A quiet pause. The dust dancing in the morning sunlight after a sleepless night. It opened a gate of thoughts for her. This whole project is written through a kind of stress and desperation. She don’t even know if it make any sense. If Nick Land’s early texts “belong to the amphetamine gods” who do my own words belong to? – ah, there is that shift in perspective again.
The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes to me. That I’ve turned myself into a kind of character; a kind of victim in a weird fiction story. A persona. (Am I Alma, the nurse, or Elisabet, the actress?)
Pathetic, yet raw and honest. I thought I would die this year, but I’m still alive. “A book is a suicide postponed,” to quote Emil Cioran. Somewhere I imagined that all these texts would fall like dust in the air and be nothing but a trace of my own existence. Something my nieces and nephews could discover in adulthood and marvel at; their dead aunt. “What the hell happened over there?” – a memoire of a mad tranny.
But in the midst of all theory and philosophy, poetry and prose, I’ve realized that I’m just an open wound letting itself bleed into words. None of this means anything. It’s just desperate attempts to keep living. A kind of auto-fixation on my own (socio-political) embodiment and my own eccentric obsessions. I am, in a way, nothing but a self so tired of itself that it tries to dig through itself to become something else: a stranger. But at the same time, I know what it’s like to be a stranger to oneself.
Why is existence so cruel? So unbearably vicious. I just wish to rest a little, for no matter how much I dig and search for this metamorphosis, the deafening hum of this existence remains ever the same. “The eternal now,” I experience it. This endless tedium that every bodhisattva thrives in, seems to me to be its own special kind of hell.
I envy the stranger. They wake up in the morning, go to work, do their daily chores, and go to bed at night only to start over. Sisyphus is happy, says Camus, but for me the everyday was always something that concealed something far more interesting. The darkness in the attic, the enormous cricket in the basement playing its own little sonata, the dreams of the night, the trolls in the forest, the gnomes under the floorboards, and all the peculiarities that gave rise to fairy tales and fables. The disenchantment of the world was catastrophic for me as a growing child. But the stranger loves it precisely for what it is; boring, slow, deceptive, and at the same time the only thing that makes their existence bearable. They carry death in a different way than I do; the little death found in sleep and rest.
All I find is Levinas’ “il y a”; the absolute swarm of pure existence, anonymous and neutral. Like an analog TV tuned to a dead channel. It is before this monstrous face that I defend my own constructions. Imago is, as I have shown, a kind of unmasking of reality’s own images. But there is nothing behind the mask. Isn’t that the whole point of “The King in Yellow”? And if the king’s mask were to be removed, against all odds, there would only be Levinas’ il y a; staring at one like a negative abyss.
*she gasps in horror*
Yet…
Yet she is tired. So goddamn fucking tired. But still she keeps writing… Words. Until they become letters. Meaningsless signs. Sighs…
z
… ad infinitum …
z
z