7: Deep Calls to Deep

What Intends the Unintentional? 

“Well, it’s not worth making any big deal about this, let’s go in,” Gabriel said.  

And so, they did. Ishmael opened the left door of the main entrance a bit more so that they could fit through one by one, but he couldn’t open it much past that because it was jammed on something. The right one had been leftcracked open a bit but was stuck in a position that would have been uncomfortable from some of them to squeeze through. Ishmael smelled the familiar smell of mold that was prominent in all the rotting structures of the zone, but itwas deep and earthy in there and smelled like his imagination of the fathomless wild. He decided that the odor was too profound to put his mask on. He assured himself that it couldn’t be toxic and so magnificent at the same time. Bodies had evolved to detect poison as well as opportunity, but he had another body that had evolved to perceive the sublime from a time before natural selection.  

The true sublime isn’t of any evolutionary advantage. It is the non-object of the Freudian Death Drive, but neither he nor anyone else has been able to figure out where it came from or what it was for because it wasn’t for life, as the name strongly implies. But Freud saw after he discovered it that it wasn’t exactly for death either. Anyone who’s investigates the Death Drive a bit knows that the direct desire for death accords with the pleasure principle because it is the desire to reduce the overly proximal intensities of life in the most direct way possible. What is the Death Drive a drive for then if not for death? It seems to be a drive for what Freud called the “beyond” of the pleasure principle, which means that it rejects homeostasis in favor of whatever increases intensities beyond the steady state necessary for life’s maintenance of equilibrium. Why is there a drive for life to undermine itself in this way? Freud didn’t have an answer. And neither did Ismael, he just knew that life without the Death Drive wasn’t worth living. 

The carpet was covered not with mold but a pleasant green moss and a layer of rich humus below. The ventilation system was running, but the air was hot and heavy with moisture. He could hear it hum and felt the slight air flow that it made in the long hall of large rectangular aquariums. Someone had dragged in large pots with various plants and mid-sized trees. Greenery was scattered everywhere producing a complex mixture of the sweet, the earthy, and the herbaceous. The original design of the aquarium included large, island-like planters for living trees and shrubbery. They were nourished by the natural sunlight of the atrium ceiling above and the manmade sprinkler system below. These trees had become enormous because they had clearly been cared for and their lower branches pared so that their upper branches had grown and spread wide. It had only been a little over a year since Ishmael had been there, but the place had been utterly transformed with both rhizomatic and arboreal growth. 

The rest of the group put on their masks as they came in. When they walked past what had been the ticketing and information desk, they gaped at the complex structuring processes of the organic life all around them. The kiosk had been transfigured by blooming, potted flowers of various kinds. This Eden had clearly been cultivated by human hands but with unknowable intentions.  It didn’t occur to the cartel yet that whoever those hands belonged to, they were more than likely still here, along with their mysterious intentions. The cartel never went into places where they knew there to be occupants. But the magic of the terraformed mall-like space was too enticing to resist, and so whatever thoughts they might’ve had about self-preservation were lost to a more primitive drive for the organisms of the novel. 

They could see that the glass of the tanks, which they had been told was “actually acrylic,” were yellowed and browned from an outside film that coated them, obscuring their contents, but not completely. They had all been filled with moving water. But it was difficult to tell if there was any animal life swimming in them because of the dimming of the natural light from the acrylic paneled ceiling and the living film that crawled across the acrylic surface of the tanks. 

The warm green glow of the moss and the trees above the artium was enchanting and beckoned them in against their better judgement. And the thick earthy smell of the thin layer of humus that coated everything was too gorgeous to cover over with their masks. In whatever ways it might have been toxic, the air flows must have purified it enough, so that it wouldn’t immediately kill them. Or at least that’s what they were compelled to believe by the alluring bouquet of odors, which seemed to them to be the perfect mixture of the living and dying and of something unnamable.  

There was still mold growing in there. They could clearly see its pernicious colonies arrayed in various colored patches along the walls and ceiling, as well as in a few spots on the floors where it intermixed with the deep greensand browns of the forest moss. As they walked further, the ground became soft and springing and even more deeply green, so that Ishmael took off his shoes to feel it under his feet. And then the others soon found themselves followingsuit because it seemed like a magical thing to do. The necessary circumspection that they had developed for their survival in the zone had been almost completely absented by the aura of dark radiance about the place.  

The air shimmered with particulate, living things suspended in the waning light of the day that showed through the hushed yellows and tranquil browns of the organic, stained-glass ceiling. The aquarium had become a rollingemerald city, profligate with verdant intensities. Now that they were inside, they could see that some of the glass panels on the ceilings were missing, so that when the outside breeze blew, it blew through the great hall, joining and enriching the machinic currents that circulated throughout the hallowed corridors. The intricate movements of the place both pleased and terrified them as they were unidentifiable in any of the conceptual frameworks that they had brought with them into this delightfully eerie space. They had the sense of walking through a narthex into a swirling viridescent sanctuary dedicated to unknowable gods as the iconography of visible darkness. 

There were dark things moving behind the yellow and brown stippled glass of the aqueous vessels that lined the vast halls and rooms of the temple, which sent bands of panic out along sloping plains of their bodies that they hadn’t felt before. They walked past the mammoth basins on either side of them unable to make themselves move closer and look through the not-entirely opaque glass. It was as though some uncanny overtone emanated from the otherworldly beings within the sub rosa cisterns. 

“This is what Freud called the “uncanny,” which is ‘unheimlich’ in German,” Julien somehow forced herself to say against the will of whatever it was that was pressing them not to speak. 

Everyone stopped walking for a moment, astonished at her audacity. She had somehow broken the spell that had bound their mouths. She glowed with a light of a different color than usual for her. She had become a channel of a hue that was unique to that place.  

“The German word for home is ‘heimlich’,” she continued. “We’re not at home anymore..., but we never were. We were born in this uncanny glow. We are not things that have homes..., except in the weird luminosity of the unhomely. Comfort isn’t comfortable for us, so we must find our home in the numinous. Deep calls to Deep where in the strange tones of audible silence. This is the ambiguity that Freud discussed when he wrote about the uncanny. Its uncertainty is somehow also familiar like a broken home.” 

Once again, she had told the truth to the cartel. This was the sort of place where sonic resonances and dissonances played together among the sentient flows all around them. The various currents of coordinated chaos formed a refractory zone of continuously novel verity that glimmered with a frightening sort of hope. Horror and beauty were so difficult to tell apart now that cryptic incandescent had been conjured at these holy coordinates from elsewhere. 

They looked away from Julien’s unbearable beauty and saw that they had all become radiant with the shadowy twilight of the noetic tincture that flowed so freely there. Their nostrils relaxed entirely in the absence of whatever acridity had been in the air until then. They would have choked on the rich brume that they so easily inhumed now only a minute ago. Whatever it was, it was a new breath that passed through pores and nourished organs that they hadn’thad before now. They had been thrown into the sublimity that had always been near them, but which was hidden by the certainty of their ideas about the world. Whatever was wrong about them was now sublime, and this vertigo seepedinto their dark places like a delicate but infinitely complex tea. This breath illuminated what was unfathomable about them without reducing their depths to a knowable quantity, so that they breathed from the hollow within them that was unending. 

It occurred to Ishmael that they might be dead. Or that they might be being pleasantly drugged to death and were now in the processes of dying. That made him panic for a moment, and then he thought, “Well. Why not?”. This is a good way to go. Whatever they were breathing, although it may be poison, it was a fascinating route to wherever they were going. And there was no bodily pain in this dying..., yet. 

Then they considered the tanks running with hidden life. Those dark waters were moving behind the obfuscation of the yellow-brown film on the glass of the tanks, or acrylic, or whatever. There were temporarily unified multiplicities, which had been foregrounded against shadowy gloaming of the moving waters by their semi-independence from it. Whatever they were, their hues were of pitch but shimming metallic tones, so that their scalesoccasionally flickered in blushes of coppers and golds as they swam close to the glass of the tanks and became semi-visible. Where the outer film on the translucent cisterns was thin and the waning light of the lost day squandered thelast of its glory, hidden forms of the victorious crepuscule showed themselves for the last time before they slipped away into the night in which all cows are black.  

Momentarily freed by Julien’s speech, the group approached one of the large tanks to get a better look. A shocking-white, skull-like face suddenly flashed momentarily across the watery screen, sending painful jolts of adrenaline into the nervous channels of their bodies. The massive waves of internal chemicals drown their muscles in heavy liquids too severe to move against. The over proximity of irreducible affects pressed down on them like the smotheringwaves of an aggrieved ocean. They had been pushed by that fright further than they had ever been into the paralyzing madness that had been threatening to overtake them ever since they could remember. Their minds had becomeblank, white slates, from which they were unable to differentiate any distinct thoughts, only throbbing, irreducible pain. All the familiar canals of their default mode networks were flooded with the unbearable brightness of acrophobia.  

Ismael’s bladder and anus instantly went limp, and he pissed and shat himself and then crumbled to the ground. A Monstrous nausea churned in his guts and head. He began to writhe and gag uncontrollably. 

The rest of them froze but did not fall. They had seen the Gorgon, and it had seen them. They had left this world at that moment, and there was no way back. Some events have affects that burn a bright, blank spot in the brain that never heals. Whatever it was, it was in them now, swimming through their bowls and cerebrums, turning them all into inarticulate mush. They were trapped in stony silence, only beginning to become aware of the peril that their bodies were in. The framing concepts of overwhelming pain began to occur to them as whatever it is that allows concepts to form slowly came back online. They hadn’t awoken from the nightmare enough yet to think clearly, but they knew in their bodies that this unnamable sickness would be with them “unto death,” if they weren’t dead already. 

It had been one of those translucent, skeletal faces from the National Geographic expeditions into the deepest parts of the ocean. Whatever could canalize its own structural flows against the pressure of so much depth, appeared as an unspeakable misdeed to the surface-dwelling cartel. Such things shouldn’t exist, and the cartel felt the monstrous showing of this living error writhing within. Perhaps, they weren’t ready to inhabit an unhomeliness quite so unhomely yet.  

“My God,” what was that?” Gabriel was the first to be able to move his mouth well enough to get out a question.  

Nobody spoke, but the birds who had come in to rest on the trees within the aquarium for the evening. Their sporadic chirps and squawks had calmed to a minimum and did not seem to belie any special knowledge of whatever the shapes in the eddying tenebrosity were. Perhaps, they didn’t mean anything to them. But they certainly did keep a good distance between themselves and the basins that contained the scaly things. 

Then, suddenly, there was the massive pounding of a bass drum from somewhere within, echoing throughout the halls in enormous waves of sound. It was shocking but a shock that allowed them to move again. It woke them from their eternal despair into a gorgeous tremendum. Whatever evil it was beckoning in, it was one that remembered them even though they had forgotten it. They had forgotten this capacious place that was in them and all around them even when it had been withdrawn from their intentions. The monstrous thumping was welcoming temporarily cultivated wild things back into the wild, which was their uncanny home. None of their studies or theories could come with them, says the unreliable narrator. 

There are textures and complex subtitles in sound that unfold dimensions of the body that were folded to extend the body into space-time. When bodily intensities become res extensa, some of their aspects must hold their breath, sometimes until the end. But the cartel’s other bodies were breathing again. “Die before you die,” the mystics say. These hidden machinic assemblages are comprised of dark materials that are made of the most concentrated sort of light, which the Pseudo-Dionysus called “super saturated.” Onward down the long corridor towards the four-on-the-floor beat, they rhythmically shimmered in the black light. In the thrall of the dark ritual, they reverently dancedtoward the main tank at the center of the complex, leaving Ishmael, who was no longer writhing but now limp on the floor, without a thought about whether he was dead or alive. Let the dead bury the dead. 

The enormous boom of the steady, ominous rhythm had somehow steadied them enough to move but not enough to return them to their wits. Percussive auditory waves penetrated their bodies and beckoned them in such a way that both soothed and intensified the rhythms of their own bodily functions. They were beyond the thrall of Julien’s terrifying beauty. They were beyond the thrall of the Gorgon and were now captured by the promise of some revelation from the giant drums. 

From one terror to the next, they preferred the terror of the drums, even though they sounded like they were preparing vast minions for war. Indeed, the drums were war machines, which were a part of a vast assemblage of themachinic processes of battle, and the violence that they portended was intended for them. It was the violence of deterritorialization, as brother Guattari said. The cartel had been strangled to stagnation by the arboreal growth of the thoughts of those who lived outside the zone, but those thoughts had remained in them. Whatever differences they imagined had grown between themselves and those others were superficial and impotent. The drums cleared away their familiar intentions for a short time. Was it enough time for them to find a line of flight to new, less ridged intentions?  

There are unlit depths from which one must be recalled by something outside of themselves. This call must come from elsewhere. There is no interior resource that can wake the already dead. Like Frankenstein's monster they were being called into something that they hadn’t asked for. They hadn’t asked for any of this but had been thrown nonetheless into this time and place, into these enculturated bodies. Culture’s facticities stick to you like unbreakable habits, so that learning to say what can’t be said must be done with the words that were given to you. You must learn to say what is timeless and nonlocal in a particular place in time. 

Genitals of all kinds began to finally flow with blood again for the cartel’s members. These lost currents had also been called out of their gloomy slumbers, back into the light of an indeterminate purpose, defined only by the drums of the deep. And then, suddenly, by the sublimity of a hopeful, dissonant drone. It soared low in significant swoops that made their brains and gonads buzz with pleasing waves of deep delectation. There are certain frequencies that manifest the uncanny voice of the numinous in the bodies of those with ears to hear. 

A baritone horned instrument had begun to drone like an ancient shofar. Its horror was deafening, but without hurting their ears. The sinister bouquet of sound urged them towards whatever its left-handed source was a bridge to.The electric vibrations in their skulls drowned out all their familiar electro-chemical concerns and opened a fear so righteous that their pudenda flowed with new streams of intensities both righteous and perverse. They breathed in the living miasma of the place even more deeply as their nostrils had dilated beyond their previous capacities. A great gate was being opened from somewhere in the inner sanctum of this aquarian temple, but to where wasn’t knowable, except by whatever new machinic processes were coming online as the renewal of the monistic relation between their physical and subtle bodies. As thinking was being shut down, a different sort of knowing, sometimes called “intuition,” was becoming prominent as the affective objects that couldn’t be objectified in their intentions. 

The twilight in the tanks dimly illuminated other things in their obscure streams. There were colors and flashes of foreign configurations, as well as of those variously tentacled things without countenances. Some of the swirling organisms had learned to make their own light, and their tanks were cascades of supernatural luminesce seemingly responding to the heavy waves of the drums that oscillated at low enough frequencies to penetrate the glass and watery medium in which they swam. The water contained in their bodies pushed against the water all around them, so that the animated water in them was moved by the exterior animations of both the deep, rhythmic pounding of the drums as well as of the liquid flows of difference contained in the tanks. A flow is a temporarily unified multiplicity animated by a liquid intention. Moving together is nothing unless it is against the counter-flows of other rhythmic intensities. The refractory zones that form between the contrary currents are where new flows of obstreperous intensities are born, as our brother Deleuze has preached. The textures of rhythms coerce without domination multiplicities of intentions into war machines, not only to renew the world, but also to make new worlds. 

Why did all of this seem to have implications? There was a mismatch between what they knew intuitively as noetic and what they knew conceptually as thinking. They couldn’t think about what they knew, or they couldn’t reduce what they knew to concepts. Why not just go mad at the meaninglessness of these disjointed assemblages of awful things? Were they looking for patterns amidst the purity of this difference? Yes, but only the temporary habits of the troughs and peaks of churning waves. The unmistakable movements of awe broke their concepts like floods of vertiginous babble. Whatever contains multitudes, advances by the unification of an only partially contained intention. At that moment they joyfully let whatever intentions they had, be broken open in the fall of love, but falling for what? At such times it doesn’t matter. Pick up the pieces later, if you can. Their thoughtless enthusiasm for the alchemical elixirs rushing through their porous skins and in the endless passages of their veins reduced whatever thinking was left to the failure of thought. 

The Zone had been the promise of a grand deterritorialization, but they had all brought the symbolic imaginaries of what had been before into it, so that old cancers had returned. There was a great devastation there, so that there was intuitive hope that something new might arrive from elsewhere. The language that had been spoken to them and which was in them when they were children would return, but maybe some of its rigidity could be loosened a bit, so that what was truly other than they were could find them and give itself to them as the space of indeterminacy needed for new concepts to grow.  

Their studies on how to loosen the grip of “The They,” as Heidegger had called the voice of “society” speaking in their heads, had only made it more solid. They had become a sex cult after all. But it wasn’t the fault of the studies. The studies had opened possibilities that could have gone either way, more openness or more closedness. They had unconsciously chosen the latter both despite and in accord with themselves. Could they get beyond the dialectic of recognition that knocked around in their head as the voice of the imagined Other? Was there a beyond? Every moment had seemed to be stuck in an eternal return of whatever there was before, until now. Had a voice from elsewhere finally begun to speak? Was there an Other beyond the Other that they had been listening to since their symbolic castration? If there was, it was the voice of the void. And speech that speaks in relation to nothing is being speaking for itself.  

Revelation makes the invisible visible without reducing it to the visible, which is something like how the failure of thinking presents what can’t be thought as excessive intuition, which is sometimes called “noetic.” The voice from elsewhere demands submission, but this submission is to what can’t be determined, which is the binding to difference itself that gives freedom from a return of the same. But this freedom isn’t sought after, but when it is finally given, it is a vertiginous horror. Indeterminacy is too much to receive, and the familiar determinations of one’s unfreedom are quickly sought. There is a difference from the freedom to determine and the safety of already determined. 

Determining in such a way as to actuate more possibility is the loving action of Wu Wei’s purposeless action, which isn’t without purpose but rather with the purpose of multiplying purposes. They were not hearing only the determinate sounds of the music, but also its indeterminate revelation, which is what is in the music more than the sound. But all true revelation is from an indeterminate elsewhere and remains indeterminate even when it is determined. Revelation presents indirectly, or analogically, “as,” a present absence. Poetry and music reveal the Absolute without the absolute determination of identification. All ethics are derived from the absolute maxim to act as if you are music. Hegel’s “Absolute” absolves identity as it determines it, so that there will always be more to determine “as” the absolution of indeterminacy. 

They strode forward with lusty hopes but without the familiar fears that had nagged at them for most of their lives, fears which had objects, which were the determinate identities that they had made of their own and of each other's indeterminate intentions. But those stifling intentions had now been replaced with open anxieties, or with fearful hopes, about the non-objects in the music that penetrated them without phallic intentions. As Lacan said, “anxiety is not without an object.” Their anxieties had been about what they imagined about their own and each other’s intentions, but now they were about what resists determination altogether, which is the resistance to the Imaginary that causes the Imaginary, and which was the no-thing that was swirling all around them in massive waves of indeterminate being.  

Julien didn’t know if she could speak or not, but she didn’t want to. She wasn’t ready to conceive of this overwhelming opacity with a theory. She didn’t want to formulate full sentences in her head but loved the murky affects and half-baked ideas that formed in the newly expended space of herself without reducing the invisibility of what had appeared there. Julien enjoyed being in the presence of something more powerful than she was.  How much control over her thoughts had she ever had? She wondered. Whatever power the others thought she had, she couldn’t stop herself from hearing their voices in her head until now. And she couldn’t stop the endless repetition of the voice of the Big Other who had given her the language that she spoke, and which spoke her, from blathering on endlessly until she had felt a stronger gravity pulling her out of herself into a sublime beauty that was indistinguishable from horror. 

And then more drums were added, tuned to the mid and high registers, that formed polyrhythms with each other and with the booming bass drums. The already huge hall became even larger, opening spaces within spaces like the unfolding of extra dimensions. They had misremembered their bodies in the gravity formed from the dialectic of matter-energy. They hadn’t recalled how light they had been at some near-far time before they were born. As they accessed those broad, forgotten places within themselves, they felt their unfolding expanses shivering in orgasmic spasms of richly textured, somatic affects. It was too much, but they were somehow able to put one foot in front of the other in the ecstatic gesticulations of sacred dance. They were asymptotically approaching the source of their revelries but were in no hurry to arrive. Johanna raised her hands as if in worship and whispered, “Hallelujah! Glory! Glory! Glory!”  

They had arrived at the place from which dance comes. It doesn’t come from need, but from the extravagance of too much. Dance is the beyond of necessary and sufficient reasons, which is the horizon of utter gratuity from which necessary and sufficient reasons arise. Whatever there is, it receives its being from the excessive givenness of elsewhere. And this elsewhere is the incontinent void whose lack of continence is the excess of its being, which is the indeterminacy of its nonbeing.   

They had had music when they could get electricity working from time to time, but mostly, the only sounds that they had heard were each other’s voices and the language of their subjectification and well as their subjugation.However, the insects made a kind of intricately textured drone that individual members of the cartel tuned into occasionally, but they hadn’t foregrounded this background together for one of their collective rites. The insects’ cacophony was the music of their entomological victory. The bugs had resolved the dialectic of recognition, without the absolution of en-languaged becoming. Without a symbolic intention, the irresolvable dissonance of sounds dissolves into bare life.  

Although their general numbers couldn’t be reduced by human intention within the zone, the insects and their environment could affect each other. The natural world mirrors the symbolic world in one essential way; there is no balance in either. It is only the imaginal balance of the whole that makes it appear “as if” whole in the Imaginary register, which is the “take as one” function of Set Theory explained by Alain Badiou. The pattern recognition of prediction machines is whole and complete when it correctly corresponds to outcomes. But patterns like all recognizable things are liable to misrecognition, the misrecognition of themselves as well as of others when they fail torepeat. Misrecognition is built into recognition just as indeterminacy is built into determination. Every determination is a misrecognition because it temporarily covers over an “inconsistent multiplicity” with an imaginary determination. Insects are free of the anxieties of symbolic intentions, but not of misrecognition. 

Entomological worlds do not contain the sort of subjectivities fashioned by the symbolic awareness of the Real. A prediction machine without the intention for the failure of the whole is a subject without psychoanalytical subjectivity. If this minimal awareness isn’t entirely automatic, it is close to it because it is an awareness that can’t make lack whole and can’t intend the unintentional. Whatever anxiety this sort of consciousness knows, it isn’t the enfeebling fear of the Other’s unknowable intention, which forms the disquietude of what resists form absolutely, the Real. In the hearts and minds of the being for whom being is a concern, misrecognition is the recognition of the Real. 

Symbolic recognition isn’t a life and death proposition for those things without the desire for and of the desire of the other. Every thought that refused to be free, refused to be free for fear of the inscrutable non-object of the external other. But this external Other is the same fearful stranger that lurks within us as the indeterminate drive, which is the intention turned against itself as the unconscious. Concepts may have been created by prediction machines to reduce uncertainty, but concepts are a relation between determination and indeterminacy, so they must touch the Real of the non-conceptual to find their form. When prediction machines produce uncertainty, it is because they have been caught staring into the abyss for too long. And when the abyss looks back, something new appears. Whatever mistaken concept an insect may have, their failure is the failure of a prediction machine without the anxiety of the non-conceptual. 

Occasionally the cartel had been able to play an old, stereo system for their ceremonies. They preferred it that way, especially because it helped cover up some of the sloppier sex sounds that were always threatening to bring in too much of the Real to the religious Imaginary of the proceedings. Their selection of CDs was pretty good, but a powerful faction among them insisted on new age synth music from the early 80s, which lessened the solemnity of the rites significantly. But the one time that Ishmael had been allowed to play monk chants, none of them were able to perform their solemn duties, so Yanni, Enya, Kitaro, Deuter and some other singled named masters were immediatelyreinstated as the preferred ceremonial soundtrack. 

They had forgotten the glory of music until that moment. No, they hadn’t ever known it until then. How does music represent the divine? It doesn’t. It is the divine speaking for itself. Musicians have been developing techniques to open sacred spaces for holy speech for as long as the archeological record can tell. Music shows the ultimate unity of bodies and spirit. Bodies are assemblages of machinic processes that structure the variations of flows. Gradients, thresholds, and shuntings vary flows of intensities by relating them to various sorts of limits like the combustion engine creatively restricts its flows to produce movement. The drum extends its flows of auditory intensities as the joyous collision with the intensive flows of a wooden stick. It is the potential restriction of the stretched pig’s skin that actuates the possibility that is realized as the glorious catastrophe of its relation to the mallet. The indeterminacy of spirit needs the determinations of the material body to push against; otherwise, there can be no expression of an intention nor the failure of intention that musical concepts or any other concepts are based on. Energy needs matter’sresistance to express itself through one’s impression on the other. Matter needs energy to be moved, which is why modern science considers them to be two modes of the same thing. They simultaneously bring each other into beingthrough an asymmetrical, monadic self-relation. 

How does music move the body? It is a sort of immediate mediation of the divine intention, which is to form the asymmetrical, refractory zones of relational vibrations between and among the machinic processes of bodies. Musical play was how life was made into the intensities of directional bodies from their relation to the non-directional void. Music is anywhere that a playful war has been declared on either the without-relation of substance or the without-relation of a cancerous repetition of the same, as Deleuze has taught. Or where the Symbolic plays with the traumatic Real, which Lacan Called “Túche,” versus what he called “Automaton,” in which there is the rather unplayful, self-referential repetition of the Symbolic with itself.  

The insect drone of the zone unified the vibrations of insect bodies without the intention of an eidetic unity. But invariable essences were of no concern to bugs anyways. Insects have an indexical relation with the noises that they produce, which may elicit fear of a predator or arousal at a potential mate, but not the indeterminable doom that it engendered in the ears of the Zone’s language users. For those who could hear the non-essential unity of the signifier, which is the sort of whole without the unification of equivalencies assembled in music, there is a dreadful revelation to behold in a drone. The drone in the aquarium was not that of insects. It was the semiotic drone of the subjects of the signifier. It buzzed low and surged and diminished in cycles of effervescent heaves and grumbles. Yes, indeed, keep music evil and undammed. 

And then, new cascades of melodic intensities burst forth from the drone’s sound but moving ground. From its percipient body emerged twangy echoes of the middle and high registers. The reverberations of the refractoryharmonies of vibrating strings and resonating wooden hollows complemented each other like waves of crashing light. There were parallel, contrary, and oblique movements of diffractory dissonances and consonances. These chromatic cross-relations of harmonies included the inharmonious qualities of minor thirds. This sort of jangling sickness can break either way, but the nausea of it hadn’t hit them yet, only the ecstasy.   

It was all building to something, an apocalypse without an end, which is how the invisible is revealed without reducing it to the visible. They stepped down the hall with all sorts of unnecessary but significant movements. When flows of intensities are only partially objectified, their extensions in space-time are indecipherable from the so called “scientific view” of the world, which is the perspective given by the material reduction. It mostly looked like bare madness, but it was a mad promenade full of sound and fury, and the signification of somewhere else, an elsewhere that had arrived here. They were as far from the “natural attitude” of the phenomenological reduction as they were from scientific naturalism. Whatever the reduction their intentions were under, it was a reduction without subtraction, but rather a presentation of the irreducible ambiguity that was normally hidden by their default-mode networks. 

As they slowly whirled into the main, domed atrium, the music was peeking in a magnificent, throbbing frenzy. They saw that the waters of its massive middle tank glowed black as pitch, which became an impossibly deep green instrange flashes of dim phosphorescent light. There was a gassy atmosphere swaying adagio around the tank. The musicians were, as of yet, out of sight because the cartel couldn’t look away from the living world of the giant caldron at the center of the watery tabernacle. Once seen, there was no unseeing. Something indecipherable had changed in their way of being. Beyond whatever change the mass exodus from the zone had wrought, beyond their studies, beyond their sex cult, they had become new. Every reduction of intentionality would hence force produce the irreducible in addition to whatever their concepts could make whole. They stood together in rapt awe at the esoteric intensities that showed themselves without uncovering. What intention had indented this lack of intention?