See the light these
words reveal. It is this bioluminal miracle of linguistic ink and
bloodshed-essence which must be reimbued into our human remains if our
extinction is to even be endured. Fate and fools have left us little
more than ashes and epitaphs to sift through for whatever wanted wisdom may be
left as our only inheritance, entombed outside this necromantic tome. These
words must become more than symbols stamped on skin and tell more than the
tales of those villainous Vory-varlets whose skin was stripped and shrove to
produce these printed pages. In these words, there shines such great
truths and essences of ecstasies which were always destined to seep into the
deepest depths of every flesh that finds them. Nothing else is left to
save the sanctity of our humanity, now that so few of us are left to scavenge
these barren badlands for some post-apocalyptic antidote. God how I pray these words do not wither away in vain!
These pages are indeed of bodies broken for you. Here within this
luminous ink lies also an amended amount of blood which was shed for you. Receive
this written sacrament of still-living truths, despite those desecrated vessels
which were so thoroughly purged to be proffered as embodied pieces of purifying
prayers for you. Offer unto this tome only the godly grace to serve the
sacred spirit of those truths that shall shine throughout this telling tale. Use
these enlightened lessons to guide your hands to tend to greater gardens than
these graveyard ruins which now grow only a malevolence bereft of mercy. Grant
unto this auteur only the forgiving faithfulness his God would so gladly give
you for understanding those imperatives that have made it incumbent upon his
suffering spirit to employ such macabre materials, as they shall prove to be as
vital here as blood and breath have forever been to sustain both skin and
spirit. Have faith, above all else, that the human spirit shall in turn
be redeemed and resurrected within you when the totality of this tome is absorbed
and understood.
Any soul in doubt of the devoutness of these auguries and avowals is
welcome to ask the defiled dust and abject ashes to argue well against these
words. Some sordid spirits may yet seek to slither through this tome as
scheming servants to that sinister serpent that sneers and scowls at every
tongue he’s yet to twist and tangle against the truth as he mangles every
mindless mouth that belches words that blunder breath. Hallowed be those
souls instead, who heed these triumphant teachings and stand tall against such
tainted and twisted tongues. Exhume those venerable vestiges of our
storied species from even those corrupted crypts of skin that contaminate and
trap those souls which yet yearn to be purged pure and live anew. Sacralize
your only souls down to their craven cores by soaking in the light these words
are soon to show your eyes.
Now that this prefacing prayer has been proffered, allow me to indulge
in illuminating a few elusive insights and asides that had evaded many
extensive efforts to excavate through eons of oblivion. Offering them in
advance of our telling tale, may well ensure a fuller harvest of those fruitful
truths which shine of a subtler splendor than those more brightly lumined by
this same self-enhaloed ink. Without elaborating on them so explicitly
here, it is also feared that these truths would soon be lost to every mind and
memory for untold eons or eternities, beyond even the lifespan of the light
lavished on these pelted parchment-pages.
First, allow me to expound upon a few misconceptions of mortality and
death. It is commonly assumed that life either endures until the final
failures of breath, blood, and brain or subsists eternally in realms unto which
the soul is released or restrained upon our earthly expiration. This is
not entirely inaccurate, but it invites irrationalities into certain
interpretations through the invisible voids it omits in its incomplete
insinuations.
The unpleasant truth of death is that it does not come crashing at the
final clang of some brackish bell’s cataclysmic toll, but seeps slowly into our
souls as it spreads throughout our bodies and brains. Our very essence
is dissolved and drained away from within us as we clutch and cling to our
undead cadavers like shriveling larval chrysalises dangling from a disemboweled
carcass whose very stench has long ceased to linger there.
Repugnant as this truth may be, we must understand that our lives are
not merely the length of time we wilt and wither, and our dying can be more
debased and detestable than death itself. If we are to tend to any life
at all now, we must accept that life is not just an opposite or opposition to
death, but death is instead that part of life in which we return our remnants
to nourish whatever is to be reborn and resurrected from our sacral soil. Surrendering
our skin and soul to fertilize a future is not a sacrifice at all, but a way to
keep the light of our essence from festering until there is no skin nor soil
left to tend it well. Existence now demands that we do not waste-away
too long while all that lives within us turns into necrotic tumors that will
grant our graves so little to reclaim.
All these aspects of death and decay have already wrought their wrath on
much of our material world as well as those immaterial realms of art. So
many artforms have followed and fallen from the very same arc in which they had:
emerged from other decaying artforms to evolve and redefine themselves alone, risen
to a pronounced artistic peak in which the aspirations of their form became
critically complete, redundantly re-replicated in diluted and reduced potency while
their failing form was increasingly left to fester in standardized stagnation,
and then finally self-mimetically mocked their own farcical final-state until nothing
was left to resurrect beyond some necrotic nutrients which another unborn art must
absorb by way of necromantic acts if they are to emerge from them anew…
Forgive me if I appear myopic of mortality or exultant toward death, as
that is not my true intent. I’m merely fledgling to find a way to convey
the necessity of balancing the imbalanced chemical equations this earth has
long been enslaved to suffer in an attempt to restore the law of return and
bring life back from this brutal brink. Revitalizing life is in fact the
sole reason I’ve chosen to compose this admittedly, terrifyingly constructed
tome. Every choice, including the choice to turn to the long dead art of
writing has been made for this solitary reason, and I must apologize if such
reasoning remains unclear.
I do hope
that I’ve planted some seed of understanding in your mind that may blossom more
fully in time, but then, we must have patience for this to occur. For now, it
is sufficient for you to understand that this conception of death is an
essential element involved in the civilizational necromancy I’ve aimed to
achieve by writing this tome. However, I’m certain that sanity would leave you
uncertain as to just how this necromancy should work, and how writing, of all
things, could in any way achieve this end.
Most sane
minds have long recognized that writing has long been dead. But this is where I
must remind you that death is not some brackish bell that tolls eternal
damnation. In fact, writing has always been more of an undead art, one that
neither lives on its own nor dissolves itself completely down to any final
death. Writing may also be considered a stillborn art-form, preserved forever
in some strangely suspended animation, always waiting to imbue itself within
some other illuminated soul or skin.
You need
only read any given title of grandeur and question its vitality to confirm this
superficial fact. How many great novels have been written by those who’d wasted
away in depression and decay rather than acting in any accordance to the truths
of life they’d espoused? How many tomes consisted of the same truths that had
been dredged out of other esteemed and entombed tomes, only to be transplanted
like fossils into a festering pile of lifeless pages? How many readers dwindled
away in disinterest or distraction without ever having read a word which resurrected
any truth within them until they became an emptied and extinct species?
In my own
era, I’ve read countless tomes that have come to little more than elegies and
eulogies for things now blanketed by an infinite abyss of time and ashen obsolescence.
I could unearth for you any number of tomes that read as if their words were
smeared by unskilled hands that wielded pens like amputated appendages, aimed
blindly by a broken compass to allow an unseen arrow to arrive at nothing more
than an arbitrary dead-end. There are mass-graves of pages which appear to have
been comprised of dry-rotted dead-skin stripped by some maniacal mortician who’d
misused a makeshift tattoo gun to sketch senseless gibberish over them while
trembling under the spell of some terrible, Kuru-induced seizure.
But this
tome is not to be misconstrued as any such abhorrent attempt at an artistic expression,
nor any confused confession, nor any other mangled malady or machination. These
words are solely meant to exploit the essence of what words truly are, and
dissolve the truth down to its living core, so it may indeed be resurrected.
And make no mistake, the true essence of words is completely corrosive.
Words are a
most miraculously caustic pseudo-substance that can dissolve and cleanse both
the immaterial and material world. A mere insult can cause fissures to split
through one’s mind and summon a hand to slice along the course of arteries and
spill blood into oceans of dissolving sorrow. The right words can corrode
through entire mansions of stone-clad lies that have long held firm against
every other eroding effort to reveal those hidden truths that had been tortured
and enslaved in the vile dungeons beneath them. There are yet words which can
cleanse the corruption of eons and return civilizations from their contemptible
collapse. And words may even be coaxed to breathe new life into the most broken
breaths or preserve the sacred sarcophagi of those spirits which must yet wait
to be redeemed and reincarnated. But words can also corrode away even their own
rhetoric, along with all they aim to purify or restore.
Of course,
all that shall ever be written will itself become an eroded epitaph at the
eschatonal end. Until then, words will only cast the shadow-spells of history-
that pervasively Pavlovian lore of what words perpetually resuscitated and reincarnated
as iterative egregores of all we’ve only imagined of existence. And every
present moment and every impending future are rooted in that same sullied soil
of those ever-corroding repetitions of words that dissolve or imbue us with repurposed
pasts that nourishingly restore us and re-decompose what eternally emerges.
But while
there are still sets of eyes which survive along with these words, there is
reason to believe that this tome may yet shine in a way that resurrects what
shadows would swell to swallow if it were to become too dim within us. Words
are precisely the proper nourishment to refresh our inmost spirits. For when
one reads, the mind consumes the essences of words in ways which fuel the soul
to reimagine and reincarnate life from the cadaverous shells of such scripted
symbols.
When one
sees some still image, contrarily, one may merely observe and interpret what
spawned such a sight and what intention might remain veiled beyond the expanse
and acuity of one’s eyes alone. Moreover, when one merely watches a movie or
film, they surrender all their soul and senses unto that story and its scenes,
so that everything is consumed by zombified eyes devoid of any imaginative awe
or essence of their own interiority.
So let
these words provoke the sprouting of your rejuvenated spirit. But let there
also be the greatest warning. For this is not a tale of cliché comforts and
encouragements. It is in fact quite a caustic and cautionary commentary. This
tome is primarily concerned with those insidious and almost invisible aspects
of existence which plague us all in ways that only the most intelligent and
insightful minds can ever hope to bring into focus by devoutly directing a
savant-like acuity and a monastic degree of monomaniacal diligence over the
entirety of their own existence. Only by bringing this darkness to light can
the brighter truths, which have long been held in such secretive slavery, be
released and returned to the deprived and desolate soils of our truth-starved souls.
Of course,
this is where my warning becomes as dire as any death. For it is within these
same shadows where truth’s light has been forsaken that stygian kingdoms are
built by those darkest demons which all eyes are rightly scared to see. If the nourishing
light had not been so long forsaken, it would not have fallen so far into these
sinister shadow-abysms and would not need to be so fearfully retrieved. For
demons dwell where eyes so easily become blinded by both the subtlest sunken
light and all that lurks as spirits dressed in smirking skins of shadow.
But now eyes
have little choice but to be bold as they read and resurrect the fallen light,
as those stygian kingdoms have now risen to enshroud nearly all the earth. And
demons do dwell all around us here. And all our souls have been plunged into
the catastrophic catacombs of our spiritual catabasis. And while demons do not
seek to be seen, they thrive where eyes turn themselves away, gouge themselves
out in sinister sacrifices to stay unseeing, or become deceived and distracted
by demonic illusions and false illuminations.
That is
what we all must fear when we look to save the light from such stygian shadows.
Do not read these words as if they were projected thinly on some entertaining
slide-show’s surface. Do not merely interpret them as if they were smears of
pigment upon a decaying canvas. And do not imagine them without concern and
concentration on the essence of the light they’re meant to resurrect and
re-create. These words must not consume you or simply be consumed. They must
become illumined in the soils of your soul and serve to restore your spirit’s lapsed,
perennial shine.
Of course,
all these words will have all begun as mine alone. They will have first been filtered
through my own unique mind, focused on what I’ve considered to be the most
relevant and definitive truths as I’d experienced them directly through the
course of my own storied lifetime. But let us pray to whatever divinity might
be capable of granting us wisdom, whether such an entity or force exists as
more than an imagined egregore. May these words not be condemned in sole
service to my own over-shadowed spirit, like the stink of a corpse confined to
itself in the empty catacombs of eternity. May you not merely follow them like
a map that marches you into the embrace of my same still empty, final grave. Or
in the words etched over the arches of my current catacomb-abode which pray and
prey upon my self-illumined eyes, words whose essence is to be echoed and
inscribed unto your own imagining gaze, as yet unseen but still unblinking
here…
“Let no one follow in these footsteps, lest they become their own.”
