Charles Wing-Uexküll Profile picture
Time war veteran. Passage Prize winner (nonfic). CHOAM sends its regards.
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Jun 9 14 tweets 5 min read
What happens after we win?

Plato counsels political purges in the _Republic_ & _Laws_, but the dialogues describe this process in totally different ways.

In the _Republic_ bk VIII, purges by tyrants are ideological: they root out factions of envious dissenters & schemers: Image "Won't some of the bolder characters among those who helped him to power, & now hold positions of influence, begin to speak freely to him & to each other, & blame him for what is happening?"

"Very probably."

"Then, if he is to retain power, he must root them out, all of them, Image
May 29 24 tweets 8 min read
on Grothendieck’s hyper-platonism Image Even the early Platonic dialogues—before the doctrine of the Forms was fully developed—taught that mathematical truths had an abstract, independent, real existence. In the Meno, a Socrates gets an innumerate slave to ‘remember’ the Pythagorean theorem. Image
May 7 13 tweets 5 min read
on the truth of Actaeon Image "“The underlying, persisting matter must constantly change form as mechanical, physical, chemical and organic appearances, following the guiding thread of causality, all crowd around, greedy to emerge and tear the matter away from the others... Image
Jan 7 17 tweets 6 min read
Why is the number & arrangement of bones in the vertebrate skeleton so fixed, but their size & function so plastic?

good Schopenhauer passage on this question: Image "This number & arrangement of the bones, which Geoffroy de St. Hilaire called the anatomical element, continues, as he has thoroughly shown, in all essential points unchanged: Image
Nov 26, 2023 18 tweets 7 min read
By August 1885, Nietzsche had conceived of a great work that would have been the crown of his philosophical career: The Will to Power in four volumes.

All of human psychology, organic life, & even cosmology was to be explained through a single force, the will to power. Image The reduction of all phenomena & events to manifestations of a single cause resembled both the pre-Socratics & Schopenhauer (in his drafts, Nietzsche would try to show that the ‘will-to-power’ was prior to & more universal than S.’s ‘will-to-live’. Image
Oct 31, 2023 24 tweets 9 min read
hopelessly mesmerized by the eerie, indifferent serenity in Claude Lorrain’s last painting, “Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia” (1681-2), painted for his patron Prince Lorenzo Onofrio Colonna:

absolute stillness & calm on the brink of a war that has somehow already happened Image There’s something about the delicacy of the leaves in the bushes & trees which creates a static, frieze-like effect, & is reinforced by the break in the composition created by the stream & the way it opens up to a distant vista: there’s a sense of tasteful proportion & balance. Image
Oct 23, 2023 7 tweets 2 min read
On September 15, 2023, a bomb dropped:

Costin Alamariu's _Selective Breeding & the Birth of Philosophy_ appeared on Amazon.

A small group of frens decided to hold a series of spaces devoted to the initial reception, explication, & commentary on this momentous work. Image The first space covered the Introduction & Ch. 1: an overview of the whole project & then a phenomenological-anthropological investigation of the agrarian society ruled by ancestral nomos.

Frens, this is the canonical articulation of 'The Longhouse':
Aug 14, 2023 27 tweets 8 min read
Schopenhauer taught that a man’s character, his moods & passions & moral sentiments, are generated by his internal organs. Image In the mid-19th c, this was a controversial matter: the new physiologists like Flourens wanted to collapse morality into the intellect, so that ‘the soul’ could be said to be housed entirely in the brain. Image
Jul 10, 2023 23 tweets 9 min read
‘First to die’

There is a haunting passage from a lost play of Euripides that is only known from a heavily damaged papyrus roll found in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus in 1906,

offering consolation for the accidental death of an infant boy & instituting games in his memory. The discovery of the site, Oxyrhynchus, & the hundreds of thousands of papyri by Grenfell & Hunt is an epic story in its own right, a lost library of documents suddenly brought back to life, more than a thousand years out of time.
Jun 14, 2023 18 tweets 3 min read
“Subtly [the gods] conceal the leisurely stride of time, as they hunt down the man who fails to honor them.”

/

“The gods cunningly conceal the long pace of time and hunt the impious.”

two translations of my favorite lines from The Bacchae by Euripides, ~406 BC. the line itself is spoken by the chorus, calling back to how the disguised god Dionysius is leading Pentheus, the king who was bent on suppressing his cult, to his doom:

“We will go by deserted streets; I will be your guide.”
Jun 10, 2023 10 tweets 4 min read
in CR ep 134 “HOMER PART ONE” BAP discusses a certain simile from Iliad 4,

the simile of Menelaus’ wound, which compares the king’s blood-soaked legs to a dyed ivory cheekpiece for horses Image unlike many other Homeric similes, this one isn’t primarily describing motion (an army as a flock of birds or swarm of bees) or an excess of emotion (a raging warrior as a lion or dismay coming over a group like a black wave bearing seaweed)… Image
Jun 8, 2023 9 tweets 2 min read
one of the burdens of being a Southerner in the 21st c is watching people become more & more retarded re: the civil war

the cultural erasure & amnesia, simplification, presentism, mobilization of ‘history’ for contemporary politics, the slander, etc takes on a tragic hue. it’s not just that progressive pundits misunderstand the Confederacy — naturally they can’t empathize with the self-sacrifice of fervent Christians defending their homes — but they don’t understood the Union, either: its economic significance or ideological motivations.
Apr 3, 2023 31 tweets 9 min read
Our yearning to retvrn to the stars, or, Homer’s Immaterium Image In CR ep 134 “Homer Part One” BAP in an offhand, joking way suggests that the Homeric epics recount events that originally took place in outer space.
Mar 17, 2023 18 tweets 6 min read
“Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings…”

-Gerhard Richter, “Notes”, 1985 Image I am reading this book about the German painter Gerhard Richter, written by theorycel art historian Buchloh who has nonetheless engaged with Richter’s work for a half century or more. This was published by MIT Press in 2022. Image
Feb 23, 2023 12 tweets 5 min read
I’m working my way through a new compilation of James Shelby Downard’s unpublished texts called _Stalking the Great Whore_

Adam Gorightly quietly dropped this book on Amazon a few weeks ago—haven’t heard much about it from anyone yet. The volume itself is very nice, with a foreword by Gorightly explaining the textual history & provenance of the manuscripts… these formed a conglomerate of fragments, typed on multiple typewriters & all converted to microfiche. William Grimstad gave them to Gorightly in 2015.
Feb 13, 2023 48 tweets 9 min read
The ruined city of Ephesus was the central battleground in the esoteric time war between the Catholic Church and the Anatolian earth goddess Cybele for more than a thousand years. May God have mercy on my soul for divulging this grotesque, maddening infohazard, but I am not strong enough to die with this secret. Please forgive me.
Feb 7, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
tonight’s reading is for my normie followers
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I have no prejudices, inquisitor.”

“Yes, you have. I can taste them. You detest mind-seers. You despise the gift of the astropath. You are a blunt, Flense. A sense-dead moron. Shall I show you what you are missing?”

Flense shook. Image “No need, inquisitor!”
“Just a touch? Be a sport. Heldane sniggered, droplets of spittle flecking off his thick teeth.

Flense shuddered. Heldane turned his gaze away slowly and then snapped back suddenly. Impossible light flooded into Flense’s skull. Image
Jan 30, 2023 13 tweets 5 min read
I am disturbed & shaken after learning that one of the mathematicians I revere the most,

Henri Poincaré, believed that time was slowing down & there was almost no way for us to tell.

My mind is melting & I can’t sleep. this is from _The Measure of Time_ (1898):
Jan 29, 2023 13 tweets 2 min read
“History is to the Greeks and consequently to the Romans an operation against Time the all-destroying in order to save the memory of events worth being remembered.”

-Arnaldo Momigliano, “Time in Ancient Historiography, 1966 “In times of persecution and of uneasy tolerance the Church had developed its idea of orthodoxy and its conception of the providential economy of history. It emerged victorious to reassert with enhanced authority the unmistakable pattern of divine intervention in history, the…
Jan 21, 2023 10 tweets 2 min read
it starts with Athanasius’ suppression of decadent desert sects in the 4th century, leading to the burial & preservation of the Nag Hammadi library & demonic texts like the Hypostasis of the Archons / Reality of the Rulers. In ancient Gnostic texts—Apocryphon of John especially—there is an archon who calls himself Sabaoth, ‘lord of hosts.’

But he is actually ruler of the fifth sphere, which is Mars in Ptolemaic astronomy: a red realm of blood and war.
Dec 17, 2022 16 tweets 4 min read
Every 🐸 needs to read these 16 books before you get to 5K followers