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Sun-kissed etchings

Fill the page with its solar excess

Psyche expands into the flesh

Where the word becomes incarnate

Noon day fire incinerate my insides

My blood carries the soul of life

The Spirits have called

To mark the Hour that has come

Boreas casts his breath

My blood freezes

With it the spirit lies in cryostasis

The midnight moon casts its gentle light

As it guides me down the cavernous path

Psyche’s echoes expand into the cave

Reverberating it’s cacophonous cries

Whispers of the dead

And wails of the damned

Encompass

As the silence thickens

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I’ve been a bit preoccupied with infinity especially as it relates to death. These are some themes I’ll be incorporating into my short story. It’s something I’ll attempt to articulate but how could you fully articulate something that’s mostly ineffable?

I remember the nighttime desert roads that we drove on our family trips from California to Las Vegas and vice versa. The only thing illuminating the inky blackness were the headlights. It felt like there was a blanket smothering over me where I felt myself slowly suffocating and contracting under the obsidian dome. When I looked outside the window, all I saw was black, horizonless flatland, and it was both captivating and terrifying. I experienced a primal terror that seeped down to my marrow and viscera. But in all its horror one is stupefied.

The devouring maw of infinitude only gave me a small glimpse of what’s truly out there. What is revealed to me was the fact that I can’t help but cling onto the concept of “me” and “mineness” – even though the self is hard to define personally and ontologically, I still come home to the entity that’s me, a thing that belongs entirely to me. And that sense of me is what carries me through life. But part of the veil of Maya is the belief that self is an entirely separate, permanent thing, but it’s hard to detach from that illusion because it feels like what we do and what happens to us have immeasurable weight.

For a very short period of time, I was into Vampire the Masquerade and was fascinated by a clan called the Tzimisce. They consisted of a vampire clan of serial killers and psychopaths, but also priests and scholars. But the connecting tissue was the desire to transcend their humanity into something far monstrous yet greater than their previous selves. They essentially were the Hellraiser cenobites of that universe. But I deeply connected with that premise especially as it involved body horror and stretching one’s physical and psychological limits. To not be a person, but an entity. Something that’s entirely boundless and inflated.

I think the terror and seduction from those childhood memories still loom over like a spectre. The desire to transcend my humanity seems to reveal both the fear of and draw towards infinitude. To desire to be beyond human is the desire to escape the clutches of death but it also betrays the desire for timelessness as it rejects the impermanence of our being. I myself want to be infinite but I’m unwilling to submit to infinitude itself. I think of the skeletons of dead animals in the desert and how they disintegrate into the sands of time and return to the plenitude of infinitude.

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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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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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It was the fall (or was it spring) semester of my junior year of college. I was in the empty computer lab and addled from not sleeping for 3 days. I had Microsoft Windows open. Blank. White. A one-dimensional white room that I”ve been occupying in for the whole day as it transitioned into evening and then slowly creeping into the dead ambience of night. For the past week, I couldn’t write anything, let alone force myself to read the material for class. I remembered the topic of the essay clearly: analyze the difference and similarities between Leibnizian and Spinozan monism. It was about female sexual predators and the intersection between the legal system and gender norms. Everything was born out of the orphic egg as the cosmos formed from the primordial yolk.

I could no longer tolerate this way of life: endless days of attending a dull lecture (if I even managed to attend class), going to work, and retreating into domestic isolation to sulk and fester in my own depression. That moment in front of the computer of me struggling to write a single word on that document had me pondering: what the fuck am I doing with my life? What vague future am I working towards? Is this all worth it in the end? What do I truly want in life? I truly hated my life during that time – I had nothing to show for it, I had nothing worth living for, and nothing to look forward to. The plan was that I finish university and start establishing a respectable career, maybe as a lecturer, therapist, social worker, or whatever, yet no path seemed satisfactory to me. I was never attracted to conventional modes of living, not because I’m a rebellious free-spirit, but because of something else….Something more deeply rooted in my being and outlook.

Throughout my life, even before the onset of mental illness, I’ve always had nihilistic tendencies. I was never one to think my life had meaning or that I was destined for a higher purpose or greatness, however that didn’t mean I did not have my own ambitions. I merely had the biological imperative to live and to explore and that was enough justification for living, at least initially, yet apparently not enough to sustain the will to live. Nothing satisfied me or made me happy in the long run, except for one thing: violence.

I’ve never been a particularly physically violent person, but the language of violence seems to speak to me the most keenly – killing, maiming, violating, brutality, oppression, and domination and their presence within the human condition didn’t require further explanation for me. I knew. I understood. I understood violence born out of rage. Violence as an exercise of power. Or as an extension and manifestation of lust. And as another tool of rationality and progress in the name of secular, humanistic values that actually in the end propagate a system built on oppression and exploitation. To live is to bleed, and you (or I) can’t fully experience the full extent of life without the force immanent within it. I remember as a young girl studying taekwondo and loving the physical and mental discipline required to master it and the pain that came with it. There was an artistry to it all by way of learning to reign in the violence and force until when it was necessary to utilize them. Mind ruled over matter in that one must not give into their violent impulses but rather channel them in a controlled and rational manner, and sparring was the activity where I could exercise these principles. In a match, if you use too much force you either lost or you were disqualified. Brute force was frowned upon, instead technique, reading your opponent, and tactical intelligence were favored, which are much more effective and impactful means of channeling violence. I was at my happiest when I sparred and won. Or even if I lost, I was still given the opportunity to fight and to learn from my mistakes. I know someone would suggest that I should get into MMA or boxing, but I wouldn’t want that. I don’t want to operate in the daylight and express my violence through societal sanctioned entertainment. It’s not about expressing violence for the sake of violence but it’s something more corrosive and at the core.

During that 3 day insomnia stretch, I was binging execution videos and snuff films (or what was available without going into the deep web). I was watching pseudo-snuff porn as that was the only way I could get off. This brings back memories of the time in high school where I read a book about sex trafficking in Eastern Europe. One story that stood out to me was a young girl being sodomized by a group of men in order to break her in. About a decade later, I listened to a podcast about domestic violence and in one account a woman was imprisoned in her house by her husband. He would beat and rape her daily, and forced her to eat from a dog bowl. Whenever they would go out, he had her duck her head under the glove compartment so she wouldn’t see the street signs and he threatened to kill her if she attempted to prop her head up. She didn’t even know her home address. In all of these moments, I was overtaken with sadness for these people as well as with a sadistic and morbid arousal. I felt empathy for the victims but at the same time I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to do those things to other people.

When I was a middle schooler, I was obsessed with serial killers which wasn’t too unusual for people that age. I’ve heard true crime and serial killers are popular with women because the fear and danger they experience in life are realized and taken seriously in those stories. They serve as guides to avert danger (via morbid fascination). I never related to that, at least not consciously. I always related to the predatory serial killer, and maybe this was my own form of internalized misogyny seeping through since I saw the often female victims as nothing but pieces for the male serial killers to project their violence onto; this was a more virulent manifestation of the male gaze that I’ve internalized. Anyone can become a victim and I didn’t care about them; they were faceless and nameless nobodies in comparison to the sensationalized serial killers. I hated femininity and femaleness and witnessing serial killers was a way to kill and make obsolete my own femininity. My violent and antisocial (and quite phallic) predilections are not in line with society’s view and expectation of women. We’re socialized to be nurturing, self-erasing, peaceful, compliant, and deferring and my instincts go against those things. Of course make no mistake, I’m not making a feminist argument for who I am since this entry has nothing to do with the betterment of women, obviously.

My violence is like a black hole, devouring everything in its vicinity and corroding everything it touches. Except when it’s not. If I lacked the compassion that I have and possessed more drive, I wouldn’t hesitate to be a more destructive force, whether I be a criminal or a politician. Even now, in my more stable state of mind, I still find myself unsatisfied with the peace. I want intensity. I want to live on the fringes. I need to bleed and cut. In order for my life to mean something, for it to be worth living, I need to walk hand-in-hand with death whether that be physically or psychologically.

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Returning to this: https://the-black-book-gallery.com/2021/06/11/post-apocalyptic-ukiyo-e/


The demolished cityscape represents the self/ego and the different blocks and aspects of the city represent the different aspects of the self. Initially I thought the crumbling landscape symbolized a fractured ego. But I’m coming to the conclusion that the dreams mean something else.


From the destruction and decay of the cityscape, life reasserts itself. The modern city represents alienation and compartmentalization, and the whole edifice of it all is destroyed, while oddly enough maintaining the bustling nature of it, arguably the main feature of a city.


Vegetation overtakes the sprawl. Whorehouses and crackhouses are situated alongside decrepit, concrete playgrounds and businesses.


Innocence and the darker aspects of the self commune with each other, coming into contact and communicating with each other.


The whole psycho-geography of the landscape is fascinating – the simultaneous urbanity and the primitiveness of the landscape seamlessly coexist, bringing forth new ways of living, communing, relating, communicating with others and viewing and inhabiting oneself. And the reason I compared the dreams to ukiyo-e is that these elements – the urbanity, primitiveness, seediness, playfulness- seem to mesh harmoniously, literally a world floating above the real world.


Heaven, hell, and purgatory all coalesce in this one spot. This one location. In this liminal space.


So I’m seeing this dream as the process of holistically integrating the ego.


As someone who’s mental health goes in and out of stability and who not infrequently went into psychotic states, this bodes well especially since I’m waaayy more stable these days.


Hopefully, long gone are the days of the schizophony of the fractured self, whose various aspects were in irreconcilable tension with each other. Though it might be premature to hope for that.

The actual experience of the dream is accentuated by the alternating feeling of being disembodied from reality and the lush sensuality/viscerality of the intense and raw atmosphere.

It was simultaneously dream-like and fleshy. It was pulsating, as if one entered into the beating heart of the center of a city and feeling the electricity run through the air and coursing through one’s veins.

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The famous Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world”, had their origins in these districts, and often depicted scenes of the floating world itself such as geisha, kabuki actors, sumo wrestlers, samurai, merchants, and prostitutes.

The term “ukiyo”, when written as meaning “the floating world”, is also an ironic, homophonous allusion to the earlier Buddhist term ukiyo (憂き世, “sorrowful world”), referring to the earthly plane of death and rebirth from which Buddhists sought release.[2]

In its modern usage, the term ukiyo is used to refer to a state of mind emphasising living in the moment, detached from the difficulties of life. – Wikipedia

I’ve been getting these semi-reoccurring dreams of a dreamscape. Imagine the entirety NYC that’s semi-demolished and bombed out but it’s still bustling. It’s nowhere near as populated as it originally was but there’s still people there doing commerce.

It felt like an almost idealized mixing of different aspects of NYC from different eras.

From the gritty atmosphere of the 1970s before Giuliani cleaned up the city.

To the modern hipster gentrification of the city.

The funny thing about it all is that I’ve never been to NYC.

Each block was interlaced with wrecked abandoned builds and semi-demolished businesses and buildings used as playgrounds by kids.

I remembered seeing a chic and busy 3 story coffee house (semi-demolished of course).

The city was simultaneously stylish and decayed. Wrecked yet bustling with life. Dangerous while also something that could only exist in dreams, “a floating world.”

Underlying it all was a joie de vivre.

Brothels and crackhouses situated alongside cement playgrounds and an apothecary.

As is the logic of the floating world.

There was the rawness of living in an gritty environment populated by criminals and prostitutes. Or at the very least, their presence was more front and center and seemingly tolerated as if they were a natural part of the landscape.

But it never reached the level of being confronted by brute reality.