I’ve been working on a Java RangeSet implementation, which enables you to define a set as a collection of intervals (e.g. Monday to Wednesday, and Saturday to Sunday). This has a direct application in my secret “toposes in Java” project, but may be more widely useful…

The full source is in the localtruth GitGub repository.

If you are a (relatively speaking) ethically aware person, it’s likely that your ethics are focused on the reduction of harm, most particularly to sentient creatures and most generally to the biosphere which supports their existence. A sentient creature is one which can be harmed in a specific way: it can suffer, both acutely (as in the sensations of a sparrow being torn apart by a sparrowhawk) and chronically (as in the sensations of that same sparrow slowly starving to death during the winter).

Both acute and chronic suffering are endemic throughout the world of sentient beings, and human life in technologically advanced societies is quite unusual in the extent to which it is able to keep such suffering at bay, to treat it as something out of the ordinary. When we think about other animals it might be fun to be, we normally choose those which are relatively exempt from being preyed on by jackals, infested with gnawing parasites, paralysed and pox-eaten by myxomatosis, or casually gulped down in their hundreds of thousands by passing whales. We tend to use similar criteria when thinking about which other human beings it might be fun to be: it might be nice to be a dolphin, or a wealthy layabout in Berlin; it would be pretty ghastly to be a vole, or someone poor, weak and undefended in the middle of a warzone.

Wars are not natural events, or at least are not wholly natural events: you can understand the daily slaughter of the wilderness without recourse to political terms; and wars can also give way to ceasefires, cessations of hostilities which would be incomprehensible to a hyena. But by disrupting and dismantling the defenses of society against starvation, pestilence and predation, war brings human beings closer to the state in which other sentient creatures live: setting aside the numberless cruelties of specifically human invention, the horrors of war are most generally the horrors of being a living thing that can suffer and perish, that must fear for its life, that can and will be hurt atrociously and for no reason other than the need for survival of some other living thing.

At what point does the ubiquity and intensity of suffering in the natural world render meaningless the individual effort to reduce the suffering of this or that suffering creature? Perhaps at no point: kindness remains a virtue, no matter how bad things are or how much worse they may get. But it does render one kind of meaning unavailable, and that is the redemptive meaning that the rhetoric of “animal liberation” gives to the task of extricating non-human animals from the grasp of human power, need and appetite. Life on earth without us would not be a paradise, in any sense that we could recognise according to our own preferences for comfort and security over terror and pain. The departure of humanity would, in fact, leave the world devoid of its only remotely ethically attractive feature: the propensity of human beings to try to make parts of it nicer, for each other and for such non-human animals as they elect to care about.

FERAL RATS, racailles, addressed as raca:
virulent emptiness, the scowling void
uncowled before the cameras. Call them eaten
ones; whip up the circus beasts’ starved fury.
Projectionists on double-time, sharp fixers
weaving through the strobed light by which
poet and statistician align their columns.
No soul-gape in Eton boys, no want
of any kind in boozed-up Buller men,
their bladders bulging, slackening at whim;
the stream called purifying which strips flesh
from bone, shows anarchy the skeleton
cavorting with bobby’s helmet, his bleached grin
unflinching before the lawless force of law.

Patrick Mullins, wayward and occasionally vexatious spirit of these and many other parts, has written a book, Illegal Dances of New York City. Graphomanic, self-absorbed and perplexing, it composes a kind of textual mirror-world out of personal anecdotes, cake recipes, opaque glosses on film and dance, fragments of online interactions with various pseudonymous interlocutors, and a kind of insistently bizarre fan-fiction centred on an elusive introject named as “Saint Nick Land”.

The first section was once rejected for publication by the editors of the journal Collapse, who described it as “execrable”. In a sense they were right, at least by their own lights: the instinctive reaction of any cohesive theoretical body to the kind of text Patrick has produced would be to try to expel it, to shit it out. Illegal Dances is frequently concerned with “crawlspace”, with places of refuge from systematically articulated thought and living. Crawlspace makes room for accumulations of junk and clutter, chimerical assemblages of totems and fetish-objects, erotic strange-attractors, items of sentimental value (among the curios exhibited in Illegal Dances is a poem of mine that Patrick liked and that I gave him permission to include; I couldn’t say exactly what it’s doing there, but it doesn’t look out of place as such). Of these, the book attempts to extract the “efflorescences and nectars”.

Is it a good book? It’s beautifully put together, a credit to its publisher. It is also a record, an inscription, of the continual involution of “outer” into “inner” life, of time into image and place into crawlspace. It will not appeal to everyone’s sympathies, but it should be understood as a genuine, if obscure and singular, work of art.

What I get most of all from LvT (watching Antichrist right now) is hatred of intelligence. Intelligence must be humiliated…

Intelligence must learn that it is not intelligent, that stupidity is more powerful than intelligence. Stupidity is the prime mover.

Intelligence cannot accept that stupidity is more powerful than it, and is stupid because it cannot learn the rules of stupidity.

Stupidity rules over beauty, emotion, nature, the depths of things. Intelligence misconstrues the world as intelligible.

Violent grief, perversion, rage, imbecility, self-harm are authentic. Intelligence obstructs authenticity with its inauthenticity.

LvT sees women as fundamentally aligned, simpatico, with the underlying stupidity of things. Men are misaligned, and trust in intelligence.

Cinema, as a sensual art, outruns intelligence: it can tap into reserves of stupidity. Cinematic immersion is a stupor, self-abandonment.

A fundamental identity: for LvT, cinema is feminine. The cinematic subject is woman. Men appear in cinema in order to be eclipsed by women.

Antichrist is extremely beautiful to look at, even if one distracts oneself by tweeting about it. A mad, kitsch, factitious beauty.

A beauty that mocks intelligence, which seeks to see truly. Antichrist’s beauty is the beauty of things that are not there.

This is also a formula for cinema: the beauty of things that are not there.

“You’re just so damn arrogant!” “Your thoughts distort reality, not the other way around”.

“I’m cured! You’re so clever!”. Everything must necessarily go to shit from this point on. “You can’t just be happy for me, can you?”

“Chaos…reigns!” And then it….rains. Reality puns.

Writing degenerates to a childish scrawl.

Let’s role-play nature, nature against reason. Nature appears to reason as a role in reason’s role-play.

“Women do not control their own bodies. Nature does”. “You were supposed to be critical of those texts!”

You are not supposed to be critical. Critique masters, neutralises, subordinates to reason. Nature’s stupidity is beyond critique.

Nature’s answer to phallogocentrism is blunt trauma with a block of wood.

Willem Defoe battering a small bird to death, having crawled backwards into a dank hole. Now he gets it. Silly man!

“A crying woman is a scheming woman”. Nature projects its schemes through abjection.

OUCH.

“None of it is any use”. Grim and frosty hail. Improvidence, inutility, loss and waste: pure expenditure without return.

Foraging, watched by woodland creatures. Typical LvT fake-out ending, equivalent to bells in Breaking The Waves: jarring false resolution.

Well, that was indeed both grim and tr00.

I think of LvT’s false resolutions as final farts in the face of intelligence. He knows what he’s about.

Antichrist less aggravating than Breaking The Waves because largely void of pathos, which acts as a kind of apologetics for the worldview.

I don’t object to a work of art’s being the product of a sick mind. Most interesting ones are. I object to apologetics, special pleading.

What non-Catholics see as Catholic sentimentality is just this form of special pleading, a way of circumventing rational evaluation.

You are supposed to be terribly moved; you are supposed not to argue with what moves you so terribly.

Antichrist is what it is: you can enter and leave its world, which has its own integrity and consistency as depressive worlds generally do.

It also - as I said about Xasthur - shows you the facticity of depressive thinking, the bare circularity on which it depends.