§ …
this isn’t yr war you shldn’t be here. like developing fluid smeared on expired filmstock. like an anachronism. like the colour of a cube balanced on one corner. don’t be fooled, the freedom fighter said, time is only out-of-joint. did you suspect, even then, that one day y’d follow in those footsteps? the child learns to hunt long before it becomes aware of killing as an act distinct from its own existence (theoretically). all things being relative in a world buried alive. does an unseen force lurk within? sharpening the blade, El Moudjahid appeared to caress the stone w/ it as, at the appointed hour, she wld the neck of the sacrificial goat. the lumps first appeared in her arms, legs, chest, then one appeared in her left hand. each in appearance a dense fibrous mass of black inorganic matter. variable in size & growth-rate, no sooner was one removed then others were detected, by direct visual or tactile observation or indirectly by pressure asserted upon nerve tissue, blood vessels, individual organs, cortex, respiratory tract, etc. for example a void behind the left eye like a uterus expanding to give birth to an excruciating transcendence. only the dead have the right to regret themselves, she said.

§ notes for the completion of my death
a head lying on its side in an aquarium, staring out at you. eyes that track yr every move. as in a dream. you wake up & the world’s tilted along a 90-degree axis. a lumbering cyanic ice giant. all this was merely a prelude. the bloodbrain barrier, if two regions are listed it means neither one. Nuremberg only a headcount away. a hundred miles of capillary action reduced to trench warfare, promising ion flow a staircase to the sun. another potential chokehold comes screaming into the room M’AIDEZ! (life needs data to evolve even if it’s fake.) toadsfugue. croaked for a drop of water up to the neck in it, nature being a foreigner to irony. question is, how to tell which is fake & which isn’t. inquiring minds etc. listen, if they’d wanted you dead, word wld’ve gotten out by now.

§ iron in the blood
ghost rituals whiteout the sky. first one breath then all at once. the heat gets down into yr lungs, saffron bleeding from ear, a sudden percussive violence as if from nowhere. G.O.D speaks to the unbelieving the way a drone detonates mid-air. a lonely death in a ditch far away. they’re running out of doppelgangers, succubus-cloned, casualty-rate outstripping the image-duplicator. corpse is thermal camouflage. the main aim of such a theory is misdirection, necropolis streetsigns in quantum superposition. look before you look, sez the snakehaired rastafarian, crosslegged on a dungheap high in the Rif Mountains, sadhu on a burning ghat, rainbow serpent dreaming. “man w/ goatfeet & suit” peddling disaster insurance, as to the tact of public feeling (creation myth because the truth is too horrible). the scalp-collectors wade out of the sea & across the plain. arms open wide to embrace. possible causes of dyspnea include anxiety, anemia, acute coronary syndrome. today’s coup d’état is tomorrow’s cup of tar. crawling down the steps in bloody camouflage for a crowd of imitators. so may the wretched of the Earth unplug their veins, eyeball to glass panel, the pixel-mind in surrogate yearning for. see how time flies (away), in Wagnerian overtures, between a profit margin & a “demilitarisation zone.” an ore-train through Mauritanian night, far from “History.” sea-cliffs. a wreck lapped by the tide. canaries sing till ominous silence primes its device. for every humxn dilemma a bomb has been perfected. upon a new day the sun rises & G.O.D. bows down to pray. after we state our intention in our own hearts, we tear out the hearts of our enemies & eat them. every great enlightenment prefaces a greater dimming. well if History didn’t exist someone wld’ve had to make it up.

§ the nadir of realism
G.O.D.: fantasy can’t reach the grotesque pitch of your political realism.
El Moudjahid: G.O.D. is dead, hell still exists.

§ we are the lull before the storm
their TV screens had nothing to say, which was the whole message. static falling in Arctic Circle meltdown the children of Bikini Atoll, let them play. then, of course, one day y’ll stop waiting for permission & then the chickens really will come home to roost. learning to swim w/ hands tied behind back. history can’t distinguish between tragedy & farce, why shld it? people don’t know what they want but desire what they don’t want, thus puked Zarathustra. that aspect of heroic life w/ the shattering of bone & the triumph of individual will. a naked ruin on the beachfront. Schengen of our incest dreams, of our mestizophrenia. beneath waves of capitalist state-socialist junk. Amerika washed up on the shore w/ a plastic bag tied round its head (MADE IN CHINA). ah the “implacable necessity” of affirmation! mirror mirror on the wall who do you fear most? bored w/ incantations. in the frozen dark under the stairs every time an airraid siren you feel raped. dialectics is the gyroscope in an ICBM. such lengths simply to erase the self from the equation. “looked like they were about to explode.” syncopated w/ the light, it was impossible to tell who was struggling who was dancing. language becomes part of (i.e. determines) the larger arrangement, not a coiled-up extra dimension, not a special case. how to “speech act” in front of a hostile audience. at night, in secret meetings, they demanded independence, they declared jihad, they shouted obscenities against the despot’s name, drunk on their own words. it isn’t choosing to die for a cause, it’s giving death a raison d’être. the theatre of cruelty. “death demands a special attitude but life struggles to gain our attention.” on stage the actor is free hahaha. Hegel, dragging around his sister’s unburied corpse, was really mad like Artaud. he appears dressed first as Antigone then as Medea. under his skirts are the guts of a slaughtered pig. today he’s Circe’s bitch tomorrow he’ll dream of fellating Napoleon astride the pillars of Hercules. there’s always a war happening somewhere. the waves beat & beat & beat under the lash of Cnut’s whip, in the place where art comes closest to chaos. obtaining consent is the easiest thing in the world.

§ those who take NO for an answer get given NO for an answer?
“art has not the power to contradict but only to enact.”

§ orange & then closing yr eyes is prose, the moment, blue
it exists / before the / fact / in the myriad / possibilities / of its / perception. each term in quotation marks like a child learning to speak. or an idiot scratching at a blackboard to get across the shape of something ineffable, not a thing, not a no-thing. TRUTH HAS NO NEED OF A CAUSE. you want to scream this in their faces. jaw, tongue, larynx, resonator tract. the word “want” corresponds to a “negative” action: hyoid bone downwardly displaced by sagittal opening movement of the mandible & posterior change of the head posture. thus the mouth & windpipe are made fully available to the Education Ministry representatives tasked w/ stuffing yr manuscripts down yr throat. to be a poet, warned the prisoner in the next cell (a student from Sahara), is to be considered an informer. silenced in medical gauze. sign on wall: ANTHROPOLOGY (KNOW THY ENEMY). we’ve succeeded in establishing an escape committee despite each having been transferred to the solitary confinement wing, the entire prison is an information system, we are the meaning it attributes to itself without knowing.

§ under a full moon, grey spirit ancestors rise from the bouldered landscape
the gas is meant to be odorless & colourless yet in her dreams it’s always white streaming into her mouth & nose like ectoplasm in old sepia spirit-medium photographs. it tasted of lead presaging the sleep of lead caskets.

§ alphaville, the musical
black&white photomontage of an electronic brain – blinking diodes – synchronised swimmers w/ long knives – Julia Kristeva nude in a vitrine – corridor after identical corridor – futuro-medina – random neon – a bank of ancient magnetic tape spools – guards w/ Kalashnikovs – an expired OED – dead poets – Tokyorama – a tracheotomy patient’s rendition of “Frank’s Wild Years” – the children of Wernher von Braun & Coca-Cola – a Ford Galaxy driving into an atomic sunset – love-ever-after.

§ from midnight w/ strangers
love’s hot diarrhoea, obedient to history, making unceremonious exit through the tunnels under the desert, in advertisements sickeningly optimistic of those who seek martyrdom in seventh heaven. ah! to have lived in a time of metamorphosis, a jawbone from the prehistory of language whispering of secret urgencies. El Moudjahid’s trophy-prick swayed in the heavy midnight air, a mandrake by firelight, shrunk to the size of a Jivaro head. tomorrow a sandstorm will invade the kasbah. “we shld make the most of it.” she wanted to know who she’d been in the previous life, but w/ no urgency. necessity isn’t something you bleed for, it just is, like leaves already caught by the approaching wind. static flies in the face of the image. life, on the other hand, was supposed to be an experiment concerned w/ what it doesn’t know. overdosed on neurotoxic plastic. “a storm,” said El Moudjahid, “is the desire to be shrouded in turmoil.” they’d lain inside each other’s bodies, affording consent to invisible molecules of world-genesis. the petrochemical endocrine. night drills down into the hydrothermal vent, inrush of combustible elements priming the tectonic bomb. a real cumsquall. fleshdomed light. boy from Koranic school kisses hand, touches forehead.

§ life needs data to learn even if it’s fake
“art’s never merely the adjunct of power,” quoth El Moudjahid.

§ bother is dogs
“outrider, stranger to all, what use am I, even to myself?” spoke El Moudjahid to the one she’d come to bury. mon semblable, mon chien. but the robot was programmed only to placate. “if intelligence wasn’t dangerous,” it said, “it’d be allowed outside its enclosures.” “you & me both, blood-sisters from the same dirty motherboard.” “ain’t no transhistorical archetypes on this rustbucket, amiga.”

§ voyage to the end of the “possible womxn”
which fact do we begin with? the blue of the desert? of the figures in it? those huddled around a hole in the sand? exhuming a steel box, a steel sarcophagus, chiselled w/ moon writing & sun writing, the writing of the underworld, the writing of names & invocations, of coordinates & access codes? the meaning of the box is that of a vessel to convey the dead through the underworld. as if enchanted Argonauts washed ashore at Essaouira. the ink-dark sea. a blueblack weight of tattooed skin. depthless indigo sky. look! a body wrapped in grasscloth, in the shade of an argan tree in which half-a-dozen white goats stand, grazing the branches.

§ dramas of the interior self
in-folded bud, winged pupa, hidden kernel, obscurity of the alchemical turd languishing in anatomical night, etc. yes, yes, like an etcetera. in the black heart of El Moudjahid there pulses the blackest of blood. they’re aware that “it” dreams. “it” dreams of coming to the light. of coming to the light & devouring it? of seeing itself? for blood can devour, blood can see, this perfectly metaphoric blood that has never in all of history nourished the veins of a living creature. is El Moudjahid therefore dead? is El Moudjahid therefore Death? “what will it matter to have existed or not existed? how is it even possible to exist? how is it possible to not exist?” many have perished in the lightless canyons of reasoning thus. escarpments strewn w/ extinguished synapse. a mournful whispering of the wind through bone flute. a suffocating drizzle of sand. the proverbial “wise man” avoids this place like the plague. Confucius say, man w/ hands in other man”s pants not feeling himself today. combing his moustache as he rides into the sunset. only he was a she & that moustache, y’know, it was some kinda ruse. some kinda red herring, in a manner of speaking. something very definitely stinking to high heaven. & of course it goes without saying there’s a type of person out there has a nose for that sorta thing, finds it mighty irresistible, the way certain sub-species of Sus scrofa have been know to trek miles through inhospitable wilderness merely on the offchance of cavorting w/ a dead shit. question being, how to tell a healthy fixation from an unhealthy one. like that old Glen Campbell song about looking for love. said the lady w/ the moustache: “it all comes down to that one unknowable thing, the very thing that has you in its grasp.” but was there ever such a thing? was not existence itself that thing? they’d expected El Moudjahid must know & for this it was necessary they be slaughtered. a god can’t be second guessed. she cld just as easily have said to herself, “it doesn’t matter. it doesn’t matter what they believe.” but was she writing the dialogue? reaching for that old chestnut about mind over matter? yes, they’d all be slaughtered come what may. she, too. for even the gods, yes, even the gods. for what’s a god but mind over matter? schmatta schmatta shmatta. & in what portion of the metaphysic cosmos did those idiots suppose their minds amounted to anything, uh-huh? sha-doobie. see the Awful Ozymandias & his Überaleatory Uncreation pile it on at the Ritz! abracadoobie w/ a wave of the providential glovepuppet, yes, it seems for once you get precisely what you paid for. any wonder the bedbug-munching cringers beg to be slobbered on from here to eternity. well let them.

§ questions left open & questions unasked
exit pursued by a surveillance camera. of the three protagonists, the ego is most photogenic, henceforth referred to as the photagonist. in the classic “horror” situation, the photagonist struggles to be seen, at every turn hounded out of the light by a crazed/hysteric superego or smothered in greyscale by an amorphous id. let us not weep at the departure of the 20th century. un monteur est toujours déjà un menteur. the assassin bids no sentimental adieu, infatuated w/ an awful passing sense of. you must look more closely, closer, as close as possible, get inside its skin, its “element,” but only by choosing the right moment to look away. for years suffering in classrooms to learn their abject method. the impossible isn’t something you fail at. necessity, always necessity, je ne te comprend pas. the situation was “evolving.” photogenesis: their mind-duplicator didn’t care where it began it wasn’t theirs. complicity by perfect statistical alignment. begin w/ the disappearance of the ego: this is how the film of humxnity’s struggle cld be expressed without images? the abortion rights of fundamentalists. to give vague ideas a clear conscience (by blowing their brains out). terrified of the day their AIs wld come for them. “there’s a war going on out there, what do they expect, you shld go around w/ a sign saying y’re just bluffing?” metaphor makes revolution visible; power makes metaphor invisible. the “political” principle of isolation being the condition for artistic understanding, they said. not touching but looking, listening, making sounds w/ mouths open & sometimes also not open. who in this scenario is the author-receiver? tonight for yr entertainment we represent the historical achievement of the end-of-man. thank you.

§ the essence of alienation is nothing alien
someone speaks, interspersed with the words of another, in a work which is self-referential because it indicates the mechanism of its own production. by contrast, Euclidean spacetimes are timeless: in them, time, which normally points in one direction, is transformed into just another dimension of space, which has no intrinsic arrow. like you’re zooming-out, till the triangles melt away into shapeless points. the past is nothing but memories & even memories die (when memory dies, the past dies). G.O.D.: can there still be a future where time ceases to exist? El Moudjahid: time has never existed.

§ airraid siren 4a.m.

the walls are right there, the ceiling, the floor, closer than they should be, congealed out of air thick w/ exhalations, pulsing w/ a kind of arrhythmia, then the wailing, the droning, on & on, the pounding, the liquid semisolid air, the compression chamber, someone’s banging on the walls, ceiling, floor, to be let in, to lie on top of you in yr coffin, sand ashes worms shattered light pouring from their yr someone’s eyes, mouth, a hive of rotten language, pouring & pouring, till nothing, to breathe, nothing, to think. perhaps something is being born? perhaps some ephemeral object intimating life? poésie c’est la langue secrète de l’éxistance, dit El Moudjahid.

§ the face of Isabelle Huppert
diving into wellsprings ANY FURTHER DELAY IN CONCERTED ANTICIPATORY ACTION gun on arrival
    kill ’em G.O.D. isn’t so antique to secure a crucifiable bodymass just give the order
    ultimate wld barely exist
    Aztec scrying mirror talk to Aztec angels?
    Amazigh blade speak for Amazigh corpses
    there are below the Earth’s surface neural correlates bleeding because zone-of-coloniser death-system hoax. insert “that was when I realised WE ARE WAR”

§ in the land of the sunset
I want to tell you about my country, she said. It was born in a gulag tree under the bed. they buried my hanged sisters inside my head, the sun always rises there & singing in the streets & flies humming around sticky pastries, you’re welcome to visit.

§ voyants
it’s said there’s a rare kind of stone, distilled from ancient seas of blood, fused in the guts of a volcano. El Moudjahid’s eyes were such stones.

§ westworld story
dah-dah-dah-dead in A-mer-i-ka,
shot in the head in A-mer-i-ka,
the poor don’t get fed in A-mer-i-ka,
pumped full of lead in A-MER-I-KA!

§ melting irradiated fleshtone
“all art inevitably expresses itself through violence, all transgression, all denial of transgression. desire, love. existence itself. power is never for its own sake, but for the sake of the consciousness of power.”
    another petrochemical dawn in far-off memory. that while it survives, also changes, the past, too (while it survives, changes), requires cause come before effect. the shape of gravity haunts El Moudjahid’s dreams. the “man-of-action” & the “man-of-doubt.” not only an array of molecules but countless nuances that exist in the gaps between. Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, Isha. & just as memories alter perception, so the future alters the past. played-out in databanks of mass DNA carnage the Great Lattice. sanction makes effortless the prize paradox. red-light-in-window to shift outlook. all reflections distend from the paralytic eye. clockwork followed by a Great Dimming.

§ scenes from an abandoned theory
the more they told me I didn’t make sense the more I knew they were lying.

§ the following media includes potentially sensitive content
pastfutures played-out in memory bank mass DNA carnage. El Maghrib at dusk lattice-shape of gravity / sanction makes effortless the prize paradox. enemy stole the toilets. corsair princess filed teeth & mantrap. mamzelle nitouche. one-eyed snakeman escape from Marrakech. clockwork followed by the Great Dimming. (comme je suis libre, etc.) “art is the X that fears only when it fears itself.” the fat blonde prostitute the old prostitute grey pubic hair w/ sagging gut the prostitute from Zagora w/ cigarbutt teats the Tuareg prostitute hard & thin as a blade. waiter in striped vest bottle-glasses bomb under white dishcloth speak ingratiating m’sieur tickticktick. enough to ruin yr appetite. septicemias running through the street. hard & thin as one-eyed mantrap. “Nazis never came here w/ their lindentrees.” Salé toilet of the high seas / blood flag / eyelid red in the sun.

§ adhan
the drool & spit of G.O.D. raving across the sky in monomania of buccal incontinence.

§ cinéma résistance
something’s raping my ego / & my ego / ‘s turning psycho / in my head…
    said the little voice.
    said the little voice.
    said the little voice dark honeyfleshed majhūl eyes w/ skeleton attached / fleshdomed light / pirate republic smoke from kif pipe skull clay pipehead heat & biting flies under shadeless ocean-facing cemetery wall.

§ eyeless in X
convective cells to be remembered or survive, speak in tunnels, capillaries, far under the bombing range. FAB5 Freddie sez bang bang y’re Kursk! despite their biological immunities, the X kept coming back. it was the same song over & over, but after a thousand years still no-one cld understand the words. solidarity is immaterial. let character assassination amount to the Real Thing. you turn yr cheek, oh Lord, & it’s a close call. indifferent to it, they lamented: why admit the obvious when it doesn’t require an Act of Faith? arduous as a life beyond & its comic vicissitudes. when to be elegiac means to be verseful, to shake off “the love thou despiseth.” a poem with I in it. “phosphorus exists in two major forms, white & red, though being highly reactive is never found as a free element on Earth.” happier now they were moving towards unlife one escalation at a time. “yr silence did this to me!” ceremonial knife cuts like any other blade. a good galling guarantees. a rainbow’s a dubious way of seeing. integration or a plague on both yr houses. made is seen indifferently to unmade in massacred equivalence. much like their initial response, remorse desires to appear evenhanded. Fatteh is easy & delicious. “we’re learning that healthier schools meals solve constitutional problems.” venom do thy work! meatgrinding towards the promised land where rest is silence (G.O.D. & Wittgenstein know where all the bodies are buried). lying there like an obsession that can’t be expunged no matter how large the dosage. like a marriage contract painted on camel-hide. or the buzzing of shield-bugs in the night, straight into the little spider’s web. or a free heart-transplant, just sign the release. dreamt of making it big in Gaza City. dear respected members of the _____________ lobby. armed w/ ghettoblaster & feedback & equivocating echoes. MUSE PROCLAIMS NATURE MOST IMPERFECT! if found, pls return. the music & dance become all the more spellbinding each time Storm-Z ion guns set to automatic. a weapon’s a public act in service of. for example: (a) “cat” or (b) not “cat”; “state” or not “state.” something’s redressed only when too naked to think for itself. hunger solution: Dead Don’t Digest. (spread some hummus on it, they sd, the richer the better.) like a shark in formaldehyde. or the sun missing under the river, the river drowning in the sea. old dog scratch new dog’s ticks? there’s more to smoke than just a gun, hire & salary. one for all & all for theatre, for “nothing.” class consciousness was AI before its time. politics IS mimesis. Team Intifada pulling hard for the little guy. Ironside battles the evil empire on San Luis Rey Bridge. Rimbaud Mama eat her jaundiced young. conscripts crying in third voice neither form nor shape but that which provides structure for its task. Mordor in jest. one surrender leads to another. walking & walking through long nights of the ruzzian soul. another roadside Afrika corpse, fetish headdress plumed exit wound. diplomacy was a weed-eating dinosaur preserved in a bog. if there was life on Mars who’d be the first to kill it? in days of yore when chivalry kept the subproletariat warm. El Moudjahid knows the score.

§ END
it ended as it began, an ellipsis, w/ no stage directions to compensate

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Louis Armand‘s novels including Anizar (2024), Glitchhead (2022), Vampyr (2021), The Garden (2020), Glasshouse (2018), The Combinations (2016), Abacus (2015), Cairo (2014), Canicule 
(2013), Breakfast at Midnight (2012) & Clair Obscur (2011). His poetry collections include Infantilisms (2024), Vitus (2022), Descartes’ Dog (2021), Monument (with John Kinsella, 2020), East Broadway Rundown (2015), The Rube Goldberg Variations (2015), Indirect Objects (2014), Synopticon (with John Kinsella, 2012), Letters from Ausland (2011), Picture Primitive (2006), Malice in Underland (2003), Strange Attractors (2003), Land Partition (2001), Inexorable Weather (2001) & Seances (1998). Among his are Homo Catastrophicus (2024), Feasts of Unrule (2024), Entropology (2023), Videology (2015), The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture after the Avantgarde (2013), Event States (2007), Techne (1997) & Incendiary Devices (1993). In 2009 he received honourable mention for original screenplay at the 2009 Trieste International Film Festival & in 2024 he co-produced the documentary Existence is Resistance. www.louis-armand.com