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About a week or two I had a nightmare and the settings were moments before nuclear warheads went off and the panic that ensued, the explosions, and the aftermath. I had it in my head that this was the conclusion of the Russia-Ukraine conflict despite having not kept up with it in weeks. I have dreamt of post-apocalyptic settings before as seen here,

Post-Apocalyptic Ukiyo-e
The Apocalypse Revisted

But long gone are the halcyon days of urban, futuro-primitivism and in are the days of brute existence’s relentless and unceremonious gut punch. Something similar to this,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17LQnaaUTp8

The halcyon days that never were. Even after writing those journal entries, the ego’s schizophony still played its discordant music. I still have a way to go before I can harmonize the notes.

As for this dream I don’t know what to make of it and it’s been bothering me slightly. Lately I’ve been on an upward trajectory – I’m in a stable and loving relationship, I’m moving to a bigger city, starting a new job, becoming more focused and driven in my career, and new opportunities are opening up for me. Wherein lies the monkey wrench?

There are a couple of ways to interpret this dream but I wouldn’t know where to start.

I’ve always had a tendency towards self-destruction both in passive and active, and sometimes violent, ways. The cycle of numbness and the desire for intensification rears its head and this period of peace and stability is alien to me. It’s almost as if there’s a fear that I might go ‘nuclear’ and tear it all down. But I don’t want that, at least not consciously.

Another way to view this is my mind cleansing itself through immolation. Let the old edifices burn to the ground and may its embers nourish the soil. May the ghosts of these edifices be put to rest. Spectres of the past can no longer obstruct the future. I no longer inhabit retro-futures but journey towards futures where the ink hasn’t dried yet.

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Somnolence dissipates into obsidian. As the blackness transforms into forms, Phantasos weaves his web of phantasms, terraforming the vistas of the dreamscape. The phenomena is as ephemeral as spectres, between things as they do not appear and the noumena that underlies them. Oh Morpheus what insights do you have for me tonight! Incarnate yourself and lead me down into the mysteries of the soul. Be my Virgil into the journey into the unconscious.

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I think degeneracy in some respects requires a poetic and religious sensibility. Hedonism, decadence, and degeneracy are often seen to be bedfellows with nihilism: there are no higher values except pleasure and the material. But I think that’s not really the case, to find meaning in these things go against the definition of nihilism no? Of course, there are many types of philosophical nihilism but I never looked further into them and I don’t care to. When people think of values and principles, they often think of religion or a worldview and system that point to “higher” values, the Apollonian as Nietzsche would put it: values of altruism, rationality, order, discipline, faith in a higher being, etc. The imperfection of base materiality compels us to go beyond its instincts and sensations. Hedonism and decadence are often associated with decay especially moral decay.

Once you reach a certain level of existence and comfort, there’s no compelling and motivating reason to strive for anything. There’s nothing to really meaningfully live for. It seems like there are a couple of options to take at this point but one of them is to descend further into the bowels of existence, into the forbidden fruits of life. This is why decadence is often associated with wealth. But I don’t think this descent has to be a nihilistic one.

I really don’t think there’s a huge difference between perverts, mystics, and soldiers. To be in the mindset of these types involves a certain romanticism and the desire for the extraordinary. To live on the fringes of existence confers a certain type of gnosis, a knowledge of oneself and the world that otherwise wouldn’t be possessed in normal circumstances. The soldier, in war, is always on the precipice of death. Or at the very least, their mortality is always at the back of their minds. The precarity of existence is always salient.

The mystic desires union with God and is willing to renounce their own needs to achieve this ultimate desire. The mystic sees God in everything and the boundary between the material and the numinous is thin. Now the pervert. The pervert is a sophisticate of sorts. They understand the sacredness of the taboo. There’s almost a sacrosanct nature to their perversion. The ritual of engaging in these acts is imbued with symbolic meaning, colored with semiological richness. It’s not just about sex, it’s about the ritual and that ritual being the playing of meaning and symbols.

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When I saw a spider entrap and consume an insect, I saw God in that moment. The spider wraps its prey into its web and I also couldn’t help but compare it to gourmet chef preparing an expensive dish. I envision them all lined up, the flies and diminutive insects waiting to be feasted upon. The lambs are unwittingly led to the slaughter on this lattice alter. I was fascinated, entranced even by this brutal, yet delicate ritual.

Perched on high with eight eyes and eight limbs, it sees everything. To see is to know and the third eye chakra is associated with divine wisdom. The spider’s perception experiences all doors of reality. It posses a mobility that’s nigh unstoppable. It weaves intricate tapestries that aides in its fine kill. These tapestries are full of awe and beauty as they are treacherous and dangerous as if the kill is immanent within the seduction. What a marvelous creator-killer.

I saw the spider prepare its sacrifice. Usually gods have humans do their dirty work, but here art and the act of killing are too intimately intertwined and it makes everything about this process sacrosanct.

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Spectres from the future imbue themselves into the past and present. Retro futures inform me of my present. I look to the horizon and I experience flashbacks.

I describe my desires as haunted; they’re like ghosts that follow me everywhere I go. Some people say desire stems from lack or privation and that these ghosts fill in the lacuna that desire originates from. It’s a ghost called hunger, a spectre called yearning, and a revenant called invidia.

The evil eye that covets its object of desire, the eye that wields its black magic against those that obstructs its will. Desire conjures up a darkness within me and within the shadows, these ghosts roam and fill the space with their wails. Ghosts are not the past haunting the present but a future that was obstructed from coming into being.

What lies beneath isn’t what was but rather what was that could’ve been.

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I remember as a child when my parents used to drive from Las Vegas to California or vice versa. We often drove through the desert at night which had an eerie but numinous feeling to it.

With only the stars and moon illuminating the nocturnal dome, it felt like you can drive forever. But I’ve always wanted to go off-road into the unknown and wild heart of darkness of the desert.

With never ending flatland in all directions, you get to experience infinity in all its horrific beauty. There’s no horizon or end in sight, but sand and inky blackness.

If the animals don’t get to you first and as night turns into day, the oppressive sun bears its onerous rays on you. You may be able to see, but the only thing in sight is just more of the same flatland rolling into eternity.

Here, infinity is the graveyard of sand and dirt. It patiently and slowly stitches you back into it’s tapestry.

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I remember this quote from Huysmans’ novel La-Bas (The Damned),

Persons of good sense are necessarily dull, because they revolve over and over again the tedious topics of everyday life.

Neither of us had good sense, especially in this moment as we drink from the chalice carrying a bestial and heady concoction of concupiscence.

The sinner’s tabernacle is where we offer up ourselves and drink from the blood and eat from flesh of the souls of the condemned. These are the Devil’s delights, where the only proper ejaculations of the soul are the litanies of evil and the ecstatic incantations of sybarites.

If the saints and mystics can experience transcendent unity with God, can we not be holy voluptuaries of carnality? Saints of eros practicing our sacramental rites that were gifted to us by nature.

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I have traveled upon the rings many times, and each revolution yields diminishing returns. The repetitions unravel different variations of a theme, but the theme will always remain the same. No matter how many times I lap around, no matter how many variations and different resonances I encounter, I can never escape its plain and simple truth. It’s not an universal truth or one that’s deciphered by philosophical contemplation, but one that resides deep within the viscera of your bowels. It’s calcified within your bones. It’s the sound you hear when nails and a chalkboard meet and your ears bleed from the searing and screeching noise. After a while, it relentlessly makes its presence known, impatient at the fact that you’ve been trying to obscure it by embellishing it with different suits.

The truth is as bilious as it is resounding. Everyone fears the hand of Saturn. In Rueben’s and Goya’s paintings of Saturn devouring his children, the old order stifles the new, asserting its power and dominion. What has been will always be whether it be the old traditional order or the darkness that always haunts us in the background no matter how much things are progressing or looking up. What is new will inevitably decay and so on.

The truth is as damning as it is mundane. The repetitions recur and recur. But why revolve around Saturn? This malefic planet seems to draw me in, as if my fate is tied to its fortunes. As I travel along its rings, I can only experience a prolonged and protracted numbness. It’s an apathy that betrays a deep dissatisfaction but I have an inability to escape from it. The past, the present, and the future amount to more of the same. Apathy is a hell disguised as a purgatory. It is an eternal waiting room for those passively waiting for nothing to come.

I think I’m starting to understand why I’m so drawn to masochism. For a moment, the pain transports me into a garden of plenitude, a garden where thorns, poison ivy, and venus fly traps lay in wait to inflict their torturous gifts onto those who seek them. Like the mystics who encounter the face of God at their most vulnerable and abject, I experience God from my blood that’s drawn, my torn flesh, and my tears. Sometimes I want to escape from the pain of the apathy, but knowing me, I’d rather fall deeper into it, allowing myself to be cannibalized by it. A few times, I’ve fantasized about cutting off all contact with the world, starving myself, and letting myself rot in my apartment until I die because it is then that I’ll experience the apex of life by edging closer to death and falling deeper into madness. I won’t because I already am.

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The ghost enlivens the shell. Its utterances instantiates the world. Speech is the breath of life. Language is the blueprint of thought. I often associate the mind with eyes, not unlike the third eye of the crown chakra. To see is to know, to know leads to understanding, understanding is the path towards mastery, and to have mastery is to have power. But the eye only has a limited field of vision and it’s world is colored by only what it can see and metabolize. Omniscience is a tricky mistress because in the end, the more you know, the less things make sense. I experience vertigo just thinking about this.

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I had trouble writing this until yesterday [wrote this on August 3rd]. It was only after I cried that I could properly transcribe the words onto paper. When I discover something so essential about myself, the thing that undulates beneath and drives who I am, something that before I could only edge towards but could never quite reach, I can’t help but experience a deluge of emotions. It is the agony of experiencing that thing to its sharpest touch and the terrifying ecstasy of being in full resonance with it. Writing this was an evocation of repressed psychic contents that were, ironically, hidden in plain daylight, and the tears were summoning incantations for these psychic contents to be unveiled.

Not too long ago, a friend of mine said I had three facets that are present within me but don’t talk to each other (compartmentalization basically):

The part of me that wants to help others.

The other part of me that wants to be left alone and be autonomous.

Lastly, there’s a part of me that wants to exert force and dominance.

The lack of integration of and communication between these aspects creates a psychodrama where I’m pulled in different directions. Internal tension shows no sign of resolution. Competing desires show no want for compromise. Emotions intensify and seethe but there’s no release valve. It’s being married to your soulmate but you’re not allowed to touch them. Clenched jaws, grinding teeth, and driving with the brakes on. I love you, don’t leave me, now fuck off.

Solitude has its own beauty and each one of us establishes their own unique cadence with it, but I would rather surrender myself to and be overtaken with the alchemical energy that’s emitted when people are magnetically drawn together. Yet I find myself frustrated because I want too much while simultaneously knowing that I myself am not good enough. And so I withdraw and I simmer and I seethe. However, my pride and avarice have it that I deny these needs and push forward. Or rather I don’t show my hand.

I want to be there for you (general, abstract ‘you’) but I feel like I don’t have what it takes to properly suit your needs so I give very little of myself. And when I do give, it’s never enough. My avarice ends up hurting you and you feel resentment towards me. In response to that, I also feel resentment towards you for making demands on me, but deep I know you’re right and the shame seeps through me. Still my first instinct is to withdraw and disengage, or to lash out passive-aggressively (whether consciously or not) and thus the cycle of rejection continues, one that’s rife with unsatisfied needs and desires, denial, and frustration. Is it not hypocritical to want so much and to give so little and to then be angry at those who want the same from me? Underneath the pride, the glue that holds my ego together, is intense dysphoria.

I’ve finally got to experience the rare feeling of catharsis when I started to actually feel the weight and sudden release of these emotions and they ran the gamut from anger, anxiety, to grief, to eventually a calm emptiness. Of course, one crying session isn’t going to do much in the long run, but maybe it’ll set a precedent for something. Whatever that thing may be.