The Stuff

…I don’t know how long this has been going on and it’s hard to recall when it started. I know I’m driving down the highway connecting the outer ring road to the city’s core. Lights stream by, becoming uninterrupted luminous streams in my vision, harsh against the velvet darkness. Fuck knows how fast I’m going – the figures on the speedo have become unintelligible cyphers and I deactivated the onboard nav some time ago – I now have my own onboard nav; where it’s taking me  I don’t know either but there seems little point in resisting at this juncture. I feel in my shirt pocket for the baggie: good, still a fair bit left – not that that’s so critical, in light of what I’ve noticed recently about the dosage.

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Cyclonopedia: post scriptum

I think it’s worth saying a few further words about the structure and style of Cyclonopedia, in addition to its contents and general themes. The book is a rather extreme example of the dictum ‘form follows function’, although ‘(mal)form follows (dys)function’ might perhaps be more applicable here.

Lovecraft, Cyclonopedia and Materialist Horror

Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (re.press, 2008) – a sprawling, schizoid meditation on oil, war, religion and the occult in the ancient and present-day Middle East – continues a tradition of ‘cosmic horror’ pioneered by the American ‘pulp’ writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) and still best known to us from his many short stories, poems and novellas. Apart from the numerous direct references to Lovecraft and his so-called Cthulhu mythos in Negarestani’s philosophy-fiction, an implicit link exists between the two writers in their shared anti-humanism and decidedly objective, materialist approach to horror. For Negarestani, this is manifested in the Middle East as a living, sentient entity, but not in any spiritual or poetic sense: the region’s fundamental ideology is not mystical or even really occult in nature but “fanatically Tiamaterialist”. This is further entrenched by his development of a “blobjective” philosophy, which is to say, an ethics and ontology from the unique perspective of oil (“the blob”). But let us first examine how a similar philosophy emerged in Lovecraft’s uniquely hyperbolic brand of despair.

Lovecraft, Cyclonopedia and Materialist Horror

II. Eye of the Cyclone

A comparable fate seems to befall Hamid Parsani, the fictional Iranian archaeologist in Cyclonopedia. After coming into possession of a mediaeval relic associated with an obscure pre-Islamic Persian cult, he begins to suffer from a leprous skin condition and a concurrent worsening of his already somewhat febrile mental state. Shortly before his final disappearance, one of his friends evocatively describes him as “a bulging syphilitic brain with a pink leech dangling at the root of it”.

Lovecraft, Cyclonopedia and Materialist Horror

III. Diabolical synthesis

Cosmic horror is not like other horror. It is vast in scope – utterly, crushingly vast – and derives its power principally from its impersonality. Lovecraft sums this up perfectly in Imprisoned with the Pharaohs, in which the narrator, lost in chambers of pitch darkness far beneath surface of hoary Egypt, begins to hear certain noises…

“In their rhythmic piping, droning, rattling and beating I felt an element of terror beyond all the known terrors of earth – a terror peculiarly dissociated from personal fear, and taking the form of a sort of objective pity for our planet, that it should hold within its depths such horrors...”

And London was no more

“In the far deeps of space there are…textures. Complex configurations of elementary fields and topological defects in space-time. ‘Non-trivial solutions’, as we say. And they have what you can almost call an awareness, a sentience – the evidence has been piling up for a decade or more now. No-one wants to discuss it openly because it’s so damn weird. But it’s undeniable. There’s complex adaptive behaviour, communication even…no-one’s had the balls to publish yet, but everyone within the field is talking about it.” – Dr. Elizabeth Worthing, Dept. Of Physics and Astronomy, UCL

A Cautionary Tale

As a forensic investigator and pathologist with over ten years’ service in the Metropolitan Police under my belt, I’ve seen my fair share of the grotesque and the bizarre, I can tell you. Acid murders, ritual sacrifice, ‘exorcisms’ taken to sadistic extremes, the most gruesome gangland punishments imaginable and sundry other instances of surreal and depraved violence. But a case I investigated last year stands out as qualitatively in a different league of unnameable horror.
          It began with a call to a bedsit on a small residential road just off Well Street, E9, about what initially appeared to be a missing-person case; however, it soon transpired that the person in question was not entirely missing. A murder, then? But no trace could be found of involvement by another party, and the circumstances of the property made it quite impossible that the body (or rather, the rest of it) could have been smuggled out unnoticed. Suicide or accident was similarly ruled out, it seemed, by the almost complete absence of remains: how could a man possibly have done that to himself, intentionally or not?

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Catch the Lent Car line from Ankh Pollard to Nether Bangle…mouseovers reveal the original name. This is just too good.

The London Dead

part 1

Five hundred generations of souls lie beneath the asphalt this close to the Thames, compacted down over the centuries into psychic anthracite. Now there’s a lot of potential there – potential energy, I mean, stored in obscure bonds within a matrix of disincarnate and impersonal memory. Race memory of races no history tells of, either pre-dating the Romans and their blasphemous practice of capturing spoken words with written signs, or else comprising some nameless, faceless tribe that coallesced from the human flotsam washed up here from the proverbial four corners before dissipating a century or two later as unheralded as it appeared. In short, a rich deposit of fossil fuels lurking dormant but potent under the brick, pavement, road and lawn, awaiting only the oxygen of living organic minds and the spark of thoughts or emotions to initiate combustion.

For a taster of a physical signature of this vast roster of bygone humanity, visit the London Aquarium on the south bank and look out for what is ostensibly one of the less captivating exhibits. It’s a cabinet showing a small selection of the diverse man-made detritus beachcombed from the shores of the lower Thames estuary; prehistoric tools fashioned from elk antler, Roman coins and pottery, mediaeval timber fragments, 18th-century tobacco pipes, Pepsi cans from the ’80s, the empty hull of a first-generation iPod. The residue of people who are gone and forgotten, but never really went anywhere at all, and are only ‘forgotten’ in the narrow, living sense of the word. Because patterns of activity and arrangement never disappear entirely, but are translated into forms too subtle for the living, with their preoccupation with activity and business and noise, to distinguish from the happenstance of purely stochastic processes. Yet those patterns are still there, implicit and invisible to all but the most sensitive, to those with the ability to tune out the overlying psychic noise of mundane incarnate life.