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autonomousbosch · 2 years

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The Horror: Pain

There might as well have been a perfect imprint of a young girl on the wildly unkept grassy hill overlooking the shore of this particular river, just north of her village. She had, since she was a child, escaped to this very place. Sneaking away, she would phrase it, as if she were a convict slyly eluding her captives, as something about it brought her the kind of peace that recontextualized all else.

What would throughout her day be the standard pitter-pattering of busy feet became, in hindsight, sharp stamping of hurried, uncaring feet, mechanically herded into obligation. What would otherwise be petty school-child gossiping became the most blackened, bile-filled backbiting; bird-like chittering transfigured into sharp crow cawing with an edge so fine it would pierce the ears.

She had always been sensitive to sound for as long as she could remember, but here, a pleasant placidity was never threatened nor disfigured, even inadvertently. Field mice roamed amongst the grass free from falcons, a frog never so much as seized upon a ladybug for a morsel. Even their belly-flopping into the gentle lapping of the river itself seem refined, of sophisticated technique such that no disturbances existed; only things complimentary.

Most curiously was the mouth of a cave which she had never ventured into, a fear she felt not at all dissimilar from that of a landscape artist afraid of applying the wrong touch of yellow ochre which, when misplaced, would sully the very face of the earth. Still, despite the feeling that it must have been her imagination, she was sure that as she gazed into its maw, it revealed to her ears the sweetest, warming hum, so feint as to be almost undetectable. She had wondered about it for years afraid that a second opinion might contaminate its deep comfort.

After getting her fill, she returned back home. The thin wood door to her home shut with a hideous creaking as she gently put her soiled shoes to the ground. Her mother was busy, kneading bread for the evening on a wooden block, the same wooden block which she had kneaded dough out for years. The very chopping block beneath her powerful palms was disfigured, warped from years of use. Every fold was done with an experienced lifting and tucking, before violently slamming it onto the board whose uneven edges seemed to strike the counter even harder. It felt wrong to wince at dinner, but the young girl did anyway.

Her footsteps were light ascending the stairs to her room and yet, there was a step which always sounded as though even the lightest feather were a stampeding pachyderm and it agonized her so. Finally, she thought, reaching her bed with all of its gentle comforts. Just as she went to lay about it, it produces a new, discomforting sound. She expected the soft landing commensurate with fluffy down, yet it buckled underneath her as if a pile of bricks had been dumped upon it.

Lying there, still as possible, the hands of the watch seem to eternally drag, grinding against the ground itself. She would close her eyes, attempting to will the cacophony of life into a dull, droning morass of sound through force of will alone. Yet, just as she felt the power of success, it was violated by the sound of the dinner bell.

At the table, forks and knives noisily clinked and clanged. Dinner plates were sat unevenly, striking ceramic onto the sturdy wooden table. Her mother grabbed a serrated knife and began to saw downwards into the crusty loaf of bread, sending shrapnel flying from its hardened gold and black surface. She took her time, macerating wheat beneath the teeth of the knife. Her oafish father ate with his mouth open, and every time water touched his tongue he sounded as if it were the first time his thirst had ever been quenched. Just as her mother finally sliced the bread clean, the knife struck the counter, and her father, in his refreshed bliss, struck the bottom of his glass a bit too happily onto a dinner plate, immediately shattering it.

Her mother was furious. Her father was defensive. She began to feel a knot forming in the very core of her diaphragm and its twisting would not relent. Her mother was yelling, her father was limply apologizing. She shed a tear, and another soon followed. Her parents didn’t notice any of it in their noisy furor, and she excused herself again; feeling as though she were sneaking away though her parents cared much less than captors would have.

Again, she escaped to the bank of the river, turning her eyes toward the face of the cave to invite its warm humming. It filled her, so faithfully and immediately, that she could no longer abate her own curiosity. She crept toward it, and every pace pulled from her cheeks a deeper smile as its humming grew more discernible, its warmth more radiant. At the mouth of the cave were footsteps, puzzling artifacts which would have compelled her far more were she not raptured in bliss.

Moving into the vast hole, free of any fear or pain, she felt as though she were experiencing the soul-touching elation of liturgy, bellowing from her mortal coil to the sky on a Gregorian movement to heaven itself. She knew the atrium of this cave was near, that whatever was revealing such a wondrous call was destined to be near too.

A hound was howling. Its fur, matted with mange. From its mouth, blood had been seeping, staining the blued limestone red. Its back was arched, a creature stuck in permanent recoil. The tail, curled around the body, shivering in perpetual fear. Its front, right leg had withered, held up from the earth and convulsing; it looked as if it had not touched the ground in centuries. Terror fell upon her as she again looked at its face, its mouth hanging open, its throat vibrating. She gazed upon a creature of endless wounding.

How, she thought, her spine tightening, could a creature in so much pain make a noise so beautiful, a sound that could touch her so deeply. She seized, all except for her mind and her neck, too, as she gazed into the hound’s eyes. They were not in pain. They were the most placid thing the girl had ever laid her own eyes upon. Her terror met with confusion, and an impossible violence of resentment came before her. How could she enjoy the crying pain of another? How could the mortifying wail of another be music to her ears?

She convinced herself that the virtuous thing to do would be to end his suffering, to strike the hound so fiercely it would never know wounding again. Yet it endured, and in its enduring she grew angrier. She would strike, and stomp, and its crying lost nothing of its enchanting resound; it never broke its placid gaze from her eyes. For all the power she placed in her blows, she heard nothing of the sound, nor of the spattering of blood against the walls of the cave.

She relented, now horrified with herself. Her retreat back out of the cave was absent all grace, and the beautiful echo withered into a warm hum until it was finally nothing but a memory she would hope to one day forget. Her feet never touched the bank of the river again.

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autonomousbosch · 2 years

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The Horror: Hell

It’s coincidental that I wanted to follow up my last entry by talking about consequences, because the buried lede in the suggestion of positive disintegration is that to avoid consequences is to avoid life itself. You act because actions have consequences, hopefully good ones.

It’s coincidental because on my way to the Chess Forum in New York City, I received a message from a former lover who is suspicious that I am a monster, and it’s worse than she thinks. So, I’ve spent the past few days drafting a letter confirming that I am indeed a monster, a vampire to be exact.

There are small, inconsequential things that I could argue back or try to put into the correct context, but it’s absurd for a monster to suggest that, well, yes; I am a monster but even monsters deserve the charity of correct light. Actually, though, monsters do not deserve that; light is particularly fatal to vampires. So I’m letting her know that I do not feel guilty. I do not rob, nor cheat, nor thieve, or kill, or rape or maim; but yes, sometimes I suck blood. I don’t want forgiveness because, well, vampires suck blood, but I do find it a duty to people rather than to a particular person to be honest about being a vampire.

It will even be helpful for her for me to confirm that yes, I’m a horrible vampire. I am another maw through which evil spews into the world. I will take the most incredible, flattering pictures of you that any man could ever take; my photos will be lurid and obscene with how they communicate deep and intimate affection for the very physical form and framing of another human being. Then, I will break your heart. I’ll revolutionize those photos into a collection of albums that remind two people of just how monstrous I can be, and I’m willing to live with those consequences.

The reason that I feel it necessary to offer closure is because I can think of nothing more horrific than fear, and there is a lot to be afraid of much more subtle than shifting in a darkened shadow or the feeling of being watched by something formless. The worst fear is the recontextualization of life as you know it in a way that is so sudden you cannot process it. It is a lightning bolt which permanently alters, disfigures your psychology.

When she messaged me, asking who I was living with or dating, she is living in this fear; fear that she is on the threshold of gaining the knowledge that another person could do something like this to her. That not only could they do it, but that they would out of malice. The letter I am sending her will be even worse, because she will learn that I am not doing things out of malice. She will learn that I am not thinking of her at all. That there is no guilt, no longing for forgiveness, no desire for closure at all. She will gain knowledge that forcibly refactors how she conceives of me, of others, and then, as people are interdependent creatures, how she conceives of herself. She will re-adjust how she behaves to account for this new existential diffidence that I have inspired in her, the fear I am delivering directly to her hands.

I know this will happen to her because it has happened to me. I remember very vividly talking to her one night, telling her through disquieting tears what hell my life was during my teenage years. When my father died finally ending a violent divorce that had tyrannized my life, my younger brother perpetually hospitalized, my older brother addicted to drugs, and our house under constant threat of repossession, such that I dropped out of high school to work. How I feel as though I never recovered from this, and struggle with it even as of writing this. Her response was one of scorn, that I was a white trash bumpkin who should have stayed in school, studied more, and traveled abroad. When she responded like this, I learned that someone could be so heartless as to handle vulnerability like this; even the very woman I would reliably make breakfast in bed. I was overwhelmed with error, incapable of understanding how I could have so poorly thought and strategized just for life to deliver me into this singular moment of spiraling psychic stabbing pains. The error in judgment in another’s capacity for empathy, the error in being vulnerable when every bone in my very body felt resistant, the error of realizing that you cannot assume charity of the person who tells you that they love you. I gained knowledge that forcibly refactored how I conceived of her, others, and then, because people are interdependent creatures, how I conceived of myself. I re-adjusted how I behaved to account for this new existential diffidence that she inspired in me.

I gained the knowledge, the fear, that at any time someone could become the maw from which evil spews into the world. Just as I am a vampire who feels no guilt, she would go on to tell me even today that my financial status is a character flaw.

I am not saying this to rehabilitate myself to any reader, or to suggest that it is eye-for-an-eye and thus justified. I am not coyly saying all this in hope that a kind hand would reach out to touch my shoulder, saying “There, there”; for I would sink my teeth into their neck as well. I am saying this because we live in hell; a baroque series of horrors where fear could seep through the floorboards of your mind at any moment. Just as others inspire it in you, you inspire it in others and you might not even be aware that it’s happening. You might not even be able to play back the CCTV footage which shows you murdering someone to be responsible for the knives placed in their spine.

None of this is to say that all love or virtue is lost. Indeed, to live at all is to live with the consequences of your actions, and to that end ideals such as virtue and love are thoroughly necessary. There is, however, an icy wind that blows through the atriums of our mind, rousing a part of humanity that does no one any good to live thoroughly dissociated from. That closure you could cling to will likely never spontaneously materialize; life will continue to become more absurd the more of it you experience. Your preferences might reveal in a way that calls into question the convictions that you feel the strongest. You will taste rejection that you did not think possible. You will see the psychic synapses in others that propel them to suck blood, to disembowel virgins, to put children into ovens and feast upon brains; to drive pins into flesh and slam shut the iron door of the iron maiden with sadistic glee as screaming erupts from it.

You will continue to live in fear of monsters without understanding your own capacity for monstrousness. You will be disfigured, and you will disfigure. Knowing that you are a vandal, and that you will vandalize, to live at all you must live with your consequences still. The horror.

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autonomousbosch · 2 years

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The Horror

“Horror” is a word with strong associations but has thankfully been muddied for most; more than likely the truest descriptive essence of progress you’re likely to find. Even now, if you were to ask yourself what horror actually is, you would circle a litany of concepts. The darkened corner of a room which just feels threatening for some reason, perhaps a teenage memory of being in a graveyard one particularly blackened night. It could be some video of gore which somehow crept into your twitter feed between videos of monkeys, or it could be some conceptual knowledge which you simply cannot forget when you look at someone.

Regardless of anything said after this point, everyone should be thankful that the horror of violence or bloodshed rarely feasibly appears amongst those concepts. While I’m not about to bemoan the lack of violence, I am absolutely about to bemoan the lack of horror.

I read a tweet recently where the author diminished the short story form, suggesting that it was intrinsically bad. Out of curiosity, I asked if he had read any horror authors and of course he didn’t. Meanwhile, my current and likely eternally favorite author is Nathaniel Hawthorne, made most famous due to his collection of horror stories in Twice-Told Tales, elevated to infamy by Edgar Allen Poe, the pre-eminent American horror author who also wrote almost entirely in short story form (poetry counts as well). It was very coincidental, as I’ve resolved to only consume horror literary content this year. I feel that horror needs serious re-integration into wider consciousness; that there is still there there, though it is disturbingly relegated to niche avenues rather than being the genre work it once was.

A brief review of the past ten or so years reveals vanishingly little in the way of effective horror in mainstream consciousness. Hereditary was good, Robert Eggers is a reliably good director but this is a sparse handful of filmography. Even the great horror authors of yore, like Stephen King, have dissolved into mundane political squabbling, indicative of the capacity for modern literature to move out of its myopia into anything more universal than the intrinsic nature of horror to gesture at the inseparable reality of darkness from human nature. By far the most culturally successful horror genre work is more than likely the true-crime genre of online content, which bodes even more poorly.

The genre-work of horror largely exists now in niche domains like video games, metal music, and occasionally some oddity such as Chainsaw Man, a manga currently taking the otaku world by storm. For good reason as well, rarely has something so effectively humanized its characters by consistently goring them. At the expense of turning this into some screed about how things were back in the day, this all feels necessary to establish before answering why it is that horror needs re-integration.

I recently read another tweet by a friend where she suggested that she understood the allegory of zombies, but that the metaphor of the vampire made less sense to her. I viscerally felt as if the vampire made perfect sense, much more so than zombies as zombies carry with them the simplest subtext. It’s this very synaptic thought that I wish to interrogate, because the fact a metaphor feels so obvious to me is its own implication.

Vampires have rules, interesting ones. There’s the stuff people know of vampires, that they turn into bats and don’t handle garlic or sunlight well. Then there are the rules few remember but are much more impactful: you have to let a vampire in your home. Vampirism, ultimately, requires the consent of its victim to have their home penetrated. Rationally, you just wouldn’t consent to the invasion of course, or perhaps that’s what you’d hope of yourself.

On the other hand, I would and did consent to this in a sense. While lust is often at the heart of the vampire mythos, I did not consent to the simple lust of sex; but to the conflagration a romantic heart is swept up in, such that it dispenses with all responsibility to put faith in abject darkness. I allowed myself to be subsumed by this lust, and I deserve the punishment I receive for it.

This is the very reason that I felt that vampires made so much sense. I might as well be one now, promulgating the same antirationality that would encourage others to allow themselves to be bitten; to let go of their rational faculties and allow themselves to also be consumed by the lust for romance. I know this is monstrous and yet, I still do this whenever I find myself in front of a self-styled rationalist. My tongue turns silver, I twist others’ arms behind their backs until they submit. Even as I suffer the consequences for following my own lust, I advocate others do the same with no thought to their well being and no consideration to what psychic defenses their rational faculties might be bolstering. It is even funny to think that the very last time such a thing happened, I slept with someone.

Put simply, I am a monster. I’m conscious of this, that there is not much distance between me and all that a vampire’s metaphor represents, and yet I still have the desire to make others a similar kind of monster as well. Horror is much more than a simple scary story, it is an avenue through which humanity makes peace with its own darkness. Just as I allowed a vampire to sink its teeth into my neck, in my very own home, others will ask of me to do the same. Does consent vanish all darkness?

One book I did not mention earlier is titled the Bonds of Love, by a feminist scholar named Jessica Benjamin. While I find the book optimistic on the whole, the thesis is that submission and domination are subdued and diffuse through-out an intimate relationship; that they are a sort of mutual recognition between two parties which need not necessarily result in abject sadism or masochism. Rather, those two extremes represent a sort of malfunctioning desire for intersubjectivity. Yet, to make this claim, it relies upon some abjectly horrific examples which would not be out of place in the most abhorrent reaches of some pornography website. Not only are the descriptive examples horrifying, but the ambient awareness of this text is also terrifying: that whatever darkness habituates itself as in my cognition and disposition might actually be desirable by another. Indeed, it’s a horrifying thought to consider that the most loving wife would not think of their husband’s ethical action, but rather laugh at his war crimes.

Likewise, I recently read about a theory of development known as “positive disintegration”, suggested by a Polish psychologist named Kazimierz Dąbrowski. What I find fascinating about it is a similarly horrific yet radical departure from common vernacular regarding therapeutic development. The suggestion that psychological tension and anxiety are necessary for personal development, which is horrific enough, before introducing the reality of a failure state: that not everyone will make it. That some will achieve positive disintegration by overcoming overwhelming tension and anxiety, thusly dissolving into the capable person they have become, while others will relent. They might achieve some sort of individuality, but remain impressionable and lacking an autonomous personality. While extraordinarily useful, this knowledge is itself horrific. In that very darkness of the human cognition, it paranoidly breeds suspicion: have I failed disintegration? Are those I love quietly failing it?

Yet, in this a good use case for horror is illustrated, as a failure to integrate this very anxiety means that the grim reality of life remains somewhat hidden. The idea that a man is responsible for the trauma others inflicted on himself is a difficult thing to swallow, yet it is no less true. It is horrible; horrible that someone can hurt you and leave the responsibility for tending those wounds on you as well.

I would not consider myself a morbid person despite my tastes for consumption, my tastes for creation are almost overwhelming pleasant things. I listen to death metal yet spend my time baking tarts and stippling apples in the style of German expressionists. Occasionally however, I will wonder. Last night, as an example, I had a nightmare. I didn’t know it was a nightmare while it was happening, it had the sort of formlessness most nonsensical dreams have of being just odd images until your psychology can prescribe some kind of meaning to it.

In this dream, it is night. I am in my small room and it is cold. There is a single lamp, dimly lit on the windowsill which throws a very soft, very gentle light onto the pale wooden floor. It is cast over a black and red kilim rug, edging partly underneath the dark wooden bookshelf containing my library. The blackened darkness underneath this bookshelf is broken by the faint refraction of light glistening off the spine of a stack of books I do not remember placing there. My cat must have done this, I absurdly think, grabbing the stack of books. As I pull them out, I am terrified looking upon them. At the top is a copy of In Your Garden, by Vita-Sackville West. I loved this book and had given it to a friend because I likewise loved her. It was stacked on top of every book I had ever given to another person, all returned to me. The horror.

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autonomousbosch · 2 years

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Resolve

My older brother was in a motorcycle accident recently. We have a special relationship even outside of being brothers, as I’ve never met another man who truly understands what life is like as a miscreant, but for some reason our relationship always feels more important whenever one of us has been hurt. He got in an accident before I left the American southeast for New Jersey. Aside from the shock of a near fatal accident, it also caused a minor uproar with the town police as well as EMS workers. Just as if it were some black comedy, there was a second accident after his own which definitely did kill and maim. In fact, I cannot recall a moment in time more close to my own flesh were such baroque gore spiraled forth from a single accident. We have had our skulls split open, knees torn apart, lips lopped off, shoulders ripped from the socket, bodies thrown from windshields, life in general has been a very bloody affair at points in a way that we secretly find satisfying. I love my older brother because every time we talk, things seem to come back to how horrible it is when dying is truly difficult; how deranged life becomes when your pain is funny.

Not to sound too bleak or brooding, just to say that it is nice to have a comrade to share this with in a way that matters. They have him doing physical therapy and we are once again discussing pain, as well as our experience with it. Like two philosophers, we come to an agreement that the worst pain can possibly get is when you’re afraid of it. For him, it’s trying to maintain symmetry while strength training with nerve damage. For me, it was the pain of having wisdom teeth, long since broken in a mosh pit, finally become infected. He says that he’s never experienced pain before where he is crying. Not sobbing I say, recalling being doubled over in an emergency room bed with tears streaming from my eyes and drool pooling on the only mattress you envision an emergency room having. “Perfectly lucid, responsive, just endless tears.”

“That’s right,” he says. “I can think clearly, and i can feel clearly. It hurts so bad I’m finally afraid of pain.”

Then he goes on to talk about how sad it is that our friends are dying. They are dying indeed. I’m entering my mid thirties soon, he is nearing his forties. Eventually he moves on to a new woman he’s dating. Her name is Adrian, though I might be spelling it incorrectly. She’s a schoolteacher, an orphan from an adopted family. She refuses to date him at all until he’s divorced which we both agree is good, because my older brother is an odd kind of misogynist. Some of it justifiable, some of it not so justifiable because he’s a womanizer; if not the root of his material problems then a significant contributor to them. Though I fear for this relationship with a new woman the way I always fear for his relationship with new women–some for him and some for her, enough to go around to be clear–I do the brotherly thing to do and wish him well regardless. Of course I hope my brother finds love, and I’m pleased to hear that it seems like he might. Again.

Lord have mercy, he is talking about butterflies in his stomach, giggling whenever she says and does things. Behaving as if ordered to by some divinity to be enslaved, perennially acting in service to the thought of another. I don’t know why I got this, it just reminded me of you. Lots of things remind me of you. I could be inside the pipe section of Home Depot and think, you know what she would love? Sharing some ice cream with me. It’s bittersweet to say but of course I know that feeling, I have a complicated relationship with it in that I either wish I had it again or had no knowledge of it at all. There’s bliss in being defiled, it’s hard to tell whether the tragedy is no longer having bliss or forever being defiled afterward. Of course there’s no need to say that to him, so I’ll just keep it to myself and wish him well.

Unfortunately, the longer I talk to him about it the more I feel a grave being upturned. The longer I think about it, the more I realize I less and less like to talk to Adam, my older brother, about the women in my life anywhere near as much as I enjoy him talking about the women in his. Maybe it’s because he’s an odd strain of misogynist that complications with women simply never arise; he’s either unpalatable outright or an intriguing specimen. I imagine some women have experience with this confusing judgment call to make, evidenced by his success. I find women endlessly complicating people. I hate how fiercely my heart responds to them when I admire them, I hate the feeling of being bewitched by something which exists outside the comprehension of my savage mind. I’m sick to death of subtext, of reading between lines. Sick of independently redeveloping academic ideas of psychology simply because I need them to make some kind of sense to me.

“How are ya’ll doing?” he asks. I don’t know what he means by “ya’ll,” because it’s her and I, not us. We’re thinking about starting a business. “That’s all?” Well Adam, it’s confusing but we’re pretty convinced about this part of things. “I mean I’m happy for ya’ll and I know ya’ll will do well.” I don’t know how to answer him because I’m sick of thinking about it.

I told him that eventually you just kind of learn to make peace with confusion. Sometimes famous people die and their letters are released posthumously, Julia and Paul Child come to mind. Sometimes people of no regard at all die and their letters wind up at post card conventions; corridors of anonymous hearts to wander through and consider that many people have wonderful handwriting, lots of people like to farm, correspondence has been a near sacred act of communication for millennia now. Sometimes a whole lot is said when a farmer puts his pen to paper and tells an odd woman, someone you could never possibly hope to understand, how hopeful he is for his yam harvest and how much their blushing orange flesh reminds him of her. They wrote back and forth quite a few times, all his postcards were beautiful hand-drawn pictures of wildlife. Do they intend to hide this all? Or is it that private language is just inherently obscure?

I talked to him about private language, about how we need to agree on what “cold” feels like because if it feels so cold you “die”, another thing it is very important for us collectively to agree about. Then I also told him that sometimes we don’t want everyone to agree, sometimes we want the right people to agree and no one else. Because of this, when communication is so psychologically sophisticated that someone actually does understand, it feels like a standard human feature that sometimes a nuclear bomb is dropped on your psychology in a way you couldn’t consent to, and thusly that you never would’ve asked for. In a situation like this, it’s going to be painfully confusing until it is either nothing at all or inseparable from who you are. It has not ended and will never end any other way.

Luckily he seemed to understand; confusion as a liminal space as everyone likes to call it. Purgatory between heaven and hell. It’s clear that we care about each other, I’m telling him. She has the flu while she’s starting a new job, so I make sure she has soup to come home to, decaffeinated tea to drink at night–lavender, good aroma to open up the chest I tell him–and then how I have it in my mind to make her a very red dinner with very red ingredients and a very red tablecloth with red wine. She knew I needed a winter coat, so she got one for me that fits perfectly. I told him I was going to build her a footstool that only she could use because she’s just so short, holistically so. To build something just for her, using the measurements of her hip width and gait.

But she’s in a relationship, maybe I should think about that stuff. Think about the things that I’m saying, because I’m sure she’d love them. I’d love to do them. There’d be a whole lot of love in the air. These are not the things you do for a taken woman.

Anyway, that evening I’m rifling through esoteric ingredients in New York City, on the lookout for esoteric black olives which have been cured and then soaked in oil. The idea is that we–and by that I mean her and I–are going to bake bread with a whole host of ingredients, a recipe we were reading about in a book that looked quite nice. I found tea for her there and put it into my satchel, hanging loosely from the winter coat that she gave me. Inside of that satchel are a handful of notebooks, a copy of short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Twice-Told Tales), and my phone which delivered me a message that a party was going to be taking place in New York City that evening, asking if I would come. I was not invited I say, they let me know I am invited now.

I hop on a train that connects to another train that connects to another train and manage to only get partially lost once while infants move about with an expert adeptness at navigating an impossibly sprawling city. I would feel ashamed if I didn’t enjoy getting lost so much here and there, if I didn’t enjoy riding trains even if they were stinky from time to time.

I get to this party and it’s thankfully not as bad as the others I’ve been to. Parties in New York City are diverse with the conspicuous exception of black people. Jews, second generation immigrants who think the American experience is having a drug problem, and Catholic converts. I’m telling our host that I’m also Jewish, a little bit of a lie, but at least a cute one–the theory being that when a Jewish girl offers you wine and prays for you, you no longer have a choice in the matter.

Anyway there’s another demographic. Effective Altruists, rationalists, call them whatever you like. I find them an odd bunch in that I don’t think rationalism is a compelling cognitive mode to move about life, but that they also respond very well to talking when they come across the right mix of good faith and disagreeableness. I think that, or would at least like to think, that the common man has in him a sophisticated ability to model others in a way that he might feel but can’t truly know. In that sense, some people are marvelous fencing partners, but sometimes one man uses a falchion and the other an epee. I meet someone I’ve seen around a few times, a nice fellow who stands in sharp contrast to me in a cartoonish manner that I enjoy. He’s a jazz pianist, I was a death metal bassist. He practices self care, I say men ought not engage in such things. Both of us enjoy synthesizing a common ground and laughing while we do it, good spirits are generally worth their weight in gold. There were a few things he said, protestations generally, that stuck with me.

He said that he’d been getting in touch with his feminine side, meanwhile I don’t think women can be understood such that a man’s “feminine side” can be known. I know what I’m attracted to, I enjoy it when an otherwise sweet girl is just a little creepy, the same way that a large pot of simmering bolognese has an undetectable dash of nutmeg sunken deep within beef, mirepoix, and wine (and milk but that’s for some other entry I’m sure). He asks me if I’m a masculinity guy, of course the answer is no. I told him I was just annoyed with how confused things are after such a large cultural focus on gender. I am in the process of understanding myself, part of that self is male–a man. I think the most charitable thing I could do for women, people I desire, is understand that they are people apart from me with interiority, darkness, compulsions, whole hosts of things I should get comfortable not understanding and certainly not trying to pry open, but rather letting them reveal it to me when they are want to do so.

People aren’t rational actors, I say. You can’t believe them! You can’t trust anyone to tell you who they are, they don’t know. It’s not because they’re liars, I say, but it’s more that the exact, high resolution contours of what they want hasn’t been revealed yet, meaning that they don’t have the language to describe it. He tells me that language can be useful and I agree, we have to have some agreement of what a door is to successfully make it home. When it comes to interiority, the value of truth changes. What we agree upon as a door no longer exists for us to leave the building, it exists as a symbol our minds are constantly repurposing for a meaning only the atomized individual can truly understand, and even that understanding is asymptotic. Imagine how much less anyone would know of themselves, I say, if they had to compromise what it meant with something as low resolution as language.

He tells me that’s cynical. I told him that I don’t think it is, it’s more likely to be projection. I didn’t tell him this, but when I was a child, my parents brought me to a speech therapist fearing some learning disability. It was because I didn’t talk. When the doctors brought me back to my crumbling family, they announced I was fine, I just didn’t like to talk. What would a toddler even have talked about?

I don’t think language can solve communication because I have never figured words to be the best way to communicate what it is that I feel. In a way, I pity the poet for not knowing what the postcard author does. The context that the latter’s sparse words exist in carry a romanticism that the former could never develop, his words are ultimately divorced from such a narrative. Indeed, the most effective poets would be known should they be treated like the Victorians treated a woman’s exposed ankles–public indecency, lurid perversion, the best it could possibly get for a poet.

I ask him if he’s ever written a letter by hand, and to my surprise he said that he had. His ex sent him one, and he felt compelled to respond in like kind. Why would he do such a thing when he could’ve emailed her, I asked. Because it wouldn’t have been as meaningful, he answers. Even though she wasn’t in the room, all three of us agreed about that. The words are important, sure, but they aren’t anywhere near as important as the context of being written by hand in a person’s manuscript form, marked with a stamp that was wet with the same tongue he used to taste, delivered to the post office box in a hand with touch slowly growing more alien to him as time goes on, delivered to his eyes which used to behold her, before finally residing in a mind that, at one point, behaved as if ordered by some divinity to be enslaved, perennially acting in service to the thought of another.

No one can suggest that rationalists are descriptively, objectively wrong, I tell him. That’s not my issue with them, and I would never try to state such a thing. What I will say that is that rationalists are tasteless in the worst way, in that they make no consideration for taste itself as the ultimate prejudice. We can accept that people exercise it when picking out the right lemon from the produce market for a lemon tart, but we don’t accept that cognitive modes are subject to value judgments as well, subject to prejudice. Yes, it is true that curing malaria is an unequivocal common good, yes I could donate tomorrow, but I’d rather donate my time and resources to precisely what is I am doing–I aim to impart all that I know and have to the world I have isolated through these very prejudices. I brought olives and tea from Manhattan to Queens with this very ideal in mind, and I’m confident in my heuristic. My world, anyone’s world, is ultimate the sum total of what they understand of it and what limited amount others in it understand of them. Malaria could be gone tomorrow and it ultimately would not be as meaningful as mine and her hands working over mini-boules until we get perfectly slipper-sized loaves of bread. Is this an objectively correct value judgment? No. Is it wrong? No.

We then talk about music as musicians are oft to do, and he tells me that lately he has been learning to lean in to the expressions he improvises on piano. I say I have the opposite problem, that I have picked up a neglected Fender Precision Bass after realizing one night at a club that I was the only person afraid of my hips, and could no longer suffer being a white boy with no rhythm. I told him that I picked the Spanish phrygian scale to practice, because it makes no sense without a flamenco rhythm, and that I practice alone, standing up, shaking my hips as I desire in time with the meter. He said that solving rhythm doesn’t seem like that big a deal, and I say that figuring out rhythm on a bass guitar is itself a revelation that I want to solve my fear of being in a place where I might avoid dancing with someone I like.

He said, “You seem to think of yourself as something to resolve.”

Of course I do. I’m willing to concede that when I say I suspect that I think people are largely nonverbal, I mean that I am largely nonverbal. There’s a broad chasm between music and noise. Music has structure, clearly defined articulation that, with enough study, everything makes sense. The world of noise is infinite, its breadth of expression is so vast as to be a paralyzing struggle to shape and control it, the stuff precision requires. I’d say that it’s absolutely appropriate to spend an incredible amount of time resolving exactly what it is I am trying to say.

At that point, people begin doing drugs and I get the urge to leave. As I make for the door, I meet my room-mates boyfriend. A perfectly nice man whom I have both shockingly little and surprisingly much in common with. I attempt to exchange pleasantries and he lets me know that they’ve broken up. I check my phone and it’s dead. I grab my new winter-coat and satchel full of olives, jot down the expression “M -> Marcy Street -> J -> Fulton”, and head for the subway. When I sit down on the train, for a bit of time I practice cursive hand after having been so touched at the postcard convention, thinking that the book I in which I write solely about love would be a lot more attractive, suitably so, were it in cursive. Then, I pull out Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Twice-Told Tales” and read “The Prophetic Pictures.”

A newlywed couple conscripts a painter who has the uncanny ability to extract onto canvas the soul of his subjects. It scares me, the idea that an observer could plainly see on my face how I felt about something, someone, someone in particular, before I had even said anything at all.

#Saturday

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autonomousbosch · 2 years

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People in New York City are all so beautiful that I feel best when I cover up around them. Easier to admire everyone and everything when I am wholly unrecognizable.

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autonomousbosch · 2 years

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Happy Trails

This is going to be the most self-absorbed, narcissistic entry that I’ve written here and it is necessarily so. I no longer live in my mountain home, nor my swampy state. I’m in a place where I speak a different language, where customs are so obviously alien the moment I leave my room.

The relationship that I had to my home is gone. It has now been eviscerated of any domestic quality, downgraded to the status of virtually any other house. Unremarkable, all except that I used to live there peacefully. Over the course of about forty sleepless hours, I loaded up more belongings than I realized I needed into a rented truck and drove overnight across the length of the east coast, from my cozy mountain home to a shared apartment in Jersey City.

It’s a change so revolutionary that I struggle to fully understand it. Not that the past few days have been exactly adventurous. I took vacation time from work with the express intention of using it wisely to complete this move, most of it has been spent attempt to organize my life once again from the ground up.

Yet, when I wake up, that ground is so obviously alien. Gone is the greenhouse heat of a subtropical mountain environment, the red clay underfoot that slowly stains and usurps all that it touches. Instead, it is the dry heat of a city covered in concrete, similar to that of a radiator which one of my friends so keenly pointed out. Rather than dust which stains my soles and ankles, it is the carbon exhaust from all the automobiles driving down the road. There is no super market nearby, it is a series of bodegas which all have their own specialties I will need to become acquainted with. My old gym, a decrepit iron dungeon, is yet to be replaced though I know I must. The baseball field down the hill from my old home to be replaced with a grand facility in Lincoln Park.

I struggle to comprehend this all immediately, it’s so bewildering. I can at once understand that man was probably not meant to do this so often, in a way it feels as though I have suffered some odd kind of brain damage. I will trip up the stairs to my home and laugh, laugh while walking down streets unknown to me as if I have become deranged. Likely because I have,

What is beginning to concern me however is that I’m not entirely sure it was move here which caused this certain kind of derangement. Indeed it seems far more likely that if I am suffering from any kind of serious disrepair, it comes from the frankly hubristic idea to extend my stay at my old home, believing that I could somehow erect the life I wanted to spend with someone else, yet made newly alone.

When I speak and interact with people up here, I get the sense that I have indeed suffered a certain kind of deterioration which I cannot really put my finger on. I can’t exactly articulate how I am different, but it is an oddly new feeling–the compulsion to articulate a specific genre of thought which ultimately never had any reason to be spoken aloud, as there was no one nearby to hear anything being said at all.

Reflecting on things, I realize that I was living a life incarcerated to some degree. It is true that the physical world was my oyster in a sense; I was free to pursue whatever projects I desired, to labor at whatever it is I desired, but only up to a point. Such a life is virtually no different from being interred at a gulag. Am I somewhat of a more accomplished baker or cook? It would be fair to say that it’s true, but will my neighbors feel my presence missed? It’s doubtful. I’m not proud to say this, but it’s that reality of a man alone and I feel some odd sense of guilt about this.

Last night, my friend and room-mate made a roasted fennel and beetroot salad with roasted salmon. It was so delicious, and I’m thankful that I’m deeply sleep indebted as it was profoundly touching. I have been responsible for the vast majority of my own meals over the past year. Had I been realized, fully conscious of mind, in total control of my faculties, I would have wept. What an unbelievable privilege after a year wholly and utterly alone just to share a laugh with someone, to look at another’s eyes and smile widely in disbelief that this is just what life is like now. I laughed in mild disbelief typing this up just now. When I think about the fact that I have in my possession a friend who do genuinely cares for my wellbeing, who I have some existing intersubjectivity with such that we are allowed to be so comfortable around one another as to share meals, it puts a lump in my throat.

I feel a deep gratitude swaying within my soul and it’s very difficult to give it the voice it needs to not feel as if I live in some kind of incomprehensible, unresolvable denial. I am happy, but I am also retarded. I need to sleep.

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autonomousbosch · 2 years

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Embody

As I write this, I’m listening to an album titled “Killing Technology” by a band named Voivod. I have been attracted to similar music just this evening, material that is raucous and rowdy but has a very specific heart to it that there appears to be no room left in life for. When running earlier, I listened to “Demanufacture” by Fear Factory seeking this specific sense of a sort of 80′s and 90′s cyberpunk and science “fiction” for lack of a better word. They are furious albums indeed, and saw something in the increasingly automated times as a fine enough metaphor for the kind of social critique that only teenage and early adult boys are capable of. Wide-netted and dim-witted.

When I listen to these albums, I allow them to possess me in a real way. I’ll consider their influences both musically and lyrically; not just the songs they learned to play in their youth, but the events of their lives that steered them toward such subject matter. When “Killing Technology” was released, Ronald Reagan was in office and the Cold War was still a reality, so naturally Voivod would have allusions to concepts like the Star Wars program, a planetary missile defense system which now seems like the sort of bumbling, primitive technological solution that you’d find in Dune. Meanwhile, Fear Factory’s “Demanfacture” saw tracks included in the soundtrack for Terminator 2 coincidentally. Looking back, their cynical attitude towards the saturation of information technologies that would come to define millennial life is almost ironic as the very land they came from, the Bay Area, would become one of the cultural dominions of our time in Silicon Valley.

Though it may sound like misdirection after having written all this, I do not intend to author some sort of cultural criticism or analysis here. In the scope of humanity, a post-punk and thrash metal crossover album from the 80′s or catchy cyber-thrash album from the 90′s are hardly anything that are fairly small blips on the radar—legendary instances in a subterranean subculture that the vast majority of humanity will live happily never knowing they existed at all.

In fact, the above analysis is held onto pretty loosely. Frankly I have no idea of its importance, relevance, or even its veracity (aside from some objective facts). The curio to me here, more than anything else, is what is happening underneath this in terms of how a person relates to both fiction and non-fiction.

I read fourteen books last year, a new record. I’m not sure what prompted my voracious literary appetite, it was the first time since I was a teenager that I devoured novel after novel, book after book. I remember each and every one of them in detail because I was actually reading—I was allowing these very books to possess me as I read them. Even the ones I disliked (The Art of Censorship in Post-War Japan) left me with auxiliary concepts to consider even though it was a bore to read and the author was unaware of her own editorial contradictions.

Using this book as an example, the central premise was that state censorship was institutionalized literary criticism. By the end of it, I was able to understand how the state of Japan itself could approach the author over the book that she had written. What they would eliminate, what they would prohibit, how they would reach consensus reality over the subjective relationship between private man and media.

The Prince by Machiavelli was another example. I found it an eye-opening read, not only in that it helped me give definition to the contour of my own psychology as a deeply Machiavellian individual, but also in that having this awareness of my predilection towards what feels like Machiavellian thinking allows me to better understand when I might be unconsciously engaging in this behavior when unnecessary or perhaps even harmful. Most importantly though is that the Prince helped me understand that Machiavellian dispositions can even be good. Indeed, it is entirely possible that a Machiavellian ally could potentially be the best ally another could ask for to advocate on their behalf (my favorite episode of Star Trek is, coincidentally, about this very subject).

Even reading the Compleat Angler by Sir Izaak Walton, a 17th century Christian treatise on everything from angling to making your own flies, enraptured me so that I strolled down from my home with a hand-axe to fell a long bamboo stalk. Finished with polyurethane, fit with drilled guide-lines and a proper reeling mechanism affixed to it, for the next several months I pitched my spot at the lakeside and would draw hummingbirds as I spent hours catching absolutely nothing at all.

I’ve used literature so far, and the last example is one of a deeper embodiment. While literature, art, and music are all things that can very easily possess someone in a way, to gravitate their cognition to some new horizon or grant them new language to more clearly define their subjective experience, there is a still deeper component of realizing what something being “of the world” actually means. Just as Sir Izaak Walton was taught to fish by his father and in turn taught others how to do just that with an almost brotherly affection, there is nothing that prevents me from doing the same.

In this realm there isn’t much in the way of distinction between literature and music, visual arts, even other varieties of handicraft. For the past month or so, I’ve voraciously devoured Darkthrone’s discography and it has sunk in so deeply that if I want to hear their earlier material with more of a crispy production, I can simply play them myself. I had listened to albums like “Dark Thrones and Black Flags” with such adoration, that even as I would be diligently working my boring job, I would figure out how to play their songs just thinking about them. It recalled a formative moment when I was a teenager, playing my first metal show and seeing the music I was creating possess others in a way that would lead to a mosh pit.

Similarly with painting and sketching. I’ve developed a fondness for a Eurasian Jewish painter, a woman named Zinaida Sarabriakova. Her paintings are some of the most charming that I’ve ever seen. Her series of nudes all feature women sleeping in a way that seems idyllic to me in a way only a woman could possibly exhibit. They are not pristine subjects eroticized even though their breasts are bare, instead there is an almost comedic element of humanity to them in that they are laid about awkwardly as one is when comfortably sleeping. Yet it is not these that strike me so deeply. It is instead this:

I almost struggle to adequately articulate all that I love about it. The silhouettes of her figures, the color palette that she continuously defer to all impart such a warm affect to her paintings. Yet this, what is passed off as another entry in the genre of Portrait of an Artist, has a quality that reveals the baroque artistry of life itself. The perspective inspires me so, beckoning ideas of a home as not only this thing which is functional, but also capable as a beautiful staging of sorts; not just for the character drama of a family, but also the staging of subjects in doorways, light through windows, reflections in mirrors, silhouettes in a square hallway. It filled the lungs with such vim indeed that I had no other choice but to try my hand at painting myself.

Am I good at it? No, but of course that’s thoroughly irrelevant. I don’t need to be good at it. I am simply possessed, and a possessed man needs only to be exorcized.

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autonomousbosch · 2 years

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Abjection and Liberation

Enduring meaningful heartbreak in my adult life recently introduced me to an icy, palpable fear which I have not felt in ages. I wish it were the fear of cold wind rolling up the back of my neck or the stillness of night broken in a violent, unseen riot of motion, but instead it is a deeper, persistent fear over a protracted time horizon: that, in absence of intersubjectivity, the ego-divestment process of clarifying the reality of life alone might turn a man into something hideous.

How to not rot, how to not fester in resentment; how to not give in to rage at being thrust back out into the desert of being alone. How to maintain some sort of grace when the privilege of attunement is bereft without being ultimately disfigured.

I do not wish to seem melodramatic in saying this. There are patterns we just kind of acknowledge, that rarely are delineations between abuser and abused instances of good vs. evil. Indeed, it is often the case that the reality of abuse is that it is a very efficient process through which abusers are manufactured. It is horrifying to consider that in all likelihood, the innocent victim is a much rarer objective instance than we believe it to be. The horrifying implication is that, regardless of what happens to man, he is responsible for his reaction to and interaction with the world even after being gored by it.

What ultimately rescues man, what provides him safe passage from a sinking ship is a higher ideal. Some platonic concept to be pursued, something which will unravel the Gordian knot of turmoil and allow the bellowing wails of the heart to be soothed and made intelligible again.

The more I have considered this, the more I have allowed myself to be consumed almost in totality with such an obsession—an obsession with love.

Though I am choosing to write this, the process of embodiment has been happening for some time. If anything, the fact that I am choosing to write it rather than pursue it in some other generative sense illuminates the depths of perversion to which this obsession has finally sunk. Though it might sound odd, embodiment is a lived process, an aesthetic through which communication happens rather than some explicit pronouncement robbing the act of obsession of all of its compelling diffuseness. Rather than developing in way that makes sense to my heart, I am compromising on the willful exposure to the gravity I have allowed this object to exert over me.

Yet to draw up a still life of how spellbound I have found myself is still somewhat of a struggle. In searching the recess of memory, I can withdraw moments in which my heart swelled; moments in which I felt my very soul extracted from my body against any pretense to concealing my vulnerability to others, finding myself in the throes of ecstasy as the desire for integration was realized in fruition.

Those things are not replicable alone, but through embodiment I can allow myself to draw up some intuitive sense of desire, of love. There is no pressing urge to make it make sense to literally anyone else, no gun to the back of my head demanding that I decipher what I am learning of my feelings. Such a thing is true of all people: there is no need to compromise on the sublime just to have another nod in agreement, as the beauty of such a thing is ultimately self-evident.

I have stayed awake into the purple hours of dawn studying dead hands, long forgotten and indecipherable, with the hopes that I might be able to craft the perfectly-written love-letter. One that reveals with exceptional form and surgical delivery exactly my feelings on the subject. I recall a morning spent making breakfast listening to Claire de Lune with another, the very moment my soul was extracted, using this feeling as a desire to bring me back to ivory keys and try my hand at being the musician who aids in this same extraction of another. I have labored consistently with doughs and creams, things of various ingredients yet all saturated in the deepest yearning and hope that the moment they are shared with another, their presence will be undeniable and overpowering.

In some sense, it is a drive that is so powerful that I find it difficult to understand it as anything other than the desire to dominate. It is not the domination of pure power, of pure control; it is a domination that posits the submission and ultimate defeat of rationality. That someone would choose this for another, that someone would belabor the endeavor of love to such a degree that its recipient would find it an inexplicable, unconquerable thing which simply cannot be reasoned through. I do not want it to make sense. What I want, very explicitly, is to force a limit experience of intersubjectivity which, through its very binding, offers liberation from rationality itself.

This is perhaps why when others make mention of some sort of purity that they sense in me, I become uncomfortable. There is no purity, I see no distinction between love and eroticism. Though I feel it true that I do not harbor any dark secrets necessarily, the one I am most diffident in sharing is my affinity for ornate rope dresses. While there is indeed a very basic component of sensuality, I ultimately find the symbolism of shibari deeply compelling in that what is being fashioned is, almost flatly, a paradoxical bondage of adornment. I am designing, often times while making direct eye contact, a sort of binding where rather than restricting any sort of movement at all, it exists to enhance and pronounce form. Tying knots as a very real worship of the physical body of the other in an effort to author new beauty on the contours of another.

More awkward still has been my recent obsession with the study of figure drawing and anatomy, where I consider for hours the ways in which muscles expand and contract. I think of all the things there it to be attentive to in the whole of another, their essence and their physique, and my tongue grows thick thinking about the moment in which the deluge of my heart is unleashed to engulf another whole.

Indeed, there is nothing pure about it.

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autonomousbosch · 3 years

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Works

No poetry, just a work order to remember.

Research home made proscuitto, look at terracotta smokers. Research good charcuterie options for diet-friendly meals. Food stuff: kaarage, malfouf, chicken and saffron rice. Rotary tool, piano. Torch for finishing wood. Complete hibiscus planter.

#48

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autonomousbosch · 3 years

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Yes

I picked my truck up today. I took off from work during my lunch break in an Uber. As a service I really hate it but I suppose it is necessary for a solitary man. My driver was an affable woman named Alicia, we spent some time talking about how much COVID had revealed about the latent neurosis in people. She was probably the most normal person I’ve interacted with in some time. Neither attractive nor unattractive, neither remarkable nor unremarkable. There’s a specific quality that feels foundationally human, that people who are very easily interesting never know how to reveal that component of themselves. For her, this was very much the case. I have no doubt she has a laundry list of interesting thoughts a day but would never think to voice them to anyone.

She dropped me off at the mechanics, and I was received by a portly shop owner named Bill. Here, “portly” is a calculated word. It and “stout” as perhaps the most perfect identifiers for this man. Very fat but in a way that is familiar, something about interacting with him made me slightly homesick for life back in the swamp. He seemed interested in the things I was doing for money, how long I had been in Greenville; he wondered what had happened to the brown girl I came in with about half a year ago. Well Bill, some things just don’t work out.

I wanted to distrust him the first time I met him, he seems to have in his voice that cadence of doing everything possible to assuage his customers. I understand that impulse, and I would simply think nothing of it were I at a cafe, coffee shop, or a gas station. Unfortunately it’s my only vehicle so I’m going to be a bit combative.

What made me like Bill is that Bill pre-empted my concern. He seemed to understand very deeply exactly what level of technical abstraction I could understand when it came to talk about diagnosis and solution. This is just to be expected of a man who has attained some kind of mastery, but without resorting to the tone of speaking to a child or another master of his craft, he worked with me through the processes he went through, the tools that they used; line by line eliminating the things that it could have been through small tests or here. Eventually, I agreed with him that nothing else made sense. (The object level detail is that with a mechanical gauge connected to the oil line, there was no actual drop in oil pressure happening, succinctly eliminating half a dozen possibilities such as throttle body intake or various sensors related to oil pressure regulation rather than oil pressure information)

Then something very surprising happened. He asked me if I had found a church. It was the first time in awhile that someone in the flesh had said something which so utterly shocked me. I cannot recall how long it’s been since someone had asked me such a thing. Of course I entertained him, I had not found a church. I have, in all honesty, thought about going. I have also spend an inordinate amount of time praying because I have been and still am suffering the worst heartbreak of my adult life with cascading material difficulties.

I asked him for the name of his church and stole a pen to write it down. I didn’t make any commitment to him at the time, past the simultaneously amicable yet plausibly deniable “I might drop by.” Yet, the more I think about it, the more I think I should say yes. It feels heinous to say such a thing out loud or write it, but I wonder if perhaps the Lord is indeed trying to get something to me.

I wonder what He wants. A couple of people recently have remarked that I am an angel, an extraordinarily sweet thing to say for sure but also I do deeply wish that it was true. I want to be a virtuous, uncomplicated good. I want to relinquish the depressive, narcissistic focus on my own pain and once again allow myself to do that which I love the most: to encourage my friends and loved ones, to provide nothing but a simple support and solidarity in assisting those I love in achieving happiness. Angels did all sorts of things for sure, there are choirs and classes and all sorts of organized complications. The thought itself is quite lovely though, that perhaps I could be something for people I care for. Faith, hope, charity, any number of virtues that could continue to encourage others to love, laughter, health, and happiness.

#47

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