XXIII. Essay by…Machinic Specters

Illustrations from Agnes Giberne’s The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (1898)

Machinic Specters is a 23-year old self-described 'creature or perhaps an entity, but mostly an apparition, also a writer', from Poland with a degree in religion studies. Their biggest philosophical influences include Gaston Bachelard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Deleuze and Guattari. Below, an essay that dwells on the act of writing, its tendency toward destruction of the self, and various other thoughts on immolation.

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Writing Directly Into The Sun

I’d choose it again: writing is a quiet art that shelters a scream

My fingers dance across the keys softly yielding under their pressure like a spider connected to the hundreds of nodes of its web through which it explores the world, braiding it into predictable constructions with a sticky, body-attracting surface. The spider runs from place to place, setting itself into the rhythmic motion of a predator waiting patiently for the moment when its prey comes within reach of its artificially extended body, to catch it and wrap a thread around it, incorporating it into the collection of its corporeal knowledge spanning from branch to branch, from wall to wall in the corner of the room where, near the ceiling, the spider watches my fingers fall on the keyboard like raindrops, spilling across the screen in a puddle of letters, in whose murky surface I try to view myself, unable to find the right perspective from which to see myself in all my vastness, without losing anything — or even, on the contrary, adding something, adding something to the image of myself that I have in my head as I, like a six-legged animal, wander from image to image, to melt in their scattered light into a hybrid whole that would not have come into being if I had not been actively creating textual micro-worlds. The root of the word ‘text’, ‘textual’, ‘textile’, lies in the mechanical act of weaving fabric, thus bringing me closer to the spider than I'd like to admit as I glance at its expanding web and wonder if it is going to starve to death in my room — or if I should take it outside; quite as if it belongs to me, as if the body it builds at the junction of two walls were not part of the same family as the words I stack side by side and erase to be replaced by more, in an endless process of assembling imaginings that go beyond my flesh, destroying the solipsistic feeling, that life is something that happens to me — and that only I have the right to call the printed fabrics coming out from under my hands’ art, as if the spider does not have as much to say as I do, stretching around itself a mechanism with which it can touch more, which turns its body into a receiver of signals beyond the reach of perception, when a signal of an intruder's position or the shape of the world emerges from between the web's taut weaves, or the form of the universe that emerges with its every new bundle, when the spider senses the situation around itself, changing in the process, building a knowledge base composed of abstract arrangements of sticky trailing language in which each sentence is a sum of vibrations, a segment in a world full of incomprehensible giants and fluttering winged victims that the spider consumes in the cool thoughtful manner of a confident artist, celebrating the web that allows it to survive another day on its surface. Heidegger said that our being in the world is an understanding being, we exist understandingly, defining things by the utility we perceive in them. I believe that we exist spider-like, knowing the world through our constructs, always on the verge of disintegration — their thin bundles lose meaning and break, to be replaced by new ones reaching further. Between the fragments of the web that makes up our resonating understanding, the textual web, the web of both texts and textiles, stretches a scream that lasts for centuries, an echo of the empty universe that calls out to itself in the incessant echo of our voices — ours, that is, mine and the spider's, mine and the tree that drives its roots into the foundations of the apartment building, mine and the wind that comes through the ajar window, knowing itself in the cognitive space in the silent art that hides the scream of torn and reconstructed bodies.

Complex devices, these thought-body connectors, fingers bring out worlds

A mechanical process, indifferent to the life in progress, takes place between me and the keyboard that has become a moment ago an extension of my animal existence, stretching me across the imaginary space between the receivers on whose screens rest others' eyes, eyes I will never look into, connected to heads I will never embrace, perched on torsos whose hands I will never see as they move fragments of skin across the displays, as they turn pages, connecting to the same machine, in which I was merely a stop, a mode pushing a whole series of information onward, to the next person, to the next, as yet unformed thoughts waiting in virtual space for contact with an electrifying element of reality that will trigger the process of actualisation, making the thought appear not in a single head, in a closed circuit in which it slowly burns a hole — but in tandem with other processing, thinking, bio-psycho-social-ecological machines existing in a network whose fragments are not visible to the naked eye; that stretch out into oceanic non-being, crawling along the bottom like snakes, becoming the object of battles between monopolising corporations, for whom only the empty, mathematical activity of data transmission matters — not the fingers that wander in place, creating something common, something simultaneously repetitive, composed of ready-made elements, of words that resonate in complex harmony (or a cacophony that destroys beliefs about how language should function) and something unique, unrepeatable, that vibrates with undiscovered life between the constituent elements, between the little ants on the screen, worms wriggling before our eyes into worlds we have not seen before. Our bodies have this ability — the ability to write, to create something largely useless, like any field of art, whose uselessness, however, does not mean expendability. Herein lies the paradox. The uselessness of art, and the ability of our bodies to build piece by piece its diverse flesh, is one of the building blocks of our existence as human beings, as beings cursed with consciousness and compelled by their own material construction to search for meaning resonating in what is in front of them — concatenating with what man calls his; one's world, one's family, one's reality, one's property, one's fears, which are reflected in the useless but much-needed creations that arise in the space between individual understanding and the material composting process, contradicting the claim that understanding is merely a feature of the mind; that it belongs to reason, which distinguishes humans from animals and makes them a higher level of evolution than the spider I wrote about earlier, or the bird that winds its nest from hundreds of found twigs and screams at full throat, even if it is alone, just to feel its own voice on/in its own body — to experience how the exhaled air is arranged into a repetitive melody, which it shares with itself and the image of the other, who can reciprocate the cry of a living, breathing animal learning with the creations of its own body about the world around it and making it its own, just like a human being, building and destroying, writing, singing, painting, recording and photographing something that would be meaningless to anyone else. The mechanical process that begins somewhere in the body and connects our wriggling fingers to the sum total of the collective knowledge of ourselves as a species makes us become and disintegrate, finding our own remains and reassembling the past and future from them, as if the awareness of the uselessness of the things that mean the most to us makes us not someone better than the rest of the world — but a brother or sister to everything we weave.

It lives in traces. I write ghosts’ resonant limbs, sacrifice the “I”

It begins like a séance — I prepare everything around me, every element of my mechanical, technological existence, in whose scraps I allude to the remotest corners of history, because there has never been a man who does not use tools, a man who is not connected to the web of meaning by means of mediating objects that allow him to construct his entire world out of both symbols and transformations — out of an awareness of the possibility of altering the fabric of bodies, events, objects and memories in which he moves, searching for himself in fleeting reflections. I gather the evidence of my existence around me, waiting for something to come along that doesn't belong to me, but nevertheless constructs me, knitting my body together from the sum of traces, on whose resonating surface walk countless past lives that I abandoned somewhere along the way, enclosing them in matter laden with the burden of remembering human things, as if it only exists so that I can summon spirits from it whenever I look at it; so that I can summon a human-inhuman presence from between its fragments, a cracked surface or muddy mush on which I can't walk as a property of the world, but only put my hands into it and manipulate its organs to create humans anew. I use each trace to look at the faces of the ghosts that appear in them, none of which resemble a human shape — they appear between thoughts, between the feverish wandering of fingers on the plastic surface of a keyboard, on a canvas where the painter discovers tools of perception previously unavailable to him, or on a camera, that records time for future generations, allowing us to experience the past as an imprint burned on the eye of a world that never blinks, looking straight into the sun of its own decay and searching for phenomena in haphazardly placed footprints, when footprints become foreign and the path begins to meander in incomprehensible directions, overgrowing before our eyes and opening up new passages. A ghost is a resonating trace — I've been repeating this endlessly lately, in my head, to myself, and looking around for clues that I can follow like an animal sniffing for the scent of prey that has long since disappeared — and we'll never see it, though we may try to evoke its image, tracing and thinking to share the failure with others hunting in the empty forest and thus create a sense of aimless expedition, an expedition between images and traces, small scratches on the surface of the world, that arrange themselves into shapes as soon as we look at them a moment longer, noticing more and more contours, from which emerges a present, however unreachable, admittedly material world, human and non-human at the same time, when it breaks the barriers of our bodies and identities, forcing us like a curse thrown by an angry sorcerer to search for representations, to venture once again into a forest where every leaf is a sign that has the power to construct worlds. Our entire lives pass from one haunting to the next — we never have peace from the ghosts, from the phantoms, from the hungry ghouls creeping after us into every lonely corner and gnawing our insides when we refuse to represent them, when their resonating surface, shimmering in the scorching sun, spreads before us a world that will not feed or clothe us, but its fascinating surface draws us nevertheless to never let go. We return to it again and again, playing with meaning; arranging words and images on sun-faded canvases with our own blood.

Libidinal text is a pool where reason drowns searching for zero

I'm sitting here, locked, as I always have been, in the same place where I move in a circle, drawing traces of my presence on the ground in the step-worn spaces on the floor, in the crumpled texture of the bedding, in the piece of paint that splintered off the wall when I nailed something to it, forever inscribing in its plaster construction the thought that appears when my gaze encounters a small sign, which, like a stream, leads to further associations, growing in strength and falling into a river that rushes at breakneck speed straight to the sea, to the ocean, to drown in non-being, in the chaos of disrupting all order and human domination of nothingness — on the ocean we are still hunter-gatherers, moving with ever new weapons through unpredictable spaces, whose waves lull us to sleep amid thoughts of violent annihilation; even if the ocean is a mere image; even if we have never seen it, its mechanism is at work in our production, which is always moving in a destructive direction, towards an inevitable annihilation, in which every moment of creation may turn out to be the last one, and every work of art may constitute our tombstone when it is created just before we sink beneath, again allowing the inert waves to carry us away into the depths of impenetrable oceanic darkness. The oceanic libidinality of the text appears in the way it takes over our thoughts, the way it lives in what we do, what we dream about, how we move in a space saturated with meaning. Our animal bodies, endowed with imagination — representing both a curse and a blessing (or neither) — keep themselves alive by weaving threads of narrative into every possible gap, even into our own memories, which seem the most unshakeable, the most fundamental to our personality. When we revisit memories, we set in motion a powerful machine that tears them apart — and each story reconstructs them, casting them into the icy depths of an unknown future, where they will take on new bodies that resemble us, but nevertheless function in a completely different narrative. The libidinality of the text draws attention to our writing bodies — by writing here I mean any creative act; forgive my simplification — which write themselves through their own indirectly useful creations. Bodies that stamp their handprints on the cave walls to endow themselves with a soul that enters them at the moment of capture, when the narrative connects them to the rock, turning it into a home rather than a mere opening in the stone massif. Bodies that scream in an empty room and smile when the echo comes back to them. Bodies that make abstract gestures when they speak, dressing themselves in the meanings they produce and connecting with the world, with the spirits they evoke with every slightest gesture. Bodies that lie motionless, exhausted, destroyed by a day in the capitalist mill, whose thoughts are fading, looking for an opportunity to lie down to sleep. Reason doesn't play much of a role here — our bodies, with all their drives, desires, subconscious streams of uncontrollable neuronal impulses, and endowed with a heart that gives their blood its life-giving speed, exist in the text, telling themselves to become what they are, to survive or to shatter, to build something new in the same shell. We, the ghosts and the boundless ocean, merge on the plane of narratives etched on the surface of the world, as if only our signature gives us the identity of the fullness of existence. We lose our minds to find ourselves in their ruins.

I squander the sun, writing through the burning light inside my own head

I wake up in the morning and feel as if I'm falling to pieces, as if the thought of the outside world is tearing out of me fragment by fragment tiny bits of flesh, pulling them to all sides to the accompaniment of other mental images that in the blink of an eye add up to an annihilating fear, an impenetrable despair that I can't stop, when I plunge into the emptiness left by the black sun burning me from the inside and forcing me to search for something to relieve the dull pain devoid of localisation and never disappearing because it has nested in my tissues, filling them with an inaudible scream, a cold, never extinguishing flame, the paradox-filled machinery of melancholy that provides the basis for my every step. When I get down to writing, every morning at the same time, religiously, without change, regardless of how I feel, what the weather is like, what I did the day before, I focus on the pain — on the throbbing breach at the very centre of my existence, which I cannot call the absence of anything. It functions like a black hole, absorbing all light with its unimaginable weight and destroying in the tangles of matter every scrap of hope and meaning I could still grasp. So I write through its darkness, picking my way through the lost photons, through the light trapped in it, and the great gaseous orb above my head reminds me of the waste, the squandering of light that is lost in the eternal maze of inky blackness engulfing every thought. I write, bending the fragments of it — fragments of the eluding, pregnant emptiness, the chilling nonexistence, the burning desire for annihilation — to understand what lies beneath my skin, beneath my muscles, beneath the room where I wake up every day, waiting for uncertainty to replace the dreamy conviction that I know what awaits me and feel prepared for whatever comes. I write, searching for the space between words that will express something I can't say directly — because sometimes it feels like that's all I have left, just making attempts at expression again and again, until there's nothing left of me, until I burn and dissolve into the air myself, leaving behind the smell of burning tissue and the black sun growing in a space filled with the emptiness of my absence. I try to write, hammering the words into my own body, as if I want to reconfigure it, to assemble a new man from the ruin I have become, fading in the face of the incomprehensible, destructive glow of the cosmos I carry inside, and listen to it echo with words I can't understand and translate ineptly, mangled, hammering them into the rigid framework of language, because I am still trying to be human, still trying to exist among people, and language, unafraid of the scorching black sun, occupies the space between bodies, creating an alley where I am not myself, but still define myself. I am not myself, but I exist among others. I annihilate myself word by word, sentence by sentence, until I reach an indefinite destination at the tip of my tongue, when the words surrender and open something to me that I had no access to before — then I look directly into the sun and let it burn my eyes, with nothing left to show, nothing left to prove, except the fact of naked life writhing beneath the tangles of the sun's rays among other similar bodies that, like it, seek something in the scorching guts of its never-ending brightest darkness. This is my Proustian task. To burn every thought in linguistic magma.

The success of words lies in the breaks they produce in the self’s fabric

Searching for a formula for self-annihilation, I let time leak through the breach I create in the fabric of my own self woven intricately inside an endless living narrative following a track only known to itself peeled between bodies and their stories, which mingle with mine like saliva in a puddle, like blood with the mud it drips on, like the wind with the contents of my lungs when it produces the sensation of suffocation. I look for words that will sweep me away — not physically, though I still wonder if there is any way out of myself left other than physical removal from the ranks of the living — and replace me with a chaos without beginning or end, in which all the free-floating elements begin to bump into each other, entering into creative collisions flashed again and again by a blinding light whose bright inexorably piercing through the tissue stream burns everything in its path like a nuclear attack destroying the memories of bodies just moments ago innocently going about their own business, before they disappear forever after a split second spent in hell, leaving a smudge on the sidewalk — an unidentifiable shadow whose weight nevertheless rests on the shoulders of anyone who looks at it, seeing in it a reflection of themselves, a fixed version of what the sun produces next to it whenever it comes out. I look for sun-words with a temperature capable of melting every bit of earth, so that nothing is left of me, so that the flare spreads me all over the world — I look for words, alternately wanting to feel everything and feel nothing, to feel every, smallest touch, to feel love for the person I want to spend my life with, to nurture this feeling inside me no matter how meaningless the rest of the world seems; to destroy in myself every measure of happiness and unhappiness, to leave only peace, silence, silence after a tragedy in which so much was lost that moving on requires redefining humanity. There are two plants growing inside me, one sprouting young shoots, extending its green arms toward the sun, occupying space, putting down roots in the fertile soil; the other that suffocates the first, wrapping itself around its branches with thorny vines and exposing its delicate insides, sucking the juices out of it until it becomes as dry and brittle as it is — until they become the same, and death becomes the only solution. I look for words that will allow me to die symbolically, to radically reformulate who I am — who I think I am; how I appear to others; how I narrate myself to myself — to get rid of the incessant fear that comes from existing as an individual in a system created around individual alienation, both from the fruits of labor and from other people, who are becoming more and more alien, and uncertainty makes a wall between us, which I fear we may not eventually jump over, if we don't turn our fear into rage, into a destructive fury, into a devastating flight of passion directed at what makes us think of ourselves in a particular, individualised, pathological, alienated way, instead of weaving an authentic fabric of community around us to embed our thirsty bodies in intimacy and build again something that might resemble a habitable world. Until I achieve this, I intend to look for words that will blow us apart so that we can rise, new and united, before our own thoughts devour us and push us over the edge of the precipice over which we are balancing.

I write to be read in a way the sunlight falls — as a gift of waste

It's getting brighter and Spring is coming. Slowly, from behind the grayness and the clouds that cover the whole world with the inconceivable weight of each surviving day, the rays come out, brushing the earth with a gentle, shy touch, as if their fingers were wandering along the expanse of its body for the first time, getting to know it and learning its shapes anew, to remember them before departing again into the icy embrace of death. The sun spills over the earth like a golden liquid, solidifying into life forms that rely on it to survive and see the next morning. We move like casts of scorching radiance — shapes made of heated metal that are the equivalent of the hardened fabric of the sun's rays on earth. The sun falls on our faces; light fills our days as the snow gives way to new life. The sun has no idea of our existence as we circle around it, craving its warmth, which it has in excess — and which it disposes of, pushing out hot fumes that reach the Earth by mere chance with countless repercussions; chance that creates worlds and watches them fade away as the light withdraws from them, plunging them into the impenetrable darkness of night. I think the same way about writing — what the reader currently has in front of him is a waste, something created when I tried to destroy myself, the result of internal explosions, flames that refuse to stop burning me from the inside, a child of the black sun that I am getting rid of, unwilling to watch it grow up inside me consuming my body, making me suffocate in the tangle of my own thoughts, which will eventually lead me to the extreme, to implosion, when I burn in my own accumulated heat, amid the cosmic laughter of the void reflecting my screams. I write haphazardly, hastily tearing off pieces of myself and gluing them to the letters so that someone else can consume them — I sacrifice myself, place myself on the altar and offer my own flesh to the indifferent, shining god in the sky to turn me into the coal from which I rose; so that I may become a simpler form of life, to reach something fundamental that lies beneath the complex construction of my self, whose heat never ceases to destroy me from within, constructing me in the image of a dying star that spews out its last flares of burning elements before it falls silent forever, taking with it the life in the surrounding, closest cosmos. I write to make my explosion as unspectacular as possible; to leave pieces of myself in the hands of strangers like a body in the form of superhuman communion; to disappear among the many multiplied selves. I waste time throwing words out because the curse of humanity produces an excess that I must get rid of before it burns a hole in me. Maurice Blanchot once said somewhere: writing so as not to die. I write to die again and again; to plunge the knife into countless hearts and rise from the dead each time, when in the flare of the explosion coming out of me I find a meaning I have not seen before — when I light my way toward annihilation, warming myself in the hot glow of self-destruction, self-translation, to enclose myself in words, multiply the areas of resonance, disperse the light to bring out the colors, not just the piercing pain of burning skin and muscles, charring bones and escaping with smoke of thoughts that revolve only around one thing, around the question — how can I destroy myself, waste every second of my life, in the best possible way?

Writing’s a small death cast onto an unmoving page outside of our breaths

The page does not think. A piece of paper covered with pen ink or pencil smudges does not think, but they are the tools with which we transform our thoughts, pulling them violently out of free flow. Writing is an act of violence exerted on the connections of neurons that throw up information for others to catch and pass on. An act of violence that invades between synapses, capturing the chaos and focusing it on a single page, where we dress up thoughts in the order of characters and words in a sentence, killing and processing the products of our own minds like animals — tracked down and hunted, butchered by thousands of quick movements while they are still moving, while blood is still flowing from their severed arteries, distributing it throughout the dying body, before silence falls, a momentary silence before the next hunt. Writing is akin to celebrating the ritual murder performed on the elusive figure of thought, which creeps from corner to corner, ready to disappear when something catches it violently and chains it to the page to inflict its death, to sacrifice it, to regain for a moment its lost animalness — to feel the connection between the elements of the world pushed back as far as possible, which become, at the climax of the ritual, parts of our bodies, whose small deaths, literary transformations, from whose rotting cadavers new creations emerge, allow us to survive as we feed on their invisible products, lest we go mad, lest we turn against ourselves. The violence of literature, the way it tears desire out of our bodies and pours it into constructions of meaning, works in its best moments like an ecstatic orgy from which no one comes out alive — everyone comes out transformed, as if the words whose bones we break and grind to a crisp, meld into our new bodies like clay from which we fashion a new form, ourselves becoming demiurges, hopeless and in love with our own power as little gods, from whose every act of creation tears something out to replace it with an artificial limb composed of words and sentences, with which they can reach far out into the world, catching along the way everything on which their senses stop, the action of which overwhelms them and makes them hate their own tools of perception, when all they catch are scraps of creation of which they could become the author if only they had more power — the power of a true god, whose absence rumbles in the void beneath everything devouring with its mouth full of invisible fangs every scrap of hope for immortality — in addition to desperately immortalising every experience, every scene and every perceived spirit, whose resonating trace has etched itself on the surface of the bodies of thought we construct, drawing life from their unshakeable indifference as we perform an abortion on our own smoothly rushing thoughts, to look at them for once before they plunge into the neuronal abyss, because it is only at the moment of creation that thought exists before us in its tangible form and does not breathe, when we feed on its flesh in a perpetual act of self-cannibalism, consuming the products of our bodies devoid of every feature of a living organism, but nevertheless giving humanity its human dimension, as if a human animal can survive in its dual nature by simultaneously relying on what distinguishes it from other animals, as well as killing it at every possible opportunity to avoid sinking into madness. I'm writing and waiting for a revival of thought whenever I put my hands on the keyboard again to slice it into pieces.

An artistic act passes through death to make it seem evitable

I woke up tired. At night I imagined myself dying — dead, lying in a dark grave with the pleasant chill of the earth around me touching my rotting limbs — to fall asleep and stop thinking for a while about what had accumulated in my head all day. At one point I wanted to die, I wanted not to wake up in the morning — as with many attempts to fall asleep, the thought of impending death helped when I felt its icy gaze on my body, hidden in the darkness of the room, and thought that it had finally come to take me away, after which I fell asleep, convinced that I was already forever sinking into a safe non-being, leaving my sensual existence and floating somewhere as a body without organs — a dream body merged with the one functioning during the day purely out of habit. I got up and began to write, as I do every day, to rid myself of the bitter taste of involuntary survival, to go through a death that didn't come any other way: by recontextualising my own experience into something that will soon cease to be mine when I translate it into English and publish it, so that hundreds of eyes will rest on a carcass composed of letters and braided from sentences that gives the impression of still being warm, but in reality has cooled long ago, becoming as alien as spat-out saliva. I look at what I'm writing and see how I disappear between words that represent neither truth nor lies — I function in a third position, the position of annihilation at all costs, which wields my hands, takes over my thoughts and makes me follow the old surrealist ideals, writing automatically and hoping that when the conscious part of my mind temporarily dies, I will avoid the total death I so desired not long ago, falling asleep. Sometimes I wonder what I really want — to disappear or to become visible for the first time in my life. Writing, as an experience of the death of the rational mind and allowing interruptions in the flow of thought to seep out of me like fresh blood, allows me to experience both, as I make marks on the screen, on paper, fidgeting with my fingers, as if searching for something I've lost in the thick fabric, and trying not to stop, until I become a complete stranger to myself, rubbing up against death, as if I bumped into her on the street without noticing her face, and went on, feeling the burning ice of her unexpected touch on my skin, like the rubbing of a rusty knife that unexpectedly turns out to still be sharp — this is how I imagine the writing I'm striving for, the writing of disaster, as Maurice Blanchot imagined it, writing that carries with it rifts in reality, rifts in the aesthetic construction of our being-in-the-world, from between which shines the nothingness on which we lean, every moment challenging the thin ice on the surface of the lake on which we move in a circle, rubbing our frostbitten hands, to feel the soothing chill of the snow falling on us for just a moment more and more like radioactive dust — the more I look at it (although at this moment outside the window I see spring being born in a painful, long process), the more I feel it burning me from the inside as I inhale it along with the air that was supposed to give me nothing but life. The toxic snow doesn't stop falling like chunks of sunshine — it turns into a white fire, fragments of which engulf me in flames as I catch them in my gnarled hands and throw them onto a sheet of paper, hoping that the death they carry can be translated so that it will stop giving the impression of waiting only for me.

Create whatever, that which scratches your death drive — whatever burns bright

This essay has two purposes: to present a view of writing influenced primarily by the books I have recently read, but also by the experience of ten years of literary creativity, in which, when as a thirteen-year-old I wrote about how the bodies of anonymous characters were being torn apart by equally anonymous forces, I tried to contain the seeds of self-destruction, as if I were creating a bomb, which I later swallow along with the detonator, waiting for the digestive juices to damage it enough for the charge to explode, blowing me into dust and leaving only a vague memory between the letters I inhabit, which have been my world since I can remember — first as a reader, then as a creator sending my stories to contests and receiving praise for style, which I can no longer recognise at the moment, because they belong to someone I buried under a pile of words years ago, burying them in my own body as in the ground in search of a method of as much destruction as possible, as if the rage I feel when I look at the world could only turn against me, striking my consciousness again and again with fragments of waking dreams, in which life continues to give the impression of being worth living, giving me a few more days, maybe months, maybe years — maybe a whole, long and peaceful life alongside my loved ones — before I am done with myself, having exhausted any words with which I can tear myself apart again and again, though they always knit together, building more and more monstrous figures. When I look at myself, I don't feel continuity, but my muscles, my body, my tissues remember every moment of inner decay, which has always been accompanied by literature — sometimes written exclusively for myself, in a notebook hidden in the depths of drawers so that no one would have access to it, as I transform into something monstrous, directly responding to the world in which I find myself, and in which I feel a powerlessness mitigated only by the realisation of the death drive on the road to joyful annihilation — a process full of hope, although from the description it sounds like the confession of a suicidal person waiting for the right moment. Nonetheless, as long as I can decompose into parts, seeking their new connections in literature, no matter what medium I create it in or how many people read it — although having an audience contributes to the desire to rip off my masks while weaving new ones from the materials I've collected throughout my life in every place I visit — I can survive, without giving satisfaction to the reality I grew up in — a capitalist, gray cage whose bars are decorated with the blood of millions of people who tried to get out of it before me, but stopped at the hard, cold surface, not having enough collective strength to destroy it once and for all. Writing — artistic production as a set of interconnected vessels — won't give us that strength, but it will give us the opportunity to break subjectivities matched to the cage, to come out on the other side transformed and unrecognisable, as new organisms — after man and after power, after the end of history — looking straight into the abyss, which no longer appears to us as the enemy. We feel the warmth of nothingness warming our struggles. By the time we deposit new lives on it, the old ones will crumble and disappear into the abyss. When the world remains empty — in the eastern sense of the word Śūnyatā — we can once again begin to breathe the air that has returned to find a path of circulation, freeing us from the productive spasm by puncturing the hole in the lungs of our eternally doomed subjectivity.

-M.S

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