Afini: The Endless End;
Afini: The Endless End;
The Wheel of Death
Afini: The Endless End;
The Wheel of Death
I. The underbelly of hope
I sit to pen this novel from the underbelly of hope: the dug out, conglomerated mist of history. The evolutionary totem pole of the ape, the bird. The slow death of the birth chemical, Draino, Lysol, lithium, the genocide of the American native peoples.
History is spread out in an infinite measure; the strength to write this is a last strength, a sort of finality that remembers the boulevards of France, Paris; their cobblestones, as they are consumed by waves. The dirge and voice of the alleys of Rome, swallowed by the broken ballast of crumbled foundations.
This is the supreme isolation: the isolation of a wanderer who has wandered too far, too fast; fallen into the collapse of time like a whirlpool, a deeper gravity – where there is no form; form is shattered by the exponential multitude of force.
The white cabinets sit quietly; else besides the abandoned dormitories of the old school: chairs, tables, theatrical masks lost to dust. The engraved coal halls where miners etched their names – never to be seen by waking eyes.
The sight alone redeems the dead weight of materials. This history of transgressions is too deep: rape, brutality, murder, cycling under endless names and faces. To write them is merely a rearrangement of the symbolic lock. They all pronounce the struggling animal, the rape of the fish upon the hook of a greater symphonic: trapped in the genum code of creation.
Enslaved. And the days roll forth with the conviction of a fortune teller. That they will bring the good salve to light. The shifting face of the lover chased in dreams, down black, fading corridors. Corroded in shadows. Gaping halls lit by the blue moon. The naked arms of thin, young trees.
Know the one who writes this as the one who is tired of running, same as you. There is no parade, nor grotesque carnival which paints a salve over the dungeon of the real. The madmen in our midst, driven to insanity by the ill effects of lust, which draw up the skirt and penetrate the nectar which endlessly births womb after womb.
Each one drops into the earth and is forgotten. Culture is memory alone. Language sustains where time ruthlessly forgets and consumes. We are a furnace; within it only smoke – to be burned away. This is what is life; in the last derangement, there is the nihil of the Walmart, the mass grave on television – bodies buried alive – or else the flat affect of dead men and women who walk upright only because the brain urges the lashed body forth.
The death of meaning is this: carelessness. A world too far revealed; too lit to the bloody hegemony of the past. And as such, release, relinquishment. Surrender. There is no war to be fought; no war to be won – Iraq, the Philippines, Southeast Asia. What little deviation appears on the surface of culture is reserved same in the rape and religious violence.
Men attempt to climb up the body and become stung by pleasure in the face of the mute, brutal, numb affect of existence. Man is used by time for time’s means and ends – again and again to reproduce himself, never learning for the better until mankind itself is resolved.
This is the terror: the trash heap, the castaway, runoff waste. The dung of mankind’s desperate attempt to conjure pleasure amidst misery unto torture and the killing of the bastard. News stations are produced to whip colonies into a fervor. The racialized war of Fox News. The silence of CNN. The quick forgetting; the blind eye to atrocities to further personal agendas of wealth and power. The stowing away of cash in suits. The pill addicted, dirt poor ushered into a hall where they spend their few meagre dollars to continually enrich the most schadenfreude twisted flesh.
It is the children buried by bombs; the children used as sex toys by empire’s most twisted; the most powerful. Violence rules man; the force of violence intimidates, takes, and uses until there is nothing left to be used. At the top of this rope, man has no qualms with abandoning all pretense of morality or ethic. All will be used, murdered, destroyed – to maintain a semblance of self security; to silence a counter narrative; a story told from the other side of the gun.
It is this madness that produces the underbelly of hope. I sit among useless things that will sit until they burn away and decay: ceiling fans, pillowcases, mattresses, books. We are unmoving; dissolving under the absolute weight of history: a weight which crushes us and reproduces the calamity of mankind over and over again. Poets like Mayakovsky attempted to escape and declare a new transcendent spiritual humanity – they attempted to reach toward the essential spiritual creative essence within man: the absolute quality of transformation. He was leered at by Trotsky and Lenin, whitewashed by the Soviet regime; suicided before middle age to a game of roulette.
McDonalds, the laundromat. The spinning clothes in bleach. Sheets. Maudlin, regular drops of blood. The hand razor, shaving ever growing hair from skin. The slowly changing color of the face, hands, hair, eye. The dripping, dribbling of time out from the gelatin of hell. Squeezing, squeezing out of time. Moulding the body towards the grave.
Man has baked a world atop of the earth and called it hell. Endless strip malls, caves of mirror lights, technological images. Shadowplays to prevent a real encounter with the condemned state of man. The rapidly heating earth. The violence of empire after empire, bearing down meaninglessly on its working enslaved. The millions of dead children in labor, mines, factories, presses, to imperial wars. All for power, all for greed.
The names that are listed are corporate names. Business entities. Shadow figures with no true self, no central body, nor heart, nor soul, nor dreams. Man has been replaced by the pure figuration of his greed; his one and sole idol. The greed of his sexual lust; the dream of his celebrity; the etching of his iconography into the authoritarian nightmare of the realization of man’s fundamental center of ego.
Today, man does not die. There is no descent into the evacuated, silent bowels of the earth. There is no death in the minds of men, only disembodied solar light. Picture after picture, ideation after ideation – fills the seat of the visions of men and carves the body of the earth unto its final realization. Mass, ritual sacrifice is the eternal motive of mankind: chased by dreams of feeding blood into the well and bowels of the earth to appease gods of harvest, or else to clear a path for religious indoctrination.
All of this was for nothing; it is all for naught. It was never but for a dream, a dream which is no matter; has no purpose or reason to become real but for the zealotic fervor. The truth of man is to sit and wait until vines overgrow him, rivers take him; nature reclaims him. Culture and civilization are mankind’s mad theater for delusion. What more, it is all a lost ark. A sinking ship – unto the realization of what has been wrought under the profound and utter neutral of mankind’s true place on earth; in the stars.
Slavery. The pyramids. The Empire State Building. Artificial intelligence. Man’s artifice and hubris spirals forward forever. Propelled by the drive of the sexual instinct and the asphyxiant necessity of man proving to himself that he exists, that he is real, that he has a purpose. Without it, there is only death; the facing of death and the absolute degradation of the physical form subjected to the brute forces of nature, gravity, and the compound, accumulated toll.
Nature grates against the soil and the earth and the form. Dissipates, grinds to salt and sand. Returns compound to particulate. Nothing of this is humanity. A brief assent. The slums of Mumbai. Eggs being cooked in hot oil in a dirty wok. Shanties made out of wood and straw. Clay, mud. Not to forget the cave; never to forget the cave – the pure survival that assails man from his peripheral vision and propels all true action beneath all pseudo consequence and ideology. There is only this base behind man; all of his actions proceed from this base insecurity.
And what of death? Unspeaking, silence, unaffected. Unpropelled by the concerns of man; fundamental. Geese, herds, trees. All fall ill to the silence of the loss of the green blood which holds them. The other side of hope proclaims truth to the most delusional. It is profoundly unliterary; without mortal arc. No salve to the simplicity, save the most fanatic, frantic; frenetic. Obsessed with the lie; legions of mad mercenaries who fuck, kill, bleed, scream; kick, cry, and claw for the last pickings of life as they are dragged into the black silence of death.
All is mourning. A preemptive slipping away, withering in the breeze which knocks the leaves and the Spanish moss. As men and women pass, children come and go, riding bicycles, sitting on white porches, they live and die in a black smooth silence unmarked by memory. Their eyes linger alone in photographs; linger alone in moments of private destitution which pierce the veil and reveal the true meaning and name of death: absence, loss, finality. Totality.
This material world is but a dream, a delusion. Berkshire Hathaway, Black Rock. These are the names which must be named as a vicious, violent murder. An assertion of a knife upon the throat of oblivion. The refusal of silence for the throated scream; the settler’s scalp. All who rush rush faster alone into death. Their blood runs and is marked for a moment by the rivers and is gone. The enslaved, thrown overboard on the Atlantic, their bones alone marking the passage of decades upon decades, enmeshed with the finely ground; compressed sand of the bottom of trenches of absolute black.
Even this violence is forgotten by nature and time. The concerns of men are gone. The names of empires which contained the factories of suffering; the lamenting screams of the wills repressed into the throat and chest and lungs of misery without a cry, without a word, without a name – the endless, nameless dirge of history and the chained slave remarking the earth with pickaxe and blood – it is all forgotten as a temporary eye of time. A temporary sight which marks the earth but for a moment before the earth’s own oblivion.
Spoiled by forgetfulness. The grocery list, the wedding ring, the red dress. These are all symbols for the human dream transposed upon the reality of time with the urgency and viciousness of sixteen billion silent, writhing dreams, screamed inside the body but never reaching the light of day, translated into mutterings, murmurs, silences; fragmented sentences. Man reaches toward the elucidation of his total truth and combusts upon the attempt. All falls before him and dies in the failure of his life. The failure to speak the true reason and heart of his soul. This is the one missive of human life. The one test, the one attempt. To reveal and elucidate what is in the depths of mankind.
All of these great evils, like a lion ripping the head from an antelope. So what is dying, in this droning silence? In this ambling on of days lit only by the cowardice and lies of men which litter governmental pedestals and news papers; books, speech? We wade, we writhe into the waters of life, the rivers of blood; do not pronounce; are untimely forgotten. We are soldiers in a meaningless war, with no out, no choice or prove for victory.
And this is the descent into madness. The casual, callous, careless murders. The colonated list of suicides. The endlessly enumerated tracts which, polished, profaned, detail each item, each material recovered. Each dollar. Each house. Each limousine. Each head of fruit. It is all perished, spoiled; late. So what is transgression? To drink the blood? To sing of the dead? It is to stand in the face of the abyss; coiled by snakes, demand only the true prove of words – the right reach, the right pitch to adequately, accurately describe the thing itself.
Filthy, unsanctified is the truth. Profaned is the last sacred device. Marcy. Idolatry. The coin. Liquor in a still. Shanty by the abandoned gas station. The little girl who cannot speak; who already lost all of her adult teeth. Face smeared in soot and holding a doll. Sledgehammer children. Grave children.
This little isle of flesh is ours for a certain moment; obliterated. Oblivion. What is lost was never gained; the words that ring out but for a moment in the brief silence are seized by the massive vacuums of space. We cannot be had, nor are we having. And this is our ill, our despair, our sickness. Our world’s grave of mourning. Hands reach out toward already retreating flesh. Faces wither and love is buried in chests; heaving, perishing, silenced. Still.
Know this, empty words, plastic. Porcelain. The unease of nameless things. Rift without language; without speech. It is in this last hour that the safety of culture falls away and we are exposed to the impenetrable, the swallowing. The nature of time for which there is no metaphor but the subtle grind and absolute degradation that takes its toll, sucking poison, minute by minute, hour by hour – until the silence of absolute sleep.
What then is man? Unspeaking loveseat. Unspeaking trees. Nature is a whisper before us; language a buffer between eyes that have seen too much, into the fold of truth; that which cannot bear to digest what the eyes have seen. So we must delude. Resist; institute mass chaos in the name of the mad grasping for sexual pleasures, distraction, television. Stories that will convince us there is another, hidden element. That fantasy can hold back the swell and water of the truth.
This is our cowardice; at last, this is our last hope.
II. Unspeakable
In the night of history, life abducts. Shrunken, abdicated, like an abandoned mosque in a modern world. Loss of sanctity. Desert of spiritual time. Desires that have been removed of all of their total depth; the whisper of life that guides man from birth to death and deepens fundamental unity. Replaced with profitable orgies. Inside the stars rot; space is a black gape wherein hostels are populated with brands; the cast out one legged beggars linger at truck stops and predictable main artery intersections of dying 18th century cities.
Time is condensed; history is a matter of sheer moments that come and go. The bralette; the unclasping. The fornication which jars the mute tongue of the teeth. A faint buzzing, caffeinated; a seizure of consciousness. A syncope of awakening; enlightenment; an equal descent into drug addled repair of withdraw. Purely chemical, fifteen second reels broadcast all over the world from the most destitute; impoverished, formerly religious chained adherents indulging in the forbidden lust. Children traded in the dead of night. Entire servers dedicated to pawning rape, violence, murder.
These wild men are caught in penitentiary portraits – forgotten from history but in the internet archives. No Gauguin; artless. The twisted ape entangled in passions, never beneath the flesh, always rushing upward into the desperate expression of the blood before time abates; the body curls up and dries like a fruit in an endless beating down of an Arabian sun. Time out of time, this is no time – other than the desperate resurrection of spiritual destitution in the name of pleasure. The child is killed; maimed; leaving only the video game screen to peer through forever; seeking to retain a sheer artery of light to fix the gutted body.
This is our life, the life of the modern man; the death and abdication of dreams. There is no throne in this world, only the desert of a broken language, heeled by lust and the ever deepening crack of machine men whored forth to Instagram, OnlyFans, Facebook. The meaningless names crack and whip, twist the face and draw blood until only empty yellow eyes remain. There are no stories to tell of resistance, because the affect is neural deep. It is a strickening. A slow drawing out, a long murder of the passions of the blood – thrown into a silenced, eyes closed sexual practice of complete spiritual withdrawal; murder for orgasm as a function equivocal to pissing. There is no contact; no unity.
A sole object, lost in space, untethered, flashing advertisements for Botox and ingestible chlorine. The chemical turning over, once and once more fixing the body in solutions to produce the necessary warm quivering to convince the body and the mind that life has been surmounted. The porn induced orgasm. The yacht orgy sponsored by business technology. The mad, wild screaming in a festival doomed to end in the broken carelessness of those who flew to the ends of the earth to consummate a misplaced Dionysian rite. Man is dead but for the twitching; the death throes of his dripping, salivate adherence to his concubines.
What is this hell then? A hell of iniquities? A hell of silence. A hell of the morgue of the soul, lashed by brands. Snickers. Northrop Grumman. Police dog robots with canine, metal teeth. Hentai porn. Jet fighters piercing g force states to deliver munitions on a childrens’ soccer field before the mind can register – ordained from remote computers, thousands of miles across the globe. From every angle, there is obliteration; the slow causal wound. And from none of it emerges the held hand of child to child, wandering off into the woods to prick the rose bush thorn in the snow. We have watched this death, shared, livestreamed it, indulged it; beaten ourselves with it until we are bloody and absent, staring upward in penitence to a nothing that we do not believe nor see.
We have taken this world to be absolutely physical; as such, lawless. Without an ethic of unity, without a sense of felt present. And this is why we are condemned. The death of emotion. The death of feeling. Enough Burger King will heal the wound of death, dopaminergic. Enough drugs, ketamine, molly, morphine – enough of it will carry us from the hell realm into the piercing thunder of the divine. Purely chemical absolution. The body is rocked and shuttered for a seeming aeon and then buried or burned.
In the desert they rape children; in the silence of the blue sea distance on all sides they commit the typical unspeakable crimes, sealed away from the propaganda of the world. All the false privacy of corruption seeps out into the eyes; the mouth, the twisting of the face. And thus we are left with nothing; hollowed out; weighed down like stones to the gravitational pull of the earth as desperate beasts looking for a fix as the sands run out.
Shocked to death at birth by the millions of murders that occurred before us that were breathed into this world by idolators and mad fanatics; caliphates, Crusades, Witch Trial burnings, terrorist plots, CIA black site operations. We breathe this into our lungs in a thousand sheer silences which inform the infant’s eyes, heart, lungs, nostrils, nerves. They carve the wound of the brain with the sounds of a thousand rearranging synapses: the mental architecture of a deranged, diseased, starved ape – wandering about the broken jungle of skyscraping carcasses; ingesting flesh, metal, diesel fuel through the nostrils.
This sheer carnage is our composite; our inheritance. No wonder men are dead; death. Breathe no life forward in the only way that matters: emotion, heart, soulfulness. The pure abnegation of feeling – the total sensorium rendered forth in a stomping duende. A cry of love and heartbreak, Spanish grief in a silent moonlit veranda. There is one strumming guitar, one agonizing, cutting balladeer of love.
We know truth in our heart of hearts. Buried like a cave in, like a lost tribe of miners in the dusk of our world. The death of mankind to avarice. Dull, cutting avarice which enables genocide through business process. The simple making of money, the following of orders. Thousands and millions of children die over this; we do not even blink. Rather, we laugh. We laugh over Thanksgiving dinners about stock markets; dolls, toys, trinkets, cars. In our little private families. Our little private sanctified murders. And this is our glee. That we survive while others don’t.
Think of this terror. Consider it truly; what it does and has done to the soul. How we are barred from the true sensate, the true embodied feeling. The sea of grief and agony which only emerges in Syrian rubble and in hospitals, on the verge of uncertain death. Instead we are lifted in the false light of Burning Mans; the fluorescent constancy of the sick womb of the CVS, the Rite Aid. Consider this silent slow death of moments. Flashes of absolute forgetting. And let the last of the fuel burn out to ash; drifting, in a silent comatose oblivion before the eventual black hole of endings.
Watch the stock glyph rise on a series of monitors. Pleasantly named prostitutes on Wall Street. Piles and piles of cocaine. The rage; fourteen hour days. Worker suicides in China at the Foxconn factory. They jump now into nets which prevent the dignity of death. Entire forests for suicides. Salarymen working overtime. Apartments the size of coffins. The desperation of mankind resides in the eyes; if it was entirely condensed, it would be the power of a supernova. Man is a vault for the volcanic. Beneath all desires there is truth; the truth is a form of grief so powerful, so absolute, so murdered – that it would break the world if it entered into space.
Factories would cease. Even sex would cease, in the astonishment at the emptiness of the act. Like shitting, we move through our lives evacuating the bowels of mute and vague instincts impelled by hormones. The shifting dead. Steps to the left, to the right, pulled to and fro by unseen forces. Marionettes in an arcade of ritual sacrifice at the level of the species; at the level of mankind. If we were to awake and feel, it would be a shattering that would fill the madhouses and asylums with reckonings – reckonings so broad and deep and wide and confessions of murder and callous abuse that they would invert man to the justice of his child.
The child awaits, abused in the corner of life. A squatter in a brutalist, Siberian building. This is the world’s soul. It is the architecture of KFCs, fourteen lane highways, sex trafficking; labor enslavement of international workers which informs the beating and suffering of this world soul. It is the child who now lives in the hands of the mass murderer, the serial killer, the rapist, the carnist. The genocide strategist. The one who proudly leads men to their doom; harvests their flesh for his mad vision of their labors: to a new glorious empire in his name; a temple of world power.
This is the ancient rite of sacrifice, from Aztec to Weimar. Egypt, Greek. Legions of slaves. Tribes seeking out dispossessed women. Fires long since burned out in the Nord of pillaging raiders. Taken women for meat and vaginal canal. Used and passed around by laughing American soldiers; German night guards. Factories where men, women, and children are turned gaunt; covered with black soot as they shovel their bleeding, blistered hands into the great sacrifice for the divine right of kings and concubines.
Used and beheaded; returned the favor in the proletarian wars. Chairs piled up into streets. Muskets fired. Songs sung. Then returned to the dirge of oppression; the mad, twisted fingers of men grasping around the head of child dolls. The greedy, laughing stubs of arms, legs, hands, gripping around the totem of erotic malfunction. Bursting, bleeding, sewage, dripping with pus and ejaculate from the genitalia. The thrusting redness of the grin. The aching, twisted mind, warped by leagues and leagues of historical backlog. A dataset that continues to compile. A list of atrocities too long to name and broach but poetically. Man, the crocodile. Man, the greatest beast. Immoral murder at scales unnamed and unseen. And thus, they persist with the glad stoic tidings of normalcy.
Listed in the nightly news with calm, detached, dissociative voice. Man is stung into submission by his own violence and hatred. Replaced with grocery aisles. Contraceptives. Trojan condoms. Prescriptions for Adderall. Xanax. Klonopin. Rattling orange bottles of white pills poured out with shaking hands. Children in line for church, dressed in Sunday suits. The sound of bombs whistling overhead. Impacting bunkers and underground shelters; raining down debris from the ceiling above. Hushed, lanterns. Waiting.
The nubile body. Petite, perky breasts. Wide, yet slim hips. Unknowing eyes. Something of the forests, peaceful, deerlike. This slaughter is delivered over and over again by the hell of men who have broken their child over their knee and brandished him like a war trophy. The head on the pike of the psyche of man – a world broken before there were words; thrown into lust and agony under the guise of experimentation and the rule and laws of nature. Calloused and empty. The steakhouses. Cheesecake Factory. The Bugatti. The Rolex watch. The finely pressed Armani suit — to project the image of wealth and power. The carnal appetite of man is so large and dissociative that it daggers teeth into flesh and rips with a broad smile. The eyes are nowhere. The victim, gazing up faintly in horror; the pure felt somatic sensation of life ripped from the twitching, motionless body. The sun is silent witness. Surrounded by LensCrafters, lithium mines; TedTalks. Polite clapping. Overhead a nuclear bomb explodes. Children, bloody, screaming for their mothers. More polite clapping. Attendees in their suits and ballgowns slowly file out of the room. In Charleston, West Virginia, a woman with a stump for a leg, pushing a Walmart shopping cart from the recently closed store looks up, her eyes murky; unseeing for this world.
There is another world entirely. Enter death; merge fully. There is another world entirely: the piss stained motel, box television, rippling waves of static, canvases poorly framed; tilted on nails. Beach landscapes. Homeless men smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. Dead fishing towns, dead factory towns. There is another world entirely: the thin thread and string is taut and snapped; the coil of life swings like a pendulum lost of tension toward death. The release, embodiment. The impoverished take on the body of the world’s suffering. They wear the world’s suffering like a mask in the flesh. They show what must be hidden in the upright speech and clean houses of the Parisian brownstone lawyers; the empty, stringing words of the politicians. They show the blood rendered and lost, not shrouded, not buried in unmarked mass graves, still struggling, writhing, alive, Palestinian families.
They wear the truth of this world. It is their bodies which speak beyond words. Very hungry, need to eat. We must know our seers. Enter the world of death and look them in the eye; you will see the effects of the world you have wrought for a moment of pleasure. A legacy of suffering that stretches on; forth in the wastes. That we wander and press on is a drive more ancient than all of us; our language; our tithes and games and codes. We merge and merge again in sacrificial oblivion. Blood, ovum, fluid spilled upon the gallery floors of history. We march in the mural of billions of dead men. Speaking the language of their flesh that they pinned to this totem pole of ecstatic awakening. We eat the flesh of life and are awakened, screaming, to the faculty of the lie. To see deeper is to be made availed the truth of all things; to see through the nature of time. Gaze into the gape and the riddles of the flesh; the knife that slashes through flesh like the canvas of history and time. You will know them as you see them. The dead that are still alive.
III. Terminus
The breath of the air alone retains us. Wavering, empty and still – like stalks in the wind. Naught else remains… emptied of worldly desires, pleasures, and pursuits. Seeking now only communion.
This is the great remedy. We are chased to death by dogs with wild tales of imagination until they are swallowed. Self consumed; autoerotic until totality. Every transgression upon the ledger of suckling womb is the face in the shadow of oblivion of the daemon. We fuck, rape, pillage and murder our reflection until the glass is shattered; the earth is rent apocalyptic dusk.
Is this the fate of man? To meditate upon the pyre of the burned and corroded real; to hinge on lust as the sole artifact and artifice that remains? Genital hunger. Warts; bleeding, hunched over gaping flesh. The walking wound of the beast that stood on hind legs; made up systems of languages, gods, symbols and signs for a profoundly animal destiny; sacrifice of meat and blood upon cool, unthinking stone.
We are soothed in the death: the first great death that is revelation of the wheel of death – spinning forever; encroaching all things, forward in their sensate oblivions, dream states, private islands; threshing them in the milk of eternity. If this is heaven: to remember death as godliness, the force of recombination which reclaims all things; flesh, ecstastically void and filled with the pumping number of voices. Organ systems. Cells writhing in a speech the ears cannot hear. The accustomed grinding of the Earth upon its axis; the hissing, seething of the sun and its black wounds; radiating tendrils.
To this: the call of a dead thing, in truth, sparked by electricity; animated by the neural current. We were writ long before; tenuously alive but for the ledger of chemical actions in synthesis which constitute even the vagaries of synthesis.
Examine the calm dead sparked with life. Their leery deceit, treachery, hatred. Betrayers of themselves and those they suppose to love. The organism fights for itself and itself alone until death is met and transcended. It is no matter that we beasts die. For what is life but the waiting room for death? Can we not reach a mortal fervor of revelation? To pierce the veil of light and become greater, loftier things – no longer chained to the sick, mute, rote repetitions of carnal evil and hatred?
We are not even sharks. Too stretched by sentience. Too conflicted. Heads filled with devils and angels; fear of death and lust for blood. The conflict stretches due to awareness of death. Man is flattened horizontally; emptied into a spilling over of the coffers of sexual hunger and metabolism or else shut up like a tomb – to rot, decay, corrode with meagre bread and the bones of fish, seals, whales. Arctic frost and African heat. Proximity to murder. The turning of the Earth’s face to and from the sun. We must die a solar death of sexual unity; the dripping salivary mouth – or die a death of protracted, prolonged cold – in a land where no sun shines: Siberian prison camps; execution lines pronounced with ringing gunshots across the icy wastes.
Lingering, wandering among the detritus, crosses, skulls, graven swords, shields – ages where the language and the old way was forgotten and erased. The hidden resonance and whispering of the blood. The blood memory. The dolls, dresses, in tatters – flags defaced, statues with hollows for eyes; flattened noses where noses once flared. This ineffable dynasty… a dynasty of the calm, cool aftermath of terror which is forgetting; yet the haunting sublime memory which is carried in the deepest blood and bone.
Man has not left time; not left transfiguration. The boney fish, the terradactyl. The mingling of solarity and nuclear force with the Earth. The pounding of physical violence and penetrative fields. First trauma, first birth – beyond memory into blood, body, and bone. This is the soma the ancients drank – the soma of their wisdom which struck them upright singing bold, wild songs of death in tones which reverberated the earth and beckoned the animals, jaguars, birds, tortoises from the forests, trees, and rivers.
We are the wastes. The time which breaks us from mortal heat; the ossuaries where reactions die and the earth lies cool and still – unbound to terrors and flagellant lusts; furies of war. The tired sad song is at last sung. This is meditation. Do you know death? Do you know the sting and then the silence, the untethered blackness. Unremembered. Unrecovered. At last – no eyes to see; no record to pronounce. Decontextualized. Nether body. Nether mind. Nether faculty. Sensate oblivion; not even compressed by dirt nor fingernail. No fleshly mark to register nerve compression. No fleshly mark olfactory. Aural.
As we are emptied, the true nature of life is revealed. Language is stripped to utter essentials. An economy of fundamentals – that all is void and lit by a turning voice which is heat. The stirring and the silence; the stripping once more of leaves and flesh; the pyre of bodies in the smashan which restores them, scorched, to the fabric of totality. As memory is erased, so is the last tincture of dying civilizations smudged from record; cultures blotched and blotted with the rainwater of nature’s time until they are translucent and resorbed.
Gone is opacity. False sight. Death is the introduction of the depth behind the appearance of temporality; the fire behind stone. The breaking rock of oblivion which renders the lit geode and returns the world to the first thunder, the first force; before it, the black silence. It is all temporal experience; all brief. A light which remarks a time which whizzes by unpronounced; unspoken – yet a near repetition of all other human times. The species’ back is broken and extinguished by one million small cuts over an aeon the length of a cosmic fingernail.
All of the war. All of the anguish, mad murder. Drifting in an impenetrable silence. Resorbed. The total sound of oblivion is one million deaths and one million births equalized in a barely audible white noise. The humming mark of all brief movement of mankind; the system of Earth’s star. And yet all within it holds the conviction of truth, meaning, power, artifice.
As we return to death, we are returned to life. Emptied, voluminous with light. The history of man is baggage to be known; sediment to be dug with the fury of a gravedigger in the night for a gem in the coming dawn. As we face oblivion, we must find oblivion within man. Then, and only then, are we truly free.