Defining Eras

…and I looked into the screaming fire inside the gap, pried open between the two weight-shuttered doors of the machine room, molten industry a plasma in the corium fire, white to orange, flames flickering faster than the eye’s framerate at an unnatural chop chop chop, like a slideshow spinning too fast to keep up.

What else could they be seeing? I wail against the guard, mute and imperceptible to anything beyond the first two feet in front of him. I brush his rifle and he pushes me aside, struggling to keep stability, stock still, fused into the wall. His body slurps under bubbling hot concrete outside the city days later, memorialized, spitting poison into the air until the end of time.

Gun falls from its hands, clattering as it hits and bounces off the ground, bruised plastic-metal-wood settling pregnant with ambition as the man kneels and slumps, gurgling and moaning. He’ll be remembered, most likely, and the body takes up more space than the most seasoned feel it does, most unable to step over the small obstacle without pseudo-climbing the emotional weight of the still-warm, still-bleeding.

In a dark corner, the basement of a building long turned over to be an inanimate fact of physical space for the street-to-street fighting, the born-neuter, hairless and null, draped in a flag, has cut a gash between its legs. A long knife clutched, bloody down to the elbow, deep organ blood pouring out below it, an ink-stained fetus clutched in the other hand. It rips from its own body, flesh tearing inside as it drags out the tumors deep inside it, hoisting them in the air to shine negatively, flashbeams of darkness shining on the wall in the dancing dust, the clouded sunlight, the muzzlesmoke and burning fire.

Condemned out of time, he clutches the gun in the trench and sobs for his mother. He freezes to death on patrol, two others starve and the fourth shoots himself. Disease runs rampant as the bombs fall and a war hero goes home from his pilot’s chair. Atop a tiger, the duke sits in a smokey backroom anxiously clutching the newspaper and intelligence reports. Suited men are lined up and the wall riddled. The machine was set in place, the mechanism primed and now we swim. Desperately, against the tide, hoping and scrambling to still be standing when all the potential energy has dissipated and the waters calm again, decades, years, weeks later when the sun finally rises again, over the smoldering ruins sheer in long-sought silence.

GolfDreams

The world is bathed in fog. The sky is Caribbean water teal, the grass emerald-hills green. I can barely stand up, lining up for my swing. The purple haze over the course, wreathing around me, purple-humidity off the poison water of a Mario Bros. DS level, it winds and twists, the dragon-tail of opium smoke in a hazy den of Victorian depravity. I’m in heaven, indulgent, succulent fruits of an Ottoman merchant drizzling down my chin in sweet juices as I crack fiberglass into the ball and watch a sweet, satisfying parabola arc over the fairway.

The second hole dips into the woods, sheltered tight into a curve amidst heavy trees. I’m suffocating after the open pleasures of the first hole, always the most attractive, rolling straight in a wavy ocean-swell to the final hole. Now I’m trapped, and becoming more trapped. I take shitty iron shots and look up. Birds fly overhead in a scattering, wings pelting in a gliding delta beneath fluffy clouds moving, painted on the interior of the firmament, their positions sliding along the smooth tempura surface of the mural. 

I meet the eyes of a deer, stalking sightlines down the long grass expanse. I hold my 6-iron like a gun held relaxed and tensed, stalking down the hill towards the ball. We make eye contact and it screams off, cutting deep gashes into the fairway as I chase after it.

I lose it in the woods for a reprieve from the game. A beautiful gemfield of flowers expands before me, twinkling dewdrops alight in the midmorning sun bearing down into the tree-circled grove. Leaves dazzle as the petals sway in the wind, my ball is nowhere to be found. My party is putting as I stumble out, slipping a throw-down at a random spot, my head clouded, my mouth slurring drunken love as I slap another shot onto the green and rejoin them, thoughts flown away in another swarm of white birds in the hot blue air.

I lose sight of the ball in its parabolic arc down the expansive green, disappearing after four hundred yards into a dog leg, the hills rising up to make a horizon line. Fore, I hope it weakly yells as I catch it, my silent soul aloft over the hills, unable to parse anything but the grass green rolling between a blue ocean above it. I become a shipwreck, gurgling, weighted, at the bottom of a black crushing abyss, waving myself through the suffocating blanket of saltwater drownweight.

A deer poked through the foliage, its human face looking me down and through to the dirt. I raised my club again, though a strange aura prevented us from moving closer or farther. A beam was cast, high blue between my eyes and its, my club poised as its antlers, unable to strike or charge, unable to retreat…

The Ancient Abbey's Library

And after some months of it, my life degenerated to an absurd, baroque clockwork of my own health managed at my expense. Slight weaknesses travailed me to incredible flounderings, stomachaches from a slightly upset PH laying me up as if it were salmonella, tension headaches from any number of mundane deprivations turning into debilitating rushes to get whatever drug I desperately lacked in that moment. My surroundings took on the exterior wood paneling of the grandfather clock I operated within myself, the lush jungle of tapestries, paneled walls, rooms half-lit by afternoon sun coming in hazy down half-drawn curtains to illuminate dark green carpeting and gout Rothschild couches, formal gardens overgrown to woody thorns in neglect, dried out fountains where I take coffee and fight through a partial migraine to peel apart the musty yellowed pages of some ancient printing of a classic far more have bought than penetrated…

Coming in as a kaleidoscope I could never comprehend as others can so effortlessly, the few channels of processing available to me trickle down all things to settle in the lowermost dungeons of my being as the only eternal emotion I could comprehend - contempt. Contempt for those close and far, the ones alike me and the ones opposite. I’m served breakfast and my lip curls as I see my father’s hands curl around porcelain, dried-out paper skin wrapped on decrepit bones, the overweight waitress bulging out to stifle her own hypertrophied heart in service of the marionette skeleton before me. Not a single morsel of food has ever tasted good, the sky here having an uncanny ability to be slush-grey every single day I can remember. 

I beg her to stay, just a little bit longer, to remain in my hands so long as she can be illuminated by the light that chills me since birth. Of course she does, she can balk no argument and breaks my heart for it. Her body, that of a porcelain bird sings to hum with the same song it always had, helping to unfreeze something that dams up constantly, welling up tears until sleep calcifies them once again. I ask her as if she’ll refuse, in order to open the possibility. A question implies 

I take coffee with my grandmother on the balcony, overlooking the tangled thorngardens, hedges turned to rosy tangles. I lose what I’m saying, my derealizing lengthened out to be chronic now. I fake conversations as though I’m on acid, words expected, responses contained in the questions, pouring out from my mouth, spilling onto my lap, soaking through my pajamas, coffee stained as they are, smelling of lavender and must.

On a walk through the woods, I find an occulted hole. Roots circled around a cave leading into a world of carrots and soil, illuminated mushrooms for a witch’s hovel cut like Bag-End in the base of a tree. It spirals up, knotting and twisting in countless strands of a great knotting rope, the base wide and sprawling out across the blackbrown loam. Someone is talking to me inside. I see her at night, fingernails scratching loving bloodstains into my nightgowns as I awake eagerly in expectation of the next mysteries awaiting me. The fog deepens. I breathe it purposefully, filling my lungs with a full imbibing of the smoke around me.

Lost Cities (Dobuita)

My mother dropped me off at the convenience store, turned rust-brown in the dark illumination of the afternoon setting sun. She parked her outdated sedan - luxurious, had she bought it new two decades ago - across the empty four lane highway, under the blackening cover of the curtained-out record shop, cloaked in its own put-ons of heavy velvet theatre curtains and nightcolor paint. Roving along the streets away, we walked sidewalks along a flat one-story desert, skateboard wheels grinding dust, brown to red to orange to brown…

The city to the ocean was a bombed out husk. Skeletons of five and ten stories rose like trees, their hollow spaces letting light pass through in spooky shafts of sunlight cut up narrower and narrower until they reached the street. My mother had gone back as we explored it. The sun had turned the ocean orange, a dead sea of rusted ship carcasses. We desperately wish for blue, for sailing. There’s no tradewinds anymore, and no one has the gold for a sextant. My mother’s back up North, where the green has been forcibly planted into dying soil all around the monastic silence of the university.

My boyfriend turns to me. “Hey now, let’s- you know, upon the- I never considered that maybe- atop the- walking over there we can- talk about it to me- I just want to know- I need to work it out- don’t you agree that- if only we had time-“ and on and on, searching in beetle-like circles behind me as we walk through the empty streets. We stay on the sidewalk out of superstition more than genuine caution, cars rare and oftentimes ours. He has trinkets in his hands, overflowing his pockets and bags. Small pieces of plastic he paws and drips himself upon, scared and feverish in his info-gathering.

We speak to each other in chains of referrals. Did you know, will you listen, pass along, into each other’s hands. They give me the info and I take it home, I hand off my own recommendations. It’s rare that we consume anything, the ritual of swapping more than enough to satiate the true purpose of the meetings. We’ve become obsessives in our own right, like my boyfriend, though few of us make the mistake he does of assuming the collections to be sovereign beyond the mere act of collecting and comparing.

I lost my virginity high on LSD in the central asian decor of an eighth floor apartment. Amidst heavy Persian and Mongolian imports, tapestries and artifacts wreathed in heavy smoke and chemicals soaked into paper LSD tabs, a connection was sparked, sacred beyond what can be found in the dead world anymore. I floated above the room, in bliss this time and not from the detachment of the previous experience. Something played on the television and a cassette tape went around the wheels on a device above it. We were all sniffing glue from a paper bag and the experience was amplified twice over.

Night always falls as a grand staging for the moon. It’s the only thing we can see now, vaguely reddish, hung above a black skin, floating limp and low, always full like a second sun, larger than it has any right to be. It loves the water, hovering, just like that. Back at the university we drink sake and meditate on our insanity in the japanese gardens. On the coast, we see it straight ahead and words come to us, disordered as a flood we’ll sort over in sun-baked contemplation beneath the humidity of an eternal August, the last dreamy week before school begins, that one final Saturday that never seems to end…

A Commentary on Blasphemous (2019)

I. The Miracle, The Father, The Son

Flowing as the force of all action, is The Miracle. The Miracle serves as both set and setting, the before and after of every action, water of the body of water that is the world of Custodia. The Miracles, as an animated force of all, takes the place of the Holy Spirit, in the game’s reinterpretation of the Trinity. It’s important then, that it emerges from the crucifixion. The young man (Son) begged the High Wills (Father) in order to give punishment and the miracle was born out of this unity. By the Son of flesh suffering in the pains of the flesh, the Father of the Heavenly and the Son of the Earthly united their respective realms, the Divine force flowing through both being the Miracle or Holy Spirit, that unifies them as one. Such is what’s meant by the ancient phrase, “Igne Natura Renovatur Integras” - fire is born between Heaven and Earth in order to unify the two. Such is the nature of the Miracle, born as the new force by which Divinity expresses itself, unifying Heaven and Earth in sacred fire.

II. Song of Solomon

The rock upon which God’s church was built turned away from its followers and for the first time since judaic exile, the patriarchs of the Earthly church beheld the face of God. God the Father in the High Wills looked upon the head of the Son, the Pontiff of the great Earthly system of the Church and granted the wish for another crucifixion. Renouncing the flesh, the fire of the Miracle consumed the body in another mortification, the mocking detritus of the flesh drowning those who desperately sought their salvation in the Throne’s Earthly form.

The Cradle of Affliction becomes the true throne at the center of the Church’s body, in the same fashion as the Holy Grail is within its mytharc. The Church transitions from a political body to a mythic one, its structures forming a linguistic framework of practice, leading to its central divine mystery - ritual. The Cradle of Affliction invites-within the Church reborn, as a corpus not of order but of leading, a labyrinth drawing the followers into the center, so that the truly devoted are led to achieve the true Throne for themselves.

It’s by this that Blasphemous makes its argument for heresy. The Church exists as a means of ritual, yet it can only do so by providing a structure that the penitent traveling to the center will be able to truly work within. Thus, the penitent ones venturing deeper must do so with a conviction to penetrate, and thus the Church pretends to be an adversary, in the seductive sense. The present protagonist is invited down chambers and passageways, enticed, teased, and resisted, so that his final breakthrough to the center is fully tested and qualified before it can occur.

This occurs all within a context of recreating the original trauma that remade the Church into this. In order to achieve the true ending, the confessional statues must be destroyed, with the text after the completion of their mini-challenges displayed: “Detestatio Sacrorum”. This phrase, used as part of marriage vows to represent the bride renouncing her loyalty to the family of her Father and taking loyalty to the family of her Husband, shows the penitent ones journeying into the Church doing the same. The Earthly body of the church is renounced and the seduction is fully understood, with the Miracle flowing within being achieved through a true engagement with the Church’s channels and passageways.

III. Attrition (Ten Piedad, Expósito Scion of Abjuration)

The exile from Eden was the act that caused the split which had to be repaired by the crucifixion. The body was then separated in kind from the spirit, with the former imprisoning the latter as the latter was cast into exile within. The exile-within the wilderness is thus the condition of the spirit within the body, as shown by Ten Piedad. The Divine things of the flesh (shown elegantly in the name “Ten Piedad”) only offer paltry balms, though offering a place for the flesh to fit and thus the spirit to be calmed in its agony. Such is shown in the state of receiving mercy on the lap of the mother Ten Piedad takes when the Penitent One enters his boss room.

Yet it’s these balms which the spirit then makes use of in its ascendence beyond. The child almost burned with the heretical mother is given up to a hollow mother, as Ten Piedad rests upon the lap of, and through it, gains its power. The mother forms the snake-like tail spitting the child’s venom in its name. The prison in this way must not be destroyed, but filled within. Renunciation would be suicide, the total destruction of all that retains the child in reality. Only in accepting and then becoming-with the structures in which the spirit is placed, is the same unity formed in reverse. Such is the birth action of Mary, where before the flesh could ascend, the divine had to descend.

The buried churches make the counterpoint to the prison of heretical works. The highest points of the spirit form within the utter darkness of the flesh and only by growing-within it and ascending to control through the corpus provided by the flesh, is wholeness restored. Far from renunciation, the flesh and the spirit are restored to wholeness when the Edenic state is restored, by the spirit’s total dominion over and complete filling of the flesh.

IV. Contrition (Tres Augustias, Melquíades The Exhumed Archbishop)

Three sorrows for the machines that failed in their attempt to construct the holy after Eden. The divine union of marriage had no love between it and it thus fell to sorrow, the gold, veil, and ribbon torn and discarded as the sisters desperately prayed to retain their freedom without being bounded in structures and machines built as recreations of the heavenly on Earth. It’s important that they appear at the bottom of Jondo, in a sewer belong the grand bell and its clockworks. The social machine is always the pinnacle of the clockwork machine and the gears of the social machine are ever more entrapping and damaging, existing not below but above and equal with humanity.

These machines only come about int he wilderness, through the process shown by Melquíades. The once divine is now dead, ravaged by time into hollow bones, with only the desperation and faith of its followers holding it aloft. In an attempt to construct the holy from the earthly, a marionette is created from the artifacts clung to as relics of God, a machine they believe can recreate for them what can never be found within or from the flesh. Such is the imprisonment of the three sisters. The union of marriage was created for them in an attempt to capture the lightning in a bottle of the holy - love - as the church does for divinity.

It’s these entrapping machines which are resisted in the way the sisters did. Desperately seeking freedom, they cocooned themselves and sought liberation at the hands of the penitent one, cross-cutting and defeating the machines entrapping them. Tellingly, the ability granted after their freedom is, is that which was imprisoned released. The freedom of their love and life-generation was at stake and it was that which they granted to the player, life generating in the form of blooded vines for the player, all over the map, as their freedom realized after they slip away into the other side of the veil. 

V. Compunction (Our Lady of the Charred Visage, Quirce Returned by the Flames)

The flesh is by its nature enclosing on the spirit which is trapped within it. The exile from Eden was the exile of the ghost into the shell, the spirit now alone and completely enclosed-upon by the wilderness around it. It’s this eternally-entrapping nature of the wilderness around the soul that leads to encasement. The instinct of the flesh is to encase and them crumble, first entombing in stone and then withering as dust.

Divinity was desperately sought in the burning oil, only in rebellion against those who sought to encase her in ice. It’s telling that fleshly desires were the cause of this predatory embrace, the stonecutting men seeking out their fetish-object to forever entomb in their lust for the solid to be made from dust. The living in her was embraced beyond them and the Holy Spirit (Miracle) granted her its sacred fire, in the form of golden oil boiling across her visage. 

This fire comes from within and without, with its deployment by the agents of entrapment being a double-traitorous action by the imprisoned. Quirce found himself at the flames by the hands of the inquisitors and yet had his solidarity against them with the fire. Their passion was identical in form to his which they found so offensive and so in the ashes, he rose again, embraced in the holy light of the fire against him, and against the frozen flesh they dispensed to entrap him into the machines of dogma and icons.

VI. Summa Blasphemia

Putti were born of occult energies, the representations since the Roman era of spirits floating about on a variety of spiritual assignments. This usage came to be common in the renaissance where they were revived in Northern Italy, giving us characters such as Cupid, messenger-like figures in the margins of paintings, pulling strings together, weaving the scene. The birth of Jocinero, of the Moon and the Bull - the dark of the flesh and the divine - is telling of this. The path of the penitent one is occult in the most literal usage of the world, darkened and obscure to all but the eyes of the one who can follow it to the end. It should be marked therefore by the occult signals of the putti of the moon and the bull, leading magic and heresy on the path to the summit.

At the summit, the Penitent One finally does away with the last obstacles before his communion, in completing the trial of Crisanta. Cirsanta accepts her destiny and performs it to eternal reward, fulfilling her duty in recognition of its higher place, even if it should not be the one with eternal destiny as the Penitent One’s.

The usage of fighting as a means of showing communion is perhaps the strongest lineage Blasphemous does have in lineage with Dark Souls, something I won’t belabor as I’ve written about it before. What matters in this context is the meaning of the final battle and what was before it. Each battle served a function in the path of the Penitent One, another gateway to another truth shown about the Miracle, until the final door opened before the place where the flesh is unified with the divine. The Penitent One does battle with Escribar in order to fully comprehend the final mystery and thus to replace the body of Escribar. At the end, Escribar is freed and ascends to a wholly spiritual existence. The Penitent One thus takes his place, as the fleshly point of union between the flesh and the divine, the tree bridging the two worlds until another like him climbs the strange maze of branches and tangles to do the same.