Apologia pro vita sua... T777 writes:
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I want to clarify some things that were raised in the thread dedicated to cataloging my posts,[1] here and elsewhere. I appreciate that people consider my posts to be worth reading and preserving, but I honestly don't think I possess the knowledge or insight to warrant that type of praise.
[1]: [[ NOTE:
https://archive.amarna-forum.net/salo/salo/004482_the-gospel-according-to-thomas777_p001_o.html -ed. ]]
I do not wish to appear self-serving or foolish in disclosing things of a personal nature, either; and I will not raise these topics again or otherwise address them - all I can say is that I am not comfortable with some of these suggestions (referenced in the aforementioned thread) going unanswered.
I was motivated to begin posting online again - here and elsewhere - because I believe that something significant is underway regarding political consciousness and discourse (conceptually, I mean). Loose, formless, and nascent as it currently is, the ''Alt Right'' has nonetheless become a formative component of general perceptions during this election season. Its neither here nor there that its mention, the understanding of it as a political or social tendency, its utilization in rhetoric and discourse is polemical at base; what is significant is that it is shaping the extant conceptual horizon in discernible ways.
For over a decade we've been engaged, severally, in creating alternative modes of discourse of a dissident nature - and (as has everyone who has undertaken such an effort) we've been instrumental, in however small a way, in the creation of a discursive challenge to System media that has at long last borne fruit.
I've never written for an ''audience'' - nor have I ever adopted an affectation or schtick to encourage readership. Anything I've disclosed, any narrative presented, any picture that has been metaphorically painted has been provided as context. I was never able to splendidly isolate the individual's experience of the world, its joys and its horrors, the form and function of daily labors and charges from the massive, epochal, world-historical tendencies that constitute the world in which we are jointly and severally posited. I arrived in no small measure at the conclusions that I hold as ''true'' as a man who (as of today) has reached his 40th year of life on grounds of the things to which I bore personal witness, that I sought out, that were foisted upon me, that I was required to acknowledge in order to apprehend my immediate environment and its relationship to the historical process; this was in part volitional - any man who thinks harbors a compulsion to structure the world into intelligible terms, some of the process was instinctive: a man who survives to adulthood, assuming he is not a cretin or an idiot, is going axiomatically to subject his environment (external as well as that which is intrinsic to the self/''inner life'') to the scrutiny of his own inductive reasoning.
To clarify/describe how this process began - and to respond to speculation about my actual credentials and representations thereof; I decided to become an attorney in autumn of 1994 - I'd returned to high school after dropping out several months prior. I determined to seek admission to college and law school because my skill-set, my innate abilities were uniquely ill-suited to successfully negotiating the demands of the era in which I lived. What motivated me in large part was that I was desperately in love with a sixteen year old girl I had met earlier in the year. I was 18 years old and had no meaningful life experience - being such a young man, I was very much enslaved by passions of a pre-rational nature, and was particularly susceptible to having my reason overwhelmed and dominated by eros. I resigned to build a life for myself and the girl, and reasoned that this objective could be accomplished by the constant and unrelenting application of will.
During this time, I viewed my challenge as to provide for and secure my own future and in doing so to come to develop an aptitude (psychic, spiritual, physical) to survive in the world in which I was situated - and concomitant with these efforts to come to understand the trajectory of my race/nation in history and the demands, obligations and functions imposed upon individual men as subjects of the historical process. Early on in adulthood, I became intimately familiar with tragedies and mortal things. The girl who I loved with such youthful intensity succumbed to heroin addiction and the concomitant despoilation of her body and spirit in the thrall of her addiction. I discerned even then - when my education on matters of historical phenomena, human affairs, race, Theological questions etc. had only recently begun in earnest - that something had become deformed in the cultural/historical/epochal environment in which I was posited.
The girl of whom I speak died on December 19, 1997 - she had been physically brutalized pre-mortem and post-mortem, and she had died of an overdose of Fentanyl. It was not clear if she would have succumbed to her bodily injuries had she not expired from narcotics poisoning.
This first death hollowed me out inside, as it were - at risk of sounding melodramatic/pathetic, I never felt like a complete person after this occurrence. The manner in which it transpired was particularly difficult to reconcile with the claim that modern life in the West was characterized by an elevated morality, by decency, and reason. This experience was and is not somehow uniquely tragic - there is probably an entire generation of men who were forced to witness girls that they loved be ground into dust, impersonally massacred because the culture to which they belong - and that is supposed to shepherd them and protect them and save them from their Enemies - has become incapable of preventing their spiritual and physical annihilation.
Despite losing what had been my immediate raison d'etre for pursuing the objective of becoming a lawyer, I continued with my course of study and graduated from college; subsequently gaining admission to law school. During this time, I developed for the first time an optimistic penchant for the fortunes not only of myself but for historical outcomes and the continuing revelation of historical events. I owed this newfound faith to the moral and intellectual example of my brother, who was my closest relation, friend, and confidante. It sounds contrived but I am speaking with utmost sincerity when I state that he was a saintly individual - he was the most genuinely pious man that I have ever known - he had no vices and exhibited a poised decency that cannot be affected.
One day, my brother went totally and completely insane. During the period of his madness (approximately the final six months of his life) there were many horrors that emerged. He'd walk the streets all night and return to our home with defensive wounds on his hands and face and sometimes bloodstains on his clothes - the volume of which was too great to have been contributed by the nicks and scratches on his face and arms that were indicative of a hapless victim (probably female) fighting off a brutally powerful assault.
One night I awoke to find my brother seated at the foot of my bed - he had a hunting knife in his lap and confided that he was contemplating whether or not to kill me. When I looked in his eyes, he no longer looked human. That isn't to say that he appeared monstrous or that he underwent a metamorphosis before my eyes as in some Lovecraftian terror fantasy or fever dream; he simply no longer appeared to be something that could respond to reason or compassion or love or hatred or any of the things that compel and fascinate the human heart and intellect - he seemed rather a malfunctioning automaton or an animal without a thought beyond limbic response, languidly then contemplating a potential kill.
Its neither here nor there perhaps to most people - but I came to believe (and still do) that my brother's madness was related to a process by which the subconscious mind (as enumerated/defined/clarified by Karl Jaspers in particular) subsumes waking consciousness and reason - the ''barrier'' as it were between these essential poles of mind is eradicated; the lunatic thereby becomes a man who dreams but cannot wake up. In modernity - particularly correlated with urbanization and its attendant alienation - psychic destruction, mental deterioration of this type has become epidemic; the experience of this particular horror cannot be extricated from the process of destruction that is underway at the core of what remains of all societies derived from and generated by the Aryan culture-form/civilization.
On October 21, 2009, I awoke to discover that my brother had consumed a cocktail of drugs and a massive dose of methanol. The latter caused multiple organ failure and the acidosis of his blood - but he lingered on for days. The condition that resulted was one of being ''locked in'' - he was unable to move or speak - his body became entirely rigid. The doctors did not know if he could see or not, but as the poison disintegrated his optic nerves, this became irrelevant. His brain activity indicated however that he was ''conscious'' in a basic capacity, which was horrifying.
His face was fixed in an expression of what appeared to be primordial terror, mouth agape. He looked like a screaming ghost - I thought of the fright mask from ''Scream'' films. I told the doctor to withdraw life support - the decision fell to me because he was not married and I was his only relative present at the hospital. It took him close to two hours to expire, during which time I kept hoping I could speed the process because all I could think about was that the most terrifying Hell I could contemplate was being ''locked in'' but conscious of impending death and one's mortal condition. It is the worst torture I can contemplate save perhaps the process of being burned alive.
During the preceding years - I had graduated law school and passed the Bar Exam in 2005 - I was having difficulty establishing a solid career trajectory that paid well. I had substantial experience but there was and is not a particularly high demand for criminal defense attorneys, particularly for professionals whose primary forte/practice area involves post-conviction appeals. In hindsight I had probably set myself back (in practical terms) by laboring in practice areas that I found to be both ethically important and intellectually interesting, in lieu of following the most pragmatic course of work and study. I had in the intervening years been practicing law on my own - while also taking side jobs to augment my income - but it was in 2009 that I began having difficulty functioning effectively in the world...although of course I did not properly realize at the time that this was underway.
My ideological commitments ossified as it were during my 20s - I came to recognize the truth of National Socialism. An anecdote that became resonant in my mind was a discussion that a Yockey biographer (Kevin Coogan) relayed that he had enjoyed with H. Keith Thompson. Thompson, a personal friend of Otto Remer and the only American (to my knowledge) to have been assigned a formal rank in the SD, in a moment of candor confided to Coogan that, ''I've served the Third Reich for my entire life''. I continue to find Thompson's description of his life's mission, his political commitments therein etc., to be profoundly resonant.
What Thompson meant, of course, was that the underlying Truth that animated the Third Reich is something of perennial significance and that represents, at base, the primordial moral, aesthetic, instinctive and pre-rational core as it were of the Aryan/Western/European cultural-form - it is not something that can be permitted to be extinguished or disdained or cast off as irrelevant or insignificant or aberrant. The means and superficial form and structure by which the Idea is expressed may and will change as years, decades, epochs advance but that/this does not alter the essential nature and monumental power and significance of the idea itself. I did not arrive at this conclusion lightly - it had always been something that I instinctively felt, at times with great intensity, others it lay relatively dormant within my conscious mind - but when I fully acknowledged this historical fact I made a point to never shy from it in the course of discourse and rhetoric, as to do so would be craven.
This is what is meant when I (and others who've far more completely and eloquently presented the argument than have I) assign a significance to a specific coterie of Continental theorists (in my own writing, namely De Maistre, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) in identifying the dialectical process and the concomitant expression/instantation of the European/Western idea - the claim isn't that any of these monumental intellects would have joined, approved of, or facilitated Fascist or National Socialist parties or platforms; the claim is that the former were instrumental in the dialectical process of perfecting the conceptual horizon that made possible the expression of political form, manifest in the national/spiritual/civilizational revival of Europe and the West in the 1920s and 1930s and the concomitant challenge to Jewry, Bolshevism and the allies of both and the grand effort to implement the New Order and establish conditions necessary to guarantee its posterity and survival for a millennia.
I must acknowledge that as I immersed myself further and further into the study of history and political-theoretical topics (to the point that these questions, the study of these questions became a singular obsession) every other aspect of my life was deteriorating precipitously. It is not entirely clear to me what the relationship is between my own mortal decline and my increasing obsession with intellectual topics and research - what I mean is that I cannot discern whether this practice/compulsion is a cause or a symptomatic effect in this particular context.
What I do know is that by 2009, I was actively retreating from the business of normal life - but not entirely deliberately. I increasingly had trouble finding clients who would pay and it seemed impossible to find a legal employer who was willing to invest in my particular skill set. At the same time, I was in my early 30s and somehow seemed less ''engaged'' with the world around me than I ever had been before. People I had known all seemed to have disappeared into adult life - those that hadn't had died, or otherwise were simply absent. I really had no idea what people my age did - what the lives they led entailed, or at least what they were supposed to or purported to entail. I had never married because the romantic affairs I had cultivated in my youth had been disasterous. I had a Profession and was fully licensed and not inexperienced but I was not employed by a business or governmental organization. I didn't have any ''peers'' - as the only people I dealt with socially were gym rats (as bodybuilding remained a primary focus of my life) or online and snail-mail correspondents who shared my political and research interests.
I nervously contemplated every day how to better monetize my skills but I had no idea how to proceed in such regards. I didn't actually know anybody - and although I did not fully recognize it at the time, my own mind was increasingly beginning to slip on grounds of mortal experiences I had endured and my survival strategy of retreating into mental space to neutralize fear.
Something that aided substantially in this ''retreat'' as it were was opiates - I discovered poppy pods rather by accident, when an Asian acquaintance had mentioned that the pods could be easily and legally obtained, and that once boiled, the pods yielded a remarkably strong narcotic derivative. Mind you, up to this point I didn't even smoke weed - in fact, I disdained recreational drug use. I realize it appears that I've somehow aimed to valorize drug use or otherwise rationalize it in my own life - I haven't. I disclosed it in the course of our discussions and interactions on this forum (and elsewhere) because I believe in some basic sense I was trying to understand what was happening to me. Frank Herbert made the point in one of the ''Dune'' books, in addressing moral frailties and the effects of catastrophic moral failure upon peoples' lives, that a thinking organism will often self-destruct/commit suicide (consciously or subconsciously) rather than become a thing that represents the opposite of what the rational organism/man believes himself (or at least desperately wishes himself) to be. I've always been disgusted by the sickly and morbid process and ensuing state of dependence and addiction and this has not changed. I have no illusions about the fact that becoming an addict murdered an essential part of my self that can never be revived.
As it was, I soon ''graduated'' from opium ''tea'' to Dilaudid pills - under the influence of which I believed (not entirely falsely) that I was benefiting in part from the process described by Thomas De Quincy, among others, by which intellectual faculties are productively stimulated and mortal anxieties subdued if not temporarily eradicated when one is in the embrace of opiate narcotic intoxication.
Around the time of the onset of my brother's madness I had been cultivating a relationship with my Mom - who had for long stretches of years been absent from our family but who seemed pleased to be at long last fulfilling what should have been her ordained role as years advanced and she entered later middle age. What I did not recognize was that she had reached out to me and my brother because she was slowly, but actively, committing suicide and wanted some kind of contact with her progeny as death approached. I would wish to believe that her motives were to make peace with her family so that she could die with a clean conscience, but I cannot believe that - she required an audience for her ''suicide performance'', and the only candidates who would suffice were ones whose rapt attention could be held on grounds of the captivating power of the emotional bonds of blood.
It doesn't bear description because its obscene - it will suffice to say that my mother purposefully starved herself into total dementia and death in the months after my brother's suicide. Every week I would be availed to conversations with doctors as to whether I would consent to a feeding tube being utilized to force her to take nutrients - when I was in her company without the presence of medical personnel or other witnesses before whom appearences had to be nominally maintained, she'd cheerfully remark about the fact that malnutrition was causing her hair or teeth to fall out, or that her weight had finally dropped below 60 lbs. Onetime she tried to provoke me into suffocating her, on grounds that if I loved her and really meant it when I behooved her to stop committing suicide by starvation, I'd develop fortitude adequate to complete the process by my own hand.
When it was finally over - and I never had to see my Mom again nor witness her drawn-out transformation into a demented living corpse, I shot up heroin for the first time because no matter how much Dilaudid I snorted, I couldn't quell an unbearable nervous energy and anxiety that seemed to have thrown me into an endless adrenal response that precluded me from relief from insomnia, racing thoughts, and mortal paranoia.
I succumbed entirely to heroin for a time. My desire to neutralize my sensory awareness increased as I continued to have experiences that placed me in close proximity to death and related sick and mortal circumstances. I'd reached the point by 2012 that I'd go entire months without speaking to anybody else. The grocery store where I would purchase my food maintained fully automated kiosks where the need to interact with a cashier was done away with. When I would cop dope from my regular source, he knew precisely how much weight I would arrive to score so there was no need for us to converse. I began experiencing difficulties in distinguishing between dreams and waking life experiences, a condition that was aggravated by the fact that heroin intoxication was producing within me a very strong and consistently regular tendency towards exceptionally vivid - and often lucid - dreaming.
I lived in a townhouse and it had essentially no furniture - I'd never properly established ''roots'' on the property and what little furniture I had acquired I sold. I'd ceased practicing law or doing anything at all to generate income; not by design, it merely came to pass that there were no more opportunities upon which to capitalize and I was so mired and lost in and hobbled by my daily, moment to moment existence in a (quite literal) 'dream world' that was facilitated I believe by a toxic genetic propensity towards schizophrenia and rendered critical by my daily intake of heroin, that I was no longer capable of seeking out ways to successfully - or at least effectively - negotiate my environment. The heat and electricity was shut off, but still I remained there. I lost 40 lbs and began to appear skeletal, so I threw away the mirrors in the house.
This state of things continued for years - eventually, my house was forfeited to pay for back taxes, so I left. I moved to a motel and continued to shamble through the phantasm-dream world that had become permanent. One day this guy who lived on the same floor as I did in the hotel struck up a conversation with me - he was undergoing a divorce or some such thing and had vacated the marital home in all probability. He was reasonably intelligent and I found that talking to another person was helping me to become more ''grounded'' and to distinguish more clearly between 'real' experiences and mere imaginary or waking 'dream' experiences that occurred exclusively in the solitary mind. This went on for many weeks - I would have coffee and cigarettes with my new acquaintance in the morning and converse about current events and news stories before we parted ways for the day.
One day in 2015, my friend came to my room in the morning - as by then had become routine - and excused himself to use my bathroom. When he emerged he was pale, and the bones in his face seemed to have strained against the skin into high relief. He sat down at the small table adjacent the window - and within several minutes, he simply slumped onto the floor. This pink and foamy discharge oozed out of his mouth, not in a violent or convulsive way, it was rather that his last gasp had been a liquid exhalation of blood and saliva. For some reason I waited several minutes to take his pulse - but I already knew he was dead anyway. I called emergency services and they arrived shortly thereafter. My friend had fixed in the bathroom and whatever product he was packing had killed him. Or maybe the gear was fine but it just was not his day and his body just quit. I'd not known until that moment that he chased the dragon - I speculated later that perhaps he subconsciously detected that I was in thrall to the monster as well, but he didn't consciously register it; or maybe he did but he didn't know how to approach the matter directly.
The reason(s) why this particular stranger courted my friendship is neither here nor there - his brief contribution to my life was that when he died and the paramedics arrived and declared him to be dead, subsequently collecting his corpse from off the floor of what was my residence, the police arrived with them - and the police proceeded to place me in custody and determine if (based upon the ''facts'' and conditions they had observed, coupled with any incriminating statements they could illicit from me by the brutally constant and unrelenting, if not particularly adroit, application of psychological pressure and express and implied threats) they could find a way to charge me with homicide.
They kept me in custody for hours and while the experience didn't 'shock' me out of torpor, malaise, or the dreary introversion and by that point thoughtless enslavement to my addiction that kept me a prisoner of my dreaming mind but it did force me to think critically for the first time in years about my immediate circumstances. I began considering the real possibility that I was not going to leave police custody, and that subsequently I would find myself convicted of a loosely-defined (in evidentiary if not statutory terms) variant of homicide that was in fact levied against junkie useless-eaters (such as that which I had become) as a sort of hygenic quarantine/removal from the social organism.
I walked out of that interrogation chamber with my liberty - and I realized upon immediate reflection that I had been frightened into 'wakefulness', shuttled out of my 'dream space' as it were by the prospect of being incarcerated for years on end...but not because the prospect of imprisonment in and of itself was ominous. I realized that there was a very real possibility that on that day - or any other day in the future - I might find myself in similar circumstances, circumstances in which it was determined by people who wielded absolute power over me that it would be better were I to be permanently quarantined in physical (not just psychic) isolation from the world; and that if that were to happen, nobody would even notice. I would not even know of anybody to whom I could address correspondence to from such a jail-abyss.
That is not a statement of self-pity - I do not feel lonely or think that I somehow deserve affection from strangers or anything of the sort. What was frightening about the realization was that it seemed as if I was (or perhaps already had) ceased/was ceasing to exist, according to any common metric that anybody in a normal frame of mind would rely upon to discern their basic position in the world among other people, objects, and events etc.
Its been several months since I experienced that final episode. I don't use heroin anymore, although I do admit that I take methadone to keep physiological and psychic symptoms at bay. I don't know if I've permanently sabotaged my physiology and brain chemistry to the point that I will always need to take a daily dose of methadone to stay ''right'' but its something I try not to dwell on. I decided to dedicate myself to the things that saved my life in the past - studying political theory, writing polemic and analysis, and increasing my understanding by connecting with and interacting with comrades. I got online again to facilitate this process in part - thus my sincere thanks and gratitude that the people here desired that I return to their ranks and contribute.
I am going to keep posting here and aim to guarantee that I never again revert to the living death of existence in 'dream space'. Returning to the things that you people knew me for and that I knew myself for (bodybuilding, political theory, polemical writing) may provide me with the reference points and the motivation to return to the world. I am optimistic that it will.
Forgive me please if it was wrong to post this - as stated, I'll not raise personal matters again; for some reason it seemed important that I explicate some of these things in unambiguous terms.
-Thomas
- 30 -
About such things, God Forgets.
