Welfare check is two months late. The City said it was a system error. They apologized. Do not apologize. The system just exposed that there are things beyond reason. I suspect it wasn’t error, but sign. Errors are signs of something prohibited. I have that problem too. I sometimes have this strong urge to send my nude photos to a random address, to be seen, but not as a clothed system. I hid them in manuscripts I sent to magazine people, so they could find me. Never heard back from them.

Sink is jammed again, in synch with my shitting, it makes me collect my own feces with the hands I feed myself with— circuit complete. Only days it doesn’t leak are when I do not eat at all. After the night when I dream of eating my feces with my hands, there’s no appetite the next morning. I wake up, dictate the dream into my phone, then go back to sleep—to dream it again.

notes:

sewer broke/ shit all over/ collect with hands and put in a grocery bag/ … and so on.

Day breaks and I wake up in the puddle, yet again. Sewer pipe broke last night. I don’t rush to fix it, because I have to record it first, maybe write it down. So here I am writing it down so I could read it later and understand what days and nights are made of.

I eat with detachment, so eating gross things doesn’t gross me out. What I don’t like, is sleeping with Freud and Jung, they smell like sewer. I do not like sleeping with people I work with either. They sleep when I babysit them in the daytime, what morons!

Sewer pipe is still crying mud.
Poor pipe.
She’s too fond of me, opening up everyday when I haven't opened up to anyone in years.
Foolish pipe.

Food is scarce, but wildflowers bloom around the house.
Tied Jung to the sewer with duct tape, I went picking.

- Hey Mister cat, what are those blues ones called?

-Blue-eyed grass.

-And their friends?

-Daisies, dandelions, red berries, and  purple clover.

I set a bouquet and announced—
“Listen you two pervert children—Freud and Jung.
I’m tired.”

Let the sewer stay in the day so I can see it.
Don’t plagiarize my night with laboured life.

I’ve got flowers
I’m sowing the night I want to sleep in.

You stay taped to the desiring machine
hold the pipe steady.

I think I have something to say but you have said it already. You always have to be the first. First you want to be the first, then you are the first but you still want to be the first. What is so first about the left? It is only by standing on the left you are always on the left of the next thing, the second thing on the right. But what if the right is right in their own right ways? Oh well, my projections, I always project on the tall wall left to me, because she is the first word if written in English. But on her big screen lit by my projection, is it me or is it her? No sir, It is your projection on a big screen, neither you nor the screen or the wall which came 1 before you. You are 2.

1 is at the center. You always have to be at the center, all consumed by what is inside you. A 0, left to you who came before you, but no one else can see— only you. You are my center and you have a void at your center, like I am at your. I am both left and right of you, like you are exactly everything outside my 5’5” age 50 weight 39 kg. It’s a win-win situation. Take it.

I didn’t paint or write a poem when we were entangled in a non-numeric space. This is quite before there was life on earth, possibly right after it banged and started to go cold. No one cared to paint back then. Just you and me smearing. I didn’t want to write. Don’t get me wrong, writing is my hands now, I will explain that later. Long story short— I write now like we used to smear each other back then. So, I am writing, smearing, returning, taking, cumming, going, vibrating and heating myself up. It’s a cold world love. You are as alone being 1 as any other number, 0 counted. Look at 11, he looks so stupid. 10 should have reflected on his miserable self but no. 11 is recursive stupidity, if it all is ever going to add up. You know what? Whatever you think it is, just vibrate, stay warm.

A forest thick and lined with pheromone infested apples which fly upwards if plucked. Thieves shrivel, raise their arms and clench their palms, cursing the God who holds a weight greater than the starved and the wretched, still bound to their feet in the litter. Eat Shit!

shoe, a shoe-shoe though we fit in well to breed— sheer tedium, while somewhere else 72 virgins with electric clitorises rub themself on salted bread and men of god, enchanted, fall asleep. Here nothing is asked, nothing is given, so nothing happens, yet we fuck and breed. Here body rises up to block the sun from excavating another inch of land. No! Not you again, something else maybe.

Here imagination crawls back to the garden of Eden not with repentance but the habit of stealing again. A place where food is memory in disguise of an apple and future is shit. Eat and shit day in, day out. Here, madman rules.

Imagine first fuckers without carrying their guilt, or even a temptation in curiosity. Imagine so, for the sake of exercising imagination. Imagine as if anything you imagine would be a secret you could take to your grave. Imagine, if such a takeout was possible. To each a world of theirs and theirs alone, yet fucking and making baby people is possible. Something wants to get somewhere, connect to something, and body is the price. Mutate, mutilate, scratch your arm-pits— change. Imagine, and keep it close to your heart. Imagine something which isn’t there, not yet.

Tie a bag to each planet as if you were tying your own hair before sleep. Plastic against branch, knot against wind. It will not keep you safe, it will not show the way — it will only be there, fluttering. A bag knows nothing, but it knows it is tied. I too have been tied to things I didn’t choose: a jaw, a toe, a memory that insists on walking behind me. The wedding ring is inside me still, soft now, part of some other organ. The planets spin without wanting to, without knowing why. The bags spin with them. You follow the sound they make, not because it will take you home, but because you have nothing else to follow. Sometimes the noise is only in your head. Sometimes it’s in the bag. And you can’t tell the difference, so you keep walking.

They say the mind is a neural network. I say it is a bruise learning to pretend it isn’t tender anymore. You touch it and flinch—but only inside. I keep walking. The gravel is not metaphor. It’s just what’s there. I think I am thinking. Still, there is a strange mercy in this bouncing off of the thought. It proves that at least something returns, if not the thing itself. Even if it’s only some form of yourself, misunderstood by you.

OP: 26th June 2025
Edit: 3rd Aug 2025

revised. 2nd Aug 2025

If there be a self, let it have the body too, lest self can avoid salt altogether. And what such self would be if not a site of constant evaporation of nothing, not even a blind single cell?

Body is mine. Only Body is mine, and it has this strange habit of accumulating salt of the earth,  weighing heavy on the soul. Time blows the entropy ever gently,  deposits calcium over calcium, tooth over tooth, and decay over decay, as if the cosmos ccouldn’t wait to switch the lights off and rest for an eternity. Nothing then would stick to nothing, not even the stuff inside a single cell bacteria. Calcium has arrived to claim the remainder— Everything. All stories, hunger, love, and phenomenology, found well rested in what remained— an absent nose and half a jaw found in the dig. No name.

I cover the house; my body, with clothes, and my mind with thoughts. Though it gets heavier and for all who are born naked, it takes a lifetime to learn to carry the extra weight which shouldn’t have been theirs in the first place. Seeing that it starts with salt and ends with bones, I took off all my clothes and started to brush my teeth vigorously until my gums started to bleed. No! Not the blood! blood is mine. Scrape and floss the deposit, whatever I did not arrive with. Shoes, pens, thought and calcification. Scrape the shit out until a weightless soul reveals itself. Scared, I punched myself in the face but morales fell off, exposing the root canal. Take the deposit, not the roots; they are mine. Fixed my face but the jaw came off. Not the jaw, it’s mine to keep. It has to be dug out and found in the future. Take what I didn’t come with.

I put back the roots and fix my teeth, then the face, using the Bataillian scalpel instead of a Kantian hammer. Kant is good for breaking stones, not fixing people. I might have to sacrifice a few teeth, but I must lose them from the place of abundance, not transaction. Gave away my right toe. We weren’t exactly talking-talking for a while now. Giving away the unproductive surplus, the accursed share, I am keeping the body.

Whatever arrives, arrives as a deposit and attracts deposit—salt. Whatever arrives, arrives from, and for an erosion. it’s only salt— walking back towards a time yet to come. You will be found in the form of a broken skull and half a jaw. The future is made of the past. All that happened, will be found, collected, and returned.

Noumena

Nightmares are shallow/ like the word itself
World is shallow/ like the word itself
Word is shallow/ like the word itself
Id is shallow/ like the word itself.

Noumena—
the surface/ the mask/ the face
muscles/ carbs/ calcium
dicks/ fannies/ and baby people.

Days are short/ like the word itself
Love is little/ like the word itself
Life is short/ like the word itself
You are away/ like the world itself
It means little/ like the word itself.

Little is little/ like the word itself
Little is the world/ like the word itself
World is a word/ like the word itself
Word is a word/ like the word Itself.

What if the values we hold; love, sin, restraint etc., aren’t universal truths, but artifacts of how the Cogito was wired to think itself into order? Kant’s model of mind declared certain truths “a priori”—as if reason could legislate reality, bypassing experience. Eroticism, however, exposes the fracture: desire arrives where law cannot reach, and the body resists being theorized.

I was laughing recently at a Hindi song: “प्यार करने वाले कभी डरते नहीं , जो डरते हैं वोह प्यार करते नहीं ”. Lovers never die; only the fearful fail to love. But this too, is Kantian in disguise: declaring its own value structure as necessary and universal. The song mistakes feeling for proof—just like Kant did. This is not to insult lovers or Kant, but to take a sassy shot at the Kantian poet who has no fucking clue, but must rub the pen in the groins— “It is so, because so it is”; finding Reason in an act of pure transgression. Fear can accompany any other emotion and more so, if what is held against it and also held high must fall with a greater thud. Must not such thinking cause self-injury? To bite your own tale and pity thy miserable life? What caused what? Point a finger at such Reason, other four point back at you. What convoluted reason and its bastard child, new-found Morals? Why blame only Kant, Schopenhauer offers a quiet death, much like his eastern counterparts who advise not to strangulate but die slowly— by sitting under the tree you could have hanged yourself from? Kant isn’t the first to test those waters after all. Is Love a matter of habits, or is it an external force that makes matter coagulate in certain manner, manifest itself as love? Long story short, neither love nor fear define each other, but become prisoners of Kantian categorization (Reza Negarestani’sSpeculation On Anonymous Material is a good listen, though he ends up eating his own tail around the midway). A value system sold as a guiding map, yet works like a trap.

If one imagine a total moral collapse with such cognition, what emerges is not clarity but recursion. In this blurted out thinking about thinking, one can only defeat old values to rediscover them, dressed in new justifications, posing as revelations.

Erotic thought becomes that irrational force that demands an autopsy—where we don’t just examine what we desire, but how desire itself is formed, filtered, and disguised by the thinking subject. If the Cogito is the instrument by which we imagine freedom, we must also admit it is the very thing that invents restraint. Ironically, Kant made a declaration of freedom of soul by erecting a personal reason to guard the values which make such emancipation possible. A prisoner guarding another prisoner?

To move beyond the moral loop, we need to ask: can the Cogito un-think itself? Can thought suspend its own recursive stupidity and allow for something else to arise; something that doesn’t aim to define love, fear, or ethics, but dares to live them in the collapse of the old? This section begins where philosophy often ends: with an erection and cognitive failure.

When a crystalized “Outside” inside one’s head comes in contact with Lacanian backwaters, it erodes and degenerates in peculiar ways. Every serpent is summoned, beheaded, and squeezed off the last drop of venom; a concentrate suitable for sickness of a different kind. Following the defiant scripts of De Sade and the symbolic economy outlined by Lacan, eroticism here becomes less about physical contact and more about the re-staging of prohibition within the psyche. Reimagined, the law is not merely broken, but re-invented, re-inscribed and dissolved as a purely symbolic act.

The pleasure, then, is not in what is permitted, but in what is forbidden and yet mentally enacted. In these backwaters, taboo and solitary arousal aren’t considered “cultural filth” deemed lower than the divinity bestowed upon man, but a phenomenological framing of mind’s work to produce a space for transgression. Here, the focus shifts from ethical norms to libidinal ethics. What kind of value is charged, inverted, or made volatile in the erotic? When imagination trespasses the socially guarded boundaries of age, consent, monogamy, or morality, it reveals not a moral failing, but an affective truth—that pleasure, when thought through its limits, may expose the structure of desire itself.

Sometimes, something as small as lighting a cigarette out of habit can open a trapdoor in thought. I found myself lighting one before stepping outside, and suddenly remembered I had decided not to do that anymore—because the smoke lingers in the stairwell. That moment spiraled. It wasn’t just memory—it was memory of having reflected, of having once decided otherwise. A thinking about previous thinking.

That’s where this began: the mind folding back on itself. The Cogito, stripped of abstraction, replays through muscle and memory. Habit, I realized, isn’t just repetition—it’s a hole in memory. A bypass. And when it breaks, something floods in: not just the past act, but the past decision, the past reflection. And now, a new chance to act again—but differently. Deleuze called it “repetition with a difference.”

This little cycle is where philosophy breathes as anti-thought. Where the Cartesian “I think” is thought again, passed through its own entrails and striped of its I and turned into a virtual. The flip/switch happens when the real contacts the remembered—and suddenly, you're free again. That space, fragile and flickering, is where I want to look next.

At stake is more than a passing habit—it’s how thought returns, how memory doesn’t just recall but reanimates a prior decision, and how a moment repeats with new weight. Now, is always an empty moment with a potential for all things possible, al things headed to their past in reflection.

Abstract

Zarathustra returns to his cave yet again. This time not in triumph, but infected with spores of Cogito. The city sleeps in delirium, mumbling slogans of freedom or collapse; no one remembers which came first. Like Socrates drinking the hemlock just to get the conversation started, the thinkers of our time never realized the ground itself was disappearing beneath them. Their prayers may have been skyward, but it was the soil that mutated to quicksand.

We are the ruins. The language has stuttered, and time liquefied. The Deleuzian forest of multiplicities no longer offers a flight and reason is a blind horse that runs amok in a hope to hit something solid, to find again the joy of a happy defeat. There is no becoming. There is only the ache of never having begun.

This is the groundless ground where Mark Fisher and Nick Land; once comrades, take radically different routes. Both hear Nietzsche. Both feel the call of a future unmade. But Fisher clings to the last warmth in the wreckage, trying to salvage meaning from the ghosts of popular culture, while Land speeds up toward the abyss, courting extinction like a muse (I do not understand his latest position. Religion is the best shelter, sure! But the building is inside a church? huh! Did Anita not get pumped there?). Fisher’s melancholy is filled with love; Land’s cruelty is strangely faithful. Perhaps later half of the last century could be known as Deleuzian (per Michel Foucault), we definitely are in a Post Deleuzian one. And this comes from a place of high praise that If the idea of Cogito was a trojan horse and Nietzsche, Deleuze and Derrida to some extent were the emergency responders, Shit still managed to hit the fan and this is a pandemic. In the case of Mark Fisher and Nick Land, Nick has a stronger desire to overcome Baudrillard than Fisher (Baudrillard is my personal graveyard in study of philosophy. I never recovered). Baudrillard is the new and timely wrench in Ontology. He is the first prophet of doom in modern times, a legion Nick Land with possibilities, compared to Fisher’s offering to remember the kindergarten days, and do something about it. He’s not with us anymore to see the eruption. Land’s job is difficult, but he puts his penny on total rejection of historization of knowledge; that knowledge and pedagogy teaches you how to read history, and not how to deal with the New. I too often strongly feel that if this isn’t the reality Merleau Ponty worshiped and Deleuze rode. It seems more like a virus, an infestation. I will shut up for a moment but come back soon.

…
……
..
.

If seen from a horseshoe perspective, it appears that there’s not much of a difference in so called too far left and too far right’s threat of a revolution, a change of order (Foucault’s ghost). Of a few more traits shared by both ideas: urgency of making a choice, an annihilating threat to everything we know— as we know them. Nick Lands believes in the future of the new (paradox there), Fisher want to take the sample of humanity to the Land-land, a huge risk in land’s project. Bleeding posthumanism, contrary to the popular notion that Fisher is the last post-man and Land, a proto-machine. They both are clearly invested in human; one choosing earth and other, fleeing to the far lands, albeit a human (a writer’s line of flight).

There may be more common to be found between Fisher and Carl Schmitt—each intuiting that something must be saved, or at least carried. Fisher wants a community hall, and Schmitt want to invite friends only but for Land, he want to burn down the community hall while both his friends and foes are in it. For him, only the phoenix is worthy of a future (at least his earlier Nietzschean position), sentimental towards an imagined phoenix, than towards on who’s ashes the new bird stands. Still a shared vision of Human.

But what if the future is no longer a valid concept? What if “forward” is a word that lost its referent? In Capitalist Realism, Fisher saw the slow death of alternatives. In Fanged Noumena, Land opens the latch and let the threat in. But the real fire might be the uncertainty itself—the unbearable possibility that the Ubermensch or Nomad, as philosophy promised, the ground holds neither. A deterritorialization that looks more like a hurried flight to nowhere, a ;last fire shot in ski’s empty chest.

• Photo courtesy: Tee Public

Ismayl Atmaca | up-close

A beer-fueled bonus episode (3.5) with two drunk hosts who swap identities in sheer confusion and Ismayl Atmaca talks about his queer world of expressionism.

Originally meant to cover Expressionism through big names like Bacon and Warhol, the plan derailed beautifully into a two-hour personal rant. We are calling it a bonus episode, with a limited time preview. Expect raw talk, weird metaphors, and zero filters (Warning: Vaginas and bushes mentioned a few times). If you're here for the art and the mess—you're in the right place.