Time is Chaos: We're all Doomed!

All quotes from Spengler, O. from The Decline of the West.

“Yellow and red, on the other hand, the colours of nearness, the popular colours, are associated with the brass timbre, the effect of which is corporeal often to the point of vulgarity.” P133

“Astonishment at alien motion is the source of religion and physics both; respectively, they are the elucidations of Nature (world-around) by the soul and by the reason. The ‘powers’ are the first object both of fearful or loving reverence and of critical investigation.  There is a religious experience and a scientific experience.” P200

“The outcome of a Numen is a Deus, the outcome of a notion is an idea…Every myth of the great style stands at the beginning of an awakening spirituality…” p201

“The Roman felt that the claim Yahweh to be recognized as sole God had something atheistic in it.  One God, for him, was no God, and to this may be ascribed the strong dislike of popular feeling, both Greek and Roman, for the philosophers insofar as they were pantheists and godless. Gods are bodies, of the highest type, and plurality was an attribute of bodies alike for mathematicians, lawyers, and poets.” P203

“All these deities more and more came to be felt as a single numen, though the adherents of a particular cult would believe that they in particular knew the numen in its true shape. Hence it is that Isis could be spoken of as the ‘million-named.’ Hitherto, names had been the designations of so many gods different in body and locality; now they are titles of the One whom every man has in mind.” P206

“That this ‘force’ of ‘energy’ is really a numen stiffened into a concept (and in nowise the result of scientific experience) is shown by the often overlooked fact that the basic principle known as the First Law of Thermodynamics says nothing whatever about the nature of energy, and it is properly speaking an incorrect (though psychologically significant) assumption that the idea of the ‘conservation of energy’ is part of it. Experimental measurement can in the nature of things only establish a number, which we (significantly, again) named work. But the dynamical cast of our thought demanded that this should be conceived as a difference of energy, although the absolute value of energy is only a figment and can never be rendered by a definite number.” P210

“All that has happened on the way from Newton to Faraday – or from Berkeley to Mill – is that the religious deed-idea has been replaced by the irreligious work-idea.” P212

“When Nietzsche wrote down the phrase ‘transvaluation of all values’ for the first time, the spiritual movement of the centuries in which we are living found at last its formula.  Transvaluation of all values is the most fundamental character of every civilization. For it is the beginning of a Civilization that it remoulds all the forms of the Culture that went before, understands them otherwise, practices them in a different way. It begets no more, but only reinterprets, and herein lies the negativities common to all periods of this character. It assumes that the genuine act of creation has already occurred, and merely enters upon an inheritance of big actualities.” P181-2

“Culture and Civilization – the living body of a soul and the mummy of it.”

“Only a sick man feels his limbs.”

“As soon as life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of great cities – which are intellectual worlds to themselves – and needs a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into a problem… It had become necessary to discover, to invent or squeeze into form, as a rule of being, that which was no longer anchored in instinct; and at this point therefore begin the civilized ethics that are no longer the reflection of Life but the reflection of Knowledge upon Life.” P183

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                All of my belongings, my indelibly ascertained objects of management ideals strewn efficiently in a blinking bucket for all-time’s sake. So current it’s almost predictive of the future status of things as they lie. Lying blinking inert.

                The albino horrorshow freak, face all mouth, no eyes. There was a time when I canvassed forests, mountain ponds, and hours of walking trail; back when? Back before the freak roamed. Much like the freak, whose judgment is blind and whose punishment is swift if he sniffs out a couple campers unawares in a pitch tent making whoopee racket when the freak upends the polyester from the terpene tarpaulin and tin stakes and sends a camper rolling back down whatever height climbed to get there, short way to the bottom, rock, tree, and then down the gaping wet white maw that is the albino’s mouth all slobbery for sapiens. Man’s knowledge of the freak extends all the way back to the Garden whence Adam tamed it and named it Gary.  Gary et apples from a particular tree that gave Gary an appealing reek, ponderously from the very fruit he consumed. Adam had leashed Gary the freak to the forbidden tree where he maintained happily blind and tethered. The fruit from the tree was known as Gary’s fruit, not simply because Gary ate from the tree, but because Gary ate whatever or whosoever haplessly gobbled the possessive apples in his sleep.  Whatever ate from the tree would subsequently produce a signature scent with which the freak associated his appetite. Gary would loosen himself and sometimes run a marathon in pursuit of whatever creature was unfortunate enough to nibble its way into Gary’s grove. Gary mostly feasted on worms, boogers, and apples, until one day…

Sun Tzuzaphones converse.
Terror: an advanced state of panic.
Terrorist: a vertiginous construction worker.
Terrorism: a monument dedicated to the panicking.
Skyscraper: Long-term scaffolding.

Dissenter to the Times Literal translation pled ignorance to knowing antennae stations of the cross with syntactic religious iconoodles executing smellings alt. Delete screen with me falling asleep in front of it.

“Since Newton, the assumption of constant mass – the counterpart of constant force – has had uncontested validity. But the quantum theory of Planck, and the conclusions of Niels Bohr therefrom as to the fine structures of atoms, which experimental experience had rendered necessary, have destroyed this assumption. Every self-contained system possesses, besides kinetic energy, an energy of radiant heat which is inseparable from it and therefore cannot be represented purely by the concept of mass. For if mass is defined by living energy it is ipso facto no longer constant with reference to thermodynamic state. Nevertheless, it is impossible to fit the theory of quanta into the group of hypotheses constituting the ‘classical’ mechanics of the Baroque; moreover, along with the principle of causal continuity, the basis of the Infinitesimal Calculus founded by Newton and Leibniz is threatened. But, if these are serious enough doubts, the ruthlessly cynical hypothesis of the Relativity theory strikes to the very heart of dynamics. Supported by the experiments of A.A. Michelson, which showed that the velocity of light remains unaffected by the motion of the medium, and prepared mathematically by Lorentz and Minkowski, its specific tendency is to destroy the notion of absolute time. Astronomical discoveries (and here present-day scientists are seriously deceiving themselves) can neither establish nor refute it. ‘Correct’ and ‘incorrect’ are not the criteria whereby such assumptions are to be tested; the question is whether, in the chaos of involved and artificial ideas that have been produced by the innumerable hypotheses of Radioactivity and Thermodynamics, it can hold its own as a useable hypothesis or not. But however this may be, it has abolished the constancy of those physical quantities into the definition of which time has entered, and unlike the antique statics, the Western dynamics knows only such quantities.” p419