madness--

my position is that one can quit smoking, for example--but that transformation will have a chain of causality.  we can shorthand that as "will," though i think that is mystificatory to the extent it implies no causality other than otherwise uncaused volition.

yeah, as though one were whole at the point of origin and then traded away essentials for mere ephemera.  you were granted purity of virtue, but you sold it for a momentary backseat blowjob.  sin! you were given clean sobriety, but you exchanged it for mere seconds of crack euphoria. sin!

it's odd.  you traded it, but you shouldn't have.  it was not yours, really, to trade away.  the property implications are bizarre. virtue is not quiritary, not allodial, not even held in fee simple absolute.  more like a lease, with many punitive conditions subsequent--as in the lease agreement in eden before the eating of the FotToKoG&E.

the implication is kinda ugly: moral doctrine as double-entry bookkeeping, but the account only and always depletes.  progress is only the advancement of decay of the origin.  it is a nasty, barbaric pessimism, contrary to the economic concepts that it uses.

anyway, EAMD, &c.

redemption is an odd prosthesis to moral doctrine, a commercial or financial concept, much like salvation, ain't it? (corollary damnation is a legal concept, as expressed for instance in the ancient doctrine of damnum absque iniuria.)

exactly what is it that needs repurchased, anyway?

abraham is nifty insofar as it's platonist forms made manifest.  what happens when the form of the dead walks the earth?  probably sits at the same demographic fantasy table as RSB, too.

ok, y'all convinced me that traveler is cnaiur.

Chapter epigram (I.16 at 465) recalls prior chapter epigram (cf. I.15 at 430).

DA again thinking of the “ancient,” despite his prior merging of ancient and recent (I.16 at 466).  is this part of the “transformation” mentioned in the two epigrams?  he had previously imploded certain binaries, but ubermensch de-implodes them?  we shall see!

DA‘s failure to “understand the rules of this encounter” (I.16 at 468) throws the politics of interpersonal discourse very plainly into the benjuka treatise, wherein “the rules are the game” (I.10 at 294).

Sleep tied to ignorance and forgetfulness (I.16 at 469): one can’t raise walls, &c.

BBT inherent in “it’s difficult, is it not, to search for those things we cannot see?” (id.).

DA’s impression that his discussions with AK “possessed the character of a voyage” (I.16 at 470) pulls on DA’s earlier imploded binarism of near/far.

“frame of common understanding” (id.) noted in the event that frames show up at some point.

More can’t-raise-walls stuff:  “But the matter had already been forgiven and forgotten” (I.16 at 472).  My marginalia records the impression that this authorizes the later marriage of AK and esmi (insofar as AK asked about esmi and DA dismissed her as merely a prostitute.  of more importance is that “the silences between men are always fraught with uncomfortable significance--accusations, hesitations, judgments of who is weak and who is strong--but silences with this man undid rather than sealed these things” (id.).  in addition to being sedgewick’s homosocial masculinity thesis (wherein women simply mediate relations among men), it’s another tidy bit of post-structuralist linguistic joking.

we note that DA undergoes a seeming dialectical transformation thereafter: “Though the increments of such things have no measure, he felt subtly transformed by his encounter with Kellhus” (I.16 at 473).

scythians have a nifty nihilistic astrology (I.16 at 477), though i’m not detecting anything particularly inchie about it.

“scratched breath upon parchment” (id.) is the type of privileging of speech over writing that derrida critiques in of grammatology.  “among the cattle” (id.) is a nice bit of Turkish (I.e., steppe) theory of governance.

gaming/ludic reference (I.16 at 478), in conjunction with reference to “beating his soul down paths of his manufacture.”  liking the reference to immaterial manufacturing, “soul” as a product of human labor, rather than divinely given.  take that, greasers.

reference to ideology of innocence (I.16 at 479).

reference to CuS dangling on precipice:  “he’d found himself battling a strange bodily shyness whenever the man loomed next to him” (id.).  is that giddy as a schoolgirl, or something else?

fairly express that AM was “the object of some obscene carnal urge” (I.16 at 480).

ludic reference situates AK and CuS “beyond the benjuka plate” (I.16 at 481), which indicates that all of the gaming references previous hereto are restructured by this admission that though all be a game, some sit apart from it.

nice description of nautzera as someone who believed he occupied the “centre of their time. I live now, they would think without thinking, therefore something momentous must happen” (I.16 at 483).  I think of this ideology as hyperpresentism.  cf. also inherit the wind:

Matthew Harrison Brady: I do not think about things I do not think about.
Henry Drummond: Do you ever think about things that you do think about?

more can’t-raise-walls stuff: “they forget how much they’re hated” (I.16 at 487).

more ludics:  I.16 at 491, 498, 499.

there is a passage in II regarding how serwe affcts the micropolitics of interacting with kellhus, as i recall ut.  not proof of divinity, but more sedgewick's homosociality thesis: proof that he is a man worthy of attention for douchey aristocrats.

a few preliminary notes,  to continue our ledger on figures of thought previously identified:

ideology of innocence:  I.15 at 435 (cf. I.2 at 68 & I.3 at 80).

gaming metaphor again (B/G/V): I.15 at 431 ff.), including the nice passage regarding “compromise,” which pulls us back to the benjuka treatise, which i regard as the novel’s center of gravity, I.15 at 433 (cf. I.10 at 300).

more spectres:

where you see a wraith of your nightmares, Schoolman, I see the enemy of my enemy.

(I.15 at 456).

the true implosion of DA’s binaries (cf. I.1 at 38-39):

This was ancient Kyranean soil on which he stood.  Here--only buried as though beneath layers.  Seswatha had even passed through Momemn once, though it was called Monemora then and was little more than a town.  And that, Achamian realized, was the source of his disquiet.  Ordinarily, he had little trouble keeping the two ages, the present and the apocalyptic, apart.  But this Scylvendi…It was though be bore ancient calamities upon his brow.

(I.15 at 455). 


tension of the chapter is built around the agon of NP and DA, wherein the former is revealed to be not only conclusively philistine but also intellectually dishonest.  the opening epigraph records ajencis as

Faith is the truth of passion.  Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.

(I.15 at 430).
for NP, however, this becomes:

“Faith is the truth of passion, Achamian, and no passion is more true than another.  And that means there’s no possibility you could speak that I could consider, no fear you could summon that could be more true than my adoration.  There can be no discourse between us.

(I.15 at 438).  this is of course a heinous (pronounced, like in my cousin vinny, as high-ANE-us) misrepresentation.  NP has turned “faith is the truth of nothing” into “I am not wrong.”

better to loop this ajencian principle back through other writings with which we are familiar through this point:

If it is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing.  Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.

(I.pro at 1).

To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things.  To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world.  To be deceived is to be the slave of another man.  The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?

(I.4 at 106).

The world is a circle that possesses as many centers as it does men.

(I.7 at 194).

(one wonders if we will encounter mr. ajencis again in later volumes, so that we might subscribe to his newsletter.)  but for now:  we might infer that mr. ajencis is a thorough self-defeating nihilist--all persons are ignorant, regard themselves as the center of the universe, whose faith is the truth of nothing, who reject the idea that cognition can occur through retrospective reflection, insisting through definitional fiat on the fictive existence of the soul in order to make comprehension immanent to events, simultaneous understanding--which is nonetheless vitiated by his other principles. 

the series title places us on notice that nihil may well be our central interpretive category.  we might discern how this nihilism works itself out in the horrible slave-thrashing/black-semen episode (I.15 at 442-47), as opposed to the earlier equally horrible prostitute-thrashing/black semen episode (I.9 at 256-259):

”What’s this?” he asked sharply.  She followed his eyes to the back of her hand.
“Nothing.”
“Really? I’m afraid I’ve seen this ‘nothing’ before. It’s a mockery of the tattoos borne by Gierric Priestesses, no?  What they use in Sumna to brand their whores.”

(I.15 at 446).  quite literally at this moment, the text affirms that faith (of Gierra) is the truth of this nothing.  similarly:

But Achamian remained unconvinced.  How did they know the Utemot had been annihilated?

(I.15 at 460).  faith (in CuS as kut’ma) is the truth of this nihil.  my suspicion now is that the entire volume should be read with this constellation firmly in mind.