Peak Oil

“Evil - I want to taste raw evil. I want to see pure evil. I want you to bleed as I cry. I want to see evil. I want to see raw evil. I want to see flowing black ink-like raw evil from a pure spring. I want to see the skin pricked and raw evil bubble to the surface. I told you, I want evil. Pure evil. Raw evil from the pure source of a spring. I want to see a needle prick his skin. I want to see that hide severed. I want holes. I want oil. I told you - I want evil. Raw evil. Pure evil.”

Seeker walked down the hallway of the den, that house, another of many monuments to decay as the soil bubbled up the black fog beneath this part of the city.  Haruspex was in the corner clutching something glass.

“Know your fucking place, girl.” The old cunt was babbling. Seeker could see the back of Haruspex’s bottle. Some old relic of the sea, Africa-boys in pith helmets astride boulders with some Rudyard Kipling ad copy printed beneath.

“Ignore her.”

“I was going to.”

Seeker and The Man walked past her. She grumbled and looked up at them, swaddling the blanket over herself, sinking deeper into the inky shadows like oceanwater made solid.

There were ghosts painted on a wall. Haruspex’s husband was almost dead, Vegas-bloated in his stained jersey and jeans, slumped like a sack of potatoes on the rotten couch. Behind him, water stains obscured the ancient murals. An old officer of the empire in his cap and epaulets, stands beside the minister in all his pulpit’s dignity, beside a cathedral, a castle, a gentleman. A bottle falls off Haruspex’s husband’s belly, bopping on the floor. Seeker  kicks it aside, letting the Queen’s face turn back to the molded carpet. A deer is hung in trophy above the television playing the colors behind them. We’re all too numb to be affected by the hypersaturation and the deer is suffering from Chronic Wasting Disease.

Seeker and The Man walk past him, out the clattering screen door, struggling with cigarettes and lighters against the winter wind that doesn’t much want to allow either. There’s an old pickup wedged into the snow of the backyard, unshoveled but trampled into a hard floor by countless footsteps. An empty container of used motor oil is leaking, black and thick off the porch, down the wood steps, their rot stopped by the cold, mold frozen in progress until the next spring.

“Did they tell you about the body out there?”

“The bear?”

“No, the wolf. And the hobo.”

Seeker didn’t respond to The Man as they both got their smokes working. The Man puffed like machinery with it soaking in the corner of his lip. Seeker couldn’t stop pulling it in and out, in and out. Her fingers were freezing red.

“Cold?”

“It’s like, what, one? Zero?”

The Man unholstered his gun.

Danse Macabre

In Lu Tong’s Seven Bowls of Tea, each successive bowl is a higher level of ascension into the clouds, until retirement bringing one gently back to Earth. In the same narrative, alcohol accumulates. The teetotal narrative is that of an arc of pleasure and an ascent of quantity. One begins innocent before they enter into the wide trajectory of the bottle, to the heights of the lifestyle afforded to one by partying, then down from the tipping point at the peak, until rock bottom or death - either way, stylized as a desert awakening, before a tundra or upon a mesa, looking out in brutal sobriety upon the unforgiving beauty of the sun, realizing, like a teenager on their first LSD trip, the beauty and horror of the world. “I’m high on life” isn’t an exaggeration, as every former alkie and addict says it, but is a life only afforded to by ascending and descending a lethally perilous arc of addiction. The living addictions, pornography or gambling, can never compare to this, as they do not have the key factor here of the arc, where one kisses Heaven, falls into Hell, awakens back into the Earth and sees the sun like the day they were born, but now with clarity - they appreciate life truly, after devoting decades to a slow dying, coming back to the world after the “rock bottom” encountered them with true darkness.

The inverse is shown in the episode of It’s Always Sunny where the gang discovers they truly are alcoholics. By temporarily going off a daily habit of drinking, they become violently ill, suffering from withdrawals that last until Charlie opens bottles of whiskey he had secreted away as cleaning supplies. The gang takes their sips, is instantly cured of their deathly illness, as they confess their own addict’s stashes of boozes hidden throughout the bar. For many an addict, the drug becomes like this - not the high/low arc, but a steady, proletarian foundation. The office worker’s coffee, the tradesman’s cigarettes, the businessman’s liquor, the doctor’s morphine.

This isn’t to debunk the former, but to provide a counter-narrative to it. There would be no sense trying to disprove either, the Michael Aligs and the ten thousand silent drunkards puttering away in your local office park all attest to both. Rather, it’s to compare interestingly, what happens in both, the relationship one has to the bottle.

Every drug is a silent death. Puritans will always bemoan the bottle over this, really anything that takes its general shape, for being the true le petit mort, drawn out and slow more than an orgasm’s instant starsight. We all know it too, sucking on cigarettes, sipping down firewater, snorting a line… it even feels like death, the body rejecting it in its own way, nosebleeds, vomiting, injection scars. If your hypertrophic instincts were anything to go by, you’d avoid it entirely.

In an early season of Mad Men, Pete is mocked for bringing up the Freudian Thanatos in reference to ideas for cigarette ads. The message of the scene is clear, when a stern German woman is told off for her strange ideas compared to Draper’s intuitive poetics. The only issue here though, is Pete’s clumsy, equally American, execution of the concept. The Marlboro man stands over the Evening Redness of the West, proclaiming the same concept. Man is alone. I sometimes drive far out into the oil hills west of Bismarck and marvel at how desolate the winds of Choco Mountain really can be. The Judge was alone, a man of nothingness that acted as a companion to the grotesques the cowboys made. The boys too, were as grotesque as the mutilations they carved up, hairy legs, dirty bodies shoved into rotten leather, gangly boys firing guns that dislocate their shoulders to rend flesh of innocents in the low sun of a harvest season where nothing grows. No one dies in the west, no one is enough for there to be a meaningful termination. The Judge is the only one who could make that happen, the wilderness of mute flesh is ensouled by the presence of the demiurgic child. The Judge surveys all things and makes them true, in order to give names, souls, lives, to the wilderness of meat.

The Marlboro Man watching the bloody sun set sucks on a cancer-stick. He knows it’ll kill him. Maybe he has one of those Australian packagings, made for shock value, where they print across the entirety of the box, a horrific cancerous injury inflicted by the product. The only question here - why? Why bother with this?

Death. We all know death when we inhale or take a sip. Yet at the same time, death is required for flight to occur at all. Lu Tong didn’t write Seven Bowls of Tea about healthy moderation, he wrote it regarding a drinking ritual that has more caffeine than most energy drinks. An It’s Always Sunny fanfic, L’Appel Du Vide by sewerkingcharlie writes of death, at the end of substances. Charlie under the bridge, rescued barely back to life, off grain alcohol and gasoline. The void always “calls” - resting at the corner of the mind, growing day by day. Shadows blossom, yet, what could we see if not for darkness?

Shadows are the absence of light that forms a presence of void. Somehow, negativity always has a shape, an inky corrupting smoke that billows into the room and seizes stability. Alcoholics dissolve day by day, vomit, shit, piss, their body disintegrating from the inside. Memories are destroyed in every blackout, consciousness becomes a hot, uncontrollable soup of movement without order. The void tears apart like a mystic’s whip, slicing apart the flesh, blood flowing out, skin turning ashen as the flesh is made a soup of putrefied vitality.

Countless examples could be given in alchemy for this process, of violence purifying the saturnine leadenness. Zosimo writes of ritual dismemberment, the limbs severed, drained of the black bilious blood of Earthly life, and then, white as ash, purified in flames. In one text, Aurora Consurgens, an illustration shows the black bird burning in a cauldron as a figure looked on holding a sword. In another, Atalanta Fugiens, the king is devoured by wolves, the wolves incinerated on a pyre, and the King reborn in purity and wholeness from the flames. The point doesn’t bear repeating, Roob’s Museum that I take these images and words from does more than a good job of presenting countless pieces of evidence. Evola speaks of the same, in his texts on alchemy, of mercury, the dissolving horizontal of waters - the triangle symbolizing pointing downwards, as water flows, turns all liquid. When God renewed the Earth, it was done through the same process as the Earth was first formed - the chaos of the dark ocean was recreated first of all, the flood being sent in order to begin the alchemical process from the only possible starting point - absolute infinity.

So many initiations take this to heart. Long bastardized, fraternities don’t make binge drinking and sexual violence their ritual practice for sheer sadism - it serves the same function. Mortification is a dissolving action, to reduce the living shit of the world to a state where it can be freed, melting ice cubes to be poured into a new tray. Every little ritual makes it - we enter as a contract with our lover, the explicit language used across the globe to describe these dissolving agents. The grand three part Pharmako series of books covers this in exhaustive detail, a number of suitors all vying to be the one we enter into the dance with. The one we use as our choice of partner in rituals of spiritual rhythm.

Quarantine Dreams

I sit in my fourth floor apartment and watch the street below. A schoolbus goes past, a rigid ruler-distance from when I saw it pass this morning. I sip another cup of coffee, my heart already racing (self-inflicted). I’m trying to drink less, maybe after a few more hours at my computer, I’ll feel the sun’s low enough to earn another sip into the dissolving agent. It’s hard to tell which way this is to the wedding, the low and slow or the high and fierce. Either way, it’s leading to something abnormal, a journey I hate more and more but a destination I feel distantly as someplace grand.

When the pandemic first hit in March-April, the memes were all about the white collar suburbanites recently laid off to live in an ambiguous leisure-month, before their employers had adjusted to a distanced 4HL. Baking bread, Tiger King, the insane glee that Etsy neurotics took to enforcing the new pandemic law, all long faded now to a sort of Soviet drudgery, a long slide downwards into universal impoverishment and political tension, the world feeling as though everyday it loses a little more color, fades a little deeper into muted middle-grey threatened to be scorched brown like Moscow or Sarajevo a few decades prior. My own memories of the time are similar in both respects. I saw blue, not grey, but the threat was always there. I saw Cuomo on television, shaken by the sight of an American politician feeling the situation has gotten to the point that he needs to put in even a shallow show of effort. Slush, rain, the usual melting cold… for some reason I mutated a temporarily thermogenic form, incredibly hot in my bare t-shirt, my goosebumps not even perking up in the windy wet air preceding the floods. 

I spent the plague season in hiding. Berate me for cowardice all you want - my FOMO at seeing the orgy of burning cars and tear gas fog over every major city certainly made me regret leaving humanity for the wild territory - though for my own development, I can’t imagine anything more beneficial. While watching careless birds sing amidst berries and bloom, I lost everything, then regained it all back in one of the wildest bear-bull cycles the market has ever seen, certainly anyone alive today has ever seen. Yet my productivity dropped off more than ever. I went into the forest and went on aimless walk after aimless walk. My life slowed down, to a pace it still keeps. I work far less, sometimes doing nothing except sitting, sitting, watching, nothingness.

We’re so often wrapped up in the business of an existence, that we forget that we’re alive at all. My life has been put on a standstill. I do less, I think less. I see only nothingness when I look outside. I walk hours and hours everyday, when I break ground, my shovel opens up below bedrock to the void.

I wrote in the beginning of quarantine that the most striking thing about the modern plague season is the way it, like all plagues, acts as a sort of accelerant to society. For ours, that was a life of the upper 20% or so increasingly atomized into isolated bubbles of consumption while an underclass lives in forever more desperate conditions, working on the supply chains to feed that upper 20%. I was correct, though I can’t remember at what point I wrote this, and how much of a prediction versus an observation that writing was. In many respects it began worse of course. Even for that top 20%, material comforts are ashes in the mouth when forced to live in an exile-at-home, cut off from all society, living in constant fear, social instability, and the ever-growing spectre of the plague itself. The comfortable go insane until they go numb and dumb. The precarious perish from frostbite and heatstroke. One has to wonder, with the looming threat of economic consequences from the sudden impoverishment of that truly proletarian lower-middle class, whether the vaccine will be anything but a momentary reprieve from the growing tensions, opened by the virus, like stab wounds - too deep to heal comfortably.

We all cling to eschatology because it gives us hope that we will never end. Oblivion is something few can properly comprehend, even fewer want to. Eschatology gives the hope of a clean end, an end not of annihilation, but of tying every last bow, dotting the T’s, dotting the I’s, and letting truth reign finally in a stone-like eternity. Recently a group of right wing protestors stormed the United States capitol building. Re-enacting some sort of revolution, they fought with security guards, got five people killed, and took lots of selfies in the rooms they’ve seen on television. A tweet was made, about the irony of storming the gates and finding - the throne was empty. We too, have all grown to realize this over time. More and more are thrown off into the realization previously only reserved for the most exiled - break ground below the barest crust of civilization and you’ll find a subsoil layer of - nothing at all. The nothing from which it came and the nothing into which it can all just slip away.

An Exercise in Empathy

It goes without saying that we met under the spell of innocence. Walking along the road that seemed to stretch in all directions as an asphalt steppe, hand in hand, the sun setting from the brilliant white of childhood summer to a dying afternoon. The whole world wreathed in grandfatherly gold, gilt flake from an earlier century coating ornately carved pillars of each villa and castle of our memories and ancestries, the simple music enjoyed only in earliest youth and oldest wisdom of chirping birds through opened windows. We had separated somewhere down the street, into our own alleys. From my window, I watched a wedding, grandfather beside me in that chair he rotted in. Two held hands and joined beneath a gazebo. I saw love and adulthood and heard the vulgar-sounding instrumentations of Vivaldi down flower lined paths. Feet trampled into stone and made an ugly discordant sound. The old man looked at me knowingly. I looked back down onto the garden and saw in horror, the future.

When she was gone - my friend, my friend who I last saw under that golden sunlight - it was without ceremony. Like we were lost in fog, we were walking along until our attempts to pathfind took invisible divergences and we slipped away, disintegrating into nothing. I cried silently, invisibly. A friend looked over my shoulder down onto my diary and I fled to hide the ink.

An outside observer called it tremendous pain. I checked in on her later. I saw her mind, a tempest in a teapot, as waves swirled grey and angry within the enclosure of her skull, her body still on the mass transit. She was beyond the reach of the canyons I was used to, only touching the city in its purest crystalline heart, never seeing the gridlock wilderness she ventured through, making circuits in streets that hated her. I saw the sky - grey. I saw red bricks bleached grey. I saw sidewalks and asphalt. I saw a horizontal world of empty lots and desolate parking spaces around a river that meandered a battleship blue growing greenbrown with every little drop of pollution.

I submitted. When I began drinking I dove into the forest, anticipating that dark point where the green turned black and I was lost in shadow. I saw her becoming grey and I fled from stone - or was kept from it. Neither of us would ever find gold again, except when a mirror was given to us. Both of us passed in the hallway of the same prison, when we had been found trying to claw the molten gold of our eyes clear from the sockets.

Sometimes it happened when the sun was low in the summer, heat foretold in the sparkles of the dewdrops on the grass, every blue, yellow, and green - all those acrylic colors - coming alive under a sun that seemed almost fluorescent. My father stepped into the sleek black car and departed. I saw the heat come up as the winding drive disappeared into the final shadowed archway before it opened onto the street. I came up against the gate and leaned into the bars.

Oh yes - we are the dead. Parasites that passed each other from across the field. I used to wake up in a cold sweat. I was wearing my nightgown and I imagine so was she. Not so in the battlefield’s sky, where between grey and green all tinged bloody-brown we were wearing opposite colors. It had come to this. We both knew it would. We wanted the same thing and God had given us diverging paths to finding it. The destination was identical, two opposite ends of a palatial heaven. We would arrive in splendor speaking foreign tongues after meeting one final time, under that garden gazebo, uniforms ripped open, a long tension of two monads where none were ever destined to exist. We occupied one space only, one that would only allow void to exist within itself, an annihilation we had to inflict on each other - insurance that we would both honor it. We awake lost from these dreams. I in the countryside, she in the city. I look out upon a nature so alive as to threaten my life. She looks out upon life hypertrophied to the point of cold grey death.

I walk along a desolate road, a raised brown gravel path, the brown steppe of dead grass rolling out like a blanket patched with clumps of snow in the low places where it never melted. The sky is a uniform grey, the kind that comes with everyday Northern cold, where a firmament from horizon to peak is formed. The wind blows against my hair and the fur on my hat. My wool coat is stained with the smell of tobacco and gunpowder, and I hope to turn my white shirt bloody with wine. A shotgun is broken in that forty-five degree lambda over my forearm. I walk with boots on. It’s muddy on either side of me in the ditch, frozen over by the cold. The sun is a barely visible disc of stifled light somewhere in the haze of the sky above. A bird squawks up as it darts from the landscape. Against the deathly sky, I pull the trigger. My body and head rock with the recoil and noise. Blood pours from the little wounds when I collect the corpse. I look up as I crouch down. I know I will never see the sun again.

How to Read an Environment

An audio log in The Witness - found inside the Mountain, underneath a series of wall panels with sketches of concept art hung up - is a short lecture from Paul Cézanne on the nature of painting. In it, he relays his concept of the Motif in painting. Beginning by putting his hands together, he then remarks on two facts of his posture. The wholeness made by the clasp, and the coming-together of the different strands. Each finger, a unique piece, that must lock in perfect context with the rest. Like a bell, the entire object requires a total unity in order for a proper ring to sound when struck.

For quite some time, a certain uniformity in design was enforced. From Quake, forward until quite recently, game engines rendered 3D space using a binary space partition tree, which enforced a geometry composed of solid brushes - three dimensional convex shapes, and a game environment totally “sealed”, or enclosed, by these brushes. It led to a particular philosophy of design, seen even where it breaks, the seams where you find an open sky to be a hard border, an infinite vista to be capped with a solid wall and nothing but blackness beyond a noclip.

From this, a few characteristic markers of video game environments emerged, blocky environments with func_detail brushes added to give depth and weight to objects, props placed secondarily, like an interior decorator hired after the fact (as the workflow often works that way for simplicity, props are much easier to replace than brushes), the overall layout being subtly yoked to a grid and totally enclosed from any infinity.

A new set of characteristics began emerging too, after this was done away with. With engines like Unity and Unreal taking center stage as of late, where the brush is a thing of the past, all things are done with meshes - premade assets that are combined as finished products in the final program. Rather than the level being sculpted from nothing by the creator, a two step workflow takes precedence, where first each “thing” must be modeled and then worked through the steps of fitting it into the overall design. This can be seen parodied in the design of Getting Over It, where a mountain of junky assets are positioned against an infinite beyond. Lighting now comes from Beyond, a place that lasts forever, the void and the level are one in the same. This was the great invisible transformation of virtual architecture that happened recently - from enclosed geometric labyrinths to a sculpture garden floating in the void. 

The Pipeline or Workflow began to take over as foundation in game creation. The 3D artist focuses on singular characters, known as entities in earlier technologies, that a second team of meta-artist recombines into the level, which are of course done through the channels defined beforehand by the programming team, large studios almost always having proprietary versions of every piece, from tools such as Maya to frameworks such as .NET or engines such as Unreal. This is in stark contrast to the piecemeal design of earlier games. The .BSP era and previously (speaking of the 2.5D Doom era) had all things done in pieces. Each part of the game can be carefully lifted from a neat bento-box packaging. The .WAD file contains sprites, scripts, sounds, levels, etc, all wrapped up in a lowest-level engine that turns all of the packaged data into the end product. This modularity made for a certain spirit, still seen to this day, as games that use modern renditions of this framework have the same form in their modding communities as the earliest Doom mods did, small cottage industries of specialists who prefer to replace one or another piece of the game, whatever they find themselves most comfortable with.

Workflows evolved, and as such, the final product did too. The connections of levels reached its limits in the Half Life school of thought - countless maps in Source having obtuse features such as invisible walls, doors that go nowhere, empty buildings, loading zones in the middle of hallways - all because they’re forcing a more fluid design to fit into the firm boxing-in of the first .BSP games, where Quake had each level named by code (E1M1), and was a unique file with an exact start and an exact end, loaded one by one in sequence. Today’s games often make use of the opposite, where the new engines allow for the open world game to become the standard over the linear. A wide flat plain works as sort of an extension of the Mario 64 school of design, that is, begin with an empty field bounded by sky, and then warp and shift it, while adding various playground-type features atop it. That game’s swings and slides and ramps evolved into Skyrim’s cities and dragons and mountains. Level design here shifted importantly, and the open world game over the more linear experience is a consequence of that, as games switched to working off more integrated and proprietary products of workflow - every piece fitting into its exact place and nothing else - over the modular system of pieces bounded by a small core.

Similar revolutions always occur in architecture, as the production of structures changes the forms of the structures. Even our modern constructions, supposedly alienated from the world around them, are contingent on conditions around them. An environment, whether considered “architecture” as it comes from human hands or “natural” as it comes from without, emerges, as a process of all things that flow into it. These individual structures too, are never in a vacuum, just as the digital ones cannot be via their technological limitations. A McMansion exists from the lawn, from the cul-de-sac, from the interstate, from the commute, from the horizontality of American cities, etc. 

Whatever the era, many often rail against the final product, without understanding its function. A given environment exists after the fact, as an emergent property of the processes underlying it. Technological motion begets the final thing standing. The machines pack up, the game ships out, and its then given to entropy where it evolves further. The “final product” is a sort of apex where the processes acting upon it shift, from those of an earlier moment, where the economic and technological forces come together to produce it, cinching together at debut, where it’s then made into a piece of the world. A Dutch term for human-trod dirt paths through manicured lawns - “Elephant Paths” - where design was further warped by humans, as the planned carpet of grass turns into a path as tramped down as the sidewalks and paths cut near it.

And so goes the age old question of what makes architecture? The question here isn’t what it is, as one walks through a building and marvels like a child awe-struck by the logos he doesn’t know the references of, but what it does and what it is from. A given environment is nothing but a monument, a temporary verticality emerging from the flows that made it and that it produces.

Consider the way that cities develop into “heat islands” - glass and steel rising into the clouds trap sunlight coming down onto asphalt and create canyons of amplified heat, even with the sun eclipsed at street level darkness. Each building, these glass and steel towers we know as our modern prosperity’s equivalent to Roman columns and Egyptian tombs, is beget by particular needs of the modern economy - methods of control developed for the workforce tasked with middle-level management of information, the economic need for such an enormous population tasked solely with higher and higher layers of meta-level information  processing, recombination, and presentation, etc - and then this set of needs working down through economic channels to produce the grid-patterned canyons of these structures - eventually arriving at the point after existence, where a new biome of sorts is created by them, the street level desert, where the sun is now amplified in a way it never was.

The architectural critic often takes a childish approach to all of this - the thing is a thing, and I judge it on gut feeling mixed with its relation to a system of appraisal I was taught in school. Walking blindly through environments, treating them as though they stood forever, he takes the temporary for the permanent, marking it onto the page as though the exact minute he saw is the forever-standing of the thing in a noumenal realm. The misguidedness of this is self-evident. The question of architectural criticism is a question of environment, both history and prediction. It’s question not of what this building is now, but what this building emerges from, in all the mycelium that it fruits from.