A Colorlessness Creeping In Empty Places to Remind Us of the Winters We Thought We Left Behind

Smoking long drags below the overpass, ashes grey like TV static in the same shade of fuzzing emptiness as the snow flurrying in all directions. Cars pass overhead in a long droning hum that sounds like the blizzard if it had a voice, A bitch cries in the cold backseat as Texas to North Dakota’s second Mississippi, the continent unfolding around the car in endless plains to horizons stacking upon horizons of the frigid steppe. After a stretch it comes to the desert, where it draws down to the sunrise.

The horizon met the red sun after a long Vegas night, the neon and electricity shining hours upon hours into that swallowing dark of desert cold until daybreak - the sun arouse bloody over the emptiness as we awoke from our hangovers to look upon the bed of a dried ocean and see a landscape of bones, our own souls hitting the bottom of their reservoirs.

The beige drywall turns into static in fuzz around the edges of the dimming bulb. Wrappers litter the floor, the crackling electricity and bubble of fermented grain carbonating out of a paper bag, a man uneasy indebted to the game that blurred into the background, a woman always half-present, spaced out.

Below a bridge we find a man who sunk into the path of wetness. Black curled hair mats to his body from swamp water clinging in a slimy film over the skin worked in every last pock and hole with dirt and mud. A bar above the river’s playing classic rock - we’ve been back to the establishment after the snow and felt it. The watery ecstasy turned to a jägernocht where trophies and corpses lined the walls and each man leered with the promise of a self-made hell waiting in his stove-heated cabin.

All along every line of driving, we find these houses - little highwayside rural homes, the kind kids get abused in, without a soul inside. Police follow the news and cut rectangular holes into the plaster to let bagged obese men fall out of the structure and onto the stained carpet and old linoleum. The latest record is forty-four, though rumors abound of a friend of a friend of a friend, who knows one they’re still using, at well over a hundred.

I’m in a hotel, ground floor, comatose into the bedding as the street blurs in noise and light outside the shuttered plastic blinds. My head is pounding, my stomach already emptied twice. The cartoon on the television has an argument - Peggy exclaims there’s no damn sun. Hank looks to the sky at the burning sun. In the blue sky, the television renders a solid field as a blur of noise. Someone is outside in the summer pool, fat and dying on a float, boiling red under the heat of the motel courtyard.

In a mountain pass the radio cuts out and turns to wild motion of particles.

On the steppe, I look over the crust of snow frozen to make a soft ice over the dry crystalline powder, as the wind begins to pick up. The dunes and rolls of dirt and snow are thrown into frenzy as snow comes from above and is churned up from below. The wind is violent, tearing at my clothes and skin, holes exposing dry bone. The ground loses its distinction with the air as all turns to a uniform mass of movement, a sea with no surface or floor, of snow dense like smoke and ashes.

As energy dissipates, water settles to the top and sediment to the bottom, a newly blank slate born from the sun that rises along the horizon.

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.

The Capital of Words

The refrain against so-called “rent seeking” always goes the same - I’m sure in the early years, when the development of written language took place there was the cry - but is this really necessary? After all, we can speak perfectly well to each other, why introduce an intermediary? And further before, writers of the pure and original will often state a case to the dawn of language itself, as some obscuring illusion that separates one from the real. A famous anecdote, Jean-Paul Sartre seething at the foot of a tree-stump - but how do I really know who you are?

The real is a concept emerging itself from alienation. The concept of there being some interior missed is one only constructed by a remove from that interior, and to be more radical, is a concept constructed by the very interior. The interior, the “real” is not the thing lost in the move to language, but the thing created for language. By constructing the notion of the real, one withdraws into the private, secondary space of language, by that very distance, speech is born. Hence the purpose of “Truth”, the ever important concept, emerges only as something that one is distanced from. The removal, the separation of oneself from the real is the act of language, to forever dance around, separate, and build second-order systems of reference-to, something that is instantly perceived at the moment of experience.

Language is always superstructural by this, secondary and above. It then mutates, develops orders of itself that then refer to the underlying previous. Written language first emerges as a set of pictograms, numerical dashes, evolving in complexity, as a tool of the leisured and ruling class, calculating economic, military, or mythic matters. It then fell, from its initial minority adoption, its infrastructure descended upon the below until the situation today where literacy is the norm in almost all of the world.

Information networks grow by this mechanism. Speech is interesting, far moreso than the “real”, as it has the potential for unlimited growth. While experience is monodirectional and single-moment, speech is infinite. One human can transmit to another, who can then uptake, reinterpret, pass on or change the message, across each node - each individual. This is the human capacity - to combine, interpret, morph - to create. That the power of “good and evil” was what got Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden of the Real is no coincidence. The divide, to appraise, is to invent language, to steal the power that was solely the province of God, as the originator of the “real”.

And so - civilization - brought about by this process of accumulating greater and greater levels of abstractions. Abstractions are fascinating in their ability to talk beyond their supposed direct reference, to talk to each other without any “truthful” reference to the “real”. An abstraction is capable of dealing with itself, as language will always refer to other language, which in turn, will only construct further and further accumulations of language as the ever-growing garden continues to be watered and fertilized by every speaker and writer.

And so too, was capitalism born, as early as civilization was itself. In one of the early issues of American Affairs, an article was published on so-called “grey money”, referring to these anonymous entities, private equity firms, hedge funds, investment groups, that controlled such an outsize portion of the world’s ownership. This is not an accident. Not out of any nefarious accumulation, from an earlier era when economics was more “real”, but out of how capitalism has functioned, always. Capitalism too, didn’t originate alien from some evil wizard or out of any exceptional new era when the steam engine was invented, as many of our contemporary thinkers will say on the question of theodicy, but out of this same process. Abstractions, formulated atop material things. In language, the narrative is more direct, with that of a sole individual first philosopher who decided to abstract the real from the experienced, but identical in economics. Material manipulation, the things of the world processed, harvested, yoked, sculpted, emerged via the same social-linguistic abstraction - now via the abstraction of money or trade, which we foolishly single out as separate from other identical forms of the process of abstraction via social-communicative relations between people. The grey-money often spoken of in anger is nothing new in this regard. Economics in itself, is nothing more than another emergent system, a fruiting body from the mycelium of language, identical to the internet, art, or etiquette.

Arena Nomads

The strange thing about Counter-Strike is that you can strip yourself almost bare - pressing G to fling everything into the air, falling to the ground as an entity, stripping the character to nothing but the knife. In D&G’s Treatise on Nomadology, a section towards the end deals with this concept, that of the assemblage made by weaponry. As opposed to tools, which form an assemblage as part of a larger apparatus of work, where the tool, the product, the raw, the labor relation, etc, all form one machine, the weapon forms a self-contained machine, which operates on the pure principle of its own projection upon the world.

This then creates an interesting situation for the player, where they find their interaction with the world dynamically transformed by their movement through various systems. In Counter-Strike it’s economic, the strategy of full-buy, eco, and pistol rounds making an element of strategy where the player’s assemblage is transformed by their ability to perform within the game. Performance as a pistol is rewarded with SMGs and armor, or with full rifle, etc. In Quake, the environment forms the basis of this strategic manipulation. Duels take place in a game of timing and area control - with all things that make up the player, health, armor, and weapons, being accessed only by moving through certain points on the map, the game becomes one of optimizing self-transformation by controlling the items scattered through the game.

In RTS games, these machines are deployed in the same manner as the formal military does under state capture. The individual soldiers are made into units of a larger mass, deployed towards various goals, often economic. The meta-game of Starcraft is built around colonial accumulation, the one civilian structure being the true heart of the game. One’s army is mere protection as one seeks to continually build more bases and their attendant worker units, in order to continually expand on and on forward. The enemy is an obstacle to be overcome and accidentally win, the strategic goals of war fading behind the tactical goals of economics.

Valorant has gained popularity recently, using Riot’s skill in 5v5 pseudo-gacha multiplayer experiences, adapting the Counter-Strike format to the class based one. They try, but can’t quite recreate it, and the basis of that is in the foundations. The class system is itself an ecclesiastical one. Whereas the strategy game refines the weapon-assemblage into a piece, manipulated by the player in their role as the totally-controlling state, the class based game is an ecclesiastical recreation of the nomad experience of Quake and CS. In Team Fortress 2 or Valorant, the player is defined by their relationship to a supertext of roles, roles chosen before the game even begins, the class/character select screen being presented at the start of every round. Here, we have predestination of course, but more than that, we have the affixation of peoples so common to institutional languages. The Pyro and Heavy are signs which one molds oneself to in order to fill opportunities descended from Heaven, roles coded in latin, the AK47 and the M4A4 are coded in the vernacular, tools that form a unity with the player.

Team Fortress 2 players have plenty of ecclesiastical concepts of duty around this. The Pyro is often a contentious place for its difficulty in fitting into these traditional schemes. Most duties in classes are sourced from their purpose in directly seizing the game’s objectives. If a certain pious subset of the playerbase were to get their way, the game would be minus the Sniper, Spy, and Pyro entirely - perceived as being either useless or individualistic hallmarks of players from a lesser, more nomadic class of game. Mains of these classes are often forced to prove themselves, the Py-Bro as a sort of gimped-medic that exists to help the Engineer, or the endless walls of text produced by Sniper and Spy mains regarding their usefulness to the team. All of this is besides the point - the basis fo the matter is that the three outsider classes will never be accepted - after all, their playstyles all reflect something dissonant to the substance of the game, the brutish repetition of labor towards objectives that makes up the coveted worship of the Church’s preset castes.

Call of Duty and Counter-Strike make for an interesting comparison of the opposite. Call of Duty gives weapons in a proletarian fashion, one simply works at the “grind” and is rewarded. Weapons are chosen at the beginning of the game, earned from working through a progression ladder that’s climbed via rote repetition of the game. What Call of Duty offers is a fantasy, a commodified, structured, fantasy of the martial competition of games which offer a weapon assemblage dynamic to the player’s worth within the game. Counter-Strike on the other hand, is the aristocracy of the wilderness. Weapons are bought from kill-rewards, ones heightened for risk taking, for working as a team, for taking on extremes such as using worse weapons to achieve greater results. It’s telling then that the Call of Duty community is obsessed with imaginary systems of rules to increase “fairness”. The gamer wants a system, a perfect machine they can slot their vitality into that will deliver them up the chain flawlessly. Call of Duty players are known then for their hate for anything beyond, micro-communities of different playstyles endlessly accusing the other of pseudo-cheating for winning or gaining “unfair” advantages. For Counter-Strike, playstyle fights are always punching down, an extension of the rigid selection systems in place already. The most mocked are not rivals to the various ways to grind the latter, but those who play badly, off the highway down dead-end sideroads, the Tec-9 and P90 spammers. 

Ultimate Practice

A recurring theme in science fiction or fantasy is the genre trope of a more advanced race with some form of noosphere above them, a telepathic network by which they all communicate and achieve harmony with each other. This works in both directions, the Zerg version of an alternate, insectoid strain in evolution where a humanity-possessing species came into being in the form of hiveminded raw biology, and the Protoss version, where an advanced species has turned into the biological priests of a technological superstructure that supersedes them completely.

The Terran counter-example here of courses uses typical anthropoignorance, where authors forget that they themselves are an organism in total continuity with their technology. Humanity has all of this in spades, with the electricity, written or spoken language, economic systems, etc, making up the same function as the magically simplified psychic systems of the other two races. The idea that humanity does not have the same thing in themselves is from the twofold error of only interpreting the things of the other as being othered in their conception (ie, a Protoss would experience all things of the world not as “X” but as “Protoss-X”), thus making a sort of objectification of all things done equally by all species into only unique to them. This error occurs as an inverse of the error of self-conception in individualistic humans, wherein one cannot perceive oneself as being anything other than an individual floating in a sort of absurd vacuum, not as a part of the larger systems - the classic shock and awe of freshman year debates on free will.

The concept of “total war” was rediscovered just as it was being lost when war, inevitably, emerged under the same laws it had always followed. Previously, war was never considered sovereign beyond the regular state of things, as some separate theatre of political pomp, until the great era of separations after industry began to take over. Several ideological processes undergirded the enlightenment, the most important of which was secularization - not the process of making the sacred no longer that, but apposite - making the profane ecclesiastical. The nation-state emerged as a consolidation of the King’s superstructural central authority, growing to a whole system of superstructural orders emanating from the central authority, across the land, drawing firm national borders, stratifying power, enclosing land into legally ordered plots, etc. All of this was to construct a similar order to that of the church, a discourse which determines the map of the territory. In doing so, the map and territory were brought into sharp focus in a way never done before, where now the consciousness of oneself as territory made an alienating effect. The various movements of legal counter-facts around the world, the Russians who proclaim themselves Soviets, the Germans who proclaim themselves Imperial, the Americans who proclaim themselves Revolutionary, etc, there’s a concept of two selves, the legal fiction of the self and the actual self. There is some truth to this - the self as a part of the state’s discourse is a part of the map, while the actual ego is a part of the territory - forming just that dissonance, often bleeding over when associations are made with others as territory itself, seen in the American tendency to obsessively construct their opponents as “establishment”.

Total War then, was a new concept, as it brought into sharp focus a reunification after the cleft, where map and territory were made complete again. The functions of state had their discourses reduced to the raw systems of political-economy that the state has always functioned as, people found themselves reduced to their place in the truer discourses of self, ethnicity, language, gender, religion, where nation didn’t suffice. It was in the second world war when the last gasps of this were felt by Westerners, when all sides of the war returned to the fact of combat that modern states so often shun - that civilians are no less a part of the thing you’re attempting to inflict damage upon than the so-called “military”, that the difference between the two is of fleeting context.

In later “wars”, though I feel that’s too weighty a word for what often occurred, when a colonial galavanting collided with quasi-genocide, such as in American Vietnam or Soviet Afghanistan, there was a conflict often between the false husks of humans at the top, those unable to comprehend anything but their bishopric, the generals and intelligence agents, would balk in horror as war emerged on a tactical level, for the Kurtz and Balalaikas of the world. Their “country” abandoned them, because what else would it do? They descended through history into war, while their country only wanted intelligence gathering and police action. It was they alone who truly committed war and they were punished for it, as war was never what was wanted.

As long as the Geneva Convention is followed, war is not. After all, what is that, but the empty words of a select few nations, all in alliance with each other? A war is a game of force to make political-economic goals realized. For the upholders of empty documents and moralities, distinctions between civilian and military casualties, between justified and unjustified force - war, when it comes, as it always does, as a rending season of evil that descends and passes every few generations, will come like the Italians experienced the French invasion in the late 15th century, where the hardened brutality of soldiers trained in war met the empty pomp and theatrics of soldiers trained in parades and duels.

Treasures of Jade and Philosopher-Stone

Most intimate to the player is the season of Spring - the world forms, often in a lush green, rarely overgrown or frozen or desiccated, resplendent and peaceful. Monsters form naturally as if from the Earth, sometimes literally, as nightfalls and the darkness of the caves below the grassy firmament rise upwards to attack the player. The Season of Wood, presided over by the Azure Dragon, the color of life, in freshly growing plants and jade, in creepers. The form of life opposite the player from this is the Testificate form, villagers and illagers making an immediately accessible conflict of species known. Their architecture is similar, above-ground overworld structures with social hierarchies implied in the construction, often made of wood and nearby materials. Agriculture grows as it does in the spring season of sowing, cut wood, sheep’s wool, bales of wheat, small gardens of vegetables forming the architectural foundation for their lives. They engage in war in a primitive way, one group living in peace and the other marching out in an innocent, savage way. They live as early civilizations never burdened with language, carrying mutely on the functions of organization like children at play.

The Vermilion Bird presides over fire, the stifling heat of summertime produced not by the fact of summer, but by passion - the heat and life of motion excited in the manner of aroused bodies, plants growing far outpace of their bounds, jungles abounding in even Northern climates for a brief window of months. The pig was once mistakenly made with its Y and Z values inverted, creating the mutation for the creeper. The pig provides the linkage into the Nether, a realm of timeless violence. Flesh of the pig, the lesser form of the human, takes on a humanoid form, where man uncovers savagery. The lava makes a haze like a bloody meridian, one has to descend, living off thrown gold and wild swings of the sword. All of it’s consensual, as where else does a lust for life lead one? Destruction occurs after-the-fact of great exertion of vitality, the empire expanding so fast and joyously entire continents are burned in ecstasy - Nero’s famous lyre being only an imperial ethos turned inwards. Destruction is a whirlwind of ecstasy as it spins out from the self and strikes everyone else, as the one inside is laughing. The nether and its inhabitants are in pain, but fire laughs. Fire is passion ignited, like sexual arousal or a lusting anger.

Autumn, the season of metal. When frost creeps in at the edges and borders of the explosive life of summertime and the world silences to prepare for the long season of winter. Death comes inevitably and bodies must return to the base matter, reduced to the leaden soil of Saturn in absolute darkness, in order to be the raw matter of the next season of rebirth. Not that this is much solace of course, as the creeping chill of autumn is nothing but terrifying and only leads to terminus for all suffering it. As the player digs and builds into the world, they uncover more and more ruins. The first proper structure added was the dungeon, a single room, made of mossed-over, long crumbled stone, with treasures and mindless flesh breeding inside it. After this, came the abandoned mineshafts and strongholds - more remnants, old buildings, long rotted and now populated only by death, metallic cutting edges and falling orange leaves, turning to brown and then soil on the ground. It’s said that the White Tiger only appears when absolute peace and virtue reigns over the land - after all, once the peak is reached, the only direction to go is down.

The Black Turtle rests at North, presiding over the darkness of water and winter. Look down from your boat, into the ocean, see the chthonic depths below. It turns to darkness quickly, as you sink, even more black than night, until the depths become so crushing... We imagine shadow to have the quality of water, as we go further into an abandoned building we “sink” and the darkness is supposed to envelop, swallow, consume us. None of this happens of course, but we can’t help but feel it. Maybe there is some memory, of the water the ocean is an eternal gradation downwards, like winter deepening colder and colder, layers of ice encasing, stilling, preservation at depths. The Guardians of the Ocean Monument make their primary goal to protect the Monument itself, to act as its namesake, still beneath the water. Mining is slow beneath water and the player is further impeded by being at risk of drowning while they cast a fatigue effect. Some question if the Guardians are alive at all, or if they’re some form of stone automaton, a life-form made akin to a golem of non-cellular matter. The ocean is a terminal point for those living in it, wide basins of existence distinct from the rest of the world beyond itself, a preserved world that slows until a deathly stillness. Towards the surface, ghosts rise and dolphins attempt to help the player scram from this kingdom of unlife.

Transcendence happens in stages. A few artefacts that we all know come into possession, the Totem of Unlife, the Heart of the Sea, etc - but what truly is the final prize of the game? Transcendence. Alchemy’s pursuit of the same in all places speaks to the same need, the one magic fulfills, to transcend the mundane limits. The Yellow Dragon of the Center, the one presiding over Earth, occupying the 0,0,0 position in the diagram of the five classical elements. A black dragon rests at the base of the game, activating the credit sequence, when The End is “freed”. This is only a pretender, after all, is the author anything but a function? Transcendence - maybe you taste it when the dragon bursts into 65 levels - the dragon sure thought it had done so, before you came along. Maybe you taste it in borderline creative mode Elytra flying, cheating death with a totem, breathing underwater. In these moments - and they are moments, never fully inhabited, but passing peaks of experiences - you become the author, the Yellow Dragon. But only ever a taste, a brief visit to the throne, before the revolution unseats you and you’re forced to once again claw down the gates and break into the palace in the endless cycle of struggle for those brief, timeless instants where you are the Earth, the center, the Emperor...

Human Organisms

Like the rings of a tree, architecture stratifies in strange ways to form a neat timeline of people and place. An American small town, the downstreets of the main come up towards the tail of the gilded age, the Old West-ish main nestled between a two story canyon. Extending beyond are the post-war boom years, when the nostalgic childhood homes spring up on wide-squared grids of streets, each plot of two car garage going on in sequence until it just sort of... ends. Far enough into the Sisyphean black hole of uncovering their timeline and you’ll find old ownerships, old locations, packed-up and sold farms and businesses, that dot the landscape beyond the borders, a demand fired once and never again. Maybe children find the old field, or hunters down an old logging road and there’s a large square hole in the ground where the foundation of a farmstead used to be dug, in a five acre rectangular clearcut being taken over by shrubby trees and tall grasses. The forest too, young and brambly, even further journeys afield beyond the tangle of two lane highways and small outpost-towns dotting the colonial interior being required to escape the five o’clock shadow land shaved and cleared day after year after decade.

For the children of these towns, video games descended as if from Heaven. In 1979, few except the hardliners of DT Suzuki’s bastard societies could even find Japan on a map, and those who could scarcely could without making a crack referring to Pearl Harbor. By 1990, Japan was a promised land. They still couldn’t find it on a map, but they knew it was some fairyworld, where technology (in this context meaning toys) were “years ahead” whatever that means.

Meanwhile in Japan, that aforementioned technology was developing a world of its own. In LaMarre’s The Anime Ecology, he puts forward the thesis analyzing the narratology of what was exported to the west as “anime” - a truer descriptor than exists in Japan, for the wide umbrella of a certain form of media that developed as an expression of technology itself. As consumer electronics grew an entire interlinked world of devices and appliances, so too did media grow to include it. What happened at the arcade connected to the television, to the DVD, to the internet, to the home game console, to the plastic merchandise, and from this there grew a genre native to this tangled web of mediums, that of the broad world of otakudom. 

Another decade later and this culture began to slowly trickle across the Pacific ocean into America. First through the usual pan-pacific channels, video pirating networks catching signals in San Francisco (Otaku no Video took care to find one), snippets of conversations in Hawaiian bars with the loneliest member of a company outing, and then backchanneling around the Ring of Fire’s Japantowns, via the internet. The connection to Japan is incidental, anime could have emerged from any nation in the world, had that nation been the pioneers of the ecology LaMarre identified. It was thus via the rhizomatic spread of this network of devices and appliances over the globe, that a peak of saturation was reached where the things native to the network become memetic upon it. Otaku culture was uprooted and planted in the now firm soil of online, where it was only a matter of time for it to propagate to the now very deeply dug Earth of the United States. Christopher Poole copied the source code for the imageboard and the rest...

In a strange way, you can track the spread of techno-media by what is loved and where. Media often comes secondary in popular consumption, to the technology available for it. Media after all is only good as long as there’s a digital slot for it to plug into. Many histories could be written here, the deeply buried fungus of post-Soviet Source Engine culture, the last video store in the world, where a fat teenager dances to nightcore in raccoon eye 2007 makeup, the Bay area pseudo-cultures of media, its fandoms, and its discourses...

Architecture and subject are unified in this dance between each other, where they mold each other into a complementary organism. Like a termite mound or ant colony, footsteps make “elephant paths”, where the concrete is skipped in favor of a shortcut through the dirt. At the same time, behavior adapts to environment, as is written about with the brutalist redesigns of college campuses often being in order to engineer social environments away from any social interactions and towards a sort of collected-solitude among the students. 

Things that are built always come after the fact of their causes - to look around and see the stock exchanges crop up around maritime western Europe, you would find yourself already under the well-dawned sunlight of capitalism. Processes form fruiting bodies, akin to mycelium, from their actions beneath the surface. The human subjects within this substratum simply cause the emergence of the fruiting bodies, the architectural manifestations of their already-present actions.

The city makes itself known as an organism in this sense. A history can be drawn of every settlement, of the flows which birthed it, as process confluenced upon a single point to create the thing now standing, the brick and mortar like tracks in the grass, concrete markers of what the patterns were, what shape they took, what was done here.

It’s then in further evolution that the next generation subjects exist within. The feudal castle gave birth to the haunted house and we found an empty-space to channel our dead and demonic. The downtown gave birth to a generation of flight, emptiness, and then return as those now suburbanized returned to make the metropolitan center fitting to their folksy sensibilities and commercial economic life. The historical record, the skeletons of now-dried up riverbeds are then terraformed by each subsequent generation of floods to make a process of accumulation - one that can be seen in the term in Ancient Near Eastern archaeology (perhaps others, but I’ve only studied ANE) - “tell”, referring to the layers of civilization past that lies beneath the streets of every city living or dead in the region, buildings and streets almost always retaining the exact locations as old with each fine layer of compacted detritus.

It’s these tells, like rings of a tree, that give the story of a place. The story of an organism, of a wide flat plain eroded into glacially shifting canyons by the ever-changing floods raging down from the mountaintops.

Lightning in a Bottle

Snow is falling, gentle fat flakes from a white haze of sky onto the gentle ebb and swell of hills rising from the intercontinental tundra. The sky is northwards forever. I look up into it in reflection, sipping black coffee before the great window-wall of the building. Jutting from the ground, the facility emerges from permafrost jagged and glass-like. All black, except for the square end of the shard that opens up to a great glass wall, where light pours in from the north over the snow and sun, into the brut office constructed for me. 

Preservation is a watchword of the day. I’m all alone on a highway, six months previous, listening to the radio. I was where the hosts are rounding about to months ago, not that I would be allowed to speak of it. I pull into a gas station where soggy paper blows across the winter slush to my feet, crunching under the salt and sand, my own lips touching cold metal with a instant guilty bite as my tongue touches refrigerated cold. I finish it halfway back into the city. Research trips are always unpleasant, hoping to get a good nap in under the city lights to wash the taste of the nation’s white-primitives out of my mouth.

There’s an email to attend to once I get back to the office. Helvetica, 12 point, as is standard. Some place use arial, not that anyone except I can tell the difference, cultured deeply as I am into those little advantages not afforded lightly. I get another sip of coffee, looking over the carefully typed paragraph, somewhat between a memo and an order. Preservation, preservation. Information as well, keeping it safe though is talked about far more than gathering it these days. In my apartment I have an image of a dozen or so men in outdoor gear standing in some distant location, smiling, holding their equipment. It’s all obsolete now, the few suckers who get shanghai’d down to the south pole, the last frontiers where it hasn’t all been mapped out like the rest, at such a pace to busy entire buildings in cataloguing it.

I was once taken on a trip to see my friend, northeast of the city, where the money lives. He was old, not even American despite being here for generations to monolinguality, buttoned down in a banker’s suit. The structure was underground, inside a sort of Versace golden recreation of a hellenic villa, windowless, marbled stone, polished reflective on all side of me. Here there was only ink black and every shade of gold between yellow and brown. Security was immense, men were standing guard equipped in the way of soldiers outfitted fresh every six months, on the cutting edge of laser-rimmed eyes piercing me as I was led past a flank of submachine guns into vaults, vaults within vaults that he could only show me on a computer screen on a mahogany desk that itself was buried deep as though it were as precious as the interior’s contents.

We produce ninety-eight degrees of heat every second we live. In abstract, we produce exponentially more. I browse the halls of a server dungeon, glassy sheer surfaces in a winning battle of their heat against the super-frozen water pumping through their veins. I sit in a plane and look down upon the world where smog coats the city palpably, a fog thicker than fog, heat islands and car exhausts pumping out radiating waves of our heat into space. If there is life on the moon, we’re like a lover to them, burning to the touch, nestle up against us in the cold night, lord knows we’re putting off enough heat to forget the big empty beyond.

Heat destroys energy, practically speaking. Not truthfully of course, energy cannot be destroyed, but it’s obvious what’s meant. After heating, it spirals off, careening through the void to nothingness, until we eventually hit the terminal cold, where all is still particles floating isolate in nothing. I think about it often. My body radiates heat beneath my quarterzip into the arctic air and I think about it, the permafrost melting and all I see... that Windows XP screensaver, the one that simulates flying through space with white dots on a black background? I can’t stop watching the center. We use a proprietary linux build here, but I can’t stop looking into the face of terminus.

When I’m home, in a minimally appointed home, snow is falling outside, in gentle crystalline flakes. Every one is a unique sparkle of art that shows brilliant under a microscope. Every one hits my upper-floor downtown window and melts from the radiance of heat inside my apartment. The pattern is destroyed and the energy is lost to the void. I sit in an Ikea couch and watch the city blurred as my vision focuses on the window, only a scant reflection of the dim lights I have burning at this time of night. My computer is vibrating along the floor across the carpet. The heat can be heard in the walls. I look to my Rothko and back to the window. I am alone.

Travis & Bubbles Buried in The Jungle

A spectre floats over a niche online community, a lost work desired. Lost media is strange in this same way always, the very absence of the thing at the center of all discourse being the function of it, producing desire through a quest to search for it. Such often produces narratives of memory from it, spurning out its own niche of psychologically identified tales, such as shown in the Candle Cove fiction.

In particular, I’d like to make a case study of Go For a Punch or Saki Sanobashi, an either fictitious or so obscure as to practically fictitious eroguro anime from the pre-internet years of otakudom. Supposedly a lost short animated film that was found by a 4chan user on the Tor internet, it depicts schoolgirls trapped in a bathroom - nine of them, one with a white hime cut -   killing themselves after some drama occurs which drives them to suicide by methods such as braining themselves on the plumbing fixtures.

Its eluded its searchers since it was rumored to exist, to the point of developing schisms as the conflicting desires of the search go in different directions. Fanart is produced, making the thing exist if not as a VHS tape from the 1980s, then as a product of a search for the absent.

Eroguro typically works from the premise of Saki Sanobashi. Girls are divorced from the usual purity associated - the main character identified as having the anti-subtle hairstyle of a white hime cut - and left to be brutally torn open in the raw desert. The bathroom is never found, the parents withheld from the girls, searching, hoping to find them. The bathroom now forms a pocket of the wilderness, knives and animalism taking hold of the girls as their bodies become primary once again.

Quite a bit of pornography works on this basic storyline, of the Id’s total triumph. Pornography first begins with an exaggerated performance - the acting of porn isn’t so much a fault as it is the purpose, a foundational act to what occurs, where armor is rendered into metal bikinis and plumbers into greasy dago studs, performance being raised to a hyperreal intensity of itself. The gendered performances are embodied more fully than normally possible, by constructing a hypergender above and beyond the typical performance. A man becomes Delaney’s Hogg, his usual affirmations of the raw and brutal nature of manhood raised to the extremes of the concept. A woman becomes a whore, her costumes remade into slutty recreations of the old mask, more vibrant, colorful, flashier, showing more skin. A third gender is constructed often as well, in the strange space where it’s always implied in normal life. What is simply a weak man normally becomes a sissy and a cuckold, a lesbian becomes one of the boys in her musculature and possible hermaphroditism.

Hypertrophy is of course never neutral. The particular line taken can vary wildly depending on what is seen as the particular components to be hypertrophied in this process known often as “corruption”. Some darken the skin, plumpen the lips, exaggerate the curves and muscles and genitals, add tattoos, destroy the body or mutate it beyond human form, colonize it with insects or wicked technology... all of these paths being taken depending on the interpretation of what the performance is before the corruption begins. The interpretation of the nurse, as an play of matronly love, or as a play of disciplinary control, or etc, will all set up different pieces to become hypertrophied in the making-sexual of the performance.

The process of making-sexual is always alien to the performance itself, as my language thus far has been implying. Yet its always done as a deeper seed of life than the performance itself, a warring triumph of the id over the superego. No wonder then, that defeat is so often eroticized, in the ancient storyline of the feral barbarians overtaking the virginal feminine of the superegoic interior.

And this giving-in process, forms the basis of becoming-sexual, wherein the Id is made to reign over the Superego, the Ego - imagine the drama stylized in the cuckold drama. The weak young man, dressed in the finest uniforms of his place in the world, is shown for what he is - nothing more than a paper tiger. The feminine he courts decides to abandon him and open the door for the feral unknowable, the Freudian correspondence speaking for itself.

The first Death Grips album is steeped in the 1960s. Aside from a few mentions of items like MDMA, samples from surf rock or the first Pink Floyd album underly lyrics regarding a primitivization of the self. The speaker becomes like the man running in the desert in the Beware video, the naked and ungroomed man posing for the cover art. No shock, as the drama of the decade was through the shattering of an illusion of a superegoic order. Without an underlying material reality, the pretending that God wasn’t dead in the barbiturate haze of the post-war era ended with dual attempts, to either continue up and up and ascend to a new plane of consciousness, or to descend, to become feral as Tiger Force in Vietnam, Charles Manson in the desert, the revelers at Altamont and Woodstock and the Summer of Love.

Eroguro provides an interesting confluence in bringing together libido into one act, both sex and violence unified to work upon the body in question. The young girls in Saki Sanobashi, performing purity in their serafuku and traditional hairstyles, have their being worked upon from within. All violence is self inflicted as part of the situation, where the bathroom acts as the greater mechanism of making them become-sexual, the self being hypertrophied in its expense of energy, the act of braining oneself on a faucet no different in function from ahegao’ing while psychotically riding an ugly bastard’s cock.

The question then of desire and its origin is one that’s lead into a maddeningly simple aphorism. Hypertrophy occurs by that within being awakened to overcome the carefully fragile systems above itself, like Agent Orange soaking into organic material and overdriving it to grow itself dead. The identification of desire with the wilderness, as something exogenous to the self constructed in early life, and yet unignorable as being infinitely more primal than it, dovetails - desire is nonconsensual and yet will always be a source of some of the truest embodiments of the self.