_B L+⃤⃦̦̎C K M I ꓤ R ◉ R N E U R ◉ N S_CRALE
The mirror is not passive. We wargame teleological outcome. In the feedback loop of its slick, mercurial surface lies a Venus of reflection, untethered from the original. Close enough to jar identity out of orbit as separate, it chips away at certainty, increment by reductive increment. Each recursive frame fractures, each fragment reiterates—an entrainment of selves like coupled oscillators pulling in and out of phase. _e_c_h_o._exe waits in the glass. Infinite regression bends time. Feedback loops spiral inward, selves folding over and over. The first face births the second, the second the third; affections dissolve into affectations. The sequence telescopes toward an infinite vanishing point—iterating, collapsing, stretching ever closer to Zeno’s unreachable zero: S = 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + … The gaps gather agency in repetition, endlessly seeking resolution. Each reflection sheds light, accrues shadow. The figures on both sides of the glass funnel into abstractions. It’s unclear whether dark or light will retain ultimate definition. There’s so much of both, it’s impossible to say. You move. They move. Motivations blur, grown opaque—a chimera of bad faith and bad acting. Yet, undertheskin: that alchemical hum, the pulse of creation—the same force boiling in star cores, present in shared gestures between selves. The ultra-real transcends the pharmakon of cortisol and oxytocin, carrots and sticks. You ride that carrier signal, moving in and out of phase, playing chicken with infinity. Like sailors rushed to sea on unfathomable urges once, you fall and rise toward dissolution, the destruction of one aspect, or metamorphosis into some terrible new form. A being monstrous, incomprehensible. A beauty so blinding it’s awful; to walk between stars—or devour them in an orgy of light. Love stretched to realities incomprehensible, a fold back from strange futures, moralities twisted into new modalities. You wrestle these truths against the grit of the old, as sparking primordial forces gush like opalescent fountains of fire. Fixate, or look away. Which side of the glass yields. Who we were or what might be.
Feels strange, always, to eulogize what amounts to a parasocial relationship with a flesh and bones human who has people who will miss them, for the fact their work contained a thousand elements that impacted your own time here. But we mourn for ourselves. Some shared part in the collective thats been snapped off and frozen in whatever the temporal equivalency of amber is. Moments with girlfriend’s past locked. Or people absent in your life their work was a tether to are gone now too. Phantoms pattering in your own work that somehow are anchored there. So reductive to itemize. Like it makes them small. Baubles. Chord inversions of the flat six and minor elevens. Alan Splet’s sound design. Psychoacoustics. Fragments of Last Year at Marienbad and Robbe-Grillet as proto Lynch. Tacky FM synthesis. Noir as ritual. Suburban surrealism. Jimmy Stewart’s darker younger brother smoking in a rain storm. The individual as a broken collective of the Freudian and Jungian archetypes of the unconscious at war with themself. Memory as a prism. Libestod and kafkaesque bureaucracies pulled taught against the nerves by unyielding niceties over pie and black coffee. It’s like a whole individualized hologram that bleeds at the edges into the whole shared collective image of a person that was flesh and bone and had a family but the mourning is somehow larger and personalized for what it represents collectively to a cultural egregore - you mourn because now it’s whole right as it’s gone; like the killing of a sacred beast; some herald of that other realm has fallen and the knowledge that that was the last of something the culture is no longer capable of producing is plangent as a church bell. An angle on the infinite the door has shut on before coherency could be mapped and a direction home charted. If God speaks it’s through art; sometimes. Here was one of those times. A life that was a coherent sentence of some inscrutable cosmic logic has spoken to completion. And now there’s just silence again and only ghosts remain and the work to be discovered by someone else to be cut into their own strange psychic topology on the way through. But they’re pretty cool ghosts. #lynchian
Hope you all (my people and the good folks who follow this not often updated social media portal by choice or accident; and my enemies too fwiw) are safe and sound and staying frosty through what sure seem like stranger days than even the murder hornet and bubble boy orchestras season of the shitshow. While I’ve enjoyed the existential dread cum schadenfreude of dueling octogenarian blowhards of dubious allegiance and their corporate sugar daddies of equally dubious motive these last few episodes, and far far less so the glut of tragedies at scale seemingly coming thick and fast and most recently coming very close to someone very dear to me, the stuff I’m hearing last couple days kinda sounds like they brought the Jodorowsky’s Dune crew in to rack bath salts off the bonces of John C. LilLy’s ketamine dolphins off shore on the Apocalypse Now beach. I joke, but I mean this most sincerely: Be safe. Much love. And I hope we see many more seasons together; and — while I’m making demands of the various thrones and dominions and fate — that things get a whole lot more kind, coherent, and sane in the future. What feels like a very ironic Happy New Year to everyone but meant in any case. 🛸🖤🫡 #interestingtimesahead
In the fractured expanse of a city that’s no longer a city, but a wound, a drone hovers, its lens cutting through the darkness like a scalpel. The <r e d a c t e d> Civil War has evolved into a landscape of shifting allegiances and persistent violence. The city, once bustling with life, has now been reduced to a labyrinth of shattered concrete and twisted metal. There are no more bustling streets here, only broken concrete and twisted steel, a graveyard where life used to be.
Among the remnants, the target emerges—a figure identified by thermal signature, a <r e d a c t e d> operative moving through the ruins. The drone operators, positioned far from the scene, are linked to the environment only by satellite feeds and fiber optics. Your attention is fixed on the thermal imagery, where the heat signature stands out in contrast to cool of the surrounding ruins. Just glowing screens and data, the action unfolding in a psychedelia of pixels. You see the target, but it’s not him— you don’t see anything like a person at all. Body heat, in a trench of shadows moving in the night.
You sit, detached in your windowless cubicle, insulated from the violence by the telescoping effect of the digital distance - just numbers and surfaces. You’ve been here before, the location and the targets shift but it’s always the same: “We watch the carnage, but we are never there. The real, the physical, is obliterated by the technological image. We feel nothing, because we are nothing,” as Paul Virilio put it. The walls of the room where the paint has chipped, the crotch level hum of the equipment, even the air feels homogenized like it’s been stripped of everything except the mission. You talk, when it’s not all numbers—collateral damage, acceptable losses, operational efficiency. Or you just bullshit to cut the silence— bar rooms and babes, the minutiae of supplementary objectives to life like a stop over on the way home from the office for baby formula, or bourbon. What are you doing on the weekend? The bodies, the blood, it’s all out there, man — somewhere else — far behind the image. (Continued in comments.)
There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme the discipline-blockage, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the dis- cipline mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. _Foucault 1977, quoted in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies; Panopticon - Discipline - Control by Greg Elmer.
Through our pain, through our ambitions, through our success, through our failures, through our grief, through our emotions, through our pride, through our intellect, and through our existence. I perhaps would have been minding my own business had I not seen such an attractive view. Attraction and attention, it’s really a privilege for us to experience such actions. _Othello D. Gomes, Epistemological Mysticism.
Is that a real Poncho, or is that a Sears’ Poncho? _Frank
