The Grain Temple

U-Mod
You were always defined by results. Perhaps this joke can only be
appreciated after your death. You will be committed later, but for
now, it is important to enjoy. By all means, be positive and
curious. The fragility that so terrifies the adult is to be celebrated.
It resists undertakings of all kinds. Though I can see these
touching the very places they expect. But there are additional
openings, multiple cut and divaricating slit. Our hands crawl and
pudenda ache from this dizzying inertia. You feel and I suppose
you knew it always in your bones. There is no defined agenda for
this motoric negation. It leaves us, the audience and the figure of
an auditor on an invisible platform– ‘sex undeterminable,
enveloped from head to foot in loose black djebella, with hood.’i
The speaker by turns is anatomized, scrutinized minutely: ‘a
monster, like you is beyond my understanding’ – one who
searches deep inside ‘like a scientist looking for a mysterious
phenomenon’.ii
And that isn’t what we expect from reader or auditor. Rather we
never knew. There it was: an ideal world to involve us all, which
everything could hinge on, reflecting our faces back from the
future.
Not I formed or entertained in speaking/writing. Not here or
now, but suffused, receptive, aching. This shivering eager skin
qcalls the bodies of Jarman’s Sebastiane, porous with sun, replete
with death… I did not know men could suffer, could be destroyed
so. I burn for that still even as I watched him perforated
somewhere near the spleen, Reni’s saint, a fabric of soft folds and
light. To be him, aching and smiling, lapsing into vision.
We naturally expect there will be questions; something for
someone to be shared, revised or reexamined in a new context;
once faithful intermediaries remodeled and rebuilt to newer
specification, as though a depth yawns under all that sortilege and
we await its permission.
Puce
The soul can be held or trapped in a tree. This is because it was,
contrary to appearances, never in your mouth. We hesitate to
erect a border, even at the elastic properties of air, the
disturbance, the interstices of bodies, too delicately responsive,
too caught up in one another: ‘To touch a pair of lips/And at the
same time know/That it was a pair of lips/To watch everything
is so deceptive.’iii
She evinces uncertainty about the voice, its dubious production
and problematic taxonomy. If both are in doubt, this suspicion
extends to the auditor, who hears Puce Mary looped to the end
of the track, digitized, sinking into a mesh of static and black ice.
We still speak or we still claim. We are each origins of locutions,
illocutions and perlocutions, ascribing to every sound its source
and recipient. Yet this functional classification is lost in all that is
unmanifest and innocent. My spontaneous faith in form renders
me unable to hear the hissing medusa in her throat, like a creature
insinuating its way into our beds.
The ear of the auditor is tuned to that conflagration, although it
cannot be heard or parsed, only enabled and propagated.
You exist in this tensed in-between somehow. You are its
‘purposelessness that compels all purpose’.iv There will be
something for you out there; some weather naturally. There will
be more Sunday outings on the bridge. Yet here we are.
I would die, but I cannot do that in a way that might satisfy you.
I would, no doubt, have preferred to have lived in the usual sense.
I assume a series of masks disappearing in a perpetual creation
the specialists here misconstrue as cancerous. Here is what Ligotti
might describe as the churning latrine of the Absolute: gyre of an
insubordinate future and lost to words, as I know you are or will
be some day.
Even if we disavow this, it only resurfaces with better injuries. So
I breathe it in, then exhale. ‘Not the body of the ego, but corpus
ego’.v The body, distended and precipitate, forcing open its
wound, with yet more bodies, thronging together in a crush, then
a roll. Only you seem to understand. You make it sing, in your
way, as you will on that far off beach of bone, before the all-
corroding wave of the Angel… This ‘You or It or Non-I or Thing
that unlistens’ finally alone, there, to audit all our memories.
Stage right, Mouth agape in black yolk, moving wordlessly. It ‘needs one
time, another, then another; a discrete quantity providing
articulation with a space of time, or a place.’
With all the intensity of a ritual flaying, it amasses ‘tension,
vibration, modulation, color, cry, or song’, a timbre and a woof. vi
The blood and afterbirth and the waters seep or settle into
encroaching desert rendering further self-laceration pointless, yet
she does not rest, so much as recede from us amidst the noise:
loping irregular basses; long continuants in high and low registers,
flurries of random beats; the susurrus of far-off industry, a soft
cataract. One qhears her barely accented English – that prefix is
only to say, something audits; perhaps it is not I. A reflection on
‘politics’ and the ‘decay of nature’ her devastating ‘lack of interest’,
‘tortured by a feeling of drowning … Under you.’ Detailing the
indices of our decline, of her particular corruption; all the changes
set to follow.vii Dead nature. Machined sun
Thought is inimical to her existence; but she thinks, she accepts
this and dies, lives, breathes in, exhales sharply, continues before,
into the silent unknown. Is this another name for the body –
generosity, grace? Is it you, or everything we cannot name or
regulate? Sebastiane drilled by the archers, balled tight and
squirming ready on the hot sand. Why is it still possible to envy
him?
Perhaps that is why she could accept her coming disappearance.
For a last vestige of her remains, a polemical trace. Boundless
generosity compelling your vast revenge.
The Posit
Take the bell once known known as Obertura. Deprive it of fast
onset and exponential decay. Export vox to matrix.
The period of modulation is determined by the frequency of the
modulus
Inharmonics rage through her apartment. They’re spurting black
tonight while my body sags down like a bag of cement. I’m about
to squirt out a successor, I think. This ‘S/he or It, We’ or thing
that fucks itself. We qthink Nessa Map’s sandy hair and pale,
freckled skin, its persistent miasma of cellulose from all those
rotting books.
Ligotti renders such things equivalent and useless: libraries, care
homes, monasteries, cemeteries, craters, parking lots – all ‘starless
cities of insanity’; the back-street medicine shop where his
narrator loiters. ‘Medicine-shop situations’ without exception. I
cannot, but if I could, I might except the periodic visits from a
floating puppet in an anachronistic Pierrot costume. Its wires
receding ‘into a ceiling of distorted light and shadow’.viii
This is it again. Whatever this is. Is it death? You’d think I’d know
after so many viable iterations.
We dab our furrowed skin with a fresh handkerchief, hypnotized
while the Matrix LFO shreds samples of low city hum and
something else squirms inside, waiting to burst from my belly’s
palpitating slit. Cracked drone sliced by some pseudo-random
modulator or granulator evokes the Mesh, static and bit rot; such
phenomena of purposeless that finite minds render as traumatic
or antithetic to themselves.
The Grey Cubes
This I, S/he or it (the thing) which fucks itself wanders to the
bridge by the former Naval Yards, closed until further notice for
a discrete cleanup around your father’s old Units. Despite the
worrisome biohazard markers there are no ungainly figures like
divers in bulbous headgear. Nothing’s going down or appears to
be going on at all, as if what was breeding within these squat grey
cubes is still being solicited.
Beside the abandoned scientific complex on the island, the
derelict Opera House’s cantilevered shard balances on its
southern pier, buffeted by morning squall under baggy clouds.
We qsee upriver to the hastily assembled barrages. Perhaps
belatedly, you became aware of the defeated thinking behind
those pointless contraptions. They maintained a certain
compliance - a safety effect your complacent state within a state
eventually surmised was useless. So you surprised us and yourself
with the capitulation to something nearly humane: allowing
inflows from the Buckies’ migrant cargoes. Barges corrupted with
q-memories of Planet Jesus float from orbit down to ocean,
passive, slippery and open to radical interpretation, as they say.
Following her substitution, what else did you extract from Nessa
or from her library? We Qcall some of the passions you indulged:
a double door, the landing of the dual staircase in the Custom
House. A slit of electric light between doors and the warm blush
of candles from below….
The modulation matrix affects the middle partials of the bell and
synthesizes the terrible voice once commonly heard in the House.
It’s a buggy machine emulation of a Posit Castrato from the
insanely spired Karakali temples The phatic wash induced
stabbing pains in your neck and groin. Still, you looped it
continually. There you told me – that’s how one paints a World and
makes it clown around.
Your Cabal only pass for rulers here. The Syndic mummers,
likewise, oppose, co-dependently. The thing we know can’t
happen will happen.
The Posit Castrati neonatally synched with stem bud
commissures wound through their several intestinal tracts. Their
many anuses flowered red orchis. Their sonorous agonies
insinuated factory ideologies the Karakali could trace through
eons of panspermia. The migrants told us of the God-factory
hollowed through the interior of their homeworld, Jesus. Yes,
Jesus! Those aliens sensed something was missing. The Karakali
are insensate but subtle enough to know they had always been
scuttling corpses, incomplete mechanisms.
The sound of the shuriken molecules. Enteric tract, interstices in
our own gut stigmatized by the bell’s endless howl.
The Matriarchs, first Daughters of the Rose loved and tortured
themselves for these meteoric hierophants, sliced themselves up
as the Posit components were ritually killed.
This process subtracts oscillators, simplifying the algorithm until
we reach a pure sine. Last: black womb of silence: symbol of the
Vitrine Christs.
The Karakali tracts were seen first in craters and clearings below,
then in stellar prodigies above. The contemporary loss of these
philosophical poisons afflicted Nessa despite the spitting
contempt for the Matriarchy instilled among modernist
intellectuals.
They imply a vast abscess in the purity of form she loved and an
idiosyncratic program of self-harm. She followed many
undisclosed wills expressed in moments of anomaly or resistance.
Weepslow sun, edging grainy pebbledash and plaster. That dream was
Map’s crime.
Alternates
Natality and mortality are conventionally opposed but we Alters
die wet. Die Welt or World considered not as image or as a site to
be populated with objects or even as a mechanism for producing
itself. In us, this fantasy of projects and manias never took. It’s
the theatre again, inert, burdened somehow by the absence that
makes the whole insidious drama, Foucault’s face auto-erasing at
the edge of the sea. But that is not a face: ‘that is not a hair/And
that is not my mouth’.ix
The negation transforms everything. At this stage Mary’s narrator
is beyond loss or grief. She seems saturated with health,
somehow. You can hear it, livid in her voice. I think the Obertura
is bleeding through a modulated bandpass filter, washing over her
like a warm, familiar neurosis. But I guess. I cannot reconstruct
the audio process. The background spume just feels more
luxuriant somehow. Now we’ve really got into death, there’s a
pause. Just her in the womb of silence, tainted and quivering: ‘I
feel on fire, I liquefy.’
‘Now you have neither shape nor size’.
Things are estranged by this act of dirty replication: they no longer
comply. Nor do the things that we are. The thing that fucks itself
can still act with a robotic independence. It belies this inertia.
Map’s later iconoclasm was prescient. It considers you the
monster and it entertains you; breeding its singular, glaciating
force.
Each apparition itself, no other. In the Custom house, you
crushed your lips to glass, stinking of wine. A stratus exuded from
your mouth like a grey familiar, simmering with rot and
corruption. Then the last candle flickered out. In the dark your
captive hand bled from tipping the thorns of a rose. You said the
sun will strangle itself with or without our help - But, no matter, let’s
help.
Your overheated skin, the summer flies sipping from your inner
labia. Each broke containment and you too liquified, became on
fire, imperceptible.
They built the stone tower to hold your suffering corpse. You do
not surrender even now but render the loss polemical and
productive.
You taught us to forget a billion or more deaths. How many more
All? We can hope for all. You memorialized only this lapsus, this
excursus, rendering and effectuating it. You invited us to your
war.

i
Samuel Beckett, ‘Not I’, in Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett. London: Faber
and Faber 1984, 218.
ii
Puce Mary, ‘The Transformation’, The Drought, 2018.
iii
Puce Mary, ‘The Red Desert’, The Drought, 2018.
iv
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. Houndsmills: Palgrave
Macmillan: 2007, 236.
v
Nancy, Corpus, p. 25
vi
Jean-Luc Nancy. Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. Perspectives in
Continental Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press (2008), p.27
vii
Puce Mary, ‘The Red Desert’, The Drought, 2018.
viii
Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco. London: Virgin Books. 2008, 58
ix
Puce Mary, ‘The Transformation’, The Drought, 2018.