Antichristic crowniii
Street car clowniv
Weissach power
Stockv bone flower
Cosmic vesselvi
Respectèd hustle
Saturnian gleevii
Pendulum freeviii
Victorian stomachix
Second to run itx
PB dropped
Season stopped
(stopped)
- Y’know how you watch pro drivers when they’re being the wheel of lard-o-rific street cars and they “saw” the shit out of the wheel to find grip because there’s so little connection between the helm and the ground relative to the formula cars they’re used to? Well, it works, even for a hack like me. ↩
- To quote Umberto Eco from Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) [emphasis added] :
“The connection changes the perspective; it leads you to think that every detail of the world, every voice, every word written or spoken has more than its literal meaning, that it tells us of a Secret. The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect. You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign that says ‘No littering.’”
“Of course. Catharist moralism. The horror of fornication.”
“Last night I happened to come across a driver’s manual. Maybe it was the semidarkness, or what you had said to me, but I began to imagine that those pages were saying Something Else. Suppose the automobile existed only to serve as metaphor of creation? And we mustn’t confine ourselves to the exterior, or to the surface reality of the dashboard; we must learn to see what only the Maker sees, what lies beneath. What lies beneath and what lies above. It is the Tree of the Sefirot.”
“You don’t say.”
“I am not the one who says; it is the thing itself that says. The drive shaft is the trunk of the tree. Count the parts: engine, two front wheels, clutch, transmission, two axles, differential, and two rear wheels. Ten parts, ten Sefirot.”
“But the positions don’t coincide.”
“Who says they don’t? Diotallevi’s explained to us that in certain versions Tiferet isn’t the sixth Sefirah, but the eighth, below Nezah and Hod. My axle-tree is the tree of Belboth.”
“Fiat.”
“But let’s pursue the dialectic of the tree. At the summit is the engine, Omnia Movens, of which more later: this is the Creative Source. The engine communicates its creative energy to the two front or higher wheels: the Wheel of Intelligence and the Wheel of Knowledge.”
“If the car has front-wheel drive.”
“The good thing about the Belboth tree is that it allows metaphysical alternatives. So we have the image of a spiritual cosmos with front-wheel-drive, where the engine, in front, transmits its wishes to the higher wheels, whereas in the materialistic version we have a degenerate cosmos in which motion is imparted by the engine to the two lower wheels: from the depths, the cosmic emanation releases the base forces of matter.”
“What about an engine in back, rear-wheel drive?”
“Satanic. Higher and lower coincide. God is identified with the motion of crude matter. God as an eternally frustrated aspiration to divinity. The result of the Breaking of the Vessels.”
“Not the Breaking of the Muffler?”
“That occurs in aborted universes, where the noxious breath of the Archons spreads through the ether. But we mustn’t digress.
- In the Thielian sense. ↩
- Yes it’s a bit “clowning” to rip around in magnesium-enrolled sports cars just to run “spec miata times” but… oh wait these aren’t spec miata times anymore. Hey, how’d that happen? ↩
- Still on stock brake pads so help me there’s sooo many seconds left in the tank. ↩
- In the “magic” sense. ↩
- Saturn is often called the “Grim Reaper” in astrology because it rules over time, aging, death, and the lessons or responsibilities that come with mortality. The bitterness of myrrh correlates with Saturn’s sobering, limit-setting qualities.
Myrrh in Christian tradition also appears at the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, underscoring the Saturnine themes of sacrifice, grief, and transformation (the memento mori principle).
Etymologically connected with “chronos” (time), Saturn symbolizes the father of time and structure. The idea of “time as devourer” and the “limitation of mortality” underscores Saturn’s link to endings, boundaries, and the rules that define human existence.
In Roman tradition, Saturn is the god of agriculture, wealth, periodic renewal (the Saturnalia festival), and the ages of humankind. He loosely parallels the Greek god Cronus, who devoured his children to prevent being overthrown, symbolizing time’s relentless forward motion and the fear of being superseded.
Saturn is often seen as a teacher through challenge: lessons learned under Saturnine influence can be arduous but yield lasting wisdom.
Saturn’s transits typically manifest as periods of increased responsibility, limitation, or hardship requiring perseverance and realism, which really couldn’t be more timely. ↩
- And what a pendulum that rear-engine is… this being my third day out at the track in the GT3 and in two of my three sessions I still spun out around laps 6-7 as the tires started overheating. Oh Martian! And yet I was still cracking off (for me) fairly unbelievable lap times, times that I thought for sure would take more suspension set-up, new brake pads, and possibly more uncorking of power. Guess the ceiling is higher than I realized. Ad astra. ↩
- Can we regain Ishmaelianism in our lifetimes? Or will it be for the lifetimes of our more courageous grandchildren? To quote from Patrick Collison‘s most recent book review [emphasis added]:
Moby Dick is a novel about the counterpoise.
It is unsparing in its description of the realities: “At the instant of the dart an ulcerous jet shot from this cruel wound, and goaded by it into more than sufferable anguish, the whale now spouting thick blood, with swift fury blindly darted at the craft, bespattering them and their glorying crews all over with showers of gore, capsizing Flask’s boat and marring the bows. It was his death stroke. For, by this time, so spent was he by loss of blood, that he helplessly rolled away from the wreck he had made; lay panting on his side, impotently flapped with his stumped fin, then over and over slowly revolved like a waning world; turned up the white secrets of his belly; lay like a log, and died. It was most piteous, that last expiring spout. As when by unseen hands the water is gradually drawn off from some mighty fountain, and with half-stifled melancholy gurglings the spray-column lowers and lowers to the ground—so the last long dying spout of the whale.”
And yet the next chapter breezily (is that the point?) commences: “The more I dive into this matter of whaling, and push my researches up to the very spring-head of it so much the more am I impressed with its great honorableness and antiquity.” Ishmael is not just ambivalent in the aftermath of the suffering; he is more impressed.
- I’m now second(!) all-time at SCR for manual-equipped street cars behind my good friend Jim’s 1:49 in his 2008 Viper ACR. The overall street car record is currently 1:46 for a McLaren MP4-12C on 100TW tires, which is probably more like 1:49-1:50 on 200TW tires like the Nankangs I’m running? And the Macca has an auto-box and 100+ HP more. ↩