indirect-blow:

My brother wants to watch Andrei Rublev with me

I won

cherish your brother, my brother just texted me the plot of raiders of the lost ark in his own words (fratbrospeak)

pureamericanism:

pureamericanism:

Regarding this post: I said “since Sunday,” because on Sunday I read Stephen J. Pyne’s The Ice Inferno, and there is very little that is more Lovecraftian that Pyne’s writings on Antarctica. 

Some quotes:

Antarctica is a place only an intellectual could love. The further one moves into the interior, away from the coast and storms and marine life that tenuously valence with the Earth, the more dominant the ice and the more extraterrestrial the surroundings. The commonsense perspective of ordinary people is that there is ‘nothing there’, and they are almost right. Even scientists in keen pursuit of data, precious by being rare — our age’s equivalent to the spice and bullion that inflamed early explorers — find Dome C extreme. […]

Consider the geographic facts: Dome C is an infinitesimal rise in the East Antarctic plateau, atop 14,500 foot of ice that extends outward hundreds of miles. There is little else. This is the most singular environment on Earth, a synthesis of the huge with the simple. Space and time dissolve. The cycle of days and those of seasons collapse into a single spiral. The energy budget is always negative; none during the dark season, reflected away during the light. There is no life. There is nothing to live on. Here is Dante’s imagined innermost circle of hell as an inferno of ice. Here is the Earth’s underworld.

It is a scene of absences and abstractions. There are no mountains, valleys, rivers, shores; no forests, prairies, tide pools, corn and cotton fields, sun-baked deserts; no hurricanes, no floods, no earthquakes, no fires. The only contrast is between an ice-massed land and an ice-saturated sky. The descending ice that links them — the ultimate source of the dome — has the purity of triple-distilled water. Yet it too, as with everything else, simplifies into its most primordial elements, as snowflakes crumble and fall as an icy dust. There is no centre and no edge. There is no near or far; no east or west; no real here or there. Words, too, shrink and freeze, as language and ideas shrivel into monosyllables: ice, snow, dark, sky, blue, star, cloud, white, wind, moon, light, flake, cold.

Consider what that does to experience, to mind, to self. Like the flakes disintegrated into slivers of crystal, a mounding of ice dust, the self disaggregates. Your self is not an essence, but the compounding sum of your connections, like snowflakes elaborating uniquely. At Dome C every particle of ice is identical.

[…]

Across the Barrier, in the interior of the continent, life ends. It can exist for skuas only by flying over and back to the sea, or for humans, by sledging in and returning. The Ice beyond is a wholly abiotic environment. Its energy flux is ever negative, it lacks flowing water, it is void of nutrients. There are not even rocks that might, in principle, disintegrate into a substratum of raw elements. One molecule dominates — hydrogen dioxide. There is one unblinking scene — a sheet of ice. Oxygen abounds, so one can breathe, but there is nothing else to support organisms. People can live only through umbilical cords and IV drips to a sustaining society well beyond the reach of the ice. Left to itself, life feeds off itself, and then shrivels.

The ice sheets are acultural, too. There is no basis beyond the Barrier for norms of social behaviour or sources of knowledge, other than those we import. There is no prospect for an Antarctic explorer to recapitulate Alexander von Humboldt’s ecstatic contact with the Venezuelan jungle, picking up one new specimen, only to drop it for another, and another. There is no engagement with indigenous peoples as guides, interpreters, and collectors, or any means to go native and immerse oneself into another moral universe. To reach the North Pole in 1909, Robert Peary adapted Inuit sledges and dogs, and relied on native sledders; to reach the South Pole in 1912, Robert Scott’s Polar Party pulled their own sledges.

[…]

The classic photography of Antarctica is thus not a photography of the source but of the Barrier — the edge, where ice meets sea, rock, and sky, where life pokes and flaps and swims, where things move and sounds echo. Beyond the Barrier lies a nature like a modernist painting; abstract, conceptual, minimal. The literature of Antarctica is likewise not a record of social exchange or innovation or surprise but a chronicle of diaries and soliloquies, the self withdrawn, drafting from its own reserves for its sustenance, like a camel on its hump. It thrives on whatever it has stocked from elsewhere. Over and again, literature recycles the same stories: those Antarctic archetypes are not only all that exists but perhaps all that can exist. The opportunities for endless variants simply aren’t present. Instead, imaginative literature turns to fantasy and science fiction, a realm beyond reason and empiricism, a dominion as intrinsically blank as the ice sheet. What the ice has done to landscape, it does to society, and hence to the social imagination of art. All that remains are ideas.

thank you, @strikegentlyco

bacchustrismegistus:

Learning about Jewish mysticism is like sitting in math class. I’m too Aryan for this shit.

i have the power (autism)

personalgrowthforsale:

Haters will see you and start running because you’re strong and powerful and brave and ready to be extremely violent in broad daylight

(via astraldeterminism-deactivated20)

@worldhistoricalgroundzero sent me the best christmas card ever 

bacchustrismegistus:

slaughterjew:

“Do not seek to penetrate the thoughts of the mysterious head. Its intimate thoughts are hidden, but its exterior, creative thoughts shine forth like a head of hair. White hair without shadow and whose strands are never tangled.

Each strand is a thread of light attached to millions of worlds. The hairs are divided at the forehead and descend on either side; but each side is the right side. For in the divine image which constitutes this head of light, the left side has no place.

The left side of the head of light is the dark head, for in traditional symbolism, the lower reaches are the equivalent of the left.

Now, between the heights and the depths of the image of God there must be no more antagonism than between the left hand and right hand of man, since harmony results from the analogy or opposites.”

– The Idra Suta or The Great Synod, commentary on the Siphra Dzeniuta by Simeon Ben-Jochai