Echoes from the invocation reverberate
As the cacophony of voices fill the space
With songs that venerate
The journey to the edge

When I speak of evil, I’m not speaking of moral degeneracy but an excess – an excess in energy, in passion, in curiosity, in desire, in ambition….

The type of excess that never reaches its catharsis and finitude, and in some cases, spirals down into the bowels of existence.

As the traveler descends down
The choir of echoes begin to wane
No longer comforted by the communal rites
The traveler begins to truly journey alone

It is the evil that harkens back to childhood, to an innocence that gave way to this excess. Unencumbered by societal constraints, the child freely lets his imagination run free and stretches it beyond its limits.

Rimbaud once stated that genius is a return to childhood. The genius is said to be possessed by a daimon or has an attending spirit that accounts for his uncanny perception.

As echoes cease their litanies
The traveler feels naked
And opened to be consumed by whatever awaits him
But there’s no destination…

The path of evil has no justification for its existence. It just is and it’s compelled to fulfill its will and expend its energy, as it has no other mode.

It seems to be in contention with death but instead it runs hand-in-hand with it as evil courts and flirts with destruction and disaster, tempting death to quell its expenditure.

In realizing that there’s no destination
The traveler realizes the freedom he possess
He’s a true sovereign
With that, he can go anywhere he desires

I don’t want to produce literature. I want to write litanies of evil with words that don’t signify but rather embody meaning. Words that evoke imagery and feelings from the foreign place that happens to reside from within.

I was at a crowded bar/restaurant one night. All I could recall from it were the thick blacks and the deep reds. If I could describe it more accurately, it was like a small little corner of hell where its residents momentarily took refuge from their eternal suffering. Even Satan understood that weekends were necessary for keeping up morale for both his minions who administered the torture and the agonized denizens who needed a respite from their torment. Hell’s powers, principalities, thrones and dominions had no hierarchical significance here. From Paimon, to Lilith, to your common demon, all mingled and fraternized with each other. Maybe it was Hell, or maybe it was your common earthly night hub, who knows. Who cares.

I was in a secluded corner of the bar, just drinking and retreating into my own mind as I usually do when I go to bars. I rarely go to them to meet other people but instead to more readily access my subconscious through intoxication, and the ambiance and white noise of a bar are a pleasant change of scenery from the domestic isolation of home at midnight. The music, the people, and the chattering were just a blur, just background noise and faceless figures. But through the corner of my eye, I saw someone approach me. I didn’t acknowledge their presence by not looking their way, and I just kept looking straight ahead, staring at nothing.

The figure sat by my side, and he introduced himself as an ex-Catholic priest. He looked fairly young to be an ex-priest, I thought. He was young, with thick curly brown hair, and he had a kind, but cute face. As for what happened next, it was all a blur. As far as I can remember, we talked about God, debated the cosmological arguments about his existence, and contemplated our place in the universe, all of which I wouldn’t be able to recount right now. But what I can remember was the increasing tension between us. It was so thickly palpable that even the embers of Hell couldn’t suffocate me with their fumes. He suddenly but gently laid his hand on my cheek and guided my face into a kiss which turned into a passionate embrace. Even in that dank place, with that kiss, all I could experience was the universe and “God.” God became personalized, visceral, and in the flesh. What occurred was boundlessness between God and us. No. It was a consuming of God and his universe, and in committing this act, we became the hypostasis of that reality thereby becoming gods ourselves. It was the creation of a reality that should have been, At least for that moment. Maybe we were in Hell, and we were playing out our delusions of grandeur and power through our lust just to be punished for it once the delusion was over.

Kindernaut: A portmanteau of kindergarten and psychonaut that I made up.

Another oldish post of mine, written a year ago:

When I was a kid (like 5 and 6), I would frequently experience astral projections which I could induce intentionally and accidentally. I would be sitting on the couch, watching TV, and then all of a sudden I would experience myself looking at myself that’s sitting on the couch from the corner of the ceiling. I would see both selves, the one on the couch and the one in the ceiling corner. I could also experience myself as different people; I could be a Native-American man in his 50s, a Hispanic woman in her 20s, etc. I was floating through different minds. These experiences made me question the fabric of reality. If I myself am real? If I’m actually situated in the house I’m living in? What if I’m actually inhabiting someone else’s body? Or what if I’m dialing in from another dimension? I haven’t astral projected in forever and I don’t know if at this moment and time, my mind is pliable to do that.

These weren’t the only instances of mind-altering experiences. While I had a lot of friends as a child, deep down I desired to leave my body and traverse multiple universes. Similar to the astral projections, I would “zone out” and go into these semi-deep trances, and this especially happened when I was swinging on the swings while listening to my Walkman. The swinging motion and being high off the ground enhanced the ‘high’ feeling of the experience. I gained a lot of inspiration from the books I’ve read and the tv shows and films I watched, and what I often did was recombine characters and storylines in my head from various mediums and create my own universe(s). Or I would just zone out and be deeply rooted in the moment. I wouldn’t think, I would just be, and that’s when the greatest insights and inspirations would emerge. I unwittingly was in a deep meditation during those times, so deep that these must’ve been proto-psychedelic experiences.

In middle school, these experiences started to wane considerably but I still had meditative states, though most of my states were tinged with religious symbolism. And these were especially potent when I was in mass. I would often meditate on the crucifixion of Christ, and how this was the greatest expression of love and surrender to ever occur. My religious meditations were also very sexually oriented, of a sadomasochistic nature actually (which led me to discover Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose names inspired the terms sadism and masochism respectively). Even then, as a virgin and not having a boyfriend yet, I knew that sexual surrender and religious surrender were of a similar nature – both involved the dissolution of ego boundaries and an ecstatic union. But the ultimate nature of these religious sadomasochistic fantasies wasn’t of morbid violence but a desire to reach a mystical boundlessness. I was attracted to extremes – extremes of excess and asceticism, of purity and debauchery, of piety and heresy, etc. We often modulate our lives towards the middle of these extremes, but I was a creature greedy for fringe experiences. And this led me to another insight: Christianity and the concept of goodness cannot exist without evil. Without evil, the moral high ground of the Church would lose its power and potency. Judas who betrayed Jesus, Jesus’s executioners, the torturers who executed the martyrs were all necessary in the propagation of goodness. And this lead me to another insight: without the concept of evil, God isn’t particularly necessary. God damned humanity from the start, it wasn’t Adam and Eve. God knew what would occur and yet still “let” it happened. If all was perfect in the world, we wouldn’t pay much mind to God aside from passive recognition of his goodness and providence. But if sin and evil were introduced into the world, there’s more of a explicit need for God’s providence and salvation through his grace. It’s no wonder that the Gnostics considered the God of the Bible to be an evil demiurge. It’s only through our intent and dependency that God has power. It was this revelation that led me away from Catholicism.

This was from years ago that I wrote this:

The body is a space where various cultural, biological, aesthetic codes and signifiers interface and combine. In some cultures, the body gets scared, mutilated, tattooed to indicate a coming of age, status, and the passage of time. Aesthetic is narrative and appearances are important. While the outward presentation may not fully expose one’s inner workings, it does give a comprehensive summary of who you are and what you’re about in both subtle and not so subtle ways, but of course the message that’s intended and the message that’s received don’t always overlap. I first got a glimpse of this between the ages of 8-10 when I was going through puberty, and reached menarche at age 10. By age 11, I already had C cup breasts and looked mature for my age, cues for some older men to flirt with me, make advances towards me, and occasionally harass me. Of course my peers at the time wanted to join in on the spectacle at the oddity that I was. The idea that really took root in my mind was what it means to be female, and coming to understand what being female entailed. I hated my femaleness since it marked me. My body was a public spectacle for others to comment on, leer at, and grope, a thing that matured faster than my mind, not to mention having all the sexual desires of woman but not fully understanding what those desires are. I almost think these conflicting drives set up a precedent for the duration of my life in that there’s always the need for me to exert control. Control over my image, how I orient myself, how I seek to manifest my own values and vision, and a lot of that control was exercised through the many disciplinary, aesthetic, and punishing practices I inflicted on my body, learning and experimenting with different ways to tell stories with it.

In my preteens and early teens, I nearly developed an eating disorder in order to wash away my womanness, an identity at the time that I felt was thrusted upon me. But what also came from my strict exercise and diet regiment was a deification of self-discipline and control to extreme degrees. Through harsh and unforgiving discipline of the body and mind, I wanted to reach to some superhuman level of existence. I wanted to overcome all of my weaknesses, become this exceptional being that’s beyond reproach and human folly. I never become that being.

Since I was 8 to until about recently, I had severe acne and then the accompanying acne scars. All I saw was pus-filled, pulsating bumps and craters. Once again, I was marked. I felt like a leper, and I wanted to further embody that monstrosity. While making obsessive attempts to treat and hide my facial deformities, I would cut my body to ribbons and burn parts of my body (1st degree burns at most). Each new mark and blood trail was a new verse on this book of flesh. I wanted to be stigmataed with the inner workings of my psyche in all its accompanying rage-filled shame, bitterness, hate, hunger, and envy. I hated my body, the deformities on my face felt like a foreign force was occupying it, but at the same time there was a sacred reverence with each act of self-mutilation. I used to fantasize and dream about cutting off my own limbs and gouging out my own eyes as those acts represented the combination of my rage and a (twisted) control over my own body as well as the desire to be liberated from it. Nowadays I mostly stick to tattoos.

Sex is poetry made in flesh and blood. Past and present lovers leave little pieces of themselves on me with each individual fragment having a story to tell. A bite mark from a man who had a fetish for teeth marks on skin. A lipstick stain from the time when a woman was kissing me on the neck while I was feeling between her thighs. A razor blade cut from someone who thought my skin looked absolutely gorgeous all bloodied up. Here the need for control slowly wanes and at some point in time, all laid claim to my body and our stories collide. Over time the physical markings eventually fade, but the emotions, sensations, experiences are still coded within me.

The body is the main mode through which we navigate the world, and with that, I navigate the world by embodying all the narratives I weave.

When it comes to categorizing my sexual orientation, I can’t seem to neatly place it under a label, not because I’m particularly special or that it’s beyond labels, but because they don’t quite capture its fluidity and ambiguity. That’s not to say that other people don’t experience that same type of fluidity and ambiguity (they very much do), it’s just that I don’t see the point of labeling my sexuality nor do I find it entirely helpful. I find that asking the right questions is the key initial step to learning and growing since pointed questions indicate an understanding of a subject while also realizing where the gaps and ambiguities lie. To me, my sexuality is a question mark, a staring point that paves the way for more questions and exploration.

I’m primarily attracted to men (cisgendered, trans, and male-presenting people) than I am to women. Men drive me crazy, send me into a frenzy, and induce me into an obsessional madness. While I can be VERY sexually attracted to women, the attraction doesn’t extend beyond lust. I can love them as friends and sisters but they don’t induce the same erotic obsession that men do. I think part of it is that men also inspire a miasma of angst, frustration, and anger that I don’t experience with women. There’s enough distance, polarity, and conflict with men that they inspire a fascinated longing. With this description, it would be easy to say that I’m heteroflexible and leave it that. While that’s accurate, I feel like it serves as a period, rather than a question mark, at the end of the sentence thus possibly ceasing any further inquiry. The label confers certainty. It answers the question of whom I’m attracted to and could be possibly attracted to.

But sexual orientation is just one ingredient in the complex concoction that is sexuality. The label serves as a categorical vector but it doesn’t portray the vicissitudes that desire brings. Of course for many people, a label is a point of departure, a a framing device that helps one situates one’s desires and how those things operate. Last year I would’ve identified as asexual which is not my baseline but rather it was a thing that latched onto me for the time being, and there were a myriad of reasons for why I identified as such- hormonal changes, different priorities at the time, exploring different facets of myself, etc. At the time, the asexuality pointed towards something more than just mere sexual orientation and attraction, and what those other things are I can’t really say yet.

Keeping my sexuality outside the realm of categorization and leaving it in the realm of the semiotic a lá Julia Kristeva keeps it both familiar and strange. The undulating felt viscerality of it all is experienced in all its nuances and slippages. It’s one that warrants interpretation but also disinvests in the clinical detachment of analysis. It’s not initially linguistic, scientific, or sociological but phenomenological and embodied. It divests in form and hermeneutics while also being rife with meaning. In our culture, I think we have an uneasy relationship with ambiguity. Everything needs to be ordered, rationalized, analyzed, and codified, and while these things make life more efficient and livable they don’t leave much room for people and things who occupy the thresholds or the in-between spaces, or those who don’t occupy any spaces. Ambiguity leaves too much room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding but it’s in these follies that we learn and discover especially if let ourselves be humble enough to entertain the fact that we can be wrong. It also confronts us with the fact that we’re perpetually in media res. These ambiguities make it known that we’re in a constant Heraclitean process.

Underneath ineffability lies Truth

A Truth that we all perceive

That’s embodied within all of us

And it is through this universality

That mere words

Are not enough to express

Its meaning and necessity

In actuality, words are not necessary

Because ineffability is the universal language of embodied knowing

A knowing that goes beyond articulation

Beyond modal contexts

A knowing that’s individually felt and experienced

That reflects a perennial nature

This notion is probably considered old-fashioned and primitive in the post-modern age:

An enduring and eternal Truth that transcends culture and space and time itself

A Truth that’s not codified

But rather one that we know once we encounter it

Do I know the nature of this thing?

Hell if I know

Have I experienced it?

Maybe

Possibly

All I know is that is that I must leave space for ineffability in an age of constant discourse

For a bit, my life was time compressed in the eternal now, but not by way of being in harmonious flow with the present.

Instead it was characterized by a protracted nothingness.

Cocooned by nullified thoughts and feelings.

Not necessarily marked by a dull and constant numbing melancholy.

Typically in periods like these, others would be reflexively compelled to contemplation.

But it was the opposite for me.

Alone with but not deeply and fully engaged with the self.

It was a shallowness of feeling and thought that paradoxically betrayed a heaviness of being.

In some circles, a zen-like emptiness of being is fetishized where non-attachment is ironically the goal of existence. Of course, there are different modes of emptiness. But the one I’ve experienced is not the one they’re coveting.

Not a peace but a standstill.

Not a zen but an amniotic suspension.

Not a harmony but rather a spectre-like haunting of the spaces I inhabit.

This dulling quietude was both a function of the change in lifestyle and an intense inner necessity.

So I can’t say I regret it. I’ve always had a romance with my solitude and just like many romances, it is characterized by its vicissitudes of ecstasies, tumult, plateaus, and peaceful harmony.

And I would say this emptiness reaffirmed my need for vitality. Not by way of desire but through necessity just like how a starving person needs food.

Like non-attachment, in some ways the will of desire is often fetishized in contrast to necessity which is often seen as acting primarily from severe lack. Desire is also characterized by a sense of lack but the emphasis is on the vigor of the will.

I guess the differentiation can stem from abundance (in regards to desire and it’s manifestation through will) vs privation (in regards to necessity) and the range and the degree of choice these things emerge from.

Necessity illuminates the essential features of the self while desire can blur the line between what’s essential and what’s distortion.

Of course, it would be faulty to pit the two against each other in that desire is in some degree rooted in necessity, but not all necessity is rooted in desire. As you know, we don’t always desire what we need but we begrudgingly accept it because it completes a vital component of who we are.

I don’t feel the same as I did yesterday, as today I’m crawling on my knees, viewing the world as bigger, slanted, and more uncanny, and looming over me, the sun turning to black. Threatening to rip the seams that hold everything together, the fissures leave me open for penetration as I’m preparing to be burned by the black sun of dark enlightenment.

The dynamic between daylight and the darkness of the eclipsed sun brings up images and concepts of knowledge and experiences that overwhelm and madden the mind, but a phase that’s only available for a limited period of time. Knowledge and experiences that destroy the ego, but if one is strong enough, one is able to reconfigure oneself into something more powerfully evolved. I dream of the primordial darkness engulfing the entire world, an endless continuity between everything, and the light piercing through the darkness and the self. The light forms both the connecting tissue and a schism between the darkness and I. It introduces emergence and strength from the primordial shadow and a connected multiplicity.

The black sun, the dark season of the soul, commences in order to both remind us of our origin and to bring us to the horizonless continuity between the core forces of life and death. As these forces reconfigure us and coalesce, the eclipse fades away and the light pierces through illuminating our new form.

Is its defilement.

To defile it is to make the sacred profane.

What was once elevated is now abject.

The sacrament that was once made holy.

Is now a symbol of decadence gone decay.

To juxtapose two totemic extremes.

Is to foreground and elevate

Each other’s fundamental truths.

Sometimes I’m left speechless, not out of surprise but because the limits of language, especially the English language, can’t quite capture the sublimity of certain moments. Language is a tool for the narrative and logical ordering of experience, and some things are beyond categorizations. Some experiences tap into the pre-verbal and pre-conceptual part of our perception in that we can’t do anything except take them as they are. It forces us to not experience ourselves as extended and mediated in time but rather to experience ourselves as pure Being – being in the now, in flow with the thing or person we’re experiencing. It’s a paradoxical situation in that our world condenses and is distilled in that moment but at the same time it anagogically opens up the agent (you the subject) and arena (the environment) relationship through a novel experience of reality.