Chasm Page 10

Main cabin of the Pythoness, six days out from Guam.

  Bolton: Did either of you guys catch Cameron’s ’89 flick – The Abyss? It went where we’re going – hopefully quite some way further. He couldn’t resist the temptation to show us too much at the end, predictably. Who can? Still, it went weirdly deep. Ocean depths are an obsession with him. There was the Titanic documentary – not the blockbuster, but the diving movie, Ghosts of the Abyss it was called, I think. Then there was Aliens of the Deep, about hydrothermal vents, and his Deepsea Challenge film. That one took him all the way down into nadir of the Mariana Trench, in a submersible. I spent a week saturated in those scenes, prepping for this. Not that we’ll see the same things he did. We won’t see anything.

  Scruggs: The Thing was incredible.

  Bolton: That wasn’t him.

  Scruggs: But he’s the guy who did Piranha II: The Spawning?

  Bolton: I don’t know. Christ, I hope not.

  Scruggs: The Lord forgives your blasphemies. What I don’t get though – why would you need flying piranhas?

  Bolton: There were flying piranhas? Fuck.

  Scruggs: It should have been terrifying, but somehow it wasn’t.

  Bolton: I’ll tell you about terror. Why did six fear seven?

  Scruggs: Damnation Bobby. What are you, six?

  Zodh: Everything is six. Everything we find. It’s the double cycle, the Iron Law.

  Bolton (ignoring Zodh): You remember it?

  Scruggs: That ancient joke? Of course. Because seven eight nine. Is this about fear, or devourings? Terror of successors, of disappearance, of being out-sized, and out-numbered, of hidden meanings. Dread of death, of primacy, of God’s lightning bolt, of divine order, of the End.

  Bolton: Seven, eight, and nine sum to twenty-four.

  Scruggs: And?

  Bolton: And nothing.

  Scruggs (wearily): And so what?

  Bolton: You know what the twenty-fourth prime is? Eighty-nine. It’s a Fibonacci number, too.

  Scruggs: What is?

  Bolton: Eighty-nine. Sum of thirty-four and fifty-five. It’s also a Chen prime, a Pythagorean prime, a Sophie Germain prime – smallest initiator of a Cunningham chain – a Markov number …

  Scruggs: The seventh chapter of the Book of Numbers has eighty-nine verses. It’s the most to be found anywhere in the Bible, excepting Psalms.

  Bolton: Really?

  Scruggs: You want to look?

  Bolton: No, it’s okay – I believe you. What does it say?

  Scruggs: Numbers, seven, eighty-nine? Let me think. “And when Moses was gone into the tabernacle of the congregation to speak with him, then he heard the voice of one speaking unto him from off the mercy seat that was upon the ark of testimony, from between the two cherubims: and he spake unto him.” I don’t really get it, not deeply.

  Bolton: You memorized the Bible?

  Scruggs: Maybe a third, at most.

  Bolton: I read Numbers, hoping it would be about numbers, but it didn’t seem to be, except in a we have the numbers way.

  Scruggs: That’s the surface.

  Bolton: So what’s beneath?

  Scruggs: Hell is beneath.

  Bolton: Eight turns into nine. Summing the integers one to eight makes thirty-six, which is nine, by digital reduction. It gets hotter, though. Do the same from one to thirty-six …

  Scruggs: … and it comes to Six hundred threescore and six. Beware of arithmancy.

  Bolton: So you agree that eight is the double-compacted numerical abbreviation for Antichrist?

  Zodh: It’s Old Nick name.

  Scruggs (ignoring Zodh): God speaks in words, but he whispers in numbers. Scripture taught me that. You should be more open to the thought that bad things can happen. It’s not a joke.

  Zodh: Their names are numbers.

  Bolton: Have to ask you Zodh, buddy, since you’re awake: What was that ‘Zommopsychowoddathefuck’ stuff about?

  Zodh: You have time in your country?

  Bolton: We have smart watches, but our enemies have the time.

  Scruggs: You’ll quote the fucking Taliban, but you won’t listen to Jesus.

  Bolton: Sure I’ll listen to Jesus, I just don’t get the jokes.

  Scruggs: Fuck you Bobby, seriously. You’re going to get yourself burned. You’re the obnoxious smart-ass in the horror movie who always dies first.

  Zodh: He hears too much to be safe.

  Bolton: It reminds me of Kode9’s ‘third ear’ thing.

  Scruggs: That’s a thing?

  Bolton: Maybe the path to a thing.

  Scruggs: You don’t think there are enough dark paths already, without going looking for them?

  Bolton: What’s eating you? That’s a joke.

  Zodh: Here’s the thing. What you think is behind, and beneath, isn’t so. That’s an image. You spun it for the sense of protection it brings. It disguises a hole, because if you saw what was missing, you’d never sleep. You don’t know what’s there, at all. You can be shown that you don’t know what’s there. It isn’t hard, to show that. A simple trick is enough to do it. There’s a gap in you – a massive missingness – the back and underside torn away. Lots of other encroachments of unbeing, but that’s the main one. You’re a flimsy mask pasted onto a sucking wound in the world. That’s the starting point. It’s the way to turn, and go, if you want to learn. Look behind you. Into the real backspace you’re pretending isn’t there.

  Bolton: Okay, I’ve got to admit, that’s intense.

  Scruggs: Sweet Jesus.

  Bolton: Dismantle the artificial anterior.

  Scruggs: What, you’re encouraging this shit now?

  Bolton: Once I get the eighty-nine thing, I’ll stop.

  Zodh: Pull the false back off the world, and draw what’s there instead. If you can count, you can do that. When I was a small child, in Guam, my math teacher said to me: “Zodh, your sums are quite bad. I don’t think you know what numbers really are.” She was a strange old woman. They wanted to kill her as a witch when she was little, but the American soldiers saved her. Maybe she was a lesbian, I don’t know. She lived alone – near the sea. She showed me how the numbers connect together. It took her ten minutes, perhaps an hour to explain. Then I understood. It’s not hard.

  Bolton: That picture …

  Zodh: It’s not a picture.

  Bolton: So what is it?

  Zodh: It’s a map, a chart – the only one without error. You know, because you can check. Is this right? Check. Check it. That’s what she taught me. Like a little kid in school, like home-work, you don’t ask: “Is this right?” You don’t ask your Mom or Dad, “help me, is this right?” You don’t even ask your teacher – not even that teacher. You don’t ask the government. You don’t ask God. You learn how to check. You learn the rules. It’s not so difficult. Then you won’t make mistakes.

  Bolton: Which rules?

  Zodh: You know the rules Mister Bobby. One and one is two. One and two and three is six. Eighty-nine is the twenty-fourth prime number. Thirty-four and fifty-five is eighty-nine. Those are the rules. Things that are easy to check.

  Scruggs: What about God?

  Zodh: Is he easy to check?

  Scruggs: In another way.

  Zodh: True providence is easy to check, Mister Joe. You only need to count. One eight nine zero is three, three, three. … Done now.

  Scruggs: It’s about time.

  Manifesto for an Abstract Literature

  §100 — Disintegration inspires a thousand manifestoes, as our age confirms. Here is another. It would be a manifesto in defense of nothing, if nothing needed – or even tolerated – defending. With its solicitude mocked by alien voids, it can only attack something – anything (everything).

  §101 — Abstraction is nothing, rigorously pursued. Arithmetical zero is its sign. To perceive, think, and do nothing. To be nothing. Zero alone – in its infinite formulations – attains such exemption from indignity. (And it is time.)

  §102 — Ab
straction in itself is the sovereign of the negative determination, and can never fall under a formal relation. It does not oppose itself to the concrete, except in terms whose keys are encrypted within itself. Apophatic method (the via negativa) is its discipline.

  §103 — Abstract negation, as Hegel perhaps understood, in deriding it, is the only kind that escapes. He recoils from a negativity that does no work or even (precisely) the opposite, and which redoubles without self-cancelation while still turning endlessly into itself. Abstract negation is already a doubling, of such redundancy that it sheds the pretense to generic negativity like Ouroboros skin – and in fact like nothing at all.

  §104 — The elusiveness of the abstract can be rigorously illustrated. Division by zero exemplifies it, in the perfect extinction of illumination. It can only be forbidden because, once understood, it makes no sense. To divide by zero is to initiate an explosion without limit, of demonstrable irreversibility. The result returned is undefined (sufficiently so to crash computers). Though a gate to the tracts of the transfinite, there can be no retreat back through it. It allows nothing to be retrieved.

  §105 — Abstract writing and aesthetic abstraction are each easily found in abundance. Logico-mathematical formalism provides the former, high modernism in the visual arts (especially) the latter. Yet literary high modernism has made a hash of its involvement with abstraction.

  §106 — “I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it.” – John Cage.

  §107 — The term ‘blank verse’ amuses us.

  §108 — The object of abstract literature is integral obscurity. It seeks only to make an object of the unknown, as the unknown. Cryptropic nature captivates it (Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ). Whatever might imaginably be shown is something else, but then so – if not exactly equally – is anything that remains simply apart. Those who dedicate themselves to this dubious cause can be nothing but a surface effect of The Thing.

  §109 — Abstract literature writes in clues, with clue words, but without hope. It is the detective fiction of the insoluble crime, the science fiction of an inconceivable future, the mystery fiction of the impregnable unknown, proceeding through cryptic names of evocation, and rigid designators without significance. The weirdness it explores does not pass, unless to withdraw more completely into itself. There is no answer, or even – for long – the place for an answer. Where the solution might have been found waits something else. Description is damage.

  §110 — John (18:20) quotes the Nazarene: “in secret have I said nothing” (ἐν κρυπτῷ ἐλάλησα οὐδέν).

  §111 — Sexual repression, pushed to an extreme, advances the mechanics of abstract literature. Puritanism is here set to dark work. Lovecraft (once again) exhibits the pattern. Whatever hides can be latched onto other hidden things.

  §112 — Fiction is bound, from the beginning, to what is not. Non-occurrences are its special preoccupation. It trafficks with things that never happened, and lies on the path to Old Night.

  §113 — No one has yet done anything with unnonfiction (the word). Now is the time to unearth still less with it.

  §114 — Because literature knows nothing, it can turn blindness to a vision of the abyss. It evokes an apprehension of non-apprehension, or a perception of the imperceptible as such. Milton explores the abyss, in order to say nothing, positively, with unsurpassed eloquence. He makes Paradise Lost the Bible of abstract literature where “darkness visible” (I:63), “the palpable obscure” (II:406), shadow the ultimate unilluminousness of “Old Night” (I:543). Horror is structurally Miltonic. What cannot be seen, or in any other way shown, can still be said.

  §115 — Lovecraft: “I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best – one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. These stories frequently emphasise the element of horror because fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or ‘outsideness’ without laying stress on the emotion of fear.”

  §116 — Except, it is not fear that guides us. Abstract literature complies with a rigorous critique of fear, conducted in the name of horror. Fear nothing, until fear sheds its concreteness, and nothing switches its sign.

  §117 — The Thing horror pursues – and from which it flees – cannot be an object (if life is to continue). Its nonexistence is a presupposition of mental equilibrium. At the virtual horizon where thought encounters it, absolute madness reigns. This coincidence is fundamental. At the end of horror lies that which – if there is merely to be sanity – cannot conceivably or imaginably exist. The image of the monster, then, is more than an error of method. It is a radical misapprehension. Anything that can be captured cannot be what horror seeks. Pictures are mistakes.

  §118 — There is no difference between abstract literature and horror, conceived in profundity (in the abyss). An encounter with the absolutely cognitively intolerable cannot conclude in a positive presentation. The makers of horror have long been expected to understand that – even if they still typically submit to the sins of exhibition, the lust to show, and tell. Within the image, horror is interred. Thus, abstract literature is committed to a definite iconoclasm, which is also a vow of silence – though a hidden silence.

  §119 — Horror anticipates philosophy, spawns it automatically, and provides its ultimate object – abstraction (in itself). It comes from the same non-place to which philosophy tends. If skepticism teaches philosophy what it need not think, horror persuades it that it cannot. In this way, the pact between abstraction and horror – the thing – surpasses anything philosophy could ever be, or know. It is a connection as old as time. Exactly as old. Horror builds the mansion of ruined intuition, through which philosophy wanders, like a nervous child.

  §120 — Abstract literature borrows its guides from horror, which are monsters. ‘Invisible’ monsters we are tempted to say, over-hastily. No monster can be more, or less, than partially – horribly – seen (as etymology reliable attests). The monster is liminal, or diagonal. It discloses a lurid obscurity.

  §121 — The initial stage of monstrosity is ‘simple’ beyondness. A monster has as its leading characteristic the nature of an excessive being. It is first of all a counter- humanoid, eluding anthropomorphic recognition. Since ‘inhumanity’ remains captured within a dialectical relation, it is preferable to invoke a ‘non-’ or ‘un-humanity’ determined abstractly – in the way of the wholly unknown aliens from James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989) – only as “something not us”. A minimal condition for monstrosity is radical unhumanity.

  §122 — Even as it consumes all attention, monstrosity does not look like anything. At the crudest level of perceptual disorganization, it dismantles morphology into the seething complexity of tentacle-monsters and bug-creatures – plasticized, metamorphic, and poly-segmentary beings – for which (China Miéville) “Squidity” is the supreme archetype. At a more advanced level of abstraction, they slough off even these residual forms as larval constrictions, becoming shape-shifting horrors, adopting the body-plans of their prey, as they evolve fluidly into the way hunt. At their intensive zenith, they sublime to sheer system, syndrome – reproduction cycles, patterns of parasitization, epidemiological profiles, and convergent waves – conceivable only through what they do.

  §123 — Fundamental ontology tells us that whatever happens (in time) is not time, and being is no thing. “The nothing nothings nothingishly,” or whatever Heidegger said, or didn’t say, it matters not, until unnonfiction seizes upon it (as it will). There can never be enough negative ontology, because what being
is not exceeds it.

  §124 — Much has to be conceded to our hypothetical interlocutor, who asks: “Is it not, then the intrinsic mission of abstract literature to visit infinite ontological devastation upon its readers?” For how could that be avoided? Our task cannot be other than to supplant intolerable nightmares with yet worse ones. Mercifully, this is no easy thing (from a certain regard), even if it is an ineluctable destiny (from others).

  §125 — From whence comes this grim pact with the abyss? We can only respond, with confidence – from the abyss. If another answer were plausible, then abstract literature would be expression, when it is only – or at least overwhelmingly – exploration, and to explore, from the other side, is to let something in.