I like DeLanda’s abstract machines (1) – more precise, more concrete than metaphors, but still loose and capable of creativity.
But what’s the point of writing anyway? Who reads the words and thinks the thoughts instead of simply filling something else in the vacuum – you look and see but do not see, still and that is no trouble but an unreason nonetheless.
Trauma is a body. (2)
Ulimwengu, the pugilist, punches and cuts against the body of Cthelll until the scabs grow and congeal hard. The wound becomes lushly gangrenous though still – here and there – it oozes. There we see mountains, here we see lakes; the scarified body of the earth has lost its smooth, metallic skin – it is only lukewarm to the touch and bacteria has covered its many lesions; the atmosphere is thick enough to smell.
The biosphere swells, always in heat, ever pregnant. It’s superfecundity is a blessing in the eyes of its many many children – only the misanthropes weep. Incest gives way to a great family. The children take all manner of shapes for no reason but excess; their tumors harden and stiffen, becoming appendages, limbs, branches, spines, stems, organs, et al. They follow after the pattern of the progenitor, abstract machines of scarification and fecundity.
Once, a human is born by the sea. The sun comes and goes in several circles, and they aren’t called anything for several passes; eventually, they decide to stay; the village celebrates. The land all around is flat, and dry; as the families all gather to eat, they cut the neck of a hooved man on all fours; he oozes the color of the land, and in the fire his skin is the color of the night without a moon. The men smoke as they watch the burning, laughing with their entire bodies so that the soil under them shakes; the women pound and laugh the same but sweating, their great muscles glimmering under the heavy sun. The nameless one watches it all, cooing at the lazy clouds without rain. In the distance, it sees skinny shadows of men, but it has no words to greet them; the strangers carry large sticks with shining tips, covered in second skin. Their faces look like lazy clouds.
A half of a thousand years into the future, a Black-with-no-name will type on a blank white screen about its disdain for autofiction and caricatures. It lives in an oasis between cyberspace and the desert of the real. Hyperreal cigarettes taste like cheap cancer on its lips; it doesn’t smoke – instead it prefers to poison its liver. No thing lives forever. Pancreatic cancer will kill them in a fraction of the time it took the first family of its kind to appear in the New World. Its eyes and face and lips give the hints of miscegenation; now, look closely, what color is it really?
Stripped naked, you can see its topography more clearly. Topography is the giving of names and boundaries to the heterogeneous terra tota. There we see mountains, here we see lakes; Bwnn has a liver, has knees, has skin. A Black-with-no-name and whites-with-many-labels all sit around and stare at each other, pointing. Race relations. Penises wrapped in barbed wire bite at vagina dentata jealous of them and their horned labia. Talking heads. La humaine n’existe pas. Nuclear dandruff condenses into clouds overhead, and rain washes plastic residue into murky puddles; the ocean is too hot and salty to drink, so we take cupfulls of these puddles before they evaporate. On a geological time scale, the strata of skin shifts like soil into sand, mountains into ocean, lakes into valleys – what remains is the inner core, a spinal column screaming with many flat faces and mouths, (3) a child of Cthelll trapped in mimesis. (4)
Still, Bwnn doesn’t exist on that scale – the rocks in its body are microscopic, small enough to be softened and molded into fragile organs which recycle and feed off of their molten refuse for lack of direct sunlight. The body is always starving, but a Black-with-no-name only notices in increments like everyone else. Indeed, starvation is the longest time scale they know, their days punctuated by eating breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, desert, nightcap, repeat repeat repeat. Two eyes on a flat face with a wide mouth and a nose that barely breathes; the better to eat you with, my dear. Yet some of the wmml have more food than the Bwnn and this will never do – until the strata do the dance geological, the pointing and teeth gnashing is useful for, until…emancipation? That is what? The chance to grow long spinal columns with fat labeled bodies hanging from them all the days until the scabs of Cthelll finally peel and wilt and the everything itself is healed and fractured and…
Everyone knows this, already, these texts and this sentiment. What is there to gain from talking in circles without depth or volume? Where is the praxis – practice, for those back home – to meet the theory? No one talks like this in the hood, in the ghetto, in projects. I live there and though we are talking all the time, we are never talking like this, about these things, though we know them and know them better than the yuppies and theorists and gentrifiers and school kids.
Here – or there – we tell the stories of Cthelll and of ourselves as king Animal, the earth’s embodied wish for eschatology. Digging our feet into the ground, we talk like trees among one another across the scarified earth and tell each other stories of our progress.
Somewhere in Africa, in a place named something you don’t know, by people you don’t know, your phone is born when it’s cut from a deep womb of the dark soil. Chunks of excess flesh encase the small device-to-be, so first it must be excised. The leftover placenta is dumped into a nearby river, which is black from all the excisions there already have been and must be; downstream, in a city the people have built to house them, many of them die from poisoned water but this has nothing to do with your phone. In fact, you struggle to call it a city in the first place: It is only a collection of sticks and cloth, and one building for the phones and computers to eat in. The people have no faces, and their hands only hold phones and dirt.
Somewhere in Asia, in a factory called a country, in a city called a subsidiary, your phone learns to be itself. Its nurses are Vietnamese, Malaysian, Thai; its tutors are Indian and Pakistani; it speaks Chinese, Korean, Japanese but its given name is decidedly anglicized. It has many siblings. And though their education is relatively cheap, only a few dollars and cents for a world, what you pay for really is the range of their knowing. Theirs is the coveted wisdom of the Buddha, of Confucius, of Gandhi, of Mao, of Pol Pot, of Masayoshi Son – the means of which gives not only access to your better self but to the objective knowing of your world all for the low cost of 800 USD retail and a total monthly cost of 150 USD for phone service, wifi-access and a subscription to your edutainment platform of choice.
Somewhere but never here there are people dirtier than you, suffering more, living mud shaped to mock your form and lack of function. Their entire lives are function, machinic connection and disjunction. They are your batteries, enabling your world to function like a toy train around its tracks. Lucky for you, they’re the same color as the earth, so you end up seeing neither. Comfortably, then, you can forget the many machines beneath you and your own traumatic birth. Oil comes from dinosaur bones and unwashed people. You forget us so that you can demand we continue mining deeper into the wound we all walk across, hoping that one day Cthelll will stop screaming all at once so that responsibility is placed upon another.
The real world is more mundane than that. We scream until the sound trails off back into nothing.
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Notes
1. Manuel Delanda, “The Geology of Morals – A Neomaterialist Interpretation”.
2. Robin Mackay, “A Brief History of Geotrauma”.
3. Thomas Moyninhan, Spinal Catastrophism.
4. Reza Negarestani, “On The Revolutionary Earth”.