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July 18, 2005
A quote by Francis Bacon that I came across in Gilles Deleuze's, Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation:
"Of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses If I go into a butcher's shop I always think it's surprising that I wasn't there instead of the animal."
Bacon, however, goes into the butcher's shop as if it were a church.
Francis Bacon, Three Studies of Muriel Belcher, 1966, Right Panel
Though Bacon understood planet earth as a slaughterhouse on the verge of annihilation at any moment, he also blurred the divide between humans and animals.
Bacon said: "Nietzsche forecast our future for us--he was the Cassandra of the nineteenth century---he told us it's all so meaningless we might as well be extraordinary."
If life is so meaningless then suffering cannot be made sense of because it has no meaning.
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Some unBaconian 1980s pop philosophy from William Gibson's Neuromancer;
"He'd [Case] operated on an almost permanent adreniline high, a by product of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. A theif, he worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporeate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data.
He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make. He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled. Of course he was welcome, they told him, welcome to the money. And he was going to need it. Because - still smiling - they were going to make sure he never worked again.
They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin.
....
For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, if was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. the body was meat. Case fell into a prison of his own flesh."