I have heard resurrections
Seagulls cry so that they can be heard over the crashing of the sea.
My voice echoes on a bad phone connection, constructing the displeasure of the third person.
Baked beans plop onto dry bread.
Just because the dead no longer exist does not mean we are done with the spectres
Jacques Derrida
it’s almost over
Resurrections have happened.
Several unresolved emotional boomerangs returned for their victory laps. I saved these emails in a folder marked ‘Ugh’, in case their contents would require further exhumation at a later date.
A cringe was discovered in the archive: an application to a gallery for a project titled ‘Stratigratification’. The proposed display of rocks and various clutter had the whiff of a regular art school fart.
I collaborated on a doom loop relationship. A slow-motion car crash in which we each kept stepping out of the car to give the tires a good kicking.
We do not destroy the past: it is gone; at any moment, it might reappear and seem to be and be the present. Would it be a repetition? Only if we thought we owned it, but since we don’t, it is free and so are we.
John Cage
A resurrection can be seen.
There was a bone that could have been a rock but was almost definitely a bone.
A year morphed into a month and then back into a year again, all within the same short breath.
What good is a stuffed bear with no face?
This is a cut-down chandelier...
And it is like coughing at the piano before you start playing a terrible waltz...
The past should go away but it never does...
And it is like a swimming pool at the foot of the stairs...
Chelsea Minnis
I see a chance to make a new start.
Dale Horvath, The Walking Dead
Resurrections still happen.
I have been stuck in The Walking Dead for some time now. Every time I am nearing the end of the series they keep adding more episodes, more spin offs, more post-apocalyptic distresses, more dead. I have got to the point where I am watching episodes in shifts. Getting it done. The Walking Dead has been going for 10 seasons, and each season has between 16 and 22 episodes. When I think back to all of the things that have happened to all of the characters on The Walking Dead, I feel a bit stressed. None of the characters seem to get a break, no small moment to themselves that is not filled with some new existential threat battering down the door. The undead aren't even the core antagonists to the main group of characters anymore. They are merely contextual in a shattered world full of broken humans who are perhaps only half dead, each group of which are trying to outdo each other in their ridiculousness.
When I am watching things other than The Walking Dead, I am still in some ways watching The Walking Dead. In pastoral scenes during other Netflix series I expect to see a decrepit walking corpse slowly lumbering out of the woods. In other like minded post-apocalyptic franchises I wait for the familiar characters to waltz onto the screen with their grizzled splendour and knowing glances. Anything set in the here-and-now I read as some type of prequel before the fall. There is no point trying to watch anything else other than The Walking Dead, because now all episodes of anything that I watch are within the universe of The Walking Dead. The undead are everywhere, so I just go back to watching The Walking Dead.
Fear the Walking Dead is a prequel to the main series. It is terrible and I am also watching it. Fear the Walking Dead is set in LA and is supposed to give some contextual information as to what happened at the beginning of the fall of the world, but instead the narrative focuses more on the dysfunctional nature of a fragmented suburban family and its transition to the new normal of a damned planet. Who knew that the end of the world could be so boring. I watch it anyway, as it is easier to watch a spin off of The Walking Dead than imagine that the walking dead will appear in all other episodes from all other series that I find myself watching.
The Walking Dead will soon end, as AMC has announced that season 11 will be the final season. Season 11 will contain 24 episodes, and you can bet that a significant portion of them will be over an hour in length. One full day of watching left, then. However, fans are assured that there will be multiple spin offs and sequels and film deals and other various investigations to deal with the fate of the myriad of characters that disappeared from the narrative arc of the main show. Like Nick Grimes. I want to know what happened to Nick. Where did he get taken in that helicopter? Will Michonne find him? And who were those guys in the storm trooper get ups? And how were their clothes so white?
Some days, I don’t know what the hell to think.
Daryl Dixon, The Walking Dead
One enormous black sky, one enormous pit of cancelled language, one enormous voice rasping out one final, incomprehensible sentence. And it was mid-day. It was very dark. There were no stars. I think the buildings were burning.
Sean Bonney
And nothing, where I arrive now, is shining.
Dante Alighieri
Black suns do not shine, they absorb light. Pull in, beckon towards the enormous misanthropic pit of cancelled time, cancelled language, rasping voices, walls of sound.
Black suns do not spin, they roll. Tumble sideways and inward and fold over themselves in a thick morass of gloopy time.
Black suns get tired of all of the end of the world bullshit. It brings them down.
it’s almost over
May the scorpions die
after stinging my body
May the sun fade away
after shining on me
May all ashes return
to its primal state.
May my deeds and my thoughts
slay all light within my soul.
Ithdabquth Qliphoth
Black Metal presents a negation; a misanthropic, melancholic wall of noise. The music distorts tempo and temporality, avoids melody and instead moves on in relentless sonic progression. Black Metal is simultaneously anachronistic and contemporary, erupting from some deep known past, yet felt in our real present. Oscillating between absolute evil, ecological dismay, total darkness and desolation, Black Metal blackens everything that can be blackened. In BM, the environment, the locale, the horizon, is well and truly fucked. Everything is blackened. In the blackened state, the individual is all that can be known to exist. In a state of damnation, the spiral leads only downward, and the individual is catapulted through a festering sea of rot into the void of oblivion. In the blackened cosmos of BM, mythologies of various sources collide into the ultimate negation of all life, and the worship of the cult of death. In BM, we embrace the apocalypse, as the apocalypse is already here, and we are sinking through its folds. Death is ultimate, the body is fallible. In BM, the void beckons to the annihilation of total death. This total death can be a euphoric experience – as being in a state of absolute melancholic negation, there are no worries, no consequences for actions. No one gives a shit if you don't respond to that email if the world is consumed in black flames.
Distributed bodies—distributed apocalypse. Metaphysics everywhere. Your body is coupled with environments both immediate, distant, and microscopic; it is bound to the internal abyss, the eternal possibility of the annihilation of ‘you’ at any moment.
Olga Goriunova
Music is the last enunciation of the universe
E M Cioran
My head is full of music: all kinds of songs and fragments of songs, most of them written, sung, and played by dead people. Some of my best friends are dead people.
Russell Hoban
In conversation with the negation of Black Metal, there is drone. In drone, there is no secret message – no code, no real thing to interpret. A nothing sitting in the midst of beautifully consistent sonic experience that creates an alternative reality. To listen to drone music is to pay attention to the passage of time, to its elasticity, to the infinite in an instant.
The music of artists such as Celer and Éliane Radigue lead the listener into a sort of melancholy stasis which progresses slowly with the minute modulation and manipulation of a constant flow of sound.
Listening to drone, we slip into a limbo state, a thick liminality, a time within time, a time out of time, where the sheer breadth of sound points in all directions at once – to everything and nothing. Within the comfortable gap of the drone, the listener is exposed to the void in-between events, the void where true time lurks.
Defining intervals and instances blend seamlessly into one another, forming a slow progression of rising severity. The longer the track is, the more the listener is divorced from their cognitive state that they brought with them at the beginning of their listening. The listener falls into a sort of semi-meditative trance, a time out of time in which the thick fabric of the weight of the day can fall off and be replaced with an alternate form of total oblivion, an end in and of itself, a vibratory liminal state.
This liminal state is a small death at the end of the day, a mini-apocalypse for the sofa. One in which you can smooth out the kinks and the knots, riding the melancholic melodic of a black hole oblivion into a comfortably endless void.
Celer’s music, as with so much ambient drone, speaks of the end of time, the end of the world, and all the unresolvable dilemmas that accompany such ends... Any Celer track sounds like it could go on forever, and perhaps is currently going on forever in some other space. This is the music of heaven, how we all might hope the afterlife to be, with no hint of kitsch. A few moments in this music might indeed be fair recompense for a lifetime’s worth of disappointment, aggravation, and boredom. But the threat of an abrupt end, of apocalypse, is latent in this music, too.
Joanna Demers
That’s the mystery of music: the creation of a temporal totality. Put differently, the past is contained by the present just as the future will contain the present. If we don’t cut them up into pieces, if we don’t interrupt them, these three times form a whole. The present is always a junction in the mind of past memories and future projections. Especially in difficult moments, these three can appear unified in a present that becomes singular, immense and eternal. It’s a frankly extraordinary state, which also occurs in advanced meditation. In some ways music is a filtered form of this experience.
Éliane Radigue
The imagination, filler up of the void, is essentially a liar.
Simone Weil
Shadows in the kitchen don’t agree on a single
source of light, but then neither did we.
Jack Underwood
Using ‘The Mindfulness of Breathing’ method of meditation, my app tells me to focus upon the breath in order to understand a sense of presence in the self.
I am directed – eyes closed, neck long, back straight – within this state, to focus on counting the breaths as they pass in order for thoughts to fall off and unpeel, to reveal an essence beneath.
Those that struggle specifically with anger are directed to pay particular attention to the length of the outward breath: the steady dilapidation of the chest, the subtle drooping of the shoulders, the relaxation of the palms. Hot tempered individuals are instructed to focus upon these sensations when dealing with the unpleasant antagonisms and impatient tensions associated with a coming rage.
It is the hope that they will be able to recount moments of meditative focus from the valley of past experience and bring these peaceful possibilities into the proximity of the present when suffering from an episode of acerbic fury.
This methodology has been both terribly useful and wonderfully useless for my own temper management on a variety of occasions, depending upon the severity of the situation.
Anxious practitioners can place their focus upon the labelling of the emotions that arise whilst counting the breath. This administrative approach comes with the hope that in the correct labelling and processing of emotions, with the association of a feeling and a naming of that feeling, alongside the slow rhythmic relief of the breath, the person can let the anxious clouds that are filled with the vapour of fervent concerns steadily clear (or at least partially subside), so as to see the blue sky of peaceful presence that hopefully lies somewhere behind.
I want to take pride
in my badness you
know, get to the log-
ical extreme. Howling
with the Omm inside
everything living
That continuous
moo of sameness, me
longing for the lazy
to dislodge still gut
in the knowing flow
generative release
Hannah Regel
it’s almost over
December 22, 1910. Today I do not even dare to reproach myself. Shouted into this empty day, it would have a disgusting echo.
Franz Kafka
In the last months I have been dipping in and out of Kafka’s diaries. It always feels quite uncomfortable reading these documents that were never meant to be read; private spaces of writers reserved for the working out of ideas. This is followed by a worry that at some point my documents and diaries will be read by others, a worry that is quite quickly quashed with the speedy realisation that there will be little to no interest in the intricacies of my life after I am dead. I am decidedly not Kafka.
The diaries sit on the shelf in my studio, and I pick them up when I am staring at an empty part of my desk and wondering why I cannot write. Kafka helps me in these moments with his relentless self criticisms; the damnation of everything he has written and his complaints of never being able to finish anything. The struggling days and sleepless nights and wrestling minds are positively encouraging.
October 2, 1911. Sleepless night. The third in a row. I fall asleep soundly, but after an hour I wake up, as though I had laid my head in the wrong hole. I am completely awake, have the feeling that I have not slept at all or only under a thin skin, have before me anew the labour of falling asleep and feel myself rejected by sleep.
Franz Kafka
Perhaps the closest we come to dying is through writing, in the sense that writing is a leave-taking from life, a temporary abandonment of the world and one’s petty preoccupations in order to try to see things more clearly. In writing, one steps back and steps outside life in order to try to view it more dispassionately, both more distantly and more proximately. With a steadier eye. One can lay things to rest in writing: ghosts, hauntings, regrets, and the memories that flay us alive.
Simon Critchley
Lank Space, and scytheless Time with branny hands
Barren and soundless as the measuring sands,
Not mark'd by flit of Shades
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
all the dreams that I typed into the document that summer
all the words in the text that burned my flesh
all the summers have disappeared
all the words that I typed into the document that summer
all the texts in the dream that burned my flesh
all the documents have disappeared
all the documents that I typed into the dream that summer
all the text of the words that burned my flesh
all the words have disappeared
all the documents that I typed into the flesh that dream
all the words of the summer that disappeared
all the texts have burned
all the typing that I did in the document that summer
all the disappearances in the words that burned the text
all the dreams have turned to flesh
all the documents that I typed on the summer that dream
all the flesh of the texts that burned my words
all the documents have disappeared
all the words that I typed into the text that document
all the thoughts in the summer that burned my flesh
and the nothing where I arrive is shining
all the texts that I typed into the document that dream
all the summer in the words that make a new start
and my flesh has shone apart
all the documents that I typed on the start that nothing
and the nothing when I arrived has burned through words
shine the flesh may chance a start
Reverie is, then, just a little nocturnal matter forgotten in the light of day.
Gaston Bachelard
In the week of limbo between Christmas and New Year, the dreams that are experienced supposedly predict the trajectory for the coming year. Last limbo week, I dreamed like an absolute maniac. Fortunately only a small number of the predictions have come to pass, metaphorically or otherwise.
Throughout the somnambulant stagger around suicide cliff dives in suits of armour, underground meat-lockers haunted by the icy ghosts of partners past, and significant financial windfalls that came with bizarre clauses, played a pervading soundtrack sung by a classical male choir. This consistent sonic singularity that vibrated throughout the texture of each dreamy encounter echoed into my waking minutes. In the mornings I would sometimes catch the trail of a song around the corner of the pillow, waltzing me back into the hysteria of the dream. In those weird days I attempted to ignore the dreams, refuting their existence. Yet the repetition of the same requiem night after night that echoed into morning after morning began to become the type of haunting that could not be ignored.
The choir became quite deafening in its reckoning. I began to hear the echoes of male voices in the music that I listened to throughout the day. Voices from the choir would rise to the surface out of the waves of doom metal and techno and ambient music alike. The more that I tried to ignore the messages within the dreams, the more pervading the haunting that ensued. As soon as I began to talk about the dreams, the voices once again retreated back into their shells.
it’s almost over
If you think you are a ghost, you will become a ghost.
John Cage
In my best moments I think “life has passed me by” and I am content.
Walking seems to cover time and space but in reality we are just where we started. I walk but in reality I am hand in hand with contentment on my own doorstep.
The ocean is deathless
The islands rise and die
Quietly come, quietly go
A silent swaying breath
I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet even on this shore.
Agnes Martin
There have been many instances throughout these long two years of enforced solitary confinement that the limbo state that I have found myself to be in has been rather unpleasant, quite restrictive, and filled with collective feelings of ennui and creative impotence.
There have been many instances throughout these long two years of warped elastic time that the limbo state that I have found myself to be in has been rather constant, yet quite elusive, and filled with collective feelings of confusion and unknown direction.
There have been many instances throughout these long two years of individual time, space and pace that the limbo state that I have found myself to be in has been rather pleasant, quite expansive, and filled with collective feelings of self reflection and positive projection.
and in fact relax
ghosts don’t kill people
because imagine how awkward it would be afterwards
Crispin Best
I’m empty in the cold, cold in the sense we’re not emotional,
speak, listen in the dark like some classical underworld but not,
where we’re dead, no one dies: place proof of that.
I want to reach your voice.
Alice Notley
There have been resurrections.
Disembodied voices of dead singers drip down from the speakers of the regular establishments.
Talk radio broadcasts work their way out into space in concentric circles.
Voice notes from dead friends live on in defunct Whatsapp group chats.
To follow the Siren’s song is to disappear into the abyss. The abyss is at the same time silent and the source of all sound; deathtrap and delight; real yet utterly unattainable. It points to the beyond of music and sound, to that which is inaudible and unknowable and which exists as the hither side of the real.
Eleni Ikoniadou
it’s almost over
Will the moon ever again be so full of itself
that the ragged barn will fill with light,
through its tin-covered roof?
You should bury more than the dead.
You should try harder.
You should give up.
Olena Klaytiak Davis
–
–
Alighieri, Dante, 'Purgatorio' from The Divine Comedy (Oxford, 2008)
Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Reverie (Beacon, 1971)
Best, Crispin, 'Don't Worry' from Hello (Partus, 2019)
Bonney, Sean, 'We Are the Dead' from Our Death (Commune, 2019)
Cage, John, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Wesleyan, 1961)
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 'Limbo' from The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Penguin Classics, 1997)
Critchley, Simon, Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo, 2015)
Davis, Olena Klaytiak, 'The Scaffolding Inside you' from And Her Soul Out Of Nothing (Wisconsin, 1997)
Demers, Joanna, Drone and Apocalypse: An Exhibit Catalog for the End of the World (Zero books, 2015)
Derrida, Jacques, 'Spectographies' in The Spectralities Reader, edited by María del Pilar Blanco & Esther Peeren (Bloomsbury, 2013)
Goriunova, Olga, 'The Bodily Sounds of the Abyss' from AUDINT—Unsound:Undead, edited by Steve Goodman, Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou (Urbanomic, 2019)
Hoban, Russell, Fremder (Bloomsbury, 2003)
Ikoniadou, Eleni, 'Falling' from AUDINT—Unsound:Undead, edited by Steve Goodman, Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou (Urbanomic, 2019)
Ithdabquth Qliphoth, Demonic Crown Of Anticreation (Misanthropic Propaganda Records, 2003)
Kafka, Franz, The Diaries of Franz Kafka: Volume One 1910-1913 (Schocken, reprint, 1988)
Martin, Agnes, Writings / Schriften (Hatje Cantz, 2005)
Minnis, Chelsea, Poemland, (Wave, 2009)
Notley, Alice, 'Voices' from Certain Magical Acts (Penguin, 2016)
Radigue, Éliane, Intermediary Spaces (Umland Editions, 2019)
Regel, Hannah, 'Move' from When I Was Alive (Montez, 2017)
The Walking Dead, Season 1: TS-19 (AMC, 2010-2022)
The Walking Dead, Season 5: Consumed (AMC, 2010-2022)
Underwood, Jack, 'I'm Still Terrified' from Happiness (Faber, 2015)
Weil, Simone, Gravity and Grace (Routledge, 2003)