I had to cut my previous writing early as I realized it was already 30 minutes past midnight. I'm sitting in my bedroom with a new oriental rug listening to The Caretaker's An Empty Bliss Beyond this World for the first time in a while. One of the women whose name I wrote in this book (the very first name in fact) once painted a copy of the album cover for me. Her kindness will be better deserved elsewhere.
I'm lazing around, flipping through my copy of the Phenomenology of Spirit and The Sinister Tradition, a collection of Order of Nine Angles writings. There's a particular writing that I'm interested in called Symbols and Being where they try to present their philosophy of the acausal through the ontological framework of Martin Heidegger. I want to show it to Dr. E but I'm afraid she might find it offensive because of the Order's reputation. I wanted to get further into Dr. E's thesis before I start reading Chapter 4 of the Navidson Record. Minor detail: I'll be using the Wheel of Fortune tarot card from the Rider-Waite deck as a bookmark for her thesis.
I'm hoping this series will help me develop as a writer. The most important part of writing seems to be keeping a consistent practice, regardless of how uninspired you find yourself on any particular day. But, similarly important is attempting to keep the practice at least somewhat focused, which is why my writing in this series will always have to return eternally to the house. But, that's enough self-portraiture for now.
Part of my fascination for this work is the same kind of fascination that I have for something like the works of the CCRU, where philosophy and fiction exist in this uncanny space where one persistently bleeds into the other and then bleeds back, each mixing and morphing like venous and arterial blood. What makes Heidegger more real than Zampanò or Pierre Ménard? What makes me real?
In Chapter 4 we get the first piece of real theory that I try and fail to sink my own teeth into. It's about a paragraph's worth of Heidegger's Being and Time written in his characteristically labyrinthine writing. I won't try to explain what I think it means but what I find rather interesting about it is its very inclusions makes me wonder a little bit about the relationship between philosophy and literature. My guess is part of what makes the juxtaposition effective is its pacing, you start or lead with dense theory, Johnny Truant gets a chance to relate to it through his own experiences, and Zampanò arrives to relate it to the matter at hand, or the Sache Selbst to use a term I've borrowed from Hegel.
There's one interesting thing that Deleuze (or perhaps Althusser) complains about but I forget in which book, where one of the biggest problems among teachers and their students is when students take obvious banalities to be more significant than they are. I came across one of these problems and I'm probably making too much of it. Chapter 4 begins with Zampanò and his short selection of Heidegger, from there we move to a rather lengthy Johnny Truant section, and we emerge out back into more of Zampanò's writing on Navidson's film. This takes place in a section where he's describing how the Navidson family came home to find a new corridor that wasn't there before, one that leads from a children's room to the parent's room. Was Johnny Truant's section the corridor itself in the structure of the narrative? It makes me think of that thing Negarestani talks about in Cyclonopedia, all that stuff about plot-holes.
I'm trying to think about which house has ever meant the most to me. I don't think I could pick one. There's the earliest one, from my childhood, which my grandfather and aunts and uncles lived in, I called it the Pink House when I was a kid and occasionally I still do. My favorite after that is probably my aunt's old house where I discovered my love of flash games, stickfigure animations, and GameMaker 7. The most ambiguous is probably the house I lived in before my parents divorced. But, after that my mom moved us into a house that I remember being up on cinderblocks. My brother had the biggest room upstairs but I liked mine a lot too. I remember smoking weed out of the window while listening to the Ballad of the Wind Fish from Link's Awakening. I remember I played that game a lot in the apartment we used to all live in together before we moved states. Truly a longtime favorite. I live in apartment again now, what color should that word be?
All attempts to create some dark precursors of my own.
Another minor detail: reminding myself to reread Red Guards Los Angeles's Four Year Summation to help me with my more personal writings within my Struggle Sessions collection that I still want to work on. If I read this book again I should try the French translation if I can find it online. Another really silly thought I had was the Satanic Front's writings would've been so much better if they took the time to read as many SCP stories as they could stomach. Here I am, in a way, reading the source of it all. When you're terrifyingly unimaginative, let other people be imaginative for you.