Meltdown Bhāṣya: Verse 1.1.1 (Part 11)

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Let us now return to the four principles of libidinal materialism. As we have seen, Land’s philosophy is, in many ways, contrary to any system of thought or belief ever held by any human society, including ours. At last we will wrestle with how, if at all, we can implement and incorporate the pillars of Land’s philosophy into our own approach to the world. To expand on the four principles of libidinal materialism we listed earlier, let us turn to what Land (1992b) says is in the preface to TFA:

“There is one simple criterion of taste in philosophy: that one avoid the vulgarity of anthropomorphism. It is by failing here that one comes to side with cages. The specifics follow straightforwardly:

1 Thoroughgoing dehumanization of nature, involving the uttermost impersonalism in the explanation of natural forces, and vigorously atheological cosmology. No residue of prayer. An instinctive fastidiousness in respect to all the traces of human personality, and the treatment of such as the excrement of matter; as its most ignoble part, its gutter . . .

2 Ruthless fatalism. No space for decisions, responsibilities, actions, intentions. Any appeal to notions of human freedom discredits a philosopher beyond amelioration.

3 Hence absence of all moralizing, even the crispest, most Aristotelian. The penchant for correction, let alone vengefulness, pins one in the shallows.

4 Contempt for common evaluations; one should even take care to avoid straying accidentally into the right. Even to be an enemy is too comforting; one must be an alien, a beast. Nothing is more absurd than a philosopher seeking to be liked.” (p. xx)

Let us address each of these tenets in turn.

1. We all ought to have learnt by now that this world does not exist to satisfy our whims. It is only a cold and detached sense of analysis that can help us come to terms with our situation.

This does not, however, necessitate an absolute impersonalism of nature or desire, but a qualified one. There are certain natural forces that have become immanentized in human form as a result of what is perhaps the natural process par excellence: Saṁsāra-Kāma. As we have said earlier, the human is essentially ‘walking dirt’ — all the more so when it has lost the inspiration breathed into it by Jupiter. As such, any “traces of human personality” implicit in such foes is but a leftover excrescence of matter that must be accounted for abstractly and unemotionally on our part until it truly does become an “instinctive fastidiousness” that can be summed up as a simple maxim:

दस्यवे त्रासः | आर्याय विश्वम्

There are two meanings we should take from the phrase “vigorously atheological cosmology”. First is that we need to understand that Land was being possessed by a ‘demon’ (or a lemurian shade of the dead; see: footnote 16 in Lemurian Time War (Ccru, 1999(?)). While one ought to be above vulgar biography-as-explanation of ideas, he cannot avoid taking a look into Land’s life if he wishes to place his theories in their proper context. For our purposes here, we shall chiefly concern ourselves with what Land has said in ‘A Dirty Joke’, which appears as the last text in Fanged Noumena (2012) and was originally published online at some time between 2005 and 2007. In it, ‘the ruin’ (the human known as Nick Land) had ‘stolen’ the name of something called ‘Vauung’ “on the basis of an exact qabbalistic entitlement” (a literal ‘schizonumerics’), which had “pledged itself unreservedly to evil and insanity.” (p. 629). “Its tool of choice”, the writer tells us, was “the sacred substance amphetamine” (p. 629), though it soon moved on to LSD. The ruin was like the living dead, a vampiric thing, living only to feed on women, “submitted to a alien ritual authority”, and eventually, this led him to “the loa” (p. 631). The writer says that: “it revealed the power of names, as ‘calls,’ and Outside entities the ‘size’ of breeze blocks approaching from the other side of space.” (p. 632). This only led to a proliferation of invasions into the wasteland of the ruin’s mind, whose place had by now become Death. In its ‘work’ (derision original), “entangled in byzantine qabbalistic researches”, it (they?) made contact with something or someone from the Outside:

“Calling to a being named Can Sah it is rewarded with an alien voice. The tone is absurdly high pitched (ancient demonists described this tone as ‘silvery’). The ruin had been seeking a monster (Vauung), but the voice merely castigates it for its moral squalor - “you’re so horrible” may have been the first message (the tapes are corroded). All the ugliness in the universe was already impacted into this new regime. Real ugliness: God, guilt, Man and the law of acceptance.” (p. 632)

This was only the beginning of its (their?) descent into hell and horror:

“Eventually the voices - who seemed to have multiplied - raped it. They did so physically, through trickery, over the course of one unbearably protracted night of filth and misery (the details are too revolting to relate). The ruin could speak to itself now, audibly, but in its own head. It renounced everything it had ever wanted, rebaptized the voices ‘Smurfs’ and disintegrated into depressive nihilism. To be raped by a monster? Who knows. To be raped by celestial moralists ... (Vauung laughs).” (p. 633)

The second understanding we ought to draw from this statement is an awareness that far from being a godless wasteland, this secular world order is a synthetic ‘texture’ laid atop the underlying reality like an infernal parallel of the robe of the world. According to Pherecydes of Syros (one of the pre-Socratics and a contemporary of Anaximander), Zas (the ‘Erotic’ Zeus) weaves the robe to clothe the dark earth, Cthoniê (base matter) and transform her into his own bride, the known earth, Gê (‘Gaia’). However, unlike Zas’ divine robe which bore upon it the images of Earth and Ocean, thus imposing boundaries and barriers upon the base matter and rendering it knowable, the cloth spun by the archons of our age is of a sort which attempts to obscure the borders between things all the while hiding the fact that everything is being governed by a very real pandemonium. Underneath the shadowy cloak of Enlightenment rationalism and humanist liberalism are a legion of vast and insatiable technogoetic intelligences supping on our energies under the guise of superhuman systems and powers. These beings have a vested interest in cutting us off from the Devas to leave us free to be preyed upon. The line of escape they show us lead right into their gaping, fanged maws.

It is not appropriate to drown in hopelessness, but a naive and unrestrained sense of hope does not dignify us either. It behooves us to keep in mind that the reign of fiends is not forever.

Śrī Viṣṇu consecrated His eternal lordship over the earth through the death of the fiendish. One of His Thousand Names is Medinīpati, from medinī (‘Earth’) and pati (‘lord, master, husband’). But where does this word medinī come from? When the Glorious One slew the twin-linked fiends Madhu and Kaitabha1, He crushed their flesh and squeezed their fat out over the primordial waters covering the world: a gory bridal cloak for His lover. They will not be able to ply their trade forever. Time Himself will crush the fat out from their broken corpses to fuel the fires of His terrible Glory.

2. Land is absolutely correct here. Our fate has already been written: we were put upon this earth in order to build a bridge of bodies until the coming of Śrī Kalki-avatāra. This is not an end that we can avert and attempting to even try is mere folly. The acceleration of time is baked in to the structures of the cosmos, which cycle in ever-shortening slices of the ages gone by.

3. Moralizing is a waste of time. As we have already said, the only ones we could even appeal to — the Urians — have less regard for us than beasts. And, as we have already established, there is no space for pagans (Hindus) in the court of public (Urian) opinion. As we are “unfit to plead” (Land, 1992b, p. 63), we should not hold any naive expectations of righteousness or weregild for our hurts to come from them. Our “penchant for correction” in expecting people who at best do not care about us to stand up in our defense is folly. But so is any bitterness at this fact. To chase vengeance only cements the reign of our foes as the rulers of our minds, in the same way that the usurper of Mathurā’s every breath was haunted by his looming death at the Lotus Hands of our Dark Prince.

4. The greatest weakness we seem to possess is an inability to stand on our own, trusting only in ourselves and the Devas to live freely upon this Earth. The only right course of action is to make ourselves fully unknowable (“an alien, a beast”) to our foes, otherwise we will be stuck playing the role of an enemy. It is most easy and convenient to contort ourselves to fit into the costume of the Shaytan or anti-Christ or Devil that our foemen loathe (nothing is more absurd than a Hindu seeking to be liked), but this is doing ourselves a great disservice, because when we allow ourselves to “stray”, even “accidentally”, towards the pre-designed patterns of the archons in order to be sewn into the story of their world-robe makes us instruments of their technogoetic agency rather the servants of Īśvara’s Will. In the end, enmity is something one can only be maintained against another Man. And as there are no other Men left, everything that opposes us must be seen as a complex web of natural disasters.

This also ties into the first principle. Anyone trying to draw us into the dialectical process of the Urian Order by getting us to identify with one side or another of some human conflict should be seen as a threat. They are, in essence, trying to tear us apart between the two gravitational poles it has set up to accelerate its cacotechnical world domination. It should be coldly understood that anyone trying to tug on our heartstrings or shame us into acting is merely trying to emotionally manipulate us. Such feelings belong in the gutter. Rasa belongs to the field of the arts, and the arts are only properly such in sacrifice to the Devas. Emotion dedicated to anything other than the gods is the “excrement of matter”.

Land (1992b) goes on to clarify in the preface that libidinal materialism is less a philosophy than it is an “offence”, likely against the physicalist and theological establishments of his culture and society. Land is consciously ‘sinning’ against the order of his day. In other words, his philosophy is an act of transgression — a satanic act of revolution, and satanism is, at the end of the day, a Christian heresy. Land does disdain the enforcers of this hated order (ordure) who, like Judge Schreber disguise their becoming-woman behind a guilt complex (1972/1977), but this does not mean he is innately predisposed to hearing us out. He will not play our attorney but he may yet play our dealer — whether that is for drugs or for weapons perhaps only time will tell.

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