A Quiet Appointment With Vivifying Results

I arrived at the Inn at the climax of an arduous journey in the backseat of a car with no clear motivations to ever arrive. I had long last track of where we were in relation to the rural train station I got off at, as small cities turned to silent towns nestled in mountain valleys with low-slung rice paddy basins, until even this gave way to inhospitality, temperate forest and high terrain turning dramatic and wild, until the only remaining structures were the industrial mid-century and the traditional, decaying Edo-era manors reeking of musty inheritances and incestuous theatrics. I hadn’t noticed the land sloping upwards until the front gate, heavier than imaginable wooden doors parting at the soaring peak where the Inn made its roost aloof between the violence and the moon.

The hostess greets me, guiding me through the maze of backrooms and corridors. She’s older, tight up like a spider’s prey, her ornate robe, multilayered, jewelry, and elaborate bun all giving the appearance of a package hiding secrets more than a woman. When I sleep, I lay on my back in a futon that feels a little too heavy and watch murals that move when they shouldn’t. Things are alive here, the walls and the images move like the forest, each second I spend behind paper walls and locked doors drawing me deeper into a confused wilderness I’ll never leave.

The next morning, the hostess had changed her face. I couldn’t tell it rationally, the eyes and mouth and nose re-arranged across an impasto-white surface like moveable pieces of a tile puzzle. She stood by as some hand served me breakfast. A tongue spoke words within lips by coincidence. I read a scroll on the wall, its words arranged by chance or trickery to say something against and twisting.

In a tearoom across the gardens, beneath paper walls painted with murals of a resplendent bird with psychedelic, fanning plumage of jewels and symbols, a man is tied to the floor. The hostess is standing over him, delicately touching him. She explains he’s a local, a peasant from a village some distance from the inn. She invites me to take part. I kneel on a pillow beside her, watching in obedience. She gently lays her hands upon him and draws from him, something internal. She slices a sever somewhere deep into him and removes from his skin through an almost invisible fold, a long strand of his nerves and arterial veins, laying them out on the tatami. She places her hand into his beneath the extracted length and uses the other to pluck out a bundle of blue nerves like a knotted ball of string from where his hand met the arm. He screamed the entire time and I said nothing. Like the arm, she proceeded to carefully lay the man out entire, his screaming unceasing as his head remained untouched. With his organs laid out piecemeal on the tatami in careful arrangement, the hostess looked at me expectantly. I did as I was told and partook of the delicacies. Each bite felt like life itself.

Digital Natives

Like a bad fever dream of the worst cultural artefacts from 3am trash TV, a sitcom punchline was elected to the United States presidency by a swooping horde of senile boomers in 2016. This basic action is nothing new. American presidents have always had more in common with old fashioned kings than prime ministers or popes, elected figureheads that emerge to symbolize the vibe of the times and the spirit of the nation, their body propped up by the million hands of the nation, in the manner of Melquíades the Exhumed Archbishop in Blasphemous, the corpse alive by the sustained puppeteering of the crowd who have their souls and destinies caught up in it.

Yet when this happened, should it not have been predicted? Beginning the year and the era, three movements took place, all towards the same end - the killing of Harambe, the disappearance of MH370, and the emergence of Vaporwave. The first and last of these strikes a chord in the long-running obsession of this era, nostalgia. The 1990s and early 00s appear to the generation today as a strange fever dream presented in “aesthetic” montages that bring back hazy memories of strange rituals in constructed spaces, media consumed and theme parks visited. The shibboleth of one of these was thus ruthlessly slaughtered like a sacred goat, and, as many others have pointed out, the chaos portal was opened. Trump was elected, Quantitative Easing known today as JPoww’s Money Printer, Jeffrey Epstein, Coronavirus. Like a great ritual constructed atop the hazy, doped-up remixes and remembrances of Vapor-mind, the past childhood destination of the zoo was brought forward into the consciousness and then violently brought into contact with reality, a folding-into-oneself like spacetime being bent to form a wormhole.

Unexplainable disappearances are nothing new. For as long as there has been enough of a paper trail to ponder over whenever someone decides to shuffle off the face of the Earth, disappearances have been pondered over that previously would have had a certain rumor attached to them as truth. Yet here the very symbol of this grid that forms the outlines of fascination goes missing, the plane slipping through the very grid it represents into absolute nothingness.

When the 20th century was in full force, it was always intoxicated with its own alienation from what was known. All the great builders saw what they did as xenogenous to themselves and the people they imposed on, dazzled by how different glass and steel and concrete were from the default of the previous era. The supposed decline of the 20th century, that spoken of by vaporwave was this, as it wore off. The frontier of technology as technology enveloped the world and with the millennials, the first generation was born where technology is to be taken so much for granted that it becomes the very known that all previous generations had been obsessed with as an image of the untouched to be pushed over by the new. There is no new for millennials, the first generation to live as generations before the industrial era did, in a world where the environment simply was with no expectations of being completely remade by the alien future. Vaporwave was their cry as they saw, a protest of how I see tech, as the concrete jungle, as the environment itself, as natural as the forest would have been to the medieval mind. It simply is.

Trump’s election was, like vaporwave, a cultural outcry of culture beginning to be separate from Modernism. Modernism, so plagued with its own newness and perpetual revolution, has died and its creations settle to become the taken for granted environment. The worldview of this is reflected in Vaporwave’s most direct descendent, Liminal Aesthetics, Backrooms content of empty schools (remember the tagline Music for Abandoned Malls?) and nostalgic dreams of scenes half remembered, parts of the city never seen with no function except their own existence… The liminal space need not justify itself, the same as the forest need not. The chord of Trump, of a celebrity of his stature arising to president, of the yellow backrooms that feel so much like home, is the chord of the generation to wake up after the 20th century’s perpetual revolution into the concrete jungle and experience it as just that - a jungle, the world, natural, as it is.

Manus' (GH GH GH GH GH)

From a stupor at the vanity, I was thrust to turn my head aside to the doorway. Three flights down the stairwell, through the hallows of the concrete brut temple I’m cloistered within, in a large chapel that opens to the outside, it begins. An enormous crashing is sounded and I know it’s over. Metal scraping on metal and stone crumbling into stone and screams of those unfortunate enough to be caught inside. In the chapel far below me, a great squealing is unleashed the way flesh is knotted around and through itself by the forces of beyond, dimensions upon dimensions of the knot forming by an emptiness ripped open like knives across paper, the solid now made so radically open that the blackness itself seems to form psychedelic within, as though we can’t bear the horror of not seeing color beyond, we cannot truly bear the weight of knowing the darkness of swirling waters.

“Get up. It’s time to go.” The man in the leather jacket isn’t asking, as he threatened. I’m only wearing my nightgowns, layers of satin and silk and stiletto heels for his pleasure. My lips are too bright and I touch my face to realize its the wrong shape today. The man leads me on through darkness growing from the edges of corners, the hallways turning to have fogged cobwebs of the abyss seeping in where rebar meets stone. The walls were always empty and now something is painted atop them, like amber paneling over the plain wood of a Russian pretender-king, and we’re being enclosed, trapped within deeper layers of the house. This is a machine for unliving, something now made clear by whatever imagination in the rectangular rooms and concrete pillars birthed that horrid thing that now rends, a gnashing hunger that snowballs through and around in dimensions unknowable, rending and ripping and twisting, not a destruction but a distortion past and past and past what can be tolerated. It won’t listen to limits and we cannot die from it. I know this and the man knows it.

A body is twisted and rent across a room where the wreckage has been made total as the form of dominion the room holds. I saw his wife. The darkness went inside her and tore her as it spun, a tornado within under she was rent across the room in the walls as pillars crumbled and metal twisted and the room became a cubist nightmare where bodies were stretched beyond their composure and pain squealed from movement like water wrung from rags.

I don’t know how long it will be before my time. The area beyond is dead and flat, a desert on an infinite plane that stretched white forever to a horizon that never arrives. The man leads me away to make tracks in the sand. No matter how far we walk, we will never walk far enough. The home will never be home to us, its language always beyond us, an alien inhospitality in which we fitfully navigate in continual tripping and stumbling, sharp bladed scraps and pieces arranged in the order of a discourse we only speak in feverish dreams cutting to shreds the feet of our waking lives.

Return to Tradition

“A real female has smells (…) this is clean and pretty” an otaku says in an image commonly passed around /c/ and its adjacent communities. This sentiment is seen undergirding the fascination with moe and cuteness for many, the sterile image of it. Women are made into hypergirls, an impossible archetype of feminine as innocence and object-value, the characters far beyond the typical of characters in shows as their entire being is made, not of actors, but of the same creative hand that birthed the scripting. The girls exist not only as a product of, but teleologically for and only-for the purpose of the show. There is no unpleasant irrupture by the reality of acting, a reminder of the flesh behind the product, only a simulacra more perfect than perfection could hope.

The fascination with this is via a process of negation, moe is-not, is-not, is-not and thus an ensuing list of all things impure and dirty with what is outside or non-moe. The real female is all unpleasant beyond, while moe provides an edenic space of purity by negation, leaving only a reality that functions akin to a platonic ideal, by separating the impure and the pure into neat halves of the world.

This purity takes the form of a regression, the boundaries of which demarcate what precisely is used to draw the pure and impure as separate. Moe is obsessed with childhood, portraying girls as not only physically young, but infantile before their diegetic age. 

Purity here is truly Edenic, a place before the fall. All things that are impure are that which associate with aging - sexuality, bodily functions, etc. Notice that this is precisely what is awakened in so-called corruption or moral degeneration hentai. The girl is taken from the boy and re-presented to him as a woman, hairy, darker skin, high sex drive, curvy body, etc. The fear here is a fear of puberty as a unified chaos of the-exterior. The ego still remains in a childlike state which beyond it is the horrifying face of life that imposes in pubescence, sexual women, virile men, bodily changes, all experienced as part of the same unknowable other that forced itself into the same world of the self. Such is the constant identification with the desired-woman and the feared-male-other, ugly bastards, black men, criminal elements, etc, and the constant obsession with not only girlfriend NTR, but mother, sister, best friend…

This imaginary realm of purity exists as a broad function in the conservative mind, often the mechanic by which it operates. Wanting to literally regress into an earlier, Edenic state, a construction is made both of the ideal and of the impure corrupting that ideal. Nick Fuentes’ fans have been obsessed with an image of “Apu”, a Pepe regressed, shitting his pants, speaking in toddler-like babble, childishly fumbling about the world. The self here is drawn as a child to reveal the nature of their fascinations. The Bambi-like meadows of romanticist landscapes, the infantilizing language of Christian love, the regressed consumption state of a child, taking pleasure in tendies and hollow gaming, all of which serve to act as a safe space, a pacifier of sorts against the horrors of modernity they politically identify against, as psychological identification against puberty.

Their female counterparts of course, take the same fantasy a step farther by creating not only a physical space but also by centering around childrearing itself. For the tradwife, nature is fantasized as Eden, a peaceful cottage in a European meadow, an image of the wilderness based not in reality of the wilderness or living off the land, but of the same regressive instinct, a wilderness constructed as a garden for small children. Their childhood is then extended to the creation of “innocence”, life untouched by the pubescent-modernity, with their sexuality suppressed in favor of an abstracted process they view as creating children.

The sublimation occurring in all of this isn’t an easy sublimation of using ones politics as an outlet for ones sexuality in a direct sense, but in a more abstract process of externalization. Sexuality is painted as the outside, as mentioned previously, and this performs a crucial function in the keeping of sexuality as intact. The fetish then is not anything to do with the self, but rather a sort of tainting that purifies the self. One will always be, in their fantasies, a perpetual victim of the other, cuckolded or raped, transformed into a being of impurity in a replication of the drama of their stunted adolescence. Purity will always remain there, as the cuckold is locked up or the rape victim will always be contrasted against her former self. This is a feature, not a problem, as this contrasted purity against the impurity reinforces this boundary time and again, satisfying the emotional architecture already constructed via the masochistic thrill.

The Young Man's Musings

I - The Young Man - I walk the streets of a North Ohio town and sit along the border between Canada and the United States. I - The Young Man - smoke self-consciously just to smoke, to ritually scourge my lungs with the forbidden. I - The Young Man - walk alone in the sidewalk in a broad flat city built for cars and asphalt where pedestrians wait at bureaucratic checkpoints with my head tilted down and my eyes drooped to the floor and my shoes pointing duckfooted in opposite directions as I wait for a path forwards.

Feeding my roommate as he mewls on the floor in the dirty mattress of our unfurnished apartment. He is deaf and blind now. He lost his eyes fighting beneath a bar. He lost his ears in an orgasm of music louder than his eardrums could bear. He had a final blast of beautiful noise and then a lifetime of silence. I play noisily, I play Counter-Strike on the living room table next to him, he howls and mewls and digests his food in mute contemplation of nothingness. He is dull, his surroundings are dull, he lives as a stain of scraping flesh rubbing itself to salty bone with abrasion upon abrasion on the grinding concrete of his surroundings. I ignore him and experiment, exploring strange maps made of cargo cult textures. He’s noisy and moaning and slowly abrading himself to nothingness until death comes as a terminus where no more ink is left in his veins to be spilled on the snow and stone.

My roommate only has one thing left to him after exhausting the speed of life. His spirit has been spread thin across the flat plains of our birth and he is nothing more than an insult against God, a naked stone laid bare against cold winds that taught and prickle him with reminders - you shouldn’t be here! you shouldn’t exist! die! go away! be gone! no longer exist! you are an affront to our purity! planes need to land here! this needs to be flat!

His insulting flesh being abraded away is all he has left to give.

I love to drink Diet Soda and feel the bubbles and caffeine. I love to withdraw and feel sick and alive and crawly and bug ridden. I love to squish spiders on the windowsill of our plain white walled apartment where plaster comes together in an unfurnished hovel that makes me Machine for Living where I practice my aim on the M4A4 and AK47 and my roommate moans against salt and silence. I love the chemical smell of colors on wrappers. I’m surrounded by plastic. I’m grateful in the rare moments when I can find a bug to squish - almost never.

The land is so empty. I drive for hours to find mountains and sea where I meet my old friend in a hillside manor. He’s engaged to his mother, their incest part and parcel of the old traditions locked away solitary on the high hills over crashing seas. Amidst wood paneling and gold, I look through them into a world of ancient mysteries that always come out the other end of discovery underwhelming and stale.

I sit alone in a subtle hour between dosing and redosing. The pool I frequented as a child is empty and cold, only the dreamy blue lights left to turn the water to oil. It smells like chlorine and I’m fully clothed. The smell takes me away from time. A third dimension of the screen’s blue glow, no time, no place, a fourth dimension of space. I sit alone as my train arrives at a fourth dimensional station. I am alone.

The Chymical Divorce

My father takes me to the open field where he forces me into the sunlight. The sky is big and empty before us, America stretching out in fields of white clouds in all directions. My father shoves me into the open field and the tall grass. My father directs me to move like a train along lines painted with white in the tick infested grass and teaches me about geometry and dull ritualisms this way. The sunlight is hot and my skin breaks open in blisters and sores. The life of my being spills in boiling melt upon the dry ground, I scream and look up and there’s no answer beyond my father’s stern gaze. I can think less and less upon the dull blunting of the light. 

The sun and moon are married. The Sun returns home to the cave of reception in the bays of Northeastern Canada, from his dominion over the distant shores that departed across the Atlantic. The Sun is angry at the Moon’s misuse of his funds in their windowless cavehome and slams her bloody against the grey and brown wooden interior, clattering trinkets that adorn every last inch of the walls, her pale white light thrown across curving geometries of toys aligning shelves, maps and sextants glittering, potatoes on the counter for dinner future, liquor in the bottle.

In scratchy fabric I sit awake at night listening to my father beat on wood in the silence of the wilderness. He brought us here to be alone, without the tedious supervision provided by the European communities we had fled from. From our native land through Quebec and then inland until we came south to Minnesota where he staked out a fiefdom he could call his own, his two daughters the subjects as he once was. He kept track of axes and little wood pallets the way a lord would his expenses and outputs. We tilled his fields and ate gruelish foods yoked from a barren desert never meant for a non-nomadic people. I’m scratchy and alone below the indifferent stars in clothes that tear my skin, under blankets only fit as rat food. Softness is for them, those we flee from, the soft people of the city my father says life in sin in their comfort. My father enjoys pain, the dull enduring of grinding tedium. He derives his satisfaction from starvation.

In a cave in Northeastern Canada, the Moon is wearing a silk nightgown in the upper floor of an incandescent lit bar. Potato jazz plays on the band below her as another drunken man strips off his suit and thrusts his five o’clock stubble and cigarette stained body into her. The light in the town is yellow, until it turns ice for the sailors who depart every morning. The jazz is always quieter than it should, she lives on snails and mushrooms and fish-laced gin. The Sun is sleeping off tin-gin from the metal mines farther West, towards America. The Moon sleeps off the infertile cum of a sailor. They won’t meet for several days.

Back home, there’s a fear of the Lodge, where it opens up in oily puddles around Jackrabbit’s Palace, where only the elect dare to tread. We came to escape the wilderness, to find purity underneath the blinding heat of the Dakota sky, the doldrum seasickness of ships and whales. Chaos, a continent of chaos, where no order structures this world from the outside astral, and all we found is the same thing we had run from within us. The forces once restricted to kings given to common men and the doors once open in sacred groves now so tread-upon as to be highways. The Sun will entomb himself by his own decisions and his soul will be crushed to dust. The Moon will live on forever, though her flight away into nothingness looks so much like death in the Sun’s dying breath.