We put The Police there. Right?
We put them there. And we don’t want to go there,
because we are smart people; we are cool people.
We don’t want to go and hit anyone.
We don’t want to go and enforce The Law –
Because we don’t really believe in it.
But we know some poor bastard has to enforce it.
Why do we hate those guys when we put them there?
Why do we hate ourselves for creating this society?
Why are so many people in America obsessed
with Marilyn Manson; corpses; dead people;
misery; John Wayne Gacy…
John Wayne Gacy’s a fucking prick.
Y’know, he killed a few people
and did some shitty paintings.
What’s that? Why should we be engaged with that?
And yet that has become..
what, “Apocalypse Culture“?
Where do we go from there, that isn’t that?
Where do we go that isn’t playing with our own shite?
The Answer… back to
The Individual.
Oh, you look so tired
Mouth slack and wide
Ill-housed and ill-advised
Your face is as mean
As your life has been --
Crash into my arms,
I want you.
You don't agree,
But you don't refuse —
I know you.
Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to The Bench where
Your Clothes were stolen
This is The Coastal Town
That they forgot to close
Down, Armageddon,
Come Armageddon!
Come, Armageddon! Come!
“Babylon?
The myth of Tuamat and Marduk, the Enuma Elish... extraordinary.
Absolutely extraordinary.
There are archetypal forms... to become as gods...
The Bacchanal. Apotheosis. It's almost.... It's almost as if... As if the act itself...
The act of violence... Some trigger in the brain. is if it were...
Oh dear God.
Dear God, what is this Aethyr I am come upon?
What spirits are these, labouring in what heavenly light?
No...
No, this is dazzle, but not yet divinity. Nor are these heathen wraiths about me spirits, lacking even that vitality.
What, then?
Am I, like Saint John The Divine, vouchsafed a glimpse of those last times?
Are these the days my death shall spare me?
It would seem we are to suffer an apocalypse of cockatoos...
Morose, barbaric children playing joylessly with their unfathomable toys.
Where comes this dullness in your eyes? How has your century numbed you so?
Shall man be given marvels only when he is beyond all wonder?
Your days were born in blood and fires, whereof in you I may not see the meanest spark!
Your past is pain and iron!
Know Yourselves!
With all your shimmering numbers and your lights, think not to be inured to history. It's black root succours you. It is INSIDE you.
Are you asleep to it, that cannot feel it's breath upon your neck, nor see what soaks it's cuffs?
See me! Wake up and look upon me! I am come amongst you. I am with you always!
You are the sum of all preceeding you, yet you seem indifferent to yourselves.
A culture grown disinterested, even in it's own abysmal wounds.
Your women all but show their sexes, and yet this display elicits not a flicker of response.
Your own flesh is made meaningless to you.
How would I seem to you? Some antique fiend or penny dreadful horror, yet you frighten me!
You have not souls. With you I am alone.
Alone in an Olympus. Though accomplished in the sciences, your slightest mechanisms are beyond my grasp.
They HUMBLE me, yet touch you not at all.
This disaffection. This is Armageddon. Ah, Mary, how times levelled us. We are made equal, both mere curios of our vanished epoch in this lustless world.
This World, wherein comparison I am made ignorant, while you....
you are made virtuous.
Do you understand how I loved you? You'd have all been dead in a year or two from liver failure or childbirth. Dead. Forgotten.
I have saved you. Do you understand that? I have made you safe from time and we are wed in legend, inextricable within eternity.
Know that I am...
uh...”
— Jack The Ripper
“Business!" cried The Ghost,
wringing its hands again.
"Mankind was My Business.
The Common Welfare
was My Business; Charity, Mercy,
Forbearance, and Benevolence,
were, all, My Business.
The Dealings of My Trade were
but a drop of water in
the comprehensive ocean
of My Business!"
“I think what we should do is walk away from the crap of the 20th century, and start thinking about what we’ve been experiencing.
My feeling about the 20th century, and about World War II and about Auschwitz and all of that stuff is that we HAD to go through it. We HAD to do it. That was Humanity’s Dark Night of The Soul, and it will never, ever happen again.
But it HAD to happen.
Every single nightmare image, every image of hell that we have in our minds happened.
Everything you can think of; people were flayed, brutalised, gassed, tortured, cut into pieces, turned into pigs – everything you can imagine happened. The world was a wasteland. There were cities completely annihilated. We went through it.
WHY did we do that?
Stanislav Grof has a conception of the ‘perinatal matrices', which was one of the big influences on the film The Matrix.
You might recognise some of this. He says that things that happen to us around birth are really profound, and they have all kinds of weird effects. They effect society, they effect the self; they effect everything. They have reverberations.
And he claims that there are several states, that he calls “Basic Perinatal Matrices”.
The first state is oceanic bliss – which we’re all familiar with, I’m sure. Oceanic fuckin’ bliss, mate. And that is the state of the baby in the womb, untouched – everything is provided for; everthing is there; everything you need will turn up out of the blue.
Basic Perinatal Matrix 2 is a different thing. It’s when the womb starts to turn a little toxic, and begins to suggest we’re about to be expelled. And, y’know, we don’t remember this stuff – what happened? What was the feeling of that fetus in there who suddenly thinks: “My entire universe has been overturned and I’m about to be shit out”?
Does he know where he’s going? “What the fuck’s this? Y’know, I was happy there. It was cool; I was getting everything I wanted.”
And so on into BPM 4 – which is kind of a release from tension; which is the birth process.
So I’m beginning to think.. as a society – and returning to the idea of ontogeny as history.. phylogeny, or whatever the fuck the word is.. what we’re looking at now is humanity’s process through Grofian matrices.
And what we went through is actually a Stanislav Grof Basic Perinatal Matrix 3 experience.
Every image that he talks about: death camps, control, the idea of people.. babies trapped in tubes.. you’ll recognise all this from The Matrix, as I said.
Oil, mechanisms, machines that hate us; destructive technology.. it all happened.
What if this little baby that is The Universe; this little larvae that’s approaching culmination, has had to go through these stages? Because everything does.
If you want to get rid of War,
How Do You Get Rid of War?
You inoculate yourself against War by having
The Worst Fuckin’ War
You’ve Ever Had in Your Life.
And everything after that’s just an aftershock.
We’ve done nothing worse than what we did in those few years. Humanity’s never come close to anything like it. We’ve tried; there’s been a few lunatics who’ve tried. But nothing on that scale.
So what if we choose to imagine that Humanity has passed through that stage?
We’ve reached the 21st century,
and we’re now approaching Basic Perinatal Matrix 4.
Which is: Victory after War.
Which is: The Struggle is Over.
Which is: We’re All Here; What Do We Do Next?
There was no apocalypse; there was no Christ.
There was no rapture. There is nothing.
All this stuff is shit.
There is only Us. And we’ve still got another thousand years, and maybe another thousand beyond that, and maybe another twenty thousand beyond that.
What are we gonna do?
Who Are We?
Are we gonna stick to these personalities; these bounded, territorial things?
Are we gonna expand ourselves;
make ourselves bigger?
So that if you happen to like.. [say] ‘world music’ and I don’t, I can tap into your love of ‘world music’, and experience it – and it means something.
So all I’m suggesting here is that we all take up magic.
Because basically it works.”
