A Wordless Thing in an Empty Place

DEAR§, [x] & Elytron Frass, Expat Press, 2024.

When the blind prophet Tiresias came upon a pair of mating snakes, he hit them with his staff. Consequently, the goddess Hera transformed him into a woman for seven years. Tiresias is a liminal figure and lives at the crossroads of all paths. Beneath a silver cloud, the body of the oracle splits in two. The novel DEAR§ from [x] and Elytron Frass employs the serpentine motif in its title, echoed once more in the cover art. The epistolary novel features a series of letters from two unknown figures that coil and unravel together beneath delirious night. They luxuriate in their anonymity, the shattering and reconstruction of self/other in an endless hall of mirrors, a game of masquerade flecked with wry and knowing humour. As Oscar Wilde writes in Salome: “Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks.”

The two players taunt and push each other to descend further into self-dissolution, writing: “Allow your giddiness to spill into veins of tooth & malice the consider me as text.” Consider me as text. How does language construct and deconstruct the self? Jacques Derrida, the ashen-faced pallbearer of deconstruction, describes the “a” of différance, as opposed to difference, “(it) remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb: oikesis.” One scribe in DEAR§ writes: “Each letter leaves us thinner, veins flooded with ink we pretend at with these spindled fingers,” which receives the following reply: “i entomb in the crypt of your anonymous sentence.” Derrida, furthering the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure, argued that language contains no inherent meaning present to us but is endlessly deferred in an infinite chain. A word only means what it does because of its relationship, and difference, to all other words. Thus, the meaning of language shifts constantly like a spider hung inside an exquisite and deadly web. The scribes of DEAR§ are like two cloaked figures stood on the margins of a blank desert. Across many miles, they howl with laughter on these shifting sands. Language always contains its own murder, haunted by its own non-meaning, or as one of the scribes describes: “The soft thrill of the death of every word we’ve brought forth and discharge for the next breath, the measure, the next paragraph.” Each and every word must die.

The two scribes of DEAR§ speak out into darkness. In his play Not I, Samuel Beckett presents an anonymous mouth on stage; each spluttering word is revelation, a rejection of her singular and unified self, the most beautiful of all deaths. Initially, one supposes the protagonist is alone. However, the stage directions for Not I includes a second character; the Auditor. The Auditor is described as being of indeterminate sex, s/he wears a black robe and is dimly lit at the side of the stage. What is the role of the Auditor? Some have argued the figure is inspired by the djellaba-clad listeners seen in the cafés that Beckett visited in Morocco. The scribes of DEAR§ relish in the power of their anonymity; heralding them(non)selves as “the new nameless.” In Beckett’s The Unnameable, the narrator describes: “I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I'm something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place.”

These anonymous figures cherish the ambiguity of their relationship, the push-pull of language and silence, describing themselves as, “hopeless for a little friendly rivalry.” When someone asked Beckett if the Auditor was Death or a guardian angel, he simply shrugged his shoulders. Throughout DEAR§, the pair of scribes use the term “youandi” repeatedly; an elegant braiding of two king cobras. The Two of Swords shows a blindfolded woman holding two crossed swords. Everything hangs in the balance, an endless game like djinns teleporting across an obsidian desert, this nothingness I call a mouth, or as one of the scribes of DEAR§ describes, “the space between words is the now that’s been years and years and the now that’s never again.” This pleasure can never end, deferral forever. As Antonin Artaud writes: “I am a total abyss. Those who believed me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point.” Through their letter writing, the scribes of DEAR§ form a death-pact between anima-animus like two black mambas hypnotising one another. This youandi writhes in ecstasy. Georges Bataille argues: “Two beings are lost in a convulsion that binds them together. But they only communicate when losing a part of themselves. Communication ties them together with wounds, where their unity and integrity dissipate in fever.” Blood-soaked, they integrate only through disembowelment.

DEAR§ reads like a declaration of celestial war. Bored in heaven, the angels decide to execute the stars. One letter describes an angel turning the flaming sword of Jophiel on itself: “The light of the first angel to blind themselves is flickering at 120Hz and it’s its own kind of torment, the last of the rain pooling in the eye socket.” Their rituals of self-annihilation are reflected in the cycles of dying suns where: “Galaxies are rupturing in line of fire mac-10-mouthed maleficium your bullets fireworking in a zig zagged scintilla of cosmos-bent collapse.” The ophidian universe greedily eats its own tail. The tortured angels of DEAR§ start to resemble, “butterflies on carrion of cosmos”. As William T. Vollman asks: “Oh, my prismatic Nymphalidae, my cross-veined Psychidae, my Sesiidae with the delicious anal veins, how could cruelly unimaginative lepidopterists have pinned you to a common corkboard of classification, when after all the world is so shadily large?” These violent battles of the ophidian world of DEAR§ invoke a gnostic understanding of the universe with its mention of Elohim and YHWH, a shattering of mirrored corridors all leading towards Keter: the most hidden of all rooms. The gnostic text Apocryphon of John describes the creation of lion-faced serpent god Yaldabaoth from both darkness and stolen light. A jealous god exists inside its dim realm. Yaldabaoth deludes and imprisons the whole of humanity inside physical matter. The scribes of DEAR§ dream of attacking this world, where the halo of an angel resembles a hole drilled into a trepanned skill. They want to “stab the sun.” Language is performed as a magic(k)al act as they play the roles of “twin sigilled lunatics.” As Nick Land asks: “Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die? Or the moon retain such fidelity to the Earth? Where is the new darkness? The greatest of all unknowings? Is death itself shy of us?” When does a god decide to slit its own throat?

The letters of DEAR§ continue never-ending like a pair of mirrors facing each other. The indigo night is endless. As Aleister Crowley declares: “I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.” The blood-stained game goes on and on because as the scribes of DEAR§ describe, “there’s only rapture in this dead heaven.” The apocalyptic battles of DEAR§ are also intrapersonal as well as interpersonal: the ego as a site of butchered multiplicity, as abyss, as endless night. Land argues that: “Psychoanalysis has always had a tendency to degenerate into a technology of repression that subtilises, and therefore reinforces, the authority of the ego.” Murder every master: the shadow of the apprentice reaches up towards its ruler. Anima and animus are rolling on the floor like green pit vipers, an ampersand folding in on itself. DEAR§ is a game of shadows. Unknown phantoms cover themselves in serpentine Arabic script. Each one approaches an opposite window and looks up at the Egyptian sky. A syzygy of twin suns occurs above the Temple of Hathor. Every word is like a tomb. As the two figures of DEAR§ conclude: “We live and die for deaths like these.”

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Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His published works include Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press, 2021); Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press, 2021); The Glass Abattoir (D.F.L. Lit, 2023); Songs of Xanthina (Broken Sleep Books, 2023) and Psycho Viridian (Broken Sleep Books, 2024).

[image: Tiresias appears to Ulysses during the sacrifice, Henry Fuseli, c.1780-85]