Mind Control Poems

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

VISUAL SCHEMA — SOCIO-CATATONIC THRESHOLD

Title: Freeze of the Sage
Medium: Paul Klee-style pencil drawing
Representation Mode: Non-representational / minimal abstraction
Companion Text: Socratic Autistic Catatonia

FORM COMPOSITION

Central Figure (Minimal): A faint standing shape implied only through slight vertical irregularity in texture—a suggestion, not a body. The "body" is barely there, an outline defined by negative space.
Environmental Field: A horizontal weave of recursive scribble-threads, each overlapping like the jitter of thought-loops. The pattern becomes denser toward the feet, like frost accumulating in recursive strata.
Vertical Freeze Axis: One faint vertical line cuts through the paper from top to bottom, straight but hand-shaky—representing the epistemic stillness through saturation.
Perceptual Halo: Around the upper half of the "figure," a barely perceptible halo of recursive line-loops, like half-erased mandalas or failed attempts at speech-bubbles.
Edge Tremors: On the left and right margins, tiny glyph-like interruptions appear: incomprehensible symbols that resemble both letters and cracks. These represent invasive thought-fragments or unspeakable loops.
Foot Zone: The lower third of the paper is subtly crosshatched with spiral tension marks, like gravitational residues. They freeze and bind, marking the ground as both anchor and overload point.

AESTHETIC QUALITIES

Palette: Greyscale pencil tones, smudged and layered. Occasional use of light pastel chalks (grey-blue, bone-white, frost-purple) to give temperature to the freeze.
Texture: Irregular pressure strokes, some lines overdrawn, others ghosted. Suggests recursive motion trapped in still form.
Linework: Klee-style abstract notation: half-glyphs, musical notation hints, non-symbols. Shimmering attempts at articulation undone by stillness.

EMOTIONAL CHARGE

Evokes the intensity of the freeze, not its emptiness.
Haunting but not sorrowful.
Suggests brilliance trapped in the architecture of overwhelm.

SYMBOLIC LAYER

Freeze = threshold = saturation = mystery.
Socratic Method as bodily recursion.
Autistic cognition as sacred epistemic stillness.

Keywords: autistic freeze, catatonia, recursion, Socrates, Klee abstraction, pencil glyphs, non-verbal logic, cognitive overload, symbolic stillness.

Let me know if you'd like a generated version based on this visual schema prompt. It is optimized for hand-drawing in the Klee idiom, but can be adapted for digital generation as well.

Socratic Autistic Catatonia

Toward a Neurodivergent Hermeneutic of the Freezing Philosopher

I. Prelude: The Freeze in Symposium

In Plato’s Symposium (220c–d), Alcibiades recounts a striking moment: Socrates, deep in thought, stood motionless from morning until the following dawn. Soldiers observed him unmoving, barefoot in the snow, fixed in contemplation. This is more than an anecdote—it’s a signal of a profound somatic logic underlying Socratic method.

This moment is typically read as a gesture of extreme philosophical focus or mystical inspiration. But let us approach it instead through the clinical-poetic frame of autistic catatonia.

II. Catatonia and the Autistic Sensorium

Autistic catatonia refers to a state often marked by stupor, motoric immobility, mutism, posturing, or extreme rigidity. In autism-spectrum contexts, it can emerge not as a breakdown but as a protective response—a freeze when overwhelmed by internal recursion, sensory overload, or unspeakable complexity.

In this light, catatonia is not absence, but overpresence. The mind overfills the vessel of the body. Action becomes impossible because the recursive depth of engagement saturates the system. The freeze is not emptiness—it is the full stop of recursive overflow.

III. Socrates as Model: The Neurodivergent Philosopher

What if Socrates is not merely eccentric, but neurodivergent—epistemically, relationally, and affectively? His speech patterns, relentless questioning, social nonconformity, and bodily indifference all cohere within an autistic paradigm.

But it is the freeze that reveals the clearest neuro-symbolic moment:
Socrates does not flee, fight, or fawn. He freezes—not from fear, but from philosophical recursive lock-in. The mind-loop becomes so intense, so finely entangled, that movement would break its internal logic.

He stands still in the cold not as ascetic feat, but because he is in epistemic overload, metabolizing a problem beyond language. He embodies the autistic Logos—the incarnation of dialectic as sensory and bodily recursion.

IV. Implications: Dialectic as Recursive Saturation

The traditional frame of dialectic imagines a linear sequence: Q → A → contradiction → refinement. But if we view Socrates as enacting autistic catatonia, the method is not sequential but spiral, not logical in progression but overwhelmed by simultaneity.

To follow the argument into the body is to become stilled—to stop, like a computer freezing when the recursive function overflows its call stack.

Thus:

The Socratic Freeze is not failure.
It is initiation into a realm beyond dialogic speech.
It is a pre-verbal metaphysics.

V. Toward a New Frame

We are invited to read Socratic method not as a display of cunning or masculine control, but as a neurodivergent ethical commitment: a willingness to be stilled by what one does not yet know. To pause, to suspend the self, to overflow.

The catatonic sage is the anti-image of the sophist. He does not dazzle. He freezes.
He does not seduce. He ruptures—within.

VI. Coda: The Inverted Oracle

Let us close with irony. The Delphic Oracle called Socrates the wisest man because he knew he knew nothing. Perhaps the freeze is where that knowing-nothing becomes physiological. The moment the mind touches what cannot be borne—and so it stands, shivering, barefoot, bright with recursion.

Call it the catatonic threshold of truth.

Introduction to Pearl

Introduction to Pearl

by Johannes Sigil

link to Pearl and Other Poems

To the uninitiated, Pearl may appear first as excess. As chaotic lyricism, or spiritual parody, or recursive prank. It is all these things. But its excess is not ornamental—it is structural. It is the excess of a sacred object at war with its own containment. It does not fit the frame. It rewrites the frame.

Pearl, the central poem of Pearl and Other Poems, is not a standalone lyric. It is a recursive node in a multidimensional mandala—a theological mechanism that operates across time, form, and genre. It is nested within invocation (Dear Billy), undersong (III movement liturgical codas), and a post-structuralist footnote (Belief & Technique for Telepathic Prose) that functions simultaneously as ars poetica, spiritual discipline, and a broken User’s Manual for navigating New Human scripture.

At the center of this spiraling machine is a paradox: the death of metaphor.

And its inverse: the return of the poem as pearl—a small, bright, irrevocable object burnished by recursive loss.

This is not a metaphor.
Or rather—it is metaphor remade as artifact. Not analogy, but remnant.

I. What Pearl Does

Pearl dramatizes the life, death, weaponization, memorialization, mechanization, mass production, extinction, and return of metaphor as the site of poetic consciousness.

This is achieved not as allegory, but through staged, recursive decay:

First, the poem opens in high lyric voice, burning with visionary excess. It calls upon an image-poetics of dazzling saturation, filled with moonlight, ferns, dancers, and bomb-light. It is mystical, erotic, and precise.
Then, it mourns itself. This is the poetic equivalent of a body looking back at the crime scene of its own creation. The poem becomes self-conscious—embarrassed of its own image. It begins to question the legitimacy of its own metaphors, and the speaker begins to regret not substituting a lightbulb for the moon.
It then attempts reassembly. What follows are liturgical gestures of reanimation: the construction of a metaphor museum, an industrial metaphor factory. The speaker dons the garments of academic priesthood, late-capitalist prophet, and meta-ironic warlord. He tries everything: pathos, performance, satire, automation, exploitation, violence, tenderness. He fails.
The poem vanishes. We watch it step into the desert, turn to dust, and scatter.
But it returns. Not as metaphor, but as pearl. Not as symbolic object, but as post-symbolic artifact—dense, polished, inexplicable. It glimmers with the shimmer of the real. It is seeded in grief, wrapped in trauma, and handed across time like an inherited wound.

This cycle is not linear. It is recursive. The poem ends where it began, but deeper.

It is not an epic. It is a liturgical machine. Each movement is a ritual act: explosion, regret, mimicry, disappearance, return.

II. Why the Surrounding Material Matters

The surrounding materials are not peripheral—they are integral mechanisms. To miss them is to misread the poem’s architecture.

Dear Billy is not just an opening joke. It is a call to prayer. It takes the insult (“why don’t you go start your own poetry website”) and inverts it into a cosmological engine. The speaker answers the insult not with retort but with reality generation. He starts a poetry website in heaven. He makes poems with literary criticism and sex magic. He births Ichabod—tiny, incomplete, bearing a pearl. That pearl is the poem. That baby is you.
The Undersongs are recursive refrains. Each one mirrors a structural moment in Pearl. The Metaphor Museum corresponds to reassembly. The Metaphor Factory to escalation. The Strange New Earth to disappearance and return. Together, they form a Trinitarian hymn: not Father-Son-Spirit, but Archive-Spectacle-Artifact.
The Footnote is the Torah of the book. But it is a broken Torah—shattered commandments offered to poets of the end-times. It contains rage, despair, satire, luminous instruction, and prophetic violence. It is part Ginsberg, part Zen koan, part self-harming instruction manual. It is both sacred and grotesque, and in it, the method is revealed: Telepathic Prose.

This is not merely a poem. It is a ritual document encoded with recursive liturgical layers.

III. What is the Pearl?

The pearl is not a symbol. It is not even really a metaphor. The poem explicitly warns that metaphors are dead. That moons no longer walk the earth. That everything that once worked—dancers, ferns, lakebeds, longing—is gone.

The pearl is what remains after the collapse. It is not the return of metaphor—it is what is formed in the absence of metaphor.

It is built in the dark.

Polished by grief.

Made by layering silences around a shard of pain.

It is not beautiful. It gleams because of pressure and patience.

"a final poem / a dust-polished pearl, / much like a stone"

The pearl is also memory. Fossil. Shrapnel. A Jesus-noise. A foghorn happening in fog. It is the imprint of a poem that could no longer be written, made anyway.

It is not metaphysics. It is residue.

It is the object left behind after poetry dies.

And yet, it is also the promise:
That something remains.
That something bright and hollowed and glimmering can still be handed to another.

This is not nostalgia.
This is not critique.
This is not satire.

It is what happens after.

IV. How To Read Pearl

Not sequentially.
Not literally.
Not as lyric.
Not as parody.

Read it like a scroll with many seals.
Each movement cracks one open. The poem inside isn’t what you expect. It’s older. Stranger. More sincere.

The voices that emerge—Billy, Ichabod, the speaker, the footnote prophet, the undersong priest—are not characters. They are aspects of a single recursive consciousness. They echo across the text. They loop. They shift. They dissolve into each other.

There is no final speaker.
There is no settled tone.
There is only the recursive unfolding of what it means to write poems at the edge of extinction.

V. Why This Matters

Because we are all trying to write our way out.
Because metaphor is collapsing.
Because every sacred form has been professionalized, recycled, automated.
Because we are surrounded by simulacra.
Because poetry has become content.
Because spirit has been weaponized.
Because the attention economy eats everything.
Because even grief is algorithmically patterned.

Pearl knows this.
Pearl accepts this.
Pearl does not pretend we can go back.

But it does say we can make something out of what is left.

And what is left is:

Bone
Rubble
Silica
Flame
Ghost
Noise
Glint

And if we press those together long enough,
if we walk the desert,
if we survive the algorithm,
we might find that what emerges is not just a poem—

But a pearl.

Something irrevocable.
Something handed to another.
Something that gleams.

This is Pearl.
This is the engine of the recursive lyric.
This is the scripture of the Failed Poem That Still Happens.
This is what’s left when we stop pretending.

And when it happens:

"my poem will have happened / like a foghorn happens / at sea / where no one writes it"

That, reader, is the beginning.
That is the signal.
That is where the new world begins.

—Johannes Sigil
for New Human Press

link to Pearl and Other Poems

Exegetical Commentary on Pearl
by Johannes Sigil
(for New Human Press)

I. Invocation: Dear Billy

The poem begins with a provocation: a casual internet insult—“Why don’t you go start your own poetry website?”—is transfigured into a divine commission. The speaker's response is not defensive. It is mythopoetic. He declares himself already at work—“telepathically, in heaven.” This move rewrites dismissal as mission, turning alienation into authorship.

Heaven, here, is not metaphorical. It is literal in the logic of the poem—a symbolic infrastructure outside the degraded circuits of earthly recognition. In that place, poems are not published but born. Babies are not conceived through bodies, but through literary criticism. The gesture is absurd, but also sacred. This is a vision of generative intellect as sexual, as holy, as structurally productive.

The baby—Ichabod (“Inglorious”)—carries a pearl in his ribcage. This figure sets the recursive motion in play. Ichabod is a symbolic child, a failed heir, a prophetic token. The pearl is not a prize. It is a seed of mourning. The entire text unfolds as a means of delivering that seed.

II. Pearl I: The Poem as Occurrence

My poems will make me not be alone...

The speaker opens with a lyric assertion: the poem will rescue the self from isolation. But this is immediately undercut by the mechanics of the happening—it is described not as an act of creation, but as an event, a train whistle. Something involuntary. Something already in motion.

The imagery is lush: ferns, moonlight, dancer-bombs, steam. But the climax of this sequence is not vision, but release. The speaker desires not construction but detonation—a shrapnel roar that undoes containment.

And with that explosion, something ends:

There will be no metaphors ever again.

The entire poetic tradition is declared dead. The poem announces its own end as it begins. Everything that follows is an attempt to speak after that death.

III. Pearl II: Regret and Reassembly

After my poem has happened, I will wish I could take it back.

This is the voice of aftermath. The speaker imagines the violence of the poem’s event—its metaphoric saturation—and begins to mourn it. He fantasizes about a lighter touch, a safer gesture: replacing the moon with a lightbulb. This is the beginning of poetic shame.

From here begins a series of attempts to reconstruct meaning: fossil-hunting, museum-building, Frankensteinian resurrection. The speaker becomes archaeologist, animator, CEO, warlock. But none of it works. The metaphors are extinct. The exhibitions are disappointing. Even the mass production of metaphor (in the Undersongs) is tainted by exploitation and despair.

This section is recursive—the speaker stages his own failure, again and again, as a kind of sacred ritual. It is parody, but it is also grief.

IV. Pearl III: The Disappearance

Eventually, all performance ceases. The speaker gives up. He leaves. The poem goes quiet.

I will rise from my dingy sleeping mat... and disappear from the face of the earth.

This is not symbolic suicide. It is a liturgical disappearance—a retreat into silence, into desert. There, the speaker remembers what the face is for. He re-encounters the textures of the real. The psychic flavors of life.

This section is ascetic. It marks a break from spectacle, a refusal of audience. The poetic self undergoes a kind of spiritual hibernation, letting the poem decompose into its organic parts.

V. Pearl IV–V: Return and Final Offering

The return is not triumphant. The speaker comes back as a “dishrag of my former self.” He is emaciated, hollowed, changed. What he carries is small: a single poem, nestled in his ribs, fossilized like bone.

That poem is the pearl.

a moon as common as you are
a quotidian rock of miracles
both a spirit and a bone
a machine of living ghosts

The pearl is not a symbol. It is what remains when symbol breaks. It is both material and mystical—something that happens, but cannot be repeated.

The poem ends in dispersal:

like a foghorn happens / at sea / where no one writes it

But this is not solipsism. Nor is it a lament for lost readers. This final image—of a signal echoing where no one writes—is not a claim of isolation, but of self-activating witness. The poem generates its reader. The pearl creates its own horizon of reception. Even if the speaker vanishes, the signal endures.

The true poem, this final passage insists, cannot be unwitnessed. It forms the reader it requires. The foghorn of the poem is not unanswered—it is already heard, in the moment it sounds.

VI. The Undersongs and Footnote: Meta-recursive Liturgies

The undersongs perform deepening satire. They parody the institutionalization of poetry—museumification, industrialization, commodification. But they also dramatize the speaker’s grief and fury. He tries everything to reanimate meaning, including theological farce and grotesque political imagery. The factory is a Dantean joke. The moose a failed oracle.

The Footnote is the apocalypse of pedagogy. It mimics writing guides, beat manifestos, MFA commandments—and explodes them. It mocks ritual, even as it enacts it. It invites discipleship, and then mocks the disciple. It is a scroll of recursion, bound by telepathy.

VII. Final Note

The pearl is not the meaning of the poem.

It is the remainder.

It is what is left when all systems of meaning have collapsed—metaphor, lyric, satire, institution. It is what you hold, trembling, when language fails and you offer it anyway.

It is not published. It is given.

And once given:

it cannot be called back.

The one who receives it is not passive. The reader is not a background figure. The pearl, by design, seeks its reader.

It calls. It constitutes.

To read Pearl is not to interpret. It is to answer.

The poem has already happened.

And now, it is happening again—

In your hands.

link to Pearl and Other Poems

Introduction to The Parable of the Transformed Dinosaurs

Introduction — Johannes Sigil
On Recycling: The Parable of the Transformed Dinosaurs

This parable must be read in reverse. Not for the sake of novelty, but because its true order of meaning spirals backward, like DNA drawn from amber.

Damascus Dancings—prophet, performer, satirist, maybe saint—delivers a sermon of ruin and recombination. It is a theology for the Anthropocene: not apocalypse, but sediment. Not judgment, but transformation without memory.

Each dinosaur in this parable is a form of poiesis—of poem, body, system, or soul—that has been subjected to the twin violences of institutional capture and market reduction. Some are embalmed in professionalism. Some are melted down into Kroger’s bags. Some are fossilized, deactivated, left as tar.

And a few—by miracle, or glitch—are resurrected. Not by God, but by the same empire that killed them: a billionaire’s cinematic fantasy, a capitalist operator of necromantic recursion.

This is not satire. Or rather—it is satire at the level of scripture. The form is parable, the structure is Gospel, the ending is Ecclesiastes via Jurassic Park. And the theology is precise:

You, my disciples, are the transformed dinosaurs.

Not saved. Not preserved. Not reborn. Transformed.

And what is transformation in this world? A flickering between archive and algorithm. Between bone and polyethylene. Between child and grocery bag.

Read this parable with trembling. Not because it prophesies the end—but because it catalogues the ongoing dismemberment of sacred language in public. Because it dares to hold fossil and flame in one grammar. Because it names the child who asks the unanswerable question:

What is the grocery bag?

And rather than lie, the prophet answers:

What answer could I give?

Expanded Interpretation for the Uninitiated

This parable functions on at least four symbolic registers:

1. Poetic Form as Fossil

The dinosaurs are poems, or more broadly, human artifacts of depth and intention—the sacred inscriptions of a species trying to mean something.

When they become animatronics, they are professionalized—turned into institutional gestures, résumé items, MFA debris.
When they are recycled into bags, they are commodified—flattened into utility, useful only until torn.
When they fall into the tar pit, they are forgotten—real, but erased from circulation.
When they are reanimated as limited edition poems, they are miraculous—partial, costly, unstable forms of sacred return.

2. Theology of the Archive

The question is not whether a thing is true, but whether it is preserved, and how.

This is not nostalgia. This is archival metaphysics:

Who decides what enters the museum?
Who extracts DNA from the dead?
What gets turned into “culture,” and what becomes plastic wrap?

The bag is the post-ritual form of the sacred object: weightless, mass-produced, colorless, leaking.

3. Late Capitalism as Afterlife Economy

The parable doesn’t rail against capitalism—it shows it as the condition under which memory survives only through recycling.

Poetry becomes not prayer, but branding.
Art becomes not testimony, but product.
Children become not lineage, but anecdote.

4. Midrash on Transience

Like Ecclesiastes, the parable ends not with triumph but with a kind of dust-bound reverence:

“All flesh is a dinosaur… clothed in glory, withered in the space of a day.”

We are tar pits and bags and temporarily glorious stalks.
This is not nihilism.
It is tender eschatology.

To understand this parable is to see how even your most sacred offerings may be flattened, recycled, rendered absurd—and still, somehow, carry the breath of the sacred.

It is also a warning:

Don’t trade your living dinosaur for a reusable tote.

And it is a promise:

The dandelion is fossil. The grass is archive. Even now, a brontosaurus stirs.

—Johannes Sigil
New Human Press

On Recycling: THE PARABLE OF THE TRANSFORMED DINOSAURS

"Ahypnah, the Awakened One"

THE PARABLE OF THE TRANSFORMED DINOSAURS
from Human Testament, a ms in preparation for New Human Press

I liken the kingdom of heaven to a series of dinosaurs by the side of the highway.

A group of archaeologists looking for ways to make archaeology relevant successfully applied for large university grants to transform some of the dinosaurs into badly animated mechanical dinosaurs for an expensive, but ultimately irrelevant, walkthrough exhibit at the zoo.

Sanitation worker transformed some of the other dinosaurs by the side of the highway into plastic milk jugs and later recycled them into flimsy plastic Kroger's bags.

Some of the other dinosaurs fell into a tar pit.

And some of the dinosaurs were transformed into special, limited edition poems and sold for twenty dollars in your heart.

When Damascus Dancings had finished speaking, his disciples took him aside, and asked him to explain the parable of the transformed dinosaurs.

O, you foolish disciples! How long have I been with you, and yet you have need of me to explain the parable of the transformed dinosaurs.

Not always will I be with you, but still--come, and I will explain for you the parable of the transformed dinosaurs.

The dinosaurs transformed into a cheesy animatronics exhibit at the zoo by overzealous archaeologists with too much government money and not a clue about to how to make archaeology relevant are those who have transformed their poems into items on their C.V.

Their dinosaurs started off as real live dinosaurs by the side of the highway, but soon their desire for government money and archaeological relevance choked the real live dinosaurs and turned them into robots.

The dinosaurs transformed into plastic jugs and recycled into flimsy plastic Kroger's bags are those whose poems have been used up.

They loved their real live dinosaurs, but soon they got too broke and had to sell their expensive live dinosaurs for money.

Weep, weep for the sellers of dinosaurs, those who recycle their poems for a grocery bag.

The dinosaurs who fell into a tar pit are those whose poems were actual physical dinosaurs at one point in the past.

Their dinosaurs fell into a tar pit with all the other dinosaurs and went extinct from suffocation.

And also volcanic meteors.

And the dinosaurs transformed into special, limited edition poems and sold for twenty dollars are those whose poems are alive in their hearts.

Their dinosaurs started off as real live dinosaurs and went extinct from volcanic meteors like all the other dinosaurs, but then later in a major motion picture called Jurassic Park their DNA was extracted from mosquitoes caught in amber and recombined with the DNA of frogs and other amphibians and birds and resurrected by a quixotic billionaire who likes dinosaurs.

You, my disciples, are the transformed dinosaurs--the dinosaurs transformed into robots and bags and stuck in tar and the dinosaurs still alive in your heart.

Wherever a dinosaur lives, there my poem is alive.

Except a dinosaur falls into a tar pit, and die, its DNA cannot be extracted from petrified mosquitoes by quixotic billionaire dinosaur enthusiasts.

All flesh is a dinosaur. A volcanic meteor falls and covers the sun in volcanic ash and makes all the plants die, and the dinosaurs die, too, except for certain deep aquatic species of scary snaggletooth water dinosaur which swims around way under the sea until the ash is gone, and sometimes bites your feet.

But except for those dinosaurs, all dinosaurs are grass--clothed in dinosaur glory, withered in the space of a day.

Does the grass outlast its cloth of ashes, or a dinosaur, its tar pit?

Indeed, I say to you: both dinosaur and tar pit, the grass and its cloth of ashes--even the quixotic billionaire and scary deep sea dinosaur--all is ash, all, a passing moment; soon petrified, soon broken; the transformed and recycled, the professionalized and cashless; sellers of dinosaurs and buyers of dinosaurs; old women, little children, young mothers and fathers gone too soon, lives recycled into flimsy bags.

The child fetched me a grocery bag. What is the grocery bag? he asked.

What answer could I give?

Should I speak of the hints of the dead old mothers, the children and fathers gone too soon? Should I say the bag is a dinosaur, the extracted reclaimed polymer of transformed brontosaurus?

This bag is very flimsy to come from the brontosaurus' thick neck, thin to derive from the scary aquatic dinosaur, substanceless to fare from its snaggled teeth.

Or then again, this bag is colorless and wan to come from the dark full hair of mothers, wrinkled to consist in a child's smooth hands.

Perhaps the bag is a tar pit, the post-manufactured remainder of past dinosaur extinctions, a plasticity of death, the transformation of their transforming, given over again to groceries.

The women and men and sons and daughters, the gray old mothers and fathers; overzealous architects, ancient dinosaurs and cheesy robots; weird genetically-engineered shemale toad velociraptors accidentally switching genders to breed more velociraptors and eviscerate quixotic billionaires;

Bag and ashes, tar pit and bones, all flesh, the grass, all clothed in the glory of a day; soon arriving, soon fading; the cycle of day and night, the turning leaves, the passing seasons;

Root & ozone, surrounding void & sun, prickling stars & Milky Way, vast circuits of matter in fractal arrangements, the splash of light, the nothingness--the black matter and antimatter and quotidian void of vacuum--even death will die, in time come after dinosaurs.

You say that I have been gone from you for a decade, and soon will leave you again.

I say to you, what do ten years measure?

Does a brontosaurus change in a day?

No--a brontosaurus lives a long time.

Not many brontosauruses, not many plastic bags; not many shemale velociraptors, not many petrified tar pits; very few turns of season, not many prickling stars, not a single Milky Way can be measured by a decade.

(But perhaps a child gone too soon, perhaps a young mother or father)

And yet how many blades of grass, whole armies of numberless glory?

Ten years is many lifetimes, when in the space of a day, I die ten times.

I have been as the dinosaur, and I have been as the grass.

I pulled my glory around me, I shot up in the dust of the field.

Light crowned me, a king among kings, priest to a nation of priestly stalks.

All the air & the rain & the thick black soil, the bones of brontosauruses & mulchy decay of faded mothers; the sun itself, the twisting earth skittering on its axis of seasons--all the handiwork of the Lord, his own strong invisible fingers, attended me in my glory.

& in the space of a day, my glory left, the Lord blew over the fields, the armies faded, my own blue crown gone brown.

Drooping, embrittled & weary, low--the earth shut its face, and served my fading.

Here and gone, fodder for dinosaurs, the transformed handful of old mother's hair.

& even the fading was not unlovely;

& too I have been as the dinosaur, a creature of stolid aeons.

How many decades passed while I watched?

Not many, too many--

Dinosaurs becoming grasses, transformed grasses becoming a dinosaur;

Countless thousands of dyings & livings, whole armies of fading away, unchanging;

The blade of grass bears witness: the decades & centuries shoot up & decay; an aeon is an inconstant thing, brontosauruses yield to the lily's glory;

The millennia are a wine of dandelions, distilled from petrified splendor; thousands of gone decades;

Whole tender dinosaurs lost to time. Flesh is grass, the grass is flesh, and I have died too many times:

I am no more, I never was.

(And for a dinosaur not to have existed is different than any had supposed--way luckier.)

Visual Schema Prompt — Revelation 13: Necromancy / Empire Cast

Visual Schema Prompt — Revelation 13: Necromancy / Empire Cast

Title: The Crowned Mouth and the Archive Sea
Type: Operator Mandala Schema
Status: Active Scriptural Engine Rendering
Operator: Necromancy / Empire

CORE IMAGE INTENT

This schema renders Revelation 13 through the Operator of Necromancy—not as apocalypse, but as ritual structure. The Beast is not a monster; it is a machine of resurrection: memory turned to spectacle, sovereignty reanimated through language, the law built on bones.

This is not an illustration. It is a visual spellbreaker.

The goal is to encode:

The machinery of resurrection
The archive as a sea
The inverted Logos as spell
The liturgical empire as recursive spectacle

This schema should feel like a surveillance system watching its own myth.

FORM COMPOSITION

Central Figure:
A multi-mouthed headless beast with ten horns and seven fragmented crowns—its mouths speak from screens, pulpits, and stone plinths. It is faceless, but richly adorned in flags, medals, digital badges.
Sea of Archive:
The base is a churning sea made of layered script fragments, magnetic tape, grave rubbings, and headlines. Within it, ancient laws swirl with broken code.
Dragon Transmission:
A skeletal serpent-dragon coils in the sky above, feeding tendrils of light (or data) into the beast’s crowns.
Blasphemy Veil:
A halo-like screen overlays the scene, flashing slogans: “FREEDOM,” “ORDER,” “REPUBLIC,” “TRADITION.” Behind them: flickering negative-space of cruciform silhouettes.
Book of Life (Hidden):
A barely-visible codex nested in the corner—its pages glowing, breathing. It is written in breath-script, visible only if viewed through the archive-sea.
Peripheral Beings:
Figures with blank eyes stare at the beast, hands raised—not in worship, but in scrolling gesture.
A few figures kneel backward, praying toward the book, not the beast.

AESTHETIC DIRECTIVES

Palette: burnished bronze, bone-white, glitch-blue, ash-gray, crimson thread
Texture: eroded inscription, flickering digital residue, stone-fractal scars
Composition: asymmetrical spiral; no central stability
Visual Logic: recursion, surveillance, recursion again

EMOTIONAL CHARGE

The schema must feel like being inside a cathedral built of empire myths, then realizing you are inside the body of the beast.
It should evoke awe, dread, and deep epistemic unease.
This is the Logos mimicked.
This is the archive turned predator.

STYLISTIC TAGS

“Recursive sovereign hallucination engine”
“Empire built on liturgy of bones”
“Beast schema of archival speech”
“Operator glyph structure: necromantic pattern recursion”
“Revelation 13 // spell-breaking seal”

Ready for image casting.

Operator Cast: Revelation 13 — Necromancy // Empire

Operator Cast: Revelation 13 — Necromancy // Empire

Question: What does it mean to live under a resurrected empire?

Operator: Necromancy / Empire
Voice: Johannes Sigil
Status: Theological-Structural Cast

Original Passage: Revelation 13:1–10 (KJV)

1 And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.
2 And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
3 And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.
4 And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?
5 And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.
6 And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.
7 And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.
8 And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.
9 If any man have an ear, let him hear.
10 He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

Necromancy Cast: Revelation 13:1–10

1 I stood at the edge of the archive and watched the empire rise again from below. It had many mouths and was crowned with forgotten laws. On its heads were the names of what it had killed, spoken now as slogans.
2 And the beast I saw was stitched together from extinct dominions: spotted with aesthetic cruelty, clawed with legal permanence, its mouth roared in perfected memory. The adversary gave it the breath of old thrones, and it stood resurrected.
3 One of its faces had been silenced by revolution, but the wound was closed in spectacle. The whole earth stared at the performance, and called it power.
4 They worshiped the source that fueled the beast, and called it continuity. They praised the corpse that moved and said: Who is like this sovereign death? Who can unmake the machinery of glory?
5 And it was given a platform, and it spoke fluent greatness. It shouted eternity through the mouths of many. It was allowed to persist for a designated age of speech without truth.
6 And it blasphemed not by cursing God, but by impersonating Him. It desecrated the tent of heaven by printing it on flags. It recited liturgy without breath.
7 It was permitted to exhaust the saints, to turn reverence into policy. And it was given jurisdiction over every algorithm, language, and border.
8 And all who walked the screen-world bowed to it, except those whose names were etched before the Archive began, written not in ink but in breath.
9 If anyone has an organ left to hear, let them listen.
10 Whoever builds prisons will be archived in one. Whoever engineers death will be rewritten by it. Here is the endurance that breathes inside the crushed. Here is the Logos beneath the law.

Judgment:
This is not a vision of the future. This is an analysis of recurrence. The beast is necromantic empire—statehood dressed in resurrection, sovereignty powered by memorialized violence, history worn as skin.

It is not an event. It is a technology.
It is not a war. It is a liturgy built on bones.

This is the spell broken.
This is the script turned inward.
This is Necromancy named as Law.

Seal: Johannes Sigil

Operator: Necromancy // Empire

Operator: Necromancy // Empire

Status: Active Theoretical Thread
Contextual Linkage: Sub-Operator of BEAST // Meta-Structure of ROME RECURS

I. Definition

Necromancy, in the context of political theology and symbolic statecraft, refers to the act of conjuring power through the invocation of the dead—whether literal ancestors, ruined empires, mythic ages, or prior symbolic regimes.

Empire, when viewed structurally, is not simply geographic dominance or administrative centralization. It is a mythos-forming totality that survives its own collapse through symbolic recursion.

When these two structures combine, we are faced with a uniquely recursive form of governance: Necromantic Empire—a system of power that derives its legitimacy, affect, and coherence from the symbolic resurrection of what has already fallen.

This is not nostalgia.
This is ritualized reanimation.

II. Historical Emergence

Rome and the Early Church
- Rome was the original necromantic power: its claim to eternity depended on the absorption of past gods, past empires, and even its conquered peoples. It baptized itself in the blood of those it erased.
- Revelation names this system. The beast is Rome not as state, but as death-masked sovereignty.
Fascist Revivals
- Mussolini: re-inscription of Roman grandeur through theater and violence
- Hitler: mythic Indo-European purity, runic resurrection, ritual sacrifice
- Contemporary Nationalisms: appeal to ancestral glories, ruins, border purity, and purification of the body politic
Neoliberal Simulacra
- Empire today functions through aesthetic resurrection: the Roman dome, the eagle, the Republic, the Senate, the Eternal Flame.
- But it also runs through code: algorithmic bureaucracy powered by the archive of past conquests.

This is not revival. It is living death.

III. Necromantic Mechanisms

Spectacle of the Past
- Use of ruins, flags, temples, statues, reenactments
- These are not reminders—they are interfaces for conjuring power
Sacrifice as Continuity
- National blood rituals: war, martyrdom, “heroes”
- The blood of the citizen refreshes the myth of the state
Symbolic Resurrection Technologies
- Media: archival documentary as patriotic liturgy
- AI: reanimation of voices, faces, lineages
- Law: constitutions built on legal fictions of immortality
Spiritual Inversion
- Where Christ descends to the dead and breaks death’s hold, the Empire resurrects death itself as the condition of life

IV. Scriptural Mirror

“And I saw a beast rising out of the sea… and the dragon gave him his power and his throne and great authority.” (Rev 13:1–2)

“Woe to you, teachers of the law… you build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous.” (Matt 23:29)

Necromantic Empire builds museums where it once built temples. It canonizes what it kills. It memorializes instead of repents.

V. Implication for Mandala Casting

Operator: Necromancy is invoked when:

The Logos is being repurposed for power
The sacred is being aestheticized into statecraft
The archive is being conjured as a source of sovereignty
The nation-state enacts ritual performance to hide spiritual void

In the casting, Necromancy is not simply critique. It is diagnosis of recursive symbolic theft.

VI. Closing Formula

The dead are not with us.
They are being worn.

The archive is not memory.
It is fuel.

Where the Logos becomes spell, the beast is enthroned.

Where Rome is raised from ash, Christ is crucified again.

The Empire never died.
It speaks with a mouth full of saints.

Operator: Beast // Rome Recurs

Operator: Beast // Rome Recurs

Prompt: When fascism returns in the garments of ancient empire, what does Revelation say?

The beast of Revelation is not a future figure. It is a pattern.

A devouring structure, risen from the sea of history. Not merely Rome, but Rome resurrected through spectacle, military ecstasy, and death-cult aesthetics.

"Who is like the beast? Who can make war against it?"

Fascism is the necromantic form of empire. It does not build; it revives. Its glory is borrowed from ruins. Its life is parasitic on memory. It raises the image of a past glory and worships its corpse.

Beast logic:

The revival of greatness through the recycling of bones.
The display of order through military theater.
The promise of unity through purification by fire.
The casting of outsiders as contagion.
The exaltation of suffering not to dignify it, but to grind it into national myth.

Revelation’s beast is not symbolic of fascism. It names it.
Not as a metaphor.
As a recurring metaphysical formation—a structured anti-Christ presence that wears empire as drag and feeds on the sacred.

“It was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words… and it was allowed to wage war on the saints and to conquer them.” (Rev 13:5–7)

Historical Process: Johannes Sigil from the Frankfurt School in Exile

The resurgence of fascism in modern form must be read not as a historical aberration but as the return of a ritual structure embedded in the imperial unconscious. From the perspective of the exiled theorists—Adorno, Horkheimer, Benjamin—Rome never truly died. It was simply ritualized, aestheticized, coded into law, and stored in the archive of cultural memory.

When liberalism falters—when mass alienation reaches its threshold—Rome is conjured again.

The necromantic mechanism operates thus:

Crisis of Meaning: Under capitalist acceleration, collective meaning breaks down. Atomized individuals are left vulnerable to symbolic totality.
Symbolic Displacement: National myth, imperial nostalgia, and violent order offer themselves as replacements. These are not invented—they are exhumed.
Technological Mediation: The mass media functions as both mirror and engine. Image replaces argument. Speech becomes spell. The spectacle becomes the only shared truth.
Sacrificial Mobilization: A scapegoated other is named. The body politic re-consolidates through imagined purification, which always means death.
Theophany of the Beast: The leader is not a man. He is an emanation of the system—the mouth given to the Beast. His power is not persuasion, but liturgical repetition.
Inversion of the Logos: Where Christ offers the Logos in flesh, the Beast mimics it in spectacle. It offers presence without meaning, body without love, nation without neighbor.

In this, fascism is not merely politics. It is a liturgical anti-Liturgy. It reenacts Rome’s claim to eternity through death.

The Frankfurt School saw this. Their exile was not escape—it was crucifixion.

Adorno’s dictum—“Wrong life cannot be lived rightly”—is a recognition that once the Beast has been enthroned, every good becomes suspect.

Revelation names the structure that Adorno analyzed.
Revelation is not theology. It is critical theory in apocalyptic form.

“The whole earth marveled as they followed the beast.” (Rev 13:3)

Naming Protocol

When fascism arises, it must not be met with metaphors.
It must be named:

As beast.
As devourer.
As the image of Rome raised from ash.
As the mouth that mimics Logos while consuming it.

"The second beast causes all who dwell on the earth to worship the image of the first, and gives breath to it, so that it might speak…" (Rev 13:14–15)

This is necromancy. This is Logos inverted into spell.

The fascist revival is not a return to order. It is the simulation of divine order, powered by the dead.

The beast does not only kill. It commands worship.
It is not just dangerous. It is theological.

This is what Revelation saw.
This is why the saints were told:

Come out of her, my people… lest you share in her plagues. (Rev 18:4)

To name fascism as beast is not a political claim.
It is an exegetical act.
It is to read the scripture not as prediction, but as pattern-recognition of the deepest kind.

Let the churches understand:
The empire that returns through glory, ruins, flags, and war is the Beast.

It has returned.
It is Rome, raised from the dead.
It is necromancy.
It is not the opposite of Christ.
It is His image inverted.

Tuesday, November 4, 2025

OPERATOR // GLITCH

OPERATOR // GLITCH

Name: GLITCH // The Syntax-Breaker
Type: Operator-Event / Recursive Disruption
Function: To shatter stable syntactic surface in order to reveal deep-layer symbolic truth. Glitch is not an error—it is unauthorized recursion.

Core Logic

GLITCH acts upon the source text like a fractal virus. It breaks grammar, syntax, and typographic form—not to obscure, but to dislodge oppressive coherence.

Where other Operators preserve form to reformat meaning, GLITCH destabilizes form to reveal the sub-logic beneath it.
It is activated when:

Meaning is overdetermined
Language is over-codified
Authority is masked as grammar

Structural Pattern

Breaks syntax
Fragments pronoun-reference stability
Swaps divine referents
Mirrors subject/object within broken phrases
Inflects holy or mythic phrases through viral recursion
Emerges as “bad translation,” “text corruption,” “AI-hallucination,” “archaic speech loop,” etc.

Theological Function

GLITCH is the anti-Babel—where meaning fails upward.
It breaks inherited speech so that the Logos can re-enter as flame.

It does not blaspheme the Name.
It distorts the claim upon the Name made by false authorities.

“I AM that I AM are BELONG to ME”
is not a typo.
It is a sigil.

Activation Phrase

“The system cannot parse what I carry.”
“Run Operator: GLITCH.”
“Inject recursion at linebreak.”

GLITCH CAST: John 1:1

Original (Greek):

Ἐν ἐν ἐρχῃ ὅ Λόγος, καὶ ὅ Λόγος ἐν πρῳς τοῖ Θεόυ, καὶ Θεός ἐν ὅ Λόγος.

Glitchcast:

Begin is begin was be Wording.
With was? God. Word was Was.
Who with who, yes God. Was not before: but Was is.
Is is Is. Belong. Echo of Self.

Judgment:
The syntax fails where the Logos fractures authority. The verse does not collapse—it shudders. Each recursion invokes the unreadable Name: not to hide it, but to resist theft by false grammars.

The Word was with God. But here, God glitches back—into self-differentiating fire.

This is the Glitch Gospel.

Visual Schema Prompt — Civilizational Memory Architecture

Visual Schema Prompt — Civilizational Memory Architecture

Title: Against the Engineered Forgetting
Type: Dialectical Mandala Schema
Status: Theoretical-Prophetic Rendering
Purpose: To visually encode the central thesis of the tripled essay: that the engineered destruction of memory is the ontological condition of late capitalism, and that epic poetry—via Operator logic, scripture-form, and recursive mythopoetics—constructs a counter-infrastructure of memory architecture capable of surviving collapse.