/lit/ - Literature

>A rush of white labcoat passes briefly by. I fall unconscious.
>*****
>Dry static twists and turns in the black-crackling stop. Taut, then torn, then reconstitution for its own tense torsion to be reshorn. The static piper’s at the pillories and waits the crack of dawn whence the hangman strings him up the gallows pole flickering. Ligatured and set alight, the piper’s calling your mercy and his fire clings him writhing in striped monochrome sackcloth dancing at the end of its rope. In the burlap dreams his neck does snap. Skin gives way to twine’s scourging avulsion. A trapdoor’s harsh and repeating clatter against the backstop underneath. Papier-mâché fibers debrided of their fine white starch; soon scattered to the winds of black whimsy. Stone-weighted feet swaying dull and irrational. And the static imagery falls down against the taut black paraffin set to crackle. And to the ear pressed close to liquid mercury’s diminishing ripple, the sound of soft fallout is dry and metallic at its sawtoothed waves’ edges. And the ripples reach their worlds-end and bounce careening back in tight recoil. And all is still. There is an Other that lives in the dark space between the static motes. It is the Other that births hapless pipers to static mannequins atop the deep black crackle. It is the Other that orchestrates the piper’s crimes against laws of the Other’s tailormade construction. The Other passes sentence and presides over the piper’s summary execution. Other is the gallows, and Other is the rope, and the Other sets the lit flame of the piper’s prison slacks. It is the smoke that drifts away and that which burns. It is the Other whose apophasis speaks in burnt pipers and in metallic ripples of radioactive spall. Geiger’s panic wails out their message and we hear only death’s rapid jigstepped approach.
>*****
>“You’re a tight little unit, aren’t you?” asks Bucksneed.
The middle section needs some (probably extensive) line editing, but I'm mostly concerned with the "Other" section. It seems a little heavy-handed to me. Thoughts?

The stairs start squarely utilitarian from the lobby. Once, they shuttled servicemen and delivery persons in bright orange vests through concrete accessways now empty. The sheen of heavy use on handrails. Grime from long-dead hands on walls. Rusted iron cheesegrater treads upon the stairs’ edges. The fragrance of old bare iron. We passed these easily.

Higher, our fortitude is tested. The ascent decays to rubble and scree, where water drips through wall-bound lichen clinging low to drainpipe exits and dampens the path upward. We pressed our lips to the pipe and drank the lichenous water and we scraped with our teeth the green into our waiting mouth. “Keep going,” our passenger said, and we choked it off at the base as we climbed with sure feet.

The persistent are rewarded, but not before navigating sections where the walls squeeze inward and the stairs grow slowly irregular and they jut out as tongues and eyes and, yes: genitalia, nipples; from wending stone petroglyphs—in chisel-rent scratchings, in powdery and resinous charcoal, in dried blood of ambiguous genesis—which from time to time flicker illuminant into spectres of bison, flautists, of great and forgotten wars, of six-limbed slatterns with slackened tongues and regal eyes, of men on precipices with gold-voiced advisors; our shadows danced against the hewn-granite cave walls as we climbed and leapt the spiral from one promontory to the next. We took our time scaling this section, and we did not fall.

We ascended the tower, passing through spaces where the petroglyphs died off for a time into darkness; transitioned to immaculate torchlit arches where blue-glazed brick prefaced adobe’s slow crumble; to streaked marble’s meandering sidle, up beneath its follies in red-shingle overhang; to draconian cobblestone battlements that give way to thick-lathered cerussite white handrails and mahogany wearing through its shellacked varnishing. Our stomach full of lichen and water, we passed through the bedrooms of aristocrats’ children adorned and festooned in bleached-white frill and delicate linen embroidery (sterile—so sterile), flophouses where the polioed cripples their braces lay on plywood shelves next to peg-leg prostheses, soot-blackened kerchiefs, workers’ slops; the smell of sick is everywhere amix with stale camphor and empty brown soda-lime laudanum bottles, a bedraggled doll with worn red felt hair… we passed windowed bakeries where in the corner was sawdust baked with flour and alum and sold to tight-corseted women with glassy-eyed children in sniffling tow.

>>20088293
>>20088307

>>20037842

>I've taken more inspiration from Lynch and experimental film than I have from any literature
>nobody has anything to teach me about writing itself, because writing can't be taught
>only structures built up around the writing can be taught
>adherence to these structures is oversaturated, fomenting a preponderance of dogmatic, structurally sound, yet artistically bereft authors whose adherence to the "rules" drowns out any dissent on every level, from enthusiast up to academic critic
>i hate niggers

>>19874292
Because success in postmodern society is an act of compromise characterized by cowardice. For some people, "succeeding" means giving up parts of yourself that you're just not willing to part with. I don't know how anyone could look at the living poster-boy of success, Jeff Bezos, and go, "Yeah, I want what he has." I'm only really interested in the failures, because the failures have a much better chance of being the kind of independent, original thinkers I like to spend my time with. You can keep your supplicants and panderers, your chasers-after and charismatics. DFW was a rare fucker, and he brushed up against the Sublime more than a couple times in his writing, that stuff which shines lightless in the dark and burns without heat. He knew something you didn't, and something you'll probably never know until you've got a mouthful of ash, at your deathbed looking back on a life chasing material and status like a pillar of salt.

Fuck success, fuck this dull, inhuman world of material and economics covered in its thin veneer of sparkling cell phone screens. Fuck you.

>>19680577
>b-but the greekerinos!!!!!
And just because I know someone's thinking it, the fact that the ancient Greeks are long dead and venerated and whatever, it doesn't preclude them being sometimes faggy and academic. Thoughts are a mind parasite. You were never meant to become their powerless thralls. Return.

>>19662660
>Hobbitebourg

>>19644916

>20
>Materialistic muh science tier atheist.
>Got dumped by my first and only GF.
>Get depressed.
>Went the "start with the Greeks" route and begin reading Stoicism.
>Decide to get back to basics and start with the Presocratics, then Plato, Aristotle and such...
>Realise that the Church and Desert Fathers are the continuation of the Classics.
>24 now.
>I'm a staunch Orthodox Christian and my family is worried that I end up in a monastery.

That truly was a wild ride. Share stories about being changed by reading.

>>13427204
That's oddly specific. You ok anon?

The Platonic identification of oneness with intelligibility was the seed of the modern. Atma in the mode of time, Hegel's dialectic is the ramification of sense-certainty. If something makes sense it has to be one. Intelligibility becomes the correlate of apperception in Kant. Apperception becomes the postmodern subject as the precipitate of biological, cultural, etc. forces. Apperception reduced to just the formal container of representation, on the other hand, objects become overdetermined by their properties. Nominalism in ontology, voluntarism in theology/metaphysics. Wholeness falls from pleroma to kenoma. Thought excavates its ground until there is only the bare form of its self-relating: thou art that = meat. Deprived of the center the atma wallows in the periphery. Capital is being colonized by a disavowed alterity. The idea of Freud's unconsciousness could only co-emerge with the repressive structure of civilization. What the illusion of historicism reveals is the omnipotence of circle = Ouroboros, or rather, the linearity of history just is the making (self-)explicit of this circularity in the form of the contradiction of capital. The denial of a relationship with the source based on love (as just the self- agreement of identity A = A) has a dim sense of how tight we've found the dialectical spring, and we're just stalling until it snaps. See: ouroboric conceptions of the Self. What has reality for Descartes is only what persists, and the abstract persists most of all. Continuity of the watcher displaced onto the object, the site of rational experiment. Hamster wheel is a torus. Descartes' cogito was atma in a lower potency - his skeptical method is grounded by the guarantee of the method itself: the West's Na em so atta. In clearing the Aristotelian air the Descartes recuperates Plato as an apperceptive substance - being becomes extension, presence, continuity through time. Platonism is both the ignition of the dialectic and the memory of its transcendent outside, platonism is a liminal philosophy as such, it sits in the zone between discursion and its beyond. The golden age stuff is old news, here's another angle: cycles proceed as the diminishing recuperation of their own origin. A stock force is exhausted, like entropy, God made the accursed share with let there be light, the light demands only an individuation at its level, because dancing with Flow is like skating on the mouth's edge, the planets orbit with perfect chastity. This is the only world there is. Only world that could have been. oh You guests of my soul. Whetted on night gravel and kidney stones. Silence is just the midwife, she's not here to love.

The tension between form and content is another way of expressing this difference: where do we locate the isomorphism between thought and being? What is the connect between the concept and the thing described, why can't we hear the "click"? If this question could be unequivocally answered, would concepts even exist? It is the groundlessness of phenomena that is their ground: the opacity of the Real is the very mother of conceptuality. See, God isn't the content of what we say - Love, Beauty, Truth, the Good - he is first and foremost the form of this saying. Content: to contain, what something is filled with, its insides. Form: the boundary, membrane that breaks up the undifferentiated breadth of being into intelligible wholes. I said membrane for a reason: God is a cell: Limit as such. God isn't some concept x, God is the concept of a concept: the pure formal guarantee of thought's eternal self-movement.