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.
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 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 throughout 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 life 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 of interpretations through the invisible voids it omits in its incomplete insinuations.
The unpleasant truth of death is that it does not tend to 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.
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 or 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 forms of art have followed and fallen from the very same arc in which they had emerged from some other decaying form, began to evolve into a form more full and well defined, rose to some pronounced artistic peak in which their form became almost entirely fixed, then redundantly re-replicated, diluted, and reduced their once singular summit-state, unconsciously causing each art-form to fester in standardized stagnation as they self-mimetically mocked their own farcical final-state until there was nothing left to resurrect from any dying art beyond some necrotic nutrients another unborn art may begin to absorb by some necromantic act if it were to emerge anew…
Forgive me if I appear 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 the 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 have chosen to construct 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 is 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 wasted away in depression and decay rather than acting in any accordance to the truths of life they espoused? How many tomes consisted of the same truths that had been dredged out of other entombed tomes, only to be transplanted like fossils into a festering pile of lifeless pages? How many readers dwindled away in disinterest or distraction until they became an extinct or emptied 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 like dead-skin stripped in an advanced state of post-mortem decay by some maniacal mortician who 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 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 miraculously caustic pseudo-substance that can dissolve and cleanse both the immaterial and material world. Even a mere insult can cause fissures to split through one’s mind and summon a hand to slice along the course of arteries that spill blood into oceans of dissolving sorrow. The right words can also corrode through entire mansions of stone-clad lies that have long held firm against every other eroding effort and reveal those hidden truths that had been tortured and enslaved to such sinister shadows. They can cleanse the corruption of eons and return civilizations from their contemptible collapse. Words can also breathe new life into the most broken breaths and preserve the sarcophagi of potent spirits eternally. But words can also corrode away even their own rhetoric, along with all they aim to purify or restore.
All that shall ever be written will itself become an epitaph at the eschatonal end. Until then, words will only spell the shadow-spells of history, that pervasive, Pavlovian lore of whatever words had resuscitated and reincarnated as egregores of all we ever imagined in existence. And every present moment and every impending future are rooted in that same sullied soil of ever-corroding repetitions of words that dissolve or imbue us with the past as they nourish and re-decompose what emerges there eternally.
But while there are still sets of eyes which may 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 actually just the right nourishment for our inmost spirits, for when one reads, the mind consumes the essences of words in ways that fuel the soul to imagine and incarnate life from the cadaverous shells of their 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 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.
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 souls.
Of course, this where my warning becomes as dire as any death. For it is within these same shadows where 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 must be bold to read and resurrect, as those stygian kingdoms have 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, experienced 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 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 do pray and prey upon my self-illuminating eyes, whose essence is to be echoed and inscribed unto your own eyes, lowered but unblinking here…
“Let no one follow in these footsteps, lest they become their own.”
*NOTE: "Caustic" is meant to be a reprinted title, based on an artifact-book. The artifact's pages were constructed from human skins which were somehow chemically treated to whiten and remove tattoos before being stretched and formed into parchment. Its ink contains a genetically modified form of human blood, somehow engineered to remain perpetually bioluminescent. (The ink continues to glow post-mortem, even now, after an indeterminate number of decades/centuries). The binding of this book is believed to be a combination of fibers woven together from both an unknown variety of banana trees and human sinew that had been softened by partially dissolving it in a dilution of caustic.
