LET OUR TEARS RUST THE MACHINES THAT WHICH STIRRED THEM

A brief bookmark in the catacombs of dreams and the libraries of whatever's left

A Dull Domestication

Historians might argue, “The fact that days add up, and only do so in a linear fashion, is something we have to come to terms with.” Indeed history only seems to accumulate. We are presented with ever more factoids and events and ruling surnames to consider. Even if the ouroboros acolytes claim the cyclical ticket (and I’m not sure if I disagree), perhaps the very notion of rejecting any given affair as novel is in itself pathological. Humans really are quite innovative when it comes to ever-evolving ways of sequestering oneself, of avoidant compartmentalization. We visit bright brothels clad in clandestine robes, safeguarding the impossible. Still, we hoi polloi intrinsically experience “history” differently. Those not yet suffering from the backwash of hemlock, prescribed by modern and ancient historians alike, generally don’t care much for the past, prior to the oral accounts of their own birth. This is because they are not yet dead. We consider this to be a typically wonderful thing deserving of praise and celebration. So we don’t simply fully exert ourselves from the get-go. Our lives don't go through every single permutation, every single order of operation possible. Memories are made and lost and found. Friends are made and lost and found. Hobbies are made and lost and found. Passions are made and lost and found. The larger environments are much the same. Morbidly, humans even out their competition (non-humans) via absorption, e.g. the extinct carrier pigeons replaced by deep sea cables and transmission towers; the quagga replaced by safari tours; the thylacine¹ replaced by zookeeping; the dodo made extinct because they needed a poster child for the mere act. The truly unthinkable fact is how extinctions, too, accumulate. One must grasp this. The accumulation of absence. Or, better, the assemblage of the absented. We hold virtual vigils and pay lip service to these assemblages, even if we don’t fully understand why. This is the seemingly morally righteous thing to do. We must mourn the deceased, but let bygones be bygones. What can happen in the future somehow severs all relations from the past/present. The dodo starts and ends in eternal remembrance.

A year (and a day) ago I started this little side project, where I can type away aimlessly, no directives in sight, my missive tucked away on the other side of the detritus, that of my mind palace. At times it seems I were to miss the point entirely, secluded in a room - let’s call it “space” - gaps of which both near and far. I have become intimately aware of the cracks in the (literal) façade, with dubious origins. Accompanied by many unblinking eyes in my room, thousand-yard stares heading south, an absent-minded jury waiting on my next fumble. I write well at night, when my neighbourhood settles into their makeshift beds. This side of the world ceases its nagging, its finger-wagging. Into the endless night they go. The pretties all died decades ago. It’s always the present which comes off as decadent, putrescent, catatonic. My lack of faith, and general irreverence would have cast me as an outsider not too long ago in the past. Still in the secular spheres of nowadays I think myself clever behind a veil of homicidal rage. Selfsame apparitions, really. A drop in the bucket (full of crabs) compared to what finer feuds the world can provide. My words are not known for their robust shelf life. Nor for being ephemerally aphoristic. Instead I choose (in vain) to fancy myself as a lax purveyor of pyrrhic victories, seldom present in your perfect globetrotters and best-sellers. I believe in the tension of sainthood - the bardo² between cheap lives. I am an agnostic animist. I treat them all in a Kevorkian manner. I like movies. Sometimes I call them films. I obey an average law of love. This is all to say, the only (invalid) difference between you and me is the keyboard pattern I generate. Do you know what you’re doing? I don’t. One of us needs to be the scout. Find a way out. Find the missing puzzlist. Now, I mention history, or historiography, and the dodo in the first paragraph because I believe the dodo is always present, at the very least, adjacent in my writing. If I were to document the currents, be it cultural or meteorological I might fall victim to the historian’s hemlock. So, consulting the spaces in between, where the dodo (and the bottomless pit I refer to every so often) resides, this must be the tangent where I can begin to craft the truly meaning-less - rendering unto Muster Point that which musters. I am not meant to succeed in legibility, or to fulfill the role of a safari guide, but to bring forth the absentees. This means I often run the risk of resembling a fanciful obscurantist, annoyingly inducing vertigo. It is not my objective to, say, effectuate “ontological shock” - I doubt this is the place to have an existential crisis. Rather, I remind the reader again I write for those flailing in free fall, yet without the bliss of learned helplessness. The dodo, mid-execution in midair. History revamped into something incorrigible. All stemming from the goodness of my heart. I’m here to combat myself. I’m here to perform liturgies for the damned. I’m here to edit the sad parts.

In any case, I can’t afford to not believe in something anymore. This does not pertain to theology but rather the decision to choose a path and walk down it. No matter how downtrodden, grassy, or obscure it becomes. The fantasy of merging lanes as you please is long past what the current climate calls for. An ethical parity must occur to level out the playing field - we have to be able to identify friend or foe. It should not surprise anyone the freedom of speech has now been flanderized, as in, the very act of “saying something” is thrown into a whirlwind of pointless debate. The hypodermic idea of censorship has grown so monstrous, that we stopped believing in anything. We live in the age of skeptics, of critics, of petty credentialism. Everything is now self-important, and must be given attention and respect. An essentialism snapping, crackling, popping into inconceivable derivatives. Cliques and crowds are now the ultimate identifier, we memorize trivia to lambast those unable to subscribe to a niche. Collectives fail because they regard themselves as distinct. As poorly individuated. We take pride in having the cleanest, the most efficient algorithm to serve us ready-made recommendations. We base our personalities on screenshots of Dadaism and witty non-sequiturs from streamers. Although not as prevalent today as my alarmist fears, the Internet will become a mediatic masquerade of so-called third places. It is the digital hub. It is the great plaza. It is a same-day delivery postal service. It is a stillborn mall with ghost kitchens and hauntological demo(“crazie”)s - a promise never made. Many already know this, through a deep-seated unease: the common sentiment where technology no longer intrigues. Instead, it’s a hot potato amongst the laymen and for the elites a grotesque revival of the space race, to see who becomes the “space race”. The machines are huffing, and puffing, and heaving, and pleading. We wake every day without the nightmares of others. I can no longer generalize. I can no longer advocate for us. Am I ready to admit how tired counterculture makes me? Must we condemn ourselves to either the status quo of demarcation, the segregation of the I, the unending, muted consumption of the commons; in the verticality of ascending firmaments à la Icarus, or in the katabasis of Silver Gleaming Death Machines? Or perhaps it is when the fictocritical topologist, the schizophrenic cinephobe, the queer conlanger, the rhizomatic nomad, the gonzoid black swan, and the ANT truther all bind together in an entropic k-hole slump, refracting and retracting, always already becoming the new idola theatri as the playwrights of doxa, of “Heideggerian hermeneutic phenomenology”, of alienating protologisms and fringe terminology that truly nobody gives a shit about? Once or twice in the lifetime of any “leftist” (if one should exist as such) worth their money, they will misquote Marx or Lenin or Lumumba or Sankara or Mao or Tito or Che or, godforbid, Guattari. We are reminded every day of the folly of our existence. That we are a soupy mess, an imperfect stock made out of flesh and bones and blood and sinew and muscles and marrow and humours and gas and water, and so we taste bad, and so cannibalism is a no-go. Yet martyrdom, the most cannibalistic sport there is, is celebrated worldwide. In every platitude there is snark. In every misery there is a thrill. The human is best not to contemplate so much on themselves. Otherwise, you become a traitor to your own species. Stick with your own kind. Pointless word vomit only divides. It is derisive showmanship for killing time and erasing boredom. What good is your prose and your impressive archive of figureheads, if their sole triumph was to attract the lame stench of death?

The point of life, goes beyond the material of goods, and the immaterial of thought. It is, more often than not, not about hoarding wealth and fame, not about the person you dated when you were 19, not about making others feel dumb, or about inducing harm. The intention is to continually consider your options carefully, after consulting your gut feelings. It’s having the capacity to care and knowing when to tread with caution. It’s to understand, “I’m better off not knowing”, and “I should try to know better” respectively. Never speak in the language of the past. “I should’ve known better.” And you do. Maybe you didn’t, but you do now. The most flattering thing I can say about myself is either a) made up entirely or b) never to be said. Carry that empathy, and let tenderness eviscerate you from the inside out. Pine, mourn, weep, drift into your dreams without a sense of purpose. Think about your tragedies. Think about the others. Fold with equal parts intuition and instinct. You are seen, heard, felt, embraced, not with malice, not with contempt, not with suspicion, but with gentle grace. Your ancestors are with you. Your future is with you. Your grave already dug and your coffin already carved and your headstone already chiselled. Your body is light, lighter than air, lighter than light, than the shadows, than life. Blink and move with intention. Strike with precision. Live with the shame and the guilt, but banish the comorbid catatonia. Ignore time passing. Close your eyes with ease. Fight with action. Rise up against those without your best interests in mind. Join in arms. Compel others. Question with confidence. Confide knowing it’s your turn someday. Stand in solidarity. Don’t worry about it. Continue on. Let our tears rust the machines that which stirred them.

Towards Jericho

Excuse my little ramble. Yes yes, we all have a book or a novella or a monograph in us, but the rooted fear of obsolescence cannot be overridden. Not in so many words, anyway. Really it begins with a shared sigh or a light beverage or a roundtable hotpot. There are only so many times you can namedrop (insert thinker-guygalfolk of choice here) before a figurative slap in the face³. Treating every encounter like a keynote presentation or a press release cannot be sustainable. Although, for the next minute I want to indulge a little. Forgive me.

Dreams are the most potent form of a past returning where it either provides immense comfort that dissipates into agony as soon as the mind wakes, or literal self-inflicted mental torture that lingers long after you wake. The hair-trigger catalyst to manipulate your own cognition to do its dirty work. The oneiric allows for the disillusionment of free will but most importantly, it forces us to acquiesce to the unpleasant truth that our mind is ungovernable, at least not consciously. There is no higher-order cognition that can directly interfere with what you dream about, there is no will-to-power strong enough that it can manifest a smorgasbord of buttons and knobs and levers to tailor this nocturnal Real, there is no lucid dream acronym operative and predictive enough that it guarantees what the unknown should conjure the next time. Once we accept this gateway into total victimhood, wherein one should forego all cognitive acts of consent (a futile stance, anyhow⁴) and start considering the different lives we lead in our heads, dreaming away in broad daylight, then it’s something. This sort of quotidian oblivion at play, as in the smithereens of endless “forks” in the gyre of everyday living, could become a powerfully paradoxical device where one would be encouraged to escape the most dominant ideology. For example, one could live in a hypothetical state where public facilities, healthcare, and transit are all paid for by the government, and still be unhappy with the grocery prices spiking at a record high. Whereas the prevailing social mores may nudge you into idle complacency, and shun anyone who “wants more” when “they already have it good (perhaps with an added anecdote of “compared to them unfortunate losers” from some random third world country for good measure)”. The given situation is favourable. At the very least, you aren’t starving. So the silly daydreams about potential improvements are now deemed ludicrous. Ludicrous, for lack of lucratives. This is how welfare decays. In the most poetic sense, it’s when a collective of people ceases to dream of a better life, when “things aren’t so bad after all”. This is especially discordant when the government (which paves the smooth roads and builds skate parks in ethnic neighbourhoods) in question sponsors foreign war crimes, an incomprehensibly complex web of geopolitics made out to the masses to be “too complicated” to become otherwise. We often forget that complexity does not equate to complication. The complexities of the world are ultimately to our benefit - we are offered many appreciations, and many exits. The complications are mostly manmade - we are taught the concept of depreciation, and to fathom so-called exit strategies. Lives are made complicated after we start to refuse the not immediately obvious. “If I don’t understand this after four, five seconds of thinking, it has no inherent value.” “If I don’t see the problem after four, five seconds of browsing, it does not concern my day-to-day life.” Curfews are notoriously synonymous with dystopias for a reason. Dreams are enfeebled by becoming a slot in the timetable. Your parents when you were 4 were tyrannical apes of the state. People who have bedtime alarms are psychopathic drones.

How can you sleep at all? Aggressors loom large in the mind of insomniacs. Ill intent is rarely seen explicitly, sure, but does having implicit bias make one inherently complicit? If I were to decide right now, evil can be both hard-coded and eminently conspicuous, but also drawing a soft power kind of banner, promoting compliance, working overtime without complaint or pay, tapping into phones and cameras, drone striking with PS5 consoles, filming Katy Perry tributes, incorporating generational slangs. The common denominator is of course the evil within. To destroy evil is hard. But perhaps, it can be facilitated by groups of somnambulists, holding their heavenly lathes, moving through life in no particular state, playing hooky, always in flux, always weepy, practitioners of herem-neutics, front towards (the actual) enemy⁵. Genocidal degenerates need not survive. To collectivize is not to have a start-up. It is almost always about putting personal ego aside and amplifying the voices of the majority⁶, which means rhythm and repetition. Repetition for itself, perhaps? A contingent flow of chants and slogans, upon which individuation might finally comfortably occur. No longer in the footsteps of idols, instead electing to deliberately worship false ones, since those are the ones the common people resemble the most. Consider what is within your earshot. A lone voice falls into silence. A lone mirror may reflect many figures, but only once. (Many) Moving mirrors generate light out of a vacuum⁷. So move with intent, and mirror one another. Endow your own light autonomous from their White Light⁸. Spawn the kugelblitz. Invite them into K_HOLE. Make them nostalgic for actual death. Make them pay for it. Make peace.

Then, fall into pleasant slumbers.

Zugzwang

An era came and went. Onto the next. Expect more ramblings, potential short stories, and whatever pops into my head that particular night as I bleed out in front of the monitor. Pray for my strength to type.

Take care, as always.

When I’m gone, blow me a dub…

1. Philologically speaking, the dodo has been replaced by the term “endling”, not only emanating a wicked need of endearment, but also no longer bearing any semblance to what death is in the days of old. Much of the same can be said about designated “terminal speakers” around the world, both blindsiding exonyms.

2. All my writings are false chronicles of a handful of truths.

3. Immediately followed by a literal chair thrown into the cranium.

4. See Privacy in Context by Helen Nissenbaum. Specifically regarding “contextual integrity” in a world excavating for post-consent privacy.

5. Each assigned their very own dream tarantulas. Evil is a twin, after all.

6. We all make the same sound when we get mowed down.

7. Excuse me for butchering the dynamical Casimir effect.

8. In fieri.