Tiki heads with burning neon eyes, psychedelic patterns on enormous screens which thrash and writhe when no one is looking, shiny lacquered surf boards and a bar lined with bamboo, ceiling lights cloaked in patches of sky. Tentacled professors, communist wizards, addicts and ex-addicts with shaking hands, artists and thinkers deep in samadhi - they drink their kava and make faces as they sublimate into whisps of higher consciousness, fragments of lazy force floating up to Somewhere Else. All of it has the quality of a transcendent absurdity. An ancient tiki sitting next to me turns and whispers reassurance to my dully buzzing mind: "You are witness to a fractal image with contradiction at every level. This place, and you along with it, is a bubbling cauldron of fuzzed-up half-thoughts. Let's see what we can come up with..."
So sit back and enjoy; a krush will do you wonders. It always does.
Like a health-goth version of a William Gibson novel, the architecture of impossibility on display at Krave is clearly meant to mirror the inner Sprawl of the oozing ochre mind, drowning in euphoria and contented emptiness. Equal parts Lovecraft and Ramana Maharshi, Krave demands of us, "Who is the eye that watches the I? And are you too not just such an eye as well? On the end of a segmented stalk, perhaps?" As the outside world dissolves, everything becomes a mirror of the mind. But your mind? No, for there is something inhuman in Krave, from the endlessly repetitive house music with the bass turned way up to the 8-hour looping Youtube vidoes of deserted beaches playing silently at the end of the bar.
Krave exists only as contradiction, as impossibility, as absurdity; this is no doubt its greatest strength. No, Krave cannot exist. Not to the feeble human mind. This is a fact, but what is its meaning?
There is a sense in which Krave is out of time, withdrawing from the sordid outside world into a self-illumined autonomy as pure as it is senseless. Yes, here we have the sense of senselessness itself, an overwhelming and irrefutable intuition of the unintuitable. At Krave, impossibility itself is subtracted and purified from the lesser contradictions of the empirical world. A singularity is always inhuman, its truth akin to an alien parasite. Yes, let us raise our coconut shells to Azathoth, for his domain is truth and we are in Him as He is in us.
The Deep One sitting next to me shakily uncoils his languid chins, spits on his swollen lips, and pukes up a smile: "What is the meaning of this? Are we going up or ever down in this collective abstraction?"
You do know this is a collective enterprise, don't you? How could it be otherwise? You wouldn't grill us with your questions unless you'd done some questioning of your own beforehand, would you? What? Are you being detained? Well not by me at any rate...
"We have," I say, pointing at nowehere in particular, "several aesthetic senses here, where usually there is just one. Really, these are nothing but abstract images, an image without a concrete visual component. When you walk through that door, you are confronted with numerous abstract images, each of which contradicts the others. Taken together - and this higher level is quite a rare thing - this is the cosmic contradiction of Krave."
It is like seeing a face which you later cannot recall, but still you know what it looked like. Yet concrete faces are each a face, but Krave is only Krave. An abstract image is an aura, speculative imagination as opposed to speculative reason. It is the Cartesian intellect apprehending pictorial essence. And what if these essences were not externally opposed to one another, but were contradictory in their innermost determination, their mucoid unmanifestation withdrawing from sense at all levels, in all senses?
Pristine Pacific islands, cyberpunk technofuturism, psychedelic New Age naturalism.
A shaman's hut, a nightclub in the year 3000, a tunnel through outer space and into the point at the center of the universe.
Contradictory abstract images are sublated into a singularity, what can only be called the Krave Aesthetic.
And there is nothing like it.
It is precisely when an abstract image is the sheath or essence of lower-order abstract images, each moment contradicting the others, that we have an aesthetic singularity.
And thank Yog-Sothoth for that.
Kava fhtagn!
