Furthering Negative Limitations (notes)

//Trying to get back in the habit of posting here....even if only a place to keep the occasional note, such as this one for the Thornscape essay.//

When identity (executive synchronic function) is removed or blunted forcibly, there can be an instinctive
fightback against this loss (which is not dangerous or problematic on its own, but only relative to certain
mental outlooks that privilege the Self as Center).

This fight itself (in brain terms: pathologically persistent search functions operating on zero data/an
empty frame of reference OR the pathological addition of new data to a frame that is in the process of
being emptied or broken) generates new identity-frames that temporally extend the experience of
dissociation. This can be extended toward a limit where, when we reach a point at which “bare” identity
is generated out of “nothing”, every glimpse of a frameless state autogenerates a new frame that
emerges directly into a state of autodeconstruction. This oscillation prevents a “clean” experience of
the frameless void-state/mors mystica, and prolonged exposure to this oscillation can generate
extreme anxiety, depression, various and sundry negative or painful brain states (this can resemble
tinnitus - depending on certain environmental factors, you can actually *hear* the oscillation).

This can last indefinitely because every recovery attempt generates movement away from the
frameless space, leading to a state in which the identity only remains insofar as it is connected to loss
or pain or whatever is removing the frames - i.e. a negative bias against frame-removal will result in
the pain of breaking frames, fear of lost frames, grasping at new frames, etc; while a positive bias
toward frame-removal will experience negativity in the sense of being unable to speed up the removal
without generating new frames, fear of being unable to prevent the generation of new frames,
grasping at nothingness, etc.

His Brain was Infected by Devils: Tinnitus as Master Sound, Waveguide to the Frameless State

/// ...Another trait the flat tone. No life. Same flat tone at all times.
For its affirmations. For its negations. For its interrogations.
For its exclamations. For its imperations. Same flat tone. You were once.
You were never. Were you ever? Oh never to have been! Be again. Same flat tone...

Samuel Beckett -- Company ///

Thornscape: Disidentification and Warding at the Limit of Negative Identity

One day I might come back and put the actual essay here ;)

sources:


https://seminalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/dehors
https://seminalrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-black-metal-mixtape
http://www.transart.org/wp-content/uploads/group-documents/126/1389741131-Kafka_The_Burrow_Part1.pdf
https://markovsoroka.bandcamp.com/album/tchornobog
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2905935?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/picsprog/articles/wipp%20exhibit%20message%20to%2012,000%20a_d.htm

//The formal refusal of success and circulation in the mainstream by underground artists radicalizes itself towards a desired invisibility. But one which has to be visible as an invisibility.....Works such as Les legions noire's catalog, aka Mortuário’s C32 tape, dehors’ anonymous productions testify to this insistence in banging one’s head against the ontological category of art. But is it a futile gesture? - JP Caron//

Let this also serve as a soft notice for upcoming sequel to Void Front Press' book Sustain//Decay, titled ATTACK! probably due out this summer, featuring work by Absentology, German Sierra, Xenovenomism squad B Konior/Y Granata, JP Caron, Owen Coggins and others.

Sustain//Decay : A Circular Scaffold

An Unstable Release Date for an Unstable Text: June 19th 

https://voidfrontpress.org/portfolio/sustaindecay/

An Introduction by Owen Coggins and James Harris

//Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss.........

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........

Ngngngngngngngngngngngngngn.........    //

Charlie Blake, Dronoclasm //  

//I draw circles and sacred boundaries about me; fewer and fewer climb with me up higher and higher mountains—I am building a mountain chain out of ever-holier mountains //

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra //

//And what defines the scale of the ultimate symbolic mountain is its inaccessibility to ordinary human approaches. [...] The door to the invisible must be visible //

René Daumal, Mount Analogue //

//Before time… before even the gods… there was only…//

Bong, “The Dreams of Mana-Yood-Sushai” //  

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

...Drone is the beginning and was before the beginning // Drone was the Nothing // Nothing Droned // The droning of Nothing was the Nothing from which Drone is self-created...

...Om // the first sound, the cause of the universe, itself a drone // an empty signifier swells to overfull // evolves, fragments, ramifies into a constellation of meaning the way a solid droning tone may begin to wobble, vibrate, oscillate // mutating, expanding, infecting // spreading, branching, self-intersecting, self-interweaving, self-absorbing, self-annihilating, becoming different through manifesting the same // “The empty set is the set with nothing in it. The number 1 is the set with only the empty set in it. And so on…”

...the End of Drone, already contained within the drone, is the End of Everything // Drone is the End which outlasts itself...

...from near-silent single tone pure ambient minimalism to crushing oceanic hyper-amplified metallic maximalism // from trance-like repetition of sameness to explicit experimentation with the radical question of what it can mean for a sound to be different from or the same as another sound // drone rotates or fades or spirals away from linear historical/genealogical genre conventions toward a meta-foundational sonic arsenal // drone is capable of infecting all genres as it is itself composed of ontologically primary techniques for sound generation and modulation, realized in extreme extension toward outer- or inner-most depths, boundaries, limits, frontiers, horizons // different variants of drone select different techniques to maximalize or minimalise, whether hijacking and mutating source material or inaugurating original tonal topologies // all genres (all life, all differentiation) can be imagined as mere clusters of patterns of iterations of momentary deviations from the drone...

...elements, both sonic and metaphorical, of drone exist in natural and artificial worlds, in geometries of plant and water, architecture, even space, underground, mind // the Universe breathes - the physical expands and contracts // the Socius hums incessantly in communal conversation // the ceaseless oscillatory dynamics of the Brain silently howl...

// For we know that all creation keeps on groaning together //

St. Paul, Romans 8:18-22 //

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

...this book is a call to approach composition and attentive listening as ritual practice // to approach drone music as a training ground for the attention, for cognitive endurance, for a weird absorption from which hidden transformations might flower // to approach the melodic and rhythmic movement toward and away from central harmonic figures, the manipulation of the “tension between background and foreground” as ritually patterned upon the mystics’ tuning of the tension between subject and object, between inner and outer worlds // listening to the spark of impenetrable darkness, in contemplation of the shadow paradoxes of language, mysticism and death...

...the spectral spectacle of drone’s all-devouring taste mirrors the range of this book // intensive studies of emptiness, inaccessibility, and eternity // death, death of god, death of death // forest, mountain // Infection, parasite, swarm: disparate mind in shattered multiplicity // sine waves between ascetic austerity and wild excess, at either pole confessing the violence of the sacrifice, of the sacred // insane or becalmed transformations of perception, infinitesimal time-slices and isoluminant eidolons // all contained within the elastic-walled labyrinth of this new spacetime, our non-terminating Cymatic Church...

...drone casts paradoxes into perception // sounds heard as light, metaphorical and alchemical, offer the transmutative properties of mystical shimmer //Wolfe// in ‘resonance subordinated to redundancy’ //Freeman// spatial sense is transformed, illusioned, bewitched, the drone ‘echoing off an invisible realm’ //Wolfe// drone foregrounds the difference and connection between sound and hearing //Kang// ‘the possibility of stasis and the sprawling occupation of its power’ //Drone Box// levitation //Csihar// ‘It escapes itself in a perspectival “experience” of time not tethered to the specific form of the human subject, to be integrated into an exceeding and not-necessarily human - an alien or machinic-transcendent subjectivity’ //Caron// drone is excess and/or asceticism //MOUTH// honey and tar //Strickland/////

...drone invokes antinomies and contortions in language too, which, ‘alienated, orbits around a central absence’ //Coggins// words dancing in rituals of forgotten purpose around the chalk circle which it is not forbidden but rather impossible to enter // in the language spat from drone’s black centrifuge, there is again and again repetition and repetition and yet transcendence of sameness // the intuition of the death of intuition //Shakespeare// the absolute emptiness of emptiness //Absentology// drone is ambient, atmosphere, a hum behind the world, but it is also metal… that pagan resonant interval //Drone Box// riffs beyond riffs, metal about metal, a meditative treatment of heavy metal’s symbolic codes so radical it may not be recognised as such //Coggins// this Möbius strip, this snake which eats itself yet is still nourished, yet is still consumed, this convulsion, infects and is infected, is the infection // is the ashy pest // ‘is legion, yet imperceptible, neither faith nor reason can fathom their presence or the principles that pertain to them except through their manifestation in distress, agony and death throes’ //MOUTH/////

...drone is death and drone is immortality, which is death // endless life is 'an increasingly pestilential drone', a background before which our deaths become relief //Shipley// it all starts with the signal path //Newstead// we 'send a signal and let it die' //Hissen// the signal, channel, noise all at once introducing 'a silent mode of communication that is directed towards nothing other, the No-Other, which is death' //Absentology// silent but communicative, towards death yet from death, expression through mortal silence // the gift of the skull of a fox //Legard// 'Everything that is dead quivers' //Cascone// 'not rhythm at all but merely a near endless ripple of vibration stretched across expanses of time...' //Norman/////

...drone ruins // is found in ruins // decays, sustains // witnesses decay // drone is 'eternity's future burden' //Shipley// that term, burden, bourdon, an archaic term for drone, the memory of the word ruined by time // monoliths, pyramids, stone circles, temples //Csihar// ‘the subject sinks into the labyrinth of the ear...' //Freeman/////

...drone is the life which grows through the ruins, testifies to ruin, is agent of ruin // creeper // root // undergrowth, overgrown // to the palace of birds, to a shallow garden //Legard// a 'monstrous aspect' of Nature ‘seeks to annihilate everything individual' //Shakespeare// a 'whole forest is heard in each sound...' //Cascone/////

...drone is the absolute // it is 'the infinitely dense form of silence, the recollection without object' //Absentology// the sound of ‘a god pulling gravity’s strings...’ //Norman/////

...drone is finally a portal //Cascone// a mountain, liquefied // the listener 'must conceptually climb untold numbers of unholy mountains to see the surface again’ //Harris// the pieces included here departing from each other and returning, requiring a re-reading of an earlier segment, a tumbler falls into place, the lockpicking continues, repeat ad infinitum, ad nauseam // an incessant, droning, revolving system of holy mountains // each climb faltering, failing, exhausting, “coming up against an insuperable object”, rotating into a new mountain with its own failures // each failure driving a new mountain range, each new range innovating its own apparatus for climbing from out of the experience or the text, for climbing out of experience or out of text, for climbing out of climbing itself // Written in the textual body of the climber, the history or memory or output of the climber, each climb demands tools from the other climbs, each apparatus applied to old mountains makes new challenges makes new failures, growth comes to be measured in cycles of failure, “progress” measured only by the uninitiated // for Wittgenstein, language was a ladder to be climbed up, and then discarded // for Daumal, the base of the mountain must be accessible while the summit inaccessible (as outlined in a book which stops, mid-sentence, unfinished at his death) // this book too, then, is one to be climbed out of // drone sound at the end of sound // ‘record needle gently click-flapping’ //Norman// ‘Listen to all at once if possible. Join’ //Hissen/////

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

//For what is God but the index that pointed to the failure of all signs?//

Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable //

//For what is drone but the unending echo of generational potential?//

Aliza Shvarts, “Troubled Air” //

Sustain//Decay

Fast approaching the day when I can finally announce a real live release date (prob right at the end of May-ish).....everything in the book is complete, cover art done (thank you Virginia Barratt and Katherine Foyle), pre-approval from printer, 50 copies of Kim Cascone's companion compilation in hand....Owen and I are finishing up a short intro and then off we go....this was the single most nerve wracking shit I've ever done and I have recalibrated sooo many dreams and aspirations based on this awful experience :)


back/spine/front cover art
VFP: Sustain//Decay

a note on Nishitanian Alignment

I finally have something to say to you....an inkling, a short stab, of where the next phase of my plot will be heading. Something coalescing....somewhen.... (a topological reveal-ation, the hyperspherical harmonics of meaning and mysticism....we are heading somewhere with this, somewhere called Erewhon, the Interzonal Public Librarynth) 




What Nishitani Keiji unfolds in Religion and Nothingness is a re-description of Christianity, Zen, existential atheism, and nihilism in such a fashion as to render these seemingly disparate chains into several perspectives on the same (non-)structure.......

......or maybe a better description might be that, in NK's reading, these become several facets of a singular map, like tomographic plates, demonstrating a spiralling-inward to a zone where even the wailing subjectless emptiness at the heart of nihility is destroyed, where even loss is lost, where annihilation is annihilated and the hole at the heart of God (the place in God where God is not Itself, where Life and Freedom spontaneously arises in union and unison with....) and the hole at the heart of Self (....the place in Self where Self is not itself but God: the neuromystical space where boundaries disappear and differentiation collapses into unity) "metaharmonically" align.

NK uses these metasystems, systems of systems of symbolism, to trace the unboundary of the seemingly impenetrable nihility that the face of god and Cartesian dualism wall us off from, the nihility that Sartre expresses as the ecstasy of being but proceeds to make the ground of being, thereby subverting the absolute negation before it hits the absolute affirmation, generating a new wall. Nishitani declares this walling-off from nihility to be the "ego closed up within itself", a nothingness posited from within the ground of Being and therefore unable to "im-penetrate" into the meaning(-((full)ness)) of infinihility.

It is this //paradoxically both firm and penetrating and soft and envaginating//* alignment that provides the "existential conversion" from the many shades of relative emptiness and relative nihilism NK delineates into the absolute nothingness of finding a completely pure and overwhelmingly complete modal continuum in the coterminous and omnirecursive reflecting abyss wherein God and Self are not Themselves but are Each Other. This tracing is also a high resolution scouring of these religious philosophies for potential points wherein the True Black of total nihility in the face of God, the absolute nothingness of the Godhead, the Great Doubt that is true philosophical nihilism, the Great Death that is sunyatta are seen as isomorphic aspects of the locus extremis, snapshots of obliteration which may be captured and aligned to "category-theoretically" or even topologically reveal novel connections between diverse terminologies while simultaneously expanding our cognitive ecology to prepare our selves for these inverse no-wavefronts of blacklight - of which biological death, conscious-less sleep, "ego-death" and total dissociation are but 4 notes of an unbounded spectrum of non-existent OMni-tonality...made all the more Real for its nonexistence.

//Existential conversion consists in extricating oneself from a person-centered mode of being to come out on the near side, in a mode of personal being in the immediacy of the actual self. The "nothing at all" behind the person comes out into the open on the side of the self, the original self. If person be regarded as the sheer mode of self-being itself, "behind" which there is nothing, this is so because the matter is being looked at or thought about. When the "nothing at all" opens up on the near side of the personal self, however, and is seen as the sheer self itself, then nothingness really becomes actualized in the self as the true self. Then it is appropriated (in the sense of being made available) in the self. Self-existence...becomes the realisation of nothingness. "Appropriating" is not "looking at." Pressed to give it a name, we might call it a "seeing of not-seeing", a seeing that sees without seeing. True nothingness is a living nothingness, and a living nothingness can only be self-attested. - Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness//


* : Charlie Blake - 'Dronoclasm' from forthcoming Sustain//Decay on voidfrontpress.org spring 2017

(Von Neumann-)Chained to (Pleromatic) Uncertainty

In the essay Pleromatica, Gabriel Catren’s “phenoumenoudelic scene” in which we are to conceive existence is the product of a series of un-groundings, from the Copernican suspension of Earth to the //relativistic crisis of the spatiotemporal background.// As these un-groundings individually undermine previously supposed //fixed god-given structure[s]// and //aprioristic motionless Ur-frames//, this chain of underminings is the maximally general subset of the arsenal of neuronihilistic gestures that may be applied to thought in order to shear away misconceptions regarding the experiential field of an endophysical observer. Here we further intensify the un-grounding and remove the ultimate Ur-referinertial-frame: the sociocultural image of closed-individuality that occults and obscures intuitive awareness of a universal and impersonal field of experience: the zero-point energy state of quantum mechanics, the supersymmetry of string theory, the Hindu’s anatman, the Gnostic pleroma, the Platonic ideal form-world, the Sufi “Black Mind” of Allah, the mystical state of “union with God”, among others, are theophysical metaphors for a non-oriented, non-performable, yet permissible state of being we will join Catren in calling the pleromatica. In the pleromatica the concept of an “Ur-frame” is sublimated into an un-framing process: //the transmutation of the immobile Ur-frame into an ark continuously going under - the coming of the one and only number that cannot be any other.//.

We label this state non-performable because acts of differentiation cause decoherence of this “substrate”, this pleromatica that is constantly, spontaneously, attempting differentiation. This provides a glimpse into understanding why it has proven so resistant to instrumental measurement as the choice of observational frame of reference is itself a differentiation. We label it non-oriented because it does not inertially or conceptually index any frames of reference, rather being achieved by iterated negations and integrations on almost any neurotheoretical axis. In other words, this state is achieved by collapsing inertial, cognitive, sensory, or linguistic frames of reference, or the protogeometric compression and integration of disparate signals into more general or universal categorical schemes. Borrowing a note from Nick Sousanis, we refer to such an anti-gesture as a flattening of the experiential field.

In the brain, the thalamus performs a colossal number of iterations per second of an operation that may be identical to a "Heisenberg cut" on the undifferentiated flow of incoming signal that seem to be almost entirely arbitrary determinations of differentiation between observer and observed, between figure and ground, between object and signifier (Von Neumann chain/Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation). The local binding problem in this view is contextually incomplete, as everything begins “bound” in a unitary signal and we cut into the flow in order to abstract. Every isomorphic cut reifies the seeming persistence of objects, and the unitary experience of “everyday human consciousness” is nothing more than the temporal persistence of the intersection of all these cuts constantly being made in the pleromatica. What masquerades as the binding problem is what may be thought of as harmonic overtones of the Bayesian basin of attraction generated from carving out so many of these cuts in identical shapes over time. This correlates well with the knowledge that the outer layer of the thalamus, the thalamic reticular nuclei (TRN), is a group of neurons responsible for aligning several multimodal topographical mappings from corticothalamic feedback, ascertaining a coarse unity, a “fuzzily logical” overlapping of maps (maps of present, past, and expected future cuts) from across every functional network that has a thalamic projection. The local binding problem is solved within the TRN and its own feedback loop of neuronal projection linking the “supervisory attentional system” to this function. This suggests that freedom from this individualized and idiosyncratic matrix of correlation is challenging because the human-type “matrix” exhibits a strong gravitation toward the singular, possibly even disregarding *substantial* elements of the foundational signal that do not correspond to the singular as superfluous to immediate experience, cutting them out in a bandwidth-saving gesture. Following Catren further, he claims that //the transcendental a priori structures of human experience are a posteriori products of the immanental natural dynamics of the impersonal field//, that the //human transcendental type, far from being characterized by some sort of pre-phenoumenal necessity, results from a contingent local subjectivization of the experiential field itself.// These local subjectivizations are “excitations” of the field, excitations whose structure defines particular frames of subjectivity. According to this line of reasoning, the human mode is just one of any number of potential subjective modes //according to which the field of impersonal experience locally [...] frames its narcissistic self-experience.//

A phenoumenodelic experience - any experience that //involves a shift of the very transcendental structure that renders a transcendent experience possible// - is an unfurling of the pleromatica out of the hyper-enfolded stratifications of a typical human-type structure’s knotwork of frame-cuts. In the phenoumenodelic experience we expose the noumenal threaded through every phenomena and find a symmetry between inner and outer: imaginative world-building takes on robust sensory characteristics and may be perceived as “real”, while outer experience is shown to be generated in a highly similar imaginative gesture as more and more mediation qua reference-frames is stripped away. At the deepest extreme of these experiences, we “transcend transcendence” onto the immanent //void-plane of zero-intensity//, a frameless brain state of high-dimensional network symmetry between inner and outer models that has been maximized via a flattening of the inner and outer experience into a single continuous field with no observable divide. This is accomplished in a total deactivation of the TRN and the thalamus, preventing the differentiation of incoming signal by eliminating the node at which the “Heisenberg cut” is performed. This causes every functional network to receive a copy of the whole signal rather than only receiving the slices of the signal it would normally process, flooding the cortex and reducing available bandwidth for the construction of a self-model in direct correlation with the reduction in mediative frames qua cognition of individually differentiated sensory signals. We may from here, assert the “witnessing” of the annihilation of the “self-as-observer”, a “death” of the self-model that drags with it the entangled world of our mediated simulation. This “death” removes the unitary observer from the field of awareness which uncovers the raw signal-field out of which we carve a “reality.” This prrovides a strong argument in favor of the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics by showing in an intuitive fashion that classical reality is entirely perspectival and results from ignoring information about the exact state of the environment. Aldous Huxley’s “reducing valve” model of consciousness was an idealization of the Heisenberg cut concept, and leads us out of this technical-terrorism and back into our primary inquiry, mechanisms for widening and even removing this “valve.”

spontaneous riff on something that came up in real-world

////apologies for the awful punctuation-abuse, you're a smart kid, figure it out! Also be excited,100th post/15,000th unique visitor today!////




I have no idea if free will or determinism or some combination or diagonalization thereof is an accurate depiction of agency in this world. “I make no hypotheses,” I merely find hard determinism the most generous and equitable ethical model to take upon myself, as refusing to acknowledge agency on any level leads me toward behaviour that generates compassion for every act, even dangerous, stupid, suicidal, psychopathic, sociopathic acts, as a case of ignorance to be pitied or overcome through knowledge rather than the common assumptions of blame, intent, upbringing or nature etc etc etc. “For the good of all sentient beings,” the bodhisattva vow is made only by those capable of understanding a conceptual space in which we claim that almost no one knows that the “environment” of culture and consensus meatspace reality is not only a persistent illusion but an incredibly dangerous and harmful one, one that takes on a conceptual framework claiming that there is no such thing as agency and that to assign agency is to misunderstand the ideal-realist assertion (backed up by certain novel cognitive and physical theories) that all sentient beings (in truth, all sentience) are a single physically conjoined manifold of points with no “real” referent (no single word or even phrase in any language i am familiar with decribes this manifold accurately without referring to religion or metaphysics, though an apophatic logic gives us a far more interesting framework for these non-descriptions) and no signifier capable of intimating the theory that we are entirely moved by forces beyond our knowledge or control that does not place us in the hands of god.

Rather than agential motion through a space, the most we may be able to hope for is to organically accrete enough information [on/in]to our entity through stochastic motion through the pleromatic “superliquid” such that we become able to conceptually model/mimic (developing the antenna/tuning speculation) these forces and “surf” the quantum probability waves (mentat : naive mind) into more conducive zones of existence. To think of this process (“existing”) as easy or difficult may be the wrong linguistic mode to describe the system, rather approaching it in a fashion that acknowledges how [[a complex entity will find the system complex, and a simple entity will perceive it as simplistic]] is more appropriate, as the “world” is a multimodal user interface - a user’s reality is in fact a highly idiosyncratic interface between the entity and itself.

Equality is quickly discovered to be only “complete” when all points are equally alienated from the original manifold (despite the fact that this alienation in a very real sense does little more than generate a new manifold, it is actually the knowledge that one can generate novel manifolds of experience or shear away cognitive manifolds regardless of any form of status in the world, wealth, disability, etc that is the key to this knowledge, not gestures toward alienation-free existences), as every alienated point, upon alienation, seems to suddenly develop a compulsion to reduce alienation in the world (whether through actions designed to reduce suffering or actions designed to impose suffering on those that would generate suffering in the world(this is frequently problematized by an entity’s desire to impose suffering on those that generated their particular (real or perceived) sufferings)). This is obviously also problematic because alienation-prevention is not a safe strategy to *end* alienation, but in fact works negentropically to hold the manifold in stasis - generating a more and more pathological drive toward demanding the end of alienation through action as the pressure of the flow of the real builds behind this false or illusory stasis. In the grand Xenofem tradition, we may not be able to eliminate alienation, but we may be able to maximally alienate everything into a categorically isomorphic equality.

no hope : not now : not ever

[[[this text is for the program from Vincent Como's ( http://www.vincentcomo.com/ ) upcoming exhibition titled 'No Hope. Not Now, Not Ever.' at the Reinstitute in Baltimore opening on October 29th]]]

//Hail thee, holy darkness! - The INCAL//

//But in the beginning there is not light,

there is not life,

there is the black universe.

- Daniel Barber, Whylessness//

//I am neither god nor creature. - Meister Eckhart//

//I am the spirit that negates.

                             and rightly so, for all that comes to be

deserves to perish wretchedly.

- Mephisto, Faust//

The threat of possession, of being swarmed by the intangible unknowable, presses incessantly on the light. The slightest break in light is pervasively swamped by blackness, voiding the safety of referential anchors and //making slits in the umbrella - (Deleuze/Guattari)// through which the outside peers back. Abyssal mirrors lurking in every gap capture our emptiness and reflect it back through these slits, entrancing, encircling, oppressing, embracing, restraining : a nebulous army of dark potential that resonates with the harmonic undertones of our own self-repression. We see our selves and our laughable negligibility in the void, but also a preeminently sovereign intensity hidden in the nigredo and it is this dual realization that generates anxiety, profound to the point of nausea. The realization of the power of darkness is the recognition of //the exponential multiplicity of all which will never be known - VC//, and //what more do you want, o soul? And what else do you search for outside? - St. John of the Cross//

The realization that our shadow, and not our light, is the shape of god; that the supreme power motivating the infinite clockwork of heaven is the supreme negation of nihil : sublimation of Self into Black. The mystics chase possession and cure themselves - and afterward count themselves among the dead, a pinprick nothingness among a field of undifferentiated dark matter. This heretical reversal is a circular inversion, a being-in-the-world being-turned-inside-out, the alignment with a black universe that is the [ur/un]ground for the Great Death called sunyatta.

//Unbearable, isn't it? The suffering of strangers, the agony

of friends. There is a secret song at the center

of the world, and its sound is like razors

through flesh. - Pinhead, Hellraiser//

//To have a body is to suffer. - Bodhidharma//

//Who holds the devil, let him hold him well, he hardly

will be caught a second time. - Dr. Faustus//

Friction: the body is gripped by ghosts and the grasping distorts the mirror. The black universe is nothing more than reflection, harshly illuminating the nothing inside and projecting it onto the firmament. We mistake a glimpse into a hole for a self; staring into deep space with telescopic lenses has replaced the sensation of existing as an infinite space - we no longer recognize that it is us we are looking at. The resistance to this recursive realization accretes on us; a body forming from layers upon layers of fear: of the dark, of separation, of differentiation.

Dreaming of arresting decay is already a misunderstanding: to hold the true image fast we must nail ourselves to the cross - god is not dead, we are, and this recognition shreds liminal boundaries as easily as it does the spirit and flesh on either side. We must nail ourselves to the cross for god is not dead: god is death, and rebirth and re-death is the passage through the secret webwork of the underworld that inscribes the negative image, penetrating darkness to reveal Black. The mouth of Yama opens onto the nunc stans: the standing NOW is held tightly by hidden teeth, constricting and compressing carbon-based lifeforms into lapis philosophorum. To paraphrase Alan Watts, as long as you do not know how to die and come to life again, the wretched earth will conceal the black universe.

//For what remains of the representable if the object is to

evade representation? What remains is to represent

the conditions of this evasion. - Samuel Beckett, Disjecta//

//bathe in the horror that the blood of time carries

with the plague, and befoul yourself with

worship - Sunn O))), Bàthory Erzsébet//

//For we know that all creation keeps on groaning

together - St. Paul, Romans 8:18-22//

Dark matter : dark meaning : inverse topology : non-tology : Black had already taken its apophatic unshape before the beginning of time. Black is the deep sphera of non-differentiation where tomb and womb become smeared as if soaked with acetone. At this depth there can be no delimitation of Black to color, as we sink below the surface of the light - where no light reaches, everything is Black, and one may come to forget the barrier between inside and outside. The ontological primacy of Black is the corporeality of the Warp and Plex and sinew behind the World; the screen upon which the light plays is a necrotic purgatory whiteness marking the stagnation of the material. Light and life is but a transient flicker on the vault: //They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more. -Samuel Beckett//

Light does not exist at an oppositional end of a linear spectrum from blackness, nor does it emerge from a field of blackness in an evolutionary gesture, nor does it remain when blackness is cleansed.

Light is color corrupted, burning up on reentry into Black: the spectacle that traps the gaze and ruins our nightvision: a negentropic plague haunts anything that clings to the light.

Everywhere light exists, Black grips.

Everywhere, light slips.

Black out the light - be what seeks to become secret for //only the secret sees into the secret like Black in Black - Francois Laruelle//