I had a dream last night, something of a rare occurence as I rarely remember them, although presumably I have them. In this dream I was fixing computers, amongst other things, when I suddenly found myself awaking in bed, in what I believe is known as a false awakening and finding a disembodied head, apparently being used to speak the words of satan, offering me something I can't remember in exchange for my immortal soul. Well, I was in the middle of denouncing him and avowing my support for God when he fucked off without hearing the end of my speech, and I woke up. Well, I think so, at any rate if I wasn't awake then I'm also not awake now.
This brings to mind a question which I don't consider nearly often enough, which is the reason for the erosion of our civil liberties. I tend far too much to simply thing of the predators in society as a monolithic evil, driven by their very nature to prey upon others and to commit acts of evil solely for their own sake, but even for the likes of Tony Blair (back in the news due to his wife selling his autograph on ebay) this seems simplistic and characateured. Not to say that it isn't right, but it deserves more consideration. If these deviants seek wealth, is this the best way to go about it? If careerist and technocratic politicians support it, do they support it with the aim of securing greater electoral success? Of course our democratic process had been conquered by the enemy, but the forms of democracy persist without the substance. Votes may be tabulated by lean, mean, touch-screen voting machine designed to ensure an acceptable victory, like in that film with Robin Williams, but the elections continue. While our long attachment to Habeas Corpus, whose finest hour came with the Somersett case and the consequent abolition of slavery, has gone the way of the American's love of their fourth amendment no threat is ever made to the continuation of elections. Motivations elude me, if I can't understand why people I know consume intoxicants I won't be able to determine the root causes of evil.
The main thought, however, which the disembodied devil head on my dream table provoked within me is this: he was in front of the window. I don't like windows, never have. You look out of a window into outer darkness and you never know what lurks beyond the threshold. I've always heard tales of alien abductees seeing big eyed screen memories sitting on the sill, and combined with my own inclinations this gave me an aversion to darkened windows which has been with me for as long as I can remember. I generally seek darkness rather than light, but to be in the light is particularly irksome near a window, where it prevents one from seeing what lay beyond the glass. For a window is not only a way to see out but a way to see back into the lighted area. When you sit in the light and look into the darkened glass the watcher on the threshold stares back with your own face.
The mirror has always held a position of reverence and awe in the occult beliefs and superstitions of the world, whether snow white's evil step mother's magic mirror or the refractions of light in a crystal ball or the Jewish superstition of covering mirrors at funerals. The primitive belief that another world full of other beings lay beneath the reflective surface of water has now been realised with the one-way glass behind which unseen intelligences silently observe and draw their plans against us. As the ancients put their offerings into streams and threw inscribed bones into holy springs we may all now constantly leak information, that most valuable commodity, to those beyond. As king El Dorado was said to have dived into the water to converse with supernatural beings so a priveleged few of us may now commune with the gods of this world, watching through the camera concealed in the supermarket disco ball or the viewing booth behind the mirror in the ladies conveniences.
I must also, I suppose, reference the well known aversion towards mirrors felt by victims of mind control, sufferers from DID who see something other than their own face in the likeness in the mirror.
And while I've never been one for metempsychosis, the figurative windows to the soul are the eyes, cat's eyes being a recent matter for consideration for me. It must have been a decade ago when I first read about the use of cats by the CIA to spy on people. "According to Victor Marchetti the CIA first attempted this years ago. Radio implants were attached to a cat's cochlea, to facilitate the pinpointing of specific conversations, freed from extraneous surrounding noises. The cat was run over by a taxi on its first assignment. As Martin Cannon points out, though, there was nothing to stop the Agency from getting another cat, or from using a human being." When you look in the mirror you don't know what's looking back, and you don't know what's looking out from behind your eyes.
On the subject of souls and animals the Vikings believed bears to be men in disguise, not in human body, therefore they were the greatest of animals. Certainly Vojtek was like a man, a soldier enlisted in the Free Polish forces in the second world war. Carried ammunition about with the other troops. Loved baths. Warm ones. Once ferreted out a German agent hidden in the bath house.
I've seen photographs of Vojtek the soldier bear, which even if he had a soul probably didn't steal it. Nonetheless a photograph captures in a moment what the mirror captures in real time. A film, however, seems to have a life of it's own, the patterned movement symptomatic of life and intelligence, enough according to legend to convince those who first saw such things that what the saw was real. A man arrested for murder for directing a film with an SFX murder in it. People running from a theatre when a train bares down on the camera. Now, of course, we're too sophisticated for that, constantly exposed to the phenomenon of artificial animation. More than a mirror, the hypnotic light of the television screen shows us what is inside, not what is outside, it mirrors the mind of our dreams. In time our dreams have come to mirror it.
If you never see a mirror you never see yourself. Our minds have had mirrors as long as our bodies, the polished copper mirrors of the ancients finding their counterparts in the myths, legends and archetypes which propagated themselves through human populations. Now, though, stories no longer flow from man to man. Their propagation is not lateral but vertical, from the centre to the periphery. The centralised media empires find themselves, not without effort, in a position to programme the dreaming mind of man. The moving pictures so faithfully watched contain subliminal messages, not messages so fast as to escape the grasp of the conscious mind, but something else. Everything else, everything seen on the screen. The things the mind takes as background, the unspoken assumptions.
Cthulhu fhtagn.
But I don't use windows, I use Linux.
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