Also, if these practices are explicitly hyperstitional, then they are, in a sense, collective – it matters little whether whoever is building the fiction up are members of some CCRU or a fragmented array of selves. Movement along the cognitive trajectory means both further fragmentation (through deterritorialisation of whatever selfhood is left) and synchronisation (maybe some “synchxenochronisation” of some sort actually – falling out of time in synch insofar as the collective operates as a functional unit – but merely as a functional one) among members of the “collective”. Movement along the cognitive trajectory would then enable progressive abandonment of whatever in language is considered regulatory or…well, simply useless for the course charted. Maybe that’s what happened back when Old Nick wasn’t dead. Who knows. Bottom line is – language is a straightjacket, but escaping it is a question of more than ditching syntax, writing in bizzare notations or speaking in tics (although I didn’t quite try this last option just yet…) It should be done strategically and intelligently, and I think such fictional practices contribute the escape. Anything this challenging is bound to happen slowly, though. Just you wait.

Also, agreed that Old One is a hell of a writer. One wonders why he writes anything but fiction sometimes (although maybe he does write nothing but fiction). I, for one, am still hoping for Cthellish Chronicles to make a return. That was so good.

It is my (amateur) sense that the theorisation of abstract literature on Outside In leans too heavily on the hallowed and somewhat conventional tradition of the Gothic novel to be really distinct from it (insofar as the genre can be distilled down to two principle traits: a particular mobilisation of descriptive language – atmospheric and architectural in inclination – and narrative ingenuity, with the twist as an exemplary figure). So I wonder if ‘abstract literature’, detached from its prevalent manifestation as (vestigially linear) narrative fiction and cast further out into peripheries of textual experimentation, could swell to encompass something like a ‘poetics of turbulence’, concerning itself with even deeper questions of form. Why persist with an intact syntax (for example)? Isn’t this already to presuppose some form of capture or regulation? The mortification of linearity at work above is exquisite (as usual) but surely there are further aspects of language available to evisceration or esoteric encipherment than narrative alone? When it’s done well, formal experimentation is the darkest of the literary arts.

Yes to Nyan Sandwich’s invocation of a 21st century Lovecraft – but a Lovecraft on the level of language, a Lovecraft whose monstrous capacity to provoke dread expands across the whole dilated economy of writing, a literature that not only describes but implements – at the level of language itself – Cyclopean cities of no architecture known to man or human imagination…

Srlsy tho, 140, you are one hell of a writer.

This: “With solemn inevitability, the shape – like a shard of broken fate, or a compact rift wounding the sky – drifted toward him across the pumpkin field.”

Reminded me of this: “And on the far rim of consciousness, a scurrying, a fleeting impression of something rushing toward him, across leagues of black mirror. He tried to scream.”

Gibson gets buried in your brain like some malfunctioning, inoperable neural implant.

And I once saw the devil’s face during a severe hypnogogic spasm. I might consider giving up half a cubic inch of gray matter if it meant being able to forget it.

Very tangentially related.

I want to read something so mind bending that it makes my brain ooze out of my ears. We need a spiritual successor to Lovecraft. Someone capable of taking the human imagination so far that it breaks down in gibbering denial of the mere conceivability of certain thoughts.

I don’t know who else that could be… Looking forward to more.

After 300 pages, one’s thought-processes would no longer be recognizably human. Then, it is time …