frankincense

Antic Institution

“Earth folks were impressed with suffering. I gained respect and admiration by praising the ordeals of craving and misery. In my disguise as a public intellectual I made myself a paragon of dread and the crowds flocked.” — Nancy B. Haigler, The Guest Book

Gathering to repair the deficiencies of their professional doctrine, the technologians adopted the robust perspectives of the Institution, the manifesto for which declared a humanistic programme for prosperity and happiness.

For the information architext, being without an informational construct meant being disconnected from the flow of life in the datastream. The concerns that surrounded the lack of an object generated unwanted empty space. The pro-consumer could only reach satisfaction by filling up space with one or another of the architext’s inventions. So, the architext designed a new mediator that would be more addictive than any drug.

Picking up the literary pencil once again, I was startled to find out just how much its outpourings failed to correlate with the literary pixel. I had access to a super-charged and strangely constructive ambiguity (which I stole from a journalist who’d been to Cheltenham Ladies’ College), although I was probably too attached to rhetoric and the monastic stench of myrrh and frankincense.

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Beacon & Vessel

“Allow me the pleasure of your destruction.” — Agapios Stojanov, Bonds

The world inhabited by Nasrul was one in which the rationales of quantification and categorisation were dominant throughout all forms of human action and interaction. His life was experienced by its readers both within and outside this novel, but less via his character than his status as transmitter of the novel’s primary superstitions, yet his absence as a coherent character and his mysterious presence as an anomalous cipher meant that the novel had no conceptual form. Rather than possessing a core integral message as a communicating vessel, whatever was communicated was unknown / anomalous.

One accurate impression that was conveyed was of N as the last man standing. The one who best portrayed N was YOU, but YOU could not realistically expect to fulfil all the requirements of the main character by recourse to facts.

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