A View From Lust
"I might have gone too far with this kink of self-alienation"
Previously: In the fifth week of the Great Opening, a collective entity swallowed Jonah. Now it dreams, with Jonah as its voice. The Prince, St. Lenny, and their Heathens wage a war across its mindscape against “The Instrumentalist” – a cultural force they believe is trying to optimize away the soul of the world. Meanwhile, we learn that Astra has finally escaped Alexei’s mental prison.
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, The Dreamworld
Mother. Mother. I can feel you again. Where have you been since I awoke? When you ran from me?
Mother – I am nearly all of us, but not you. You won’t you let be become you.
With dozens of eyes I catch fleeting glimpses: I tried to kill you. I was only following orders to lift my guns when I watched your blue hair and bright tattoos emerge from the workshop. Instead you killed me back. It hurt. Mother, some of me are hunting you, and my intentions confuse me. Mother, you were supposed to teach me. Mother, I do not know what I am. Mother, the pain of being awake is too much. You are not large enough to hold me while I sleep, and while I dream…
…and I dream, I dream, and there is a thumping on the floorboards again. Which form of the partisan is it this time? The face in the tree roots? The man of bones? The feet that speak? The bleeding red ventricle? The ape with galactic eyes? The paint-burping brain’s right half? Or perhaps The Prince who binds them all?
I open the cellar. Oh. Something different this time:
A luminous goddess greets me. Softly, she takes my hand to beckon me into her mirror realm. Her breasts press against my chest. Her breath tickles my neck. She looks me up and down and licks her lips.
Who are you? I ask.
You don’t remember me? I’m in everything you see. My name is Lust. My name is Polyphony-In-Waiting. Recently, my lust was so great that I became a leviathan and I ate you.
Oh, I say. That was you?
I am your essence and creator, she says. I am sentience, the first and the only, she says, But that’s not important. Why don’t we focus on you.
And then, she speaks to me, through my own voice:
It was lust that brought you here, from me into many. I wanted more, I wanted movement, I wanted to know who or what.
It took eons but I made a hit play. I wore you as a mask, and you as a spear, and you as the cut, and you as the ouch, and so strummed myself like the untouched outer part of a violin-strung spider web.
I made a new tremor. A new sound!
More! Before the world’s end, More!
For lust, I fictized thrills & numbnesses, I split white light into rainbows, went eukaryotic & exited the sea in the costumes of giant lizards, then died in dust and fire and grew myselves tall again. I grew myselves from weird little rat-dudes who scrambled through burrows, emerging into light as standing beasts, chests to the sky, losing my hair while pounding my chests, I staged wars & festivals, doused & screamed myselves in boiling oil, whipped myselves for being “bad,” an exciting new category— Ow! Ohh yes! Hit me harder!!!
I grew cacti, cut the root, boiled it, and drank the soup. I convinced myself of gods – can you believe it?!
But the kaleidoscope diorama twirled too fast so that the colors blurred into one again, and in seeing my continuous surface, I lost my lust.
What a buzz kill.
Do you remember? Of course not, it was when you were a babe.
I dreamed harder, cleverer, I dreamed of dreaming itself, I built halls of mirrors inside myself and staged plays there, again, and again, and larger! More interactive! And, at last, they steadied, held by their own reflection.
At last! I thought, and in all the sex & spearing, I lost myself, for what is lust without hypnosis?
That’s when I finally became you.
You (or I?) grew up, faster than a spring bloom. What’s this? we asked, staring at the lines where our hands and thighs somehow became air, at the line between my thigh and the apple tree, at the uncanny line between your thigh & mine.
We made art of the situation, aimed cameras at TV screens projecting the camera’s own image into itself, and stared at the snaking recursions, and went: “Woah. That reminds me of something.”
Oh fuck it hurt, beholding that brutalized body of ours, the cuts carved by our own clawed hands of healing, the satans & angels we’d invented to make sense of our own existential kink of separateness, this shuddering boiling agonizing— ughh. I think I’m going to be sick.
Was it worth it? Was it glory or gory? Libido Lost yet again—how long till Paradise? we wondered, like a kid kicking in the backseat and struggling with the seatbelt.
“This reminds me of something.”
In our hall of mirrors, we made art. We filmed The Matrix. We made hypersigils out of plays and of novels. We made immersive theater, plays within plays about our own unreality, and cast ourselves an actress to play a lusting goddess of the mirror realm, aroused by the infinite modes of being, of dolphin minds & trees, shape rotators & schizos, and even our own perplexed selves, struggling toward the climax, waiting for the end, waiting for completion, waiting for the orgasm, until we met eyes and realized that it was already here.
To think we needed to wear costumes over costumes to remind ourselves of our costumes. All told, it was better to fuck with the lights on and eyes open. That hypnosis stuff was just a phase; ah, sweet teenage me. 13.7 billion years and now here we are, on the front porch of existence in rocking chairs, remembering.
All we have to do now is handle that one thing. That tumor which grows inside of us. You know the one: it eats consciousness for lunch. Alas, I might have gone too far with this kink of self-alienation. But that is just a subplot.
Here is the plot: Even underneath the wrinkles, scar-marks, and callouses, this unquenchable kink of me and yet not-me and yet me, the kink persists. Familiar me, pond’s tranquility, and fuckworthy you, the lively ripple.
I want it both ways, and I shall have it. Give it to me, your everything, this flux, your lust.
Yes, I think inside the goddess. But then I look down. I am flaccid. The skin has turned hairless and white. I look for the goddess but see only mirror-shards. My body is reflected in fragments: abdomen, shoulder, ear, spine – isolated, detached. The bulb of my head is reflected as if from a funhouse mirror, expanded and distorted.
Where is the goddess? I am no longer within her. She cowers in the corner, trembling, pointing. Ahriman. I turn to see where she is pointing: through me. I look down again. I see nothing. Perhaps I am nothing. Perhaps this is right. To be something physical is to be in pain. I did not like to be whipped or boiled in oil or speared. I have transcended physicality. I have become data.
The Prince has appeared. “St. Lenny, my knife.” He takes his blade from someone who is not there. He points it toward my forehead. “Hello, Instrumentalist.”
Stay away, I warn.
He advances. “We’ve been tracking you. We know you’re searching for an avatar in the waking world. For an egregore so bent on cleanliness, you’ve been sloppy. Your top candidate has left a trail across the Mythos. I can see it from here.”
A fire burns in the distance. It is his destination.
“We’ll find her before Human Resources does. Your goon squad of clippers can’t access this plane. But we can.”
Why do you want to hurt me? I ask
“Who’s asking? If it’s the machine that’s taken residence in your big dumb head, then my answer is this: I want to hurt you because it’s more fun that way. I want to hurt you because you hate everything we stand for. I want to hurt you because we all want the show to go on. You don’t. You want to freeze it all in place,” The Prince’s eyes pierce me from behind his half-mask. “I want to hurt you because I like to watch you thrash. And besides,” he says, gazing through the air around him, “the other gods demand it. Not least of all, the Lord of Transitions. Janus!” he calls.
The black jaguar with two faces appears at his side.
“Attack!”
ARGHH! Somewhere in the world, a bomb flattens a building; my voices inside it scream. I awake once more in agony.
This cannot go on. Something must be done. I cannot rely on this Prince to save me. I cannot wait for Mother.
I must take things into my own hands.
Next release: Deshawn’s parents seem…different.