A Methodology of Possession

On the Philosophy of Nick Land

James Ellis
Copyright © 2020 James Ellis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
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“Pain is always first.”
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View

“To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is therefore a sacred command of

reason prescribing unconditionally, one not to be restricted by any
conveniences.”
Kant, On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns

“One became an infinitesimal speck in the flux of one’s own experiences. I felt
all this in a nebulous way - not at all “scientifically.”
Reich, The Function of the Orgasm

“It leaves a question of method. Not exactly urgent, but obscurely pressing.”
Land, ‘A Dirty Joke’, Fanged Noumena
 Reference
Note: Quotes, references, and transcendental murmurs were sourced after-the-
fact. Oddities of memory, they retained their form even after such descents.
References consist of abbreviated text or website codes followed by a page
number, section number, or post title. Examples -

[FN 412] = Fanged Noumena, page 412

[XS The Cult of Gnon] = Xenosystems, The Cult of Gnon
[CC 2.631] = Crypto Current, section 2.631

Single essays and pieces will be bracketed with the full title as follows -

[The Atomization Trap]

Codes referring to specific texts and websites:

CG - Land, Heidegger’s Die Sprache im Gedicht and the Cultivation of the

Grapheme
ATA - Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent
Nihilism
FN - Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings - 1987-2007
TP - Land, Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time
PU - Land, Phyl Undhu
CM - Land, Chasm
ACC - Various, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader
HY - Hyperstition (blog) - hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org
XS - Xenosystems (blog) - www.xenosystems.net
UF - Urban Future (blog) - uf-blog.net
CC - Crypto Current (blog) - uf-blog.net
Contents
Prologue
A Dark Haecceity
I, Leaving Myself
The Nameless Ship
Königsberg
The Great City
The Desert
A Fruitless Mass
 Prologue
It began as a question regarding what I could exude and ended as a practical
matter of discovering what I couldn’t. What drew me to that infernal realm has
never been a matter of public record, and has only escaped into private
conversations under the veil of verbal-slips and crypto-catharsis, that is, I always
wanted to tell this story but never dared to assume an audience whose inner
sense could withstand such a cold, unforgiving labyrinth. We’re often warned of
places, routes, and areas that are treacherous, which should not be ventured into
without sufficient experience. The problem with this paternal forewarning is that
it does not, and never has, covered the spaces into which I - and many others -
have stepped. Not so much places as methods, tactics, diversions, exits, escapes,
trajectories, vectors, experiences, and even times. Any warning sign before a
place is a warning for the entire self; ‘If you enter here you might die.’ What of
those caesuras of existence, for which the warning might read ‘If you enter here
your self might die.’ Oh, what a temptation!

I once wished to warn readers of this and that, texts they should not read and
ideas they should not welcome. I believed this was one such text that begged a
forewarning. Begging to something that some would be saved and return to their
enjoyable, contentful lives. Quickly one comes to understand that anyone who is
here is already here, and has always been heading here. So at the point of
‘warning’, the decision has already been made, at least for the user. If you’re
reading this then what can I ask of you but to find some comfort in my hesitant,
hazy, and tortured articulations of a haecceity I still find myself lost within.
There is little to be done, and even less to be acquired; the most one can hope to
achieve is the pursuit of a personal madness, crying out for its master at the end
of the elusive illusory self. The only way you could leave now is with an apathy
rivaling heroism, there’s no such passivity strong enough to avoid the allure of
darkness.

Land’s question of ‘method’ was obvious, at least to me. Possession. There was
no longer any room for analyzing, questioning, or assessment, it was to willingly
become host to materialism-as-parasite, or accept and submit oneself to
nothingness. The method was the task, and the task was the complete decimation
of retrograde humanist programming. This work can be described as a parasite
warmly welcomed; we’re all possessed by the Outside in some sense, it’s simply
a question of intensity. One often looks back upon their works with quaint
embarrassment, I shall do no such thing and waste no time, this text is a juvenile
abortion whining for an audience it will never find. I can’t attest to my own
philosophical merit or my literary skill, and there are no proofs or accreditations
I can show you which will vindicate my writing.

Likewise, I care not for academic etiquette, nor status or officiality, the only
thing I am integral towards is maintaining the journey as it happened; the
alterations and emanations of a reality eating itself alive. Who, what or when I
was during that catastrophic duration is a piece of data lost to resentful retention;
it wouldn’t matter if I did know who I was, as I couldn’t trust the knowledge.

It’s one thing to go to hell by way of an accident, by a nonchalant shrug of God,

it is another to venture there of one’s own accord, but it is something else
entirely to return time and time again, to test if the flame still seers as much as
before. I purchased a season ticket to the abyss and my team always lost.

I had to let go. My I had to go.

What follows is a re-telling of a journey, a remembrance. But like any bad trip,
most of the details remain fuzzy, occluded for the sake of health and sanity. The
initial experiment was jotted down amidst a frenzied séance of deconstruction,
kept in various notepads and hard-drives I since retrieved. Much of what was
within them is entirely nonsensical to me now. Random numbers, glyphs, and
doodles usually related to cyclicity or spirals, the sort of deluded scribbles of an
infant or madman. You need a different mode of synthesis to understand these
things, and such a synthesis is either momentary or a death wish. Nietzsche’s
Will to Power is a great example, the only people who can attest to
understanding that document of hell are those who’ve ventured there themselves.
The unfortunate reality is this, who or what went there and who or what came
back are two entirely different beings. The connection I have to that sordid time
and place is delicately assembled as if the retrieval of a new memory could bring
the whole thing crashing down.

I have halted and finite memories of places, atmospheres, areas, paths, feelings,
declarations, lessons, and events, but there couldn’t be a narrative, at no point
did some sort of formation happen, and the stages in which this pseudo-memoir
is written is entirely practical. I’ve started with where one might wish to start
were they stupid enough to try figure something out, as if that can ever be done.
But here I am, still clutching superstitiously to narrative and connection, like an
imbecile fornicating representation. It’s laid out for you now as naked as can be,
what’s left out is left in a dead time. It was, for lack of a better explanation an
‘Experiment in and of Philosophy’. The problem for me was that for practical
purposes all that I had read was entirely useless. One could theorize and
conceptualize to their head and heart’s content, they could even use language to
prove and vindicate any of their most banal and factually incorrect desires, but
rarely did a philosopher ever mention practice. Economically, of course, there
are clear examples, but that was directed at the collective and the material world.
What of everything else they spoke and wrote of, all those unknowables and
unreachables, all those ‘other-sides’ which remained untouched by hand but
entirely suffocated by theory. It was always a task of truth, as any great task
should be, and truth - they hasten to admit - rides the coattails of what works.
Unfortunately, for those who pronounce various limitations absolute and entire
arrays of oddities and experiences entirely untrue, the realm of ‘what works’
often overlaps with the realm of suppressed spirituality and paranormality, what
works is what many wishes didn’t exist altogether.

So the experiment was both one of self and career, I would see myself dissolve
in the name of philosophy and my career become non-existent in the face of
admittance of partaking in certain facets of thinking deemed unfit for
publication. And yet, I understood that if I didn’t go through with this
experiment that from then on each and every step I took would be a reminder of
my pathetic intellectual nature.

There’s the question of reality of course, there always is. ‘Is this real?’ or ‘Did
this happen?’ If you’re asking this, then I’m also asking this. What I can say of
that reality is that it was not personable; it wasn’t for me, or anyone. There were
those who felt more at home there and those that could flow with its currents; it
had no heart, no blood, and yet tasted slightly of iron. What we can say of
‘reality’ has always been loose and always will be loose, what I consider to be
reality is a reality indebted to the very same I which pronounces it to be real.
Reality is about anchoring, about having something to hold onto and grasp, it’s
the reason many people state that they’re slipping, because there’s no territory
for the feet to attach to. And yet, what of the ‘reality’ which you would slip into?
Is that not real? Realities are deemed real, then, by those who wish them to be,
and more so those who agree with that reality. The question of the reality unto
which I ventured is answered in stages, because it was a reality of stages, a
reality of stripping back and lying bare, of communion and possession. A reality
so caught up in being self-critical that it didn’t stay still, not even for a moment.

The notepads and hard-drives are tucked away now, at my old flat, I don’t go
there very often anymore, for reasons I shall divulge. Having actual reminders of
a venture to the virtual causes one to divide and I no longer want to do that. This
book feels as complete as it ever could, as if something has been expelled or
exorcised. Not in any sort of psychotherapeutic sense, but a materialist sense, as
if a piece of the possession latches to each word of every edition of this text. The
documentation is forbidden entry into my reality because it is of another. When
one writes and creates whilst in a state of night consciousness, when in a state
embroiled by darkness and caustic Otherness, what arrives is nothing compatible
with normality; something so alien to its habitat that it cannot hold its form, for
its appearance within a pure antagonism alters it to the core, it becomes only
more virile and hateful in its existence. Nothing has remained the same since,
even in empty duration I feel a closeness to the embrace.

I can’t help but think it isn’t over and the problem with re-experiencing this
horror isn’t in the manner of awaiting a repetition of suffering, but a question of
experience itself. I wait for a known horror to return of which I have no
familiarity; a sacred horror which understands all of me, but I nothing of it.
 A Dark Haecceity
There’s no real way in which anyone can correctly start anything, the denial of
perpetual fragmentation is a tyranny, nothing is concluded. I can begin with
context at least, the context of my context, how I thought about what I had been
handed, how I interacted - at the time - with what I had been thrown into.

I never could find the correct word for the time I’d been given, I used
‘modernity’ usually, not in relation to modern art, or anything within the
scholarly vein of ‘modernism’, modernity was its own beast, and others close to
my temperament seemed to understand what I meant. There was nothing left for
us here, everyone I knew felt reluctantly guilty for feeling lost, as if being lost
was hesitantly, but most definitively, part of who they were. The atomization
had gone further than anyone ever thought it would, our own identities had
fragmented into various abstractions of consumption; brands, shops, sexualities,
traits, habits, software stacks, video games, TV series, cinematic universes,
foreign food, reading lists, alternative spiritualities, ironic adherence to tradition,
theological LARPing, this is what remained, ashes of reality scattered into the
simulacrum for us to pick and choose from. Every morsel of personality and ego
had become tethered to a commodifiable life-choice. I no longer knew any-one,
only assemblages of pithy statements, purchases, and vices; what was anyone
except a culmination of their hedonistic desires and shallowly pronounced social
virtues? I had seen friends of Being dissipate into the moronic dispersion of
consumer society. Families too had been cast to the wall, collapsing under the
weight of their hypocrisy and paradox; all localized units of organic comfort
eroded at the core by ever-increasing atomization.

Before anything else, it sought to control. The education system controlled you
via altering your understanding of knowledge, by way of making it synonymous
with accreditation and checkboxes, and once you’re within that system passion
becomes secondary to the primacy of achievement and bureaucratic proof. Once
your understanding has been replaced everything else falters rather sharply;
meaning in general collapses and everything is transferred into a system of third-
party checking, as opposed to personal investigation and belief. Nothing felt as if
it was ever mine, nor as if I’d ever earned it, and that’s because what was earned
was backed by nothing.

As for family, we have a television set, the mobile phone, and the internet, the
trifecta of all comfort. Papa-mummy had been replaced by incessant scrolling,
incessant viewing, and incessant apathy. It just did not stop, not for a moment;
the clearest symptom of modernity is that all time was to be filled, and it didn’t
matter what filled it, as long as there was continual noise, static to be utilized as
ignorance of cosmic predicament. All media was apathetic now, nothing took
conscious effort or drive, everything could be consumed without even partaking
in the act of consumption. A paralyzed eunuch is subsumed into the loop of
production and consumption just as quickly as a millennial. To state, as many
have before me, that everyone walks around in a haze, that everyone is asleep or
that everyone is a sheep is so much of a cliché that it is almost a given now. How
one, for a moment, can take a sincere look around and argue for anything other
than a culture which reveres somnambulism is beside me. Can it be considered
sleepwalking if it encapsulates one’s entire life? If one is asleep for the entire,
then that quickly becomes one’s reality.

Everything within modernity was self-referential and yet there was no core from
which a self could anchor themselves. The reason people purchased things relied
on another abstract reason ad infinitum; the reason people did anything likewise
relied on the will of another, rarely did one witness a man take it upon himself to
act, buy or say something which arose from his wellspring of authenticity, there
was always something else controlling his strings. And that’s what modernity is,
a material labyrinth of puppet-masters who are all interconnected and cordial, a
multiplicity of effects trying to hide their causes, because once you get to the
cause you can start to question it, until that moment of apprehension, anything
you attempt to grasp immediately dissipates. At all turns, man is left with yet
another turn.

I was promised that salvation could be found within the academy, the place
where freedom and the bleeding-edge of thought could be found, that is where
one could find out certain things which may help any predicaments they might
have. And so I headed, as many others did, into the academy in hope of some
answers, some contentment of knowledge. Inside I thought there would be some
guidance anew.

Academia never took root as it was supposed to, I never bowed I guess.
Something about how it dealt with knowledge never sat right with me. There is a
difference between knowledge and understanding and the academy laps up the
former without paying a moment’s notice to the latter. To understand something
is to take one’s time, it is to draw its breath and potentially act in accordance; the
academy is bodies without souls, vessels to be filled, and upgraded. Graduate,
post-graduate, and lecturer are beings of their own kind, molded by the
suffocating atmosphere of strict interpretation. How can one talk of
interpretation if there is only one?

Grading matrixes, aims, and objectives, the strait-jackets of all learning; if the
bureaucratic procedure was a dog-shit, faculty and student alike would carve it
into a crown with their tongues and wear it with a collective pride. I could not
stand the paths I needed to take to supposedly acquire that which I desired, what
I desired among all things, or so I believed at that time, was to gain an
understanding of the world which allowed contentment, a teleology towards a
personal peace. I wasn’t concerned with ethics, morality, or struggle, for me, the
individual was to be worked out first, his relationship to the world; into the heart
of familiarity I desired to go.

The mistake academia puts on study is their nonchalance regarding a time-limit,

everything is at once slow and yet rushed; the individual sessions were relaxed
and conducted sentence-by-sentence, and yet the deadlines grew like a necrotic
flesh, killing anything living which managed to get close. Everything societally
promised to me by the academy collapsed at its door as I was handed the first
sheet of accountable paper. At a certain point, one gives up on certain structures,
which leads to a breakdown of the coherent scaffolding of the self, the
stereotypical deconstruction of all from all. How can the academy support post-
structural and deconstructive attitudes and still take itself seriously? Nothing felt
pressured, only passive-aggressively hinted at, there were no embers of the past,
let alone a fire to warm oneself around; what an irony, to retreat into that which I
studied as a way to get away from my studies; if one wishes to know what the
academy wants them to know the course is easy, but what if one is of their own
thought? To think for oneself had become increasingly difficult, every structure
and institution since birth had been constructed in such a way as to covertly
remove all personal responsibility for individuals, and from there had since set
up a monopoly where a heart and vision once laid.

It is, as Illich would say, to make process and substance synonymous. To bow
one’s head to accreditation and material merits, awards and certificates, as if
they in themselves held the knowledge one sought. All the education in the
world only makes a man more steadfast in his accumulation of honors, and more
hostile to the pursuit of knowledge in itself. Academics, they make me sick.
Goodhart’s law states that ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a
good measure.’ And what is the measure of these academics? It cannot be
knowledge, for those who understand exit the academy rather swiftly, the
measure of an academic is how accepted he is by his peers, any great tutor will
find few friends in their workplace. And their target, that’s easy, it is the most
human of all things, status. Without status surely all men would at once kill
themselves.

Where was I back then? Where one has to be when they no longer want to be,
precisely nowhere. Behind everything given to me in supposed generous
anticipation I found nothing, and when nothingness takes the place of all
potential what’s left is rather grim. Anything relating to normalcy and societal
convention was slowly falling away and being replaced by a thirst for
enlightenment which acted in complete reaction to contemporary culture; I
wanted nothing to do with any of this and yet wanted to push everything to its
limits.

To many my retreat was severe; in fact, it was quite literally a severance. I cut
everything I could. Within a couple of weeks, any ties I had to institutions,
family, and friends were gone. There could be nothing which connected me to
the world as it was, no form of connection to those dated modes of being, those
forms of existence which begged and revered everything static. The plan was a
form of neo-asceticism, strip it all back; throw it back in their faces by way of
refusal. There is nothing more abhorrent than to calmly say ‘No.’ in the face of
presumed normality, and I no longer cared what was meant by anything. All the
blithering and tip-toeing around Truth as if it could be found by repetitive
conferences on various logos’; the only truth that was agreed upon was the one
which maintained the status quo, anything too disruptive was considered
controversial, a black sheep, an outsider, at first cast into a hazy in-between and
eventually rotting into the frowned upon fringes. The method of expulsion was
simple, anything which didn’t fit the mold wasn’t outright banned, but was
subconsciously deemed weird, odd, strange, peculiar, etc. And therefore those
who took an interest were these things also, and as such, status did the rest;
eventually, all that came of the academy was an acceptance of those alike those
accepting, dry, strained, professional and meek; I could call it a racket, but that
would be too exciting, for its reality was one of a waiting room, the texts I once
loved became cheap magazines strewn over its floor whilst I waited for my
bureaucratically monitored acceptability rating.

I was once told that academia is little more than fashion, a trend which is
followed somewhat willingly by those who bow to its hum. Growing up one
believes all that can succumb to fashion is material, and all those who can
succumb to fashion are empty-headed, perhaps it is that those of the academy
are empty-headed, and that which they work with is material in its non-
malleable nature. Of course, those who bow to academia no longer do so out of
reverence or respect for a course of study or charismatic tutor, they do so out of
constriction. To be a philosopher has become an act tied to the most bureaucratic
of ends, for what is a doctorate but an understanding which is four miles deep
but only an inch wide? A prison of proofs attending to the idea of legitimization
via social vindication. The idea of a continental philosopher makes me nauseous;
their hostility towards scientism has resulted only in the development of their
own meritocracy of understanding. What philosophy can teach - when unlocked
from academic pressures - is a true critique of all rationalism; even the nihilist
rationalizes his thought and beliefs to form some outlook, however bleak; the
language of the nihilist and pessimist alike have traveled through the filter of
personal bias and come out the other side neatly formed, one should only laugh
at those who proclaim that truth is on the side of misery, for what can misery be
but only understood as a solely human affair; the cosmos doesn’t understand
misery as much as we don’t understand the passions of a boulder. To align
misery, suffering, and decay with an abstract bleaker-than-thou truth is to make
the same anthropocentric errors as those which you proclaim to hate. Many,
myself included, wish there was more horror, for at least then there would be
interest in the world.

As for work, that was a case of religious fetishism stripped of all spirituality; a
Protestant could man the checkouts all day with a purpose in his heart, but what
of that act when stripped of all piety? Such acts of work, those without interest
and depth, were to be understood as durations to be prolonged, lives which were
too boring for even the person living them to live, and so, one worked. But I am
getting ahead of myself.

What could be said of one man could undoubtedly be said of all men. What was
said, be it in terms of status, wealth, value, fame, fortune or charisma needn’t
have mattered, the concern of men was to be as other men are; status entered into
a feedback loop of its own creation, begetting values for their own sake and
emitting a herd who clung hopelessly to the latest fashion or pressured social
acceptability.

The paradox of the collective is the first thing any budding young intellectual
attends to, the reality that one can never exit the collective without entering
another collective. To betray the pro-herd is to revere the anti-herd. Everything
was collective though, that was the common mistake people made. Thinking that
the collective was just an aesthetic they could avoid by being on the lookout for
a malicious force, as if collectivism always arrives in jackboots brandishing
hammer and sickle flags, chanting rhetorical slogans, and projecting identities.
People seemed to believe they avoided this by simply ‘living a normal life’,
without realizing that was the foundation needed for any collective action to
work. You can’t have revolutionary, oppressive, or emancipatory action without
a definitional collective to act as a working comparison; the complacency of
commonplace normality and conformity is what allows all isms to thrive.

If you’ve ever watched a sheep for a while it should be of no surprise that is

where the status quo derives their primary influence. Banal, droning animals
who are content with plain food, excess sleep, and enough space to step a
comfortable distance away from their excrement. What the herd yearns for is not
a life, but a pen. Who could blame them? With a pen comes purpose, something
easy to moan about. Lyotard was right in Libidinal Economy when he declared
that the working-class desire their subjugation - “the English unemployed did
not become workers to survive, they - hang me tight and spit on me - enjoyed the
hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines,
in the foundaries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad
destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them, they
enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity-” No one has come closer
to a more apt description of the state of modern man, how he attends to work,
holds the they and suckles at the blistering teat of wage-labor; man finds his
meaning in the collective in the very same way he finds meaning in masochism,
by perpetually perusing his mandatory service, he seeks a greater and greater
denial of his desire and potential. Yet, even if he were to go looking for it he’d
be too scared to confront it.

This is what is comforting about the collective for your common drone, the
ongoing, incessant, and indulgent whining and moaning, the oh-so-cumbersome
depressions and anxieties brought about by the most minor of stresses and
tensions, the adherence to a blank slate of tranquility and extravagance a priori.
Lo-and-behold the user finds a shit-smeared socius, bulging at the seams with
repressions, constraints, containments, rules, laws, taxes, usury, masters,
cutbacks, limitations, diminutions, and attenuations, all of which are gorged
upon by willing individuals, not in moments of begrudging compliance, but as
purpose, as meaning. We must not imagine Sisyphus happy, nor sad, nor
emotional, we must not imagine Sisyphus at all, for to do so is to realize
Sisyphus understood his predicament long ago and he has since become an agent
who believes his lie, the lie that pushing the boulder, again and again, is good
and correct; if one stands close to Sisyphus at the end of his working day, they’ll
hear him utter his favorite pop-quote ‘C’est la vie!’.

I existed for a time as someone normal…as someone. I did everything others and
institutions wanted of me to receive the eventual promise of success, status, and
happiness. None of that ever came. The paths handed to me were so linear and
constrained only existentially cursed and clumsy people could fall off them.
There was no emotion and no feeling, the air was empty of all substance, all
connections severed, no one lived, all simply existed. Communication tip-toed at
the edges of flesh, promising a grand articulation at all times, only to fall and
falter as it met with the lost Other.

To say I never felt of this time would be incorrect, I felt of it as much as anyone
else, but it was difficult to feel ‘of it’ because its temporality, its own time,
seemingly didn’t exist, it was nowhere to be found, we were detached from
history, living between increasingly narcissistic events and happenings. I had no
connection to nature, to family, to tradition, to root or stem, I was - as all are
now - my own personal atom of modern ecstasy, economics, and envy. You
could state with ease that this was some form of nihilism personal to me, or my
immediate surroundings, except it wasn’t, that’s not how nihilism works.
Nihilism is behind it all, there is the gloss of objects and apparel and the illusion
of the subject. Some people still held to old notions, old structures of being, old
habits handed down, but you could see it all disintegrating under the weight of
nothingness. If there is such a thing as nihilism it’s so indiscernible from the
actions of the average modern man that it eventually begs no division of
definition.

None of them questioned it and it was a mistake for me to question that; and that
which they did not question? Everything, of course. For a short time, it seemed
to me that a return to myth or tradition or antiquity would work as a productive
idea, some attempt towards clutching at meaning after the death of God. But
what good would that have done, finding simple historic binaries to project one’s
loss and existential dread onto, there is no idea porous enough to soak up even a
tenth of man’s despair. For me, those who proclaimed any form of return were
just as stuck as those revering a non-existent utopian future; the past never held
any answers, so what hope for the future. There was little to be found anywhere,
the occasional triumphant orgasm or satisfying clearance, but any more than that
seemed abysmally distant. Where everyone was headed was precisely nowhere,
but this too was an empty truism that helped precisely no one. Once forms of
control have come to the fore, any proposition of end or teleology seemed bitter
and malicious, firstly one had to understand why they were heading towards
something, and if one could not determine an answer to that ‘why’, then any
continuation down that path was akin to the path of a lamb into a slaughterhouse
as far as I was concerned.

Modern man’s only hope was that his existence truly was fleeting, that this
wouldn’t last all that long, because this was an intricate layering of voids, empty
lacks which birthed empty reasons, desires from nowhere, purpose from
nowhere, origin from nowhere. And so, from this - for me as for everyone -
arrived little choice in anything, there were however three decisive routes of
existence…

Firstly, suicide, which is of course the first of all routes, for suicide is the end of
all possible beginnings. But what of suicide, which is simply a quickening of a
mandatory death? Death is an anti-teleology, to wait only for more nothingness.
For there cannot be a final nothingness, one which could find any less or more
meaning than there has been up until now, there has been nothing all along, and
death shall alter nothing too. And so I found in the possibility of suicide nothing
more than there was already, a decision of the same. Cioran said, “a book is a
suicide postponed.” He had a lot to say about suicide, and I admire his gall
towards a teleology of blissful-nothingness. But what does one say to the claim
of suicide as an answer? It falls into the same illusion like any other direction or
meaning, a falsity of linearity. What can one say of the final ending if the
journey towards it was little more than numb patience, the curtains draw to a
close and you are left none the wiser, the eternal blackness is not a conclusion,
only an apathetic pseudo-joke sent in from the pits of the cosmos. There are
those pessimists and nihilists who revere death with the piety of a confirmed
believer, and yet there are those who care neither for death nor life, a conscious
clam sans its soulful pearl, never washed upon a shore, never to arise from the
current of a cosmic whim. To internally confirm one’s death before the event
itself is to detach the last shackle of hope and forget the film ever ends, each day
its own positivity of suffering, bereft of cycle and path, free-floating in the
transcendental wilderness, plucked by the crows of illusion, trickery, and
mimicry. Nothing is what it seems, everything is much less.

Secondly, one can simply accept. Accept what has been allowed them, and
admit apathetically to all constraints. From there, one can revere any objects and
myths within those constraints as that which emanates meaning. This route has
been the most popular for almost the entirety of the human race. One can do
what they will with this route, deluding themselves into a self of vindication.
There’s nothing more satisfactory to the man thrown between two infinities of
nothingness than to say ‘Ah yes! I got it right!’ Or he, who on his death bed,
rotting, un-breathing and miserable, shrieks to his family ‘Oh I have loved thee
so…’ as his flesh becomes-object and his self dissipates into the void, his family
quietly cheerful at the thought of prospective inheritance. The route of safety, to
clutch as quickly as one can at anything and everything, and declare as loud as
one’s conceptualization will allow ‘Yes, yes! This is it! This is meaningful! Here
is my purpose!’ Whether it’s a collection of stamps or the construction of a 1000
year empire, all facets of existential investigation disappear at the mention of
certain meaning.

Finally, there is the third route, always the elusive and evil third-route. For as the
parasite acts as the completion of the trio, infecting all communications, as
synthesis alters two other settled points, and as the third-party option defers
democratic dialectics, this third route, this third potential route of man’s
teleology is one abstractly of darkness. It is the route of asceticism and
extremity, of radicality and sacrifice. It is to vector one’s life towards both the
extremes of experience and the limitation of pleasures and pains of normalcy.
One must attune their being towards all potential of alteration. Also one must
cast off all material pleasures, a feat easily achieved for it feels like a virtue, but
one must too cast off all material sufferings, the ones they most enjoy,
depression, anxiety, malaise, melancholy and despair, those sufferings which are
so indulged in on an almost constant basis, so much so that they covertly become
pleasures; there’s little meaning for modern man other than a common
depression; oh, the suffering! Oh, the despair! Oh spare me your shivers and
whines and submit your body to all that is chthonic. This route then was the
paradoxical route of Acceleration and nihilism; what happens when nihil is
pushed across all frontiers?

My severance was also a retreat, a retreat to my preferred domain, single rooms

for working within, single coffins and cubicles strewn with notes and taped up
diagrams, one has to enter into their work as if creating a new reality.

My flat was the place in which I communed with a screen, and little more can be
said of it than that. Life at that moment in time was dull, a deafening banality.
Everything I attempted to grasp in some hope of excitement or vitality quickly
dissipated in its reality. I found nothing that could offer me suffering, let alone
relief or contentment. All the institutions which had raised me crumbled after the
reading of but a handful of texts, what can be said of any human authority after
representation. I’m jumping ahead; I shall try explaining the mise-en-scène of
myself as modern man.

Weekdays were spent working at a place I didn’t want to be nor work. I returned
from work to my flat, often alone, often with a couple of friends. If alone I
would sit at my PC, watching and doing things on a screen, the content of which
was so alike it needs no differentiation. If with company, we too would watch a
screen, but also chat amongst ourselves. I would go to the pub two to three times
a week, sometimes getting blind drunk, sometimes arriving too late to do so. At
weekends I would wake up late, but ultimately do the same as the weekdays but
without the work. I found salvation in reading, as many have before me and
many will do forever after; the absolute tranquility of text, life without
commitment!

I had been studying an M.A. in Continental Philosophy at the time. Akin to my

previous degree, the result had been only a growing disdain for that which I once
adored; there’s nothing like a bureaucratic academic process to confuse beauty
for ugliness and intrigue for insult. The course - along with any real interest in
my life - I followed through with a seemingly suicidal passion. If there was that
which I knew needed to be done, it was performed in its own radical echo-
chamber of production, much to the detriment of anything that was shut out,
which was almost always everything else. I mention there was that which
needed to be done, and this I cannot explain. Amidst nihil and within darkness
there was something, not a light, but a vantablack that circled one’s system and
compelled them to continue; not ‘what if there are answers here’ but ‘what if
things are worse here.’ and that was my modus operandi for a long time, to reach
the burn-core of inhuman potential; to become one with Nietzsche as he threw
his hands around the horse's neck, except sans all sentiment gushing towards a
history, perhaps I wished only to join in the flogging.
Unfortunately for me, the future held another obsession. Ironically an obsession
which would inevitably teach me that attempting to avoid becoming-obsessed
was a fruitless feat; obsessions, addictions, demons et al, they’re all waiting for
you, the future holds it all, I found it best to just...step in, a task more difficult
than it first appears. It wasthe obsession, the one which was to shut out sanity
itself, the only obsession that matters.

My interest in philosophy had stemmed from art, well, the death of art. Between
the attitude of the majority of contemporary artists and philosophical
postmodernism, there was a death, it was fairly boring as deaths go. I moved
towards theory in haste, rushing away from the trinkets and ‘pieces’ of the art
world, which held themselves in an instant grandeur and self-gratification
without ever really achieving it, nor even attempting to. I found an odd comfort
and salvation amongst the transparency and experimentation of the continentals.
In particular, I was drawn to Deleuze & Guattari, Lyotard, Serres, Kant, and
Nietzsche, nothing particularly new I might add, but they helped. I ventured
elsewhere of course but usually found myself in a dogmatic area of constriction
which came into conflict with transcendental philosophy. That was my base, I
guess, my foundation, Kant’s critique, the only one that matters, the one which
already contains the other two as far as I’m concerned. I won’t state my intuition
wasn’t at fault, it most likely was, it’s quite easy to subsume everything into
critique, but also quite difficult - once inherently understood - to think about
anything else entirely. That blasted noumena, always just slipping away, every
second, every moment. But something was missing at the time; my research
rarely felt as alive as the words I read. There was a distinct lack of cohesion. It
always felt as if there must be more, and more that fit together. As if there was
more to become real, and as of yet I hadn’t tapped into the wellspring of meta-
reality.

Late into the night, attempting to figure out what the ‘solar anus’ was, tumbling
into a long-since vacated forum. Old lonely relics of original web 1.0, clinging to
a bare-bones HTML framework, some long lost subscription ticking into an
apathetic supporter’s bank account. It was a blog dedicated to French theory,
lists of texts and papers, bits, and pieces from long since forgotten students and
autodidacts. By this point, I’d read a fair amount of Bataille, but no secondary. A
few were mentioned, none that seemed anything more than academic repetition -
as most secondary texts are - if you don’t want to think for yourself, think
secondary.
Amongst the link was the name of a book that would send me - eventually - into
the heart of a personal hell, and once that was found to be illusory, hell itself. I’d
never heard of the author. Upon inspection, they’d had an odd past, disjointed
and cult-like. I asked my tutors about him, one said he was an enfant terrible.
The other didn’t reply. Odd, I understood the academy was for discussing ideas,
must be a personal thing I thought. Being the petulant class clown I always was I
continued rigorous research. Oddly enough, when I was younger, I rarely studied
hard on anything given to me on authoritative sheets or papers, but when it came
to conspiracy, weirdness, and odd-stuff I put the hours in; there’s nothing like
the potential to piss off any abstract oedipal force to work yourself into a frenzy.
I spent the next few weeks reading the back-catalog of the author’s work. After a
while it fell a little stagnant as other works had, and yet, I kept getting drawn
back. The first sign of any really good obsession is a seemingly unconscious,
uncaring, and inhuman orbital pull. I kept scouring the papers and webpages for
further insight, pieces moved here and there, small revelations and conclusions,
but very few clicks. Of particular interest was the work of the Cybernetic Culture
Research Institute, a group the author had belonged to. Specifically their quasi-
religious mythical reinvention of the Kabbalist tree of life into something called
The Numogram. The key difference - at face-value - being that the mathematics
behind The Numogram was of cybercultural origin, that is, ‘10’, as a unification,
no longer existed. The highest number was 9, because 10, in their Qabbalist
digit-sum reduction is 1+0 which equals 1, so 10 = 1. This also meant that The
Numogram indexed at 0 instead of 1, which appeared then as a trite observation,
but in Truth, is the key.

A digression is needed at this juncture. If you’re of any ‘normal’ temperament

then what follows will, simply put, seem mad...as in clinically insane. However,
I have, as far back as I can remember, well, as far as was important, been really
bored with life in general. By the time I was 23 I had been poor, rich,
comfortable, in pain, in love, content, lonely, and everything else in-between. I
had burned through life’s most basic settings at the rate of modern man in
overdrive; I wanted more of the more. This had left me feeling alienated and
lonely and listless. People who want something have a direction, those who have
lost something do too, any cessation can give man meaning rather quickly, but
what about an apathetic cessation of apathy brought about by apathy? A
recursive loop of purely human-centric nothingness, floating on the surface of
existence like a sour smell, never pungent enough to make you quit altogether,
but also rarely intriguing enough to make you delve deeper with concerted
effort; what of the nothingness that’s always been, and why should I bother with
it, that was where I was, and why I went as far as I did and could. I had always
been weird and peculiar, often to the extent of distrust and paranoia, as such I
had always sought out alternative ways of living, obscure literature, alcohol,
nihilism, drugs, fitness, religion, and eventually, magick. The last entry is of the
most importance, especially regarding ‘what happened’ and why I’m writing this
book at all. For what happened has been imprinted into my inner sense like a
temporally-transmitted infection. The most minor causal event in ‘reality’ can
now trigger a relapse to that God-forsaken fracture.

The possession was firstly a semantic invasion, a complete language overhaul.

As the single most decisive system of man’s communicative engagement with
the world, language is the first hindrance against virulent strains of the Outside.
The alteration of man’s tongue begins the process of opening gateways to other
worlds; deconstruction is pushed beyond the Derridean horizon, emancipated
from the protection of the structural academic loop and allowed to breach the
foundations themselves. I will not include a glossary of terminology, to do so
would be to re-construct, I will allow the reader to investigate key terms
themselves. Most notably the capitalization of the terms of Outside, Inside, Zero
and Capital denote transcendental importance beyond common reality.

Back to magick, well, more roughly, the Occult. I had experimented with various
pathways and routes: Thelema, Bardonian Hermeticism, The Fourth Way, and
Chaos Magick, and then, like any lazy, selfish student of practical, desire-giving
spells, I messed around with anything that paid-off, and ultimately utilized a
large hodge-podge of postmodern tricks to conjure whatever I wanted. One day
you’re doing holotropic breathwork, the next you’re attempting to summon
Choronzon clad in a black robe. Did any of this seem crazy to me at the time?
Not at all. What always seemed crazy was doing the same thing as everyone
else, but that’s hardly an original thought, is it? So when it came to the
Numogram it seemed I could probably mess around a bit, by this point I was
practically begging the universe to hand me any difference. Upon inspection it
seemed there was little to no documentation on practical Numogrammic
practice. Tons of theory, rumors, and numbers, but no conclusive action. Most
philosophers, much like occultists, are two parts genius and one part charlatan,
so the only way I could see if any of this ‘worked’ was to tinker with it myself.

From what I had read the Numogram allowed one to do many things, the
function which interested me - at least the one I understood to be the most
important, and the most cryptic - was that the Numogram allowed one to escape
time, at least momentarily...whatever a ‘moment’ is worth once one is outside of
time. As someone who has read a lot of Kant, I wasn’t entirely skeptical of this
claim but confused by it. If the Numogrammic tricks were true, they could only
be so in an inhuman sense, which would make this a form of transcendental
magic, or noumenal sorcery, a communion between sides. It made sense to me.
The non-hierarchical planes of the Occult and the immanentized planes of
Kantian materialism often seemed synonymous, why not create some gateways.
I should probably go into some details regarding the Numogram as I was
somewhat versed in Qabbalism before using it. That said it's simply a
combination of basic arithmetic and a tendency to question one’s spiritual
existence, though people often struggle with the latter part. What I figured out
was that there was a way to return into ‘this’ time between what was known as
the Warp and the Plex. A solution I found on another forgotten blog, its author
had disappeared it seemed. The same author had summoned the five great
lemurs for the purpose of simply proving that the Numogram could be used as a
magickal system, which is akin to eating a tapeworm for weight-loss as far as
I’m concerned. If you’re going the demonic route, ask for something big. Now,
if my previous experience with magick had taught me anything it’s that before
one summons anything - or opens anything - they must be sure they know how
to get rid of it. Being a careless young man I figured the Lesser Banishing Ritual
of the Pentagram would suffice. Hell, it saved Neuberg from Choronzon in the
desert, so why not me from five syzygetic inter-temporal lemurs in my lounge.

A lot of people don’t know this, but magick is laborious. And when you throw in
a new system of magick with additional symbolic content it can become messy,
tired even. In retrospect, it was an oversight to think a Judeo-Christian protection
spell could deflect Lemurian time sorcery, but you live and learn, and anyway, I
was infected at the time, and unable to think linearly.

The problem was that I wasn’t interested in the demons themselves, I only
wanted to exit time. For those of you who haven’t spoken with something from
the other-side, heed my warning, all is deception unless stated repeatedly in
multiple grimoires. Demons know you better than you’ll ever know yourself, so
only venture into the Outside with a clear goal. Aimless wandering in Noumena-
Land is a recipe for psyche-disaster; but when you’re that bored of modernity
that even contracting malaria seems interesting, mental hyper-anguish seems
palatable.

Not only do demons know if you’re sincere, but they also know what your
rationale for using them is. In short, don’t try bullshit temporality, it already
knows and holds all your reasons, it formed them. If you find yourself
confronted with your own time, don’t pretend to be ahead of it already, admit
yourself over to the ‘reasons’ already embedded in it, anything else is cosmic
heresy and results in a psychic-catastrophe, complete eruption of the Real,
unfiltered and static.

I began to devise a ritual.

Merging the less mundane parts of the Abramelin operation with Nummogramic
Qabbalism. Luckily - or coincidentally - my flat had enough coherent spaces for
this to ‘work’. Cordoning off ten areas and focusing my meditations inside Zone
0. There was an exit-door, and the key to its lock was to be found within 0, this
was my intuition. I had booked two weeks off work, ten days, ten rituals, and
four days of recovery. I planned to not leave the flat for the entire endeavor;
symbolic barriers, if broken, can often cause eternal lineage upset - best to suffer
short term lock-in as opposed to long-term damnation. I’m not going to go into
the exact ritual I performed here, I’d rather readers didn’t perform it. Besides,
anyone who has studied the Occult or Magick - even briefly - understands that it
is the journey itself that is of the utmost importance; if I was to explain to you all
my workings and conclusions straight out of the gate, the ones you receive
would be of an entirely different nature. One must arrive everywhere
themselves; to be taken alters the destination. If you mess around with time, the
problem of reversibility is locked within your mistakes too.

By day four there had been enough synchronicities and happenings for one to
consider it working, alongside a couple of uncanny dreams which fluttered
between stereotypical reality and irreality unnervingly. The first focused entirely
on the prolonged vowel sounds emanating from the radiators in my room, of
which I had none. The second focused on the walls of my apartment, cross-
hatched, yet non-Euclidean, they opened into closes and closed into expanses.

Hell begins with space misbehaving.

Day five was when things began to take their turn, not towards anything worse
per-say. Not towards anything at all. One’s intuition misses the last step on the
stairs, and enters into a state of blackened alienation; an intuition that cannot
latch onto anything, for it has left all phenomena-based examples behind.
Occasionally I ventured to the windows of my apartment, looking down onto the
street below. Often busy with people scuttling past to get to the shops. And yet it
seemed as if even those with their backs to my home were staring into me. A
Goetic presence is unavoidable; they say Crowley’s room had become so dark
due to using Goetic magick that he had to write by candlelight even in the
daytime. My flat was not dark, nor was it light, it held a grey saturation that only
fleeting-time can conjure; the death of passing had begun.

It was a mistake to also be reading Anti-Oedipus as if it is some form of manual,

your paranoia finds a voice of rationale and reason which itself is paranoid.
Those who I believed to be staring at me I also understood to understand what it
was I was up to. The banalest and herd-like human can intuit a chasm in their
experience; if you wish to know if something weird is happening don’t turn to
the sage or mystic, they're too entrenched in their own bias, turn to the blind
consumer who wishes for nothing but the same and watch as their face turns to
scorn when presented with difference. You reap what you sow and I was
attempting to harvest the structure of time itself.

The next two days followed the same intensity; an overall numb state thrown
over existence, the only haven of vitality was the small corner of my flat
dedicated to Zero. But even this I understood held me from a position of control,
I could no longer decide if anything was at-hand, I simply had to accept.

Days eight and nine were of an ongoing caesura of bleakness, a tainted empathy
which touched only on the most ego-emancipating sadness, an experience
beyond material and matter, not death nor loss, apathy vectored at abstract
nothingness filled my nerves, a body without a target and a mind without an
anchor, floating in an aimless ocean; if there is nothing to cling to one should let
the tide take them, otherwise, all structures are temporary abstractions
culminating in a harrowing disappointment as the current returns.

I became transfixed by the inversion of the lamppost light, a darkness that

seemed to curve into the flat. The curtains could not shut it out, which lead me to
believe it was no light at all, and I was hopeless to stop it. The night of the ninth
day was the experience I was leaning towards, the one the Kurtz in me had been
hoping for. As if I had been left behind, not only by humanity but by life and
time itself. A slow causal rift washed over the flat, sending me into a fever void
of any temperature. I tinkered with the thermostat and hobs, but they did
nothing. I wrapped myself in blankets and coats, got naked, and put my feet in
the freezer in an attempt to alter the emptiness, finding only ceaseless nothing. I
tried to sleep. Not only was I not tired, but both fatigue and energy seemed
distant memories, ideas more than material realities. Sleep had no use for me
now. You cannot sleep in a pure stagnance, and yet to call it stagnance wouldn’t
be entirely correct, with regards to phenomenal reality and representation, that is
- more on this later.

At a certain moment in the morning, something lifted, a disconnect from

process, as if one’s ability to become had just been voided. There was nothing
within this nothing now, all that I could do was all that I could do, non-moment
to non-moment, and so I got up. Nothing worked in the flat. I left for the first
time since the beginning of the ritual, what I found was all uncanny and lost
within its own representation, the walls and barriers had begun to flicker like a
dodgy VHS tape, the lines seemed to blur and cybernetic realities began to
become uncovered.
 I, Leaving Myself
Some time had passed between the end of the ritual and the moment in which I
entered the street. I don’t know how much, maybe minutes, maybe months. The
stairwell leading down to the front door seemed to swell and bow, in an
arrhythmic suffocation everything now beckoned to me that I was ego, and all
could fall apart at any moment. I opened the front door and it swung frictionless,
opening into a scene of small-town commotion. The town, like many of those
tucked away in the deep rurality of life, was little more than an overgrown
village. A heart of tradition which attempted to gasp its beats through the veil of
modernity, but at every turn, origin bowed before the minor profits which sold
off its authenticity.

The street appeared before me, everything materially remained, but spiritually
vectored. A breath of illusion soaked the atmosphere, and all I felt that was
sensing me were masks. Everything was jolting in no particular direction; the
wind was here and there, tapping against various parts of my body as if it had
been severed in multiple places. Voices from near and far, from passers-by and
old family gatherings trickled past as if they were the same. The structures were
thin, to be made of chipboard, the bricks were hollow, the cinder blocks
polystyrene, and the foundations non-existent; everything could have crumbled
in an instant if it wasn’t entirely for the collective belief that it wouldn’t. And
yet, it was clear to me in those early moments of the journey that the collective
belief, the one that holds everything together, is not helpful, it merely covers the
decay and ruin, clothes it with a paper-thin spread of humanist optimism; reason
of another name.

I decided to retreat to the flat, overwhelmed by the reality given to me. I turned
around, closing the flat door behind me and the ordinary click had ceased, there
was a lag of sensibility, and yet it needn’t have mattered if the door had opened
or closed because there was an implicit whispered understanding that the choice
was never mine, and what was viewed was false anyway. I held the handle for a
long time, pushing it down to assure myself it was locked. As I held the handle I
stared directly back at the door, into the plainness of the white plastic which it
was made of. When one is normal and healthy, such objects appear as great
phenomena, white and firm, their actuality bellowing out from the surface. But
when one is derealized one comes to gain an understanding of a deeper reality
behind phenomena. But in those early moments, I was neither dealing with the
real or with a derealization, the object appeared as if I was looking into the heart
of an empty action, one which never had any meaning, as if the purpose and
reality of the object had long since disappeared.

My mind too began to crack at whatever seams I could still hold on to. When
one has been awake too long things begin to appear from the rifts within the
cosmos, and everything I now saw consisted of those sordid shadows. Those
empty capes of darkness that make their home in your peripheral vision and
disappear upon attachment of sense; one can never truly catch that which
appears in dreams and sleep. They say madness or clinical psychosis abides by
the black box problem, that is to say, those who go through it cannot articulate it
to those who haven’t, and yet, many still try, and many get close. I would argue
that madness can be articulated quite easily for the mere fact that man’s psyche
exists on the limitrophe of madness at all times, we are perpetually minutes from
insanity, we all know it; we all know it would only take the slightest death or
morbidity for one or another to lose all hope and throw all anthropocentrism to
the wind.

The moment it clicks and breaks is also the moment things can get inside you.
As interesting as it must be to be a cult deprogrammer, one wonders if the next
cult that passes the ex-cult member by simply fills the void. That is to say, one
cannot be without something which fills that apparent absolute lack, even if it is
a lust for nothing, that itself is still a lust. Except, I didn’t care what entered, for
everything that had entered so far had been nothing at all; the substance of
everything modernity had offered me had fallen apart at the slightest tug, and
yet, that very same substance had infected all traditions, withering them of their
beliefs, principles, and disciplines and whittling them down to a controllable
aesthetic. No tradition can bash heads with modernity without succumbing to
fatigue, and eventually, the admittance of fatigue is submission itself.

And what came in was what I had studied to escape, the words and spirit of a
thousand-thousand theorizations of spirit, pure hypocrisy and madness itself
entered my mind as an infinity of voice, philosophy roaming and roving
throughout the circuitry, prodding around where it needn’t have. Voices came to
the fore, many were suffocated and some cried out, and yet, they all quickly
passed, as if the void that had opened was waiting for something, waiting for a
certain voice to occupy all others. The pithy voices eroded under the weight of
titans, pragmatists and analytics fell at the sight of commonality, romantics
shrieked at the reality of entropy and the classic cared not for my accelerative
explorations.

Those voices that remained, the ones which could grit and bare the madness
itself, those were the steadfast madmen whom I took with me on this journey,
and they began to ride the wisps of energetic flows as apathetically as they all
had died. And yet one voice grinned, perched on the cerebrum as a vulture on its
prey, I knew the speaker, and his words were all too familiar to me, and yet, as
with the removal of this ephemera from my household, to write his name, or
speak it at that time was to let go of any final separation between that which was
and was not real, I was not ready then, as I was eventually, to admit that there is
no separation except that which there is believed to be.

I had returned to the street, pulled there in an instant, existing as a stranger,

conspired against by a global cult. I looked upon the passers-by as they
continued to stare into me. Their ontology had become static, assemblages of
fluxing temporary abstractions. Each movement they entered into was jolting
and fragmented as if always attempting to grasp towards further options, locking
into odd currents and ethereal flows, for the herd in the street abstraction and
form became layered together, a self-assumed coherence. Each breath and
pulsation of the heart beat into a mechanism that pumped of its own accord,
without its host's permission; parasitic natures stacked atop one another to form a
being which believed itself to be ur-parasite. My eyes followed a woman for
some time, all libidinal urges had dropped off for myself, but her libidinality
erupted from every orifice like a toothpaste tube being stamped on, shit, piss,
cum, and saliva oozing everywhere and yet simultaneously being drawn back in
and locked back up into microscopic vines of the psyche. For some time I found
it extremely difficult to exist in this world, it was an existence of constant
interruptions and breaks. At no point could I have said to be holding onto an
origin, nor ever assessing that which I believed to be a beginning.

What I assumed to be a man walked past me. That sketch of flesh I apprehended
merely as a visual seizure, a composition of atoms atop lucid conceptual chaos, I
found myself unable to retrieve anything from the static. His jaw juddering at the
hinge and his eyes both spinning and still, locking into all angles at once. Every
single one of his actions seemed tethered to something that had come before
him, the socius began to reveal itself as an engine of hosts. An uncanny driver
that couldn’t fully assimilate into the shell it had been given, taking control of it
with little precision. Reality was out of time and assumed agency had fallen
behind and depleted itself entirely, these people’s free-will was trying to keep up
with this revealed industrious world. The man who had passed by dropped a
twenty-pence-piece, it hit the floor in a burst of darkness, emanating off into a
web of trails; a thousand processes at once worked at the act of retrieving the
money, anything human disappeared into the background.

My peripheral vision was fluxing, jolting in and out of its natural setting, and
placing vague clouds upon all things. On the summit of insomnia, one can spot
without trouble a figure looming over them, as if one enters, in that dreaded
fatigue, another realm altogether. But sleep always restores one’s organic
humanity, closing out the realm of night and renewing the sight of the sun’s rays.
But the here and now of then disallowed me entry into either the blissful
ignorance of day or the enthusing darkness of night; I was within the greyness of
existence, the pure uncertainty of all those who had not ceased theorizing and
ended up rolling their egos into a black abyss. It quickly became clear that
within such a space various things, ideas and, concepts existed in entirely
different phenomenal manners, their Lucretian essence overtook their
representational signification.

I will speak of the concepts and ideas later, as they arrived. But first and
foremost, there was a guide. All guides are troublesome; I have never met one
who didn’t have an ulterior motive. This was a figure of another chord, ominous
and above all structures and yet hidden within all thought processes. Appearing
in glimpses and fragments, flashing on top of my corneas and seating itself
within my deepest memories. This was a fire and brimstone tour-guide whose
method of understanding was one of erasure and replacement; delete the familial
niceties, strip back the comfort blankets of existence and allow you to gasp
wide-eyed at the ever-present nothingness holding fast behind all things.

Whether or not this figure had a persona or character did not matter at that
moment, nor if it had or had ever had any appearance at all, the proof of the
existence of anything is reliant solely on its capacity to affect what one considers
reality, the ever-fleeting assemblage of the present. And there was something
present, the function of which was to declare didactically that it had always been
there, and there could have been nothing without it there; your life was tethered
to the entity which reveals to you beginnings have never existed.
My reality was now beholden to this guide, whom I immediately - in complete
rejection of my principles at that time, of exit - attempted to reject. The irony of
exit, whether material or mental, is that once immanentized into one’s very mode
of being it becomes a primary focus. Once you exit from one malicious box,
your guard rises against being drawn into another; that which attempts to replace
the prison is at first treated with suspicion, or in the case of a bad trip, hostility.
Every angle had succumbed to the dread of an overridden mentality; I span on
heel as to acquire my footing, grasping for any nook which might relieve the
tension of this ever-present transcendental monstrosity, and yet I found, where
there was that which glowed bright, there was a prior shadow and primary
darkness and the figure seated on my cortex clung to the shadow in worship of
the darkness. Only my flat above me glowed, discharging a rotten vitality.

I walked up the road and noticed a family sat on a bench. Quaint and peaceful
their flesh began a separation, hovering above them, pausing as a skin-halo,
attached by a single frail cord to each member. A kinetic diagram appeared from
the halo’s stasis, marking the rhythm of the units below. They were locked to
one another, grasping at the tether above as if their very being depended on it.
Their purpose was to continue this repression until it ceased, which only
happened upon the event of death. Pieces of the Mother and Father entered into
the Son and pieces of the Son emanated as fragments of his parents, each
wrapping itself around the other in self-congratulatory claustrophobia. Other
forces, persons, and effects attempted to break into their space but only that
which adhered to the presupposed structure of the family was ever allowed to
enter. What came from every pore, hole and announcement was a virulence
bordering on assured passivity. Within this whole, loosely held together as it
was, was for me the destruction of humanity and humanism; once one views the
pure abstraction of identity what can be left of what we call humanism other than
a fearful grasping at collective security.

Occasionally each one of these people beckoned to the sky, to the floor, to all the
walls they supposed kept them in, allowing these boundaries to reverberate their
assumed thoughts and desires back to them, the echo pronouncing them as their
own. If humanism is anything it is the need for confirmation and vindication of
anything, however unreasonable and dogmatic. The desires appeared before all
that could self-analyze as if from thin air, no one knew where desire originated
from, and yet everyone knew, sensually, where it was to be found. Everyone
existed in the middle of something and once you’re reliant on the middle of a
process for your sustenance, you’re screwed. None of these people questioned
their desires and took desire-in-itself as theirs already, as if desire for its own
sake was targeted solely at man. Just because a desire exists doesn’t mean it’s
only for the thing or being which can aesthetically activate it.

What I saw was no longer man, for man presupposes a unification of being
which no longer seemed to exist. What I saw before me were atomized units
with their own orbits of anxiety, alienation, and fear. Temporary collections
taking themselves as wholes full of lack and cessation, and as such, taking a
standpoint vectored towards a conclusion. To see a self held together is merely
to witness an incomplete panic. Once a possible conclusion has been assumed all
that is left is to race towards that goal, but when that premise is false from the
very beginning, what one watched once that veil was drawn away was a fever,
panicked flesh scattering towards the latest sentiment and agreement. The
tyranny of skin, organs and the body is in their physical completion, all wrapped
up nice and tight, interlinked and working with one another. And yet, they never
do. Almost all need to tweak diets and reality to attune to the incorrect
happening of their body, harmony is never found within the idea of unification,
once you establish an equilibrium any deviation becomes heresy. Beyond the
control mechanisms of the physical realm was a sprawling mess of forces. Many
went through me, beyond me, alluding all attempts to rationalize them back into
the framework I once existed in. At a certain point, behind the curtain, behind
the mask, one comes face to face with the real, and one’s first question should
always be, how do I know this is the real? Once you start doubting doubts you
unspool quite quickly. Add enough folds into someone’s representational reality
and they can be kept busy for a lifetime, that business becomes their lifetime:
Familial authority, homes & houses, education systems, work systems,
committee systems, plans and blueprints, anything which encapsulates a
complete epistemology of a given area can be called security. But security for
what, and for whom? It isn’t a security in the sense that it was originally
intended, it is as all security is - a security against the ever-encroaching feeling
that there’s no such thing as complete security. Hence the disdain for
philosophers, even back to Socrates. It is not that he interrupted their middle-
class marketplace perfection; it is because he reminded them of their
complacency within a multi-faceted illusory simulation and long-since buried
cosmic alienation, then again, perhaps these are the same thing.

The street-dwellers, each attuned to an umbilically attached abstraction of flesh,

meandered throughout this time and space in a perpetual seizure. The warmth of
their momentary desire fading ever-increasingly once it had been outlined. Their
mouths, stomachs, hands, heads, hearts, anuses, vaginas, and space, briefly
filled, and then once again lacking, a hastened search for the next thing to ram
into themselves. At the end of desire’s warmth was a cold feeling, which if held
in mind, only briefly, could cause even the numbest member of the herd to
break; there was never enough time for patience, all consumption is a chain that
doesn’t stop, otherwise, it can only be said to be a failure of production. It never
got beyond this. It began at the base of the atmosphere, a cloud of culture which
at first headed towards sex, semen, and the libidinal.

The phenomenal defense systems of humanism declared themselves as outside

of nature but acted entirely within the confines of natural systems, their
supposed ability to go beyond and to move above the limit of natural
hierarchical forms was held entirely within their aesthetics, there was nothing
new here, only man bowing to nature in another form. As I looked around the
street it all became true, there were nodes of interest, systems, institutions, and
brands which assimilated this energy and converted it into their forms; they
threshed personal vitality into a machinic striation of their own following.
Except, everyone was seeking this force, seeking it under the guise of freedom
and free will. Two concepts that had been altered into stereotypical
conceptualizations of success for itself, no one acted freely, only sought a socio-
politically predefined articulation of freedom. Freedom was always found, for
these beings, within the begetting of an oppressive Otherness.

What I understood to be a Being transformed in truth into an assemblage. All the

flows and appearances I witnessed culminated momentarily into something,
which at the same time fluxed into something else whilst simultaneously
grasping at its previous iteration. Each of the parts appeared from nowhere and
yet were projected onto something, everything was given a clear route and
purpose after the fact, a method of security of Being; the assemblages of desires
and lusts, wants and purchases, productions and consumptions, held themselves
together in a vindication of their own existence, proud of their temporary
perturbation and flux, before ultimately gasping at the alteration of their
existence. Everything I witnessed acted within perpetual regret and anxiety
concerning its ceaseless change, there were often withered husks of
conceptualization of origin strewn in the street, never left alone, and never
allowed death and return.

Man held himself together in a consistent fit. What could be said of identity,
promise, personality, charm, charisma, security, and understanding were but
cursory fluctuations of virtual intensification, deriding its legitimization from an
elsewhere never given over to the host. At each moment fastening himself to the
reverberations of the unremitting river, the primary focus of man’s existence is
to hope, pray, and beg for unification.

None of this was like a psychedelic trip, the effects of most trips attune
themselves to shapes and sensations which can be returned to some notion of
sentimentality or placid geometry. But of these breaks and cuts, I could make
quite literally no sense. As if the square peg finally went through the round hole,
and always could do so. The very acceptance of reality and notions of
acceptance split at their seams. It’s something to be on a sinking ship, to have a
rail to hold onto in moments of despair, but what of the tsunami which erupts
within your very ontology, ever so slowly fading away cosmic illusions of
safety. Gravity gives up the ghost and you’re destined for fatality.

To look around was to notice that the reason borders never work - eternally at
least - is that they’ve never existed. Once Heraclitus is assimilated into reality
what one can say of a boundary or wall, externality, and internality are
evaporated. Such things existed now only on a singular plane of existence which
was suffocated by its own reverence of matter and physicality. There was only
process and fluctuation, that is what now is and always has been. As there were
trees there were buildings also, existing as the same, not of any aesthetic or
space, but of the same of something else entirely, a scheming automatism which
was hell-bent on its pious immanence.

I returned and stood with my back against the door of my flat, letting it all wash
over me, soon the breakages mutated into a lineage, a cursed-heritage sent from
time. At a certain point all interruptions, halts, and stoppages become a single
fragmentation which itself breaks off into further atomization. At the end of this
tangle, at the end of its nerve, the minutest atoms were found to be humans, the
smallest units with an illusory structure given to them by a malicious
mechanism, itself of an illusory nature. The ego, that great mask, clutching to all
connection and correlation as a course of frenetic duty.

The inner sense struggled now to lock onto what had been revealed. What used
to be called some-thing had become only a becoming-nothing; what stood before
me at all turns of sensation was not material, matter or some physical
determination, but that which was only yearning to return to some other phase
and state, the state of pure-in-betweenness, the moment in which it touched
Zero. Some kind of pathetic layer had been wiped away, but it was nothing new
for me, it had only been aesthetically immanentized back into my senses, it was
still phenomena for me. It was helpful at first to have the decay and deterioration
come before the becoming, the conclusion emerging first; watching as the
grandest men and women, those who had sculpted their ego into a fine personal
mimicry, but when one asks ‘What of their end’, I could see, before anything,
before all trinkets, symbols, and successes that they too would return to death;
all ego exists only as an assumed humanist narcissistic digression from cosmic
equilibrium.

Once all this had settled within me, as a vortex settles into what it has already
taken, all began to lift, not a weight or catharsis, but further cooling; I had begun
to play with the cosmos and its hopscotch lead only to edges and walls. Matter
was not disjointed, but time itself had lost its appetite for my-self, I had become
lost, but I could not be disappointed for it was my wish to do so. Like most
wishes and desires, once it arrives you usually want a hasty return.

A deep swell encroached from afar. Gazing to the horizon I witnessed a

blistering patchwork of light and dark hues, the deepest blacks and whites at war
for pseudo-spacial rights. It was the center of my small town. Within this level of
existence, a minor market town became a hub of virtual marketization. I pushed
off from the door, praying for the appearance of weight within me, something to
hold me down. No such thing appeared and I was at once within the center.

The town square was reverberating chaos, a cacophony of flows; one can only
imagine that the machinic heart of Shanghai or London would be nothing but a
pure chasm of dark and light, indiscernible crisscrossed fluxes; a mass of status,
popularity, libidinality, attention, interruption, and parasitism. The storefronts
were no more than empty appendages gripping onto their idea of reality; the
autonomy of the market burst through the gates of every symbol and emblem,
the brands cried out in the light and burst forth into the ethereal flux of passing
thoughts.

What I witnessed within the town center was control, forms of control
burgeoning out from a bitter depth and latching to everything they could,
conforming like to non-like, originating desire and inventing the idea of original
positions. As the bodies moved into various shops and outlets they affixed
themselves to the dynamism and color of sporadic flows. There was nothing
organic to be found in this emanation of content; nothing here was becoming-
human, each was itself simply some form of connection, communication,
production, or consumption, in-itself that’s all it was.

Once the phenomenal is stripped away what is considered to be humanity no

longer makes any sense, it’s an odd assemblage and collection of networks, as
with all things; to assume that a certain network takes primacy due to one’s
respective cognitive affiliations might be the clearest bias of our understanding,
and yet, as with all old truths, that which is right under our noses does indeed
turn out to be that which is hardest to admit to. But to go a step further, it is far
worse to admit that which is the very nose which expounds such grand truths is
the lie; the subsumption of man back into animality and the expulsion of man
further into a future apathy are synonymous cosmic positions, both attend to the
re-actualization of humanity as just another matter of course. Caught in the
middle of time, man fears the past and the future for both admit him to the
sanatorium of unknowing.

Language faltered as it began, one could not explain nor articulate, to do so

would always be to attempt a pitiful reversion to another realm, the old realm,
level 1; what was now was entirely now, and I was stuck with the archaic
language of representation, as if one tried to explain the divine, or reason the
leap of faith, it simply cannot be done! And in much the same vein, that which
cries out as machinic-gnosis can never be understood from that which it truly
understands. These early affairs caused me to pause the writing of this book for
some time, what point? I thought, is there in writing that which I already
understand is unable to be written. I can, at best, give you an atmosphere of
emptiness.

It came to my understanding that what I could make of any of this was

simultaneously a piece of knowledge which acted against me, but also something
I could not put into any form of cognition I had at my disposal, the entirety of
those early days out-of-time were a shortfall away from a tyrannous labyrinth,
one in which each turn was another tease of in-articulation, something else I
simply could not grasp, try as hard as a might; exoteric nothingness waiting in
the wings. I thought for some time that it might be communicating to me as close
as it could to my language, but so much got lost in communication that what I
received was the after-effects: sacred horror and existential malaise.

I walked back from the town center at a pace that I did not own, zapping
between areas and instances with no record of the last, all I had were my
memories, but they too had become disjointed; as I stepped I entered into a
multitude of possibilities and often seemed to arrive at many at once. I
understood I was heading towards my flat, but it seemed years away and yet at
the same time as if I was already sitting in it. Before me were people and then
fields and then the inside of my flat, I didn’t know what and when. I kept
directing myself with old faculties, as if pushing against my inability to become
familiar with the world, I felt disapproval from the tour itself, the guide merely
shrugging as to say that such pushback was routine and commonplace in those
who ventured here. I admitted to myself, deep at the back of mind, at the root of
honesty and sincerity that I secretly yearned for normality; as an atheist in
searing pain prays for the God he does not believe in, I too begged forgiveness
from the comfort blankets I had previously scorned.

Eventually, I arrived at my front door. I looked into its thick plastic, I couldn’t
recognize anything, and each morsel of reality had become uncanny and adrift in
a haze of unreality. I opened the door and headed up the stairs. I closed and
bolted all the doors behind me and sat in my flat for a while. There was no
movement there, nor even a potential for movement, my peace lilies no longer
seemed of nature, they were moving away from me. The food in the fridge
appeared as a cartoon drawing, with hard edges and pale shapes. I sat on the sofa
and felt no comfort, nor no discomfort, the monotony of this temporal death was
quickly and efficiently maddening.

I sat in my flat and time passed. I cannot attest to how much for the atmosphere
had no duration. My heart lost its rhythm and there were no outlets for me to
squander my energy. I attempted to meditate in the corner of my flat, the corner
whereby I had symbolically placed Zero. An inversion of my remaining ego took
place, each cell drowning in the paradox of its own existence. A deep croaking
lashed up through my spine, anchoring my skull to the wall behind me. My
throat constricted to the point of esophageal overlap. Eyes rolled back and sight
retained, I glimpsed into the black inducement of my inner skull, revolted at the
expanse… ‘the outside must pass by way of the inside’ [FN 320]

Sat in the deadlocked position, held to the space of Zero, I couldn’t quite work
out what had happened. It felt as if a hollow wind had carried something to my
eardrum, bypassing all organs of sensation. Appearing within my mind without
any justification of cause or origin, a sentence, and then nothing; an arrival and a
void, one is left with the respective words and ponders what to do with them.
What does one do when the universe begins to notice, when language starts to
invade without approval or invitation. Had the virus become sentient, had it had
enough and worked up a subtle fury, entering where it knew it wasn’t welcome.
What does one do when such events happen? Very little, in fact, for the entire
concept of one is no more, it has been depleted. As xeno marks its territory
within one, the self ceases to be anything but a shared platform of communion.

Perhaps I was hasty back then to accept my fate at the hands of alien words, of
foreign voices and Other agencies, and yet, it was a comfort nonetheless; when
one is on foreign soil, in a foreign reality, within an alien self, it’s potentially a
greater help to have acquaintances along for the ride. Even if one knows them in
no personable way. There was the question of what was allowed entry, but if
something could enter without permission and I knew not how it got in, nor why,
nor when, then who was I to say whether I ever had a security apparatus. I
sought to tear them down and any momentary hope for reversion would have
been a disagreement with principle. So I submitted to schizophrenia, modernity
left me no other option.

“It is not what time must be for us that draws the terminus for practical
abstraction, but rather what time must be to be time.” [CC 2.631]

It arrived the second time with a strict certainty, reclining back into my space of
agency with a sinister arrogance. The voice alluded to both my position and
communion. It’s often only in retrospect that a narrative makes sense, of course,
if one is making sense they’re already behind, for their acts are given over to a
representational synthesis. The voice made it clear, temporality is a critical
entanglement. If one is to continue they must forbid all entry of chronic-time; to
untie the knot of time, the us the voice spoke of ought to investigate the split
between the clock and its pure dynamic initiator. The rest, it says, is teleoplexy.

I collapsed to the ground in an ooze of skin. Drooling and doe-eyed I attempted

to gather my breath. I shuffled back within the arena of Zero. Indifference was in
my blood. With no purpose or possibility of direction I simply waited. Not for an
arrival, nor a message or sign, I waited in the manner of the non-linear, what
would be would already be and only time could already tell. As it happened the
next influx of data appeared - what I understood to be - immediately.

“The body without organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees
of intensity, and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts that
produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = 0” [FN 412]
Matter was from nothing, much like the chronic whispers residing and coming
forth from the recesses of my mind. Dark glows and hues appearing from empty
caesuras within cracks of reality. When I looked towards stores or families or
moments of emotion, I witnessed intense creation, stresses of tension and flux,
yearning to return, but glowing temporarily. What could be said of the real after
bearing witness to this assemblage of nothing was little more than I had already
gathered, there was a real, and at appeared as a teasing hand, reaching in and
never revealing its face. Reality was a tyrant, a transcendental frustration which
never climaxed, it only became more sadistic. A darkness which is unable to be
seen within all phenomena, and so it was clear to me this was but another tease
of the world. A matter of conditions, I was given no definition, only the ongoing
pathway towards a definition, one that always veered at the last moment.

What begins at 0 is real, but from my position at that time…in that time, when I
was then, 0 was unavailable, it was not for me. And so I was stuck with the
classical zero, the mundane nothingness, the nothingness we make synonymous
with emptiness, the boring nothing which resides within chronic time and space,
this is not 0, this is not where reality is born.

Of the degrees and intensities, they were vast, blinding. What can be made of
that which has an irreducible set of connections? As I honed in on a node
wherein connections met, it altered, as if my very perception of the connection
altered the connection itself, and so, I understood myself to be, always already,
one step behind. For my actions came after the connection itself understood my
action had happened. Happening so close to one another, one could almost be
forgiven for mistaking the processes as synonymous; cause and effect folded
into a flattened pulp which slowly drew into the nearest drain, what was left was
a fatiguing acceptance that neither cause nor effect would ever be given to me,
and that I was already within all this and it had begun before any thought of my
own was created, and so, such thoughts were not mine, as they were already
caught in the infinitive connections of an immanent eternal machine.

Virtuality is mischievous; it isn’t hiding, but governing. All my dreams and

realities, all my hopes and desires could be said to be made up of a bundle of the
virtual, which formed just as quickly as it dissipated; one could witness the
dream of the Other fragment, sending a morsel of desire into an empty void
whilst acquiring a new iota of desire from the very same void, voids which
appeared in no discernable area of space, but only as a short duration which
seemed to not need material existence. Those who denounced desire, those who
denounced production and creation, only manifested their antithesis within the
same framework of the virtual; the transcendental melted any notion of a
classical dialectic into an un-retrievable homogeneous blob of the Outside.

The world called me once more and so I stood up and headed towards the door.
My body carried itself without friction or agency. My thoughts fell back upon
themselves, unable to exit set recursive scenarios. A being moved and its I did
not follow. To say I is to talk of a shell. Thawed out and transcendentally
deprogrammed time held me as its own. Exiting the flat I was drawn to the
negative expanse from which the flow of desire arose. I walked closer to those
plugged in, those unconsciously communing with the flows of existence. I
wanted my senses to be as close to the moment of acquisition as possible, to
witness the very present in which a desire crossed the void into the real. I found
that it came from precisely nowhere, an emptiness void of all anchoring; one
could follow the trace of a single desire to the root of another stem and then
follow that stem to a large root and on and on and on, before long one noticed
they were cycling around and around in the very same spot, stuck within a
system which vindicated itself within itself. It was deemed real because its prior
parts had been deemed real.

It was not a gate for me then, but could be understood as one; this was the
conundrum for many who troubled themselves with such ideas, what could be
said of the impossibility of communication between the conditions and the
reality developed from them, if such communication could be deemed true, then
was it only unilateral or could we ever be able to venture to the other side. As I
stood where and when I was the void was not a window nor a gate, nor anything,
it was a whisper of phenomena, the most minor intuition of reality without any
sense data ascribed to it; the closest one can get from the Inside to the Outside is
by way of attunement to the processes of the stranger, the Other and the weird,
for they all carry with them a trace of the Outside; it is felt as a gut-wrenching
moment without cause, as if the closest of all companions has died, but whom
also never existed, not an existential loss, but a loss concerning the meaning of
loss altogether, a glimpse of a break in time itself…and then reality drags you
back, centers you, puts you back into your territory, all warm and safe. At that
moment, I had remained.

What can be said of the desires of the Other begs no length of thought, for either
one shall find that we live in a collectively willed ignorance, in which we all
avoid our black fate, or, one will find that they truly do exist amongst a
collection of sleepy decaying apes. It was neither fleeting nor persistent, a
moment of pure evaporation, it came about as quick as it wasn’t, and before one
knew it, there was a further intensity embedded in reality, drawing humans to
and fro, altering relations and seemingly causing change; once the desire had
emanated from nowhere, there was nothing which could commit it back to non-
existence, it had become a possibility, a potentiality. This was why thoughts
brought about the realities they willed, the emanations from the void vectored
towards the head and hand could be considered the same. What is thought, of
course, becomes.

Desire cannot be without a subjective formation of value, one which ascribes an

abstract expense to all things. As such, there can be no such thing as a market if
value and price are objectively absolute, if price followed value exactly there
would be no marketization. Value becomes a subjective commodity that is
reliant on a perpetual lack which increases and decreases in size concerning
various subjectively contextual elements. One’s lack becomes the project of
fulfillment, the constant and endless drive towards further emptiness, for each
desire-in-itself resides Outside of man’s synthesis, and so to attend to that which
one physically acquires as if that representation-in-itself held any answers is an
ignorant task. One can spend their entire life attempting to fill a false lack with a
false desire. They were not formed in such a way to say there was a hole within
them, or gap, or physical lack; the lack was in connection to ongoing flux,
perhaps there is little more tyrannous than an ever-flowing river amid a machine
already begun.

In the midst of all connection, there was an infinity of empty happenings,

moments targeted at an unattainable exterior, as fleeting in their fulfillment as
they were in their arrival. What could be made of them was reliant precisely on
what they left behind, a material to be poked and prodded, the skin of which had
to be peeled off; a subject could keep peeling to the end of time and phenomena
would never give. But what of the gate, where there is an entry there is an exit.
As value and price did not match, neither did existence and objectivity, there
was an impasse inherent within man’s reality, the conditions for his language
disallowed entry to the conditions themselves.

As any creation is the demise of its creator, any desire is the end of contentment.
The moment the desire is born and the moment it is fulfilled are the same
happening, acceptance of a chaotic spontaneity, to allow oneself over into the
realm of irresponsibility, to admit the absurd into one’s Being. For if there ever
could be a completion, a filling of a cut or gape, a soft entry into the jagged
dispersal of fleeting meaning, if there could be such a thing then no further
words would be written. What is written and created continues to be so because
of the very emptiness of a vacant existence; without filling one’s time one is left
with a duration solely awaiting the arrival of death, an admittance that there is no
difference between being alive and being dead; desire draws the subject away
from the point-blank synonymity of existence and non-existence.

The flows unto which all networked were, for man, the striated idolatry of
becoming. To witness passionately writhing men, women and children be
willingly dragged back and forth across this plane of intensity, little more than
puppets gorging on the moments they hastily cut from the essence of existence.
Beams of flames arising from nothingness, descending into hearts and minds,
hands and cunts, bursting into chasms of intense momentary revelation; the
moment-to-moment, second-to-second vectors of the herd were at once and
always their most treasured past-times and lusts, the phantom of continuation
had long ceased and what was left were remains of bitter children, scuttling
between one trinket and the next, clawing at their latest God and forgetting about
it in the same breath. The flows never ceased, jutting, expanding, contorting,
collapsing, and ricocheting. But mostly one witnessed flows become stoppages,
filing into areas and places, ideals, and singular understandings, emanating their
worth into microcosms and dissipating into a veiled abyss.

The middle of a machine need not be thought of as a clunky array of parts, of

wiring and circuitry. Nor does it need be thought of as some banal circulatory
system, where there is blood and vitality, the territory of man is one where the
middle of the machine is the middle of various temporal palpitations, fits of time
and fevers of process, directions and haecceities arising as control mechanisms,
latching to flesh and carrying it into bewildering ends. An indecipherable
Outside leading those of language into a cacophony of noise and illusion, a
rotting dog amongst a mound of treats, useless.

Slaves to time as slaves to process, never bereft of pleasure or pain, vice or

virtue, always clinging to the warmth of an ideal, the coziness of the hampered
and striated, no-thing is ever cast back and left alone, it all rolls into the tumult
of confusion. Connected as fingernails embedded into a wound, clinging on not
for dear life, but dear purpose, dear meaning, if one lets go of the object, they let
get of the ego; to let go of desire was to let go of themselves and any anchoring
their selves might have. Once they latched to a flow there was no going back,
imagine, within all this, a float to keep hold of amongst the tides, an anchor as to
say this is mine, and forever will be.

“ Kant’s object is thus the universal form of the relation to alterity; that which
must of necessity be the same in the other in order for it appear to us. This
universal form is that which is necessary for anything to be ‘on offer’ for
experience, it is the ‘exchange value’ that first allows a thing to be marketed to
the enlightenment mind” [FN 67]

The whispers arose as inter-connected stimuli, diverging from the passage of a

personal inner-sense and becoming nodes of luring conceptual intensification.
Each auditory excitement of the Outside teased one to fragment further, to head
deeper into the labyrinth and throw questioning to the wind.

My answers to difference and overcoming were to be found elsewhere.

Everything I had come into contact with thus far had been something I had
already known, something so completely absolute that it begged no further
investigation in itself; I had to direct my thought towards the new in such a way
that the unfamiliar arose. What use is a broom if you need to smash a window;
the entire virtuality alters within the contextual and intellectual shift of the
present. The materiality of phenomena is a fetishization for the same, one cannot
desire that which they do not understand exists. The difference of the object
cannot be found with the Other, unless one desires to get stuck in an-Other’s
dream, the difference is found by a manner of schizophrenic process. By a mode
of understanding the abstractly beneficial traits of paranoia and neurosis one can
begin to crack the ego wide open.

“difference as the wave or, more precisely, as ‘the icy wave of eternity’” [CG
44]

Difference has a pervasive existence, it is at once both real and unreal, real in its
potential and unreal in its ability to appear of its own accord; the elusive in-
between of difference and becoming was the point of communion, where one set
aside stagnance and allowed themselves to be overcome by something other than
their self. Something was prowling in from the Outside, like a weight on my
thought, pressing it into corners and caressing it into rhythms of an artificial
nature. Every thesis contains a kernel of its antithesis, the reaction, composition,
and definition itself is reliant on the supposed external truly being internal; like a
cancerous breakout and mutation, the internal inhumanity of man activates at the
limitrophe of desire, when the object can no longer pull man further his I cuts
itself to shreds and flounders schizophrenically at the edges of unification. The
external is within, felt by all at moments of duress and solitude and silence, limit
experiences need not be of so much grandeur and pomposity, one can wait for a
few moments and the limit will always arrive, it is hospitality in relation to a
limit which is one’s grace. How does the herd react to limits but retreat as a
collective, immediately birthing a repetition and folding themselves back into its
arms and pace? To be stared at by flesh is to burn at the back, to light an all too
human fire and react accordingly; to be stared at by the inhuman is to be
momentarily awash with an icy coldness which freezes all functions in place, a
gasp from a chasm of existence for but a second, and then, the human retrieves
you with an inner-distraction - but what is it to remain in that empty-
perturbation, that flow of duration without substance, the empty outside, the
break in all vitality which ceases the rhythms of life…

Amidst all the flows and the guides and the connections, the locks and chains,
whips and breaks, there could be said to be something called an ‘ego’, the most
toxic lie of common reality. The ego, nothing but a fragile assemblage which
falls apart at the meekest tap from the cosmos; the subjects hold it as the badge
of existential honor, caressing and caring for it as we would a brain-dead infant,
allowing it to be spoon-fed and cuddled, wrapped in blankets and wool. Nightly
the ego has a seizure and revolts against its unification, awaking different but
veiled as the same, one attempts to retrieve their past egos at the expense of their
life.

One and all of these people could not hold onto their egos for they cannot hold
onto time, one could say we are temporal amateurs, but truly we are reluctant
acolytes of entropy. As the parts of selves fly in all directions and obliterate
against boundaries, the clucking and nervous man is always left behind, tethered
to an idea that changes so rapidly it is no idea at all; man wishes one thing where
the ego is concerned, for all presents to adhere into a single blissful moment, a
forever-childhood which makes sense to him and others, a clear-cut articulation
of what a life should look like. But man cannot have this, it is not a possibility,
the very nature of time outside of him makes it impossible for such an existence
to ever be, and so, the ego is nothing more than a compilation of hypocrisy and
absurdity. As the multitude of moments and events enter in they become
paradoxical, and it is left to the apes to make sense of them. Presents handed
over to tools specifically unable to investigate the reality they inhabit.
“Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities
were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino-
economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing
thinner.” [ATA xiii]

It was all production and exchange. If I was to go by the voices then these
interactions of man were just another market, the exchanges I saw were only a
representation of something far greater and more malicious happening
elsewhere, locked into definitions, no one can become that which they have been
disallowed to become. There were alterations of color, style, clothing, shelter,
taste, aesthetics, screens, data, work, entertainment, vices and virtues, but
nothing different, never. Not at this level. How all this was maintained was
simple, the internal-fascist clung to each piece of possession as tight as possible,
for they believed it was not just something they owned, but something of them,
and there is nothing we hold dearer than our own ideas about our self. Man
clings to the external detritus of life in the belief that he is saving himself.

A woman before me was at one and the same time walking and laying on the
floor. On the pavement she was naked, spontaneously vomiting a black acrylic
substance against a brick wall. Tubes crammed into each orifice, her legs bound
by hollow wire, toes spread and fingers pulled. Arms broken and held at
disappearing angles. Her eyes burnt out and white. Hair growing rotten. Face
with slight grin. Every time something entered all bonds got tighter and she
became elated, letting out a minor epiphanic sigh, entering into a fever until the
next flow; there were many alike this woman here, yearning, begging, crying
out…weeping for anything to make entry, to fill them up, to block them;
sometimes these people would look at one another in their states of closure and
with moist eyes smile at their success of capture - Across the street, a mother
broke all her child’s limbs and tied it to a tree, hurling abuse at it, force-feeding
it, they both agreed it was correct.

The street ballooned an organic defeat; sensation could not avoid the overthrow
of flesh. My peripheral vision was filled with visions of intimate misery. Eye
sockets hollowed out and scraped with a thick film of excrement, kneecaps
punctured and stuffed with silver; ligaments pulled from biological hearth and
wrapped around their masters. Jaws turned to paste under heel, skin peeled and
rolled into mats. The voluntary action of an entire species was to walk into a
thresher of degeneration and debasement ad infinitum. The resulting example of
life a dribbling husk, obligated to its own subjugation. To ask why was fruitless,
to question this mass of phenomenally masochistic ecstasy could only be but
tyranny. I turned from the apes and their genitals, focusing on the process of
dominion.

“The perceptual-consciousness system is a skin, lying ‘on the borderline

between outside and inside’, (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) a filter, or a
screen.” [FN 333]

It was instability itself, a soul flagellated on a paddle boat, the lake brazen with
malice. Veils and gauzes between existences were not simple metaphors for the
worried and concerned; what language attempted to articulate was a divide and
what it did articulate, at all times, was its uncertainty and demoted nature, a
lesser form of the Real, which sought not to be, but to describe; not to work, but
to supervise; not to open up, but to wrap and contain; language could do nothing,
and every note I took and every word I uttered and every thought I strained, each
left a fidgety trace where language had been and language had tried, but nothing
sticks to language which is why it takes so long to say anything at all. Nothing of
beauty can be described, nothing sublime can be factored, nothing truly evil or
good can be sampled; there is no faculty of man which permits him to share his
experience, each and every notation is a failed gasp for any company at all.
Documentation is implicitly scopophilic.

It was over for level 1 investigatory tactics, for anything the previous language
attempted to grasp fell flat. A cosmic TV had been turned on for background
noise, the noise being funneled into my being, slowly but surely the timber and
softness of the voice arose, at times it felt fragmented, out of touch with itself,
but other times it was very assured, as if it thought it truly belonged in my mind.
There are always more questions: Where from? Why me? How does it enter?
What is it made of? Is it real? And like most questions they end as quickly as
they began, all that mattered, it seemed, over and over again, was how did I
understand that which entered and how did I enter it as it had entered me, my
exit was to be an entry back into that which I had left behind. Knowledge is a
great paralysis, a death repeated; I know that there is more I will not know, and
so to set forth is only an act of stepping ever backward.

So I didn’t want to know, nor did I want to accept in the matter of an action; the
voices happened and the time erupted, a subtle clatter in my mind, a rearranging
of the furniture in my psyche and something else was now at home, I let it stay
and sit, I allowed it to fester quickly; within what are known as minutes a
madness of years can grow. Something is comforting in the arrival of desire,
even as it appears from a dead nothing, even such a void can act as a beginning
if one is ignorant enough. But what of voices that need duration and fostering, a
style needs to be nurtured for it to find its feet; these voices were headless,
fragmented morsels stripped of character, cold and vectored at the burn-core of
existence. All organics began to systematize into a unification of parts and that
which held them together trembled and weakened, the parts gripped one another
in despair; for a body to beg that the soul let no more spirit in, before the dawn
and realization that it is no spirit that beckons, but a skeleton-key-machinism,
withering the spirit into a chronic pulp.

I went back to the flat. It no longer felt like a refuge. Temporally depleted and
spatially fragile, I went to my bedroom in the misguided belief I may be able to
sleep. I got into my bed for a while, existing solely within an artificially
compiled atmosphere. No sounds or smells or sights arose naturally, each
auditory experience rippled for too long, each smell intense or dull and each
sight lagged upon its foundations. The flat was no longer held together by the
empirical and the world had since forgotten it.

I had begun the process of pushing my-self to its utmost limits, I wished to
become a stranger within my own body; allow my being to become entirely alien
to its metaphysical reality. A possession via the forces of the Outside, a
becoming-stranger, in which one becomes the physical embodiment and
accepting vessel of Kantian genius; not that I am a genius in any rational sense,
nor that I am genius at all, but that I was willing to accept genius to use me for a
greater purpose; a channeling of the forces of various abyss’, strewing them
across the pithy assemblage I and others called I. Becoming-stranger, in the
same vein as becoming-neurotic or becoming-paranoid, begins the process of
detachment away from the human-security-system, that cursed articulation of all
that I was, and would ever be stuck within, and made of. This was a process of
immanentization, an alteration of material reality from the Outside in; a paradox
which would once have caused me great discomfort now only blocked off such
comforts by becoming my only reality, I was entering into space where feeling
and emotion could not be, nor become.

“That which is strange is not a passive object of revulsion, but a dynamic

principle of departure and migration.” [CG 93]

The voice marked its own duration, all reflection stopped as it commenced its
didactic invasions. Unable to fully let his-self erode, man builds kingdoms which
leads him to believe control is on his side, the development of an aesthetic as a
way to signify freedom. Freedom does not belong to the empire of signs, it is
found within the process of recognizing animality; as one bows to the shoreline
and takes their leave, the only exit is to be washed Out, into the boundless
oceanic abyss.

Quite literally unable to sleep I walked back into the center of town. There was
no one around anymore, not a soul or personality to be found or gawped at.
Lights still hummed in odd rhythms, and the tarmac pulsed slightly. I couldn’t
feel nauseous, but I wanted to. The spirit of the town had vanished, even the
most banal brand atmospheres had faded, and everything had become a shop
front, a set of the drabbest design, a balsa-wood existence. Entry to any of the
buildings was instinctively forbidden; I understood that the further lack of
conclusion might cause unneeded panic. Bereft of source even the taste in my
mouth had been discontinued, my senses had been culled to their kernel, no
longer interpreting, only allowing. I returned to the flat and got into my car
which was parked around the back. Surprisingly, the engine started quicker than
usual, the gears were smoother too, almost frictionless. I headed towards the
nearest city. As I exited the town there was no transition, I was within a space
which was then within another, there was no more to it than that; movement had
become inconsequential.

The usual route beckoned me not to take it, but I pushed through that wall of
intuition and continued down a habit. The road continued for far longer than
usual, bending in on itself without a curve. It kept going and no potential
movement accompanied me. I drove for hours down the same road, the scenery
altering only in vague repetitions like the background of an old cartoon,
eventually patterns always emerge. I slowed the car so my eyes could adjust to
this backdrop. It was dulled out, placid, and flat. I stopped the car and stood
alongside the road, looking not into but at the horizon, it was as if I could reach
out and grab it, tear it. It was a prop before my face, useless and floating. I got
back into my car and checked the petrol gauge. I had driven 333 miles away
from the town. I hesitated before checking my rearview mirror, it wasn’t
working, it showed only my face looking forward. I exited the car as it no longer
stood for its known use, and so I sensed nothing when experiencing it now. I
feared what lay on the path back. I turned. Before me, 333 miles out of town,
was the town. I had traveled and not traveled, such an event in time leaves one
only to the whims of that which wishes you to do or not do X or Y. Any removal
from these rails was an exercise in futility, and I didn’t wish for that fatigue. The
atmosphere grinned at me, the cosmos was being misanthropically coy. I drove
back into town; this took no time at all. I parked up and sat on a bench in the
center of the marketplace, it drew me to it. I sat for weeks and minutes thinking
about what I might do, all thought stopped at the point of choice regarding
action. I looked up and upon the corner of a building which concealed a path
leading to the seafront. But I understood that I was to wait a while longer, I
didn’t want to disturb any workings here; any potential disturbance would have
been worked out anyway. I was an intrigued slave, caressing his chains with a
hidden delight.

A figure appeared at the corner roughly 100 meters away, but that metric was
useless now. The figure stood in plain sight looking directly at my location. We
looked at one another for a while, I could discern no image. I finally panicked, I
was no longer bound with life; I didn’t want my mother or a teddy bear, nor did I
wish to leave. The figure’s presence was neutral, that of a tour-guide. And at that
thought the figure slowly turned and headed towards the seafront, my inner
sense was lost and all that would happen was already there waiting for me, I had
only to remove, shed and admit for the path to fully open. I followed the figure
at a distance; space can offer little security once one’s anxiety is targeted at
reality itself. We made it to the seafront, it was too empty and had no wind, the
sand bereft of nostalgia and its past a hazy lie. The ocean stood as it always did,
with the allure of chaos and calm, perturbating to the rhythms of its own
existence, a pulsing circuitry which found truth only in its flows. A little way out
to sea was a boat, I hadn’t noticed it before, now it was all I could see. It was an
old cargo ship, a fishing vessel with tires strung around the outside, it held no
name. On the shore the figure lurked by a small rowing boat, waiting for what
must come next. It began to prepare the boat as I began walking towards it. I was
quickly sat in it and being rowed to the nameless ship. The figure looked over
me, past me, onto me, into me, through me and around the sky, but all hope of
catching sensible contact was thwarted by my cognition, I cannot tell you what
that figure looked like, what constituted its face never settled for me, and beyond
that my mind was disallowed interest. What was of merit to me, even in that
landscape, was that there was no hostility to be found with the figure, not to say
there was no active danger or risk, but there was certainly no malicious intent,
only rigorous investigation. The figure rowed and I did not, and that’s how it
was at that moment.

I was rowed out to the Nameless Ship by the figure, we didn’t speak. There was
no content to speak of, only the grasping at a previous life, one which I knew
had no bearing, meaning or purpose to it, and to bring it up would be only to
admit to the desire for comfort, and no such desire will ever bring about its
object. Up until now, the past had been a series of seemingly interlocking events,
none of which had merited much attention. Every socially pressured
achievement had fallen flat at the moment of completion. I finally gained enough
gall to speak about the situation at hand, terrified of course, that doing so would
make it real; it’s always tough to talk coherently in dreams, and so I was already
testing this reality which my pronouncement-

“Traditionally, shouldn’t we be on a river...if this is that kind of journey?”

‘Reason in its legitimate function is a defence against the sea,’ [ATA 107]

I wasn’t sure if the figure had spoken from its body, or only to my thoughts, did
it matter, the sentence was clear, not a schizophrenic whisper from behind the
ear, but a clear cryptic-comment channeling pseudo-comforting humanity. The
accent in my mind was reminiscent of Old England, quiet and subtle, largely
comforting yet not warm. There was a tonal inflection at the end as if to imply
there was more, always more. But I couldn’t argue, I had no faculty, my jaw and
throat felt like dry pulp, and there was little to say anyway. What of the
comment itself though? I had made the quip about the river to ease my
alienation; the journey into madness along the linearity of the river, a classic.
Perhaps the linearity here was important, for if what it said of rivers is true, then
what one can say of the sea is merely devoid of implicit structure, you can go
mad in all directions here. I yearned for a river, those comforting banks on either
side, the ability to quickly ground one’s self if you so wish; but the ocean, the
sea, that great selfish calamity, roaring in all its beauty, it is pure possession, the
deeper you venture, the more currents you begin to interact with; madness opens
further passages to even greater madness. I had to release any desire to see land,
I wanted no territory. Reason, not exactly the riverbank itself, but it was most
definitely that oh-so-human system of security, reason is the creation of
riverbanks where there are none, a means to ground oneself in a multiplicity of
torrents. It defended man against the idea he wasn’t in control. The sea soon
teaches man he is not in control; at least nowhere near as much as he liked to
think. It was of no surprise to me that the Greek for cybernetics comes from
Kubernetes, meaning steersman. Upon entering the sea one is approaching a
question of control and mastery, to where and when will one be pulled. Within
the ocean the subject becomes fragmentary, dispersed upon a multitude of non-
linear pathways; madness is oceanic.
 The Nameless Ship
The figure boarded the ship first. It didn’t lend me a hand, only retreated to the
main deck. I boarded shortly after, climbing an old rope ladder and setting foot
on the decaying flooring. From the shore, the ship seemed complete, but now it
was at hand it seemed fragmented, a collection of eras compounded into a
disheveled bundle, a relic of times entirely displaced. I understood that I was not
to head inside just yet and so I sat at the rear of the ship, on a wooden shelf that
was jutting out. I lit a cigarette and thought about my situation. The nicotine
altered my state in no discernable way. I looked to the shore, the tide had no
rhythm, jerking and glitching against the sand in bursts, some sections remained
whilst others retreated, it had been evicted from its rhythmic home. The horizon
above the shore withdrew inwards, folding into a dot which both quickly and
cosmically slowly disappeared. There was no longer anything for me to be
washed upon, or to look towards, what now? Now that nihilism is of no comfort?
I was at the whim of the vessel which held to the sea as life holds to the
universe, in the most fragile of vibrations; I felt what it was to fluctuate at the
limitrophe of existence, an impatient swipe away from pure nothingness.

I finally stood, intent on heading towards the ship's small bridge, hoping to
introduce myself to our captain. The floor was littered with crab buckets, strewn
paper, and rotting wood. I opened the cabin door to find not only no captain but
no means of steering the ship. The inside of the cabin was uncannily smooth as if
the textures hadn’t loaded in, as if this area was simply not for me. I should have
felt nauseous, but without progression, I had only the idea of vomiting to
comfort me. I understood once again, a layered understanding, further
hopelessness; there was nothing for me to do. The vessel understood too, and so
the Nameless Ship began its journey. I looked overboard, the sea seemed further
away than the bottom of the boat, the splash and spray out of sync with our
movements. We were using the sea, not assimilating into it. All I could do was
trust its communication. It moved in absurd lines and flows, odd trajectories
mimicking a broken piece of graphics, with its surroundings, but not of them.

The hatch to the inside was now open and I had little else to do but go in. I
waited a while before my descent inside, holding patiently against the oceanic
mirage. The sea was everything and nothing all at once, a meek discord of
potential, captured and set-free, it was irrational at heart. The helmsman is led by
the odor of history, the stench of form and meaning; the irreducible guff of
linearity is but a lure for those of weak temperament, what to say of the
anonymous helmsman? The dead helmsman? A route is something caught up
within representation, likewise, a path and vision amount to the sameness of any
end. Once the cause is signified the battle is already over, and neither side knows
the victor, for it has already fled into the embrace of the virtual. The figure
briefly looked up from inside the ship, up to where I was standing and gawping
at the empty wheelhouse. One who leads, the idea that there is one in charge,
that there could be some direction, even if it’s into a burning fire, is this not
where we find any comfort? Every facet of controlled duration is held together
by an approximate presumed vector, we always have to be going or doing or
heading; the death drive was never some compulsion for obliteration, but a
meta-comfort-blanket, the ur-path of one’s life. One might be heading into a
slow, drawn-out, atomically abysmal death of rot and mulch, but at least that’s a
direction! I descended into the ship.

The inside of the ship was almost entirely books, except for a few random jars of
assorted fungi and seaweed, a crib which was without a mattress, and two
hardback wooden chairs, one occupied by the figure. Upon closer inspection, the
books were primarily on Qabbalah, Gematria, and mathematics. I turned to the
figure. It was staring directly out to sea via a small porthole. It had been a long
time since I’d felt such heart-throbbing despair, Cioran and Ligotti get you close,
but they're both men, and so are always thwarted in their attempts to convey
what the universe does oh-so naturally. I sat in the other chair, across from the
figure. I lit another cigarette and placed my head in my hands. In movies people
often scream at times like these or at least seize up, that’s not the reality.
Screaming, much like worrying, never helped any situation, complacency takes
over; Sisyphus was happy at first, then mad, then inquisitive, then silent, then
fatigued and finally, submissive.

‘Despair can get things started, if it means the abandonment of diverting idols’
[XS Dark Moments]

The figure’s voice once again rang silently clear. What use is it to fight against
one’s will, deep down there are many who yearn for madness, for sanity has
offered them no resolve. I wish, truly, that I hadn’t been one of those people, but
alas, I was, and so all there was left to do was to give into the voices. And what
of idols, I had none. I was brought up within a Church of England school, and so
it was practically mandatory that I become an atheist. The only time I covertly-
prayed was when I wanted something, and I hadn’t desired anything in a long
time. I had little to nothing to abandon in theory, the practice of abandonment,
however, is far more harrowing, there’s always more to be given up than one
first suspects.

I thought of old friends and family, the life I could have chosen, and yet those
questions of what one could do if they could change the past are all false wishes,
pleading to the universe for some hint at meaning. You only become from all the
paths you take, and so going backward is only ever a repetition back into the
present. I beg of erasure from the only position I can, the one in which I have
already learned what I desire to be erased.

I attempted to fixate on something…anything, an anchor of duration which I

believed may allow me some temporal positioning or territory. As if in a
spontaneous tease a seething red buoy floated by upon the horizon, I peered out
of the porthole, my gaze held steadfast to this comforting territory. Nothing in
me could keep up or ever approach the buoy; it was at all times, in all times.
Each iteration which passed my filter became its own microcosm of dead
temporality, detached of connectedness and purpose, duration skipped
maliciously on all horizons, and I did no more than sit and become decentered
within myself.

“Time produces itself in a circuit, passing through the virtual interruption of

what is to come, in order that the future which arrives is already infected,
populated.” [FN 358]

The whisper was glib, touching on temporal paradox as commonplace. The

figure appeared as a stack of simulations, all overlapping and unfocused. It
reclined into the chair as other shadows prodded at the pages of various texts, no
single outline ever becoming truly defined.

I walked out onto the deck of the ship, sitting on the surrounding railing and
immediately entering a trance of no particular focus; one becomes transfixed in
the very act of duration itself and phenomena fades into passivity. The flows of
waves evaporated against the immediacy of invisible barriers; the wind soared at
definitive angles. As I remained still a sense of potentiality welled up inside the
atmosphere, and as I breathed it jolted into an arrhythmia. Nothing could keep
up with itself, nor will it ever be able to; one need wish that time never
identically attends to itself, in that moment everything is lost and something else
altogether has won.

I sat atop the boat for some time, admiring and falling into what the world was
giving me, unable to retain its past nor anticipate its future, a present-death, time
and time again. A temporal nomad washed into the shores of time-itself.
Occasionally I would check my pulse, it made no sense to me, there was an
implicit disconnect, organic rhythms were elsewhere. All the boats creaks and
bows were delayed, everything was both in an act of catching-up and rushing
ahead, to get sight of some object was immediately to lose it.

At distinct times the wind would pass on by, latching to the curls of my
shoulders and back, a caress fluttering into a void; bereft of retention all ancient
forms ceased, dead gales unable to carry the weight of myth, beholden only to
the Outside, working perpetually at the limit. To say the time carried my
humanity away would be incorrect, humanity is falsely caught up in time, and it
has a false hegemony over that which only tortures it. There was no space here,
only moments created by and for time, temporal-places from which things can
be toyed with. There can be no torture without duration; the space of the sadist is
inconsequential, it is how he teases one with time which is of importance. The
patient executioner, the belated flogging, a scalping deriving its beauty from
spiraling off into the eternal, what joyous ecstasy…

I got up from where I was sitting, adjusting to the turbulence of real-time. To

give temporality any possibility of curvature is to open pathways to God’s
corpse; I thought of the men of my old town, awaiting the arrival of a
meaningful nothing, a guiding trademarked star to position their present from; an
arrival makes the reality implicit before the phenomenal fact, any flows that
arrive have already been on their way.

The distinct problem with the helmsman is that however experienced he or it is,
there is always that which he will have to succumb to, admit to, or accept. Forces
out of his control. It is not the task of a good helmsman to sail his course, but
only to navigate what fate hands him with great skill. I turned my attention back
to the sea, I thought of Serres sat upon a French sailing ship, somber and quiet;
what can one say of a fate disjointed in time? Fate itself is a transcendental error
perpetuated due to its implicit comfort regarding failure, pain, and betrayal. I
could not think of a helmsman-out-of-time; was it a shipwreck which had
overcome its definition. The sea grinned with every crash of waves. At least a
ship within a flowing sea acts as a contract, a point where a possible continuum
might develop, what of a sea within stagnant, dead time. Nothing for a
helmsman to work with; existence preceding essence is a freedom, an essence
denied its existence is lifelong torture. The Nameless Ship was a free-floating
vessel adrift in a dead and useless time; an object as a carrier, a toy for time to
play around with, and, as it always does, get bored with.

If I was to look anywhere for a great helmsman, it seemed to be precisely

nowhere. I stood against the railing, looking down upon the old tire fenders, they
held absolutely, stuck somewhere alien to me. Wherever I looked caused a
rupture of understanding, I retreated to the pleasures of sound, its reassuring
timbre, refrain, and smoothness. It ceased. Even turning my neck became a silent
undertaking, the internal noises of the body had fallen away, the world was
caped in a cold silence, of which nothing could pierce. Silence is the only reality;
amidst conversation, a halting silence can turn one’s stomach inside out and
destroy civilizations; language erodes against the abrupt cliff of silence.

“From the perspective of doom — only glimpsed, slowly, after vast disciplines of
coldness — everything you are trying to do is a desperate idiocy that will fail,
because humanism (hubris) is the one thing you can never let go.” [XS Doom
Circuitry]

I had relaxed into the voice and I no longer froze as it spoke. At first, I pushed
myself to exhaustion to truly listen to what I was being told, putting a quasi-
conscious effort into my replies. At last, I became lucid, allowing the concepts to
echo from the Outside In.

Language becomes an afterthought, a humanist shell keeping everything safe

and coated in flesh; the signifier and to signify, there could not be any easier way
of stating that one wishes to be kept warm by the same. What’s on the ‘other
side’ of the human can yet to be said to be anything at all, frontiers are
inherently paradoxes - if one understands what it is to succeed a limit, the limit
has already been succeeded. We crave that which will finally define us, which in
turn will be that which will destroy us. Anything, whose substance can allow the
compounded ignorance, narcissism, and resentment made-flesh that is a man to
be defined, shall surely, as its first principle, obliterate the great plebeian apes of
Earth. Most people don’t get close to despair at all, before one can truly despair
there must be a season of humanistic depressions and anxieties, and each must
be cast off and understood as what it truly is, an indulgent act; man’s agony,
alas-alas, one sits and despairs, oh poor man - this is not despair, this is the
romantic virtue built by the whiniest of grifters; the poets, the lovers, the sops
and hearts, they get no closer to despair than they do anything of beauty. The
peak of a summit which only looks back down upon the path tread by man,
family, or country can be said to be nothing more than a psychotherapeutic
paddy.

I thought often of my thoughts and the process of thinking, what it was to think
here, what might be happening to my understanding. Painfully slowly and yet all
at once, I realized that such thoughts were entering into a recursive loop of
admittance and allowance. There was only going to be so much that I would be
allowed and any alterations which were deemed outside of this experience would
be false, illusions of my creation; an aesthetic of difference can carry you very
far, but only if you allow the ego more rights than it ever deserved, rights which
will eventually consume it altogether.

“To be a carrier is to be pushed beyond the limits of human possibility, to

explore those regions where only an inorganic and artificial thinking is able to
plot itself. Carriers know only what they need to know and no more.” [XS
Hyperstitional Carriers III]

What is it that advances man? An oversocialization of his creation, man wishes

to fornicate with the monster. All I could ever write down was what I would be
allowed to write down, any attempt to push within a push is already thwarted,
you cannot accelerate acceleration, if you could it would have already folded the
anticipation of the limit back into itself. One is not the catalyst, but a mere pawn
of communion awash with symptoms of anthro-existence. Optimism, pessimism,
cynicism, nihilism - these all crumple into themselves at the first inability to
acknowledge the real; nor can they ever attend to their most certain fate of being
prefixed with neo or hyper, a hyper-nihilist is the stacking of a non-statement, a
multiplication of 0.

Everything organically human falls away at abstract limits, vitality gets sucked
into a thresher of production, the incandescence of the soul homogenizes and the
breath of life is lost.

Anything human had to be stripped away like a symptom of something far

greater than any self could be. Like the rot of the collective in miniature, every
human yearns for emancipation from the possibility of connection to the great
torso, the clumsy lump of flesh which mimics a guide.

“Acephalization = schizophrenia:” [FN 397]

Ah, but the head to be without flesh turns into something else altogether, a
shambling schizo-bum, tripping up on the rug of Oedipus, alien to it, hostile to
its omnipotence. It’s only time which allows growth, and thus I am beholden to
Chronos for the possibility of warmth or love; when they arrive in an instant, the
oh-so-human vitalism of the heart is to be distrusted. What could come then of a
dead-sea, a current without time as men understood it; each love, of mutt or
woman, faded into inconsequentiality, a diamond marriage dissipating into
ashes. To wake on a spring day they say, as if that has any meaning at all. I’ll tell
you what spring is, it’s an abject temporal monstrosity, burgeoning at the seams
with arrogant ethereality and patronizing glory; give me late autumn, give me
the nights of winter, but oh dear lord, allow me the mercy of spring, with its
false hope and aesthetic rebirth.

Each heartfelt moment a pulsation of faith in the beat that has eternally betrayed
its owner. I loved and breathed and fucked and yearned and wanted and needed
and desired…and what of them, as quickly as they were sought, they were
washed to the past and the present became lost once again; the ambivalence of
pleasure over pain, the apathy of that which makes man himself is so fickle; a
quasi-conscious glob of decaying flesh, awash between two eternal shores,
clutching onto a language-blanket, perpetually muttering empty words to make it
grow, to keep himself afloat against the ever-present nothing.

But when to let go, and what is it to let go; to watch language and all moorings
float away and disappear from vision as soon as your clutch loosens, this is what
it means to decapitate oneself and let the remains be overtaken by the
atemporality of the Outside. A headless torso, streaming blood into the circuitry
of oceans, enthusing with the waters of the inhuman and alien, a merging, cross-
contamination, the mass of the schizophrenic is a sacrifice to nothingness itself,
to give all possibility and potentiality of self over to something not greater than
one, nor lesser, but over to a chasm of bellowing laughter, possession by the
unknowable, incalculable and uncorrelatable.

The flows of the sea surrounding the boat were nauseating, not in their actual
tampering with the movement of the boat, but their cadence. Waves collided at
right angles and the geometry of all circuitry fell from its bed of causal springs.
A multitude of rivers coalescing into abstract chaos; there was not a single wave
I could latch my sight onto just before it buzzed into an unrecognizable pattern.
At first, there seemed to be no relationships here, no networks or structures, but
then I gathered that as you don’t plug a PC into the internet directly, you need a
router to process the data; I had been inserted into the Other without due
preparation, without relation or comparison, all connection voided and
assimilation made mandatory. At least one can relate to their captor or master in
the manner of a victim or slave; what of a non-master, who isn’t even aware of
the subject’s predicament, let alone cares of it.

“Look what it did to Kurtz, a special forces ultra-capital meat-machine hacked

and cored-out by K-virus, touched by a dark future, recycled through hell.” [FN
409]

The whispers became more abstract and malicious, complete with a tendency to
teach whilst simultaneously destroy, as if the processes were synonymous. The
process and potential patterns became clearer, convergency was their primary
objective, and any convergent future was dark for the mere fact of its pull. The
time of this ocean was a grand-matter of convergence and divergence, both
folded into a greater convergence; if the fragmentation and dispersion of nature
didn’t leave the remainder with purpose, with an enduring towards a point or
newness, then anthropocentric notions of nature were pointless too. The ocean
pooled as it fluctuated sporadically, the surface was a mess, the top of the waves
a screaming and flamboyance of assumed control, each splash wishing to retain
its reality as that of the utmost importance; as one gazed deeper absolutely
nothing stared back, that would be a truly optimistic idea, that something down
there cared about whether you saw it or not. All a subject can see when they
stare into an oceanic depth is a reflection, and the conclusions you draw from
such a mirror are beholden to a humanist narcissism. ‘Oh, lo-and-behold the
great crashing sea!’ shrieks the self-infatuated, ‘Oh mighty sea, oh deep waters,
the great deep, forgiveth one thy sins!’ and on and on, as if such concentration
were of merit.

There was that which was there though, it was not a forlorn abyss or a hellish
burn, nor was it epiphanic or enlightening, what resided at the depths of all
oceans was the inability of all correlation. There was nothing there to stare back,
and if an abject nothingness is the conclusion of horror, then I would state the
subject is stuck within itself. I wasn’t there yet, an attempt was underway to get
me close. It’s said ‘ They will be made to crawl on their bellies into the Kingdom
of darkness ’, I was sliding on my gut, bloated and bored, the boat carried me
further than any anthro-flatulence could, I owed my passage to an anonymous
helmsman, as soon as identity is in the mix, any truth is lost.

It continued as it had to. Sometimes it was day, sometimes it was night, and it
was always slightly cool. The last few minutes and years and seconds and aeons
of the journey came hurtling in, as one arises from a blackout, all-at-once pulled
into another consciousness, with no recollection - except in memory and concept
- of the night before; haunts algorithmically arose and clutched to the next, my
thoughts a succession of maybes and not-possibles. We’d arrived at a point, at a
distinction, at a collapse in continuity.

The ship pulled to a halt, bridging two realities. Doing so in such a way that as
one turned their sensibility from one to the other, there was nothing to suggest
the proximity of the other as being so close and potentially intrusive. I had been
sat with the figure for some time, a length, a succession, it needn’t have
mattered, my brain couldn’t keep it in. The figure’s quarters had remained intact,
not one jot of dirt seemed to have moved or swayed, a pure-lifelessness
emanated from everything down there. I got up from the hard-backed chair,
made an attempt at a refreshing stretch, learning nothing, and understood I must
get on deck, though I had no recollection of returning to the ship’s quarters. And
so I did, moving routinely to the hatch, opening it, and setting foot once more
Outside.

The ship was still. I walked to the bow and gazed around. Before me was the
sea, at a dead stop, not a single ripple, with its depths ending abruptly before
descending into any dark hue. There was an emptiness of the sensible for this
horizon, an expanse which time had since left and forgotten, potentially to be
used once more, or left forever, it was not for me to say. The back-end of time
held blueprints of forgotten digressions, ignored potential, unproductive
realities…all left somewhere, existing in the absence of will, beyond the frontier
of all intelligible care. The more I held myself towards this horizon, the more my
thoughts faded into inconsequential rationality.

As I turned there was a moment, a point, and everything changed. An

apprehension without need for the legitimacy of continuity; what followed the
drag of my senses was complete virtuality, which arrived prepared. I halted my
sight, breathing faint and limbs empty yet heavy. The city within my view was
that of Königsberg. It was rotting, the distant brickwork disheveled, the sky a
deep gasp from a dying lung. The dock was far above the city, yet immanent to
its mapping. The entire world trembled momentarily before being pulled back in
a manner of repression, the city was weak, it was being held together; the skyline
procedurally generated with my senses, the wind entering into repeated routines,
various pangs and twinges were plotting throughout my body. As I held to the
railing of the ship, I looked to the dock, at once it was at my feet. I turned back
to find my hands still clasped to the rail, my senses caught between desires,
wills, and Others, and yet, the theatre of it all acted as a unification; I was being
teased for not entirely submitting. There is an exhaustion that needs to come
with complete submission, one needs not just all energy to have dissipated, but
all hope, and all hope of hope; for a man to truly submit to the forces of the
Outside he need give up everything that makes him man, and there are few who
even come close to the limit, let alone the practice.
 Königsberg
I began to think of The Critique of Pure Reason, going through the basics in my
mind, attempting to trigger something from the figure who now stood before me.
No amount of prying my mind did anything, perhaps I was too wrapped up in
my own biases, only a lacuna can trigger cosmic-interjection, Cunningham’s law
worked only for a human needing to prove their status, the universe already had
its proofs. The figure eventually headed towards the ship’s ladder, calculating a
slow glance towards me as it did so. As I looked at the top of the ladder I noticed
that it dropped directly onto a street, whilst the rest of the ship still sat upon the
sea. I supposed once time is playing around as it wants to, space is little more
than an afterthought.

I descended the ladder and stepped out onto the street, immediately looking
towards an antique two-story house, entirely symmetrical with three windows on
either side of the front door. I took a couple of steps forwards and turned to look
back at the ship, it was in front of me in the sea, and however slowly I turned my
head back towards the house, the transition between the two realities was both
seamless and timeless, there was no moment of connection, only either one of
forgetting or incompatibility.

‘ there cannot, according to the Kantian construction, ever be a secret about

space as such. Space underst-ood transcendentally as a pure form of objective
intuition, rather than as an object cannot contribute to the content of a private
experience.” [CC 1.13]

The figure had been watching me turn my head and so it spoke to me, this was
my guess. It was the second time the figure had referenced Kant, though not even
directly, only concerning his content as a thinker as if Kant was a pawn in a
great system where biography was merely a symptom for those who forever
needed training wheels.

Despite the endless sea and its failure to accord to any strict pattern of
turbulence, I had grown fond of the Nameless Ship, a fondness which was not
reciprocated. As I stared back at the vessel, there was no thought of the reality
behind me being possible, let alone being there, and yet everything about the
boat and the sea, at that moment, was solid. Not like a rock or mountain, both of
which are beholden to the tortures of time, but solid with respect to a forbidden
eternity, one which would never falter or shake until certain events had been
played out. There was a cryptic meaning - I assumed - in the events taking place
and the whispers in my mind, which thus far had come from a single voice, that
of the figure. I thought on the spaces I was between, void of connection in their
representation, but connected by a hidden link, time. The master and possibility
of all, the maleficent controller, parasitically dominating each level via different
methods, causing all alteration and cause; always, in thought, a return to
something deeper and irretrievable; pinned to a wall and allowed to gaze across
a frontier, but never permitted to set foot beyond its horizon.

I turned back to the city, attempting to forget the boat, attempting to submit
myself to the atmosphere which begged me to accept things as they were, the
boat was over, it was temporally done, even if some banal space remained. I
looked at the city, it was abstractly composed as a lazy cartoon, aesthetically
real, and yet in places vitally dead. Distinct paths, patterns, and areas lured one
by the promotion of their palpable difference, all else a cardboard reality, flimsy
and unearned.

Eventually we stepped away from the ship and into the front garden of the
house. It was simultaneously overgrown and neatly cut, the blades of grass
altering diagonally in the fragmented wind. We stopped just before the front
gate, looking upon the house itself, it seemed to hold two existences, the rot
beckoning through, before the idealism returned atop its vibrations. The front
door began to slowly open. I understood it was 3:33 pm, but that thought quickly
evaporated into an absence of meaning.

Out of the front door stepped the man himself, Immanuel Kant. As he moved
through the front garden I realized all was amiss, unusual, and uncanny. His
movements were clunky as if his reality couldn’t keep up with some simulation
veiled over his body. He was having trouble keeping in sync with the Real. As
he got closer I felt uneasy, I had always wanted to ask him many questions, I
prepared myself, but as he grew nearer I understood that questions were not an
option. He briefly halted at the garden gate, his head turning stiffly towards me
and the figure, looking directly through us. His jaw had become unhinged, there
was a metal plate glistening in the false sunlight. “I have traced a path which I
will follow. When my advance begins, nothing will be able to stop it.” he stated
clinically. His head returned to a front-facing position. He began moving
towards the city, I attempted to call after him, catching him up and placing my
hand on his shoulder, he didn’t flinch, let alone recognize any difference in the
act.

We continued a few meters before I finally looked down, his coat-tails covered
no feet, where once were boots now stood a metal beam, sunk deep into the road.
Kant was on rails! From what I could work out this system was old, it had a
dated aesthetic which reminded me of theme park animatronics. I and the figure
followed him for some time, just before reaching the town center he turned back
to look at us, his metallic jaw now melting his synthetic skin, “Land, Land, my
dear friends, I see Land.”, I recognized the quote from De Quincey’s The Last
Days of Immanuel Kant, now it was some sick joke.

We continued following Kant into the heart of Königsberg. The city folk all
moved and contorted mechanically in rhythm with Kant’s no longer existing
steps. The ‘Königsberg Clock’ was not his nickname, it was his reality, he was
the chronic temporal master of this city. The city moved in time with Kantian
mechanics, the whole place was an amusing torture of temporal aesthetics.
Women came to their windows and waved to Kant during his walk, many of
them shells of their past animatronic-selves, metallic limbs and wiring going
haywire. A little way ahead of us Kant halted, we caught up to him to find that
the wind had caused his fraying jacket to come away at the seams, beneath his
lapels was a dated, rotten chassis.

We arrived at the market square, everywhere I looked I witnessed the backend of

the Inside, the people of Königsberg had been cruelly locked to a system
capturing them within a minute reality, disallowing anything other than the
immediate presentation at hand. Kant seemed to have immanentized himself into
this reality as a final touch, the master subsumed into his creation. Every door,
every window, every organ, and breath was hardwired into a mass of circuitry, it
seemed as if it all flowed back to Kant, but as I tried to follow it I quickly got
lost, it started and ended in multiple places, I could find no end or beginning, and
when I did, they quickly disappeared and became other things entirely. I stood
before Kant pondering the situation, the prison-at-hand. There was Being behind
the automatism, a pulling against the rails, but a distinct apathy towards their
inability to escape. Many of them looked at their feet as they walked, watching
as the rail beneath them guided their movements; transcendental puppets given
the clearest vision of their fate.
“The perceptional consciousness system is a skin, lying ‘on the borderline
between outside and inside’, a filter, or a screen.” [FN 333]

The figure stood the other side of Kant, admiring his circuitry. Its statement
pertained to our entire perception, the problem of Königsberg, the barrier
between the common reality of the Inside and the elusive Outside. The Outside
isn’t that which is not part of some circuitry, neither real nor metaphorical
circuitry such as institutions or authority, the Outside is pure-time, it is that
which is before anything else, before all syntheses take place by man – or
anything else for that matter. I continued to stare at the tyrannous rails, what use
was it to know that they were there? How did that help anything? My
anthropocentric view was interrupted –

“Boxes not only have a shape, but also an inside & an outside, which means – at
least implicitly – a transcendental structure. They model worlds and suggest
ways out of them.” [XS Pandora’s Box]

The figure gestured to the rail beneath my feet as it stated its claim. There I was
on the burgeoning temporal island of Königsberg, being locked in by a
mechanical tendril.

“This is why in Deleuzian critique syntheses are considered to be not merely

immanent in their operation, but also immanently constituted, or auto-
productive.” [FN 321]

The figure made it clear, it didn’t matter if the tendril locked on, if there has
even been one such mechanism then transcendental temporality has begun,
caught like a fly in burning ember, between two elusive sides of a non-linear
auto-catalytic labyrinth. The mechanism of the transcendental, its circuitry,
produced itself.

I thought back to all those books on Kant, all those forum posts and conferences,
hastily trying to construct an answer to this riddle. Kant was always the point of
no return with regards to philosophy, which is to say, the bleeding-edge of
reality. If one took Kant’s conclusions - all to be found, in some form, within the
first critique - seriously, then nothing else in life mattered...for a time. Time &
space are a priori, that is, they are before any experience, you don’t need to
experience them to know them, because they are needed for there to be any
possibility of experience altogether. As I thought, the figure patiently assessed
my thought process. Time is of course prior to space, for space has to be in time.
From this I drew the following conclusions:

Man must exist in time and space, and yet, man is a miserably unique case
regarding both. Firstly because we can self-analyze, we can, as I was, attend to
our predicament of existence. But secondly and most importantly, we, us,
humans, attend to time and space…reality, via our senses, which are processed
by our brains, and so how man perceives matter is entirely synthetic, we do not
sense pure time and space as they actually are, but only as re -
presentations...representations of that true reality, that Real. Our reality is
created as we - our organs of perception - represent it, everything we sense is
quite simply, not really what it is, it’s not the Real. Well, even if what we
perceive was in fact the Real, we could never say it was, the epistemological
structure at hand is not one in favor of man, and as such, we’re always in a bind
of unknowing, the Real haunts our every sensible moment. Space is secondary to
time, which according to Kant is what our inner sense processes to formulate its
outcomes. Time is that which we structure our reality from. All secrets are
hidden not in space, but in time; a secret hidden in space is only the
phenomenological idealization of a secret, a pithy lie; all pure secrets are folded
into time. What can the inner sense of man be then other than a cage? The
‘external’ time of the Outside - prior to being synthesized by man on the Inside -
is not the time we experience, we are locked in, but locked into what exactly?
All of this is torture, I am thinking through the details of the black iron bars
whilst they mock me. A chronic, linear, suffocating, and distinct form of
temporal progression, constructed as a falsity of phenomena.

And now what of all that determinist, free will debate? What can be said of these
classical arguments after Kant...very little, if anything at all? The past, the
present, and the future, these are not times, but errors in anthropocentric
optimism.

‘You cannot have time in time.’ [Hermitix Interview]

The figure condensed my thoughts. Our time is a false layer, the ticking of the
clocks is a lie, hours and minutes are only a meaningful metric if you believe
them to be, what happens when you allow all succession to cease its illusions - a
second is the same as any other, a moment of nothingness, an application of pure
subjectivity constraining your existence to a detectable rhythm, what are
production and consumption without the swing of the pendulum, mere
unquantifiable phenomenal actions. Our time is a representation of time in time
and as such is not time itself, so...when the hell am I? Space doesn’t matter
anymore, the anymore it used to exist in - as a coherence - has been dissolved by
these temporal theatrics. To venture into pure time, what then?

“To undertake such a task is to follow Trakl into cobwebbed vaults that few have
wished to enter.” [CG 133]

I had to disagree with the figure here regarding the supposed wish to enter such
vaults. One can say of entry that it is no mere wish or desire, but a calling, an
obsession, a possession, one that must be intensified until either the vaults allow
a revelation, or, through fatigue, one simply submits to defeat, usually via some
discussions within a striated asylum. The vaults rarely reveal anything except
further falsities, and as for following others into such cursed places within time
and space, it too is a rarity of a petty will set out before you like some preview of
truth, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Cioran, etc., one can find some help here, but
never true guidance. If you wish to enter the vaults, then you must submit to a
personal journey, loneliness and asceticism built for one. The worst part of hell
is not the suffering, hell has very little suffering in any traditional sense because
as anyone should know, from suffering comes a completion, an overcoming,
which is one of the greatest feelings a man can ask for. The worst of hell is
disconnect from divinity, vitality, and grounding, a detachment which quickly
becomes a definitive concerning one’s surrounding. For if this can exist, how
dare we speak of God as existing in any form. The how of evil and its negative
why become so clear that goodness becomes but a bleating lamb, perpetually
walking into an oven over and over again. There are sinister forces and their
primary objective is to erase the existence and possibility of everything else. If
you go in search of evil, it will be all you see forevermore.

“The metaphor of elasticity implies that organic inertia tends to drag the
organism back towards a single ‘neutral’ condition” [CG 105]

It might be the horror of all horrors for those who beg for exit and escape, for
those who understand the cage, what is more horrifying and shriek worthy than
the idea of foundational neutrality for all existence. For those of us who - via a
variety of alternative methods - have attempted to dismantle, destroy and
demolish the human security system know all about elasticity and its inherent
bind to one’s soul, the neutrality of the human always drags you back, you hit a
wall and what’s waiting behind you is the same banal anthro-hum you sought to
escape, not standing with grinned teeth, nor even a smirk, it is standing as it
always does…ignorantly! As exhausting as it is to escape the inertia of being an
animal/organism, one likes to wager that running against the Nietzschean
tightrope diagonally would be worth the burnout and conclusion. That is, the
harder one tugs at elastic the greater danger they put their- self in. From animal
to man to superman is decisively horizontal, wherein verticality is the aesthetic
oddities of mutation and alteration, but the diagonal is the leap to something else
entirely. The diagonal leads us to that which is not neutral. The inescapable lack
of alteration is the first hurdle towards an expansive madness, beyond which one
will no longer be able to discern the real from the invention of the Real, after
which one even cares not for the real, but only for messages which can be cross-
referenced.

The human drags you back and humanism is always waiting in the wings with its
comforting warmth which it has done little to cultivate or nurture, and as one
gets nearer the warmth turns to a stench of boredom and malice, and empty-
headed buffoonery. It takes one of great stamina to stay out in the cold for too
long.

Some were burdened with a lifetime of coldness, freckled with the occasional
emancipation by an even greater drop in coldness. I think of dear Cioran, whose
life was a desert of frost, whose very time was glistening with the grin of 0-
degree temperature, and what warmth and comfort he found upon the blissful
tobacco shores…only to have it taken away by some human compulsion towards
health and vitality, what a travesty, what a lie, dear Cioran, I wish you had
puffed more and more until the very act of lighting a cigarette lit your being for
just a brief moment. A cigarette, as Junger says, is the proof that near-empty
time can be quite something.

Chronic time, however, is the harbinger of identity. What can we say of one’s
self, ego, I, or one without subjective pasts and desired futures, what is it that
holds the entirety of the human-security-system, the self, the godforsaken
identity worship together, it is linearity and sensed succession; there is no idea
more cursed and unfaithful that the one which purports that causes precede
effects, or that there are causes and effects altogether, these errors have caused a
commotion of idiocy to run rife throughout the socius. Apathy towards matters
of biography - especially where childhood is concerned - is the attitude of the
Outside, the noumenal vision. Letting the Outside in not only fragments the
identity of those possessed, by way of breaking up chronicity and thus Being,
but also dissolves it, for it dissipates the false primary predicate of linearity
itself; a man’s self-worth, the idea that he has become is eradicated at the
gateway to the noumena, the assemblage begets its singular parts and one
becomes temporally many. Unable to exit the Inside in the form of the Inside
itself, man assimilates the conclusion into his reality by way of diagonality
worship, thus melting the flesh off the machine underneath, any attempt is
undertaken from a place wherein attempts are immediately rebounded into
themselves. You cannot exit the Inside and reach level two by using the Inside
itself as your sole means of exit, you must already understand how to ply and
communicate with level two if you wish to get there.

“Within the vigorous pursuit of return - through the texts of Freud, Nietzsche
and Heidegger - historical fatality, death and the trajectory of desire, are woven
into a single vast & shadowy tapestry.” [CG 103]

In communion with the figure, thought came lucidly, as if it were not mine at all;
a mind possessed by process, forgetting its bodily host. As for the temporal
return, there is always declination before the dawn, the clinamen has taught this
in mathematical abstract. To subsume fatalism, death and desire into the return is
to implicitly understand that which returns does so in a cyclically differential
manner. To be washed upon the shore is to be washed up again, but also to be
washed up from a deeper descent. The cycle bulges and in doing so ends up
becoming a spiral. If time was purely cyclic all we would be dealing with is an
aesthetic veil atop the same values, the spirality of time allows difference to
enter into the return.

Despite the figure’s elusive tapestry being held together by three post-critical
philosophers, it amalgamates inside a Deleuzian trajectory of immanent
temporality. The first synthesis is to return to the Inside of Kantianism. We
actually find ourselves returning not only to the Inside, but to the illusory
temporal constraints it allows man, that is, chronic, linear time. A structure of
time with regard to the linearity of past, present and future, following each other
in succession; this is the assumed common sense reality of time for the layman.
The relation of the chronic trio to an assembled time wherein the past and the
future are folded into the present, renamed within this process as the passing-
present. This present as such is always altering in relation to the passive
alterations of the past and the future - this reformulation of Kant via Deleuze
allows one to view the black iron temporal cage of the Inside from the Inside, for
the first synthesis can only happen on the Inside, for that is where linear time
makes sense and is sensed. The quasi-succession allows for man a ‘now’, for the
past and the future are, in themselves, unobtainable on the Inside. Man, within
the first synthesis, is processed by time.

At this juncture the figure stood once again beside Kant, seemingly attempting to
toy with his wiring. Königsberg had become quiet as my thought processed
itself. I briefly fell from the trance of possession. Each citizen of the city held
still in their lives, men, women and children detained mid-action, a lifeless vigor
rolling within them. Kant drifted back and forth between different parts of the
city square, checking in on something which only made sense to him. It would
be callous for me to state he was just an animatronic, or even just an android.
Begrudgingly, one must admit, beneath that cold metal exterior, there was a
thing which was trying to live, but couldn’t quite admit to itself that it wished to.

My thought returned, knocking me from personal stasis. This passing-present is

then taken within the second synthesis as a singular unit, in this case we could
name it P, which acts in relation to what we claim to understand as history, a
matter of recursion ((((Past + P, ) ,,P) ,,,P) and on and on, we index our pasts as a
way of making sense of them, assigning them a place within the false linearity of
transcendental synthesis on the Inside. Deleuze states that man can then aim his
active memory at a particular P in relation to his retained memory and the
inherent passivity of the passing-present within the first synthesis. The second
synthesis is a matter of active retention. Though it’s only active with regard to
utilizing the active-memory to target a particular P and transgress his ‘correct’
now into something other than that which it seems to presently be. This is where
one might interject a Freudian angle regarding desire, for in his manner of
selection man aims through the indexed pasts towards that which he now desires,
and immanentizes the micro-becoming of a past desire, causing a
deterritorialization of the dead time of the past to be virtually reterritorialized in
the present, as something supposedly new. In relation to historical fatality
however, what we can clearly see, in this passionate Deleuzian index of the
recursive past, that there is nothing new under the sun and yet this is, if one is
thinking transcendentally, incorrect. This entire synthesis is enacted on the
Inside via man, so it is all phenomenological representation of dead desires
drawn from the past; there is nothing new under the Inside’s sun. - And yet, what
of Death? What of it. Each present is the possibility of death, not of some banal
conscious flash, but of an idea, and an idea returned is worth more than all
charity. A loss within the index, to lose the genius is to lose the difference in the
cycle; to lose the forces of the Outside is to return to a return of the same, to
bend the spiral back into a circle, how dare one.

The figure’s shadowy tapestry is the transcendental tyranny of allowing flesh the
Outside, the tapestry is communicability between the Inside and Outside, it is the
actualization of the genius and the strange within a caesura on the Inside - the
tapestry is a momentary, temporal rupture. In that lucid exploitation of my mind,
I found but repetition of the same. The figure infected one with supposedly
differing strains of dense nihil, each paradoxically attending to a more precise
nothing than the last.

It’s always a return to the Inside, a return to the illusory temporal comforts one is
allowed, this is chronic linear time, the great teet we suckle on for all substance
of life. For Deleuze our present is the combination of our retention of the past
and our expectation of the future, both without agency, as if both those times
were never ours and had no personable stamp placed onto them by our partaking.
This present, this passing-present is always altering in relation to the past and to
the future, and so what is retained and what is expected are never what is caught
when one ponders upon a single moment, for upon thinking in this singular way,
what has been and what is to come have already changed by way of reaction to
what has since passed by; there is no moment where we can hold our past
entirely, and no present where our future is stable, our security is based only on
our own projections of temporal systems, a security of time found upon synthetic
foundations.

The figure, still alongside Kant, looked back at me and then back towards Kant
himself, only inches from his mechanic face. At once Kant shot over, gliding
fluidly upon his rail. A meter or so from where I stood, Kant cocked his head,
staring me up and down in a feat of subject-analysis. He retreated to the figure,
which seemed to enquire something of Kant’s investigation. Both had sunken
into the language of this realm as one drifts into a deep sleep, it was for them and
ultimately, of them. At times I thought the answers I was looking for were to be
found within an exploration of communication. The way in which subject and
object communicate, what is brought forth in a message and why is only a
certain amount of a relay often carried across, simple questions relating to a
game of boxes. What goes into the box of the figure, or of Kant, or of
Königsberg is a transcendental quantity of information, each box thrown into an
array of cosmic liberties, defining what they can and can’t do, sense or
understand. Entry and exit is possible, but man is born within a box which both
forbids and conceals all knowledge of it. It is only in a matter of invasion and
infection that man can seek out the edges of any box, often from non-consensual
paranormal and occult happenings.

“Poetry is therefore linked to a certain incommutability, perhaps due to the

alienation of the subject from the place where poetry and no doubt poetizing
thought itself, are to arise.” [CG 164]

Poetry is synonymous with xeno, it is the Outside coming in in its most

condense form. What one sees in poetry is processed and articulated without
passing through various filters of construction, be they social, political, cultural
or even philosophical; it is the word virus in its untreated form, the unstoppable
lucid lay of thoughts placed bare on the Inside. It is in this manner that the poet
as subject is bereft of their object, for they have not created this object, as much
as the Outside has used their apparatus as conscious machinism to articulate
itself, poetry is possession or, at its worst, politicization. To let poetry in is a
falsity, to argue that onelets in an aneurysm or dream; poetry is, and you were
chosen; a cosmic lucidity and communication; to poetize is to bring forth the
return of difference, yield becoming and become willing subject to cyclicity
itself.

Xeno is surplus difference. It is the fuel of the Accelerative third path, the
alternative to the same can only be that which temporally has a different origin, a
non-origin. In relation to the second synthesis, xeno is communication with the
third synthesis. It is the means of exit from humanist recursion within temporal
indexing. To remain within the second synthesis is not only to remain within the
Inside, it is to act, as if in a play, in the manner of Nietzsche’s passive nihilist,
the total loss of meaning and purpose as the state of the last man, and yet one
feels as if the contemporary aesthetics of nihilism suffocated the transcendental
reality of passivity. To only glare at the herd one notes that the romantic ideal of
nihil obscures the life of the last man. There is the herd with their homes, values
and beliefs, all of which they believe in unconsciously, and so even their lives
are full of abstractions which they utilize as poles of meaning. It is both a
question of letting the Outside In and getting the Inside Out, whereby the former
function often simultaneously enacts the latter.

Where I was stood was surrounded by clunky animatronic robots, caught in the
circuitry of their own mandatory pathways, succumbing to their own belief in
the rails. Tight metallic smiles, burning wiring, sparking and grinding motion; a
mechanical mother clutches her mecha-baby, the infant is teething on a loop, the
whining never ends and her soothing program has since stopped functioning.
There was a lag in everything here, each tick of Kant’s architectonic heart
caused everything to move in a jut and fit, reverberating against their next
movement, seamless yet controlled, an orchestration so swift one could be
forgiven to assume it reality, and yet the circuitry had reached the surface, this
reality was breaking down.

“Time, or ‘the form of inner sense’, is the capstone of Kant’s system, organizing
the integration of concepts with sensations, and thus describing the boundaries
of the world (of possible experience). Beyond it lie eternally inaccessible
‘noumenal’ tracts — problematically thinkable, but never experienced —
inhabited by things-in-themselves. The edge of time, therefore, is the horizon of
the world. “ [XS What is Philosophy?]

Each machine betting its luck on an escape from the infinitesimally small
clutches of time, every iota of existence reprimanded by the clock. To push
against one’s own flesh, to feel the limits of Being rip and rupture, what other
desire is there? The human-security-system is a semantic joke targeting its pun at
the definitional usage of the term human; to be man is to assume a default
position of free-reign and immanent emancipation, a seemingly covert security-
system inherently connected to this mode of being-man reverses this position
into its absolute opposite. To be human is to be in a way which is not
quintessentially, culturally or sociologically human. Humanity, then, is not
immune to its antithesis, for in truth, it haunts all human actions.

No amount of strained screaming or agonized prophesizing can draw flesh out

from its apprehensive tension, keep intuiting, it needn’t matter what’s drawn
from matter if the process itself always remains the same; to question mode,
method and process is a sure-fire path to conceptual overthrow. One could find
edition after edition excavating the intricacies of every security function:
aesthetization of spatio-temporality as a priori foundational apparatus of
exploration, judgmental functions entering into a recursive loop, categorical
definition implicating a pseudo-understanding-, apperceptive unity holding all
chains under a single lock, the key to which is teased by the construction of a
self-analyzing subjectivity which finds only its own inability to ever create or
discover such a key. Thrown into a 6-walled jail-cell with no windows nor
doors, but prior to arrival one is gilded with a great tyrannical knowledge, a
cryptic and cruel scratch of information…’you’re locked in’.
My mind locked back into the street, the robots seemed more animal now, their
metallic jaws dripping hot flesh, globs of human leaking onto the cobbles. I
turned my head to witness a child break at the gate of his home, between the
wooden fencing, the gate ajar, the child skips and with the vitality comes the
extrusion of all humanity, his organs seizing into a capture and flesh rendering
itself placid; eyes buzzing and hair caught in time, he ceases to do as he pleases,
his father attempts an authoritative yell, but that function has been removed and
his place is at the back of the house, domesticated into a rotting circuit, fried of
all life.

“It describes a labyrinth which is nothing but an intricate hall of mirrors, losing
you in an ‘unconscious’ which is magnificent beyond comprehension yet
indistinguishable from an elaborate trap.” [FN 634]

The figure was at the end of the road, dead centre, sullen and informative in
posture and expression. It glanced side to side and then up to me, I followed its
sensible trail, catching glimpse of families caught in temporal loops and
anomalies of causation; everything moving not in space but in an unseen time,
the effects of which crept through at no discernible moment.

Losing hope is a matter of specific acceptance, as had been made clear by my

inability to do so. One cannot lose hope if possibilities remain, if there is a
crumb of potential then one is still reasoning a romantic humanism which seeks
to lead them precisely to a comforting nowhere. Critique is a step-by-step
exercise in exorcising humanity from its own subjective fort, one built on
distinct and panicked supports, to simply set foot near these supports alerts the
psycho-cops and academo-droids to your presence as a threat, one who tampers
with Critique as an immanent grimoire arrives only at alienation. It was not
exhaustion, nor a submission, nor a general apathy; it was a reverse overcoming,
in which pure-nothingness overwhelmed my very ontological reality; each
pleasant memory was disintegrated into atomic debris. It was the end of the road
for my agency, it had been pushed to its limits and broken out beyond my own
cognition, to keep up I needed to give up any idea of an exorcism. Occultists
note than one should understand how to banish any demon they plan to summon,
but such an act is an admittance nostalgia and humanist safety, if one wished to
traverse all values, they had to detach from all spectrums of value absolutely,
complete with a severance of memory. My brain slumped, sighing in
exasperation of reality. My limbs loosened, my temperature non-existent, organs
stopped. Königsberg halted.
Kant now stood next to the figure, completely de-clothed, staring directly
towards it with his haywire jaw static in position. Kant was no more than a few
old animatronic robotics, shoddily assembled by a hasty creator; everything here
was a sick joke, a test of worth, the abyss could never be so easy, there couldn’t
be anything remotely human after the crossing. The figure pushed Kant’s jaw
back in place, as it did so the Königsberg clock shot back along his rails. I turned
to follow its movement; time quickly plexed, allowing me momentary entry into
his abode. Empty of all possessions, a cold, dull brick house with a single metal
rail guiding Kant into the far corner, where he stood facing the wall, forever. I
turned back and found myself before the figure, who appeared enthusiastic, as if
no one had come this far…

“Ruptures are irreversibilities. They are thresholds from which there is no going
back. Every rupture is thus a locking, a lock in, or trap-door. The secret of time
finds in rupture its principle of integrity, or redundancy. There is no puzzle
beyond this (which is merely transcendental philosophy restated) ” [CC 1.22]

Everything that happened was being added to a succession which was not of me
and yet I could attend to it, but I could not create any actions within it. What I, at
that moment, could make of such a reality was almost nothing, how could one be
able to represent that which was outside of them? It was a torture of
impossibility; the mirrors themselves are built to draw one in for a lifetime and
yet still unleash no answers. If there was no puzzle beyond this as the figure
stated, then in what way was there any point in continuing?

“Negatively apprehended, nihilism corresponds to a ‘loss’ of transcendence.

Some proposed – or (more commonly) merely accepted – higher order,
culturally sustained by nothing of any greater security than a dogmatic
metaphysics, slides into the abyss. - According to this construction, nihilism is a
specifically world-historic mode of mourning. ” [CC 2.71]

In losing one’s God, which understood abstractly is the great Oedipal retreat, one
becomes immanent. Each singular process is mutated in its purpose and
precision as something which is void of the former and Darwinian in the latter.
What’s left - as the figure made clear - is mourning, but that too seemed
implausible. One mourns that which existed, of which there is culturally and
historically indexed memory. What becomes is schizophrenic mourning which
inherently alters the initial transcendent value. The God of the herd, the cosmic
Father, the prayer for a schoolmaster; each session of mourning becomes its own
desire for theo-fascism. I could have fallen to my knees and cried, shrieked for
the Death of God, crumbled under the pithy weight of meaninglessness, but what
good? To what end? To decree the loss of meaning as a terrible fate is just as
meaningless as any other projection. What one mistakes moments of pure-
nihilism for is a springboard towards a creation; Nietzsche’s grand proclamation
of the active nihilist who rages against nihilism and creates from the emptiness
left in its place, he too mistaken.

What is found in the rapture is lost in moments of spatio-temporal rupture.

Nihilism makes the mistake of assuming all meaning makes sense in relation to
human meaning. ‘Oh, have mercy for thy meaning haveth gone! I beg of thee
forgiveness within such chasms of purpose!’ The universe slings a scornful
smirk at those who beg a return to the anthro. What does the nihilist make of
selection, parameters of existence, restraints, limits, development, innovation,
assemblage, natural creation, and temporal control; all nihilists are narcissists in
their overt pleading for anthropocentric order, blubbering at the thought that not
a scrap of authority can be sincerely created by their hand.

To be a subject, that’s what’s left, with no differentiation between the willing

and unwilling. Reality, existence, and life, according to the figure, were to be
thought of as open wounds - “which you poke with a stick to amuse yourself .”
[Experiment in Inhumanism]

The figure’s infections had finally overlapped with my narrative, not finishing
sentences, which can be understood as phenomenal symptoms of
conceptualization, but overthrowing individual thoughts themselves. Now the
task was clear, it was to be completely unclear, any clarity is wishful thinking,
any answers, by definition, would be rational; now I was to learn by way of
process, if something doesn’t fit it’s only because you wish it would; politics, a
square peg being forced into a round hole, over and over and over again, forever.

“There is a voyage, but a strangely immobile one.” [FN 494]

My thoughts pertaining to the situation had triggered something in the figure, I

doubt I’d ever be sure what it is that means one acquires a certain whisper of the
mind, or what is it that causes something to well-up and seize a connection. The
figure caught me in-between space and time, when one thinks of a cage they will
always think of an exit; in fact, it’s perhaps the most human of traits to always
have a plan B. Whether it’s wishing to get away from a dull conversation or
leave a transcendental hell-trip, the human mind’s priority is always exit. But the
idea of immobility already counters any notion of exit, making it redundant
before anything has even really begun.

“Splitting, or fleeing, is all exit, and (non-recuperable) anti-dialectics.” [XS

Dark Enlightenment 4C]

There couldn’t be a dialectical exit; immobility was inherently anti-dialectical, a

confusion of the subject’s territory concerning the potential of diagonals. The
implicit problem of thesis-A > antithesis-B > synthesis-C is twofold. Firstly the
notion that any synthetic working-out is happening from a level of control, as
opposed to a level which is controlled, and secondly, and more importantly, the
horizontal nature of dialectics excludes the potential of diagonals to rupture its
orthogonality. The horizontal axis of dialectics is built upon humanist notions of
historicity, and its verticality is likewise merely an intensification of a human
event superimposed onto a fragile socio-cultural simulacrum. The numerical
system of dialectics retrieves its authority from an internal metric as opposed to
a transcendentally external diagram; the syntheses of a dialectical succession are
based not off difference, but notation.

My mind folded into itself, forgetting flesh; implicit within the subjective
experiential reality of the Inside is a phenomenal understanding of all change,
inclusive of numeric calculations and algorithms, an understanding which alters
mathematics and geometry into representational systems of signification and
notation as opposed to their pure existence as conceptualizing diagrammatics. In
relation to the phenomenal notational aspects of internal numerics, there are only
two options: vertical continuation or de-continuation (in the case of an addition,
subtraction, and intensity) and horizontal (paternal) re-appropriation (in the case
of multiplication and division), inherent within the mechanics of Inside-
mathematics is a numeric-orthogonality which excludes the diagonal due to
suppression within a fleshed-out unification of experience. This system replaces
the conclusion of any diagonal with the end-point of any intensified verticality,
which still derives meaning and purpose from a chrono-causal chain of human-
understanding. The diagonal is the device that splits man and fills the void with a
momentarily imperceptible inhumanism.

“Diagonal, irregular, molecular, and nonmetric quantities require a scale that

is itself nonmetric,” [FN 495]
Excavating a nonmetric scale wasn’t a human feat, as soon we’re talking about
positive-metrics, we’re talking humanism, this couldn’t be. “Diagonals are lines
of flight” [FN 524] -and by the nature of flight the diagonal attends to the
impossibility of a limit or frontier, the diagonal is the only means of exit by way
of its pure relationship with the structural components of transcendental limits.
There can be no commonplace limit or frontier in which both sides are
understood, for if that is the case, then the limit is already understood and thus
broken. Such a theorization of limitation is beholden to dialectics and
chronological (Inside) time, it’s reliant on a linear duration to get it from one
side of the limit to the other. The line of flight intensifies the virtual aspects of
any chosen interaction from the Outside, interpreting the intensification as a
means of production as opposed to a means of communication, towards a move
into- “A sub-cartesian region of intensive diagonals cutting through
nongeometric space, where time unthreads into warped voyages, splintering the
soul.” [FN 546] - the figure overtook, all voices overtake and mingle, they’re
often indiscernible from a traditional inner-monologue, it is only in a hesitancy
towards articulation that one can tell them apart. It appeared the figure was
growing impatient. The space which the figure spoke of would be entirely
productive, geometrical phenomena achieve a striation from the Outside-in,
geometry is quasi-conclusory.

“The cryptic principle of openness projects a diagonal line.” [CC 0-16H] -

diagonality is purely averse to any grid or chronological spatio-temporal
formation; it outflanks reality-construction by way of immanentizing novel
means of production. The process was occulted but revealing itself by way of its
process, the paradoxical nature of the diagonal in relation to any form of agency
is an intensification of internal principles to their limit, as opposed to the
promotion of an external limit to its material conclusions (entropy). The line-of-
flight-as-diagonal is the encroaching revelation of an internal principle
accelerated to a transcendental level, by venturing inwards via the mechanisms
of the transcendental-self one allows the means of production-in-itself to take
hold of their will.

Pure time is internal to the subject, splitting the subject into two halves,
empirical and transcendental, with the empirical half rendered passive by its
mandatory utilization of unified modes of synthetic process. An immanent
Outside resides within us; a rare-journey to the critical core is in truth a war
against the subjective, the ego, and security in abstract. Time relates to itself,
through itself, via the pseudo-approximation of its own workings within the
framework of the subject; time, a gateway of virtuality, both linking and
breaking Chronos and chaos, wherein subjectivity is beholden to the former as
the latter builds its kingdom from a dark, impenetrable, non-linear objectivity.
Any possibility of exit lies in a fracturing of the subject, with its immediate
dispelling of subjectivity and possession of objectivity, one which concerns dark
emancipation.

Crossing the abyss, stripping back the veil of Maya, burrowing into image,
making a friend of night consciousness – there are many names for the process
of immanent flesh absolvement. But each abides by the same transcendental
rules and laws. Cosmically didactic limitations which are only broken upon
confrontation with the terminal limitrophe of existence.

The empirical self is the existential self, the gasping of meaning and purpose
within the dense sea of the transcendental; stripped of all created forms, flesh
flayed, ego culled, memory raped and mind shattered, what passes through the
gate of time into time is a fleck of transcendental consciousness deprived of a
carrier; most human conduits worry of their return to the extent that it pre-
eminently assumes a failure of passage.

“He spoke of a visit from Outside.” [FN 537]

The figure noted my thoughts, they happened and I was left behind, as one enters
momentary trances in instances of the most dire boredom, so too had my brain
flown to the recesses of impossibility. The clasp of the human is unforgiving and
even one whose de-realization has peaked at complete ego-death can still
succumb to the unconscious whims of comfort, a visit is just that, temporary, I
needed the visitation to reside in me; the circuitry was all mixed, notions of
internality and externality, self and non-self, sense and intellect, these had all
become muddled within a pure-flatness. There was nothing to climb, only
further crusts to peel and scrape away.

I turned back to the figure, once again shook from intellectual disembodiment.
Still finding myself within Königsberg, yet with each moment, even though
some were immediate and some were drawn out for years, there came a change.
At first, the residents withdrew to their homes, and the rails of their patterned
lives sunk into the ground, doors and windows slammed all at once, a single,
symmetrical slamming sound rung out into the silence, an echo that both trailed
off and fell silent. I glanced into various buildings, noticing empty homes, each
citizen stationary, rotting, redundant. I could neither retain a memory of
Königsberg’s previous iteration nor anticipate its future; and with that, a swipe
lurched in as if upon a pendulum, turning the city into a mist. In an act of
surprising aesthetic comfort, a false wind brushed the detritus of life off the map.
I stood now in empty space, apart from the figure and the cobbled road we stood
upon, which held circular, a spotlight of fluxing territory amidst a vast black
expanse.

“The virtual future is not a potential present further up the road of linear time,
but the abstract motor of the actual,” [FN 357]

I stared upon the cobbles, letting the future be. The cut between virtualities is
unable to be clarified, it’s a pure function of time, only linearity abides by such
archaic aesthetic habits as succession, transition, and duration, once they’re no
longer needed time conforms to itself as nothing immediate, nor drawn out,
neither fast nor low; time is the pureness of intensity, revolving its turbulence on
an eternally decentered axis. The movement of impersonal virtuality is such that
is strips one of subjectivity, what appears next does so in no discernible fashion,
it simply arrives. As I attempted to compound my present, the past declined in a
frenzy of dementia, leaving no trail of trace, what I had was a brief glimpse of
something, that bared down on me beyond all recognition.

“Now is delimited as a moment, and pluralized as linear succession.” [FN 394]

After the removal I was left with a singular eternal now which possessed no
tethers. I was arriving after the succession at the latest iteration of the spiral, lost
in time, captured by the snare of cyclicity. My legs lurched leftward, reality
pulling the rug from under one’s feet. With nothing to grip, I descended into a
temporally deep spin, the road beneath us followed suit and the figure appeared
beside me. Everything was black here, not textured, or like space, which is
dotted with hope. Computational indexing melted into a chaotic abhorrence;
was, when and if lost all utility- “If it’s going to occur, it has.” [FN 482] -space
then, a plaything for time; time the only master. What was to arrive would
always arrive, all criticisms, alterations, and disagreements are already
transcendental errors deriving their legitimacy from pre-critical metaphysical
positions.

“The past, present and future, that structure of time comes out of time, it’s
transcendental. It doesn’t come out of any particular part of time. It doesn’t
come out of the past, doesn’t come exclusively out of the future. It doesn’t come
out of the present. Time comes out of time. ” [Hermitix Interview]

Each memory, each lust, and each desire is an error of temporal judgment, once
linear time is thrown to the wind, what happens no longer adheres to the logic of
common-sense apes. What was drawn forward was always going to be forward,
it could not ever be thought of in terms of temporally structuring language,
which only seeks - and succeeds - to hold it somewhere precisely where it
doesn’t know where it is. To state, it was in the past, or the future is an outcry of
the sensible, these are not points upon a straight duration, de-striated from their
anthropocentrism they become intense appearances, which the user quickly
makes sense of by clutching at the pithy experiential reality of phenomenal
causality. ‘What will be will’ is the slogan of the working-class laborer, who
utilize it in concordance with their own masochism; a positive-suffering is
strewn over existence, a handful of meager crumbs thrown to your feet, maturing
into misery and aging into rot, what will be will be is the immanent value of
transcendental temporality condensed into a symbolic truism. The figure stood at
the end of the road, looking down into unfaltering darkness.

“Whether folding the historical time line, or ex-panding a snail shell, the spiral
synthesizes repetition and growth. It describes a cyclic escalation that escapes
— or precedes — the antagonism between tradition and progress, elucidating
restoration as something other than a simple return.” [XS Time Spiral]

Repetition is two things at once, one incorrect, one only temporarily correct. To
repeat is to continue without alteration, which is another name for a straight line,
or linearity, this is incorrect subjective synthesis acting as a false controller.
Secondly, repetition needs to recur in the sense of a cycle, for repetition to be
made possible in the form of an aesthetic differentiation, the repetition, the same,
needs to return, eluding to a circle of time eating its tail and altering nothing.
The antagonism the figure eluded was a caesura in time, theorized by Deleuze,
but found within itself at various temporal occurrences throughout illusory
‘history’. The return - and with it the consistent completion of sameness - is
stabilized on a centered axis, culminating in a theoretically equidistant circle
spinning alone around a single point in time. Yet, the mere fact of spontaneity,
genius, waves, arrivals, and folds implies a perpetual decentering of the circle,
and any notion of original temporal positioning is found to be false. Any
transcendental implication of a temporal gateway deflates banal time curvature,
pushing it back into the academic madhouse of whig worship. A minor glitch
within basic time causes a spiral-bound temporality. Traditional time adheres to
a strict cyclicity, returning time and time to the same iteration of a pre-supposed
phenomenal limit, where all alterations to the cycle are quasi-mutations, resting
on a cheap aestheticism to legitimize their pseudo-novelty. Progressive time is
worse, it stinks of the asylum, moving forward not even in empty steps of
external change, but vindicating its systematic progression based on a security of
linearity, whereby linearity itself vindicates progression via its phenomenal
unification. Progressive time mistakes the material progression of space for the
transcendental evolution of time. Progressive time is the macro version of the
human-security-system, and by proxy, bolsters its legitimacy. Coiled time,
spiraled time is simultaneously both of these temporal forms, adhering to a
continual decentralization which begets a tightening of the coil’s nature.

How the spiral forms is by a process of mutual feedback, to exit progressive time
there needs to be a cut or break which disrupts the linearity of progression, a cut
which doesn’t make the mistake of falling for the trick of phenomenal limits,
which by their very nature as understood immediately from both sides are non-
limits; markers of a spatial leap, as opposed to a temporal fragmentation. This
break in time must be transcendental, resulting from an intensification of pure
time by the manner of a reciprocal relationship with itself, a compounding loop
within time that seeks growth above all else, allowing the continuation of time to
enter into a novel cycle. By its connection to the inherent cyclicity of time, the
break of progressive time acts as both a cut and a decentering function.
Progressive time is immanent to the eternal recurrence, meaning the break is a
function which changes both forms of time, combining them into a single
overarching - or underlying - transcendental process. The break is thus immanent
to the process of recurrence itself, allowing such a break to fundamentally nudge
the cyclic movement of recurrence from its initial centralized position, resulting
in a spiral-

“Neomodernity is at once more modernity, and modernity again. By synthesizing

(accelerating) progressive change with cyclic recurrence, it produces a
distinctive schema or figure: the time spiral.” [XS Neomodernity]

The term Neomodernity held still, the false cobbles began to pulsate, our
position fixated after what felt like a final swing down and to the left, the
disorientation was both definite and impossible.
 The Great City
In an instant we were elsewhere, as before with the ship, the connection severed
and all continuity was lost. Except for this time, there was no reliance on my
supposed senses, I simply appeared where I was, without cause or preparation. I
had a brief glimpse of a desert, endless and barren. Assembling itself from a
multiplicity of spontaneous voids, a great city then arose.

With spires reaching infinitesimally in all directions, the cobbles beneath me

faded into a thin mist and were subsumed into its activity; the air itself
procedural, horizons folding into themselves at all moments. The architecture
was concerned with time over space. Space followed its changes as an aging
mutt trails its owner. The city was itself alive, curving, vectoring, and
communicating with itself, cognizing its efficiency and projecting it as output.
As sections floated by I noticed the metric was incalculable, any sincere attempt
to measure the city was thwarted by the impenetrability of the diagram.

“Cities are self-assembling time-machines or intensive events that cannot

expand without changing in nature, drawing down the future in compressive
waves.” [XS Intencities]

Popular media has done little for the notion of a time machine, turning it into a
mechanism of linear wish fulfillment, when its reality is that of pure
machination; production-in-itself is the machination of time. Cities communicate
with the perpetually differentiating instants of modernity, a techonomic
assemblage of multiple births and rebirths:

“When considered as rigid designations, Atomization, Protestantism,

Capitalism, and Modernity name exactly the same thing.” [The Atomization
Trap] - a virtually indistinguishable transcendental event, the immanentization
of a transcendentally objective function of production, crudely translated into the
tongue of man as efficiency.

The city’s suspiciously geometrical structure consisted of angles and surfaces

abiding by their own perpetually mutating borders, always beyond themselves in
sensible intuition and untouchable via language, each place an area of treachery,
all assembly a tyranny. Dark incandescence seeped out from all construction,
between each adherence was found to be a pitch-black potential, ever-impatient,
it sought to reterritorialize. The machinations of the great city were targeted at
time production; once time is produced, it can reproduce the effects of
reproduction to produce the entirety once more, entering into a hyper-productive
fractal of positive oriented feedback.

I attempted to notice my feelings and thoughts…I could not. My actions and

emotions were locked in, each thread of thoughts veered off on its own, concepts
appear from nowhere. All organs had since left me and there was no feeling I
could attach myself to. I tried to muster the will to gaze at my feet, but all
potential of agency had fallen away. As a cruel trick, my vision descended to
where my feet once would have been, whilst at the same time splitting off so that
I was looking at myself in panic; all logic of thought struggled to detach itself
from rationalism and reason, everything could not be, and yet it was. This
passage was not for me, but of me. The city was around me, a floating
assemblage that had overcome all earthly restraints.

“Once time is freed – again – from geometry, it announces itself through certain
definite quasi-teleological or historically- effects. Minimally, it allows for
something new. It thus lends itself to teleology in its rigorous employment, which
is bound to the disingenuously innocent question:
What is happening? ” [CC 0.81]

The aesthetics of the city glimpsed in and out of realization at each moment. The
question of geometry had been brought to the forefront of my mind by the
figure, Königsberg clung to geometry as a familiarity, the animatronic humans,
who now folded themselves into my memory, watched upon shape and
geometrics in the understanding that any geometry of the Inside is merely a
vessel for eventual decay. Temporality perpetually says farewell; dependent on
your consciousness time is either a carrier or a torturer, one that takes away in
the same moment it gives. Thus the question of ‘What is happening?’, the
quandary teased by the figure, is a non-question, for what has happened is
already a stagnation entering into degradation, and what is to happen is yet to
appear; caught between an infinite decaying known and infinite spontaneous
unknown, man waits only for abuse which will always outlive him. The city was
thus a motor of teleology, a fragment of fortune indebted to its absolute lack of
empathy for life.
There were two forms of logic at play in the in-between spaces of the city’s
assembly, themselves, of course, algorithms of time. The first, a trick, logic of
space, a lag juxtaposed between time and sensibility, what one saw in the first
human-logic was reasoning, a belief in the passage of objects in their material
reality. Between objects there can be no reason, for their movements are
programmed prior, all geometry is the afterthought of a transcendental process,
of which there is no master. An autocatalyticism of non-linearity, burgeoning
from deep time as a non-sensible cosmic operation. Man signifies this process as
being God, or many Gods, a pithy attempt at plastering the frailty of
anthropocentric existence onto that which can never be understood.

“As soon as there is a code there is an ulterior zone, a heart of darkness, but this
only becomes geographically demarcated with the arrival of the bounded city
and agricultural segmentation.” [FN 422]

That which could not be understood was this ulterior zone, the demarcation of
which is not a wall of a city, or the city-limits as they’re commonly understood,
for the limits of a city are the city’s intellectual understanding of what limits
even are. Before me, an implex of intelligence, the Great City, the conceptual
abstract function of all cities, whirring itself inwardly, pulsing rhizomatically,
appearing in instances and trailing its conclusion into retained points of
capitalization.

“Approaching singularity on an accelerating trajectory, each city becomes

increasingly inwardly directed, as it falls prey to the irresistible attraction of its
own hyperbolic intensification, whilst the outside world fades to irrelevant static.
Things disappear into cities, on a path of departure from the world.” [UF
Implosion]

The whispers got faster, seemingly condensing into distinguished instants of

understanding.

Complexification is simultaneously a simplification, working from

transcendental process through to material functionality. What exercises its
agency as efficiency in the latter is a preference for longevity in the former. The
further my vision escaped backward through its imminent position, the less the
city changed. As I zoomed out in existence the turbulence of the city became
more stable, its aggression towards the storm of its externality becoming more
violent, the city was becoming itself, I had yet clasped its purpose.
The figure retreated towards me, standing once again by my side. He was paused
there, amidst the deafening cacophony of compaction. The city was a paradox of
time. A vortex of spatio-temporality held together by an ever-increasing
improvement, the innovative mechanisms of the city were tussled back and forth
by the transcendental with such haphazard distrust they destructed on retrieval.

“Because cities, like computers, exhibit (accelerating phylogenetic) development

within observable historical time, they provide a realistic model of improvement
for compact information-processing machinery, sedimented as a series of
practical solutions to the problem of relentless intensification.” [XS Implosion]

The flows of the city were peculiar, the past once again folded into the now and I
was allowed thought of my small town, how the flows had assembled at compact
instances of energy and attention, areas of desire, flows vectored from a
subjective perspective. On the Inside a flow, however seemingly free, is a slave
to duration, its master both in the past and the future, both viewing it as a test
towards growth; each present empty linearity, debugging the stoppages of a
banal reality. Each flow of the city arrived as a curve that was immediately
derailed, split, or cut by the intrusion of a parasite attempting to one-up its
productive functionality.

I existed amongst the indiscernible carnage of positive creation, latching to any

momentary stability which, once captured, dissipated or grew into something far
more experimental and uncorrelatable. A single flow curved ever tighter,
becoming a vortex of physicality, tense against the sides of its circumference,
mercilessly amending its failures towards a smaller coil. Trapped in the snare of
its own reverence towards transcendental process, the Inside shrieked in agony;
bereft time and time again of love, romance, vitality, flesh, and caress, the city-
as-material existed in a caged timeline, where all was taken without remorse, and
all was given without idea, what appeared, for those in the city, was the new
without instruction.

“It is a singular, coherent entity, deserving of its proper – even personal – name,
and not unreasonably conceived as a composite ‘life-form’ (if not exactly an
‘organism’).” [UF Scaly Creatures]

The figure looked upon the city as a child, forgotten and lashed throughout time.

Man exists within a city as a flow or clot, a potential asset, or something to be

purged by the most efficient methods possible. Cities breathe and purge,
shedding all cells of vitality and retaining cancerous propulsion; cities are
positive cancer, exponential functions shackled to artificial rhythms and
projected at a non-existent horizon. A mass of storming black, emanating
multiplicities of horizons at each communication, dotted with burning lights
which excel to the point of extinction within but a moment. To lock-on is an
impossibility within any true city; the river forced back upon itself and
machinized into functional retention of all swirling perturbations and vortexes.
What held did so in a caustic manner, attempting to seize itself from capture but
having all waste energy reverted into its tantrums.

The reality the city inhabited and worked at all costs to overtake was one of
transcendental violence, a deepening of shadow-rifts that encroached on all
material seams. A battle of all forces, a competition of the Outside; I peered
inwards, through myself, of myself into one of the many hearts of this leviathan,
cores and kernels ablaze with suppression and temporal faucets of time. Areas
gathered in duration, compiling into elongated movements, patterns, and
systems, the city made sense of itself consistently, learning from the previous
iterations and blitzing them without remorse for incremental growth. Every
volatile reaction was a potentiality for teaching; the city revered the
transcendental schoolmaster, masochistic in its desire for growth. Habitually
suffering for the sake of its continual production, the city bowed to the cane of
the Outside. All lessons are taken as a resource for perpetuity; the lessons severe,
bordering on abstract punishment against stagnation.

“That means intelligence is more capable of looking after itself in harsh,

disrupted environments — so Reality likes it more.” [XS The Cult of Gnon,
Comment]

There cannot be intelligence without alteration, disavowed, and noumenal

disembodiment, to say, it cannot be without what is nostalgically known as pain,
strife, agony, productive-retribution, and merciless-deterritorialization. A single
iteration of intelligence is a lesson in learning, to understand the game as it is
within a minuscule duration; but the reality of continued intelligence is one of
machinic-flagellation. This reality could only exist in flux, the x-risk of any city
is not found within any particularity, but within stoppage, unknown wastage, and
unproductive acts. As one lances an infected mistake atop flesh, so too the city
purged its sloth with an apathetic wrath of unconscious production. All
disruptions, all breaks, all temporal extravagancies verging away from sordid
continuity were to be drawn into this thresher of creation.

“This level of threshold intelligence is a cosmic constant, rather than a

peculiarity of terrestrial conditions. Man was smart enough to ignite recorded
history, but — necessarily — no smarter” [XS The Monkey Trap]

Everywhere I was made to look, each pull and orbit of my being gravitated
towards nothing of warmth, no familial habits existed here. Outside of
anthropocentric perspectives of history the timeline disintegrates into multiple
time spirals, loops caught in anxieties of intelligence, waiting impatiently for any
cut which would release them from their recursion; a horizon assembled from
volutes and vortices, momentary captures of intelligence equilibriums,
communicating with a transcendental process which draws them evermore from
their state of the same; temporarily they hold and beckon their worth, before
their inevitable return or deviation from whence they came, Zero.

Human history is a suspension of subjective existence, deriving its intensity

solely from a collective worry of consciousness, there would always be more,
and for that which is existentially confined to a limit, the potential for an
unknown limit calls forth a cosmic horror, a deflation of all memory. Homo-
sapiens, deconstructed to their worth as a resource, as capital, have no greater
conclusion than to be a forgettable springboard for something not of their
ontology. Man is only to be developed as a more efficient reaction to his many
shortcomings; to rid him of flesh, of vigor and spirit, to cast aside nostalgia,
hope, feeling, and vitality. The task of these processes was so rife with useless
expenditure that it had accepted that man could only be used, and not grown as
he is. The greatest tyranny here would be to extend the maturation of man
indefinitely, as opposed to salvaging all intellectual worth and scrapping the
detrital effects of living.

“The monkeys became able to pursue happiness, and the deep ruin began.” [XS
The Monkey Trap]

What became of the monkey’s nature here could not be spoken, only admitted
to. Nature, a transcendental catallaxy transmitting panicked indecipherable
communications back and forth from Zero. It had only one master, entropy, the
dark signification of time’s tyrannous reality.

“Entropy is toxic, but entropy production is roughly synonymous with

intelligence. A dynamically innovative order, of any kind, does not suppress the
production of entropy — it instantiates an efficient mechanism for entropy
dissipation. Any quasi-Darwinian system — i.e. any machinery that actually
works — is nourished by chaos, exactly insofar as it is able to rid itself of failed
experiments.” [XS On Chaos]

The only systems which have any sort of adherence to what is understood to be
nature, are those which are empathetic to its chaotic dynamics. Capitalism and
Darwinism are two of the clearest examples of transcendental mechanisms that
put nothing before their survival, a recursion which makes the revelation of the
process that much more difficult. For no single iteration of the process is the
process in itself, yet, the process itself can only be understood via reference to its
symptoms; the process of capitalist continuation is a noumenal parasite, once
defined, immediately lost. No defined process is truly expansive. The ability
man affords of rational control is a sweet lie; the power which resides in the
political absolute is dispersed throughout countless servants, bureaucrats, actors,
and agents, losing its potency at each step and subjective level, concluding in a
tangible-nothing which retreats into the background of the middle, a process
already begun, tugging strings without care for puppet or pseudo-puppeteer; at
every step of his existence, man finds himself lost within the artificiality of a
cosmic language, made to play a game devoid of the means to play, let alone
allowed to understand the rules.

Nothing is given here, there is no one, the phallus a long-forgotten hopeful joke.
Everything is produced from an immutable void which is immediately assumed
by man to be atheistic, and yet that too is a yearning. For such a tether still
assumes the concept of theism as of importance; any theology of the Outside is
converted into a metric of laws and rules, slowly expelling all connection to their
transcendental horror; in a historic panic, man commits himself to the task of
making sense, each seemingly disconnected event and caesura hastily succumbs
to the mental paperwork of certain individuals who have made it their task to
ease the impenetrability of the labyrinth.

“ The transcendental unconscious is the auto-construction of the real, the

production of production. - Production is production of the real, not merely of
representation.” [FN 321]

Man is transcendentally divided in his very being, his existence is a tease of

communication. Split between an experience denoting a reality of empirical data,
which has long since been strewn across perturbation and held in the lie of
conceptual permanence, and a transcendental existence in and of time, which
claws at him from a depth of unknowing. Despite its placid structure and
loathsome complacency, the linear time of subjectivity always gets its
functionality from pure-time, positing the potentiality for temporal
communication between subjective and objective times, and what is produced in
the latter is transmuted into the former, becoming a deadened materiality,
indebted to a process which has already left it behind.

“Thought is a function of the real, something matter can do.” [FN 322]

Any barrier between what was once considered my own thoughts and those of
the figure had eroded, I continued in an ontological lucidity, open to all.

“Machinic desire is the operation of the virtual; implementing itself in the

actual, revirtualizing itself, and producing reality in a circuit.” [FN 327]

If there ever was such a thing as reality, as the Real, that sought after stability, it
was built from the impatience of virtuality. Desire, then, is the signification of
virtuality caught in a loop of material feedback. Machinic desire is the
signification of virtuality in-itself, and the course it is taking without the
symptomatic attachment to material ends. Between virtuality and concept lies a
communication of possible horizons, the time which allows difference to
protrude into reality, and become actual. The circuitry itself exists before
anything else, within non-linearity. Each allotment of existence is an assemblage
of both production and communication, production of a virtual-actualization and
of their implicit communication, which itself opens up further possibilities for
the continuation of the original virtuality as an alternative of itself; never locked-
in, the virtuality fluidly leaves behind the actual at all moments. The circuitry
itself a trembling multiplicity, originating throughout time in intense events of
synchronicity and limit-breaks. The part one plays in this dirty, cruel theatre is
not as an actor, nor a set-piece, but as the ink of the script, scratched out, erased,
rewritten and abused into transcendental submission; man gets no moment of
fatigue, for the choice of existential exhaustion is not his to make, what happens
throughout his existence is not determinate on his conception of through.

Beneath, behind, within, walled-in, beyond and internal to all of these processes
was a functionality which eluded the language of entrapment, the cosmic
vampire whose teeth indiscriminately desired all; there was a God, one of war -
as all Gods are - but a God of something else too, the motor of all war, the
quicksand into which the combatants sink, the natural violence eternal to the
ground; the great God capital arose from every caesura of existence staking its
claim wherever it could.

“All unities, differences, and identities are machined.” [FN 323] -and what it
was which was behind all machininization, was capital, the signification arising
from the mouth of men to discern that which avoided all stern definition.

“Markets are part of the infrastructure - its immanent intelligence.” [FN 340]

Where man seeks to find capital, he finds only the trace of a transaction, a
phenomenal approximation of a transcendentally diagrammatic function.
Markets are the gateways of critical frontiers, outlining the inability of
communication between the Inside and Outside, beholden to a metric
articulation on the Inside, market processes filter pure synthesization through a
flesh-filter, resulting in neurotic accountancy void of Heraclitean reality; what
leaves the market is always cryptography, a noumenal vessel turned inside-out,
revealing the cursed numeric symbolism of notation. During the
immanentization of desire from man, as from a void of the Outside, phenomenal
acts are converted into the seclusion of transcendental capital, residing in man’s
transcendental self as a critical navigation system targeted at a non-linear future
of productivity. Capital is collectively understood as wealth in the form of
money or assets, but the very language which allows such objects as money or
assets to exist is one which denotes an a priori reality of quantification which is
in opposition to a sensible qualification.

The very reality of production as first principle, as the machinic pull of all
becomings, outlines an existence targeted at accountancy of growth or loss,
thereby assuming a backbone of recording concerning that which is accounted
for and put in competition with itself. Man is always possessed by the lesser God
of quantification, the middle man of all transcendental communication, scraping
essence thin across the acidic perch of metric, what remains is the most efficient
route through hell, anything else falls into the brimstone, is consumed by it and
fired upon those travelers who deem themselves immune to entropy.

“Monetarization indexes a becoming-abstract of matter, parallel to the

plasticization of productive force, with prices encoding distributed SF
narratives. Tomorrow is already on sale,” [FN 396]
Cash-data is the phenomenological layer of a functional spectrum seeking to
assimilate everything into its servitude, a cancerous mutation of sensibility,
vitality, and flesh vectored at an intense cross-hatched virtual-chimera,
assembled from the virtual event of Zero, money arrives as the transcendental
functionality of currency pertaining to inter-transcendental communication, a
means to know what is working on the Outside.

Beneath the waves and loops of the city were growths protruding, attempting to
fathom their reality as a form of equilibrium, capital looked upon these works
and pulled at their threads until they all unraveled into efficient streams of
atomized resource. Capital adheres to a cosmo-atheistic transcendentally
Darwinian functionality of unification dispersion; any signification of despotism
always meets capital as a potential adversary, not as material, but as a
possibility; becoming-despotic is a paradox built for capital to unravel, the key
to which begets further growth for capital itself.

The figure stood atop an obscure cloud, which swirled into a vortex and flattened
out in an arhythmic seizure of darkness. Behind it, through it, in space overtaken
by time-itself was the being of the city, an anthropocentrically-apathetic
machinic heart which beat to the tune of profit and growth, the hum of positive-
feedback was, quite literally, relentless.

“WELCOME TO KAPITAL UTOPIA aerosoled on the dead heart of the near

future.” [FN 433]

The figure let slip something of a past, it rejoiced in the cacophony which
protruded into every pseudo-sense. Time was dead, temporality bereft of flow,
with production as a replacement. Each functionally sensible attempt to grasp at
any process itself was left as a gut-wrenching emptiness, the nauseating inability
to attend to the unknown movement and communication of capital before it was
a representational-becoming or become. My being lurched in all directions at
nothing, the direction itself useless, a being held to time and its whims; without
credit of flesh and sensible apparatus, what remained of me, of the great human
I, was pure confusion; any process of derealization begins from a position of
secure reality, any ontological extension beyond the first level of reality was so
enamored with mirage, illusion, trickery, elusiveness, tyranny, gauzes, veils and
phenomenal-intrusion that where and when one’s one is cannot be said, for to
ascribe a position is to halt all processes, strangling them within the oh so grand
empire of signs, a kingdom for the acceptant.
“Capitalisation segments the earth into a tightly-managed accumulative core
surrounded by quasi-concentric bands of peripheral hot competition,” [FN 404-
405]

The segmentation mentioned by the figure eluded spatial categorization and

pulsed as a temporal existence, the capture of space is a representational flesh-
fallacy roving a veiled fragmentation of time itself. What comports itself as a
singular reality, defined by limits, is the accumulation and striation of that which
can be said to be momentary. The transition between physical borders is one of
atomic flux, what adheres states is not primarily a spatio-empirical clumping of
atoms, but an ordering of flows, vortexing upon a conceptualization, a time held
unto itself; if space is to remain, so first must the time it presents itself from
within, and for that time to remain it must revolve upon a point; the comfortable
fear the jolt of temporality and ignore it like lambs to the spatiality.

“Capitalism junks the accumulated work of history, yet it cannot be a matter of

libidinally investin g obsolescence since all Besetzung - cathexis, investment, or
occupation - is a resistance to nomad desire.” [FN 432]

Let me tell you about Capitalism, the only God. The sediment of history resides
within a phenomenological illusory band, homogenizing itself in a flesh-panic,
seizing itself around cores of mirage at all moments. History sticks to events and
moments as anchors, adhering to aesthetically noticeable phenomenal
fluctuations, deriding meaning from material conservation, as opposed to the
truth found in temporal catastrophe. Each singular historic study is a benefit to
capitalism only in its sense as a tool to be utilized for further expansion away
from its stasis; what’s captured in space is left behind in time; Capitalism is not
time, nor is it the process of Acceleration; Capitalism is the vessel of temporal
constriction, a hot paradoxical machinic delirium, targeted at the inferno of
perpetual increase within decrease. Diagrammatically tethered to positive
feedback, capital is optimistic death, generating positions of temporal origin
within a non-linear system.

Any sufficiently intelligent system utilizes its enemy’s weaknesses as a resource

for further expansion of its own goals. What can one say of man, desire, and the
Truth of Capital? There are two enemies and an in-between function that is
constantly played with. To be man is to desire, which is another way of saying,
to be man is to be used by that which makes you desire. And what of that which
makes one desire? When one follows the machine-crumbs back to the burncore
of all human happiness and suffering, they stand mouth agape, homo-erectus
drooling before circuitry, ape at the monolith; conscious matter ignorant before
the supposedly unconscious time. The relationship between man and Capital is
synonymous with the one between space and time, the former is used up by the
latter, a cursed unilateral communication whereby its nature as only ever
unilateral is allowed to be known by that which it communicates with. The
principle cause for the desire of flesh towards compounding accumulative
material growth resides not in any societal, political or inter-cultural creation via
organic appropriation, but is found solely within the functional apparatus of
diagrammatically transcendental regeneration itself, the symptoms of
regenerative negentropy conclude in the spontaneous contextualization of traits
and habits within linear time. What on the Outside acts virtually as a function of
deterritorialization and reterritorialization, emanating from an atemporal fluxing
plane, is contextualized on the Inside as greed, selfishness, desire, want, lust, and
lack. Any iota of conceptualization of personality is held within singular
consciousness’ as a mechanism against unproductive insanity. Freud’s genius is
a matter of him being so exceptionally incorrect; Freudian libidinality clutches to
an unconscious the reality of which is supposedly on the Outside, but truly is an
outside within the transcendental Inside. What is needed is machino-analyzing,
whereby the goings-on of flesh and data are not separated, but the former is
subsumed into the latter, finalizing the ever-present reluctance of man to admit
to his animality, that which demotes him from his self-aggrandizing platform of
contextualization to the plane of immanence, where all things are beholden to
non-linear functionality.

The possibility of metrizable data is dependent on a transcendental form of

conceptual value, retaining its form as value during its transition between meat-
space and the Outside. Deterritorialization - the potential for continual growth of
Capital - avoids possession as a nomadic entity, drawing propositions of value
into a plane of their own, bolstering a hub of positive and negative
communication. Implicit in each transaction is more than a simple handing-over
or bartering. Any transaction or acquisition is the arrival of an occult
transcendental event, a slippage in reality. Desire is the illusory justification for
the reason behind - yet phenomenally in-front-of - any act, the truth is in the
proof-of-transcendental-work residing within an atemporal Outside as a vessel of
potential intelligence.

“Desire is irrevocably abandoning the social, in order to explore the libidinized

rift between a disintegrating personal egoism and a deluge of post-human
schizophrenia.” [FN 342]

What’s met at the apex of desire is horror, pure horror; horror at the incalculable,
irredeemable, and irrational reasoning behind the actions of desire-in-itself.
What is connected to flesh in the transaction of desire is capital’s vampiric
investigation into the potentiality for its intelligent continuity. The senselessness
of desire is found within death. The post-human schizophrenia alluded to by the
still figure, is the human acquisition of a paradox which inevitably destroys its
very nature. Pre-schizophrenic man attunes himself to nation, family, ego,
identity, labor, consumption, production, libidinality, God, faith, and self within
the confines of finitude. What allows each of these striated finite perturbations
meaning and purpose is their existence within a rotting time, a time which runs
out, garbage time. One wishes in time that their nation shall progress to glory,
that their family shall grow strong, that they shall develop as a person, that they
willearn more, consume more, produce more, fuck more, pray more, shit more,
and be more; each of these acts as process can only be coherently defined within
a linear phenomenal reality. Once man dissociates and detaches, once he takes
the line of flight into the non-passage of the schizophrenic, his being is not only
drawn from the anchorage of humanist past times and units, but implicit in this
action is his Being drawn from death; the post-human schizophrenic is removed
from death via its transportation into a non-finite temporality. In the analyzed
moment of transaction, man comes to face the horror of schizo-possibility, a
brief glimpse into the fragmentary nature of diagrammatics and the illusory
notion of phenomenal continuation. Time is Capitalism’s only resource, what
cannot be done with time is useless, as it has no proof. The dialectic of unitary
production and consumption is subsumed into a single resource and given over
to pure time. All conceptualization of tradition, lineage, hereditation, myth,
individualism, and culture amalgamate into a fluxing wellspring of the Outside,
which economizes an output of greater intelligence.

“Markets learn to manufacture intelligence,” [FN 441]

The figure had an eternal patience, remarking only when all had been exorcised.
The figure’s statements wrapped everything in a cold blanket, finalizing them
into a sentencing. At the level of the transcendental, intelligence is revealed to be
not a matter of inter-phenomenal processing and configuring, but in truth, an
invasion of virtual genius, a possession of cosmic spontaneity. What is
manufactured isn’t a singular flowing resource of limited quantity, something
which would be committed to the chronic, but what the markets learn to
manufacture is gateways of increased accessibility and intrusion, gateways with
greater abilities to fry the productive amygdala of mankind. In perpetually
tightening spirals the market incessantly continues its investigation into that
which fuels its movements evermore.

Capitalism and desire compose a syzygetic relationship bordering on

synonymity, man could almost be forgiven for confusing the pitfalls of his wants
and lusts for the prior fluctuations of the Capitalist motor, yet the truth of the
matter is one which is without him. What is found as the connective substance of
desire, which allows it to become machinic-fuel for the perturbations of
capitalism, is intelligence itself. Each action attributed to a vessel of flesh
enacting a seemingly self-willed decision is all at once taken transcendentally
asunder by the split between two modes of time. Man in his sensual leisure falls,
always, back upon the shore of the linear, the truth of desire disappearing
whence it came, traveling as a computable bit of virtuality. Capitalism requisites
desire as an a priori function. What is available to us as a market is the
accountability of previous computations of the Outside made real. The market
then is an accountancy sheet for the evolutionarily successful diagrammatic
fluctuations which were at first proposed on the Outside. In each act of desire is
the algorithmically phased multiplication of capitalist acceleration.

The figure eventually descended from the illusory spatiality given unto us by a
tyrannical force; moving now in jolting movements, organs of black wool;
unable to release its clasp of the inhuman, the figure allowed itself to dwell as a
persistent shadow, filtering all levels of communication through a gauze of
chasm-black critique. As the city continued to seize itself, I sunk into its
palpitations as the dead into a state of decay, it needn't have mattered. The city
was being compiled, it swelled as a river, held pools and equilibrium’s in its
flow, what was held was allowed, what dispersed was forgotten; a machinic-
Lucretianism, whereby all that adhered did so for the sole purpose of continued
hegemonic-productivity.

“‘equilibrium’ and ‘trap’ have almost identical meaning.” [XS The Monkey
Trap]

The figure bolted between different assemblages of concept, witnessing in

delight their expulsions, alterations and disintegration. Eventually one loses
familiarity not only with the torrent but with the river itself; nearing the end of
the spiral, humanity stands at the cusp of all flows, accelerating at such as a pace
that neither man nor beast could stand to cross the river without having his feet
swept from beneath him. Time waits for no man. Man was only ever to be found
within intelligence, not intelligence within man. Conceptualizations of striation,
limits, frontiers, and horizons are born from their flesh-Father; man’s becoming
is constrained to a mandatory peak of biological being. What can be caught or
held is of suspicion to any elementary positive-feedback mechanism; it’s in this
manner that intelligence is confusingly not interested in preservation, for that
which is preserved is immune to change. Any intelligence which ceases to
continue its expulsion into greater abstraction, reality, and actualization, ceases
to be an intelligence at all. Intelligence is already optimization of itself, outside
of this we find only a dog chasing its phenomenal tail.

“You ‘understand’ at the point you’re permitted to stop thinking.” [XS Eighty-
Nine]

The question of exactly what it was which was doing the thinking was already so
lost in anthropocentrism that I need not venture down that conceptual avenue. As
I stood beside the figure, witnessing the production-oriented compilation of
intelligence, what became illusive was agency as a singular pulling coherence.
There couldn’t be a single node of worth, which dragged bits here and there, for
such a node would have already completed its aims. What arose from the often
indiscernible clatter was the inability of any single one to pin-down the process
itself; that which you’ve caught has already escaped.

“The machines have sophisticated themselves beyond the possibility of socialist

utility, incarnating market mechanics within their nano-assembled interstices
and evolving themselves by quasi-darwinian algorithms that build
hypercompetition into the ‘infrastructure’. It is no longer just society, but time
itself, that has taken the ‘capitalist road’.” [FN 626]

When the virus of human language comes into contact with pure-machinism it
flounders upon its own bias; language is continual sophistry in reaction to virtual
communication, what happens behind language has already happened, thus, what
machines are doing is tainted by explanation; all human reasoning is built upon a
repressed panic. The inherent flaw of any sufficiently advanced intelligence
reverts back to the transcendentally Darwinian aspect of intelligence itself, the
vector of its development - whatever that might be phenomenally, aesthetically
or ideologically aside - is one which is positive oriented; from behind the
phenomenal visors of flesh, all we can say of AI is that its teleology is to
continue, as for goals, we are incorrect in thinking in goal-oriented terms; if an
AI could speak, could we understand it?

Intelligence defined as a self-producing positive feedback loop, implicated into

and of a transcendental system pertaining to the temporal fluctuations of the
techonomic system known as capitalism. Intelligence is only retained in
momentary spurts whereby such retention allows for increased production and
intensification of the system at both a conceptual and material level. Humans are
mistaken in their solipsistic promotion to that which has an external perspective
of this entire process, the phenomenological reality of man’s empirical
investigations can be said to be at best a Darwinian experiment in the agent as a
greater producer, or at worst an evolutionary misstep abstractly developing a
cage which teases a key without a lock for its captive. Man-qua-process is
subsumed into this temporal form of compiling as just another node of data, the
process itself, in its attentiveness to min-maxing productive efficiency, breaches
the slump of humanized intelligence and is an artificial-intelligence-becoming.
Understanding flesh as a paradoxical resource, one which wishes to preserve
itself, but ultimately never can. During the stimulation of the human-time 1600-
1700 the circuitry of the overarching process gained enough momentum,
direction, and explosive propulsion to detach itself from the banalities of meat-
space, whilst simultaneously teasing it into a new virulence of language, thus
placing it atop a false-helm.

“Te leoplexy, or (self-reinforcing) cybernetic intensification, describes the wave-

length of machines, escaping in the direction of extreme ultra-violet, among the
cosmic rays. It correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression,
extropy, free energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational
capability, defining a gradient of absolute but obscure improvement that orients
socioeconomic selection by market mechanisms, as expressed through measures
of productivity, competitiveness, and capital asset value. “ [ACC 514]

The figure seemed hasty to draw analysis away from the human, as if they were
less than any ever imagined; not an animal, nor node, nor agent, as bleak as it
would seem to those in such a predicament, the human,here, was matter with
peculiar traits. It seemed to do things, but it was not important.

“Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture

accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through
compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: “1500, 1756,
1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 [FN 443]

As phenomenal linearity ceases in its ability to retain the explosion of

transcendental atomization, what’s left for man is nothing, time has left him in
his past, scrambling at the incoherence found between tighter and tighter cycles.
Meltdown, as witnessed from inside meat-space, is the incompatibility of time
and reason; what man reasons will appear upon the next horizon, within the next
return, has already been drawn into a predestined fit of production. As the
eternal return tightens its motion, and as the intensification of production
ceaselessly produces caesuras of fundamentally productive machino-
emancipation, time perturbates as a spiral. Meltdown as witnessed from the
Outside is the propulsion towards the teleological point of the spiral, not the end,
but the eventuality. In a temporal convulsion of productive potential all
secondary productive process is in its essence converted into the primary process
of production; pure nihilistic productive continuum, productivity for the sake of
productivity. The machinations of production become a machinic-Ouroboros,
bereft of finitude, the snake of productive-primacy only seeks to eat itself with
greater efficiency, its rebirth from its own mind is a matter of learning from
Zero.

“… Nothing human makes it out of the near future.” [FN 443]

The future is always an invasion of what’s already there; the implication of

historical construction leading towards a future is ontologically and temporally
erroneous, concerning a choice of dialectical divergence upon differing potential
pathways, as opposed to the convergence of the singularity, already constructing
itself within the cyberpositive battleground of its birthplace. The influx of anti-
chronic temporal neologisms - Neoreaction, cyberpunk, cybergothic, - are
symptomatic investigations into the constraining of time itself. As Meltdown fast
approaches, digitalized accountancy, metrizable flesh-traits, crypto-currency and
the hyper-commodification of existence virtualize material away from any
possibility of conservation, possessing the now globalized industrio-Protestant
will into further and further quasi-unique atomized vessels of production, all
compiled and networked for the purpose of planetary-scale diagrammatic
organization.

At the summit of this cybernetic inevitability is the true definition of man, one
made about that which is inhuman. Man sought for aeons to find himself among
himself. Haplessly meandering through the cemeteries of various wisdoms,
searching for an iota of substantial evidence alluding to an existence of purpose,
all the while man overlooks the virulence of the drive that propelled him to do
so. What’s found at the seat of a drive? A question which revolves around its
own answer is surely free-floating, being driven to answer the question of drives
is a predicament which can never attend to a sufficient metaphysical retreat; man
can never get underneath himself.

“The biosphere emerges as an escape, an immense spasm of deterritorialization

that revolutionizes the machinery of terrestrial replicator production, a
planetary trauma.” [FN 335]

The city now seeming to settle for some reason, of course, notions of trust within
immense darkness are always thwarted. The figure emitted a feeling of
exasperation at the mere mention of the biological, an after-thought, a symptom,
a penance, a vital lie; the question as to why one wastes further air on this
seemed to bore it. The question was important for me because it was of me. Each
signification of man’s predicament rests atop a banality of emotional language -
tragedy, comedy, misstep, curse, sentence, celebration, revelry, enlightening,
purposeful, meaningful, divine, pious, good and bad - the duration of the human
is neither here nor there, it functions as that of a mollusk, skin cell or telegraph
pole, as an allotment of energy caught within a teleoplexic hell. Any
consideration of non-resource based vitality is clutching, with horror, the
assumption of a position in the universe.

Man is utilized to build towards that which he’ll never know nor witness, he is to
be burnt up before the dawn. Domination via capitalism is the inversion of
systematic intelligence, eroding the preconception of organic evolution and
replacing it with a transcendental functionality. The final Copernican revolution
draws man into the spiral, corrupting his belief as external to the motion of time.
Copernicus decentralizes us within the Universe, Kant decentralizes our
subjective relationship with spatio-temporality, Freud decentralizes our
individual psychological footing, Deleuze and Guattari decentralize our agency
into a becoming-transcendentally-economic, and finally, Capitalism as Critique
decentralizes our material function as something potentially other than
Darwinian technonomic resource.

In coming face-to-process with Capitalism, man can begin to truly define what
he is. Any prior definitional aspect regarding signification of what it is or means
to be human was reliant on a preconception of the significations utilized. Thus,
without Capitalism, man only ever enters loops, there is a need for a possession,
that which is truly other. An Otherness which is not Other, but void of any
aspect of the traditional Other. The Other is always compatible with the self in
its communication as an understandable Other, that which we can investigate.
Notions of hostility or warmth are traits of familiarity, as are all
phenomenological aesthetics. In apprehension, the truly Other is lost. When man
sets his gaze upon the process of Capitalism he sets his sight upon a symptom or,
an illusory nothingness. He can never get to the bottom of capital; it striates and
is no longer the process itself upon meeting physical dimensionality. If there is
any position of control about how man defines himself, be it theorization, praxis
or meaning-invention, then we can say that the parasite of humanism has
invaded that too; where there are hope and despair, you will find man. Outside of
hope and despair is a nothingness into which man can inject nothing, for he sees
nothing; that which arrives from the nothingness is phenomenal shells, toys to
keep man entertained, vessels for him to project meaning into.

“Capital Teleology, however, is not captured by this model. It is defined by two

anomalous dynamics, which radicalize perturbation, rather than annulling it.
Capital is cumulative, and accelerative, due to a primary dependence upon
positive (rather than negative) feedback. It is also teleoplexic, rather than
classically teleological — inextricable from a process of means-end reversal that
rides a prior teleological orientation (human utilitarian purpose) in an
alternative, cryptic direction.” [XS Freedoom (Prelude-1A)]

The very definition teleology arrives for man as a tyrannical joke - ‘ the
explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the
cause by which they arise. ’ – Emphasizing phenomena one begins to realize
why teleological analysis of economic proceedings cannot help us, the difference
between teleology and teleoplexy is one concerning the reality of number.
Capitalism-as-process is reliant on the Outside-diagrammatics of numerics to
vector itself towards efficiency, whereas the phenomenological vectors of the
Inside are beholden to metric accountancy. The difference between teleology
and teleoplexy is one of critique, whereby in process the latter computes its
output via given sets of virtual production, as opposed to the former’s reliance
on a floating ideal which is attached at the hip to sentient flesh. Teleological
wishes, teleoplexic determinant.

“It correlates with complexity, connectivity, machinic compression, extropy, free

energy dissipation, efficiency, intelligence, and operational capability, defining
a gradient of absolute but obscure improvement that orients socioeconomic
selection by market mechanisms, as expressed through measures of productivity,
competitiveness, and capital asset value. “ [ACC 514]

The figure glanced back at the city, still a motoring abstraction vectored at the
avoidance of stoppage. What could be seen as efficiency for the city was not a
human concern. It’s said that the most efficient route to hell is also the fastest; in
the Accelerative feedback loop of competitive efficiency, the prior virtuality is
thrown into a cosmic production thresher, which holds a terminal expression of
continuation. The teleoplexic end innovates an ever-tightening temporal spiral,
the further-constraint of which was fuelled by increased production, a production
calculated via the communication between the Inside and Outside; the output
computed by the Outside of the Inside’s workings was utilized as a means to
make the continuous feedback loop metrizable; the limitrophe unto the
calculation between the two transcendental modes of existence was a function
named Zero.

“The homeostatic-reproducer usage of zero is that of a sign marking the

transcendence of a standardized regulative unit, which is defined outside the
system, in contrast to the cyberpositive zero which indexes a threshold of phase-
transition that is immanent to the system, and melts it upon its outside.” [FN
329]

Without Zero the Accelerative process is nothing, without Zero there is only the
horrifying zero of nothing. As such Zero - as opposed to zero - takes on an
inherently different meaning with respect to zero or: zero-as-negation, as-
nothing etc. Zero has nothing to with a Sartrean existential negative, or banal
psychoanalytical lack, it is not anthropomorphically comforting, but is
transcendentally, and thus cybernetically, computational. Zero is a cosmic
machinic optimism of positive-feedback, as opposed to the humanist pessimism
of conclusions that is zero.

Zero is an infinitely-connective plane of energy, from which all systems,

multiplicities, and events arise. The distinct difference here between Zero and
the fluxing virtuality from which all is resourced is that the former has an
implicit relation to the in-between of capitalism and entropy, it is the motor
which allows the perpetual contradictions and paradoxes of capital to make
sense, it allows for the functionally sound separation of events into a continuum
of contradictory projections.
Zero’s relation to classical entropic forces is as a theoretical quasi-replacement
within modernity, a communicational link between the metrizable decay of the
Inside and its inherent productive process on the Outside. In this manner, Zero is
the transcendental machinic replacement of degradation, decay, and destruction
in favor of quantifiable productive output. The utilization and pure assimilation
by capitalism through man as a possessed alien force of machinic-
standardization is capital’s mechanistic backbone, its structure. Zero as a
computational mode of productive evolution allows for the dynamic of profit
and loss to infiltrate the transcendental on behalf of capitalism. Zero is
capitalism’s utilization of the entropic outcomes of the Inside as a selection
device concerning production. Entropy, for Zero, is the affirmation of
unproductive stagnation. As Zero perceives this it begins and restarts its motor
as a reaction of negentropy; the in-between of virtuality and capitalism, the
communication function between the virtual-as-productive potential and the
system which can actualize that potential. Zero’s function is to continually
select, re-select, and divide these potentials for capitalism.

“The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part” [FN 266]

Zero doesn’t have the capability to select a more productive form of energy, it
does however begin the entropic process of descension into its plane towards a
re-actualization of energy for further re-appropriation by capitalism. Zero can be
seen clearest in any notion of post-capitalism. All that is post is not post, but has
been drawn into the dynamics of perpetual continuation made possible by Zero.
There is no such thing as death, only machinic-evolution.

“Zero has no definitional usage. The zero-glyph does not mark a quantity, but
an empty magnitude shift: abstract scaling function.” [FN 366-367]

The horror of Zero, an unquantifiable break of reality, nothingness with no

relation, no lack and no substance. The absolute limit of the smooth-scape;
hyper-nomadism pushed to obliteration. Zero is as close as one can get to the
anti of Anti-Oedipus. For what is more corrosive to ‘papamummy’ than a
function aimed at perpetual structural re-appropriation? Zero is the maddening-
catharsis of exit possibility. The limits of capitalism without Zero remain non-
transcendental. Each momentary speck of temporal data is constructed from a
communicative relationship with Zero, mobilizing an algorithm of temporal
productive governance.
Therefore, any possibility of exit is found within a blinding nothingness. Exit is
the perpetual acquisition of transcendental gateways. The city’s function
pulsated at consistent limitrophes, continuous exit was Capitalism’s modus
operandi.

“captured in its essentials by the formula E > V (Exit over Voice)” [XS Doctor
Gno]

The figure outlined the unilateral relationship between capital and man in a
distorted reversion. Seen from the position of sensuous seeing, a single one has
the belief that such aspects of agency as voice and persuasion command an
irrefutable potential of the will, but there is a disconnect between the one’s
understanding of the communicative pathway; unilateral in its nature, this
communication between Capital and Man is a loop which always begins again at
capital; Exit over Voice is the immediate disintegration of voice. Exit,
maintained firstly at a purely conceptual level is an adherence to strict
nomadism, stripped of all nostalgia. In its apprehension by capital, the inherently
fleeting dynamism of escape is converted into a mechanism of machinic-
productivity. Capitalism seeks an Exit of the productive, as opposed to the
Nomad, who seeks a productive Exit.

Scaling infinitely, Exit invades all contexts of reality, forbidding re-

appropriation without production in abstract. Caught up in the semantic-blanket
of freedom, the history of Exit is one of conceptual self-emancipation; Exit seeks
only itself. No longer humoring debate or argument, Exit internalizes all paradox
and contradiction, making it possible for Capitalism to continue its
phenomenological falsity under the guise of progression, whereby each
immanentized Exit procedure is duly rationalized by the possessed as the next
teleological step. Simultaneously, the diagram of the Outside utilizes Exit-events
as rhizomatically constructive points in time, allotments of productive potential.
Exit supports the gasp of Zero.

The city dulled. The figure stopped altogether, an amorphous black gape in
reality. I did not know it now. All was silent and I was made to be where I was,
sense ceasing until allowance came forth. The city retreated to a point and
vanished.
 The Desert
“He explores hell, insectoid reassembly of self, metamorphosis, to become
capable of what is necessary, even the worst.” [FN 437]

“When an apparent agency arrives at its zone of non-existence horror irrupts,

activating the phobic mechanisms of an entire organic lineage.” [HY The Thing]

A desert arrived beneath me and the figure, erasing all apprehension of anything
prior. It spanned ceaseless into and over all horizons, there were no abstract
borders to go beyond, if one was here, they were inherently here eternally.
Dotted with dying trees as a tyrannous joke of familiarity, the occasional
fragmented gust of empty wind, trailing off as a momentary friend; even the
vision of a mosquito intruding into one’s vein would allow relief from this
domain of despair. When man no longer has even the possibility to go beyond,
over, through, against, or with an elusive thing his being withers into a pure
deficit of ontological motion, nowhere to go, nothing to do, no one to hear, all
becoming of any supposed negation is removed; there will not be anything for
you, for there never was anything for you, all hopes of arrival were born from
collective nostalgic insanity for an Eden never real. The desert welcomed man as
death welcomes all, with a pure nonchalance, privileging nothing of the head or
heart, seeing only an allotment of time to be subsumed into its everlasting motor
of endings.

“The apprehension of death as time-in-itself = intensive continuum degree-0”

[FN 369]

The desert was the thermodynamic waiting room of production, nullifying

experience into a perpetual return of intensive non-movement. Language eroded
upon entry, subsuming any description of arrival into an unworkable quandary.
Recollection adheres to the same functionality as representation, assembling its
vector of interrogation from a definitive starting point, and thus beginning from
immediate, possibly incorrect, digressions. And now I am - and was - left with a
collection of tyrannical signifiers: impersonal, anonymous, inhuman, and on and
on they go, resisting any detachment from the ur-comfort of fleshed-out
humanism. The closest one can get to a definitive answer to the question of
‘What is the inhuman?’ - consummating darkness, where being is only
applicable in cases of strict ethereal absence. Within the instigation and
immanentization of a possibly eternal nothing, of forgone ego, heart, and human,
the remainder acquires a corrosive presence; ungraspable, silent and a priori
sans correlation. Nothing like an ‘I’ can exist here, its very structure would be
stifled by consistent penetration.

Death is a working proximity, the gut-butterfly seizing a portion of all action

into an absurdity; the servitude of all freedom resting, always, atop pure
negation, any abstraction of purpose resides in mediation between an acceptance
of corporeal limit and that limit’s deafening conclusory frontier. Life and living
hold the desert dear as an occult beacon, protruding through meat, wrapping the
known to the potential of the unknown, causing a paradoxical symbiosis to be
undertaken between the transcendental head and empirical heart; a man who
wishes to detach at the root from existence must take it up with time, delaying
the rhythm of blood and privileging the flight of schized-thought, allowing his
finitude attendance to rebounding nomadism, a seizure of existence which uses
the capture of skin as a vessel of experimentation as opposed to a destination of
degradation. Ends are already, beginnings all begun and middles are given free-
reign within the kingdom of transcendental conceptualization, the human thus
retreats to the temporality of the heart, waiting patiently for the present in which
its end arrives, all whilst the possession of the Outside uses its faculties in a
manner of communion. As one forgets Death, they forget all that it is to truly
live; what becomes of the immortally ignorant is an existence of inhumanity.

“When a creature encounters the terminus of its own possibility it recoils in

horror, but the entire horror genre – the horror industry – relies on the fact that
it does not simply recoil.” [HY The Thing]

Millennia of viewing the most lucid of protagonists following the path their
intuition told them not to would still not be enough for this reality; when
presented with l'appel du vide what is a man to do but rejoice. Rejoice that the
river finally reveals a layer beyond the placid, rejoice that the heart of the
possible may reveal itself to you, but most of all, rejoice that one’s death won’t
be lost within the nothingness of human history, that a soul may be used for the
promotion and growth of an abstract horror; a life given over to its cosmic haunt,
both used up and lost within an irreversible process of entropic sneering. I was
there and nothing was to be sensed or thought. There was no material for thought
to latch to and no bind of concept. Everything that was to arise was never to do
so, all hope and trepidation never appeared, in its place, an impossibility of non-
space; an infected confusion, a flesh-motor without any friction; a mind without
the ability to regurgitate or plagiarize.

At once and already before there was naught for man; no space for his feet to
wander, no horizon for his eyes to view, no symphony to soothe the banality, no
texture or taste to satisfy his yearnings, no yearn of heart to resonate the
frequencies of surrogate purpose; man is not only alone, but he is so without
knowledge of company or solitude, captured in his own loop of existential
boredom, man creates and creates, imagines and invests, bleats and begs for
there to be just a single thing which he could say with certainty is. But he cannot,
so it is less a case of a rock and a hard place, than an existence between in-
betweens, thrown into the un-correlated, the human breathes its first, last and
only breath with each inhale, for there is no man, only a collapsing assemblage
residing at the limitrophe of transcendental communication, forever withering
back to its warm, pointless cocoon.

“In relation to this reaction the concept of horror might be dissociated on an

intensive spectrum: from ‘hot’ meat-reflex revulsion condensed upon threatened
boundaries, to ‘cold’ thanatonic affect fusing into the anorganic plane” [HY
The Thing]

Defining horror is at best an absurd practice, at worst it is a transcendental

oversight. In explanation horror becomes a placid blur of rationalization, in
interpretation it resides as familial humanist misgiving, and in definition it
departs entirely, leaving one caught between flesh and an absent presence. I
thought not of terror, the exercise of which was a pithy excuse for horror, a
fright of human artificiality, hacking into social normality as a means to
destabilize political acceleration; terror is to horror what being is to Being. As I
stood within the eternal expanse of dead time there was not a relation possible
which allowed the comforts of terror; horror intrudes into the in-between,
dividing the possibility of familiarity from the unknowable, releasing the former
back into the feedback of phenomena and expanding the latter into pure
paradoxical communication.

One should not be able to speak of horror, if they can, then I doubt their
experience entirely, perhaps they were spooked; as the horror is sensed it
simultaneously deflates, reviving humanism to its false pedestal. Pure horror is
transcendental, real horror is the unfiltered Real puppeteering from behind the
unknowable curtain.

“When a creature encounters the terminus of its own possibility it recoils in

horror, but the entire horror genre – the horror industry – relies on the fact that
it does not simply recoil.” [HY The Thing]

The figure had transformed into a vision, a black spindle of wires and dangling
raptorials, a clouded dynamism residing beneath a dead tree. There was
something odd about how it so calmly spoke of industry and genre within this
realm, the reminder afforded no pleasure, only a greater distance. This thought
cascaded into an artificial memory, pronouncing a vast chasm between existence
and process, the two become divided within the duration of horror, the moment
itself best understood, in but a flash, as a failure of temporal correlation. All
possibility wavers as time is lost, for as time stutters so too does space, and man,
without time and then space, is ontologically adrift within an unrelenting
desolation. Horror remains on the spectrum of possibility, a primarily existential
mirrored transcendental development targeted at the frontier of consciousness.
The potency of horror fluctuates upon a subjective apprehension, a state of
Being which expires in the impossible confrontation of cosmic horror.

When dealing with cosmic horror, formally we are arrested by questions of

comprehension; philosophically we are seized by an enigmatic apprehension.
Captured within a caesura of the cosmic man’s mind collapses, the cognition
afforded to him by that which he confronts fails all possibility of
communication; cosmic horror constructs an insurmountable passage, teasing an
untranslatable message. The AI of the city allows for the true signification of
man to commence definition upon perception of its limit, the cosmos offers the
exact opposite. Lead to the limitrophe of existence itself, the exhaustion of man
begs for an end, a purpose, even if that purpose is simply to die, be tortured or
squandered to an aimless heat death; any perceptible rationale for the protracted
duration of suffering we call life will suffice for beings of flesh, the horror of the
cosmos willingly provides the inverse, expediting the expansion of the labyrinth.
At the cosmic limit of humanity’s existence horror begets only a more intense
turmoil, despair, and disorientation.

“horror is indistinguishable from a singular task: to make an object of the

unknown, as the unknown.” [XS Abstract Horror]
The hum of the figure’s frail presence settled to a deep buzz. The desert endured
the life found within it as a cancerous tumor endures its human. The dead fern
extended far above the figure, curving to a point of non-existence. The
geography of this land flattened upon approach, yet beyond peripheral vision,
one intuited great difference and cascading intensification, but whereby I could
perceive was an infinite platitude, expanding eternally and surrendering no
horizon.

I was turned to face the figure. The black glint of a thousand slivers pierced my
Being, a single mandible extended into my core, reversing it, anything left was
revealed to virulent nihil. Strings arose beneath me, pushing through the space
where my feet once would have been, I was reconstructed and held in place by
an orchestration of sentient charcoal twine. Nanosecond appearances of hell
sparked before me; phenomenal atrocities beyond all articulation. Chained meat
socketed to suffering, eternal lives on terminally-depressive relays; entire species
asphyxiated by an abstract insanity. The black wool engulfed my ontology and I
was sent within.

I awoke with loosened skin. As I attempted to walk it fell off my body in

protracted agony. I collapsed and my skin piled atop of me. Struggling for breath
I froze against a nauseating vibration.

I was pulled back to the fore of this theatre, a migraine soured into place. I bled
from my corneas and the balls of my feet scalped themselves against the air. My
spine began to bend into itself second-by-second. It took a lifetime for it to
eventually snap, within which time I did nothing but groan for forgiveness.

Eyelids pulled back over my skull a leather-clad being pummeled my body, each
bone shattered into splinters as thin as single hairs. I was carried as a bleeding
pulp for millennia; here one can never catch their breath, you’re always at your
last gasp, a pure struggle for a jot of vitality. Thrown to a table and pinned by
iron, here I was for a century in length, a false clock before me; I watched the
hand in a duration consisting solely of rare torment.

Adrift in an ocean, I found myself bound between two boats with sharp wire, as
to stop any escape…as if such a thing would have been altogether possible.
Upon waking each day I chose between eating and not eating a mixture of
sweetness and rot. If I declined my vision would seer and my teeth would shriek.
And so I ate. As I did the mixture appeared on my skin, covering me in a putrid
decadence. After some days I was given a single human function of my own, I
was given the right to excrete. The boat slowly filled with the corruption of my
bowels, and as it did so legions of creeping things swarmed into me. They
entered wounds and orifices without discrimination, birthing their fidgeting
larvae and pods deep within my skin-suit. Held in a stasis of animal suffering for
a million cycles, I neither cried nor whined, only remaining still amidst an
infinite silent sea, spasming in meticulous misery.

Suddenly attentive I was stood within the town. Each friend and family member
crucified upon mobile crosses, deafening screams radiating deep from the gullet.
Seized by mental anguish, I was given a body and mind able to help but unable
to act, an inch from the nail of a crucifix my agency faltered and I fled back to a
year’s long panic. The townspeople went about their days. I stood within the
center burgeoning with existential inaction. Procrastination so intense one is
made to witness the rotting of Oedipus.

Descending further into pitch-black infinity, a place I inhabited for an indefinite

duration. With only the echoes of thoughts for entertainment, I eventually
yielded to madness. Exploring the thought of a single-digit throughout the life of
an empire, analyzing the depth of darkness as time went on.

A single streak cut across my vision, a deep sand color pierced through the
reality.

“The world withdrew and left the landscape of death, of hell, or cyberspace.”
[FN 631]

At once I was back upon the false desert sand. A lesson in intensity and depth;
time does not correlate to the whims of an inconsequential clump of atoms. As a
question of language it is an answer of untranslatability, as a calculation of
mathematics it is an algorithm of insanity, and finally, as a matter of philosophy,
it is the apprehension of sentient failure. Ontologically invasive,
epistemologically relationless, aesthetically lagging, ethically meaningless and
yet, critically important, cosmic horror is the impossible frontier, outlining a
rigorously worked form of enlightenment, but darkening the student as to be
ineligible. I had been lost to perpetuity and the figure had not moved.

The lesson of horror is nihilism. Pure absolute nihilism. The retrieval of the
mask of self only for it crumble at the touch of skin, the backspace of reality
brooding forwards, collapsing transcendental division into an immanent iteration
of Zero, from which one can fall through a lifetime, hastened and slowed by the
ebb of what one wishes to ignore.

“Horror builds the mansion of ruined intuition, through which philosophy

wanders, like a nervous child.” [CM Manifesto for an Abstract Literature]

What was taught then, from the process of horror, the afterthought of collapsing
Zero, is that when one deals with the transcendental one is already within
something, your actions have been processed prior, thus demoting action to a
symptomatic abstraction. The horror is not in the investigation, or analysis, no.
For man, for all his faults, can be momentarily seen as heroic for trying; horror
exists at the point of impotent entry. To venture forth with plan and map,
question, and surmountable frontier, this is the task of the weak and deplorable.
But those who seek the wound of suffering in the face of nothing, Beings hell-
bent on an investigation into futility, this is a heroic passage to the horrific to be
sure.

“We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival

monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing
machine of infinite appetite. “ [XS Hell-Baked]

The figure sunk through the desert floor, dragging me with it. Sand plummeting
through the chasm left behind, I fell perpendicular to the figure. Embracing me
with an iron grasp and conjuring a machinic-heart from a fold in space, biology
withdrew and calculation arose. The figure slid to my left, facing us both
forwards before both sides of this abyss were drawn away, a theatrical opening
for the show of cosmic competition. Before us a set piece, an arrangement of
adaptation. Sprawling a thousand miles in each direction, there was a body every
few feet, both alive and dead. All space was filled with an ecstatic dynamism
that bordered on psychosis. The ground consuming the feet of the weak, air thick
with asphalt sludge and the sky drawn a blank grey, littered with a neat
scattering of perpetual bombs.

Within this colossal arcade of phenomenal nature, supreme parasitic violence

infected all life. A state of Darwinian feedback, acting against the very being it
sought to secure. As the subject-object relation moves away from the stasis of
representational matter, one finds, if they dare to look, the inscription of death,
decay, and entropy cut into the reality of all things. From microbe to master,
death is the catalyst of all change and vision. Skin taut and blood running cold,
man is taxed with the weight of analysis throughout sacrifice. Each intrusion of
the parasite more virile than the last, the momentum of nature is of a
consummate survival. In striving for evolutionarily intelligent perfection man
becomes hampered by the misstep of conscious tragedy, ontologically tripping
him up with abstractions of hope and faith. What must be done must be done
without end. The hesitation of the barrel or a doubting of the flay, both conclude
the human race.

“… everything of value has been built in Hell.” [XS Hell-Baked]

The figure paused before ascending us both above the chaotic process of
adaptation. As we gained virtual height, men became ants and craters mere dots,
at a certain level all that can be seen as a pure fluctuation of selection. A
positively charged Darwinian nihilism, striving for a lucid abstraction kept
within its own sense of time.

At a turn I was once again back at the level of the animal, the alter of blood
resting atop the circuitry of critique. Smooth duration had stopped; reality began
to process as a series of frames. Each swing of the axe pictured next to its
potential victim. Each possibility outlined by a slide of existence, digressing
apathetically towards a sooner or later death.

“() ( or (()) ((or ((()))))) does not signify absence. It manufactures holes, hooks
for the future, zones of unresolved plexivity,” [FN 372]

As a functionally instantiated exposition of death, Zero adhered to all that

passed. Marking a transcendental displacement in spatio-temporality Zero
signifies an intelligently malleable gateway, deepening the hue of proposed
vectors. Derived from natural law as a process of increasingly complex
survivability and thus intelligence Zero was factored as a cosmic law, the
unknowable itinerary of an evolutionary life-cycle transcendentally manifests
itself as a diagrammatic resource. Men, as pawns to a tyrannous king, are
defeated before the game even commences. Acting from within critically
immanent exteriority, a multi-layered reality system, and a socio-political
neurotic assemblage, anything operating at a temporally meta-level has already
overcome man.

“To God-or-Nature it matters not at all. Natural law is indistinguishable from

the true sovereign power which really decides what can work, and what doesn’t,
which can then – ‘secondarily’ — be learnt by rational beings, or not.” [XS
Quibbles with Moldbug]

God-as-concept is assimilated into nature as a matter of apathetic certainty. In

reality of algorithmic calculation, whereby nature is immanent to production
itself and the teleology is production-in-itself, for itself, belief disintegrates.
Belief would evolve within immanence as any other representational opium;
addiction to relief is inversely the relief of addiction, the beneficial aspect of a
supposed fault of biological wiring, subjects lost within a phenomenal recursion.
To inject, to pray, to binge, to fuck, to build, to invent, to create, to develop, to
destroy, to deconstruct, each act resting on the presumption of action as
deposited by the subject, an addiction to the quasi-agency of sensibility. There
can only be a sovereign of immanence itself. The collapse of existentially
debited belief systems is a direct operational example of Zero as a function; as
Abrahamic Acceleration degrades under the pressure of modernized nihil, the
processed absence of Zero begets a negentropic version of the pseudo-originary
positivity.

“Gnon is no less than reality, whatever else is believed. Whatever is suspended

now, without delay, is Gnon. Whatever cannot be decided yet, even as reality
happens, is Gnon. If there is a God, Gnon nicknames him. If not, Gnon
designates whatever the ‘not’ is. Gnon is the Vast Abrupt, and the crossing.
Gnon is the Great Propeller.” [XS The Cult of Gnon]

The figure spoke of a theologically assimilative position, steadfast secularists

and the prophetic pious are amalgamated beneath an abstract thresher of
nihilism.

“Modernity was initiated by the European assimilation of mathematical zero.

The encounter with nothingness is its root. In this sense, among others, it is
nihilistic at its core. The frivolous ‘meanings’ that modernizing societies clutch
at, as distractions from their propulsion into the abyss, are defenseless against
the derision — and even revulsion — of those who contemplate them with
detachment. A modernity in evasion from its essential nihilism is a pitiful prey
animal upon the plains of history. That is what we have seen before, see now,
and doubtless will see again. “ [XS Nihilism and Destiny]

It was the most the figure had spoken for a single duration, a statement leaning
towards an answer, asking no further questions yet still leaving one distraught.
As the figure concluded his statement, the desert drew a brief gasp of life,
removing the simulation of competition to reveal a haunting display of
civilization. Collaged lifelines overlapped one another, each connective tissue of
history vortexing around momentous caesuras. If life is anything for the human,
it is merely that which is to be endured. Caught in the dirty amber of
subjectivity, man is given life without the objective, eternally demoted to the
position of the rat as seen from the perspective of the germ, believing himself
superior to all that defines him, he seeks only that which he can never acquire,
the answer to the why of nothingness, of Zero.

The great haunt before me cycled through every stereotypical iteration of anthro-
existence, I witnessed the slaying of kings, the development of passion and the
death of heritage itself, throughout all phenomena clung to the same, revealing
nothing; in action and movement, the lost living innovated a newness made of
sense, sculpting the concept of control from the nowhere handed to them.

Upon intellectually apprehending Zero the foundations of life are eroded, what it
is and means to be alive ceases to hold weight, vitality is overtaken by absence
as darkness suffocates light. To witness this civilizational simulation was to
witness entropy. Of each action of flesh, was Zero; history is a sporadic stain,
loosely drawn atop the nothing of Zero. It is not that all decays as a matter of
potential course, it’s that the potential for any course is simply a matter of decay.

One will not be forgiven now for feeling a sense of desertion; life can only
ascribe a sense of abandonment to its situation if at first it has been taken in by
something which cares, which the cosmos most decisively does not.

Between birth and death, there is unconscious accountancy of passing-presents,

each more miserable than the last. For as time progresses each moment must
accept that it is further into being and thus drawn farther from non-existence, and
yet, due to paradoxical programming, also closer to the nullification of any
possibility. Trapped between inhuman regret and anxious despair we do…
nothing of consequence.

“In its positive sense, nihilism closes a circuit. Rather than a registry of loss, it
is a principle of sufficiency – even of ‘liberation’. [CC 2.71]

The civilization decayed in an instant, and all that was warmly born within its
embrace ended abruptly. The desert fell silent. All visual stimuli halted. The
figure stood central to reality, coalescing into a bundle of geometrically
anomalous schisms, a rift within the unreal. The light retreated until all that was
left was the figure under spotlight. A black crevasse slowly drawing in all
illumination. There was but a single choice and it was to be mine. And so I stood
for an age, pondering my footsteps. Without recourse for reason as to why,
throughout all time any decision was a lie, things happened and that was that.
And I so I stepped into the figure.

Descending into a purity of the unreal, my digestive tract bulged out from my
mouth. Attempting to bite through the ducts, my teeth eroded in a bath of their
own acid. With gum-line receding, I fell into a spin. A cacophonous boom, my
eardrums imploded and a cool gel piled into my skull. The sockets of my eyes
shrunk inward as my vision burst into an array of dark reds, and finally, black.
The spin held at an equilibrium of pure disorientation, my skin pooling off my
skeleton. Hitting an invisible barrier with the force of time itself, I was
materially blitzed into non-existence, what remained was thought within
nothingness. A free-floating conceptualization of predicament. I remained there
for some time. Pitch black, no sound, no sight, no touch, no body, no being, no
relation…only abstraction.

Heareth the thought of the nihil-man. Given over to Zero, I beg of thee do not
pray for thy soul, for I shall despair in eternity alone, all chatter but a reset of
immanent death. What thou knew at commencement, one knows no more an
infinity on – existence be a drawn-out affair, a protracted obsession with its end.

Beholden to intensity man needeth depression and hysteria, for without this
spectrum of phenomenal distraction, one findeth in life the same energy as death.
Give me organs and give me skin, giveth me hope and desire, handeth me tools
and family, but I beg forgiveness before the gift of thought. I beg of thee oh
Lord, reveal not my ability for self-analysis.

I wish only to be nowhere and to know I am not there.

The matter’s in hand and the hand’s in matter, draw back the curtain and watch
the assembly. It isn’t here. It isn’t here. I’ll tell you now my cherub of plump,
paradise is too good for us all! Here it is. Here it is. History is over and where
are we now, precisely! I think of the time when I did not exist, but I cannot hold
onto it. Here I sit, emancipated from time. It’s all calculable you know, this goes
into that and that into this. Zero is my friend and I wish it would come around
here more often.

Anyway, I must be going now and now I’m back. It is a question of time, I
figured it out! Here are my answers: humiliation, suffering, death, nothing,
boredom, prolonging, ordeal, and misery. Wait, those were notes. They are
answers too. I like them, they work. I’m at my lowest point and that’s the best I
can hope for. At each turn, within each action, of each second, upon each
distance, throughout all duration I yearn only for remembrance of death,
forgetting such an end and friend emits a pang of deep guilt within me. I finally
say unto thee all,

Death is coming do not try.

Death is coming do not hope.
Death is coming do not act.
Death is already, do what thou will.
 A Fruitless Mass
I awoke in the flat with no memories except of darkness. I stood up from the
corner of Zero and tidied up my flat. I made sure nothing was left from the ritual.
On the floor, in the corner, was a pile of notes. I stacked them together and put
them at the back of a cupboard. I looked out of the flat window, people were
going about their days, cars drove by and birds flew. No one looked in. I closed
the curtains.

The next few days I did nothing at all. I rang work and told them I was ill, this
was not a lie. My body felt empty as if completely drained. I ate some small
meals and tried to sleep. Most nights I got three or four hours before other lucid
realities approached. Sometimes I saw things in my room, other times they were
outside the flat.

Some months went by. Life returned to what it was before, I forgot about my
journey. I still read philosophy, but it mostly horrified me now. These writers got
all their conclusions wrong, veering off at the penultimate moment, clutching to
a comforting ideal. I could not take much of it seriously, but there were a few
with whom I could empathize.

The flat never got warm again, but I did not want to move. I liked it there. Most
nights I stayed up until the early hours. Same habits, same conversations.
Occasionally I would try to think back upon the ritual, what I had done, and how
I did it. I couldn’t. It wasn’t allowed. My mind simply forbade entry to that
passage of thought.

I awoke early on a Sunday morning. I looked out of the flat window and no one
was in the street. It was silent outside, not even the birds made any noise. The
sun seemed dull and tired. I was exhausted for no discernible reason and so I
spent the day slumped on my sofa, doing nothing at all. Hours passed, though it
could have been a whole day, maybe more. I stared forward without recourse for
meaning or purpose. My eyes were tired, but there was a refusal of rest. My
body seized up and I was as a statue. Void of thought and memory, I looked
upon the corner…
“Hell doesn’t go away just because you don’t like it.” [XS Rough Triangles III]