with the
sublime?
When the emptiness of everything casts itself over you and everything you know.
THIRST FOR ANNHILATION
whether through:\\
drugs
sex
loud music
we try to cast off our shell
(self)
despite this, there’s a difference between the willing resignation of identity, and having it forcefully jerked from possession.
The beast consumes,
the sun is not known merely for sustaining itself on helium, it's known for its expansion, for the light that floods the land, that feeds the crops and supplies man and beast with life and light.
[It giveth]
eclipse = definition by way of subtraction,
all that is seen is, for a brief moment, wiped from the face of the earth, through negation, one finds out what they are:
A small cog in a monolithic machine they can barely get a glimpse of.
TO LOOK UPON THE SUN IS TO BECOME WITNESS[ED]
TO LOOK UPON THE SUN IS TO BE TRANSFORMED
Bataille writes about
Gaston F
after staring into the sun,
the man promptly
wrapped his teeth around
his index finger before
sinking
them in and
severing
connection.
[ EXPENDITURE-EGO_DISOLUSSION-DIVINITY ]
The sun disrupts on its own time, consuming the space around it and expending pure heat, it gives life and melts flesh in equal measure. Proximity to sublimity renders reality gnawed. Once one is introduced to existential disruption very rarely is returning an option.
One enters into a position
of religious ecstasy.
When the borders of the body make themselves known it’s hard to become unaware of such things.
WHERE DOES A BODY END?
under totality
all is pushed
into the same melting pot
of
blackened
sludge,
one
loses focus on physical borders.
The world becomes one shrieking mass.
Superego-Blowout
In ancient China, the Mandate of Heaven was a cultural philosophy that helped determine how well a dynasty was functioning,
Its other function was to
foretell when a revolt
should re-render the dynasty.
Once the dragon swallows the sun, the land swallows its tyrant.
The disruption on its own has a
momentary effect on the people,
but the rupture itself is not
merely forgotten, the ripple
spreads out, affecting not only
the water's surface,
but the body itself
It is hard not to feel like the world
is
collapsing
in
on
itself,
as if the arc of the universe
bends
towards
oblivion.
[1] From Greek Holokautein, or ‘Burnt Offering’, wherein the sacrifice is completely consumed by fire. Nothing is left.