A Commentary on Deus Ex: Human Revolution

The Quest for a New Man

The supposedly central quest of the game is completely illusory. Adam’s obsession with Megan is so poorly conveyed and motivated as to border on farcical, the strange justifications of a madman as he rampages across the world at the whims of his employer, telling himself it’s all for the sake of the object of fascination, Megan Reed. The conclusion of this quest, culminating in a stark white room where he encounters her, shows the truth of this quest. Throughout the quest, what really takes place is Adam being guided along an episodic journey to become who was destined to be, an esoteric quest towards his destiny guided by the hand of this desire. That Megan is out of his grasp matters little, Megan ultimately being a trick played on Adam to make him undergo his transformation.

Two Cities

The sidequests in Detroit make the player return again and again to the same locations, the DRB-occupied ruined block, the mass of apartments, the police station. In these locations, hostile humans are compacted into dense complexes, forming a tightly compacted maze of flesh and heat with which to do violence. Flesh and violence makes up the theme of Detroit, with the pure humans turning to rioting and flailing against the semi-robotic riot police, the main gang antagonist being the larger and unaugmented crew, the comments from purity-seeking hobos, and etc. The populace of Detroit is a populace left behind, wallowing in the decay of a city forgotten by history, in the null death of a human body untouched by advances in the human organism’s evolution.

The human in Hengsha is situated not as a part of it, another piece of grime on the bottom of the street, but against it, navigating it as an outsider. Hengsha is a city of capital and technology. Every part of its construction is built for higher, machinic purposes, with the player visiting centers of consumption and production, nightclubs, market streets, construction sites, dockyards, etc. The dramas taking place are dramas of interaction against these inhuman machines of economics and technology, being stricken down with augment malfunctions, resisting forced augmentation, struggling against the power of capital and technology. The motif recurring in showing this binary is that of vertical transition. Multiple missions deal with humans thrown down great descents in the Youzhao district, the design itself is vertical, Jensen navigates in story progression in ways that cross-cut the layers of the city, emerging from the construction site of the ambush, climbing the TYM tower through both layers of Hengsha. Vertical transition shows the free movement through an inhuman structure such as the city of Hengsha, an image of humanity after technology.

Bull, Mantis, Snake

Barrett and his forces appear occupying the facility of another, a large complex of purchased factories and a FEMA facility. His personal title and style is the first and most brutish form of martial power, that of mere presence, of power manifesting as the baton or beating, the logistical and guardian work of the war machine.

Federova’s presence comes from nothing, the deferred presence of Eliza, first leading Adam from room 404 (not found), then to the unknown part of the Picus building, only to discover that Eliza herself is not. Federova’s original appearance in the opening is her emerging and then quickly making herself vanish again, a way of fighting she uses against Jensen, making generous use of cloaking abilities. Her attempt to kill Adam from behind shows her role, the tip of the spear, the surgical piercing end of the war-machine, manifesting in the single instant the bullet impacts.

In a room of muscle-bodies, Namir comes out as one of them, a deconstructed specimen of a person, naked in a sense more extreme that simple unclothedness, his appearance laying bare the foundational operations of a human. If the player bought into the narrative of the game enough to get themselves upgraded, Zhao strips them of their augmentations for the fight. Adam winning against him is a stripped-down contest of war machines against each other, an image of two nude warriors wrestling to prove their rawest individual prowess. Incorporating the tactics of the other two, Adam and Namir engage as an apex of Adam’s entire conflict against Belltower, against the enemy soldiers throughout the entire game.

Selection for Fitness

In the second “first” mission, the more advanced tutorial after Jensen’s been augmented, the player is tasked with surgically solving a hostage situation in the Milwaukee Junction factory. The Purity First members have attempted to throw their flesh upon the assembly lines, forcibly stopping technological production. Jensen’s removal of them occurs by reminding them of the situation they’ve found themselves in. Far over their heads, Jensen solves the final dialogue challenge by convincing Zeke of his impotence in the face of the superior power of war, competing ultimately, with technological and economic capabilities far beyond their comprehension, retreating in timid fear of a lower creature back to the unaugmented sewers.

Jensen’s conjecture against them, the superiority over pure humans, is tested in The Missing Link, when Jensen finds himself on the other end, the captive and subject of another antagonizing him. In both of these fights, what occurs is evolutionary competition between organisms. Stripped and forced to rebuild himself, Jensen passes through the various gateways as he triumphs against Belltower, his competitor in the struggle for dominance. By killing Burke in stealth, the achievement is “Apex Predator” as Jensen proves himself the superior being above and beyond Belltower.

Viruses & CPUs

The first encounter with Zhao Yun Ru occurs at the apex of the Tai Yong Medical building, a tower ascending like a flower from the productive substratum of Hengsha. The building is decorated in tune with this metaphor, green and orange with various botanical shapes drawn along its interiors and the only unclouded sunlight of the game being visible from its upper corridors. The new form of life that Adam represents in his namesake, the first of a new type of human, grows from this fertile garden of biotechnology. Upstaging all his predecessors, he proves himself worthy by nature’s test, selecting to the peak of augmented-human perfection.

Zhao is met again at the bottom of Panchea, where she fails, being overwhelmed by the machine she attempts to unify herself with by performing the same integration as the captive human calculators the computer uses. All of these captive humans and Zhao are killed, purged from the system. When Adam achieves the ending, his final meeting is with Eliza Cassan, recognizing her as his only true equal. Both Adam and Eliza have the same fundamental nature in that they remain a whole organism at the peak of their chosen machine. Zhao was purged as a foreign entity, as were the captives, for being only pieces, as expendable as it would be for Adam to replace his arm with a new one. Eliza in the same way, could lose infinitely many devices spreading Picus, computers below her, as long as her central intelligence remains intact. When the Hyron Project purged the flesh invading its body, it did so just as the crazed people in Panchaea desperately tried to purge the invading biochip from their own body, desperately attempting to retain the stability of the unified organism. The next evolutionary step of technology is not, as Zhao sees it, a singularity of all things, but a new type of entity, a biotech animal, evolved and formed by the template that Adam evolved and was formed in the progress of the game.

The Function of the Middle Class

Combining the complexly ordered collection of Bob and Barbara’s hoarding, it’s no surprise that Chris acquired the pathological relationship towards possessions he did. This relationship towards objects however, had another component which informed the intense strangeness of it, that is his autistic typology of personhood. There is an anecdote he gives, where he lost his ability to speak for several years, regaining it via reading the text on the back of a toy’s packaging. This can be read as something deeply pivotal in the structuring of his mind. Reading or watching even a surface level amount of his content will reveal one striking fact about all of it - it is completely informed in its form by media. His comics have odd arrangements and devices, all of which are such through being poor imitations of other tropes of staging and arrangement seen in animation or cartoons elsewhere. His speech is inflected in the same way, with each sentence being noticeably composed so as to be an imitation of a cartoon character’s voice, without real regard to the specificity of that character.

Bob’s career as a mid-level engineer awarded him with a great deal of comfort and status in his local society, the fruits of which can be seen in the parodic views Chris reflected in speaking of politics while he was alive. Bob’s life is one best shown in the funhouse reflection of Kacey’s Father, a character Chris has a phone conversation with in which he is berated using a variety of standard American conservative talking points on the virtue of work and the immorality of Chris’ consumptive life. In Kacey’s Father, is the ethos that sustained Bob, an altogether mediocre and petty man, following it dutifully in wageslavery and reaping the rewards of the American middle class.

For this middle class ethos, there is an equation of consumption and labor that structures their life. Bob and Kacey’s Father balanced the equation perfectly and thus have nothing but contempt for Chris, who refuses to one end of the life, he exists in consumption without justifying himself through work. Many have reacted to Chris with the sentiment that their fascination comes from how easily it could have been them in the sonichu medallion and rugby shirt, displaying the horror of imbalance, the horror of the perfect equation of labor and consumption going out of balance.

Throughout this post, the term “middle class” has been used uncritically, but this is suspension is only in order to let it down easily. In a basic Marxian analysis, the middle class is fundamentally illusory. Still relying on wage labor to sustain themselves, owning no profit-generating property, they are simply a class of laborer fed with excess fats of the wealthiest nations on Earth, giving the delusion to something different from the common prole. Yet their enrichment is not out of some altruistic or accidental means, but rather has a specific function, shown in the other half of the equation. With the actual production being done through colonialism and its attendant slavery (always infinitely more foundational for capitalism than the urban prole ever was), the middle class is often tasked with useless work, managerial or clerical busywork, abstractions upon abstractions of paperwork liked by none. While this often has the basic utility of managing larger economic engines, it has no need to do this. It is perfectly possible to have a completely useless middle class worker for the reason that their true economic role is not production or management, but stimulating capital flow for its own sake. The middle class is encouraged in a way the upper and lower classes are not, to consume endlessly, sold endless piles of products and goods to structure their lifestyle with. Their wages are so high in order that they can go towards purchasing of these goods, thus converting production into liquid capital and stimulating the flow of value by not only giving value to and then discarding produced goods, but also returning value as liquid capital. The middle class exists for this and this alone, as a class of purchasers, tasked with stimulating capital flow, in order to keep the markets of production and distribution generating liquid profit.

Effectionary Morality

Innovating on the common RPG trope of monster drops, Dark Souls introduces the idea of the “soul” as an item released upon death of an enemy. The basic idea of the drop is innovated to its always present conclusion in this, where the item once dropped as the expression of what that monster was in life now literally referred to as it functions, the soul of that monster. The brief description of the attained item gives a thesis statement on the monster encountered as well allowing the player to recreate the essence of that monster for themselves, crafting the soul into a weapon that mimics their attacks.

That the soul produces the ability to imitate the attacks of the monster shows that the soul produces what beget it in the first place. The boss appears to the player and only exists in the context of what the boss does unto the player, ie their attacks. That the soul would replicate the attacks, makes the soul return full around to what originally stated the personhood of the boss to the player, their attacks, their actions in relation to the player.

This is a more radical turn than is understood at first interpretation. The soul post-dates the encounter with the person, the being comes as a result of the becoming. The linkages of this to other thinkers are obvious - identity emerges from performance (one is not born, but becomes, as de Beauvoir said) and thus the personhood is created as an accumulation of all that person is.

The opposite of this is pervasive, the platonic referencing to an ideal or higher realm granting personhood. The idea of a platonic soul appears even in cases where the spiritual is on the surface, dead and removed. Often in debates over moral guilt of those who commit violent and criminal acts, the debate goes between two sides endlessly adjudicating the criminal’s immortal soul. One proposes inborn explanations, biological race, gender, etc, the other proposes environmental explanations, systemic obstacles, mental illness, etc. Both of these are ultimately making the same fault and thus are utterly indistinguishable. Both assume that the victim is tabula rasa an immortal soul which was then degenerated into the being they are now, coming up of theories of why a being would do this thing that most beings do not.

The way out of this debate is to recognize that being only occurs as an accumulation of becomings. The being of an individual to everyone except themselves is a creature made by the effects that consciousness had on the world, a composite images of all the marks they’ve left on everything around them. It does not matter whether the criminal had any motivating factors, because what matters is that they’ve made themselves ontologically immoral by becoming-immoral, by committing an immoral act.

The individual made of becomings shows another radical truth of this - the individual ultimately doe not exist outside of themselves. Their personhood is only real in one way to others, with the consciousness being fundamentally not their personhood, but the conductor attempting to steer the construction of their personhood by dictating its becomings. Contra Thatcher, it is the individual which does not exist, only being a consciousness navigating the great mesh of all interlocked effections and becomings.

Transformotion

Heat forces the segmented chunks into motion, the pieces fighting for control in great cataclysmic dramas. The minerals at play, now in the freemoving play of agitated molecules, soup together to become primitive bacteria, feasting on the floating particles from which they emerged. As the primordial reactions cool into relative stability, the new forms grow out, the basic seed of the family tree of all life, slowly expanding from its deepest roots (still visible on deep-ocean vents, sucking down plutonic gasses) onto the newly solidified continents.

In reading the world around them, the common mistake of the American nature writer, no doubt schooled in all the pioneering sciences of the new continent, is to believe what he sees to be an assemblage of verticalities. This appears in their narratives, tales of audubon-correct collections of sights seen, leaping off the page like listing off a catalogue.

A rabbit nibbles on grass, pressed furtively into the marshloam. Shadows and sounds dance at the periphery of its awareness to the horizon. A raptor soars from the globe-wrapping winds, from cirrus-skies, sighting its dash, descending to bring down forces of beak and talon into its flesh, piercing its skin and dragging it through the ground, settling in momentum with the corpse transmuted to meat. When it returns to the air, successions of consumers take their morsels until the corpse has been reduced to the nitrogen, seeds deposited from the raptor’s winds embedding deep to spring up the next generations.

Beginning in the civilized world, he enters nature removed from it. While in awe, his awe is that of an invader, of an outsider, humbled before the face of a great God before him. As such, his journey into nature is just that - a journey, a passage. He conducts himself as an alien in another’s land. It is for this reason that American naturalism is obsessed with preserving some platonic ideal of the forest, disallowing even limited usage and artificially forcing it to not react or change in tune with the world around it. The consequences of this can be seen in the great Yellowstone fire of 1988, where a crown fire destroyed more than ever imagined by human insistence that no fire should occur in their Garden of Eden.

Vapors collect at the mercy of the wrapped winds, condensing to heavy finalities, cirrus wisps accumulating to stormclouds. When their weight grows too much to bear, their mass descends to Earth as liquid water. Hydrophilia forms puddles, forms streams, wears down channels, inscribing its movement downhill into what it should fall upon. At the terminus, what was stripped from the land and what fell to the ground returns as sand, as mineral, as water, to the watery depths it all emerged from, the beginning, the end.

Platformativity

For the technologically inclined, their life is structured around asymmetrical relationships with a particular dynamic. The singular user is situated below a machine into which they plug. This dynamic informs technological structure. The single user appears again in the form of the client, connecting to the server through the HTTP protocol. The machine to be plugged into opens up as a world, an environment, within which the user slots into.

The user enters the machine in order to engage in mechanisms which the machine offers to the user to input libidinal energies. These mechanisms are platforms, various forms which enable content creation. Content expresses itself through the form of the platform, the website, the trend, the game, the toolkit, etc.

The products of these platforms interact with each other in ways which spawn new mutations via linguistic interactions of interpretation during the user’s reception of the products of their machines. In turn, as new products emerge, the users are inspired to input into higher order platforms with creating sub-platforms of their own. These dynamics can be seen at play in meme culture and in game creation. In both, the original creates a product, the meme shared and read or the game experience, which is consumed and reinterpreted. When this interpretation occurs via an act of writing sublimated into the platform, the platform’s products mutate via plurality of products in one space, thus allowing for mutation to occur.

The question then arises of how these memes turn into platforms or rather function as platforms. The answer lies in the nature of online revenue, which is gained through clicks or ads, the attention economy. Return again to the schema of the user and their machine. The individual user is plugged into a device alien to themselves, sublimating their libidinal energies into a form. By this, the meme itself functions as integral to the platform, as viewing or interacting with it in consumptive fashion requires some amount of plugging-into the platform, even if that plugging-in does not result in production of any tangible results.

Recognition of this has been building in the objective metrics of libido sacrificed to a platform chased after by those who convert these metrics into currency via ancient occult techniques of turning mass libido into monetary liquid. The interlinked social media presences and brand sales of an e-celeb are done in order to make their presence more than mere personhood, but rather a complete machine into which their users can plug hours upon hours of time into. Mobage companies have recognized this as well, seeing the success Touhou Project was able to attain by using its mythological structure to create a platform of infinite interpretation, fanworks are encouraged as the lowest pieces of a vertical structure, for the purpose of getting libido inputted into the gacha game, converted into currency and power for those at the top.

Bones of the Father

The primary preoccupation of the level design of Dark Souls is in ruin, in spaces long after they’ve served their peak. The Darkroot Garden is all that remains of what was once peaceful groves surrounding the city long lost to the Abyss. Anor Londo is empty, populated only by the guardians of its few true inhabitants, whose death triggers the end of the illusory kingdoms they uphold. Izalith, New Londo, and Oolacile appear as ruins, half-sunken in chaotic forces that swallowed their glory. At the deepest levels of the map, the ruins of primordial cradles, the Tomb of Giants where death was born and struck down the first life, the giants, and the kiln of the first flame, the primordial site of origin in the birth metaphysics of the world.

At the end of Gravity’s Rainbow, Slothrop’s disintegration is almost orphic. He returns as a ghostly spectre, haunting the few who can see his personage in the paths they all walk, after he enclosed the mandalic mytharc of Der Raketenstadt’s birth. His self though, dissolves, at the center of the mandala of the text, into the crossroads of 0,0 on a cartesian grid. When the text loops back around, we encounter Slothrop again, a spectre showing the path of the text, the text now a landscape, a world to inhabit, to walk across by the paths he made by his first steps.

Thomas Hobbes imagined the nation as a body, as depicted on the frontispiece of Leviathan. The sovereign is the kingly head of the nation, thus being the personhood of the nation, while its body is composed of the numerous lives and existences within him. The King himself becomes far greater than even an individual possessed with powers over all, but instead becomes the apex of the state, which itself is the head of the entire corpus of the nation.

Composing the institution as a body, heraldry has this same form. Flying over the kingdom, the flag shows the kingdom composed with all its organs, with the vertical heads made to dissolve once again into the overall picture. The stability of the crown dissolves in this as the flag becomes territory, as the body of the king sinks backwards into the landscape to become the nation it once ruled over.

Hitler once made a directive to his architects to construct buildings such that they would decay gracefully. No doubt in his mind, visions abounded of the Hellenistic ruins, now sprung alive with gardens of forest over their cracked marble, the half-ruined parthenon symbolizing the ultimate glory of his thousand year reich.

In the canonical ending, the player of Dark Souls becomes one of many who answered the siren call to link the flame. Taking themselves into the fire, they disintegrate to ash as many after them will. In doing so, they fulfilled their ultimate end as men. When the father dies, his buildings erected, his cities constructed, his name remains as his bones. The masculine obsession with “legacy” is thus, the wish to fulfill the purpose of the height of manhood, to make oneself present to such intense degree, that one can finally annihilate themselves, becoming the landscape they have built, their bones becoming as everpresent as the trees or mountains.

Bringing Forth the Thin White Duke

A common example used to refute the validity of IQ tests as a measure of human worth is the rhetorical on what occurs when those raised in close proximity to nature do in response to some questions. While a more urbanite mind will organize for instance, animals, in abstract categories such as mammals vs reptiles, pets vs domestic, a ruralite will organize the same animals into concretely useful categories such as what predates on another, what begets different resources or results. The test, biased towards a particular type of bourgeois intellect, will bias towards the urbanite in respect to their greater ability to perform intellectual labor such as computation.

This issue shows the marked intellectual difference created in the discursive or mechanical structures of minds reared in different environments. The mind more insulated within human-created entities grows to a new type, a more civilized kind made by, in the lump-state of development, greater degrees of human influence.

The hyper-civilized person is blind to that which the animal-body is immediately open to. The blinding of Thomas Jerome Newton is symbolic of this, brought into cold metal where facsimiles of organic eyes are fused to blind him, making his visage plastic, the button-eyes of Lazarus. There is a different form of sight, eyes turned backwards, unable to view the things of the physical world with the depth of a primitive and instead turned to different, higher frequences of the third eye, that is accessed when this happens.

Such is symbolized in the sealed eyes turning into the station to station mystic insights. At the peak of his civilization, Thomas is transmuted into the Thin White Duke, gaining transcendent insight by being blinded to the lower things of the world. In this blinding, the closed circuit of standard animal-cognition breaks down, the whole psyche of the primitive is fractured in ways unique to those existing in the linguistic density of privilege. The standard schema of an animal, a life based around consumption and excretion, moving from one node to the next of these two, is broken, its totality shattered. The seeping in the cracks of alien forces is sometimes literal, the infamous anecdote of Bowie as the Duke detecting a gas leak at the hair salon, or the experiments proving the ability of schizophrenics to predict the weather by reading data normally hidden by the well functioning psyche.

The Thin White Duke comes into being as the neophyte of transcendence after privilege by this shattering. These cracks are formed by the circuit being unclosed or overstuffed, in ways only capable by unnatural, external forces not known to the lower animal composition of the mental circuitry, forces of intense unnaturality unreachable by those who must make normal use of their animal-circuitry for reasons of poverty. Doing so cracks open the enclosed loop and prepares the individual for not only free movement, but free construction and reconstruction, and in doing so, mystic practice.

A Commentary on the Topanga Canyon Grail Quest

Formalities

Both albums are produced around one occulted axis. Saint John Green was produced while Charles Manson was being sheltered by the LAPD (with probable influence from the CIA) in Topanga Canyon. Death Grips as a whole, especially Year of the Snitch, have always paid heavy debt to Manson in their citations and influence. This would not be so significant had the albums not lined up so ideally in their structure and concerns, forming two halves of the same whole only visible when considered regards to Death Grips’ larger project. Is this an intentional similarity? Most likely not. But the unintentionality strengthens the reading, pointing towards a connection beyond the physical or intellectual realm.

Beware

MC Ride gives his introductory remarks, in tune with his later comments on life as an MMORPG, in the opening song of Exmilitary, Beware. Echoing the same dichotomy of himself in the wilderness in opposition to the city where everyone is “laggy as shit”, he describes himself seeking outside ascendance. Going back to the ebb and flow, the source, the root of all mysteries, etc. These trips to where few have been is the nature of his wilderness dwelling and points to a deeper truth. After the unification by the conquering of Lower Egypt, Lower and Upper Egypt came to be a spectrum of truth. Lower Egypt became the commercial hub, the cities of the fertile delta where the Nile met the Mediterranean and Egypt met its neighbors. Upriver however, in barren desert far inland where few were allowed to travel (or even given reason to suspect there be a reason to travel that far), lay the true secrets, the secret necropolises and temples where the priestly rulers contacted the gods. This notion - that there could be some secret hidden in the barren upriver desert - is vital in its schema. Imagined at the core, there is some singular goal, a portal of some sort to the other world - Manson’s hole to a lush paradise, a grail of a sort. Like the grail as well, the object itself is secondary to the true action, the simple being in the wilderness allows one to find and enter the grail, the hole, the portal and see the source, the ebb and flow, upon high winds.

Make Me Shine As a Testament - Death Grips is Online & Seventh Generation Mutation

Returning to flex on those making it laggy in the city, the audience is addressed in the opening song as the hero speaks to the unenlightened. MC Ride spits out Death Grips over the dispersed horde of fans, “online” in the thousands of memes, “in your city”, a miasma descended over the arena. The speaker of Seventh Generation Mutation comes more directly, saying what MC Ride only says obliquely, “such misconceptions” in reference to the beliefs of the audience, “mutations of a once beautiful race”, in reference to their present condition.

The Path I Find and Claim as Mine - Flies & Canyon Woman

Taking one down to the green canyon, the woman becomes the plot or organization of the disordered collection of redpills in Flies, the guiding siren leading one by the hand to conclusions through the raw material listed in brutish shouts. The Flies have dispersed the corpse of this information and now it must be collected into a narrative, a truth, to lead one by her hand to the goal, the green canyon, the dark skills. The nature of culture is recognized as vitally important for practice here, with the stories and information mentioned forming the ways in which a true path can form, turning the first step of study into the second step of understanding.

Storms that Force the False to Die - Black Paint & Devil and The Sea

At the first the narrative and now the cleansing, purification before entering. Light turns to ashes, the devil stands over the sea rising upon a meadow as the speaker of drops the curtains, soaks in shadows. Black Paint shuts out the world of impurities, reducing all to shadow to retreat internally, to think finally. This purification is an act of self-perfection, turning inwards and away, the hermit becoming free of all detritus, hence “satanic urges”, Satanism referenced being the ultimate selfishness of the greater master morality required to have gotten this far.

Worship is the Way I Ride - Linda’s in Custody & Do You Believe

Trusting leads to control and thus to greater actions - purging herds of stunted cells, nursing the worm until it swells, both spoken of by “we”. The preacher’s final three lines are vital, in summary the red sea parting, the holy grail, and Jonah in the whale - all deeply symbolic passages beyond the others mentioned. Earlier, the nature of language as it relates to mystic matters was dealt with and now the practical considerations of this are brought up. Track two dealt with the nature of language as it relates to how to properly consume and utilize language, while this deals with the nature of language as it can be used. The preacher of Do You Believe screams out to his flock their instructions, casting out the instructions to them to worship, reinforced and repeating patterns of sacrifice to him “you know the drill”. In such cults, as the in the case of the preacher, there is a markedly hierarchical relationship between the leader and the followers, characterized by there being a single way flowing upwards to the leader. “Herds” flock around the speaker, “stunted cells” unable to break out of their slave morality, their lust for a leader leads to only be the weak bowed before the higher practitioner.

Trips to Where Few Have Been - The Horn Section & Help Me Close the Door

At this point, the first transitory section of the albums. Previously, the album was spread open in four songs declaring themselves, largely disconnectedly, the state of things and several axiomatic concerns. This song marks the turning point to the second part of the album, the linearly ordered movement the protagonist takes into some final removal from the world. The decrepit form of the individual rotting in age shows why this must take place. In order to complete projects, that which is diseased and hypertrophied (rotten) must be moved past, ascended from, left behind, in order for real progress to be made in a new wilderness of an underworld.

Feel My Vessel Go Up in Flames - Hahaha & Messages from the Dead

The first step of the descent in burning away, the pulling down. The flames of hell burn one away, dragging one down, as the passions do, dragging one down to seven levels of hell, a wet fuck hole. The first step is an initiatory passion in order to make one fully of the new place in which they enter. By being burned in the fires of passion, they are now charred, reduced to all except that which hell can abide. Thus, they become of hell and not of the Earth, capable now of entering the new discourse of the new realm.

Wastelands With Naught to Call My Own - Shitshow & Goddess of Death

The fires clear to the vast emptiness of a world unexplored, now the wilderness stretches on forever. The passions of lust give way to the unusable chaos of a shitshow, all seems strange to “me”. We’ve been here before, careful not to step on previous friends, the bones of those never to return. After the initial descent, the next step is the lonely journeying, the days in the desert to turn internally and hopefully find something previously unknown, hopefully find a path on which to travel to some higher end.

Rites Begin When the Sun Descends - Streaky & Saint John Green

At this point, a structurally vital song is played. Streaky was the first song released of Year of the Snitch via Youtube video months before the album’s release and Saint John Green bears the same title as the album and artist. The individual concerns in regards to structurally identical premises are explicated thusly, with those songs showing the different and copresent perspectives on the same text, at the level of explicating the perspective itself. From the grime of prostitution and dope dealing metaphors, secondary meanings of the various turns of phrase bury the path the speaker walks in the wastelands outside the city. She’s a walkabout, dream time announced, the mystic ascension occurs in the wilderness, in the place of “streaky on the outside”. As in the walkabout, movement itself (but the path I walk alone) is the way of power, paraglide, surfin’, stun drive, sail, joyride, ghost ride, low ride, fly, all named in quick sequence in the second verse. Saint John Green meanwhile comes to save us and protect us from this dragon - notice the album art. Saint John Green himself is at once the shotgun rider and the savior, fulfilling guardian, savior role so common in archangels and lambs of god in christian theology. Saint John Green forms the path by his protection, by his guidance, the one taken through the grime of Streaky.

Wisdom of the Old and True - Dilemma & Spirit of Now

As shown by the using of the lesser in the techniques of song four, following a figure as Saint John Green is dangerous, without proper consciousness to distance from attachment and proper peerage with the figure in question, being the same plateau of being with them as opposed to following them as a religious leader. The wise practitioner will win their dilemma, the false conversations faced in the strange meetings. Walking through the woods, companionship is found in characters at least on equal level, a spirit, a woman who wouldn’t speak except to declare their mutual hunger (channel bias is used to indicate the speaker is, left and right are equalized for the final lines of the dialogue), the relationship once of the teacher (the common mistake of any low level practitioner, to mistake the first extrahuman presence as their new guardian angel) is now made into that of conversational riddles and puzzles with which to walk as the wilderness. This walking is pathed out via contemplating the solving of this winding relational mazes, being stalked and returning back with violence that seems to come all too naturally.

The Hunger Burns Within My Gut - Little Richard & Love Of Hate

The ode to the solitary warlord, the nature of humanity realized in the practitioner facing their lonesome death in embracing fashion, rising above the delusions of those who pretend to be otherwise. The next doorway is recognized, one beyond the scope of the album, the next ascendance beyond which the scope of the album cannot touch. Little Richard prepares to blow, the last to die does so without life’s light, having long burned all such impurities away.

Past the Point of No Return - The Fear & One Room Cemetery

A ritual is performed, leading to the portal, the one room cemetary, a grave, a doorway, leading beyond. What happens after, what happens outside, the world is stepped outside of as we’re playing with it. Death is recognized as more than mere annihilation. The perspective of the Fear is split, first and third person being of the same, as the speaker steps outside even the boundaries of the self. Such is the nature of this final ascendance, the true step beyond, after which there can be no comprehension by those below. This is the final exit from the prison of the world, from the hell, into the beyond, into divinity.

Beggar on a Bitch’s Leash - Outro/Disappointed & Shivers of Pleasure

The artist is gone, long since ascended, and all that remains is the album. The album speaks directly to the audience, thanking them in a comedic credits sequence and mocking them in an aggressive spit. Silent in one, marked by the instrumental Outro in the other, this is the final section of the album, made up by only one song. The album is now a feedback loop of itself, hollow as its protagonist has left us. The critic hears himself on the track, screaming “why me?” between the mocking shouts against him. The music hall ditty plays out his exit, pure and empty forms of music all that remains.

On Practice

In the final song of Saint John Green, one of those listed is Howard Hughes. In this, there are too many connections not to believe strange things to be at play. The description of the ruined husk of a human in Close to Door matches the physical state of Howard Hughes at this time, who would have been connected closely to the creation of this album by his instrumental part of the WASP aristocracy that was so deeply behind the counter-culture. Who is speaking against Hughes, but Manson, a new breed of actor in the same family tree? Manson returned action against the world of Hughes in his infamous killings, via the line of flight that was MKULTRA, drugs given from the father to inspire his own killing via their unpredictable effects. What was Manson searching for in his hole in the desert? The structure in which one was born is instrumental for it, providing the LSD and ignoring parole violations, yet it must at the same time be transcended. One must flee Topanga Canyon for Death Valley to seek the hole in the desert, as the daughter betrays her father by losing her virginity. Such is the reason behind Evola’s command halfway through The Hermetic Tradition to rip up your books, as after a time the structures learned are of no use. After a time, solidity must become liquid as one becomes a free agent, in order to achieve the same transcendence those before one achieved of their own right.

Abstract Kondoism

Cushions work via a substance-level interplay of positive and negative space. Fibrous positive space exists in concert with negative space around it, so that force applied upon the overall body can be distributed and absorbed. The fibers themselves are partially empty as well, being of light and pliable materials with low density, such as textiles or foam or feathers. The image of the ideal cushion is conjured in the form of clouds, as they appear from the ground, soft and almost liquid bodies of absorption of all “hardness” of weight and force. To the body, this strategic negative space allows for a material which absorbs weight and force brought by the unclean (weighted) human, allowing for relaxation and stillness.

The material-level interplay is done through harmony between negative and positive space, something well documented in Kondo’s account of cleanliness. The focus of her cleaning is to create harmony, through the principle of “sparkjoy”, which goes over each piece present and determines one by one if it is part of the harmony being worked towards.

The ultimate end in this is the state of the cushion, all things being in perfect order to produce a system capable of absorbing and cushioning the weighted body. Kondo recognizes the ideal state of the environment as being, like the cushion, a harmonious single object, a “machine for living” in Le Corbusier’s term. Allegations of fascism abound against Le Corbusier for his supposed fascism, which are in fact, directly on point. Le Corbusier recognized as Kondo did, that the ideal living space is a singular machine and that this machine is only made singular by a destructive cleansing, a purifying of the space to all except that which “sparks joy”.

Le Corbusier is railed against as Kondo was when she recommended that perhaps the hypertrophied libraries of unread and collected junk are not so vital as believed to be, that the fetishes of “high level” consumption, are to be purged. As comfort only occurs through purifying, purity has its greatest enemy in hypertrophic life, which is defended by the forces of hypertrophy. In contemporary society, the force of hypertrophy is extremes of production and consumption, symbolized through “soy”, though perhaps more accurately symbolized through “sugar”. As documented by Mencius Moldbugman on Twitter, the shelves of these people are often overgrown, moreso collections of products that libraries, series and color-sorted hardbacks read once and forgotten, with shallow prose at 20 pt font retelling the same stories again and again.

As minimalists have been noticing subtly, consumption is a false end. Consumption and production are engines of hypertrophic growth of excess, more, far beyond what could be a unified harmony. The praxis of moving towards comfort is a praxis of purifying and cleansing, stripping the machine-for-living of all except its singular harmony, thus creating an ideal place of rest.

This “rest” is revealed through the phrase “machine for living”. The “rest” in question is a state of peace and contentment brought about by perfection of the harmony. Harmony, the music BwO moving through patterns of writing, the qi flow moving in one harmony. Such is the art of Feng Shui, which dictates the forms which the KonMari method must be deployed to seek after. The home is a place of peace through purity, through all things being settled, all flows kept in a single balance.

Writing Music

For most European language, the smallest building block, the letter, has no meaning in itself. Its smaller than its role in any parts. Standing alone, only a few letters can even be pronounced (without modifying them such as making “T” into “tee” or “tuh”) and have no meaning autonomously. The letter is then built from. Beginning with putting it in concert with other letters in sequence, thus forming a standalone object to manipulate (the word). The words are combined upwards still, where the small word is combined and reordered in order to form larger accumulations. Thus we have the way of writing in European languages, where meaning is drawn out of meaningless units and kept in careful harmony and interlocking strength, accumulative sculpting.

With their smallest units of construction being higher than English, Japanese makes an interesting opposition. At the most basic level is a single syllable, which, due to having legibility at its individual level, can be used on its own in a way English letters cannot. This is seen in the onomatopoeia, equivalents for exclamation: “あ” vs “ah”. In English, two letters, which are nothingness on their own, effervescent and meaningless, must be combined to something larger than the sum of their parts, while in Japanese, the single character syllable stands on its own, unable to be broken down any further.

This ties into what Ezra Pound identified in Chinese. Japanese word construction occurs by sequencing these syllables, such as in a strand of DNA, an object made by a linear order, one after the other. Linear constructions can be superseded by non-linear constructions, as in the case of kanji, which carries with it the same ideogrammic form of Chinese. In Chinese, the character has its component radicals which are arranged in orders that determine the meaning of the character by how they are nested and combined into one another.

Pound’s overall obsession with this way of writing a text has wider consequences than Chinese alone. The common way of making art uses the same form, from the development of heraldry, to the works of art produced in formal style before more innovative and abstract or realistic techniques are discovered.

Hebrew uses letters as its foundational root, but leaves parts of them unspoken and other parts left open to link to other texts. Gematria is built into the numbers, allowing recombination into mathematical text by seemingly nonsensical sequences. Further, as the vowels are left unwritten in older forms and in later forms, only written as added marks upon the consonants, the way of reading is written anew with each returning.

Writing is in all these cases, the manipulation of objects. The basic action, combination brings to mind musical modes of expression. Words interact as music does, resonating across voids of asimilarity with each other and thus producing pelasing tones in difference, in contrast, in sequence.

Poison

The alraune monstergirl has seduction via a language known to the makers of intoxicating nectars over the generations. Images of falling back in languid stupors after smelling vaporous emissions from the hookah pipe or burning incense, as the oriental vapors which cause Alice to enter the Campbellian journey section of Madness Returns. It’s no wonder then that the most intoxicating perfumes all have the most direct names. Dior’s Poison, Yves Saint Laurent’s Black Opium. This state of desire, symbolized by the alraune, is worthy of deeper investigation. The kunoichi uses her image cynically to make a “honeypot”, the forbidden sweetness which arouses male passions to fall into her traps. These images all tie back to the floral kingdom, where the alraune finds her inspiration, the curvaceous body emerging from the seductive petals of a flower. No wonder then, does Zizek consider tulips to be an obscenity, to be forbidden from the eyes of children.

As commentators have pointed out, the male drive is excited not by whole bodies, but by assemblages of parts. Linked to the autistic typology of men, which dictates that all things be seen in differences of kind and never degree, desire is for parts as if they were nations. Hence, the common male struggles within each other, tits vs ass men, the object-type of the nation and the desired object being the same in this phrasing.

The monstergirl emerges from the flower, from the body of the scorpion, from the bestial limbs, as a torso and head, as the most essential parts of the assemblage of womanhood. That monstergirls are always imagined as superior in every way to human women is based in the same mechanics of this design. Their physicality is in every way amplified, their limbs symbolic of their incredible powers to excite and draw-in men, superior strength, poison, hypnosis, and once inside, they have abilities to draw out excitation long past its natural span, keeping men in a state of eternal pleasure, artificially supported by various pseudo-medical narratives about nectars and venoms and magic.

That the man has to imbibe to enter the honeypot is the nature of desire. It’s well known that drunkenness excites the self in the same way that desire does, a liquid force sliding one down into an abyssal end. Metaphors of “descent” abound for extremes of sexuality.

What man obliquely recognizes here is that desire is not only present, but a liquid. The second part of this teaching is only recognized by woman however, aware of her own essential emptiness. Taking for granted his presence, the man has no capacity to realize that this liquid emerges from within himself, it being the male essence. Desire is this liquid of male essence being excited, drawn in, by the negative, empty space of woman.

Thus the relationship of the White Tigress and her Jade Dragon. The male, the present, must preserve his own selfhood by restraining from expulsion of his essential force, while the female, the absent, must create her selfhood by drawing-out the essence of man. The two species of male are revealed here, the male open to be drawn out, the male becoming-empty, the Green Dragon (Bull), and the male pure and still fully human, the Jade Dragon (Cuck).