I’ve been wrong too many times not to talk about it. As we speak, I don’t know how deep I am beneath the house that hosts the family man, the successful writer, someone taking a chance, top of the class. Stylistic master. Working towards his doctorate. The coveted title. As his hero before him. His dad. We can still say that. God, the world that we live in. The waves that we crash through. The way they can split beds.
Derangement of the senses, is our only salvation, the only cure for death. What does it mean to say merely? What does it mean to say merely nihilism, merely solipsism?
What I say instead is precisely. I say whatever is devalued and dismissed out of hand precisely for not participating by the generally established rules of the communal debate there we must find the secret elixir if it should exist at all—among those “dead ends” one might find what is most fiercely viral, what has absolutely no survival value, what begins the terminal countdown to orgasmic self-extinction. …or, better yet, a count upward that must be suspended before it comes to any end.
Chen Zhaozi (1930–2002)
“My first memory is the army camp at Yan’an,” wrote Chen Zhaozi in his memoir. “That memory determined all the rest.” Chen’s father was a high-ranking officer in the Red Army, and Chen went on the Long March in his mother’s arms. In 1949, the family settled in Beijing. Due to his father’s position, Chen was able to study abroad at Humboldt University in East Berlin. He attended the productions of Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble and in 1951 began to write his first play, Autumn Harvest, in the style of Brecht’s epic theater.
Chen returned to Beijing in 1954 and took a position in the Ministry of Culture. He completed Autumn Harvest soon after; it was staged in 1956. The play depicts a 1927 peasant uprising in Hunan and concludes with what Chen called a “dialectical ballet.” Two years later, he completed The Water Seller, an adaptation of Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, praised the play and encouraged Chen to try his hand at opera. Working with composer Zhang Ye, Chen wrote The Prairie Fire, which premiered in 1963. Set in the Ming dynasty, the opera concerns a group of farmers and their greedy landlord. Chen designed a grotesque mask for the landlord character, but the actor was unable to sing in it, and the mask had to be replaced with dark make-up.
Can’t sleep son, been reading and was just thinking that if I could help you take that brilliant mind and reallocate all that gifting away from things of this world and into the deeper context of real spiritual things you have no idea how much you could be set free to live and live others. Anything is life first starts by decided and looking at our mind. Seeing and deciding what we think, then with that as a reference we decide what we will allow in. Today’s world is crushing with media and influence and shallowness in every possible way. There is a real Spirit realm where all things come from and are manifest, deeper knowledge and wisdom, empowering us into a place of reality where we attempt to get to with drugs, superficial beliefs and ideologies, or feelings and experiences that are temporary. For some getting high, some a fast car, some being in moral high ground, some intellectual
stimulation and superiority… it’s all idolatry. In that sense we seek and search and look. It always come down. The bubble always bursts and we realize it’s a bust. But there is a high that transcends getting high on whatever the short term idolatry (some very short like getting wasted) can ever provide.
BABYHEAD
Those of Jesus Town are curiously out of the world. Of the Rose, reconstituted of HIS superfluity. Some heed their request with exotic fails. Thus far and dross. A Wonder.
Laminar walls squirm filth.
Egg and Sky bled HIS life
The Eremite spins around his anus. The Seeker was his first mark in a millennium, apart from the Regenerates. They were insistent brats. He perforates the skulls of the foremost, tickling for pain. The Decay-Mystic extends the beguiling prostheses and spigots along his visible axis.
These days, it is not at all difficult to lead men. I will even go so far to say it is, in fact, easier than ever before. The following is an example of the time I found my way into what is known as a “message board.” Unlike traditional postage, one needn’t use an adopted identity or even an address. Just “sign on” as it were, and create yourself.
“What kinds of things do you like?” the admin asked.
“Oh, I don’t like all that much,” I replied.
“That can’t be true.”
“You’d be surprised.”
The cursor blinked on the screen.
“Ok.”
And then I was in. That was all it took. What a fertile smorgasbord of wretchedness and despair lay beyond.
The internet is Satan, says a woman on a documentary but a hole in my memory means I forget which film. Maybe it’s the don’t-speak-on-your-mobile-phone-while-driving 1 by Werner Herzog? Maybe it isn’t but I seem to remember this woman says the internet is Satan cos a guy was driving a truck while looking at INSTAGRAM and he crashed into the woman’s daughter. Killed her. A life kaput cos a trucker was amused by his partner’s selfie or whatever. Yeah. The internet is the devil’s playground, I thought at work this week. It’s the beast with a neatly trimmed hipster beard, 2 goat-like horns. Dunno what sparked the feeling but for the next few of my dot-dot-dot sections I’ll try exploring my notion that the world-wide-dreaming, which polluted my brain with pictures I can’t unsee, is the devil’s work.
I am now going to disappear and there will be nothing left of me. No “traces,” over which the European philosophers like to obsess. Film can make disappearance happen. Or not happen. Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s Permanent Green Light (2018), Michael Haneke’s Happy End (2017), and Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017) pursue various disappearing acts. Like magicians. Who can get out of this world first? All films depict a desire to escape the modern world—either through meaningless suicide (a-purposive) or cause-driven suicide (purposive, e.g. eco-terrorism).
In these films, buildings collapse for no apparent reason. Europe can’t take care of herself. She is calling for help, for God. A hamster is killed by a young girl. A student is collecting bomb vests for fun. A priest, son lost in a meaningless war in the Middle East, is dying of cancer as his church collapses over his head.
For a first thing, a physical image: in the folds of a dusky leather couch and myself some pale limbs and a head heaved through a formal dashiki, here sit I the 800lb NEET FBI guy behind every girl online, or any other apparent sweet charity in the world. To take the contradiction in this description and collapse it like an antique chair, see that I’m fat with focus, so devoted to my online work with the Bureau (so-to-speak: my employer is only a functional equivalent), that no desires lead me away from this richly furnished basement suite in my childhood home, which is admittedly a rare mansion in mostly dronestruck southern country and for that reason alone difficult, logistically, to leave behind. But the point is that while I am in a way stranded, I am neither dissatisfied nor lonely. Despite war, delivery boys and prostitutes aplenty come feed and fuck my big body every night, and I’m kept in beer and speed by an indigenous “nurse”, and College pals are in frequent contact across Spase. Mother and Father are equally dead, regrettably. But I can see them look down proudly from Heaven at the well-oiled machine they’ve left in my nominal charge:
STANDARD ISSUE M84 STUN GRENADE
death encoded 20yrs in // the XX defined null
algorithm determined breath amount // 1/0 toss up
i was infected by girlware // i’m going to die for it
i commit insignificant big-violence in Flatland
all concepts singular here
i toss out another bissected moth into the 3D
i toss
out a dismembered cock [mine] into 1D
american brand survival
daggerknives to gorefuck my boyblood
by 27 i’ll have a fake pussy
stay execution
renew GIRL/ALLOWANCE