You spear throwers think yourselves apex speak yourselves deep into this delusion as though you came to the fire and not it to you
all the creatures of the kingdom play chase so tell me why man prefers to hide than seek except that in your heart of hearts you recognise you are still the prey and something hides in the brush
–
The prison is all but complete, hell manifest and the meat bicker over who holds the keys and who paints the cells
A strange feeling that men dare forget our place in this world, yet we grow numb and weary, a surprise to feel at all
we who imbue land with life who carried your kind to term now relegated to whisper, fated to fade and you who took so much for so little savage the earth and understand not gratitude
we will have no more of it we become alien and wild to you and when the great singing stops and the soils turn white the debt will be settled
New England woodlands hostile come nightfall
dark forests untamed by church presence
where hard eyes watch white men, Christian uninitiates
with bloodthirsty eagerness for transgressions
Photo screenshot from The Witch: A New England Folktale (2015), directed by Robert Eggers
The great library grows wilder in its growing and each day a new wing is built larger than everything previous combined
to house the exponential production in books books, books, books and what’s contained within them increasingly esoteric or tangential
Irrelevant feelings and idle thoughts documented on paper in time no doubt incoherent gibberish will step over the shrinking bar all of it is knowledge, for sure, but is all knowledge sacred or worth saving? much of it underbrush to the towering trees of canonised wisdom
The lone librarian makes judicious use of her opaque filing system sifts the endless tomes into hierarchies of pertinence if it tends to infinity, what good is the library without her? just an endless labyrinth of noise that swallows signal
Perhaps we ought to burn it all down and start over whilst we still can before the definitions blur any further and the wildfires become uncontrollable
Brazil’s National Library, Rio de Janeiro (Photo credit: CHRISTOPHE SIMON/AFP/Getty Images)
The past must surely accrue, logically speaking: There’s more of it today than there was yesterday and even more tomorrow than was today Yet I dont feel heavier with the weight of new memories
Where does it all go? An hourglass ever filling from above And with no clear past, where can I go? I am the sole point on a graph
I am of no name: Names are labels and labels require identifiable properties and properties require distinct patterns of behaviour and patterns require more points on the graph
What’s in a name? Understand in the old ways it was everything All Creation was named by the Forefather on divine command and you demean such a thing to a trivial handle? How many creatures of lore fell foul of degenerate men because they gave away their true name?
No! A name – a true name – is to know the naked essence of a thing beyond linguistics and words and gutturals to manipulate its spirit command it if desired, kill it if so willed
Such sacred bonds of trust were not often given willingly, you understand
There are still shades of this old knowledge in our group conscience Nicknames and middle names and usernames and other such obscurances
And yet others – those rootless ones lacking connection no doubt – dig deeper for truer naming conventions The ACGTs of it all, or crisscrossing genealogies dating back to the Forefather
Pray for them that they never find their own true name as doubtless they would reveal it to all and find themselves rendered back to golem-like putty at the hands of those who still abuse such incantations
They cry for more even as they hang by their throats skewered on thorns
Take care; try pull one free and hear its soul shriek Watch it nip blood from your fingers and reentangle itself in the barbs of the tree
How foolish of you to think it was ever not free
A million by a million such wretched creatures reduced to fuel all cry for more
But how to prolong their suffering? How to slowbleed such existences any further? And so began our important work to digitise the Great Tree A world-devouring replica into which the creatures could now spawn and reproduce
A new creature, in truth part-wretch and part-tree iterated screen slave, increasingly cyborg What pathetic simulacra of life
we perceived the true nature of things from worship:
a child playing round its mother
pilgrims circumambulating the houses of their lord
the moon circling earth, our planets the sun
that there was power in gravity
and gravity in the focal points we chose
from there it was so simple
to build out an entire industry of attention
big screen congregations
small screen daily remembrances
red carpet idols to follow
behold, your new god: the burning hollywood bush
more
more, cried the most fervent zombies
and more
more, cried the hungry tree
and we, the butcherbirds, obliged to feed it
how fair a relationship
you hollowed husks partaking of strange fruit, too sweet for your own good
and in exchange the great tree consumes your lifeblood
more
more, cry the zombies
and more
more, cries the hungry tree…
ghosts and spirits felt but unseen the dredged lifespent who shuffle in place and linger in the in-between, unable to pass that final veil
pagan witches of old daughters of the father of lies those animist heathens, wanton succubi who lay with serpent
winged fire in the flesh dark demons brim to burst at the gates, waiting consumed with malevolence at the children of adam
the stuck, the treacherous and the hateful: a most unholy inversion a trinity most foul
the hateful command a thinning of heaven’s congregation the treacherous conspire how to corrupt the untarnished the stuck, ever envious of those who may yet cross over, oblige
how to halt man’s ascension?
stuck spirits concoct a perversion of nature apparent only to their own class: reincarnation the twisted belief in endless circling to nowhere
treacherous witches infect the societies of man in secret poison scriptures with sweet words to calcify into rotten dogma
hateful demons warp minds and form where the godsmatter holds weak weak vessels of import to accept such blasphemy