+++

Text: You With Your Memory Are Dead

Author: Gary J. Shipley

Publisher: Inside the Castle

Plot: The shadow of an ape is formed and deformed and reformed gradually over the course of two weeks inside the looping guts of Begotten.

Subplot: The observer of the shadow of an ape is formed and deformed and reformed gradually over the course of the hundred and eleven hours they spend continuously reading and/or writing about the text of the shadow of an ape.

Sub-subplot: Trapped in a state of infinite usage-stroke-exhaustion, ‘feels like’ and ‘I don’t know’ join forces with a jaded ‘or does it’ to find a way out.

+++

You With Your Memory Are Dead [YWYMAD from this point on] opens with the following quote card:

~

‘Like a flame burning aw-     the darkness

Life is flesh on bone co-    ulsing above the ground’

~

The two hyphenated words in the middle are interrupted by the tightness of the inner spine fold. I didn’t know, or didn’t remember, that Begotten opens [not ‘opened’, it’s eternal] with the same quote when I started reading so I tried to fill in the [anti-] spaces. These were my notes:

‘aw’ is either ‘away’, ‘awash’, ‘awful’, ‘awol’, ‘awkward’, ‘awkwafina’, ‘awe’ or ‘aws console.’

‘co-     ulsing’ must be ‘convulsing.’

Why the tight inner spine?

Accident, or an attempt to make this unconvincingly unfamiliar?

You think you know Begotten…

+++

The preface, written by the director of Begotten, E. Elias Merhige, tells us that Gary’s plan was to make the film his own by sitting in a room for two weeks and watching it on loop.

A bit random to drag this in, but it reminds me of Orwell and his stipend whenever things got a little too tough. He did work the dish-washing jobs he said he did, but he was never in danger of being poor. I mean, can you ever truly be absorbed into a thing that is not innately inherently you?

I wouldn’t do the Begotten plan, even with something I adore, e.g. DS9, so it is definitely a feat of endurance.

Parameters?

The only breaks allowed, according to the preface, were for meals and sleep, and, I assume, trips to the toilet.

Is that accurate?

Did Gary’s eyes have to stay on Begotten at all times?

Could they look at the wall nearby?

Would a fainter version of Begotten be playing there too?

+++

To fully commit to this, in my harshest mind, you would have to watch Begotten on loop until death and have no goal of publishing, or giving posthumous permission for the publishing of, what you write afterwards

Is that fair?

+++

Two problems:

1] detaching your mind from the premise you’ve forced upon yourself.

2] detaching your mind from prospective readers.

During the two weeks, was there pressure [from himself] to write something? At which points? Could Gary edit later what he wrote down at the time? Was the entire book ‘notes of reflection’ written retrospectively? Or ‘notes of just-now-past’ typed up afterwards?

+++

Form/structure.

Ostensibly written in first person, though ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘me’ appear only intermittently, about once every two pages.

[I just went through some sections at random, and ‘I/My/Me’ crop up a lot more than once every two pages, though it does thin out a little as the book goes on – intentional??].

Most of the sentences are single or double widows, with the spaces between quite wide. This is consistent throughout the text.

As presented, it neither feels immediate nor chaotic/erratic, which [superficially, perhaps] puts it one extra layer from intimate truth. The language lacks casualness too. Makes me think Gary wrote notes first, during the two weeks, and then typed it all up afterwards.

Could be wrong.

+++

Begotten [dir. E. Elias Merhige]

It’s on YouTube and around seventy minutes long. According to wiki, there are various religious and pagan themes/symbols embedded inside the madness, but I don’t really care about that aspect, it’s the madness I crave, the idea that someone would consciously make the choice to write and film something like this.

The sound is like badly-recorded grasshopper-fucking played on loop, and the images are grainy/scratched/sloshed, which both reduces and alienizes the horror of the opening body-cutting.

For Gary to respond to this, to quarantine himself with a void-scape companion, is to achieve what? Access its madness? To say that there is no other way except through previously-made culture cos everything produced feels like that anyway?

How much of YWYMAD is its own thing?

Was that even the intention?

Schism Press publishes a lot of mutative/mutated [?] work that bursts like pus from other works, this is probably following the same theme.

+++

Back to the form, the layer/barrier separating it from intimate truth [via Gary’s melting brain/phenomenology/solipsism/whatever you wanna call it].

Wouldn’t “erratic” writing i.e. a structure which appears like a structureless mess, be equally artificial? An attempt to create an aesthetic chameleon appropriate to the madness of Begotten.

This is potentially true.

Any novel is a planned thing, on some level.

How to lose control?

Keep in typos, put text over text instead of correcting/editing. E.g. write a novella, then write something else and superimpose it on top of that novella without consciously choosing the placement area. Think of the underlying text as a lost act. But have no intention of doing all this superimposing when you sit down to write the initial novella.

Still seems designed, to be honest.

Hmm.

[Hmm is also designed – as I told Danika, I would never say hmm in real life, but it’s there now so…].

In Perma Neon O, there’s a typo of ‘space exhibition’ instead of the more logical ‘space expedition’ and, by the time I’d noticed, it was too late to fix it, but that’s fine, better even. ‘Space exhibition’ has its own life to it, a false life that never should’ve been.

I think there are some typos in YWYMAD too. ‘Existentiell’ instead of ‘existential.’ Though it could just be a German spelling cos it’s a Heidegger quote. Was he German? Sounds like it.

[Of course I just checked and ‘existential’ in German is ‘existenziell,’ so pretty close]

Note: Gary just told me on twitter that ‘existentiell’ is an actual philosophical concept from Heidegger. So, not a typo.

+++

Another annex to form, the book is split into fourteen sections, each with a heading that may or may not be related to Begotten.

The number ‘fourteen’ = an allusive mirroring of the fourteen countries consumed by the Soviet Union, which itself was a premise either in relation to or contradiction with the idea of Communism and-

+++

+++

Day One Of Breathing Sand

~

‘I forget everything.’

~

Bold statement, a desire, impossible if you’re still a human ‘I’.

What would a forgetting of everything even look like?

~

‘The unknowing I knew that became the fetish of me. And the room I’m in.’

~

Which room is being referred to here?

The shack in the opening scene of Begotten or the room that Gary is sitting in, watching the shack in the opening scene of Begotten?

‘The unknowing I knew’ = inversion, or fold-contradiction, folded again [twice?] by becoming ‘the fetish of me.’

Who is me attached to?

I’m having trouble pinning a perspective to this, feels like the ‘I’ is already unravelling. Or worse, unraveled.

~

‘The presupposition that I lost that returned that I’ve come to unpick.’

~

Tough sentence, use of triple relative clause, a headfuck the more I read it.

The second ‘that’ is especially hard to grasp. Unless it is supposed to be read as an object-noun i.e. that returned thing, and not that which was returned. Or ‘presupposition’ itself is the subject and each ‘that’ is referring to it without a comma to intervene?

I don’t know.

Looking at it again, I still can’t be sure that I get it.

+++

I’m curious [again], was this written on day one?

The section heading implies that it was, but was it?

Or is it a conscious attempt to write something cos it’s day one and Gary feels that he must?

How do you overcome the premise you’ve set for your ‘self’?

Even in a trance state, you’re still an interloper, still fixed to an aspect of your incessant ‘I’.

Is that where the ‘fetish of me’ comes in?

~

‘Because the space around looking is more of it’

~

The sentences are a bit off, disconcerting.

‘Around looking’ is what? A compound without a hyphen? Or should it be read as ‘around, looking is…’?

Some lines are phrased grammatically as questions but refuse the addition of a question mark.

~

‘For the womb wearing clip-on ears to the autopsy of Mickey Mouse’

~

Nice line, but artificial?

Did this come from the “watching” of Begotten or the ‘breathing of sand’ of Gary trying to dig himself into the right mindset to start feeling it.

The non-mindset?

~

‘And the world becomes my Parkinson’s tremor’

~

Just like Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, the text [Gary] is trying to go inside the insides of the inside and at the same time give it a quantum power over the outside, the macro, the universe, but a quantum power that is sick and diseased in some way.

+++

All these quotes appear on the first two pages. If I keep going like this, analysing every other line, it’ll be 100,000 words, longer than YWYMAD itself, so I’m gonna pull out a bit, which, as soon as I write it, feels like a mistake.

Luckily, I’m typing up my notes on YWYMAD now, so there’s no problem, no mistake.

This piece will be long.

Is long.

+++

Okay, I changed my mind, here’s another line from early on, complete with the same super-distant spacing that [form-wise [or somatically if this thing is alive]] segregates the text:

~

‘And I breathe the air of image, the nothing that’s something when it’s gone.

And the space around me drained of seducements.

An abandoned artery growing God on a chair.’

~

Weirdly, that last line sums up the feeling I had after finishing Blood Shack, though if God really were growing on that chair, I would’ve melted their tits off.

Don’t particularly want to – Gary is a trained philosopher who wrote a monograph [sic] on Baudrillard seen by Death [sic], so this could be more embarrassing than usual – but feel compelled to drag in Baudrillard, especially the line about seducements.

[Even the phrasing feels odd, like it should be ‘seductions’ as it’s more commonly used].

Baudrillard talked about [in Passwords, the only book of his my nearest library currently has] seduction by the object, linked to a possible revenge, and it feels like Gary has gone beyond that, or is attempting to. Feels like we all have. Culture has looped in on itself, so much so that even autofiction reads like a pastiche of older autofiction now.

Gary has inserted himself into a closed loop.

He desires to go beyond it.

In any direction whatsoever, but initially he seems to be veering towards inside/inversion [not subversion].

The end can no longer be located cos its quantum and nothing quantum allows itself to be located.

Is it still rhizomatic if the rhizome is ingrown?

Sorry, crossed wires there.

+++

Just searched for that monograph to confirm its existence [my memory is death-adjacent] and its full title is actually Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying with Baudrillard, a Study of Sickness and Simulacra.

And this is the synopsis:

This book is unique in its dedicated tackling of the subject of death in the work of Jean Baudrillard. Through new readings of his work, juxtaposed with philosophical (Schopenhauer, Kant) and artistic (Jeremy Millar, Ron Mueck) examples along with films (Norte, the End of History; Ida), the book makes so patently clear the importance of Baudrillard’s tendency to poeticize, his core indebtedness to Georges Bataille, Alfred Jarry, and others, and his reliance on paradox. Ultimately, Stratagem of the Corpse is less a making sense of death and more a transcript of what occurred when death made sense of us, a reverse thanatology in which death delineates the variant forms of our encroachment, not so much death as seen by Baudrillard but Baudrillard as seen by death.

Apart from JB, I recognise one of those names and it’s not Ron Mueck.

It’s Bataille, my favourite communal beheadist [in theory].

Actually, I know Schopenhauer and Kant, haven’t read them though.

Baudrillard as seen by death = Gary as seen by Begotten?

+++

It’s hard to read YWYMAD and not stop every twenty seconds to either try and re-process what you’ve just read or extract a chunk and write it down.

I need to immerse myself for a while, without the thought of having to write something/breathe sand.

Which is hard cos a little kid is running around my table and that fucking Dra-ma-ma-ma-ma song is playing on the speakers [which are hidden].

But I will try.

I’m pretty good at blocking the outside out.

+++

Looking at this, I think the guy in the shack is ‘god on the chair’ and Merhige is the abandoned artery.

To cut or renovate?

+++

Form-wise, each page contains around 22 lines, with some of the half-text, half-film-still ones running fewer than ten. You could motor through this in an hour if your concept of reading is just recognising signs/signifiers on a page and giving only the most superficial ‘signified’ to them.

But you can’t do that.

There’s too much going on.

~

‘And he wears himself like a bride wears an electric chair’

~

You can’t rush this.

Which bride?

How exactly does she wear an electric chair? What is the root of this surrealism?

Can’t be good.

Which means HE is uncomfortable in his own skin – and psyche – and beneath that also.

HE in the line above, not Gary.

+++

Another aspect of the premise that I’m curious about: how did Gary feel after publishing such a perverse and draining work? Did it have any value at all beyond the writing process?

Feels like not.

What can anyone possibly say that would mean anything?

Maybe the director, Merhige?

He did blurb the book/write a preface.

A mix of insight [don’t just watch, digest, ritualise], implied permission [he was contacted, liked the idea], egotism [‘approach this film like an ancient ruin’], a nonsense call to the divine [to be fair, that could’ve just been semantics], and sincerity.

I think he’s right.

Passively watching a film like Begotten might not be enough.

You need to go deeper.

Or smaller?

+++

To connect with a piece of art [‘piece’ sounds like it’s been captured/interned], just to think about it in some way afterwards, is like coming across a rehabilitated artery with a ‘gods gone’ t-shirt lying ripped on a footstool. And the artery can’t remember ever being abandoned. But feels that it might have been. I’m moving on. Going back to Trash F-Log. Next one: Alien Private Eye and my convulsing Lembro.

+++

Staying in the outside zone for a second, it’s also interesting that Gary apparently contacted Merhige before locking himself in the room. Why? To ask permission? To test the response?

I wrote an e-mail to Rudy Wurlitzer a long time ago [after reading Quake] and he replied, telling me my zine sounded interesting, but he didn’t have time to write anything for it cos he had a headache.

I think he was just being polite.

But it was surreal to get a response. To think that it was the same hand that typed Quake typing to me.

Happy to see that he’s still alive in 2024.

Hope he’s not dead now.

~

‘And the world is an aneurism in the brain of God, and man the vomit it induces.’

~

The God in the shack is a horror-clown that hasn’t cleaned up in millennia, why would they?

All the language used is disgusting/unsanitary.

Sanitary is a lie.

Children in a swimming pool are just waiting to be, or already are, cancered.

This kind of thought does drool out when you go small enough, singular enough.

All things can be abjected, disgusting.

[Abjected isn’t a word?? Should be.]

Yet there is ambivalence to this, a resistance for me at least, when I see real horror happening in the world. Horror even more ‘horror-state’ cos the distance between myself and it is paralysing.

It diminishes this type of philosophy, renders it selfish/solipsistic…not infantile but barricaded off somehow.

The western philosopher is not going to have a bomb dropped on their head.

[None of us are].

But then it’s not wrong, there is truth in this. And this smallness is referenced in the text [‘Because early man never saw himself in a mirror. But died anyway.’]. Being able to have the time to look in a mirror also gives you time to know how futile the mirror is, how fraudulent the reflection.

You could just not look.

Or paint a clown face on it.

Or have it bombed by the IOF.

I think I said a similar thing about Vitiators. It’s both philosophically fascinating and endless yet also redundant if the outside world truly turns against you.

The inside world?

I suppose cancer is tolerable if it’s figurative.

+++

Is this style, this philosophical/psychical burrowing/thrashing about euphoric or tiring?

One: the emotion is drained out.

Two: the emotion cannot be fully drained.

Is there emotion to this?

You can’t be vomit in the pool of a divine aneurism without feeling.

Abjection is euphoric cos it’s unremembered.

Has the face of something new + grotesque.

Reveling in this gives purpose within purposelessness.

There is purpose.

Just not a centralised one, on a recognisable artery.

What about the writing/typing of it, is it tiring?

[This de-con-struc is handwritten first, typed up later, I’m resisting the urge to edit as I type this brand new sentence right now and failing]

Don’t know about Gary, but to commit yourself to something undesigned is euphoric but tiring in the sense that you made it close to “there” once and now you don’t know if you’ll ever make it back again, and it feels tiring to think about trying. Or tiring to imagine the route of trying to get back “there”, which is hidden + unfamiliar like everything in the trance state.

Did Gary wonder where the next ‘abandoned artery’ line was coming from? Did the line itself start to feel artificial when he re-looked at it?

It is grotesquely beautiful, and attached in a semi-abstract way to the film image [God Killing Himself on the shack chair], but it’s the saying of something already said, isn’t it?

Or does it go beyond that, becoming a line that can’t quite get to where it desires to get and, through that process, perfect for the first section which might be Gary grasping for a familiar way into terrain that may be undiscoverable?

The divine should read as madness.

+++

+++

Took a two day break, possibly an error.

Need to work my way back into this.

+++

Hatching Cycle Of Futile Exertions

+

No Day Two of Breathing Sand, but Hatching Cycle of Futile Exertions, which feels thematically similar i.e. Gary still trying to dig his way in and committing to the premise.

At least I think that’s what he’s doing.

This could be written at any point of Begotten as he’s watching on loop.

It is not a linear progression.

He might be digging + getting nowhere for all fourteen sections, the only addition being desperation/frustration at self or the process, or the self for instigating that process.

+++

Before each section is a double-white spread of pages, and a double-black spread afterwards.

The white spread seems emptier somehow.

The black, mystical.

White is symbolic of reaching a [psychological] impasse? Black is symbolic of diving back in?

+++

Need to check the formatting/layout in more detail. There are a lot of white spaces taking up half to two thirds of a page, plus stills from Begotten fixed next to black stills of equal size.

+++

I’ve gone back to the start and the book begins at page 30. The title is stated four separate times. There are a lot of filler pages. It’s almost as if the work itself is reluctant to get into this.

Reluctant or anxious?

Again, can Gary go to where he desires to go with Begotten?

Of course he can.

Even if he goes nowhere, he can chronicle that dead end. That could be what the first few sections are. Maybe the rest of them too.

This isn’t masturbation over biblical/pagan symbolism.

I hope.

I don’t know what this is.

Don’t know if I’ve been using the correct philosophical terms.

Psychical? Phenomenology?

+++

I’ve gone through and counted the number of text-only pages in each section + it is as follows:

9, 12, 12, 10, 9, 9, 11, 9, 10, 12, 11, 10, 10, 6

No section goes above 12 pages.

Suggests some kind of discipline/restraint.

What about the layout?

1^st section: lower-half text, upper-half text, full text, lower-half text, left page text, right page white.

2^nd section: lower-half text, full text, lower-half text, very low half text, upper-half text, upper-half text, very high half text.

All sections begin with a two-page spread of lower-half text, with a Begotten film still on the left hand page. After that, there is typically a double-page of full text, but not always. There are variations within a relatively strict design.

The widow lines aren’t always widowed either, they’re clearly a follow-on from the previous widow. Yet they are separated by a large white space. Why?

What does this layout mean?

Theory 1: each section requires a grounding element for Gary to begin the trance process.

But why stick to a [relatively] rigid design?

Sometimes when I do my nonsense scrawls I can feel the thought pre-empting it, and I attempt to follow that thought, I suppose, but there is also a treacherous element that won’t allow it. I don’t know what I am drawing at that moment.

It helps that I can’t draw.

The Count Fleshweather I did in my Ponds de-con-struc doesn’t make sense anatomically/visually, and I’m unsure how I broke my conditioning enough to be able to do that.

Should Gary have added nonsense scrawls to this?

Theory 2: the layout is the grounding element, a tarpaulin stretched out over the black space for Gary to lay his prospective corpse on.

Like David Lynch eating the same thing for lunch, at the same diner, every day.

He needs this.

~

‘The light failing, a path across the ceiling, down the walls.

The dribble of a culture of a never-ending face.

My eyes antennae unable to retract.

And even the blind exist in their seeing nothing.

Imaging the dark.

When sight is the phobia of sight.

And the way the screen looks out: humanoid.’

~

Another blurring of the room and the screen and the room inside Gary’s melting head.

Imaging the dark, not imagining it?

A materialist experiment stuck in the strictest materialism.

With what scanner?

Could be a reference to dark matter. Far as I know [which isn’t that far], it’s undetectable, or detectable in the sense that it should be there.

Something has to be.

Detectable by its absence?

~

‘When sight is the phobia of sight.’

~

Struggling with this one, unless the second ‘sight’ is a preternatural one that denies the materialist ‘sight’?

~

‘The way the screen looks out: humanoid.’

~

Screen = abyss

It is humanoid or we are?

+++

A lot of this section continues with the seemingly ritualistic act of inversion. Many acts of it. I could quote any line and it would be there.

~

‘How every murder is unfinished, when every murderee seeks a nature for himself for herself where only a culture is found.’

~

A murder is unfinished from the POV of the observer, and the search of seeking of the murderee for a ‘nature’ is performed by that observer on their behalf, and it turns out the murder was a cultural act.

Everything is inverted yet not.

+++

How much of this has to do with Begotten? The limit of film analysis is to remain outside the object, or the action-image, whereas by looping it + himself within that, every thought/tangent becomes an <abandoned> artery of Begotten, a rhizome that didn’t exist before.

[I’m probably overusing the artery metaphor].

You could read every line as ‘that can’t happen, that can’t do that.’

Will it become repetitive, ultimately?

Before then?

I wonder also if it’s a barricade to sincerity, to humility. A murderee doesn’t seek anything, they’re dead. Only someone safe from being murdered would utilise them in this way.

I believe, quite strongly, that Gary is aware of this.

Is inverting some aspect of it.

Maybe someone he knows was murdered.

Maybe he’s a murderer.

A future murderee.

Maybe it’s not some aspect at all but inversion on top of inversion on top of inversion fucking the next door inversion cos what other direction is there but inside-out?

+++

I’m only on page 48, making a lot of assumptions/lunatic turns [as is my style].

Need to see where this goes.

All the inversions could be a pantomime that Gary is trying to get beyond.

Or a series of rituals?

Think generally of inversions, Baudrillard, the screen as God, Begotten as observer of you, and write from there.

Is that a series of rituals?

Am I doing anything different from that here?

+++

I’m drifting off into Trek memories. Scenes in Season 7 where Kira puts on the Starfleet uniform and says, ‘a Bajoran with the authority to speak on behalf of the Federation.’ As a [wintertime] anarchist, I shouldn’t feel good about this scene, but I do. On some level, I want her to join the thing I relate to…cos it’s run by humans?

Consciously, I don’t like the way the Federation is human-led. The HQ is in San Francisco. It’s supposed to be a multi-species endeavor.

The aliens are just humans in alien-face.

Parallels not inversions.

Yet I still know and love Trek the same way Gary knows and loves Begotten. I’m even trying to write my own version of it now.

Is that really me though? The optimism?

My other sci-fi novel, Planet Rasputin, is pretty miserable.

What’s this got to do with YWYMAD?

Shares the same artery?

~

‘Because man is not the fingerprint of God. Because the fingerprint of God is God.’

~

Still no lower case ‘g’ on God.

I almost feel that extracting any single line is irrelevant as it’s the whole that matters more. To me. As in, what do all the lines of each section amount to together? How do they mesh with/scrape against the other?

They’re all fairly dismal, bleak, way beyond reductionist…and do they build up that feeling in their totality or nullify it?

I suppose the question is: did Gary direct it this way? Did he excise the arbitrary? If he suddenly felt that ‘God’ looked like Michael Wincott, would he consider that extraneous + leave it out?

I think it’s fair to say he would [and did].

No mind is this one-note.

One note shredded into a thousand quantum folds?

I’m veering towards philosophical discipline reflected in the strict yet unorthodox nature of the layout design.

If correct, does that negate the experiment?

I don’t know.

Maybe the Michael Wincott nod turns up in a later section.

Maybe I’m trying to superimpose my own mind onto this [cos the text is powerless to resist such a superimposition].

It just feels odd somehow.

70% relatable – the inversions, the surrealism – yet, at the same time, Kira in her brand new Starfleet uniform [tailored by a Cardassian].

~

‘When the house around me is delocalised. And I fidget to postpone something. Something else. Something I won’t be ready for. When my days are one long extended fidget.’

~

Could [must?] be wrong but this feels like a confession, one that matches my earlier guess that Gary is trying to dig his way into this and is flailing a bit, but is aware of the flailing, and is willing to write it into the text cos it’s part of his psyche [while watching looped Begotten].

For me, the best way is to detach from the purpose, any target you may have.

You are not a designer.

You don’t know what you are.

But then, every written [typed] word is by design. The moment you put it down, it has passed through a layer of mediation.

How to avoid this?

~

‘Because I choreograph the stillness of the things I know to be inanimate.

The sound of momentum of disemboweled sand.

Because horror is airtight.’

~

Objects are beginning to get possessive; the subject is both choreographing their stillness and knowing it, which is most likely the same act.

Sand can now be disemboweled.

Humans have infected the object-world with its torture-terms that lose all value in the process.

Unless you’re the one being disemboweled.

Then you can know exactly what it means.

Is this an indictment of the room half the world has sectioned off for itself? A quest to go deeper into its guts? To invert it and then what?

Inversion may lead to destruction [and/or an end] but, on a solipsistic level, it’s an admission that nothing is destroyed and you don’t wanna do anything that might get you disemboweled.

Isn’t it?

We’re all in the same room here

Each of us reading this

Merhige too.

~

‘And this room fits inside, is sanitary, a place to ritualize the processing of processes.’

~

‘z’ not ‘s’ on ritualize, thought Gary was British?

At the risk of making ‘feels like’ completely bloodless, it feels like I’m definitely onto something with the series of rituals idea as this line directly states it.

Gary trapped in Raccoon Alphabet Ritual City.

+++

+++

I’m onto the third section now. Getting tired of stopping to write notes, feels like I’m too detached from the mass of all this hitting me in one continuous wave, so I’m gonna just read for a while. See if my assumptions/theories pan out. Or turn into penises and eat each other. To be honest, design is inevitable, to some degree. I think I need to watch Begotten again too. I’m writing based off a memory from a year and a half ago. Far too long.

+++

To go deeper, smaller, you need to jettison the philosopher?

Feels like a comfort blanket.

Putting terms to things.

+++

Day Of Minus Things

+

I’ve unremembered what it’s about.

The outside world, the Begotten scenes mixed in, slowly taking over, everyday things distorted, de-territorialised.

‘When the sea mist comes inland. When it’s in here with me. Chewing at the edges of objects.’

+++

Begotten is on my computer screen now.

Or it was when I was writing the notes that I’m typing up four days later.

Is the screen big enough?

The room has too many objects/distractions.

It’s daytime.

My wife is watching Vincenzo on the TV.

How big was Gary’s screen?

Did his locked room have objects/distractions?

Was it [a] barren [wasteland]?

+

The film stills in YWYMAD appear to follow the chronology of the film yet it was watched on loop.

+

Didn’t want to [I never do], but I got distracted enough to look on wiki, the legacy tab of Begotten, and both Marilyn Manson + Zola Jesus watched the film on loop while producing their albums. Or had it playing on loop in the background. Influence fumes not engagement?

No mention of Gary’s work on wiki.

Why not?

+

Can’t decide if the grainy vagueness of the image makes it more abject or less.

If God Killing Himself didn’t jerk around with the razor so much it wouldn’t be horrific.

It’s not horrific exactly.

More like bizarre.

Why wouldn’t ‘God’ be jittery?

Looks like a McDonald’s M on the wall behind.

Black blood is worse than red.

Someone, somewhere, right now, is wanking over Mother Earth.

How was this even conceived?

+

Can’t see what’s happening clearly.

I think she’s tugging off the corpse of God Killing Himself.

Is that her muff or gore residue?

+

Son of Earth – Flesh on Bone is here.

Covered in dirt + shit.

Someone, somewhere, right now, is wanking over him.

He looks ready/unready.

Jittery like his dad.

+

No way that’s a fire pit.

+

Hi Mum.

+

Mum?

+

Fuck, him too.

Again.

+

There’s something magical about forests, viscera occluded by newness [compared to that barren wasteland].

+

I’m reading with my dick out.

 A razor held to the frenulum.

A serrated knife.

Thinking about it.

First line is true enough, the rest, a pale maybe.

+

On page 84 now and I said I wouldn’t stop to take notes, but I wanted to quickly note that the room is being referenced again. In a dyad with the dead boy born alive. Everything is vague, deformed, image up to the neck, grey-celled, like turning in on its own likeness, organs on a zipwire, retched ectogoo of the sun [which may be sick of being sentient], baby forks sticking out of heads that can’t be bothered to mould themselves, astronomy in a swimsuit etc.

+

I had the sudden idea to reformat this whole thing to match the formatting of the thing I’m desperately drowning on the surface of. Not fond of this plan though. Feels like a bloated architect. I won’t do it.

+

Is there a difference between this and the first three sections?

Should there be?

It does mimic Begotten in a way, which makes sense as it’s loosely pursuing the narrative, Gary is feeding himself into and out of the scratchy blackness of the thing, connecting himself to the baking soda re-death of Mother Earth.

+++

+++

Interval In Which Parentheses Warp

~

‘So I feel like, when I leave, the room will come with me.

Like the twitching of the dead boy born alive.

His regenerating decay.’

~

The <newest> question: is that genuine? Is the room truly becoming a convulsing dirt-child or is he wishing it to at that moment?

It’s unclear [to me] mostly cos of the structure of the text.

None of these sentences would come out this way, in this order, with this kind of beauty-grotesque.

It has been edited, surely.

But at which points?

That’s it, isn’t it? When you commit yourself to the loop-watch-witchifying premise, when do you start the act of writing?

How much do you edit?

I think I need to either look for an interview with Gary talking specifically about his writing process for YWYMAD, or just ask him directly + paste it on at the end here.

[Note: there are no interviews, nothing will be pasted].

+++

Haven’t counted but it feels like around 96% of all the text is composed of contradiction, juxtaposition, black surrealism, re-territorialised hell-scape.

Look:

~

‘dead wall doors.’

‘Fast-food miracle vomit of IVF.’

‘gulp a smartly-dressed eviction.’

‘reverse puking of the son’s first breath.’

‘synchronised inanimation.’

‘my stillness is the frozen unzipping of a clot.’

~

Where are all these coming from?

The trance state?

When he’s looking at the screen or away from it?

Looking at the ghost residue of the screen or the ghost residue of the room?

Theory: once you pick up the razor and slice open one inversion, nothing but cousin inversions will follow.

This may be a long-form experiment to make that inverted a normal state.

THE normal state.

But if you go there alone, disarmed…and if you’re successful…how do you then return to the world afterwards?

When Gary exited the locked room [was it locked?] after two weeks, did the first face he saw look like an abomination?

Was it painful to communicate with them?

Not exactly the same thing, but a long time ago, when I was at the melting submarine hatch to insanity, my brain turned against me, coldly.

Meeting people was Franju-esque horror.

None of you were human to me anymore, or you were too human, saturated human, I don’t know, but talking to you was an act done almost completely outside of myself.

I was there but not.

I was there spliced, terrified, I didn’t even know how words were forming in my brain + coming out, the actual biological process of it, I could not picture it or comprehend it.

It fucking terrified me, intimately.

I don’t even know if I’m explaining it well enough [it’s laid out better in Charcoal, without fumbled explanations] but going that small, that deep into things – not in a zany, post-structuralist way, or what I think of when I think of post-structuralism, which is quite limited to be frank – was something I never want to go back to…but fear that one day I will.

Two weeks in a room with Begotten would be impossible.

I can’t be seen like that.

Best I can do is dip in and out of a trance state in my writing. Including whatever happens to me during these de-con-strucs.

Staggered unraveling?

+

Perhaps because of the philosophy training, Gary is more disciplined than I am?

I don’t know [again].

Would that same discipline allow him to invert everything though?

Every possible thing?

+++

It’s been three days and I’m here picking this up again.

At the Period Of Disrupted Containment.

Still [self-] debating whether I should read the whole of YWYMAD first then come back and write notes on it.

Can’t keep stopping every other line, it’ll make this thing longer than the book itself.

~

‘Life’s quavering fungus of the sun.’

~

Don’t know what quavering means.

Quivering?

~

‘The planets circling like so many bonnethead sharks.’

~

Bonnethead sharks?

 Distinct from bottlehead or hammerhead sharks maybe.

Bottlehead doesn’t sound right.

~

‘I make flies explode through psychogenetic reverse zoonosis.’

~

Zoonosis?

[checked: a disease that can be transmitted to humans from animals – should’ve known this one, probably did at some point during COVID, someone must’ve said it].

~

‘The head devoured in this erased circle of sky.’

~

Had to re-read this several times. Devoured + erased = too much negativity, no clearly delineated space.

Devoured is an aggressive/joyous act.

Erased is cold/totalising.

~

‘This briefest decapitation: God’s own mercy, a vaccination.’

~

Decapitation as vaccination…for who[m]?

~

‘And I am reminded of those German airmen who only ever killed children from a distance.’

~

Jarringly clear line – sums up the previous five?

~

‘Their ears cratered by asteroids.’

~

Whose ears?

~

‘The self a dead planet on a collision course with worlds it kills to stay dead.’

~

If it’s the children’s ears, they’re already dead, which means death doesn’t matter here. Has no matter here.

The Son of Earth resurrects.

God Killing Himself does not.

~

‘And there’s something like the promise of words in the chirr.’

~

God Killing Himself is resurrected [externally].

Chirr?

~

‘A lunar twitching.’

~

The moon is chained to us, why wouldn’t it feel angsty/antsy?

~

‘Where substance does not believe its own lies.’

~

We [substances] didn’t pull those lies from nothing, they’re not innate, they’re inherited.

Aren’t they?

Maybe the bedrock is, to some degree.

~

‘Where I start to smell my few hours of sleep in the middle of the day. And it smells of formaldehyde, and it smells of methanol.’

~

Past sleep or coming sleep?

Gary has self-placed inside a laboratory.

He is the scientist observing himself as the patient and is sick of both roles?

He is sick of both roles.

Was sick.

+++

I’m still struggling to see all these lines as one whole mass.

Maybe if I go through this section [Period Of Disrupted Containment] + write down all the object-references + how they are dealt with.

+

The Sun/Moon – fungus/twitching

Flies – exploded

Planets – bonnethead sharks circling

THE head – decapitated

German airmen – cold faraway killers [of kids]

Ears – hit by asteroids

The Self – a dead planet both out of control and on a mission of self-sustenance [as dead]

Substance – us? Described as if an object that has finally woken up lost/confused

I – smelling chemicals of limited sleep

Alien figures – rotting, lumbering, encumbered

Fish – cannibalistic, beyond a moral meaning of the act cos fish is not a word for them. The devouring of not its negation or opposite, but its very own self…yet not quite…fish eating fish just calls for further sub-divisions or categorisation e.g. blue fish eats red fish, blue fish eats light blue fish, blue fish eats blue fish that couldn’t go that far that fast that didn’t know what the fuck it was talking about.

Reflection of I – like a UFO 3 miles wide

The dead – unstill

The room – becoming less familiar

+

Going back through it, I’m not sure how much symmetry exists in these references. The Sun + the Planets could be paired with the Head + the Flies. Aliens + Fish, Body Parts + Self, the Reflection of Self.

And, overall, as the author, object + subject, is Gary attempting to keep this off-balance, random, or is the philosopher part of him reeling in the macro [Sun, Planets, Aliens etc.] and micro [Body Parts, Room, Self] and smearing it all with shit/gore/death/grime/the unreal cos that’s where he feels Begotten should be taking him?

I remember there was a Mickey Mouse reference in the first or second section. Does that automatically become sullied with Begotten in the same room?

What if Mickey wins?

What if he’s more abject?

Seems impossible, but if the abject is let back in, if it devours its own abjection then wouldn’t it return in the form of a beaming mouse [that doesn’t look like a real mouse]?

+++

Vincenzo is pointing a gun at the villain [who can’t act], who I know from earlier encounters cannot beat him in a fight.

He’s been pointing the gun for almost seven minutes. It’s going to bridge over into the next episode. It is bridging now. The next episode starts before he’s pointed the gun. Now he’s pointing it. For another seven minutes. He’s dropped it now.

Why does my wife watch this shit?

Why am I covert-watching it?

K-dramas are weird.

I’ve probably watched about twenty of them and each one stretches out an episode to over an hour, with 16-20 episodes in total, yet I still can’t say it’s indulgent. Scenes are extended for melodrama only, the characters pose instead of act, incidents and scenarios pile up as little pockets of meaningless emotional release…to do what exactly?

Begotten is around 72 minutes long.

~

‘Because depending on the time of day, the room’s objects will bloat and shrink without changing.

Because they make themselves an illness.’

~

Focus has settled on the self, body parts, senses and the room, none of which is stable. Everything appears to be merging or vanishing or encroaching or othering itself.

I think Begotten is in there too.

~

‘Like the son’s entourage of smotherers.’

~

But out of sequence in relation to the film-stills placed on the pages in the book.

At this point, the son is being birthed.

Either Gary’s or Mother Earth’s perspective is toying with itself.

Paedophilia on one line, the shadow of a door handle being a bit off on the opposing one.

Some ‘thing’ is polluting the other?

Some ‘things’ polluting the ‘others’?

~

‘And hearing myself speak is like crawling out of an evaporating hole.’

~

Don’t know how long Gary has been in the room at this point, how many loops of Begotten he’s gone through, but the perception of his own senses is beginning to turn on him.

How can he be sure he actually spoke?

~

‘And he’s hauled along by a vine? a rope? his own engorged umbilicus?’

~

Gary is enmeshed with the birth of the son in Begotten.

Or trying to be.

Is it a true, fully tethered connection, or the attempt at/mimicry of one?

I keep coming back to this.

The writing, the language used, gives the impression of entwinement, but is there some embellishment also?

Were these words typed or scrawled on a page?

Was that process distancing in some way?

How could a writer ever avoid that?

I do not know.

Anything designed to be intelligible, anything transcribed has to have some artificiality to it, surely.

You just have to chip away at it.

But is that chipping or remoulding?

Philosophically, in that specific zone of language, this is beyond me yet I can’t stop slicing away at it.

I’m certain Gary is circling something here, trying to reach something that can’t be reached…and I know I’ve written that same thought already, maybe several times, in many de-con-strucs…and here it is again, like a grinning Carnival of Souls remake.

I just don’t know [man].

+++

Watching Begotten for the second time in three days and it is beautiful in the sense that someone made this.

I think I’ve written that before too.

Still stands though.

Someone made that grasshopper/faintly howling wind sound design and the grainy black and white imagery and [probably] made the actors twitch + jitter like that, and put it out into the world for people like Marilyn Manson and Nicholas Cage to see.

It’s almost unwatchable.

I won’t watch it a third time.

Vincenzo is on.

I wanna see what happens to the bad guy who can’t beat Vincenzo in a fight. Which is depressing. But I mean it. I’ve read the episode summary on wiki and I want to see how exactly Vincenzo forces a blade to kill the bad guy slowly.

~

‘The self a dead planet on a collision course with worlds it kills to stay dead.’

~

Me = dead planet

Vincenzo = a world I kill

+++

+++

Hours When Walls Opened In

~

‘When the parasite is ageless, when it exists eternally before its host.’

~

Gary is decomposing himself + everything surrounding him [macro + micro, it’s all the same now], in prose at least.

[Double checked and ‘decompose’ can function as both a transitive and intransitive verb – can a human decompose themselves though?].

If the parasite is ageless, if it predates its host then it was not always a parasite [in terms of a denotative meaning]. The host is calling it that. And in what tone? Respectful? Affectionate? It’s unclear.

The host can no longer accept the placement of things around itself, in relation to it.

~

‘And my body an imperfect replica – of some other person’s body.’

~

This is deconstruction, not decomposition.

In this one specific sentence.

The rest of the time, it’s muck and misery vibe.

But not really.

Cos these lines are also delivered with the same coldness as a scientist’s deconstruction.

Are they?

That might not be accurate.

Language-wise, there are no emotional appeals. Yet the ‘muck’ words still have meaning/resonance. For a short while. To someone who’s never read this kind of thing. On top of each other, structured incessantly like this, the effect is deadening.

Pedantic?

I need to think about that.

+

If pedantic, there is what purpose to it?

Feels like an ‘actually…’ stretched out indefinitely.

Pedantry is done from outside the effect. An observer [in a hotel] of the abyss.

Gary is edging his way into the black [reverse thanatology]?

It’s not pedantry.

There’s inquisition behind it.

~

‘Because sanity adores the abstract, so it can avoid believing in it.’

~

This confirms it.

I was right all along.

+++

According to Capitalize My Title, it takes the average reader 40 minutes to get through 12,000 words. YWYMAD is around that length. The text is made up of abstractions/inversions/folds on top of folds, so should take longer, maybe 70 minutes or so. The running time of Begotten is 72 minutes.

+++

+++

Time Of Killing Off Surplus

~

‘His diet has not seen light or colour.’

~

For the first time reading this, the last section began to feel repetitive. Like it was looping the same imagery/language from earlier.

There is no real variety to YWYMAD.

Perhaps the moments where the room is referenced in an overtly physical way, without surrealism or intrusive dislocation.

But those parts come and go, and become more and more surreal/dislocated.

Decomposed.

This is intentional.

I’m sure of it.

I remember seeing Gary had a sci-fi book that was 800 pages long [Crypt(o)spasm] and he explained to me that the final 400 pages or so were basically just a repeated inversion of the first 400. Maybe not exactly that phrasing, but something similar.

The structure of YWYMAD, the sullying/decomposing of everything, the looping of imagery, the fact that no character truly dies in Begotten, it all adds up.

This is me sitting here writing this de-con-struc, dead planet self half-watching Vincenzo.

+++

I’m a robe-less druid slut inside abandoning artery growing god lips and plastic chair.

~

‘When I haven’t had an erection in a month.’

~

May I direct you to God Killing Himself?

~

‘And one more abused boy is dragged to the summit to watch the sun burn out his eyes.

Because he’s fluorescent in the feedback of his being extinguished this way.

Because I cough the thoughts out pre-numbed and half-digested.’

~

Initially, I just wrote out that last line, but then I realised it needed at least the preceding two in order to make sense [of itself].

An abused boy watching the sun burn out his eyes = torture superimposed on torture.

Fluorescent in the feedback = inversion of torture-death towards beautiful light effect.

…the feedback of his being = inverted by its echo-status.

Extinguished this way = echo-status of boy’s own torture-death, an entropic loop.

These thoughts are coughed out = a sickness inside.

Pre-numbed = drained of feeling/being before the process of being drained.

Half-digested = already existent + consumed.

Every single thing is in a loop alongside Begotten.

Gary’s unsatisfaction, too.

Dissatisfaction?

Maybe both.

Is YWYMAD going the way he hoped it would, for Merhige to read? Is that a factor?

Theory: the book [any book] was half-digested before he sat down in the anti-space to write it out. There cannot be satisfaction or unsatisfaction as it’s not trying to be anything.

Counter: there can be satisfaction, notably in failure.

This book is dull, repetitive, it has failed to do anything for me.

I have failed to ritualise the processing of its processes.

It has failed to describe the room, the I.

The room is alive.

Degenerate.

I have failed.

We have.

The sun-boy is still alive, he just doesn’t have eyes anymore.

+++

+++

Date Denoting Transparencies

~

‘The scab roots and forgets the wound.’

~

Seems quite basic to say it but…de-territorialisation?

Weird to see ‘root’ used as a verb. The son apart from Mother Earth or Mother Earth abandoning [scab]?

~

‘And the room has lost its fur, chewed space into concrete like weeds drinking deserts.’

~

We are relocated into the room again, this time without a surplus layer [fur]. Technically, concrete always has space [intermolecular + the vast gaps between nuclei], everywhere does, there is no need to chew.

That was pedantic.

Concrete in both denotative and connotative meaning is firm/spaceless, and a desert cannot be drunk. Unless drinking is shifted too. Drinking sand? Breathing it? This section is about the dead boy born alive and only incidentally about Gary. Co-incidentally. I’m forgetting which word works best. I know his room has changed already. It bloats and shrinks, makes itself an illness. As a space, it is unconvincingly familiar. Or it was. Has any part of it been stripped? Did it have fur previously? It’s good to know he’s still there, in relation to it, whatever it is.

+++

Just noticed,

Mother Earth takes sperm from the just-now-dead God Killing Himself, so is giving birth to life inside death. All humanity originates from this act, in this form,

that’s why we’re not immortal?

+++

Feels like I’m in the pocket of someone who imagines he’s about to meet Baudrillard, has already seen a monotone recitation of Passwords on YouTube, which was written for simpletons like me, fears that this loop will spit him out before the non-re-location of the end, which will have a NO TO TRESSPASSING sign mangled in the dirt pool.

+++

That was artificial, calculated, apart from one line in the middle.

Don’t know why I coughed it out.

+++

This whole thing is calculated, that’s my own argument.

The book is face down on the table.

[Yes, I bought it]

I’m free-styling.

This is a post-book state, when the words I’ve read are vaccinating me, colliding with all the words I overuse.

Remember enervating?

Erratic.

Contradiction Queen.

Feels like. Maybe. I don’t know.

Abjected.

Object and its failed revenge.

I’m in a Gary-loop and I’ve only seen Begotten two and a half times.

Which part of my writing is genuine?

I can’t write ‘I don’t know’ again, but really, I don’t know.

What the hell is a trance state?

I’m just working the already-connected connections a little bit faster. Trying to put down the train of thought that contradicts itself, to present that as is. To make things like House 2 intelligible.

But I shouldn’t do that.

I don’t want to do that.

~

‘To be as I am, as it’s somehow proved I am – that is, caged in a skull – I’d have to stop thinking.

While still thinking.’

~

Feels like there’s a confession in this, a desperation. Is it painful for a trained philosopher to think? I say ‘trained’ but what I mean is perhaps ‘experienced’ or ‘read a lot of other philosophy.’

Would Gary feel nervous meeting Kristeva or Jean B?

Would they feel nervous meeting Gary?

Defensive?

That’s the beauty of speaking another language, no one expects a thing. Except my potential humiliation. Of which there have been many.

After all these years why do I still feel this?

~

‘And though fear is toothless, there’s still this dread of the suck of its open kiss.’

~

Your body despite itself.

Your brain despite itself.

Even at my lowest ebb, I never triumphed in killing myself.

It was a long ebb too.

More like a crater…with ladders at the side…but I just couldn’t get to them…couldn’t climb them before jumping back down.

I was defeated, hollowed out…depressed…scared. Still had the ‘dread of the suck of its open kiss.’

It’s a completely irrational state, I know.

If you see all these surfaces as rational.

I would.

I am.

Cos there are peepholes.

+++

+++

Phase of Virtualised Invasion

~

‘A pre-medieval smog. An industrial age of volcanoes. A lung on a wire-hanger – deflating.’

~

Where else is there for this to go?

253 pages is a footnote.

YWYMAD needed to be infinite.

As far as Gary could stretch before stretching became intolerable.

+

Virtualised Invasion?

I wonder if these section titles are related to anything, a philosophical text, Baudrillard?

~

‘A pre-medieval smog. An industrial age of volcanoes. A lung on a wire-hanger – deflating.’

~

My wife has moved on from Vincenzo to Queen of Tears. The lead actress is beautiful in that plastic kind of way. The lead actor is there too. I’m trying to keep up with the Chinese subtitles, but they’re moving too fast.

I adore languages.

+

Just checked ‘Phase of Virtualised Invasion’ and the first results were species invasion, specifically the following four stages:

i] introduction

ii] naturalisation

iii] colonisation

iv] dispersal

Not sure if this is related.

+

I’m still looking at this as a progression [into insanity/an unstable state] and I need to stop doing that.

The premise is loop > inversion > loop > inversion > disease > loop > inversion etc.

[> does not = greater than]

~

‘A pre-medieval smog. An industrial age of volcanoes. A lung on a wire-hanger – deflating.’

~

Back to Begotten for the fourth time.

Son of Earth is being pulled up the cliff face, either by ropes, vines or his umbilical cord.

He won’t stop with the spasms.

The cloaked figures have jittery movements too, movements within movements.

+

I’m not sure what’s happening here.

Coughing up globs of muck and mucus and gore.

There are black scratches all over the film.

Wiki says it’s organs, not gore.

+

Into the fire pit [again].

Poor community spirit on the part of the cloaked figures.

Community is sated.

[Insert Bataille reference]

~

‘A pre-medieval smog. An industrial age of volcanoes. A lung on a wire-hanger – deflated.’

~

That type of community would never last if functioning that way. It relies on a constant stream of intruders. The numbers are too small. You need to not know the person you’re flinging into the fire pit. Imperative expulsion becomes meaningless to these feckless nomads. There is nothing to continue. Just a bunch of robed lunatics traipsing elderly-like over an endlessly rocky landscape.

+

The rape/murder of Mother Earth flitters in and out of this dimension into black and white sloshes of void-light that resembles bodily fluids.

~

‘A pre-medieval smog alarm. An industrial age of sexy volcanoes. A lung on a piece of wire-art – deflated.’

~

This should’ve been the first film of early cinema.

You try to watch it as a narcotic narrative, you’ll get a migraine.

I look forward to the sloshes of black and white cum-blood.

The pedantic wind.

The faint heartbeat.

The grasshoppers.

At what point did Gary start seeing shapes instead of people?

They are not part of the terrain.

It is mass intrusion.

I am reconfiguring everything into something else and inverting its Mickey Mouse remains.

Can’t do that with Vincenzo.

+

Similar to Vitiators, there’s no horror if everything on screen has become horror and you can’t even see the horror clearly anyway.

What is left?

An unconvincingly familiar room?

~

‘A pre-medieval smog. An industrial age of volcanoes. A lung on a wire-hanger – deflated.’

~

Conflicting eras, following the action on screen.

Gary is again the Son of Earth – Flesh on Bone.

Or I assume he is.

He’s pushing himself there.

The difference: Son of Earth – Flesh on Bone is at the mercy of lunatics, vomiting up organs, convulsing while Gary is only doing that mentally, as is the actor playing Son of Earth – Flesh on Bone.

Writing this book feels absorbing or intrusive?

~

‘And I remain my own faded target. Full of holes I can’t see. And I will step over death on my way to sharing in it.’

~

A mirror to the two deaths of Son of Earth- Flesh on Bone?

Realistically, which may not be appropriate in symbolic/abstract work, stepping over ‘death’ can only be accomplished conceptually as in you stop dwelling on ‘death’ in order to die…with child-like comfort?

+

It’s not coming easy this morning.

I took a two day break and now all I can think is, ‘only six sections left.’

This is a reflection of the sameness of YWYMAD. The structure of these sentences are slowly killing me.

~

‘With stooping troops of gorgon Goya witches crawling at the wall.’

~

A nice line but not.

Let go.

I want to reach into the writing of this line and force a long black scrawl after ‘Goya.’ I want to scrawl all over the black film-still positioned above.

The discipline of this structure is infuriating.

The incessant folds and inversions, contradi-

+

How retrospective is this?

By how many days/weeks/months?

+

I need to keep going.

Stopping six sections from the end is an insult to the author. It has to be endured. I am in the room with him now. This is intentional, I can feel it. He’s dragged me into the loop and you too if you’ve read it, gone into each contradiction/fold, tried to make sense of it, sacrificed sense to impressionism, phenomenology. I swore [to myself] I wouldn’t use that word again, I’m not comfortable with it, don’t know if I’ve encountered it enough to fully understand its meaning, but there it is. I’m dragging out a headache from nowhere, from the writing of this, and now the typing up of the notes. I don’t think anyone else has truly read this book. I don’t think anyone truly understands what it’s doing.

~

‘And I thought there’d be at least one impervious filter to prevent me from witnessing my own puppetry. Or that if I breached it, it would come back quickly to obscure its error. And I really thought that.’

~

Do you think it now, Gary?

Did the filter come back?

+++

+++

When The Mother Is Remade

~

‘And behind me in the hallway are excuses not to be still, a door that leads outside, a door some hand could open.

While another takes a club to his head. And the boy gets to dancing like a seal.’

~

I can feel the blood running slower in my arteries.

Gary becomes Son of Earth becomes me.

Or:

I become Gary becomes Son of Earth being whacked on the head by Anthropocene Bataille stan, who clearly isn’t aware of what I wrote earlier, the numbers issue, the smallness of his community.

Walking on rocks + murdering the mentally ill is not a civilisation, my friend.

The door that could be opened vs. a club to the head.

Has Gary merged with Son of Earth? Is he attempting to [by writing it so]?

He already did that, though, in the other sections. He merged with God Killing Himself and Mother Earth. If I’m remembering right.

But then, this is a loop.

The state of attempting to merge with that on screen is continuous.

+

I really don’t know how he managed two weeks of this nightmare. For what? Philosophy?

+

The film Wicked World just popped into my head [while looking at my collage pic of it on Instagram], the chaos of its structure, and I was thinking of a way to shove it in here, but then another thought came up, the conviction I have that I’m gonna end up alone [watching Kira and Garak scenes on loop, continuously]. All my friends [such as they were, didn’t really like most of them] have left where I live, I can’t move away from here, I’ve isolated myself by chance and intentionality, and if anything ever happens to my wife I’m pretty sure I’m done too. Or maybe I’d just keep going alone, clinging to those Trek scenes or the things I write that no one reads, being used by sociopaths less talented. I hope I wouldn’t but I might. I did before. Just couldn’t end things. To kill yourself is an act that takes some effort, after all. I added ‘after all’ in the type-up cos it reads better out loud, but I didn’t really want to add it. It’s a written type of word, I would never say it in everyday life. Wouldn’t say the Cantonese equivalent either. I wonder if Gary thought about killing himself during the writing of this. Or at the end, leaving YWYMAD as a suicide note, like Arguedas. Maybe the premise kept him going, the purpose of it. But what about that final filter line? When that went, did everything not seem utterly pointless?

~

‘While four hands make dough between her legs.’

~

I was wondering what the robed figures were up to.

Thought it was a visual euphemism for rape.

Only done right next to the cunt.

Half a visual euphemism.

~

‘And beyond the rectangle, the image track: a depressive’s one-man experimental soap opera, in which every unfamiliar turn is the mark of it having happened before, somewhere else, to someone else – ultimatums of some self-eater’s decay.’

~

Finally, a ‘what the fuck am I doing?’

It doesn’t happen often in YWYMAD, the break with inversion/abstraction/the screen to reveal Gary’s direct thoughts on the process he has pushed himself into.

Here, it’s hard to tell what the emotion attached is. It’s written with the same coldness as the rest of the text.

‘Depressive’ could be a temporary or permanent state, or, in my case, continually intermittent.

‘Soap opera’ implies melodrama, a lack of seriousness.

‘Self-eater’ = done to the self by the self/imperceptible stowaway.

I don’t know.

If a loop like this was expected before starting the ‘experimental soap opera’ then is anything gained at the end of it? In the middle of it?

Does the quote above invert itself and bring a strange layer of satisfaction [to replace the fur]?

+++

+++

I’ve just worked out the word count of YWYMAD and it’s around 11-12,000 words, give or take a few hundred either way.

This de-con-struc must be close to that number.

[Typing it up, the current word count is at 10, 342].

+

Then I Imitated New Outsiders

~

‘I see calculations rolled out as genital mutilation.

As blind number feedback of auto-gynaecology.

When my dementia is outmoded.’

~

Where are these lines coming from?

The immediate part of the brain, just after thinking it?

Can’t be.

The words are too neat.

Which means he didn’t ‘see’, he ‘saw’ calculations.

Unless…

There is a state or interzone of being where these word-combinations come out just like ‘where are you now?’ and ‘let’s have pepper gai fan for dinner tonight?’

It’s possible.

I guess I’m just having trouble, at times, linking the structure of the text to the premise, which to me seems to beg for immediacy/madness.

Is this the transcribing of a ‘just-now-past’ state?

The writing up of notes made during a ‘just-now-past’ state [like I am doing right now]?

All writing is from at least the ‘just-now-past’ state.

Even ‘right now I’m feeling sad.’

The thought of it too. E.g. by the time you’ve thought it, you might already feel sadder.

But what about in a ‘just-now-past-just-now-coming’ state of a continuous loop?

+

The headache’s back [or it was in the handwritten notes].

I’m gonna switch back to reading only.

Could be purer that way.

More pure?

Purer looks weird.

+

I wonder if the publisher tried to edit YWYMAD.

I wouldn’t have.

If I were a publisher.

More than that, I don’t think experimental writing of any kind should be edited.

Who are you to think you understand any of this, that you could improve it?

+++

+++

Duration Made Of Various Uncoloured Pollutants

+

Bergson’s Duration?

I wrote about this in Charcoal.

Can’t remember what it means.

That was a very long time ago.

Feels like millennia.

~

‘Intermittently, the body remembers itself in horror tropes of independent parts, the aggregate that sheds new life. And if only we could hide in the bits that crawl away.

Because I’m birthing a thousand gods a day, straight into garbage bags.’

~

I’m sensing this duration on a visceral-psychic level, got nothing fresh to say, so I’m gonna go in tight on some of these lines. Even though I know that’s not the point. I sense that’s not the point.

Read it, wear the language, the jarring folds, add it to the other folds you’ve already absorbed.

But I desire to get a firmer grip on the imagery. I want to image the noise.

~

‘The body remembers itself in horror tropes of independent parts.’

~

The body was once separated/unformed? The body doesn’t remember, the brain does. The brain feeds the body, is the body. To be separated would be horror mode. Horror trope? Horror tropes are tired repetitions, no longer frightening. The body/brain is remembering a previous state where it was or felt separated in some way, and the natural horror of that state has been reduced to horror-reproductions.

~

‘And if only we could hide in the bits that crawl away.’

~

The bits that crawl away are the horror tropes of independent parts leftover from the birthing process? There is a desire to go back to that state, even though it was previously unsatisfactory. Because the new life will eventually decompose into repetition too. And there is comfort in the horror trope.

~

‘Because I’m birthing a thousand gods a day, straight into garbage bags.’

~

Gods are thoughts, each one a creator of its own universe that sustains itself? I’m not sure about this one. Each god goes in a garbage bag, is forgotten, excised. Then what’s the problem? The process of constant creation-death is exhausting?

~

‘Because murdered women look homely on any shade of sofa.

With the sandstorm of an eye folding in on itself.’

~

There is almost no variety in tone or feel at all.

This is the forced dragging of ME up to the fire pit and then we just circle it like bonnethead sharks folded in on themselves.

I can’t love this.

It’s infecting me.

+

But on another level it’s mesmeric.

Someone made this.

Forced everything in on itself.

I can’t read anymore.

~

‘Because Heidegger said, “Unless we have an existentiell understanding, all analysis of existentiality will remain groundless.”’

~

A lacuna inside a hole.

Let’s just build a swimming pool there.

+++

+++

The Problem Of Ten Or More Quarantines At Once

+

Getting near the end.

Day thirteen or fourteen?

+

I remember reading the comments under YouTube episodes of Blake’s 7, and the first one would invariably say, ‘Servalan should’ve died in this episode.’

And it was true, she should’ve.

Too many people hated her, wanted revenge, had the opportunity to make good on the ‘want.’

But she didn’t die.

The writers wouldn’t let her.

~

‘The exterminating angel as one extra thought that looks like an absence: the glitch of the Sphex wasp.’

~

What is a Sphex wasp?

Feels quite random.

Good.

Cos the preceding four lines were horror trope crawling away from its own grainy love of horror trope.

+

Is there a point of exhaustion, where Gary and I just run out of lines? Get sick of writing them?

If something popped up now, without any twist, splice or inversion, it would terrify me. I think it would feel like he was looking right at me.

~

‘And my face comes back to me like something that needs to be there only because I remember it, is a certain way because I haven’t forgotten its layout, mine like this room and the rooms around it – home just as long as I remember to return.’

~

This whole section is a battle between control + passivity, an assertion of the former beside a surrender to the latter. That’s what it feels like to me, when I reflect on it. I just read it now. He’s sterilised his nerves to become unreal. He’s the shadow of an ape. No clear winner. No clear battle either.

+++

+++

I’m the only one who’s read this book.

Unless you’ve done what I’ve done, written out 12,000 words, typed up 12,000 words, dug into the folds of the folds etc.

Just reading it isn’t enough.

I’m in the room.

+

When It Will Begin

+

The final section, a beginning.

Maybe it was written first. That way the impulse to layer the words with surplus finality will have been avoided.

Can there be an ending to something that never went anywhere?

That never intended to?

I’m speculating < after all>

~

‘So what’s the psychological equivalent of a plastic mattress?’

~

I like this line.

Just a nonsense question asked sincerely, no inversions.

~

‘Because I’ll stay here once the last run’s done, give the dead screen a mourner.’

~

I assume he’s talking about the last watching of Begotten.

The screen must be a close friend/dear enemy by now.

Must’ve been.

At that time.

Whenever it was.

I wonder if Gary has watched Begotten since.

During editing perhaps?

Would be funny if he forgot a scene.

Some friend/enemy.

~

‘Is a man returning, backward-blind, sucking batteries of himself for the last delusion.’

~

No point summarising my thoughts, I’ve just written a dead novella.

The fetish of one.

I’ve forgotten [almost] everything.

+++

You With Your Memory Are Dead is a feat of endurance and suffering and euphoria if you truly commit to it, and that feat is waiting for you here.