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'.

Initiation

'To call up a demon you must learn its name.' — Gibson, Neuromancer 

'There is no return for one that has started on this path.' — Crowley, Liber CCCXXXIII, §23.

'The beginning is the end.' — Heraklitus, Fragments, §70

It is Friday evening in the Deadlines bar, informal lair of a certain slice of Pacific Rim society, driven into loose conspiracy by nothing stronger than a vague sense of exodus from other, more legitimate loci of macrocultural conviviality. Only a few tables boast occupants. Improbable combinations for the most part: professional con artists, arms-dealers, off-the-clock sex workers sheathed in glittering but deadly nano, a few ragged pseudo-intellectuals wired on the newest blackmarket nootropics, stim addicts, at least one well-connected yet morally dubious politician ... and the usual handful of literary dissolutes, momentarily dissolving their special brand of self-directed despair in the bar's unusual cocktail menu, a master-catalogue of neurological sabotage that seems to have been decanted directly from the Book of Lies. The bartender appears to have a cybernetic arm, although—as with all the latest Shenzen somatech—it can be hard to tell. The inorganic provenance of the red glint in its eyes nevertheless remains overtly readable, for ostentatious effect. Screens blink lethargically in various neon hues from the depths of the bar. The lighting is uneven, fluctuating unsettlingly as regions of dense smoke from the archaic analogue cigarettes certain patrons refuse to abandon migrate across the ceiling. The cumulative effect is that of a blinking cursor, calmly awaiting input. 

It's only my second time here. I find the place intensely troubling, yet somehow irresistible. I was handed the address almost entirely by chance after cementing an online exchange with a dyslexic tech dealer who, fatefully, mis-transcribed the sixes in the pick-up address as nines. After realising the mistake, I nonetheless resolved to remain and observe the clientele. Some kind of literary meeting was underway at the time and the participants were reading samples of their work to one another. It seemed opportune, as I considered myself somewhat of a failed poet and was on the point of abandoning my practice for more, let's say, respectable pursuits. So I settled in at the bar, savouring the temporary anonymity afforded by the situation, ordered one of the abominable cocktails on offer and began, as discretely as possible, to listen in. It wasn't long before the discussion converged on something I would come to find peculiarly relevant to my current predicament. The problem of beginnings.

The conversation went roughly like this:

“‘Beginning is the most difficult thing.’” 

“That’s it?”

“Yes, those words, exactly.”

“Double embedded?”

“Surely, yes … That’s all it takes. Then it’s happening.” 

The catalyst for this exchange seemed to be the work of an absent, little known horror-porn writer, referred to by one of the conversants (who appeared to me, despite the seediness of the environment counselling against the propriety of such a conclusion, to be a high-ranking Party member) as 'Mary Karno'. Karno had an unusual practice, something that had been inadvertantly divulged to the latter via an explicit video recording, obtained, without Karno's knowledge, via some kind of Party-sanctioned spook rig. Karno was, obviously, an intense writer, so much so that the simple utterance of her name seemed to usher a strange energy into the room, something I wasn't entirely ready to attribute to the hallincinatory effects of the cocktails I'd been demolishing with increasing diligence. She seemed to hover over the space, electrifying it, as if her very absence functioned as a kind of presence in itself. The suspected Party member continued his disquisition.

"It was all there, on the video. I actually watched her start a new story – two actually – open an immaculate notebook, with a giant question mark, jot down a few scrappy thoughts, cross-legged, meditating or some shit, then cross some kind of threshold – you could see it, as if something had cut through her body, switched her – and then she seriously set to work, patiently, full of – what the fuck do you call it? – intention, rolling back the rug, chalking a huge diagram on the floor, all swirls and numbers and ancient evocations, then building what I can only describe as a voodoo shrine, pasted together out of candles, clippings from poetry books, kitchenware, pictures, drug paraphernalia, bits of dead animals, and electronic trash. She’d get up, wander around the number maze in loops, muttering some cryptic stuff, in a whisper – the audio was too crap to pick it up – then back to the shrine, shifting pieces about, nudging it towards convergence. It was mad as fuck, obviously, but the horrible thing was that I began to pick up on the purpose, I could see it coming together, like a wave out of hyper-space, the necessity of it, I just couldn’t stop watching, seeing it arrive. I mean, holy fuck. And then a jolt went through her, harsh and electric. She snapped out, crossed over to her laptop, and typed in the name.”

By now I had taken out my tablet and begun, as surreptitiously as I could manage, to make notes. A decision, mind you, I would only perceive the utter fateful recklessness of long after it was too late to take any of it back. The key components of Karno's method seemed to be a diagram and the extraction of a name. Beyond this, the act of writing appeared to unfold automatically. From what I could gather, Karno had recorded, cryptically, the details of this process in an essay entitled Ascryptions: Practices for Writing on Reality. The effect of this information was akin to learning of the existence of a newly synthesised drug. I wanted to try it ... and I left the bar that evening full of naive ambition, swearing that I would do anything I could to get hold of Karno's essay and experience the thing myself. 

I will spare you the details, save to say that it took a lot longer to obtain the text than I had initially hoped, and I'm not one who usually has trouble procuring contraband items. The essay opened me up to an experience of ... well, to an experience I had not thought strictly possible. That sounds trite, but let me assure you, it is true—to the utmost extremity of unfathomable ruin—and if I could undo the damage it has since wrought, I might just reconsider. Might. For Karno's method works. The question is how long one can continue to survive it and return—intact—to write. Maybe that stops mattering after a while.

A beginning is also an initiation. Necessarily decoupled from the tyranny of linear time, that is—when cybernetically understood—'beginning' indexes something like 'an initial kick'. Similarly, an initiation, properly carried out, cannot be undone. Both processes are collapsible into a simple diagram, one that I have come to use more and more in my own experiments: that of a spiral. In the essay, Karno writes, somewhat unintelligibly, of a 'communion with the Outside'. Perhaps, most curiously, her references to 'the Outside' are always couched in positive terms, construing the effective difference (between the writer and that which they struggle to capture, the self and the Other, the identical and the nonidentical, phenomena and noumena, inside and out—however one wishes to characterise it) in an entirely alien way to the one I had been forced to study as part of an initiation of an altogether more banal kind—always defined in terms of the negative – and pedalled by a certain variety of religious zealot, the ridiculous canon of which had detained me for far too long in my attempt to understand the various dynamics of creative and social processes alike. No, Karno's Outside was truly different ... it was difference in itself. Its positivity blazed like a dark beacon in a world of increasingly insufferable illumination. For her, the modality of this communion was to be understood as one of affirmation. One that folds the outside into the inside—somewhat erotically, it must be said—via an act of ultimate, emancipatory, submission. (SUBMISSION, I would later learn—as my adeptness in certain magical practices grew—is embedded numerically in the word ASCRYPTION.) This is, necessarily, an involuted process. One cannot simply covet communion with the Outside and expect that, by desiring it in its difference, it can be easily subsumed. That would be to understand it negatively ... not to mention being far too straightforward and not nearly horrific enough for Karno's tastes. The real mechanism is more akin to apprehending the fact that it has been part of you all along—hiding—just beyond the lip of the fragile equilibrium that constitutes whatever it was you took to be yourself, perpetually poised to tear that superficial construction to pieces. It suffices to disturb the balance just a little to ignite it, or more clearly, grasp that it—in fact—is what ignited 'you' in the first place. The truly horrifying insight being that its emergence, when it does appear, is nothing other than a return. I was beginning to understand why critics called her work 'fundamentally unbalanced'. 

This, however, didn't answer the question of the diagram. 

Control 0: Alien Psy-Ops

'UFOs not only lack real existence, they demonstrate that everything lacks real existence.' — Sarkon

Jacques Vallée on Control:

'When I speak of a control system for planet earth, I do not want my words to be misunderstood: I do not mean that some higher order of beings has locked us inside the constraints of a space-bound jail, closely monitored by psychic entities we might call angels or demons. I do not propose to redefine God. What I do mean is that mythology rules at a level of our social reality over which normal political and intellectual action has no power.'

∇

'Vallée posits the idea of a "control system". UFOs and related phenomena are "the means through which man's concepts are being rearranged." Their ultimate source may be unknowable, at least at this stage of human development; what we do know, according to Vallée, is that they are presenting us with continually recurring "absurd" messages and appearances which defy rational analysis but which nonetheless address human beings on the level of myth and imagination.'

Social Technology

For Vallée, the UFO phenomenon - a uniquely 20th century interpretation of an enduring occurrence that unites, not insignificantly, archaic with futuristic imaginaries - consists of three levels: the material, the perceptual, and the social-semiotic.

'First, there is a physical object. That may be a flying saucer or it may be a projection or it may be something entirely different. All we know about it is that it represents a tremendous quantity of electromagnetic energy in a small volume. I say that based upon the evidence gathered from traces, from electromagnetic and radar detection and from perturbations of the electromagnetic fields such as Dr. Claude Poher, the French space scientist, has recorded. 

Second, there's the phenomenon the witnesses perceive. What they tell us is that they've seen a flying saucer. Now they may have seen that or they may have seen an image of a flying saucer or they may have hallucinated it under the influence of microwave radiation, or any of a number of things may have happened. The fact is that the witnesses were exposed to an event and as a result they experienced a highly complex alteration of perception which caused them to describe the object or objects that figure in their testimony. 

And then there is a third level, the social level, and the impact on our belief systems. At that level - and this is something that's very difficult to convey to the believers in UFOs - that at that level, it really doesn't matter whether UFOs are real or not. If enough people believe that something is real then, it is real, in its effects - in terms of its social reality, in terms of the ways people act according to their beliefs. 

That opens a question of - really, at two levels - could the UFO phenomenon be manipulating us? Could it be a teaching system of some sort? Perhaps something that we are creating ourselves - perhaps a series of images that we are projecting. I think Carl Jung came very close to expressing that idea in one of his books. Or could it be manipulated purposefully by people who have the technology to simulate UFO sightings? People say "Of course not! Who would do a thing like that?". Now I would remind you that during the Watergate investigation it was discovered that there was a plan which originated in the Whitehouse to surface a submarine off the coast of Cuba and project the second coming of Christ over the island of Cuba using holograms - which is well within our technological capabilities today. The idea was that since there is a large Catholic population in Cuba they would be so upset by this vision that they would saturate the communication channels - the telephone system - long enough for an invasion to take place. It's a classic in psychological warfare that that kind of manipulation is well understood, and I have personally investigated several apparently genuine UFO cases where the the main conclusion - the conclusion of the scientists working with me - was that there was in fact a manipulation taking place and that it was not a hoax on the part of the witnesses but a hoax on the part of somebody much better organised than them.'

First Retroaction

Everything lately has been rush and weft, writing an impossibility. Nevertheless, I thought I’d drop by what I can muster; a few quick notes to report on the current [and still nascent] research finally underway here at the Institute for Contaminative Method [CM]. There has been much to occupy me following my recent forced relocation, a violent expansion of possible investigations, only exacerbated by the interventions of satellite investigators. Welcome though they are. In general, the tendency has been towards what one such agent has recently named mode délire: the conviction that the farther one extends beyond the bounds of ‘sense’, the more pressing the need for rigour in extending these vectors. The aim cannot only be the production of nonsense. Beyond the embrace of delirium as method, I am interested in something altogether steelier: method as delirium. Perhaps this is something around which all of us here at 0AZ can constellate.

However, method requires material. In this respect, a vital inducement has been the recent discovery of some scattered work signed ‘Yeter Çaba’ in the University of Canberra archives, an event already hinted at by Fi. Although some others at the Institute have remained sceptical of these fragments, me and |end| have been pursuing their consequences with mounting excitement. The Çaba papers, from what we have been able to discern thus far, are concerned with the development of some mongrel logic for retroaction [henceforth abbreviated to LoR, although see [note 1]. Its utility is certainly suspect, its coherence even more so. Despite [or perhaps because of] this, the notation has a certain appeal to it. At the very least, its apparent purpose - a minimal formalization of potential organisations of non-linear causality - is an urgent one. Excavation seems merited. Whilst questions remain as to the providence of the documents, we have largely bracketed these in favour of extending Çaba’s initial systematisations to their terminus.

Such an extension is however complicated by ambiguities of intent. At least in the documents we have examined, Çaba’s elaboration operates on the level of pure syntax. It develops a closed systems of arrows, each supposedly relating to a different temporal determination. However, semantic interpretations of the arrows remain contentious. We know a little of how they relate, but are less certain of what they ‘mean’ [or if such a question is valid]. This has led, for the sake of comprehension, to apply the basic heuristic of reading the notation through the lens of first-order logic. Vigilance is key here, for certain results already suggest that this might be an overcoding of LoR’s syntactic autonomy. Despite this risk, such a frame has the benefit of giving an initial sense to the formalism. We can take the standard material conditional [if ---> then] and invert it, tracing a retroactive conditional of the form:

then ---< if

This notational innovation is the core of Çaba’s logic, from which all other proliferations issue. We can then read the plethora of additional determinations in Çaba’s scribblings as following this pattern of implication. For example, the first-order biconditional, A <---> B, ‘if and only if’ [iff], the familiar mark of necessity, has an immediate retroactive correlate:

A >---< B , ‘then and only then’ [thenn]

Other logical combinations of arrowheads can then be introduced at will, such as >--->, a relation we have dubbed the ‘Robin Hood’ or ‘Looper’. Further mutations then occur with Çaba’s introduction of a function of ambiguity, ---), and its correlate, ---(. It is as yet unclear whether these new signs [ ) , ( ] notate concrete undecidability/indeterminacy or some decomposable register of potentiality [an interpretational dilemma that has significant implications when introducing negation into the system]. In either case, what is clear is that these parenthetical marks are an index of possible becomings, such that:
) = > , ) , .

( = < , ( , .

This can be read as an [exclusive] list of ‘options’ open to a given parenthetical arrow. The introduction of the dot [ . ] here highlights one of the unique features of LoR: the lack of a mark constitutes a determination. Put otherwise, the empty space ‘around’ the arrows marks a failure of [conditional] relation. In its most extreme form, this function of the system introduces the potential to mark the relation of ‘there is no possible relation’, syntactically notated and semantically interpreted at follows:

A --- B , ‘nilponens’

Perversely then, one can say that the condition of nilponency is simultaneously the most and the least determinate of all temporal relations. Çaba’s final act of proliferation is then to introduce the notion that the arrowheads ‘stack’ at the point, a situation that we are currently taking to mark causal overdetermination or contradiction [whether these two interpretations in fact coincide is a stake that has yet to be adequately explicated]. In any case, the simplest form of this stacking yields the basic relation of contradictory cause, ---><, or the 'dialethal’.

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)’

The Tomb of Dead Hyperstition

‘As Cage says, it is of the nature of the plan(e) that it fail. Precisely because it is not a plan(e) of organization, development, or formation, but of nonvoluntary transmutation. Or Boulez: “Program the machine so that each time a tape is played on it, it produces different time characteristics.” So the plan(e)—life plan(e), writing plan(e), music plan(e)—must necessarily fail for it is impossible to be faithful to it; but the failures are a part of the plan(e) for the plan(e) expands or shrinks along with the dimensions of that which it deploys in each instance (planitude of n dimensions). A strange machine that is simultaneously a machine of war, music, and contagion-proliferation-involution.’ (ATP)

A nascent hyperstition (provisionally –––⦅ ) becomes a successful hyperstition ( –––< ) under certain specific conditions—carrier proliferation, cybernetic uptake, memetic vigour, insertion into functional circuits of long range positive feedback, mutant suppleness (or - ‘making itself up as it goes along’ [Carver])—all, significantly, beyond the control of the hyperstitional cyberneticist. As Marc Couroux (whose reality is yet to be rigorously confirmed) reminds us by way of NLP: “[t]here is no failure, only feedback” in an immanent system.

With success emphatically decoupled from control ('all planning is theopolitics, and theopolitics is cybernetics in a swamp') and pushed out into the unpredictability of the system itself, what does it mean for a hyperstition to ‘fail’? Do we know of any that have? (Where do they go?) Positive feedback is a basic requirement, but then what?

Truth and falsity fall into irrelevance as reliable measures of failure or success, for it is the effect of hyperstition to destabilize the oppositional relationship between these terms precisely by manufacturing the former out of the latter. Traditional epistemology is among hyperstition’s most prized victims. It is impossible to ‘be faithful to’ the plan(e), just as it is impossible to believe in the Numogram (or, indeed, refuse to believe in it). Such things do not exist (or consist) in a manner that licences ‘faith’, not in the least because the temporality of faith requires that something stable pre-exist its being believed-in—a continual looping back (to the plan). But co-production with unbelief is something different altogether and approaches much more closely the condition of nonvoluntary transmutation that causes the plan(e) to fail. Not having to enter into a relationship of belief with a hyperstition is an indicator of its potential success. On the other hand, a hyperstition that crosses the line by entreating belief is, perhaps, the only other possible capacity in which failure in the appropriate sense could be ascribed here. As soon as a hyperstition becomes believable it inaugurates the supplementary dimension that returns it to the plan and in that moment annuls its particular, programmatic function, crossing into ideology. Could we say, then, that for hyperstition—the failure of failure is failure?

To fail in failing is to stymie flows of contagion-proliferation-involution and allow the system to rigidify (or to attempt to govern the meme in any manner that circumvents its internal logic). Believability is escorted by sclerosis. Things need to be inverted, flipped, and twisted from time to time: diagrams, angels, plots. Circulation must be maintained at all costs...

The tomb of dead hyperstition is Heaven.