The Messenger by Kathryn Ian, 35mm slide projection on glass panel
Dear friends,
I hope you all are well, despite the continuing trials and tribulations of life in post-everything 2020!
In the present post, I'd like to share some details about a project we’re really excited about, which has been in the works for quite some time now: New Wilderness Gospel, an experimental serial novel that will be released in connection with the forthcoming Lux Interna album of the same name. While we're still working out the details, we plan to release the first of two volumes, both electronically and physically, in 2021. A multimedia project at heart, the text will be illuminated by a series of prints made by Kathryn, which make use of an alternative photographic process from the 1800s.
A bit of background.
The seeds of inspiration for NWG were sown during a summer I spent working alone in an archive in Wrocław, Poland gathering research for my dissertation on the early modern mystic Jacob Böhme (1575-1624). That August was so dark, cold, and rain-soaked that it could have passed for a harsh February pretty much anywhere that nature had a shred of affection left for humankind. It was a wonderful, but somewhat lonely time. Spending my days in the company of sixteenth and seventeenth century visionary texts, and my nights scribbling down notes in cafes and bars over a few Polish beers, odd “scenes” began to pop into my head. I suppose you could call them vignettes: situations and characters that arose out of nowhere and then disappeared, each apparently unconnected to the other.
As time went on and I found myself living in California, where one really shouldn’t ever complain about the weather unless it’s in reference to a terrifyingly high AQI number or those days when the sky turns a pale shade of “Blade Runner orange,” I returned to my notebooks. The scenes and the characters kept coming. And what was more, a plot began to form around them—first a thought of water. Then a mirage. And finally, a real river began to flow. I realized that some of the core ideas that I’d been wrestling with in my research were simply demanding to be given more supple bodies than academic prose could offer them. That’s how it all started.
Fast Forward to the shitshow of 2020.
Although the book was started long before the pandemic laid bare the extreme precarity and outright dysfunctionality of what passes for "business as usual" in the late capitalist west, the intensity of our historical moment has made me even more invested in the themes the work treats. In a nutshell, NWG explores time, loss, and the ever-elusive possibility of redemption against the backdrop of a world defined by an increasingly fragmented sense of reality. By employing a nonlinear approach to narrative and engaging with the wreckage of western philosophical and theological history, the work explores a tangled ecology of characters that move toward a point of convergence with ontological implications.
But don’t worry, it's not all melancholy & metaphysics—there's also music, a backwards walking shadow that speaks German, liquor store robberies, time-traveling saints born from hexatonic scales, and sentient radios! So, at the very least, it’s got that going for it...
A message from the messenger.
Since NWG shifts between drastically different narrative voices and styles, I had a difficult time deciding on an excerpt to share. In future posts, perhaps I'll share passages from more "narrative-driven" scenes; for now I've decided to share the brief monologue that opens the book. Gabriel, whose voice you hear below, appears from time to time throughout NWG to offer a sort of “meta-commentary” on the narrative and the world of the text. These interjections are referred to as "transmissions." Without giving too much away, Gabriel is a “messenger,” connected in strange ways to both the natural radio waves emitted by lightning and astronomical objects, and the ancient Greek concept of angelos ("messenger, envoy, one that announces”), which resurfaces in the New Testament and takes on another significance when it’s used to translate the Hebrew mal'akh. But, as they say, things are not entirely as they seem.
Gabriel often feels a bit misaligned with the times and worries that he comes off as somewhat grandiose. But I’ve assured him time and time again that his tone just makes him unique and interesting.
At any rate, it’s still a working draft, so changes may eventually be made; but for now, I hope you enjoy the excerpt! And as always, we love to hear from you— so drop us a line and don’t be a stranger.
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TRANSMISSION #1.
The hour is, as they say, getting late. A thick blue darkness creeps across the cartographic scar of the western hemisphere. It fills up the eyes and lungs of a billion sleeping bodies. Petals of black fire fall over the shapes of distant mountains and the birch in the valley shine white as teeth.
Or perhaps it’s early. Dusk and dawn, like dogs and wolves, are hard to tell apart in the twilight. Well, whether late or early, inter canem et lupum, in times like these we should pray that we’re visited by the latter rather than the former: right now we need force and fire more than the false friendship of feeble familiarity! But best to leave behind these polarizing metaphors and moralizing metaphysics altogether. No more pitting light against dark, dog against wolf; these dualities are only the phantasmal flickers of a grand and dangerous illusion that has taken up residence within us. There is no more time for such talk. Not when something so inconceivably precious is on the verge of disappearing forever from our world.
Now, certainly not all disappearances need be mourned. Many things deserve a quicker death than they get. And I’m not one for nostalgia. No, not in the least. Backwards-facing sentiments are utterly lost on me. My life is not divided into soft-shaded pasts and distracted presents and fleeting futures. I simply don’t inhabit time that way. There is only a bottomless now that is everything at once. But however differently you and I may map time, it is indeed high time that you worried about this disappearance; franky, you should be terrified. If it's completed, a part of you will vanish completely. And in that moment a thousand threads will be cut. You see, there’s a secret language that weaves you into the world and the world into you; and this language will be lost beyond recall. Believe me—even though you might not feel anything when it happens, that very loss of feeling will be the sign and seal of a loss beyond comprehension.
Look, there are forms of violence so deep, so pernicious and pervasive, that you don't even sense the pain of the blow or the cut of the claw. Acts of destruction that numb rather than sting. Brutalities that breed silences instead of cries. And here's the thing: what we used to call reality is weakening right now, decomposing more each day. But it's not, as those old Germans thought, that everything solid is suddenly melting into air—it's more that the air, the breath, is being taken out of the solidity of the world.
You see, an imperium has been underway for some time now. Invisible though it may be, its roots snake deep down into the soil and feed off the dead. But it’s happening inside you too. And through you. An imaginal imprisonment, a calculated cruelty that transforms captivity into complicity.
Yes, Rome is still building her roads. And these roads will run straight through your heart! So many will be sacrificed. So many already have. But you might never even suspect what's going on. In the wake of countless rituals of subjection, dehumanization, and conquest, and in the pornographic glow of a thousand shiny new technologies of displacement, a numbness has sunk deep into the heart of this land, leaching away the light. Long ago, history came like a hunter to these shores. And now it grows, gnarled and obscene, a tangled thicket slickened with blood and wrapped in threads of gold. But many of its branches fork out into dead ends. What you used to call the future, for example, is a lifeless limb that will be cut away and tossed onto the fire that is to come.
And in this very moment, even as each of my words ring out, we are entering into the late stages—the last stages perhaps—of a dire sickness. But the fevered fires that flash like lightning through the flesh of the world are signs that the condition is not yet terminal. And this is why we must fight what is ultimately a spiritual fight. Yes, yes...I know, I know. A ridiculous word! But please, hear me out. I’m not trying to wriggle free of this world and sneak off into some boundless beyond; I have no interest in slipping away from the haunt of history and the scandalous softness of skin and the wet dark scent of the soil to leave it all behind me in the dust like a cast off snakeskin. And I certainly don’t mean to invoke that warm-bellied abstraction so many of you late moderns like to toss around in your calmer moments. No, not at all; the last thing we need is to lose what vision we have left by staring directly into the pure white light of an abstraction.
I mean only to say that this fight has everything to do with life, with breath and movement...with spiritus. Moreover, it’s a strange sort of fight. One that calls more for openness than armament. Because this crisis transcends us all. It cuts across your divisions of human and animal, animate and inanimate, subject and object, and so on. In fact, those of us who want to resist this infectious imperium, must refuse to replicate the violence encoded within these categorical regimes. We must turn away from the seductive paths that lead slyly from name to noun to number. We must learn to flourish, as the old English seer had it, in the barren climes and rage in the wild where lions roam.
Yes, the poets have often found ways of using language to lead us toward liberation. But even if we are tempted to discount their eccentricities, we should reflect equally on the profound mistrust that many mystics have had for language. And we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the seriousness of their private struggles with its structures. For as all colonizers know, language also has the power to circle around things, to divide this from that, them from us. And it is often those who wield the weight of the word alongside the threat of the sword that are arbiters of both place and presence within the orders of things. Yet although these orders may appear to be designated by providence, nature, or some other metaphor that’s hardened into a lazy metaphysics, they are indeed never natural. My dear reader, we must never forget how powerful a weapon language is in the struggle for the soul of a world; but silence too is pregnant with potency and potential—at least for those who learn to listen to its secrets!
But now my thoughts are getting away from me. We should stay with the threat at hand. Now if this conquest—this imperium—is fully realized, everything that cannot be contained and controlled by the prisons of number, quantity, and definition will face extinction. There will be no knock at your door at midnight. No heavy tread of boots in the streets. It will simply all cease to be. Yes, yes...again...I know. It all sounds absurdly dramatic. And these days we have little patience for tales that strike us as too poetic. Too romantic. Too grand and metaphysical! This is after all an age that values bathos more than pathos—yet another symptom of the very affliction that I’m describing.
Yes, I do fear that you'll dismiss all this as the product of an embarrassingly overwrought mind. The melodrama of a second-rate poet. Or perhaps the ramblings of that most maligned of creatures: the feebleminded religious fanatic. But please, listen with an open mind. I can't think of any other way to put it to you. And let me be clear: this is no exhortation to return to some imagined Eden of the past. No, this type of thinking places redemption in the hands of Cronus—an unwise move! There is no going back and no back to go to; only into the storm and into the dark and into what is beyond all vision. But go on we must. Should the reality of the imperium finally ossify, all that will be left of the world—and of that small portion of the world that you refer to as your self—will be what is easily categorizable. That which is entirely reliant on its relation to endless sequences of reference for a sense of its own meaning. To use a word that is in danger of being irreversibly domesticated in these late or early hours, we will lose all that is wild.
So, roll your eyes if you must. But we should really be quiet for a moment: America is slipping into a dream within the thick blue darkness...