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.

The Structure of Gravity's Rainbow

A rocket in flight forms a parabola and thus, implies an ellipse. It’s this implied ellipse, one being in the negative half of a four quadrant graph from the positive parabola of the rocket’s trajectory through the air, that forms two halves of an enclosed circle - the mandala, an egg-world containing all the things encompassed by the myth produced from Genius in the original sense of the term as the perfect author-function channeling an abstract subject such as a people or a time period. The author-function channeling this myth is the dreamer of genius, in this novel, Pirate Prentice, in his ability to take on the fantasies of the war and by extension, the transformative myth of the 20th century.

Two rockets and their opposite guardians, 00000 and 00001, for Blicero and Enzian respectively, form the two points of Y=0 on the quadrant axis. It’s these where traced is the overall structure of the novel, both the literal concept of a actual rocket and its opposite in a potential rocket, duplicated in the text’s structure, where an arc of a rocket is drawn over Europe and by extension, the structure. Beginning with an impact at +X,Y=0, a clockwise rotation first through the impacted, negative world of the allies and then through the positive, aggressing world of the axis.

The cycle always works by passing beyond some veil, with parallel underworlds and overworlds on the other side of the impassable line of 0. In one respect, this is death, the movement of transgression “Beyond the Zero” and into the other side of the world, in the form of the alien world entered in the hero’s journey. Enzian’s birth and resurrection from the veld that meant death and back to the village, coming to mind as demonstrating.

In a broader way, this cycle emerges, as all cycles do as being mechanical moreso than stable, with their movements using the subjects as mere functions. The Schwarzkommando return to Europe as America does, the colony coming back around to the colonizer to submit it to the same work of death. The work of death, Europe’s Kingdom of Death as its put, is explained not as being the material work of the rocket-city but something beyond - the wilderness, where the European man escapes from death, to bring death upon the world in the pursuit of life, savage natives, wild plants, coca, hemp, poppies. 

This mechanic of death inflicted as an action of pursuit of life is shown further in the remark on the nature of humanity. Humanity was created in order to be a counter-revolution against the green life of the wilderness, humanity as a culling agent of death to restrain the chaos of life choking the plant - metal after fire and wood, in the Wuxing. Death and life thus come not as an alien product but a result of not just humanity, but of the self. Life is nature here, the human as they are in third person while death comes at the behest of the soul’s driving of that body - the self in itself is life, while the actions performed are death.
This dynamic is felt by Geli in her consorting with Pan in the wilderness, where in contacting the titans she recreates the old way of humanity, the dead within the world of the living, the European in Africa, the Africans in Europe. This is a closed loop, a broader mandalic cycle that makes up much of the text, both within the self, of knowing one to be both, but also of the two working across the same theme, such as colonialism, where the two do death unto each other by means of their simple mixing.

With death as the external actions of the self, death then becomes something which can be imposed in a regime, where the body is forced to act in ways alien to the desires of the self. This, known in philosophy as Biopower, forms the obsessions with systems where the death-bringer can create something such as Der Raketen-stadt or the dramas of the war (genius of the war, like Pirate’s dreams) Blicero holds Gottfried within. The self in these regimes is within a regime not of death-itself but a regime of reproducing death, as the self is not only bringing the same death that the self brings in its life, but is forced to bring death via the agendas of another.

This marriage, that between Blicero and Gottfried makes up the entirety of the zone. The wilderness is always unreachable and yet the pursuit of it will never cease. The Counterforce does such a thing, their hippie excesses degenerating into the final realization, of the circular unity. In seeking life, they practiced death until this loop spun so fast it made a circle and the holiness of both as one in the same was realized, to prompt the worship of the blood upon the grail, the blood as life and death, the closed-circle containing everything, the cosmic egg. Raised to the heavens, they sacrifice the counterculture by performing counterculture on itself, closing the loop between two station-marks, yellow crayon through the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971.

It’s this action, a mandala of death and life as being two aspects (inflow and outflow, if you will) of the self and all things, that the text is formed as a myth. Slothrop is the rocket, as is shown in the final few episodes, and his personhood marks the trajectory of life and death as it runs in a circle to enclose the matrix of the myth, where all the strands and tensions and histories and ideas are drawn together. Beginning after the rocket’s fall, in the world of the body (life), Slothrop journeys as a coherent person, putrid flesh like that of Brigadier Pudding’s sexual appetite. Arising at the rocket launch, parts three and four deal with the world of actions (death), where Slothrop’s body and self disintegrate until the text itself does, vignettes of pure image and action after all corporeal bodies of diegesis are resolved, until the rocket descends to finally impact, and the circle is closed, the arc beginning again.