7: Deep Calls to Deep

What Intents 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.  

At some point in the night, dreams disconnect from their uses altogether and return to the useless beauty, sublimity, and horror that birthed them in the first place. When we lose ourselves in play, and in the play of dreams, we return home to the infinite play from which we came. We don’t tell stories for the practical propagation of the species alone, but we propagate the species for the sake of stories. The material consequences of our embodied play give our stories gravitas, so that the skin we put in the game intensifies the value of stories beyond value altogether. What is a body’s value if not for journeying forth into what is invaluable, which is the transcendent immanence of an ecstatic yarn? Our access to the infinite is always through our finitude, and there is no way to better use up our finitude than by strutting and fretting for the hour that we are allotted on this stage with the reckless abandon of the idiot who tells all great tales that signify nothing except the non-fungible, what-it-is-like of being in it. 

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 rolling,emerald 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 darkness made visible. 

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 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 the cryptic incandescence of Elsewhere had been conjured at these holy coordinates. 

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 outside air of the Zone. They would have choked on this rich brume only a minute ago. Whatever it was, it was a new breath that passed through their pores and nourished organs that they hadn’t had 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 seeped into 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 unending hollow within them. 

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 were foregrounded against the shadowy gloaming of the moving waters by their semi-independence intention. 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 darkly 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 infamous 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 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 smothering waves 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 become blank, white slates, from which they were unable to differentiate any distinct thoughts, only throbbing fear. All the familiar canals of their default mode networks were flooded with the unbearable brightness of nothingness, the super-saturate nothingness of boundless terror.  

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 writhed uncontrollably and gagged on the foam that had been formed by his panicked breathing and his vomit. 

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. There are other worlds very close to this one that should never be seenbecause they do not offer any revelation but only blinding horror. Their affects burn so dark in the intuition that the intention goes mad trying to make whatever they are appear. The dark radiance of those other places was in them now, swimming through their bowels and cerebrums, turning them all into inarticulate mush. They were trapped again in stony silence, only beginning to become aware of the peril that their bodies were in.  

The basic, still mostly affective, concept of overwhelming pain began to occur to them as something nameable. Whatever it is that allows concepts to emerge out of pure sensation slowly came back online, but not much.Massive waves of thoughtless emotion continued to rattle through their bodies. Their minds were ruined, and they were beginning to understand that in some rudimentary way. They could never again awaken from the nightmare, 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 their fragile, Earth-bound bodies. They weren’t ready to inhabit an unhomeliness quite so unhomely yet. One can never be ready for such awful things. Could their bodies still move in the world that had made them, the world that they had lost? 

“My God, what was that?” Gabriel miraculously moved his mouth to ask.  

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 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 skeletal, 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 them, it remembered them even though they had forgotten it until then. 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 these wild things back to the wild from which they came, back to their “un-homely” home. 

There are textures and complex subtitles in sound that unfold dimensions of the body that were folded when the body became an extended thing. 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, which alchemists call the twice negated blackness of the “Nigredo,” which is the “super-saturated” darkness that Pseudo-Dionysus saw when he was granted the “Beatific Vision.”  

Onward down the long corridor, they followed the pounding drums. They shimmered in the black light as they shuffled in time to the “four-on-the-floor" beat. The drums must be massive given the depths of their booms. In the thrall of the dark ritual, they reverently danced toward 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 their preferences mattered very little then. It was nonetheless wonderful to resonate with whatever decisions were being made and with whomever was making them. Those pigskins had been stretched over monstrous vessels and struck to prepare vast minions for war. Indeed, the drums were war machines, which were a part of an enormous assemblage of the machinic processesof battle, and the violence that they portended was now their macabre ally. It was the violence of “deterritorialization,” as brother Guattari had preached. The cartel had been strangled to stagnation by the arboreal concepts of those who had raised them, but when those trees had been uprooted and left, their thoughts had remained in them. Whatever differences they imagined had grown between themselves and those others were superficial and impotent. They yearned for the individuation of differentiation rather than that of resemblance, which only comes when the “Big Other” is put into relation with the absolute otherness of the Real. The drums were clearing away their familiar bodies and their dearest intentions, at least, for a short time. Was it enough time for them to find lines of flight to new, smoother bodies and 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 striated bodies and intentions. One’s, Facticity is a sticky substance, like an unbreakable habit, 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. This is the immanence of transcendence, or how far, is near. 

Genitals of all kinds began to finally flow with blood again. These lost currents had also been called out of their gloomy slumbers, back into the light of an indeterminate purpose, defined only by the open purposes of the drums of the deep. And then, suddenly, sublimely, a fantastic drone rose up and filled the air with voluminous awe and complex, dissonate affect that resonated with the bodies that they were beginning to remember. It soared low in vertiginousswoops that made their brains and gonads buzz with pleasing waves of deep delectation. There are certain, evil chords that manifest the uncanny voice of the numinous in the intentions of those with ears to hear. Evil can be either of the generous sort or of the petty. The petty one is what most people call “evil” like gratuitous criminality or wonton mistreatment of innocence. The generous one is generative of difference, so it is evil because its gratuity augurs the coming violence of the new. A truly righteous drone must be evil because the refractory zones between the notes of its chord are like cups running over with victorious mayhem.  

A baritone horned instrument droned like a massive shofar. Its horror was deafening, but without hurting their ears because ears were meant for drones before they were used for whatever other practical purposes they have been put to. 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. The affective objects that they were sensing couldn’t be objectified in their intentions, yet they made blurry impressions in their intuitions. 

The living things in the giant, glass cisterns were also enlivened by the bass tones that penetrated their watery containment. Now, the twilight dimly illuminated other things in their obscure streams. There were colors and flashesof foreign configurations of aquatic organisms, as well as of those variously tentacled things without countenances, but no faces. Everything was moving but without heads and without distinct beginnings nor ends. Some of the swirling organisms made their own light, and their tanks became cascades of supernatural luminesce. 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 currents 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. The refractory zones that form between dissonant currents are where new flows of obstreperous intensities are born, as our brother Deleuze has preached. The textures of rhythms lure, without domination, multiplicities into the configurations of 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 because they couldn’treduce what they knew to concepts, so they had to feel it. The affects of the experience were too proximal to reduce with intentional concepts. Why not just go mad at the incomprehensible assemblages of awful things parading all around them and penetrating their innermost sanctums? Were they looking for patterns amidst the purity of this difference? At that moment they joyfully let whatever intentions they had, be broken open by the fall of love, but what was the object of their love? At such times, it is always the non-object of what cannot be objectified, but what is valued beyond the value of precious things. Pick up the pieces later, if you can. Their thoughtless enthusiasm for the alchemical elixirs rushing through their porous skins and in the cavernous passages of their veins reduced whatever thinking was left to the rapturous failure of thought, which was a succulent fright. 

The deterritorialization of the Zone had promised something that they hadn’t been able to realize because the Big Other who had ostensibly left, remained in them. They had kept the devastation of the bug apocalypse and of the subsequent mass exodus from themselves by repeating the past, so that Elsewhere couldn’t come near. But now that far away place was near, even though it always had been, even before the incomprehensible arrival of the irreducibleinsect populations to the Zone. Later, their default intentions would return as would the language that constructed them, but maybe some of its striations would be smoothed a bit, so that it would be easier for them to find the outside that was always within them.  

Their “authenticity” studies had taken the form of ridding themselves of “The They,” as Heidegger had called the voice of “society” speaking in their heads, but finding their own voices in this reactionary way had only entrenchedthe Big Other more deeply into the folds of their cerebellums. They had become a sex cult after all, “The They” couldn’t have been more pleased. But it wasn’t the fault of the studies or of Heidegger, although, he is responsible for a lot of other bullshit. The studies had opened possibilities that could have gone either way, more openness or more closedness. “More openness” for the cartel’s purposes meant, more bringing outside otherness in without reducing its otherness to the sameness of identity.  

The Big Other can’t be gotten rid of as long as one uses language and concepts to articulate her experience, but the Big Other can be brought into relation with the outside otherness of the Real, so that the Big Other’s speech becomes new in relation to its limit. They had unconsciously chosen to repeat the speech of the past both despite and in accord with themselves because they couldn’t get beyond the dialectic of recognition that knocked around in their head as the voice of the imagined Other. But misrecognition is as important as recognition when it comes to new speech. If whatever you see, you reduce to whatever you already know, then there is no unknowing to make new. Every moment had seemed to be stuck in an eternal return of whatever there was before, until now. Now, Elsewhere had arrived, and it was speaking. They would spend the rest of their lives trying to understand what it meant. They would find that the irreducibility of its ambiguity would be the gift of otherness that is the continual renewal of being called “becoming.” 

Revelation makes the invisible visible without reducing it to the merely 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 indetermination, rather than to anything programmatic. Fidelity to the event binds one to the freedom of its irreducible ambiguity. But freedom is only sought after,until it’s given, and then its acrophobia inevitably causes one to flee to more solid ground. To be free is an almost impossible slog, as the Existentialists taught. Freedom is too much to give and too much to receive, which is Lacan’s definition of love as “Giving what you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it.”  

Giving without having is determining without reducing indetermination, so that your giving and receiving actuate more possibility through their realization, which is how this indeterminate love generates unwanted freedom. Most Westerners have at least heard of the Daoist concept of Wu Wei, or “purposeless action,” which is doing without reasons. Purposelessness “inadvertently” multiplies purposes because purposelessness can’t prevent purposes from arising. However, love must be active, or intentional, because purpose can become too determinate, or too intentional, and constrict being’s becoming by blocking its accesses to the spaciousness of indeterminacy. But being’s access to its nonbeing can’t be prevented for long, so love enjoys the openness of becoming in such a way as to intend it, like Nietzsche's “Amori Fati,” in which the inevitability of becoming is embraced as if freely chosen. 

Love is realized in such away as to open more possibilities for being’s becoming, which means that it does not restrict its access to the otherness of its nonbeing unless this sheltering is a temporary strategy to build the capacity for more possibilities. Love is active because it is vigilant about being’s becoming in relation to unknowable otherness, but its care is excessive when it reduces uncertainty in favor of the falsity of guarantees. But lack of care can become excess too. To protect without sheltering, or to intend without intending, is a balancing act that requires care without caring too much or loving without smothering. So, in as much as purposeless action is loving, it may be “purposeless” because it is ambiguous, or without guarantees, but not without purpose altogether.  

Love’s creativity is to allow for as many independent purposes as possible, which sounds passive, but love must be more deliberative than simply “not caring.” It must be the “shepherd of being,” as Heidegger put it, to discern which realizations of its care give more freedom, which is more access to otherness, the otherness that allows being to be an open flow of becoming, and to discern which realizations reduce creation by reducing creation’s ground in the ultimate otherness of nonbeing. This is how love makes, or opens up, more possibilities in its realization of a particular possibility. The purpose of music is the revelation of the purposeless ground of all other purposes through the realization of particular, sonic possibilities.  

The righteous rhythms and the mighty drones that the cartel was soaking in were revelations without the determination of knowing, or determinations without the reduction of indeterminacy, or knowing without the reduction of unknowing. Music puts knowing into relation with its ground in unknowing because whatever music is, it isn’t for uncertainty reduction, but rather it is for uncertainty production. Whatever conventions music employs, they are repetitions of difference, or of variation. Variation is the relation of repetition to difference or the determinate to the indeterminate, or of the conventions of the known in the register of the Symbolic to the novelty of the unknown in the register of the Real. Music’s revelation remains hidden, even when it is determined by particular instruments and intended sounds. All ethics are derived from the absolute maxim to act as if you are music, as well as that maxim’s extrapolation, which is to never use somebody as if they didn’t also contain the Imago Musica.  

They strode forward with lusty hopes but without the familiar fears that had nagged at them for most of their lives, fears that were familiar because they had objects. Their fears had become anxieties about non-objects, which is the ground for the good kind of evil, the kind in which destruction and creation are so closely aligned. Fear about objects is the ground of the petty, stupid sort of evil that desires identification at the cost of ambiguity, which is the fatuouslove of prediction machines for certainty over beauty, sublimity, and horror. The identities that they had made of their own and of each other's intentions were the objects of their fears, fears which reduced their desires to the idiotic equations of their intentions to things. But those reactionary intentions, fashioned by their fears of the Other and their deference to the Big other, had now been replaced with the sort of indeterminate anxieties that are more like the curiosity that opens one up to unknown gods.  

Music is a non-object that penetrates without phallic intentions because its determinations are open and generative rather than domineering. Their anxieties had been “open” in the sense that they were about the indeterminacy of what they imagined about their own and each other’s intentions, but these were the fears that wanted the closure of identifiable objects. Now, their anxieties were the non-objects that resist determination altogether, which were the no-things that were swirling all around them in the massive but subtle waves of determinate being becoming indeterminate as the realization of love. But whose purposeless action was it? That’s the point of Wu Wei, it is intention without an intender, or intentionless action, so its ground or source must be purposelessness itself, which is the outside other of the Big Other: the Real. 

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 because she loved the murkyaffects 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. And how much control over her magnetism? Whatever power the others thought she had, she hadn’t had the power to stop herself from hearing their voices in her head until now. And she couldn’t stop the endless repetitions 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 this sublime beauty that was indistinguishable from horror. But this beautiful horror was given to her and the others by the failure of concepts, not by not having the correct concepts, or the concepts that corresponded to an objective, external state of affairs. 

And then more drums jumped in, tuned to the mid and high registers, forming polyrhythms with each other and with the colossal boom of the bass drums. The already huge hall became even larger, opening spaces within spaceslike the unfolding of extra dimensions. They had misremembered their bodies in the gravity of matter-energy's dialectic. 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 the 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 containment is the excess of being called “becoming.”   

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 subjugation but also of their subjectification.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 intoinsignificant. But not for en-languaged beings, who are trapped in the significance of signification, even when their signifiers are of the void. 

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. The pattern recognition of prediction machines is whole and complete when it correctly corresponds tooutcomes. But patterns like all recognizable things are liable to misrecognition, including the misrecognition of themselves when they fail to repeat as occurs sometimes when DNA fails to be a repetition of the same. 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 the imaginary wholeness of an identity. Insects arefree of the anxieties of symbolic intentions, but not of misrecognition, which means that they are free of anxiety, even when their pattern recognition mechanisms fail.  

Their misrecognitions don’t contain the anxious failure of the imaginary to make whole and complete as the failure of symbolization does. There is only a buggy kind of fear of what is either recognized or misrecognized as untoward. When an insect doesn’t “know,” it isn’t because of the “non-relation” to the “non-object” of anxiety provoking indetermination, as it is for the being whose anxiety is the “sickness unto death,” as Kierkegaard put it. Insect misrecognition is a simple failure to correctly identify, or to adapt to, a pattern. Entomological worlds do not contain the sort of subjectivities fashioned by the Symbolic and the awareness given by symbolic failure in the register of the Real. A prediction machine without symbolic subjectivity, has right or wrong prognostications but none of the uncanny hauntings of the indeterminable Real. If this minimal, insect awareness isn’t entirely automatic, it is close to it because it is an awareness that can’t lack or desire but only need and obtain, or not. Whatever anxiety this sort of consciousness knows, it isn’t the enfeebling fear of the Other’s unknowable intention, which forms the disquietude ofwhat resists symbolization absolutely, the Real. There is no Real without the Symbolic. In the hearts and minds of the beings for whom being is a concern, misrecognition is the recognition of the unknowable Real. 

Symbolic recognition isn’t a life and death proposition for those things without the desire for and of the desire of the other in the register of the Real. Every thought bound to the Symbolic, refused to be free for fear of the Real, which is 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 rather than reduce it, as they were designed by evolutionary biology to do, it is because they have been staring into the abyss for too long and their imaginal projections have encountered the Real. And when this “abyss stares back,” something new appears in the relation between the imaginal projection of the subjective intention, which is Lacan’s virtual object that he called “Object-small-a,” and the devastating counter-gaze that resists this positivation of lack. Whatever mistaken “concepts” an insect may have, this failure is the failure of a prediction machine without the anxiety of symbolic failure. 

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 selectionof 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 immediately reinstated 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 music’s 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 flows of intensities like music structures sound. Gradients, thresholds, and shuntings vary intensities by relating them to various sorts of limits like the combustion engine creatively restricts its flows to produce movement. The drum extends its auditory intensities by the joyous collision between the pig’s skin stretched over a hallow barrel and the wooden stick that extends the machinic assemblage of a body. 

 Only because the drum pushes back on the body is there sound. Semantic meaning is manufactured by this same relation between symbolization and its resistance. Potential is nothing until it is actuated into possibility by the realization of a limit, which is the reciprocal relation of energy to its resistance in matter. The glorious catastrophe of a mallet hitting a drum is the realization of previously actuated possibility that actuates more possibility from out of the abyss of potential. Spirit’s indeterminacy needs the determinations of the material body to push against; otherwise, there can be no expression of an intention. Energy needs matter’s resistance to extend itself through one’s collision with the other. And 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 being through an asymmetrical, monadic self-relation of material bodies and energetic spirits. 

How does music move the body? It is a sort of immediate mediation of the divine intention, which forms the unbalanced, refractory zones of relational vibrations between and among the machinic processes of bodies. Being is not only being-there but also being-with, which means the necessary but playful relations of the individual intention to the communal because individuation is the communal project of differentiation. The musicality of play was how life, as a communal endeavor, orchestrated the intensities of the One into the multiplicities of bodies. Music is a war-machine because its communities of relations produce the variations of differences that disrupt the without-relation of substance, which is the without-relation of a cancerous repetition of the same. Where the Symbolic plays with the Real, there is a catastrophe, but it is the trauma that produces whatever beauty, sublimity, or horror there might be. 

The insect drone of the zone unified the vibrations of insect bodies without the imaginary unity of symbolic intention, but its unconscious meanings produced significant non-objects in the imaginations of the cartel. The indeterminate ambiguity of the drone could be beautiful, sublime, or horrible depending on the parallax shifts of the cartel’s imaginal projections into it. The truths of invariable essences are of no concern to bugs, nor to the Real. Insectshave an indexical relation with the noises that they produce, which may signify 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 can hear the imaginary whole that music presents, there is an ambiguous revelation to behold in the precipitous doom of a drone, a bit like the brightness of hope. The hope drone in the aquarium was not that of insects. It was the semantic drone of the subjects of the signifier. It buzzed low and surged and diminished in cycles of effervescent heaves and the pleasing grumbles of deep satisfaction. 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 the twangy, repetitive melodies of the middle and high registers whose echoes bounced offeach other and formed refractory zones between and among them. The reverberations of harmonies comprised of vibrating strings and resonating wooden hollows complemented each other like waves of crashing light. There wereparallel, 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 rhythmically stepped down the hall in various, unnecessary but significant bodily movements. When flows of intensities are only partially objectified, their extensions in space-time are indecipherable to 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 an extravagantly 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 reduction their intentions were under, it was a reduction without subtraction, but rather a full presentation of the irreducible ambiguity that withdraws from all other reductions. 

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 gaseous atmosphere swaying adagio around the tank. The musicians were, as of yet, out of sight in the foggy cavern. The cartel couldn’t look away from the living world of the giant caldron at the center of the watery tabernacle. Something indecipherable had changed in their way of being. Beyond whatever rupture the mass exodus from the zone had wrought, beyond their studies, beyond their sex cult, theywere becoming new. Every reduction of intentionality would hence force produce what was irreducible about their intuitions in addition to whatever their symbolic imaginations could make whole. They stood together in rapt awe at the esoteric intensities that showed themselves without disrobing, so that the intention and the extension revolved around each other forming infinitely strange loops.