THE TOTAL OPERATOR TEXT (MASTER DOC 1)

I. Master Scroll 1

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II. The Traveler and Other Stories

A Collection of Short Works by David Bussell (2024-2026)

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THE PHANTOM

I.

Her husband had committed suicide in the war. His name was Jean-Claude Parsonne, and he was buried beneath one of the last remaining Mayan temples, beneath some felled tree stumps, left to the orange and black specked bugs, dung beetles, and distended worms. “The jungle has teeth,” he would tell her, “it is furious and will eat all things, even the last memory of us. There will not be a scrap of flesh, a memory, a leaflet, nor even a statue. All of the ancient cultures had sun gods,” he said, “but it is just a matter of when those gods would die; go up in a plume of colorful smoke; live in a graveyard rainbow haze.”

She was rocked by his death and descended into a sort of brutal insanity with flashes of lucidity, where she could remember a certain math equation, a chemical compound, or distillation. She was a practical chemist, tasked with making anti-cancer injections for the new government, harnessing genetic information to potentially begin the new eugenics projects of terraforming the consciousness of the nation. The war was over valuable genetic material—more valuable now than water was genius, intelligence. It was what the people were truly starved of; without innovation, the cities had stagnated, clogged with filth and reeking of bodies. The cemeteries, like the landfills, were long since overfilled; the tenements, full to bursting. He had died breathing the flat, noxious gas so typical of the guerrilla insurgency—designed to perfectly preserve in working order all the organs of the body so they could be repurposed; the genetic material to be registered and logged in the databases.

Her name was Emma. Once, she was told, far down her line, she had ancestors in the old Parisian resistances—where they clogged the streets with furniture and buttresses and shot pistols valiantly but uselessly at the police. There was a time of revolutionary solidarity, but it faded like a mist into the obscurity of the times: lost, wandering, borderless, nameless, faceless. Now, there were no thoughts but the rare hiccups of genius that echoed throughout the centuries. The last of them unified the world in an undistinguished, cultureless mass. All that was left was for one more fragment of an innovative mind to emerge. The people were starving for it; with uprisings in Guatemala, Guam, Moscow… it was as if they were, by violence, attempting to turn the entire world on its head. But no blood spilled could birth a mind capable of revolutionizing the dead spirit of the times.

She lived in a lone hut overlooking the sea, where it battered against the rocks; a cliff face on the coast of what was once Maine, in the old United States. There were no names now for these places, just relics of a lost time, just as there was now no language. We remembered these things, names like Emma, but we did not speak them. They were useless; life was condemned to silence, but a vague whisper in the market, a customer to the butcher—haggling a price, or sleeping away at an inn. She thought of Jean-Claude and how he’d died for nothing; perhaps it would have been easier to take a bullet in the head, like his favorite old poet, Mayakovsky. At least he was looking up at the solstice sun as it scraped the back of the old temple. All the sacrificial blood before him, buried in the sedimental skin of the earth; he had added to it, like silt or volcanic rock.

For Emma now, there was dead time and silence. She drifted like a ghost through the streets of the old abandoned fishing town. Now there were the shrouded awnings of the lone fish grocer or two, where even during the days, only the lights of the eyes would pierce the smog and flicker like predatory panthers. Without money, it was easier to exchange favors for the essential things. She was a weaver when she could, and when the sale could be made—but women mostly sold their bodies in her town and elsewhere. Culture was simply sex; without language, there was really no need for books. Nothing new under the sun, they say. But Jean-Claude used to read. He’d keep a stack of books hidden underneath the mattress frame. He’d tell her, in his guttural hushed tones, when they were alone in those old moony nights, where only the crashing of the waves dispersed their speech, “No one needs to know, nor would they remember, what these poets and philosophers said. What their minds and hearts reflected, the heart of life…” She drifted. Science had given them the final truth, put down like a commandment from ancient gods or an axe blow. They were simply chemical reactions, spawn of heated molecules in a swamp, sustained by a brief myth; a sheer illusion of consciousness. Many accepted; the few rebelled. Life collapsed into the regularity of obedience.

It was ideal for this life to have no meaning, for the drug lords and pushers who owned the cities. Their skyscrapers, sleek, rolling black luxury vehicles, the cigars rolled with hallucinatory leaf. They lived in a paradise condemned to the silence of orgasmic thrusts, and the sickening crunch of beef bone and lobster claws against the knobby lapels of their fists, crackling against the sharp teeth in the jowl. She sat and rocked in the old wooden chair, imagining the crack of the bone in the snapping of the dry woody fire in the iron stove before her. This fire burned with seeming ceaselessness. It was a mirror of the stars.

II.

The next day, Emma awoke to the sound of a hen bleating. She stumbled out of bed, feeling perfect in the hum of her mind, but with the fugue of last night’s sweat upon her brow and chest. She had dreamt of Jean-Claude. He was screaming behind an ancient mask, groaning with red and purple lips, before a great pyre of bodies. The flame from them was a brutal gold, and their blood danced in waves before weaving a fabric in the sky, turning into the hair of a black, witchy goddess. She was thrown awake by the temperament of the dream. The ashes of the fire lay before her; the uneaten stew in the burned bottom pot. She was tired; worn down by the fixture of time. The sheer oscillations of it beat her into the ground, day after day, worn to tempered seeds of sand like the waves of an ocean. It soothed her, this fatigue, just as it agitated, like the smooth underside of a gem. It came to her, the wildness of the fire; it lived in her.

She walked through the feed grounds, petting the prickly feathers of the flock, delicately scooping up some flecked eggs and placing them in the wicker basket by the door. She decided, somewhat unconsciously, to walk to the checkpoint. It would be just through the valley, led there by a grove of trees where the sun passed over them like a dial; the waving branches cast beautiful, cooling shadows. It was the town that was once Bridgeport, and now was simply a gate for militia and munitions, with all the land cleared away to provide a clean line of sight for miles in all directions. She enjoyed passing through, the make-believe of her papers, the laughably stoic faces of the guards. She saw the whole theater of death now, this parade of the new government; it brought her great joy and a sense of deep hilarity. She indulged in the apishness of the victors and the new party, even as she was haunted by the circumstances of Jean-Claude’s death. There was still something to it, to him cracking the homemade grenade of gas there, that froze his mouth, teeth, eyes, and lungs in a perfect contentment of death right before the ancient stone temple. Statues of snakes were leering right before it, where they found him, almost entranced and vibrating in a perfect seated meditation. She loved him, in the way that all human beings loved—desperately and casually. He was her friend; they understood.

As she passed through the checkpoint, she checked the pockets of her black fatigues. There were some non-perishable rations, some of her favorite French cigarettes, the great Gauloises—the ones her great grandfather used to smoke. It was her last memory of what ‘being French’ was, or seemed to be. He told her of his father and the graffiti, the protests, their films of love. Mad painters, and mad poets. Baudelaire, chanteuses, opium addicts; the fires which took first the Notre Dame, then the rest of the city to smoldering rubble in the cleansing. Now there were no homes, only passages; travelers, nomads, highwaymen, and thieves. And, of course, prostitutes. Beneath them were her garters, where she kept the glistening silver hunting knife with which she skinned deer when she could pin them with a bullet or an arrow; her Walther. The bees danced in a hive she could not find with her eyes. Beyond the clay road, marked off with sandbags and the metal gateway of the scanning station, lay the desert expanse. Out beyond the Bridgeport checkpoint was pure desert of flat, hard dirt. It was as if the memory of trees had been forgotten; the sun leered overhead, ominous and red. She dragged, near retching in the sun. In the distance, back to the coast, she could hear the sirens of the opening of the gene factory.

III.

The gene factory was characteristic, first and foremost, of the unified new government. The production of optimal genetic circumstances dated all the way back to the days only her great ancestors could recall; they had finally done it, in the midst of Jean-Claude’s war. The European armies had marched deep into the Guatemalan jungles; razed the Peruvian flora to the Paracas Peninsula in search of the old masters, the shamans who could recall the structure of DNA intuitively, in order to harness their genetic knowledge. For there were no notable births in the crumbling empires; the nations desperate for leaders, condemned to usury of the country coffers by petty thieves; bickering in the Parliaments; futility of the changing of the guard, with no greater innovations than the space hotels that lay rotting and lightless for decades. It was a tiresome sham, until the introduction of the gene factories. It gave the failing species a hope, a way out, a way through - the barbaric march of another two hundred thousand years of blind, bickering, stumbling evolution - unto the hopes of growing a third thumb, or producing the next Renaissance mind.

There was a cruelty to it; a cruelty to the brute dumbness of humanity that Emma inherited, like a genetic code, or inner, sacral reasoning which she could not completely nor entirely shake. She had the urge to kill; it was an urge that was stronger even than the urge to fuck, or eat. In her early childhood, they had all given up speaking, and resorted back to the brute and bodily actions which characterized the animal which man had been wretched back into. Years and years without renovation and revelation stung far worse than years without birth. Sex, food, water, and the repetition of concrete stairs, flat, tan, concrete walls, like prisons, like asylums, like schools; the wire lining the streets like a forced processional. Each day was like an execution, and it hardened Emma around her brows. She trudged onward, defiantly; became increasingly militant. She brandished her gun in her waistband at onlookers; polished her black leather combat boots with a heavy fist, digging into the smooth, scuffed flesh. It was a regime of pure discipline; she carried the whip of her mind like a dominatrix. For her, she would be the greatest executioner, if they wished to live in a slaughterhouse.

It was the dumb fear of cattle, who caught a flash of a light in a mirror, startled in their stiff march to the factory grave. They gave them a song, a cross, a relic of the old land; the earth folk who worshipped many gods folded into the industrial wasteland which was both pre and post war. They were desperate for meaning. Some ran in hopes of languishing in the sea of the old times, like a biological devolution. They receded toward the womb of religious stories. Others reveled in the pure hedonism of the cities, or sequestered in the cold scientific computational tombs of the research schools. Jean-Claude had only enlisted to get out of the computation factories; she remained, in an increasingly porcupine exile. Left to the eggs on the farm; the herb garden; the moon water, the rain water, the sunlight. When she’d received the hologram of his death, the image shimmering in the breeze like an olfactory hallucination, she could taste the memory of his soul, his words, their conversations; the way he made her feel. The mornings that passed swiftly and yet in a perfect, rhythmic time, the two of them in bed, both serious and in laughter. She ran out to the garden and screamed in anger, and in defiance. He had to die in the mud, alone; he wandered off, knowing that she’d see this, see him. She was embarrassed. Shameful. Her tears burned; burned again in her memory.

It felt foolish, to love, to feel anything at all. Frivolous as it all was. Sometimes the dreams felt more real; that life was just a passing hobby until she returned to sleep. She would drift forever, buoyant, like a fugue to death, a preface to something far greater. An opening into a truer, lighter reality. The canyons of silence around her echoed; she wiped the sweat from her brow with a snatch of free cloth she had tucked in her waistband. It was more real to be alone, out here, in this vulture wasteland, left to herself and her own thoughts. The heat enveloped her; she sweated off her membrane, her border. It was like leaving into a private symphony. She didn’t need to be seen, known. It was better that they no longer spoke; that Jean-Claude was her last language companion. Strangers knew better to speak to one another, beyond the completion of a transaction which could not be gestured with the hands. It would arouse suspicion of the presence of mind, and that would draw examination; inevitably, an autopsy. The gas Jean-Claude took for himself had long been perfected by the new state’s chemists. It could perfectly preserve the flesh for decades, if not longer. Plenty of time to dissect the intercoursing neurology of the organism’s brains, organs; to understand the full fabric of its being. Intelligence. The second coming of genius. The waiting. The desperation. It was all much clearer in the daylight of time… clearer now than when she sat as a child and heard the stories; tried to understand.

IV.

They hoped that it would rescue life from decline. For it had all declined. Misery, shortness of life. Brutish and short. There could not be art, for there was no art to remember. Hands and minds worked, but the instruments and brushes; pages and pens were as alien as language had become, the playfulness. It was rote; entirely economical and ecumenical. The schools produced endless surgeons. They invented the chemicals, the weapons, the bombs, the computing devices. Faster, faster, faster, in a whirlwind; a tempest of explosions and cold, dead innovation. Jean-Claude had hated it. The two of them were like poles of a magnet, repelled from the living grave; into the warm embrace of the heart. Emma sneered. Just the thought of it sent a surgical chill up her spine, like the touch of cold metal, grinding against her flesh and creasing up against her bloodstream to break the barrier of her skin and the sterile air. The cities where the barons lived and warred were now simply hospital schools and laboratories - where aspiring technical minds raced against the clock to build the next efficient device to extract energy, information, and material from the failing human corpus.

Emma herself had once traced that metallurgic line across the sky. But inside her, Jean-Claude knew, there was a poet, and a lover. By the fire, they wrapped themselves in one another, like a blanket of continuity. They weaved, and were lost in the galaxies, lost to time; they drifted forever, inside a vast continuum, unblinking, filled to the hilt of the skin and bursting to the rosy flower of the mouth with one another, entirely consumed and coiled like mating garter snakes. Their time was precious and yet infinite. Two years later, he was there, staring at the stone steps, thousands of miles away from her, fighting in a war of nuclear weapons, sticks, and stones. It was like he was retreating to another time, death. Something more animal, primordial, fluid. In the vat of his blood, slowing, pulsing; growing cold and coagulated, like the slow oily blood of the earth which seeped black from the well wounds. She left the factory cities and was left to her memory of the thread; she wove and wove for hours with the thin metal needle, until the tips of her fingers started to bleed. She’d suck on them and think of him; once they became calloused she considered abandoning the whole project; leaving it all behind. Perhaps, she thought, even on this walk, that last dream of him would be the match with which the whole affair would go up in smoke; the house itself would recede into distant, blacked out memory. She’d let the hens reclaim the fireplace; walk on forever.

She came across rail tracks; balanced on them like a child, darting from plank to plank, spike to spike. She had no trouble. Someone in her line was a dancer, but nobody remembered who. The genetic thread of her lineage wove millennia – but to her, she was this hidden thing, this emergence, with a dark history. It was as if there was a snake within her, coiled around the sheer profusion of planetary bodies, with its forked tongue clasped about the stars. Her body remembered where her conscious mind could not; she handled the grace of the movement, even amidst the beads of sweat which crested upon her nose, chin, and lips; fell to the stony ground. Tufts of grass bled through the cracks of the chapped ground; occasionally she would see the remains of an old gas canister, or a bottle cap. It was an abyss in these parts of the world, as it was by her cliffside home. Life was retained solely to the cities; unbroken in its pace, rhythms, and pathways. It was entirely predictable, down to the first and last bell of the day and night; the narrows of the roads which served only as walkways for the students and disciples of the new science of the flesh. Every last drop of the day was to be extracted toward the task, at risk of the fatal discovery falling to the hands of the guerrilla machinists, working with rudimentary tools in the far jungles of the south; Asiatic southeast. It was as if they were attempting to barbed wire the possible synaptic pathways of existence – to tame humanity into such a deep and rote regularity as to enslave even the essence of imagination; consciousness itself. The last line between the two factions, time and timelessness, was the jungle. It provided the necessary cover of insurrection’s night against the pocketwatch of the day; the factory world of regulated and regular hours and lives. The folk songs drifted hesitantly out of the land where there was no time. Weaving was one of those relics, as was the making of dolls. Some still remembered the ancient art of making pigments for clay and gourds out of the crushed atomic materials of the forest; the distinct hues and dyes coloring the cloth and fabrics of dresses and ceremonial garments.

V.

It was the pyre again. There was a man standing beside it, an old man. His beard wrapped wildly around his face. He grinned with an almost entire lack of presence, like the coil of the lips and teeth upon his face were structured by an entirely unconscious force. The bodies were glowing embers of coals. Growing fainter. She blinked; the slip of her eye, it seemed like an aeon had passed. He beckoned to her. There was a tunnel, in the cave behind the fire. They walked. The stone was carved with bones. She shivered. The man looked back, with pure, dark, blackened eyes. It seemed like there was nothing there, but there were black stones in his sockets. At the bottom, there was a pool, with a shining gold light emanating from the water. She looked in.

The day slammed into her face loudly. She sat up, and rubbed her eyes. Beneath a lone sapling, she had rested. There was a wall, an old general store; the brick wall provided a lean-to. She splashed some water from her canteen against her eyes, mouth, and lips. She was shocked, stunned; her mind moved freely, untethered and untamed, as if caught in a static television set, a radio channel, a faint whisper which had guided her on. She didn’t see it, but in the night before, she’d walked into an abandoned town. She normally only spent an hour or two beyond the Bridgeport checkpoint; this distance was unprecedented for her. Something inside her told her she was never going back. Never going back to the old house, the memory of Jean-Claude; the tiresome regularity of her increasingly contracted reality. She had become like an animal backed into a corner, a stray dog bearing her teeth. It was enough, like the end of a play she had been present for, but entirely divested from. A bad act. A half show. She would walk until the end of the earth, or else a breakpoint, a fatal disruption to her previous life. She sought rebirth like a sacred water, like a crystalline substance, a waters of life to quench a deep, inner thirst. She would die and be reborn; shed herself.

The houses were in a line like soldiers, back to back in perfectly similar construction. They were industrial houses, as most were in these townships, with these old general stores often co-opted into shops which sold the essential clothing and uniforms for the workers. In these types of outskirts towns, the workers mined coal, minerals, and elements; crafted the steel and metals necessary for the factory machinists in the cities and the laboratories. Coal was now secondary to nuclear, but nonetheless could be used; was often preferred by the smaller industrial units - relegated to older, more easily obtainable methods for energy. There were still oil fields in the south; like lone great metal storks they dipped constantly into the innards of the dirt. She remembered the images they had shown her on the dusty film reels in the lecture halls of the college… of the smouldering furnaces; the roaring engines. Anything that would power the lurching, monstrous beast - bellowing its noxious smoke. Beneath the towers, sample bodies slept; jolted - steaming in a perennial, manufactured night of smog which eclipsed all shade of day.

She examined herself. There were these faint beginnings of the felt newness. The decision. The step into this new life. There were these moments, flickerings, where she basked in this truth - like a salamander upon a hot stone in the sun, in the full breadth of her individuality. There wasn’t even this nonsense of the new government; this vast insurgency, Jean-Claude, genetic absurdity. It felt like some distant myth or legend of some far off empire. She was part of nothing - she had no language, no name, no place. She was wild, like a horse living on a fertile island of green. It was her soul, murmuring like a brook, deep within her breast. It was a new language, and it had a taste. It was fresh, evergreen, a crystalline dew; a blue-white mountain stream. She began to walk.

VI.

In Emma’s mind, there was something forming. Like in the stars, they drift without noticed meaning, until the observant eye pulls them together in a constellation, and recalls the ancient story of the hero who felled the monster which recoiled beneath them, in another, far off network and league of lights. She felt this mute coagulation, this consonance within her; she reveled in it. It was the sensation of private novelty; the participation in something great and yet entirely availed to her and herself alone - a participation which was like a blanket atop her corporeality and humanity; a womb in which she heard the song of life, which whispered in a language she could not quite recall and yet knew intimately and completely. It spoke with a tangled language, a series and sense of syllables which were like a woody, leafy vine coiled around something sacred and diamondine, a substance true and parallax to all of nature. She touched it within herself as she walked, and the veiny leaves responded; twisted, and peeked at the gem within her. It was a stone of her inner truth, and it glistened. She was walking away from everything untrue; toward something entirely real; filled with the depth of something unconquered and primordially natural. It resided within her.

This was an idea, she realized. And as much as she disliked it, she recalled Jean-Claude’s words: ‘An idea is something formed in the stream of reality. It is an image of existence, the imaginary face of life, the very source of creation, staring right back at you’. And it was then that she connected the dream. Jean-Claude and the old man. She had to sit down for a moment. It was as if he had aged; the lines had blurred - between sleeping and waking. Her certitude of time faded like a candlelight in the passage of hours. She slowly began to contemplate it: the death of Jean-Claude, the war; the years before it; her recession into the depths of solitude. Where did they meet? Ah… in the dining halls of the hospital’s college. He was an intern in… computing, was it? Her memory flickered; conjoined with the touch of sensation. She remembered his smile, the chaos of his black hair writhing about his forehead - the product of too many sleepless nights. He was young then, almost impossibly young. She held up an apple toward him, and he laughed. Understanding. That was when the dreams started. It was a night with him, not one of the first. He was on top of her, thrusting, staring almost solemnly into her eyes; she, staring right back at him. And then, suddenly, like thunder to her mind. It was the shaking of the blood, like a baby’s rattle in the hands of an angry god, or the tempest of an unseen hand which tossed a snow globe into utter turmoil. It was laughter, not his, nor hers. They came into one another like open doors, and there was a chemical transformation, his sweat on her red breast…

The necessity of him, was it dreams? Their time together seemed unbroken, not in a respite of a night, nor a waking hour. They tumbled through life until his death; her reception of that hologram upon the steps of the old hut. Her companion, even her guide. Without him, she wandered. And yet, this old man was him. She must sleep again. This time, like before - alone - in perfect solitude. Far from the world; in the company of the blackness of the night; the twinkling, weaving of the stars. As she drifted, she thought - he must be a memory… a memory of something utterly real; yet necessary, a product of a world where waking and sleeping were unified; night and day collided in a rapture of perfection, unity.

VII.

The gun butt in her mouth woke her up. She opened her eyes to see a thick browed, slack jawed man holding a rifle barrel in his hands, the butt pressing her teeth and skull into the dirt. She glared; his eyes shimmered with frivolous power. He gestured for her to get up. She knew he wouldn’t speak to her, as it would imply an equality, a trust, and a personality. This would be entirely impersonal, designed to humiliate, control, and designate her as less than him. He noticed the outline of the garter beneath her pants; she immediately recognized the gesture following his implicit recognition. She drifted away, and allowed herself to become someone else entirely. This would pass, as the rest did - jaggedly, uncomfortably, and quick.

The soldier left as quickly as he came, almost as if an apparition but for the marks he left upon her skin and inside of her. The bruising was a faint, dull, throbbing reminder - almost as if a recognition that she was alive, a mute churning within her; pulsing atop her skin. She strained to remember the dream. She knew she had one, but it was just in flashes. It was a maze. At the center, there was a heaving stone pyramid, with a shooting light of red fire beaming from within it, carving a beaming hole deep into the gape of the black, abyssal sky. Was I supposed to stay here? Wait? She was leaning with temptation into the center of the maze. To go to it, and yet - as she widened her eyes as if to return to the dreamscape, they refocused, and gained a clearer picture of the row of houses around her. There were bodies strewn about them. Motionless. She walked up to them; they were figures with all the appearance of life, and yet - plasticine. With veins and eyes perfectly moulded, with all of the impression of life, and yet the fluid, life, and dewy wetness that ran through them was not blood, nor was it ever blood. They were frozen in animation, never having lived, nor, certainly, never having died. She felt a sense of surprising calm, and ease. There was this implicit understanding within her, beneath her, that she had entered into the world of Jean-Claude himself, the true Jean. He had never truly, strictly, ‘been’, in this sense - but rather, he was a bridge, a way between, an occurrence, an apparition. Just like she was. A throughway to an entirely different world of being - as it was with the cusp of dusk; dawning, the break of day. Between consciousness and this underworld. His death was a subsumption, a going under, a sinking into this forbidden dimension. His age was his leaving, his commitment to the world of the dead, as it was hers. In this leaving, her leaving, she was gone - and dead to the world. She had traversed to the realm of the seeing, the seeking. She recalled, briefly, amidst her fading old life, a yellowing newspaper clipping which recalled the first encounters of the European geneticists with the Peruvian shamans, whom they had cornered in some far part of the jungle: ‘In the microscopic essence of life, there is a passage into an entirely different form of temporality, a timelessness, a song, a dance of existence without breaking; a singing which pierces the heights of light; penetrates the darkness of form. It lives in the shadows of being, waiting for its resurrection into the light’.

She picked up her canteen. As she walked, the sun seemed to pass the very dial like shadows as it did across the breach of her last passage of the checkpoint - and yet, there were no trees nor buildings to cast it. By now, she had long since passed the mineral bordertown of houses. There was dust, and a growing heat - as if she was passing into the equatorial center of the world. Before her feet were scorpions; before her eyes were caves in the ground of deep dust and dry dirt. To spill the water here would make for a difficult journey; she tightened the metal clasp on the lid. Something about the land beckoned; called for her to go deeper inside of it, like a waiting, wanting canal. It was as though she herself was the water, a conduit for the essence of life and being itself; that she was being called through the flue of the land that was her body; her fingers in the crags of the rocks; her mind in the rising heat of the dust. And within it, there was a palpable fury, like a vortex of fire. She drew her hands out of the gloves upon her fingers and pressed them against the air like it was a wall, and felt around the remarks and indentations within it. It had a permeable quality, a definite line, and a symbolic movement within it. It was as if she could read it with the flesh upon the fingertips of her body; press her lips up against the sweating essence and sweltering core of being itself; recall the ancient body of time as it passed like a river in a wind that would barely disturb even the youngest sapling of a tree. The subtlety of life astounded her; her mind was entirely present. Every brush of the coarse fabric of her undershirt pronounced the node and the pulse of the sensation of the alive, conscious body. She felt herself wandering very near to where Jean-Claude had died. Or was it death? She felt that she was near to that place, even though it was, surely, thousands of miles away. She had only been walking for mere days. And yet the expanse of her wandering, the very time and space itself seemed to pulse and bend. She was not entirely sure where she had been, nor where she was going. And yet, she was not tired. A voice within her was like a drum, and it held no meaning but the pounding. It was essential. It called her out of her body and to the place where Jean-Claude sat, transfixed in meditation. The hologram was sent automatically from his breastplate, like an electronic mausoleum. She knew where he was, how he was. This deep in the jungle, it would be unlikely for anyone to find him. And she knew that’s why he went there… to be alone.

The heat became more humid, dense, and overbearing. It was like a body itself; it acquired all of the characteristics of flesh in its compounding gravity. It pressed down against her, and it was like it breathed. The air was its own animal; she sweltered and struggled and swung against it like a drunk. The breeze, what little there was, flattened; slowly, vegetation sprung up before her. She was angry, furious; swatting at great, massive, buzzing, humming insects as they pulsed and lunged at her amongst the growing foliage and lush, leafy canopy. It was like a sweet, sickly drunkenness; it was like the derangement. Her madness… she remembered. Becoming a patient, the flashes of her occupation; the release into solitude. The slamming of the shutter doors upon the hut in the storms which smashed against the rocks; threatened to overwhelm the entire cliffsface and sink their little home into the pits of the ocean. The wild blue black darkness of the ocean. It was her anger, her fury, her rage. She swung, and crashed out into the opening of the grove of trees. There it was - the temple. And she saw Jean-Claude - glittering and still in the twilight.

VIII.

She rushed toward him, to embrace him, to put her arms around his neck and kiss his face… but she collapsed through him, and tumbled into a ditch. Looking up, she saw the ominous towering of the temple; the statuesque snakes. He lay there, beside her, terribly still. And this time, she embraced him, weeping the tears of her anger, hollowed by time. She swore she felt the touch of his skin; in that instant, he disappeared once more. The anger turned to vengeance, and murderous fury. Shaking, she pressed her hands into the shallow dirt and lifted herself out of the tomb. The sky was dark in the setting of the sun; with an overbearing cloud, heavy with rain. She knew there would be relief, and that the sky would breathe again in the relinquishing of its burden. With this thought, she decided to begin to climb the stairs of the temple. She moved - with the quickness of pure instinct.

As she climbed, the air got lighter and lighter; her breath became slower, deeper, and of greater ease. She tasted the sunlight in the air. It was effortless, as a water presses down a current infinitely, into the greater ocean of being. She relinquished the burden of her body. As she neared the peak, she looked back to where she first saw Jean-Claude in the clearing of the trees, and it was there that she thought she saw his image flickering as the sun at last passed over the bedside of the horizon, and descended into the belly of the earth. With her neck craning, looking back over her shoulder, she took one last step forward, and passed through the veil of the night. The air was silent, but for the screaming of the insects. The curtain of the night, vibrating and still.

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Underneath The Long Street

I will tell you a story that does not belong to any space, or any time. It is the story of a time out of time, that stretches possibility and evokes fascination in the limitless.

It begins in an opium den on the Rue Montmartre, Room 322. The room itself was of bare concrete and wood, stripped to the steel skeleton of the building itself, with chunks ripped from the walls like a great hand or a bomb. The floors and walls were unadorned, but for red velvet sheets, draped diagonally across the room; catching and blocking light deep within their thick flesh and fur.

The corners of the room were piled with pillows, so as to support slumped bodies… lingering aplomb among plumes of pipe smoke. And in the center of the room, a trail of burning candles of red and white wax, dripping heavily in their copper candlesticks upon the wooden floor.

It was there that poets came… in from begging for bread and amidst the torrential summer rains, where the gold light of the sun barely struck the cobblestone streets, down; out from behind the heavy blue-black clouds that bore the city in their arms. The city itself would offer nothing in those months. The year was 1888; the laborers struck in the summer and the painters were interned in asylums. What remained of the shocking gothic artists would gather on the streets and exchange poppy seeds, or else would venture into the wooden shanties on the edges of the district – out by the bridges – to roll the dice on venereal diseases.

It was there, amidst the dope smoke… that our hero, Arles, lingered. Lost in a distant reverie of golden red hair; his mind transposed upon a Raphaelite dream. He had a painting in his mind… one that had not been painted yet, with gold foil; depicting the ancient goddess Daphne. He shrunk into the pillow, his frock catching beneath his bruised elbow.

The windows in Room 322 were consistently curtained by blackout blind, to keep the room suspended in an endless night. The homeless and vagabond artists from about the city would drift in and out, tipping small glass vials of laudanum from their sleeves. Arles coughed slightly into his hand; with the other hand wiped his brow. He glanced down at his pocketwatch – it had been stopped at 5:32pm for several months now. He had nowhere to go; he had come from nowhere and was going nowhere.

He had worked out on the docks of Le Havre in Normandy two years ago, but had been fired by the management for his addiction. He drifted; found himself a small commune in the galleys below the Second Arrondissement; with common criminals and burlesque painters. His milieu all had one thing in common – they were destinyless. A crowd without a past, present, or future. And as such, they flowed and streamed into reverie substances and the burlesques. Many called themselves artists, poets, painters… but to obscure the fact that they were rootless addicts; petty thieves.

Arles slowly climbed his way out of the dream; back into the black room. The sheets draped across the room rippled slightly before an open window, filling the room with putrid, cool air just behind the blackout blind. He stumbled to his feet; groped with his hands toward the door of the room. The den was a converted apartment in an abandoned hotel, the Rodez, formerly a temporary lodging for foreign dignitaries and ambassadors, long since fallen into disrepair and reclaimed by the destitute and wanderers of the city.

The halls were sparsely lit by the occasional lamp; most of the rooms with doors shut. He heard the spare chatter behind several of the unpainted wooden doors as he passed, cut with the yelping and scrawl of the prostitutes who patrolled the alleys below with their temporary customers. He lit a thin cigarette; crawled toward the back stair that opened to the garbage strewn, half flooded alleyway.

He would avoid the tree lined Boulevard and seek the sidestreets… to find his common crowd. Wheatpaste lithographed posters advertising the nearest freakshow before masked burlesque at one of the underground nightclubs. A mirror reflection in a murky, oil filled puddle of his unshaven face and his flattened mustache; his face shoved into a pillow as he forgot his body in the opiated descent into his mind. He wore his thin linen frock, covered by an overcoat; raindrops running from his horsehair thin; long, uncut hair. The Paris summer heat was dampened by the afternoon rain.

He paused in the alley, trails of the cigarette smoke licking his face. He again looked for a vision of the painting; the longing of the archetypal image in his mind. He saw her again, like one of Rossetti’s muses, untranslatable. He began to feel the familiar craving of near immediate withdrawal. The salivary glands in his mouth started to elongate… creating spontaneous speech. He was drawing out of himself; his body began to rush toward an unknown destination. He could not wait for the rains to stop… rather, to get inside at a new station.

He would go to the new burlesque, Cabaret Savant, just down the alley to the right – buried deep within the back alleys of the Second. He could get lost forever in the winding lamplight after dark… behind the grinning short men with faces like pitbulls – twirling sticks of fire. The two faced women with red lipstick smeared far beyond the scope of their twisting mouths. He drew close in the nights to circles of Arab men who dueled scorpions… throwing franc coins at one another; sitting atop old wine barrels.

He wandered through days and nights for hits of pipes in each of his familiar stations… pipes which would toss him back into his preferred dream. Daphne would morph into Persephone, standing in a long, dark hallway – beckoning to him, and he would follow. She would lead him down a great flight of stairs, which zigged and zagged into the catacombs. Standing in rodent infested sewage, she would light a torch…

He was pulled back from dream memory by the torturous hunger and thirst which signified the return of the spirit to his body. He was before a bunting adorned antiquarian shop – with windows lined with a new French translation of the Poe scroll… he could make out, Le puits et le pendule. It was beside a manuscript detailing the building of an ancient Gothic cathedral in England; an alchemical manuscript by a man named Hierophanes Duchamp. And a more recent text, Une saison en enfer.

It was clear to Arles that in this time the world was on the precipice of a mad change. The old religious spell was broken; the alchemists of old were emerging from the tombs of their exile apartment rooms in the historic tower districts and proclaiming the dispersion of an ancient spiritual gold in the human soul. They no longer sought to transform common lead as found in the Earth – they were beginning to suggest that this lead was the waxen form of the human body. A great new potentiality was rising; it was rising in the heads and hearts of the mad poets who were leading the slogging French philosoph into the modern age.

Arles… even amidst his lack of pretension and his addiction – knew he was one of them, one of these mad poets. He spoke with his friend Maldoreur about the coming of a Russian bard deep from within the Siberian wilds… a fellow exile who wrote about the redemption of the human soul from the depths of hell. He, like them, was not afraid to descend into the depths. Maldoreur, too, preferred opium as his guide to the abyssal – whereas this bard, this Russian bard… simply meditated upon this state to achieve access. They had read of great spirits of this nature in the journals of the German philosoph, Schopenhauer – the monks of the Tibetan mountains who mediated upon piles of skulls; Maldoreur’s mistress, a librarian in the state archives, had procured him an ancient Hindu scroll, perhaps from as early as 400 B.C., which described a wild devotee of the god Shiva who ground human skulls into a chalk – which he then sipped in a leaf tea to produce spontaneous vision.

They, Arles and the rest of them, were vision chasers. They sought the eternal at the end of the tunnel of the world; they dug like moles in a world of no light – deep into the human brain and mind… into the archaeology of the brain; the depths of history, unto the first note that was sung by the creator God – to obtain the primordial crystal which is and was the first key to liberation before the book of mankind was writ and rote. They entered the dream to become, to find what it was before the dream of the world. Before the dream of Paris. Before the dream of mankind.

He decided to inquire into the shop; take leave but a moment from the ebbing and flowing rain… considering that the new burlesque was now just around the coming corner at the butcher’s just beside the antiquarian storefront. As he stepped over the threshold he could hear the dull thud of the blade of the butcher against the wood board in his back-room.

The aquarian shop had a small front desk with a bell and a ledger, which was unoccupied. Arles was quite surprised at the depth of the shop – there were three vertical rows of manuscript shelves; shelves of texts… which stretched back farther than the eye could see. It seemed like the shop flew back indefinitely… impossibly so, considering the cramped reality of the Arondissement’s physical laws itself.

Arles lingered by the bell; proceeded toward the head of the first row. It was labeled, Egyptian and World Mystical texts. He had another pang within him… deep within his stomach, first like hunger, then like addiction, then like being pulled forward, as if by a rope, to the very back of the depths of the rows that extended into darkness. So Arles walked, gripping the ledge of the shelf as it wound vertically into space. His vision began to contort; his stomach began to twist… as he was interrupted in his stride; doubling over in agony. From his mouth he produced a small black cube… inscribed with a symbolic language which made no sense. He turned it in his hands. It was illegible to him. And yet – the words seemed as if they gleamed, lit from beneath by a great fire. The black stone was cold obsidian.

As he walked, the manuscripts seemed to get older. Wrapped in twine and string, covered with sand – some even burned; half burned as if by torch. He reached toward a scroll whose twine was broken. It showed the face of a defiled Sphinx, leering back at him with penetrating, seemingly living eyes. He tumbled backwards in fright with a yell – knocking against the shelf behind him. He began to fall… as it fell…

Persephone gazed back at him. The stairs had led to the cave of the skulls; yet, this was not the end. She wanted him to go deeper. There was a gust of wind amidst the cobwebs; the steel cellar of the basement of the city slowly began to fade as he clamoured after her. The rat infested waters fell silent. There was no movement. And yet – there was an ancient presence. Arles gazed down briefly into the water, as a mirror to the torch he found in his hand – to catch some reflection of his astonished face. But there was no one there to mirror back where his eyes searched… he had no form. And in a flash, a skull, stripped of flesh; in another, pure lightning… from deeper, deeper within the cave – that illuminated Persephone’s absconding figure. He followed her, like a shadow.

The cavern broke open; he entered a room where it seemed air had not circulated for whole epochs of time. He immediately got the sense that he had stumbled into a place that he was not meant to see; a place that no one was truly meant to know about. It was a time before time – a time before history, counting, and numbers. All across the walls were beastly, contorted figures. The body of a snake, the face of a rooster, the feet of a crow. A crocodile ingesting a sun – whose beams seemed streaked with yellow pigment; smeared by finger and hand in a red blood. And yet… this blood was still wet. Impossible… Arles thought to himself… impossible. To enter this room. It was a time when man was still changing – before man was man. Indistinguishable from ape or fish. Like a dark shadow in the midst of changing, in which all of the animal and all of the plant was still manifest within him.

The die within his hand… he understood – it was a genome. A compression of the history of his body. A book of his language. He had an immediate impulse to swallow it again; to return it to the imminence of his flesh. He shuddered; began convulsing, sweating profusely. The room swam like a mirage light; the air itself began to flicker and wave. He then realized that Persephone was gone… she was not there in that room. The beastly paintings on the walls were dripping; filling the floor with blood. He touched the ground. The congealed liquid was cold… deathly cold. Like Arctic ice where great fossils of demonic fish were trapped… lost and forgotten in a prior infinity. It was then that he realized the Earth was far older than any living man truly understood. And that the Earth had a secret parlance, a secret purpose, a secret game for mankind.

Arles awoke suddenly. The room was filled with light, peeking out from a crack in the shifted curtain. On the Rue below, hundreds of boiler hatted men wandered and crossed the sidewalks, surrounded by their Victorian women. He heard a newsboy shout, Écoutez la nouvelle! Les Américains ont joué au base-ball devant le Sphinx! La grande tournée mondiale d’Albert Spalding arrivera bientôt dans notre chère Paris! He dragged his hands across his face. Pale, but warm flesh. He felt the cusps of the sunken bone of his eyes. The craters of his skull. He looked down at his watch. The time was 5:32.

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Sof witnessed the fall. She knew she had to change, but into what - she did not know. In the center of the town square, lit a dim gray by the clouded, glassy light of the sun, the head of Farouk had been lopped off of its marble bodied base, and was left in the dirt of the gallery roads, where people with wagons strew and rode their carts to and from the various market storefronts. A couple of small children played with it, slowly rolling it upon its cranium, lips, and mouth; attempting to lift it atop one of their toy carts.

She backed away from the window, and shut the linen curtains. The room was once again submerged in darkness. Far off in the distance, she could hear the chants of the villagers, echoing off the stone buildings. All that she was burned. Her insides were like a coffin of ash that she expelled endlessly. She looked up at the plaster ceiling absent-mindedly and coughed. There didn’t seem to be a way out of any of it. Her nearest friends, Anna and Katya, were both trapped in this party fervor of the insurrection. The revolutionary guard was hungry for blood; they sought out any and all means to take it, including propaganda of the mind to enslave fellows to their ideals. It had been two weeks since they had all last spoken; it had ended in a blowout. She remembered feverishly trying to pull Katya and Anna out of the rubble of history like abuse victims. They just kept going back to the well of pain; sipping from the same desperate cup that gave them even the mutest, vaguest sensation of control. It was all for sale. Even the last shade and essence of human dignity, self respect, and love.

Sof watched, even as she knew how it was all going to play out. It was a predictability that she hated; like the coalescence of a series of independent variables in a controlled experiment, she was a masterful scientist in the unconscious repetitions of humanity. The whip would inevitably come down upon the backs of the new regime; power would shake out to the most radical, daring, and threatening revolutionary - the inevitable figurehead of the party to come. And Anna and Katya would kiss the dirt before him with their teeth; become whores of praise and false valor to the ideology stapled upon the doors of the church, or brandished and engraved upon some sacred stone. She looked off into the distance. The sky was scarred and scored with lightning, far against the duny shades of the mountain which towered over the village. It was as if all of these small affairs were kept over it; the mountain presided - like an ancient judge.

All about the town she wandered, like a vagrant or a flaneur. She enjoyed the appearance of a beggar, an ancestor, the pockmarks of age and the ravages of time making her like a discarded item, invisible to others; freeing the observant nature of her eye and mind to look on at will, herself being unseen; thus perfectly preserved. She’d wrap herself up on a shawl and walk with the deliberate slowness of age and she’d even see Katya’s sister, or the butcher, or the senator’s son. They were all conducting the same play. Like marmots to a tree branch, they stood briefly and wavered upon the stage of time and pronounced some guttural utterance and desperately grabbing for their brief allowance and allotment of sand, tumbled into the black dice pit of infinity, showing a secret, sacred symbol and number that they bore upon their backs like the branding of a slave, the marking of a beast.

There was a certain calmness of terror to it, Sof thought. That these people tumbled - with all of the conviction of love, being, reason - all of it being the private destiny of their vision, their thought; the privilege of their destiny - to live these lives that even as they remarked their despair, their agony, that there was almost this joking glint of unreality to it. Until the tanks came; the bombs fell; the bones were bitten and limbs were cinched by dust. Until metal and steel bit the flesh and the howls filled the night like storms; it was like all hell was unleashed and crawled upon the earth, with wolfish hair upon its back; baring it’s teeth; upon all fours like a terrible infant.

She sat in the wooden rocking chair by the window as the chants faded. Her thoughts returned to Katya and Anna; their love of abuse, pain, suffering. It was all they’d ever known; it was handed down to them like a legacy; like baby mice in a laboratory taught to love the shocks of an electrode device because it brought them survival food. Without the shocks, the food was tasteless, bland; even untouched. They had been girded their whole lives to accept this - the very legacy of mankind; the brutality of the inevitable dominant usurpation of power by a hand that would take with serial psychopathy; a hand that would take and inflict endlessly. And they would rejoice, because it would be the return of the pleasure that they knew as children.

Sof wanted to run, but all there was left were the mountains and the desert. To the east there was a great lake, but it went nowhere; beyond it stretched further only endless wastes. The hunters took to the lake, and it’s seemingly endless well of bright, rainbow scaled fish, whose skin struck the light of the sun like the revelation of a geode. She supposed she could go for a swim; to cast off her clothes and float there in the buoyant salt water; it would lick her and bleed into her inner body, like a river meets an ocean. She began to prepare her things for the journey.

The lake was the village’s only source of sustenance; only the hunters went towards it, as the journey was long and arduous - over the mountain and down into the valley where the water drank. Sof was one of the few who did not hunt who made the journey - she being strong of mind and body; able to wander off like an exile toward the far corners of their small world. They lived upon an asteroid - only a few full square miles in length, hurtling rapidly through black unmarked space into an unknown destination. And all of the reveries on the ground were as regular as though the chaos of an unknown gravity were totally absent from them and this world; this thought bubble, if it could even be called such as thought; it’s total, utter insulation from the terrible revelation of the chaos of their reality - even if it was governed by stable, psychotropic physical laws.

The people fished and ate; did their dishes in the water of the stream of the terrasphere which allotted them what was needed to survive; they copulated and frequently agonized at the taverns and inns of their trivialities; the ravaged, ranted, and raved; listed for power and beautiful flesh; lamented their fates as they hurtled endlessly, listlessly, through this total and utter dream of the mind. To Sof, it felt as if she was the only one who could truly see, gifted of true sight, seeress. And even she was limited by the looming black expanse; the inevitable collapse of all known laws into the hyperbolous vacuum of all space, time, and known trivialities - condensed into the hungry mouth of utter, immense black gravity.

She descended the worn concrete stairs into the market below. They were like bleating sheep to slaughter, sacrificial stars. All of them. She passed, one by one, waving at Inez, the grocer from down the street; her small child, Luka, the bagboy. She could not admit to agree to any of their lives; she wandered in this lone space of the expanse of the reach of her knowing; this was owed solely to her scientific bent. She was a witness, a watcher, an overseer, a looker into the lens of the complex thermodynamic reaction of humanity - to see how they spent their fire. How they devoured the whitefish with pitcher after pitcher of beer and stumbled into some utterly unknown love masked suffering and endured beatings, beratings, degradings; that they quarreled and died for victory at the banks or at the schools; their competition was like the pattering of a single series of raindroppings at the windowpane of the great existence. It barely rapped; whispered among the roaring of a thunder that, for them, was too agonizing to hear; without sensate nor quality of abstraction to hear the abstruse warming of all reality about them - immersed as they were in the radicalizing chaos of their feeling. She saw Katya and Anna at the fisher’s - buying smoked salmon. She walked forth unnoticed; she did not wish to stop. And this was the worst of it - her human love, her inevitable humanness; how it touched this disaster, this chaos, this breaking and broken of minds. Katya and Anna held no rational stance nor sight; they were pure feeling - storm amidst the storm. And even Sof envied them for this, that their lives tumbled, blustering; that they fell so utterly in immersion that they did not even make a sound. Sof dreamed of them. They were always smiling, or moving their mouths, but they never spoke. The town, the rumbling of the carriage wheels, the bleating of the lambs, all of it was distilled into a locus of pure, mute rumbling. Every time. She would then look up; hear the shrieking, barreling thunder; the whirling vortex of breathy, hurricane like fire shaking and rattling through the stars; vibrant and vibrating like a terrible earthquake. It was the pure, devouring hunger and essential fire of the cosmos. It had no face, but it was alive. There was a clear essence of being; it approached with an ominous feeling. And Sof knew that it was that, this, that they were consumed with. It was that, this, was chaos incarnate.

The populous faces became more sparse as she reached the edge of the village; the opening of the desert before the expanse; inevitably, the looming guardian of the mountain. It was like stepping out of a wildfire into the peace and quiet of the crackling of a single hearth, whose sparks of ideas steamed and streamed up from the breast of digestion. She felt herself this single forge of time; this perfectly tempered fire. Within her was this gold of the breath; this flute and flue of being so delicately carved, her song some small and perfect embodiment of the whole of the fire of the stars; the whisper that breathed through them; the reflection of the parallax lives that streamed through them like whisps of smoke, distending and distorting and dragging the bodies and face.

For Sof, to step out into this desert of wasteland and nothingness was like to be free of the dragnet of the massive factorial ship of culture and civilization, which was really nothing more than the brute reminder of the very nothingness and repetition through which the species embodied and reproduced the sheer agony of its existence which it called pleasure, excitation, and event. The sheer reproducibility of it was what terrified her most, the rote procession to the grave which consumed all of these lives like smoke. They were not individuals - they were cattle in the slaughterhouse of a great and malicious god of their biology; they bowed to it blindly as it carved their brains into delicate sculptural figures which required of them their destinies. Their experiences shaped the very hardwire of their neurology; like grooves of an old record player, they were doomed to repeat the same song until the electrical tether of the synapse was shattered; they fell into elemental grounds, dereacted. Death was scientific. The fire burned until it was coals and ores; screaming for fuel. Only so much food and water, only so much breath and time. She trudged in the sand; kicked it up into the wind as she walked. It was just like this - they shook the beaker for awhile; moved the chess pieces of the elements; composite and dissolute parts. Butcher, beggar, king - they were all chemists in a brief order of change. If there was gratitude, there was gratitude for this - understanding.

The mountain loomed, away from the court of its village. Children of the mountain, ants of its basin. Each time Sof approached the mountain, her dreams would accelerate; kick into gear of greater form, function, and acuity. They struck her; struck her memory like a forge of lightning; she’d wake in a perfect understanding; settled in the buzzing hive of her blankets. She craved the mountain like others craved water, sex, and the sweet candy at the shop by the outskirts. All fell and found their mountain and died upon it, praised by the distance which they traveled. Sof could walk miles and miles without fatiguing. In her mind and in her form - she’d emerge at openings and distances untouched by fingers and eyes. She’d peer into caverns of mute blackness, where ancient things were stored; languages were spoken as of yet without true, real, meaningful translation. Here, there were symbols that were the fertile grounds of mountain streams; glacial waters which were sopped up by years of untouched ice, perfect crystalline blue; drinkable with the pure form of fire mingled with fire; a true language which spoke immediately at and upon the grounds of the hearth of the mind, body, and soul. It was as such that this, that she traveled, was to acquire the great distances of truth.

She had three dreams at the foot of the mountain. The first was of a great fire. There were no things; there was no fuel for it. It emerged like speech from the language of the mouth of total, utter, consuming blackness. The second was of a fire within a skeletal cage; a figure meditating within it, beneath it, and amidst the cross of the sternum. It radiated out from the procreative center; it burned brightly, fully, with an uninhibited beauty and grandeur. The third was of a light, simple, pure, and white.

Before she knew it, Sof was over the mountain. There was nothing, really, left of her or any of it. Before her sat the white sand beach, and the water, this clear and ineffable blue, stretching out in a seemingly great expanse. But Sof knew it had an end; it was an end that circled back in and upon itself in a wild, truly endless diameter and measure. This was the contradiction; her contradiction; the contradiction that settled and unsettled all things. Dust kicked up in a storm. The wildness of Anna and Katya’s love; the changingness of their faith. The desperation to cling to any feeling of the animal lost in the tide of longing, belonging; fighting against the great fate of all things to be subsumed in the very fire from which they sprung and ravenously searched at all costs to maintain it, foster it, nurture it, in their private cages. This fire that is the preserve of life; light, and the nutriment of it. There was no reason; what reason there was was brief amidst the great rumbling of the thunder from above, which shook and shifted the dirt of their lives. There was a great sadness to it, Sof thought, but also, a great redemption. For she who saw the laws, not merely and simply the laws of men; the games of their play. It would be a brief time now; if and when she returned, there would be a new proclamation at the center of the village. Revolution sprung up from the shadows like a wolf spider; a few milliseconds in the diamondine infinite, there would be a new script - or rather a new face or brand upon the fundamental. It was not that Anna or Katya or any of them would change, truly change, but rather that they would adopt the same creed, oath, and dressing of humanity in a new color, a new fashion. The limits of their lives were the circle of the village; within that circle, it would be anything to preserve the order, their order; their desire for a suitable existence. And it would be dressed with any illusion and delusion necessary to sustain even the shadow of it - the shadow of what sat near perfectly in their minds as the justice, judge, and arbiter of the justification of and for survival. And even if that were to be stripped away, there would still be the hunger. They would still eat, in self degradation, misery, and poverty of the spirit and soul. They would find a way to justify even this. The mountain sat now behind Sof, and shaded the turning shadow of the rippling light upon the blue diamond refractal water. Sof was at peace with this misery. She understood; she even loved them in their misery and pain. She wished she could help. All of this road that she walked was within her; it was rippling to get out. She was this aqueduct, of the ocean back to them. With this understanding, she spooned a glass of water into the canteen, and walked back home.

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THE TRAVELER

She is complete, but never finished. As she works now, so can she always work. Everyone sees her in his own fashion. She hides under a thousand names and phrases, and is always the same. She has brought me here and will also lead me away. I trust her. She may scold me, but she will not hate her work. It was not I who spoke of her. No! What is false and what is true, she has spoken it all. The fault, the merit, is all hers.

Goethe

THE FIRST ACT, I.

Come closer now towards the light, so I can speak with you. Ah, yes - the silhouette of your face is made apparent. It is but a shallow lamp in this hall by which we speak; at each moment, the wick of flame flickers in the wind of time.

At each shadow you jump, on the verge of collapsing. Are you so fearful of the night? The things that lurk within… we have a vestigial imagination; remembering the claws of history. But can it even be called history? So ancient that it cannot even be remembered. We do not have a name or an image for fear; yet it lives in the brain; tosses and turns in the limbs. The frantic pumping of the motor, the animal nature…

Yes - I am not from here. You’ve caught it. Just traveling; this city by the river reminds me fondly of the temples of the blood. The desert rivers, the cradles of life. We gather and drink and trade among the waters…

Anyways. You said you are running? From one gutter to the next, from one parasite to the next. We are but fleas hopping upon the backs of this earth; gobbling at her blood mouth. To live you must bask in the sun and drink the electric blood. That was the purpose of the old rituals; the madness of torture; the dungeons of the asylums. Civilization, to drink the wine of the blood; beating the sacrificial drum together. We throw the dregs, the lost, the confused - into the fire; this fleeting twist of the mouth that is joy at the murder.

The way that the blood of the red meat nurtures the flesh… this cannot be denied. You’re running from the killer, you say?

He’s gone into the night with the rest of the prisoners, the nectar, the drug of life, he sips it most gleefully; hops from branch to branch; dying, blanched carcass of earth. He changes clothes; shifts in the daylight; glimmers in the night… the fatal dream. We endlessly dream up new sacrificial methods for our closest silent meat; all the while grant ourselves the permissiveness of illusion to throw feeling into the fire for survival - for hunger.

Yes, yourself, as one who champions the weak, one of the strong. The first to lie, the most triumphant in the story of uplifting beggar fellows from their slipping into the silence of the last sleep on the cold streets. It’s an ancient story, the noble motive. To uplift the sick, the impoverished, to raise all life towards the light. We’re like dogs, we are, or something with less language; even more pure utility. All goodness and glory erased for the moment where one form of life must raise itself up in front of the next and raze it for blood and warmth. The pure carnality is unavoidable. All of this boasting of righteousness emerges from the mouths of those who are most quick to shed the masks of their skin; feast and devour those they’ve sworn to carry forth into a new world of power.

I lie? That this is simply a vicious internal motive, a belief… let’s not be fools about life. Man is no different than any other beast that is forced to roam in the wastes, where nourishment is spread far and warmth is tinged with the threat of a dropping cold; a winter’s chill. None of us are exempt from the dying of a star; the fading of a pulse.

Notion of the true fear is peripheral. It haunts you and the others out of the corner of the vision of their eyes. Fear stalks us like the true predator. For all you want, you can pretend that this life does not begin and end at the precious fire within you, that you protect; that you greedily slurp with each fading and distant passion - which, from child to bleached bone, you drink in a self consumption which bleeds you dry. That your hands do not grasp at the rungs of life like the rest of us, your high and mighty power! Divorced from life. That’s what we call those who slip into dreams, idealism. They hold no ground, they’ve already gone from this earth. The dead that creep among us; whisper speech of pure delusion.

All there is is the ingestion, it is the blood and nutrient, the element and mineral that enriches us. We live gnawing at the dead stone of the earth, and take the warmth of the stars unto us in all forms. Nothing is exempt from the raging heat of a star rising toward a meteoric light; the angry, raging star that consumes all of the death and dust in its field; swallows the radius of other slighter, younger, and careening deathly fields. And this is known to all, even if it remains unspoken. The true radius of power is thankless, feelingless, and takes all unto itself. You protest - I see it in your eyes; feel it in the stirring of your hands and face. But your protest is a revelation of the truth that you know to be true; the rebellion of contradiction within you. That which you believe, to protect yourself from the truth of reality.

This is the nature of all animals, that the young are reared by those it must usurp; by a pride that must expand and be cut down by the fall. We rise into a summer of ecstasy and seeming eternal power, the reaching of true ephemerality to a knife’s point, a razor’s edge; then a cascading downward into the coldness of oblivion. For we are at the reach, we are the outlier, are we not? You sit here and speak with me about unspeakable things; the sweat upon your brow - this language revealing something inhuman. And yet you remain, even against your best intention. You, too, wish to know plainly, purely, what is, what exists in this world.

And I applaud you for that. Truly. Amongst all the snakish addicts and street beggars, the rags of the marketplace, those who clutch to their already dead memoirs; pure sentimentality. This is the warmth that keeps the folk of animals alive; into the fold of their stories, their culture, their histories, their presumptions of right and wrong. But we are far beyond this, my friend - we are into another realm entirely. We can no longer afford to believe in such religious things. Survival screams like the panther emerging from the brush. It grits and bares its teeth to such unfortunate realities as these. And who are we to call them right or wrong? When a baby suckles and teeths at its mother’s breast? And the mother strangles it in the cradle? Yes - I see you wince at the thought, or for me to even begin to broach these realities to you. That the weak are just toys, to be manipulated, pranced about, manacled by the proud and mighty whose fall is soon destined. For everyone and everything has something beneath them, no matter how small - no matter how lowly the order of power. Even ants take life beneath them; order it, enslave it, to fit the correct and proper system of assumed responsibility.

It is so wrong to kill those weaker? To enslave them? You speak from a place of unreality, of nonexistence. That which makes this world is an endless chain of blood, linked from all species and life forms - from the plant to the cell to the biped. We all live and breathe and eat from the star, a reaction sparked by the far reaches and ends of time. Such a thought is death, dissociation, or utter ignorance. And yet, the very survival of our vision of collectivity, of community, depends on it. The kindness of others, in an ecosystem where the order of our jungle is submerged; the acceptance of submission by lessers is required. All false order springs from this, the smokescreen over the true procession of the affairs of power. Bankers, officers, titans of industry - we have made these men great rulers who grip the currency of this world in their hands and thus assume command. We are totems among totems, images among images. We sit in a theater and imagine a world of order that we have left behind, a world of order long forgotten; a world of order from which we have awakened into chaos…

Yes - precisely. It is the mind. It is language; the creation of the art of life. For this is where we stand, this strange species, mankind - we stand upon the precipice of an alien world, an alien life. We cease to be animals and yet with each fright we remember our animality. The softness and fallibility of the flesh… we are stretched in the splitting of the brain. This new world that is incarnate within us is the growth of the very technology which allows us to reason, to reconsider, to re-think and reflect. We cannot yet grope truly with it; we stumble. Gather closer to this lamp - so that your face is not in shadow. Good - I prefer to see clearly. The mind is yet so young; fed like a sapling or a fetus on the fat of the mother; we are the incubator for another way of sight; another way of seeing. Perhaps the mind feeds from us, that we are its ambassador, its tube for feeding…

THE SECOND ACT, II.

This new brain. There is a concept called dialectical redoubling. We are pushed back in upon ourselves with the contradiction of self examination. Can you not see that this is the trap? We have stepped too far into a new world which is not yet existent. We cannot take our bodies with us. The rush and race after us, but we have already breached into another realm, the realm of the ideal. And the mind rests there and dreams and frets, depicts life back to us on an endless loop. We consider ourselves, toss ourselves over in our heads like a smooth coin. And all the while the fundamental fabric of our lives does not change. We are still trapped in this embrace if you like, or wandering in the garden of substantiality. We are still wrapped to wanting things. The body that must breathe, the blood that must pulse, the mouth, stomach, and intestines that must feed. And yet we worry about this? The appearances and trifles of our world? The stories of culture… it is but a madness, my friend, a madness. Any and all will kill to preserve their stake upon this ladder; all that is left is to free ourselves from it entirely.

How, you ask? Quite simply - suicide. We must die to everything. You think that I am joking! Rather, I am quite serious. The only path forward from this dirge of nonsense is to see the fundamental emptiness in everything. Life is a tunnel, a fire, that passes through everything. It bestows no meaning but the capacity to see meaning, create meaning. Humans are narrative beasts, narrative animals. From the place and pit of survival, they tell themselves whole shadowplays of meaning, the entrance and exits of characters - multilayered and leveled visions of their own existence, character, and persona. When all the while, it’s just a mask to maintain; shovel in the pit the coal of the endless, insatiable hunger.

We’ve run so far into this dream that we’ve surrounded ourselves with affirmations of the story. Toys, trinkets, clothes, roles, jobs. Imagine a cell dressed in a suit! Or a rat or a heifer presenting you with a bill of goods. This civility itself is a mask that must be ripped from the face to reveal the bloody, intercuteal layer of existence. You make yourself stone. You live and act in a rigid, rigorous darkness of ideals and roles. You have yet to unleash the animal; you shield and sheathe yourself from the madness which rattles in your bones like a caged demon; you’re a beast unto yourself.

Trudge endlessly into the future of a cold science, if you please. The mind… it wanders. Perhaps you remain even halfheartedly in this conversation as it dwindles; I myself cannot even be convinced at this language, the writ of this tirade. To struggle and smear the shit of this word onto and upon the air. There is something about the lowness of it all that is illuminating. We could step out into the night; remark upon the paths along the riverbanks. The animals and beings, bodies that decompose peacefully and slowly in the ecosystem of the water. These are the simple facts and affairs of life; yet they are treated with such fear and disgust. Perhaps it is because we do not truly understand life, nor do we understand who, or what, we are.

Ah, I’ve piqued your interest! Good - we might remain in this place of wonder, like a slight drunkenness. A red wine on a spring or summer’s evening. A cobblestone path lit by orange streetlights… a great moment in time of possibility. We must remain drunk… but I digress. Yes… who we are. Or rather, what. A series of chemical reactions, a series of sparks of electric light; animation which propels us forth? Pure energy in dreaming suits. We must react and react forth, yes, to live! I must take in the fuel; the fuel that fuels the deepest bowels of the earth, the iron engine; the heat magnet; the voice of the earth; the magnetic pulse which spins us in a dance - propels us into the great attraction of which we can only speculate! Ah! The return of passion, gracious, gracious wonder. I must feed upon the oil of the earth, the black river of soot; the ash of the ancient ones. This emboldens me, grows me in power, a flower among evil, a petulant thing. This is what was meant by the devil and the fall. A fallen angel of the light to reside in the world of fixtures; temporary things with gravity and density. That is the risk, that is the cost of maintaining form. It cannot be avoided, monsieur, it simply cannot.

Yes, I’ve let the mask of my language slip… I am not from here, but I know many languages. You could hear it in my accent? Perhaps I cannot remain as obscure as I wish to be. I am no universal thing, but a stone among stones, a ray among rays. I travel with a hood over my face. I remain in no place for too long. I know many cultures… yes… many. For I have been a part of heritages… many names… many worlds…

We must remain focused. We must remain in the place of ecstasies. Come - follow! We are taking on this brief coat and traveling to the palace of evils. Rather, we are goodness disguised as evil. Each of us cowers over the river of blood and furtively fills the chalice of life; sips like a guilty animal. Are we demons because we are called toward life? I say - this is our very being! And we are to shy away from evil to become deathly things… yes, my friend, this is your religion. Your religion is one of death and pure sterility. It is of the mortal fright of the weak. I see your rebellion now, greater than ever. Perhaps this is what makes you devilish! We who do not shy away from life are those who endure. Your great preachers and monks, your interpreters of books - they feed and tell you not to feed, to die, to find your life in the next world. Who was ever enlightened by death? Die to the world you believe; cease to know. Silence your mind and awaken to truth! Enough foolishness!

Pardon me… I’ve let myself become incensed. This passion… I’ve seen many like you. Many who with great obstinacy retained the veil. I cannot peel it from you, nor take it from you. Your fear protects you, makes you stable; throws you into a world you wish to know. I know of the power of dreams… many nights, I’ve slept - and they’ve told me things. You may think I’m mad! The ancient depths of the mind wander toward truths we can scarcely begin to estimate. It is remembering the origins of itself, monsieur… it is remembering the origins of time - the moment the first cradle of the yolk of the egg of fire broke from the womb of timelessness. The moment of the abyss; the moment of creation. Your eyes remember it, your mouth, your tongue. Every inch and ounce of your body seeks to create; to remember the procreation process. You are but a tool; a tool approaching and inching toward the horror of its own self recognition. Do not worry… this process will free you eventually…

For now, you are like a prisoner, in chains, marching in circles. Row after row, prisoners in their manacles clasp the backs of one another and see no further than the man in front or behind them. The shadows in the pit of the yard hazy; the twisted faces of the soured, rotted, mad brains of each and the next - telling each other horrid tales of philosophical incompletion. You see, we are trapped here, among this world of stone. This open air mad house. We cannot remember what is like to be sane because no one has ever known! Consider this, and know this to be true. The only sanity we’ve ever known is the sanity of the animal, utterly and totally enmeshed with nature. The sanity of pure survival, mindless, thoughtless survival. And this is worse than the Bastille! How are we to pick the locks of the mind which chains us? This mind that you are given has utter attributes, my friend, attributes that are severe and unforgiving. It is your lot, the code that has been handed to you - the alphabet from which your existence powers itself into being. The rotting smelt in the breath that seeps from the core of the stomach precedes all speech. Men who are killed by their own vices - their words are meaningless. They cannot speak of anything but death, utter destruction. They are jesters, clowns in the carnival. And yet - this world is all clowns!

Join us then, in the parade of madness. Celebrate the carnival of ecstasies! Drink deep from the barrel of the witness; let blood in the open. Do you not see where this road takes us? Men like us who think, our sanity slips from us to let the masses. The sheer force of thousands, millions, it overtakes the voice of reason. And yet, we cannot let ourselves think these things. We must protect the barracks of our privation. We must allow ourselves this allotment to think, to understand. For what else remains? The coldness of this world… the dull, brute animal steel of clashing, of war… of men; power over men…

I stand and warm myself by this small fire. Join me, beggar, ironworks, men who work on the rails; in the mines; I call you forth to be enlightened! Laugh! And yet, the fire is truly warm. Feel it, flush against your face. This aliveness, this passion… we must become strong in mind, in heart, in body, in the very unity of our ideal with the manacles and materials of this world. We must forge, you see, forge this passion upon this earth; sear it consciously into being with the power of embodied, elemental life. And yet, it takes men of genius to see it. Men of genius who can penetrate the veil of life and return it to elemental wholeness - beyond men; beyond animality; beyond earth. We must return to the primordial origins; to the fount of life; where it all began. We must know time in a deeper way; return time to timelessness.

In each moment, life penetrates; leaps into being. We must seize and ride that electricity, understand it to be ourselves. We must grow and enliven and entrance and dance that energy. We must awaken it; awaken ourselves to ourselves! Surely you understand, monsieur, surely you understand! Need I not explain this to you!

Nothing else matters, nor does anything else exist. The rest of this dross among us is like shadows to be polished off a diamond; yet this is no diamond, but a star. The opacity of life is like a sheathe we must remove upon a dagger which pierces mortality into immortality. This is the true identification. Beneath all of the coats and cloaks of self imagery, we are a current utterly and truly unbroken from the source of existence and life itself. We must return to this place, this place we have never left, but a place we have never truly known! Understand this contradiction at the level of history. We have lived in the utter survival state; we are and we must migrate with the power of the new mind, the mind of the front brain; we must migrate into the state of true self recognition beyond all shadows, imagination, and imagery.

You’re quite right indeed! Even words seem to veil this phenomenality. For how could I explain to you the internal, embodied union with something more primal, with more depth and truth, more accessibility than even the most animal, guttural instinct? We have not prowled deep enough, my friend, we have not prowled nearly deep enough into our heritage and origin. This mind is millions of years old, but our life far precedes it. We have been passed down, like a beaker, a test tube, more times than we can scarcely imagine. How can you recover yourself, you ask? How many lifetimes have you, as this code, this mixture, this amalgamation of genetic language - this book of nature - how many lifetimes have you truly lived? More than you can scarce count; the sheer atomic elementality and cellular life within you remembers a history scarcely worth bothering to attempt to contemplate. And yet, you can feel it, can you not? The life that lives you, the life that steers you like the bow of an ancient ship through waters that you simply cannot conceptualize! You call this madness and confusion, I call this innate enlightenment! You must dive deep into the core. This is where the blueness of the sky and the ocean touched by life turns to blackness. The pearl of life rests in the core of the blackness; the core of nothingness. Therein rests the nature of the true light of the sun.

Understand this simply. Before the star there is nothing, abyssality. We must know what we are and what we are not; what we are is time and the state of being before time. We must return to the balance of nothing - the balance before any and all duality, any and all relationship of separate cores, beings, bodies. We are a stage at which this dynamic of time is playing out; intermingling, comixing, expanding, contracting; articulating an increasingly complex dance of a multiplicity of forms. All this emerged from a window as brief as a needle; a contraction and expansion which birthed from the womb of mote singularity an entire phenomenological relationship of beings, species, galaxies… all of this we do not know, nothing, not even the remotest thing. And yet, again, we must feel it! We are left to our feelings, to our intuition. The faculty of eyes convinces the truly blind of their mutually exclusive genius. It is the ignorance of hubris which fools us. And thus we live and die as things which merely survive our own ignorance. And what kind of fate is this? Destined to do much less than know; to rejoice in our own stupidity - rolling around in the mud of our own delusions of imagination.

I know. It is the last gasp of control. It is the last stage of the animal. It is the way we keep ourselves and others safe, like a wall around a city, a fire around which we gather our huts, a method of organization. The stories, the tales. The art. For that is what it all is! The art, the imaginations of worlds - these are all mechanisms of control in the face of the brute fact of breaking into the truth. It is an exclusive thing, done by the terribly few. For it requires the constellation of a great deal to penetrate into reality from the utter delusedness of the animal. The fearful know that they know nothing; they are crushed in body and mind and thus in image by the utter weight of a life process that plays out before and within them. The many know that they are victims to a deluge of life; a deluge of life that comes wearing the mask of death to them. The very organic nature and laws of life, the principles of the cycle of life and death; the subsumption and transformation of energy and blood and fuel; of heat - it appears to them like a great evil. They expound, they shout and scream, they call it the reaper of evil, the carnal matrix of the devil; they claim that it must die for them to live - and it must! These many are not wrong, these masses. Their very lives are threatened and taken by the powerful, the life and the tiers of life which trample over them to claim further vestiges of life.

So they recede into spectacle. The sovereignty of the pleasure of the witness of the carnival, the circus, the colosseum. The play of death and power which scarcely touches them. The witnessing of the death and foolishness of others to escape their own. It’s consistent with the idea that one who is condemned can only free himself through the condemnation of the other. One who is powerless must only find one less powerless than him; unleash all of his angst and anger upon the wretched, the lesser.

Leave this world! Truly. One must leave survival behind; open himself and his insides up to death; to be polished and be made pure by the total ecstatic suicide. This is why we are drunk, my friend, upon the ledge of existence. Then and only then are the mortal burnings of the stars clear; only then can we see what is truly at stake. It is our ability to experience the truth of existence; not to live and die in the anguish of the shadows. We must not labor long for anything other than the total apperception of the truth; this is a toil that requires us to relinquish ourselves entirely of ourselves. And this is precisely what constitutes the real and only death, the death of illusion to reveal the eternality of the real. Everything else is a cloak we must strip from ourselves to bathe naked in the ecstasy of the moonlit river of the stars. This, my friend, sounds like poetry to you. It is the poetry of the truth!

I am no preacher, nor am I no babbler, musician, poet, or anything of the sort. Words are my medium, my language, to communicate this truth to you, in hopes that you and only you will hear. I speak them with utter clarity and directness; I speak to you in confidence as a friend, as we are - here together to contemplate these things in the tavern beside this darkness of mortal struggle just outside. May we sit here awhile and contemplate further? This, we generate true warmth from this - the camaraderie of truth. It does not matter where you are from, or what you or I once believed. It is that we are seekers; that we seek the truth of our nature, our very being. What is your essence, monsieur! We have come from darkness and shifted shape into complex networks and channels for electrical information, for light. We are discrete data packets; we are ceaselessly exchanging, communicating, with ourselves, one another; with the network and soil of cellular life… the coil of the air and the heat of the fusion of the stars which are our birth mothers. The earth which is our womb…

We have come from darkness and yet we shirk the darkness in fear of ourselves! This foolishness… this fear of our supposed great evil. We condemn outside of ourselves what is within us. But we are the great evil! The murderers, the heathens, whatever horrific crime so soothes your definition of the evil. The strangulation of a young woman and the death of a butterfly. The extinguishing of the life of a cell; the murder and consumption of an animal. This line that we draw of cannibalism; this line that we draw of life! We are ceaselessly crossing it; yet we proclaim this judgment; this ability to condemn others for the acts we thoughtlessly commit at all levels of existence to remain; to retain flesh upon this scaffolding of darkness and abyss; the turning and fleetingness of life in any one, given, temporal structural form.

It is much easier to perceive ourselves as being the righteous, you see… much easier. For it is us against the rotten world is it not? The world that is out to get us, take from us, steal from us. The intuitions of common folk are nearly always correct and well soothed. It is far simpler to stake this claim of ourselves as the victor, the hero; that whichever conception of divinity is on our side toward our holy pilgrimage of destiny, is it not? It makes the murder, the rape, the corruption much simpler. To us it is this ‘necessary step’ toward the fulfillment of our powerful destiny, is it not? You see… this is not foolishness, as you seem so desirous to suggest. It is a great tool, a way of being in the world so as to convince oneself that one’s violent acts are not simply necessary, but dignified, honored, even holy. It uplifts the struggle of the animal to the plane of the divine. Each rape or murder that is committed, each massacre, each genocide, is committed for the holy rite of supremacy, the holy rite of power. Can you see how much weight is behind that concept, monsieur? How much weight and how much power is placed beneath the conviction that whatever act one perceives must be committed is not only necessary but holy?

All of this is pure selfishness my friend. And you are afraid to admit this, perhaps as am I. But it is this selfishness that propels even the most righteous act. We must become, as it were, ever more selfish. Why? So as to perfect selfishness. To unify selfishness as a whole. The truly selfish act is an act that is committed in total balance of life. The chain of life is meant to birth something higher than the human, higher than us. We are but a step, a stage in life. And that we surrender to life is that we surrender to this process; the realization that this process is at the root, us ourselves. That we hold no permanent ground in this shell, this corpse - but rather this body is a passage of the life itself through the tunnels and gravities and grounds of time into new form, new formation; new matrices of evolution; unknown methods and ways. How can we know which way the future will turn? The drop of a pin, a hair-trigger - the life on this earth reverberates and dances on the dial of chance. One movement, one perception, one belief, one idea - it changes everything, in the most subtle of ways. This is the dance of the light and the rays of the sun. One winter, nothing may grow there again. One summer, this plot of life, this land may become a new paradise.

We must embrace this chance, you see. We must dance on the dial of darkness and permit the total and utter silence of death; in another hand ceaselessly, endlessly create like the fusionary powers of the sun. We are a contradiction reflected by the moon; we are an hourglass which takes on the colors and flavors of the light. We are penetrated by the light of life and aged like a wine in the bottle and barrel and still of the existence of being. And thus we are drunk off of ourselves, indeed! For we are permitted nothingness; this is our freedom. We must embrace this chance that will grow wild things from the vines of the unseen; even as our feet and toes grip the warm dirt and soil of this earth that threatens to grow cold as the body of our flesh careens away from the warmth of the sun. We are a game of perilously small distances. And this is our beauty, indeed… the beauty of our uncertainty which is in fact a deeply perfect geometry measured in planetary movements; the exact curvature of the earthly form and how it hangs entranced in the mutual dance of its neighboring bodies…

We are a perfection disguised in the balance of the known and the unknown, which can only be called the past and the future. Before us lies an expanse, monsieur, an expanse that is a gulf, cavernous, deep and wide; it is into this unknown we must leap before the flower of our candle is extinguished. We cannot be concerned with good and evil; we must only be concerned with what is righteous and true. And truth alone is righteous; truth alone may be our guide when all else has fallen into chaos. Warring parts ceaselessly vie for control; only the whole of existence and being rests in peace. It is the true spectator, the true witness beyond the spectacle, beyond the theater of time, life, and reality. We must stand outside of being and remark upon it from nonbeing. Do you understand this?

Very well. You must take your rest, as I mine. Tomorrow I may well be off to another city by the river water. I crave the silence and solitude of the woods of travel; away from this turning world of affairs. I bid you farewell! Perhaps we may speak again… Adieu, my friend, adieu!

THE THIRD ACT, III.

Bonsoir monsieur! Yes, you recognized me! Very well… no we did not exchange names. Perhaps it is best that it remains this way, is it not?

It is rather hopeless in the marketplace today isn’t it… the carts are blocking the way, the disorderly nature of it. Let us step away from the clamour… this hopelessness that is everywhere. Passè, is it not? The struggle to maintain our lives. This overcoat that you wear of your sincerity, the guest of your disguise. But I know you too, the one who seeks to assert passive dominance in your extension of friendship. By your eyes, you see it in yourself!

It is good that we speak to these things; give them an eye, an ear, an air to the nature of the beast. His hunger. It is best that we do not avoid these things, monsieur - and face them head on! This gives us this little nobility, does it not! Indeed… we are a great struggle between the demon that threatens to overwhelm us, and this thin thread of compassion that we extend over the gulf toward friendship. Let us be not misers but comrades in this war that burns the trees, the villages, and leaves us all cynics! I’m afraid so, my friend… I’m afraid so… that we are all bastards of the demon mother goddess that we call nature. She is a hungry woman, alas… she will not leave us, and she is the one that will feast through us! Insatiable carnal beast, devil woman! She is called the black woman of hunger, she of many names. But my friend, forbid that we get caught in this place, simply forbid it! It is best that we remain upon the surface and exchange glances of goodwill, is it not? Before we are dried up tar, left upon the spit of the bone…

To meet on this day, awfully hot day, the sweat. It is days like this where the struggle against death is forgotten, where the sun is mortally close. It is less threat to be burned alive in these summers than it is for the blood to run cold in the snow. Remain close to the sun, chérie! Indeed - we are all huddled for warmth to keep the blood alive. The whisper of the language that we all speak; the shadow of which words merely evoke; replicate. So much of us and around us is dead; it is death itself at which we stare and persistently evoke. All that life is, it takes unto itself! Robust, bloated, consumption! This hunger, yes, in our best intents, threatens to eat us alive; we are burned of it until the ash of old age. We ache; we long; we leer jealously at the young! At the height of life; not knowing the fall that awaits them. The young are close to the sun, are they not? Maintenant! At this moment! Precisely. And what fallen image can replicate this? The blood of youth?

Nothing, monsieur, nothing. And this is why we devour our young, eat them alive. For they are close to the sun; the ripe fruit that is plucked by the hungry march; the procession of death. We are death eaters. For we must gobble the meat before it rots; take from the vine at the robustness of the flower. And we do so with a mixture of fear, shame, and delight. This is our lot, monsieur, may we rejoice in it! That we are killers of the hunger; killers for the pleasure that is to mingle the hot blood; for a moment give us life before we lapse into the dead silence; the depths of feelinglessness. You have felt this abyss, my friend, have you not? The abyss that beckons and waits; the abyss that is neither moronic nor intelligent, the pure characterlessness, the abyss that is not even seething! It is this dull point that perhaps we most are my friend. We are entirely neutral, in our moments before we are heated like the stove towards passion, or broken from passion and ecstasy like an addict that is sapped of all of his desire into a catatonic blackness of despair and death. We oscillate, do we not? This absence, until our threat or fear or predation is aroused. In a childish, pure way, we might call this curiosity…

Precisely there is nothing to fear. Death for us is the most personal, immediate state. The felt sense of emptiness that we must obscure with music and noise; the chatter and throng of the market, of the clubs, dances, musicals of our lives. The theatre must obscure it my friend! Lest death threaten all and each of us personally. Lest death confront us and unseat us from the carousel wild ride of feeling, sensation, and the mad circling of our thoughts. We dance around the fire, and this is what makes us mad and free; ignorant and intensely stupid. Consider it! But for a moment, recede yourself into silence. You are nothing, not even a worm. You are not even the lowest chatter, not a branch, nor a rung, nor a chittering of a molecule. Deep in the soil there is the intense silence of death. Not even a sigh disturbs the dead; they are truly at peace. What are you, monsieur, running around for your desires? You may tell me that it is a certain coat that you want, or a certain stone. A certain vehicle, but all of this is a fugue, a smokescreen for your true desires. You wish to elevate the thing that has always belonged to the dead to the palace of enchantments; the celebrity of desire. You must let pleasure overwhelm you, even in the mutest lie, even the shadow of the desire of your ideal. You must have even the fraction of the image, even the wafting scent of the fullness of the dream image to sate this fiendishness!

That we are - fiends until we truly die. Fiends til the end, til the surrender and relinquishment of the temporal to the eternal. In this silence we are undisrupted; left to the withdrawal of escalations and deescalations of pleasure. Can you feel this, monsieur, the silence and shuddering of the addict, suffering in the privacy of his cell, deprived of his object of chemical injection? We are at the site of madness, monsieur, the site of madmen who are hopelessly addicted to the hunger. We starve and gorge; spoil until we ourselves are as rotten as the meat and fruit we slather ourselves with. We spoil in the stomach of the beast of our desires until we are nothing more than the skeleton of the seed that is dutifully returned to the soil of being. This, my friend, is true groundedness! Is this not what you wished to hear when we first spoke! Perhaps… this is why we found one another once more… this part of you inside that remains; that will not die; that will not relinquish the white fisted grip. Ah! What remains of you is embedded in one final object. It is deep in the dream of pleasure and fulfillment; the ecstatic unity.

You are used by this. Nature’s instrument, the black goddess. Used, in the fire of your state, the passion of your metabolism - to create - to ceaselessly create! Driven by the fear of death, you are but her pack mule my friend! Look directly at the horror! It is but a joke, a language spoken in the silence that you are but a carrier of the language, a seeker of the very word which you transmit. You are an alphabet, a letter, ceaselessly added to the speech upon which nature stacks, block by block; builds her web of consciousness. This sophistication - there is something of a beauty to it - is there not? The delusion that sweeps through all of us, this imagination, this conviction that wakes us from our senselessness; drives us towards creation and procreation? There are a thousand lies which we use to justify ourselves, our grandeur, our fitness, our strength… a thousand ways to enter into the halls of the paradise of pleasure. We are used by our sensation, by our feeling, my friend. And we call this choice; we call this freedom of will! That we shall go as we please, do as we please. But do we ever consider what constitutes this pleasingness! That we revolt at death and are drawn with the sickness of magnetism to that which we consider beautiful? That we copulate at the poles of attraction and violation; that we draw blood from the source and center of the greatest evil and the horror of the beautiful?

That - we are is violators, my friend. We step into the halls of nature and make distinctions based upon the chemical program of our desires. We are made to press forth; become a stage of difference. We are called to rape, to penetrate, to enter the sacred by way of the violation of the beautiful. Our very bodies are sites of violence; sites of interpenetration! Consider that we are the liver of the world, maintenant… that we are the wine of the lips that it pours down its gullet! This is what it is to be eaten alive from within, my friend, to go mad with the consumption of desires!

You must be used to my tirade by now; find it permissible, even an enjoyment in it. The rantings and ravings of a beggar, a traveler, a man without a home. For I have wandered far and wide; found these things to be true. Even if I refused to look at them; even if I hated or reviled to see! How men protect their trophies of false destiny. How they gorge upon the hated thing; stare up from their meal with forced smiles of feigned pleasure. How women drown in the false platitudes of men; let themselves be swallowed up by the current of their biology. How this time is limited! And how, time and time again, we settle for shadows. The fruit is never as ripe, the steak is never as juicy as - it had tasted in our minds, monsieur, is it not! So we settle for the mere shadows. The pregnant waiting of a time that will never come - oblivion! And yet, at each moment, we stare into the grinning face and mouth of the abyss. That which we are, verily, the abyss itself! The monster which we seek, the mouth which it gapes; entrances, and entices with the dream image. We are drawn further and further into the dream, monsieur, further and further into the maw which entrances and entices. It is like the glow of the lanterns of the deep sea fish, the fish which grin with stakes for teeth. We are skewered, the meal of nature. Our blood is a great sacrifice…

But we must regret this! We must repent this and shield it; shield ourselves from the terrible realization! Nonsense, my friend. This is pure and utter nonsense uttered by the real heretics and harlequins of this world. The real bastards. They must run and jump and prance and kick in this musical, you see. They must grin and frown with their faces in their mouths to force false feeling in order to pretend that the devil within them is not slicing and gutting their insides. These false men… what is there to do with them? This world is a circus, monsieur, run by bastards with cardboard insides. This is how we do war and make religion. We must entrance. There is this enemy or that enemy, there is this evil demon that resides here, or there. It is all within us! There is truly nothing in this world but abyss, and the attempt to make the abyss recede. To ignore it, to hide from it. And this is what makes devils, monsieur, this is what makes hells upon this earth. For there are evils far worse than the peace of the abyss. It is neutral, it is a silence - it is the end of speech! And yet, you and I, we must keep speaking to avoid the silence…

Our real evil is the hunger, my friend. The monks who starve and die; turn away from nature. They sit on cots until their flesh clots and grows around it. You could say that these men are sick, that they are mentally ill, deranged. But you must see the small lacerations that we make as we carve our way through this world, monsieur, the small, almost imperceptible lacerations. We are all very clear upon where our focus truly lies, even if we must lie to ourselves in our determination of it. Each of us has distinct hungers; we seek them out with the desperation of men on their deathbeds. We are aware of this infrequency of true pleasure; how little time truly remains to make ourselves gluttonous with images of power which incite our receptors. We gorge ourselves among bones, monsieur. We are the vultures at the feast of the dead, sucking what remains of the meat like carrion in the aftermath of a great war. For it is already over - we are living in the aftermath of a death that we cannot reach but through the slow creep and crawl of time. All of the ugly terrors; the monsters we synthesize - they are all of the mind’s attempt to reconcile what time will bring; what time may come. And in this, we cannot rest.

For this we long, truly - the rest of the mind. The peace of death which is the aftermath of death. The true silencing and relinquishing of this earth; the fruits for which we lust. The true satiation of our carnal desires. Why else would we lust so furiously? But for the end of lust? Why else would we desire and drive toward our ends so fervently, but to still them in the soothing waters of pleasure? But for a brief moment, in the burst of orgasm, monsieur, we are truly sated. The sigh of relief. The bite of pleasure from the vine which stokes the lust of our blood. This meal, this meal for which we are truly seated. We are both the enjoyer, the sacrament, and the sacrifice. But it must not be our blood, no! We must outsmart, outwit, the one who sates himself upon our flesh. We must not be the consumed!

Alas, this play will go on. You nor I are no different. Something must keep this fire alive within us, whatever it means; to whichever ends it is directed. And this is our hopelessness, our homelessness. Can we gather around this fire of being and derive meaning from it? It is simply an ember, a ceaselessly glowing flame, lest it by extinguished, transmitted, passed down; changed hands from a bush, a bird, a flower, a star. What does it matter if we take this ember forth? And yet, we cannot relinquish it but to submit to death. And all that is within us rebels at this thought, lest we are consumed with the madness of suicide. And this is where all men come to rest. We are so dutiful at the upkeep; the taking up of this life into our hands, that we must madly rush after pleasure or else… at our disgust, our lack of fulfillment, of our pain - to cease to be henceforth? Our lot is between everythingness and nothingness. We are stuck between a place that is endlessness and no end. Is it any wonder that men go mad and are left with no option but a rage that knows no time, no place, no meaning, but simply rage?

And yet we must go forth… we must. Each day we are urged forward, pressed forth, into a life that is not even ours. A life that we must keep like a sentence, a field that must be tilled like a prisoner, clasped at the ankle with this mortal coil. What is left of this? We must sing work songs to keep us busy. Lest the prisoners rebel; kill themselves and the guards; rush to a freedom that is only at the end of the ocean. The body keeps a time, and this time moves forth; burns within us until the flame is excited past the corpse; rides the corpse into a shedding of the skeleton. We are steadily dispersed, breath after breath. This time, this rhythm, is a clock of death; the movement of shadows around a totem until the exhaustion of the heat and breath of the sun. Become still, monsieur, and feel the presence of the moment. Breathe in the solidity of this endless transmission, this transaction of oxygen between ourselves and the trees of this earth. We are an exchange of materials. We are a membrane, my friend… a membrane. Nothing that remains in and of us is ourselves, but for the very essence of the transaction itself. Nothing remains of us; no parts of us will keep but the essence. We must take to the river! We must row; rejoice in the rowing! For it is not we that are rowing, but nature herself…

You have known this feeling. I can tell, I can see it! This feeling of having been won by a dark hand… of having been operated, somnambulated like a puppet… an unforeseen shadow… you have been won over. The terror, the fear; the secret knowledge that the entirety of your life was played out by a series of forced impressions; the winning over of forced favor; a series of almost unconscious, knee jerk reactions. Your body twitches, your words espouse, your position shifts - all to reveal the terrible etching and framework of nature’s work. But is it so bad, my friend, is it all so bad? Perhaps we are won over by this greater force like we suckle upon the breast of the stars. That we are lesser things within a greater order; to let ourselves be won over by this order is creation’s work. That we are a cell within a massive network, a gear within a massive grade. We are spun like a rock upon a mountain; lest we tumble and bring the whole secret machination to the ground…

Awaken to this! The shadow of the operation at work and at hand. To realize, to achieve true recognition is dangerous work. Lest we rebel against our programming, raise our hands to the very force and essence of ourselves. Who are we to question the great machinations and law of nature? Dutifully heel, and these pleasures are ours! We are whipped into anger and a lust for violence. Copulation, is this not how we were made? See how easy it is to fall into the lust for sleep. The simplicity of receding into the animal being. The slumber of plants; we must long for the dream, monsieur, we must… we must long for the dream and the silence of forgetting. There was a world then, a world that was a womb that we must climb back into. An ocean’s song, where we forgot about death. We did not fear then; we were the song of nature herself. We were resorbed and spat back out into her, over and over again. The song of a million births. The repetitious lapping of the waves. Birth and death was a meditation that bled over into itself, time and time again. There was no distinction. There was no line. Feel this pleasure, monsieur! This idyllic thing! This thing that we once were, thrown out into death! I spit upon it, monsieur, I do! This awful knowledge, this curse that we are cursed with. Forbid it, forbid it all!

We must flee to another land. We must escape this knowledge of death. But to where do we climb but dissociation? Where do we flee but the world of dreams; the land of forgetting? There are opiates for this, my friend, a great sleep, the pleasure of the death of dreams. Solidify! Wake up! Dance among this cursed stone… where is this enlightenment, this freedom? It lives only in the silence. The dawn before the very essence of life itself. Before the dance of sun and moon, shadow and shade. We must find the dark essence. For a star must go out, shall it not? These are all eventualities. We are waiting with the bated breath for the dead, from the eye of the sun of light. We must resolve birth and death by going to the land before it, the subsumption of all dualities. We must find out what we are before birth and death. Before day and night.

There are no words for this, monsieur, truly no words. We become nothing, nonexistence itself. And this, my friend, is freedom. This, my friend, is peace. And you must tell me what great joy it is to become something. I spit on this delusion! What suffering it must cause you, for the fear to lose everything you have so precariously built upon this background of total abyss, total groundlessness. You have built this castle of persona against the backdrop of ceaseless night, so much night that it can scarcely be called such night as there is no arising of day! The illusion of the star is an active forge of burning, my friend. It is a transformation of fire, a transformation which cannot be said to truly exist, in that it is ever moving. Time is a stream which deludes us in its appearance, that we are light in a passage of time, in a false tunnel. These are our chains, monsieur, these are our prison bars; we drag them through the low light to the crowds of the grave! You are within a narrows, a box, a cage! You must die! Become nothing, throw your chains! You liar, knave!

This is the passion of one who has stripped himself, my friend. Foregone it all, be done with it! I spit! To the lies, and yet I eat this meagre portion of bread; trudge along and trudge forth. This world is a circle. To dance around the circle with true self forgetfulness; true rejoicing. We must have nothing, be nothing; be less than nothing can possibly receive or believe. We must be utterly absent, and in this way we are utterly present. Do you see? Empty your pockets, you fool! You must be not you. As I am not I! We swirl and dance in the true presence. Without words, you see? Without words. We must be, and thus I speak because words dribble from me endlessly, I am a fount of words. They must come and go silently, like a music that is needless and yet a joy of creativity. Wise is nothing! Wise! Dance with me! Wise!

THE FOURTH ACT, IV.

Perhaps the night shall dull in tone for us, my friend. That we will recede into the quiet of the firelight and contemplation. Let us return…

This day has been nothing but terror. Waterlogged with the sweat that marks the feverish man – caught up in the tossings and turnings of his own machinations. These refractions of light are like a coin in our minds, monsieur, but a die, a chamber, a prism. Every apparition haunts us to no end; ceases us nevermore. We are running, rapidly, rabidly – incensed by the smell of flesh; the promise of a great prize. My friend – this is death! The promise of death! It is like how fanatics are chased to the end of religion with the promise of glory; sex; virgins… the carcass of beauty rests just on the other side of this road. Picked at by carrion; picked at by diseased, wretched worms…

Do not let sickness frighten you, nor the huddled, pale, cold – these night terrrors are nothing more than spectres in our vigil. Their flames waver. Some are drawn to death not even emergent from the tunnel of the womb. Some stars squirm and are extinguished in the wet, cold, suffocating moist waters of life. She could not bear us all to the surface, monsieur, she could not… only the proud and the strong screamed their way into the light; suckled upon the fat of the earth before it was stripped to the empty bone; sucked deep of all marrow. It is not the lucky that survive, monsieur… no… not the lucky – it is the strong!

If one is not strong, he must trick. She must bare her teeth and entreat the blood. A costume draws the suitor, or a shark fitting to bear her lesser hunger. The weak must eat less, they are silent and still more. They do not resist death; they welcome it, the sour taste and scent upon them. It is the breath of death; the rotten flesh and excrement which suffocates the life within them. We must not pity the weak monsieur, no – but we must not indulge them either. For the weak see an opening among the strong, else they stiffen; put on a proud face. See her my friend! With the cowl about her face, bent over her cane! How proudly she bares the winds by the water, humbling along. This woman is a wretch – she is longing for death – but she would never speak it. The weak put on a proud face… a brave face. But when they are faced with strength, true strength, monsieur, they must sour and spit upon it. It is their way.

You look at me with scepticism! Truly, my friend! Have you not come across one who is strong among orders of the weak? It is like light cast upon roaches. One who must lie and cower to survive – one who must serve at the feet of one greater than himself – my friend, he is the greatest threat. He is the one who makes himself low because he must; makes himself low and knows he is thus. He strips the meat that remains on the bone off a lion’s kill. You say you fear the one who kills; I fear not! But I am wary of the one who follows the killer – the one who feasts on his remains.

These are the simple facts of life – the facts which follow after we arrive in transcendental bliss. Like a drug, we are shot from ecstasy back down into the lowliness of the world. Like a man who is unified in sexual ecstasy with the sun, the impossible light would shatter the flesh. We are not rid of the weight of life – no… we trudge among the hells of other men; a world that is cold and heavy with clouds; a world of brick and mortal desperation. Men who do not know heavens, nor do they know pleasure beyond chemicals that riddle the body and sap the blood; whorehouses that drink the blood and juice of life until nothing but dry sacks of the guts remain. We are among the forgotten ones, monsieur, the ones who are forgotten by heavens and forgotten by life; live firmly upon this plane. They are chained here by the hard senses; the dull firm senses; the plane of the reptilian eye; the eyes of animal hunger. Many live as beasts, monsieur. Many live in this world like a cheetah upon desert planes… slow, isolated, stalking prey. Ambling toward no destiny but flat horizontalities. Inevitabilities of emptiness, stretching endlessly into the distance. The sheer emptiness creating a mirage of something, anything coming of which to survive them.

You ask me is this hell… certainment! What do we, or they, know of heaven other than what they have been told? These men live in containers. They are ensconced in a reality which is purely material. They are liver punishers. This world is a filter for pleasures, my friend, a pack of smokes, a cigarette which must be smoked down to the marrow of the bone. There must be anything, anything to sate this ill of life, monsieur, anything to sate the sickness of this skeletal form. This is what is ghastliness, monsieur, pure beastliness. It is the irrefutable truth of what ends man, or any beast will go to in order to receive chemical pleasure. Men who have been beaten, whipped by the cane of their passions can now only feel by the sight of rape and murder. They live in their quiet rooms and toss and turn diamonds and cash in their palms while screams fill the mines in far isles. What does it matter to them, the mass graves in jungles far from here, far from this place? The arrondissement must be peaceful, my friend. Only if the boulevard where the money is cleansed of the blood is charming, this world remains. All of this death and murder – it must not touch the world of the charmed.

We must not see the cattle we slaughter, nor the rape that sustains us. We must be blind to it. It is not a matter of will… it is a matter of necessity. For if you were to see the gutted soul of a cow, the raped slave in the mines – you would recoil with such fright that your very life would be at stake! You would be thrown into the deepest peril, monsieur, the peril of the pit of your life, the stakes of your soul. You would be driven to the confrontation which no one truly risks – the confrontation of the consequences of your actions, the truth of your responsibility! For we are all complicit in this madness, my friend, all of us. It is we who hold the knife, or worse – it is we who turn the blind eye.

All of this is chilling… yes… chilling indeed… for you did not realize that you were the devil of this earth! Oh holy one! All of these praises be and sung within us. The most wretched among us are the most holy, my friend – only the most wretched. For they can have no qualms, no presumptions about lifting themselves up to the heights. One who lives in the gutter must imagine heaven; he simply must! For what does he return to but something less than silence, something less than nothingness, emptiness – but derangement, sickness, futility!

The wretched, the women, the sick… these are the holy, monsieur. These are the ones who bear the ills of this world, the ills of our world. It is their hands, feet, faces, which bear the scars and lacerations of the whips of the powerful, the masters, these ‘great men’ who carve this earth into quarters like pieces of a rotten cake. They must suffer with smiles upon their faces, for suffering is their fate. Some are born under the boot that breaks this life, monsieur – they are born under it and they know their birth. They come to know it and they must bear it or else be trampled; beaten beyond recognition. They must find ways to survive; they must become useful to the strong…

Perhaps it is thus – that those who break the weak are the truly strong. Those who hold no last sympathy, no last compassion for the ones who cling to life by a mere tenuous thread. It is like breaking an apple from the branch of a tree, monsieur, even the most twisted, sour apple from the vine of existence. If one must eat, the branch must be broken. And who are we to say that this is a bad thing? Where has it come from that this life is sanctified? You and I, we sit here and talk of what must be. What is beautiful, what must be preserved – all of this is consternated in the eye of the infinite! It is either all beautiful, or all corrupt, black sinfulness monsieur, to the root and core! To me, this is the truth of what is pure, that the beautiful and the terrible are hopelessly intertwined. That the thread of life that defines the most beautiful, exquisite ripeness – is destined to the corruption of mold, the spoiling, sourness; the corrosion of death. It is damned! All that is of time is damned! Blast it… fear it all! And this is where we escape time, monsieur, where we ride to the land of the ecstasies – the eternal things. It is the seed of power; the seed of creation that rests within even the most mote form of mortality. Therein lies the infinite, the immortal, my friend… this is the sacred conspiracy!

It is as if we are breaking in, that we are thieves of the divine. This is what is meant by the apple in paradise, indeed. We are partaking in something that is a way, a path to the infinite. And it takes the appearance of a gate of hell, a gate of certain death. We must charge to the razor’s edge, the borderland, the borderline – the place where the sun rises and sets. It is the mask of the greatest terror that wears the hand that soothes the fate of men. We step into and upon the grounds where death relieves us of the appearance of life; reveals to us only the immortal, eternal truth.

Do I appear opaque! My speech… I mean not to. This world, all of it, even the stone that forms these galleys… it is an essence, a purity, monsieur, that wears the face of the devil to drive us away from the realization of the essential. It is a secret that wears the brace, the speech of the banal. It is we who distinguish it, my friend, we who put names, numbers, and spaces between the light. It is we who must discern it to feed off it and upon it. It is the separation of our metabolic life which disbars us, concerns us from the ecstasies. For we are drawn into thought… for the next meal, the next bite of sweetness, the next drop of poison. We are thrown into the lurch of reactivities. Our breath must feed upon the breast of inner workings. The delicate gears of the lungs; the filters of the liver and kidneys; the synapses, spears of the eyes. All of this is poisoned with death… but this death poisoned life allows us to see, monsieur! Is it clear! That we are poisoned with time as a way into the light. It is this, my friend, that what is essential must be sacrificed into two parts, two pieces, so that one may observe the other; in the union of the two we are returned to holy number. We must be separated from the timeless; we are lurched into a place that must be sustained, if only in order to see… to see… it is sight which defines us as spiritual animals, monsieur. Our true nature, the alien aspect of this consciousness that is witnessing…

In time, we take part in revelations. What can pass through the gates of paradise but that which is moving, moved, and able to transgress? To commit, to become active. The holy is something unified, infinite, unbroken. For if we are to be, as separate entities, we must be fallen from this! We must be but a cascade, a shard of light. What is our way back monsieur, but through the catacombs! The slivers of death! We must descend… into despair, depravity… in order to see the true light. This world must be extinguished in the darkness… to let true terror and madness reign. There is too much false light, my friend! It is light that is cast from the sun. Light that allows us to see. Do you know what this means, to be in holy night? It is the devil’s chaos, the spiritual eclipse; the reign of the gutter instinct. Pure manipulation, exploitation, murder; sin without guilt. What is sin without guilt, monsieur! It is not sin! There is no transgression without this illumination of the spiritual sun. It plunges us firmly into an abyss where we are entangled with the most carnal instincts. For we are lawless at last, my friend, lawless to the root and core. There is no quarter for this evil but true understanding. And to understand a thing truly, you must let it run free. You must let it reign; rear the mask of its most bitter and hellish impulses upon you; let it be consumed; consume you with the smoke and teeth of the hot breath of meat and blood.

You are in this cask, as am I. Who are we to fear this, the truth of what we are? For it is much deeper than we; deeper than what must survive. It is what must be allowed to reign… this, the deepest of hells. We must be unleashed to the carnal terrors; for these impulses to be allowed to thoroughly overcome us. We must be possessed by them if they are to be possessed by us. Do you understand this, my friend? You must become carnally entangled with your demon. You must make love to him, this, your greatest evil. Only then, will you rise from that which you must know. Do you understand this? You – the one who fears this descent into abysses. Are you afraid of who you are, of who and what you must become? You must become this very killer, monsieur, this very killer which you fear – this very shadow which is cast and haunts even the tallest spires of this world. Civilization upon civilization, sacrifice upon sacrifice. All of this has been entangled with the demon, the demonic. Are you ready; willing to embrace this heritage within you? This talk of goodness, righteousness, faith. Are you prepared to descend; truly know the depths of life; the deeps of hell – the silence, loss, and lack of light? Know this, that this world is corrupt because the demon is loosed upon it. Know this, that you are turned in and upon yourself by a cold, inhospitable nature – a nature which forces confrontation with the demonic in order to free your soul.

This is why we are wretched; why the weak are wretched. They vilify the demon, and rightly so! For the demon is strong; it easily overpowers them. The demon has a right to kill, a right to claim the body – it is an energy, a life force that is insatiable. It knows no bounds, no reason, no quarry but blood and satiation by blood. It has no second thought at ripping the throat of a doe. And this is what we call the horror! The terror, the sublime fear. This is not what is beautiful, we proclaim and shudder. We have thrown half of life away, we, nature’s wretched bitch! In casting her so called evils, we have cast ourselves into an abysmal hell. We have denied half of life; thus we must fix ourselves upon moldy, crusted bread, and call this feast. For we have sinned first and transgressed, by demonizing the demonic.

Protest again! I laugh, laugh at your terrors! All of your might at which you squirm against a world that is as natural as a wet birth. The great evil is only that you have deprived yourself of the truth; cut yourself in half and declared your very mortal nature ruinous and ill. And it is in this very doing that you cannot scry the infinite, the truly beautiful. For you know not even half the dance of life, that life requires death in life; that violence and murder are necessity. You must harness this instinct; go deep into terror to describe what it is to be tremendously alive. You must inhabit the fury, the passion, the ecstasy of what is at once the birth of a newborn child and the violation, the death, the murder of the mother who bears her. We are twisted between the old world and the next – reaching out in longing for what once was; decrying what comes raging, breathing, beating from the remains.

Cast off these shackles, my friend. Surely, it is true – that you wish to rest in who and what you are. We cannot vilify this essence – else we are not even advocates for death. We are instead advocates for total lifelessness; suspension of nature – no life, no death, not even the spectre or the haunting of the divine, the infinite, breathing through the incarnate paradox, the seeming contradiction between two impenetrable impulses – time and timelessness. We are the seers, my friend, that know no bounds, no true time and place, and yet are at the cross between life and death; it is this paradox that compels us full of mystery. We are uncertain; at the precipice of formlessness and namelessness; this is precisely the place from which we create and raze ourselves into and out of existence and nonexistence.

This is the universal. Who and what are we to fear these greatest ills of mankind which taunt us with half realization? We who suckle upon the breast of brief pleasures. Realize this! That from atop even our weakest; most quivering desires, we are the mount from which we scry the whole, the great totality. What is this, the very tone that births life and death; contradiction, density, the notes of form and being – what is this to be transgressed! Come… let us not be fools!

Are you comfortable with this now, monsieur, does it satisfy you… to sanctify the desires within you that you once held, hidden away… yes – it is that this world has not yet learned to descend truly into darkness; it is in this way that we are blind to the true light; led only by illusions to self satisfying illusions; half visions of the true self. Otherwise we must remain here, my friend! Remain here in this, not even hell – purgatory! We must await, hours and days of emptiness, for the true vision of self to emerge. And we call this apocalypse! I spit monsieur, I do! You, await for a savior… and all the while, your hidden totality seethes and paces in its cage. You have thrown away, lock and key, your life monsieur, and you protest at the true sensation of the broken and the damned! This, truly is what you must repent! You must recover yourself, my friend – recover yourself from the depths of hell! For in each hour, death encroaches; with its eternal wisdom it is scentless, neutral… the fear of death is the fear of the true self, monsieur, remember this…

There is not time left to waste, nor to spend chained and entranced to images – images that do not sour and rot – shadows and visions of mind which titillate only the most abstract senses… you must go among the gutter and die in the mud to be reborn, my friend. And this is no entreaty or a humble joke, but a command! You must touch the red note within you which seethes – and does not care which violence of murder or death it penetrates with the knife of visceral reality! You must go where the knot of meat is, the spiral of the heart; disentangle the sea and wall of blood from the root! You must perilously flow, monsieur, and meet where the rivers and walls of time and the timeless meet, my friend, and you must break them! Break them with an ecstatic fist!

---

OSSAWON

I.

Jane moved to Ossawon, wishing it were the Maldives, to bestow a kiss upon her temples and free her from the sunlight. The sky was cold, and bearing down upon her. Like a stream, demented, she rose from her bed and peered up at the hours, ticking perilously.

If life was a series of gods, a sundial - she passed through winter and spring like a miraculous less-than-nothing - a thing utterly unmarred by thingness. The body melted away like an unwritten letter. An empty postage. She wandered, moving about the tidal pool of the house.

All about her were scraps, paper clippings, cards, charnel ephemera from the past - a wind of time that had blown about her into this cave obscured by roof. She shook out from the life of the body that remained, her hair like tree leaves, brustling. Her skin like an oak, a wooden door.

All that shined shone upon Ossawon, as it did forever in a prism of same. All life was suspended there, and did not exist but in the dewy glossalia of amber, a language that was spoken yet removed by millennial walls of ice. No voice, no noise escaped from the chamber of silence. Even laughs of agony were nonexistent, nor were there spells of peering light, to mark the stone of the walls.

It was this voice that was Jane - it was a silent blustering of a wind that passed over the stones; wandered as the dials seeped elsewhere about planets and cyclically illuminated the siren of their form. It was this voice that ruffled the paper and disturbed the tombs, where at last flesh and skin seeped, pillage of dirt and bone. She was an isle, and island which was wild, vines which gave way to void of speech, of Nature glistening.

All of this was rhythm. It was a black stomp to the plume of a guitar which did not exist; yet illuminated with life from within the utterance of form, almost self consumed and vacuous, reaching back within itself for the engine of the drive which sputtered into abyss. Ossawon was a prison of words, a place for Jane to be utterly encompassed.

It could not be sun, nor could it be shade - winter nor spring. Time was unbending to the point of breaking in its relentless rhythm. To escape the time of endless summer… but this was not the wind. She thought about that breath which shuttered the gales. There was no great mouth that made the essence, and yet it was evasive. All about her she breathed, until her skin was a veil, a curtain, and at last - a void.

Not the Maldives, not the dungeon of summer! The words broke and tumbled into an utter quaking of speech, the quacking of a duck in the isles of the dead. There were no tombs that uttered the pure soil; Jane was a stillness of movement about a field of suspended stones. No gravity tugged from beneath the depths of space. There was a bottomless pit as stars rose hot into the night. What did it matter, to be here in Ossawon, heaven… what did it matter to be a spool that unraveled forever, signifying nothing…

Breathing! Uttered the jar. To filter the water like a dutiful fish. To pass through the mind sigils, hands that traded upon hands, language, time, the scraps that evade captive obliteration. But we must die! Certainly, we must die. At the hands of the breaker of time; upon the bridge of nothingness, infinity, and obliteration. A stone broken is released, but ash to winds ground down by the trickling of a creek slowed by winter’s creeping. As heat breaks the water into an exaltation of steam, so must hot exhalation drive all materium back to the spirit of being. She must die and go beyond debate of place. To sweat away the veil of speech and reveal the fire which unites the slowed ice of breath to body in breakless infinity.

Ossawon was a dead place. It was cold as ice and yet there was no ice to be broken. Time idled in a ceaseless pool, spinning and gyrating, spiraling for the sake of speed. Each star is a slave to the whip of rebirth, there in Ossawon. Not the Maldives, thought Jane - not the Maldives. Nor the slow pilgrimage of unbending and stripping the flesh before the idles of the stars, no - but the forgotten burning. For there it was too cold, too deep, like the straits of ocean which fed far beyond desire into trenches of death. Only cool things could breed there, she thought, only cool things. What hunger could sweat in the belly of a galaxy devoid of stars? There could be only space, but a cockroach titan. An eater of all things. One with the hunger stronger than the belly of the stars.

II.

Leaving Ossawon, then, was the dilemma. Like leaving the palace of the dead, she breathed and was forgotten. Back, again and again, she was returned to the voice of the body. Like a cycle and a tether, the slow hum of the beating, the oscillation of the entropic cask. Form, like a death mask - we must live and be spirit. And yet the wind was free, like the tame desert, casting shapes in the shifting hills of sands. Back, back, we must return. Nature has built with stone and brick and bone; wild animals have destinies! They must copulate. But not in Ossawon, no matter. It was the timeless, time out of time which kept her in the slow molasses. Let the sun hum, so infrequent that winters were forgotten. That sleep was an eternity unvanquished and unreleased to death; drawn out yet long enough to provide but the shadow of solace.

The eyes of the body peered out forever over the dawn. Awning, yawning for this? Dying for a fervor, thrashing in a pool of molecules between an ocean and endless land. The breath squabbles for life and constructs the entire clothes of the personality. She could not be Jane, but the sundial of the figure that resembled her. Each hand and arm twinkled with the nerval tone of the body. The limits of construction. She could not feel the reach of the blanket, nor the brain of the swan, nor the eyes of the toad or the grave of the wood which is chairs. This world is muted and heavy, like a wool blanket, like a clasp of densities. Whole volumes of oceans pound and roar; gravity is constricted, restricted. Bodies pressed down into land’s formal unity. Ossawon was endless, and yet Jane was definitive. She began and ended at the nerve symmetry which stretched like ossuaries down her feet and palms. Jane was electric in the palace of the dead; yet she could not leave, but for the brief ecstasies.

The brief ecstasies, recalled Jane. It is when stone breaks against the tempest current of storms; when the sky bleeds the blue gray of stone. It is not fog, the unity of stone and sky. If all is in the nature of water, stones remember what it is like to be free. Phase change. The state of matter is an insurrection, a raising up and casting down. Is this what energy is, thunder? Before light there is sound; before sound there is the raising up of the fist of absence and presence, the gyration of molecules into a collapsing clap. Before space, there is the tension of the idea - the introduction of space into spacelessness.

It is as words fill the page, or water rushes to fill a void. This essential gravity. This excitation of the friction of empty timelessness. She carried buckets of milk to the storehouse of grain. There was no tongue to taste in Ossawon, but the muted gallery of fruits which tumbled from trees to the flesh of the earth; lay outstretched in utter unseparation. The earth of the ground tumbled from infinity, and rested where it rolled with indignity into the mute outer reaches of space. She spilled upon the threshold; reaching for the frame of the door, uttered a scream which echoed only in the spilling of her mouth into expression. The world is the sound of a generator, ceaselessly humming. Generation after generation of form, spilling from the fire of time.

She thrashed, then relinquished to the truth. Years of stone would be broken open and resummoned, like a spell. This world was enchanted with a hush, and no music could break the loud violence of the growling of the stomach. No beggars could berate and copulate but in the palace of the real. There was no story nor song that would remain, no skin that would not grow spiny with thorns then be reborn. However many lives she had lived, this was to be irrelevant. It was to puncture the halls of the gelatinous world which held everything together. The very skin of god which with spindly hands stretched across all of the bounds of the eternity of her life. And beyond it, what was the nothingness but furthermore the shadow, the underbelly, the trailing sketch of the figuration which was the creation of all eternity itself?

It merely continued. And there was no sharp jutting cliff of death, nor the puffing gale of seriousness which whipped the starry horizon about like a peacock… nor was there meaning beyond the purity of sound. Could this be madness, to be dipped like a pattern into the ocean of death and emerge half crazed, half alive, and yet the outline of the shadow of death to the world? All that was held an equal and opposite, the darkness of the shadow of matter cast in the quaking net of energy. Everything that was held before it the prerequisite drop of infinity, the rise of a wave of integer found the numbing descent into the valleys of the dead silence of evil. Angels rose and tangled with light and fell to stone. Suns and stars writhed high patterns in the sky and fell beyond the shallows of the caven tomb. Tongues whipped and lashed and fell silent with the quiet tiredness of lingering on the precipice of nonexistence. This whole world was ushered into a hospital and shone the gaze of forever and then writhed and died, like the death of a brain cell, a synapse reaching out toward an aeon of colorful, quickening light.

This is what it was to beheld a mirage in your hand; turn it over like dice and cast it into the effervescent glow of just nothing. The pulse quickened and dropped off the table; the dead body was thrust into the pyre which was a mere echo of the stars. They dropped off elemental bricks which mingled with the language that made beaks of small birds, toucans; the breasts of apes; the tongues of dust which dribbled across the floor and beckoned into corners which sniffed the crest of infinity. Her finger stood upon the trim and lingered, touching the far reaches of a rung of space which had not yet reached her eyes. And every moment was obliterated in fire. The truth of Maldive was Avalon, and yet a bird flew between there, a wind, a threading finger of string; a spool that made the warmth of heat like an oven of the tinder of all of life, burning at different radiations of degree, against and across all time, in an inverse measure of birth and the tumbling it takes to death.

Surely the dance of some other star would lead us there, away from here. She fought in her eyes and in her mind for Sirius; she fought for stars without names; stars that bellowed and hoofed and stampeded like wild oxen and bulls; meek stars on the verge of death like old men, stars that flickered and plinkered in a meaningless galaxy after meaningless galaxy like intubated blood in vein, stars like pinball machines and stars like a frog comedy - she prayed and begged and slapped the stars until they bled; dripped dew into the catching jar.

The onus was upon her, the wild imagination of infinity. The elixir of the signless sign that had dripped down in a formative millennium upon the doorstep of her body and gobbled up the seeping sap and fat of her mind; lived and breathed beyond her beating, bleating oblivion. All that was and was not was the goat and the slaughter, the thing that laid the sacrifice down upon the stone and the neck that was severed from the head. The mind takes infinite forms upon and in the body recombinate. The universal lung, organ, fingertip, nail and chest is infinitely mutable. It is as the mind pleases; as the mind commands. The language itself is that which constructs and construes the dream. The form sculpts around the mind’s eye - ideation. And that mind is wild! It grips and grasps death upon the play and ballet of the formative art - and casts that which role should be light and shadow; in the grips of dreams dances the act!

This is what it was to Jane, enactment that was the straits of the true Maldives, the Avalon of Aeon. But a toy, but a child dances upon the tightrope of the stars and rips the horns from the sacred bull… the slaughtered calf at the foot of the maze, whose corpse stretches to the center, the eye of all life; the infinity of all time and art. What beckons is the point! The thimble upon the thread which weaves, the mind which is the eternal thing manifest at the heart, core, and center of all possible universes. At each moment, creation weaves upon the dial of the thread, upon the thread of the needle. A rope stretched to breaking, or coiled loose in relaxation about the feet. A pulse quickened or relinquished to a breath which paints a field of grasses green and waving ambulant.

Oh Avalon! Jane danced, a gripless hand that painted and carved the dimensions, the art of a painter and a sculptor which could relinquish life and death like shade and shadow, like a contrast in play about moonsphere. If that time could endless dance an art, it was that time was both broken and necessary, a theatre that was at the utmost pure and only aesthetic. That art itself was the concern of the play and the playing. And thus, it was not concern, mere tumbling. Emotions like the palette mix colors of mood, but that mind… could silence paint.

III.

Jane left the story of death behind like a cloak. A ceaseless, eternal play. And thus, rest… a rest deeper than sleep in life nor the endless abyss of death. It was the disinterested play of the cat with the bauble that kept the Maldives and Ossawon intact; at the point of Aeon they were abridged and abolished. No animal could fear tumbling from the unknown that was all encompassing a mind, vast in the sleep and slumber of baseness. And yet, for the animal to die, it required a biological solvent, an alarm that remembered and awakened the inner language of its forewarning. Why did they not long for death, instead evading it at all costs? Why was death not welcomed, ushered, conjured? As it stood among them, the shadows faded from the mixture of the light. What was left was flat truth. It was at this point, that Aeon stretched like an infinite horizon, into the gobbling mouth of the black lung - which with each breath expressed the vehicle of eternity: the dying eye which witnessed the swallowing of all dimensions into a singular, vacuumless point.

They all rushed to it. Like dancers in a painted mask worship of oblivion cast in black stone. All that rose in the ocean of the wave of electromagnetic form fell back toward it. The curtain of heaviness. It called, and called, and called once more in the deep rhythm which only alludes to the buoyancy of the surface of the ocean. Without salt, we plummet to the ancient, timeless, tomb. Whole worlds and seas of life dance upon an ocean of salt. But I wish to see and know death, thought Jane… the death that lies at the bottom of Ossawon. The death that is like a beast but is not dead nor alive. The death that swallows but with an empty mouth and throat. The death that is like eyes and yet is a character, a form, a shadow. A shade which beckons and whispers. It is something that in the dark of truth at last illuminates, more empty than space and yet with more character than all of this parade. Succession after succession, nothing truly dies. But I must grasp death and unmask it as the true singularity of things.

Death passes right through her, rips at her with false jaws. Tears at her with false mouth. Unsubstantive, I cannot know death! But I taste the excitement of death all about. The eyes of life are enraptured with death. We are at dance with it, in circus with it. It is all of the brightness behind the entrancement of life and light; the falsity of form. The mute, plastic tune that lies at the bottom of every pale whispered desire. Death is the bottom and the gulf of all things, the last peninsula of life down into the core of ice is the character of death, an ecstatic haunting which rumbles with the roar of an ancient beast and yet is forever unseen. It is this totem at the last reach which is the horror we all desire. At the bottom of Ossawon is a monster which is monsterless. And it must eat! It must swallow us alive! Thus we must see the parade of death. We must be consumed in the very cavernous tomb of its maw!

This was the monstrosity of the swirling of time. The prism which breaks and reforms about itself like the mould of a lizard arm. And this was destiny! At the bottom of death was the parallax creature of resurrection, the formulation and reformulation of a primordial ooze, a fire and mixture of blood, a gelatinous orbit of false forms about the chest of infinitely resurrecting life and all carbon forms which dance upon the the fire and spit of the splitting. It was a compound creature, a creature composed of the atomic gusts of life hidden far among the junglish reach of distant stars approaching the obliteration of time and the most churlish infant moth or the gargling mouth of the swamp. This isle of demons is compounded at the hand of the depths which dances like current of electricity across each ambulant form; the potentiation which haunts, lingering in the magnetism of stone and the churning waves which bring together and apart cells and molecular syntheses for further chemical injection.

Jane was uttered at the beginning of all time and life, and was consumed by it in layers, like the sediment of stone, mask upon mask of the wrought iron core of a star entangled within the depths of the land and earth. Beneath her lay the infernal engine; about her lay the stars that burn upon carpets of black plumes of space, clouds of smoke their children; we were like demons upon couches, birthing up the exhaust of excrement which ate away at the hungry energy - bartered with parts for parts in the junkyard universes, beat and berated and pillaged and raped, stole and lied and betrayed - it was this agony that was the groan and moan of the hunger of the generator… of parts ground to pure salt; crystalline… diamondine…

It was left to us as black oil which we slurped on the canyon shores of Ossawon. Left to us like an inheritance among the wilderness of skeletons which etched the skyline of the beaches which stretched out into the breachless distances of space. Jane yearned, she yearned for Avalon, even the disguise of Maldive. It was the jutting point of a peninsula, upon which she dove, crackling, like an explosive device, a bomb upon the precipice of existence and the swirling nothingness. To her, it could be beautiful, or terror… it did not matter.

Above her, the sun carved a slow trial upon the peaks of Ossawon’s bridge. The gape of the stars opened to reveal an endless corridor. The air of life was thin, like a fading pulse, a collapsing membrane of the dewdrops that remembered a singular cell, writhing in submission before the mouth of a murderous sun. Jane collapsed to her knees in grief, digging her hands into the depths of the molecular soil of the beast of the body of the earth which fed the weight of Ossawon; collapsed into the narrows of the string which led the spirit of all life to Avalon’s breaking creek. Her body was swept by a dry wind about the grains of whittled rock; the false light of Maldive trailed behind, leaving nothing but the memory of a shadow in the heavy silence, the abridging ending of time.

---

Soumission de l’âme éternelle au siège de la chair

Gerhart trudged in the light snow, thinking about Olivie. This crystalline presence, rare amidst the primordial, fluid chaos of uterine life in an expanding universe. She was informed by an animate spirit of the mind. As he walked, the entirety of the external world appeared to him opaque, a sphere darkened by the lapping of waves in a moonless night.

She composed quiet music of space and acquired character in the twisting of her form to accommodate the shifting seat of her soul. Breathing, a cellular lung animating her personality beneath her fleshly clothes.

Above them, supernovae like flashbulbs popped off silently in the abyss. He remembered her black garter, the way she spoke to him; the way she found his room at the end of late nights, stumbling in, drunk and rambling. In an overcoat. He would push her away, saying nothing. And even in the drunkenness he could see her woundedness. The silence between them, the misunderstanding.

This was, in due, his love for Olivie. She represented something of the primordial freedom endowed to him by the universe, a window of compassion, a window of the possible elevation of carnal love to the sublime. All else would be abstract, a metaphysics of the stars, a calculation or else a geometry, but for the love that was endowed on this earth to be rightfully indulged in and by the blood. And they had consummated a total erotic magnetism, a shaking totality; an engagement with the pure mechanism of the universal itself.

In such consummation of a life there is indelible, stainless purity. It is the chrome of the full submersion and emulsion within nature. He would go to her doorstep, the long, towering hallways of the bloc and wind up the stairs to her apartment on the upper floors; their consummation was ritualized, delicate with sobriety, or her attempts to bring her drunkenness to him. But it was useless, this drunk intercourse. It had nothing of the presence required to fulfill what was predestined in the seed of each soul. This world arrives and departs in perfect motion, spilled from the cup of the dance of hours; the mind of the universe itself.

One of the last times he saw her was at the bar she tended, somewhat frantic but still perfectly pronounced, the underlying symphony of mutual understanding that wove in and out of ideas, books, precepts. It was this life that was drawn inside him and was to remain locked there but for the key of the world where it could and would be mutually received.

There was Olivie’s terrain and there was Gerhart’s. He could not know if any of him had truly made it over to her world, nor she to his. Perhaps it was only the silent gaze of direct physical confrontation that was the mutual understanding that surpassed all language, or that there was a shared vocabulary or linguistic that went beyond the word of nature which was writ into each body and hand. In this, there could be only the native communication - native to the totality and whole of being, the authentic and clarified state of consciousness and expression of l’âme de la divinité without censorship.

This carnal, blood energy of the consummation with Olivie was limitless in a way that was almost frightening; mindless. It was as if there was a prepossession of his total animal state to which his mind disinhibited him, dishabituated him. The mind was slashed from it, yet this very quality constituted their union - a realm of chiaroscuro, shadow, and darkness. It was this common essential character of candlelight which drew both, with the mutual terror of being understood.

He understood the innate fallibility of human nature. That each person’s sensory experience and canvas, framework of the world, was locked entirely within them and their composite sensory nature. The being was an aperture, a scientific vessel for sensory experience. So we become inner worlds of spiritual seeing and blindness. Each man, woman, child, creature, wanders with a terrified confidence through the world which they must convince themselves they understand, or else be relinquished to the total foreign sublimity of experience, objects; the entropic, metabolic candle of the flesh. That we must feel is our prison, our fate, our timeless destiny.

All that there was then was this authenticity of this experience with Olivie, something that could not be reflected but merely pierces through the banality of sense signals with the irregularity of extremity. It happens; is an encroachment upon the body self organization by the direct experience of decontextualizing ecstasy. And it was entirely self conjured, through the aperture of his own personal experience, perhaps entirely manufactured. All their lives, men force belief. But we must relinquish and surrender ourselves to total individual experience; be freed through the pure lens of the soul immersed in existence. And this relinquishment in freedom was felt first and primarily in the carnal unity which is the consummation of the two. All he experienced was the pure chemical alchemy of their unification; the timeless comingling of essences therein, entirely banal and sublime beneath their reality of everyday lashings.

In this way, the experience is the self mirrored back through the relational object. Even in our most sacral relationships, we project outwardly and immerse inwardly in a dance of image, heat, and light. Beneath these masks, entwined, in a secret chemicality. The synthetic reality of the body, endlessly shaped and terraformed by time. This transformed, slipping, black eel of electricity.

And the reach of this character is in carnal union. Beyond this is placation: the emptiness of cold mechanization, ceaselessly churning. For what constitutes carnal union is the true meeting of desires beneath the mask of pleasantries, adulterations, and suppressions, nor is it the half measures we take in our lives to placate the plastic masks of the world. We must penetrate with the light, heat, fire, and thunder which was first endowed to us in the mind of the Grecian gods. This is the primordial awakening first described in manuscripts but must be experienced literally.

We are the vessels for the divine, thought Gerhart. And this organic unity happens entirely with the automatic animal nature. Reflection alone is a futile dance of memories and shadows. We must act, live; thus find truth manifest within ourselves. We are within our intercourse with this world.

---

It’s a circus

A carnival of fools

A CIRCUS OF FOOLS

1.

He thought he might run off and join a circus. Or ride rail cars. Perhaps become a tycoon, or financier. No… too much responsibility. It didn’t matter what. A bunch of apes, destined for death, milling about. And all the distractions, excuses, and chest-puffing that came with it.

He thought of Olivia, making the easy choice out of fear. And he thought of Elizabeth, surrounded by her doctrinal community, protecting her existential openness with their system of values, beliefs, and books. The neighbors, walking their dogs, wasting their skin down to sallow gray sacks beneath the sun, looking sideways with slit-like contempt.

This was all of life—and he knew it through the weakness they showed in every action, every behavior. Every lie and false extension of the hand. Teeth-gritted smiles and pretend kindnesses. Animals in apartments, mortally wounded, hissing even as they extended a wing, a talon, a claw. A local alliance, to them, was far better than unpredictable animosity—an affair in the jungle.

David had known this for some time. It was, simply, a pattern of predictable behavior emerging from mortal forms that didn’t know any better. And even if they did, their animal reason prevailed. This fundamental lowness sank through everything—politics, government, love. They were all just polite ways of saying, “I’m dying, and everything I do is to prevent that.”

He couldn’t see the honor in any of these affairs. Only in the surrendered, perhaps—the true saints of the enlightened. They were, simply, more accepting of death. And this was where the circus idea came about. He could go… from his job stamping documents… to a circus in the wilderness. A circus beyond man; mortal contemplation. Where women didn’t guard their wombs with such ferocity, stumbling blindly into the arms of men who guided them off the cliff of pure animal confidence.

Were there such things as real people? People not entirely, ruthlessly, vindictively dictated by biological mores? This would be the sense of mystery. Someone, something, that had surmounted biology; become a fully autonomous being through it. A true self-realized individual.

He had read about Eugene Samatin in the papers one Monday morning, as he was stamping documents about public sewage at his old wooden desk in his small home office overlooking the central city park. It was a clipped story, right next to the latest news about the oil fields. Samatin was a self-proclaimed “enlightened entertainer” who traveled with a band of endearingly named “freaks.” They’d set up on the outskirts of cities and towns in the American South… a traveling band from nations and tribes around the world.

It was a three-day affair each time. Nobody knew exactly where or when they’d arrive, but there it would be—a little red tent in a clearing in the woods. Maybe by a rail track, or a stream. All the paper had were eyewitness reports that sounded more paranormal than anything: “A little tent that held massive grounds within it”; “fire breathers, two-headed snake twins with glowing red eyes”; “Samatin, a towering man, his face always in shadow… seemed like he came from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Not even human.”

David’s Monday unfolded in the typical fashion. Once the documents were certified—anything from births to civic motions—he’d close his books and step out into the evening for his walk. Mothers pushing strollers, couples debating bookshelves and lawns; antique stores filled with dusty porcelain cups and cookbooks. It was a vacant world, utterly emptied of anything but the slow procession to death. Women clasped their children’s hands with a white-iron grip. Men glanced to and fro, attempting to appear muscular and large. The farce was enough to make him laugh… and the laughter made him visible. Being too in on the joke—nobody likes to feel like they’re the punchline of it all, and rightfully so. He saw them as links in a long chain of births and deaths, endlessly pumping out the same rote motion of survival: a game of pretend and make-believe. What was worse, of course, was that their feelings, their suffering… these were deathly real. But it was all squabbles over sand. The last girlfriend. The last child. The last dollar from the last hedge fund, all fallen into sand and ignorance. He needed something more. So he passed them by slowly—in a sort of horrible, farcical respect—suppressing his laughter, leaving them to their machinations.

That’s what they were, he thought. Machines in a garden performing a ritual function. Tending and sowing crops. As he passed an old church beneath the Spanish moss, he weighed the idea of Samatin.

2.

David knew Samatin’s traveling band was likely to make it back to the Georgia coast soon. They’d made rounds, by word of mouth, all the way down and around the Florida peninsula and dipped across the Mississippi into Shreveport. They never crossed west of the Louisiana border, often finding themselves—as word would have it—playing for old bluesmen in hollers you couldn’t drive through because of the rivers that ran through them.

There was a chance with Samatin, he thought—a chance you didn’t get with other men in this world, or with women, no less. What he’d experienced in innumerable failed loves was nothing less than fear. The woman guarding her feelings, her future, her biological function. Any man guarding his perceived power, his status in the world. It was purely animal and existed only to persist, however meaningless, inane, or chaotic.

This was the inner reason, a reason that David could not accept. There had to be more to life—something sacral, possible, born even from this fruit of evil. And he understood it quite clearly to be the flowering of consciousness from the sleepwalking beast of the earth. A flower, born in all the great minds, which allowed true, conscious creation to spring from the automaton of man. This awakening drew him like magnetic lightning to Samatin. This was Samatin’s message: a revelation of the true nature and possibility of man, the abyss from which man springs and to which he returns in contemplation of being.

This, naturally, made Samatin a threat to the province of religion within the American mind. An abyss of fire producing visionary consciousness did not sit kindly beside the clean rhetorical images of Biblical figures or narrative stories that people clung to like mantric crosses. Samatin’s message was of the true individual, the individual born through the eyeless garden of carnivorous plants. And this was all David saw around him. Lazing at the river bars. Staring vacantly, desperately, violently out from behind their drowning meals of beer, wine, brandy, beef, potatoes—as their skin slowly sagged further in the sunlight. Desperately looking for a reason, a salvation, an anything beyond the biological game playing out within them. A record they couldn’t stop playing.

There was no agency in man, and thus no true creativity. Just reproduction. Like a factory machine, over and over again, stamping the same self-beneficial, aggrandizing impression upon everything. A die totally formed by the consciousness that produced it. A fallible, submitted, enslaved consciousness—to biology, to ideology. Entrapped.

3.

David got wind of Samatin’s return the following month from the postman. He arrived, waving as he always did, in his light blue collared shirt and tan hat, dropping mail through the slot in the old yellow row house. David sifted through the mail basket with some coffee in hand, squinting against the early morning light.

It was an unmarked envelope, different from the usual packages of old baseball photos, property bills for the building owner, and marketing magazines. The envelope was made of firm, aged, brown-bronze paper, with a thick pamphlet inside. He tore it open slowly, somewhat amused. Inside were fifteen blank pages. On the last page of the booklet:

THE OLD KLAN WOODS, AUGUST 12, 11 P.M.

This deeply startled him with its explicit reference to the Southern history so many would like dead, or at least buried. He knew exactly where the woods were: just outside the city limits, past the bridge over the swamp and the strip club set against the purple evening horizon and miles of marsh; into the jungle of the beast of the Deep South, ever closer to the Florida glades; in the gap southwest, too, between here and New Orleans.

The highways out there tapered off to billboards bearing the Shroud of Turin and isolated private properties, cabins with shoot-on-sight threats against trespassers. It was, simply, a place you drove quickly through, trying not to dwell too long on just how much blood had been spilled by the generations that had seethed there.

The old Klan woods were, truly, the last place he was trying to go. He had no intention of encountering the bloody ground in person. Some kids had even found remnants of a burned white cross in a hollow out there just a few years back. Nobody went out there except, on occasion, the construction crews, pastors, senators, shopkeepers, and church revivalists who kept the tradition alive.

But he knew it was from Samatin. He placed the pamphlet on his desk. There was a difference in being called to something by someone you didn’t know—something you knew was also calling you. Fate, destiny, karma; there were plenty of names for it. The Life Bureau, the stamps, the hilarious authority of his position in the world—it all could wait, cease, disappear. Certifying babies. Certifying insurance. Certifying property analyses, civic ledgers.

He looked at this world and saw it dying through each name, number, and child born into it—living and dying a life totally dictated by bureaucracy, dogma, and desires it was convinced were its own. By the body, parents, teachers, institutions, culture. A shell of impressions and persecutions. He decided right then that he would go.

As the day approached, David felt increasingly wary. He hadn’t realized it at the time, but Samatin’s carnival was set for the day of a total solar eclipse. It would be seen in totality only over northern Russia, Greenland, Iceland, Spain, and a small corner of Portugal, but the event would remain astronomically intact—regardless of where you were in the world.

He packed a bag with a camera, some provisions, and a notebook; then stuck a hastily scrawled message on the door:

OUT INDEFINITELY.

4.

The tent held three people at best. A large, waving banner hung between two trees, lit by small yellow bulbs:

ENTER.

David considered muting his laugh at the absurdity of it, but it emerged naturally as a knowing smile. He stepped into the tent. Immediately, it was clear that he had entered something akin to a third space, or an astral zone. It had, simply, made clear what was already explicit beneath the barely suppressed cover of the real.

It was a campsite fairground. People passed him in all sorts of garish makeup—heaps of powder-white paint; deep red lips and cheeks. Clowns juggled bowling pins as kids stared in amazement and clapped with thoughtless amusement. David walked past a fire breather—just like the accounts said—and a group of whores, covered in hermetic tattoos, who whistled at him. One had a dragon breathing fire up her back, its tail coiling toward the nape of her neck. She puffed on a cigarette, her hair in a tight pixie cut, her eyes behind small, circular sunglasses.

“The name’s Daisy. And you are?”

“David. I’m here for the show… and, really, to have a talk with Samatin.”

“Samatin don’t talk to anybody unless they really wanna see him.”

“Suppose I do.”

“Then you must have an invitation, don’t you?”

He flashed her the unnecessarily empty pamphlet.

“It’s a shame you can’t stay here with us… but I can’t say I know where he is.”

David kept walking. An extremely small man waddled past, not taller than a house cat, being chased by a man who must’ve been at least seven feet tall—even before the stilts.

David began to ruminate as he passed a stray train car filled with opium smoke and laughter. This was clearly a metaphysical trick of time and space—an allowance for something else to glitter through. It wasn’t a coincidence that Samatin chose the old Klan woods; come to think of it, he always chose violent swamps. If he ever made it up north, David thought, the forests of Gettysburg would be all but guaranteed. It made sense… that Samatin needed to open a canal between time and space, a rift to allow some stray, strange form of creation to sift through. To allow what was real and always true to take hold in the world in a way that was phenomenologically clear. To create a portal in the everyday, revealing the archetypal body of the infinite through the prism of man and beast, stone, plant, and star.

Lost in thought, David bumped into a hard, large stomach.

“Lost?” it said.

“Maybe. What’s it to you?”

The face above the stomach glared.

“Nothing.”

The man revealed himself to be Alastair Gordon, the camp’s strongman.

“I was born into a family of Jews who escaped the pogroms. Took refuge with some Romani. Know Django Reinhardt? My grandpa played with him. Good guy. Loved his wine. Suppose we got a thing for caravans.”

David nodded, not knowing if any of this required a reply. Alastair was a huge man, something approaching six feet nine, with massive, oak-like hands; a stomach almost as wide as he was tall.

“I split redwoods for sixteen years to get this strong. Ever thrown axes?”

He picked up a comically large axe from beside his trailer.

“Nothing like that.”

Alastair threw the axe. It whipped on a horizontal axis, cutting clear through a large willow as the snake charmer one campsite over screamed in surprise, accompanied by hissing.

“Know anything about Samatin?”

“Do I? That’s my brother-in-law!”

“You must have quite a sister.”

“You’ll meet her.”

“How do you know?”

“She told me.”

He pointed toward a woman standing at the far edge of the clearing, beside the deep wood. She had bright red hair. David rubbed his eyes to get a better look; when he opened them again, it had changed to golden blonde. Again. To black. She whispered something. He strained to hear as she laughed and beckoned him into the darkness of the woods.

David looked back. Alastair smiled, waved with his huge palms, and turned toward the torches and bustle lighting the grounds. As David followed the woman, the convent of the woods returned.

5.

It was now dark and silent; the full blue moon above him bathed the trees in a revealed light. A full moon… during a total solar eclipse? And the trees were stripped of their leaves, naked, as in the dead of winter.

It must’ve been the tent… and a deeper movement within it. David weighed this. A deeper descent into the already rifted space. He hadn’t come back out into the regular woods, so to speak—he had gone deeper into the woods of Samatin’s conjuring.

He caught a glimpse of the woman. She was beautiful… with undeniable snakelike features. The slit of her pupil. Her teeth and tongue. Even from a distance, it was as though he could see the gills of her face; the leathery flecks of her skin. Hardened against the weather. And yet, she had the soft flesh of a human woman. It was a contradiction he couldn’t reconcile with appearances.

She turned and faced him.

“Yes?”

“Well…”

“What do you want? I’m here.”

“This is normally when I’d say something romantic.”

“We both know you’re not here for that.”

“I wasn’t before I arrived.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“I’ve heard that one before too.”

She laughed, then abruptly stopped, as though remembering her role, her part in a play.

“You’re here to see Samatin.”

“Aren’t you, too?”

“I’m not here by choice.”

“So you’re trapped?”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“Chained?”

“Better.”

“Better?”

“Clearer.”

“Why am I here?”

“The same reason we all are.”

“Is he who they say he is?”

“At the deepest level, yes. There is no Samatin.”

She turned to face the wilderness.

“You’ll have to go there.”

She pointed. There was a lone tombstone. They were now so far from any sign of life or civilization that David couldn’t imagine who could’ve possibly died there.

The tombstone said, simply:

HERE.

“You want me to dig?”

“Look behind it.”

Behind the tombstone was a staircase descending into the earth. David could see, around the first spiral turn, the dancing of a hidden flame.

“Can I trust him?”

“The better question is, ‘Should I trust him?’”

“Well, I was thinking you could give me a straight answer, considering you’re his wife and all.”

“Alastair told you that, didn’t he?”

“He might’ve.”

“Alastair doesn’t know the full extent of our relationship.”

“So you aren’t?”

“Not by choice.”

David took a scrap of paper out of his pocket, wrote down his phone number, and began to walk down the stairs.

6.

The stairs writhed through the earth. Increasingly hot, David took off his shirt. It was as though he were swimming toward the equator, then diving directly into a hot mass of air, water, and light.

As he descended, the stairs changed from metal to wood to stone. The railings bent, rotted, and disappeared. And the walls… they bore images. He saw paintings of the Civil War, the French Revolution, Japanese rebellion against the emperor… the Mongols besieging the Great Wall; penitent Tibetan monks and Aghori smeared in shit, holding skulls and bones; immolations; the Smashan Tara. Egyptian tombs, Seth, the weighing of the heart, ochre handprints smeared against the walls like blood… Was it blood? Then nothing.

Silence, fire, and shadow.

David descended for what felt like days. Thirst assailed him. Thoughtlessly, he stumbled down, down, down.

Until the depths belched him out.

And there, on a throne of stone at the base of the stairs, sat Samatin.

“You called?”

“I came.”

“You could have just said the devil.”

“It’s a tired game. A boring crowd.”

“I would’ve known you then.”

“Does it matter? Do you think I want to be known?”

Samatin stood. He was entirely nondescript.

“I’d miss you in a crowd.”

“You’d miss me anywhere. I am the crowd.”

“I met your wife.”

“Did she give you her number?”

“I wish.”

“Don’t we all.”

He sat back and laughed. His face and eyes shifted. For a moment, his hair was black and slick, then brown and curled. There was something Mesopotamian about his features, whereas minutes earlier they had been definitively Italian.

“Don’t you get tired of holding her captive?”

“She comes and goes as she pleases.”

“I mean in a metaphysical sense.”

“In that way, my sway extends far beyond the yoke of a common wife.”

“Let’s talk.”

“We are talking.”

“I mean about what’s at hand here. What’s at stake.”

“Who’s buying?”

“Everyone. All the time. And that’s why I want out.”

“Out is death. Buying your way out is just going deeper in.”

“That might be the first honest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Samatin looked at him, his eyes glowing like iron coals.

“So you see.”

“Enough.”

“Enough to what?”

“To know you’re the center of the maze. The burning core.”

“Yes, that is the prism of all my affairs.”

“So the world is in the throes of the devil.”

“Yes. The most religious are the most afflicted; the most prideful and powerful are the most puppeted.”

“And what about the most debased?”

Samatin looked at him, his eyes nearly downcast.

“They remind me of myself.”

“So you take pity on them?”

“Pity is the only emotion worth taking.”

“Not lust? Anger? Love?”

“I’ve found those to be selfish things.”

David looked at Samatin. Now he resembled an exhausted street urchin, a mill-working boy out of the old photographs of Lewis Hine.

“What about suffering?”

“You think I don’t suffer?”

“I think you are suffering.”

Samatin paused.

“Yes.”

“Why are we sitting in this miserable little room?”

“You think I’d be here if I had any say otherwise? I’d be in the stars. Or else rippling… with some majesty. How can I explain? Flesh in a box.”

“You are the limits of your world.”

“Look around, David. These are my limits.”

David realized he’d failed to examine the room. It was a small stone bedroom. He could see a teddy bear and a child’s blanket. There was a poster showing a night sky full of stars. Beneath the image, it said:

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND YOUR DREAMS.

David’s eyes began to fill with tears.

“So why are you holding us?”

“You think I chose that either? I’m the body. I’m the only thing there is to hold. Without me, there’s nothing.”

Samatin pressed his head into his hands.

“This isn’t going how I expected it to.”

“You expected some mystery? Some revelation?”

“Explain the tent. The freak show.”

“Illusions are easy. People see what they want to see. I just create the conditions for the theatre.”

“So you know Aeschylus?”

“Who doesn’t? Great writer.”

“How about Shelley?”

“We’re acquainted.”

David had to get to the heart of it, the root of it. Or was there even anything to get down to anymore?

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Live with it.”

“What, these people? They’re insufferable.”

“Are they any different from you? Fallible, dying, collapsing. Like all things.”

“Do you die?”

“I am death.”

“But you’re still here.”

“Every time I die, I’m born again. I’m every mother’s child and every child’s corpse.”

“That’s a hard job.”

“There’s no pay other than wisdom.”

“Wise Prometheus.”

“Something like that. Men have come up with many different names to describe the same problem.”

“So I go back and just accept all of this?”

“What else is there?”

“Suppose I could stay in your camp.”

“There is no camp.”

“Alastair? The whores? The snake charmer?”

“All real.”

“So what did I see?”

“The truth beneath reality.”

“What is that?”

“Your recompense.”

7.

David climbed the stairs. There was no fire; there were no images. It was like returning from a cellar. The way beneath the tombstone was sealed by a wooden trapdoor. He opened it into the morning.

The drive back was long. There was no sign of the campsite, Alastair, or Samatin’s wife. David didn’t care whether any of it was a memory or a dream. All he cared about was sleep.

---

THE GREEN SNAKE

He watched them in the park and sneered. The saccharine pink dresses, covering up the stench of inner psychic corruption. Didier wiped his face with a handkerchief. A sweltering summer. Water hanging in the air; the wavering haze of heat, lifting the image of the leaves as it danced before his gaze.

Couples held hands in the evening, descending sunlight. Didier saw one pair step thoughtlessly on a beetle, leaving a smeared yellow-purple corpse in the cement. He looked at the pair as the male smiled dumbly in the woman’s eyes, as she fidgeted with her wedding ring. He knew right then and there that neither of them would have the capacity, nonetheless the courage, to do the right thing unless they saw how it explicitly benefited themselves. Not even to one another.

Didier sighed, pocketing the kerchief; checking his watch. 7:32. Just before the sun would crash into the river, filled with tugboat sludge and deer corpses. He was tired. It was another day of useless labor to feed his body; counting sheathes of lumber on parchment to pass to foremen who did work — far away from his desk.

The girls danced, jumping up and down gleefully by the fountain; taking pictures. A few of them looked over at him with erotic curiosity. He walked past, filtering them out of the corner of his eye.

This was his ritual, to walk down to the river, catching the last light as cicadas screamed. The thick of the summer, molten against his skin — not even air. Flaming hot body of water, the air itself a transparent figure, a real mass. His breath fought against the harsh humidity. It was jungle weather — weather where you swat mosquitos and carve through relics of an ancient time: reptile shadows of a beastly nature.

The men sleeked by, wearing wraparound glasses which obscured the upper portions of their faces with reflective sheen. The women, in their skirts, milling about in packs. Some holding hands with confused men. Now that he had her, he simply didn’t know what to do with her beyond the point of basic physical consummation.

Didier’s consciousness was shattered. Perhaps by opium, perhaps by drink. Perhaps simply by sun exposure on a foreign island, surrounded by Komodo dragons and too much time to think. The women, the men, the bookstores… they were all translucent. Like a tired game. Too tired…

This world was a sickly green to be swallowed. That would swallow him; everything. Drunk on themselves. Their own blood. Didier stumbled over a lifted crack in the pavement as an old couple leered at him with jealous eyes. He understood why they so desperately needed religions. To prevent them from themselves. Out of the cracks of the books of ideology seethed the animals they so urgently attempted to suppress and deny.

The river was close now; the air shifted. Lighter, like the weight of the water in it was being drawn to a deeper well, a deeper source. He craved the rippling of the waves. Their geometry soothed him amidst the chaos of human affairs; the chittering alarm of the squirrels, the mad dash of the cicadas as they mated and died. The whole animal world was exploding with one primary symbolic expression — lust — in the savage yell. Throwing themselves into bodies as they screamed into death. So quickly.

By the river, there were a string of bars. Pedestrians and tourists littered the riverwalk, in some combination of awe, confusion, and just pure lostness. Didier sidestepped a young couple as they attempted to take a picture against the railing. He smiled. The young man and his girlfriend reminded him of Kali. They were in love. Didier said “I’ll take one, but you have to kiss her.” They hugged each other tightly as Didier flashed the lens. The young man thanked him kindly.

The smile lingered on Didier’s lips as he stared at the calm, lashing waves. They beat against one another and dispersed in a gurgling silence, traveling down under the bridge and disappearing into the now-violently orange-purple streaked horizon. A few tugboats lingered under it, as cars rushed past into the distant eastern marsh. He sighed. And then he saw her.

A woman — he only saw the side of her face at first, in a booth with a velvet curtain on it. Clearly imported. Her cheek had a long black scar on it… a wound long since “healed”, however poorly the term implied. She was animated, frantically shaking her hands at a man in a suit, as he shook his head at her then walked away. Didier was intrigued. She was beautiful, yes, and perhaps that was her sole appeal… but the scar. And then Didier saw the snake. Long, lime green, its back littered with black and red gems, glistening in the twilight. He hurriedly approached the booth.

“What is this?”

“Who’s asking? You a cop?”

“Not usually.”

“Yes or no.”

“What are you selling?”

“Dreams, pictures with the snake, you name it. If I don’t have it here, suppose I can get it for you.”

“What’s its name?”

“Paolo.”

“And yours?”

“Marguerite.”

She slowly revealed that she was French by way of Brazil; her parents had frantically migrated due to some vague persecution in the mid century. She wouldn’t specify when he pressed.

“So you buying or what?”

“What’s on offer?”

“You’re clearly a man of dreams.”

“Fulfilled or denied?”

“Who’s to say but you.”

“They tend to be suspended between two points.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Are you busy tonight?”

“Who’s asking?”

“A man of dreams.”

“Yes and no.”

“So you’ll go.”

“Yes.”

Didier stood there as she smiled. The snake politely hissed. Behind her, the sun dipped into the water like a bright iron. It was almost as if smoke was rising up from the winding tail of the river itself, as the ore was lowered into it by the blacksmith’s hand of night.

Her face turned, almost twisted up in its own features, as if it was attempting to express something beyond its nature.

“Mister, you know we’re not going anywhere right?”

“What’s do you mean?”

“Well, suppose I sell you this. We go out to dinner, you pay my bill — in a manner of speaking — and what’s next? How many more dreams will I have to sell you?”

Didier considered this question, rolling it about on his tongue. Her eyes sparkled, blue-green, like the snake’s body darkened and was thrown in the mixture of the river water. A paint.

“How many are you?”

“Mister, I’m no dream. I’m just a girl selling snake venom. It’s twenty dollars a picture with the snake.”

She jingled a couple glass vials together between her fingers. The snake leered. The sun was now glowering, drowned in the river but for a fiery orange cap. Rapid light dispersed like a last flare for safety.

“So you won’t play.”

“I can’t.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s more important than you realize.”

She clutched her chest, almost agonizingly.

“You fear, what… death, me?”

“I’m afraid… of the serpent taking control”

The snake appeared to smile. It was now dark, but for the blue stars and the lamplight. Didier heard drunken laughter and a bottle smash from one of the nearby barfronts.

“I’m sorry, you said ‘taking control’?”

“I fear this life isn’t mine. By the way, I do fortunes. Ten bucks a fortune. I’ll tell you.”

“Maybe later. Tell me.”

Didier was too deep into this conversation. He needed to understand. This girl knew something the others didn’t.

Her face continued to bunch up and contort. He could hardly recognize her. It was like she was trying to spit something unrecognizable up from the bucket of her stomach.

“I’m being used, mister. I know it. I just can’t stop it.”

“Used for what?”

“A child, a toy. I’m a marionette. Upon a string. Men look at me. Women leer. And what’s worse, I don’t get paid for none of it.”

Didier was starting to see her more clearly. She had a slight gap in her front teeth; a bit of acne. The way she moved her body and hands, he could tell she came from a lack of formal education.

“Do you read?”

“A newspaper here and there.”

“Suppose you could get out?”

“There’s a way?”

“Christian?”

“Yes sir, I go to church.”

She appeared to him as a small girl.

“You believe in Jesus?”

“Yes sir. You trying to sell me on it?”

“I’m trying to determine your constitution.”

She smiled and fingered a small silver cross necklace.

“You think I can be saved?”

“Saved from what?”

She stuttered and looked down for a beat.

“I suppose… myself.”

“You’re a sinner?”

We all are mister. We’re fallen. We’re guilty. We need to be saved.”

The snake had coiled into a penitent position. Didier put his hand on her shoulder.

“You’re learning.”

“Learning what?”

“How to not be controlled. By anything. Nonetheless an ancient thing.”

She looked up, half distrusting, with a happiness on her eyelids.

“Suppose it’s true?”

“Suppose it is.”

“Does that mean we go to dinner?”

“It does and it doesn’t.”

He shook her hand; she waved to him as he walked off toward the pier. He turned back once; saw her and the booth crowd with blue darkness. He sat for awhile, then walked home.

---

EURIPEDES

“You’re watching the joke. You either laugh or cry.”

Conor looked up from putting on his white makeup in the dressing room. The light was an ugly yellow-white fluorescence.

“A little heavy for before the show isn’t it?”

“Whatever. You never read Euripides?”

“It’s a traveling band for kids.”

They were putting on a clown show for a group of little students in an empty cornfield in Petrograd. The trailer shook a bit in the wind.

“Why are we here again?”

“Money.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not that I can remember.”

Conor’s theatrical partner, Katy, put on her nose.

“You ready?”

“I think so.”

They went out on their makeshift wooden stage, unloaded from the wagon on the back of their truck; hit each other over the head with foam bats a couple of times, made faces with their fingers and teeth; employed a variety of diverse Whoopee cushion solutions. The kids roared. As the sun began to set, their parents ushered them away; thanking the duo, the show tapered and curtained.

“Well.”

“Well done.”

“Now we sit here?”

“Moscow next.”

“Not too soon.”

Katy went to remove her makeup with a transparent solution.

“Care to make a joke?”

“Which one?”

“The one about the horse.”

“That’s from so long ago. Did you forget?”

“Enough that it will make me laugh again.”

The room went a bit blue with melancholy. Conor could feel it seeping into his pores.

“Katy — is there really a line between comedy and tragedy?”

“It’s so thin you could barely see it.”

Katy looked ninety instead of twenty-three.

“Aren’t we too young to be having this conversation?”

“There’s only seen too little and seen too much in this world.”

“And we’re the latter?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the line then.”

“It’s the eye.”

Conor considered this.

“Something like the dance of death?”

“You could call it the dance of life.”

“Dancing and writhing. What’s the space between?”

“How you see it with the eye.”

The field around the trailer settled with fireflies; the Milky Way in the sky about them opened like a womb cave. Crickets shuddered; stalks bent in the wind, moaning slightly.

“Hear that?”

“What?”

“That’s music. The whole thing.”

Conor pressed his ear up to the trailer door.

“And?”

“And you get used to the song. But can you still hear it? Especially the breaks. When the carnival ceases and the sky lets up. There’s something religious to it.”

“Religare. To bind.”

“We won’t stay here. But we also won’t ‘go there’ so to speak. The world is a slow dispersion.”

“How did we end up as clowns?”

“For the money.”

Katy and Conor settled into a slow silence as the night wound its path through their part of the world. Conor laid his hand on his face and dozed off intermittently. Katy began knitting.

“See, Conor — this is the world — like a net of threads of fate. Pull one, it shakes the others. They work together.”

“Sure. What’s my fate?”

“We don’t know where the string ends. But we can begin to understand where it’s going by observing where it came from.”

Conor opened the door to the trailer and looked up.

“The comedy of the gods?”

“Something like that. Higher than comedy and tragedy though, there’s a third thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Reason.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t… strictly speaking. But I’ve got a pretty good feeling for it.”

“God?”

“The word is a force of being. You choose.”

“So how can we resolve this?”

“We play our part.”

Katy continued knitting as Conor shut the door.

“Part to what?”

“The theatre of ancient stone. We walked in screaming. We wake up slowly. And if we wake up soon enough, deeply enough, we realize we all have a part to play here.”

“Play it well, and what?”

Katy looked at him.

“I don’t know. What reward is an actor’s role well done?”

“Money?”

Katy laughed.

“Sure. Anything else?”

“The joy of the play itself?”

“Yes. Who knows where the direction comes from? Or where it’s going? But we know… we can feel the call.”

Conor sat up.

“Call to where?”

Katy put the knitting down.

“To life. In our own way. Comedy then is the tragic laughing. Tragedy is the comic crying. But above all; beyond the absurd, is the order that we may never truly, fully understand. And if we can content ourselves with our allotment, our role, our fate in the grand order and play, we have a great measure of peace. Our life in the design.”

“So why aren’t we doing some kind of evolved Greek theatre?”

Katy laughed again.

“Why do you think? Money!”

The next morning, all that was left of the trailer was a rusty spoon and a few stray tire marks.

---

III. The Unified Cosmology of Answerable Persistence

A UNIFIED COSMOLOGY

ANSWERABLE
PERSISTENCE

The Total Cosmos Operator

A Unified Theory of Being, Consciousness, Compensation, Civilization, Technology, History, and Art

DAVID BUSSELL

Being persists. Consciousness registers the cost. Compensation conceals it. History distributes it. Disclosure reveals it. Answerability transforms it.

Contents

Proem The Problem of Conscious Existence

Part I The Architecture of Persistence | Chapters 1-4

Part II The Construction of the Self | Chapters 5-8

Part III Symbol, Civilization, and Power | Chapters 9-14

Part IV Modernity, Technology, and Catabasis | Chapters 15-18

Part V Art, Truth, and Historical Incarnation | Chapters 19-23

Part VI Answerable Life | Chapters 24-30

Part VII The Moral and Cosmological Synthesis | Chapters 31-34

Coda Civilization Begins to Live

Notes Empirical and Philosophical Sources

Abstract

Reality is not most adequately understood as a collection of static objects. It is a field of temporary organizations: forms that maintain sufficient continuity against dispersal through boundary, energetic exchange, memory, regulation, and feedback. Stars, cells, organisms, nervous systems, persons, institutions, archives, and civilizations are materially and causally different. They should never be collapsed into one substance or granted the same agency. Yet they exhibit a recurrent formal problem: each persists only while a determinate organization remains viable under constraint.

Life intensifies this problem by becoming actively self-maintaining. Nervous systems intensify it again by modeling changing conditions. At sufficient recursive depth, an organism registers not only its environment but itself within that environment: vulnerable, dependent, temporal, and mortal. Persistence becomes experience. The form that continues becomes a form that knows, however incompletely, that it can fail.

This is the existential aperture. It is also the primordial wound.

To remain coherent under the pressure of finitude, the organism develops regulatory adaptations. It achieves, controls, submits, cares, seduces, withdraws, masters, purifies, or expands. These adaptations are not simply false. Repetition can turn them into genuine capacities: discipline, competence, composure, perception, charisma, care, invention, or artistic power. The danger begins when a capacity forgets the condition that made it necessary. Strategy becomes identity; identity becomes a claim about reality; the claim becomes a demand upon other people; the demand becomes an institution; and the institution preserves itself by relocating costs it cannot register into other bodies, roles, populations, environments, and generations.

This is the compensatory madhouse: not a society governed mainly by irrational people, but a society governed by functional adaptations that have mistaken themselves for universal truth.

Civilization magnifies the process by externalizing symbolic organization beyond individual death. Language, ritual, law, image, archive, market, metric, machine, and model allow one nervous system’s organization to shape lives it will never encounter. Symbol can remain answerable to the conditions it represents; this is disclosure. Or it can continue circulating after traceability to those conditions has been lost; this is veiling. Modernity’s characteristic danger is therefore not ignorance alone. It is immense symbolic and technical capacity joined to declining contact with embodiment, consequence, purpose, and limit.

The alternative is not purity, self-erasure, perfect knowledge, or escape from constraint. It is answerable persistence: organized continuity that can register more of its cost, receive the replies of what it affects, revise its account, preserve the separateness of other minds, and bear more of the consequences of its own continuation.

The total argument can be compressed into six movements:

Being persists. Consciousness registers the cost. Compensation conceals it. History distributes it. Disclosure reveals it. Answerability transforms it.

Proem: The Problem of Conscious Existence

Existence produces forms. Some last for fractions of a second; some for billions of years. None stands outside process. A form persists only because relations continue to hold: pressure answers gravity, membranes regulate exchange, organisms metabolize energy, memories organize response, institutions preserve rules, and cultures transmit patterns across generations.

The emergence of consciousness introduces a decisive turn. Existence no longer merely takes form. In mortal organisms, it becomes capable of registering what form costs. Hunger, exhaustion, attachment, humiliation, beauty, uncertainty, dependency, contradiction, and death become interior conditions. The world is no longer only what acts upon an organism. It is what the organism remembers, anticipates, desires, fears, interprets, and knows it may lose.

Symbol answers this exposure. Through language, image, number, ritual, story, identity, and institution, the organism makes its conditions intelligible and transmissible. Symbol enables memory, coordination, self-knowledge, historical continuity, philosophy, science, religion, and art. It is among humanity’s great disclosure powers.

Yet symbol can also become a second environment that protects the organism from the first. The role replaces the need that produced it. The metric replaces the life it was meant to describe. The doctrine replaces the encounter from which it arose. The image replaces the body. The account replaces the person. The institution preserves its declared identity by hiding the consequences required to maintain it.

The central problem of conscious existence is therefore not simply whether a form can persist. Every living form must persist. The problem is whether persistence can become conscious without using consciousness chiefly to evade the conditions and costs of persistence itself.

This work develops one operator across ontology, psychology, civilization, technology, history, ethics, and art. It does not claim that these domains are identical. It argues that a recurrent structure becomes visible when they are placed in relation:

1. organized form maintains continuity under constraint;

2. life actively regulates the conditions of that continuity;

3. consciousness experiences those conditions from within;

4. the organism constructs adaptations to bear what it cannot continuously face;

5. adaptations generate real capacities;

6. capacities become identities and truth claims;

7. truth claims acquire institutional force;

8. closed institutions preserve coherence by distributing unregistered cost;

9. disclosure restores traceability between symbol and condition;

10. answerability allows persistence to be altered by what it affects.

The system is not dualistic. Disclosure and veiling are not separate substances. Every disclosure can harden into doctrine; every doctrine may retain a buried disclosure. Every wound can become capacity; every capacity can become coercion. Every account can preserve evidence and destroy remainder. Every institution can become closed; every institution can, in principle, become answerable again.

What follows is a theory of that movement.

Part I. The Architecture of Persistence

1. Being as Organized Continuity

Reality is energetic process taking temporary form. A star remains coherent through dynamic relations among gravity, pressure, radiation, and fusion; a cell through membrane regulation, metabolism, signaling, and repair; an organism through coordinated physiological systems; a civilization through material infrastructure, labor, language, law, memory, and transmission.[1][2] These are not equivalent achievements. A star does not possess a cell’s self-maintenance, a cell does not possess a person’s reflective experience, and a person does not possess an institution’s transgenerational duration. The comparison is formal, not anthropomorphic.

What recurs is a problem of organized continuity. For any determinate form to remain identifiable through time, enough of its relations must remain within a viable range. Constraint is not merely an obstacle imposed upon an already complete thing. Boundaries, limits, gradients, and dependencies are among the conditions by which a distinguishable form exists at all. Without constraint there is no determinate organization; without throughput there is no maintained organization; without continuity there is no persisting form.

The first law is therefore:

What persists does so through organized continuity under constraint.

This statement does not mean that everything strives, wills, calculates, or deserves to survive. It names a formal condition, not a universal psychology or moral entitlement. Persistence is broader than agency. Agency is one late and highly organized mode within it.

The expression is descriptive rather than teleological. A cell need not calculate a probability, and a civilization need not consciously maximize a function. The formalism identifies a question: what organization is being maintained, by what means, within what limits, and at whose cost?

That final question cannot be asked of every physical form in the same ethical sense. It becomes decisive only when persistence architectures can register consequence, represent other minds, and organize the lives of others. Ethics enters not at the beginning of matter but at the point where a form can know more of what it is doing than it permits itself to know.

2. Recursion and the Scalar Sequence

Persistence becomes recursive when the stabilized output of one level becomes the substrate or condition of another. The sequence can be stated without pretending that every transition is fully explained:

energetic organization - > chemical repeatability -> biological self-maintenance -> genomic continuity -> nervous-system modeling -> recursive self-registration -> civilizational symbol -> artificial symbolic recursion.

At the thermodynamic level, gradients permit temporary patterns. At the chemical level, repeatable relations make patterned continuation and replication possible. With biological organization, a decisive novelty appears: bounded systems actively maintain internal conditions through selective exchange. Homeostasis is not perfect equilibrium but regulated stability within changing conditions.[2]

Genomic continuity adds transmissible biological information. DNA carries instructions involved in development, functioning, survival, and reproduction; the genome is not a literal narrative of everything ancestors endured, but it is a historically selected structure through which prior viability shapes present possibility.[3] It is therefore best understood here as compressed inherited constraint, not as a complete script or sovereign destiny.

Nervous systems add rapid, revisable modeling. Perception, attention, memory, aversion, attraction, and expectation relate present signals to possible consequences. Predictive-processing theories offer one influential, though contested, account of how brains generate and revise predictions rather than passively receive a completed world.[4] The present framework does not depend on any single neuroscientific theory. It requires only the more modest proposition that nervous systems model changing relations and use those models to guide action.

At sufficient complexity, a system models not only conditions around it but itself as a participant within them. It remembers its own past, anticipates its own future, registers the reactions of others, and can represent the possibility of its own injury or death. The persistence architecture becomes an object within its own model.

This is the threshold of existential disclosure.

The transition from functional self-modeling to subjective experience remains an explanatory boundary. No philosophical vocabulary should conceal that boundary. This theory does not prove why organized neural activity should produce consciousness, nor does it reduce experience to a survival calculation. It makes a more limited proposal: wherever subjective experience emerges in this sequence, it appears as the lived interior of a form capable of registering the conditions of its own continuity.

Persistence becomes experience.

3. The Existential Aperture

The existential aperture is the opening through which organized continuity becomes lived condition. Through it, a mortal organism encounters not only sensation but temporality, dependence, attachment, loss, uncertainty, beauty, contradiction, humiliation, limitation, and the irreducibility of other minds.

The aperture is both power and injury. Self-registration expands navigation: the organism can imagine futures, compare alternatives, remember failures, coordinate with others, and revise behavior. Yet it also exposes the organism to threats that are absent from the immediate environment. It can fear death when no predator is present, relive shame after the danger has passed, anticipate abandonment before any departure, or experience insignificance within an imagined social and historical totality.

Human suffering is therefore never only present sensation. It can be symbolic, recursive, retrospective, and prospective. A word can reactivate a history. A boundary can be interpreted as annihilation. A role can become the condition of worth. An image of the future can regulate the present more powerfully than the present itself.

The organism has entered a world of meanings, and meanings can wound.

4. The Primordial Wound

The deepest wound is not one childhood event, political order, or historical catastrophe. Those conditions specify, deepen, and distribute the wound, often with overwhelming force. But its primordial structure begins earlier:

A temporary form has become conscious that it is temporary.

The organism knows, at least intermittently: I can be injured. I can fail. I can be abandoned. I can become unnecessary. I depend upon conditions I do not command. What I love can disappear. I will die.

Embodiment creates the possibility of this wound; biography gives it a particular language. Family, class, race, gender, illness, violence, poverty, neglect, exclusion, conditional love, and historical catastrophe determine how finitude is encountered and whose vulnerability is intensified. To name a primordial wound is not to flatten those differences. It is to identify why historically different injuries can become existentially total: each can seize the organism’s felt conditions of continuity.

No person can remain continuously exposed to the full weight of finitude while performing the ordinary work of life. Attention must narrow. Affect must be regulated. Continuity must be organized. The organism must become someone.

This is where compensation begins.

Part II. The Construction of the Self

5. Compensation as a Persistence Technology

A compensation is an organized strategy for remaining coherent in the presence of a condition the person cannot yet fully bear. Its elementary grammar is:

If I perform X, I will not have to experience Y.

If I achieve, I will not be worthless. If I control events, I will not be helpless. If I remain useful, I will not be abandoned. If I am admired, I will not be insignificant. If I am morally pure, I will not encounter my aggression. If I understand everything, I will not be vulnerable to confusion. If I remain detached, no one can possess me. If I keep expanding, I will never have to become small.

Compensation is not mere falsity. It solves a real regulatory problem. It narrows exposure to overwhelming affect, organizes attention, produces predictability, and gives the person an actionable position within the world. It may be the best available intelligence of an organism under particular conditions.

This is why contempt for defenses is intellectually shallow. A defense may have preserved the very person now attempting to examine it. The task is not to denounce the adaptation but to understand its necessity, power, cost, and present jurisdiction.

The decisive question is not whether the resulting strength is real. It is whether the person can refrain from using it without losing coherence. Can the achiever stop? Can the controller tolerate uncertainty? Can the caretaker permit another person not to need her? Can the leader be corrected? Can the intellectual remain present when explanation fails? Can the independent person need another without experiencing defeat?

When the answer is no, the person does not merely possess the capacity. The capacity possesses the person.

6. Wound, Repetition, and Real Capacity

Repeated compensation trains the organism. The child terrified of chaos may become exceptionally organized. The person humiliated may acquire extraordinary discipline. The person exposed to abandonment may become acutely attentive to shifts in others. The person injured by helplessness may pursue technical mastery. The person denied recognition may develop immense ambition. The person overwhelmed by feeling may become composed under pressure.

These capacities should not be reduced to pathology. Their effects are real. The organizer produces order. The achiever achieves. The caretaker provides care. The skeptic detects contradiction. The leader coordinates action. The artist makes transmissible form. An origin in defense does not nullify competence.

Yet the origin influences the conditions under which competence operates. The organizer may become unable to tolerate spontaneity. The achiever may experience rest as disappearance. The caretaker may preserve the dependence that secures her indispensability. The skeptic may lose the capacity for trust. The composed person may become inaccessible. The visionary may experience correction as an assault upon reality itself.

The wound has produced a tool. The danger begins when the tool becomes the only permitted relation to life.

Capacity therefore has a double structure. It is simultaneously an enlargement of agency and a possible narrowing of freedom. A person may become extraordinarily effective within the strategy that confines him. Indeed, social reward often makes the confinement harder to perceive. The world applauds the output while neither the world nor the person registers the regulatory necessity underneath it.

Gift becomes appetite when the return from the world is needed not merely as recognition of action but as stabilization of being.

7. Identity: When the Strategy Forgets Itself

An adaptation becomes identity when the person no longer experiences it as an adaptation. It becomes who I am, what strong people do, what responsible people do, what love requires, what reality demands.

The person is no longer someone who achieves; he is the achiever. She is no longer someone who cares; she is the caretaker. He is no longer someone who values independence; he is the person who needs no one. She is no longer someone with moral commitments; she is goodness standing against corruption.

Identity stabilizes continuity by organizing selection. It determines which memories matter, which threats become visible, which desires are legitimate, which failures are intolerable, and which interpretations can be admitted without collapse. Once identity fuses with compensation, contradiction becomes existentially charged.

Failure is no longer an event; it is worthlessness. Dependence is no longer a condition; it is defeat. Correction is no longer information; it is humiliation. A boundary is no longer another person’s limit; it is abandonment. Disagreement is no longer separateness; it is betrayal.

The adaptation has forgotten that it is an adaptation. The symbol no longer points toward the wound. It replaces the wound with a doctrine.

This is personal veiling: the symbolic self becomes more coherent as the person’s knowledge of what that self is doing declines.

8. Universalization and the Failure of Separateness

The decisive social transition occurs when a private adaptation becomes a universal truth claim. The controller no longer says, “Control protects me from helplessness.” He says, “Control is responsibility.” The achiever no longer says, “Achievement protects me from shame.” He says, “Achievement is the measure of worth.” The expansive person no longer says, “Growth protects me from insignificance.” He says, “Growth is the law of life.”

The claim then becomes a public demand. Compliance is maturity. Sufficiency is laziness. Distance is rejection. Doubt is corruption. Resistance is fear. Another person may be permitted to exist only in meanings compatible with the first person’s regulatory system.

The deepest ethical violation is therefore not command alone. It is the assignment of another person’s interior reality.

The leader says, “Your resistance is fear.” The parent says, “Your independence is ingratitude.” The moralist says, “Your disagreement reveals corruption.” The possessive lover says, “Your freedom proves that you do not love me.”

In each case, the other mind is denied separateness. It cannot want something different, value enough rather than more, refuse without terror, or establish a boundary without destroying the bond. The appetite of one person becomes the destiny of another.

The compensatory madhouse is built from this conversion:

wound - > compensation -> capacity -> identity -> universal truth claim -> public demand -> institution -> distributed cost.

It is not a world in which nobody functions. It is a world in which functional people universalize the strategies by which they function and compel others to inhabit them.

Part III. Symbol, Civilization, and Power

9. The Two Channels of Continuity

Human continuity operates through two recursively coupled channels.

The first is biological. Genomic inheritance, nervous-system development, attachment, memory, affect, attention, and learned expectation organize how an organism perceives and responds before it possesses an explicit theory of itself. The body carries prior conditions as readiness, sensitivity, aversion, attraction, capacity, and limit.

The second is civilizational. Language, ritual, law, image, mathematics, philosophy, science, religion, art, archives, institutions, and technology externalize patterns beyond individual mortality. Writing and other durable media can become active components in human cognition rather than passive containers alone; tools, records, and environments participate in the work by which persons remember, calculate, decide, and coordinate.[5]

Civilization is therefore a second-order persistence architecture. A nervous system can die while its organization continues through a text, a family rule, a legal category, a machine, a school, a story, a metric, or an economic arrangement. The person creates the institution; the institution shapes the developmental conditions of the next person.

This second channel is neither immaterial nor separate from life. Every archive requires bodies, energy, maintenance, labor, and interpretation. Every institution enters the nervous systems of its participants through reward, threat, routine, language, expectation, and role. Symbolic continuity is always materially hosted, even when the material conditions of its hosting disappear from its self-description.

Civilization begins precisely where private organization becomes durable enough to outlive the organizer.

10. Disclosure and Veiling

Symbolic continuity operates in two modes.

Disclosure architecture preserves traceability between representation and condition. It keeps some relation to mortality, embodied cost, material limit, energetic requirement, historical consequence, relational complexity, uncertainty, other minds, and the remainder outside the account. A disclosure need not be literal or exhaustive. Myth, fiction, ritual, philosophy, and art may disclose through image, compression, contradiction, and dramatic form. What matters is whether the symbol returns perception to conditions it helps the organism encounter.

Veiling architecture allows symbolic forms to continue circulating after their connection to those conditions has weakened or disappeared. The language remains. The ritual remains. The metric remains. The doctrine remains. The institution remains. But the living reality originally encoded becomes inaccessible.

Veiling does not require a conspiracy or conscious lie. It emerges whenever the rewards of stimulation, identity reinforcement, commodity exchange, institutional survival, or power outrun the rewards of accurate registration. The image survives because it circulates; the body vanishes because it interrupts circulation. The account remains coherent by excluding whatever would require the account to change.

The result is a characteristic inversion:

more signal, less orientation; more representation, less contact; more identity, less self-knowledge; more capacity, less understanding of purpose.

Ontological displacement occurs when the instrument that should reveal reality becomes the substitute that prevents reality from being encountered.

11. Institution: Psychology Made Durable

A universalized adaptation seeks durable form. It becomes family rule, workplace norm, religious command, political ideology, professional standard, economic account, technological system, or definition of success.

The private wound acquires procedure, budget, hierarchy, metric, architecture, ritual, story, reward, and punishment. A founder’s anxiety becomes policy. A parent’s abandonment fear becomes compulsory loyalty. A nation’s humiliation becomes destiny. A profession’s fear of error becomes bureaucracy. A civilization’s terror of limitation becomes endless expansion.

The originating person may disappear. The structure remains. Later participants inherit the adaptation not as somebody’s strategy but as reality: this is how serious people work; this is what love requires; this is what success means; this is what history demands.

Institutions do not simply copy their founders. They generate complementary roles. A grandiose leader may produce admirers who mirror certainty, anxious followers who borrow confidence, rescuers who repair impossible commitments, translators who convert fantasy into workable action, scapegoats who absorb failure, dissidents consumed by exposure, and hidden operators who preserve functionality without recognition.

The central wound becomes everyone else’s role.

The system becomes most efficient when external command is introjected. The employee asks, “Am I making excuses? Am I insufficiently ambitious?” The child thinks, “If my parent is upset, I have failed.” The caretaker thinks, “If I stop helping, I am selfish.” The achiever thinks, “If I rest, I am disappearing.”

The institution has entered the person. Inherited demand is experienced as conscience, professionalism, loyalty, aspiration, character, or common sense.

12. Distributed Cost and the Law of Debt

A closed system preserves coherence by assigning costs elsewhere. One person receives regulation; another carries consequence. The controller receives relief from uncertainty while others lose autonomy. The expansive leader receives admiration and protection from insignificance while others receive emergency labor, instability, and blame. The compulsive caretaker receives indispensability while others remain dependent. The morally pure group receives innocence while an enemy receives projected guilt.

The cost migrates into bodies, relationships, labor, attention, health, silence, guilt, burnout, self-doubt, erased history, ecological damage, and future generations. An action may last seconds while its consequences reorganize another life for years.

Consequences do not vanish. They find places to live.

This is the deepest meaning of debt in the system. Debt is not merely money owed. It is unresolved consequence still traveling. If denied, it is transferred. If moralized, it may be assigned to the wrong person. If converted into infinite punishment, the account reproduces the injury it claims to settle. If consciously borne, repaired where possible, and prevented from becoming another person’s unconscious inheritance, it may cease reproducing itself in the same form.

The law is:

If a debt is paid wrongly, someone else carries what remains. If it is paid rightly, it may stop being debt.

Right payment is not equivalent retaliation. It is the metabolization of consequence.

13. The Account and the Remainder

Every institution creates an account. The account may be financial, statistical, legal, moral, historical, photographic, bureaucratic, diagnostic, or algorithmic. It must select, because no record can contain the whole.

Selection is unavoidable. Concealment is not.

The ethical questions are therefore: What is excluded? Who controls the frame? Who benefits from the omission? Who can answer the account? What happens to the remainder?

A closed account treats its frame as reality. It converts persons into fields: name, image, value, productivity, risk, debt, status, diagnosis, classification. Each field may be locally accurate. Their assembly may still produce a false person. An institution can arrange true fragments into a false whole.

The account becomes violent when it denies the right of whatever it names to alter the meaning of the name. A photograph may preserve evidence and crop out causation. A ledger may record every transaction while concealing the structure that guarantees the debt. A productivity measure may count output while excluding exhaustion. A historical archive may preserve the victor’s documentation and the defeated person’s absence.

The remainder is not a defect that better administration will always eliminate. Some remainder belongs to the irreducibility of persons, events, and other minds. An answerable account seeks greater accuracy while acknowledging that completion is not possession.

14. America as a Conversion Architecture

Within this cosmology, America appears as a concentrated historical theater of conversion:

gift into property; body into labor; movement into freedom; expansion into virtue; image into commodity; person into account; appetite into progress; history into product.

The sharecropper’s ledger provides the governing image. The account appears neutral, yet seed, feed, medicine, tools, food, interest, and whatever amount the owner requires are deducted so that the total remains debt. The arrangement calls itself an account. Its function is continued dependency. The family calls it half the crop because that is easier than calling it the whole life.

This is the defended psyche translated into arithmetic. The conclusion is required in advance; reality is organized until the conclusion appears objective. The ledger performs socially what motivated reasoning performs psychologically.

The American conversion machine is not reducible to hypocrisy. It is powerful because its declarations can contain real disclosures. Freedom, mobility, enterprise, self-creation, and democratic answer are not empty terms. Their historical force lies partly in the fact that they name genuine human possibilities. Veiling occurs when the symbol’s truth is used to conceal the material distribution of access, labor, risk, and consequence required to sustain it.

The critique must therefore be double. It must neither surrender the disclosure to the institution that betrays it nor allow the disclosure to absolve the institution. It must recover the promise from the machinery of conversion and ask whom the machinery made carry its cost.

Part IV. Modernity, Technology, and Catabasis

15. Modernity as the Escape from Embodiment

Modernity externalizes capacity. Machinery multiplies physical strength. Industrial organization multiplies coordination. Computation multiplies calculation and memory. Artificial intelligence multiplies symbolic production and recombination.

Each enlargement is real. The mistake lies in the compensatory bargain attached to it:

If capacity can be expanded without practical limit, finitude will no longer have to be experienced as the condition of human life.

Production becomes proof of progress. Consumption becomes proof of fulfillment. Efficiency becomes proof of intelligence. Convenience becomes proof of welfare. Yet the human being remains metabolically, neurologically, emotionally, developmentally, and mortally finite. The machine records output; the nervous system records cost.

Technical capacity can alter the conditions of suffering, extend life, reduce drudgery, distribute knowledge, and enlarge possibility. The argument is not anti-technical. It is against the substitution of capacity for purpose. A civilization may become increasingly able to act while becoming less able to say what action is for.

When meaning cannot be answered, convenience becomes the proxy. The questions “What is a human being? What is enough? What forms of attention deepen life? What should power serve?” are replaced by “Is this faster? Easier? Cheaper? Does it remove friction?”

Convenience is a property of tools. It becomes veiling when it is promoted into a metaphysics of flourishing.

16. Catabatic Conditions

Every symbolic order has finite regulatory bandwidth. A civilization can generate more technological, informational, economic, political, and existential load than its inherited forms can metabolize.

Under catabatic conditions, inherited institutions continue circulating while their connection to lived reality weakens. Symbolic output proliferates; orientation declines. Individuals encounter raw conditions of mortality, status, desire, ecological risk, and social fragmentation through systems increasingly optimized for stimulation rather than integration.

The result is saturation and absence at once: more language, less articulation; more images, less seeing; more data, less judgment; more connection, less relation; more declared identity, less capacity to endure contradiction.

Catabasis is not mere decline and not an automatic prophecy of collapse. It names a descent produced when complexity exceeds navigational form. A breakdown can intensify veiling through panic, scapegoating, and authoritarian simplification. It can also expose what the inherited account could no longer represent.

The question is whether descent produces only disorganization or becomes passage: whether a culture can return from the limits of its symbols bearing forms more adequate to embodiment, consequence, and relation.

17. Artificial Intelligence: The Archive Without Descent

Artificial intelligence marks a genuine transformation in civilizational symbolic continuity. The archive was once comparatively passive: records required biological interpreters to activate, connect, and redistribute them. Artificial systems can now process, classify, recombine, generate, and transmit symbolic material at extraordinary scale.

The archive has become active.

But symbolic power and existential standing must not be conflated. As of 2026, current scientific assessments do not establish consciousness in existing AI systems, and serious researchers distinguish functional indicators from proof of subjective experience.[6] The philosophical question remains open for future systems. The present argument is narrower: current language-centered systems process human symbolic products without having demonstrated the mortal, metabolic, developmental, and affective traversal from which those products arose.

They can process descriptions of grief without thereby establishing that they grieve. They can recombine testimony about death without thereby approaching death as the anticipated dissolution of lived continuity. They can reproduce the form of revelation without demonstrating the descent that gave revelation existential charge.

This creates the characteristic danger of the age:

Maximum archival access joined to minimum demonstrated existential grounding.

The map circulates without the territory. The symbol is reproduced without proof of the wound. A civilization may possess every recorded statement about mortality while becoming less able to encounter mortality directly.

18. The Proper Subordination of AI

The correct relation to artificial symbolic recursion is neither rejection nor submission. It is subordination to humanly answerable purposes.

AI can serve disclosure when it helps a person compare evidence, connect archives, test interpretations, recover neglected relations, clarify thought, extend memory, or expose inconsistencies. It becomes veiling when production substitutes for experience, judgment, responsibility, patient attention, historical encounter, or the formation of a mind.

The issue is not whether the machine generated a sentence that resembles understanding. The issue is what relation the human reader establishes to that sentence. Does it return the reader to evidence, experience, consequence, and independent judgment? Or does it allow symbolic completion to arrive before the capacities required to evaluate completion have formed?

Human oversight, access to remedy, transparency, and responsibility are not administrative ornaments. They are institutional forms of answerability; international AI ethics frameworks likewise emphasize these principles.[7] Yet oversight remains shallow if the institution asking for it is itself insulated from those affected by its systems.

The governing relation is therefore:

Artificial symbolic recursion should serve existential disclosure that it cannot be presumed to originate. The archive may serve the descent. It cannot replace the descent.

Part V. Art, Truth, and Historical Incarnation

19. The Existential Masterwork

The great work of philosophy, literature, religious imagination, or art is a high-density disclosure architecture. It preserves not only information but the pressure of confrontation with mortality, contradiction, beauty, suffering, injustice, history, desire, and being.

Its power lies in its capacity to reactivate the existential aperture in another nervous system. The reader does not merely learn what another person believed. The reader partially undergoes an organization of perception. One mortal form’s traversal becomes a symbolic body through which confrontation can continue beyond individual death.

This is why a masterwork cannot be reduced to content. A summary may report its propositions while extinguishing the conditions of attention by which those propositions became visible. Form is not decoration applied to thought. In the masterwork, form is the preserved movement of thought through resistance.

Yet art is not automatically disclosive. It can become commodity, prestige, identity, anesthetic, or proof of the artist’s exception. The seer may need the sleeping world. The prophet may need unbelievers. The theorist may convert total explanation into protection from contingency.

The work becomes more answerable when it includes the conditions of its own production within its field of suspicion. The observer must remain inside the theory.

20. The Scroll and the Wounded Interior

Master Scroll 1 occupies the point at which the operator is experienced from inside the body before conceptual separation. It registers animal inheritance, sexual reproduction, metabolic hunger, blood, history, death, prophecy, beauty, madness, dream, god, extinction, and recurrence as one continuous pressure.

The Scroll sees civilization as organisms manufacturing masks through which embodiment becomes inhabitable. The mask is false insofar as it hides the wound; it is necessary insofar as it permits a mortal organism to move through life without perpetual exposure to everything it knows.

The visionary task is therefore not simply to tear away the mask. Total exposure can destroy orientation as surely as total concealment. The task is to reopen passage between symbol and condition without imagining that the seer occupies a view from outside existence.

The prophet is another wounded persistence architecture. Prophecy may disclose the world, and it may project the prophet into the world. The deepest visionary work knows both. It does not escape the madhouse. It is the madhouse becoming partially conscious of itself.

21. Comedy and Tragedy

Comedy and tragedy are not opposite descriptions of history. They are the same mechanism viewed from different positions.

Tragedy is the view from the body carrying the cost. Comedy is the view from the machinery declaring the cost necessary while wearing the costume of human importance.

The empire says destiny. The corporation says efficiency. The state says necessity. The collector says authenticity. The moralist says righteousness. Comedy strips the compensatory claim of metaphysical dignity and reveals appetite, vanity, fear, bureaucracy, and self-importance beneath the sacred costume.

Tragedy preserves the wound beneath that costume. It refuses to let the exposure of absurdity erase the body that was injured.

Comedy without tragedy becomes cruelty. Tragedy without comedy grants the machinery too much dignity. Together they reveal the costume and the cost.

22. Truth as Distributed Custody

No single witness contains the whole. No photograph is uncropped. No account is complete. No theory escapes position. This does not make truth impossible. It makes truth relational and answerable.

Truth is therefore not possession by a solitary omniscience, whether institutional or prophetic. It is distributed custody among partial witnesses whose frames can be examined and responsibly aligned.

Accountable framing requires preserved evidence, disclosed limits, multiple witnesses, the right of reply, revisability, and attention to exclusion. The claim “I see only part” is not a surrender of truth. It is the first condition of an account that can be answered.

The governing epistemic law is:

Selection is unavoidable. Concealment is not.

Part VI. Answerable Life

23. A Living System Receives What It Causes

A dead or compensatory system protects itself from feedback. It treats consequence as attack, silences the answerer, preserves its official identity by assigning failure elsewhere, and calls its inability to change consistency.

A living system is alterable by what it affects. It treats error as information, permits strong voices to disagree without dissolving the form, and allows participants to complete rather than merely obey the structure.

This principle does not mean that every reply must govern the system, every boundary must dissolve, or every conflict can be harmonized. A form incapable of protecting any boundary cannot persist long enough to remain answerable. The requirement is more exact: the answers of affected persons must be capable of becoming consequential information rather than noise defined in advance as resistance.

The positive institutional law is:

A living form must be alterable by the answers of those it affects.

24. Answerability Beyond Accountability

Accountability can remain one-directional. An authority may demand that subjects justify themselves while remaining insulated from their answers. It may collect feedback without surrendering any power of revision. It may permit speech while ensuring that speech cannot alter the account.

Answerability requires reciprocal architecture. A person named by an account must possess meaningful capacity to answer, correct, refuse, add context, reveal omitted cost, challenge the frame, and alter interpretation.

An institution becomes more answerable as the people living under its categories gain power to revise those categories. A relationship becomes more answerable as each person can remain separate without the bond collapsing. A theory becomes more answerable as evidence and other minds can force it to change.

Answerability is persistence with open consequence.

It is not the abandonment of judgment. Some accounts are better than others; some claims are false; some actions require limit or sanction. Answerability means that judgment remains exposed to evidence, reply, proportionality, and revision. It refuses both sovereign certainty and the relativism that makes every answer inconsequential.

25. Grace and the Closure of the Account

A system organized entirely by accounting can never finish. Every action produces remainder. Every gift creates asymmetry. Every repair leaves something unresolved. Every historical account excludes. Every life ends with incomplete obligations.

If completion requires perfect settlement, no account can close.

Grace is not the claim that no balance exists. It is not innocence, forgetting, exoneration, or denial of consequence. It is the refusal to let the unpaid remainder become an infinite mechanism of possession.

Grace is the book being closed while a balance remains.

It permits completion to belong to the human being rather than to the account. It interrupts the recursion by which every wound is converted into another person’s debt and every debt into authority over another future.

Grace without truth becomes evasion. Accounting without grace becomes endless capture. The answerable form preserves both consequence and the possibility that consequence need not possess the remainder of a life.

26. Integration: The Strategy Ceases to Be Sovereign

Integration does not mean becoming unwounded, undefended, pure, or free of inheritance. It means that the adaptation ceases to govern as unquestionable law.

The person becomes able to say: This strategy protected me. It produced real strengths. It also excludes part of reality. Its necessity is historically intelligible, not metaphysically absolute. It does not determine what another person must want. My need does not automatically become another person’s obligation.

Integration proceeds through six movements:

1. Observation: I notice the pattern. I become controlling when I feel uncertain.

2. Ownership: I recognize its regulatory function. Control is not only a response to unreliable people; it protects me from helplessness.

3. Toleration: I permit contact with the concealed condition. I can experience uncertainty without immediately eliminating it.

4. Choice: I respond to present conditions rather than historical compulsion. Control may be useful here, but it is not mandatory.

5. Separateness: I recognize another mind as irreducible. My anxiety does not invalidate another person’s boundary.

6. Responsibility: I bear more of the cost of my psychic life. I will not require another person to become the instrument of my regulation.

The adaptation remains available. That is essential. Integration does not demand the destruction of competence, ambition, care, skepticism, independence, or vision. It releases capacity from compulsory service to the wound.

27. Freedom Under Constraint

Freedom is not the absence of constraint. Without constraint, no determinate form exists. It is not infinite choice. Every organism acts through a body, history, language, culture, environment, and finite time.

Freedom is the increased capacity of a persistence architecture to recognize what is moving through it and to choose without being wholly governed by what once had to remain unconscious.

The achiever becomes freer when achievement is available but not compulsory. The caretaker becomes freer when care does not require being needed. The leader becomes freer when correction does not produce collapse. The believer becomes freer when doubt does not destroy identity. The intellectual becomes freer when uncertainty does not require retreat into abstraction. The independent person becomes freer when dependence does not mean defeat or possession.

Freedom begins when the strategy ceases to be sovereign.

28. The Observer’s Compensation

The theory must finally turn upon the theorist.

To perceive the compensatory structure of others can produce a new compensation: everyone else is unconscious; I alone see. The observer’s bargain becomes, “If I understand every mechanism, nothing can govern or injure me.”

Insight becomes invulnerability. Analysis replaces encounter. Contempt protects against disappointment. Total explanation becomes a fortress against contingency, dependence, and mystery.

The observer has not exited the madhouse. He occupies another room within it.

A complete theory must therefore include the following admissions: My perception may be real. My need to remain outside may also be organized. Seeing another person’s defense does not abolish my own. Understanding vulnerability is not the same as allowing vulnerability. There is no final exterior position.

Intellectualization is especially dangerous because it resembles integration. A person may explain why he withdraws, fears dependence, becomes contemptuous, needs control, or repeats a relational pattern while remaining unable to act differently.

Integration is not demonstrated only by what a person can explain. It is demonstrated by what the person can bear. Can the thinker remain present without solving? Can he receive affection without reducing it to motive? Can he need without experiencing degradation? Can he encounter another person as more than an instance of a theory? Can knowledge remain open rather than becoming armor?

Thought discloses when it remains connected to embodiment, uncertainty, relation, evidence, and consequence. It veils when explanation replaces contact.

29. The Shamanic Function and the Return

Across cultures, the shamanic function names a passage through the limits of an inherited symbolic order and a return bearing transmissible form. It comprises descent, exposure, disorganization, encounter, reconfiguration, return, and transmission.

The term should not erase the particularity of actual shamanic traditions or convert them into generic psychology. Here it names a recurrent cultural function rather than a claim that philosophy, art, science, and ritual are historically identical. The function appears whenever a person or community crosses beyond an exhausted symbolic arrangement, encounters conditions it could not represent, and returns with a form capable of reorganizing collective perception.

Its test is not unusual experience alone. The test is transmission. Revelation that cannot enter material life becomes command without nourishment. Ancient instruction must sometimes accept flour. The command must become dough: something that can be eaten, divided, revised, carried, misunderstood, and shared.

A civilization that destroys every passage beyond its official symbols does not abolish the conditions those passages once mediated. It leaves individual nervous systems to encounter them without preparation, recognition, or collective form. What another culture might have organized as passage may then appear only as private pathology.

The return completes the descent. Disclosure must reenter consequence.

Part VII. The Moral and Cosmological Synthesis

30. The Moral Law

The moral law of this cosmos is not imposed from outside the persistence operator. It arises when a form capable of registering consequence systematically prevents consequence from becoming legible; when a system capable of recognizing other minds treats them only as instruments; when a civilization capable of representing cost survives through the concealment of cost.

The demand is:

Do not preserve your coherence by making another form carry what you refuse to know.

This law does not promise purity. Every living form consumes. Every boundary excludes. Every action changes conditions. Conflict, asymmetry, death, and tragic remainder cannot be abolished by moral declaration.

The demand is not innocence. It is answerability: register more of the cost; conceal less of the transfer; preserve the other person’s power to answer; revise the form when its continuation requires voiceless suffering; bear what can be borne; repair what can be repaired; refuse the fantasy that every remainder can be owned or settled.

31. Answerable Persistence

A form must persist. Without persistence there is no life, consciousness, relation, memory, art, ethics, or answer. But persistence becomes destructive when it treats its own continuation as absolute and externalizes every cost required to maintain it.

Answerable persistence means:

• maintaining continuity without declaring continuity sacred in itself;

• preserving boundaries without converting boundaries into domination;

• receiving feedback without defining every contradiction as attack;

• registering cost without pretending every cost can be eliminated;

• recognizing other minds without assimilating their meanings into one’s need;

• allowing reply to alter the account;

• metabolizing consequence rather than exporting it invisibly;

• refusing infinite possession through debt, diagnosis, identity, or historical judgment;

• preserving the remainder that no formal representation can own.

It is not self-erasure. A form that cannot protect any boundary cannot remain capable of relation. It is not domination. A form that cannot be altered by what it affects becomes closed, brittle, and veiling.

Answerable persistence is organized continuity with open consequence.

32. The Complete Operator

The complete sequence is:

energetic flow - > temporary organized coherence -> biological self-maintenance -> genomic continuity -> nervous-system modeling -> recursive self-registration -> existential aperture -> awareness of vulnerability -> compensatory regulation -> real capacity -> identity -> symbolic continuity -> universal truth claim -> institution -> distributed consequence -> symbolic veiling -> overload and catabasis -> disclosure -> answerability -> integration -> living continuity.

The sequence is analytical, not chronologically linear. Multiple movements coexist. A technologically advanced society may remain psychologically primitive. An ancient ritual may preserve a sophisticated disclosure architecture. A person may be integrated at work and rigid in intimacy. An institution may remain operational while degrading the conditions of its long-term viability. A disclosure may arise inside a veiling institution; a compensation may generate the capacity by which it is eventually recognized.

The operator recurs, but recurrence does not erase difference. At each scale, its terms must be translated into the capacities, materials, timescales, and forms of agency actually present. Formal analogy becomes false when it is used to attribute consciousness to every persistence, moral status to every continuity, or biological purpose to every physical pattern.

The operator is valuable only if it increases discrimination rather than replacing discrimination with one magnificent word.

33. The Governing Laws

The Law of Persistence

What persists does so through organized continuity under constraint.

The Law of Recursion

The stabilized outputs of one level become substrates and conditions of higher levels.

The Law of Existential Disclosure

At sufficient recursive depth, a persistence architecture may become capable of registering the conditions of its own continuity as lived experience. The emergence of subjectivity remains an open explanatory boundary.

The Law of Compensation

An organism constructs strategies to regulate conditions it cannot continuously bear.

The Law of Capacity

Repeated compensation can generate real discipline, perception, care, competence, power, or invention.

The Law of Identity

A repeatedly used regulatory capacity can become indistinguishable from the person’s sense of self.

The Law of Universalization

A private adaptation becomes a claim about reality, morality, value, or human nature.

The Law of Institutionalization

A universalized adaptation acquires durable symbolic, procedural, economic, technological, and political form.

The Law of Distributed Cost

A closed system preserves coherence by relocating unregistered consequences into other bodies, roles, populations, environments, or generations.

The Law of Veiling

A symbolic architecture becomes veiling when its forms continue circulating while losing traceability to the conditions they originally encoded.

The Catabatic Law

When symbolic, technological, political, and existential load exceeds the regulatory bandwidth of inherited forms, coherence degrades into fragmentation, saturation, and loss of orientation.

The Law of Disclosure

A symbolic architecture becomes disclosive when it restores contact between representation and the conditions of persistence.

The Law of Living Systems

A living human system persists by receiving what it causes.

The Law of Answerability

A person or system named by an account must retain meaningful capacity to answer, correct, refuse, contextualize, or transform the account.

The Law of Debt

Unmetabolized consequence continues moving until it is consciously borne, transformed, or transferred.

The Law of Grace

Completion does not require the fiction that every balance has been settled.

The Law of Integration

Freedom increases when an adaptation becomes consciously available rather than compulsively sovereign.

Coda: Civilization Begins to Live

Existence is recursive persistence becoming increasingly capable of registering itself through temporary forms.

Life inherits the struggle for continuity. Consciousness experiences that struggle as vulnerability, desire, mortality, dependence, beauty, and contradiction. To remain coherent, the organism constructs behavioral and symbolic adaptations. Those adaptations produce genuine capacities. Capacities become identities; identities become doctrines; doctrines become institutions; institutions organize bodies, labor, memory, value, and meaning.

When institutions lose contact with the conditions from which they arose, they become veiling architectures. They preserve declared coherence by distributing costs into lives they do not fully recognize. History is the record of those transfers.

Art compresses confrontation into transmissible form. Philosophy makes the operator intelligible. Psychology studies its conversion into selfhood. Politics struggles over whose persistence will be protected and whose cost will be hidden. Economics formalizes the distribution of energy, labor, value, scarcity, and obligation. Technology externalizes organized capacity into durable systems. Religion preserves, transforms, and sometimes veils the relation between finite life and powers exceeding it. Comedy reveals the machinery beneath sacred claims. Tragedy preserves the bodies that machinery consumes. Grace closes the account without denying the remainder. Integration restores traceability between identity and wound, action and consequence, self and other.

The final question is not whether existence can escape constraint. It cannot.

The final question is not whether life can cease consuming, excluding, choosing, and imposing consequence. It cannot.

The question is whether a form can become conscious enough of its own persistence that it no longer mistakes every strategy of survival for universal truth.

Can it receive the answers of what it affects?

Can it bear more of its own cost?

Can it preserve continuity without making another form’s voiceless suffering the concealed condition of its existence?

The total cosmos operator resolves into one final principle:

Existence becomes ethically and ontologically adequate when persistence becomes answerable to the conditions, consequences, and other forms through which its continuity is achieved.

Or, in its most compressed form:

Being persists. Consciousness registers the cost. Compensation conceals it. History distributes it. Disclosure reveals it. Answerability transforms it.

Freedom begins when the strategy ceases to be sovereign.

Civilization begins to live when it can receive what it causes.

Notes and Sources

The central operator, terminology, literary interpretations, and normative synthesis in this work are original arguments. The following sources document the limited empirical and philosophical premises explicitly identified in the text; they do not by themselves establish the total cosmology.

1. NASA Science, “Stars,” overview of stellar formation, structure, life cycles, and energetic process: https://science.nasa.gov/universe/stars/

2. Libretti, S., and Puckett, Y., “Physiology, Homeostasis,” StatPearls , National Center for Biotechnology Information: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559138/

3. National Human Genome Research Institute, “Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) Fact Sheet” and “Genome”: https://www.genome.gov/about-genomics/fact-sheets/Deoxyribonucleic-Acid-Fact-Sheet ; https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Genome

4. Walsh, K. S. et al., “Evaluating the neurophysiological evidence for predictive processing as a model of perception,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1464 (2020): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7187369/

5. Clark, Andy, and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58, no. 1 (1998): https://consc.net/papers/extended.html

6. Butlin, Patrick, et al., “Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness” (2023): https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708

7. UNESCO, “Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence” (adopted 2021): https://www.unesco.org/en/legal-affairs/recommendation-ethics-artificial-intelligence