#higher order

[lebuc]

higher order

* all the way from the heavens to my finger, or waiting tongue

a snowflake arrives expressing uniqueness;

huddled birds eschew any such air, perched dually, branchwise in the winter chill.

how the garden holds out during the season's haughty hurl of wind & frigidity, frost & low humidity (indoors!) always amazes.

as the cycle continues mammals, animals & invertebrates express or not, as is their wont, their own measure of distinction,

perhaps unaware that all, as it should be, is in perfection of a higher order

all the way down from the heavens to a stray leaf, windblown to the porch at my front door. * 1/22 - lebuc - higher order

[dustedmagazine]

Eric Arn — Higher Order (Carbon)

Higher Order by Eric Arn

Eric Arn has spent the last three or four decades in the service of the experimental guitar, early on as part of Wayne Rogers’ Crystallized Movements, later in his own deep droning, electrified Primordial Undermind and now in this mostly acoustic blues-folk infused set of solo material, partly improvised and partly composed. These songs run the gamut from buoyant, bucolic, fingerpicked transcendentalism to tetchy, twitchy, untethered shows of digital skill, with one space-age foray into electric guitar psychedelia at the end.

In the quieter, more melodic entries, Arn sounds a good bit like Basho, washing homespun folk melodies in a luminous mystical light. “Wer Tauben füttert, füttert Gespenster” which translates as “Whoever feeds pigeons, feeds ghosts” is perhaps the best of these, a placid, gentle rain of notes that taps into something spiritual without making too much of it. “6 or 7 Adepts” is knottier and less serene. It leaves lots of space for meditation, hazarding a spray of notes, then a pause for contemplation. We have time to consider the intervals between the music. Phrases tilt upwards like question markets and are answered by muted bursts. The piece seems like an internal inquiry, as Arn picks his way carefully through it. There is a provisional quality to the way it resolves, as if he were just deciding what it means for himself.

Elsewhere, tracks veer further from folk tradition. “Warpage in the Figures,” molds blues-y bends into abstract shapes, agitated sound running sprints, then stopping to pant and recovery. It is less melodic than the other tracks, but full of a brainy aggression; you can imagine strings being broken in its rush towards revelation.

The disc closes with “Greets the Dawn,” for someone who has admittedly not kept up all that well, the track that most recalls Arn’s work with Primordial Undermind. Here tones build slowly in vibrating atmospheres. A sense of wonder is palpable. It puts into relief how densely full of notes and ideas all the previous tracks were, and how stillness can evoke just as much as busyness.

Jennifer Kelly

[olydemy]

I grew up with three older sisters and a younger brother. Both masculinity and femininity were valued in our home. I grew up watching musicals and listening to the Carpenters but also playing football and listening to Metallica. I am who I am because of the environmen I grew up in.

I thank God that in our home, intelligence was valued. Unfortunately, deep thought was valued but original thought was not. If I believed something else or thought a different way, I was punished. And when I "behaved" (complied with the status quo) I was rewarded.

The kids in school did not think it was cool to be smart. So I learned how to act stupid. Then I discovered that the right people value intelligence.

A friend once said to me as a compliment, "If you hang out with TJ, you learn what words mean." I found my tribe, those who valued me for me instead of how being around me affected their status.

Now that I am awake, I decide what I do, what I think, and what I believe. And let me tell you, I don't believe much of anything anymore.

They call it nihilism. I call it realism. They call it anarchy. I call it higher order. They call it rebellion. I call it freedom.

I am who I am. Don't try to change me and I won't try to change you. In 12-step programs we call it cleaning your side of the street.

If your side of the street is clean you will have less desire to tell someone to clean their side because often the people who criticize are the ones who don't have their own lives in order.

So, as the saying goes, stay on your side of the street. The world is full of people who refuse to stay on their side of the street.

You want the vaccine? Great. You want me to get the vaccine? My body my choice. You want me to wear a mask so you can feel all warm and fuzzy inside? You can want in one hand and shit in the other.

I don't live to please anyone anymore. Live and let live. When the fuck did people stop valuing that statement?

"But don't you care about how your actions affect other people? You're selfish."

Everything you do has the possibility of affecting someone else in unforeseeable ways. By this logic we should all kill ourselves because our existence is a potential threat to society.

Fuck society. I have been saying this since I was a teenager and I have never meant it more than I do right now. Society can crumble for all I care. I will survive. Just like I always have. Maybe you won't. Who knows. But it won't be my fault if you don't. Maybe then we will all learn to take responsibility for our own lives and not be so offended and codependent.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Indeed, empire, in the true sense of the word, can exist only if it animated by a powerful spiritual impetus, by a powerful spiritual  impetus, by a faith, by something which addresses the same spiritual depth from which religion itself takes life. Without this, there can never issue anything but a creature of violence -- 'imperialism' -- and a mechanical disanimate superstructure. For this reason it is needful to capture --if we can put it that way -- the same forces which act in the faiths, without injuring these faiths, but rather integrating them and carrying them to a higher level.

Julius Evola, “On The Spiritual Premises of Empire.”

[the-funtime-autocrat]

The Classical and Mediterranean world exalted the sense of individual dignity, of difference, of aristocracy and hierarchy: it set, above every other, the ideal of culture, in the sense of the realization of the self, of the creation of 'types,' of living works of art expressing complete persons. And in the autarchy, blooming out of the superb dominion of those who possess themselves, of the Doric and Homeric type, whose purity is strength and whose strength is purity, it recognized virtus, which brings the human to communicate with the non-human.

Julius Evola, “Alternatives for Civilization.”

[the-funtime-autocrat]

All too often the primordial essence of Rome has been overlooked --- the essence of that Rome whose origins lie in an August myth, that Rome which will always have an evocative power, that Rome which will always have an evocative power, that Rome which coincides, not with a merely historical concept of ancient judicial structure, but rather with an order shaped by something more than simply human values --- by divine powers, figures and dominions: a world of metaphysical tensions, a solar world marked by elitism, an Olympian and heroic reality, order, light, pure vitality and pure action.

Julius Evola, “Romanness, Germanicness and the ‘Light of the North’ (1968).

[black-star-element-23]

[vandora-sart]