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.

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. 

Risk

'To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law — to be linked with the vast outside — to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate — surely such a thing was worth the risk of one's life, soul and sanity!'

— Whisperer in the Darkness, HPL