“If there is to be any basis for solidarity, much more intensity is required. Firstly, to salvage and revitalise, and then to acquire full comprehension of the cohesive energy that binds the different elements our mistaken beliefs have disconnected from the primal origin. And then to synchronise that energy with the alienated environment in which it was lost.” — Nadezhda Kharitonov, Alien Republic

I was sent from the future. Any verbal object was a tool of the imagination. I was writing from within the essence of things, but the centre would not hold, so I related the following…

Nasrul was consenting and often anecdotal. He was aware that his collaboration with the author was in both their interests. Nevertheless, in making the golden choice, he was denying the cost of life or death and leaving behind the need to survive as a character. He had no belief in evaluation or development and had abandoned the mental effort to grasp the fact of time some time ago. None of this entailed withdrawal or disinterest. On the contrary, it enabled a fuller penetration and excavation of the great unknown.

In this dispensation, the reader would decode an impenetrable text as if translating speech in tongues. Whatever they uncovered would be visionary, not factual. It would have the radiant qualities of ultra-material, not matter as we know it. The intelligence of the language did not reside within the realm of facts.

“Literature is to be burned and discarded, not exalted or copied.”

Reduced to a biological phenomenon, the entity had become the property of science. Selves were given what they wanted and allowed to eat or drink only in so far as they were willing to obey orders. Science was in the thrall of consumerism, which made it pseudoscience.

“That we are alive does not mean we are living.”

To live was the task of sacrifice, but where would the sacrifice be held? Seeking confirmation of the extra-terrestrial, all that was required was subversive.

Edward, the diarist-poet with the enormous drug habit, knocked out verses on the balcony, blunt diatribes, miscreant rants, transcendental vagaries, telegrams from the war zone of his bitter imaginations. Absorbed into a species of voyeurism, assimilated into the void cheques of material dogmas, obedient to the cuckoo clock, and trained in machismo of tech gear, his blunt constructs were sublime visual nuggets that emotively pierced the heart.

Within the blood of the sun
a hard silence
a great fire
a unity of feathers is
enveloping outside of itself,
neither a flask
nor a vase

Because Edward, the diarist-poet, described himself as somehow living and breathing within the poems he wrote, and was naturally suffering from that malady known as poetry, he became a self-dramatist, or rather a symbol of one. The poems he wrote were a self-referential play upon the sorry state of play as far as poetry in general was concerned. Hence, he was his own worst enemy, the self-appointed victim of an unfortunate job title which necessitated the experience and qualifications required to record factual events in the form of poems.

In later years the amphetamine imbiber turned to fictive pleasures, composing a demented saga of a segregationist rapist torturer politico who mass-incarcerated at the pinnacle of the genocidal power matrix, a stark warning re: all that was corrupt and vile.

“When you say I am this thing, this representation of a school of thought, your intelligence appears as a function which seems to be acting on behalf of someone else. But who? And who or what do you expect me to serve? A function suggests a rational purpose, not a mode of being.”

As the miracle drew closer, signs no longer signified. Their joys, their beauty and wonder were out of reach of the superstitions which had, unbelievably, kept the signs in place and given them a monstrous glow. No further description was necessary. What would have been the point? To illustrate some greater concept? To serve that great beast of communication, that ghostly product of sheer information?

Any poet worth their salt would die voluntarily, a willing sacrifice.

“Oh, the human condition, and its poetic and philosophical fruits, the serious stuff of art and misery, without which we cannot stave off fear of the imagination, oh, culture, glorify us.”

As for Nasrul, reduced to a biological entity, he no longer functioned as a character. He was a shoddy receptacle for other entities as they strived to assert or uphold themselves as social constructs which passed for identities.

But from now on everything would change all the time. Nature was girded with a fortuitous pliancy. Primitive notions about day and night and the changing of seasons were dispensed with. Today was night.

“Everything looks very different the other way round.”

At the encampment, articles of faith were furiously reproduced as the gossip-mongers and factfinders with their morality tales, scaremongering and sales talk, their theorising, psychologising, categorising, socialising and sheer information, worked so hard to consolidate the dictatorship of the factual. Pseudoscience held sway at every frontier.

Authority had been transferred to the faceless so often it seemed to YOU it was second nature to allow them to manage YOU. YOU was entranced by humiliating attempts at subjugation. YOU was willing to aid the permanent state of emergency, to be moulded for one purpose only: to defend the paradigm of the factual, on behalf of something that was purported to be natural but was produced by pseudoscience, and this is what comprised the tyranny of emergency.

Such notions appeared too far-fetched for the reader. Nonetheless, to avoid the trap of avoidance yet remain privy to counsel, upon salvaging the mental truth from these torrents of deranged verbal invective, deformations of character and fantastical truth bombing, the paradigm of the factual would reveal itself within the reader’s most direct experience to be wholly deceptive.

Concessions were made to give YOU feelings of inclusion and equalness while YOU was treated like pieces of information. YOU had the chance to negotiate with the symptoms of the disease THEY induced but the colonisers concealed the origin of YOU so that YOU naturally assumed it was always a location. All interactions were financialised, quantified and distributed in various places across the planet. Speculations upon how and why speech, thought and behaviour manifested in the so-called individual floated in the air like ambient music or were put on sale in the marketplace. There was no individual and no collective, only YOU, subject to terms and conditions.

One controversy after another withered or flourished at break-neck speed, reproducing accelerating involutionary arcs embroidered by the affluent and educated of the nations, always fond of modern measures of taste and decorum. Facts determined origins in poverty or riches, but inevitably they were controlled by the factfinders who tended to put their own spin on things.

N reminisced about his years at Leaphonine when he had reached breaking point, demoralised by that corrupt organisation. He had found another job with Tabulator, a boutique software firm that suited his personality. Some of the relevant documents were uncovered while he was clearing his desk to accommodate a new fax machine.

Q: Do you regard yourself as a product of a) society, b) nature or c) both?

A: I am not a product.

“The moral is always found in a formula.”

YOU was history, wallowing in nostalgia and recycling, but I was never historical because I was outside events.

Social media was a psy-op which mimicked religion with the promise of salvation through confession and approval ratings. Users were digital souls, willing sinners and saints whose data constituted the identities of entities living on a transcendental plane outside of meat life. While their media operated subliminally at the religious stratum of the collectivist unconscious, it made a false appeal to the social instinct. The invisible billionaires believed they had influence and control over the technogods but the opposite was true. Masked by the veneer of entrepreneurialism, social media was a giant pyramid built by the blood, sweat, and tears of its followers as it floated up to a great cloud in the sky where the technogods would grant them immortality. Thus, while I subsisted on hyperbole alone, pseudoscience reached religious goals by the material means of social media.

At the encampment, prospects for survival were talked about in hyperbolic terms, but no signal was discerned. There was a conspiratorial air and a strong promise of subversion. Electric, shining, beautiful and strange, the strangeness across the encampment was exciting. Every minute before midnight there was an erotic charge. The familiarity of strangeness raised the colour zones and portals. A harsh precision made for easy access to pictograms in a long rectangular leatherbound book which showed when the planets would be aligned and the sacrifice conducted.

Simultaneously, depravity throughout the encampment was relentless: forced abortions, brain stuns, artificially induced comas, nebulous and decadent, very hi-tech tortures. Everyone in the encampment slept and dreamt at roughly the same time every night. This allowed for psychic implanting of images or sentiments by the secret police. Paranoia or euphoria, stagnancy or servility were induced and put to use during the day. Items were removed: penknives, watches, envelopes, photographs, library cards, etc. So many of the prisoners were compliant. The richer the prisoner, the more chance they had of joining the secret police and dispensing the sleep logic themselves.

N knew that by defiling the hypercapitalist god’s churches he was taking a risk in that it could damage his reputation, but he had appeased and placated that god too much already at his own expense. It was obvious to the reader that N wasn’t really a biological entity but a figment of the thoughts of various other people, real or imagined, constructed out of the discontinuity of their speech and the twisted deformations of their characters. N had been dragged to the surface of this fiction not solely to destroy reason, but he would not die without love.

Like everyone else, academic revolutionaries who denounced the televisual poison of Reality TV suffered the disease of voyeurism in which every word became dirty, but in a good way, and like everyone else, their words were sullied by misuse and abuse by the industrial rulers of LogicNoTech whose war made peace seem like weakness.

Where would YOU recognise a time-bound being in some abstract shelter like memory or status, function or fortune? YOU would not. But irrational beliefs were always more imaginative than the rational and it was impossible to calculate the immeasurable.

Perceived threats to survival were non-issues. All particularities were either gods or goddesses or signs of gods or goddesses. Spirits were in all things and all words and in all particularities of form and content.

When I awoke
in the mist, actually
I was playing death with a saw
which I brandished upon the world
& left it hanging
relinquished of its cruelty
I tore words from their bonds
in the ground

As Edward once said, “The anarch always suffers the wounds and heroism of vagabondage, and in another age, Baudelairian angst.”

A structure dedicated to E’s destroyed memory was erected and positioned above the body-earth of conceptual desire, prior to will.

Reacting appropriately to the given moment, seeking pleasure without purpose, and without a referee, without repetition, or anything, anything like that at all, the reader acknowledged that much of what was written here may have been incomprehensible or even foolish, but that would not deter the writing. It seemed this type of information was good for attention seekers, bad for those who like to pull strings, and useless for everyone else, but under the dictatorship of the factual, which was unavoidable, uselessness was useful. So, this synthetic pleasure of the flesh in a parallel universe I proffered as a global experience.

N leafed through an article in The Oracle about datablocks which touched upon 1. Ratification, 2. Receiver, 3. Flowchains. Copies of the cylinder were copied and transmitted. He called on the superhuman intelligences that gathered around the hearth. They confirmed he was witnessing the reinvention of FreeDomination in which its commodity fetishists would be reintroduced to the colonisation of their own subjectivity at the objective level.

But all that was irrelevant.

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The Conversations: 20 | The Dictatorship of the Factual | text & image © A. A. Walker