I'm a writer and independent scholar with a special focus on religion, horror, the paranormal, creativity, consciousness, and culture. My books include Dark Awakenings, Divinations of the Deep, and A Course in Demonic Creativity. I also talk a lot about cultural apocalypse, economic Armageddon, peak oil and energy, the madness of the corporate-controlled media, the sickness of our collective domination by a technopolistic social order, and the unfolding of dystopian futures right here in the present. Here at The Teeming Brain I explore the convergence of these matters by writing original articles and curating compelling content from around the media webs. Also see my blog Demon Muse, which is devoted to exploring the theory and practice of artistic creativity as an engagement with a felt "other" in the form of a muse, a daemon, or the unconscious mind (or all three at once).
"Cardin's tales are rich with references to Lovecraft, Nietzsche, and other writers whose work gives them unusual philosophic depth." -Publishers Weekly
“Matt Cardin ranks among the foremost authors of contemporary American horror.” -Laird Barron
"Dark Awakenings offers the dream imagery of the best weird fiction but goes even further beyond the ordinary thanks to Matt Cardin's fierce intellect.” -Nick Mamatas
“Matt Cardin is the most underrated horror writer in America.” -Tim Lebbon
“It’s a bold writer who, in this day and age, tries to make modern horror fiction out of theology, but Cardin pulls it off.” -Darrell Schweitzer
“In the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft, Cardin's accomplishments as a writer are paralleled by his expertise as a literary critic and theorist.” -Thomas Ligotti
“Matt Cardin is becoming a kind of expert on the subject of the relationship between religion and horror." -Mario Guslandi
“Matt Cardin’s stories display a thorough appreciation of what cosmic horror is all about." -Brian McNaughton
“Matt Cardin is one of those rare horror authors who is also a true scholar and intellectual.” Jack Haringa
If you, like me, are feeling more and more haunted in our information-glutted age of universal online connectedness by T.S. Eliot’s famous lines “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” then maybe you’ll find this 1997 episode from Season 3 of The New Outer Limits to be as compelling as I do. Written by TV writer and producer David Shore (who later created House), “Stream of Consciousness” is a brilliantly conceived and effectively executed dystopian science fictional meditation on the clash between the computer’s “craving” for pure information and the human values and realities of the people who, if we’re not careful, may allow ourselves to become enslaved as instruments for the furtherance of this inhuman imperative.
Here’s the official description, followed by the full episode. If you watch it, notice that at one or two points the dialogue seems to indicate that Shore wrote the episode with Eliot’s words explicitly in mind.
Due to a brain injury, Ryan Unger cannot enjoy the benefits of a neural implant that allows other people to tap into The Stream — a direct connection into all human knowledge. He tries, unsuccessfully, to keep up with everyone else by using a long-forgotten skill: reading books. When the Stream develops a virus causing people to die, Ryan, being the only one that is immune, must use the knowledge he has gained from books to save the world.
Opening narration: We quantify our world in order to learn. We break it down into facts, numbers, information. But how far dare we go before we destroy its mystery?
Closing narration: We make tools to extend our abilities, to further our reach, and fulfill our aspirations. But we must never let them define us. For if there is no difference between tool and maker, then who will be left to build the world?
The sad news is currently sweeping through the fantasy/SF/horror community and the movie-oriented corridors of the Interwebs: Guillermo del Toro has publicly announced that his long-anticipated adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is really and truly dead. What’s more, the (unintentional) culprit is Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus.
Say what? I wrote a recent column for SF Signal about the thematic links between Prometheus and HPL’s ATMOM, but I never expected to hear that del Toro would take the new film as a cue to abandon ship with his own project. So now I’ve written another column to process this information:
A couple of weeks ago, I used this space to speculate about the possibility that director Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Prometheus may prove to be a kind of heady hybridizing of 2001: A Space Odyssey with Lovecraftian horror. Now comes the news that the Lovecraftian elements of Prometheus may be so close to certain key aspects of Guillermo del Toro’s long-planned and long-anticipated adaptation of Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness that they may have killed the project. And this comes straight from the mouth, or rather the keyboard, of the man himself.
…So now we are, I suppose, left with the hope that Prometheus will deliver these cosmic horrific philosophical-emotional goods…But this doesn’t soften the blow of losing del Toro’s take on Lovecraft’s novel, especially since, as The New Yorker‘s Zelewski reported, “Del Toro had hoped that a greenlight for ‘Madness’ would mark a new golden age for horror films” and had been planning to use the project as a cinematic channel for an authentically Lovecraftian sense of cosmic dread: “Del Toro loves the story in part because Lovecraft combines terror — the panicked effort to escape the creatures — with metaphysical horror: ‘The book essentially says how scary it is to realize that we are a cosmic joke.’”
Thanks to an emailed link from my friend Don Webb (the Austin-based horror writer, writing teacher, and former High Priest of the Temple of Set), I kicked off my day with the funniest video I’ve seen since Funny or Die’s “Wax On, F*ck Off with Ralph Macchio.” I literally almost did the proverbial coffee spit-take all over my Dell laptop.
The video shows one Jacob Fleischer, who describes himself as “a huge science fiction fan” and “not an actor — professionally,” as he auditions, in just under three minutes, for “every character from every science fiction TV show or movie that has ever been made, or ever will be made.” In the accompanying text description at YouTube, he announces, “I am available to star in any upcoming science fiction blockbusters.”
I’m fairly entranced by this just-released video, and I daresay you will be, too.
Here’s a description of it, apparently issued by NASA themselves (although I’m unable to source it):
NASA dreams big science. The Space Shuttles may be gathering dust, but we’re not staying on Earth! In this awesome new short, NASA presents the Earth, the planets, the Sun, and the endless universe beyond. Come for the cool, stay for the music, take away a sense of wonder to share. It’s six minutes from Earth to forever, and you can see it here!
Maria Popova of Brain Pickings offers an on-target commentary:
NASA may have given us decades of cosmic awe, but the agency’s future and thus the future of space exploration are hanging by a thread. Neil deGrasse Tyson has argued that the only way to get NASA back on track is to get those to whom the president is accountable — the electorate, “we the people” — excited about space exploration again, and Pursuit of Light, a beautiful short film from NASA with original music by Moby, seeks to do exactly that. (“Pursuit of Light: NASA and Moby Capture the Magic of the Cosmos“)
Note that the (dazzling, beautiful, hypnotic) musical accompaniment isn’t just by Moby. The opening track is by the amazing Jami Sieber.
This week’s recommended reading includes: a news report about worldwide beliefs in the imminent End of Everything (to which I’ve added a recent local television news report about a doomsday-type drill that was run at Chicago-area hospitals); multiple articles and essays about Jung, psychology, consciousness, science, and spirituality; information about early psychological warfare studies and Big Pharma’s mission to hook us all on lifetime drugs; our collective transformation into a high-tech dystopia with “sentient cities” and a digital Dark Age; and a man who claims he was part of a secret (and successful) DARPA program that experimented with time travel.
Nearly 15 percent of people worldwide believe the world will end during their lifetime and 10 percent think the Mayan calendar could signify it will happen in 2012, according to a new poll…”Whether they think it will come to an end through the hands of God, or a natural disaster or a political event, whatever the reason, one in seven thinks the end of the world is coming,” said Keren Gottfried, research manager at Ipsos Global Public Affairs which conducted the poll for Reuters…Ipsos questioned people in China, Turkey, Russia, Mexico, South Korea, Japan, the United States, Argentina, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, France, Spain, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Italy, South Africa, Great Britain, Indonesia, Germany.
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NATO Summit : Chicago Hospitals Perform Radioactive Dirty Bomb Attack Drills (May 01, 2012)
[NOTE: Is this an instance of sensible preparedness, hysterical overreaction, standard procedure, the culture manifestation of the apocalypse archetype -- or all of the above?]
Teaser: We might not know anymore whether we are sane.
In the time between the wars, eight years before Nazis invaded Poland, Jung wrote an urgent open letter to the American public. Warning that the world was sinking toward “another catastrophe from which we may never recover,” Jung cautioned that the Americans’ conscious refusal to reject the destructive consumer fantasy that happiness lay in “trying to live exactly like one’s successful neighbor” was forcing their unconscious to rebel with dangerous eschatological yearnings “to see our great railroad terminals deserted, the streets deserted, [and] a great peace descend upon us.” Unless we heed the “symbolic warnings of our bodies,” Jung wrote forebodingly, “we may gas our lives out.” Today, the plague of consumer fantasies has spread globally and, once again, we are haunted by prophetic dreams of collapse…Here begins the future of activism, a spiritual insurgency against the polluters of our mental ecology — corporations, advertisers and consumerists alike. Mental environmentalism means knowing that, to halt ecological/psychological catastrophe, we must first disrupt this waking dream.
[NOTE: This is a radio show with full downloadable mp3 and transcript provided.]
Carl Jung’s exploration of the psyche took him deep into the world of religion, myth and the occult. The founder of depth psychology, Jung said that his patients suffered from a lack of what religion used to give people, but lost, and that healing would come from a direct experience of the Divine. A mid life crisis in which Jung believed he had lost his soul prompted a profound exploration which resulted in The Red Book, a magnum opus of his visions, internal conversations and paintings. Jung specialist Claire Dunne discusses The Red Book with Rachael, and her own book, Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul (2012). ALSO: The Symbolist Movement in art at the end of the 19th century drew on dreams, myths, and spiritualist ideas which it ‘clothed in sensuous form’… Senior Research Curator at MONA, Jane Clark, talks to Rachael about the themes in the upcoming Australian Symbolism:
Art of Dreams exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
[NOTE: Martin is a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst, and is co-founder and President Emeritus of the Philemon Foundation, the famed non-profit foundation dedicated to preparing for publication the Complete Works of C.G. Jung. It funded much of The Red Book's editorial preparation and all of its translation.]
Driving away in the cab I knew that it wasn’t a matter of headway, it was a matter of fate. I knew that a foundation, the Philemon Foundation, would come into existence and that my life had changed its course.I didn’t sleep that night, not one bit; I was inspired, seized by a daimon. I knew, or it knew, that once I got home, called a dear friend of mine, a self-taught Jungian layperson who loves Jung as I do, and explained the situation about The Red Book and the trove of unpublished material, the foundation would become a reality because he would help us fund its birth. And, after bursting into tears, so he did and here we are. Within a month after that, the three of us met and the plans for establishing the foundation were formalized.
[I]f consciousness becomes sufficiently subtle to see the implicate aspects of both psychic and physical phenomena, their unity in a common source can be directly experienced and not merely inferred indirectly from diverse concrete particulars. This implies the necessity for an expanded epistemology for physics, psychology, and knowledge in general that takes us well beyond the forms of knowing that are limited to only the most explicit orders of reality. For truly integrative knowledge, we must expand and deepen our capacities of consciousness. Otherwise, an integral theory will be nothing more than a pleasing speculative construct based on explicit contents that have emerged from the deeper levels. In short, if we are really to know the unitive depths of Bohm’s ocean of energy, we must allow ourselves to sink down into them, and not merely watch the surface phenomena that merely hint at what is below. The unconscious calls us into its depths.
Teaser: Interview with biblical scholar Dr. Mike Heiser examines how many Christians approach paranormal claims from curiously skeptical perspective.
The Bible’s description of the other worldly conflict raging all around us has been lost to view because of a veil of familiarity we’ve draped around it. Most Christians have not dumped their belief in miracles or the spiritual world and yet something inside us as moderns compels us not to believe in an invisible, animate world or universe. We aren’t as open to the supernatural as we think we are. Many Christians are supernaturalists who think like skeptics.
Raymond Moody has spent nearly 40 years looking forward, trying to understand what happens when people die. That pursuit led to the publication of “Life After Life” in 1975, a seminal collection that actually coined the term “near-death experience.” But in his new memoir, “Paranormal: My Life in Pursuit of the Afterlife,” the 67-year-old Moody instead looks back, reflecting on his fascination with death, the effect of his life’s work, and trying to figure out what it’s all meant. One key revelation: despite his frustrations with some religious and New Age interpretations of his work, and the fact that he does not practice a religion, the psychologist and philosopher who grew up the son of an agnostic surgeon says he has “woken up to God.”
Teaser: Perhaps the time is coming for thinkers to be braver, to push for a truer contemplation of nature that knows its aliveness.
[The great German polymath Johann Wolfgang von] Goethe was…convinced that good science embraces a subjective as well as objective dimension. This is because what scientists see in the natural world depends upon what they are prepared to contemplate seeing…[I]magination matters as much as investigation…The paradox that Goethe highlights is that materialism understands itself to be the champion of empiricism, when really it detaches us from the world as we experience it, in the name of objectivity. “All theory, dear friend, is grey,” he wrote. “But the golden tree of actual life springs ever green.” Perhaps then, this is the problem with the contemporary dialogue between science and religion. Theology has felt obliged to secure a place for itself broadly within the materialist worldview, sensing its main task is apologetic. But perhaps the time is coming for thinkers to be braver, to push for a truer contemplation of nature, one that knows its aliveness, its spirit.
“Contemporary research on consciousness in neuroscience rests on unquestioned but highly questionable foundations. Human nature is no less mysterious now than it was a hundred years ago,” writes philosopher Alva Noë…It’s a bold assertion in an age when fMRI has enabled us to see images of the brain functioning in real time, and when many prominent public intellectuals (Stephen Hawking, Eric Kandel) have argued, either implicitly or vociferously, in favor of reductionism…In other words, you — at least, the waking you who gets out of bed in the morning — are your brain…What Noë is advocating is an entirely new approach — what if we were to try expand our conception of consciousness by crossing that boundary out of the skull, to encompass “not just our bodies and our movements over time, but also the dynamic interactions that we have with the larger world around us, including the social world?”
[NOTE: Also see Big Think's brief (3-minute) video interview with Noë about this subject.]
The Rockefeller Foundation was the principle source for funding public opinion and psychological warfare research between the late 1930s and the end of World War Two. With limited government and corporate interest or support of propaganda-related studies, most of the money for such research came from this powerful organization that recognized the importance of ascertaining and steering public opinion in the immediate prewar years. Rockefeller philanthropic attention toward public opinion was twofold: 1) to review and establish the psychological environment in the United States for anticipated US involvement in the coming world war and 2) to wage psychological warfare and suppress popular dissent in foreign countries…[T]he elite class to which the Rockefeller family belongs has traditionally failed to distinguish between domestic or foreign subjects as targets for propaganda and behavioral modification. From a perspective that often recognizes national boundaries as obstacles to expanding a certain agenda of political-economic power and control, all are equally subject to similar designs of manipulation and persuasion and the often unwitting acquiescence they cultivate. One need look no further than the legacy of supporting certain philosophical and pedagogical approaches to US public education from the early 1900s that has resulted in a vast reduction of the quality and scope of educational institutions to recognize how the Rockefeller interest in psychological warfare is but a chapter of a much larger saga.
Teaser: Since direct-to-consumer drug advertising debuted in the late 1990s, the number of people on prescription drugs for life has ballooned.
There are two ways Pharma hooks the US public on prescriptions for life. First, prescriptions that used to be taken as needed for pain, anxiety, GERD (gastroesophageal reflux), asthma, mood problems, migraines and even erectile dysfunction, gout and retroviruses (in some cases) are now full-time medicines. Instead of having a bad day or heartburn, you have a disease like anxiety or GERD which calls for full pharmaceutical artillery. Instead of having body pain to be treated transiently, you are put on an antidepressant like Cymbalta or seizure drug like Lyrica or Neurontin indefinitely. Secondly, many of the top-selling drugs today are to prevent chronic conditions like high cholesterol, high blood pressure and osteoporosis that people are said to be “at risk” for. Needless to say, in both cases, people never know if the drugs are working or whether they would have had symptoms without them. This creates a loyal customer who is afraid to quit a prescription.
Teaser: Cities as technologically precise as a Formula One race car are being built now. Do we really want to live in them?
Slated for completion in 2015, PlanIT Valley won’t be a mere “smart city” — it will be a sentient city, with 100 million sensors embedded throughout, running on the same technology that’s in the Formula One cars, each sensor sending a stream of data through the city’s trademarked Urban Operating System (UOS), which will run the city with minimal human intervention…[T]his radical re-imagining of city life is a classic example of top-down urbanism, treating the residents as a problem to be solved rather than as part of the solution…Humans will act in ways that even the smartest computer model can fail to anticipate — which is fine, until you put your entire city in its hands. “What’s not being discussed is that cities are stubbornly resistant, highly unpredictable places,” says [architect and author Mark] Shepard. “In the end, the unforeseen implications of this new technology will be the real story.”
Teaser: The world is losing its ability to reconstruct history. Better regulation could fix that
[Note that this piece was linked to by Big Think under the more vivid and, I think, spiritually appropriate title, "Is the Internet Deleting Humanity's Historical Record?"]
Picture yourself as a historian in 2035, trying to make sense of this year’s American election campaign. Many of the websites and blogs now abuzz with news and comment will have long since perished. Data stored electronically decays. Many floppy disks from the early digital age are already unreadable. If you are lucky, copies of campaign material, and of e-mails and other materials (including declassified official documents), will be available in public libraries…The stakes are high. Mistakes 30 years ago mean that much of the early digital age is already a closed book (or no book at all) to historians. Without a wider mandate for libraries, giving them the right to store both digital materials and the tools to open it, historians of the future will be unable to reconstruct our times. They may not even know what they have lost.
Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been publicly claiming that from the time he was 7 to when he was 12, he participated in “Project Pegasus,” a secret U.S. government program that he says worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. “They trained children along with adults so they could test the mental and physical effects of time travel on kids,” Basiago told The Huffington Post. “Also, children had an advantage over adults in terms of adapting to the strains of moving between past, present and future”…Basiago claimed he can be seen in a photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg in 1863, which he said he visited in 1972 via a plasma confinement chamber located in East Hanover, N.J.
Thomas E. Mann is a senior fellow at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Thus, the essay that appeared by them in The Washington Post six days ago, and that set off a kind of seismic chain reaction of positive and negative responses among readers and pundits, is birpartisan in origin (although the question of Ornstein’s validity as a real Republican has been called into question. An example of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy at work, perhaps?)
The authors adapted the essay from their new book It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. In my opinion, it constitutes Necessary Reading, and the book has now moved to a high spot on my must-read list.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party. The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges
…Today, thanks to the GOP, compromise has gone out the window in Washington. In the first two years of the Obama administration, nearly every presidential initiative met with vehement, rancorous and unanimous Republican opposition in the House and the Senate, followed by efforts to delegitimize the results and repeal the policies. The filibuster, once relegated to a handful of major national issues in a given Congress, became a routine weapon of obstruction, applied even to widely supported bills or presidential nominations. And Republicans in the Senate have abused the confirmation process to block any and every nominee to posts such as the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, solely to keep laws that were legitimately enacted from being implemented. In the third and now fourth years of the Obama presidency, divided government has produced something closer to complete gridlock than we have ever seen in our time in Washington, with partisan divides even leading last year to America’s first credit downgrade.
…We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public. Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
Description: “The footage in this video is derived from image sequences from NASA’s Cassini and Voyager missions. I downloaden a large amount of raw images to create the video.”
