Alien Rhythms

There was only one thing that I didn't like. In the very back of the garage, near the canisters, I could see something silvery. That hadn't been there before. Well, all right, so there was something silvery, we couldn't go back now just because of that! I mean it didn't shine in any special way, just a little bit and in a calm, even a gentle way. I got up, brushed myself off, and looked around. There were the trucks on the lot, just like new. Even newer than they had been the last time I was here. And the gasoline truck, the poor bastard was rusted through and ready to fall apart. I didn't like the looks of that tire. Its shadow wasn't right. The sun was at our backs, yet its shadow was stretching towards us. Well, all right, it was far enough away from us. It seemed OK, we could get on with our work. But what was the silvery thing shining back there? Was it just my imagination? Now, the thing to do would be to light up, sit down quietly and think it through—what’s the silver stuff above the canisters … why is the tire’s shadow like that? The Vulture Burbridge told me something about the shadows, that they were weird but harmless. Something happens here with the shadows. But what about that silver stuff? It looks just like a cobweb. What sort of spider could have left it behind? I had never seen any bugs in the Zone.  

—Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic 

What is the schema of the spider? The schema of the spider is its web, and its web is the way it occupies space and time. … [T]ake the concept of a spider; the concept of a spider will include all of its anatomical parts and even the physiological functions of the spider. Thus one will encounter that funny sort of organ with which the spider makes its web. But can you deduce from it what we can now call the spatio-temporal being, and the correspondence of the web with the concept of a spider, which is to say with the spider as organism. It’s very curious because it varies enormously according to the species of spider. There are cases of very extraordinary spiders that, when you mutilate one of their legs, which is nevertheless not used for fabrication, make abnormal webs in relation to their own species, they make a pathological web. What happened? As if a disturbance in space and time corresponded to the mutilation. 

 —Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Schema and Synthesis’, Lectures on Kant

Alienness — and the alienation that results from a confrontation with alienness — is the genesis of novelty and change. Wherever one encounters the alien, a mutation or a transformation isn’t far behind. And yet, because alienness involves an aspect of unknowability and unpredictability — an erasure of the familiar and the homely — it is also one of the things in the world which makes us most afraid. We fear the different and the strange, yet we require these things in order to evolve. This makes for a paradoxical affective relationship with the notions of otherness and difference that alienness encompasses — a bizarre and complex orientation unifying dread and desire. Already there is a kind of geometrical confusion in this: desire drives you forwards, while dread forces you back. As Mark Fisher writes in The Weird and The Eerie, it’s not a simple case of ‘enjoy[ing] what scares us’. Rather, ‘it has … to do with a fascination for the outside, for that which lies beyond standard perception, cognition and experience’, an affect that involves terror and distress, but isn’t wholly described by them.[0] Fisher’s invocation of ‘the outside’ immediately brings into play the prefix ‘xeno-’, a denotation nominating what follows it as foreign or alien — an ‘outsider’, someone or something that arrives from the outside.

Twisted

The inverted Angel of History is a demon. (It has a name but not a face.)

The Temporality of Ascryption

< 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

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 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'.

Demon Est Deus Inversus

Vallée: 'There are, in fact, numerous stories in folklore of humans who have gone to fairlyland of their own will, either taking a message, or bringing one back, or performing some service for the supernatural beings who live there. But — and this is my third point we also have numerous accounts of abductions by the fairies. They take men and women, especially pregnant women or young mothers, and they are very active in stealing young children. Sometimes, they substitute a false child for the real one, leaving in place of the real child a broom with rugs wrapped around it or one of their children, a changeling. [...]

Of course, the UFO myth has not yet reached such romantic proportions, but we are perhaps not quite far from it, at least in certain rural areas, where strange flying objects have become a source of terror to people travelling at night, and where the rumour that "invaders" might be around has gained interest, if not support. A recent television series has capitalised on this aspect of UFO lore. In the show, the human race has been infiltrated by extraterrestrials who differ from humans in small details only. This is not a new idea, as the belief in changelings shows. And there is a well known passage in Martin Luther's Table Talk, in which he tells the Prince of Anhalt that he should throw into the Moldau a certain man who is, in his opinion, such a changeling — or killcrop, as they were called in Germany.'

Paranoia is both a modality of control and a means to its evasion. Vallée, with utmost methodological scrupulousness, draws a continuum between folklore, myth and the UFO phenomenon that not only charts its universal cultural persistence, but allows a smooth connection to be made between the replicants, clones and anthropathogenic parasites of modern science fiction, and the legends of changelings and killcrops that haunted medieval Europe. This fear of the alien insider has been with humanity for far, far longer than we might have at first assumed, and its specific brand of horror is connected to an intense doubt concerning the stability of our own imputed 'humanness'. How do we know what we are when other beings can fool us so profoundly? A security function is inevitably triggered, and endorsed by 'us' ... the faithful adherents of those religious institutions that have traditionally made it their job to purge villages of their interlopers, and will—so we persistently imagine—relieve our future cities of their inhuman intruders. 

The guiding affect is distrust, and distrust reaches its peak when it is no longer simply directed at the other—the alien, the immigrant, the machine—but turns upon itself. We are so paranoid because we know there is nothing to hang an enduring notion of the 'human' on that cannot also be perfectly simulated. 

Western monotheism, following a similar impulse, absolutises and anthropomorphises its god. Once this move has been made, all evil can be understood as essentially separate—inhuman, when held against the humanised image of god—and therefore, available for exorcism. 'Changelings and killcrops are laid in the place of legitimate children by Satan in order to plague mankind,' states Luther, 'such a changeling child is only a piece of flesh, a massa carnis, because it has no soul.' (The remedy hardly needs reiterating: 'That is not your child! It is the devil! Throw him into the brook!') H. P. Blavatsky, to whom the title of this post is owed, explains it in the following way: 'Satan never assumed an anthropomorphic, individualised shape, until the creation by man, of a "one living personal god" had been accomplished; and then merely as a matter of prime necessity. A screen was needed; a scape-goat to explain the cruelty, blunders, and all but too-evident injustice, perpetrated by him for whom absolute perfection, mercy, and goodness were claimed.' Rigidly enforced identity automatically generates an illusory negative, fooling its bearer into believing that circumscribing an antagonist supplies the power to eliminate it. It is exactly this fervour for purification that conceals the fact that the alien is already inside, and has always been there. Hygiene is its camouflage.

Taqiyya, perhaps, is our most terrifying contemporary reminder of this fear. Glossing Hamid Parsani's Peace in the Wake of Double-Betrayal ('a straight socio-anthropological analog to John Carpenter's movie The Thing') Reza Negarestani writes, 

'In order to infiltrate Jihadi forces, the state must first inquire into the very concept of citizenship, and strictly regulate what an ordinary citizen is and is not, so that the civilian is both the first and last target for the state and the Jihadi. It is in the wake of the doctrine of Taqiyya and Jihad that the civilian becomes an obscure ally—that is, worse than the enemy.

"Today, Taqiyya, or adherence to the logic of the Thing, connects the survival of a believer who conceals his practice and belief to a catastrophic consequence for the enemies' community. Survival of individuals or collectives, particularly the very existence of native and indigenous entities, must become an object of police curiosity or even liquidation, because the hostile entities who exploit Taqiyya practice and revere everything but their own systems; they populate every niche and land but their own." (Hamid Parsani, Peace in the Wake of Double-Betrayal)

The proximity of this scenario to that of The Thing, according to Parsani, comes from the fact that it is not the Thing (the extremist under Taqiyya) which is targeted as the object of eradication and assault, but its potential hosts, or the positions (niches) which it might occupy.'

This is the logic of the labyrinth: upwards is downwards, resistance is openness. Everything is always covertly its opposite. These arch-injectors—the duplicitous fairy, the alien insider, the Thing, whatever name one gives it (it wants nothing more than for you to name it)—exploits the human desire for identity and its necessary definition. On this shoddy platform—the inability to rid ourselves of our desire for the same—a construction roughly equating 'intrinsic humanity' could, perhaps, be thrown up. But it only identifies a weakness and is entirely without hope. To be Human is to Desire Oneself—etched across the falling blade of a guillotine.

Cycles

Strange how LoR notation—which, as far as I know, has yet to be fully exhumed—installs a solid link between 0X (or degenerately, TX), AQ, and hyperstitional circuitry. I.e. PLEX [as opposed to thenif < ] reciprocally codes NASCENCY [ –––⦅ ], executing CHRONOPOLYTICAL incisions into (and as) standardized, modulo-12, clock-time—underwritten by AQ consistency in (())()().

If, as you suppose |end|, the LIGHT CONE ‘adequately renders time,’ then time is symmetrical, radiating outwards from UR in twinned CYCLES of (())() (mirrored expansion-retraction) so that the outer point [6a] converges with outer point [6b] as its inversion, creating a brief moment of occult ingress for a WAVE to travel from [6a] DAWN as augural SUNRISE to [6b] DAWN as inaugural GENESIS. Perhaps I am forced into this thought by the strange path my research has taken of late, but I cannot help but see here the twinning system of Kusta ben Luka’s notorious DOUBLE GYRE.

The gyre system, as perhaps you are aware, was divulged to George and William Butler Yeats via demonic agents known as the Instructors, although the system’s terrestrial journey passes through a series of other carriers ‘before’ it gets to the Yeats’. To be distressingly brief, the diagram is a tool for scale-neutral augury, as well as invocation. (If this sounds familiar to you, I urge you read my articles 'The Riddle of the Al-Raschid Esoterica: Item 423' Journal of Occult Histories, vol.9, Spring (2012): 23-45 and ‘The Templexed Abomination of Terrestrial Modernity: Notes on the Spiral Codex of the Court of Harun Al-Raschid,' Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, (Sydney: CCNESA, 2012): 99-140.) One thing my research has taught me is that time is never straight-forward and I am convinced that your intimations of HYPERCAMOUFLAGE are not misplaced. From experience I can tell you that CHRONOCAMO is always in effect when DAWN and DAWN meet in PLEX, confirming your suspicion of an occulted numerical agent. 

This was among Linda’s papers (part of an unattributed manuscript she had been annotating):

‘To be inside history is to have a relation to Chronos. Yet (universal) history is not itself chronological. Pure Chronos - the State’s (synchronic) time - can never be fully-realised, for two reasons: there is always more than one State, and the State (as a form) is always in a relation with the time-systems of the two other social regimes (the primitive socius - which “precedes” it - and capitalism - which “succeeds” it). “Before appearing the State already acts …”. (ATP) The State appears “all at once” as history’s only break. ... Crashing into history, the State sets off time waves that move in both directions at once. “It is necessary ... to conceptualize the contemporaneousness or coexistence of ... the two directions of time - of the primitive peoples ‘before’ the State, and of the State ‘after’ the primitive peoples - as if the two waves that seem to us to exclude or succeed each other unfolded simultaneously in an ‘archaeological’, micropolitical, micrological, molecular field.” (ATP)’