Persistent Patterns

Cynicism: confirmation bias,

Castrated compassion,

Coagulated recognition—

Patterns persistent;

People piss along pitilessly

Strange Illusions

 A short analysis of the 1945 film Strange Illusions

A teenager named Paul has a dream while out with a doctor, that his widowed mother has begun seeing a man with a murderous secret. Sinister in nature his dream was incredibly precognitive and he quickly makes his way home and upon arrival it appears the help of the house is in agreement regarding the man being ultimately a suspicious character. 

For a few initial instances, it seems Paul’s fretting is overblown concert as Brett, the man to soon be engaged to his mother gives off no innately unnerving vibe. However behind closed doors with the aid of what was supposed to be his doctor, expresses his own sense of unease at Paul’s prying about business he seemingly shouldn’t know. Proving Paul’s hypothesis correct, the man is in fact out for revenge against the family of Detective Cartwright, or the late father of the protagonist, for legal trouble. 

Paul’s sister comes to attention on the issue, divulging to her brother that while swimming Brett had forced himself on her. Explaining, though he stopped as quickly as he attempted, “I felt sort of queer about him ever since.”

All the while, in spite of Paul’s clear unease and Brett’s progressively more insistent attempts for a swift marriage, the widowed Ms. Cartwright remains incredibly oblivious to the situation. A fool in love, so to say. 

Overall the subtext of the movie seems to lend itself to the idea that the gut instinct of a child’s intuition is usually more accurate than mirror neurons being manipulated in a fully developed frontal lobe. 

Circus From Hell

Circus from hell, instant pulsating swells

Masterful maze of fragmented jails

Carry the burden, weight of the world

Social underdevelopment, amusing comedy

What is society in relation to me?

“Lies, everybody lied”

I care until it dies, shrugging shoulders to my confused eyes

Why? Temporary temptation; false hope elucidation

Intense serotonin, bleeding bereavement

Pitiless plight, anti-white light

Yellow hue comes all true

Deceptive refraction, unsafe correlation 

“Love is just a history that they may prove…”

Old act, freeze frame it’s all the same and then beyond the time of day

 Fetish For Finale: The Doomsday Clock

An observational rebuttal to the fear-mongering of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

By Claudia Berdella

According to the latest statements from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientist, the Doomsday clock which supposedly shows how close we are to Armageddon is at 85 seconds to zero hour. As of January 27, 2026 their Security Board announced their placement of the hand. Headlines reporting on the news give an air of immediate imminence; fear inducing propaganda, claiming the position of solid authority on the matter… As if the clock is not a mere arbitrary monolith and hasn’t been reset on numerous occasions. 

Sarah Starkey in her written press release for the Board quotes a 2021 speech from CEO and professor Maria Rose to illustrate the given message:

“Without facts, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no trust. And without radical collaboration this this moment demands is impossible. We are living through an information Armageddon— the crisis beneath all crises— driven by extractive and predatory technology that spread lies faster than facts and profits from our division. We cannot solve problems we cannot agree exist. We cannot cooperate across borders when we cannot even share the same facts. Nuclear threats, climate collapse, AI risks: none can be addressed without first rebuilding our shared reality. The clock is ticking.”

Not wrong by a longshot at face value: global tensions are at a fever pitch, and AI directly feeds into climate issues. However, what is this, if not fear mongering? What is this if not an insincere voice regarding a fetish?

Since humanity developed knowledge regarding its own mortality, paired with the Upper Paleolithic ‘creative revolution,’ evolving an overactive intellectual capacity and biological prerogative for self preservation, high is the likelihood that apocalyptic scenarios have been around as long as any semblance of society has. 

Terror Management Theory, as presented in the book Worm At The Core: On The Role of Death In Life— or Ernest Becker’s ever poignant precursor The Denial of Death— is the highlighted absurdity within the death-wish. Similar to a suicidal individual, doomsday scenarios are a hypothesized form of symbolic ego gratification. A monumental moment, then it’s all done. In the individual person this is delegated to self-esteem (ego) and romanticism of the human condition in comparison to the vast scheme of universal existence. Essentially the basic thought process in such is that at least you aren’t the only one dying and there’ll be nothing to miss out on; and maybe, just maybe, there’s an extension of consciousness beyond the post-Morten rigor mortis where we can all meet. 

Even in the imagined end-scene, there’s a post-credit snippet. Denial of death permeates. 

Say we do wipe our species off the face of the planet like in any apocalypse movie or a biblical barrage occurs and brings down perdition, what is the former but a self-fulfilling prophecy? What is the latter but deified daydreams? What is it if not a formalized fetish? Seemingly, the idea of a deathwish is encapsulated almost perfect, in both hope for and fear of an imagined end of the human world. 

Albert Einstein has the famed line explaining, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones,” in association with the idea of a nuclear battle and subsequent fallout reducing technological advancements back to antiquity. Humanity in this hypothesis survives however. As it would seem, even if a nation like Israel decided to enact its Samson option, likely it is that survivors would still manage to straggle their way through. Atomic arsenals have obviously improved tremendously since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and undoubtedly moreso since the Tsar Bomba; so the reconstruction of societies would be more of a struggle undoubtedly from the survivors, but like cockroaches have managed numerous extinction events, humans are pretty resilient in spite of excesses. 

Blaming technology is unimaginable in the face of history and human tendency. Calling it causation for increased division among people is averting the human responsibility in the matter altogether. Back in the day, union busters would bring in black workers to piss off white strikers— it’s nothing new, imposed animosity. It all merely updates to the times as, mind you, humans are the ones programming it so. 

With that, powering the technological advancement in the race toward artificial intelligence, also lies climate change. Eating up resources as an energy means, but simulating not irreparable. Without humanity much issues presented would revert. The Doomsday clock merely symbolizes the end of human existence, not the Earth which has spun and sprouted life before man and will long after. 

With that, what is the actual truth and fact here? The planet would objectively fare better without mankind? Highly unlikely would it be for the entirety of ecosystems to die off, even in the advent of abhorrent man-made mutilation. The end of the world is just a placeholder for The Last Hominid’s Inheritance of Extinction. Overestimating itself: humanity is and are not the sole inhabitants of the planet, nor would it be the first or last to die here. 

At face value, human society is neither innately good or bad, it is and evolves as time progresses. Most every era of its existence has it been predicted the end of the world was right around the corner; soon or sometime shortly after one’s lifetime. Sure, the span of human existence is but a short blip on a pale blue dot thus far, but with that (and to paraphrase Nietzsche in his book Human, All Too Human), come many assumptions as to its qualities and characterization of its own conscious perception. 

Ultimately the Doomsday clock is a ruined orgasm on loop. Almost a self-fulfilling prophecy with the Great Filter hypothesis and centuries of media from the Bible to Stephen King’s ‘If It Bleeds’, depicting a sudden stop to it all. Realistically and observationally, such is nothing more than a fetish without finish. 

Refracted Attraction: Issue Is Its Own Escape

Eliphas Levi uses the phrase “infallible reason” in regards to fellow travelers, cautioning them of the possibility of going mad as a result of the danger in toying with the operations of occult science. As if science, of the occult inclination or accepted variety are not madness in of themselves on some level. Delusion is key to the willing of and illusion, until it becomes an attainable reality, is it not?

He explains his position further a few paragraphs later. Expressing that, “human passions produce blindly the opposites of their desire, when they act without direction. Excessive love arouses antipathy; blind hate counteracts and scourges itself; vanity leads to the abasement and the most cruel humiliations…”

Like myself at the beginning of the last year, 2025, with the will being refracted towards and external entity; and basing it in some sense on the obsessive madness detailed in Lolita, sonically synthesized to the album Eat Me, Drink Me; all the while attempting to evade its dreary, closing confirmation for a self-fulfilling prophecy. Shane warned. D’Annunzio preached. But I have little regret. “My pain is not ashamed to repeat itself,” only the issues which coagulated it so. It’s less cruel humiliation as Levi described, the verbiage I would use that of what Quentin Tarantino delegated in a podcast interview conducted by Brett Easton Ellis; when recollecting his a certain period of his life wherein it was himself and a friend existing and feeding off of one another’s ‘pathetic-ness’. 

Like Jesse Pinkman and Jane in Breaking Bad, or better shown with Jimmy McGill/ Saul Goodman and Kim Wexler in its sister series Better Call Saul; together it’s ecstatic, cute, invigorating— but really as both shows go to present, it’s really two anchors weighing one another down. “It’s better to push something when it’s slipping, than risk being dragged down.”

Surviving

What is thriving?

Constantly conniving.

Strange sentry,

Charged with breaking in and entering

“What’s in a name?”

Freeze frame, lock and wait-

Get high with excessive haste;

Hate the waste,

Issue is it’s own escape.

Rogue Delay

 

Depressive expression

Pervasive correlation 

Rogue allegation 

Strained delay

Familiar foreign fugue

Gray gaiety

Translucent dissociation

Unimaginable mind migration 

Pointless Prescription

Frail validation, Atlas armor —

Enduring in spite of futility,

Failure and elation:

Time does not permit,

Poetic reflexes-

pointlessly prescribing;

Philosophical plots are merely preparing,

For an imaginary eternity flying 

Malignant Indifference

Debased restraint

Contradictory taint

Wounded, winded

Actively attached

Draining phrase;

Malignant, indifferent

Instituted and intentional

Invigorating incarceration 

Envy: Invigorating Or Extreme Error? Neurotic Nihilism IV.4.1

Dictionaries from Merriam-Webster to the Oxford English commonly give the description of Envy to be one with malicious, negative intent. Similar to Ayn Rand and George Orwell in their decrying of the impulse but only in definition. Formally the combined definition of the emotional state would be an individual who is aware of an advantage enjoyed and possessed by an external entity which they desire but do not possess, and have issue in seeing how to go about attaining what is desired. 

“…as soon as a powerful foreigner invades a country all the weaker powers give him their support, moved by envy of the power which has so far dominated them”

—Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince

Use of the word Envy in this is notable. Envy for the power dominating; as Machiavelli explains in the text, of those beings in the society being invaded who live in fear of it. Motivated by envy for said power in the home nation, upon presentation with the option to flip the script for a taste of the flavor. “Every woman loves a Fascist,” so to say. With that however, such is still an ill willed position— Sonderkommandos died as well even if among the last. 

“What happens is that men willingly change their ruler, expecting to fare better. This expectation induces them to take up arms against him; but they only deceive themselves, and they learn from experience that they have made matters worse. This follows another common and natural necessity: a prince is always compelled to injure those who have made him the new ruler; subjecting them to the troops and imposing endless other hardships which his new conquest entails. As a result you are opposed by all those you have injured in occupying the principality, and you cannot keep the friendship of those who have put you there; you cannot satisfy them in the way they had taken for granted, yet you cannot use strong medicine on them, as you are in their debt.”

Niccoló noted prior. The grass is always greener and who appears to be savior is fraud. Like the Sith rule of two: in the envious lust to attain power beyond most understanding, it is its own pitfall. Master gets slain by apprentice. Rinse and repeat. Going with the Oxford Dictionary delegation of the word, describing, “a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone’s possessions, qualities, or luck.”

Characterizing the pitfalls of pure, excessive Envy without the intent of turning it into ambition dates back to Greek legend. Poetically personifying Envy as an Entity in his Metamorphoses, Plubius Ovidius Naso detailed her use; sought out by Minerva to instill her ill upon Aglauros of Athens over her sister, Herse, having caught the eye of Mercury; who wished to produce an offspring with her. 

“…and there inside she saw Envy, consuming the flesh of vipers,

The food for her natural venom…

[…]

That face is constantly pallid; her body is totally shrivelled; her eyes are both at squint while her teeth are decayed

  and discolored;

her nipples are green with gall and the poison drips from

  her tongue. 

She never smiles except when excited by watching pain,

nor can she sleep, there are so many torments to keep her

  awake;

wasting away; she is gnawed herself, as she gnaws at

  her victims,

by torture that’s self-inflicted…”

Filled by this spirit with its mental malaise, Aglauros attempted to prevent Hermes entrance with the previously agreed upon bargain for the betrothal of her sister, she is seized by her own sluggish inertia:

“And like the malignant spread of a sadly incurable

    cancer,

creeping on to affect other perfectly healthy organs, little by little the deadly chill crept into Aglauros’ breast, and finally blocked the vital paths of her

  breathing

[…]

She simply sat there, a lifeless statue; the stone was not even white, but stained by her own black envy.”

Envy, ideally, invites ambition, then proceeds to do away with that envy. Envy presupposes ambition, but only so far as to attain it; alone and in excess it’s a poison, as with anything. Alone and unending Envy is merely vicarious, rather than ambitious. Leech, not primrose peach. 

Commonly Envy is used in conjunction and synonymously with Jealousy. Envy goes with Jealousy synonymously but not vice versa. Difference being that jealousy regards desire already within ones grasps— greed with envy and a bit of a flimsy ego; while envy is a a longing for the attainment of desired ambition in regards to such a possession. Like John Flory in Burmese Days for a late life he never lead; or Patrick Bateman’s psychotic state in longing to fit in. 

The failure in such Envy is an attempt at assimilation; when the motivation it could have towards ambition would probably be better put to adaptation. Though, as the example of both Flory and Bateman show, such is Neurotic in its own right regardless of it an envy for assimilation or adaptation. 

Avatar: Misanthropic Muse?

 

Recently released was the third installment in James Cameron’s Avatar movies; and in seeing the new Fire & Ash film I left the theatre, like after the second movie, with an imbued sense of unbridled misanthropy. Leading to the pondering, is that truly the point? 

Ramping up Agent Smith’s prescription of humanity as a virus in The Matrix, the Avatar franchise depicts the species as exactly so, spreading to other worlds even. In this sense it’s akin to the Nina Paley documentary film Thank You For Not Breeding, which uses the analogy of humanity being akin to a cancer spreading uncontrollably and maliciously. 

Is humanity necessarily a virus, or could such be symptomatic to only its habits? With that, is it not a virus?

While the Na’vi natives of Pandora are shown to have many similarities to human tendencies— namely in regards to tribalism, such are purely logical in the face of the attempting onslaughts. Rather than extraterrestrial invaders coming down to Earth, the ‘sky people’ coming from Gaea are the abhorrent aliens. 

By the closing scene of the third installment, Pandora is made out to be clearly more than meets the eye, as prior films already heavily implicated. Zooming out for a final short, shows the planet inhabited but within the spiritual realm the population of Pandora all interconnects with.

Pandora gets its name from Greek legend. As the mythology claims, the first woman on Earth, Pandora, is given a box as a (poison pill) gift from the gods, and instructed not to open it. Like Eve in Eden however, curiosity got to the cat as was always planned; from the box all pestilence and suffering and all that can be claimed as ills to the human condition sprung. Pinning the punishment onto Pandora, as explanation for the negative in the Garden of Earthly Delights, simply for married in lineage to Prometheus, who both molded mankind and stole fire from the gods to illuminate his clay. 

Na’vi have a spiritual superior strength while man has mechanistic ‘might’. In that Pandora being as it is christened, is heavy in irony. Opening Pandora’s box isn’t humanity’s quarrel; it’s breaking in. Like Plato’s cave allegory, but the inhabitants of the cave are the enlightened ones; mixed with the Jungian invigoration of the primitive perceptions… the Na’vi are written to reflect this in blatant juxtaposition to the sky people. 

Living in conjunction with the world they inhabit. Intrinsically connected to it in a literal, metaphysical way. Even though intelligent and conscious of the fact as humans are on their home world, the Na’vi do not counterintuitively attempt to refute their link to the broader ecology. Portraying invading humans as largely sociopathic, save a select few. Mechanistically, snobbishly, and militarily mistaking the “savagery” of the native population for stupidity. Savage is subjective; throughout the course of climaxes, mankind is repeatedly reminded to be incredibly brutal in its breaking into the world. Not dissimilar to real world situations like American forces in the jungles of Vietnam fighting against speaking trees; or British soldiers unfamiliar to the Virginian terrain. 

Art imitates life; earth isn’t totally in shambles from pulsating tumors; and being the lie that attempts truth, the creation of an entirely new world being ravaged in interstellar rape, makes an acceptable allegory for box office hits. Differing in depiction from other blockbusters like the Independence Day movies, it’s a polar opposite picture. It’s not aliens invading, it’s aliens being invaded.