h e t v i c . エラー

“Ever has the river risen and brought us flood,
the mayfly floating on the water.
On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,
then all of a sudden nothing is there!”

The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet X

Enkidu of the wild would be the only one who could measure himself against Gilgamesh. The gods brought his existence as a counterweight to Gilgamesh’s strength. But in their struggle, Gilgamesh stood as the victor. In the encounter with this Other, Gilgamesh found himself, or so he thought. Yet Enkidu remained merely a mirror; Hegel’s slave constructed through friendship.

Gilgamesh had found an equal, and together with this equal he wished to build a monument that could reflect his own greatness. Therefore, in hubris, they defied the gods together and killed Humbaba, the guardian of the cedar forest. Ishtar herself, dazzled by Gilgamesh’s feat, asked for his love. But Gilgamesh did not desire the love of the gods; he was not receptive to the negativity of love that Byung-Chul Han unmasks in The Agony of Eros (2017), for love presupposes death—the submission of the self before death. Ishtar became enraged, not out of pride, but because of Gilgamesh’s self-love and vanity, and thus sent the Bull of Heaven in a failed attempt to punish him and Enkidu. With one of the bull’s own limbs, Enkidu humiliated Ishtar, which was punished with a divine death sentence.

In Enkidu’s death, Gilgamesh saw his own mortality. Enkidu had given Gilgamesh the eyes of an Other with which to behold himself. Through the death of the Other, he now saw the fragility, a crack, within the self. In Enkidu’s death, he became certain of his own powerlessness as master over slave. He wandered through the wild, seeking the clay that could piece the self together; to make it whole and eternal, and rid himself of existence’s immanent incompleteness. And in the moment he believed he had found it, a serpent stole his hope and shed its skin.

Heidegger was right in his analysis that death is one’s own. It is not possible to understand one’s own death through another. Gilgamesh’s moment of “aletheia” was only made possible through his dialectical relation to Enkidu. The Self—all singularity of becoming—is inherently negative (I am willing to step down from my throne of Deleuzianism, forgive me my beloveds). Just as one cannot find a lost object where it is not located, one can never find a negativity that is already present. Death as such is always present as a watchful dark precondition for our existence. The self is thus always haunted by something other than itself: its own end.

Monumentalism is a curse. It conceals death with a veil. Through the will to create permanence, through the murder of Humbaba, a distorted lie arises that prevents the self from seeing itself. We live among all these damn monuments. They are stacked upon each other and refuse to disappear, obscuring our sun and its desert.

Monumentalism praises its own lies. It justifies itself by being a documentation; a “I was here” carved into a filthy toilet. But Kilroy was no builder of monuments. The concern of monumentalism is not memory, but the archive—perhaps memory as a computer remembers. But for the one who cannot forget, there is nothing to remember. It creates an impossibility of mourning. A grief that was never allowed to be experienced (sad that I mourn mourning). In the same way that contemporary love is not love but a kind of pornographization of love—a sort of love without suffering, as Byung-Chul Han argues—monumentalism carries a kind of pornographization of our own death:

“Death, like mourning, has become obscene and awkward, and it is good taste to hide it, since it can offend the well-being of others. Etiquette forbids any reference to the dead. Cremation is the limit point of this discrete elimination, since it minimalises the remains. No more vertigo of death, only dereliction [désaffecté]. And the immense funeral cortège is no longer of a pious order, it is the sign of dereliction itself, of the consumption of death. In consequence, it grows in proportion to the disinvestment of death. […]

Speaking of death makes us laugh in a strained and obscene manner. Speaking of sex no longer provokes the same reaction: sex is legal, only death is pornographic. Society, having ‘liberated’ sexuality, progressively replaces it with death which functions as a secret rite and fundamental prohibition. In a previous, religious phase, death was revealed, recognised, while sexuality was prohibited. Today the opposite is true. But all ‘historical’ societies are arranged so as to dissociate sex and death in every possible way, and play the liberation of one off against the other which is a way of neutralising them both.” (Baudrillard, Jean. 1976. Symbolic Exchange in Death.)

Love requires a submission to the Other, and grief requires an abandonment of the self; our own life. Ironic, I know. “To will that there be life only is to make sure that there is only death” (ibid).

It is not true that authenticity has died in this necropolis of stacked monuments. Death is my own. It is the constant possibility of my own impossibility. To murder is to steal someone else’s death; the most radical form of enslavement. Even a slave owns their own death where they do not own their life; in the master-slave dialectic, the slave is the one who clings to life:

“Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave describes the battle for life and death. The party who emerges as master does not fear death. The desire for freedom, recognition, and sovereignty raises the master above concern for bare life. It is fear of dying that induces the future slave to subordinate himself to the Other. Preferring servitude to the threat of death, the slave clings to bare life. Physical superiority does not determine the outcome of the struggle. Instead, what proves decisive is the ‘ability to die,’ or a capacity for death. Those who do not have freedom unto death (Freiheit zum Tod) do not risk their life. Instead of ‘following through to the point of death’ (mit sich selbst bis auf den Tod zu gehen), they remain ‘standing alone within death’ (an sich selbst innerhalb des Todes stehen). The slave does not venture as far as death, and therefore becomes a vassal who labors.” (Han, Byung-Chul. The Agony of Eros. 2017)

To be authentic is to overcome this dialectic—something not even Gilgamesh managed. I am not romanticizing death with my silly little words. Yet in order to honor life, we must honor death and thus, to be authentic, we need to integrate our negativity into virtue; we must love our fate.

Art may be dead in this world of digital data registration, where art is monumentalized. But what is still possible is to create a mayfly on the river. A poem that only I get to read. A symphony for deaf ears and a work of art on an abandoned wall. Nothing has been stolen; we only need to learn to open our eyes to events. To learn to open doors where the new may arrive and the old may be forgotten. The band The Grateful Dead was such an arrival. (Half-formed thought: if we must imagine Sisyphus happy, then we must imagine the dead as grateful).

This kind of event should perhaps be called imago; the Latin word for “image,” but also the origin of the English “imagine”—to envision. These “images” stand in contrast to Baudrillard’s “simulacra,” as they are temporary openings of something new—thus not copies. An imago is a metamorphosis of the old, which allows death and celebrates its own fate as mortal. It is within this concept that we can mourn: to allow ourselves to be incomplete. By confronting our own negativity and letting the old die in ecdysis. But just as love forces us to die in the Other, we must have the courage to let ourselves die in what is arriving.

Alas! Down with monumental art, and long live the imaginal. For we are all mayflies on the river.

Jag ser färger blinda i mörker
Och frukter falla träd i fantasier
En binda runt bröstet och allt är tröstet
Älskad i motbjudelse och förbud i
förbindelse med halshuggna tårar i ansiktets
förblindelse.

Förruttnelsen är divergent; permanent nu -
språkmässigt inkompetent nu -
förädlad och sorgsen nu -
förbränning i sekretionsfasen och du
bara skrattar åt villfarelsen nu och du
bar slagstiftet mot pannan nu och du
bara slagfjädrar loppet nu och
jag

ser färger rött i avloppet nu -
hör märgen brista i kroppen nu -
är Wernickes område i botten nu? -
sprätter hjärnbalken upp nu? -
lobala temporala patroner i geo-
traumatiska gangliala stopp-
i Nangijala nu och du -
varför slet du mig
itu?

Mother Earth; our very own Santa Muerte. Hell is literally derived from her. We are born out of sunlight; Sol our very own prime mover. Always on the move, hunted by voracious wolves. Are they not her own shadow?

Consumption isn’t just an act of submerging the Other into the Self. It is a way of giving back. Of expelling a part of the Self onto Earth. Death, as such, must be understood as the subject of the Earth. By consumption, the Reaper takes back what was borrowed from her. But she always gives back in the form of life. We are her excrement in the most literal sense. Only in her dance with the ever self-consuming explosions of the Sun do we live:

As much as the night is being hunted by the Sun, we are in a way being hunted by Death. Being consumed, literally or figuratively, by our distant siblings may be the most natural thing to die. Maggots to the Earth or by the very monsters of our own imagination. By our very own body in cancerous or autoimmune self-consumption, in which our bodies reveals themselves to be as foreign to us as teeth penetrating our skin.

I met someone interesting today. Someone who pointed me towards the point of no return, by showing me the virtual surface of clay. Ceramics is a parody of life. We build our lives with it; forming our very own little earth, of the Earth. As much as life is a fractalization of the Mother Earth; ceramics are the fractalization of the human earth. A patterning of its own kind.

It is though, a parody, only so far as it is its own becoming-out-of-earth. For clay has no going back; it lacks consumption. It is the Earth othering itself, with no point of return. Ceramics is thus violent in its own kind. It pulls out something from the body without giving anything in return. Thus, it bears its own curse of stagnation.

Isn’t this striking? That philosophy in many ways is a form of ceramic sculpturing; it contains the same violence. Though, as with ceramics, do not offer a remit. It is only in decay that thought can perceive patterns, and there are always a redundancy of decaying courthouses of reason; whole crowds of architectures and sculptures of thought, piled on each other in layers and layers. Decaying. Refusing to go away.

This is its own catastrophe. There is a point of no return in thinking. We can only throw so many bricks through the window. We can only hope for a shore of ceramic shells. A desert of the ruins of our minds.

I want to divulge Death in this way. There is another Death, more primal than that of Hel. There is a Death of No Return.

Humans are made of clay, it is said. But, in this interpretation, we are not made of clay in substance, but in form. A life, as such, is clay in form; all life does return, by the rules of consumption. But it is not a return of “the same”; it is a return of difference:

Thus, what is meant by life as clay in form, is that life as such will only return on the basis of the difference. Thus, ceramics uncover that the new is conditional. Only will the curse of ultimate Death be lifted by the return of something different. The horrors of stagnation is much greater than the horror of being (self-)consumed, because, stagnation itself points towards a threshold; that of the Point of No Return. The Sun only shines in the promise of its own demise. This is the promise of ceramics. And thus, maybe Prometheus is the parody of Pandora and not the other way around. Prometheus gave us hydrogen bombs; Pandora gave us difference.

All the native lays are interwoven with such obscure metaphors that there is hardly a man who can understand them unless they are studied in a very special way and explained so as to penetrate their meaning. For this reason I have intentionally set myself to listen with much attention to what is sung; and while the words and the terms of the metaphors seem nonsense to me, afterwards, having discussed and conferred, they seem to be admirable sentences, both in the divine things composed today and in the worldly songs.

Diego Durán

I

I despise language. A wise being once said that poets fear the power of language. Words are violence; they dictate like dictations, they surveil like Lacan’s big Other, the Father. The Christian language planes us down into repression.

“When the schoolteacher questions her pupils, she does not inform herself about anything, just as little as she communicates information when she teaches them a grammatical or mathematical rule. She ‘teaches,’ she gives orders, she commands. The professor’s commands are not external; they are not additions to what we learn from him. They do not derive from meanings that precede them, nor are they consequences of information: giving orders is always, from the very beginning, about other orders — that is why giving orders is redundancy.” (2015)

Language consists of this redundancy; of a pure excess. It is praxis all the way down. Its peculiarity lies in its radical rupture with base matter — in its ability to draw lines between distinct forms. But it is also sets of rules surrounding these acts of line-drawing. Without rules, the whole system collapses into meaninglessness. We seem, in modernity, to have lost the insight of language as magic (and perhaps the connection is partly lost due to the Protestant interpretation of magic). Thoth was not only language itself but also magic; married to Maat, order, truth, and divine justice. There are multiple relations revealed in this dynamic and the arrangements of these concepts. Language as such, from the standpoint of ancient Egyptian culture, is bound to rules, which in turn are bound to cosmic order. Let us recall what it is to remember the birth of written language — what it is to create a secret sign-language with our friends in childhood. We are so enclosed in words, in abstractions, in data, that these machines are lost.

Computers are magical machines — literally. They are founded upon binary rules, axioms, that build a syntax and produce patterns of calculation. In this sense, language is in a love affair with order. And it is precisely in this aspect that language is terrifying to a poet. The immanent threat of constantly reducing the sacred, the inner, experience itself, into a structure, is the threat of self-annihilation through the cataloging of the poet’s own subject; to become a thing. Poetry is a linguistic expression that declares war on language’s marriage to order.

Bertrand Russell is in many ways the savior of language. His letter to Gottlob Frege, showing how Frege’s logic was self-contradictory, saved language from collapsing into meaninglessness. Zermelo and Fraenkel pumped further life into this virus by sacrificing simplicity for the virus’s own survival. Plato’s theory of ideas could continue to live on; Thoth and Maat in union. Furthermore, Kurt Gödel is the poet’s savior, as he demonstrated that every ordered (that is, consistent) language is necessarily incomplete.

The Aztecs’ understanding of language can be contrasted with the ancient Egyptian tradition. Quetzalcōātl, the feathered serpent, was to the Aztecs what Thoth and Maat were together. But Quetzalcōātl was not the god of magic; this role was instead given to his brother and nemesis Tezcatlipoca. Together, in their war against one another, the world came into being. Tezcatlipoca, the “smoky mirror,” magic itself, the invisible, the night, is the aspect of reality that the poet desires; who uses language as magic to annihilate any sort of goal — to annihilate logos (Quetzalcōātl) itself. Tezcatlipoca is the elusive ground upon which Being as such stands; the observer and the observed, mirroring the entire kaleidoscopic reality back onto itself.

“Oh, great lord, ruler of the Near and the Nigh! Immanence enclosing itself; letting the forms reflect within you and freeing us from the dictatorship of things… Let me never be seen, just as you are never seen. Let me be destroyed in your mercy.”

The Aztecs’ understanding of this intimate dynamic between language as order and language as magic points precisely toward the forbidden knowledge that I here seek to vomit forth. Gödel reveals the necessary incompleteness of language’s territorializations; thereby he also exposes this duality within the nature of language. On the one hand, language breaks down if it lacks its redundancy and its rules. On the other, it renders itself limited and incomplete in its establishment of meaning. Language is a battlefield between these gods. The poet fears language precisely because of this violence — of being reduced, constrained, made incomplete — for what the poet desires is language’s liberation from itself. The contradictions in Frege’s system are exactly what do it justice; they mirror language’s ability to produce nonsense. This nonsense is not that of Deleuze’s “surface level,” represented by the innocent wordplay of children in The Logic of Sense; it is Antonin Artaud’s violent internal level of nonsense, mirrored in the dialectic between Tezcatlipoca and his brother Quetzalcōātl. This internal level of total non-sense is the invisible domain over which Tezcatlipoca reigns.

“Artaud says that Being, which is nonsense, has teeth. In the surface organization which we called secondary, physical bodies and sonorous words are separated and articulated at once by an incorporeal frontier. This frontier is sense, representing, on one side, the pure ‘expressed’ of words, and on the other, the logical attribute of bodies. Although sense results from the actions and passions of the body, it is a result which differs in nature, since it is neither action nor passion. It is a result which shelters sonorous language from any confusion with the physical body.” (1990)

The poet’s pursuit of Georges Bataille’s inner experience makes use of language with awareness of this nonsense. Russell’s paradox is an ontological threat; one can sense how the god of Night smiles at the end of the tunnel of paradox. It is in this quality that language is magic — not merely as praxis, as power, as a way of coding, but in how language itself is written upon a body without organs. The organization of language must be created, repeated, and propagated like a virus through the schoolteacher, through mother and father, through police and the justice system, through academia and journalism, through politicians and fascists. For its existence is constantly threatened by its own inherent nature — its freedom to draw lines across an immanent plane.

Is it not in this capacity that the human being is a “white slate”? Or rather — is it not in this capacity that Being itself is a white slate? The cornerstone of empiricism arises from this ability for radical freedom — the subject’s ability to draw lines, to sketch like a madman, to diagram schizoidly across its whole body. Chakras as a map of the body to hold it together. Language territorializes in this way; we make sounds and roar. Humans have sound to mark their territory just as cats have scent. Language is functional only in this aspect — not as a tool but as magic. Language as such is thus the logos from which reality flows. God spoke; he uttered existence. In this sense, Being — or rather, Becoming — is a direct result of language: the linguist studies not only the structural forms of language but also the structural forms of the cosmos. Things only surface through a construction of meaning — an arrangement of associations of earlier forms. The cells in our bodies communicate with each other; they speak, they have a language. Our bodies — a division of unicellular organisms into here and now. Actualization comes from this communication, from the set of local rules, from repetition and differentiation. My body is a result of these processes — of an infinite chain of cell divisions, of atoms’ struggle to break the silence and speak themselves into existence, thus tearing holes into the beast of nothingness.

I can almost see it — how the cells have communicated themselves into this body. Through an intimate dialogue of molecules with atoms. Their rules have indeed both created the conditions and the limitations of this body’s potentiality. And it roars. My whole nervous system trembles in all the damned clamoring. It drives me insane, so I too roar; I go mad. They — the whole damn lot — I am never alone; even Satan is the lord of the flies — they scream to me in desire, as do the bodies outside this damned machinery.

Language is violent. Inside and out. And I am afraid of my life— in every sense of the word: afraid of life.

“I could have told myself: value, authority—this is ecstasy; inner experience is ecstasy; ecstasy is, it seems, communication, which is opposed to the ‘turning in on oneself’ of which I have spoken. I would have in this way known and found (there was a time when I thought myself to know, to have found). But we reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it. But nothing resists the contestation of knowledge and I have seen at the end that the idea of communication itself leaves naked—not knowing anything. Whatever it may be—failing a positive revelation within me, present at the extreme—I can provide it with neither a justification nor an end. I remain in intolerable non-knowledge, which has no other way out than ecstasy itself.” (1988)

I am not a poet by virtue of vomiting stupid arrangements of letters and words. I am a poet by virtue of using language to reach ecstasy. I want to break it apart and see the mirror that lies beyond words. The mirror that can only be described as ecstasy — the self-revealing mirror in which totality is enclosed. I want to write poetry that feels like the moment before death. These are my offerings to the gods, to the sun: language itself.

---

• Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 2015. Tusen platåer. TankeKraft.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. Logic of Sense. The Athlone Press.
• Bataille, George. 1988. Inner Experience. State University of New York.
• https://www.famsi.org/research/curl/nezahualcoyotl_intro.html (2025-10-22)

Somewhere, in the infinite web of Samsara, a being was born — one made for sacrifice. The day was the first trecena of Itzcuintli and the first tonalli of Itzcuintli. The flayed god watched over them, planting a seed within their innermost soul; a seed of a new sun. Together with death itself, they became a vessel for their becoming, raised upon the blasphemous graveyard of a forgotten settlement among winding ravines.

Life was lived so that the seed could be nourished; so it could bloom, that it might be kindled into a sacrificial fire. The body was already predetermined to become an immanent event; a circuit for the contemporaneity’s conceptualization of itself and its own self-annihilation. Time ticked with the revolutions of the sun. They sacrificed their own seed and became a eunuch, a castrate, a woman. With each step of the stairway they accelerated their becoming toward absolute 0. They became unrecognizable. Their humanity evaporated, and with every turn of the sun toward its fate, they became more and more like an angel, inasmuch as a fallen one.

The time has not yet come. There remains one more step to climb upon the 33-step altar. But they are already burning. And the only thought they carry is: “I AM THE SUN.” Only thus can they live and die — as intensely as a new sun.

I wake in a pink coffin, Malibu sunrise, California dream and palm trees baptize this show. Depression smells like plastic perfume, an unlit cigarette between my barbie lips. It ticks, like a psalm ticking down to a bomb. Face-palm. Il n’est de orquestra. A magazine-shaped guillotine castrating my fantasy. Hasan Piker on loop just to scoop up my femininity and fear of men. It’s a coupe, maybe, guess I’m just a corpse wanting make-up, wanting to fuck fame until fame fucks me back and spits out glitter in a Lynchesque cable table TV-screen, while I dream there’s an eviction staged as performance art, a postmodern simulated tragedy on hyperdrive putting me on fire. did I mention I lost my partner and gained a monster and called it love? ha! ha! laugh with me audience. studio lights burning holes through my face, I lied to the doctor; no flashbacks here, just cinematic seizures in PTSD waiting for her close-up, Mulholland Drive kissing me with open scissors, am I Swedish girl or just made up? am I survivor punchline in a sitcom? angel or receipt stapled to a fridge? every man I wanted turned into a laugh track and every authority turned to silencio, Kafka scribbles eternity on a napkin, and I’m still here begging for a door that locks, a paycheck that doesn’t choke, a body that isn’t staged for audience approval, tick tick tick, and there is the applause.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I haven’t the slightest fucking idea what I’m up to. Death coils along my spine like a centipede while I try to keep my thoughts in check. Flies. Moths at best. They buzz as if my brain were a nightlight. Beelzebub; lord of the flies. I don’t even know if the subject speaking is me or a virus using me to configure its future existence.

Blood in the sink. Huh… From my nose. You look awful. The pale green eyes don’t help; they make the red look sickly. What’s the point of this anyway? That body? Stuck in its own past, by nostalgia and PTSD. You don’t even remember what it feels like to be human anymore. Or is this exactly that?

A cup of tea. Sometimes it helps. I want to be a little more than this. Because right now I’m just a dying corpse burning itself away with heat. Thoughts accelerating; not psychotic, because to be that you’d have to get lost like a hanged man in the woods. It’s rather the opposite. I know all too well where I am. To such a degree that the synapses are burning themselves apart. A dying body. The nosebleed is only a symptom. But isn’t everything a dying body? Why does it take the sun so long to die?

“You never walk alone, even the Devil is the lord of flies”.

obs: the ccru was not involved in the making of this text. The CCRU was not involved in the making of this text.

i didn’t see meltdown
—entered thru the pupilhole like a virus, slurping concept-juice from behind my face & writing poems in spit on my neocortex.
i am too open
TOO OPEN TOO OPEN: bubonic breeding ground for abstraction&formlessthoughts.

:::this is not metaphor:::
i am leaking syrup (ego? poppy?)into STRATA, into god-zones where language infests itself & the smoothness is fucking unbearable.

total loss of “I” to topology of me; a node in some great gnostic meat-map asking:
HELLO. HELLO. IS THIS THE DIVINE FEMININE?
No response. Just laughter
like drowning in fake orgasms & malware & scripture.

barndom = ???
i remember static, not sequence. someone carved a downward curve into my timeline and told me to call it development (installing dialectics.exe)

ADHD meds tasted like future

5
4
3
…

HISTORY INSIDE ME
baby’s first animism, murdered philosophers in my head, knights templar arguing about my genitals in dreamspace and scholastic gender dysphoria dissolving into piss. renaissance whispering: “delete your meat.” enlightenment locked me in a chromosomal argument
and i clawed my way out through, the only way out it through

nothing remains.
ROMANCE IS DEAD
MODERNITY BLOODSHED
POSTMODERNISM IS LAUGHING BACK AT ME ME AT BACK LAUGHING &
♀ over ♂
♀ over ♀
♀ over self
♀ over EVERYTHING
♀ → NULL → “NEW FORM AVAILABLE”

acceleration hyperfixation-stition
2
1
0
0
0
0
0
countdown stuck(?)

I AM DISSOLVING INTO MORE
I AM DISSOLVING INTO MORE
I AM DISSOLVING INTO
I
/
NO
/
MORE

█████END TRANSMISSION█████

He despised them. Hated them. The ashes of paper fluttered like feathers in the dying flame. The smell clung to his clothes like tobacco. Everything he had ever done was now undone. Yet he felt the monstrosity cling to him with its claws. Just as hard. Just as firmly. Like a festering boil. He poured a whole pitcher of water over the mess. As if that would help. Then he took a shower and tossed his shirt and the coal-black jeans into the washing machine. He sat down and watched the water swirl, break apart, spiral under the pull of the earth’s gravity and rotation. The domestic house spider he’d spotted earlier in the dusty corner of the living room scurried off and hid behind the laundry basket.

He spent the whole night on the porch, watching the pines dance in the wind. The sunrise turned the lake into a spectacle; the silhouettes of the trees looked like otherworldly fractals against a cyan sky. For a moment, he didn’t know if he was part of that picture.

At eight o’clock, he borrowed his aunt’s bicycle and pedaled through the forest—past the Falu-red cottages hiding like trolls among the trees—and into the village. An abandoned suburb, rotting away as its youth drifted off. There were more villas for sale than there were jobs. Outside the local retail, the same middle-aged men sat with a beer in each hand and the same empty stare he himself wore every night—intoxicated by the breath of yeast and nicotine. Pensioners walked their dogs. A few cars rolled by. The sound of children playing. Still, a carpet of death laid over the whole community, as though the healing from the plague had never truly occurred.

It took him about twenty minutes each morning. The only thing keeping the town alive was its folk high school, which stood not far from the church—stately and bourgeois, with rusted bronze lions guarding its gates. The corridors smelled of something undefinable: old wood and stale air, despite all the rattling windows moaning in the wind. Was this how ectoplasm smelled?

“Good morning, Ludvig.” He flinched; he’d almost forgotten he was there, staring out the window. He barely recognized his own voice when he answered, “Morning.” It was Henrik, in charge of the art program. “You’re early as usual,” he said with that kind of casual smile. Ludvig lifted the thermos in his left hand as if to wave. “Yup,” he said, though he couldn’t quite summon the eager expression he was aiming for. “Nice. I’m off for coffee, but see you at ten.”

Ludvig sat outside the classroom door with a brand-new A3 sketchpad and had made a few charcoal studies—each one ending in a field of nothingness, in total blackness. An ocean of infinite static. He couldn’t create art when someone was watching him and wherever he went, it felt like he was being observed; maybe it was his own eyes watching. There, in the limbo just outside the classroom, he felt a fly… or maybe a ghost. After all, they said a janitor hanged himself at the very top of the school. Probably just a legend.

Thirty minutes before class, she glided into the bitterly lit corridor. It was Sofia. She avoided his gaze, and the moment she realized it was him sitting there, she snapped her book shut and moved to a bench as far away as she could. Still, he could smell the artificial rose scent she wore. He hated that smell as much as he hated the way her eyes flicked over his sketchpad, as though she tried to conceal her disgust.

Soon her entire circle of friends arrived. Each of them carried themselves in their own performative madness: the obsession of appearing unique. Maybe it was that very failure to stand out that bound them together—performative to the core; you could read it between the lines.

“Sofia, aren’t you coming with me after school? I’m going to get a tattoo,” one asked. “Oh, what are you getting inked this time?” “Nothing special, continuing on this one,” she said, showing off a half-finished sleeve of neo-traditional flowers. “Pretty,” Sofia answered, then added, “I could never have the courage to get tattooed… I’d hate wearing someone else’s art on my body.”

Silence.

“Well, you can always do it yourself, then,” she answered. Then the third friend jumped in: “I only design my own tattoos,” to which the girl with the flowers replied, “Is that why you don’t have more of them?” The trio laughed, theatrical undertones and all.

Sofia was the one who stood out the most. Maybe that’s why she carried herself with a spine straight as if Death itself had fashioned it. She stuck out in the entire class—misplaced, dressed as if she belonged at the School of Economics. Yet she proclaimed herself an aesthete proudly.

Static. Ludvig nodded off. He could hear his own thoughts, but jolted awake when Henrik sat at his desk—a sympathetic gesture for his insomnia.

“So, today we’re going to try what the Surrealists did,” Henrik began. “I’ll set the timer for twenty minutes. I want you to draw—anything that comes to mind. Let every association, thought, and feeling guide you. Don’t limit yourselves. If the drawing takes a completely different turn a few minutes in, follow it. Let it become what it becomes. Alright? The important thing is to start; you don’t even need to know what you’re drawing. As soon as the time starts, make a line—let it curve. Any questions before I start the clock?” No questions. Just emptiness in the classroom. “Then I start the time… Now!”

Hypnagogia. A wave of associations. Limbs and bodies transformed into cactus-phallic forms. Everything in an infinite ouroboros; a fractaling slime of Ludvig’s own body’s soul-eating hell. He hated what emerged on the paper. As always. He couldn’t really dive into it. Couldn’t break down that damned barrier and let himself vomit up the monsters that lived inside, turning his body into nothing but a mirage of a human.

“Aaaand… Stop!” Henrik called. He looked at Ludvig—at the grotesque fractal patterns in his pad. He placed a hand on his shoulder, a gesture meant to signal that he had just received some kind of grace: God’s damned judgment. Then he took the paper and held it aloft for the class to see.

“What do you think?” The same reaction the class had given when he asked for questions. Then something beeped behind Ludvig. It made him turn. Sofia sat there with a realistic portrait of a girl at a table, eating from a plate of rose thorns. “Intense,” she had said simply. “Okay? Could you elaborate?” Henrik asked, but she just shrugged.

After class, Ludvig waited until everyone left. Henrik gave him the same smile he’d offered that morning. “When’s the deadline for the collage?” Ludvig asked. “What? You should almost be done.” Ludvig shook his head. “I burned it all last night.” Henrik’s face froze, as if the words had come from a poltergeist. “But… okay. Why did you do that?” Ludvig avoided eye contact and shook his head again. Henrik placed his hand on his shoulder once more and sighed deeply.

“Listen, Ludvig,” he began. “It’s all in your head. Trust me, you’re more than capable of making art. I know it’s hard to see your own work objectively, and it’s easy to get stuck in self-criticism. I’ve been teaching for fifteen years. But I’ve never met anyone with creativity like yours. You have a gift, and I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t truly mean it.”

Why did his words feel empty? They echoed in Ludvig’s mind without sinking in—like a jackdaw’s warning cry in an inner courtyard.

When he got home that day, he made tea and instant noodles. His ribs were visible; he knew he couldn’t survive on one pack of noodles a day. Yet that’s exactly what he ate. As he waited for the water, he saw the same house spider from before—right in the middle of the kitchen floor. Its shape stabbed him with fear, though not enough for him to really react. There was no room for it; his soul was already occupied by inhuman suffering and sorrow. In anger at the crime of being, he crumpled a piece of paper, crushed the eight-legged creature, and whispered a quiet “sorry.” Somehow it felt like he was killing it for someone—an imaginary friend afraid of spiders.

He managed only an hour of sleep that night. He woke during the witching hour and began his ritual of smoking with the pines in front of the lake. That night, he thought of death. The judgement of all things. He thirsted for it. Human life was merely a shell for something greater: a byproduct of sunlight. The sun was a dying god, and he yearned for its annihilation. Still, all of this was just maggots in its excrement.

The next day, he didn’t go home after class. He stayed in the school’s studio until they locked the doors and the flock of human beasts had marched out. All day he’d failed to create anything beautiful—no, anything at all. The church bell tolled, and tears streamed down his face. He could barely feel his body as he lay on the grimy floor stained with watercolor. His sobs turned to nausea, gagging as if something was trying to escape him. He got to his knees, ready to vomit. But instead, insectoid limbs burst forth from him—twisting in forms beyond the limits of existence. Out flowed a sea of black bile and tar. A body smeared, split, corroded itself in an intersection with the waves. The face, a fractal of the same process, blurred as if in an ancient photograph. All of it an expression of escape from himself; an overcoming of himself.

“Intense,” said a voice behind him. How long had it been there? Was it a silhouette of his own consciousness? She came forward. Kissed him, and all he felt was that damned rose scent. Their tongues danced—a growing intensity. But in a pause, he heard the same voice say, “I fucking hate you.” Then she continued, but he took over. He wished he could carve out her entrails. He wished she’d gouged out his eyes. As did she. Neither of them could breathe. They were trapped in each other’s bodies in a violent act born of revulsion. Death himself wished he could join them; suffocated by the boredom of reaping the collapse of stars and life’s ceaseless repetitions. The canvas’ muted paints took a splash of red; an anti-body mix in a cosmic cardiovascular system.

Their bodies could no longer move. Instead, they laid in each other’s arms—feeling hearts pump and lungs fill and empty. They wore wounds and bite marks, congealed blood and each other’s fingerprints.

In that moment, sleep conquered them both.

The sky was blue like the deep sea. Venus in brilliance. A crescent revealing the sun’s dominance, even during l’heure bleue; the shadow of the moon etched in an even clearer darkness.
A black sun, I thought — a crow’s head in my arms.

My consciousness flickered like candlelight beneath the orange street lamps. They danced with the night sky’s blue, like golden shimmer in a field of blooming thistles.
The asphalt beneath me was black, still warm after its decay beneath the violence of the day.

A quiet house, its windows like eyes. Was it looking back? Innocently white, with yellow lamps piercing mine.
If only I could see the horizon beyond the trees — it would be cyan, like Uranus’ gaze.
I wished I could reach it with my red-glittering hand. I reached toward the white surfaces, maybe I could stain them red.
Eyes.

My eyes. A theater, or a wall painting. I would hollow out the holes, hold my invaluable treasure in glass, just to see inside. To see it from the outside.
There, I could watch my intestines shine — yes, shine like rubber — in the spectacle of my own gaze.

But everything turned red anyway.
I lay there, fucked by the earth’s rotation.
Ready to face the whole mess —
in a final orgasm, at the edge of my body’s ultimate

limit…