The Capital of Words

The refrain against so-called “rent seeking” always goes the same - I’m sure in the early years, when the development of written language took place there was the cry - but is this really necessary? After all, we can speak perfectly well to each other, why introduce an intermediary? And further before, writers of the pure and original will often state a case to the dawn of language itself, as some obscuring illusion that separates one from the real. A famous anecdote, Jean-Paul Sartre seething at the foot of a tree-stump - but how do I really know who you are?

The real is a concept emerging itself from alienation. The concept of there being some interior missed is one only constructed by a remove from that interior, and to be more radical, is a concept constructed by the very interior. The interior, the “real” is not the thing lost in the move to language, but the thing created for language. By constructing the notion of the real, one withdraws into the private, secondary space of language, by that very distance, speech is born. Hence the purpose of “Truth”, the ever important concept, emerges only as something that one is distanced from. The removal, the separation of oneself from the real is the act of language, to forever dance around, separate, and build second-order systems of reference-to, something that is instantly perceived at the moment of experience.

Language is always superstructural by this, secondary and above. It then mutates, develops orders of itself that then refer to the underlying previous. Written language first emerges as a set of pictograms, numerical dashes, evolving in complexity, as a tool of the leisured and ruling class, calculating economic, military, or mythic matters. It then fell, from its initial minority adoption, its infrastructure descended upon the below until the situation today where literacy is the norm in almost all of the world.

Information networks grow by this mechanism. Speech is interesting, far moreso than the “real”, as it has the potential for unlimited growth. While experience is monodirectional and single-moment, speech is infinite. One human can transmit to another, who can then uptake, reinterpret, pass on or change the message, across each node - each individual. This is the human capacity - to combine, interpret, morph - to create. That the power of “good and evil” was what got Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of the Real is no coincidence. The divide, to appraise, is to invent language, to steal the power that was solely the province of God, as the originator of the “real”.

And so - civilization - brought about by this process of accumulating greater and greater levels of abstractions. Abstractions are fascinating in their ability to talk beyond their supposed direct reference, to talk to each other without any “truthful” reference to the “real”. An abstraction is capable of dealing with itself, as language will always refer to other language, which in turn, will only construct further and further accumulations of language as the ever-growing garden continues to be watered and fertilized by every speaker and writer.

And so too, was capitalism born, as early as civilization was itself. In one of the early issues of American Affairs, an article was published on so-called “grey money”, referring to these anonymous entities, private equity firms, hedge funds, investment groups, that controlled such an outsize portion of the world’s ownership. This is not an accident. Not out of any nefarious accumulation, from an earlier era when economics was more “real”, but out of how capitalism has functioned, always. Capitalism too, didn’t originate alien from some evil wizard or out of any exceptional new era when the steam engine was invented, as many of our contemporary thinkers will say on the question of theodicy, but out of this same process. Abstractions, formulated atop material things. In language, the narrative is more direct, with that of a sole individual first philosopher who decided to abstract the real from the experienced, but identical in economics. Material manipulation, the things of the world processed, harvested, yoked, sculpted, emerged via the same social-linguistic abstraction - now via the abstraction of money or trade, which we foolishly single out as separate from other identical forms of the process of abstraction via social-communicative relations between people. The grey-money often spoken of in anger is nothing new in this regard. Economics in itself, is nothing more than another emergent system, a fruiting body from the mycelium of language, identical to the internet, art, or etiquette.

Arena Nomads

The strange thing about Counter-Strike is that you can strip yourself almost bare - pressing G to fling everything into the air, falling to the ground as an entity, stripping the character to nothing but the knife. In D&G’s Treatise on Nomadology, a section towards the end deals with this concept, that of the assemblage made by weaponry. As opposed to tools, which form an assemblage as part of a larger apparatus of work, where the tool, the product, the raw, the labor relation, etc, all form one machine, the weapon forms a self-contained machine, which operates on the pure principle of its own projection upon the world.

This then creates an interesting situation for the player, where they find their interaction with the world dynamically transformed by their movement through various systems. In Counter-Strike it’s economic, the strategy of full-buy, eco, and pistol rounds making an element of strategy where the player’s assemblage is transformed by their ability to perform within the game. Performance as a pistol is rewarded with SMGs and armor, or with full rifle, etc. In Quake, the environment forms the basis of this strategic manipulation. Duels take place in a game of timing and area control - with all things that make up the player, health, armor, and weapons, being accessed only by moving through certain points on the map, the game becomes one of optimizing self-transformation by controlling the items scattered through the game.

In RTS games, these machines are deployed in the same manner as the formal military does under state capture. The individual soldiers are made into units of a larger mass, deployed towards various goals, often economic. The meta-game of Starcraft is built around colonial accumulation, the one civilian structure being the true heart of the game. One’s army is mere protection as one seeks to continually build more bases and their attendant worker units, in order to continually expand on and on forward. The enemy is an obstacle to be overcome and accidentally win, the strategic goals of war fading behind the tactical goals of economics.

Valorant has gained popularity recently, using Riot’s skill in 5v5 pseudo-gacha multiplayer experiences, adapting the Counter-Strike format to the class based one. They try, but can’t quite recreate it, and the basis of that is in the foundations. The class system is itself an ecclesiastical one. Whereas the strategy game refines the weapon-assemblage into a piece, manipulated by the player in their role as the totally-controlling state, the class based game is an ecclesiastical recreation of the nomad experience of Quake and CS. In Team Fortress 2 or Valorant, the player is defined by their relationship to a supertext of roles, roles chosen before the game even begins, the class/character select screen being presented at the start of every round. Here, we have predestination of course, but more than that, we have the affixation of peoples so common to institutional languages. The Pyro and Heavy are signs which one molds oneself to in order to fill opportunities descended from Heaven, roles coded in latin, the AK47 and the M4A4 are coded in the vernacular, tools that form a unity with the player.

Team Fortress 2 players have plenty of ecclesiastical concepts of duty around this. The Pyro is often a contentious place for its difficulty in fitting into these traditional schemes. Most duties in classes are sourced from their purpose in directly seizing the game’s objectives. If a certain pious subset of the playerbase were to get their way, the game would be minus the Sniper, Spy, and Pyro entirely - perceived as being either useless or individualistic hallmarks of players from a lesser, more nomadic class of game. Mains of these classes are often forced to prove themselves, the Py-Bro as a sort of gimped-medic that exists to help the Engineer, or the endless walls of text produced by Sniper and Spy mains regarding their usefulness to the team. All of this is besides the point - the basis fo the matter is that the three outsider classes will never be accepted - after all, their playstyles all reflect something dissonant to the substance of the game, the brutish repetition of labor towards objectives that makes up the coveted worship of the Church’s preset castes.

Call of Duty and Counter-Strike make for an interesting comparison of the opposite. Call of Duty gives weapons in a proletarian fashion, one simply works at the “grind” and is rewarded. Weapons are chosen at the beginning of the game, earned from working through a progression ladder that’s climbed via rote repetition of the game. What Call of Duty offers is a fantasy, a commodified, structured, fantasy of the martial competition of games which offer a weapon assemblage dynamic to the player’s worth within the game. Counter-Strike on the other hand, is the aristocracy of the wilderness. Weapons are bought from kill-rewards, ones heightened for risk taking, for working as a team, for taking on extremes such as using worse weapons to achieve greater results. It’s telling then that the Call of Duty community is obsessed with imaginary systems of rules to increase “fairness”. The gamer wants a system, a perfect machine they can slot their vitality into that will deliver them up the chain flawlessly. Call of Duty players are known then for their hate for anything beyond, micro-communities of different playstyles endlessly accusing the other of pseudo-cheating for winning or gaining “unfair” advantages. For Counter-Strike, playstyle fights are always punching down, an extension of the rigid selection systems in place already. The most mocked are not rivals to the various ways to grind the latter, but those who play badly, off the highway down dead-end sideroads, the Tec-9 and P90 spammers. 

Ultimate Practice

A recurring theme in science fiction or fantasy is the genre trope of a more advanced race with some form of noosphere above them, a telepathic network by which they all communicate and achieve harmony with each other. This works in both directions, the Zerg version of an alternate, insectoid strain in evolution where a humanity-possessing species came into being in the form of hiveminded raw biology, and the Protoss version, where an advanced species has turned into the biological priests of a technological superstructure that supersedes them completely.

The Terran counter-example here of courses uses typical anthropoignorance, where authors forget that they themselves are an organism in total continuity with their technology. Humanity has all of this in spades, with the electricity, written or spoken language, economic systems, etc, making up the same function as the magically simplified psychic systems of the other two races. The idea that humanity does not have the same thing in themselves is from the twofold error of only interpreting the things of the other as being othered in their conception (ie, a Protoss would experience all things of the world not as “X” but as “Protoss-X”), thus making a sort of objectification of all things done equally by all species into only unique to them. This error occurs as an inverse of the error of self-conception in individualistic humans, wherein one cannot perceive oneself as being anything other than an individual floating in a sort of absurd vacuum, not as a part of the larger systems - the classic shock and awe of freshman year debates on free will.

The concept of “total war” was rediscovered just as it was being lost when war, inevitably, emerged under the same laws it had always followed. Previously, war was never considered sovereign beyond the regular state of things, as some separate theatre of political pomp, until the great era of separations after industry began to take over. Several ideological processes undergirded the enlightenment, the most important of which was secularization - not the process of making the sacred no longer that, but apposite - making the profane ecclesiastical. The nation-state emerged as a consolidation of the King’s superstructural central authority, growing to a whole system of superstructural orders emanating from the central authority, across the land, drawing firm national borders, stratifying power, enclosing land into legally ordered plots, etc. All of this was to construct a similar order to that of the church, a discourse which determines the map of the territory. In doing so, the map and territory were brought into sharp focus in a way never done before, where now the consciousness of oneself as territory made an alienating effect. The various movements of legal counter-facts around the world, the Russians who proclaim themselves Soviets, the Germans who proclaim themselves Imperial, the Americans who proclaim themselves Revolutionary, etc, there’s a concept of two selves, the legal fiction of the self and the actual self. There is some truth to this - the self as a part of the state’s discourse is a part of the map, while the actual ego is a part of the territory - forming just that dissonance, often bleeding over when associations are made with others as territory itself, seen in the American tendency to obsessively construct their opponents as “establishment”.

Total War then, was a new concept, as it brought into sharp focus a reunification after the cleft, where map and territory were made complete again. The functions of state had their discourses reduced to the raw systems of political-economy that the state has always functioned as, people found themselves reduced to their place in the truer discourses of self, ethnicity, language, gender, religion, where nation didn’t suffice. It was in the second world war when the last gasps of this were felt by Westerners, when all sides of the war returned to the fact of combat that modern states so often shun - that civilians are no less a part of the thing you’re attempting to inflict damage upon than the so-called “military”, that the difference between the two is of fleeting context.

In later “wars”, though I feel that’s too weighty a word for what often occurred, when a colonial galavanting collided with quasi-genocide, such as in American Vietnam or Soviet Afghanistan, there was a conflict often between the false husks of humans at the top, those unable to comprehend anything but their bishopric, the generals and intelligence agents, would balk in horror as war emerged on a tactical level, for the Kurtz and Balalaikas of the world. Their “country” abandoned them, because what else would it do? They descended through history into war, while their country only wanted intelligence gathering and police action. It was they alone who truly committed war and they were punished for it, as war was never what was wanted.

As long as the Geneva Convention is followed, war is not. After all, what is that, but the empty words of a select few nations, all in alliance with each other? A war is a game of force to make political-economic goals realized. For the upholders of empty documents and moralities, distinctions between civilian and military casualties, between justified and unjustified force - war, when it comes, as it always does, as a rending season of evil that descends and passes every few generations, will come like the Italians experienced the French invasion in the late 15th century, where the hardened brutality of soldiers trained in war met the empty pomp and theatrics of soldiers trained in parades and duels.

Treasures of Jade and Philosopher-Stone

Most intimate to the player is the season of Spring - the world forms, often in a lush green, rarely overgrown or frozen or desiccated, resplendent and peaceful. Monsters form naturally as if from the Earth, sometimes literally, as nightfalls and the darkness of the caves below the grassy firmament rise upwards to attack the player. The Season of Wood, presided over by the Azure Dragon, the color of life, in freshly growing plants and jade, in creepers. The form of life opposite the player from this is the Testificate form, villagers and illagers making an immediately accessible conflict of species known. Their architecture is similar, above-ground overworld structures with social hierarchies implied in the construction, often made of wood and nearby materials. Agriculture grows as it does in the spring season of sowing, cut wood, sheep’s wool, bales of wheat, small gardens of vegetables forming the architectural foundation for their lives. They engage in war in a primitive way, one group living in peace and the other marching out in an innocent, savage way. They live as early civilizations never burdened with language, carrying mutely on the functions of organization like children at play.

The Vermilion Bird presides over fire, the stifling heat of summertime produced not by the fact of summer, but by passion - the heat and life of motion excited in the manner of aroused bodies, plants growing far outpace of their bounds, jungles abounding in even Northern climates for a brief window of months. The pig was once mistakenly made with its Y and Z values inverted, creating the mutation for the creeper. The pig provides the linkage into the Nether, a realm of timeless violence. Flesh of the pig, the lesser form of the human, takes on a humanoid form, where man uncovers savagery. The lava makes a haze like a bloody meridian, one has to descend, living off thrown gold and wild swings of the sword. All of it’s consensual, as where else does a lust for life lead one? Destruction occurs after-the-fact of great exertion of vitality, the empire expanding so fast and joyously entire continents are burned in ecstasy - Nero’s famous lyre being only an imperial ethos turned inwards. Destruction is a whirlwind of ecstasy as it spins out from the self and strikes everyone else, as the one inside is laughing. The nether and its inhabitants are in pain, but fire laughs. Fire is passion ignited, like sexual arousal or a lusting anger.

Autumn, the season of metal. When frost creeps in at the edges and borders of the explosive life of summertime and the world silences to prepare for the long season of winter. Death comes inevitably and bodies must return to the base matter, reduced to the leaden soil of Saturn in absolute darkness, in order to be the raw matter of the next season of rebirth. Not that this is much solace of course, as the creeping chill of autumn is nothing but terrifying and only leads to terminus for all suffering it. As the player digs and builds into the world, they uncover more and more ruins. The first proper structure added was the dungeon, a single room, made of mossed-over, long crumbled stone, with treasures and mindless flesh breeding inside it. After this, came the abandoned mineshafts and strongholds - more remnants, old buildings, long rotted and now populated only by death, metallic cutting edges and falling orange leaves, turning to brown and then soil on the ground. It’s said that the White Tiger only appears when absolute peace and virtue reigns over the land - after all, once the peak is reached, the only direction to go is down.

The Black Turtle rests at North, presiding over the darkness of water and winter. Look down from your boat, into the ocean, see the chthonic depths below. It turns to darkness quickly, as you sink, even more black than night, until the depths become so crushing... We imagine shadow to have the quality of water, as we go further into an abandoned building we “sink” and the darkness is supposed to envelop, swallow, consume us. None of this happens of course, but we can’t help but feel it. Maybe there is some memory, of the water the ocean is an eternal gradation downwards, like winter deepening colder and colder, layers of ice encasing, stilling, preservation at depths. The Guardians of the Ocean Monument make their primary goal to protect the Monument itself, to act as its namesake, still beneath the water. Mining is slow beneath water and the player is further impeded by being at risk of drowning while they cast a fatigue effect. Some question if the Guardians are alive at all, or if they’re some form of stone automaton, a life-form made akin to a golem of non-cellular matter. The ocean is a terminal point for those living in it, wide basins of existence distinct from the rest of the world beyond itself, a preserved world that slows until a deathly stillness. Towards the surface, ghosts rise and dolphins attempt to help the player scram from this kingdom of unlife.

Transcendence happens in stages. A few artefacts that we all know come into possession, the Totem of Unlife, the Heart of the Sea, etc - but what truly is the final prize of the game? Transcendence. Alchemy’s pursuit of the same in all places speaks to the same need, the one magic fulfills, to transcend the mundane limits. The Yellow Dragon of the Center, the one presiding over Earth, occupying the 0,0,0 position in the diagram of the five classical elements. A black dragon rests at the base of the game, activating the credit sequence, when The End is “freed”. This is only a pretender, after all, is the author anything but a function? Transcendence - maybe you taste it when the dragon bursts into 65 levels - the dragon sure thought it had done so, before you came along. Maybe you taste it in borderline creative mode Elytra flying, cheating death with a totem, breathing underwater. In these moments - and they are moments, never fully inhabited, but passing peaks of experiences - you become the author, the Yellow Dragon. But only ever a taste, a brief visit to the throne, before the revolution unseats you and you’re forced to once again claw down the gates and break into the palace in the endless cycle of struggle for those brief, timeless instants where you are the Earth, the center, the Emperor...

Human Organisms

Like the rings of a tree, architecture stratifies in strange ways to form a neat timeline of people and place. An American small town, the downstreets of the main come up towards the tail of the gilded age, the Old West-ish main nestled between a two story canyon. Extending beyond are the post-war boom years, when the nostalgic childhood homes spring up on wide-squared grids of streets, each plot of two car garage going on in sequence until it just sort of... ends. Far enough into the Sisyphean black hole of uncovering their timeline and you’ll find old ownerships, old locations, packed-up and sold farms and businesses, that dot the landscape beyond the borders, a demand fired once and never again. Maybe children find the old field, or hunters down an old logging road and there’s a large square hole in the ground where the foundation of a farmstead used to be dug, in a five acre rectangular clearcut being taken over by shrubby trees and tall grasses. The forest too, young and brambly, even further journeys afield beyond the tangle of two lane highways and small outpost-towns dotting the colonial interior being required to escape the five o’clock shadow land shaved and cleared day after year after decade.

For the children of these towns, video games descended as if from Heaven. In 1979, few except the hardliners of DT Suzuki’s bastard societies could even find Japan on a map, and those who could scarcely could without making a crack referring to Pearl Harbor. By 1990, Japan was a promised land. They still couldn’t find it on a map, but they knew it was some fairyworld, where technology (in this context meaning toys) were “years ahead” whatever that means.

Meanwhile in Japan, that aforementioned technology was developing a world of its own. In LaMarre’s The Anime Ecology, he puts forward the thesis analyzing the narratology of what was exported to the west as “anime” - a truer descriptor than exists in Japan, for the wide umbrella of a certain form of media that developed as an expression of technology itself. As consumer electronics grew an entire interlinked world of devices and appliances, so too did media grow to include it. What happened at the arcade connected to the television, to the DVD, to the internet, to the home game console, to the plastic merchandise, and from this there grew a genre native to this tangled web of mediums, that of the broad world of otakudom. 

Another decade later and this culture began to slowly trickle across the Pacific ocean into America. First through the usual pan-pacific channels, video pirating networks catching signals in San Francisco (Otaku no Video took care to find one), snippets of conversations in Hawaiian bars with the loneliest member of a company outing, and then backchanneling around the Ring of Fire’s Japantowns, via the internet. The connection to Japan is incidental, anime could have emerged from any nation in the world, had that nation been the pioneers of the ecology LaMarre identified. It was thus via the rhizomatic spread of this network of devices and appliances over the globe, that a peak of saturation was reached where the things native to the network become memetic upon it. Otaku culture was uprooted and planted in the now firm soil of online, where it was only a matter of time for it to propagate to the now very deeply dug Earth of the United States. Christopher Poole copied the source code for the imageboard and the rest...

In a strange way, you can track the spread of techno-media by what is loved and where. Media often comes secondary in popular consumption, to the technology available for it. Media after all is only good as long as there’s a digital slot for it to plug into. Many histories could be written here, the deeply buried fungus of post-Soviet Source Engine culture, the last video store in the world, where a fat teenager dances to nightcore in raccoon eye 2007 makeup, the Bay area pseudo-cultures of media, its fandoms, and its discourses...

Architecture and subject are unified in this dance between each other, where they mold each other into a complementary organism. Like a termite mound or ant colony, footsteps make “elephant paths”, where the concrete is skipped in favor of a shortcut through the dirt. At the same time, behavior adapts to environment, as is written about with the brutalist redesigns of college campuses often being in order to engineer social environments away from any social interactions and towards a sort of collected-solitude among the students. 

Things that are built always come after the fact of their causes - to look around and see the stock exchanges crop up around maritime western Europe, you would find yourself already under the well-dawned sunlight of capitalism. Processes form fruiting bodies, akin to mycelium, from their actions beneath the surface. The human subjects within this substratum simply cause the emergence of the fruiting bodies, the architectural manifestations of their already-present actions.

The city makes itself known as an organism in this sense. A history can be drawn of every settlement, of the flows which birthed it, as process confluenced upon a single point to create the thing now standing, the brick and mortar like tracks in the grass, concrete markers of what the patterns were, what shape they took, what was done here.

It’s then in further evolution that the next generation subjects exist within. The feudal castle gave birth to the haunted house and we found an empty-space to channel our dead and demonic. The downtown gave birth to a generation of flight, emptiness, and then return as those now suburbanized returned to make the metropolitan center fitting to their folksy sensibilities and commercial economic life. The historical record, the skeletons of now-dried up riverbeds are then terraformed by each subsequent generation of floods to make a process of accumulation - one that can be seen in the term in Ancient Near Eastern archaeology (perhaps others, but I’ve only studied ANE) - “tell”, referring to the layers of civilization past that lies beneath the streets of every city living or dead in the region, buildings and streets almost always retaining the exact locations as old with each fine layer of compacted detritus.

It’s these tells, like rings of a tree, that give the story of a place. The story of an organism, of a wide flat plain eroded into glacially shifting canyons by the ever-changing floods raging down from the mountaintops.

Lightning in a Bottle

Snow is falling, gentle fat flakes from a white haze of sky onto the gentle ebb and swell of hills rising from the intercontinental tundra. The sky is northwards forever. I look up into it in reflection, sipping black coffee before the great window-wall of the building. Jutting from the ground, the facility emerges from permafrost jagged and glass-like. All black, except for the square end of the shard that opens up to a great glass wall, where light pours in from the north over the snow and sun, into the brut office constructed for me. 

Preservation is a watchword of the day. I’m all alone on a highway, six months previous, listening to the radio. I was where the hosts are rounding about to months ago, not that I would be allowed to speak of it. I pull into a gas station where soggy paper blows across the winter slush to my feet, crunching under the salt and sand, my own lips touching cold metal with a instant guilty bite as my tongue touches refrigerated cold. I finish it halfway back into the city. Research trips are always unpleasant, hoping to get a good nap in under the city lights to wash the taste of the nation’s white-primitives out of my mouth.

There’s an email to attend to once I get back to the office. Helvetica, 12 point, as is standard. Some place use arial, not that anyone except I can tell the difference, cultured deeply as I am into those little advantages not afforded lightly. I get another sip of coffee, looking over the carefully typed paragraph, somewhat between a memo and an order. Preservation, preservation. Information as well, keeping it safe though is talked about far more than gathering it these days. In my apartment I have an image of a dozen or so men in outdoor gear standing in some distant location, smiling, holding their equipment. It’s all obsolete now, the few suckers who get shanghai’d down to the south pole, the last frontiers where it hasn’t all been mapped out like the rest, at such a pace to busy entire buildings in cataloguing it.

I was once taken on a trip to see my friend, northeast of the city, where the money lives. He was old, not even American despite being here for generations to monolinguality, buttoned down in a banker’s suit. The structure was underground, inside a sort of Versace golden recreation of a hellenic villa, windowless, marbled stone, polished reflective on all side of me. Here there was only ink black and every shade of gold between yellow and brown. Security was immense, men were standing guard equipped in the way of soldiers outfitted fresh every six months, on the cutting edge of laser-rimmed eyes piercing me as I was led past a flank of submachine guns into vaults, vaults within vaults that he could only show me on a computer screen on a mahogany desk that itself was buried deep as though it were as precious as the interior’s contents.

We produce ninety-eight degrees of heat every second we live. In abstract, we produce exponentially more. I browse the halls of a server dungeon, glassy sheer surfaces in a winning battle of their heat against the super-frozen water pumping through their veins. I sit in a plane and look down upon the world where smog coats the city palpably, a fog thicker than fog, heat islands and car exhausts pumping out radiating waves of our heat into space. If there is life on the moon, we’re like a lover to them, burning to the touch, nestle up against us in the cold night, lord knows we’re putting off enough heat to forget the big empty beyond.

Heat destroys energy, practically speaking. Not truthfully of course, energy cannot be destroyed, but it’s obvious what’s meant. After heating, it spirals off, careening through the void to nothingness, until we eventually hit the terminal cold, where all is still particles floating isolate in nothing. I think about it often. My body radiates heat beneath my quarterzip into the arctic air and I think about it, the permafrost melting and all I see... that Windows XP screensaver, the one that simulates flying through space with white dots on a black background? I can’t stop watching the center. We use a proprietary linux build here, but I can’t stop looking into the face of terminus.

When I’m home, in a minimally appointed home, snow is falling outside, in gentle crystalline flakes. Every one is a unique sparkle of art that shows brilliant under a microscope. Every one hits my upper-floor downtown window and melts from the radiance of heat inside my apartment. The pattern is destroyed and the energy is lost to the void. I sit in an Ikea couch and watch the city blurred as my vision focuses on the window, only a scant reflection of the dim lights I have burning at this time of night. My computer is vibrating along the floor across the carpet. The heat can be heard in the walls. I look to my Rothko and back to the window. I am alone.

Travis & Bubbles Buried in The Jungle

A spectre floats over a niche online community, a lost work desired. Lost media is strange in this same way always, the very absence of the thing at the center of all discourse being the function of it, producing desire through a quest to search for it. Such often produces narratives of memory from it, spurning out its own niche of psychologically identified tales, such as shown in the Candle Cove fiction.

In particular, I’d like to make a case study of Go For a Punch or Saki Sanobashi, an either fictitious or so obscure as to practically fictitious eroguro anime from the pre-internet years of otakudom. Supposedly a lost short animated film that was found by a 4chan user on the Tor internet, it depicts schoolgirls trapped in a bathroom - nine of them, one with a white hime cut -   killing themselves after some drama occurs which drives them to suicide by methods such as braining themselves on the plumbing fixtures.

Its eluded its searchers since it was rumored to exist, to the point of developing schisms as the conflicting desires of the search go in different directions. Fanart is produced, making the thing exist if not as a VHS tape from the 1980s, then as a product of a search for the absent.

Eroguro typically works from the premise of Saki Sanobashi. Girls are divorced from the usual purity associated - the main character identified as having the anti-subtle hairstyle of a white hime cut - and left to be brutally torn open in the raw desert. The bathroom is never found, the parents withheld from the girls, searching, hoping to find them. The bathroom now forms a pocket of the wilderness, knives and animalism taking hold of the girls as their bodies become primary once again.

Quite a bit of pornography works on this basic storyline, of the Id’s total triumph. Pornography first begins with an exaggerated performance - the acting of porn isn’t so much a fault as it is the purpose, a foundational act to what occurs, where armor is rendered into metal bikinis and plumbers into greasy dago studs, performance being raised to a hyperreal intensity of itself. The gendered performances are embodied more fully than normally possible, by constructing a hypergender above and beyond the typical performance. A man becomes Delaney’s Hogg, his usual affirmations of the raw and brutal nature of manhood raised to the extremes of the concept. A woman becomes a whore, her costumes remade into slutty recreations of the old mask, more vibrant, colorful, flashier, showing more skin. A third gender is constructed often as well, in the strange space where it’s always implied in normal life. What is simply a weak man normally becomes a sissy and a cuckold, a lesbian becomes one of the boys in her musculature and possible hermaphroditism.

Hypertrophy is of course never neutral. The particular line taken can vary wildly depending on what is seen as the particular components to be hypertrophied in this process known often as “corruption”. Some darken the skin, plumpen the lips, exaggerate the curves and muscles and genitals, add tattoos, destroy the body or mutate it beyond human form, colonize it with insects or wicked technology... all of these paths being taken depending on the interpretation of what the performance is before the corruption begins. The interpretation of the nurse, as an play of matronly love, or as a play of disciplinary control, or etc, will all set up different pieces to become hypertrophied in the making-sexual of the performance.

The process of making-sexual is always alien to the performance itself, as my language thus far has been implying. Yet its always done as a deeper seed of life than the performance itself, a warring triumph of the id over the superego. No wonder then, that defeat is so often eroticized, in the ancient storyline of the feral barbarians overtaking the virginal feminine of the superegoic interior.

And this giving-in process, forms the basis of becoming-sexual, wherein the Id is made to reign over the Superego, the Ego - imagine the drama stylized in the cuckold drama. The weak young man, dressed in the finest uniforms of his place in the world, is shown for what he is - nothing more than a paper tiger. The feminine he courts decides to abandon him and open the door for the feral unknowable, the Freudian correspondence speaking for itself.

The first Death Grips album is steeped in the 1960s. Aside from a few mentions of items like MDMA, samples from surf rock or the first Pink Floyd album underly lyrics regarding a primitivization of the self. The speaker becomes like the man running in the desert in the Beware video, the naked and ungroomed man posing for the cover art. No shock, as the drama of the decade was through the shattering of an illusion of a superegoic order. Without an underlying material reality, the pretending that God wasn’t dead in the barbiturate haze of the post-war era ended with dual attempts, to either continue up and up and ascend to a new plane of consciousness, or to descend, to become feral as Tiger Force in Vietnam, Charles Manson in the desert, the revelers at Altamont and Woodstock and the Summer of Love.

Eroguro provides an interesting confluence in bringing together libido into one act, both sex and violence unified to work upon the body in question. The young girls in Saki Sanobashi, performing purity in their serafuku and traditional hairstyles, have their being worked upon from within. All violence is self inflicted as part of the situation, where the bathroom acts as the greater mechanism of making them become-sexual, the self being hypertrophied in its expense of energy, the act of braining oneself on a faucet no different in function from ahegao’ing while psychotically riding an ugly bastard’s cock.

The question then of desire and its origin is one that’s lead into a maddeningly simple aphorism. Hypertrophy occurs by that within being awakened to overcome the carefully fragile systems above itself, like Agent Orange soaking into organic material and overdriving it to grow itself dead. The identification of desire with the wilderness, as something exogenous to the self constructed in early life, and yet unignorable as being infinitely more primal than it, dovetails - desire is nonconsensual and yet will always be a source of some of the truest embodiments of the self.

A Pattern Language

Minecraft building practice is often surreal and uncomfortable to look at. The game works in 3D space, with the smallest unit available to all construction being a cube. The basic unit of sight is always divided likewise into this individual cubes, which then project their being in six directions from each face. As such, Minecraft constructions cannot have meaningful connections along anything beyond a two dimensional axis. For instance, a single block floating in a void at 0,0,0 can be connected to via adding one to any two of these coordinates. An addition at three creates a strangely jarring effect, where the block is both paired and unpaired, the connection to it is a three step process to add an additional pair of blocks between to connect 0,0,0 with 1,1,1, yet the human eye perceives some vague connection at the same time as the mind interprets a disjunction.

It’s these two factors which create the first jarring element of Minecraft building. Many major projects, the top rated on sites like Planet Minecraft, “epic” castles and the like, suffer from a strange effect where even close up, they look more like magic eye puzzles than buildings, a jarring visual noise of differently colored cubes all arranged in a chaotic soup of shape and color. These buildings form into this way by building backwards. Many of them attempt to imitate real-life styles, which are typically not suited to a world where the smallest practical unit of measure are cubes half the height of a human being, and thus are forced to perform strange operations that result in an unpleasant noise that looks like nothing at all, where every last block of a wall has some addition or subtraction, different blocks are used in conjunction, every single line is some form of a diagonal, items like stairs or pressure plates cover the landscape like a visual vomit...

From this emerges another strangeness, where the buildings become totally divorced from the meaning of their structures. Walking around many of these structures, one sees anvils as fences, pressure pads as tables, etc. Very few of these techniques create the desired effect, where again, the builder has worked backwards to fit the square peg of their intended design into the round hole of the world of Minecraft.

Few structures break this mold, the ones that do being instructive. 2B2T bases as they’re called carry this torch, one seen in singleplayer creations only a rare few times in projects such as Lumina Nocturnale. The game builds itself more akin to real architecture here, where the formations of the game inform the buildings created - notice the simplicity of lines, and the at least basis in economic utility of the layouts. All 2B2T bases are built at the very least with often clumsy to use dupes, if not through brute force collection of masses of resources.

Architecture is never rootless, as these examples show. Minecraft buildings either form out of the game or are an attempt to form a structure into the game, but either way, are processes of emergence from within the game’s systems. Architecture always works by this negative process of formation, where strands are drawn together by subtle hands.

Every style shows this, with the style of practice emerging over time as the manifestation of the needs, akin to the unconscious formation that any other organic structure, such as a tree, river, or ant colony takes. The motte & bailey emerged in a society built in the ruins of an empire, where the old roads still connected but there was no central hegemon or a throne of a hegemon to vie for, leading to disparate settlements with horizontal relations to each and thus always at the risk of banditry and war. Contemporary glass & steel rectangles came about as cities grew in density of capital, transportation by train and car allowed for urban density to become vasty wider, leading to more horizontal segregation among activities. Office towers were born, in neighborhoods that became single-purpose destinations for work in things which exist in the cloud - literally in the sense of modern computerized work, or figuratively, in the nearly identical tasks performed on typewriters before the internet.

A game’s architecture similarly will show everything there is to know about its mechanics. Minecraft is a game of manipulating the world and a lot can be known about a person by the nature of their base, from the utilitarian complexes of Feed the Beast players, to the isolated projects of builders, to the vast grinding-hubs, all of it shows particular ways the individual chooses to impress upon the world. Other games work similarly. Shooter games like Quake and Counter-Strike are worlds of hallways, corridors divided by doors and corners, a theatre of experimentation on sightlines. Mario 64 levels are wide flat planes with a series of playground like simple machines on them, for the player to use the simple movements and run and jump upon them. Examples could be made going on and on, in how this reading-backwards can be used to divine the mechanical foundation of what created a static structure.

Architecture exists here - not in the experiments and grand designs of individual architects, the privately commissioned mansions of the wealthy, cutting edge experiments of artists, but in what emerges. What practically forms the common home, workplace, farm, etc, the layouts that emerge from society. Artistically constructed architecture always has a problem of being more like statues that human beings happen to exist in, much in contrast to the world of architecture that emerges from the process of living itself. It’s in examining this, the character of architecture as the emergent language of a society imagined as an organic being, that architecture begins to reveal its power to teach about the hands that made it. 

Glass Half

It was the first term of Obama, under a frigid sunlight, maybe those doldrum times where March stagnated with slush half frozen and half-thawed beneath unseasonable shoes and craggled tires. I pulled up to the house under pleasant circumstances, situated as it was in plot once cleared for farming, now left to overgrow with waving grass and the slow sprinkling of rust flecking off abandoned tools. The house, wood, was the sort of building that only ever enlivened as it decayed, slumping down comfortable-like to become more of a hobbit hole as the elements heaped dirt and time upon it, giving it the air of an old man well deserving of rest, dispensing poetic words from a heap of blankets and sweaters.

In the living room, a couch looked the same, the figure in it slumped like a smoothed rock in cloud-like pillows. Upon it - a Windows Vista laptop, wireless mouse resting on the cushion under her hand, rapidly moving across the screen. Two Internet Explorer windows were open, each covering about three-quarters of the screen, one on Facebook’s home page and the other on Bejeweled. Noises glittered around over the sound of crushing and matching atop strangely bland images of distant planets.

Beneath the television was a Wii, all bright, with Wii Play, Sports, and Resort attached. Above it, the flatscreen was playing Gaga’s cavorting ritual-like, almost an invitation to her world. The room, white emptiness surrounding power condensed to tiny crystalline gems, a single chandelier in an airline hanger, gold draped from her body, sequin dusted over her skin as she glided inhuman-like in a world between worlds. Gaga was inviting us. I watched on the other side of the couch, wondering where this was the Black or White Lodge - or if that distinction was even real outside the old fashioned morality plays our older siblings grew up on.

Dinner was being put together in the kitchen as the couch was left to my devices. Distant-aunt was busy showing off her petty wins from the Indian casino, passing out little electronic games from her trip through Walmart, her livelihood of crumpled papers all along the passenger side of her Lincoln Town Car. His-sister was at the other side of the counter, papers pushed aside to make room for strange antiques and gadgets found at auction from a nearby desperate liquidation. I ignored the noise and the orange of burning secular candles, to push the cushions aside, hands held together like an Olympic diver, spreading a passage for myself between the cushions, into a dark. The fit was tight, warm and smothering as I progressed deeper, though I never felt stuck. I didn’t notice when the entrance sealed up behind me, all of that covered up with an unconscious knowledge that there was no point in even holding onto a thought of coming back the way I came.

A time - it felt long and I can’t say beyond that - later, I was in darkness, floating amidst the twilight zone spectacles of bioluminescent predators, occult eels and jellyfish, forbidden megafauna, my arms and legs flailing all about myself in dense water. I was propped up by it, suspended. This couldn’t be the ocean, I was neither freezing nor sinking nor crushed, a womblike floating.

Despite this, it was anything but. There were no wombtones to be found amidst the darkness, it was all lunar blue and shadow of nothing, if this darkness was feminine at all, it was in the infertile, witchy sort, the kind girls mature into, not the kind children are beget from.

I’m brought back to life, opening my eyes blearily. I’m wrapped in tundra clothing, of the kind that a human wears until it becomes an extension of their being, turning them into a hulking giant of the Far North. Scattered through the blue interior of the shelter are ancient bones from undersea demigods, the whales we worship, on whose rough skeletons we acquire rocks where myths are glyphed in languages impossible.

I learned to write when they taught me to read the stars. Out here, we don’t need fire. The ice and us had an understanding, as we walked on through lights and countless miles, that by the time we reached our stillness, it treated us like stones. We passed around pipes that put us to deep dreaming sleep, atop the ice sheet, looking upwards to Heaven, an abyss of magic below and the runic roadmap of the celestial firmament above.

When I returned to America, I did it Southerly, from Alaska’s trashiest hideaways - I pretended I was born there - down, down, through the darkest shadows of truck stops and dead hooker motels along the detour roads a few miles inland from the pacific coast. I dodged every major city as I picked up money I didn’t know I had. I made it to LA and emerged into a party, drink in hand, materializing out of a dark corner of a plastic-cum-marble Mulholland manor.

I was ascending a staircase. The stars were in my hand, every constellation seen from the tundra rendered miniature and blown up by the optical illusions of the crystal that vibrated between my delicate palm. The building was all white, lit perfectly, nothing but open, bright, and these little raindrop gemstones of magic above and upon. I was here for the coronation. In a grand white room, a woman we had never met came to us, knelt before an empty throne. The witch crowned her with two stretched palms, clothing her naked body in gold. The woman took the throne and we all circled, vulturous, the courtiers who elected ourselves. Our new queen looked out into the empty white between the throng of bodies we made around her. Our queen looked out into the empty white between the gold and crystal. We clapped. Our suits and dresses, black, made our queen recognize the situation at hand. Our queen gently had her eyes closed with two heavy coins. Our queen dreamed a dreamful sleep and we all took up harps in her name, to play our part.

Winning, Hearts & Spades

In order to enter the convent, the monk swears a vow of eternal enslavement. Humility is the foremost virtue to be cultivated, to put ones life aside wholly for another. This is symbolized in every way - work must be done in dour silence, for the sake of the church, possessions must be forgone, stark robes and an ugly tonsure, eternal chastity. This state of permanent bondage, wherein one fully yokes their being to being married within a feminine system such as The Church (the bride of Christ in the orthodox reading of the Song of Songs), shows the nature of the church’s effective bondage. Individuals are captured with an efficiency never seen elsewhere, their whole being diverted and channeled through the organs and pathways prescribed by the Church.

It’s a breaking away from this world that is the tragedy of novels such as Lewis’ The Monk, wherein the titular monk breaks away, diverting his being and energies on lines of flight, which end in his permanent exile - left to starve in the deathly silence of animal decay in the wilderness, forsaken by the enclosure of God’s light.

This capture of a human forms the basis of all successful economic systems, a process of systematic working that was refined in the transition Foucault identified from monarchical to disciplinary power. The phase of this first follows the corrective then the using, where the individual is remade into the image of the self desired (ie, the monk), the monad of a being the machine has preconfigured as its ideal subject. This was first taken up by the military and prison systems, where young men had the animal within colonized out of them, in order to be remade in an image of pseudo-monastic vows towards the end of properly slotting into the system of entrapment they had been Shanghai’d into. 

The first test of this, beyond the ecclesiastical, was in the invention of the colonial plantation. Many commenters have made the point that the concepts of race as we know them are the genesis of the ideologies we hold for granted as the nature of races and not motivated by anything pre-existing in the European mind. This process took place through this formation, where the kidnapped slaves had to have their personhood reconstructed into a new form that slotted as a monad into the system they were brought to, they had to be rebuilt as the subjects already invented with the system’s authorship. Such was the origin of racism, a process of affixing peoples into various categories by their relationship to colonial economics.

This formation, that of capturing the soul, is often limited to men for a specific reason - it only works within a gendered dynamic, as shown by the language of the church as the Bride of Christ, the female in the relationship between clergy and their institutional owners. The feminine power is a negative space, a system of hollows where male energy is sublimated into. No shock then, that oftentimes these systems of reforming the individual into the desired subject are masculinizing, from the all-male monasteries, to the military.

That this reformation process takes place in order to make a subject amenable to the desires of a female system, puts the blame of male monad-creation on a process ruled by female desire. It’s here that the potential for sex magic comes in. For female-focused sex-rituals, the desire of the woman comes foremost in recreating the man to fit the image of her desires. Even when the man is supposedly uplifted, he is always reforming himself to suit her. This can be seen elegantly in raceplay, the white or black man has to be recreated in order to fit the female desires intended for him, turned into a new being of her creation, akin to the recruit being trained into being a soldier. 

Female desire works at its highest in this way, as a form of systemic seduction that fully entraps the man into recreating himself as a being for her consumption. In effect, she provides the webbing and the fly wraps himself in it, supplicating before her web. His supposed dominance, taking a physical or emotional lead during sex, provides the cover for his own submission, wherein the very mechanism of his entrapment is in his belief of conquest, all psychological needs he can comprehend provided for him, for the small price of his soul sacrificed for her.

Pathological Fear of the Slow Falling of Autumn Leaves

Aside from the mafioso, the greatest casualty of Qanon has been the emotional stability of journalists. The rationalist parasites are, like never before, inflamed in agony over the breaking away from the truth being carried out on a mass scale, first by boomers and now, horrifyingly, by a generation whose decay away from “reality” can’t be pushed out of sight and mind as a contemptible symptom of Alzheimer’s. The actual fear is fuzzy, with the utterances being spoken as if the conclusions to be drawn are self evident - “truth” is decaying, and this is terrifying. A few more premonitions of vague danger and then a handwaving towards everything bad in the world, Covid, Trump, mass shootings, the alt-right, incels, SJWs, woke culture…

In a way, these deacons of the cathedral, are correct - whatever ill they find, its roots can be found in investigating the supposed degeneration of “truth” in our society, if nothing else, then as a foremost symptom of all discussed. The story as they tell it goes like this - in sometime in the past, that edenic 1950s every American assuredly waves their hands towards, friendly Mister Rodgers type older men would sit behind a desk and deliver the facts as they are to the American people. Uniformly, the people who go home with a common story, one aligning with a clear-headed view of things as they really are. However, over the years, a minority of bad actors have conspired to rid the world of truth by creating a stream of confusing and conflicting information. Facebook, 4chan, Fox News, Tumblr, etc, all give birth to a number of competing sources that all dovetail into new refractions of what should be stable for them.

The fact that they’re unable to grasp is that what they are identifying is a symptom of a larger breakdown, and not one perpetrated by any of those discussed. Societies are organisms of capture, the corpus must be made of cellular entities - the people working within them. A society fails by its cells failing either in mutation or in breaking away. The truth decays as the head does. The brain comes finally, the most gilded and downstream images from the workings of power, and the utterances from the mouth, the after-the-fact of almost every operation undertaken by the body. The Truth decays since its inception in the golden era of the empire, as the empire itself fails.

Cell breakaway, they identify too late. Necrosis and cancers begin far before their symptoms show and when mutations and localized death begin to occur, separatism and rebellion in the social context, they have no recourse but mute horror. Certain desperate attempts are made to return it back to its original form, to no avail. The cycle of life and death, so eloquently described in the Dynastic Cycle, only goes one direction - clockwise. Death of an empire cannot occur by anything except killing and rebuilding it. Truth collapses like leaves falling from trees in Autumn, and only a long, snowy season of death, can precede the new bloom of springtime.

There is no tendency more identifiable with a late and decaying empire than this first dawning of the fading sun, when those born in the golden light of prosperity look down upon darkness with scorn and unbelief. It’s often said that boomers do not believe they can die and nothing speaks more accurately to the heart of their soul than this. Boomers, born at the imperial pinnacle, were born into a time and place where they could believe that death was abrogated completely. The shock of “American Pie” as in Don McClean song, a long ranting breaking-open of the world after the Day The Music Died shows this. Between this event and the Kennedy assassination, the Boomer experience was one of shock, born at the pinnacle, riding unstable waves, desperately looking for an exit as the Camelot president’s head was shattered open and the clean-spoken ditties of radio music went down in a rural cornfield.

The boomer years carries with it the fascination it does, even for younger generations, because in it is contained all the pathologies of what would ensue. The boomers had a brief glimpse of what was to come, when icons of the Cathedral were shattered before their eyes and the window could be cracked to see the yawning horror beyond. Their movement had a duality to it, one that Pynchon writes “dovetails sharp as knives” between the knowledge of death and the expectation of life. They lived in total prosperity and their movement was based around hedonism, drugs such as LSD, marijuana, and free sex embracing open pleasure like a balkan cartoon of an Ottoman nobleman. And yet, their concerns always pointed towards what they experienced when they saw the veil open up, like Prince Siddhartha’s Four Passing Sights, when they saw not only the coming end of a society in cancer and necrosis, but its naked anatomy, in the operations of power. They enjoyed what was given to them, the dream of wealth that was still in full swing during that decade, but without the barbiturate dreaminess of the 1950s, their eyes opened for a brief second to the reality of life beyond the enclosed comforts of an empire’s apex.

The veil I speak of is the shattering of truth, so feared by journalists. The see the end with pathological fear that must be sublimated into various imaginary enemies, SJWs or the alt-right, like Michael S. Judge’s theory on the Courier’s Tragedy being Oedipa’s sublimated interpretation of the nakedness of power revealed in the Kennedy assassination. When the corpus decays, in cancer and necrosis, so too does its coherence and thus the coherence of the image it projects to the world. The veil it creates, its superstructure, falls to pieces before the eyes of the viewer, to show the naked wilderness beyond. This brutal comedown, the slow falling of autumn leaves as frost begins to creep in on the edges of the once womb-like humidity of august garden parties, is the pathological fear that the most downstream parasites of our society are gripped with. Without knowing it, they, like few others, capture the sense of an empire decaying, even if in delusion and farce.

Spontaneous Generation of Carrionfeeders

Lucretius wrote of the origin of life, that ecosystems naturally gave birth to those that exist within them by way of spontaneous growth. Later authors took this concept to a microscale with spontaneous generation, where meat would generate maggots and similar from their own rot. The theory is attractive, dovetailing nicely into the interconnected world spoken of by miasma theory and similar, of things emerging as natural phenomena from other phenomena in the world.

Like maggots from rotting meat or the plague’s miasma from still-settling sewage and rot, at the point of decay, harbingers emerge. The old story goes, that a meme is born on 4chan, lives on Reddit, dies on Instagram, and then proceeds through several generations of carrion feeders, from late night talk shows to your parents on Facebook. All culture has this process, akin to a sudden bloom of a plant - a slow trickle upwards where few would descend to sink, then a sudden blooming, before it wilts and decays in a steady decline. 

The plant is born underground and snaps off like a horse at the track, life careening forwards. In an explosive blaze it stumbles and trips and collapses, dead. It continues on. Tents trickle down. The corpse is now dead and easy to feast on. Bones are picked clean in the greatest activity ever seen, until they slip away one by two by dozens, until the corpse is alone, a skeleton amidst a vast rocky desert of memory, where the horizon disappears like the ocean’s, into a flat line that seems to go onto the void.

It was spontaneous generation - from the soil beneath the corpse where blood and pus leaked into the soil and turned it putrid, where the maggots emerged. The documentary “Nobody Speak: The Trial of the Free Press” is a show of it all. An endless slideshow of about three different facial types, in varying degrees of slothful degeneration to a melting or tumorous rot, whine about the living beings of the world as they struck out against them. Unable to wait for the usual Nightcrawler type antics of their profession, Gawker made a particularly egregious example, ripping meat off the bones of still-living prey like wild canines, but its contemporaries are much the same. In defending each other they recognize their identical class position, existing as ultimately empty people in themselves - downstream from all life, they live as carrion feeders, forever downstream, in the land of after, feasting on tumors and wounds, twitching and whining. 

Like a miasma emerges, we left the trash out too long and the rodents and roaches came to bite us as a scourge. When the printing press gave birth to an entire industry of information like the world had never seen, life became forever suspended. All information was condemned to never die, records upon records upon records keeping a great cloud of data in suspended animation. The corpses are left to pile up endlessly in the open plain, beneath the baking sun, the flesh turning to a putrid soup - and we are shocked the maggots emerge, yes, spontaneously?

In the past I spoke of the “bug dimension” - the seams in spacetime that bugs use to get into impossible places. While I still hold this as the cause behind the invincibility of roaches and bedbugs, and I’d like to offer a small elaboration on this theory here. Humans in society, like the carbon soup of putrefying materia, are nothing but a dull mass of uncreated matter until the environmental conditions cause beings to emerge. in the same way as this, life was born from a primordial soup and beings emerge as products of their time. The caste of the downstream is a wholly new one, only existing with the overgrown mass of rotting organic materia created by information-economies. The downstream, ever larger than before, gives birth to new lifeforms within.

Such is the source of so-called “bug people”. At the bottom of it all is a great stagnant swamp of backwash and silt deposited between the continent and the ocean. From these turbid waters, emerge a people wholly of this strange order created by corpses stratifying into the archivist’s instinct of collecting, journalism, information-gathering, and etc.

The modern consumer economy can be traced back to these new appetites and organisms. Calling it such - “consumer” - is a bit of a misnomer, as what it really is is an information economy, and even more specific, an economy of the corpses of information turned into data. The most ridiculed aspect of bugman culture, the Funko Pop, shows it elegantly. After their life in art, its life is first killed by putting it through the “Wiki” process, where stories and themes are reduced to organized data. From this, emerges the collections, like that of a headhunter, where the story has been reduced to characters who are then transformed into individual objectified things, tokens mounted on pikes until the skin sloughs off and it’s just one skull of countless below the harsh sun. 

This is only possible by the over-production of culture-creation mechanisms, where archiving reaches such a point that it becomes this - a self perpetuating tumor of an economy, where information dies and then lives on and on as another replaceable cell in the great blob. That carrionfeeding human life would emerge from this - in the first form as the journalist, then the nerd, and today as the bugperson - is only to be expected. After all, when it comes to information, we seem to be allergic to taking the trash out.

Dalliances With Our Devil

The devil card of the tarot depicts the crowned adversary upon a pedestal, to which two figures are chained. The adversary shows androgyny in the literally minded medieval fashion, all genitals at once, often with additional equipment such as a hungering face on the belly or wings from the back. Chained to it are a male and female human figure, both humiliated and naked.

From this image of the devil, the two descend - in what fashion is clear - the play of duality and unity in the figure. The appetites ultimately source to one figure, that of the ultimate “Other” the adversary or the accuser, as pre-Satan christians imagined sin’s king. The division of the sexes is in reference to an original source, both in terms of the past, with the interpretation of the devil as the origin of the sex organs and appetites, or in terms of the future, with the interpretation of the devil as the ultimate teleology of the desires of both opposites, their ending being in the figure to which they’re chained.

The origin of evil in christianity is clear - difference. The original sin of christianity refers to the origin of the world as being something more than the egg-unity of Eden, where the human encounter with the serpent caused the pure sphere to be burst open, casting all things into the world of difference, the wilderness without God’s direct oversight. Older theologians, still believing in pre-Miltonian ideas, will hold that Hell is not a place of fire and torment as commonly drawn, but a state of exile, to simply be without God’s constant grace. This interpretation holds far more water than the usual, with reference to the nature of the original sin, a repetition of that first exile being self-inflicted by the sinner in exiling themselves from the wilderness between God and the infinite, into being forever removed into the infinite.

It’s this dualistic thinking which Christianity finds itself again and again attracted to, with most amateur theologians being gravitated to the easy answers of a sort of moralistic Platonism, where the good of the world is in the Edenic created-image of things and all Earthly things are chaotic divergences from that. 

As much as christians make fools of themselves with this sort of hyperfragile thinking (the recent controversy of a priest engaging in S&M desecration on an altar requiring the archbishop to see it personally burned in order to wipe away the sin of e-girl pussy juice), there’s a way in which none of this is unique to christians, only their moralism of it. This sort of dualistic thinking, far from being an aberration of its moralizers and totalitarian followers, forms the foundation for thought.

In two anecdotes of creation stories. In the Daodejing, division into a binary of presence and absence generates all things. After there is anything at all, the ten thousand things - that is, all motion and thus all of the world - is born. Difference in itself creates two things which are in conflict and thus generates motion, and it is from motion, that all the things of the world emerge. In the bible, God creates the world by taking first void of unform and creating the world via a process of dividing, the same motion of creating difference and from thus, creating the motion from which all things emerge.

Mirrored here is the way thought itself works. As much as escaping it must be a political imperative to evade the kind of pathetic slave-moralism of christianity and communism, thought itself can never. This basic act of separation always works in pairs and it’s this mechanic that enables the perception of things at all, the creation of the world in the eye of the beholder.

The creative act of the self’s eye is the satanic impulsion of all humans. Capable of the same act of dividing that is attributed to God, humanity has the root of its sin and through it, the root of humanity’s will-to-power in the linguistic and systemic realm. It’s this ability to divide that enables the eye to be the speartip of any act of a pagan master, the true dealing with the devil being to look inwardly and trust the self and ones own eye.

Teeth of Ghosts

Leyland Kirby remarked that his project “The Caretaker” was inspired by the final scene in The Shining, where the camera zooms into the wall of the entrance to the Gold Room ballroom, to show Jack Torrence’s face among the revelers of a black and white photograph of a party in 1921. Two strands are drawn together here. The Caretaker’s albums were crowned with Everywhere at the End of Time, a lengthy album chronicling the six phases of neurological degeneration taking place during Alzheimer’s disease. The album begins with “a beautiful daydream”, wistful, nostalgic remixes of the source material that gradually loses its coherence as the disease progresses. Order degenerates, ideas loop, thoughts become stuck in strange places, the ability to form a coherent train of narrative thought is lost. In the second half fo the album, this reaches the “post-awareness” point where this process crosses a threshold into losing a grip on the structures which make up coherent consciousness. The ego is broken down as more and more foundational facts of the self and the experience of the world fall to pieces, the identity, the external self slipping away, before one’s location in the world, the ability to form the experience of reality into coherence. The music becomes jumbled until it reaches an almost psychedelic point of recombination where fragments cross and loop over each other in disorganized, where the “grey fog” of hallucination and pains mix with the last embers of the old self and the new experiences of the self unable to comprehend reality, all these confused pieces overlapping and distorting each other to form a confusing tangle of hallucinatory noise. This picks up and up, losing coherence until, like a container containing a gas expanding until it bursts open, the particles and pieces lose proximity and fall away even from this process. The final part is emptiness. The mind is no more, the physical brain flaccid and literally drained of over half its mass, a drooling waking-coma that gradually leads to a silent terminus - “death” would be too human a word for it.

In The Shining, memories have teeth. The violence of history is shown in Jack Torrence’s timelessness, always being the caretaker, recreating the crimes of the previous caretaker, Charles Grady, repeating the older structures of racism and patriarchal family at the advice of the spectral ballroom-institution of the hotel. A corpse of a woman rises from her waterlogged grave and seduces Jack into the corporeal embrace of the past, choking the son capable of “Shining” - Dick’s word for telepathic connections with ghosts. Ghosts in all these cases return, bloody and horrific, the torrent of age-old blood in the hallway, the burial ground upon which the hotel is built, the sex scandal in the room. Wendy’s horror at the end of the film caught by the spectres of history in incoherent terror, unable to cohere them into legible messages as her more gifted son is, is the opposite reaction to Jack’s, as he is swept up to the point of being regarded as an employee of memories, at the end, burned into their recollection with the final shot zooming into the photographs.

Jack dies like the last images of an Alzheimer’s brain, injured, lost, bleeding and limping, through a world of fog, hazy electronic lights, and cold. Cold that increases and slows, stiffens, snow whipping to bury and wash away - “the grey mists form and fade away” and the last shot is of Jack’s person entombed in frost of the labyrinth. The protagonists escaped, pushing forwards in time while memory itself now fully possessed into Jack decayed and fell to pieces over time.

Such is the case for history and memory. Time encodes into the future in language. After writing and speech, humans were able to not only record but repeat and recombine abstractly the things of the world into a form that would continue on past their natural lifespan. All things then take on a form of suspended animation floating spectrally above the world - a ghost, in the most proper understanding of that phenomena. The past is the future of another time that now hangs, a foggy ectoplasm of things - things that barb, things like those of New Londo Ruins where the corpses of the flooded populace return with bladed arms and magic screeches to kill the player in a blackness without bonfires. Memory recombines into hallucinations by the process of its own fragility. It cannot decay cleanly, rather it falls apart into rumor and idea and fantasy, these fragments reproducing as they take on new lives of their own, a jumble becoming a cancerous new organism unrecognizable as anything familiar.

For those suffering underneath, memory entraps. Memory takes hold of one, until like Jack, they become a hollow vessel for ghosts. Until like Wendy and Danny, one is left to flee in terror into a black night of unknowing. Jack, now caught up decays with information and falls victim to the crumbling dementia of the labyrinth, while the snowcat’s dim headlights pierce an unknowing future, their terror and screams left behind to produce yet more ghosts.

And yet what other way could there be to live? The linguistic mind is a machine for memories, and thus a machine forever entrapped to dementia and hallucination. Entropy gnaws, delusion creeps through every crack, the human animal nothing more than a victim of ghosts, a rambler in a garden of roses tangled and bloodied by a shibari complex of thorns.