Celebrating Amidst a Crisis

Saturday Night LIVE. CosmiKnots tried to continue the three-day celebration, Public Ceremonies for the Cult of Consumption. Surrounded by our sacred altar of trash, we were ready to keep the party going. But then our friend/follower, Hardly/OK, got into an accident and ended up in the hospital. How could we celebrate our cult of stuff when our close friend couldn’t be there? WHAT MATTERS IN THE WORLD? ( #blacklivesmatter! )

“Both moral and metaphysical pessimism point to another kind, a pessimism that is neither subjective nor objective, neither for-us nor in-itself, and instead a pessimism of the world-without-us. We could call this a cosmic pessimism… but this sounds too majestic, too full of wonder, too much the bitter aftertaste of the Great Beyond…

The contours of cosmic pessimism are a drastic scaling-up or scaling-down of the human point of view, the unhuman orientation of deep space and deep time, and all of this shadowed by an impasse, a primordial insignificance, the impossibility of ever adequately accounting for one’s relationship to thought—all that remains of pessimism is the desiderata of affects—agonistic, impassive, defiant, reclusive, filled with sorrow and flailing at that architectonic chess match called philosophy, a flailing that pessimism tries to raise to the level of an art form (though what usually results is slapstick).

”Cosmic Pessimism” by Eugene Thacker in Continent Continent

(from Nihilisa Frank)

Procession, interrupted / Crisis, inverted 

[ A chalk of courage, like a pen. A container for feelings, spilling over, upside-down, inside-out. A sad clown performs for the stage.]

“Ultimately, pessimism is weary of everything and of itself. Pessimism is the philosophical form of disenchantment—disenchantment as chanting, a chant, a mantra, a solitary, monophonic voice rendered insignificant by the intimate immensity surrounding it…

The very term “pessimism” suggests a school of thought, a movement, even a community. But pessimism always has a membership of one—maybe two. Ideally, of course, it would have a membership of none, with only a scribbled, illegible note left behind by someone long forgotten. But this seems unrealistic, though one can always hope.”

-Eugene Thacker in Continent Continent

The shred of human hope, like the salt in your tears [before ocean’s rise].