"Todd T" <tttNOSPAM.TakeThisOut@megapipe.net> wrote in message news:<rGJZb.1336$c33.537@fe01.usenetserver.com>...
> "reap-er2000" <reap_er2000.TakeThisOut@yahoo.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:658f7412.0402200556.ef60d74@posting.google.com...
> > "Paula C. Hunter" <paulahunter.TakeThisOut@alltel.net> wrote in message
> news:<1GgZb.840$dU3.487@fe01.usenetserver.com>...
> > > This might be of interest to some of you:
> > >
<font color=brown> > > > <a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.antiqillum.com/glor/glor_010/glor_issue10.htm</font" target="_blank">http://www.antiqillum.com/glor/glor_010/glor_issue10.htm</font</a>>
> > >
> > > Paula
> >
> > An interesting link Paula, (perhaps some of the items may be perceived
> > as a little 'heavy'?)I've recently read Foucault's 'La Souci de
> > soi'...a difficult work.
> >
> > Many thanks
> >
> > Peter
>
> Some of this seems like the sort of material on which Matt Cardin is
> knowledgable. I wonder if he lurks here, and maybe could give us some
> pointers on this list.
>
> - Todd T.
Sorry for the late response, Todd. I only discovered the above
comment/query from you a moment ago. Oddly enough, when Paula first
posted the link to the "Antiquities of the Illuminati" site, I went
there and browsed its contents, and found them so engaging that I
almost posted a thanks to her for pointing us in its direction. But
then I decided not to and stopped checking the thread, just as I've
stopped following this group almost completely in recent weeks and
months due to the unqualified disgust with which I have come to regard
its ongoing flame war.
So, here's a belated thanks, Paula, for the providing the interesting
link.
Todd -- Interesting that you would think the stuff at that site seems
resonant with my particular brand of writing (or however it was you
made the connection). Indeed, I'm fascinated with the type of thing
the site's owner has made it his business to catalog. I don't know
whether you clicked on the "home" button to access his more
comprehensive site, but if you did, then you discovered like I did
that he's engaged in what he views as an authentic project of tracing
the trajectory of an occult history of enlightened thinking through
the maze of world literature. I'm sure I'll never in my life take the
time to read everything he's posted online -- I won't even take the
time to read all the items included in that single current issue of
his "Grey Lodge Occult Review" zine -- but I'm glad to know the
resource exists nonetheless.
I doubt I can provide any useful, or even interesting, pointers
regarding the contents of said issue of Grey Lodge Occult Review.
Korzybski's SCIENCE AND SANITY is of course one of the primary source
texts for the school of linguistic thought known as general semantics,
which has been so important to the thought of Robert Anton Wilson
(Wilson mentions Korzybski all the time in his voluminous writings).
Cioran's "The Cult of Infinity" and Huxley's "The Desert" strike me as
particularly interesting with their consideration of the way infinity
and formlessness interact with finitude and form in the actual
experience of life, both existential and aesthetic. The Cioran
excerpt reads to me like something Tom Ligotti has probably read and
enjoyed (I know Tom has savored Cioran's writing in the past, so I
assume he's read ON THE HEIGHTS OF DESPAIR from which this excerpt
comes).
I had never read Philip K. Dick's "If You Find This World Bad, You
Should See Some of the Others" until I discovered it at this site,
although I'm guessing it's a fairly well known work in his oeuvre. I
found it to be utterly enthralling. Although Dick was of course quite
serious in his claims of having experienced a memory of an alternate
world stream, I can't help but feel that he pursued these kinds of
spiritual and philosophical tangents as much for the combined
aesthetic-intellectual pleasure he derived from them as for their
possible truth value. In this, I feel a strong sense of kinship with
him. Recently I came across a wonderful passage in Robert Frost's
essay "The Figure a Poem Makes," which is included as the introduction
to his complete poems from Holt, Rinehart and Winston. It described
so perfectly my own approach to the kinds of occult/spiritual-oriented
material included at the Antiquities of the Illuminati site, and also
my pursuit of spiritual and religious scholarship in general, and also
my (largely involuntary) efforts as a fiction writer to include these
elements in my stories, that I had to copy the passage immediately
into my journal. I mention it here because I thought, as I was
reading the Dick essay, that he probably could have agreed
wholeheartedly with Frost's point as well:
"Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle
of where they differ. Both work from knowledge, but I suspect they
differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by.
Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected
lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out
of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick
to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is
on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind
is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A
schoolboy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the
order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he
snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new
order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old places
where it was organic."
As I type these words, it occurs to me that they also reflect some of
the same spirit that is evident in the Cioran excerpt about the "cult
of infinity" and the way the interaction between form and the
formless, boundedness and the boundless, stands at the heart of the
artistic enterprise. And my hunch is that the creator and maintainer
of Antiquities of the Illuminati is working in much the same manner.
Scholarship as poetry/art, or vice versa -- this is what I suspect the
the site's owner is pursuing. More power to him, I say. This same
approach is the only way I can even face the thought of continuing my
studies of the types of things that obviously obsess this man, and
also you, me, and many of our mutual acquaintances. If I had to do it
comprehensively according to a set plan, I wouldn't do it at all.
These, at least, are a few of the random and probably useless thoughts
to which I was led by visiting that site. Thanks for asking.
Best wishes,
Matt Cardin<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
>> Stay informed about: This might be of interest.. 
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