Hashtag Gnostic Problems and the Dreams of Descartes [Trenchant Edges]

Estimated reading time: 26 minutes, 39 seconds. Contains 5330 words. But if you read last week's you've already been through 1200!

Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, where we autopsy the fringe past.

It’s the last month of 2021, so I want to take a bit to take a look at the open loops we’ve built up since September. No fun if I don’t actually finish, right? ;-)

I’ve got enough time in December to actually finish the rebranding work I started months ago. Maybe we’ll get a new name and better thought-out format in January.

On a personal note, I’ve been really surprised at how I’ve weathered the last week. I’ve got from maybe 2-3 hours of activity/day to more like 7 or 8. Kinda drives home how bad for you sitting for long periods is, tbh.

But still, one has to be careful. Never know when a relapse could threaten.

Alright, so we’ve got 3 sections today. First, a quick walk through our open loops. That is, topics we’ve started but not really finished.

Oh, PS, if you like paranoid competence porn Barry Eisler’s John Rain series is pretty fun.

Open Loops

Right now one of the things I’m most frustrated within this newsletter is the tension between writing about whatever interests me/is on my mind vs more disciplined investigations.

Clearly, there are some ADHD-adjacent issues here. But that’s not the only thing on the table. And I’ve got to figure out how to balance the issues.

Our Open Loops:

• When did the right-wing fearmongering about guns being taken become ascendant?

• Background on America’s Cultic Milieu.

• Difficult Conversations

• Terence McKenna and Descartes

• The investigations

Today we’re going to be handling the Mckenna/Descartes loop. I figure the rest is a good enough conversation piece for the rest of the year. We can get back into the investigations in the new year.

If I had to guess, the Gun-grabber narrative still requires the most research. There’s just a lot of Bircher-adjacent crap to go through.

And I haven’t even looked at the American Rifleman back issues yet.

We’ll probably have the last cultic milieu piece ready next week. I’ve been down multiple rabbit holes trying to write it and I think I’ve got all the information I need, it’s just down to actually organize it into something good.

So if we’re blessed with productivity this month, we’ll see them coming out for the next few weeks.

Cool.

On Gnosis and the Interpretation of Mysterious Signs

I’ve been going back through a lot of the ideas of historical gnostics over the last few weeks, including rereading the Gospels of Judas, Thomas, and Enoch as well as some of the great critics of gnosticism. I’ll be starting Irenaeus’ Against Heresies this week, a fine counterpoint to tax prep.

This is all prep for digging into the scholarly research on Gnosticism, particularly the recent scholarship that argues that “Gnosticism” is more a modern scholarly project than a discreet ancient religion.

And one that in some ways continues the original project of early Christian apologists who created early ideas about what “pure” Christianity was versus the many other syncretic religions of the era.

A big part of the appeal of historic gnosticism, I think, is the allure of secret knowledge hidden by history. To be one of the few who know.

This goes back to a lot of the points I was making on Friday’s On the Limits of the Internet, where historic censorship has destroyed any kind of living record of the beliefs and practices of many groups from the past.

Chasing this particular dragon has fruitful moments, but is more rife with bullshit and fancies than truth.

I was going to point to the discovery of Troy as an example of the fruitful moments this kind of cranksearching, but it looks like even that greatest example of the crank being proven right is littered with bullshit.

Whoops.

The first thing that got me interested in gnosticism was when the first English translation of the Gospel of Judas was published, revealing a different view of the Gospel story where Judas turned out not to be a traitor at all but the only disciple who understood what Jesus was trying to do while he was alive and the only one he could trust to go to the Romans and sell him out to make sure the whole, “Sacrifice the Lamb to save all mankind from Sin” thing actually happened.

That got my attention because realizing that Judas quite literally did nothing wrong in the gospels was one of my original heresies. Along with realizing that on a close reading of Genesis, a literal interpretation is actually impossible (there are two mutually exclusive versions of the creation story!), which means it must be read as an allegory or bullshit.

I didn’t read the Gospel of Judas for a few years, but it kindled my interest in the idea of Gnosis, which drove a lot of my interest in Hinduism and Buddhism which seemed to have far more techniques for inducing altered states than western religions.

And it wasn’t the tales of Christian or near-Christian heretics and their suppression by the church that I was interested in, but Gnosis itself. The esctastic and direct revelation of certain knowledge.

It took me a long time to understand what appealed to me about it and the answer came with learning more about the concept of mediation.

Not in the sense of a mediator, but in the sense of an intermediary. Links in the game Telephone. I was desperately searching for a way to find unmediated knowledge. Uncontaminated by the distortions of social consensus and the demands of relationships.

Pure knowledge.

And what I found was, well, there’s just not a lot of that. Mathematics has a lot, sure. But even in that most abstract field, there’s layers and layers of piled up consensus and convention. Here’s a tiny example of convention bluring the allegedly pristine knowledge of mathematics. Note that convention is a double-edged sword, both allowing quick progress up a learning curve while also hiding alternative approaches.

So I looked for other edges of real knowledge and found solipsism: an edge anyone could work with. Solipsism is the question: How do I know other people are real in the same way I am? That there’s “personness” on the other side?

If you think of this as an abstract game, it quickly devolves into meaningless absurdity. Cue that letter Bertrand Russell mentioned getting about a woman solipsist who wrote, “I’m surprised there aren’t more of us.”

But there’s another option for solipsism that’s much more fruitful.

If you combine a Cartesian, “I think therefore I am” with a Buddhist approach to felt-sensation, you notice that thinking isn’t actually who you are. Nor is it proof of a self. It’s simple a river of occurring. Stuff happening.

And if you watch it, you have a validation of an important piece of knowledge: Something exists, and it’s working a process on me.

And if you watch that is-ness on a moment-to-moment basis, you see a clear gap in certainty. So Solipsism dissolves both the narcissism of self worship and the assumption you know what’s going on in other minds. You see the limits of your own sight.

And since perception precedes thought, you become curious. What else don’t I see?

I’ve been regularly shocked as a solipsit how naively solipsitic many people are.

My self, for better or worse, is fairly self-obsessed. You could blame it on a lonely childhood or growing up as an American or a thousand other things but that’s not really useful.

Since it looks like there’s not much changing that at this point, the higher order watching thing underlying it has to play with that self obsession to not get caught up in it. Pride as a joke.

How does this tie back into Gnosis? Well, modern occultists have a charming phrase for a certain class of revealed knowledge: Unverified Personal Gnosis. Or UPG.

Information you found in a vision or dream or through divination or in an intense altered state.

UPG is a complicating issue in occult communities for the same reason even in religions where Prophecy is considered possible at present those capable of having their prophecy validated by the group are limited: UPG is both powerfully emotionally compelling and often contradicts other ways of knowing.

It also introduces toxic status dynamics into a social world: A prophet may become either revered or condemned. And both roles complicate trust.

Mormonism is interesting in this regard. The Church of Latter Day Saints acknowledges that prophecy is real and that anyone can do it. But they only sanction it by the church elders and not in a general way. Similar to the way the Catholic Church sanctions some of what the Pope says as infallible.

This limits the number of people willing to experiment with prophecy and alienates most of those willing to try.

Revelation can come for anyone at any time, though, and it can easily derail people’s whole lives if handled poorly. Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven is a wonderful exploration of this phenomena.

So there’s some serious skepticism one should practice if Revelation happens to you. You’ll note even that time I thought about creating a religion, I didn’t base it on any UPG I’d received. Nor do I speak of such things.

And I’m never going to.

The two reasons for this are simple:

1. A Moby Dick quote, “ Ah, my dear fellow, you can’t fool us that way—you can’t fool us. It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to look as if he had a great secret in him.”

2. I’ve yet to see an example of a social group taking someone UPG seriously that turned out well.

It took me a long time to work through being able to live with other people’s beliefs and my so-called secrets and I wouldn’t invite anyone again to put up with that shit.

The point isn’t to venerate someone else’s revelations, but to go out and have your own. Let the universe flash you and see what you find out.

Of course, you may prefer not having done that. Which is why I no longer peddle gnosis as a lifestyle. If there’s a bottom to that ocean, I’ve never found any hint of it.

The idea that the occult or esoteric is a kind of self-help is an easy sell to newbies, but most people eventually either realize it’s all bullshit or worse that there’s something real but that nobody understands a goddamn thing about it.

Neither of those possibilities are exactly true.

Gnosis, like psychedelics, is a process that breaks down previous boundaries.

It’s easy to assume this is a positive process if you’ve had a good experience with it. Shit, I’d be dead if I hadn’t embraced it. But I had really fucked up boundaries.

I needed some extreme medicine just to tolerate the trauma I’d accumulated and even more to heal it.

But for a lot of people it just becomes a kind of psychosis. And I don’t know if there’s any way to really protect yourself from the worst possibility.

Thus, the older I get the more I understand why mystery schools and secret societies gate their knowledge. It’s not just about providing control and influence and the thrill of initiated secrets, but a way to prevent harming people who aren’t ready to swim in the ocean yet.

I’ve got a lot of problems with Campbell, but this is quote is a banger.

Humans naturally develop shared reefs of knowledge, ecosystems of beliefs that provide structure and norishment. At best, those reefs generate human thriving. At worst, they become parasitic.

Discovering there are reefs other than your own and learning to navigate between them is one of the more important skills I know of.

Cartoonish racist HP Lovecraft once said something like, “Madness is coming home and discovering your flowers are singing.”

He meant the strain of discovering that there are other belief systems (belireefs? No, that’s terrible. Be-reefs? Worse.) working on completely unrelated rules than the ones you’ve learned.

And if you’re a shut-in raised on racist old books with a rigid belief system and little experience with the wider world of actual humans like old Howard Philip, that’s going to be a lot more intense than if you’re a normally socialized person.

How much does this matter? Well, there are quite a few examples of smart people exploring the esoteric edges of the world becoming weird racists or some flavor of fascist.

The two most obvious examples today are Nick “I was doing Horse Drugs Before it was Cool” Land and Aleksandr “Hey what if we combined the worst parts of Soviet Communism with the worst parts of Nazism to own the libs in the USA” Dugin.

The former’s accelerationism embraces the creation of hyperfascist technocapitalist AIs which will, uh… I don’t really know what the payoff for Land’s accelerationism is. I guess we all get to be blood sacrifices for the electronic kings of the world? I guess that’s supposed to be a positive?

Actually one of my favorite memes of all time.

Dugin, by contrast, is a chaos magician who wants Russia to take the USA’s place as global hegemon. Which I guess at least makes sense as a goal.

Wait, was this whole thing about the latent possibility of boundary dissolution to enhance profoundly harmful ideas and worldviews?

I don’t really have a better solution than the far from ideal, “Well, maybe secret knowledge is secret for a reason after all.” Since it both creates knower/ignorant hierarchies and corruption.

But, again, perception precedes thought.

And alternatives may only become possible in emergent moments.

And to recognize those we need to develop both better standards of evidence and the language to describe the world we want to live in.

"There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” -McLuhan

Alright, so we’re going to shift into a related subject from last week: Terence Mckenna and the Dreams that Defined Descartes.

I’m just going to repost the section from last week so it’s here. Just skip to the next headline if you don’t want to deal with it.

Mckenna, Descartes, and the Secret Mystic Heart of the Rationalist Project

I am, by inclination and what passes for an autodidact’s training, an extreme or radical skeptic.

As such, old Rene Descartes is a historic figure I have strong opinions about. And when I stumbled onto a video discussing an interesting piece of his legacy I had to fixate a bit.

If you don’t know, Descartes is an early Enlightenment French Philosopher and Mathematician who pioneered the rationalist epistemology underpinning both the whole of the enlightenment and the modern scientific method and thus most of the modern world.

He’s an, uh, pretty influential guy.

For our purposes, he broke some really important ground in what we might call Methodological Skepticism or Doubt. The emerging idea that one discovers truth by attacking its opposite.

Rene wasn’t the first skeptic, as many Greek philosophers fit the bill as well as numerous eastern thinkers. Examples include Socrates, (probably) Plato, Phyrro in ancient Greece, and no less than the Buddha himself in ancient India. As well as some of his successors like Nāgārjuna or (arguably) Dogen. I’m skipping over a lot of people and places.

One of the things that set Descartes apart is timing as he published his ideas at a vulnerable stage in European thought where Aristotle’s physics had started to be refuted by rigorous experiments and theory.

This drove two crises of thought:

1. Oh shit, we were wrong about the fundamental facts. How do we correct that mistake?

2. How can we develop or discover knowledge in such a way to prevent this from happening again?

And Descartes's answer to this is basically where rationalists and scientists are today: Doubt everything that can be doubted, what survives scrutiny is worth keeping. Oh, and then grandfather god in as an apriori assumption.

There’s some criticism of how well Rene did that in his philosophy, but this isn’t about that.

It’s about a thing Terence Mckenna said that’s just been… stuck in my craw for a few years and a video discussing that exact thing.

In summary, McKenna said that Descartes had a dream in which an Angel told him that “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.”

Let’s take a look at a couple of his quotes. This is from one of his Lectures On Alchemy, and the transcription is done by a volunteer. The section preceding this quote discusses the Hapsburgs putting down an “alchemical revolution” in Prauge, a claim I’m unsure of the quality of.

In that Hapsburg army, there was a young soldier of fortune, only 19 years old, still wet behind the ears, knowing nothing, happily soldiering and wenching his way around Europe while he decided what to do with himself. His name was Ren ́e descartes, a Frenchman. descartes in his later years reminisced about his period as a soldier in this army, and I like to think that it was actually descartes who murdered Maier. One of my ambitions is to write a play or a novel where these two confront each other in a back alley of burning Prague and carry on a debate about the future of Europe before Michael Maier falls to the sword of descartes. That may be apocryphal, but what is not apocryphal is that this Hapsburg army, having laid siege and destroyed the alchemical kingdom, began to retreat across Europe that fall and by mid-September was camped near the town of Olm in southern Germany. By a strange coincidence, Olm is the birthplace of Einstein some hundreds of years later. On the night of September 16, 1620, descartes had a dream, and in this dream an angel appeared to him — this is documented by his own hand — and the angel said to descartes, “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.” That revelation laid the basis for modern science. Ren ́e descartes is the founder of the distinction between the res cogitans and the res extensa, the founder of modern science, the founder of the scientific method that created the philosophical engines that created the modern world. How many scientists, working at their workbenches, understand that an angel chartered modern science? It’s the alchemical angel which will not die. It returns again and again to guide the destinies of nations and peoples toward an unimaginable conclusion.

In a different talk, focused more on Mckenna’s criticisms of science, he said:

If you’ve read Thomas Kuhn’s book on the structure of scientific revolutions, you know this is all lies and propaganda. The real story of science is that it’s a series of revelations, brilliantly defended by people whose careers depended on the brilliant defense of those revelations. One of the best-kept secrets of the birth of modern science is that it was founded by an angel, that the young Ren ́e Descartes was whoring and soldiering his way across Europe as a 21-year-old in the Hapsburg army, and one night in the town of Olm in southern Germany he had a dream — it’s strange that this would be the birthplace of Albert Einstein some 200 years later — and an angel appeared to him in the dream and said, “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number,” and he said, “I got it! Modern science. I’ll go do it,” and he did. That was the method for over 250 years of the conquest of nature, and it leads us to the Josephson junction, the Mars Global Surveyer, long-base interferometry that searches nearby stars for earth-like planets. It brings us the entire cornucopia of scientific effects, but an angelic revelation disguised as a logical-philosophical breakthrough: this is what you’re not told in the academy.

My point there is that human progress has always depended on the whisper- ing of alien minds, confrontations with the Other, probes into dimensions where imagination and chance held the winning hands; so the shaman, as paradigmatic figure, is applicable both in the aboriginal social context and in the present social context. The skywalker, the one who goes between, the one who passes outside of the tribe and then returns with memes, insights, cures, designs, glossolalia, technologies, and refertilizes the human family by this means. It’s irrational, but it’s how it actually happens, and it’s how it’s always happened and it may very well be the only way that it can happen: this cultivation of the irrational, this flirtation with the breakdown of boundaries.

So, some of this is definitely true.

Rene Descartes was a Gentleman soldier, and he was involved a battle in Prauge and on the way back Descartes had a series of dreams. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts the dreams on a different date, November 10th 1619, and I think we should prefer that over McKenna’s memory.

The first important deviation, though, is the line “In his own hand”.

While Descartes did keep a diary of this and we have records of what the diary said, the actual diary itself did not survive. So we probably have a record of what he wrote with his own hand. Some notes survived in his lost treatise Olympica and commentary on those is our main source.

I mostly bring this up because cranks like Terence McKenna often play fast and loose with how reliable a text is and it’s the kind of thing that makes them less trustworthy.

As he often does, Terence goes for the good story. But the actual story is just as interesting and, I think, more challenging to both the conventional narrative of linear progress and Terence’s own alchemical fancies.

For a few days before his dreams, Descartes was overcome by a kind of religious mania he termed “Enthusiasm” and he went to bed in a state of spiritual expectation.

The Dreams of Descartes

So, enthusiasm.

The connotations have changed quite a bit between the centuries and languages between us and Rene. As I said, this wasn’t the modern vaguely positive interest, but a more intense passion. The imminant feeling of anticipatory revelation.

This isn’t an emotion one really wants from their hyperrationalist philosopher. But it’s exactly the kind of paradox we like here. The creative process is weird. And even reason is generated by that process.

And so, our young “hero” goes to bed unsure what to do with himself and expecting some kind of breakthrough.

This mania is the result of a somewhat intentional process to attempt to travel and learn of the world. Rene doesn’t know what he’s trying to do exactly, but he’s chasing his dissatisfaction and trying to understand how to approach finding an answer to it.

Note: This account comes from the writings of Descartes’ Biography Adrien Baillet, as recounted by Alice Brown in a 1977 article for Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes and by Gregor Sebba’s The Dream of Descartes.

So, touched with delusions of grandeur, he senses his exploration is about to come to some kind of, uh, climax and falls asleep.

In the first dream he finds himself on some city street surrounded by ghosts and weakness in his right-side limbs, so he hobbled away from the ghosts in terror looking for a church to pray in for protection. When he gets inside, he meets a Mister N, who gives him a melon from a foreign land. Feeling the evil wind push him over again, he wakes up feeling like he was under attack from some kind of maliveant spirit or Evil Genius or Demon.

After he wakes up he prays to god to protect him from this evil, fearing that the “Enthusiasm” he was experiencing was not to be trusted and that its secret evil would bring down the “Thunderbolts of heaven” upon him, even though he hadn’t done anything really sinful.

As he dozed again he considered of various goods and evils in the world and was violently awakened by a loud noise he took to be a thunderclap.

Unsettled by both his thoughts/visions of the world and the shock of the loud noise, Descartes began to reason that the vividness and appropriateness of the qualities of the dream were signs he was on the right track providing him with some reassurance. Perhaps also with the assurance that his senses and rational mind continued to work correctly despite the uncanny feeling of the dreams themselves.

So he bravely soldiered back to sleep for the third and most important dream. This is the one Terence spoke of where he met an angel.

The third dream begun with Descartes in some room finding a book on a table, not knowing who put it there he picked it up and discovered it was a dictionary. This was very much to his liking and he hoped it would be useful to him. He then noticed he was holding another book and inspected it.

He discovers it was titled Corpus Poetarum (literally, The Body of Poets which is a fucking rad title if you don’t know that a Corpus is a collection) and opened it to find the Latin phrase, “Which way should I go in life?” from the Idylls of the Roman poet Ausonius.

At the same moment he began to read Ausonius’ poem, a man appeared before Descartes. The stranger mentions a poem titled “Yes and No”, and praised its quality. Descartes, who recognized it as one of Ausonius’ Idylls started looking through the Corpus, and is unable to find it.

As he looks, the stranger asks him where he got the book and Descartes admits he doesn’t know. By the time he finishes speaking the first book was gone, confusing him until he sees the Dictionary is on the other side of the table.

On picking it up, Rene discovers it’s now incomplete. He puts it aside and goes back into the Corpus Poetarum looking for Yes and No. Not finding it, he points out there’s a better poem by the same poet and tries to show the stranger the poem that began, “Which way should I go in life?”, but when looking for it again he was distracted by copperplate portraits of very high quality and the stranger and books disappeared without waking him.

At which point Descartes asked himself if this was real, a vision, or a dream. And, still dreaming, he decides it’s a dream and begins to interpret it in real time. The Dictionary represented the union of all the Sciences, a yet unfinished project. The BODY OF POETS by contrast was Philosophy and Wisdom.

And he decided that the, “Which way should I go in life?” poem was about his own indecision and the stranger was a wise and moral person who’s advice he should listen to, a Spirit of Truth who would be with him.

Eventually he wakes up and perhaps makes some detailed notes on the subject.

Whew. That was a lot, and there’s plenty of other details I’m skimming over.

So what the fuck was that about?

We can tell from the first dream that Descartes’ anxieties about being on the wrong path in life and haunted by ghosts he doesn’t really see or understand coming into sharp focus. The dream is less a revelation than an enactment of those anxieties.

This moment reappears often in fiction and nonfiction around revelation. One of my favorite moments in Moby Dick is Ishmael discussing why Ahab wants to Hunt Moby Dick:

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.

He finally sees the problem clearly, rendering it practically assailable.

But I digress. (Yes, you should still read Moby Dick)

It’s worth noting that my two main sources for this translate things differently and I’m kinda eyeballing the tension between their interpretation for this. There’s a great deal that’s ambiguous on both ends and I’m doing quite a lot of interpreting.

Among the bigger questions is if the second dream is even a dream at all. In the bit where the first dream is discussed, Bailett mentions that Descartes went back to sleep after an hour of meditation. While in the second dream he describes Rene as taking two hours of thinking about good and evil to doze off before being awoken by a thunderclap.

Which was it? Did Descartes even know? Maybe not. I think of my own dreams and how regularly I wake up after stumbling and falling in some dream, my whole body shuddering. Perhaps he experienced something similar.

It kind of sounds like he hadn’t really fallen asleep so much as he was dozing on the boundary to sleep, mulling over the categories his religious training had taught him to obsess over and then was suddenly startled back awake.

Hard to say. There’s a whole cottage industry of interpreting this night I had no idea about and as usual with interpreting it usually probably says more about the interpreter than the subject of interpretation.

Here’s another version of the story I found while looking for the poems in question.

So, let’s step back and compare this with Terence Mckenna’s account.

It’s pretty clear if you’ve read Descartes that these dreams represent intensely influential ideas in his thinking that will *ahem* haunt him his whole life.

The tension between Truth and falsehood, the concern about being deceived, the striving for solid ground to rest his ideas on and so on. A ton of it is there.

But what isn’t there in any way I could find is anything resembling the phrase, “The conquest of nature is to be achieved through measure and number.”

Descrates has an intense and thought provoking series of dreams that boil down to: Well, maybe the way to avoid going down an evil path is to learn whatever the fuck Truth is and find some goddamn wisdom.”

This isn’t some kind of cheat coded handed down from on high, further highlighted by the fact that Descartes didn’t really radically change his life immediately after this. He still had to work through the implications of everything and that took time.

Balliet’s comments on Descartes are telling for anyone super-interested in mystical revelations.

His enthusiasm left him a few days later; and although his spirit was back in its ordinary state, and had returned to its previous calm, he became no more decisive as to the resolutions he should make.

And the vow he made to make a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Loretto as a way of thanking both God and the Mother of God. But he didn’t fulfill this vow for much longer than he claimed he would.

Ooops.

So, while Terence is broadly correct about the arational heart at the core of Descartes, he does a particularly bad job of characterizing the experience itself or Descartes’ moral and intellectual struggle to make sense of both his personal anxieties and the larger movement he’d come to help define.

Handy for the story Terence wanted to tell though.

Conclusion

I think a close reading of Rene Descartes’ dreams gives us a lot of really important context for people trying to find breakthrough ideas or who are seeking some kind of mystic revelation.

The pattern of tension-building, the flashy experience that’s both extremely novel and familiar, the immediate attempts to make sense of it lined with grandiosity, the fading into profane memory, the slow descent into day-to-day living, and the aftershocks over years… all of it is extremely familiar to me.

I’ve been through a similar pattern maybe four or five times with varying degrees of altered state involved and those experiences form a core of my motivation to write this newsletter.

It’s interesting to contrast Descartes’ constant interest with the moral dimension of his experience with the more nihilistic visions of Nick Land (who, oh yes, we’ll get to) or HP Lovecraft.

Certainly, more harm has been downstream of Descartes’ attempts to fill that incomplete dictionary than Land or Lovecraft, but he also got in much earlier and in a much more critical place.

It could be worse.

So, it’s tricky.

But that trickiness also keeps things fresh and challenging. Hopefully, it won’t kill us all, lol.

Alright, I’ve been writing this fucking thing on and off since 9 am. Got to make some breakfast.

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