NIGREDO
Our darkening world has dressed itself up in vestment of blue Void. Has lain on its self-discrowned head the lazy eyelid corpse. Vacuum abhorrent naturam. That’s what they say. What they say. Forests burn in a world that has become an alchemist’s fire. In this stage, our naked feet are frozen, are hard. And we watch with drooping gaze a silent shadow, drifting allway over Deep. Hope? The hidden bedbug, mere bit of lice. And the Spectacle has hired itself a team of talented, well-trained exterminators. We are vampirized by our own atmospheres here, sucked well and through by selfset traps.
Become, here at our so-called “the end of history,” a dryest sack of goat skins. At bottom? We know no point of reference is to be found anymore, anywhere. No plan of action or belief can hold for us an untarnished promise. We claw at closing walls in anger, and then, we feel quite foolish. Performative affectations, signifying nothing? Our world is a ghostly derelict. She’s lost at sea. And no one, no one, shall ever find her.
All has been savagely emptied of meaning by a machinic assemblage that we ourselves did summon. All kisses have gone skeletal, all Other is autumn wind. We are as like Mantis now—we always devour our own. Still, though our Joy has retreated, we at least retain a vague ability to enjoy the excitements of death, of de Sade. Before crooked smiles of a lightning strike, some still feel that grim yet perversely pleasurable shiver. A toad lapping at the fountain of collapse…Yet it is an ever-dubious meal, never enough sustain.
I wonder, will any of us still be able to find that elusive luciferian sublime hiding there, within our big and final death? Or has even that poetic organ utterly atrophied in us? Will our end be instead merely another anxious, oppressive disappointment? Les ennuis de Maldoror…?
ALBEDO
Sole path? Is it? Perhaps our sidewalk still end on Elsewhere. Actually. Or at least on a Somewhere. Perhaps the eye of the needle we face is in actuality a red and honking clown car, just a silly, stupid game. If only we could become “as Clown”, if only. A sad clown maybe, yes that’s fine too. Perhaps then the things which prick truest life from hope’s veins would fall away a little higher, would fall away. And the death march weasels would run ’round frantically, confused for just a second or two. With a little cartoon question mark a dangling dumb above their fascist heads.
Could we all just shrink ourselves down? Just a presto, and easy peasy? And discover on the other side of needle’s dissolution a kind of alternative, a new carnival synthesis? Leaving behind the despairmuck of this modern desert of spirit, we could, no we should, become instead as like an all-smiling trickster. Leaving behind that previous tiresome role we’d played, of the unresponsive and vacant Victorian ghost. Newly as a trickster gods, we could throw our greenish feces at the spectacles of the Spectacle. We could piss our stinking piss along all his fancy shoes.
It doesn’t matter if this behavior changes anything in the grand scheme of things, no, it doesn’t matter, not at all. If we manage to birth even one hint, manage to squirt just one tiny shimmer of humanity’s previously evaporated joy from the stage of these mad sideshow performances? Then our act would be utterly, quite utterly worthwhile.
CITRINITAS
Up from our self-dug pit, then. Let us go. Goblins and ghouls, we are. Were. As yet unaccustomed to the bright light of fetal hopes. Blind at first, yet slowly glimpsing Future’s still multinodular forms. Some quiet suggestions, some vague hopes. More of us ascending aboveground than we ever expected, now. More than we ever guessed.
The fleshsurface of our palpated earth positively teeming with rebellious We. With mutual eros assemblages. Dreamers, all ‘a forming, all ‘a squeaking. Singing with one life-giving one lovely big NO. An eternal no—to all the loyal dogs of mutual acquiesce. An eternal yes—to the ascending sparrovvflock signal of mutual aid. Forming a new insurrectionist egregore, hatching out a strange and shifty brew.
We didn’t see the absolute aquatic ease of this bold river’s flow before, no we didn’t. And yet now, we can’t even imagine how we ever could have missed it. Indeed, from the lightless depths of Capitalism’s witching hour, one can hardly believe in the reality of a golden goose’s chatterings of an Otherwise. Unrealistic, stupid. And yet, the sun of Eros returns again, everalways. Utterly erasing all spotted movements of nocturnal joyless jellyfish, of depressive voids.
The birdboy vibrations of dawn’s surgery chorus have replenished in us every ounce of our lost and vampirized blood, yes, we can hardly believe in the power that that previously darkened Other had over us now, that darkening Otherwise of nihilism. So, we soap ourselves up, so we shower. So, we clean our hair, put on our bacon and our eggs, so we are readied for the morning’s new insurrectionist working. We conjoin all our lost collective powers, and begin finally to fight—begin to build.
RUBEDO
Fresh breath, new movement. The feather and the fin. Ascending sign of gecko, scrawled from inside of a spurious cardboard heat and flame. There is a spiral of dialectical pain emerging out from a gap in the blackened teeth of our great Lion of Hegel. A herd of sheepskin dreamers, all? Separated yet reforming, rainbow-colored cells in the microscopic embraces of lover Ocean’s jealous slap. Vibrations in a wind of cosmic interdimensional seeds. All sprouting surreality from our ominous viper’s red nose.
Our revolution is as a schoolyard let loose in the heat of the nile, she is half spectral and half mist. And the cloud of our unrealized moist Becomings reburrows itself in sticky sands, it reheats itself. Becoming glass becoming newly “the all glassy-eyed ones.” A thousand luminous and over-wrapped eyes, splintering high gathering fast. Hovering high and hovering in.
We’ve cast somnambulist hieroglyphics, from inside the rubber hearts of purest pufferfish clay. All undiscovered erotic organs we’d well-hidden now sewn deep on the blink, on every lip. In the dancedance of a newly ejaculated and allfragrant Now In the rising semen river of our revolt, there stands a palm tree, swaying. Fold her wildly, my maybefuture. Get her fast in tune with this song, this most janky musics of tha spheres.
Here, in our marvelous Wonderland of the ten thousand friendly phantoms, even one bastard squirrel can become its own aquatic opposite—the mackerel. And so can you, friendo. And so can you. So start up the old dreamachine, start it up. In the saucy universe next door, our surrealist revolution has already been utterly triumphant. Has always ever been, and it always ever will. In the universe next door, next door.
And Dream is the magickal crack through which we hear our lost lover Revolution whisper to us, scheme. We must widen her unholy crack, O living ones, we must unchain her moist deluge. Let all beautiful utopias seep out from her moist slit, chattering with an Eros unending…
Steven Cline co-edits the journal Peculiar Mormyrid and participates in an Atlanta surrealist group.