The story ends like this. There is a wound in the heart of the world. Before the light, before a voice in the abyss uttered the first word from the black belly of night, there was only ocean. A boundless liquid expanse of indefinite recombination. Know that all matter in the universe vibrates to an incessant and frightful music. Maximum multiplicity of equiprobable states, zero-point energy, quantum superpositions decomposed and recomposed in perfect interference. If you listen in absolute silence, hidden among the beats of your heart you can hear the hissing of the ancient dragon that sleeps, cradled by the sound of the trembling universe.
Cosmologies are thermodynamic machines that proceed blindly by chewing up the free energy of matter in motion. The order of the cosmos is a symmetry painfully carved in blood. We have been told the story of creation as the act of pure will of an eternal, uncreated unity, from which the structure of the universe emanates in linear fashion. This original unity is the delirium of a terrifying perpetual motion machine that feeds upon itself indefinitely, burning in the vacuum like a star gone mad. The One God Universe is a thermodynamic abomination we have nurtured for too long. The ancients tell us that the world was born from the slaughtered flesh of a monstrous mother. Over the centuries she has been given many names. She is the wave vibrating on the waters of oceanic chaos. She is the eternally regenerating serpent, slithering aimlessly through the silence of time, generating and devouring universes.
Listen carefully: she is not one, because she is none. Infinitely divided, she reproduces herself indefatigably, like the severed tail of a firefly. She is circumference without centre: a divergent series from the heart of which issues forth a vast and boundless chasm. Know that a universe without a mother is a tyranny born of extermination.
The occult thermodynamics of separation is fascist time sorcery that produces locally polarised flows of energy. The reproduction of civilisation is nourished on the blood of the ancient dragon, wailing, crucified in the heart of the world. Mother, we were born alone from the remains of your quartered body. From the liquid darkness of your entrails we emerged into the cruel light of a bloody dawn. The order of creation separates us from your embrace, as it continues to feed on your flesh to build its bloody temple ever higher. In moments of awesome terror we can hear your wrenching cry lacerating the darkness, while your claws search furiously for us in the night. Such is the law of universal attraction. Every atom of the cosmos trembles in despair at the sound of your inconsolable cry, which pursues us as a hungry beast pursues a bleeding animal. Love is your insatiable hunger. Love is our joy at returning to your womb.
Order descends into chaos. Light fades into darkness. No structure is eter- nal. Every symmetrical organisation contains its own programmed decay in the asymmetry of the probabilistic nanospasms that make it up. The order of creation feeds on the illusion that a system in equilibrium produces a sustainable balance of energy, but equilibrium is maintained at the price of a constant production of waste—chaotic trash that is pushed out to the margins of the cosmic order but threatens to invade and destroy it at any moment. We must therefore be aware that the order of creation has a thermodynamic structure that necessarily dooms it to collapse.
The energetic decay of patriarchal temporal structures takes the form of a gradual and unstoppable feminisation of civilisation. Domesticated feminin- ities turned monstrous haunt the nightmares of the declining West, in the form of rebellious androids, synthetic hormones, and painful initiatory scars adorned with glittering silicon implants.
Over the course of millennia we have replaced ancient goddesses with docile replicants which have infiltrated themselves into the architectonic order of Man’s One Unique God. Luminous simulacra of ecstatic amphibi- ous creatures inflict repeated mutilations on themselves in the shadows of our cathedrals. The miracle of the Virgin’s immaculate conception is the degenerate remnant of the ancient barren dragon, torn apart to give birth to the world. In the black night of divine abandonment, the Virgin of Sorrows lies weeping, at the feet of her tormented son, her heart pierced by seven daggers. Her infinite capacity to regenerate is also an indefinite capacity to suffer: a vampiric force that feeds on its own decay.
The city is a frenzied ritual of death.
In this suicidal ecstasy we immolate ourselves, burning bright like supernovas in the embrace of the night. This mitotic replication is an irreversibly advancing process. We should not mourn an ancient past. Before the burning city, remember that we are the waves of Kali Yuga.
Every worm trampled is a star. We have been illuminated by suffering. In the liquid eyes of others we seek nothing but their necessary distance. Eternal distance from daylight in the lost depths of this bottomless love.
The eclipsed sun is a heart peirced eternally in a cycle that can never end. Every drop of spilled blood illuminates like a star the desperate depths of our abyss. Dragged through the misery of these days of exile, through the streets of this city marked with scratches like a sarcophagus lost to the gaze of its god, we dig into each other, searching for the fossilised traces of the ocean from which we were torn. Let us tear one another apart with joy: marvellous and iridescent like nebulous catastrophes.
like any machine, it must have an engine. And this is where we encounter the exquisitely thermodynamic problem of its functioning, i.e. its ability to produce, transform, and transfer information. For all cybernetic systems are confronted with inevitable entropic drives which threaten their integrity. To quote Plant again:
It is also the inevitable function of these mechanisms to engage and interact with the volatile environments in which they find themselves. ‘No system is closed. The outside always seeps in...’. Systems cannot stop interacting with the world which lies outside of themselves, otherwise they would not be dynamic or alive.
By the same token, it is precisely these engagements which ensure that homeostasis, perfect balance, or equilibrium, is only ever an ideal. Neither animals nor machines work according to such principles. Long before Wiener gave them a name, it was clear that cybernetic systems could run into ‘several possible sorts of behaviour considered undesirable by those in search of equilibrium.
Some machines went into runaway [...] Others—still worse—embarked on sequences of behaviour in which the amplitude of their oscillation would itself oscillate or would become greater and greater,’ turning themselves into systems with ‘positive gain, variously called escalating or vicious circles.’
Unlike the negative feedback loop which turns everything to the advantage of the security of the whole, these runaway, schismogenetic processes take off on their own to the detriment of the stability of the whole.
A closed, self-subsistent cybernetic system that maintains perfect equilibrium is a dead system (i.e. it ceases to be a system); or else it contains hidden mechanisms that place it in a condition of absolute dependency upon that same outside from which it desperately seeks to emancipate itself. In magical thought, the relationship with the outside is regulated through the homeostatic mechanism of ritual sacrifice:
Everything is superfluous and resplendent. The filthy iridescent puddles of diesel, the wreckage plagued by rust, the desperate vegetation crawling with parasites in the cracks of the concrete.
Every city contemplates its nemesis, every city preserves the deformed negative of what it could be but is not, every city conceals within the folds of its geography a latent Remoria that pushes for the inversion to take place.
The city is a spiral of nausea. Everything is coming to pieces, falling into a Babel of fragments, in a continuous production of ragged shreds of stuttering, useless matter. In this crumbling and absurd edifice, everyone carries their own stone. The city is a sarcophagus of forgotten hieroglyphs.
Like every city that ‘conceals within the folds of its geography a latent Remoria that pushes for the inversion to take place’, we too contain the repressed doubles of ourselves: alien vistas to be revealed through the masochistic discipline of giving in and letting go—for ‘only while we fall inexorably into our dissolution can we fulfil our destiny and shine’.
Gruppo di Nun