[De-Con-Struc] DEAR§ // [x] + Elytron Frass

Text: DEAR§

Authors: [x] + Elytron Frass

Publisher: Expat Press

Plot: Two baroque souls write to each other, soothe each other, destroy each other, invert each other, hallucinate each other and a new pocket universe around them.

Subplot: I, the reader/pervert, intrude.

I was gonna write this out in epistolatory form, a series of letters to either myself, my Id, past self or blood grandma who put her head in an oven, but that seemed too obvious and exhausting [and a bit insulting to my blood grandma who I never even knew] so I’m gonna try and do this normally, without gimmicks.

If there are images later on in DEARS, I might do some too. Sneak them in somewhere in the middle

[note: checked + there are images so I will]

Every world and every dream is shut in on itself, closed up around everything it contains, including the dreamer.

DEARS = connection of two dreamers [or dreamt world]?

I can’t find the intertwined double S on my computer so we’ll just have to mentally put it there ourselves.

Both Elytron and [x] are pseudonyms for two writers who could be anyone. I don’t mind pseudonyms, nothing external gets in the way then. Elytron becomes the sum of everything they put out in print and online. In my head, they’re the author portrayed in Vitiators, the creator of the cereal box, or maybe they’re all the characters?

I don’t know [x] so DEARS will be my entry point to them [my interpreted version of]. Apparently, it’s their debut, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t already been writing for years/decades/millennia.

Actually, what did the cereal box symbolise in Vitiators? Even after 7.5k words, I don’t think I ever figured it out, or tried to figure it out, just quietly appreciated the detail.

The last epistolatory novel I read was probably that one I can’t remember the name of now, the baseball player writing back to his old high school buddy or coach. By Ring Lardner.

You Know Me, Al, that was it.

There was also a sci-fi novella How to Win [Lose] a Time War but that’s pointless, no depth possible, not from the mainstream. Of course I haven’t read it, but I’m confident in my assumption. That might change if the fuckers publish my death loop isekai thing, at which point, the Time War book will become ‘pretty good, nice character work.’ Still won’t read it though. Same way I won’t read The Alchemist or Iron Flame [The Empyrean Book 2] or Ghost Station or-

I don’t know, I should just not think about the sci-fi world.

Focus on DEARS.

One other thing about pseudonyms: the idea that you can confess to anything under that shield/umbrella/canopy without real life consequence [only consequence for that pseudonymous persona you’ve built up].

What consequence?

I don’t know, don’t really care about that aspect, I’m more stuck on the confession aspect, the freedom to deviate…does a pseudonym really allow you to do that? Is there weight behind what you confess? Do you still have a little Arguedas in your head telling you to only go so far, even if you’re planning to shoot yourself afterwards?

Pseudonym = clarity, the removal of “real” identity weight?

Also, Elytron’s real name could be Steve Smith or Chad Lake or Sally Trent, [x] might be Jane Dodderton or Lydia Wells, none of which carry the same vibe of esoterica.

I use a pseudonym too.

Cyan of Mogh for my softer, more brainless stuff. Superficially, it’s to avoid people getting angry going from Infinite Atom Mall to something gleefully dense + insane like KRV, but is it more to do with embarrassment? As in I’m embarrassed to be writing that stuff.

Maybe.

I don’t think so.

I love sci-fi [and Atom Malls] and isekai, the concepts of them, and I use my real name on serials like Dah Station 7 and Void Galaxia on Psycho h. Though VG is a little different, kind of in between generic and experimental.

It’s all a mess.

Seems like Elytron is bowing out of literature now [according to their last twitter post]. Hopefully not to self-combust like Sangeiko-San. Though there might be parallels. Did E also become dissatisfied at the reality of publishing their work? Did “Elytron” turn into an unwelcome brand?

This is the stuff of my nightmares. Putting an isekai on Royal Road was bad enough, but having sub-reddits about you and your work, being exposed to the looped stupidity of others…

I still haven’t looked at DEARS.

Four pages of preamble is enough.

Far as I can tell, this is about two souls connecting through the joy of their anonymity. Or pseudonymity. There is a difference [I think].

According to the blurb:

…

I’m struggling to get through it. The first paragraph. Not sure what it’s on about. War in heaven?

Second paragraph is clearer:

Two unnamed correspondents.

So not explicitly Elytron and [x].

‘Dead-drop mailboxes + abandoned email servers.’

Gives an ‘out of phase’ vibe, the two letter-writers in a shrivelled version of [a past/undead] reality.

‘Where + how are the characters/narrators living’ is usually crucial, but maybe here it’s beside the point?

‘A new war in heaven is declared, fought, lost and won.’

Grand delusion?

Hallucinatory renovating of the environment around you so you can live more as you please?

I saw this recently in my de-con-struc of Virgin of the 7 Daggers, the characters supplanting their own “faculty of association” onto the “real.” [Prince Alberic is exiled to a dilapidated ruin but describes it as if it were in its prime]. The depressing “real.”

Vitiators could be argued [by me] as doing the same thing, literally, with the superimposition via Sangeiko-San of New Gehenna.

I’m not gonna argue that.

Vitiators was last January, DEARS is now [or should be].

‘Purgatorial hymns eschewing salvation.’

Rarely see purgatorial – purgatory is typically located as a place, not a descriptor ambushing the real – but appreciate its use.

A desire towards purgatory?

What if that’s tedious too?

Same as usual, I’m putting on a K-pop mix while reading this, hopefully to force out some weird contradictions. I don’t know how it works, but it does usually work.

G-Dragon/Power Power meshed with DEARS, Red Velvet fingered by ‘shared rib’ etc.

Actually, I’ve just realised I can copy/paste DEAR§ from online, so from this point on it will be in its proper form.

I just read an extract on Tragickal and at the end it says DEAR§ was an ‘improvisational, turn-based, hybrid conversation between two discerning anons conducted via e-mail over 120 days.’

I’m interested in this method.

How much exactly did they edit these “letters”? Was there a loose framework e.g. ‘at some point we need to fight heaven’, or was it simply pure improv?

I don’t know enough from the extract to say anything yet. The language seems euphoric, rambling, esoteric, abstract, violent, beautiful + detailed, which implies it’s not at the beginning of the correspondence, and also that both “dears” may actually be talking to themselves as the opposite is anonymous and unknown. But then, to respond in kind is a sign of connection, of symbiosis [or of reflection?].

There’s no punctuation either.

A large black hole on one page.

The image of a wrestler sucking off a cloaked figure?

That one’s not so clear.

Sucking off the black hole torso of an angel?

A lying angel?

Kneeling in awe of it?

No punctuation means no deep line analysis, thank gods, just a kind of floating over the text as a devoured mass, picking out bits that are weird or ho kup yun. I say ‘thank gods’ cos I’ve read a lot of surrealist poetry recently + I’m drained.

I seek purgatorial hymns now, dear.

How dear is DEAR?

ARE they just talking to themselves?

It’s good to connect with someone, through words, surrealism, art, the occult, death drives. I never have, not really. It’s why I write [might be]. Suck people into my failed neutron star state.

Start reading the text you fucking conk.

This is the real, unspoiled-by-me cover.

2 snakes entwined at the tail, spiritual but not devoid from the physical, looking down on two figures [both blindfolded], one gazing at something in their arms, the other at the hovering snakes.

According to the description, this was designed by Elytron.

I’m sure the V with 2 snakes is symbolic of something occultish, I just don’t know what.

The V is actually a triangle.

Both snakes have their jaws open.

How does this relate to the text/correspondents?

That might be a baby in their arms.

Hard to tell.

I’ve zoomed in and there’s a black mass, maybe some swaddling with no baby?

Snakes represent body + spirit, together but not.

The devil as a pair.

Just like Dead Ringers, there’s 2 of them, the gynaecologists of purgatory.

This could be endless.

Snakes = bridge between the 2 figures, connecting through the images their language creates.

I refuse to bring in religion.

I suspected this might happen.

It starts already entrenched deep in their relationship, at the switch from pen to e-mail, a hospital visit the Cromwell theocratic intermission to their curly-wigged monarchy strut.

Which one of the two is writing this?

Does it matter?

‘I’m drawing closer to midnight…’

To death?

‘you should come by…’

This could just be desperate whimsy, not a serious invitation. The premise said they were only correspondents. Not physically seeing each other. Didn’t it?

Like and unlike Vitiators, the language is elaborate, suggestive, a little bit eccentric, probably more so cos with Vitiators there were more characters who sometimes simplified things in speech and narration.

Apparently, they’ve come to write this way to each other, but over how long a period exactly?

I have no idea.

Conceptually, starting it this way pins everything inside a constructed world [which all writing is, I suppose], gives it a degree of clear artifice, but also affection + intimacy as no one who you didn’t cohabit a black hole with would ever talk to someone this way.

It’s akin to talking in code, with the implied assurance that the opposite-other would be interested in a symbolic interpretation of dead fruit flies.

Thinking about it, using ‘dear’ to open each e-mail, and as the title, necessitates starting this way. Or both Elytron and [x] wanted it to begin already intimate and used ‘dear’ as a vassal to do it.

Vassal/vessel, one or the other.

Is anything lost by skipping the seeds of their relationship?

Wouldn’t it be tedious?

To get past etiquette + social conditioning + will they flee if I use ‘chiffonade’?

What the hell is seagull wine?

I don’t mind if it’s a synonym for blood.

Those white little fucks used to steal my sandwiches on Douglas promenade, when I was stuck in a job I loathed.

‘There were no flowers to put in the vase…’

A dig at ‘dear’ or a blank statement of fact i.e. no family or friends cared that I was in the hospital.

‘god hangs, in waiting, as an ornate brocade from the living room curtain rod.’

god in the wings, inside the mundane.

Hangs = has been utilised by others, made passive [a vassal?]. ‘God is in everything’ turned on its head cos they’re stuck there, a permanent voyeur. Pervert too, if that has any meaning/significance to them.

The text is fainter than that of the other ‘dear’ and the I is capitalised. Could simply be a method of differentiating the two dears, perhaps foreshadowing a series of unanswered letters from one particular ‘dear’ later on.

It’s also one large block paragraph.

The first one [letter] was more scattershot, lots of semi-colons and ellipses. I don’t want to try and predict anything, but it’d be great if the formatting + typography changes throughout the text, maybe as a way of reflecting mood, or even one ‘dear’ influencing the other and vice versa.

E.g. the ‘just out of hospital dear’ might start using a capitalised I or repeating vocab from the other ‘dear’, or writing in big block paragraphs. Then it’ll be up to me, the intruder, to decide if this is a form of control/absorption from a “superior” or a return to normality, or the parroting of a sociopath, or a movement closer towards a loved one, or the original influencer re-clothing themselves in their writing style, which was actually mimicked by the ‘dear’ writing in a capitalised I now.

My pen’s running out of ink.

I thought this might happen.

Back later.

[As with other de-con-strucs, I’ll keep this part in when I type this up later, give some authenticity, even though it won’t feel that way when I do it [it doesn’t – I’m typing it up now and thinking I should just delete this bit].

I’m back with a working pen. A black YOKIS 0.7mm, if that means anything to anyone. The previous one was yellow with a Big Bird face on the end, given to me by my wife. I never really noticed it much when I was using it, but now that I’m using a YOKIS 0.7mm…

In the interim, I did some digging.

Chiffonade is a French type of vegetable cutting.

‘Small i dear’ will become that.

[From this point on, I’ll refer to the two dears as ‘small i dear’ and ‘big I dear’, which may add a layer of hierarchy that I never thought of until I just wrote this out now].

I assume it can also be like a noun, a chiffonade of something.

Or maybe it doesn’t matter.

As a ritual of personal bonding [between me and the text], I’d love it if ‘small i dear’ had no clue what chiffonade meant and used it anyway.

But I don’t know if this is that kind of text.

I mean, malapropisms need to be constant, or at least regular, to show that a character is out of their depth on a topic.

It has to be explicit.

Otherwise literature won’t know what it is, what kind of person they’re dealing with.

In DEAR§, the advantage of writing in letters, or epistles as I saw Elytron write in a description somewhere, is that you can bury so much detail within it, especially if it’s between intimates as they won’t feel the need to explain themselves.

Or you can write ‘from the act’ and leave interpretation to the observers.

Intruders, like me.

It can mean something or it doesn’t.

I also saw Elytron use the word ‘frisson’, which makes sense if they’re not in physical contact with each other as then it can be stretched out indefinitely through words and the power of ‘might-be’ [com-possibles? I’ll have to look this word up again later cos it’s been a while].

Are they actually in physical contact with each other?

I know I asked that already.

I’ll have to read + check.

But if they’re not then language and its esoteric limits/tangents should be key. As a deliverer + receiver? Both, perhaps…the deliverer get frisson from the reaction in words from the receiver and the imagined reaction of them reading it live. To see words together that normally wouldn’t be, to know that another mind caused that with the intention of you reading it, feeling the images [FRISSON!!]…

I had another thought on the bus back home, or two thoughts:

1] the ecstasy of receiving a letter from someone you genuinely love the psyche of, and the depression when that person turns on you, calls you a toxic motherfucker for making fun of their marriage to Anubis.

2] should I try a different way of reading this i.e. take a break between each letter to try and build up some anticipation/excitement?

It might work.

The problem with just reading this work in one go is that I’m detaching myself from the process that went into creating it. Adding gaps between each missive would allow me to really think about what’s been said/written, the same way Elytron and [x] would’ve felt during construction.

Counterpoint – I’m the author of neither letter, have given nothing of myself good or bad, so there can be no emulation of Elytron’s or [x]’s feelings/psychological states.

Could also be deeply pretentious.

I don’t care.

I’m gonna try it for at least 10 pages, see if there’s any qualitative effect.

Just re-read the last few pages and realised I didn’t say anything about the 2^nd letter yet. I inserted it and then just left it hanging [next to god the bromade curtain rod].

‘…so here we are again, ending on a bitter note so we can start this while we’re raw enough to call this a beginning and not a fucking love letter…’

The whole message is one long run-on sentence that glides between gutter-real and lyrical contradiction – ‘you know the rush that makes this run-on as intolerable as the throats we’re stuck with’ – and a backlash against the form of asking ‘how are you?’ that ends in a plea not to be told cos there’s no real need, not when they’ve just explained their mood which is constant, depressed, elated, abysmal, and true for both of them, who knows, maybe the plastics can help?

It’s hard to go line by line on this as too much is unknown to me at the moment.

I appreciate the lyricism, the rhetoric. Again, it feels both like a letter to someone known intimately AND their own psyche, as in they’re also writing to pleasure/unpleasure themselves.

And the writing is controlled.

It ends on ‘don’t-…’ but it is controlled.

All writing is controlled.

Or processed, at least.

If this ‘dear’ had added typos or cut-off sentences or aborted metaphors, it would’ve only given the appearance of a manic state.

Maybe it’s better not to do that.

The sentiment is still true.

It’s possible to think in beautiful esoterica…is it?

Or you could call it an ‘act of love’, beautifying your thoughts as language, not to hide but to enhance/seduce.

Is this referencing a real shared past or a shared hallucination of one?

‘my plastic bag, your chloroform; we knew just how to end it & then didn’t.’

They attempted a joint suicide?

Or they were doing this to others?

Obviously, I’m intruding on an already well-lived-in relationship and most of the things being referenced are out of my knowledge zone, and it’s all written in such a ketaminised/baroque way that I think, this is complete fantasy-sponge, they’ve con-joined psychically and spawned a past that elates them when written and read about in letter form.

I thought, actually, when I read the first letter that the ‘dear’ coming out of hospital was artificial, something authors insert as a symbol of “unwellness” when, in reality, they were never in any hospital, you know, all writers are fraudulent to some degree, and the other details, the thoughts, the flights of baroque Stroszekism were real to the ‘dear’, but it doesn’t matter now if they were really in a hospital or just dreaming it as the writing in the first three letters goes beyond that, commits itself completely to making the “real” irrelevant, the hospital stay diluted into a trip to the supermarket or the post office or eating a cup noodle or some other mundane thing you instantly forget about.

I could say it’s not natural for anyone to communicate in this fashion but that would be a sharp misunderstanding of the word ‘natural.’

The ‘dears’ exist in this language, it probably sustains them.

I’m slowing adapting to it.

I just asked my wife what chiffonade meant, and she knew it! English is her third language.

She doesn’t know ‘frisson.’ Or what ‘chiffonade’ is in Cantonese.

That’s not that weird, there are vegetables and fruit I don’t know the names of in English, only their Cantonese labels.

We both don’t know ‘lumens.’

There is still the point [that may be pointless] of how much of a performance this is between Elytron and [x], how much real is embedded in the baroque [house], did they set it up with normal correspondence and then say, ‘okay, my next e-mail will be a little weird, let’s start from there’? Did they agree to a style and improvise within that?

I don’t really know why I need this to be “real” or know how exactly it was organised pre-show.

I know I’m reading a book.

The excess is the point?

In KRV [which I re-read last week and just about still liked], I would slip in moments of egotistical mania/rage, often lifted directly from my diary or how I was feeling that day, and stretch them out until I was exhausted and, although they were authentic, something was still lost a little bit when I wrote it all down on paper and maybe even more so when I edited it later, weirdly to achieve that type of ‘in situ’ feeling, the sense that, yeah, it was exactly like this in my brain too.

I’m not gonna dwell on the artifice-performance aspect anymore, it’s time to move on.

I will throw myself into the baroque interzone.

The 3^rd letter…forms itself into blockier paragraphs…has slaughtered the ellipses…most of the semi-colons too.

There’s a retraction also, spun into an ‘overjoy that can’t be overstated’ at the fact that ‘Big I dear’ rejected the invitation to meet again, as if doing such a thing would’ve cheapened their relationship.

It’s implied, I think, that they were in a mental institution together before, but, again, that could be a supplanted past-hallucination agreed to by both of them, I’m not sure.

‘am i crying wolf or do i cry for help? but, oh, what a wolf your black fanged repartee could ever shape regardless.’

The second part is key here, the ‘small i dear’ desiring both saving and destruction. Or devourment as the wolf would digest them into itself and they would live on inside its wildness.

Would this be called nihilism or pessimism, or something else?

Seems to me that both nihilism + pessimism are insufficient, dealing only with the material world, maybe the lack of a spiritual one, whereas the two dears are supplanting or have already supplanted their own reality on top of the existing one…yet it is still there, the thing that disturbs them?

[I just searched: there are, apparently, 72 different branches or sub-groups of nihilism and 412 types of pessimism – maybe this text falls into one of those, or maybe it’s closer to sensualism, or the fancier word for that which I can’t remember? – searched again, and it’s hedonism, but inverted perhaps].

What is it exactly that is wrong with the material world?

Its precision? Conventions? The lack of space for ‘supplanted-from-above/below-otherness’?

I’m gonna need a synonym for ‘supplanted,’ already used it about ten times and I think I’m gonna be using it a lot more going forward.

Supersede

Usurp

Dethrone

Defenestrate – throw out the window?

I’ll use all of the above on rotation. Maybe bring ‘supplanted’ back in at the end for old time’s sake.

I waited 45 minutes before reading this one, following my plan to force gaps between letters as a way of feeling more.

My takeaway from the last letter: ‘small i dear’ is both asking for help + final destruction, possesses some doubt or confusion as to how it will be received, or maybe how they want it to be received.

E.g. don’t give me generic help, no sympathy, I want the wolf + my spirit crushed.

Seems like there may have been a suicide attempt before this. Can’t say for sure, but it feels like it.

The flashes of material, mundane reality are what caused the depression?

Defenestration of that is the cure.

On reflection, I think I used ‘supplanted’ wrong earlier, grammatically. Something is supplanted by something else, but my sentence was ‘they supplanted their own reality on top of the existing one,’ and I think ‘the existing reality’ should’ve been the subject i.e. ‘the existing reality was supplanted by the dears’ own created one.’

Is that right?

I don’t really care.

Did the error unlock anything, a new perspective/inversion?

That happens sometimes.

Like mishearing ‘the truth feels so real’ song lyrics as ‘the truth feels so green.’ [green = occult/xeno-things/perversion etc.]

The dears’ hallucinated reality is turning itself inside out while being placed on top of the ‘existing reality.’

It could work, if I can get the images straight in my head.

‘we’re going to get bloodier with this…’

The first paragraph [of this epistle] is mostly beyond me, fully coded, lots of signifiers that may not be tangible [dead letter office], that may have secret signifieds for the dears alone, though it does give the vibe of a call to arms, ‘big I dear’s’ version of the shotgun + the wolf, loving help and ultimate destruction. And they’re gonna get bloodier, unexpected things will occur, even their own absolution will blindside them, come at the wrong moment.

‘we’re perilous’

A nice sub- or inversion of ‘perilous,’ usually reserved for situations not people.

Used this way it could mean many things, could be received in different ways. I guess ‘small i dear’ will take it as a blessing, they have become the situation, things are both out of + under their control.

Under control cos they’re aware of it, they embrace it, and out of control cos they still have bodies.

As usual, this is getting quite long, so I’ll skip ahead a bit. I will read each letter, I have to, but I won’t comment on each one.

Okay, I included the next one cos of the last paragraph. Also, it implies in the letter that they did meet before, for a last supper of blood + ritualism, but again, how materially real this is remains debatable [by me].

I really like the last paragraph though, despite having no real use for religion myself, even in a figurative way.

[Stump memory: back in 2006, I wrote a [terrible, didactic] short story called ‘The Atheism Jab’ that swore it wasn’t didactic at the time. A religious zealot, put under medical subversion in his own home, slowly forced into becoming an Atheist. I’ve lost the story file now, but I remember the imagery was quite basic, as were the bible references, and I only wrote it cos I was hanging around with a guy who said suicides were going to hell and that evolution was a hoax cos of macro reasons, and, man, don’t confuse giant leaps with minor speciation etc. I think at the end the [story] zealot succumbed to a brain hemorrhage.]

[It’s not lost, I found it saved on my old Hotmail account. Too scared/deflated to read it.]

‘god is here for gutting’

The connective metaphor with the old [Gothic?] aristocracy, a derelict estate, fits well as that’s where that version of god really embellished itself, yet why could they not cut through the spine? The head came off easily enough, but not the backbone. Does that have some occult symbolism I don’t know about?

I’m not a biologist, or even friends with one, but I’ve just googled ‘is the spine connected to the brain?’ and, yes, the brain stem connects the brain with the spinal cord, so maybe in this paragraph, the ‘small i dear’ is trying to separate the physical [body] from the dream [head].

Wouldn’t this already be achieved by cutting off the head?

Probably.

But the spine of the god might function independently, or the line is telling me that the physical instincts contained within the spine [body] are more resistant to severing than the mind.

The world continues with the head of its dreamer cut, the spine has cultivated its own autonomy.

Baroque House. Baroque House. Baroque House. Baroque House. Baroque-

I’m losing my way a bit here.

But I did like the language of that paragraph, the forked path of the metaphor.

I generally like all of the writing.

It just soaks into each other most of the time, makes it hard to pick bits out.

Make sense if the dears are reality-phobic.

Not phobic, vulnerable to.

The bringer of plague.

I haven’t spent that much time thinking about who’s writing which part yet, and don’t think I will cos there’s no loss or dip in quality between them, they both mesh and deviate along their own vectors of beautiful madness that sometimes intertwine, and I guess they wouldn’t have started writing this thing if they didn’t sense that from one another beforehand.

Or they read each other’s work and knew it directly?

I’m still going through the missives one by one in direct order and putting them up as extracts that way, but this one is worth stopping on.

It is tricky sometimes cos the letters don’t explicitly relate to each other, in fact they seem to intentionally avoid it e.g. ‘what you said about god being here for gutting, I really felt that’ does not appear in the next correspondence.

Instead, it’s more like they follow each other in tone, in sentiment, and the endless baroque imagery is just dressing for that.

I don’t know if that explains it well, I just wanted to say that I do feel like they are responding to what was in the previous letter, even if they don’t directly repeat the same words.

Again, this one is ‘big I dear’ doing a run-on sentence, which has been semi-matched by ‘small i dear’ in their letters, the only difference being the use of semi-colons and hyphens.

‘I’m not so cruel as to get us thrown out of the only place that’ll take us.’

Would that be church, heaven, temple or hell?

Mental Institution?

Of course, I’m still struggling to place these two dears in material reality – why should they care about that? I’m an intruder – but I’m wondering if they see themselves as angels?

The fallen kind?

Betrayed?

Or the snake twins on the front cover, stuck here on Earth after performing their role, their duty, in the garden-prison complex?

I don’t think they need to actually be angels in the physical sense, they can just simply inhabit the roles.

Two angels, ex-holy-addicts of a psychopathic god who won’t turn this thing off, ecstatic in divine rebellion, depressed at the supermarket, hospital, church, replica arcade, trapped here indefinitely…wouldn’t they be exactly this way after all this time?

Even if it’s not physically the case, they can situate themselves there, feel those feelings, seek comfort/joy only in each other cos they are both singular in an aspect only they understand.

Random thought: what happens when the baroque gets tiring? When the ecstasy is diluted from overuse?

Really feels, at times – maybe at all times – that they’re pushing each other there.

Beyond the edge and all other edges beyond that.

How tedious is it beyond those edges?

Will they become resentful of each other?

No, exhausted of, not resentful.

Maybe resentful.

I would like some variation, just cos I myself would do that at some point, based on mood, based on exhaustion.

Like, one letter saying, ‘sorry, I’m not in the mood for your mania today. This is too much.’

But would either dear bother to type that, with the spaces between each letter?

If they lived together, that kind of response would be inevitable at some juncture in the relationship, but as they’re correspondents, they can mitigate any mood distortions by just not writing anything that day. Or, by burying any grievances in the body of the baroque.

Which makes their correspondence even more fantastical/divorced from the “real.”

I’m taking a break, turning off my brain.

The organisational part, at least.

Gonna read about twenty letters in a row, with a half hour gap between each one to give it time to settle. Maybe work on Dranonika a bit, make it messier, more unreadable

Sub it to the ghost of Ito Noe

Sub it to hell

What’s the point in any of this?

I’ve found no one out here.

I’m happy for Elytron and [x], that they could loop their tails together.

Don’t wanna bring up Vitiators again, or praise anyone, but I really have a lot of admiration and respect for not just writing the same thing again, for attempting something different. A lot of people still read the de-con-struc I did of Vitiators, quite a lot, in fact, and I have a gut feeling that they would bounce off this new work after a few pages.

Their loss [if my gut is accurate].

I made some notes last night when I was out running, quickly typed them up + e-mailed them to myself, and here they are:

‘Compatibility with another, in letters, always at arm’s length.

Wife conservative streak with voting for self not others.

How deep can you connect with another?

Other-subject vs subject-other.’

There was more attached to this in my head, but I’ve forgotten it now. I just remember a sadness at thinking about the way my wife would vote [if voting meant anything where we live, it doesn’t], and at others who share this same view. Yet it’s also irrelevant to our lives, our relationship. She is not political, doesn’t follow that stuff. I do, a lot, but might as well be an asteroid out in the Oort Cloud cos I can’t vote, can’t do anything much anymore, can’t help anyone, I’m like ‘small i dear’, only permanently looking at god hanging on the curtain rail, thinking stop fucking looking at it, Oli, but I can’t, I’m stuck. I can only be compatible with myself, and even that’s awkward, chaotic. Compatible doesn’t mean 100% fit though. Right?

It’s better not to get close to other writers, they’re the absolute worst.

Sociopathic, unreliable, desperate to prove their intelligence and therefore cutting nothing out of themselves when they write.

Can’t say it’s all of them.

Can’t say it’s not just my own diseased brain, turning on me again, turning on others.

Once again this has become therapy.

No better therapist than a guy who hates you.

I think I’ll make a separate page of notes, complete shorthand, for the twenty letters I’m about to read and then bring it in as a reference point later.

This pen is already running out of ink.

I’ve only just started using it, 19 pages ago.

Do not buy YOKIS.

Is it true you murdered cats?

Goodnight, sweet cats.

The following will be the notes I’ve made for pages 7-30

Response to preceding letter – godhead + silver platter – I think it needs moments of directness like this, to make sure [in my mind] that they’re actually listening to each other and not just punching buoys in a sea of personal mania.
‘stations of the cross on ice’ – a reference to ?? Feels Russian/Polish. Silver Globe? A Visitor To A Museum?
‘ms ascension 1997’ – could stop most of these letters and say nice line but then the de-con-struc would become The Wandering Inn [only not shit] and ‘nice’ would be worthless. [To be fair, I only read the first five paragraphs of The Wandering Inn, and that was shit].
‘regurgitated belphegors & buer’s dark sign looms over me…’ – had to look these two up, not at all reassuring that MIC WORD also doesn’t know them – Belphegor = sloth demon – and now I really feel that I’m reading code that shouldn’t be beyond me cos I attempted A Raft Manifest a month back.
Buer = Great President of Hell – should I assume all these unfamiliar names are demons?
‘hold on, lemme try something’ – followed by ‘ritual’ in the guise of customer complaint, meshing of magic[k]s and mundane.
One of the dears is either in withdrawal physically or spiritually, or just plain depressed and masking it as something else. I’m not sure which. The other dear tries to stabilise them in their own way, shows a closeness beneath the constant flow of baroque language, which might get a bit tiring after a while…needs some variation not only for me, the intruder, but the dears also?
‘currently am cocooning kabbalistic in my bedsheets shivering from keter to malkuth dielectrifying every node until da’ath opens its abyss…’ – no, you’re not, you’re writing this letter, this description that makes you feel better…or is it a chore that must be done? This is a bit of stutter in the projector for me. Am I supposed to notice this disconnect, that the dear is either writing after the ‘bed shivering’ or is embellishing it with grimoire fantasy cos the act itself is too bland, too low-biological?
For both dears to write continually like this…is a sign of desperate/vital necessity? They can’t just write ‘in bed, feel like shit,’ it won’t satiate either of them. The real is miserable.
Are they trying to out-baroque each other? Are they stuck in this [as much as it pleasures/unpleasures them]?
One thing in my head right now: does either Elytron or [x] have to strain themselves to write in this way, to come up with lines like ‘brick theatrics’ or ‘got the itch of LED to it’, or does it coil out naturally?
The lyricism seems so fluid that it could be either/or, that kind of flow that can come by itself, or despite me, given the right mood or mental state, but a lot of the references are so specific that I think maybe the dears put a [ ] in and filled in the blank later.
I mean, I couldn’t write this way, in this kind of language.
But no one could write my way either.
Except Skynet 3000 maybe.
Or those pedants who waste time trying to mimic a better writer.
Or [ ].
I hope not.
I need to feel uncopiable.
Why?
‘you can stomp your heel down; i can cut its tail off…’ – not the head. Tail is the key. The more active part. Two snake tails entwined on the front cover, both heads disconnected.
Does ‘tail’ have a significance in demonology?
What happened to the spine?
‘I want the hosts of heaven massacred I want I want I want to harrow hell I miss it so fucking much…’ – ARE they fallen angels? Masquerading as such?
The ‘I want I want I want’ bit…I can’t decide if that feels forced or natural. On reading it through, natural, quite beautiful, but surrounded by the decadence of the other words…there’s some friction there…or not friction exactly, but a question: is this authentic passion? Did the double repeat spring from something “real”?
I can’t answer cos I’m not the epistle writer. But when I think about it, I also think about these de-con-strucs…how authentic am I being here? How authentic is my asking of this question? Everything written down by anyone is at least one layer removed, the worst writing a gurning forgery. De-con-strucs…I don’t know. There are things I omit, usually petty thoughts about people cos I don’t like drama…and then there are even pettier things that I keep in.
If it’s a mess, it’s genuine. Genuinely me. As much as I’m prepared to confess to.
No one’s reading this far in, except [x] and Elytron.
I’m stuck, moving on.
I think there is a desperation to the letters here. Not cloaked, but made glaring through the language utilised. I’ve probably said this ten times already, but it feel like they need this madness.
‘the city has me pinioned…’ – now the other dear is depressed/stuck.
‘I think I’ve fucked up, I think I’ve missed godhead and hit oncoming traffic’ – obviously ‘hit’ figuratively unless ‘big I dear’ is writing and driving at the same time and the ‘hit’ is prophetic, an intended soon-to-be-act.
The best part is in the next letter when ‘small i dear’ continues the act and buries them near their wreckage with a call-me string.
They both do this, every time the other dear cries out for help in their own way; acknowledge and respect the cry, indulge it, and then offer a way not out but back in…cos they need each other to persist/survive, they cannot do this alone.
‘you may not recognize this new angelic form…’ – hang on, was there an actual crash? I can’t tell. They talk about ‘wreckage of the flesh’ and ‘internment has been wondrous’ and I have no idea if it’s literal with consequences or a stretched out metaphor.
I still think you can’t write that you’ve hit oncoming traffic and hit it at the same time.
So it’s metaphor slide?
And they both play along with it?
I can’t decide if that’s beautiful or irritating. Is there a letter limit for this metaphor? If they keep it going for another twenty missives, will one of them finally snap and blurt out, ‘what fucking crash, you nut?’ [blurt out via typing, capitalised maybe?]. From what I’ve read so far, it won’t happen, they usually move on to something else, as if they’re aware when it’s become fully exsanguinated. But then, I’m only around 18 epistles deep.
At times, the language [despite the beauty] really is exhausting, impenetrable. At times, it feels like there’s nothing in this nine-line paragraph except a chain of words ripped from the texts of Great President Buer of Hell or Corvin the Temporary or St Jean the Defiler, words that the dears are dripping out of their veins like [ ].
I suppose when the language is so esoteric and abstract [to me, at least, who can’t picture half the references], it invites this kind of feeling from the intruder.
I know it’s not written for me.
Is it for them?
Do they, at times, intentionally get lost in the language, in all the signs?

A crack of honesty or more fiction?

If taken at face value, the line about these letters having no recipients, does that mean both dears are in fact the same person? Which would make this whole correspondence both [x] and Elytron testing how much each of them could become the other.

There is a synchronicity in the writing, the language used, though ‘big I dear’ splices in ‘lines of real’ more than ‘small i dear’ does. From memory. Which is unreliable. I mean, the beauty of two anonymous writers producing a book of epistles together is that for all I know it could be the same person. Elytron could be [x], [x] could be Elytron, I could be me etc.

This all hinges on the dear of letter XX being truthful.

Or mischievous.

It’s more likely that they’re just continuing a death-rainbow fetish. Death as an alternative [better] state of living. Or unliving. I don’t know the correct terminology. I’m in danger of getting lost [a recurring theme in these de-con-strucs, my natural state?] but I think this dear means ‘no recipients’ in a witch-semantic way. They are receiving each other, they just wish they weren’t [alive to do so]?

Twenty epistles in and there have been 2-3 moments of deviation from biscornu, religious grotesque [‘biscornu’ might be French, I just looked for ‘baroque’ synonyms and it came up].

I think those moments were needed [for this intruder].

I wonder if there will be more.

This isn’t really a narrative, unfolding by design.

I don’t feel that it is.

It’s more like a ‘clinging to’, desperate coping via an intimate subject-other who could come to double as yourself, and maybe the grand abandon of the prose is the fight against the temporariness of it, the feeling they both have that one or other of them will get bored and leave at some point.

I think I’m getting this from the avoidance of plain “real” language in the letters so far. That would indicate the long haul. Which is torture for them?

I haven’t reached the images yet.

Not even halfway through.

Current word count = 7374

I know the longer this runs, the more people will check out, but but but it has to be this length, we have to learn as lovers of fringe art to keep reading me even after 25 pages of ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I can’t decide if…’ and ‘maybe it’s the same person.’

[x] and Elytron clearly put a lot into this, we should too.

Looking at it, this de-con-struc might even top You With Your Memory Are Dead, which ended at around 12k words.

It definitely will if I keep writing sentences like that.

How much of DEAR§ is [psycho-]fantasy?

Could be a meshing of past events from the lives of both [x] and Elytron. E.g. at some point, one of the dears was in hospital and they’re pulling on that memory. Or maybe they were in hospital while writing this?

I’m reluctant to say they weren’t [in hospital] cos maybe they were, but I just have a level of mistrust when it comes to writers [especially horror writers who often tack on a murder to something grubbily real, which undoes all the hard work cos that murder never happened and putting it in also lets in the artificial. This happened in a story by Charlene Elsby that I wrote about recently, but I didn’t write in that specific complaint, which kind of bothers me on reflection. I should’ve written it in cos it was what I felt when I read the ending of her story, which was fine until the ending].

To elaborate a bit, I think [the mistrust of writers] stems from a guy who posted his novel on a writing site about 15 years ago, saying it was an autobiographical account of him shooting himself as a teenager and the subsequent ten year spell in a mental institution, and when I read his work, it sounded false, fabricated, I did not believe him at all, and it turned out he may have been a liar cos he posted in the forums the alleged video of his teen-self shooting themselves, saying he kept it all these years, but it was poorly acted and there were technical errors with the muzzle flash that others pointed out [even though they loved his work, believed his lies], and he disappeared after that, and when I looked him up online a few years ago, I saw that he had released that same novel but had dropped the shooting stuff and, unless the mental institution was called the University of M******** , then that was bullshit too. [To be fair, he could’ve gone to Uni later in life]. Anyway, cos of that guy, I always feel sceptical when authors write about hospitals or suicide attempts or psych wards. But, in this case, maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not, maybe it was, maybe it almost was, the author is making no claims and, on some level the whole thing blends in perfectly with the ‘what is real/what is baroque lunacy?’ theme, essence, soul running through the whole text, which makes sense when I remember that both authors are anonymous constructs known for this kind of language [I haven’t read the work of [x] before, but, based on this, they’re clearly not an amateur/forger] and what other theme would they cultivate but ‘real vs artifice’, and what else could an intruder get out of this but ‘what the hell have I intruded in on here?’ Basically, what I want to know is everything.

Another infinite stretch of a sentence from ‘big I dear.’

Starts with an admission of pessimism [type no. 411?] then blossoms into a boast of ‘there’s never been an exit wound like us.’

Pessimism is retooled, or deified, worn like bear-skin, but is it surrounded by more bears, a greyer pessimism?

Again, it’s hard to tell.

This could be cope, could be genuine flights of ecstasy.

I just remembered something similar to this that I’ve read before, done a de-con-struc for.

Sorcererer // Jace Brittain.

That also had two correspondents, inmates in a mental institution [no claim of autobiography, thank gods], communicating in code [hidden in the pages of obscure books], abstruse language that made it difficult to discern what was materially real and what was psycho-fantasy.

I also remember getting lost in that, getting frustrated.

Since then I’ve done around thirty more de-con-strucs and am now a veteran of this art.

Your code cannot defeat me.

Except for A Raft Manifest but only cos the text was so tiny and had all those dogberryisms. And that text was designed to be impossible, I think.

DEAR§ is just secretive [openly, the doors are unlocked, windows smashed in, anyone can intrude if they want to].

Now at 8.2k words.

Not sure how much longer I can keep going, how much more I have to say, even though I’m still not halfway through the text.

I skimmed ahead and it doesn’t appear to be too different.

But that’s the point I just went on about. It’s in code. You have to read inside the thing. It could be wildly different.

I’ll read through for a bit, not make any notes until I reach the images, which is page 65, I think.

The worst part of de-con-struc is the note making cos I can’t stop.

But I love it.

You should do it too. Really look at what you’re reading, take it all in, write down each off-spike and tangent, otherwise about 85% of the text just disappears into nothingness. And you’re gonna write a review from that?

It’s weird, this does kind of slowly absorb me into its style, which is more bitter-seductive pocket universe than just style. I am become used to it now.

Part of me [the Buer part?] wants to reach into the epistles and strangle [x] and Elytron until they tell me in crayon what they’re feeling what they’re thinking everything all that. But then I’d have to strangle myself too, for KRV and Perma Neon O.

Am I a forger?

I remember Elytron posting something about not loving your art/work/novels if you don’t promote it and at the time I thought, fuck off, you’re just trying to make yourself feel comfortable about having to do that shit on twitter when you can’t stand the idea of it, but then, about three minutes later, I thought, maybe I don’t love my work enough, maybe I feel embarrassed by it. But that’s an overcorrection. My work is okay, I just don’t love myself. Feel like the curse I got twelve, thirteen years ago is still pulsating behind my pineal gland. I deserve little to nothing. I write my novels and then forget about them. They’re easily forgettable. The beginnings are shit. I can’t remember them enough to love them. They become so distant that my psyche spins them into unlovable shit. It’s much easier to pimp the work of others. Through that I can pimp myself. Or taint myself by being fucking annoying, over-producing stuff on Psycho H. I do pimp my own novels sometimes, with a whisper. Same as when I used to put my zines about. Wish I could go back to that time, the spirit of it, but it’s long gone now.

Actually, I did re-read KRV while on holiday in Taiwan last week, and it was mostly pretty good. Did I say that earlier? Can’t remember. This de-con-struc is about 200k words long.

I just skimmed through all my novels and I love all of them, even the isekai.

They’re all an aspect of me, surreal or otherwise.

I want [I want I want] to see it this way.

Maybe a cope.

About the “faculty of association” thing [supplanting material reality with your own fantastical one], I just remembered one of the first novels I ever wrote, around 17 years ago. It was called Benny Platonov – Me as Benny, basically – and I put it on the same writing site as the shooting himself guy, and another author said it was just me walking around sniffing flowers, no plot whatsoever, one-note protagonist etc., and I agreed and then disagreed and finally wasn’t sure, after all, Benny was ME pretty much, written as I was + thought, so if there wasn’t enough variation, it just meant I wasn’t varied enough at that time, had no interest in being so. Monomaniacal? I don’t really see it that way. That novel is long dead now, yet somehow it reminds me of DEAR§, not the text, but the commitment to a non-varied, pathological self [selves?] where the variance is there but quantum, interned deep in the detail.

The letters between XX and XXX seem to imply that the dears are in a mental institution.

Are they though?

Really truly gotta admire the lyricism, even when it flies off into occult Disneyland. I don’t think I’ve read a false note yet, after 30 letters. And if I did, I would suspect it’s false on purpose due to my trust [earned] in both authors.

Anyone who says they connect to this has fatally misunderstood their role?

I know I said I was gonna read on silent mode for a while but then letter 26 appeared and, overall, it’s the usual other-boosting catharsis chat, however, in the details, it talks about ‘peering into each other’s other’, which feels like a fusing of some type and embracing of that fused state.

Yet they are still separate.

Is it just desire?

I mean, it’s written that way, maybe cos the letter starts with ‘things are a bit cataclysmic here at the moment.’

Desire is at its strongest when you’re searing lung tissue alone, at its weakest when you’re fused and incapable of what you both always always promised each other.

[Eternal] counter: they could be the same person.

I hope not.

Just spotted the word ‘moieties.’

And ‘dissection’ for the 3^rd or 4^th time.

I wonder if they’ll recycle some words so many times that they become sick of them, their new tameness.

I know I get sick of ‘but then’ and ‘feels like.’

‘these glitch-apparitions that e-mail each other: not us, nothing like us.’

Are they disassociating?

Pre-empting a dreaded state of tedium in their e-mails by saying, hey, it’s not really us?

‘: : remain dangerous to me : : don’t become endangered : :

Remain what’s strange to me : : don’t become l’etranger.’

‘To me.’

This is ‘small i dear’, I think, though there is in fact no ‘i’ in this particular letter. Only ‘we’ + ‘us’ + ‘me.’

A break from the self when the correspondence is endangered by the other i.e. ‘big I dear’ suggested they can’t carry on with this in the preceding epistle.

But the last 2 lines resort to ‘me’, defining ‘big I dear’ existing only in relation to them. Or perhaps a plea for that to be the case?

Theory: you can communicate in this way only to yourself, rarely to an Other, but ‘to yourself’ is not enough. And ‘to an Other,’ you fear, can only ever be temporary.

Is this a theory?

Are they actually making each other worse by clinging to each other[‘s other]?

Worse is better?

Might be a lack of sleep, but reading ten letters in a row is breaking me. It’s like reading a constant flow of two people dared [by Buer] not to be comprehensible to each other. Yet they clearly are. They’re loving it. It’s just me that doesn’t know what they’re on about. Is lyricism enough when it’s just endless lyricism?

I guess I’m feeling the same kind of dead end fatigue I felt with You With Your Memory Are Dead, though this one isn’t quite as persistent in its intent. There is an ebb and flow here, a subtle one, it’s just really hard to grasp it. You have to sort of feel it spiritually cos it’s not explicit in the words, not to my reading of them, at least. I think maybe the best method truly is to leave gaps between reading the letters. I should go back to doing that.

‘Each letter leaves us thinner…’

An acknowledgment for a fear of boredom from the Other and a buttressing against it by saying there’s a ‘comedown that never hits because we’ve got so much further still to fall for it.’

‘irl: hardly getting by barely holding on day to day 4am to 4am dear to dear…’

So this is a “faculty of association”, a joint hallucination mothered from within all four lobes. Or eight lobes [ as there are two dears].

This doesn’t really change much though.

Material reality is peripheral [inside the universe of their epistles].

I guess I keep coming back to: is this genuine?

Cos at times it does feel like two lonely souls pleasuring/un-pleasuring the other with baroque fantasies, but, at other times, like two sadists set on draining each other of everything through infinite embellishments of ‘purgatorial hymns.’

Maybe it’s both.

Masochism and sadism.

And there are fears on both their parts.

Mostly that the correspondence will end.

That’s what I get [currently], but could be way off [cos it’s all in occult code!].

There is no metal bar in the bicycle spokes to this. Lyricism is met in kind, each + every letter. What WOULD happen if one of the dears just wrote, ‘sorry, I can’t do this today.’?

I know for sure I wrote that earlier, maybe only a few pages back, but I have a kind of desperation for it now, simply to see how the other dear would react.

What if they understand the consequences of that, and that’s why it isn’t happening?

I think they do understand.

It would break apart everything, wouldn’t it?

But I did also say earlier that, if they really didn’t feel like writing baroque, then there would be no letter that day.

It would remain unsaid [and eventually unfelt?].

And maybe they don’t even want to say it, maybe they’re sick of writing in a normal way?

Evidence for: DEAR§. This entire text.

‘I careen from funeral to funeral, becoming more becoming by the second.’

This isn’t the first time I’ve noticed a ‘doubling-up’ of words, can’t remember the other times, my brain is sludge, but they do exist.

I adore the line above, I truly do, the contrast of ‘funeral’ with ‘becoming’, the use of ‘by the second’ as a pun on time + ‘second’ as the other dear. May have been intentional, may just be in my head, doesn’t matter. Though I think the epistles are short enough + the language smooth enough to suggest it was by intent.

How much am I missing here?

Feels like a lot.

Each response is relief that the other dear is still there.

Any machine in the world would take it.

She can’t be dead, not yet.

After looking at the letters with a team of minimalists…I’ve discovered that there might be something in the number of times god is referenced vs. the no. of times Satan pops up, as well as the level of degradation/perversion forced on each. This ties in to the war in heaven. Is that the whole text, the backdrop to it?

Also: small i vs big I, the total count in each letter reflecting the mental state of that dear and their position at that moment to the other dear. A lack of ‘i/I’ indicates a detachment from self, a wandering around the new prison-garden complex they’ve constructed. The actual total ‘i/I’ count in each letter connects to a number in demonology.

Letter 1: 9 x ‘i’, 2 x ‘my’

Letter 2: 8 x ‘I’, 7 x ‘we’, 4 x ‘me’

Letter 3: 6 x ‘i’, 7 x ‘my/me’, 10 x ‘we/our, 12 x ‘you/your’

Letter 4: ??

I’m unsure.

There is progression towards a greater use of oppositional/collective pronouns [you/we] over the ‘I’ singular, but that’s based on my reading of three letters and I don’t have the energy to go through the whole thing.

Isn’t it just instinctive anyway, the deconstruction just pointlessly proving something already felt i.e. they prefer to not talk about themselves?

An author does put detail into the text, code within the code, but sometimes it’s just aesthetics from god knows where, and that’s beautiful.

Ah, this is different.

And following a request from ‘big I dear’ to ‘tighten the noose.’

To go abstract in form instead of in language shows that ‘small i dear’ truly cares? Or is worried that a lack of creativity will doom their correspondence?

I think it says ‘cross signs exed ‘dears’ on our forehead’, and ‘dears’ intersects with the vertical plank narrating the saving of them, but are they in fact not the main cross but the pair of Satanic crosses on both sides, bleeding for exit?

Okay, I took quite a long break and made it to the images in the middle section of the text. And they are there with great precision.

DEAR§= 132 pages [counting every single page, not just the text]

Part 1 [before images] = 61 pages

Middle [images] = 10 pages

Part 2 [after images] = 61 pages

The 1^st image is black, the 2^nd says ‘and yet…’, while the last image is also black and the 2^nd to last one says, ‘even so-.’

A splitting into two, why?

Do the numbers 61, 10, 132 have any significance in occultism?

This puzzle could be beyond me but I’m glad I’m conscious enough to spot it. Writing out 500 pages of notes on this thing and not seeing that…

‘you can tell me anything i am your spare your dear your dual your equal ever listening ear

don’t hesitate, cut here, cut me; reveal…’

So, are the following 10 pages of imagery a revelation of some kind?

I think ‘small i dear’ was the one in the hospital in the first epistle, which makes the ‘big I dear’ more enigmatic? I can’t remember if they were in hospital too, or just inventing it. Can’t really distinguish between the two dears anymore. But I feel like ‘small i dear’ is the one who has confessed to more irl…which means…what?

Didn’t think of it this way before but the dears write as if they’re the last non-humans on Earth, both singular, both a crutch to the other. Actually, I did say they might be abandoned/abandoning angels.

I’m gonna read the second part and make zero notes.

This could make everything I’ve written up to this point meaningless and incorrect but it’s probably that anyway.

I’m tired, drained.

Fifty-two pages of notes, 10.8k words.

10.8K WORDS!!!

Maybe that was the point all along, drain the intruder with encoded baroque, make me go away?

That doesn’t add up.

They write as if I’m not there, as if no one else is reading.

Same as this de-con-struc, which is for me, [x] and Elytron, and maybe a few fringe masochists out there.

Weirdly, I may be an intruder in my own text, but I’m choosing not to think about that.

I’ll just come back in and add one last thing.

The final two letters are back to ink + collage and quite beautiful. Borderline unreadable in form too, some of the middle text obscured, other text illegible or tiny.

Perhaps e-mail was the prison all along?

+++

DEAR§ may or may not be still available to buy at Expat Press as there is a limited run of 150 copies, but you should definitely give it a try.

PsYChO hOLosUitE [zine]

i shall be eaten by whoever i please

[De-Con-Struc] DEAR§ // [x] + Elytron Frass

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