1. Deep Calls to Deep
The Near-Far
Sometimes when Deep calls to Deep, Ishmael heard it. At first it was an accident, but after that his desire to hear it again was insatiable. There were more and more opportunities to hear it as the neighborhood emptied out because there were more and more dark places where there had once been light. But Ishmael soon realized that it wasn’t only the dark places that were dark. The darkness’s self-obfuscating intensities were an ambiguous dissatisfaction with him that wanted to speak without meaning and to be seen without being known. His inner dialog became like the impenetrable rants of a psychotic’s certainty, interrupted less and less by his familiar, neurotic doubt. He was beginning to doubt his doubt, which was a source of great concern for him because it was his doubt that had kept him safe thus far from the belief of some of the others.
The dark voice was in him more than himself, which was both superficial because it often seemed to be the manic, meaningless speech of advertisements and influencers, and deep because it was beneath his knowable intentions as their hidden adversary. But there was a sort of strange, possibly sick, enjoyment to being undermined in this way. It felt like being opened to the sublime transcendence of indeterminacy itself, but an immanent transcendence of local vastness that he had heard called the “near-far” by the mystics, and that he and his fellow travelers into the near-far felt as the proximal hiddenness of queer affects.
There were others who had been left behind, and who had also heard the Deep speak in the dark places. Most other folks had left because the bugs had become too much, but most of the small minority who remained had continued to dream the dreams of those who left. This remainder kept those other dreams for fear of being without concepts before the drives now loosed within them. They didn’t know what the ambiguous yearnings were for that they felt despite being fed, clothed, and sheltered. Whatever this lack was about, it was not about anything directly necessary, but more about the hidden necessity of the gratuitous.
There was coming to be a gradual enjoyment of what was counter to their given biological and social-biological intentions in favor of a sort of crazed intention for what was unintentional, or for what wasn’t for anything, which wasn't for nothing exactly, but for what couldn’t be said, which wasn’t for silence exactly, but for what was invisible even when it appeared, like the visible darkness of John Milton’s Satan. Meister Ekhart, whose sermons they had read aloud in a circle on the moldy library floor had called this desire for its own sake, “Living-Without-a-Why.”
At first, their little community kept falling for what they imagined their desires were for instead of for desire itself. There seemed to be no way to directly desire, desire without its imaginary objects. New techniques had to be developed to trick the intentions of their intentions away from their satisfaction and towards the ambiguous excess of the unintentional. But how could they intend what was unintentional, or be unintentional about their intentions? It was like caring about what didn’t concern them. But care has always been excessive like this. It has never been enough just to be, but to know what being is, “in-itself,” whatever that could possibly mean. Care is broken, and no longer useful, when it is no longer about what the world is for me but what the world is for itself. This diseased sort of care that had broken the mystics into useless founts of babbling nonsense, was now within the small cartel that formed in the zone to worship what was counter to intention together, “alone with the alone,” as the mystics said of the darkness within that connected them to each other through their mutual love of lack and its coincidental excesses.
The cartel began to study religious practices for clues as to how to coerce the unintentional to speak for itself. They tried religious practices that were “for” something but always found that whatever they were “for” corrupted the practice with intention. There must be some way to sneak up on the intention, so that it might be kept unaware and unintentional.
Of course, a lot of these initial practices, given their ages, were various sorts of sex magic. The most powerful intentions within them that seemed to be truly beyond them were their libidos. At that age all intentions were for sex, but sex proved to be much more elusive than its mere presentation as its biological operations. Libidinal intentions were the excessive intentions of all desire, and sex, which structures all desire, resisted their various attempts to represent it, absolutely.
The public library had been left as it was the day that it had been abandoned. At first, it was guarded by some unhappy security guards who were quite discontented by the swarms of various sorts of vile insects busying themselves with their short lives of collective murder and overwhelming fornication. It was a mess. There was some initial thought from someone somewhere to protect the library from looters, or from squatters, and so they were sent to watch over what had already been lost to a secret curse. However, within a few months, any oversight of the neighborhood ended, and the locks were broken, and the wires were pulled out of the half-hearted alarms without a fuss. And the bugs didn't care about any of that.
Those who didn’t have other places to stay moved into the library, and the others who were staying in their increasingly unfamiliar homes, like Ismeal, had to visit the library each day because their utilities had been shut off. The library’s water had not been shut off for some unknown reason, and even though the heat and the electricity were shut off, the library’s clean water became an essential community good, so the pipes did not freeze even in the dead of winter because water flowed through them day and night filling the endless buckets that the denizens of the zone around it brought in for their daily needs. It wasn’t for a while after the procedures around water distribution were established that the library’s books entered active circulation again, especially among the cartel of horny, twenty-something seekers of the near-far.
Any clues that might be found in the wisdom of the ages about how to live now that the future had been cancelled was enthusiastically sought by the cartel, but to a markedly lesser degree than for more, attractive women members, so that the ratio of men to hot women might be improved for the sake the sex magic’s efficacy. The women needed to be of “high-value” from the perspective of the more, self-proclaimed, “potent” male members of the group because at first the cartel was overrun by their libidinal concerns. However, their concerns apparently took a sharp turn as they splintered from the cartel into one in which they could enjoy their virility together at an intensity that better matched their potencies.
Those seven remaining within the cartel engaged in plenty of potent sex practices themselves, in all sorts of combinations and conditions, but their praxis was blessed because they read religious books and discussed esoteric techne before they performed their holy sacraments. When the cartel had worn out the books of their sacred knowledge, and grown dissatisfied with post-coital ennui, they began to experiment with new forms of transcendence. Was there a way to enter the near-far without so much lingering dissatisfaction? Could you stay in the before of libidinal bliss without facing its after? Was there such a thing as a satisfying dissatisfaction, and could you live that way?
Ishmael’s studies had brought him to the discovery that the vagina was the origin of the ancient mystery cults. Mystery cults recreated the descent into their darkness. But to enter the inner chamber resulted in the dissatisfaction of satisfaction, which was the “little death” of the orgasm that the French called, “jouissance,” or excessive enjoyment. There had to be a way to enter the chamber without satisfaction to remain in the moment before, rather than the moment after completion.
When Antiochus Epiphanes enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Jerusalem, he was shocked to find that there was nothing in there. And so, he placed a statue of the god of the Phallus, Zeus, in there and sacrificed some pork to it. And then he ate that pork in there, but he was dissatisfied in his satisfaction. The temple priests called it, “the Abomination of Desolation.” And maybe the Greek general would have agreed if you had asked him afterwards. Antiochus Epiphanes had come into the temple looking for the satisfaction that the Jews were keeping to themselves but found only the presence of a profoundly unenjoyable absence of something that he couldn’t put his finger on. The ancient priests had had it right and Antiochus had had it wrong. Phallic enjoyment is empty desperation and feminine jouissance is an impenetrable mystery of endlessly deferred incompletion.
The initial errors after switching over to vagina worship were inevitable but more enjoyable than the previous attempts to sacralized inserting the phallus wherever it seemed to want to go and pronounce it the holy of holies. The members of the cartel with penises practiced what the learned among them called “Onanism” when they were with the frontsides of those members without penises, and they didn’t when they were with their backsides, nor did they when they were with each other’s backsides, but there was no need for any of that once they learned to enter the inner sanctum through abstract representation rather than directly with penises.
