Black clouds poured over the cliff Like Treacle over hardcore and Hell was written across her belly By two Roman soldiers In lines that brought down my father That put radical humiliation on television And left a little cut That will tear
Confusion reigns Despotically With a crown of roses Without knives Or knaves At all
2 The Schizophrenia Prodrome of Mary
Total ambiguity will not be reconciled By ambiguilty verdicts In any path that we tread I have forgotten what I have lost A wave far from the shore Is building in my womb These babies grow like nipples In a chill breeze The ground shakes with pairs The number 2 is burned in the sun That I stare at These two suns One for each eye Burn a line across me And open Hell like a zip Death shall be born from me And suffering will walk across the desert
3 The Schizophrenic Episode of Mary
Draw this babe from my flesh I have seen his double Walk upon the sea in horrible dreams I have seen him conjuring demons In the flickers of nights Screaming myself awake into Joseph's bewilderment I thank the world for this crime That has brought a change in me Those who attack me are but nothing And shall rot in the soil As my daughter shall inherit all the dust of the Earth I am a glass That magnifies And clarifies I am the world made flesh Take me Gabriel In the sight of Joseph Where are you going? To my bed to be raped again My rage shall fill the oceans A great wave of hate Will grow through me Scatter the nations In my vengeance This girl in my innards Will melt temples into air The stone will boil as magma Vomited from the throat of Satan Heads shall hit the earth while they still scream New worlds will be torn down by her sword Our souls shall magnify And if there be two inside me Their clash Will shatter kingdoms I am walking in the graveyards of the future And see myself written across bodies
Mary fell on her knees and the visions began Awful metal angels dropping fire from the sky As human dots ran into holes A new order of cruelty shall wash across all the lands As each is meat to each
4 The Nativity
The pains of birth Eased the heart's stormy warnings Peasants happy In literal shit Then baby then piss Relief In the heart of the storm The boy will spark At the fuse of everything What is this fresh joy on the bed Of losers and layabouts The spring of red blood has emerged From a virgin ground That will run into a river And dye the oceans
5 The Wild Orgiastic Youth of Christ
Festivities beyond reason Well past jokes Misrule rules In parties and orgies Unbounded by any law Cocks and cunts and cuckolds and Falling again to newer lower higher older Loves and hates And running From last night To the last night That there is no sun In these eyes To be bloodshot And drunk again In two shots To two eyes
6 The Schizophrenia Prodrome of Christ
Basic mistakes Grow in this strange alien That suspects Suspicion itself This new angel Of geometry And flight That rises with perfect symmetry And casts a shadow of lines In numbers in books That line its infinite library On shelves that tower Over wheels that turn In on themselves
7 The Schizophrenic Episode of Christ
My madness mirrors my mother's Her Hell has handled him Bring the cut again The scissor Across the sky Open the blue against the starry black nothing The angels arrive as a pair And the mirror Is the first glass to be seen In both my eyes Staring at each other As holes in holes
8 Hell on Earth
Pour it Down the gullet Let it Pull you down All the poor Have arrived To watch Us fail them No drink Pouring Just silence Future History Can be seen As the past Everything to be is in one eye and everything that has been is in the other
9 Grace
Clarity has graced the Earth But once That was Had to be Long ago For us To see it as it was
10 Fully Realised Anxiety
The sweat tinged red with blood drips On this face of fear The garden shakes With the day that is coming
Two soldiers return Again for a second That will live in the minds of men For all eternity And will worry the heads of women For another That will meet the unmeetable In love and hate Cold shivering hairs Await the morning And begs for day break to wait Like a child trying to blow the wind away And a kiss becomes an icon
11 The Crucifixion
The whole world be split Absolutely dethroned The word itself crumbled On the damned Seven words that join and cut And cut and join The mother and son and son and mother A thirst that wants some water unknown A forgiveness that forgives some crime yet to be He is in no place to forgive And so he was his mother's forgiveness The two soldiers cut him again And yet he restrained the burning hate from his lips Abandoned at the gate of flame The original slasher movie Has already happened At birth It is a memory Of your cosmology Paradise is told in pain In the wound of the world That seeps blood On broken promises On orgasms edged and finished No one No knowledge No action Only vengeance versus avengers annihilating each other and No body
12 Absolute Infinity
Absolute zero One and the other In fields of grazing grief Slit by rivers of tears And psychedelic skies Lit up by digital fears And disappearing whats And whos and wheres Slipping out of a now empty world A final why screamed at the sky and all I got in return is this lousy Silence.
Algor mortis is a cool breeze That went too far Rigor mortis is an ironic erection Yet ultimate impotence Livor mortis is the revenge of gravity Against the arrogance of the leap
Bloat
The last thing the stomach eats is the body itself From the inside out The last meal of a murderer on death row Could not be more savage
Active decay
There is nothing so riddled with life as a decomposing corpse The body of Christ lies across England Slain twice And we are the maggots devouring him Animating him The grotesque puppet
Advanced Decay
The flesh is a carnival With an ending supply of booze To the last revellers Who should know better
In The Schreber Case (1911) Freud makes this astonishing claim that there is a ‘genetic’ link between Judge Daniel Schreber’s desire to be a woman penetrated by a man and his schizophrenic delusions of being Christ crucified. If there is such a perverse sexual content to the crucifixion then let us analyse it from the perspective of radical atheist theology. What psychological functions might it serve? How is this collective dream structured? In this version of the stations of the cross I will pontificate on the meaning of each stage leading up to Easter Sunday. We begin with the wrongful accusation. From Kafka to Lynch the idea of being wrongfully accused is a central element of anxiety. The concept of anxiety will therefore be central to my reading.
“Can Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that even he can’t eat it?” – Homer Simpson.
I can do that of course so surely Jesus can. The crucifixion is the key element of Christian contradiction. The paradox is the question of whether power entails the power to be powerless. This is the classic atheist reading. That we needed a story to signify the death of God and the transition to a post religious world. Engels paraphrases Hegel in the Anti-Dühring (1877) and says that freedom is the recognition of necessity. Christ taking up the cross can then be read as taking on the inevitability of death and nothingness. The walk to the crucifixion will be a carnival and a pandemonium. It is not a suicide but the wilful recognition of the necessary conditions of life. A materialist account of accepting limits freely.
A pratfall! Pure humiliation and there will be more! It is a supreme arrogance to look at our own failures and humiliations and call them divine. Is that the basic story of the crucifixion? By humiliating God we exalt ourselves. We are capable of killing Christ! Nietzsche calls us the ‘bungled and the botched’. We are an animal gone wrong. An unplanned pregnancy caused by a broken condom. The evolution of consciousness was a catastrophic error on the part of the world. I do think that we are such a disfigured animal that we would exactly misrecognise a pure soul and kill it through arrogant misunderstanding. Mentally disfigured by language. A positive reading of this is that being fucked up is what constitutes the subject and that that is what is divine in us and inaccessible to animals. They cannot be fucked up through pure self reflection. They cannot go mad. We can simultaneously brag and brag humility with Christianity. Thomas Jefferson said that pride was the hardest sin to overcome because if he considered himself without pride then he would take pride in not having pride. But if we are the people that kicked a man when he was down are we then ashamed? Can we have no pride and no shame simultaneously? To err is human. To fail is divine.
The standard atheist account of the nativity might be that Mary was raped by a Roman soldier or had a teenage love affair. Joseph then agreed to marry her and not have sex until after the birth to provide legitimacy. Joseph as cuckold always struck me as an interesting character and his absence from the defining event of Western culture could be because uncertainty over our paternity is a constitutive element of the self. This to me is implied in the superstition free Gospel in Brief (1892) synopsis written by Tolstoy. The vulgar Freudian reading of the virgin birth fantasy is that it is traumatic to discover that your mother had sex with your father. This appears as a primal betrayal. This is actually a reading of all infidelity that it is a regression to the infantile separation anxiety. Women can orgasm during childbirth as a direct result of the terrible pain. This sets up a truly crass reading of the virgin birth fantasy that Christ gave Mary her first orgasm and he therefore is free from the existential guilt of jealousy of the father. Might this be the most important aspect of the Christian fantasy. This is a neatly dialectical referent to the crucifixion as a depiction of being anally penetrated that we see in the Little Hans case (1909). This fits with the stations as a model of a life and the cuckold fantasy as concerned with the primal scene. In the contemporary world around two percent of children are incorrect regarding their father. One can only imagine greater ambiguities in the time of Christ due to the lack of the capitalist disciplinary apparatus. Meeting the mother is both to be seen humiliated by your creator and to face the anxiety of unknown paternity. The steady march to death intensifies.
This moment is comical to me. Imagine seeing the pathetic site of a political prisoner carrying his own execution device. Feeling a moment of pity Simon tries to help him and all he can think to do is help him carry the weapon itself. There is a dramatic irony to the comedy and the total failure of all except Christ to understand the significance of the injustice. We the audience are aware of the end of the story and so see how Simon is oblivious. The scene puts the viewer in a God like position because we know the end and know how Simon will later learn the significance of his act.
“Critique is the condition for a possibility” – Chris Cutrone’s summary of the Kantian project of critique.
“All critique starts with the critique of religion” – Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx (1843).
We should not compare Christianity to modern science but to modern culture. It is not in conflict with contemporary evolutionary biology but with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Should ideology critique move on from the crucifixion then and concentrate on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)? My argument is that the two must come together. The Crucifixion has not been conclusively critiqued such that the possibility to fully bury it and construct a new culture exists. Christianity retains the possibility for an immanent critique. The carnivalesque comedy of the procession to the cross is a further aspect of the total condensation of the plot. The condensation of the comic and the tragic. It continues to yield to critique. Each new set of economic and cultural conditions has a new reading. It is the thoughts of the ages condensed into a short walk. A metaphor for life and death.
The widow gets sentimental! Like Simon of Cyrene helping to carry the cross wiping his face is a pathetic act of help. Farcical. The man is about to be killed. A slight wiping of sweat and blood is a minor aid. Nevertheless, it contains a kernel of grace to go against the baying crowds. That some felt sympathy may even heighten the guilt at taking part in the killing. There are no excuses. In the heat of anxious terror grace is still possible. Surely the widow knows a little sadness. The festival of depravity is amusing but you might still have a momentary lapse into sentimentality.
Repetition is a key aspect of the humorous. They say if you see one secretary crying it is tragic but if you see a second it is funny. Falling down is the perfect example of the superiority theory of the comic. It adds to the carnival nature of the stations. We can imagine the bulk of the public drinking and laughing and enjoying the spectacle. To be laughed it is also a central component of humiliation. Don’t we imagine that we are being laughed at in our lowest moments? In each moment we can identify with either the crowd or the victim. The schizophrenic intensity is building.
Engels called woman the original proletarian. Within the patriarchal marriage the man was the bourgeoisie and the woman the working class. Here we therefore see the basic inversion at work in Christianity of honouring the powerless. This is Nietzsche’s central critique of Christianity in its undermining of power being driven by ressentiment. The pathetic are heralded and the strong are brought down. The lambs shall eat the meat of eagles. That is what makes the religion interesting as a technology for population control. It symbolically resolves the resentment of the weak through its honouring of them. This is most perfectly achieved in the Magnificat. A poor woman and nobody is chosen as the spring of all power. The failed, the ill, and the insane can call the world upside down while the powerful can claim modesty and maintain position. But arguably there is a radical element at play. For that reason I see Christianity as a central ideological battleground. The previous move of atheism to retreat off the territory may have been a tactical error. What did Jesus talk to the women about? Abortion access, miscarriages, and the menopause? Pay differences, misogyny, and maternity leave? In all seriousness, yes!
In the prodromal stages of schizophrenia one warning sign is an intense interest in the occult or religious ideas. Adorno calls an the occult a regression of consciousness. A regression is a return to an earlier stage. To a more fundamental stage. We are all constructed on these irrational foundations. The third fall as a high point in humiliation is for me therefore the apex of the schizophrenic disorientation. In Sabina Spielrein’s account of a case of schizophrenia a woman’s distress at her husband raping her and his sex with other women is unified with her misery at her miscarriage into an incoherent totality of religious fervour and aesthetic theory. The stations of the cross structure the descent into insanity. Sexual humiliation and its religious opposites clash in a disturbed mind which is the universal foundation of sanity. The passage of the cross in reversed time is a return journey to the birth of consciousness.
If the first repetition is comic what is the second? This to me is an aggressive assault on the audience. Daring us to laugh at a pathetic man brought down with our fingers pointed. Still laughing? The carnage is ramping up. The schizophrenic breakdown is peaking. Can the mind survive this radical primal humiliation tracing back to the earliest moments of infantile indignation? The mind is growing incoherent.
The pinnacle of the humiliation. Here we see raw human flesh. I would probably have taken part in the mocking and the cruelty. Is there a sexual sadism? Yes. I have heard it said that there is always a libidinal element to ritual violence and surely here we see the height of human baseness. Do we take a sadistic pleasure and identify with his tormenters? That might be the real genius of the story. We can enjoy his suffering from the perspective of our violence and we can enjoy the innocence of his wrongful accusation from a masochistic position. Christianity puts us in a position of power over God. As Hinduism claims to venerate the cow but then leads a cow around in a ceremony and dresses it up as if to mock it it is an inversion of modesty. We call ourselves Gods with religion. We claim our language lifts us above the animals and nature and we have both the power and the cruelty to humiliate even the highest. We can bring all down to the level of shit!
To enjoy Christianity you need a taste for blood! You must be able to imagine weilding the hammer. And to enjoy it! You must stare at the phallic symbol of a nail in flesh directly. You must show no mercy!
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” – Pascal.
I can think of worse physical torture. It is not the most painful thing I can imagine. Burning by fire always strikes me as the most frightening violence. Instead it is almost banal in its humiliation. The agony that will follow was surely terrifying but still no one present knows what is to come. Jesus himself is not even aware that there will be no help from any God. The true weight of an atheist world is dawning on him. There is no hope. The nightmare is here. This is what makes Christianity the anti-religion par excellence. A warning against the religious fervour which helped us take part in the religious festival of the crucifixion.
It is typical to mask the genitals. Perhaps for prudeness or perhaps to create a radical ambiguity over the sex of the beast!
“Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.” Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille (1987)
For the mother to watch the death of the son is the ultimate incest. They say that you cannot look directly at the sun or death. The atheist reading of the crucifixion concerns the impossibility of full atheism. Only a God could be fully atheist because only a God could look straight into the pit of death. Christ’s discovery of atheism on the cross was his genius. A weaker mind would have fallen into religious certainty or sentimental platitudes. Christ faced his own abandonment and the meaningless of his life. He realised that the prophecies of a new prophet to end all prophets were ironic and all he was was a pathetic political apostate being executed by the state to be forgotten. Therein lies the irony of the whole project of atheist Christianity. The real material Christ cannot have seen the full nothingness of existence but he discovered the ideal. Like an asymptote of how much truth a human mind could conceivably take before schizophrenic disintegration. In a previous Easter I drew the seven words on the cross. If the stations are a metaphor for a life then the seven words are the stages of death. If the crucifixion is the highest image of death then so to it is the height of eroticism. The orgasm ideal.
The last seven words on the cross:
1. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. 2. Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise. 3. Woman, behold thy son! and Behold thy mother! 4. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? 5. I thirst. 6. It is finished. 7. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.
“How shall we comfort ourselves we murderers of all murderers” – Nietzsche, from The Gay Science (1882) God is Dead section.
Nietzsche was of course referring to modern science, the lack of need for religion in an industrial economy, and the disenchantment of the world later theorised by Max Weber. We can also read the Crucifixion as our murdering of God and creating the atheist world view. We the Christ killers! We shall reign over the Earth for two thousand years!
We will inevitably end with a consideration of the Hegelian concept of sublation, aufhebung, or perhaps colloquially overcoming. There will be no image of the resurrection which is a purely mental sublation event. The best example of sublation I think is relativity theory where some basic facts were finally sublated in to a coherent whole which disolved contradictions. The mind can produce and destroy the ontological proof by thinking alone. The resurrection for me then is the sublation of the notion of a physically existing God. Instead by our killing of a pathetic man simply because he was a genius creates the conditions for a moral sublation. The good news is that God has been killed. We killed him and so become aware of our status as God slayers. We, the “murderers of murderers”. We walk in to a terrifying new epoch of freedom and responsibility.
This is a psychoanalytic method for tarot reading. It is based on a small number of hard assumptions:
1. Randomly drawn cards do not predict the future in any meaningful sense. 2. A free and superstitious reading of cards can give some insight into psychoanalytic principles of both parties in a reading with two people.
The technique draws on the most fundamental aspects of psychoanalysis. The analysand is to sit comfortably facing away from the analyst. The basic aim is to produce a dream narrative. Three cards should be drawn and revealed from past to future and structured like a story with a beginning, middle, and end. One should think of the process as trying to produce a ten minute short film by David Lynch. After the film has been produced free discussion is permitted to analyse the story using a literary theory approach. Some further points may help:
Cards should be read literally. Two swords are two swords. If these were drawn first the story should begin with two swords.
A discussion between the two can ensue. Why are there two swords? Where are they? This should not be analysed psychoanalytically until after the story has finished. IT should instead be discussed as a conspiracy between the two. The analysand will be the central character in the dream. The analyst may enter into the dream or not as they wish.
How can the first card develop a mystery which might begin to be solved? A basic possibility is the scene of a crime. Another possibility could be a scene the analysand happens upon. A mystery is the basic premise but a detective and a crime is not necessary.
The third card should add some finality to the story but leave open some uncertainty to allow further analysis and interpretation after the session.
There is nothing superstitious about enjoying a story about supernatural occurrences. Two swords can transform into two cups for instance.
The story can take the form of the dream. A good ambiguity can be produced by starting the story with awaking during the night. Try to foster uncertainty regarding the reality of the situation.
The two readers should be trying to produce a joint dream. Only after the story which should not be more than ten minutes can we begin to think of meaning.
The reading should be relatively fast. If it takes you too long to think of a story you have made a mistake. Spontaneity is key to finding interesting connections.
It will succeed if it fails and fail if it succeeds.
In declaring its aims and its aims at completeness it fails necessarily.
The complete work of art is a contradiction. The complete joke doubly so.
It is masculine.
It is defined by masculine failure. A failure to be masculine and therefore successfully masculine.
The negative generates the positive but the positive cannot generate the negative.
Has there not been a great terror cast upon the earth? Do we not tremble in the shadow of a complete irony? And yet it yearns for an impossible completeness.
To break the limit of the infinite in a finite language.
To produce the contradiction in the reader without proof.
To refuse suicide because it is too positive. To remain in the infinite abyss of the negative. To reject the pure unity of death.
Let us continue to fail or die. To continue to live after success is a sin.
Neither the first manifesto nor the last. Merely another failure for the pile.
This is an aging movement. It does not concern the young who do not know the gentle catastrophes of life.
The practitioners must be freed from the tyranny of sexual rank by age, injury, or failure.
It is a metaphysics of sex. It is the contradiction of the erection. The inflation that occurs in the genitals of all humankind as a protocontradiction. A protocontradiction that defines the negative masculinity.
Hypermetadoubledialectics.
It is at odds.
At odds with the world and therefore itself.
It is an incomplete nontotality.
It is a comedy of anxiety.
It is a schizophrenic disjunction of text units.
The I moves around and through it as any word.
The we is the failure of the cogito.
The I is complex and not simple.
The becoming is a failure to be.
It is not finished. We are not born after it was finished. It has not begun.
Slay me at this beach. I shall take my own head and not watch! But lovely memories of a kind child overwhelm me with tears. Let me follow the sticks and my destiny. Now is not my time.
Nightmare strikes the west. All certainties are turned upside down. History has begun again. So bring the farce. Bring the infinite binary. Then let me die on my sword. What three are against me?
I liked them to face each other since they were drawn as a pair.
The Star
Rider Waite plus milk emerging from the nipples.
The reading
A fight! How can one take a coin to a sword fight? He will be killed surely. He holds up the coin and as the swordsman approaches merely says ‘buy me this life’. He is cut down viciously. The dead body looks up at the sky as it takes a last breath. A single star burns into his eye.
Guilt reeks. Lying in bed after a night of debauchery. The sun shines through the window. Checking my wallet I find just seven coins. I had two hundred last night.
A man labours over the coins. Each coin represents one coin time.
2. The Ace of Swords
The Sword decapitates the king and takes his crown.
3. The World.
When we look upon the world rationally it looks rationally back.
The reading
A man is hard at work making horseshoes. There are eight. Can we assume they are for two horses? A masked assassin bursts in and cuts off his head. His cloth cap falls to the floor and reveals a golden coin. The assassin takes the coin but doesn’t realise that it will bring him great misery.
He has gold but lives in a world of golden senses.
2. The Six of Pentacles
Bill Gates.
3. The Four of Pentacles
Jeff Bezos.
The reading
The poor wise hermit searching with his lamp. Searching for an honest man in daylight like Diogenes before him. He is not looking for an honest man but a rich man. The excel spreadsheet and the shopping basket full and resplendent with wealth and beauty. I won’t be so trite as to say these are worth nothing. The masters of capital have made fountains of gold.
I knew I would do something pornographic but decided to keep it relatively traditional with a ‘reverse cowgirl’ position taken from a French erotic illustrator.
The Emperor
Lacan’s graph of desire overlaid on US president Donald Trump.
The reading
An overflowing of emotion wells within me. Where is my lover? What cruelty that we are separated. And in this lustful anxiety a dark master has taken the reigns and put them upon us.
Money is the order of the day. A fortnight of deals!
The Queen of Pentacles
I had wanted to include Queen Elizabeth II and pentacles seemed a good choice as I wanted to put her on a fifty p coin. Unfortunately i drew her too big so that idea went down the drain.
The Ace of Pentacles
The Rider Waite has a hand so I drew my own hand with a coin in it.
The Ten of Pentacles
Elon Miusk occurred to me and only later did I realise it was probably because the roman numeral X looks like logo for X.
The reading.
Coin rules us all. Queens and thieves both. Take this coin and do what thou wilt!