5. Deep Calls to Deep

Being is a flaw on the Purity of Nonbeing 

They left, of course, as demons cast out without their proper names and without an apology. 

Joshua couldn’t get his penis back into the proper position, so he took it off when they got out of sight of the house. He held it angrily in his hand like a weapon, but it was tie-dyed, rainbow color, which made its lethality seem doubtable. Simply allowing it to shoot straight out was the most comfortable way to walk with it on, and he should have just left it like that, but he worried that the others might think that he was trying to turn his penis into the phallus by making it so noteworthy.  

Even in the zone someone else’s voice was always in their heads, usually it was each other’s, and now that chorus included Evangelical shivaree and Pentecostal vainglory. The internal voices were all caricatures based on some loose resemblance to the non-relation between speaker and the intentions of the hearer. Ishmael’s voice was usually saying something about “the Deep” in the heads of the others. His favorite passage from the Bible was in Job when God upbraided Job and said, “Were you there where the Deep calls to the Deep?”. Ishmael wanted to be there, and he sought out any place where he thought the Deep might be calling to the Deep, and where the mysterious “Leviathan” lurked in the Deep’s congress with itself. He was haunted by the Deep, but the others imagined Ismael as the voice of the Deep seeking itself, which could either seem like a maharishi’s heavy teachings or the ravings of a dangerous lunatic.  

Ishmael consciously cultivated his speech now to sounds like the maharishi that he wanted to be in the thoughts of the others, but the dangerous lunatic kept breaking though as the Freudian parapraxis of curious tics, bizarre locutions, and incompetent movements. He more and more frequently found himself internally reviewing some previous conversation that did not accord with how he wanted the others to think of him. During these gut-wrenching self-appraisals, he would unconsciously blurt out the words that either he wished he would have said, or the words that he did but regretted. It would take him a moment to realize what was happening and then stop himself from this uncontained revelry.  

Soon, He had started to spontaneously shout aloud not only when he was alone in his home but unpredictably when he was with the others. No one had said anything about it yet, and after each humiliating parapraxis, Ishmael played it off like he had sneezed or performed some other automatic bodily function. He thought that his sudden flare-ups were like accidentally leaving up a porn tab on your laptop when you handed it to the IT guy to help you with something. However, back then the IT guy had one of those tabs up on his too, so that there was some secret, pervert comradery between the two of you, but now all the IT guys were gone, and the cartel had disavowed the Pervert’s position altogether because the Pervert believes that he has the phallus. Ishmael knew that the others thought he was slipping into degeneracy, rather than into the deep sort of darkness of the mystics, and this lack of control over his own narrative was now the primary preoccupation of both his self-talk and his perverse vocal outbursts.  

It would have been better for all of them, if Ishmael would have said something, regardless of what it was, about his unscripted jump scares. They were made far more perverse because he didn’t speak about what was happening to him. This sort of silence was ugly because it was the silence of shame. But some of the others couldn’t see that it was Ishmael’s lack of words for his symptom that caused the symptom of his excessive words. They thought that it was a sort of self-indulgent, self-induced psychosis because he wouldn’t speak about it, which they felt that he owed them. Slipping into darkness was fine, but one should take responsibility for their madness when one is a member of a society. 

They thought that Ishmael’s symptom of suddenly ejaculated the non sequitur was acceptable even though it freaked them out because in general they supported the process of behavioral differentiation; however, they could not accept the “Psychotic’s position,” which was what they saw as the Psychotic’s disavowal of a shared Symbolic. The cartel needed each other to demonstrate, through some basic societal norms, that each of them understood that even though one was free to explore new territories of individuation that they still shared a common symbolic means of representation. They rejected the stultifying norms of those who had left, but there was still a need for norms, and their foundational norm was that there should be “no private language,” as Wittgenstein had so convincingly preached. The language of their differentiation, somewhat paradoxically, had to be commonly held. 

Julien had once put the cartel’s stance on norms, “Go wherever you feel called, but talk about it with us.” When she said that she was thinking of how Kierkegaard had written that if he had been with Abraham on his way to Mount Moriah to sacrifice Isaac, Kierkegaard wouldn’t have prevented Abraham, but he would have talked to him about it the whole way. The talking was the relational, or the communal, part and the “going-wherever” part was the non-relational, or differential, part of the cartel’s two founding principles, even though, they weren’t able to articulate that when it was founded. Both parts were necessary to avoid the dual mistakes of either the madness of “totalitarianism” on the one hand or the psychosis of a “private language” on the other. 

Holding together this contradiction between the unification of a shared language and the separation of difference could be thought of as relating the non-relation, which Lacan simply called, “The Non-Relation." The Non-Relation was how Johanna interpreted St. Augustine’s phrase, “Love God and do what you will,” and she said as much to them as her conclusive pronouncement on the matter of the cartel’s active cultivation of deviant behavior. She reasoned that loving God meant loving the Other since Jesus had said so, so many times. She connected the “do what you will” part to the “love” part by saying, “Our love of the Other compels us to speak the silence of our being to other beings because beings are connected by their common Silence to Being-itself.” She then went on to say that this formulation of the Non-Relation was what Lacan meant by “Love is giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it” because “we cannot possess the silence that is ourselves, and the Other doesn’t know that that is the silence that they also want. To which Gabriel said how do you know that Lacan meant that? To which Johanna said nothing. 

Johanna saw in the silence of the mystics not a failure to speak, because they spoke, perhaps excessively, but the failure of speech itself. By “silence” she meant what was in us, or what was about us, that we must speak of with a failing tongue. The irreducible difference of each of their singularities could only be indicated ambiguously in the rupture of representation. She also had recently thought of Ibn Arabi’s saying, “Alone with the alone” in relation to the non-relation between being and representation, but she hadn't thought to make that connection during group discussions yet. 

Gabriel had said to the others when they were away from Ishmael, “If you’re developing Tourette’s, you should let other people know that that's what's going on.”  

“But maybe he doesn’t know it,” Mariam said in her general spirit of charity. 

“Or maybe he doesn’t care to explain it to us because he imagines himself to be too profound for us, like Isaiah preaching enigmatic invective bare naked, or Ezekiel lying on his left side for 390 days and then eating a scroll,” Gabriel retorted. 

“Or maybe neither the labels of ‘denunciatory, Hebrew prophet’ nor ‘Tourette’s Syndrome’ resemble Ishmael,” Mariam said.  

They talked among themselves about confronting him about whatever he meant by his queer tumults, but Mariam objected to bringing in either ancient religious categories or those of the DSM into their new lives, and she assisted that Ishmael would talk about it when he could define it in terms other than those of either the “Religious Establishment” or the “Psychiatric Industry Complex.” Pushing him to explain himself to them would force his ebullient flows of difference into preconceived categories and all of Ishmael’s novelty would be lost to resemblance.  

Julien said, “He should say something, even if it isn’t well formulated, just to let us know that he knows that it is occurring and that it’s disturbing.”  

And then Gabriel said that if Ishmael “kept on with his spasmatic paroxysms without the curtesy of an explanation,” that she wouldn’t “be held responsible for what happened to him.” She reasoned that “People can only take so much random shrieking until they knock someone out.” Although, it wasn't really shrieking, but it was at least as irritating. 

To which Mariam said that she’d “appreciate Gabriel not using the term “spasmatic,” because “Those sorts of medical terms were the technologies that the previous regime used to control human behavior.” She often resorted to Michel Foucault when she was trying to keep them free from one sort of bondage or the other. 

“If we wait around for the poetry of fresh idioms, it’ll be too late,” said Julien. “We must demonstrate a willingness to speak to each other, however roughly, so that we can gauge, however vaguely, where the other is in relation to us. Psychosis is cool but if it’s taken an antisocial turn, it can be dangerous if we don’t know about it, for him and for us,” Julien added to demonstrate for the others not only her concern for their well-being but also for Ishmael’s. 

“The unknowability of the Other is what makes relations both dangerous and wonderful,” Johanna offered. “For now, I’m in agreement with Mariam. Even if he had spoken to us about it, he was also a mystery to himself and can’t really disclose what he doesn’t know.” 

Ishmael could not hide what was other in him from the others as he wished, but what he wouldn’t come to see until much later was that the inconsistencies of the self were the hallmarks of lacking-the-phallus, in particular, the phallus of a unified and consistent self. The wholeness and completeness given by the phallus was the illusion that they all claimed to want to be without, but it was not always so easy to live without that fantasy projection. 

“Not everything is so fucking deep,” Julien once abruptly interrupted Ishmael to tell him during one of his more quixotic rants. She was exasperated but maintained her characteristically sultry tone, which made Ismael wonder if she was right and that he was “in too deep,” so that he went through a phase of involuntarily blurting out, “in too deep!” whenever he thought about Julien saying that to him. He startled the others again but still couldn’t explain what was happening to him in a way that felt true, so he looked away from them and hoped that they would repress the incident into their “unconsciousnesses,” or something like that; although, he knew good and well that they wouldn’t.  

Julien’s voice was in his head on repeat saying, “You’re a psychotic imbecile,” and “Nobody desires you,” even though she had said, “Not everything is so fucking deep,” in a sultry, but demeaning tone, but not quite as demeaning as the one that was on repeat in Ismael’s skull. “She knew him better than he did himself,” he thought. He wasn’t deep, but callow,” he concluded. Most of the worst of what he imagined hadn’t been said, but he also was mostly correct, Julien did in fact think that Ishmael was a “psychotic imbecile,” but he didn’t know that like he thought he did, and it was his general belief that he could know such things beyond the surface of what was said that drove him day by day ever more deeply into his illness. 

In general Julien’s speech was full and provocative, except in her own head, where she didn’t think of herself that way. Her notion of herself was as undesirable because while she realized that she was alluring to the others, she felt full of holes. Whatever it was that they had for her, it wasn’t love, as they claimed, and she felt their lack of real appreciation as a deficiency that her intentions for their more careful attention to her could alleviate. So, she often indulged in the intoxication of their objectification of her as compensation for their absent love. For all of Ishmael’s self-proclaimed love of the deep places, she knew well that most of it was only the insobriety of his own imaginary projections onto the surfaces of the objects that made up his world, especially when it came to whatever he thought of as deep in her.  

And that went for all of them. They saw her cock-teasing voluptuousness as the inversion of their lack, which is how the virtual phallus that Lacan called “Object-small-a" is projected as the “Gaze.” They had been through the apocalypse but hadn’t gone any further than the shallows of their own neighborhood. When they ogled each other’s nubile assets, but especially hers, and especially the “partial object” of her high, round ass, because she had an especially good one, she knew that what had been projected onto it was the phallus. Her enjoyment then was truly the enjoyment of “the desire of the Other,” and she wondered if there was anything deeper than the satisfaction of being desired in this way. 

Julien wanted to see if there was something beyond this deeply addictive sort of attention, which is why she wanted more than sex magic, which was mostly just direct fucking. She conceived a true mystery cult as a somewhat more transcendent expression of abstract unknowability than penises inserted into vaginal or anal canals, but she would discover only through practice that mystery wasn’t transcendent or abstract but as imminent as the commonplace ambiguities that found themselves in every day.  

Since they were all in their early twenties, it was doubtful that she could keep them interested in an enormous vagina installation, even an artful, interactive one. They wanted the artless, life-sized ones that the Church had vitiated with its voyeuristic gaze. But she held out a secret hope that she could cultivate the capacity for symbolic mediation over the immediacy of fucking itself, so that art might become “immediate” through practice in the way that Lacan had revised Freud’s formulation of “conversations as substitutes for fucking” to “conversations are fucking.” The penis holders’ general impotency, except for Joshua, was the result of the endless sex magic itself and not really of the Church’s perverted gaze as the impotent cartel presently imagined. The result of sexual liberation is always a lack of desire for what is now immediately available. Art did not reduce ambiguity the way that fucking did, so art’s immediacy was the immediate encounter with imminent ambiguity, which required a cultivated soul to enjoy. 

Unlike Julien, Mariam sounded the same in her own head as she did in the others’ because her “Ideal Ego” and her “Ego Ideal” matched. Her Ideal Ego was the image that she wanted to project of herself as both kind and sage, which was how she imagined her childhood therapist had been, and there was rarely anything that challenged Mariam’s image of herself as the group’s healer. Her Ego Ideal was how she imagined that others imagined her, and now that “The Big Other” had left the neighborhood, she imagined that the cartel thought of her exactly how she wanted to be thought of. She was often sought out for her sex magic because she believed that the others conceived of her as whole to point of being excessively non-lacking, so that her excessive wholeness offered them temporary completion while they were within the radius of her good words or in her body. She loved the Object-small-a that had been projected onto the partial object of the healer that she presented to them. It received their intentions and seemed to secure their desire for her because they would always need healing. 

What she couldn’t see, as most “healers” can’t, was that she needed for the others to see her as whole and complete because there was a deeper double in her beyond the acknowledged healer than spoke to her in the darkness about her disavowed brokenness. Certainly, the broken healer is a cliche, but it was not a cliche that Mariam recognized in herself, except when she wasn’t kind to and couldn’t fix the others, and when the illusion of her offering herself in intercourse for the general good left her each time they entered her, which meant that she was left with nothing but the violent pounding of flesh while they finished pleasuring themselves in her. It was never until after they climaxed that their imaginary projections couldn’t project themselves anymore. However, the register of the Real can only resist the Imaginary for a time, and they were in their twenties, so their libidinal fantasies return sooner than later, and then they would once again see in her their alma mater, who could sooth them when they couldn’t sooth themselves. They then would go to hide themselves within her ample feminine phallus. 

Michael often went to her with his Viking’s giant-sized angst. But now that he could no longer get erect, the release that she offered was significantly less. In fact, much to Mariam’s dismay, and to Michael’s great humiliation, she could only increase his frustration. This recent incapacity was the first that Michael couldn’t overcome with either his naturally positive disposition or his brawn. He had been a star high school athlete and a straight-a student before the bottom dropped out of his school his senior year amid the mass evacuation of the area. No diplomas were given out that year as they were the year before because the school was closed in February for lack of students and an ineradicable population of school bugs, which are always cockroaches and ants. The few students that were left were told via a hand-written note taped to the school’s, chained and locked, front doors that they had to go to the next closest high school to wherever they lived in the zone. And an aged and torn, classroom, social studies map had been taped next to the note that delineated which school to report to according to neighborhood zones roughly circled in by a black marker.  

Michael didn’t report to his designated high school, and thus, the day before became the last day that he attended a public institution, or a private one for that matter, for the rest of his long life. Michael told himself that he stayed because his family did, and because he thought that they needed him, which was true, but not in the ways that he imagined because he didn’t stay for them as he had imagined. He, like the others, could not imagine why he did what he did because he imagined that he already knew himself because after all he was himself. It wasn’t until this moment, long ago, as he meandered with the cartel dejectedly down the unkempt, broken street that he started to become ready to see that the others didn’t see him the way that he saw himself, the way that he wanted to be seen. And it wasn’t too much later than that that he couldn’t see himself the way that he wanted to be seen by himself either.  

Although inevitably his two sisters would have to migrate out to live with extended family, the entire family remained for now in the house of Michael’s and his father’s childhoods. The block looked forsaken and wild with overgrowth, but until that moment when Michael unnoticeably, except to himself, quietly lost control of himself, he could’ve still gone home. He had never thought of himself as a social media influencer as the others had because only Gabriel had said that to him, and she had said it in anger, so Michael had been able to defend himself against it. But now it came to him that he had wanted that, he had wanted them to see him as someone who they needed to listen to because he knew things, especially things about cultivating a “positive mental attitude” and about how to “manifest intentions.” His stance that the “new” male could be the “without-the-phallus" position because it was without the “new phallus” of the vagina was a disavowal of the phallus without giving up the fantasy of wholeness and completeness that the influencer peddled, but it would take him a while to admit that to them, especially to Gabriel, who Michael knew would take the opportunity to become the group’s now, unquestionable influencer.  

Michael’s father continued to leave the neighborhood for work every day in the family’s slowly aging station wagon, as he always had, and the utilities were still on because he continued to pay the bills, but the utility companies had said that as their infrastructures went bad, they wouldn’t be out to fix it. Gas would be the first to go, then electricity, and finally running water. However, they were able to keep the home close to what it was for a seemingly long while, which didn’t seem so long once it was gone. The home was too precious for Michael’s father to leave, and Michael’s mother agreed as she always did until she couldn’t anymore. The insects were never too bad in their home, but they could always be seen if you looked. They could be shooed somewhere else if they were presently, inconveniently located like where you wanted to sit or in your bed or whatever. They could be killed by insect sprays and newspapers, but they would return within hours to their previous levels. They did not just pop back into existence like a cartoon character after meeting his entertaining demise. The miracle happened somewhere else, and they just crawled back into the home from wherever that was.  

Michael’s Father’s home seemed less like his each day than it had the day before, but he could usually find a spot to stare into that seemed untouched by the growing corruption. There were still large sections of the walls, carpets, closets, dressers, cabinets, couches, tables, recliners, and linens that made him feel like he was back home. And it was possible with the right spray or cleaner to make it smell as it once had for a fleeting moment, but the smells of his mother, which his wife had so dutifully reproduced, were losing the battle against the creeping domination of moldy decay. This gnawing lack of control over his immediate environment would gradually drive him insane even though it was this same insanity that had kept him in his home in the first place. 

Michael’s voice played in the others’ heads, unbeknownst to him until the devesting moment now under consideration, as if it were one of the social media influencers who had left the zone along with the internet. Much more significant than the eternal insects or the general population’s withdrawal from them was the present absence of social media. Michael, like the rest, had learned how to speak more from social media than from his primary caretakers, and his influencer talk came from it, which was either encouraging or a nuisance depending on how you viewed such things.  

For Gabriel it was the latter. She developed much of her concept of self from social media’s cultivated reaction against social media influencers, which took the form of posting videos to influence others not to be influenced by others. Gabriel’s identity was the rejection of identity, which was why Gabriel covered her traditionally male-coded body in traditionally female-coded, gothic-black garb and make-up. She could see through Michael’s true motivations for joining the cartel, all of which were forms of “the phallic disavowal of castration.”  

But Gabriel could not see how her rejection of the masculine position by covering herself in femininity fetishized femininity in such a way to patronize it as if it were a game. But one day she did realize just that, and then she further theorized that that was what the “feminine” was, a game played with the phallus. She then finally understood what Alenka Zupancic had been talking about in her book What is Sex? when Zupancic had said that make-up was the female phallus because artifice was the truth of identity, or something like that. Identity was a game that you lose when you believe that it has any depth, as if it were substantial or essential, like when males believed that their penises identify them as males. But for now, Gabriel still projected her identity as if it were the substance-like rejection of masculine identity because she could not yet consciously articulate her femininity in relation to the enjoyment dressing up, which is simply to relate to the phallus as a game of infinite play. 

Gabriel’s voice spoke in their heads not only as the opposition to Michael’s proposals, but also as the super ego’s “shouldn’t,” or “should,” as the case may have been. They were mostly grateful for its suspicion of Michael, even though they were clear that he wasn’t evil or anything, Michael had more than his stated intentions for much of what he said and did. And nobody, except for Gabriel, was sure what they were, including Michael. However, they were not quite so keen on Gabriel’s voice’s super egoic function, especially Michael.  

Gabriel did not want her penis because it would forever be tied up with the notion of the phallus. If bottom surgery were available to her, she would have had it. Penises have caused nothing but misery. She was well aware that she wouldn’t have an anatomical vagina because it wouldn’t be an opening to a womb, but she didn’t care about that, she only cared about not having a penis. She didn’t believe as Michael did that one could have a penis without the phallus because each time that she looked at her penis, she was reminded of the stupidity of the male position. If the penis historically represented the phallus, and the phallus was the lure to the desire of the Other, then Gabriel’s penis had become a reverse phallus. It repelled her and any desire that she imagined that her preferred Other might have had for her. Instead of giving to her what the female lacked, it was a painful reminder that she didn’t have what the female did, which was the lack of a penis.  

Gabriel’s voice could be heard scolding the cartel, either in their ears or in their heads, whenever they grew tired of “not-having” and sought “wholeness and completion” in their imaginary projections of it. However, Gabriel didn’t see herself as a scold at all, and she could not fathom that they saw her that way either. They were all caricatures of each other and of themselves according to their intentions for each other and for themselves. Gabriel caricatured herself as a Heideggerian “shepherd of being,” making a clearing for being to become a perpetual process of becoming new for itself and not as a “Ready-to-Hand" tool for “The They.” She had to guide her flock and bring them back when they strayed, and she had to keep them safe from wolves in sheep’s clothing like Michael. 

The cartel acknowledged that the voice of Gabriel meant well when it spoke among the chorus of the parodied others within their intentions even though it was the voice of a scold and not of a kindly shepherd. The parodies of each other and of themselves contained both their intentions and the un-intentional parodies of their intentions, so that their desire was for a parody of themselves and of the others, but they didn’t know that then. And what most of them would never be able to accept was that parody didn’t hide or distort their “true” selves because each of them was in fact the infinite play of parody itself.  

Gabriel’s parody made mostly good points, so they generally listened, but her fantasy projection’s hard stance on fantasy projections was deconstruction without consolation. It’s fine to play with blocks and then knock all of them down to make something new, but neither ending play by diligently preserving them in their present formulation, nor ending play by knocking them down and leaving them strewn across the floor are acceptable options for beings who being is a process of play. Simply put, she was a “Debbie Downer” who Michael sometimes thought of as a “cock blocking bitch,” which he then scolded himself for because he really didn’t want to be an “alpha male,” or a “Chad,” if you will, except for the part of him that did.  

Deconstructing the concepts of the patriarchal Big Other was exhausting and did not eliminate the need for a Big Other in the form of a somewhat shared code of conduct, which would not be a much maligned “Metalanguage,” but which could serve as a temporary pigeon among them. Lacan’s dictum that “The Big Other does not exist,” did not mean that a Big Other wasn’t necessary. The Big Other’s non-existence might mean that there wasn’t any Metalanguage, or Metanarrative, or any other kind of substantial “Meta” but a shared language, however provisional, was necessary for differentiation to be a relational process among flows of difference. Gabriel’s body dysmorphia was related to the patriarchal Big Other’s concept of femininity, which is what made Gabriel’s symptom “dis-morphia,” rather than “eu-morphia,” or “ambi-morphia,” but some sort of morphia, or body concept was necessary to navigate the world of intentions. Gabriel knew that her dysmorphia was like that of any other woman in the sense that it was also caused by the Big Other’s concepts, but she still hadn’t figured out that her jouissance was in causing those concepts to fail, and that her singularity was in the particular manner in which she caused those concepts to fail. Difference comes into being as the differential relation between concepts and their failure. 

“The They” was Heidegger's term for the “Big Other” before Lacan, and Gabriel preferred it because it more clearly indicated that the failure was not within any individual but from somewhere else. Gabriel loved to chant, “Somebody else’s idea of somebody else’s world, it’s not my idea of things as they are.” Sun Ra had given that mantra to the world to keep it free, but everyone was always running back to the comfort of “somebody else’s world.” Gabriel wept whenever she heard June Tyson singing “it’s not my idea of things as they are.” That “not” was where everything beautiful waited to be ingress into an intention. “No” is the only freedom that being will ever know. 

The They had bombarded them with screens, or what were previously Lacan’s mirrors, before fleeing the insect end times, so the cartel had internalized concepts that failed to model how they actually were. The dysmorphia that this failure created inevitably caused their imaginary musing for the cure for this dis-pleasurable condition, a cure that they could obtain if they could get whatever it was that would temporarily receive the inverted projection of their lack, which was the desire for a concept that could contain their desire for containment, and which is the phallic projection of desire inserting itself into the vagina as a container rather than the vagina as the void. They could not conceive as Gabriel did that there wasn’t any cure for dysmorphia because it was built into the words that they made their bodies. Her desire for bottom surgery was not to end body dysmorphia but to embrace it as the parody of the body, which was the sort of body play that might birth something new. 

The Cartel’s hallucinated animations of Gabriel articulated the conundrum that they were in. They all agreed to reject how things had been, but they wanted “permanent revolution,” and not another installation of the Big Other in another guise. It was good to make a clearing for what new differences were to become, but some of the novel growth had proven to be cancerous. The clearing had reproduced the most commonplace sex cult shit of every “intentional” community known to man, and that cancer was crowding out whatever might be beyond this monstrous repetition of the same old cock and bull story. 

Everything seemed to come back to that enigmatic Biblical episode in which Jesus taught his disciples a particularly hard lesson about casting out demons. Jesus said to them that it was all good and well to get rid of a demon and sweep the place that it had occupied, but that the demon would come back with friends whose tenancy would be facilitated by the cleaning that the exorcism had performed on their abode. That teaching seemed immediately true because it accorded with their experiences, but what could be done about it?  

Johanna spent most of her general silence thinking about this conundrum that they had not avoided because of greater learning, nor because of the thousands of examples of failed revolutions from the past. And the worst of them all was the failure of the Jesus movement, or of what had been called “The Way” by his disciples. That failure was the success of Christianity brought about by its doing and teaching the exact opposite of its founder. She supposed that that was the problem with Jesus’s having come in weakness, “in the form of a servant,” rather than in strength. Coming in weakness meant that there was no way to stop the powerful from using your name as a blessing for their wickedness.  

Johanna’s silence spoke in their heads as the Leviathan’s call amid the depths of the foundations of the sea. Johanna was down there quietly luring them into a patient stillness while they lunged from one frantic project to the next. But that, like all the other parodies of them, wasn’t true. She was just as caught up as they were, and thrilled at their adventures, maybe more than any of them. Now that she had spoken and surprised them with her anger at the bizzarro Amish family, she felt that she had ruined the mystery that she had cultivated about herself. Now they knew that she was not so deep as they had imagined but right up on the surface with the rest of them. Maybe, she needed to stop caring so much about how they thought of her, she finally concluded. How her voices played in their minds was none of her business. Easier said than done.  

But what she did not know yet was that speaking reveals as much as it hides, and she had only let slip that she had more skin in the game than she had previously let on, which was no small thing, but at the same time her slip also deepen the general impression that her hidden intentions went further down than they had imagined, unlike Joshua, whose intention was on the deep surface between his legs. But in the end, they would all come to know that no intentions are very deep but are always worn on the surface as a prosthetic was the thing-in-itself. 

Joshua was plain but lofty, and he wanted the others to imagine him as always ready for a scrum, for them, of course, and not against them. He was a team player. He had always been on teams, and ever since the collapse of organized teams and sports leagues, he had wanted to be a part of the cartel because he thought of it as the best team in the zone. They all loved him and thought of him as the one that they wanted to have next to them if shit went down, which it had, and would again, plenty, and each time Joshua had stood firm and tall juxtaposed to the uncertainty the others. Even Gaberiel, who hated penises, didn’t hate Joshua’s penis because he didn’t wear it like a trad man but like the new being that they were trying to birth here in the zone. Not all of the new growth grew as if a cancerous tree. 

However, Joshua wasn’t quite as simple as that. All of them had a mix of feelings for each other.  And none of the voices in their heads didn’t also have their more dissonant tones. The thought that Joshua was foolish and too genuine was both in Joshua’s thoughts about himself and the others about him. Is it possible to imagine that Joshua, or the others, didn’t doubt his prosthetic penis? But maybe that was why Gabriel liked it so much better than her own, because it was doubtable and couldn't possibly be believed, so that its intention could not contain what was unintended about it. 

At that point in time the sounds of the unintentional from both within and without themselves were of an ominous timbre to the cartel. However, the unintentional was already, always within their intentions, so it could not be avoided, and their efforts to try to rid themselves of its grinning contradiction rebirthed that sort of violence that they had wanted to rid themselves of. Confutation was the ubiquitous babble that undermined the coherence of their well thought out projects. It often appeared as the contravention of the Others, but it was of itself. The Deep calls to the Deep as the difference of negation without the resolution of negation into a synthesis. Ishmael had encounter undecidable contradiction often but didn’t acknowledge it because he couldn't yet imagine the Leviathan’s Deep abode was the ambiguity from whence difference itself came. 

They walked down the street in the dejected silence of their unintentional and collective failure. The insects’ cacophony was not for them. What was is for? What were their intentions? They flitted around and crawled within the overgrown grasses and weeds that formed the walls of the entangled flows of green on either side of them. Horrible black flies buzzed around their ears and ankles not seeing them at all but smelling both the thickly smeared citronella ward and the blood beyond it that they desired to extract for themselves from the insides of these bodies barely covered by their summer dresses. A few of the ever-hungry mosquitoes had already broken through that sharp blast of lemony goo and had stuck their monstrous, tubal mouths into the flows of red blood beneath. Their long sharp lips were intended to penetrate the soft barriers of delicate skin, but the mosquitoes had then gotten stuck in the sludge indented to prevent these violent breaches of the human body’s precarious integrity.  

The mosquitoes slowly died as they gorged themselves in the oblivion of the perfected indulgences given to bugs but not to humans. Bodies gather fluids and creatively restrict and direct their flows across gradients and thresholds and gaps and stops towards their given intentions, but bodies cannot seal the flows of their intensities from the world because all the body's projects project the body into the world. The body’s inescapable vulnerability is built into the process of differentiating bodies because the world is comprised of the intentional projects of different bodies.  

And human bodies are even more open than that because they lack the given directedness of instinctual intentions given to all other living things. Human bodies are too open and should never have been left to drown in a freedom that they cannot use for their intentions because their intentions are, in the end, all for the abyss. The choices given to them by their so called “freedom” are given to them by negativity of the abyss. Human’s must say “no” to get to “yes.” There was never a choice to just go with the flow because human flows lack direction until the “no” to every other direction has been silently spoken. 

The cartel moved over as Michael’s father drove past them without acknowledging them on his way home from work. The wagon was making a slightly new noise than the month before. Its flows were slowly being redirected into audibly new territories but not according to the intentions of its driver, but according to the intention of entropy itself. A cultivated blindness to entropy was the intentional gift of Michael’s father’s ever deepening madness. The cartel was not always able to go mad in this way and often found itself unintentionally attending to entropy’s slow unraveling of their intentions 

They looked together into the verdant choke of plants feeding directly on the sun’s intensities. Within the tributaries of aberrant green flows were the profligate arthropods and arachnids blowing out their short lives with reckless abandon. There was a particularly shiny horde of metallic, green beetles feeding and fornicating within each other’s zones of indifference that momentarily caught the groups attention. Insects are always “alone with the alone” as the mystic Ibn Arabi had preferred. They were as indifferent to the observers of their dalliances as they were to whatever they happened to couple with and deaths. All their little intentions rolled into either the intention for random sex with whatever was proximal or the murder of the same. They ate and killed to fuck and die.