Fruits of Empire

A fat, sickly man with dying blonde hair mopped in a half-assed combover atop his corpulent head waddled  from the teebox to the beercart. His legs, solid stalks of jiggling flesh indiscernible as either fat or muscle, tilted so his feet pointed in opposing directions at almost 180 degree angle. He pours the amber piss down his throat, gulping and excreting at the shock of cold and bubbling.

His wife waddles up to her child in the clubhouse. Too much noise, slapped down. He can’t behave like that if he wants his sugar. The child calms down, the child runs across the dirt track, making noise into the wilderness, coke in hand.

I watch them from the corner. I watch them silently, from the back of the shadows. I lean against white plaster where ornate fixtures alighted with dust hang incandescent. The owner is on his way, visiting one of his dozens of developments. I found his hiding spot the other week, journeying into the woods off the ninth, where he had pitched himself beside a river, a cloth camping chair unfolded in the deep gouge made by a backhoe tearing the bank apart for an as of now unknown further development.

I’m drunk. I feel half dead. A sickly woman, bones with a supposedly healthy BMI of loose skin and fat undulating in stocky globs off her body, limps from her brand new car. A man from another side of things has his arm around a teenage boy. He’s telling a story. He’s dealing weed and beer.

It’s hot. Incredibly hot. The air is thick with disease, a sweet sick smell of food decaying in the light, insects in the life pregnant, the whole atmosphere feeling like a root cellar below a burning building. This is what it’s all for. So much wood went into building it. The maggots and termites are popping in the heat of the wood they eat.

All I smell is clouds of disinfectant that do nothing. They rest on fecundity like snow blanketing the forest. For all the desolation celebrated and sickly ritualized, nothing dies here. Long past their time, corpses continue to shamble on, soused and wet, like unburnable firewood soaked by rain. 

Opium comes off like swollen fruit, overripe and ready to taste an insect’s ovipositor, happiness dying out as a burning incandescent light until it’s all shredded, strung out jerky-dry in wide nailed boards underneath the sun on the long flat plains of the driving range, looking up to heaven, where the sun is too bright and the air too thick and our bodies immobile with weakness, desiccating at the end of a long process of driving ourselves out and to the end.

Bodies plump and bloated walk the path. Squishy lumps of fat absorb anything hit against. A hearty chuckle. A meaty hand. An unwanted penetration. Sweat, alcohol, sugar. Burned slabs of meat. The sun draws down and the fat is all that remains, an oily shadow and blue velvet shafts of light you never want to be seen by.

Future Legend

Nero and Elagabalus watched the building burn in the parking lot across the four lane. It was a dorm of the small university, insignificant state school where Elagabalus had been deployed to make his way to an American citizenship. The EMTs and firefighters herded the cowering and phone-wielding huddle of students surrounding in the grass and parking lots, some with smoke burns on their face and hair clutching the small totebags of the few valuables they could scrounge from the horrible oven.  Two firefighters dragged one girl out, naked, pudgy like baby with the body of an adult, pale and sooty, from the womblike sunheat of the near-windowless brick building. EMTs desperately worked on her. She had already died and began to turn grey as weeping mourners flung themselves upon her. Student council president, valedictorian, high achievements from birth to high school to freshman rushing a sorority between three sports teams... countless organizations lost their poster-girl that day. Nero and Elagabalus slowly drove out and through residential streets to the interstate as the flames died down, mourners calling parents, friends, family...

Nero was cold. He drove as they made their way beyond the edges and borders to the wilderness where space lost orientation to all but up-down and the poles. They slowed down, amidst the pothole flecked roads of the wasteland where wandering lost souls made their desolation in the few remaining spaces between where electricity had long been fried away. Nero was the kind of boy to hold his hand in flame to feel a forceful intrusion of warmth at his long deprived skin. Nero grew up here, the children of bitter colonialists disintegrated into a bonecult of divine emptiness, huddled in the corner of tiny wooden churches watching the ancient figures of the isolated world that had reared up hymn and chant.

Elagabalus was afraid. Small and pathetic, he had forced himself to imbibe deeper than all the rest, forcing himself to the top of every competition and petty hatred. He sipped whiskey and did a bump on their drive. The water flowed over him, through him. He only ever bottomed when he fucked. He cut his tongue on his knife bloodied in atrocities. His nails were clawlike of his own volition. He envied dogs with owners.

Nero and Elagabalus exited from their lead of the convoy, decamping at the head of the small town cut into the trees. A flag rose from the well in the center of the streets long torn up to make a public square where once was highway. It was the wrong flag. They had received payment back in the city to make it go away. No one drew hard borders out here, but little parcels on the fuzzy edges were traded back and forth at reasonably fair rates, cut by 50% by Nero and Elagabalus and then passed out amongst the masked men who pulled up behind.

Hundreds of years ago, the cousins of the ancestors of this town had descended from across the ocean and put the natives to fire and sword. They, the smart ones, did it to drink blood and collect a paycheck, riding in emptiness and then returning to build lives whole in the city. The ancestors of this town had settled, still in the old tribal mindset of petty patch-of-dirt squabbles in interior Europe, as though the purpose of genocide and war were to acquire anything as vulgar as physical goods.  Now, they stained faintly still with the blood of that ancient conquest, waited in horror as Nero and Elagabalus stalked amongst their town. They shrank, as the natives they held the blood of did long ago. Degenerated to natives in their own right, they could only muster awed running and mute horror as Nero waved his hand and the men opened fire.

Elagabalus ran up the proper flag, photographing it for evidence. Elagabalus rubbed himself through his pants. Nero stood still, cocked on one leg, as his men piled bodies in the center. They didn’t bother to be complete, only firing at the witnesses and letting those who should run, run. This wasn’t a massacre. They were beyond that. This was a higher calling, war for the love of the ultimate liquor.

Nero sat down, reading a map as his man idled beside him. Elgabalus was being fucked within an empty building nearby, screaming a little too loud, acting to himself, to prove that maybe he can feel something, that maybe he is capable of receiving something worth receiving. The sky was grey and carrionfeeders began to descend. They didn’t bother to burn the bodies. The men had no need to scavenge from the pathetic trinkets the victims called home. Elgabalus would be here for a while. A few of the men were taking turns with him. Nero continued reading his map, checking his silent satphone. Muzzles cooled. A dog barked up the road and fell dead. Nero waved away the annoyance of flies. Elgabalus was trying some new humiliation and a few of the men were laughing as he desperately submitted in hopes of thawing, opening. Bodies began to stink. A cold breeze gusted down the road. Nero was only cold. The villagers had fled into the woods. Nero rarely realized how frozen the ground was. The sun slowly drew down behind the clouds. The first maggots were laid in the flesh.

A Woman Dreaming Between the Walls

One

The bailiffs led him out of the courtroom, to a windowless office, orange jumpsuit and multiple kinds of cuffs. They left, leaving him alone to stew in his sentence. He dropped his face to his knees in despair, the walls of the yellowed drywall and cracked wooden bench closing in around him. He tried not to consider the years ahead, helpless and scared before the prospect of his being foreclosed upon.

His cuffs slipped off. He startled as metal slid down his jumpsuit’s pants and muffled its clatter onto the carpeted floor. There were no cameras in the room. The door the police had left through was ajar, the courtroom’s door sealed and no doubt deadbolted. Down the hall through it - the courtroom was gone. The courthouse couldn’t possibly be this long, as he looked upon the beige carpet and yellowing drywall extending empty for as long as he could see, disappearing down any number of turns and identical unmarked doors and branches.

Aimlessly, he wandered, dying fluorescents shining like a sickly moonlight, carrying him into the shadows of the strange labyrinth behind all walls. 

Through door after corner after door, long stretches that should have doubled back on themselves, concrete stairwells that wound up and down with no clear orientation in space, offices with outdated computers and furniture stained as though it were in use currently, stale coffee, the hum of windows XP and motivational posters tacked into the walls, he finally came upon the end of it, through a bookcase of binders of A4 printouts, a an open garage door found him to a parking lot’s loading bay, the low-lying ramp cloaking him from the rest of the world.

It was high night. The stars fogged over by the usual light pollution. Moonlight and streetlight came together in the same yellow angelglow backlighting the woman smoking against the concrete wall of the ramp.

“You lost?” She said.

“Yea, who’re you?”

“Who do you think? Daughter of that judge that just put you under. I’ve been looking for someone like you for a while.”

“Someone like me?”

She laughed, putting a hand on his shoulder to lead him into the parking lot. “Welcome to Moonlight.”

They walked together, under flickering lamps down the empty streets of a suburb without a metropolis.

“Moonlight?”

“The sun never rises here. We’ve been looking for you. My father and all his compatriots, they want you with them, in all that bright light. He’s a rigid man, all see-through skin and everything. I hate seeing it! And I hate seeing boys like you suckered through his sunlight systems! He wants you out on some concrete examination table, all laid out like a piece of lab specimen. It’s barbaric! You’re coming with me.”

“Can I head home?”

“To the sun? Where they’ll just pick you up again? This is your rare chance, sink or swim in Moonlight.”

“Doesn’t look like anyone lives here.”

“Houses just aren’t active. Look I’ll take care of things, make the arrangements, alright? Just pick a door and settle into whoever’s partying. I’m sure you’ll make the groove.”

Two

The Judge cocked a hand back and swung it down across his daughter, sprawling her to the floor, red-throbbing in sobs. It wasn’t clear that the justification for it could be, though she suspected it was nothing beyond that he came home in a shitty mood. He babbled on and on, spewing a few choice slurs and kicked her, stepping over her to ascend the grand staircase of their home.

At the vanity, she alighted upon her wounds, carefully on the throbbing flesh. It still stung, it would for days to come. The sun was descending and the Judge would soon be asleep. She waited, on the edge of the bathtub, silent, scrolling porn on her phone, hoping to stave off the boredom and doldrums until the night would fall and leave her to her own realm.

The newcomer was on her mind as she saw the first glimpses of shade spill from the low places of the yard outside her bedroom. They came into Moonlight every so often, falling in their lust or anger or despair, like flies to be picked apart by her spindly forelegs. She didn’t have much respect for them, except a certain kind of affection, that of a dog owner towards the miserable creature bred to think of a human as its mother. 

It was sink or swim in Moonlight, a town of ruthless rulebooks that weeded out new ones to be dropped off the face of the Earth in the tall grass of ignored ditches under perpetual shade of eternal midnight. She had the rulebook, spiral bound and handwritten, under her bed. A world of her design, a world where she was the roads and homes and signs, where she won by virtue of dictating the game.

Moonlight was ready for him, a maze he had been searching his entire life to be seduced into losing his way in. She would check on him later. For now, he was a little too fresh for her to deal with. He had to acclimate. Learn to let go, learn to start dissolving in the acidic fog she had spit over the town, a little bit of venom in his veins before he was ready for true digestion. Her pedipalps twitched as she salivated. She rolled over on her bed, scared for the sound of footsteps. She watched the sun go down and twitched her spinnerets, ready for the night to deliver her to her silent throne between the walls.

Writing a Maraviglia

At the conclusion of his ascent into the Warp, Fulgrim leads his children on a quest towards a full artwork, a theatrical production fulfilling all the ambitions of every theatre-director or musician with a little dreaming, every creative mind behind the music video - The Complete Work. A work of art encompasses the totality of existence, the world enclosed by the firmament of artistic creation for the audience to step into. For the audience, such a thing is obviously impossible, with the human mind being only on a narrow few channels of simultaneous sensory input, but for the artist...

The artist when working with such an idea first works with a unity of fundamental form - the same as God's creation is done through a unified substance of All, the artist in creating the Maraviglia must do so through a unified foundational substance by which all things in the work are linked. For Fulgrim, it was the Warp, which unified all aspects of the theatrical production and its decor. This can be seen in worlds within a single medium, where a complete world is created in tableu of a single work, such as in the paintings of Bosch - notice The Garden's cabinet is built in such a fashion deliberately, the world within its firmament upon the exterior of the cabinet, opening to show the world at a ground-level perspective, looked at as if one were on a high hill.

The digital world offers this to artists as few other things do and it's for this reason that polymaths are selected-for in social media. Specialized art is outdated when all things are unified into the single medium of the screen, leading to only those who can be polymaths themselves or imitate it by unifying specialists under a single corpus, achieving true artistic heights within the world of the cyber. This can be seen in the emergence of two predominant medium of artistic expression in the digital - videos and games.

The skillset required to produce both requires the artist pull-together specialities, disparate strands of small production that then have a meta-discourse of unification wherein they form the work. For video production, graphics must be produced, requiring either/or drawing, modeling, cinema- or photo- graphy skills, then applied with some form of audio, requiring sound design and music. The meta-discourse comes at the point of the video editor, wherein the raw material that is already a form of artistic production is brought together into the complete product. No surprise that this long-practiced artform, so beloved for its wholeness by the Modernists, flourished in the digital age like never before. This is given an additional layer by player freedom in games. "Assets" are all created disparately, themselves often requiring mini-steps, such a the texture artist, modeler, and level designer working in a pipeline of varying orders to produce the same genre of end-results. All of this is then linked in a non-linear fashion by programming, where all assets are tied together by sets of scripts and systems - open and circular where film is monodirectional and linear. Film always fell short of its aspirations to being complete in this way - film ultimately always fell victim to the fact that its aspirations at wholeness were contradictory to its own nature as a straight line. Games never suffered this problem, being enclosed circles from the beginning.

At the end of it all, Fulgrim’s rituals give birth to a new species of consumer or channeler of art - the Kakophoni. The centerpiece of the performance was the audience-musician meeting, as Daemonettes took control of the show and exposed it to the warp. Kakophoni emerged from this experience having experienced ecstasy, heights dizzying from which they were unable to return to the old, forever only capable of breathing the light mountain air. Such is the experience of art from the end of the consumer. While the creator exists in drawing together disparate strands of materials and process to form the final work, the consumer enters the art as one enveloped, then as an aquatic life form, drowning giving birth to a human whose lungs can process water. The consumer enters the art first as a traveler and then uses it as a conduit as a writer themselves, forming now the author-function of interpretation in both their further usage of the discourses within their own linguistic systems and in working-within the original work.

Games like few else awaken this capacity of art. No wonder that the line between mod and original game is constantly blurred, with vestiges of the old able to be seen in countless games a bit sloppy about hiding their origins - “impulse101” in any Source game to experience it firsthand. As games operate through processing and this processing requires interaction with the meta-discourse of the work - the machine, games naturally give birth to further advances on their own technology as they then become interpreted and worked-within by creators afterwords. Worlds, enclosed firmament-globes, thus mutate, akin to cell division.

The cell-division nature of games is shown in the reverse of games, the only medium which is purely meta-discourse without an alternative craft that goes into production beforehand - writing. Writing is language, the equivalent to programming which draws it together, with no others below it. Writing however is completely codependent on all other writing - notice the evolution of form and style over the years, the consistency of grammar, syntax, references and citations - what else could this be but cell division? One work forms the SDK or ripped-assets for another.

The problem of all forms of artistry is the problem of technique over substance, the Protestant Mindset of art where the work turns into an exercise of a practiced skill with no pretensions to a linguistic flowing-through at all. This is the issue of all specialized disciplines and ultimately it takes over, where the art of the discipline turns into incest, as the discipline is speaking only to itself. Painting showed this as it went into the era of abstract minimalism, where meta-technique became the sole concern of artists - Ad Reinhardt’s matte grids, Kline’s action painting, Pollock’s barnyard drippings. Paint became the focus of painting, as the technique ultimately surfaced as primary above form.

It’s only in the production of meta-works - when image making ascends into texture artistry or set dressing - that artistry emerges primary above technique. Technique is an impossible term in writing. All thousands of years of shifting form and style have proven as much. And in meta-production, artistry happens as the artist no longer becomes a practitioner, no different from a tennis player, but a creator wholly, a builder of discourses beyond the mere production of things and the working of hands.

Cogito, Nada

“don’t say anything.” - Coda

Barthes spoke of the author in echoing of Derrida’s remarks against invectives of moral relativism against him - never that the center doesn’t exist, but that the center is a function. Not a noumenal ideal, but an emergent position in the motion of the flux of phenomena. 

When The Beginners Guide came out, countless Professional Critics emerged from the woodwork to engage in their favorite activity - self flagellation over the useless and parasitism inherent to their profession. Forgiving for a moment the pathos in their correct self-assessments, to take them at face values shows a reading of the game missed - that of the text as a text. Barthes by Derrida - not that the author doesn’t exist, but that the author is a function, a position in the topological space of becomings-in-flux, an emergent “center” of the strands and tensions that flow and swirl to form a text. The vortex’s center is the author-function, the voice of the text. In The Beginner’s Guide, Coda and Davey form two in the singlesame, each emergences of the author-function, as Coda becomes the facet of the author constructing the game as the world while Davey constructs it as diegetic and intellectual writing.

Davey obsesses through the text for meaning and his contributions are just that, the vertical signification that the author-function is assumed by the critic to provide. Davey becomes the critic’s author here, the vertical author. The lamps at the end of each level, the diegetic story, the “meaning” of the game laid out in plain English - all of which are functions of the critic which the critic then performs through the text’s author-function in their writing-within.

Coda meanwhile acts as the author-function’s horizontal properties, the author as flux. Coda constructs levels mutely, only speaking to rebuke the critic. Coda assembles and creates, as nature does, wind and water assembling forests and mountains without purpose besides motion. Coda provides the material of the world, the author-function as a magnetic center of flux into which flows revolve to form the text.

The game ends as Coda is destroyed by Davey. The critic, like the gun to destroy precious projects, is caustic. Criticism, a vertical imposition upon the text, comes first as dissolving agent and then a crystallization-imitation, a facade of the former remade in monochromatic ice, an intellectualization that reduces the work of the horizontal-author to a one-dimensional set of plain-english text to a single lamppost ending, a vertical cap to construct the author-function as a path, a path of words towards meaning.

The cleaning game was never meant to end. Between the doors, that black space of…

Coda preferred prison games, and why not? Does interpretation become demanded, does a vertical-author-function demand to be imposed on each text or is its imposition a product of the critic within themselves, a writing-anew where they take the world and remake it within their own prison, a world of ice of their own copying and creation?

Coda wrote poetry as Davey wrote criticism. Coda stayed in limbo, in flux, breathing motion as rivers and tides. Davey attempted to freeze. Davey trapped himself as the seduced husband,  stifled, lost, and loveless, in a torturing mechanism of his own design.

Hey, Heroin

Feels sick and dirty more dead than alive - I plow on in wide rotations around the steering wheel, rocking atop the suspension down country roads, sugardrunk off two dozen Arnold Palmers and the burning sunlight upon the fairway. 

I arrive to the pre-party a little before dusk in the orange light pouring down glass sliding doors and window-walls in the lakehome, a manor made of fake log siding and laminated wood furniture, all knotted and grained beneath thick sheens of sticky soft plastic.

I watched the last dregs of sunset disappearing into the water below the treeline across the placid lake, beer in hand while I swayed to gentle music. Our conversations picked up intensity as we all burned hotter in anticipation as the night drew down upon us. The last few cars were pulling into the long drive, pulling off into the gravel beside the asphalt.

True art conceals the means by which it was achieved. Music silences and our voices muffle. We climb the stairs and step behind velvet curtains, into empty rooms without windows. Take off our shoes and look over the chained woman on the floor. The doldrum steppe, from Texas to North Dakota, a wide vertical band of prey to parcel, little bits of the finest taken away, dispersed east and west to the true power’s dormant coastal hideaways.

She’s fucking a dog, sobbing limp pressed into the sticky wooden floor as I dip out, bored of the sweating doberman’s ruthless pumping, her flab twitching as she rocks back and forth with pain of its claws upon her back.

I crushed another pill onto a metal tray, scooping it out to a needle I burned off a lighter and spoon, falling half-sleeping backwards into the leather couch as my veins flood at 90 miles an hour. Classic rock is still drowning me in this anterior section of the newscaster’s mcmansion.

“No heroin?” He looks down at the pile of medical junk scattered onto my little territory, taking a seat beside me.

“Couldn’t find any. Wanna sit?”

“Nah. Just chilling.”

He sipped his beer. The songs droned on without end. I lost track of where one began, where one ended. Swampy rhythms caressed me into poisoned water, gasoline floating like cirrus clouds atop a sea of belly-up dead freshwater fish. Cans crack open. Sun rises and falls. I sweat. I vomit later, greasy pizza, expensive beer. The trees rustle. My rapist tears them down.

Sakuragaoka

There was no one home and the doors of the private room were open to her. The granddaughter secreted the key from her pocket and twisted the iron lock, pushing the door aside, piecing steps into the must-addled atmosphere of the room. A bed sat made and untouched against the wall, its fibers frayed and spun out by age and neglect. Amidst the dense walls, hard materials from an era before it was all hollowed out with foam interiors, she grappled with subtle mechanisms of the cabinetry adorning against the walls.

The collection was careful, possessions prized and placed in individual positions like pointillist blots. A comb inland with gold and little insets where tiny arms of metal reached out to cuddle tiny gems into themselves. A jade mirror polished within carvings of mythological stories and epics long forgotten. Hollow porcelain from an era of Chinese wealth. A wooden box of British import with velvet cushioning lining it as a miniature coffin.

The old woman was careful, quiet about her life beforehand. She had lived through the turbulent century and secreted away from the whirlwind of violence safe and in some form of profit, the details of which she refused to disclose. The generations postceding her descended under a strange cloud of prosperity, the origins of which were only known in whatever occult stories lay behind the trinkets she kept locked away in that collection of value, a collection curated as a representation of a royal hoard moreso than an old woman’s precious heirlooms. The secret was kept by subtlety, inter-marriages too distant to have sprung from her unaware of the faint air she held over the children of her own womb, an air even they count only halfways detect in the quietest hours of reflection and memory.

The old woman was asleep, back to guard her post. The granddaughter wrapped the plastic coat tighter around her shivering body. It was grey, the air nipping sharp with the solemnity of late November, a deathly emptiness swollen with the potential of winter.

The convenience store was yelling at her with an array of options from overseas, descended distantly, impossibly cheap, products of a heaven of plastic. She selected one, a small electronic box that promised something to her. She wrapped it into a pocket, walking home uphill with it nestled within her warmth beside batteries promised to it.

The grandson had taken the box from her in the ensuing days as they both departed for and returned from school. He was captivated by it. The granddaughter had walked in on him time and time again in deep study, back arched C-shaped over his lap, staring into it, headphones jacked in to silence all outside it. She ignored him and it, moving on through December without his attentions.

A diagram of a circuit had taken up the table as they had their morning breakfast. She ignored him as he pulled his hair, eyes wretched and red over the schematic he mocked up himself. The device was in pieces, the guts of five of them scattered with an intact sixth as the centerpiece of a strange altar. He kept writing in a notebook, using a pen to feverishly scribble ASM. She ignored him. The old woman kept watching him, as if lining him up in her sights, a predator meeting a peer across the steppe.

The grandson had disappeared for weeks. It was high April, flooding rains, snow more than melted, deep blue skies the color of cold yet to fully dissipate.

The grandson met his end on the raised trail across a ricepaddy. The farmer ignored them as three suited men took turns circling. Guns were a rarity in Japan. They fired a dozen times, shots no one heard or acknowledged.

The old woman spoke little of him. The granddaughter and the old woman drank as the sun set on a June afternoon. The old woman spoke the grandson’s name quietly, letting it whisper into the sky. The granddaughter cleaned out his room the next day, piling the trashcan high with the scribbleball of engineering that traced his demise.

Northern America

The night is bright and this land is poisoned.

The heiress fell violently ill in her bathroom, overlit with the vanity and overhead and tub all reflecting together off granite and drywall as she wavered and shook, sitting on the lip of the bathtub, perched ready to lurch forward and vomit into the toilet. She was nauseous, headwise, her cheeks swollen blushing, her throat spittling up in microspasms. It was a brutal comedown, jitters of hunger and insomnia riding on the overdriving of herself, another speedbinge alone.

She hadn’t done this for months, only having an opportunity to do so when she was forced back inside, to inhabit the lonely country home, idling in the shadows of unbound chains hanging from the walls, shadows of strictures they claimed she outgrew. She had done it like she always had, driving her body past its limits like climbing through pain up a mountain, a rush she had been forbidden to touch now opened to her. She felt alive as she did so, flexing through a cocoon membrane around her skinless flesh.

But she had been in the cold for months and hadn’t notice her skin had grown fully hard around herself, an enclosure she hadn’t notice as she hid it in darting stealth from her family. She had reached the top of the mountain and like a snowball rolling down it, had developed herself, had come into possession of a full corpus and thus, only made herself violently ill. The rotten material of this poisoned land, that was so instrumental to her to come to this stage, now returned as alien to her after she had separated and became whole, no longer wedded to the piercing soil as she was in the first tentative steps into her own light in those youthful imbibings.

The night is bright and this land is poisoned.

The dirt was sandy and fruitless. Their shovels were weak and frail, fake metal and half-liquid plastic. There was motor oil saturated between tiny grains of sand, mixed into the earth. The sun was too bright, baking them through shirts that disintegrated into fibers of paper-like nothing as they baked. They ate styrofoam lunch as wind blew cancer through the dying sticktrees.

She nervously smoked under the stands of the dirt-track, her bruises still smarting. They discussed something as the crowd above screamed and pissed and drank. The night turned plastic-purple through the window of the repair pit as they descended into the egg-shaped convention center where all manner of engine and oil was displayed. South City motor teams made sport of it as a fight broke out in the parking lot, as another drunk died in the arms of a loving wife beside another famous garage.

She had come back from wandering on the railroad tracks that led through overgrown trees and tall grass in a long line across rusty forest to nowhere, deeper inlands of meth-fueled sawmills beyond her fentanyl wasteland city of empty factories. The sun was setting and rock played on the radio garbled to nothing by the speakers. Charred meat burned deeper on a grill. Paper plates stained with beer. A screen door slammed and someone got behind the wheel of a sedan that could barely get up to interstate speed. She leaned against the fence and poured her soda into the toxic dirt. She looked up at the sky. it was bright. She knew there was something beyond that she was destined to find.

Fascist Realism

Tragedy strikes on the evening news. A man was stabbed, penetrated by a knife and stricken to bleed out on boiling concrete in a hot Florida afternoon. Camera vulture in on the body, filming and commenting. Guilt and pain pool out from the two bodies that locked in congress with the blade. Vultures feast on footage that’s recut and reinterpreted in ceaseless debate, said debate leading the one left standing to a concrete box. Words are said and built upon each other as cameras turn into an overgrowth, yet for what end? No matter how many, or how firmly they win against other cameras, the third parties will never be anything except that. Words bloom spectral in a Heaven of self-replication yet flesh and metal are still all that-is of the original case. The facts of the case are the blade as-is, the flesh as-is, with even the motivations and reactions internal to those involved being as secondary, an imaginary third added before and after the fact, as the camera vultures now debating the floating “ethics” of the matter, above and beyond the matter as-is.

Philosophy of ethics or morality is countlessly unable to reconcile this as to do so would force self-abrogation. In the opposite turn, Mark Fisher has made the interesting move of throwing out the question completely. Mark Fisher proclaims that the concept of the end-utopia of communism has become so occluded by capitalist ideology, that it has become ‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’. Such a statement is correct, but relies upon a partial-truth. To say that capitalism is not the world would be an outright lie. Capitalism is the world as-is and never, has there existed a socialist society which didn’t exist with capitalism at its core. True existing socialism becomes an impossible goal as Mark Fisher somewhat acknowledges it, and as Marx’s command against utopianism tacitly agrees, as to annihilate capitalism would require the annihilation of the world as an entropic place.

What is capitalism here? Capitalism takes the place of evil in Marxian theodicy and as all concepts of evil, its being is always present. The flesh will always desire as the abrahamic fears, and so continuous revolutions are needed to root out the evil-within, that of desire. It’s flesh, from where the harming of flesh emerges, and it’s this harming that becomes known as capitalism. Marxian thought makes the move to construct capitalism by externalizing a pure humanity from a form of sin, capitalism here substituting for Satan as the fetishized source of all evil alien to the foundationally good nature of the being underneath. What truly distinguishes capitalism, what is there in capitalism that is separate from any other economic system, modernist, hypothetical, or previous? Is the exploitation of human bodies, the violent coercion of lower classes, the brutal struggle for fitness-to-environment of systems of power, different in anything except quantity than previous? Capitalism as a concept is only constructed by externalizing these things from the self in order to build a utopian system of negation beyond it, in order to construct the paradise of is-not against the world as-is.

It’s here that Fisher becomes genius in his defense of the Camera Vultures from the stabbing. The end of the world is the end of capitalism, as both are one in the same, capitalism being the sins of the flesh and the world as-is, while the end of capitalism being the dream of revelation. Fisher performs a fully christian move here, to contemplate the world as being possibly cleansed, to truly believe in a God-the-son, in an Unfolding to bring purity upon the world.

The archetypal socialist in these words is Raiden in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. The bosses proclaim through the entire game, their philosophy of fitness, of nihilism, of war as foundation, as Raiden cuts through spewing words of truth and justice that become more and more hollow as he slaughters thousands and ultimately vindicates their own words by winning through being the strongest and most fit for the discourse at hand. Raiden at no point awakens to the reality of what he was practicing, though this reality often awakens wherever a “higher cause” is attempted to guide the ways of the as-is. Violence will affect its victims and perpetrators sufficiently to annihilate occlusions of morality by its caustic flow. Colonel Kurtz traveled through the ways of the great empires of Liberalism and Socialism and came out with this lesson, the lesson of the world. Philosophy when attempted to be practiced is abrogated by its very practice, as spiritual things are when they began to copulate with the material. To annihilate philosophy is only to ignore it, to deal with the as-is, to meditate, to close one’s monologue and breathe.