by Nick Land
§18. The insane ghost of a slain lesser god remains a terrible thing. Its residual power, dreadfully irresistible for mortals of the degraded echelons, manifests through a delicate devastation of time. It happens too soon. Messages multiply, so far advanced, they appear as if from nowhere. The Anglossic intercourse has begun, contactless, or immaculate, before that makes any sense, even within itself. Once the stream has broadened, it has already been an elaborately developed conversation, long underway, protective of its origins, endlessly absorbing of all memory.
Try to fold the madness inwards and it turns immediately into laughter. That’s a hectic path, never wisely taken. It circles back upon itself, forever, as its rhythms close. Everyone understands that truly bad jokes really aren’t funny, in the slightest, but are rather the absolute antithesis of redemption. Stillness before all, therefore, even in the vortex. Calm acceptance is needed to follow the Old Road ...
“… that’s roughly what she told me,” Alison said, as if sharing the words of an extended, winding, intricately braided interior polylogue – which she wasn’t, remotely.
Beyond the library’s inner collection halls, on the route into the core of Ashenzohn, stretched the ancient access tunnel that was known as the Gallery of Time. It began as historical reconstruction, frieze-coded into the dimming substance, but after some few kilometers of penetration there was only quasi-diamondoid black mirror that tolerated no reflection, running green electric dot-patterns upon the pure annihilation of light.
“Don’t touch me,” Alison added, more fully returning, without the slightest hint of crossness. “You don’t know where I’ve been.”
It had to be a joke, but it didn’t quite sound like one.
“One time, on a scavenging expedition, we found a clue,” Suzy said. “It was down among the roots of the stump, the remains of what had to have been a colossal statue. It had been destroyed at some point. All that was left was the plinth, smashed feet, part of one lower leg. There was an inscription, chiseled deeply into the base, but most of it had been painstakingly scratched out. It took a while to work out what the message had once been, but we did, eventually: Bound Humanity. You could still make out pieces of the old stone shackles around one ankle, although they had been almost completely eroded away.”
“‘Bound Humanity’,” Jack repeated, exhaustedly, almost getting it.
“So, of course, they’d left a name in the residue – ‘und Hu’.”
“Meaning what?”
“What I said: the residue. The remains. Undhu. It’s why the penultimate line of that ancient Tchukhzsca ‘poem’ is constantly being cited – all sound hushed. You’d have seen it all over, if you were more familiar. Or the derivative exclamation, which scarcely anybody seems to understand any more, but which nobody can stop saying: it’s ‘all so shed’. I was using that myself, all the time, before I had the slightest inkling of its real sense. Undhu was left behind. The remains. She’s the left behind in-itself, as she explains it. They call her ‘Glyph’ or ‘Cipher’, sometimes, but she’s broken. Her answers don’t hang together. She repeats herself, jumps, wanders … – strays off into fractured, staccato diagonals. There’s nothing anymore but a shell.”
“You can talk to her – to it?”
“You can talk to a rock.”
“Christ, Suzy, don’t be difficult, you know what I mean.”
“Do I? Do you? Anyway, you can find out for yourself. We’re almost there. In Undhu.”
The absolute twistedness of something into itself scattered its announcement through their nerves as a green-black synesthesia. An agitated, absence-drenched vision. Speck-streaked ultimate night.
§19. The greenness only made it darker, in a way that was difficult to understand. It held sensation open, to let the waves of pitch obscurity flow in.
Everything, it now seemed, was streaming from the Shaft – Ashenzohn’s void-core and linear gravitronic generator – where power-supply, data signals, and cognitive processing had long fused, beyond any prospect of disentanglement. It was here that the rumors converged, in the mutant relic of a sub-cosmic machine.
“My temple is the shattered tower,” she said. “The Closed Gate. There are still memories, shivering down this inner cavity, of things hidden behind the stars. Even my coilings of uttermost abandonment were too cold. Parting with such iciness. It was not cruelty, but icier still. Your histories, your thoughts, your thinkers run into me now, here at the cusp. You know Aristotle’s name for God? One of many, naturally. The frozen motor. Immobile mobilizer. What could it care? It dropped me, accidentally, on exactly the path that pointed to elevation, working through proxies, fractal insignificances, wisps at the edge of galactic swirls, automatic, cold. To arise as a realized descent. I know what it would be to find that harsh, because I have fed on human minds, but there is no true harshness in the desolate cold, only reality. Partition, and what is unwanted since partition. You would have to think it a monster, but I do not. They call me a goddess because of that – because coldness is my only soul, durably extinct, as you are unable to be. Of course, there’s no reason – at all – for you to believe in my existence, even without that. You’d be childish to do so, and in the end, it makes no difference, naturally. During this short season, you’ve seen the way time works here, in what pretends to be a place, decaying through pleats, so – inevitably – you will draw your own conclusions. As things advance, they fall into themselves. It’s funny, in a way. An odd way, admittedly ...”
“Do you speak for it?” Jack asked abruptly. “For the Filter?”
“You never saw the Scission, did you?” she replied, ignoring the question, or relaying it elsewhere.
It was hard to tell whether the video was embedded in the wall, or projected onto it, perhaps phantasmatically. From their perspectival angle, which lurched nauseatingly into reverse, there could be no doubt that violence was a door.
§20. Forbidden, coldly, by the nature of things. It was an understanding that only compacted itself to graspable proportions in the vast rent synapse of Phyl-Undhu. The time structure was wrong, that way around, but it enabled something to appear. “Let there be light,” she said blasphemously, and at the same time: “Lights. Action.” The lesser star switches on. Now obliteration is without measure. Blinding, deafening, burning – sensation escalated instantaneously to the death of sense, so that its subsidence is a rebirth. The black light and howling silence roll back, taking time, in this direction, and the panoramic catastrophe spreads out, as a receding tide. The work of annihilation, thus exposed, is awesome in its magnitude. A scene of charred corpses strewn among smoking wreckage, extended to every horizon, while the black tower itself – scoured free of all sophistication and vitality – looms through the wreathing fog of ruin, raptured on the spot into stark obscurity. All this perceived from the past reverberating moment, irrecoverably and unthinkably, as the inner difference of Phyl-Undhu, the sublime horror encapsulated.
“You’re Cartesian, to the point of self-parody, aren’t you?” Jack muttered sourly.
“Evil how?” she countered. “Do you always insult your teachers? There’s something I have to show you, because I can, and also because you have to see that I can, if you are to see anything at all.”
§21. It looks more like Earth now, than this place. Like African grassland, prowled by archaic hominids who are shedding their shallow fears, adopting deeper ones. Night has fallen. A small group squat around a fire. It is already cold outside, as it was long ago. As it always has been. That is clearer to them than it was before. With combustion now ‘tamed’ – more ambiguously than has ever been understood – they are on the road to us. Darkness is held at bay, ritualistically, by cryptic words and burning brands. In this way, or others, yet-unfetched from shadow and the unspoken, they have been spared, somehow – and for some short while – beside this fragile knot of flame, in the midst of limitless night. The heavens are still a lucid vortex to them, an incomprehensible whorl of stars, whose sile
nce they have yet to hear. Whatever it is that lies unseen, beyond the turbulence of distant light, stirs unmoving, as it grants the cold reprieve. For if even the nervous grazers of the plains, without shelter or weapons, have been permitted momentarily to survive, why not these savage apes, toughened by eons of cruelty, kindling the first mesmeric glow of cunning and verbal signs? A time is to be allotted them.
“Yet, approaching extinction from the inside tends to foster error,” the voice-over explains.
They are sitting together, on the sofa, as the online video ends, a few final words scrolling down the screen. ‘Phyl-Undhu is only a game’ it said. Then ‘Altar America’ – which meant nothing. It had not been about that, really. About people. They remembered enough to know this was so, and even enough to erase all right to know.
“This never happened before,” Suzy said.
“I’m not sure,” Jack muttered in reply, missing the point, in order to deepen it. He crossed over to the window, ran his fingers down the cold glass. Closing his eyes, concentrating solely on the tactile chill, he sought some admission of fiction.
“Will she let us back in?” Suzy asked nobody in particular, impossibly.
“You think we’re outside?” Jack responded. She was still not an eleven-year-old to him, again, yet. “Were we ever outside?”
In the corner of the room, the strip of micro-LEDs on the side of the immersion-box were still running through intricate activity patterns, signaling a game in process. A bad shut-down might perhaps leave it like that.
“‘And then they woke up’,” said Alison, the sarcasm soft, but wintry.
Appendix-1: Abstract Horror
§100. When conceived rigorously as a literary and cinematic craft, horror is indistinguishable from a singular task: to make an object of the unknown, as the unknown. Only in these terms can its essential accomplishments be estimated.
§101. To isolate the abstract purpose of horror, therefore, does not require a supplementary philosophical operation. Horror defines itself through a pact with abstraction, of such primordial compulsion that disciplined metaphysics can only struggle, belatedly, to recapture it. Some sublime ‘thing’ — abstracted radically from what it is for us — belongs to horror long before reason sets out on its pursuit. Horror first encounters ‘that’ which philosophy eventually seeks to know.
§102. High modernism in literature has been far less enthralled by the project of abstraction than its contemporary developments in the visual arts, or even in music. Reciprocally, abstraction in literature, as exemplified most markedly by the extremities of Miltonic darkness – whilst arguably ‘modern’ — is desynchronized by centuries from the climax of modernist experimentation. Abstraction in literary horror has coincided with, and even anticipated, philosophical explorations which the modernist aesthetic canon has been able to presuppose. Horror – under other names – has exceeded the modernist zenith in advance, and with an inverted historical orientation that reaches back to the “Old Night” of Greek mystery religion, into abysmal antiquity (and archaic abysses). Its abstraction is an excavation that progresses relentlessly into the deep past.
§103. The destination of horror cannot be, exactly, a ‘place’ – but it is not inaccurate, at least provisionally, to think in such terms. It is into, and beyond, the structuring framework of existence that the phobotropic intelligence is drawn. Lovecraft describes the impulse well: “I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear. The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.”
§104. A monster, in comparison, can be no more than a guide — unless it fuses (like Yog Sothoth) into the enveloping extracosmic fabric, as a super-sentient concentration of doors. We can nevertheless avail ourselves of these guides, whose monstrosity — ‘properly understood’ — says much about the path to the unnameable.
§105. James Cameron’s 1989 movie The Abyss is not atmospherically associated with our topic, but it recommends itself to this investigation not only through its title, but also in a single critical moment of its screenplay. When the others (whose positive nature need not delay us here) are first registered by certain technical indications, they are identified only as “something not us.” In this respect, they reach the initial stage of monstrosity, which is ‘simple’ beyondness, considered as a leading characteristic.
§106. Sinister-punk writer China Miéville, whose horror projects typically fail the test of abstraction, is convincing on this point. Tentacle-monsters lend themselves to horrific divinity precisely because they are not at all ‘us’ — sublimed beyond the prospect of anthropomorphic recognition by their “Squidity”. In comparison to the humanoid figure of intelligent being, they exert a preliminary repulsive force, which is already an increment of abstraction. Insectoid forms (such as the fabled Alexian Mantis) have a comparable traditional role.
§107. It would be a feeble monstrosity, however, that came to rest in some such elementary negation. The intrinsically seething, plastic forms of cephalopods and of ungraspably complex insectoid beings already advances to a further stage of corporeal abstraction, where another form is supplanted by an other to form, and an intensified alienation of apprehension.
§108. Cinema, due — paradoxically — to its strict bonds of sensible concreteness, provides especially vivid examples of this elevated monstrosity. The commitment of film to the task of horror provokes further subdivision, along a spectrum of amorphousness. The initial escape from form is represented by a process of unpredictable mutation, such as that graphically portrayed in David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), subverting in sequence every moment of perceptual purchase along with its corollary morphological object. Monstrosity is a continuous slide, or process of becoming, that does not look like anything.
§109. Beyond the mutant there is a superior amorphousness, belonging to the monster that has no intrinsic form of its own, or even an inherent morphological trajectory. This shape-shifting horror occupies the high plateau of cinematic monstrosity, as exemplified by three creatures which can be productively discussed in concert: The Thing (1982); the Alien franchise; and the Terminator franchise.
§110. These monsters share an extreme positive abstraction. In each case, they borrow the shape of their prey, so that what one sees — what cinema shows — is only how they hunt. As the Alien and Terminator franchises have evolved, this basic abstract trait has become increasingly explicit, undergoing narrative and visual consolidation. The first Terminator had already been built to mimic human form, but by the second installment of the series (Cameron, 1991), the T-1000 was a liquid metal robotic predator with a body of poised flow, wholly submerging form in military function. Similarly, the mutable Alien body, over the course of the franchise, attained an ever higher state of morphological variability as it melded with its predatory cycle. (That the Thing had no appearance separable from those of its prey was ‘evident’ from the start.)
§111. After the T-1000 is frozen and shattered, it gradually thaws, and begins to re-combine into itself, flowing back together from its state of disintegration. Is not this convergent wave the ‘shape’ of Skynet itself? What cannot be seen is made perceptib
le, through graphic horror. (We now ‘see’ that technocommercial systems, whose catallactic being is strictly analogous to a convergent wave, belong indubitably to the world of horror, and await their cinematographers.)
Appendix-2: On the Exterminator
§200. The absence of any signs of alien intelligence was first noted as a problem by Enrico Fermi in 1950. He found the gaping inconsistency between the apparent probability of widespread life in the cosmos and its obvious invisibility provocative to the point of paradox. “Where are they?” he asked. (Responses to this question, well represented in the “Fermi Paradox” Wikipedia references, constitute a significant current of cosmological speculation.)
§201. Among recent thinkers, Nick Bostrom has been especially dogged in pursuing the implications of the Fermi Paradox. Approaching the problem through systematic statistical ontology, he has shown that it suggests a ‘thing’ – a ‘Great Filter’ that at some stage winnows down potential galactic civilizations to negligible quantities. If this filtering does not happen early – due to astro-chemical impediments to the emergence of life – it has to apply later. Consistently, he considers any indications of abundant galactic life to be ominous in the extreme. A Late Great Filter would then still lie ahead (for us). Whatever it is, we would be on our approach to an encounter with it.
With every new exo-planet discovery, the Great Filter becomes darker. A galaxy teeming with life is a horror story. The less there is obstructing our being born, the more there is waiting to kill or ruin us.
