The Burning Block Issue 5
By Shane Eide
()
About this ebook
In issue 5 of The Burning Block, the theme of politics is considered as a mechanism which absorbs the apolitical. Ruminations on monarchy, culture and the effect that streetlights have on human consciousness sit beside anecdotes of childhood memories in which the perennial absurdities of human social interactions appear in skewed and playful forms.
In this issue, one is also introduced to the idea of occult politics, which could be said to be a means of re-examining conspiracy theory by placing Machiavelli and Lao Tzu at poles which represent two different theories of sovereignty.
Shane Eide
Shane Eide is a part-time hermit, part-time flaneur, which means that he is either spending time on literary pursuits or taking walks and thinking about literary pursuits. He lives in a little room walled with books and sleeps near a big desk, on which he doesn't write since all the quiet is too distracting. He usually goes someplace noisy in order to write as much about fiction as he writes fiction. He's been writing fiction since he was about 11, in which time he's written several novels that he never intends to publish and which no one will ever see, and several others that he wants to publish that he's read out loud to his gold fish. He's been writing what he supposes would be called non-fiction ever since he wrote "Shane was here," in easily erasable pencil on a desk in junior high. You can read his essays and occasional fiction at his blog, www.emergenthermit.com
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The Burning Block Issue 5 - Shane Eide
THE BURNING BLOCK
Philosophy, Politics, Literature
Issue 5
November 18, 2017
EDITOR
SHANE EIDE
Copyright
© The Burning Block Issue 5
Edition 1 Published by Shane Eide, November 18, 2017
Edited by Shane Eide
Cover design by Shane Eide
Cover image by Fred Velvet
The articles included in this issue appear here with minor edits, having first been featured at emergenthermit.com.
Portland Oregon
The contents of this issue may not be republished elsewhere or redistributed by anyone but the editor, with the exception of brief excerpts for the sake of review or critique of ideas herein.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Letter From the Editor
Occult Politics
Whale Watching
Defending Native America
The Economics of Tragedy
The Apolitical in Politics
Cake On a Napkin
Monarchial Insolvency
Thoughts on American Literature
Singularity and Shame
Politics and the Primordial
Smile for Posterity
Anarchy vs. Autarchy
Genocide and Proximity
The Origins of the Right
Revolt Against the Current Year
The Ethno-State is a Zoo
Before the Portal
Streetlights and Straightjackets
Twenty-First Century Nearsightedness
Voting for Samadhi
Impotence and the Divine
A LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Shane Eide
A theme which has, for better or worse, become dominant in my thinking is the idea that the nature of politics itself relies on a paradox in this way: that those forces, institutions and powers which comprise the domain of sovereignty today seek the ends of their respective goals on the pretense that they are, through political means, protecting entirely apolitical features of life. Here is not the place to explain why I’ve come to this conclusion, as this idea seeps into almost every passage I write on the subject of politics, even if from different angles. Rather, I wish here to account for the spirit in which one will read in the following essays and pieces a constant sense of antagonism between the framing of societal crisis and the potential crisis which initially caused us to mis-frame such a crisis. One will have very little understanding of or will feel very little need to read the following pieces if one doesn’t first approach them from the position that what we accept as normal today is fundamentally, incontrovertibly wrong. However, if the reader accepts this position but is also willing to take it a step further, which is to say, if the reader is a fellow traveler in the hazy if all-important quest to revitalize life and is not content to merely cling to those few mirages of security one finds in the desert of nihilism, the reader will feel quite welcome here. I far from shy away from the term ‘Divine,’ for I can’t possibly think of another term which is better suited to describe a type of attainment which implies the very agency by which the reification of life as a unity of the nominal unit and the whole can or should take place. The Burning Block only has an allergy to words where they fail from the outset to keep those islands of determination which those speaking them so love from submerging into the ocean of chaos, where they are then warped, made porous and ill-conceived; objects to be seized upon through rhetoric and possessed by those who would use them for little more than the perpetuation of neurosis masked as catharsis, sickness masked as satisfaction and mania masked as mere expression. Nothing gets a pass simply because it exists instead of something else. We are here just as concerned with the good which doesn’t yet exist, and tragically, perhaps could not exist had things