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Photo: @krisroller

I lay awake. The ceiling is landscape. Skyscape. A half century of existence. What could possibly go wrong? The President is tinkering with Iran. People are dying. We are protected by a computer screen. Until we realize it is plastic. Until we realize it is not there. No separation. Amerika gets bigger and bigger. It is no longer a country. If it ever was. It is something else.

Information. What is information? The Camaro parked on the street? The yellow sulfur streetlights? Is it a Camaro? What if it is a Mustang? I think it is a Camaro. Yes. Definitely. It is a Chevrolet. Why do I doubt myself? Am I a coward? Does anybody really care about this conversation inside my head? I am not even sure I do. Yes. Uncertainty. Everywhere. I no longer trust myself. Bergson tells us this moment is telescoped through everything we have experienced.

Is memory a peephole?

Are we looking through the wrong end?

Pinpricks of light.

.

I see you. I think. If you are. Are you? You and I keep blinking in and out of existence. What a performance. Being a person. Who says it is hard? Just be. You are what you are. Or not. This is your beating heart. Your inhales. Your exhales. 

Strike a ball.

Watch a ball hit your racket        a yellow blur.

We are waiting for memory to return. It will never return.

I am a creature of the elsewhere.

This place is temporary.

Good enough.

The chainlink fences. The scrub oaks. The dwarf pines. The endless sand and the sea.

What will happen to you? I hardly know. If you do this for money, you are doomed. Nobody reads. Not anymore. If they ever did. People need a text for survival. This is that text. A novel. 

It cannot feel like a novel. Must feel otherwise. Urgent. Emergency purpose. Not a beach book. Or perhaps a paperback at the sea is the most important book of all. Endless miles of beach sand. 

Zoë in her bathing suit. 

Waves.

I linger at the edge of memory. Fog. Mist. Under a gray sky. Every now and again I see something. What? Unsure. Lack of clarity. Opaque. Obscure.

The Volkswagen Beetles of tomorrow are hurtling through hyperspace.

You ever feel like driving a ’74 Volkswagen Super Beetle down to the Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile? I feel like that sometimes. Shift into gear. Pop the clutch.

The fallen pine trees are everywhere. The river gurgles. Earth spins. Turns. Orbits. We are passengers aboard this rocky planet. Spaceship earth.

Will they carry this book at The Strand on Broadway? Who the fuck knows? Who the fuck cares?

Are you a writer? Are you a dishwasher? Are you a sock puppet? 

Are you capable?

Can we use this book as a flotation device? Is there any yellow highlighting in this book?

Is this book really a novel? I mean, I am starting to wonder. Where are the actors?

Is this a first edition?

Signed? Get the fuck out.

I am getting hungry for a paragraph. You got anything left? Like a story. Like a fairy tale. Tell me more about the Sump Monster. That dude freaked me out. Did he really wear a brown paper bag over his head? And he just emerged from the sand dunes? Heavy. Really heavy, man. I’m trippin.

It might happen. It might not happen. Whatever is about to happen. What is the probability? What are the odds? I am not a mathematician. I am a novelist. I am a machinist. I am an artist. 

I am a hooligan.

I am a jester.

What information does your body take in? What perceptions? What observations? Sensations?

I am a fool. I get easily fooled by the foolishness.

Newspapers.

TV shows.

Radio.

What is the ultimate reality?

A memoir of Being. I should write a memoir about Being.

Fragments.

Diaries.

Notes.

The echo is uncanny. Orgasms lasting for 13.799 billion years. Spiral galaxies. Supernovae.

I miss you. You know who I miss. Remember what you said?

I forget.

What is left of what we were? We shed our electronic snakeskins. Keep moving. Keep wriggling. I am becoming something else. I have no idea what. Are you what you anticipated? Great expectations. Remember Miss Havisham? She freaked me out. Not sure if I ever recovered.

Amerika is at its best when people invent things. Nikolai Tesla. Charlie Parker. Jack Kerouac.

The government can brute-force the key space on your iPhone.

We are electronic beings.

Quantum beings.

This book is forever. Keeps getting better and better. Can you take any more?

When does a novelist surrender?

Never!

Might have to perform a spellcheck on this puppy. So many words. Ruff ruff! Bark bark!

Cats meow.

Marmots whistle.

I am in the Wilderness. The wilderness of the human imagination. Anything goes. Anything is possible. We are beginners. We are professionals. We are electromagneticbiochemical reactions.

It is so fucking cold in Space.

This apartment is toast. It is my spacemachine. Things I think here are incredible. The vastness of not knowing. Unpredictability. Beginner’s flux. Every now and again I am.

Absolutely!! she texts me. I want to bend her over a green leather sofa. It makes no sense. She is twenty. I am ?. Actually, it makes sense. I want to pull down the back of her panties. See her ripe cunt.

Men write about machines. Women write about people.

Just an observation. 

Might not even be true. 

What do I know?

Is film superior to literature? Probably. What are we doing here? Spooling from spool to spool. Reel to reel. The electronic eel of human consciousness is the Kraken.

Zig imagines the spread of his big right hand on K.’s left buttock. 

We are in Greenpoint. 

Fucking.

Everything is imagined. Even reality. Even real things.

I watch Zoë lick the glans of my penis.

My balls are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. My balls are bigger than grapefruits. 

I am at a distance. 

I get smaller and smaller and smaller.

I want to get arrested. I want to spend time in prison like Václav Havel. I want to write letters to Zoë. Is it too late? I want to be a playwright. I want to be a dissident. I want to be a defector.

Eyeballs the size of grapefruits.

The secret police are watching you.

I write a quick novel. This novel is a quickie. A detective novel. SF novel. A dimestore novel. Pulp fiction. Amazing stories. Hugo Hernsback. Philip K. Dick. Fans call themselves Dickheads.

I have no time for Amerika.

Amerika is all I know.

Thinking about writing a SF novel about a man named Razaqk. Something like Logan’s Run. Razaqk and his girlfriend Giselle running away from the secret police. In a big city in the not-so-distant future. A planet under the threat of giant methane clouds. Earth is becoming a gas giant. We are going to freeze to death. Unless we can escape. Escape pods are only for the elite. Razaqk and Giselle are adjunct lecturers of composition. Pods are not designed for part-time faculty. Nevertheless, Razaqk and Giselle make love like nobody has ever made love in the 13.799 billion years of the Cosmos. They deserve a second chance on a terrestrial planet. We all do.

Are #hashtags making us happier?

We are lying under the duvet cover. I am wearing a flannel shirt and green dungarees.

“I am taking off my pants,” she says.

“Why?” I say.

She laughs. 

Nobody can come. I am just too tired. She is just too tired. We just kept fucking. Doggie-style. Missionary. Nobody comes. Still. It is nice.

I thought you abandoned Civilization. Why are you still here? So much good TV on Netflix.

This paperback will be carried in the backpocket of every University student on the planet.

Unfinished nature of reality. That is what intrigues me. The fragments. The particles.

We are interactions.

I realize I faked it for most of my life. That is upsetting. I thought I was real. It just crept up and slapped me. Such realizations are incredibly sneaky. I sit in a chair for a long time. Run my hand through my hair. Who am I, I keep saying.

Getting colder. When it gets this cold, there is only a single goal: to remain. 

Survive.

Wait for the sun to heat up. If it ever will. Wait for it to expand.

What am I supposed to do? What if I do nothing? Is that okay? Will the Cosmos collapse? Or will I remain? What if I sit here with the engine running? Jotting my thoughts into a notebook. Making believe I am somebody else. Not simply me? Will you go on? Will you continue? Dare you? Are you not afraid? Uncertainty. Unknown. 

You are brave indeed. I envy your position. Where are you, if I may ask? Aha. Just as I thought. No need to elaborate. We understand each other.

I am getting bored watching strangers walk past me. Vehicles accelerate and decelerate. Supposedly, the planet spins and orbits and loops after the sun.

I have no concrete proof. No evidence. For any of this. We could be a film projection in an extraterrestrial theater. Perhaps a planet circling Betelgeuse.

I hear that star is going to blow. Supernova. Wait for it… 

there.

Getting colder. I should restart the engine. I turned it off. To save the planet. Now I feel cold. The vacuum of space presses in on me. Sucks me up. Into a tube. 

Wormholes fascinate me. As they fascinate you. What do you say? Let’s go for a twirl. Let’s go for a swirl.

The Internet is a disaster. Everybody knows it. We are addicted. We are bewildered. Riveted to the machine.

Snow. 

Are things a little better? 

Yes. Little bit. 

Kind of nice.

Do you suffer from Imposter Syndrome? I do. I definitely do. I do not belong here. Never did.

Anger.

Unable to capture the Kraken in my bare hands.

She is so good at it. What am I good at? I keep trying to be a person. It is so hard in Amerika. At least for me. Are you doing any better? I hope so. Somebody has to represent.

There are so many writers in Amerika.

They are writing memoirs.

Diaries.

Letters.

Fragments.

I want a totality. I want the whole fucking thing. Bring me the Kraken! And if I see Pierre fucking his half-sister in that crazy French flick Pola X one more time… I just don’t know. 

I might watch it again.

Again.

by on

by Evan Isoline

The rosy tigers mutated under your fingernails. (This is probably my favorite photo.) Mimicry. A few of the tigers are just clones of other tigers. (Click to enlarge.) 


Of my blood-colored wheatfield when I hold out your fingernails. The sunlight is too much for your eyes and you are not alone. Your eyes will never be too much for me. A mere mite, a blighter of a blab, is what I would offer in lieu of a reckoning. We are not yet at the level of the dead and I am not a dead man. My balaclava is an emblem of the dying. Their sum is a symbol. Where is nobody? 


(Click to enlarge. Click the face of a tiger to see more detail.) Where is the one within and the one outside and its sound? The grasslands are jacinthe in your grasp, where everything is different from everywhere else, where your own little dream is brook-fed and teeming. I would tell you that everything has been done, but I would be an imp of the first rank, a reasting renaissance is what I would breed. The sound of the grass is enough. 


Your fingernails are clogged with light, baetyl stones of a new order, and the teeth of the sirens grind for art’s murder, but not yet. (Click.) The tiger’s face is an empty white mask of what is not. The sun is an example of how to perceive such things without knowing them. I am nothing if not an unidentifiable symbol. Garish as the tiger is. What somebody is beyond speculation? Your bullfighter sweat and so forth. It was a ghost thing. You leave my skin on a faraway hill, as I stammer, oh so happy, a fool in the stage light. (Click image for more detail.) 


I was familiar with two things. This place is without an architect. The second thing is that you had already made me a copy of myself. I cannot speak for the mountains I left in the desert, where my parents are watching birds with strange eyes. The way that we are not our bodies. The tigers through the holes of a ski mask make you forget about the emptiness. There are tigers in the trees. You mouth the word “fire.” Your picture is a dalliance, of the sort that has not a blush or a blench, of what might be in a way not worth seeing. (Click to expand.) 


Nobody here is waiting for the other tigers to evolve. You are already an avatar for a different you. (Click image to open in new tab.) The tigers have feathers in their mouths, but this cannot be taken as proof of a connection to the sky. You shake your head, fraught with pang, point toward the spikelets of foxtail, needlegrass and brome, you make the sign of a rectangle, in the air with a finger. We stared at the clouds that had gushed out or met amorphosed. Each omnipotence is a solitary duet between the sky and itself. (Drag the edge of the frame to adjust image size.) 


There was something familiar about the image. Medieval ghosted tigers, phantasied, decorated, captive until transferred to the new host. Do not expect them to be shunted to a pool of goo. Endosymbiotic rift, a slurp that equates them to stars running through my fingers. (What you click will tell you what you were looking at.) The image had a function outside of itself: it was a map of unconnected places. Antipodes. Not an object that is seen, but a subject that sees. I go back to the niches to repeat a bitter remorse. Grapefruit sweat and so forth. The white tiger on the right has been painted red to resemble the blood of the sun. The tiger to the left is an homage to your love. 

You make the sign of a triangle, which I see as a sail or a wing. A boat is an object in pre-phonological perception: a sight-word. So is a plane. But I know what you mean. The tigers of the droning sea, you think, they do not go near the surface. You would daftly dare to swim them up, just for a look at the sky. The white sky gralloched for the same reason you pleaded the sea to a truce, the bamboos of a broken arpeggio, also palindromes of the moon, fed your carpals with a thunder that flayed the clones of the tigers, more gaunt now, as the image becomes less a representation of the sun and more a mirror of my own rage. 


Where peonies grow wild, the grey peonies sown to your nailbeds, the linden trees and their branches, encuticled. They are so much more, like you, a monasticism, than little beasts made of clay, in the mangrove swamps you call the stage. (Click for higher definition.) Gravity-truth or allegoric. The mince of this once plucky saint all twee and frown. How you muck up, bring ruin to undue dominance, slip to surliness. I don’t like a foretaste of masks. (This picture mocks the way I associate the word “mask” with the idea of masks.) The tiger’s face as a cynical rhizomatic wombland and it’s here. My memories as a blazing cyberlag, a vandalized temple to nature. 


(Open tab incognito, click, click, click.) The heliotropes and pyroclastic borages remember why they are trounced upon, the calliope hummingbirds you call in, each had a name. Why is a word a man? You remarked apropos of an answer, and through the mask you are always oratorically nude. The image is less associated with a sound than with a silence. The image of your dream, this theatre of plenitude and the lolling moorlands where you hide, or were you entranced by a graceless glow? No, flatteries like this, be damned, treasures of hurt, such as I cannot say, as drunk as a swan on white water, this Moloch’s mastery of miniatures—a mighty insectile burden!


(Click. Click. Quite satisfied with the double-click.) The white swan in the mouth of the tiger, the tiger painted black, the two in a circle, the cloned suns I had been too afraid to touch, that are, when they were the bribe for hate, loose swarms of lineages withering, after your abracadabra, waiting at chakra-points of my blank frame, cruel biomes, where the tigers flood in. (Click the maw to open.) The antithesis of semiotics, I suppose, is your picture, skulled in the throat of the tiger, kiss, kissed, by a wide-open spigot of ants. My own implications. The lust and fear of “why?” Why is darling. 

Even in the chaos, there is a number-zombie (letter), which is called Becoming. Autoflowering. Ditto dandelion and begonia. (Click the “x” in the tab to close the window. Force quit if window won’t close.) Remove the mask. The image wasn’t rosier than the cinders leaking up in the dark. The wet-winged tiger split this misanthropic breed from its old god. All your brooms were broken. Floating in the zeitgeist. The image approaches a thaumaturgical theatre. It was the day before, and suddenly it was gone, like a dream. Sunlight on a windowsill. Sunlight in your eyes. I’m a sign, they think, shifting up, back, subvocalizing. The most kind of jaw-dropper quill. Red of acetylene. Numb threads were woven along. Their sum was arbitrary. There isn’t a number lower than infinity.

by on
Photo: @photoshobby

This life is not for everybody. The artist’s life. The machinist’s life. For one thing, it is terribly lonely. I crave solitude. So perhaps I belong here. This void. This abyss. This vast emptiness, nothing holy. There are no road signs. The way is the way. It is a roadless road. A switchback without foresight. A rattler behind every rock. Take a flying leap. Blue azure sky too cold to contemplate.

We live hours away from each other. Our bodies cooling from the heat. You write me such beautiful letters. Paper. Ink.

My hands cup your breasts. I am unpracticed. So much to learn. 

Still.

Talking is difficult. It requires human thought. Feeling. Sometimes I am a machine.

Can you get to the next chapter in a novel without chapters? Probably. There is always something to say. Silence. Echoes of the Cosmos. A star explodes. A tree falls in the forest.

Mountains & rivers.

The Catskills.

I love you.

Six thousand light years away is the Swan Nebula. It was discovered in 1745. It is also called The Omega Nebula. It is also called the Horseshoe Nebula. It is also called the Checkmark Nebula. When will astronomers make up their fucking minds? At any rate, it is in a very milky part of the Milky Way galaxy. In the area of Sagittarius. Birthplace of 800 stars and more. Interstellar matter.

Nobody has written the great tennis novel.

As far as I know.

Jannik Sinner. I am predicting that Jannik Sinner will win a Grand Slam title. Perhaps he already has by the time you read this novel? Spacetime will tell. It will fluctuate. It will warp. It will tell.

Perhaps I should become a tennis journalist?

Is it too late?

It never occurred to me to  skip a  beat a  pulse  a gap  a space. What if entropy kicks in? What then? Are you and me okay? Is Maxwell’s demon spinning some weird shit? Opposite of entropy is negentropy. Perfect example being a star system. 

The Solar System.

Here we go again. Space & drums.

.

o

O

Sometimes a machine is for the sake of a machine. Nothing else. Not watchers. Not Hollywood. Not Netflix. Not Hulu. Just for the sake of writing. Being. Being in the peculiar way that is a novel. Boy do I feel peculiar today. Not of this Earth.

Played some tennis. Supposed to help. Did it? Now I am in a funk. Every machinist gets here. Or maybe only I get here. In my peculiar way. An orbit not sampled elsewhere in the Universe. Every move feels false. Like a miss-hit. Unforced error. 404 error. I am a computer fuckup. I am a human being. I am a robot. I am a machine. I am a defect. I am a defector. Ye$$$. I am a defector. The cash in the register is artificial. Are you sure $$$ equals work? The banks are too big to fail. I keep failing. My dad taught me many lessons about money. I forget them all. Where did he go?

Information is information. Particles of what.

How many tennis balls are on this planet?

Good morning, Amerika! Saturday. Are you ready? Did you pay all your upcoming bills? Are you satisfied with the arrangement? Satisfied with your situation? Satisfied with your station? NFL playoffs today. What else is necessary? A cheerleader. A Budweiser. Go Green Bay. Go Packers!

I am demonic.

I am the antichrist.

I rage like Poseidon.

You’ve got a semi-Western grip. You’re making me fall apart. I thought I understood strangers. I am a stranger myself.

A novel is a provocation. I dare you to read me. I dare you to permit yourself to be bewildered.

There are no more books. 

None. 

Only this one.

You are like a fucking machine. Buttocks engaged.

Amerika is going smoothly. And then I arrive. I am a defector. A defect.

I rub my face between her buttocks. She is from Pittsburgh. She lets out the low moan of a prolonged orgasm. My penis is gaining altitude.

She sits on my vertical cock and gives me something to think about for eightyeightthousand years.

I am a beginner. Little or no experience. I get better.

Nobody wants to marry me. I am a Neanderthal in a flannel shirt. The blank stare of a novelist. I am good for a fuck.

The end of chapter one should be around here somewhere. I just do not know where. This might be one of those Thomas Bernhard novels. Endless eternities.

I am not a regular novelist. So. Expect nothing. 

Expect everything.

She has a semi-Western grip and I am squirting coconut milk before I can put it in her pussy.

What does it mean to be a human being in the Third Millennium? 

What does it mean to be real?

What does it mean to be fake?

What does it mean to be plastic?

by on

by Pseudo-Heraclitus

Please, please. Do you know what they say about philosophers who are applauded when they speak? It never ends well for them [laughter]. I have a lot to say tonight, so forgive me if we get into the dirty work without the requisite foreplay.

The topic today is titled “Paraphilia and the Unbecoming of Becomings-Cephalopodic”, and I will do my best to keep matters strictly on this topic. There is a lot of material to deal with which does not fit cleanly into the issue at hand, but I will resist the temptation to wander. Why paraphilia? I am asked this question more than almost any other. It is often said, sexual tendencies are subjective… Subjective! If sexual tendencies are subjective, then this is evidence that the paraphilic is not a matter of sexual tendency at all, but something murkier. Sexual tendency, basic autonomic proclivity, is a matter of simulation. Paraphilic proliferation sees only half-simulated tendencies, strung about throughout the cosmic assemblage by cybernetic particles reduced to vibration or k-waves. Allegory is only a partial fix here, but it suffices to say that through the Aleph of Borges, a point which sees all, the paraphilic presents itself foremost, as the paraphilic is the matter under the surface, the material conditions of unbecoming which goes customarily unseen.

Paraphilia is inherent to k-wave topology, but it always exceeds and goes first, as k-waves have no aspect of proliferation but rather appearance, and appearance is never implicated by paraphilia but situated within their intensive limit like the center of the labyrinth. The visible universe has grease on its fingers. But slippages from the hands of light waves, or L-waves, cannot account for the excess cardinality in their cybernetic counterpart, as we all know, the primary elements of ordinality both overcode and direct the uncovering, and in the Aleph we recognize it as it is, paraphilia, perched at the foot of the gates in some fashion of a wooden animal, tentacled and black. But the cosmic assemblage is not a whole, it is a partial object contiguous to all other lines of extra-natural becomings, becomings-beyond, as posited in my most petulant child, The Apple and the Hand. Paraphilia does not arise in The Apple and the Hand, however, and I would personally recommend no one to read it unless you are interested in stillborn theory.

It is sometimes said that every author must write a book they wish to scrub from the earth, for me, this is it. It is incomplete, a sexless desert. My early work didn’t simply avoid paraphilia, it resisted it. I must forgive myself here somewhat – paraphilia resists the visible universe [laughter]. Its power lay in the unwritten, the pre-agreed. No one is greater than paraphilia if it catches up to them, and at the end of the cosmic assemblage and beyond, what might have earlier been considered dialectics withers and decays. Dialectics is long dead, gone, vanished into the ethereal inky blackness of the beyond, becomings reaching like the squid from its own ink. Tentacles are lines of paraphilic potential, and they are always reaching to connect multiplicities, a subterranean intra-relation block formed by means of what Deleuze called an anomaly, or point of individuated linkage between multiplicities. The squid is anomalous by its nature, as it remains an individuated multiplicity, not through the generic pack, but rather the repetition of tentacles and lines of becoming-violator inherent to the cephalopodic. The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife is the dream of becoming-violated, but it is also a fantasmic reaching for the becoming-possessed of a becoming-violator. The dream is, of course, a becoming-squid, as the anomalous nature of the squid so readily allows, but this violation always goes beyond itself to pair with the paraphilic.

The proto-Lovecraftian work of Martin van Maële stems more from paraphilia than it ever did horror, and we can note that in this particular artwork that the genitalogical abominations are littered with phallic tentacles, a coding which obscures a key fetishistic horror in the nature of the tentacle and a pre-phallic object. The tentacle is horror not because it is phallic but the fact it maintains the function of positive linkage and overcoding of the phallic while smuggling in all kinds of feminine insurgency: the tentacle is instrumental, prehensile, but not rigid. Its instrumentality is not the function of penetration but that of squeezing, contorting, and enveloping. The tentacle is not singular but partial, an incomplete network of complex mirroring and repetition, which of course I expand in my work on Deleuze, Mirror and Mirrors, which unlike the aforementioned and best forgotten monster mentioned earlier, is quite expansive on the concept of paraphilia and most certainly worth reading. When it comes to tentacles and paraphilia, it is only natural to look to Japan.

The Japanese call this particular form of paraphilic tendency shokushu gōkan, translating literally to tentacle violation or rape, which, contrary to popular mythology, did not arise under the animated forms of pornography or hentai which they can be so readily associated with, but an artistic fascination born out of the early 1800s. Of course, my now infamous argument is that this tendency is a hyperstitious alignment with the Other that was modern Capital creeping upon the shores of Japan with black ships and gunpowder. Matthew Perry was a terrible squid, drenched in black ink, an Old One set afloat from the freshly occulted shores of Norfolk. But I mention this only in passing, as the claim is too intricate to embarrass myself attempting to replicate it here for you tonight. Our interests lie in the paraphilic, and that is where we will stay.

I suppose what I mean to say by all this is that paraphilic tendencies are at their root a form of primitive sorcery, a union with the anomalous demon with pacts and rituals disseminated by libidinal overcoding, or, the libidinal k-wave which overcomes the barrier of “L”, that being light. Bataille spoke of an anus which is both blinding and the night itself, and it is this blinding darkness that characterizes paraphilia as a form of pre-subjective void, the sexual unbeing which supports itself only in its own negation, it’s own rejection. The edges of sexuality don’t run up against nothing, they run up against an ocean of unbeing, of unbecoming, of unions with demons yet uninscribed and ugly, pinching their noses at their own stench. Tentacles. Well, to put it simply enough, the phallus can’t bridge the gap, it doesn’t have the dexterity. An unbecoming is a becoming all its own, it is a becoming-violated, a becoming-possessed, mediated by an anomaly which itself is a becoming-violator. In this pact, the anomalous has no need for, and in fact should resist, all becomings-human, because the goal is not the intra-relation of the multiplicities of the individuated human and the multiplicity of the mirroring of tentacles, rather the squid is the subterranean bridge which intrarrelates the multiplicity of the individuated human to the multiplicity of unbecoming that stands as the immanent expression of paraphilia itself. The becoming-squid of man cannot be reciprocated by the squid because the cephalopodic escapes anthropomorphization, hence the tendencies of shokushu gōkan, the cosmic monsters lurking in the mythos of Lovecraft, the feverish warnings of monsters on maps of the sea. The cephalopodic is an individuated reflection of the unindividuated other, it isn’t a symbol but a prism, a looking glass which glimpses only just over the edge. It is through the squid that the simulations of sexuality are diminished, reduced to vibration, ‘k’, and slid over the edge. This movement is a function of manipulations of the tentacle permitted by use of acetabula or suckers, appendages which have the property to affix and detach based on flexations, or wet-k-waves, which connect and disconnect in conjunction with squeezing, enveloping, and pre-phallic positive linkage. Suckers are characteristic of all anomalous individuals, regardless of their physical composition, but in this regard, the cephalopod is obviously the example par excellence.

If these physiognomic speculations on animal-becoming are of interest to you, there is much more in my essay A Critical Treatise on the Sucker and the Club. But let us not escape this term of unbecoming before it has been properly wrung. Unbecoming plays a funny game in the English language here, and I have seized upon this without mercy. Unbecoming should not be mistaken as if it is a type of abecoming, that is, a lack of becoming, nor debecoming, that is, the reversal of a previous becoming; these do not hold up to the full weight of the term.

Consider the colloquial usage of the word: unbecoming begins not as a metaphysical statement but as an ethical one; one should avoid behavior which would deem them as unbecoming. The moral judgment is clear, unbecoming is itself a becoming-deviant, and as such the positive act of becoming-deviant, and, in a paradoxical sense, what we might crudely dub becoming-unbecoming, we discover this supposed moral judgment was drawing a metaphysical line in the background, behind the scenes as it were. The moral judgments illuminate lines of becoming, separating them from the lines of unbecoming, but only after they have been drawn. This paradoxical relation that unbecoming finds between its moral definition and its metaphysical one is only exacerbated by the fact that neither emerge before the other, but rather support themselves on the cuts drawn by real lines of flight, which is why unbecomings are never subjective, they exist in material conditions already drawn, or better said, unbecoming, however omnipresent, can never manifest on the transcendent plane. Lovecraft, in his branded xenophobic manner, drew this unbecoming in the occult practices of the jungle, indigenous rites which are seen as the alien counterpart to the human which bridges the Old One and the multiplicity of the preindividuated tribe. This is obviously paranoia and can be disregarded in its content, but its form is the telling aspect. Unbecoming was a matter of material rituals only drawn as unbecoming through the alienation mediated by the anomalous (Old One) and determined through reflection. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders discusses paraphilia based on two generalized groups, those being anomalous activity preferences and anomalous target preferences; those being whether the pact with the anomalous is predicated upon paraphilic action or paraphilic direction. Paraphilic direction of course is unbecoming which points to a particular ‘who’ or genre of ‘who’’s, rather than the actions being pointed in themselves. The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife transcends the distinction here: clearly there is an element of anomalous target preference, as it centers around the desire for the squid, but clearly the act in question is not simply normophilic, it contains an anomalous activity preference by nature of the tentacle and its complex instrumentality, which as we already looked at, transcends the phallus, yadda yadda. Anyways… The reason I brought up the DSM was – yeah the next one [there is a brief issue with the slides here] – if there isn’t a better sign to show paraphilia draws the lines of becoming and unbecoming! Right here, the underlined. It says that in the very old or ill paraphilia may mean: “any sexual interest greater than or equal to normophilic sexual interests”! Imagine that! Subjective, subjective… Moral real… What? [Someone shouts a question from the crowd; inaudible] This is it, my friend! These are the moral repercussions! They are drawn through normophilia, and if this is true, as the literature reads, and even living up to the norm may put you in the crosshairs, you must accept that the normophilic, the moral becomings, that which resists deviation, they are the real fairy tale!

Where is it? Where is it besides that petty remainder beside the figures, the inanimate desert of the undrawn? There is only objectivity in paraphilia, nowhere else. Nowhere else. The visible universe is stupid, it is a lie. Paraphilia is the only thing substantial enough to carve a mark in the real. [Another inaudible comment] Yes, yes I do. The place for (audio here starts to become obscured by growing unrest in the crowd) there is a suggestion, if you would [inaudible]. What? No, it’s okay. What? Okay, no, yes but I have an answer for you. [inaudible] but no one can hear you up here. I’m wired, the mic is wired so – no one – yeah, can we get a mic? If you get down they will get – I will – look [inaudible] get off the stage. I will let you speak, I will [inaudible] and I will let you speak. You can –

[There is the sound of a live microphone cord being pulled, and the speaking stops. Inaudible yelling. Something glass breaks. The recording ends here.]

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Photo: @r3dmax

I am not Zig. I am beyond Zig. I am the radioactive pile of Zig. Fermenting. Becoming something else. A new element. Periodic table, beware! Erasure. Disturbances in the electromagnetic field. What do I do? What do I do, pal? I am sitting in a chair. Supposed to fix screws in a doorframe. Cannot do it. I am machinist. Need to be here. At the machine. Banging away. Not at the hardware store. The hardware store that puts gazillions of dollars into the regime. Gasoline (gazoline? guzzoline? guzzling?) makes the world turn & turn. The Persian Gulf. The Strait of Hormuz. The Gulf of Oman. I pump gas into the Beetle. I slap a right buttock. This is madness. Existence. Civilization. Credit card debt. Student loans. I remember smoking a cigarette with Giselle. We are naked. We just fucked. A window is open. A black plastic ashtray. No idea what is out there. What is coming. We should stay in bed. Amerikans are everywhere. Fighting. Fucking. I study the law. I study the human body. I study the imagination. I study memory. No story. My life is shaped by absence. Pools of time. Riding a bicycle on dirt trails in the pine barrens. Yellow diggers moving the earth. Sheetrock infrastructure. Blacktop driveways. Chainlink fences. Razorwire protecting a forbidden zone of the sumphole. A UFO. An asteroid. Nobody really knows what made the crater. What is certain: the Sump Monster emerges. I keep a German shepherd in the yard. Sleeps in the garage. Barks at danger. He is always barking. The machines hulk. Lathes and Bridgeport milling machines. It is a nightmare of piecework. Burrs of metal. Stainless-steel. Aluminum. Teflon plastics. No future. Earth is not a Super-earth. Earth is simply Earth. There are Super-earths out there. Waiting. We need a fast enough spaceship. A VW Super Beetle. Elon Musk can kiss my ass with his Tesla. Floating out there. Space debris. Space junk. The Tesla Cybertruck I like. I might want to drive it on a rocky planet. A desert wasteland like Tatooine. So long as the windows hold up against projectiles fired by the Sand People. The Druids might salvage my Cybertruck. Put it in that amazing giant machine with caterpillar treads. Sell it to the Skywalkers. I digress. Where am I? Precisely here. Nowhere. Terrifying and beautiful places. If we can stand it. I am getting closer to the end of the beginning. We all are. Are you letting things happen? Is this a liquid document? Is this your life? Are you a computer file? The city is hissing. A steampipe metropolis. It is morning. I am cold. The coldest cold. Interstellar space. Believe in this. Believe! I push a bicycle over a hill. I see the landscape. I am exploring the planet. Everything looks so far away. There are no people. Just a village of red-tiled roofs. Houses made of ancient brick. I am an American. I am made of ideas. I am a Hollywood movie. An episode of a sci-fi TV show. Behold my blaster. Tunic. I am a Sandman. Everywhere somebody is building something. Construction cranes. Never ceases. Never stops. The jackhammer is the music of our time. People call it progress. I guess. Cannot hear a bird sing. Sip coffee in the morning. The apartment is warm. Winter light spills in through a window. No snow. Not anymore. A good idea for a post-apocalyptic novel: The Last Snowboarder. The ice is upon us. Behind us. In front of us. The coldness of interstellar space. Are you happy with this Solar System? It is pretty good, right? Lots of interesting planets. Rocky planets. Gas giants. The rings of Saturn. I need to go food shopping. Trader Joe’s. 

Or someplace like that.