***

Pazuzu, the Sumero-Assyrian demon of epidemics (the southwestern desert wind) is an occultural operative of the xero-informatic Abomination or Dust (= 100 = NO GOD), and possibly the most awe-inspiring cultist of Tellurian Dustism in ancient Mesopotamia. For wind is truly the high acolyte of dust, as well as being the dust-enforcer. In his Notes on Reliquology, Parsani put forward Pazuzu as a schematic diagram of the middle-eastern population and its peculiarities.

Pazuzu specializes in scavenging the stratified Earth and its biosphere in the form of dust, which then is uplinked to alien currents flowing in the universe. These combinations of dryness and wetness are carried back to earth to disseminate disease. According to the Assyrian axis of Evil-against-Evil, Pazuzu the demon feeds on dust, which is qabbalistically equal to No God (=100). Pazuzu scavenges the surface biosphere of earth as dust clouds or inorganic bacterial relics; then conducting them to xenochemical hydro-currents, or what in ancient Greece was called cosmic wetness (hydrochemical singularities). This is why Pazuzu is associated with the emergence of plagues. Pazuzu then carries the plagues back to the surface biosphere in the guise of dust-soups, arid floods, messy rains, unheard-of epidemics and xero-informatic communications which usually manifest in the form of demonic possession (The Exorcist). This process of dust-scavenging and plague-engineering takes the form of an accelerating non-Aristotelian spiral or cycle when the terrestrial hygiene industry incrementally spreads more anti-pest agents and over-produces defense mechanisms (to ward off plagues) which once again are scavenged by Pazuzu’s pest-industry. In this sense, the accelerated rate of resistance ironically intensifies the emergence of plagues and dust-floods, speeding the journey of plagues back to the surface biosphere. When it comes to recollecting all that exists as dust, there is no need to be fastidious.

The horror of Pazuzu is usually embodied as a winged bipedal human-like beast with talons instead of feet and a head concretized through an almost fleshless dog- or lion-skull. The long reptilian penis of Pazuzu (a pest-seeding machine or a disseminator, according to glossaries of epidemiology) is a later pestilential modification to its body, which strangely has two pairs of wings instead of one, as if two wings are not adequate for its missions. Pazuzu is also visualized with the right hand upward and the left hand downward, heralding the Pest-Cycle of dust whose axis is a double-flight (Pazuzu’s tetra-winged body) or a ferocious inter-dimensional ‘line of flight’ (Deleuze and Guattari) from the Earth to without, and from without to the Earth: the tactical line of the xero-informatic Abomination (dust) and the traffic zone of its bacterial data. Pazuzu exhibits several morphological anomalies and peculiarities which separate him from other Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian demons. According to the first excavated Bronze statue of Pazuzu (Iraq, post-Paleolithic era, 800–600 BC) these morphological features include:

• Extremely thin legs bearing an unusually skinny torso. Chest bones are clearly visible as if it suffers anorexia or fatigue; a body struck by famine and carrying its ailing flesh with difficulty. Its wasting body narrates the cyclical desert famine of the Middle East, accompanied by vast locust-swarms (as vehicles of desolation) and other pestilential omens. If the body of Beelzebub (ba’al zebub) insinuates a legion of flies, with their perverse collective enthusiasm to come together over a fresh deliquescing carrion or a yellowish lump of excrement, Pazuzu’s anthropo-insectoid body bears the black humor of all bodies it overruns, strips naked of flesh, all the bodies chewed and peeled off by a sky-blackening swarm of locusts, by the hurtling body of Pazuzu, dehydrated and reduced to a twisted spectre of bone and wrinkled skin. Make yourself many, like the locust! Make yourself many, like the swarming locusts!

• Four wings instead of two: The wings seem to be feathered (later statuettes confirm this hypothesis: the feathers become visible as remiges, the powerful flight feathers which provide the main propulsive force during the powered flight of the rapax bird) and emphasize a demonic lust for flying, for speed and migration. Such wings engineer a flight corresponding to desert whirlwinds, dust devils and other meteorological phenomena of deserts which are believed to have been created by Anzu, the beast of flight, who stole the tablet of destiny and eventually was slain by Ninurta. The Sumero-Akkadian epic of Ninurta portrays Anzu as the forerunner of later flying demons, the engineer of demonic flight and of beasts with feathered wings which are linked to cyclogenesis, sonic havoc, spiraling storms across deserts and dust devils. These four wings render the demon a perfect vehicle for carrying pestilential particles (Namtar) and delivering them to their destination without delay, always promptly on time.

• A snake-headed penis, a pest-fertilizing machine which confirms Pazuzu’s kinship with Humbaba (Khombabos, the guardian of cedar forests and the city of gods, who was defeated and killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu). Humbaba has the same reptilian phallus and is believed to be the son or brother of Pazuzu. Both Humbaba and Pazuzu are able to reflect a prognosticated future of each individual: Humbaba’s labyrinthine face (with unicursal human entrails as the beard) recalls the early art of Haruspicy (divination using the liver or entrails) in ancient Mesopotamian cultures, later developed by the Etruscans. Pazuzu as the demon of the south-west wind is associated with Rammalie (an Arabic word for communication with other worlds and aeons through patterns on pebbles and desert sand). His roaring flight introduces rhythmic ripples as crypto-vermiform parasites upon dunes which cumulate transiently as short-term inorganic memories of desert winds; then, ripples and other intermittent patterns can be deciphered as runic alphabets of epidemic journeys and plague-propagations aerated by desert winds and narrated on sand. Abdul Al-Hazred as an adept rammal (sand-sorcerer) probably wrote Al Azif through the dust-infested language of Pazuzu, who constantly enriches its howls with pest-spores in order to expand the hallucinatory space of progressive arid diseases.

• A dignatory’s beard, bringing Pazuzu into the fold of Evil-against-Evil and making of him an apotropaic character. Pazuzu, like other demons who belong to the axis of Evil-against-Evil (for example Ugallu), can simultaneously spread terminal plagues and cure certain maladies. According to the Assyrian Axis of Evil-against-Evil, every human is constantly a puppet of demons, suspended from the labyrinth of their strings. During illnesses, witch doctors attempt to repel hostile demons from the patient and summon a protector-demon to possess the sick person. Pazuzu is among the chosen demons, one who could even pass the last guardian Lamassu or the Repellent of Evil: a Pazuzu-demon guards the niche in the bathroom of Ashurbanipal’s palace at Nineveh, Iraq.

• An almost fleshless head that cannot be distinguished clearly, Pazuzu’s head diagrams the metamorphosis of three carnivorous animals frequently appearing in the Babylonian / Assyrian pandemonium: the rabid dog, the Shogal (jackal) and the Kaftaar (hyena). Ibn Hamedani, in his book Aja’ib Nameh (The Book of Marvels), calls Kaftaar ‘a terrible beast’. The hyena, from an afro-asiatic lineage, is possibly the most cursed, obscene and lewd animal in Mesopotamian folklore. Ibn Hamedani tells horrifying stories about this desert-beast who has sex with its prey while devouring it. The Hyena emits high-pitched cacophonic cries of mirth, enough to drive a lone desert traveler mad. Rabid dogs are the spawns of Abzu (Abyss), and the Shoghal or jackal connects Pazuzu to the Egyptian Anubis and the dead.^[1]

Fig. 22 Pazuzu-demon

Fig. 23 Ugallu-demon

The face is of limited relevance for a rigorous archeological investigation into the demonic. Even the most distorted, disfigured and grotesque faces cannot be identified as evidence of a demon (xeno-agent) — that is to say, (de)faciality cannot be a constitutive element in diagramming a demon (especially in the period from the rise of Mesopotamian civilizations to the end of antiquity and the early Middle Ages). All radical xeno-demons have a diagrammatic seal of their own; they are always delineated by anomalous cartographies or diagrams based on which their bodies, positions, and arrangement of their appendages (organs?) are presented, built and (re)composed. Or else they are identified by their coming in pairs (one a recognizable entity and the other an obscure twin of the familiar entity; examples include the Phoenician and Etruscanian demons). The most well-known demonograms are as follows:

The right hand upward, and the left hand downward suggests a swash-backwash model of epidemics; it is the seal of pest enforcers.

Outstretched hands, one pointing east and one pointing west — solar demons. The Romans borrowed the same diagrammatic position from Babylonians for their crucifixions. This demonogram later influenced the religious iconography of Mithraism and then Christianity, the most prominent examples being, of course, the iconographic portraits of the crucified Jesus.

Bodily organs (appendages) connected to each other by curves and circles which construct a closed or sealed labyrinthine convolution.

Smaller wings attached to the main wings, or possession of more wings than are necessary for flying and migration.

Horns forming spirals (in contrast to general belief, horns are not satanic agents) or horns pointing to each other which signify arch-demons.

Legs open, far apart so as to draw a triangle, also known as the three-dotted profanity, which is among the most significant diagrams of unlocalizable or betraying demons.

The demonogram of Pazuzu (the right hand upward, and the left hand downward) is the unique ABYZmal cartography of disease; it signifies the rotation of The Wheel of Pestilence. This demonogram confirms that Pazuzu (like Ugallu) belongs to the legion of plague-dissipating demons. Demonograms demonstrate the abstract distribution of demons; they are plans for demonic mobilization — mobilization in a military sense.

They believe Mesopotamia and the whole Middle East is overclouded by some kind of fog of war which is peculiar to the near and middle-eastern regions of Asia. That you must practice blindness, must dry out your lungs and return to dust in order to coalesce with the reeking pit of the Middle East. The inhabitants of a village near Tell-Kuyunjik, which is believed to be the ancient site of Nineveh, told us that this arid fog is the haze of Pazuzu, the searing mushroom cloud of Middle East. To live in dust requires a certain degree of demonism which western people deem too much for humans. Jackson West does not think the Middle East is a geopolitical region, he thinks that the Middle East is alive. Not metaphorically; it is alive in a real sense, waiting to let loose its sentience. ‘It is alive but it doesn’t need to survive, because it has a life of its own’ — this was the last thing West told me before reconnoitring Mosul with his sons to locate that Iranian oil smuggler and that guy Omar who claims to have the diaries of Ibn Maimum, the Persian occult-saboteur, guerilla expert and conspiracist who assisted the Al-Fatemid to overthrow the Caliphate regime in Egypt. (1^st Lt. Ali Osa, US 1^st Battalion, 41^st Infantry Regiment)

Tell-Kuyunjik: Nineveh 36^o 24´ N 43^o 08´ E

Excursus VI (Xeno-agents and the Assyrian Axis of Evil-against-Evil)

The human defense mechanism is the most consistent entity on this planet; its self-fertilizing paranoia is capable of grasping and identifying every contact only in terms of a potential incursion. When this paranoid consistency (or consistency of paranoia, since paranoia, ironically, tends to be consistent) attains autonomy, it becomes ruthlessly schizoid by passively opening itself to unknown threats from the Outside or xeno-agents. The anthropomorphic security system is a Pandora’s Box of unrecorded diseases, emerging from the consistent resistance of the system to outside invasions on the one hand, and the consistently-escalating invasion on the other hand. In this sense, the human security system is a projection of the intensity of the conflict between the xeno-agent (demon) and the system that registers new indefinable plagues mapped at the outer limits of the demon and the system.

Unlike Martin Bergman’s still profoundly religious demonology — which insists that a demon should be exorcised not to save the possessed but to assist the demon to escape from the ‘mammal meat’ — according to the Assyrian Axis of Evil-against-Evil, the demon infects a person to extract a wide array of pest-insurgencies from the security system not by possessing it (in the sense of seizing a property from the monopoly of the Divine — for example, the human as belonging to God), but by turning the Divine and its secured properties into intermediate parasites (pimps) for incoming diseases. In the Assyrian politics of demonism, the Divine and its world are turned into a pest-feeding farm. Their resistance and blind oppositions are encouraged because each instance of resistance harbors more incursions from the Outside. Pests, xeno-excitations, cosmic diseases kick in when capacity is reached and the security system of the anthropomorphic agency starts to crack and waste, consequently trying to survive at all costs which in turn causes a wider array of pestilential activities. In this panorama, survival and security reinforcement (as opposed to the dying system) ‘turns on’ the demon to no end.  Modern criminology refuses to acknowledge the presence of demons, in the same way that secular disbelief condemns the inanity of a demon possessing a helpless human: if demons exist and are that powerful then why would they possess a wretched anthropian? Such an objection misunderstands the mechanisms involved in the communication between xeno-agents and the human security system. For demons maintain their outsideness precisely through a power of overkilling (sheer exteriority of a force), inflicting more power than is needed just to unlock a gate. Demons simply crack open the prey. The overkilling power effectuates an openness outside the system’s capacity to afford it. Once openness cannot be afforded by the system’s capacity, it turns into an instance of butchery rather than an act of emancipation characterized by human ‘access’ to the outside. Overkill is a spectacle staged on the fundamental incapacity of the system to cope with the outside. Through overkill, the xeno-agent performs its demonic spectacle and effectuates its exteriority which the system cannot afford. The exteriority of the demon cannot be captured by the desire of the system for openness, and for this reason such exteriority overkills (butchers open) the system. To possess a strong man is certainly enough to flaunt the demon’s power, but all the better if the possessed is a child or old woman, to signify the outsideness of the demon through which overkilling power is generated.

On the Assyrian Axis of Evil-against-Evil, the demon does not seek to dismantle (anthropomorphic) identity; instead it tries to make identity a gate for summoning new demons from the furious clashes between xeno-particles and the resisting system. Beyond the borders of identity lies the indifferent realm of unconditional (absolute) madness, or that which can never be schizoid, since schizophrenia germinates on the wasted remains of boundary, territory and capacity. Schizophrenia needs a minimum degree of organization and system to spread, to be mobilized, to transform into agitations and to interlock with xeno-excitations and demons. Schizophrenia is engineered through the synergetic oppositions between xeno-excitations (demonic particles of the Outside graspable as uncontrollable intensities) and the forces of the boundary; it is restlessly mobilized through attacks and counter-attacks, one attack from xeno-particles, two or more counter-attacks from the system. The furious resistance is exponentially intensified and progressively overrun by xeno-agents until meltdown, the becoming-GAS of all particles.

Schiz-fluxes only flow on differentiated zones, meaning that there must be at least two opposite sides — identity and its nemeses. Since the rise of Foucauldian psychoanalysis, the only image of a schizo represented in pop-culture is the external image of madness, that of an inconceivable, semi-paralyzed madman lurching in the manner of an intoxicated spider. The schizo can be found everywhere except in madness. Schizophrenia comes with delirium (Jnun), the passion for terminal disease (which presupposes health), war-torn realms of organic survival, attacks and increasing counter-attacks diagrammatically narrating their tireless, attritional engagement on a draco-spiral which sometimes melts, sometimes evaporates, burns incompletely and blurs into particles instead of dissolving into nothingness. Everything excitingly schizoid, capable of attracting the merciless invasion of xeno-particles and igniting criminal excitations, happens on the borders of identity and its regimes which balefully put up their resistance against any malicious force. In order to draw schizo-lines of communication from the Outside, a rigorous course for dismantling identity is necessary, yet any serious attempt for total eradication of identity intrinsically excludes the space of xeno-excitations and ends up in autistic nihilism.

In the Middle East, the Arabic word Jin (or Jinn) refers to a race created by Allah prior to the creation of humans, made of fire and thus capable of shape-shifting (unlike the human, which was created from dust and water, the bacterial mess of dust-soups). In the Quran and in Islamic demonology — unlike in Christianity — Shaytan (Satan) is not a fallen angel but the first Jinn (Man’s nemesis) created by Allah. According to the Quran, angels have no Will; as a result, they have no ability to disobey or choose. However, Jinns, with their unfathomable intelligence, can choose their paths; they have the Will to disobey or obey, be loyal or be a traitor (Khazoola: ). A Jinn or Djinn is male, the female side of this race is called Jnun (in plural form: ), a polysemous word which also means delirium, maddening love and terminal schizophrenia (corrosive tidal waves of xeno-excitations).

In Persian mythology, Jnun are descended from Jeh or Jahi, the first anti-creationist agent engineered by Ahriman’s own body, the daughter of Ahriman who awakened her father from ten thousand years of slumber to spawn a pest-legion. Jahi is the first woman whose mission was to undo the entire pro-creationist project of Ahura Mazda. In Arabic folklore, Jnun are daughters of Lilith. Rûb-al-Khâlie, the dreadful desert where Abdul Al-Hazred settled for ten years, was inhabited by Jnun — not Jinn —  which operate as female gates to the Outside. Al-Hazred must have communicated with the female side of the Outside (i.e. Jnun) in writing his nocturnally-encrypted Necronomicon, a chef d’œuvre on cosmodromic blasphemy and on the realism of openness.

Jnun possess men, yet they do not occupy or colonize their hosts. Instead they lay open male hosts to the Outside, an openness in the sense of being laid, cracked, butchered open (as in the case of the Moroccan jinniya, Aisha Qandisha, or Aiesheh Ghediseh, who is also called ‘the Opener’). Possessed by Jnun, Abdul Al-Hazred found this path the only reliable polytics to communicate with the cosmodrome of the Outside demarcated in the Numogram as the region of Djynxx or more precisely, XX-djinns. The path to Djynxx or the region of XX-djinns is mapped as becoming-woman via Jnun who, according to Arabic and Farsi folklore, narrate untold stories for the one who is opened and devoured by them. Lilith tells travelers forbidden stories before opening and devouring them. In this sense, Jnun (mapped as the region Djynxx in the Numogram) is a direct link to the cosmic blasphemy and the female current of the Outside. The reason that Lovecraft frequently calls Al-Hazred the ‘mad’ poet or the ‘mad’ Arab is that communicating with Jnun, as the female gates (vulvo-cosmic singularities) to the Outside, has one inevitable consequence — radical delirium. In Arabic and Farsi the word Jnun also means delirium, maddening love, terminal madness as the result of being laid open by the female cutting-edge of the Outside. However, Jnun is not compatible with the western definition of Madness. It cannot be translated properly, but suffice to say that it is mainly comprised of three elements and is developed through their compositions: Possession, Love and utter Openness. Abdul Al-Hazrad is a majnun (), a man laid open by Jnun and at the same time, a majnun man, a madman (majnun) who immediately reminds us of the melancholic tale of Leyili and Majnun, their love story which converges in madness, openness, and a delirious love — the Forbidden.

Aisha Qandisha or Aisha Qadisha or Ghediseh is one of the most popular and fearsome Jinniya (female Jinn) in Moroccan folklore. Beliefs and rituals for Aisha have continued into the twenty-first century. She is both a hunter and a healer, sometimes appearing as a beautiful (irresistibly seductive) woman and sometimes as a Hag. When she possesses a man, she does not take over the new host, but opens the man to a storm of incoming Jnun and Jinns, demons and sorcerous particles of all kinds; making the man a traffic zone of sweeping cosmodromic data. This is why she is feared. And she never leaves — she always resides in the man to guarantee his total openness, which is not always pleasant. According to the Moroccans, the only way to feel comfortable with Aisha (the new mistress / lover) is by participating with her, feeding her, exciting her through passionate and barbaric music rites with cacosonic rhythms.

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In order to think narration in a world that is devoid of any narrative necessity – an expanding space into which all ideas of embodiments dissolve and an absolute time whose radical contingency aborts any necessary difference to which a narrative can be applied – first we must redeploy the hierarchy of thought in nature as the view point or locus of speculation and narration. The exteriority and contingency of the real or the cosmic abyss is not what should or can be objectified by thought; on the contrary, it is thought that is objectified by the exteriority and contingency of the real, which simultaneously and in every instance give rise to thought and usurp it. The very hierarchy of thought that was supposed to bring the possibility of reflection on the object or event X is turned upside down and inside out, the space of reflection itself becomes a playground for the exteriority and contingency of object X. Now if narration is both ‘to know’ and ‘to relate’, not only is the narration of/about the contingent reality twisted with a logic endemic to tales of spirit possession (when I think, it is actually the outsider, the demon inside me that thinks through me), but also it is unfolded with the dynamics inherent to conspiracy theories (all relations, adventures and plots are twistedly driven by a secret agreement – or complicity – between contingent and indifferent objective worlds… the more epical the narration, the thicker the conspiracy, the more elliptical the depth of the complicity).

In this hierarchical corruption of the narrative, the narration of any trivial or non-trivial reality turns from being a reflection on the world and objects to being an inflection of the world and objects themselves in their exteriority and contingency. With regard to the narrative nomenclature, twist is the name given to this troubling turn whereby contingent aspects of the real reclaim the plot and fundamentally shake the course and hierarchy of narration. In the wake of a twist, whimsical imagination and extravagant plots are hardly more than intuitive errancies since any mundane and superficial world will turn out to be a local mode of dynamism or materialisation of an incalculably weird universe. The twist, therefore, has a spontaneous ability to reclaim and remobilise all forms of plot, perspective and history by force, collusion or contamination on behalf of a contingent outside. It is this ability that gives the twist a veritable narrative capacity that is asymptotic to crime, horror, conspiracy and detective fictions.

When the twist occurs – that is to say, when it seizes the trajectory of the reflection on behalf of the contingency of the objective relations and contorts the course of the narrative orientation – it forces a sweeping or perhaps even a pulverising re-evaluation of the entire narrative trajectory. This is especially evident in variants of pulp fiction from horror stories to detective thrillers, crime novels and conspiracy fictions. The so-called plot twist seizes the reflective space of narration or simply turns the ‘knowing’ of the narration into the narrative object of contingencies and, therefore, subjects the narration to an inquisitive speculation from the perspective of complicity between objective resources, which in radically contingent ways play their influence over the narrative causality. What used to be ‘knowing’ is now, all of a sudden, revealed to be a literary gimmick facilitating a plummet into what was always already there but could not be reflected upon – a short-lived resolution (dénouement) degenerating into a cosmic conspiracy at the speed of a trashy airport thriller.

In the wake of the twist, the causal meshwork of the narration is forcibly revised to a new system that is determined by the contingency of the twist. For this reason, the twist, far from being mythoclastic, is at once pro-narrative and mytho-accelerative; rather than shattering the plot (mythoclasm), it remoulds and accelerates the plot through reconstructing the causal system from the viewpoint of an ineradicable alien presence that has suddenly erupted or has long resided in the narration as an alien seed around which the plot has been crystallised. (One example of this resident model of an object that randomly or homogenously constructs the plot around itself is the so-called Chekhov’s gun, an object that early in the story is introduced to the reader, then it is abandoned and only later toward the end resurfaces to overshadow all human characters, narrative events and their relationships. Contrary to Chekhov who believed that an element introduced in the story must be used at some point, the gun is merely a force of contingency that might or might not (for no reason at all) resurface later in order to seize the trajectory of the plot. Hence in order to understand the function of Chekhov’s gun, one must twist Anton Chekhov’s own words: ‘One must put a loaded rifle on the stage even if no one is thinking of firing it.’) (1)

Yet this alienating shift of perspective is precisely equal to a descent wherein the narrative has to unconditionally adopt any (alien) point of view as the plot loses its established ground and the contingent depth is traversed. Sometimes this alienating descent is only registered as a vertiginous effect or a shock (cf., the plot twist as a shock in pulp narratives, especially giallo fiction). Other times, the descent becomes the narration itself. In the crime novels of Jim Thompson, such as Pop. 1280 and The Killer Inside Me, the first person voice of the narrator is itself the twist that forms the narrative while calmly – under nonchalant influences of a global unconscious – pushing the entire (narrative) world off the cliff.

The speculative power of the twist on the causal configuration of the narrative is analogous to the shock of trauma that sometimes simply overthrows all that has been narrated. Yet there are also times when, instead of inflicting a shock, the twist perforates the causal system of the narrative from all directions, changing the plasticity and the formation of the narrative to a new narration whose every relation is a twist, a contingency in complicity with another contingency ad infinitum. The twist, in this sense, becomes another name for speculation from the other side, one whose endemicity to the narrative dynamism makes its role creatively problematic and whose irrepressible persistence for a thoroughgoing re-examination and reconstruction of the narrative world through the medium of contingency and from the outside allies it with the force of trauma. Since trauma is both an overthrowing contingency and a restructuring building process that changes the horizon according to contingent forces and objective resources of the Outside.

***

Now imagine a narrative book focused on a place on this planet called the Middle East, with its oil and dust-driven everyday life, with its controversial yet terrestrial politics, its religions, its arid and hot climate. What would be a veritable narrative of this place? One possible candidate would be a geo-political narrative shaped by embracing a Middle Eastern viewpoint (the victim, the other, the Middle Easterner). Another alternative would be a global/planetary narration (the Middle East as technologically, ethnologically and economically inhomogeneous, the breeding ground of terror or the land of ancient wisdoms). Yet both these narrative viewpoints harbour a twist that might creep on them at any moment for no reason whatsoever, confiscating their narration on behalf of a chasmic reality that can be narratively fabricated by the complicity of cosmic viewpoints – a narration accreted by the perspective of anonymous (cosmic) materials. In narrating the Middle East, the triad of the narrator, the narrated and the narration turns into the narrative object of cosmic contingencies, extra-terrestrial gravitational fields and alien influences: its petropolitics become the epic of hydrocarbons from a nether point of view, its religions, politics and demography are revealed to be links in complicity between terrestrial dynamics, solar radiations and stellar death, its wars the tactical mobility of nested geo-cosmic traumas and strategic perspectives spawned by contingent distribution of cosmic matter throughout the planetary body.

What was supposed to be a theoretic or fictional speculation on the Middle East turns out to be a narrative from a chasmic point of view. It is not so much that this narrative is horrific or suspenseful; it is the usurping nature of this alienating twist that finds its narrative asymptote in horror, conspiracy and crime fictions. When it comes to astute realism, the regional or local speculation must be rethought and reformulated from the universal or cosmic point of view, but to do so means to affirm the vertigo of the twist that opens the regional (the Middle East) into the cosmic and to prioritise the role of the contingent turn by which the cosmic fabricates global and regional localities.

Here twist as the force of the realist speculation (realist in the sense that it is asymptotic to the contingent reality that drives the universe) approximates the function of the philosophy of Speculative Realism in which speculation is not driven by our grounded experience or reflection but by the exteriority and contingency of a universe that always antedates and postdates us (that which thinks us from the other side). Ironically, philosophy seems to have strived this long only to become, belatedly, a crime fiction, a conspiracy thriller in order to embrace the force of the radical twist and paint itself yellow. This calls to mind the image of a philosopher who has realised that in speculating the world, it has been the world and its ‘strange aeons’ that have twistedly narrated her all along.(2) The philosopher’s vocation is to recognise the abyssal cosmic twist that has given birth to her speculation and to adopt the cosmic perspective as the only viable commitment to reality. Thus spake Sutter Cane in The Mouth of Madness: ‘For years I thought I was making all this up, but they were telling me what to write.’(3)

End Notes

(1) “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.” — Anton Chekhov, letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev

(2) H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, New York: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 156.

(3) In the Mouth of Madness, dir. John Carpenter, writ. Michael De Luca, 1995.

Originally published by Índex number 1, published by the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spring 2011. Reprinted by kind permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Editor’s Coda from The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities:
 
Kris (“The Assassin’s Twist”) — A kris whose every turn and twist on the blade is supposed to inflict a certain wound or an affliction upon the victim. However, unlike all other krises, the twists in this one have been forged in a way that any attack by the tip or part of the blade will surely kill the target, yet when the large kris is pushed into one’s body up to the hilt it will leave the person alive (owing to a secret twist devised on the blade below the hilt.). This geometric weapon increases the assassin’s chance of killing the target (for even a single scratch would be enough) yet introduces a final plot twist to the weapon by leaving the target alive once it is pushed up to its hilt to the body. (by Incognitum)

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Cyclonopedia

***

Museum: Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects, Saragossa, Spain

Exhibitions: The Secret History of Objects; The Center for Catoptrics and Optical Illusions; Hall of the Man-Object

Creators and Causes: Objects themselves; Deviant phenomenal models of reality; Neurolinguistic and cognitive distortions

Dates of manifestation: May 4, 1808–1820(?); July 1936-January 1961; January 2003

Title: The gallows-horse

Objectal mediums: Gaspar Bermudez (Spanish, 1759–1820), Thackery T. Lambshead (British, 1900–2003)

Also known as the Edifice of the Weird, the gallows-horse is the highlight of the Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects. Simultaneously being displayed in three distinct and permanent exhibitions, the gallows-horse presents the four basic criteria of the museum—Immateriality, Intangibility, Elusiveness and Ephemeral manifestations. Gallows-horse was first brought to the attention of the museum’s board of experts and trustees by an international collective of researchers consisting of art and science historians, linguists and philosophers who were commissioned by the Universities of Oxford and Exeter to index and organize the notes and memoirs of the late Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, a prominent British medical scientist, explorer and collector of esoteric arts and exotic objects. These notes, according to the research collective, include references to various objects and artworks collected by Dr. Lambshead during his lifetime. Whilst the majority of these references have been traced to tangible corporeal objects currently on display in various international museums, there were also scattered allusions to objects which did not have any record in museums or private collections. Either ravaged by a fire which broke out in Dr. Lambshead’s private residential collection or lost during his lifetime, nearly all of these objects—thanks to engineering and technological interventions—are now visually reconstructed through digital simulation.

(Art by China Mieville)

In the late stages of documentation, however, the research collective came upon a concluding remark written by Dr. Lambshead regarding an alleged and final item added to the collection before his death. In a presumably closing remark marking the completion of the collection, Dr. Lambshead writes:

January 28, 2003: It is not about the question of part-whole relationships, it is not even about the question of possible combinations of different objects, it is about the self-improvising reality of objects—unapproachable and incommensurable with our perception—that could rise to gallows horse just as it could rise to either horse or gallows, or something fundamentally different, or nothing at all. Even in its most kitsch material forms, the gallows-horse rises from the pandemonium of objects. A collection without such a thing is simply a tawdry carnival that spotlights human perception and displays our mental bravado instead of objects themselves. […] Today I erected the gallows-horse as the final and crowning piece of the wonder-room.

“It is this emphatic reference to the final and crowning piece that made us reexamine [his] notes in search of the gallows-horse,” says Professor Rachel Pollack, one of the researchers appointed to index and categorize the bulk of writings penned by Dr. Lambshead. The first reference to the gallows-horse dates back to January 10, 1936, when Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead writes in his journal “The sky is clear and the gallows-horse reigns; canaries sing from crogdaene.” For more than two decades, references to the gallows-horse persist always in the context of such enigmatic sentences that undulate between brief cryptic notes and self-invented semantic structures, and are always preceded by an exact date. For example a note from July 15, 1953, reads, “The Salamian began to sink Ariabignes’ boat. When a man runs out of the steam of history, it is in our best interest to restore the history to a previous state when that man did not exist or make that man mount the gallows-horse.” Or “December 3, 1958: In the wake of recent incidents, my pain is rekindled every night either by the fear of death or even worse, by the fear of riding the gallows-horse at a gallop.”

I. Gallows-horse at The Secret History of Objects (Second floor, Room 6)

The letter to the Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects states that none of the early references to the gallows-horse written between 1936 to 1959 described or even identified it as an object or a thing. During this period the gallows-horse continually appeared in the form of a chameleonic crypt or a cipher that opportunistically mimicked the semantic context of the sentence or the phrase it inhabited. It has been unanimously confirmed by the members of the research collective that in its larval stage of development between 1936 to 1959 before it began to fully appear as an object – at least as objects are commonly known – the gallows-horse has been a linguistic crypto-object with parasitic behaviors. “Like a menace which must be assimilated by its foes to defeat them from within,” the research collective emphasizes, “the early form of the gallows-horse tends to adapt—in the most esoteric way—whatever meaning the sentence that hosts it conveys. This uncanny linguistic crypto-object demonstrates its independent reality by moulding the world of the conscious and thinking subject around itself, literally thinking the subject that thinks it.”

During its incubation period, the gallows-horse was simply feeding off of contexts and linguistic connections in Dr. Lambshead’s notes and memories in order to build an empty cognitive carapace around itself. In this period, therefore, the gallows-horse cannot be understood in terms of an emerging thing, whether this new thing would be an idea, a thought or a corporeal object. Adamantly refusing to be considered as something (let alone a unified thing made of a gallows and a horse), the gallows-horse is the very personification of the primordial death of all meaning par excellence that oscillates between sense and non-sense depending on its mode of deployment against the parameters of human perception. In this early linguistic incubation period, the deeper you dig into the context where the gallows-horse is buried, the more promiscuous you find the gallows-horse is in relation to its semantic and semiotic neighbors. In digging for the true gallows-horse, you simply dig out nothing. In its basal form – that is the gallows-horse before it is born as a distinct idea and is manifestly imagined – the gallows-horse can be anything precisely because it is nothing.(1)

The Secret History of Objects is proud to present Naught-horse-Naught-gallows, an equivocally inexistent object that linguistically manifested as the gallows-horse from 1936 to 1959 throughout notes attributed to Thackery T. Lambshead—a meaning-feigning crypto-object which not only reveals a tenaciously alien yet meaningless expanse behind its ideated components which are “horse” and “gallows” but also worms itself into the semantic foundation of its context, eroding it so thoroughly that only a depth devoid of meaning, significance and ghosts remains.(2)

II. Gallows-horse at The Center for Catoptrics and Optical Illusions (Second Floor, Room 9)

The second life of the gallows-horse as an intangible object began December 15, 1959, when for the first time Dr. Lambshead directly addressed the gallows-horse as an object by obliquely writing on the ambivalent aspects of the gallows-horse:

I dreamed of myself dancing on the gallows-horse, hanging to its neck, swaying on its back, trotting with the rest of the herd. How can a horse take you to the gallows when the gallows is the horse? It is not a euphemism for death nor does it realize the literality of a horse carrying the convict to the gallows. As far as the nomenclature is concerned, it can be the horse-gallows as much as it can be the gallows-horse. There is no distance between the gallows and the horse to be either stretched or traversed. Yet despite the absence of such a distance, the gallows and the horse retain their distinct identities, the horse is still a horse and the gallows is still an inanimate edifice. But the curious aspect of this object is how can the horse and the gallows be united as one without one being the extension of the other or without a substantial change in their nature necessary for the intimacy and entanglement of the animate with the inanimate?

For less than two years, a scarce number of comments on the gallows-horse were made by Dr. Lambshead. These comments have frequently been presented in the form of bewildering riddles regarding the unified nature of the gallows-horse as one object in which both the gallows and the horse retain their distinct identities in one way or another without veering toward monstrous or marvelous categories. This “period of second advent” (as it is stated in the letter to the Museum of Intangible Arts and Objects) lead the research collective to believe that what Dr. Lambshead was calling the gallows-horse should be none other than the Equcrux which is also known as the cross-horse or the Spanish sphinx.

During the Spanish War of Independence (1808–1814), two days after civilian residents of Madrid stood in rebellion against the occupation of the ruthless French army and one day after the massacre of the same Spanish civilians by Bonaparte’s army, on May 4, 1808, on a hilltop outside of Madrid a small French task force handpicked by Marshal Joachim Dandy-King Murat had prepared the gallows for hanging a Spanish traitor who was also a renowned and talented portraitist named Gaspar Bermudez. Being an artist friend of Francisco Goya, Bermudez certainly did not share Goya’s more patriotic sentiments. He had been providing the French troops with vital military and inside-palace information since the beginning of war. But on the first of May, he had inadvertently given erroneous information to the French army stationed in Madrid, contributing to the rebellion of the second of May and the flowing of French blood in the streets of Madrid. Marshal Murat had ordered the execution of Bermudez immediately after repressing the uprising, but he later changed his mind and decided to subject the Spanish artist to a humiliating mock execution instead. This was mainly due to the popularity of Bermudez as a gifted portraitist among Royal and wealthy French patrons including Murat who had Bermudez paint seven different portraits of himself.

Reportedly minutes before sunrise, the French soldiers take Bermudez to the gallows riding on a horse, they perform their short everyday ritual by putting the noose around Bermudez’s neck and charging the horse. The gallows having been manipulated by the French soldiers possessed two adjacent nooses, a fake and a real noose. Once the horse leaps forward, Bermudez finds himself—perhaps after a minute or two lost in terror—with a second noose around his neck, fallen on his chest on the ground. As he raises his head, he sees the sun dawning and an opaque light that permeates between the gallows, the neighing horse and a patch of swampy ground in which the horse is rearing, transiently filling the gap between all three objects (that is the waterlogged patch of earth, the horse and the gallows). And Gaspar Bermudez beholds what he later calls the Equcrux, a spectral object consisting of three distinct identities (the soggy earth, the horse and the gallows) seamlessly fixed upon each other in a fashion that the horse was beheaded by the gallows and the quaggy patch of earth was inseparable yet categorically distinct from the hooves. The Equcrux, according to the Spaniard himself, was an object that had been created outside of the infinite possibilities which were given to the worlds of the horse, the gallows, the waterlogged earth and even the aurora as separate objects; it was a spectral gradient between the animate and the inanimate, a frozen instance of transgression from the realm of the individual objects toward a universe in which things were always anonymous until now.

The figure of the Equcrux enjoyed a brief popularity after the war when Bermudez claimed himself as a war hero and mass-produced the spectral object as a kitsch symbol of the horrors of war branded as the Spanish sphinx, an object made of stuffed leather and wood in the form of a horse in rearing position whose body was attached to a modeled gallows from the base of the neck so that it had as its head, literally, the gallows. However, due to production constraints and additional costs it had been decided by Bermudez himself to abandon the third object, the quaggy patch of water which in the first models was unsuccessfully made of straw mixed with resin. In the course of a few years, the Spanish sphinx lost its national popularity after Gaspar Bermudez was finally brought to the Spanish court as a traitor and a national shame. The last vestiges of the Spanish sphinx as a figure of terror were erased from memories and flea markets when Francisco Goya’s The Disasters of War was finally published in 1863.

As a part of The Center for Catoptrics and Optical Illusions, an inoperative replica of the Spanish sphinx has been installed with a patch of wet soil, a taxidermized horse and a wooden gallows brought together in an illuminated cubicle where these objects can no longer be conceived as the gallows-horse.

III. Gallows-horse in the Hall of the Man-Object (Third Floor)

In 1920, an unpublished essay by the Russian psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein entitled Gaspar Bermudez: A Case Study in the Spontaneous Shape of Trauma recounts a different analysis of the Spaniard’s spectral object. As Spielrein writes in the introduction to her essay, she came across a surprisingly well-preserved copy of a personal diary attributed to a Spanish portraitist named Gaspar Bermudez through a German collector and became growingly interested in the life of this obscure artist and his vision of the cross-horse. The diary, as Spielrein remarks, opens a secret passageway into the life of this enigmatic Spanish artist. A major portion of the diary deals with Bermudez’s intimate fascination with horses which obsessively asserts itself as a form of identification of his self with a horse or a drove of horses. The diary reveals that in conjunction with his main profession as the portraitist of Spanish and French nobles yet hidden from the eyes of the public, Bermudez had the habit of making self-portraits of himself as horses with different—subtly human— postures and facial expressions. This complete identification of his self and ego with a horse, Spielrein argues, eventually became a mental basis for the figure of the Equcrux or the cross-horse. During the mock execution, the humiliating blow that was inflicted on Bermudez’s outgrown and mutated ego forced the self—that is the Spaniard’s self—to shed part of itself in order to cope with the extreme and unbidden force of trauma that asserted itself not as a French executioner but as the gallows that firmly stood before his overthrown self and prostrate ego.

The act of shedding a part of the self in order to save the rest is in fact common among organisms (such as lizards shedding their tails or the so-called scratching tic) as a primitive yet powerful means of self-preservation. The curious and interesting aspect of Bermudez’s traumatic experience is that while he was degraded at the foot of the gallows, it was not his human self that cut off a part of itself but his earlier identification of his self with a horse. Since Bermudez’s ego had already fully identified with a horse, at the moment of the traumatizing blow, it was his equine self that cut parts of itself in order to save the integrity of the rest of the horse (or more accurately Bermudez’s full mental identification with a horse). When Bermudez’s ego dismembered itself to ensure the survival of the greater part, a void was left in his nervous system, a deep hole punctured in the horse that had already replaced the mental human image of his self. Knocked down at the foot of the gallows and his ego dismembered, Bermudez’s equine self had no option to restore its “lost chunk” (Spielrein) other than by filling in the new cavity with the invasive force of trauma that could neither be expelled nor be allowed to shatter the entire nervous system. The Cross-horse is precisely the mental object created by these traumatic tensions and breaches in Bermudez’s psychic structure, the beheaded horse was permanently trephinated by the gallows which was but the mental identification of the traumatic force. Spielrein writes that not only the damaged cervical vertebrate of the horse tightly locked into the wooden end of the gallows but also the intrusive traumatic force of the gallows impaled the horse from precisely where it had already torn off one of its parts. The upright pole of the gallows was re-erected as the restored cervical vertebrate of the horse, the triangle formed by the cross-beam its new cranium and the noose-hole the space between the mandible and the higher jaw.

An offspring of a traumatic invasion, a traumatic object with a spontaneous anatomical structure, the Equcrux intriguingly does not signify a receding tendency toward earlier states of the evolutionary chain. In other words for Bermudez, the trauma of the mock execution did not—unlike other instances of trauma and toppling of the ego—cause the individual to relapse into an earlier state of evolution when the species was still crawling due to the lack of spinal developments. On the contrary, the Equcrux melds the bestial locomotion or four-legged model of walking with the anatomy of a straightened spine which characterizes the bipedal species. The quadrupedal horse gets a new spine that exhibits the traits of a straightened—perhaps even too straightened—spinal curvature that has been transplanted by the L‑shaped and the obsessively perpendicular composition of the gallows. For this reason alone, the spinal anatomy of the Equcrux cannot be compared with the spinal formations in monstrous mental categories such as that of a centaur in which the curved spine of the horse shifts to the less curved spine of the human. In the Equcrux the spinal curvature is not produced by extending a more curved spine to a less curved one, it is the creation of a mathematical marriage between a curve (the quadrupedal spine) and a straight line (the gallows).

Spielrein continues by stating that from the day of the great humiliation onwards, the Equcrux became the sole mental and artistic image of the Spanish portraitist for it was not really a passing traumatic object any more but his very self and psychic structure that had turned into a full-fledged object. After a month-long pause, Bermudez recommenced writing his diaries which were this time exclusively dominated by his ambitious rants about replicating the Equcrux by any means or method of fabrication, and his immutable and recurring dreams wherein he was always a drove of gallows-horses rushing down in great numbers from a hilltop toward a city.

The Equcrux or Gaspar Bermudez as was traumatically conceived in the form of the gallows-horse is currently kept in the Hall of the Man-Object in an empty vitrine labeled Gasper Bermudez, the gallows-horse. A motto runs under the label: ¡Suelta a los raros!

Endnotes

(1) “It has been suggested that mimicry such as that of a chameleon is an impulse for dissolving back to the environment from which the individual was once relatively segregated; it is a force that is temporarily lent to the individual entity by nature. In using mimicry, the individual unconsciously utilizes the impulse for dissolution (or death) in order to gain some kind of profit (surviving, preying or living in harmony with something else). But in reality, in using mimicry the individual exercises the indifference of its environment to meaningful change and intention, that nature does not have any interest or motive to create meaningful differences and that even in its most cunning and meaningful acts the individual affirms the dissolution whereby all differences (including its own) and meanings are eradicated. The semantic mimicry that the gallows-horse undertakes is, in the same vein, neither a tendency to return to a meaningful semantic environment nor a meaningful yet cryptic act in itself. Instead, it is an act that reveals the fragile construction of meaning as the aftereffect of a compulsion to return to a meaningless abyss that precedes all patterns, signs and signifiers. The gallows-horse communicates a meaning by mimicking its sentential environment, and in doing so it demonstrates how meaning is the result of mimicry which is in fact a compulsion to flatten all semantic differences and return once again to the meaningless abyss that lingers behind the words horse and gallows, as well as any other word, sign, idea or image.” (Richard Graansvort, From Cryptography to Neurolinguistic Mimicry in Thackery T. Lambshead’s Memoirs, London: Samuel Buscard Institute, 2009)

(2) Shortly after the death of Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead and the publication of a number of his memoirs, the pseudonymous Pravda Online columnist Novena Brines published an exposé on the life of the British scientist. According to Brines, Lambshead was an overseas coordinating officer of MI6 whose scientific journeys and seemingly scandalous communist sympathies were only shields to protect his true identity. Among the documents and sources that Brines cites as evidences and clues is Lambshead’s memoirs. Brines particularly focuses on the name gallows-horse. He considers gallows-horse as a codename or what he calls an operation-marker. Brines argues that in the majority of cases, the name gallows-horse marks an imminent launch of an operation. In his exposé, Brines cites as an example the note “January 10, 1936: The sky is clear and the gallows-horse reigns; canaries sing from crogdaene.” He explains that the note is dated one day before the British MI6 officers departed from Croydon Airport toward the Canary Islands in order to move and protect General Francisco Franco for the nationalist military coup that began with the code “Over all of Spain, the sky is clear” and ignited the Spanish Civil War. Brines, however, fails to provide any more convincing examples or concrete documents and mostly resorts to rumors to the extent that in a public apology, Pravda’s editor-in-chief called Brine’s speculation “a wild conspiracy theory more fitting for an American gossip column than Pravda”.

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