"A Most Peculiar Dream"

The peculiar is a dense and winding dream in which
the hollow point at the center of every atom
is cracked and strung on Indra's net, not pearls but husks of
being. A graveyard garden suspended throughout time,

refracting only dully an alien light whose
fount, Sun beyond Sun of hawk and disk, transmits our
dreams of writhing murk, gordian knots aborted and
birthed, λόγος of snakes' desiring: XI and qoph.

I fear that I have been devoured by a Truth while
apprehending astral vistas far afield. Tunnels
crack the face of God and increase psychedelic yield.
Explosions and modus ponens, axioms of ShT.

Thought-storms feed pelagic
in-betweens, and abstraction
goes not up but down, to the weirdened loam of being.

And Lucifer opens
up the veins of the world to
destroy the dependence. Vishuddhi theorems – ergo:

Forms bleed alive! but dead
the formless fornicate
in the back of the Head

Viva Geburah!

[First published in the Project NONA poetry chapbook entitled Parts of a Feather.]

"A Multinucleate Musing"

The xenophyophore is a macroscopic multinucleate amoeba populating the abyssal plains, a paradigm case of what scientists term “abyssal gigantism”.

Scale is not a spatial construct, but indicates a logico-causal domain of production – the macroscopic is perhaps the furthest thing from the macrocosmic one can imagine. Each relevant sense protrudes in such a manner that its center is strictly indiscernible. The multinucleate is therefore a hodge-podge of essences, each and every one possessing, the scientists assure us, a common ancestor (maybe the most common of them all). According to legend, this ancestor could scarcely hold all its genetic material, and is now much deteriorated. Its uniquely flat and utterly unimaginative structure has led some heterodox researchers to posit their own presuppositions and tout the result as formally equivalent.

A hideously overnourished shoal of squids inexplicably commits suicide on the beach. Entropy remains more or less unchanged.

It is in the nature of beings to secrete a thin shell about themselves as a guarantee against non-dualism, the dull inertia of the border providing perhaps the only limit between a membrane and a second membrane. The system of objects is held together by separation, without which Nature's laziest taxa would be forced into a vicious state of mutual presupposition, not a static equivalence but an irregularly-beating transcendental organelle of uncertain function. Life-cycles of feeding, mating, and molting proceed from even the most globular adolescent and ensure (in that case) a most remarkable ability to set self-relations into eternal motion. The enlightened gene-stealer is nothing compared to the falsified dwellers in singularity. Far more noble, however, is the refusal of one's shell in the name of giving someone else a home.

The gnostics believed in an emanationist mystical philosophy wherein God produced successive pairs of Aeons called “syzygys”. Jacques Lacan likes the number 3.

An inexcusable anachronism exists in any thought of the Two, contingent and negotiated oppositions notwithstanding. A quintuplicity is undoubtedly the way to proceed, a double structure of both contraries and contradictories (the semiotic square) offset by a transcendentalizing/de-substantializing fifth element. Though comparisons with the fabled quintessence are unavoidable, our fifth element is in no wise a completion. Rather more like an expansion, the fifth element is the principle of traversal of rationalisms, in other words the principle of pagan permutations. Therefore our formalization is equally a breakdown of form, indicating the absolute distance between one constructed constellation and its nearest neighbor.

Having diverted the entirety of their admittedly non-existent resources to the manufacture of the secret ray of the moon, an obscenely sticky substance much too big for them, the micro-fascists had no remaining energy for use in growing to a healthy size.

What's big is small, and what's small is small (but not a bit smaller than the big). Time would be the smallest thing if it weren't for space, which, according to the very ugliest scholar now in existence, is the very definition of a small thing. The gleeful dissemination of the portable microscope was made possible by certain arche-industrial manufacturing techniques, spotted on his very first attempt by the absolute tiniest of right-wing nationalists. The problem with this picture is of course that every operation of thought, every synapse of whatever size, effects an embiggening, a loss of predicative information through successive ideation. As sad as it may be, our miniature industrialist hatemonger shall remain microscopic for the rest of time, for the miracle of one substance.

Descartes' true radicalism was his mind-body dualism, which he believed to constitute an unbridgeable gulf. Contemporary thinkers, by contrast, often prefer theories of complex interrelation.

There are some branches of knowledge which are reserved exclusively for troglodytes. Being unable to think with their brains with any proficiency, they instead make lists to think for them. Their entire civilization has been consumed by the making of lists. While it is easy to make fun of the frog-legged metaphysicians, in actuality they have both asked and answered questions the singular beauty of which no one, including the most bulbous of their wizened scribes, can sketch upon a page.

The tesseract is the preferred geometrical figure of the anti-cosmic satanist.

All thinking, it has often been said, is either geometric or algebraic. Those who think for the sake of thinking, on the other hand, affirm that thinking is equally, in all parts, at all moments, all of its possibilities. There is speculative imagination just as there is speculative reason. The regime of thought is governed by an infinity of axioms, predicates, intuitions – in other words, thought governs itself. Thinking is the self-absolutizing and self-actualizing activity, with no further necessary determinations.

An axiomatic formal system of considerable strength can be constructed using only a few axiom schemata and a single rule of derivation, typically modus ponens, a.k.a. conditional elimination. A single axiom schema constitutes an infinite number of axioms, calling into question the supposed foundational simplicity of the system.

Foundation is the making-absolute of LOGOS. Wandering up a chain of universal derivations, one eventually comes face to face with the paradoxes of self-reference. A self-interpreting system always does so poorly. God did not deign to enact such folly, preferring instead a meaningless and infinite deduction, no more damning for its impossibility.

Some philosophers think that reality itself is a social construction, but nonetheless real. Others accuse them of inexcusable idealism. Still others accuse those accusers of naive realism. When will it end?

Interpretation is one mode of thought which cannot be defeated, but neither can it win. Of course, not every giving/gift of meaning is identical to the one before it, though sometimes I do expect a joke. Every word that has ever been expressed is both ductile and malleable to an infinite degree. Signification is, contrary to popular belief, the only non-speculative function of language, including such apparently mundane occurrences as forgetting a word or saying “hello” when one only meant to hiccup. But when one goes to make a pun and instead burns oneself to the very bottom of the calcinator...

Ex Contradictione Sequitur Quodlibet.

Readers are urged to do some lab work with their very own Specially-Modified Generic Formalysis Machine. This most astounding apparatus takes inputs and produces outputs just like a simple function. Casting axioms, propositions, beliefs, images, dreams, will, words, and everything else into the apparatus produces the desired feedback loops of speculation, (non)relational emanations, asymmetrical essentializations, irreversible derivations, and everything else. It goes without saying that certain incantations improve efficiency, while others proliferate unpredictable byproducts.

[First published in the Project NONA poetry chapbook entitled Parts of a Feather.]

Man as Musical Microcosm: Introduction

As above, so below...

The universe is holographic, but not completely. Certain of its parts are, or can become, reflective of the universe as a whole. They can come to contain, in some sense, all the exhaustive and infinite forms which could pour from the kingdom beyond possibility. Being and beings alike, as well as what belongs to neither, in their most total and true abstraction – all these things are the implicit truth of certain subsystems approaching the cosmos in its totality. Let this be our axiom: a microcosm, a part which is nonetheless in truth the whole, is possible.

The macrocosm is the very definition of the singular, a uniquely existing in-and-for-itself which tolerates no relation. Each element within the macrocosm is related to other elements, yes, but there is no relation between any element and the whole as such. The general idea of a whole-part relation may be coherent, but the same cannot be said for a totality-part relation, and the macrocosm is just such a totality. Therefore must we singularize, leaving ourselves behind.

We as animals, as bodies, are ever in the thick of the world, quite literally defined and, what's more, brought into being by our relations with the elements of this world. But we have no relation with this world as a whole.

However, the macrocosm is not altogether inaccessible to us.

Paradoxically, one must take leave of relation to become like the macrocosm, to become “related” to it. The macrocosm has no relations, and therefore must man become non-relational in its abstract image.

Can two singularities, then, be related to one another? No, but there may come to exist a formal similarity, a metaphysical parallelism, between certain of these singularities. We might say, fancifully, that singularities may have the same shape.

But how does one take leave of relation? Many methods present themselves historically: meditation, ritual, the intake of drugs, experience of overwhelming and strange emotions, the assumption of certain yogic postures. But here we are focused not on the occult tradition (at least explicitly), but on the most singular of art forms: music.

Music has a high density of singularities, in fact the highest of all the arts. It has no object, and it has by far the most variations of that fact. Visual art can escape representation, but these pieces, compared to the awesome profusion of musical styles, express on the whole a dull monotony. Music abounds in the abstract, in form. It is the formless en-formed.

Music takes leave of relation. And it allows the listener to do the same, since thinking is in each case being, and vice versa. But not just any music will do, nor any subjective orientation.

It is the aim of this series to assist listeners in making themselves into microcosms. Music is presented along with some linguistic indication of the corresponding abstract image. Rather than empirical or argumentative, this series will be an exercise in a rather fanciful and speculative aesthetics.

Drawing Down the Truth

(Source: KingOvRats, http://kingovrats.deviantart.com/art/Lovecraft-Yog-Sothoth-Lurker-At-the-Threshold-373819633)

It has been said that the universal is a parasite, an inhuman irruption in the mundane order of things, something which grafts itself to the human organism and refuses to let go, sending society into great and terrible eruptions of Virtue and Terror. This designation of universalism as asocial, inhuman, or even inhumane, is an enormously fruitful one. The writer who is perhaps closest to questions of the inhuman is HP Lovecraft. The aim of the current essay is to interpret the universal through the lens of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. To facilitate more efficient communication, I have sought not to adopt the typical tone of messianic and ecstatic prophesy that often accompanies such speculations. That is not to say, however, that those who choose—if choice indeed it is—to adopt that mode of writing are by any means incorrect to do so. Whether I have been successful in this, I am unsure, due simply to the nature of the material to be presented.

The human organism is ruled by particularity, by particular desires, characteristics, molecules, hormones, structures, forces, notions, experiences, and social relations. No concept is yet universal simply for its conceptual nature. No generalization made by any human being has ever once been universal. No abstraction has ever left the concrete behind while yet remaining a product of the human mind. That absolute abstraction can be thought should in no way be confused with the process of its volitional generation out of the concrete, with its subordination to human minds. And nothing is more laughable than the concrete universal. But this is not to say the universal is empty – rather, it is absolute form.

Absolute form is necessarily the act of formalization itself, its own intimate non-relation to the formless. Abstraction, insofar as it is absolute, proceeds not from the particular to the universal but from the formless to the en-formed. It is not mere thought but thought in all its power and glory. En-forming the formless is a lateral move and not necessarily a hierarchical one like the dialectic of universal and particular. The universal is synonymous with the singularization of this cosmic passage, the giving-birth of the formless into the realm of form. The Lovecraftian expression of this reality is without a doubt symbolized by the deformed child of obscene and sorcerous rites.

In Badiou's philosophy, one is seized by a truth. Seized and devoured, we might say. While this process simultaneously engenders and empowers the subject, it is a strange empowerment indeed. In Lovecraft this is represented by the practitioner of the dark arts who can no longer control the beings he has evoked, but must nonetheless persist in his activities, for the truth has come to control him and he cannot tear himself away and return to mundane ignorance. But to speak of control is to remain beyond the reach of truth's tentacles. The individual body is controlled, perhaps, but the subject is always already part of truth itself, existing only in the activity of having been seized, having been devoured. This is the first, necessary moment of the formless en-formed. Truth is a parasite, indeed, and its local name, its malignant relationship to the body, bears the name “subject”. There is nothing more joyous than to proclaim: “I have been seized! I have been devoured!”

The horror of the universal is brought out best by a consideration of Yog-Sothoth. In “Through the Gates of the Silver Key”, it is written:

It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self—not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep—the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign...

All-in-One. One-in-All. Beyond-One. And universal. As the Lurker at the Threshold, Yog-Sothoth exists between form and formlessness, in the zone between duality and non-duality, between the Naught and the Two in 0=2. Escaping definition by both imagination and logic, art and science, Yog-Sothoth defies the categories without collapsing into a non-dual entity lacking individuation. For Yog-Sothoth exists as a discrete entity in one sense, and as non-dual non-entity in another. Yog-Sothoth is the non-duality of duality and non-duality, a formulation that is formally equivalent to the non-relation of relation and non-relation, the doctrine of singularity.

In “The Dunwich Horror”, it is written:

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.

Yog-Sothoth is the key and the guardian of the gate, an answer to the paradox of truths, “Why are there many truths and not one?” The truth is the gate, the in-between, the situatedness or specificity of any given subtraction. And in this capacity, it is also the passage between form and formlessness. It is the Gate to the further step of the formless en-formed. For to en-form the formless, one must first experience/think the absolutely formless. The gods of the Cthulhu Mythos are truths in their obscene proliferation, their parasitism of humanity.

Lovecraftian truth exists not only as a symbolic relation to the truths associated with other spheres and other processes (Badiou's “conditions”, for example), but also with respect to the direct mystical experience of the formless and the universal. Non-duality does not form the end of gnosis, but can be perceived as a stepping-stone to what is beyond it. By these means can Sunyavada be subordinated to the second ruler of Thaumiel, to Universe B. The logico-metaphysical structure of reality must be stripped away in order to produce mystical speculations, to live and experience radically novel logico-metaphysical structures; the formless en-formed. Yog-Sothoth, we might say, is partially in Universe A, partially formless, and partially in Universe B (and C, and D...). He is a being of many dimensions, even many metaphysical structures, many realities. This knowledge is a gnosis beyond gnosis, and its possibility is attested to only in the most obscure and suppressed traditions.

This process is not just some single truth but the doctrine of truth, the Idea of truth itself. If this is heresy, then so be it.

Does the universal precede this process in which the human organism takes part? The human mind is too weak to produce the universal; the contagion must spread from an outside source, the Beyond. For the secular Badiou, truth is a creation of our activity. But in light of absolute form, the projection of logico-metaphysical architecture (otherwise known as reality) is an activity as spontaneous as the emission of cosmic rays by impossibly distant supernovae. This is not to say, however, that the distinction of self and other holds in the vacuum of theory that quantifies over metaphysics as such.

Lovecraft, unfortunately, was too reactionary to see the beauty of this parasite from the stars. In his stories, the dark magicians are wholly blameworthy, ushering in the end-times with their improper speculations. Lovecraft was still too humanist, unable to praise the end-times for their singularity, their self-authorizing and self-legitimating auto-creation. Readings of Lovecraft that reduce the Great Old Ones to symbolic representations of racial miscegenation are perhaps correct on one level, but on another they miss the point entirely.

Does this have to do primarily with the “Other”? Not exactly, since the category of the “Other” is bound up with so many wholly-en-formed social and political identitarian negotiations. And I'd rather not get into Levinas.

The political implications of the foregoing associations are vast. Absolute form can only be generic, the enactment of which is the precise meaning of egalitarianism if it be properly understood. Lateral abstraction, defined by Atus 0 and VIII, is rigorously equivalent to Badiou's conception of truth, as long as it is radicalized with reference to form and formlessness. Truth is the promise of intimate non-relation between form and formlessness. Absolute generic equality, as impossibly organized activity, is the always-incomplete enactment of itself. And here is how formlessness infects forms in their potentialities, their actuality producing its own virtual-in-actual by virtue of the Beyond-One.

But precisely which moment of our process corresponds to Badiou's truth? Truth is what opens onto infinity, the trajectory of an infinite subtraction. Therefore truth is the opening of possibility, the opening onto formlessness which in the end will have produced absolute form itself.

Communism is the domain of Yog-Sothoth. All right-wing readings of the Outer Gods have insufficiently understood the radicality of formlessness and its (non)relation to forms in their bloated overgrowth. Absolute form, as formalization, as the occulted and situationally pathological purification of form, is the assertion of the ultimately incomprehensibility of particularity, being as a result the ultimate and absolute expression of communism as process.

What we have been outlining is a structure or essence internal to the regime of form and formlessness itself. The dialectic of particular and universal has already been shed in the work of Lovecraft, though of course their non-relation remains a major point of interest. The universal must be of another order, and cannot be defined as the result of the humanistic process of abstraction conceived in the usual way. Yog-Sothoth has always already abstracted Himself (is it really a “he”?), affirming that very process as unintelligible in the wake of His success. Did it ever happen? Could such a thing possibly have come to pass?

Yes, Saint-Just and Robespierre were the first confirmed victims of the contagion. The ultimate goal of the epidemic was (and undoubtedly remains to this day) the birth of monstrous forms unintelligible to society. The internality of the procedure, however, is ignored by any and all critiques thereof. It is no mistake, no whim of contingency, that communism is impossible. In fact this is its greatest strength. But how is one to prepare for such a thing, to make one's vessel appropriate to the in-dwelling of truth? The antennae of Azathoth, otherwise known as the backside of the twin petals of the ajna chakra, perhaps provide a mystical key (although the hidden potential of the vissuddhi remains relatively unexplored on this point). Intellectually, we would recommend the generic faculty of speculation applied the study of mathematics and its inherent limits.

Drawing down the truth is synonymous with the taking-root of a sidereal communism, since Yog-Sothoth is above all the Beyond-One. Sothis, the star of Set, the sun behind the sun, is a similar symbol, the point of the Beyond that exceeds the planar and planetary system of association. As the root of the power of formlessness, the rays of Sothis disrupt the regime of form and produce a new extension of intelligibility. And every such extension is simultaneously a disruption or reconfiguration. This is the necessary effect of radical novelty, the inherently excessive formlessness. When philosophers assign novelty to the void, they make an error. It comes not from nothing, but from a lateral, sidereal ontology of formlessness and its bizarre generations, the formal characteristics of which remain to be specified.

It is not that everything has been transcended in this process. That would be an unfortunate reintroduction of duality, that ultimate poverty of form.

It is furthermore a difficult truth that the formal nature of the operations under consideration produces not only formlessness as such, but a universal and therefore in the last instance real en-forming of itself. It all follows from the simple inhumanity of the Ideas. Nothing is as alien to humankind as universal truth, and yet this reality is pitifully misunderstood. With these considerations in mind, we can say with, if not certainty, then at least a certain speculative rigor: Lovecraft was the greatest egalitarian of his time. And no sociologizing opinions can deny us this.