Wound of Wounds: An Ovation for Emil Cioran

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WOUND OF WOUNDS An Ovation for Emil Cioran A Mount Abraxas Anthology Edited by Damian Murphy & N With Art by Louis Soutter and Edvard Munch and various Photography by Diverse Hands. * "It is of no importance for you to know who I am, since one day I will no longer be." Emil CIORAN To You, Who Kneel before Altars, To You, Whose Blood is made out of Words, To You, Who have the Will to Bliss, To You, Who are World Weary, To You, Who has no Country and knows no Borders, To You, the Aesthete, the Blasphemer, the Pornographer To You, The NIHL Let our wounds bear witness to the cult of the irrational, to the ultimate futility of human endeavor, to the inevitable spectre of perpetual decay and to the scandal of the first act of Creation. Who can deny that history is but a shadowplay of vanities and borders; that our prayers are snuffed like candle flames in the all-encompassing indifference of the Absolute; that time itself is weighted against us like a river that cannot be diverted from its course; that even our bodies are built to fall apart, incapable of withstanding the terrifying essences for which we suppose them to be the vessels? We cling to destiny with the ecstasy of shipwrecked mariners, though we know it to be a dead end. Let us glorify defiance as our last remaining virtue in the face of the tyranny of incarnation. We’ve retained the freedom, after all, to spoil our own lives; to embellish or evade the humiliations due to us; to embody, not without a certain dubious honor, the last among men in an empire of insolvency. And let us not forget the humor of the gallows, the one true solace that remains to us who wander through the ruins of a future shattered by the scourge of insidious utopias. O this impetuous void, this vast archive of nothingness that negates the very possibility of inquiry! Our legacy is a book so profuse as to obliterate all meaning. We’ve succeeded, in our insatiable thirst for wisdom, only in crafting a poison so subtle as to dissolve the means of comprehension. Our highest efforts have left us with a temple fallen, an altar erected on insubstantial grounds, a doctrine of dissent and mutual suspicion which is useful only as a weapon against ourselves. Even the revelation of the highest god compels us to self-annihilation. Let us pray, then, to oblivion—the match that strikes the brightest flame is worth far more to us than the most erudite of the tomes in all the libraries across the world. Let the smoke that rises from their blackened pages exceed the splendor of the sun! Let us proceed with fiery sermons and scathing condemnations, written over the course of a single sleepless night, scribed beneath the light of our afflictions and sealed with the blood of our iniquities; we’ll pen testaments to the intoxication of the exile, the self-abnegation of the poet, the secret narcissism of the mystic, and the immolation of the saint in the intolerable fires of perfection; what is needed is nothing less than a full-scale assault upon the bastions of fate and servitude—black epistles written on discarded cigarettes, smuggled in the broken hearts of the defectors, on the merits and the tedium of the labor of abandonment. It falls upon the poet, that most specialized of idiot savants, to exalt and overwhelm the mechanism of despair. To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege—how much more so the voluptuous sensuality of the mystic? Is there any freedom greater than that of absence, to remain unknown even to ourselves, to indulge in the luxury of self-abasement that we may, in our negation, smash the last remaining idol? He who knows no shame is the greatest ascetic of all. This is for Saint EMIL CIORAN, who dreamt of Spanish monasteries on women's breasts. Table of Contents: Misanthropos by Eugene Thacker The Infinite Error by Jon Padgett The Aristocracy of Weak Nerves by Justin Isis Obsolete Systems by Adam Golaski Bach’s Marionettes by Douglas Thompson This Disquiet Demiurge by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel The Translator of God's Silences by Thomas Stromsholt Saint Severina's Fire by Damian Murphy He is Heading Your Way Already by Rhys Hughes Decade by D.P. Watt The Genealogy of Night by Andrew Condous Horrill Hill by Karim Ghahwagi Dead Engrained Skin by Jonathan Wood The Treasons of the Rue de L'Odeon by Colin Insole The Funeral Cry by Stephan Friedman The European Monster Part II by Adam S. Cantwell Untitled by Charles Schneider A 11 pages PDF Preview is available at: [email protected]. For inquires and details, write to: [email protected]