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What is the point? What is the point of Barbelith?
This is a question that has been buzzing and arcing around my head continually for days now. I get the feeling that a lot of you may not like my answer. I am going to get shot down for this. But, please, bear with me while I ramble.
In many ways The Invisibles still fundamentally defines and informs the flavour of the place. I mean it bloody well has to as its original inspiration. Which leads me to suspect that Tom may possibly be considering cutting its ties with the now defunct comic. To lead us on a new path of birth and rebirth. And what would we gain and what would we lose by this action?
Did The Invisibles mean anything to you? What did it say and how does that affect the content of the site? For me The Invisibles was a comic that was centred around hope. It was, like Grant, almost unassailably optimistic. Like Terence McKenna's theories it relied on a feeling of an impending armageddon, of an eschaton. And the fact that this apocalypse was sending ripples backwards through time, that 'history is the shockwave of the eschaton' (in McKenna's words) and that those with the capability to do so (whether by trance states or meditation, by prayer or fasting or magic or music or psychedelic states or sunspots or astrology or cultural observation or whatever fucking path suits you) could pick up clues as to the nature of this event, this dwell point, this omega point. And moreover that history moves in cycles, in revolutions so that it becomes evident that this is not an ending, this is a change. And that we, that is, all of us define the nature of that change. It seems to me that the new world was created and the Archon defeated via a huge sea change in culture, by the fusion with the Supercontext, by the redefinition of the concept of self, by the narrative, by words. King Mob's bullet wasn't even a fucking bullet, it was a little flag with the word 'POP' (with all its multi-layered meanings) written on it for fuck's sake! But I'm pointing out the obvious.
Now whatever you think of Morrison or McKenna or Castenata or Dick or Crowley or whoever, what we have here is a very interesting melange. We got the shamans and the chaos magicians and the wiccans and the faithful on The Magick getting down and dirty and dabbling with reality, subjective or not. We got the activists and the sociologists and the social anthropologists and the media buffs picking apart the memes and the movements on The Switchboard. We got the philosophers and the political theorists and the social scientists and the lit crits ripping at the very foundations of language and perception on The Head Shop. And we got those wacky science guys in The Laboratory showing us the possibility that the brain can make changes on the quantum level, that because quantum particles have an indeterminate state until trapped for observation that we may well live in a multiverse, that we only see one observable state of reality at a time, that the very foundations of physics, those Universal Constants may have fucking well changed, that mathematics has huge holes in it, unknowable values that are unknowable because of the very nature of mathematics itself, that reality is a four dimensional crystal growing in a five dimensional liquid...
And we mix it all with a liberal dose of music and pop culture and sex and drugs and fun.
So to me this site is very much about hope and possibility and change. That the revolutions that were discussed were about hippy/punk/rave, romanticism/relativism/nihilism, that they were conceptual and creative in origin. That there's another one due soon. That we can be part of its creation. Nihilism is dead. When Nietzsche warned us about that big old abyss gazing back into us he failed to notice that the universe is not an abyss; sure there's a lot of black, but it's punctuated by more galaxies than there are grains of sand on the entire earth, that there are six billion individual human worlds on this planet and that they are all continually interacting. That we are not simply the prey of the corporations and the governments but that we change the world we move through in whatever tiny way. That we are all charged potentials of interacting information rushing forward through time. Art, technology, music, language changes things.
So, go on. You know you want it. Say it.
Say you want it.
[ 31-08-2001: Message edited by: ephemerat ] |
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