“Metaphysical revelations begin only when one’s superficial equilibrium starts to totter…”
– E.M. Cioran
“…the consolation of horror in art is that it actually intensifies our panic, loudens it on the sounding-board of our horror-hollowed hearts, turns terror up full blast, all the while reaching for that perfect and deafening amplitude at which we may dance to the bizarre music of our own misery.”
– Thomas Ligotti
“When early youth had passed, he left
His cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands.”
– Alastor, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Hegel once told us that the “aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world of its strangeness and to make us more at home in it.” But what if the opposite were true that the real aim of knowledge is to invest the objective world with abject strangeness and to alter our mode within it as pure homelessness?
Homeless voids roam the empty abyss of this universe licking up light from the swirls of galactic clusters surging round the infinite drift of dust and stars; black holes like the gods of some delusionary dream shuffle among the broken quasars seeking out the dark filaments of superfluous suns, each cannibalizing the light of a thousand civilizations on the edge of cosmic nothingness.
The Trauma Factory
“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal…”
– H.P. Lovecraft, The Tomb
Behind our eyes are those of the tiger, wolf, dolphin, elephant, and mustang and all those animals and insects of the terrestial dream; the shifting gazes of a million life-forms spread their light among the dark contours of this sensible self. The mutable surface of skin hides the innumerable macrophages who defend the black inner realms like the militia of a defensive army, engulfing the cellular debris and pathogens of a terrible desire; and the bacterial denizens of this wet oceanic life in symbiotic resistance break down the ancient predatorial and vegetal vitality that invades the blood and acidic cavities, each mobilizing its own secret agenda without benefit of agent, goal or purpose beyond the sacred power of teeth chittering in the hive. The inertia of metalloid biotics collides with the fractured resilience of this strange flesh like a musical score played upon some stellar harp spread across transfinite dimensions, bleeding into this space of time giving birth to the shape of a spectral delusion that is beyond the human form.
Over the years wandering the sub-cultural delirium of dark alchemical mutant dataclash like ccru, conspiracy theory, bizzaro, weird tales, horror, gothic, noir, pulp etc. one gets the feeling that what is being related, although not empirically true nor part of some vast collective reading of the unconscious psyche of the planetary psychosis, is rather the notion of a world-wide Trauma Factory. As if there is a productive system of necrotic knowledge systems producing cosmic nihilism and despair, nightmares and consensual hallucinations; populist narratives gathering threads from every form of deranged mediatized corruption and fetid unknown shadow world; absorbing, collating, revising, narrativizing and republishing for mass consumption the fears and geotraumatic events of our age. Theory-fictions: all the subtle horrors and aberrations, sociopathic and/or psychopathic invasive natural and transnatural installations from the great Outside. Broadcasting not the actual but rather the virtual inlays of a traumatized civilization and species as it faces absolute extinction at the hands of its own secret death-drive toward apocalypse and annihilation.
Fantastic: Recent Posts, Book Reviews, Essays, etc.
- Joe Koch: Good Paper – from Convulsive: A Collection of Weird Tales
- Thomas Ligotti’s Politics of Despair
- Mutant Grotesquerie: Richard Gavin’s Monstrous Vision
- S.P. Miskowski: The Worst Is Yet To Come
- Michael Griffin: Armageddon House
- All the Things We Never See by Michael Kelly
- Phantom Airfields – Christopher Slatsky
- Christopher Slatsky, Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales
- Matt Cardin: Master of the Fantastic
- Philip Fracassi: Behold The Void – First Thoughts…
- John Langan’s Sefira first impressions…
- The Eruption of Chaos: Horror Literature as an Anaretic Inferno
- The Evil Eye: On Apotropaic Horror
- The Truth of Horror
- Michael Wehunt: A Review of Greener Pastures
- Fantastic Homelessness: Sacrifice, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Horror
- “Modern † Gothic”: Farah Rose Smith’s Anonyma
- Simon Strantzas: Antripuu a Folk Horror Story
- Flannery O’Conner: The Delusions of a World
- Thomas Ligotti: The Abyss of Radiance (Publication in process
- Jon Padgett: The Secret of Ventriloquism
- Thomas Ligotti: The Red Tower
- Christopher Slatsky, Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales
- Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance
- Discovering Crypt(o)spasm – Gary J. Shipley: The Madness of Abstract Horror
- Thomas Ligotti: Dark Phenomenology and Abstract Horror
- Cosmic Horror: Spinoza, Poe, and Lovecraft
- Rethinking Conceptual Universes
- Clark Ashton Smith: Visionary of the Dark Fantastic
- The Dark Gnosis of our Malignant Uselessness
- The Darkening of Macon Tobin: Part One
- The Weird and Eerie: Paradox of the Anomalous Outside
Fantastic Chronology
- Fantastic Chronology: A List (8th Century to 1900) Part One
- Fantastic Chronology: A List (1800 to 1850) Part Two
- Fantastic Chronology: A List (1850 to 1899) Part Three
- Fantastic Chronology: A List (1900 to 1949) Part Four
Fantastic Authors: Appreciations
- Achim von Arnim(1781 – 1831)
- H.P. Lovecraft: Aesthete of Cosmic Fear
- H.P. Lovecraft: The Spectral Art
- Clark Ashton Smith: Visionary of the Dark Fantastic
- The Smile at the Foot of Time: The Enigma of Judge Holden in Cormac Maccarthy’s Blood Meridian
- Cormac Mccarthy: The Judge’s Sermon of Fire and Fire
- Gary J. Shipley: Theoretical Animals
- John Barth: The Elegance of Exhausted Possibilities
- Jorge-Luis Borges: Tlon and the Hronir; and, The Immortal
- Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Science Experiments: Information from the Future
- Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky: The Fantastic Stories of Russia
- Stanislaw Lem’s Proof of an Independent Reality
- The Miserablist: Thomas Ligotti’s Puppet Philosophy
- Epicure of Pessimism: The Horror of Thomas Ligotti – Part I
- Epicure of Pessimism: The Horror of Thomas Ligotti – Part II
- The Stack as Alien Intelligence & Governance
- Nick Land: Phyl-Undhu: Abstract Horror, Exterminator
- Thomas Ligotti: Dark Phenomenology and Abstract Horror
- Thomas Ligotti: Epicure of Pessimism – Part III
- Thomas Ligotti: Speculations in Black
- The Nemocentric Vision: Thomas Ligotti
- Thomas Ligotti, Miami: The Collapse of the Real
- Thomas Ligotti: The Horror-Maker
- Thomas Ligotti: The Frolic and the Wyrd (Weird)
- Thomas Ligotti: The Order of Illusion
- Thomas Ligotti: The Vignettes of Horror
- William Burroughs: Paranoia as Liberation Thanatology
- Joseph Conrad: The Nameless Woman – Queen of Night and Darkness
Essays on the Weird
- Michael Cisco and Weird Fiction
- Fear of the Unknown: The Heart of the Weird Tale
- Vladimir Nabokov: The Wood Sprite
- The Dark Fantastic: The Wild Lands of the Monstrous Other
- The Mad-Hatter Returns… (Notes)
- Fantastic Politics: Subversion, Symbolic Order, and Exit Strategy
- The Daemonic Imaginal: Ecstasy and Horror of the Noumenon
- David Roden: Aliens Under The Skin
- Warren Ellis on the Silence of the Net
- Gateway to the Real: Lovecraft, Ligotti, and the Inhuman
- The Paraxial Realm: Dostoevsky’s Fantastic Truth
- The Transgressive Fantastic
- On Fantastic Horror and Cosmic Nihil
- Surrealism and H.P. Lovecraft
- Dark Vitalism and Lovecraft’s Philosophy of Nature
- The Post-Nihilist Sublime
- The New Fantastic: The Carnival of the World
- The Neon Demon: Decadence and the Art of Darkness
- Angel of History vs. Demon of the Future
- In the Uncertain Realms of the Fantastic…
- Secular Mysticsm: Pharmakon, Ritual, and Pain
- Short History of Necropunk Philosophy
- Hyperstitional Closure: Historical Change as Retro-Virus
- Lee Braver on Philip K. Dick’s “Ubik” as Postmodern Gnosticism
- The Philosopher as a Young Madman
- Franco “Bifo” Berardi: The Joker Steps Out of the Mirror
- Nick Land: Philo-Fiction, Chasm, and the Abstract Manifesto
- Eugene Thacker: The Horror of Philosophy
- Eugene Thacker: In the Dust of this Planet
- Depressive Realism: Psychosis, Solipsism, and the Real
- Chasing the Void: Modernity, Abstraction, and Aesthetics
- Time’s Prisoners: Nietzsche, Burroughs and the Rift
- Toward a Non-Conceptual Fantastic
- On Fantastic Horror and Cosmic Nihil
- A Fondness for the Damned
- The Mad-Hatter Returns…
- Mash-ups, Rhizomes, Funereal Surgery…
- The Satyr’s Play
- Joseph Addison: The Fairy Way of Writing
- Our Necrophilic Culture of Doom
- Creative Destruction: The Age of Metamorphosis
- Nick Land: Philo-Fiction, Chasm, and the Abstract Manifesto
- The Cosmology of Nick Land: Bataille, Gnosticism, and Contemporary Physics
- The Curse of the Sun: Libidinal Materialism as the Composition of the Universe
- The Horror of Thought and Dark Pantheism
- Emile Cioran: The Fall into Time
- Emile Cioran: On Sainthood as a Form of Despair
- Graham Harman: An Ontology of Forces and Actions
- E.M. Cioran on Borges
- E.M. Cioran and Slavoj Zizek: A Difficult Gnosis
- E.M. Cioran – The Irreparable Uniqueness Of Things
- E.M. Cioran’s Revenge: The Triumph of Failure
- E.M. Cioran: The Delusions of our Sadness
- La Sorcière: Jules Michelet and the Literature of Evil
- Meditations in Black (1) – Aberrations of the Impossible
- The Occult Revival – Literature, Hermeticism, Magic and Philosophy
- La Sorcière: Jules Michelet and the Literature of Evil
- Fredric Jameson On David Wittenberg’s “Time Travel: The Popular Philosophy of Narrative”
- Paul Virilio: The Anti-City
- Topology of the Unknown: A Fantastic Anthropology
- The Grand Illusionist: The Non-Existent Self
- The Folds of Horror: Notes on Ligotti, Lovecraft, and Philosophy
Current Work in Progress:
- More Alive Than Dead: A Fantastic Tale
- Shadows and Dust
- The Gnome
- Dr. Rinaldi’s Labyrinth of Horrors
- The Horned One’s Dilemma
- Oblivion’s Paradiso