25 September 2016
Adjacent Dimensions
The Temporality of Ascryption
Mainframe
< Part One: 'Initiation'
Alice was just beginning to say 'There's a mistake somewhere—,' when the Queen began screaming, so
loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. 'Oh, oh, oh!' shouted the Queen, shaking her hand
about as if she wanted to shake it off. 'My finger's bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!'
'What is the matter?' Alice said, 'Have you pricked your finger?'
'I haven't pricked it yet,' the Queen said, 'but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!'
— Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
With all such words it is of the utmost importance that they should never be spoken until the supreme
moment, and even then they should burst from the Magician almost despite himself—so great should be
his reluctance to utter them. In fact, they should be the utterance of the God in him at the first onset of the
divine possession. So uttered, they cannot fail of effect, for they have become the effect. — Aleister
Crowley, Liber ABA
Abstract Horror
Apophenic Nightmare
Zone
Library
Abstract Machines
Nummificator
Plexplore
Syzygy
Ccru
Oeis
With Karno absent, and no way to reach her (what would I have said in any case?), I had no choice but to continue my
exploration of her practice unaccompanied. The inverted nature of the enterprise continued to mystify me. One night,
uselessly intoxicated and unable to push my earlier success at recreating her method any further, I had scrawled
'ASCRYPTION IS REVERSE ASCRIPTION' on a post-it note in some now unrecognisable fluid and stuck it to the wall
above my desk. The evocation of the literary act via the attribution of a name had proven successful—too successful if
the complete occultation of every surface comprising my admittedly cramped living quarters by loose stacks of
unevenly daubed, sometimes completely indecipherable, sheets of paper was to be counted as a reliable
measurement of efficacy. I felt I had lost control. Ascryption was, indeed, a matter of utter submission to the will of
some outside force. As a writer I had been schooled in the importance of control. This was variously denominated in
terms of metre, rhythm, tone, cleverly constructed metaphorics, believable characters, narrative consistency ... and yet
I was producing these effects without any recourse to my own personal catalogue of literary tricks and turns of phrase,
or even what I had once arrogantly considered my 'unique poetic voice'. Some utterly alien enunciator had infiltrated
my output. Or better, enunciators, for they were certainly multiple. Adept across an unbelievable span of deranged
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aesthetic proclivity. Where the hell was this all coming from?
I reread Karno's essay again and again, searching for a decipherable answer among her numerous appeals to 'the
crypt', 'the rift' and, most curious of all, 'the future'. It was while staring at the post-it note, utterly lost, half-conscious
from the criminal quantity of bootleg mezcal I had drunk in anticipation of yet another night's futile probing, that it came
to me. Unlike ascription, which one has no choice but to understand as a cause-effect relationship, ascryption—the
production of cause from effect—encodes, by virtue of this deranged causal logic, time in reverse. A text attributed to a
writer; a writer attributed to a text. What was at stake was more than the automated procurement of a poem, but a
theory of time. Karno was madder than even I (who was—demonstrably—prepared to accept a lot) had suspected.
And yet it explained so much. The enigmatic subtitle, 'Practices for Writing on Reality' suddenly took on a terrible
significance. She meant it literally. What had I gotten myself involved in? Was I evoking something more significant
than a roomful of poetry? I took in the chaotic state of my apartment, unsure I recognised the person to whom it had
once belonged. The unfinished bottle of mezcal sat in the middle of the floor, staking out Zone 7 in the remnants of the
diagram that continued to leer through its pelt of paper refuse. A bloated agave worm, suspended in the few
centimetres of liquid that remained at the base of the bottle turned listlessly in response to some imperceptible tremor
from far, far below.
It reminded me of something I'd overheard at the bar—a verminous word: 'Plutonic'.
Reverting, spontaneously, to the resources offered by my native tongue, I'd initially understood it as 'plutôt-nique', a
punning neologism that would passably be rendered in English as some complex of 'otherwise-ness', 'too-soon-ness'
and 'imminence'. This skewed line of thought was evidently owed to my long-time obsession with the writing of Antonin
Artaud, who had exploited the same contingency of language in his 'Ci-gît' ('Here lies': a mortuary inscription) where
he formulates the following causal ruin:
mais plutôt / trop tard que plus tôt / ce qui veut dire / plus tôt / que trop tôt / ce qui veut dire que le plus
tard ne peut revenir que si plus tôt a mangé trop tôt / ce qui veut dire que dans le temps / le plus tard / est
ce qui précède / et le trop tôt / et le plus tôt / et que si précipité soit plus tôt / le trop tard / qui ne dis pas
mot / est toujours là / qui point par point / désemboîte / tous les plus tôt
but rather / too late than sooner / which is to say / better sooner / than too soon / which is to say that the
later cannot return unless sooner has devoured too soon / which is to say that for time / the later /
precedes / both the too soon / and the sooner / and that however accelerated the sooner / the too late /
which says nothing / is always there / and bit by bit / it unboxes / all the sooners
The death of time in the mouth of sonic drift. Whether I had been lead closer to—or further away from—the intended
meaning of the term by the dissimulation of sense in sound, was unclear. But it gave me something to hold onto and,
let's state it plainly, lured me even further into the abyss, for it occurred to me that the names I had been extracting
from the diagram on the floor followed a similar, disjunctive, logic. They were sounds before they meant anything. Pure
sensory stimulus. Enough to distract my conscious mind while the entities to whom these names belonged took over.
Evidently, some unnatural synthesis was occurring between the sounds, the diagram on the floor and the numbers it
had began to bear of its own accord, scrawled in under the guidance of the things I had been summoning. Perhaps
the numbers too were important. With the diagram incrementally clarifying itself during each visitation, I started to
perceive that the names which bore numerical significance with regard to the ever-complexifying contours on the floor
produced the most successful poems. The thing was, I never had any idea what I was going to say before I said it. In
most cases I'd simply babble whatever came into my head—nonsense, generally—over and over again until I hit a sort
of threshold and some unfathomable string of phonemes sputtered forth in a voice that I understood as mine, and yet
—simultaneously—another's. What happened in that moment was always hard to describe. Something flipped. The
binding sense of recognition came from the other side, and the thing I had identified as alien, was somehow myself.
By means of some ghastly, 'plutonic' inversion, the word I had deployed to summon the imminent poem's demon
shifted from its imputed role as cause to that of effect ... as if the demon had emerged a split-second too soon—plus
tôt—and caused 'me', against conscious apprehension, to speak the word that would summon it. In this way, my
utterance was its effect, and it—the demon—the cause of the utterance. This was, of course, completely senseless if
one stubbornly insisted on continuing to approach the process linearly. It was far more complex than that. Karno
encouraged her readers to think of it as having occurred the other way around, writing (with legible delight) that her
demonic names 'arrived from the future', or even more ominously, from beyond the edge of time itself. I wasn't
convinced I needed to take it quite this far. In fact, I was afraid that acknowledging it would somehow render the whole
thing more real. For what it came down to was a loss of personal agency. I was giving up authorial arbitration, and if I
hadn't already consigned my writerly aspirations to the status of adolescent fantasy independently of the whole
Deadlines episode, I would not have yielded so easily.
It was the diagram that eventually swayed me. Each time I evoked a poem the thing grew more complex. It had begun
as a simple triangle, the kind one uses for evoking (and apparently, containing) demons, but it soon obtained strange
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outgrowths: my beloved spirals reappeared, one to the north and one to the south, then the triangle doubled itself, the
second iteration slotting over, but slightly offset to, the original. Next, an array of convoluted tendrils escaped from the
primary diplo-triadic circuit to connect the exogenous vortices, weaving strange routes between the inner and outer
zones. By the time the numbers appeared I was in its thrall. I gave myself to it fully (or was taken by it, plutôt niqué ...
what does it matter?). As I chanted the barbarous names enciphered in its numbers, innumerable phantom tongues
rose up from the depths to intone the poem's words with me and I—the obedient automaton—mechanically wrote
them down.
These episodes continued, night after night. The piles of ink-spattered paper towered higher, gathering in increasingly
obscene arrangements traitorous to every geometrical law known to humankind, swallowing the few pieces of modest
furniture that had come with the room, creeping along the walls, filling the shower recess and the sink, until, finally,
they reached the ceiling and extinguished what was left of the pallid eastern light that had once made its daily
pilgrimage through the city's infamously polluted air to strike the high casement window for a brief hour every morning.
I forewent going out except to acquire more mezcal, until I could no longer locate the door to the external corridor.
Cardinal orientation was by now a vague memory. In fact, memory itself seemed to be no more than a fading
hallucination. 'ASCRYPTION is SUBMISSION' I muttered to myself, 'ASCRYPTION is SUBMISSION' ... before
jettisoning the copula altogether and simply letting the two terms oscillate until they formed a kind of motor. It was by
virtue of this vibratory mechanism that another door appeared. The spatial organisation glimpsed through its black
aperture recapitulated that of the paper ziggurats that had been progressively infiltrating my lodgings. Did they want
me to go through it? By now it hardly looked different from the space I currently occupied and could not—nor wished to
—escape from by any conventional route. Above the door a garish LED sign repeatedly flashed the word 'Victis' in
mean purple neon, followed, after an unbearably long interval, by 'Vae'. I reassembled the phrase retrochronically.
Where had I read that recently? The last vestiges of memory rallied themselves in a final, baleful déjà-vu, then winked
out altogether.
Affirming becoming means affirming being which is not your own. I was becoming a great poet. And although some
thing inevitably was, the poet wasn't looking back. I waded through the detritus on the floor to recuperate as many
empty bottles of mezcal as I could find, compelled by some spontaneous notion to extract the grotesque, distended
larvae that had—deprived of their conservative medium—been quietly rotting in their depths. I felt I needed to take
something with me, a material souvenir to replace the memory I had lost. In this way, a ridiculous tourist gimmick
became my talisman. I dropped a handful of the sodden things into my pocket and, steeled by their reassuring, earthly
tangibility, took one last ecstatic breath and stepped across the threshold.
Posted by Yves Cross at 03:33
Labels: A-Death, A. Crowley, Ascryption, Control, Crypt, Doubles, Evocation, Hyperstition, M.
Karno, Mesh, Numogram, Plutonics, Templexity, Worms, Writing
2 comments:
Mazuzu 7 October 2016 at 15:27
Looking into a mirror. Our bodies make no sense, because humans invented them. Performing
a BDSM session with a friend. Punishing each other to escape the torments of the
adversaries, before the great escape (revealing). Walking together near the water. Here
are the rules that apply to no one. Wind in the trees. “I miss you”. “Hurry home to me”.
“So go”. “I want to”.
Cat like, ritualistically preparing a potion. She cries. Three vessels say, “Open me”.
Walking amongst the forest. Looking at the bodies decaying on the ground. “Are they being
healed? Do I know these bodies? I can’t remember”. She tickles their and her decaying
holes.
Reply
Replies
Jess 17 October 2016 at 04:06
An accidental glance in the water reveals the absence of your own reflection.
Instead: the night sky above, with its spray of senseless stars.
Reply
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