Based – very roughly – on a true story.

[Subsequent content carries a vulgarity and decadence warning, for sensitive readers.]

§00. Friday was fright night at my (virtual) place, and Deadlines was the most reliable source of inspiration. Most of the deracinated Shanghai morbid literature scene cycled through the place, but no one would be turning up for hours. So it was just Cal and me. We both had better things to be doing, which – as usual – we weren’t.
“‘Beginning is the most difficult thing.’”
“That’s it?” I asked, unconvinced.
“Yes, those words, exactly.”
“Double embedded?”
He tilted himself even further backwards into the deep leather chair, so that he was staring straight upwards into the attic rafters. His slow exhalation released a column of cigar smoke on an obscure expedition among the old beams. “Surely, yes … That’s all it takes.” Voice down-paced in dreamlike detachment. “Then it’s happening.”
If Calvin Lambsblood Dodd had written so much as a paragraph of horror fiction himself, it had been done in strict secrecy, without a hint of the fact escaping. Yet the attitude he now slipped into, once again – that of an authority on the topic of anomalous prose construction – had been adopted as if by instinct, and with seamless confidence. He was adept at it, undeniably.
It was hard not to smile, but my irritability was slow to dissipate. “‘Thing’ is wrong.” I closed my laptop, with calm theatricality, and finished my drink. “A beginning isn’t a ‘thing’. I use ‘thing’ too much already.”
Dodd squinted at me, his features micro-adjusted to some space between amusement and annoyance. “So you’re just going to bunker-down in your precious writer’s block?” He shrugged. “That’s OK. Let’s investigate the Thing, while we’re waiting for the others.” Then, indicating my glass with a slight re-angling of his head: “Ready for the next one?”
I glanced at my watch, knowing it would be precisely 3:33pm, and it was. Not that it mattered. “Sure.”
He caught the bartender’s attention with an absurdly feudalistic hand-gesture that concluded silently in two raised fingers.
“Dark Enlightenments again?” The softly-spoken words, ritualistically unnecessary, carried easily across the empty lounge. We both nodded in confirmation.

§01. A Dark Enlightenment – or ‘333’ – is a hell of a drink. Dodd had spent most of a weekend inventing it, immediately after the Include-Me-Out Club had first been convened at Deadlines. The base was some kind of rough ‘whiskey’ he had discovered in southern Yunnan, distilled as moonshine in the mountains. Each bottle served as the pickling jar for a giant venomous centipede, which tainted the liquor distinctively. The complete cocktail recipe, as far as I was able to tell, was:
2 shots ‘pede spirit
1 shot absinthe (for the wormwood)
1 shot black rum (for the extinction of light)
3 drops funestia
1 drop specially-concocted house ‘herbal tincture’
1 speck strychnine
Chili garnish
Absolutely no ice.
The psycho-active effects were remarkable. It was almost certainly illegal.

§02. Not that illegality was any problem for Dodd. Even if the Shanghai authorities had given a damn about self-inflicted brain damage in a private club, which they quite evidently didn’t, there was Dodd’s girlfriend, the ‘PP’, to manage things. PP was the ‘Party Princess’ (with ‘party’ referring to the Communist Party of China, rather than to anything more frivolous). People called her that to her face, and she didn’t seem to mind. Her real name was Jiang Yu, her uncle a senior cadre in the local party apparatus. Dodd met with him regularly, and they got along well. Boss Jiang’s security-related administrative position meshed well with Dodd’s specialism in organized decadence and unscrupulous trans-national deal-making. Their Party Nights were notorious.

§03. Cal was strictly a facilitator, and not a practitioner. It was a distinction he invested with peculiar significance.
“I don’t need to write. I don’t want to write. Fuck writing.”
“OK.” I had no idea where he was going. “So what about this?” I gestured vaguely towards the surrounding lounge, abstractly indicating the club. This was ‘the second drink’ exchange. We must have had it hundreds of times before, and each time it got worse.
He squinted at me suspiciously. “Honestly?”
“Of course.”
“‘Of course’,” he repeated, the sarcasm wound up to a peculiar, biting extremity. Recognizing that its object was unintelligible, he added, awkwardly: “Which ‘course’ would that be, exactly?”
Not only was the conversation increasingly hard to follow, his mood was deteriorating unpredictably. There seemed no way to extract myself from it. I took momentary refuge in a gulp of 333. “You build a temple to writing, and then tell me you’re not interested?”
“Oh, that …” he feigned nonchalance, took a drink, idly toyed with a cigar, put it down without lighting it. Then, as if restarting randomly: “I never told you about Mary Karno, did I?” It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t bother waiting for a response. Without significant pause he continued: “I never told anybody about her, about her ‘practice’. It’s time I did.”
Up to that point I had read only a couple of Karno stories. It had been enough to get the gist. Her fiction was undeniably intense.
Merely by broaching the topic, Dodd had undergone an extraordinary transformation. His obnoxious, sullen slump of posture and affect switched into ardent engagement. He leant forward, as if about to clamber onto the table, left leg jittering as an emotional dissipator.
“It’s not that I don’t have problems with her stuff,” he declared, adamantly. Tiny drops of sweat beaded his forehead. “I mean … fuuuuuck.” He reclined a little. “Truly. Fuck.”
“Sure. It’s strange stuff.”
“The priest-torturing thing she has going on, it’s unbalanced. You know, really unbalanced.”
“Right.”
“The sex is out there too … out somewhere. Guess there has to be a market for that kind of metaphysically-smashed lesbo-tentacular fucking demon-twisted goneness.”
“Apparently.”
His voice dropped to something scarcely above a whisper. “Still, she’s serious.” He picked up his cigar, inspected it curiously, and finally ignited it. “Utterly serious.”
It seemed pointless to interrupt.
“She stayed in my place for a while, you know. A small place I own here. Off Fuxing Lu. It was an interim arrangement – lasted maybe three months, a little under. Thing is, the place was set up for …” He trailed off. Clearly, the function of this building was not easily describable.
I had already guessed why. “Boss Jiang?”
Dodd’s expression froze immediately into a mask of fortified suspicion, cross-laced with lethal traps. “What do you know?” he hissed.
“A lot more now,” I responded, with a pathetic laugh.
There was a drawn-out moment of tension. Then he smiled crookedly. “Yes, it was an arrangement we had,” he conceded unnecessarily. “He called it ‘the information room’ – set up guests there, place was rigged with all kinds of crazy snoop-tech shit that he provided.”
“And you put Karno in there?” I asked, in disbelief.
“It was a mistake. She was supposed to get the apartment next door – the unmonitored twin. It was over a week before I learnt what had happened, and by then the situation had become rather … sensitive.”
“Christ!”
“Yeah, well, not exactly, as you know, but the point is – I wound up learning a lot.”
“I bet.”
“Are you just going to carry on snarking about this? Or are you going to let me tell you the story?”
“No, yes, whatever. I’m interested. Obviously.”
“So you’ll shut the fuck up with the smart-ass remarks?”
“Absolutely.”
After a micro-punishment pause, he continued. “I’m going to cut short the technical details, because you’re being such a jerk about it. Main point is, Boss J. didn’t have any professional interest in Karno, naturally, but she kind of captures attention, if you know what I mean. Extracting all the video wasn’t easy, but in the end it isn’t the sort of material you want to leave lying around for a Party inspection team to stumble upon. After XJ took over, the negotiations became a lot smoother. A couple of bottles of Moutai and he was ready to wash his hands of it. Assured me there weren’t any copies. Who knows? It probably doesn’t even matter. I was going to delete the lot immediately – nearly nine gigabytes …” he scrutinized me for overt indications of skepticism. My poker-face held. “… but then I thought, ‘what has he seen?’ – it seemed important, right? I had to know what I was dealing with. You don’t survive in this business by blinding yourself to potentially vital information. Could have been some Tantric craziness with the Dalai Lama there, for all I knew. Sure, it felt grubby, but my hands were tied.”
‘Grubby’ doesn’t begin to cover it, of course. It was the abomination of desolation. Still, Dodd had his business, and his bar. I had my blog. The story had to come out.
“You’re not going to mention any of this, are you?” he suddenly asked me, anxiously.
“I was thinking of switching a few names about.”
“Oh, hilarious.”
“You ready for another?” changing the subject.
Without replying, or taking his eyes off me, he did the neo-feudal hand signal again.
“It’s fate, right?” I suggested encouragingly. It seemed to work. There was an unknotting of tension.
“You ever see her odd little essay about ‘Ascryptions’?”
I shook my head.
“Never met anyone who gets it. You know, even remotely what it’s about. I certainly never did, before. Subtitled Practices for writing on reality, then wall-to-wall senselessness, even by her standards. Remember Bob Clayton?”
Another head shake. I didn’t want to risk interrupting him.
“Strange guy. Driven. Working on that tale about buried-alive dreams for over a year, without ever managing to finish it. Anyway, he was obsessed with that piece. Constantly trying to talk to me about it. Told me once that it ‘solved everything’. Hung himself from a rafter two weeks later. Not to imply there was any connection. I’ve come across that a lot – not quite so far gone, of course.”
The digressions were straining my patience, but the drinks arrived. I stole one of his cigars, without asking, and flamed it up.
“It’s all in the first two sentences. ‘Writers get stuck when they forget that every story has a demon. To begin, you have to learn its name.’”
“Ascryption?”
“Exactly. And there it was, on the video. I actually watched her start a new story – two actually – open an immaculate notebook, with a giant question mark, jot down a few scrappy thoughts, cross-legged, meditating or some shit, then cross some kind of threshold – you could see it, as if something had cut through her body, switched her – and then she seriously set to work, patiently, full of – what the fuck do you call it? – intention, rolling back the rug, chalking a huge diagram on the floor, all swirls and numbers and ancient evocations, then building what I can only describe as a voodoo shrine, pasted together out of candles, clippings from poetry books, kitchenware, pictures, drug paraphernalia, bits of dead animals, and electronic trash. She’d get up, wander around the number maze in loops, muttering some cryptic stuff, in a whisper – the audio was too crap to pick it up – then back to the shrine, shifting pieces about, nudging it towards convergence. It was mad as fuck, obviously, but the horrible thing was that I began to pick up on the purpose, I could see it coming together, like a wave out of hyper-space, the necessity of it, I just couldn’t stop watching, seeing it arrive. I mean, holy fuck. And then a jolt went through her, harsh and electric. She snapped out, crossed over to her laptop, and typed in the name. Ascryption. That’s how it works.”
We were both silent for a moment.
“She has to come and lead a discussion session at the club,” I said, predictably.
“Invite’s already in the motherfucking mail,” Dodd replied.

[To be continued – with some regularity]

UF (2.1) plug here.

If you know anybody teetering on the brink of a psychotic episode, who just needs a slight nudge to plunge over the edge, it would make an ideal present.

The better half has been in NY for a few days, so I’ve been juggling some unusually intense kid-management with getting my (short) time-travel book up on Kindle, and all kinds of threads have been dropped. Kindle throws me into a greater state of ambivalence than anything else I know. It’s at once a delight — raw disintermediation euphoria — and an absolute nightmare due to the obstruction the interface puts in the way of editorial control. Would it really be impossible to allow an editorial function at the MOBI end? It seems obvious that Amazon has put almost the whole of its attention into the reader-experience end, but it’s getting content-providers fused with the process that will lock-in the future. The present set-up can only be considered a flaky intermediate stage.

While I’ve been distracted, NRx seems to have been in exceptionally productive mode. Among the best things I’ve picked up on have been an epic overview of far-right practicality by Yuray, Nydwracu on the slow collapse, Anomaly revisiting the Trichotomy, Poseidon Awoke on Left-Liberal difference, and Dampier prodding traditionalists, and tech-comms (but this might have been my favorite recent Dampier piece). Feminist outreach from Jim: “A woman is like a badly behaved dog …” Machine Lords. Cathedral Cultural Studies. He‘s baaaaack.

Gamergate remains a popcorn machine. Some outer-edge of lunacy exploration here (sample: “… if South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission can do it, I don’t think I’m asking so much. … America is Gamergate”). ClarkHat chats to AoS. Tactical stuff. Christian-shaming. Alexa-analytics on the great migration. The Grays. Hitler.

Ebola science. (This story is losing its grip on my mind — strange that something continuing up an exponential curve can do that.)

Clausewitz and nonlinearity (superbly done).

Games Theory simulation for Eth-Nats.

Free Northerner completes his To Be A Christian series (with internal links to the rest). And, from Matt Walsh: “We are, without a doubt, the most marriage-averse group in human history.”

A conversation with Nicholas Wade.

“I don’t care.”

ADDED: The Dampier Trichotomy-tour is completed (with a penetrating look at nationalism).

While noting the importance of correction for narcissistic bias, which operates through selective attention, memorization, and (from commentators here) communication, it seems as if this blog is referenced disproportionately by the most extravagant NRx-sensitive /pol/ conspiracists. That is quite understandable. Occult philosophy, secrecy, crypsis, codes, and obscurity are insistent themes here. Xenosystems is inclined towards arcane cultural games. It identifies cryptographic developments as keys to the emerging order of the world.

The primary philosophical task of this blog is to disturb unwarranted pretensions to knowing, in the name of a Pyrrhonian inspiration. In this regard, confusion, paradox, and uncertainty are communicative outcomes to be ardently embraced.

For the purposes of this post, an exceptionally exotic /pol/ suggestion provides the opportunity to make a comparatively compact and simple point. The occasion is a web of conjecture weaving together Xenosystems and The Order of Nine Angles (O9A, ONA, or omega9alpha). In addition to the (highly-recommended) link just provided, the relevant Wikipedia entry is also extremely stimulating.

Xenosystems micro-ethics is uncomfortable with soliciting belief (or invoking expectations of trust). It is necessary to note at this point, therefore, that the following remarks are not designed to appeal to credence, but merely to add testimonial information, to be accepted or rejected at will. In the world we now enter — of “sinister dialectic” — declarations of honesty are utterly debased. However, for what (little) it is worth, these are the facts as I understand and relay them.

The O9A is not entirely new to me, but it is not a gnosis I have studied, still less deliberately aligned with. The few hours of reading I have undertaken today is by far my most intense exposure to it to date. What little I have learnt about David Myatt has not attracted me to him as a thinker or political activist, despite certain impressive characteristics (his intellect and polyglot classicism most notably). With that said:
(1) Many convergent interests are soon apparent between Outside in and the O9A (as well as a not inconsiderable number of divergences).
(2) ‘We’ are both (I think) inclined to dismiss the pretensions of the individual intellect and will, which makes the possibility of connections around the back impossible to dismiss in a peremptory fashion. As one /pol/ ‘anonymous’ remarked: “why so sure that ONA would be the deepest layer, instead of just a japeful ruse?” Real connections, influences, and metaphysical roots are obscure.
(3) O9A is fascinating.

The point of this post (finally) is taken directly from Aleister Crowley. In the compilation of his qabbalistic writings entitled 777 (Alphanomic equivalent of Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, although that is surely coincidental), he makes some introductory remarks on the topic of hermeticism. My copy of the book is temporarily misplaced, so I shall gloss them here. A secret, of the kind relevant to hermeticism, is not something known and then hidden as a matter of decision, but rather something that by its very nature resists revelation. Crowley proceeds to mock charlatan occultists who treat the numerical values of the Hebrew letters as secret information, to be revealed theatrically at some appropriate stage of initiation. Let whatever can now be known, be known, as lucidly and publicly as possible. Only that is truly hermetic which hides itself. Reality is not so destitute of intrinsically hidden things — of Integral Obscurity — that we need to replenish its coffers with our tawdry discretion.

Whatever might exist, in the way of an occult bond between Outside in and the O9A, it is not one that anybody is keeping secret. To emphasize the point, I am going to include the alpha9omega document in the Resources roll here, not as the acknowledgement of a connection, but as a clear statement that this stuff is not a secret. It is, however, about secrecy — and that is interesting.

ADDED: Is there something in the water?

* Nested comments still resist the new regime at this stage.

Some bits and pieces, which everyone if of course free to ignore:

Commercialization of war (video). This trend seems to be huge.

The (first) Age of Unqualified Reservations has now formally passed: “I think it’s clear that UR has gone on de facto hiatus, so it seems best to adhere to my own philosophy and make it official. … UR will reemerge, of course. But not here, and not soon – and probably not even in this form. I’ll also try to do something non-lame with the archives.”

Nydwracu crafts a conceptual tool of great value.

Action at Reddit.

William Gibson and Hyperstition (or not): “… was Gibson just a smart reader of the way things were already going, or — as Jack Womack suggested in the afterword to the novel’s 2000 re-issue — has ‘the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?'”

Alain de Benoist interviewed.

Either an extraordinary techno-scientific breakthrough, or not. (This, I’m supremely confident, isn’t.)

Singularity won’t save us (a conclusion I share, for entirely different reasons).

My Russian isn’t good enough to understand what the hell is going on in this, but NYC looks spectacular even when it’s teeming with Slavo-fascists.

Hate.

Some semi-random words and terms:
Agorism, Asabiyyah, Caliphate, Communism, GDP, Liberation, Risk, Poe’s Law (+, ++, +++), Value, World War (G).

Perhaps I lack the imagination to do so, but I just can’t see Jewish feminists, homosexual restaurateurs, black power advocates, Chinese mathematicians, and Amerindian Aztec nationalists locked in any kind of permanent alliance against what they imagine anachronistically to be the WASP establishment. Their enemy has become diffuse and milquetoast, while the contenders for power and gain have at least as much that divides as unites them. I have every reason to believe these anti-WASP, anti-bourgeois activists don’t like each other very much even if they think they can use each other in a power struggle against an enemy that doesn’t show up. Over the years I’ve noticed the pervasive anti-Semitic prejudice among blacks, the revulsion for gays among blacks and Hispanics, and the escalating struggle for favor from government bureaucrats among blacks, Hispanics and Asians. The question is when these contradictions will overwhelm the system. I’ve no doubt they will in the end.

(If it doesn’t, that’s OK. It’s your call …)

ADDED: True Detective and philosophy (a start). [When I get a chance to finish this show, early July, I’ll definitely do some kind of review.]

“Anyone who doesn’t love Twitter is an idiot.”

Language and identity.

No end to Big Data: In the end, the crippled epistemology of the big data movement may prove to be our biggest problem. Remember that the underlying assumption is that “more is better” – the more data you have, the better your knowledge. But since the world is infinitely complex, that means that the search for more and more data, in ever-finer granularities, is effectively infinite. You can never be too rich or too thin – or have too much data. And this applies in particular to the intelligence agencies, as Kate Crawford points out in a brilliant essay, “The Anxieties of Big Data”.

This is my public position:

Every tweet chips a piece out of peoples limited stock of attention — repetitive babblers are noise pollution.

— Outsideness (@Outsideness) February 23, 2014

The medium works its junkie magic because ‘unfollowing’ is an implicit act of microsocial aggression (whatever its rational motives), triggering primate brain-chemicals associated with social signalling. It’s as if you had suddenly declared an unwillingness to any longer pick ticks out of somebody’s fur. At a certain point this monkey business has to be over-ridden, or deterioration is all-but inevitable. People who aren’t prepared to to protect their time — even at the cost of social discomfort — will get nothing done. That’s the threat of social media, as a disease.

Since tweet-space is limited by nature, some background to informational hygiene procedures:

(1) I have two twitter feeds, and (for obvious time-preservation reasons) I’m not going to be following anybody on both. Non-NRx types who’ve been chucked out of my @Outsideness feed are most likely implanted on @UF_blog, so that should not count as microsocial violence except to the hyper-sensitive.

(2) Opinion signalling without thought or originality is tedious. Even if I agree with everything someone is saying, they’ll be chopped if they never say anything new. Something that’s new once isn’t new after being repeated 500 times. Sadly, there are all too many reactionaries who think the very idea of saying something new is close to civilizational treason. (I’m sure they have an audience, but I’m not it.)

(3) Twitter babbling is grating on me a lot. I don’t care about your mating or drinking habits. If I have to listen to you talking about either at a rate exceeding one tweet a day, we have to part ways. Also, the rampant ‘alpha’ peacocking in the reactosphere is getting utterly repulsive. If you want to persuade people you’re intelligent, try saying something intelligent. Saying “You know what, I’m really freaking intelligent” is about as pathetic as human communication can get. (Such statements probably have an audience that finds them charming and witty, but I’m not it.)

(4) Basically, I don’t care about you at all, but only about the information and ideas you share. The odd joke is OK, but it better stay odd. Cognitive survival demands that I dig out my inner ruthless bastard, and I will.

ADDED: A typology of Twitter conversations.