Satanic prophecies, Christian hypocrisy; bury me deep in the filth and disease. Open my mind and then hammer it closed—into the darkness, I'm strangled and choked. Tracing the patterns and numbers in smoke—blood on my dagger from enemies' throats.
Content Warning: Suicide ideation and self-harm.
I've been off of my anti-depressants for about 3 weeks, maybe more, maybe less. I cut my wrist recently, maybe for fun. My classes have been going relatively well, some of the homework I occasionally find myself struggling with, and there's always too god damn much of it. I haven't really been doing any outside reading, my brain is simply scattered into too many different directions for me to follow through with any of the books I want to read at the moment. It's funny, I thought I was better than this. Even when I have the motivation to read, there's simply so many different paths to follow that I can never bring myself to make a decision about any of them. Then, when I've finally made a decision, all the time I should've spent reading has passed, and now it's time for homework again. Or work. Quite simply, I'm absolutely miserable in this condition. I know school is something I have to do to get out of the living situation I'm currently in, but most of the time when I'm busy with my classes I'd rather be doing anything else. Even when the material is something I'm interested in, the second it gets assigned for a grade I immediately lose all interest. I don't know how much more of this I can take. I don't know if I'll even bother to continue my education after this semester. It's just like high school. Except this time I'm actually doing the work, mostly. For some godawful reason, my sociology professor assigned a group assignment for an entirely online class. There's only 3 days a week that I dedicate entirely to school, the other 4 days I have to work to make enough money to pay off my parents and keep my car at least somewhat operational. My group ended up finishing most of the group assignment while I was busy with work or trying to drink myself to death. So far, that's the only thing that's been assigned that I haven't managed to do myself. Although, I can't blame myself too much because I was at least there to help them out quite a bit with the first assignment that we had. All this and I'm only complaining about having to take 2 classes. Even still, I feel beaten and like I have nothing to look foward to. Continue my education, hate my life. Too much homework and too much regular work. Or, drop out, hate my life. Too much regular work, stagnant wages, eventual suicide. I feel robbed of any kind of future I can look forward to, regardless of what I choose. Maybe I'll just end up killing myself anyway. All this bullshit and I still have to pay to be here.
So, what the fuck have I been doing? Spending way too much god damn time reading the work of a fucking charlatan. I don't even see the point in talking about it, my work is useless. I've been reading Iron Gates by Joshua Sutter, who ran Martinet Press with the money he received from being an FBI informant. Recently, I finished reading Liber 333 which I am to assume he authored with others from his outfit, the Tempel ov Blood. I even got my hands on a copy of Bluebird and an issue of False Prophet, as well as the issues of Predator, the internal ToB theoretical journal whose issues have been uploaded to Anna's Archive. If I recall correctly, issues of Predator specifically were only accessible to fully patched members of the Tempel ov Blood, which basically meant that you would've had to email them personally and presumably give them your address as well as your payment to receive your patch in the mail. A one way ticket to having information about your involvement forwarded to a letter organization. I feel like an idiot for researching this, I feel like a rube for giving it serious theoretical attention. This was obviously a half-serious FBI honeypot intended to attract the lowest common denominator like flies to shit. But, ultimately, people did take this seriously, and I have to as well. Anyway, here's a rather telling quote that I found while reading through one of the issues of Predator, for those who wonder if Sutter's novels were expected to be taken seriously by those of the ToB milieu:
Read Iron Gates, read Bluebird—reread them. The models are all there within ready grasp.
There's a few different ways that I want to approach this project. Firstly, it's intended to be limited strictly to textual analysis of all the Tempel ov Blood documents that I have in my possession, as it's incredibly difficult to get any kind of information on the group or its membership. As far as I know, no one's come forward and given an account of their time with the Temple of Blood without the usual embellishment you see their self-descriptions littered with. Secondly, I have decided against using the term cult
to describe the group itself, preferring the term New Religious Movement. Another thing that I've been considering is, what sort of theoretical tools will I be bringing alongside for my analysis of their works? The most immediate and obvious candidate for me is Georges Bataille, whose works Literature and Evil as well as Erotism: Death and Sensuality look particularly prescient to bring along. As I read the Tempel ov Blood works, I'd also like to finally go through and read Lyotard's Libidinal Economy just for fun and exploration, to see if there's anything he can bring to the discussion. I've also been starting a reading of the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia along with occasionally thumbing through Brian Massumi's User's Guide, it seems like another set of books that'll help me make sense of this all.
I say this all mostly because I've recently come across a slightly similar project, Impressions on Iron Gates, by the presumably sole author behind Yperion Press. My biggest problem with his analysis, other than occasionally being outright wrong, is that he doesn't really bother to put his own ideas about the book in dialogue with anything else, and when he does, there's absolutely no sources cited, or it's so brief that it may as well have been left out, thus it mostly hinges on trusting the speculations of an author that's done next to nothing to establish their credibility, so the entire series becomes primarily an exercise in self-reflection through the prism of an admittedly quite amateurish book. My other main problem is that the author behind this series goes through great lengths to justify the presence of every chapter for the work as a whole, when—as someone interested in all the editorial decisions that go into a good work of creative writing—truthfully, some chapters of Iron Gates simply should've either been cut entirely or the scenes and material should've been reworked into other chapters. It's a very obviously imperfect book and could've used another draft. My opinions such as these more than likely won't figure into my more detached and scholarly appraisal of the works of Sutter and the Tempel ov Blood, I might end up having to make a new section on this website to give my more informal opinions, which usually involve personal annoyances with the material as someone who cares greatly about quality writing. There we have the biggest scandal with Iron Gates, not that I think it's obscene, or that it should be censored or banned, but that it should've been rewritten.
Another potshot against this author that I'm willing to take, as if I'm Hunter S. Thompson shooting at his neighbor, is that in the very first article on the first chapter of Iron Gates, the author ends their analysis with: In a climate where [Marquis] De Sade, Peter Sotos and Georges Bataille are raised up as the extreme art of ironicists, Iron Gates continues to be feared and propagandized against.
There will be many jabs at the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille in their analysis and I think they're completely unwarranted, partially because they never demonstrate that they're a particularly careful or clever reader of either of these two thinkers. I suspect they're out of their element. Again, in the very last article, they state: For those crying about the explicitness of the novel series in terms of depicted (accusatory, revelatory) pedophilia, we advise you to look at how normalized and worshipped De Sade has become, propped up by a perverted academia that, through Bataille, has placed it by the side of Nietzsche (ever the target of the corruptors).
Personally, as someone not necessarily within the halls of academia but at least adjacent to them, probably smoking a cigarette by one of the trash cans outside, I don't see where they get off saying that the Marquis de Sade is somehow propped up
by academia, as his writings are still particularly divisive among different interpreters. Bataille's analysis, if he's referring to The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade, which is never explicitly mentioned, nor are any of his other works, is simply one of those contested interpretations. Not to mention, neither the Marquis de Sade nor Bataille seem particularly well read within academia these days. Bataille, I admit, is starting to become more popular due to recent translation efforts from Stuart Kendall, but the Marquis de Sade is just as marginal as he's ever been. I think their constant harrasment of the long dead Marquis de Sade is simply an attempt at deflection, as well as a cheap rhetorical ploy.
One penultimate bit of reflection is that I'd like to put Iron Gates in dialogue with other books that are also set in a post-apocalyptic setting. As I've been reading through it, and I'm about halfway through with it now, questions that keep popping up in my mind typically relate to the worldbuilding and setting and how something like The Organization manages to function in the world they now inhabit. So, I feel one of the best ways I can address my questions that are related more to the literary and fictional elements rather than the ideological intents of the author, are to put Iron Gates in context with copies that I have laying around of books like The Road or A Canticle for Leibowitz. Maybe I'll be able to hunt down copies of The Parable of the Sower and a somewhat similar book that I've also come across called Swan Song. I'm probably thinking way too much about this book, but as Alan Moore has said before, anyone who wants to be a writer not only owes it to themselves to read good books, but to read bad books. To read books that make you think, Jesus Christ, I could write this shit.
This does lead to one last bit of reflection on this book, and that's that Iron Gates is the work of an amateur, and should be read as such. I don't mean this as an insult, in fact, I consider pretty much everything on my website the work of an amateur, and I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm an amateur philosopher, an amateur reader of Hegel, an amateur speaker of French, and I willingly admit to all of this. I say this, because we shouldn't let unfamiliarity scare us off from trying new things, and there is something admirable in devising something a bit too grand, knowing you'll fall short of your own expectations, and trying to get it done anyway. We should all be less afraid to fail and make creative mistakes. For all of its obvious faults, I would like to keep an eye towards what I consider to be the merits of Sutter's works and writings, whatever they may end up being.
As far as my French is concerned, the other month I bought a subscription to Audible so every month I've been getting a new French audiobook, although the only one I've listened to all the way through was a translation of the first Harry Potter novel, hence why I've since read it in English. The other one I've been listening to a lot is a French translation of Neuromancer, as well as funnily enough a translation of the first Twilight novel, which I've since decided to give an honest read. I haven't yet purchased any books in English other than the audiobook of A Movie Making Nerd read by James Rolfe, better known as the Angry Video Game Nerd. Hopefully soon I'll be able to listen to the translation that I now have of A Scanner Darkly, which appears to be called Substance mort en francais a la place. J'ai aussi le premier et deuxieme livres de Dune. Un autre chose qui est un peu ennuyeux, c'est que l'auteur d'Impressions on Iron Gates a decide de battre avec mes gars, mais probablement il ne parle pas n'importe quoi de Francais! Donc, pour moi, il y a beaucoup des choses de Bataille et de Sade qui j'amerais lire a quelque moment quand j'ai l'occasion, pour defendre mes vieux garcons d'une petite hack.