Charles Baudelaire seems to have foreseen his early and unpleasant death after a depraved and brutal life when he wrote “I believe that my life was damned right from the beginning, and that it is so forever.”
Continue reading BaudelaireBaudelaire
Category: Literature
Carlyle
The British essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle was just another chronic melancholic, easily irritable thinker who failed to locate any profound meaning in life.
Continue reading CarlyleVoltaire
As the doyen of the French Enlightenment, Voltaire has come to exemplify the Age of Reason.
Continue reading VoltaireJonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was best remembered for his ruthless expose of man – at best, a fool, and at worst, a demented brute.
Continue reading Jonathan SwiftShakespeare
The moral and philosophical predicaments of Shakespeare still haunt us today. His sonnets exhibit a fixation with time, uncertainty and death, whereas his plays explore the gory existence beneath the pleasant veneer we manufacture.
Continue reading ShakespeareIn the beginning… there was Nothing.
Nothing at all. Our relationship with death has profoundly shaped Western culture. A pervasive death consciousness has created religions, nourished philosophies and eventually stimulated scientific investigation, as well as fueled fanaticism, a brooding and melancholic pessimism, which resulted in nihilistic conclusions. Such nihilistic sentiments are far more than merely isolated occurrences, pervasive although manifesting in various guises. Continue reading In the beginning… there was Nothing.
Panfuturism
From the established trunk of Afrofuturism emerges a new branch I call Panfuturism. This isn’t some Ukranian offshoot of avant-garde Futurismo, for what it is worth. Where Afrofuturism is science fiction without the colonial mentality and othering, and reimagined with ancient African traditions with an unapologetic black identity, Panfuturism is also science fiction, but on a global scale, up to and including all our ancient mythologies re-imagined in a post-human future. Continue reading Panfuturism
On Writing Pantheon
Last month, I finally published the first volume of Pantheon: Heterotopia. This blog is the lessons I’ve learned from writing and drawing it over the last few years. Writing Pantheon, at least the very first chapter, was done in a flash of inspiration, and unlocking a hidden treasure. But it wasn’t until long afterwards that I realized that most of the hard work was done before I even sat down to write – it was the reading and imagining the possibilities for years until it finally crystallized as a true piece of art. Something worth endowing with a thousand perfections and to count my blessings with limitless satisfaction. But this was a serious overestimation, as if the first chapter dripped from the honeyed lips of the Muses into my broken ears. Chapter one was just the opening step. Continue reading On Writing Pantheon
The Decline of Science Fiction
In this day and age, science fiction, not to mention its more popularized version, scifi, has lost its prestige. Before we get into its current dilapidated state, first we need a cursory analysis of its emergence, to properly assess its origins. Continue reading The Decline of Science Fiction
Nihilism in the Iliad and Pantheon
It seems that our time is the most cynical and intensely pessimistic era ever in recorded history. Continue reading Nihilism in the Iliad and Pantheon