Goya's Last Caprice

ununmbered plate from Goya's Disasters of War

Goya's handwritten draft title of the volume now known as Disasters of War was Fatal consequences of Spain's bloody war with Bonaparte, and other emphatic caprices (Spanish: Fatales consequencias de la sangrienta guerra en España con Buonaparte, Y otros caprichos enfáticos). Amongst three unnumbered etchings gathered at the end of the sequence is the one above, usually labelled 'Proud Monster' or 'Fierce Monster', and usually placed first of the three, followed by the two concerning Truth. One of the 'emphatic caprices', all of which are connected by some element of allegory, there is a double ambiguity here, both in the nature of the creature itself (which finds a curious echo in the Montauk Monster), and in the direction of the bodies of humans in its maw - are they being devoured or disgorged?

Barbers Again

Soldiers - don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you - who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel, who drill you, diet you, treat you as cattle, as cannon fodder.

Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men, machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men. You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate - only the unloved hate. Only the unloved and the unnatural. Soldiers - don't fight for slavery, fight for liberty. ('Barber' speech from The Great Dictator)

On not tolerating intolerance

It's the ultimate modern shibboleth. We've passed far beyond the quotation attributed (in The Friends of Voltaire, 1906, by S. G. Tallentyre) to Voltaire, that 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it'. Now it runs 'I disapprove of what you say because it hurts my or someone else's feelings and I demand something be done to shut you up and make you pay!'.

'Hate Speech' is the new lucrative and exciting area for the state and the law(yers) in which to spread their tentacles. Saying hateful/hurtful words now appears to be a more serious crime, in terms of sentencing, than actual physical hurtful acts. Whatever happened to pointing and laughing at idiots as a way of dealing with their idiocy?

On 27 February 2013 the Canadian Supreme Court explained why expressions of intolerance are intolerable:

Hate speech is an effort to marginalize individuals based on their membership in a group. Using expression that exposes the group to hatred, hate speech seeks to delegitimize group members in the eyes of the majority, reducing their social standing and acceptance within society. Hate speech, therefore, rises beyond causing distress to individual group members. It can have a societal impact. Hate speech lays the groundwork for later, broad attacks on vulnerable groups that can range from discrimination, to ostracism, segregation, deportation, violence and, in the most extreme cases, to genocide. Hate speech also impacts on a protected group’s ability to respond to the substantive ideas under debate, thereby placing a serious barrier to their full participation in our democracy. (h/t Reason)

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision that punishing a man for expressing disapproval of homosexuality is perfectly consistent with freedom of expression...subject to 'reasonable limits' upheld the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal ruling against Bill Whatcott, who in 2001 and 2002 distributed flyers condemning the normalization of homosexuality in public schools. The  Tribunal ordered Whatcott to pay a $17,500 fine and to stop handing out anti-gay literature, citing a provincial law banning material that 'ridicules, belittles or otherwise affronts the dignity of' people based on various prohibited criteria, including sexual orientation. The Supreme Court concluded that two of Whatcott's flyers, headlined 'Keep Homosexuality out of Saskatoon’s Public Schools!' and 'Sodomites in our Public Schools', were hateful enough to be banned:

Passages of these flyers combine many of the hallmarks of hatred identified in the case law. The expression portrays the targeted group as a menace that threatens the safety and well-being of others, makes reference to respected sources in an effort to lend credibility to the negative generalizations, and uses vilifying and derogatory representations to create a tone of hatred. The flyers also expressly call for discriminatory treatment of those of same‑sex orientation.  It was not unreasonable for the tribunal to conclude that this expression was more likely than not to expose homosexuals to hatred.

The court said prohibiting such speech 'balances the fundamental values underlying freedom of expression with competing Charter rights and other values essential to a free and democratic society, in this case a commitment to equality and respect for group identity and the inherent dignity owed to all human beings'.

But the cognitive dissonance of this apparently doesn't hurt the brains of the Court's judges as it does mine. I've met many Mr Whatcotts over the years, with sandwich boards and flyers, telling me that I'm going to Hell. Unless any of them had actually hit me with a sandwich board or tried to force feed me a flyer, it would never have occured to me to phone the police and whine about hurt feelings. Because, oddly, the Mr Whatcotts also have 'the inherent dignity owed to all human beings'. To stand outside in all weathers and risk mockery and attack means, if nothing else, that he really believes what he says.

But only selected groups get awarded the right to never be offended without recompense. In victimhood poker I hold a high value hand. But playing it would make me that most regrettable creature, a government pet. Coddled, protected, performing tricks on command or risking being put out in the back yard. Thanks, but no thanks.

Aphorism #6

The pen may be mightier than the sword but if they`ve confiscated your pen what else is there to reach for? (Anon)

Halloween-as-Carnival

Turned up some curious photographs from pre-WWII U.S. Halloween parties...

A mask, grotesque, inhuman or caricatured, is sufficient, it seems, without any further costuming, to grant the wearer licence to disrupt and disturb the conventional order, to play with their identity, to perform as an other. Although the mournful demeanour of the female in the first image suggests she'd rather have come as something else, anything else...

Old Boneless (and Hegel)

Our mother’s maids have so frayed us with Bull-beggars, Spirits, Witches, Urchins, Elves, Hags, Faeries, Satyrs, Pans, Faunes, Sylens, Kit-wi-the-Canstick, Tritons, Centaurs, Dwarfs, Gyants, Impes, Calcars, Conjurors, Nymphs, Changelings, Incubus, Robin Groodfellow, the Spoorn, the Mare, the Man-in-the-Oak, the Hell-wain, the Firedrake, the Puckle, Tom-thombe, Hobgoblin, Tom-tumbler, Boneless, and such other Bugs, that we are afraid of our shadow (Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcrafte, vii. 15, 1584)

Couldn't be, could there?

Without the common courtesy to maintain a discernible shape (so run away, screaming 'A formless thing! Save yourselves!') or to represent something, from the folklore of Scotland, Ireland, England, and the Hebrides comes an amorphous horror slithering and floating along desolate roads.

Old Boneless represents absolutely nothing, that is, absolutely nothing human or animal beyond predatory devouring of the unsuspecting. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature makes provision for two kinds of monsters. On the one hand it accounts for monstrous deviations as necessary components of the richness of nature itself. Although these monsters exceed derivation from the concept directly, they do not resist its movement and therefore are nothing more than contingent particularities. Such monsters do not impede the demonstration of the science.

On the other hand, the Philosophy of Nature is also afflicted by a kind of deviation that exceeds this determination of acceptable and accountable monsters. These second-order monsters resist the movement of the concept insofar as they constitute aberrations that deform the very method of rationality. A shapeless, insubstantial, mindless, motivationless monster that will nonetheless eat you defies categorization, eternally taxonomically identified as “other” or “miscellaneous”. Most monsters are described by what they are (an undead human, a half-man half beast, the souls of the departed), even if that is a deformation of the category of existence. Old Boneless is described by what he is not. What could be more monstrous than a thing whose ontological status cannot even be named? Could anything be more monstrous than a creature that steadfastly refuses to participate in the order of the universe? Old Boneless not only rejects order, he pretends it doesn’t exist at all as he floats in an amorphous mass on the back roads of the British Isles, absorbing the odd human into his absolute negation.

Making Monsters: Montauk

at about 30′ away i could see what i think was the back shoulders of a very large version of the montauk creature alive and well and hunting swans… pinkish skin and large shoulders was all i could make out ….. when we got close enough for my son to hear it clearly …he said “pop theres a monster” and he started backing up fast… shit we both
did…. the area has many places i think something like this could hide easily…. i went to check for prints the next day but it rained pretty hard that night and there was nothing……. my son is 7 and while he does have a vivid imagination  im 39 and i dont

July 2008. For a while the only public photograph of the Montauk Monster was this one:

But then a new one emerged. (Photographs may not lie but they do tell different kinds of truth.) From another angle, in a different light, taken sometime earlier judging by the lower level of decomposition, the same 'monster' on the same beach:

Speculation in published reports included theories that the Montauk Monster might have been a turtle without its shell, although turtles do not have any teeth, or a science experiment from the nearby government animal testing facility, the Plum Island Animal Disease Centre. Mad scientists manufacturing crazy hybrid animals which then escape from the lab into the wild is the stock-in-trade of shlock horror, after all. The monster is now stated, categorically, to be a raccoon, its appearance much altered by prolonged submersion in seawater. But the human mind struggles to impose that kind of scientific order on a chaotic and distorted creature thrown up by the ocean, and, moreover, finds pleasure in thoughts of monsters. Especially dead ones.

Living chimera, on the other hand, disturb the category of 'human' profoundly. This sculpture by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini (made with, among other things, leather and human hair) frequently provokes howling or weeping on internet sites where it appears, since it is taken to be a living creature. Posed in an ostensible hospital environment, it passes for a medical freak or a medical experiment. Once taken for an actual creature, no one seems to find it very amusing, only horrific or deserving of compassion.