#also... yes this man exists so my boy Theodore can have a boyfriend

[newtafterdark]

Hmmm... what if it's 2023 and I make another VTM OC but it's a Nos' this time? 👀

[incarnate-death]

Slaughterhouse part 1

I don’t think I will ever understand Paul Celan’s agonized poetry. He kept looking for something in the poetry that poems cannot provide and so failed to capture the misery, loss, love, and deaths of millions of people killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Talk about pressure. He wrote in German for the Germans who killed his father and mother and left him scarred for life. Through the decades of nightmares, anti-semitism, accusations of plagiarism, and mental hospitals, he never stopped writing in German. Such maddening horror—the inevitability of escaping the trauma even while seeking to be relieved from would be enough to drive anyone to drown themselves in the Seine River, which he did in 1970. But he made it further than other writers! Walter Benjamin: suicide, 1940—he tried to reach America through Spain but Nazis contacted the Spanish government to return him home (the camps) and he killed himself with a couple handfuls of morphine tablets (boy am I jealous) before the police could arrive. Benjamin’s friend and colleague, Arthur Koestler was not so lucky. After Benjamin’s death he took the leftover pills and tried to suicide with them—it didn’t work. Everything turned out alright for Koestler anyway; he made it until 1983 before he did what he should have done decades ago: Koestler and his wife killed themselves with an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol, which is much more appealing than opiates in my opinion. (To tell the truth, I’ve never even read Koestler’s work. ) But the best way to go was told to me be my friend, a professor: lay in a cold snowy forest, one pack of Newport Menthol 100s (my addition), an iv drip of dmt (my addition) a fistful of barbiturates and another fist full of 2mg xanax bars, but they can’t be generic. 2mg xanax bars are a wonder of design. There should be a special exhibit for bars at the MoMA.

I bet the pharma company spent millions deciding the precise size and shape of the 2mg xanax bar; perhaps this is why I can buy brand name 2mg bars for 8 dollars a piece, but only  $4 four 4 half milligram pills. 4 pills for two milligrams?? We’d get full before we could eat enough to feel it, much less kill ourselves.

I sometimes fantasize about iving fatal doeses of DMT straight to certain egotistical and/or evil people’s veins when they’re not looking. Some people just need to join the dead. My partners father: he was a piece of shit ass and tried to drown Z when they were ten, then when they came home from college he told them he couldn’t stay cause of his transition.

Jean Amery’s shoulders were dislocated as the Nazis tied a rope around his hands behind his back and hung him up like and did lots of other dirty things. Amery admitted the truth about writing about the Holocoaust and torture: to convey the pain of his torture, he must torture. Amery refused to write about the camps or in German more than a decade after his release. He also brought up the problem implicit in our lives: what is dignity? Some people thing a human loses dignity when they can’t marry who they want, Amery writes. I think he knew it was futile to write in German for Germans about the Holocaust, but failure is irresistible so he ended up doing it anyway. Perhaps his resistance kept him alive longer than Celan, who wanted everything and never stopped writing for a moment until his death. Celan was almost even greedy with poetry. Amery didn’t kill himself until 1978—another overdose. But Primo Levi (also yet to read his writing) is the real marvel: it wasn’t until 1987 that he threw himself out of the third story of his apartment. I hope you don’t think worse of Primo Levi because he made some poor EMSA person scrape him off the pavement. I worked in emergency services and it would be an honor, perhaps even a joy or a privilege to clean up anyone in artistic relation to Celan and maybe even fuck with the leftovers a little bit while no one is looking. but most of all I am validated by the knowledge that because i did my job right, no one will step over him like the road kill we all are. As much as I’d like to be on the EMSA team that scraped these guys up, I’ll admit it was quite inconsiderate of him to make such a mess.

there is however much to admire about Celan’s stamina. He wrote from the 1940s until his death. It’s unthinkable to me. Theodor Adorno explained the dilemma of Celan and his contemporaries: it is impossible to write in the same language and produce cultural capital in the German context without recreating the Nazi horror and therefore barbaric.

The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. (Prisms, 34)

The Nazis didn’t disappear. They are still neighbors. But Adorno later retracted the statement; the poetry isn’t barbaric, but it requires the same bourgeois coldness to the suffering of others that characterized Nazism. In a sense, they all wanted that coldness, even Adorno. He is brutally honest in

his retraction of his previous critique of poetry: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

In other words, if they had any sense they would have killed themselves long before they had the time to write much less publish. Yes, Celan, Levi, Amery, and Koestler must have been truly evil not to suicide before pen became print. Instead, they spent countless hours sharpening their line breaks, enjambments, and images, reading literature, philosophers and mystics and magicians and historians so they would have the power to peel the skin off their readers’ bodies and make them watch it while the poet douses the husk of their readers’ flesh with kerosene and sets it on fire. It’s obvious that this is what they would have liked to do, but in the end, meh. Their writing was brilliant, yes, but flashes not sunlit hours, no spontaneous human combustion at the site of a poem. I wish they were magicians, not just poets; maybe then they could recite incantations and really show me what torture is like. I can handle being knicked for sure, but not if reading their writing requires me to adopt the cold bourgeois mentality of your average US secretary of state, which is pretty fucking cold. No, I’d rather be dead.  V soon now, I will kill myself with a bullet to the brain in the two bedroom apartment I share with my partner.

     I’m not the scholar on the above authors. My partner is. I simply became obsessed with their research, particularly regarding Celan and began investigating it in a different academic field. Z’s research has convinced me that suicidedeath is the only way for people like me. I’m not comparing myself to being a Jew in 1942. I just see partial homologies that help me understand the world and my relation to it.

     Once, when Z was escorting in Chicago to earn extra cash for grad school, someone stole hundreds of dollars and enough bars to make us both forget a month. I was at home doing drugs and had no solution but would listen as best I could. Z’s friend, D, is also an escort.  Some of her money was stolen as well and she called her boyfriend who got the numbers of the dudes who tried to rape our significant others, then stole from them, and threatened to come to their house and personally beat them. I’ve never been scared of D’s boyfriend because even though he’s big and got a deep voice, he’s mostly slumped. But damn he must have scared them, because they gave the money, but the drugs were gone. Some of my partner’s friends from highschool took care of him and his friends for us a couple weeks later; they are allmiddle class whiteboys and they lied about their addresses, saying they lived in the ghetto. We all threw a little money up and no one knows what happened or who beat them. Z called me after it first happened and said how angry they were they were trying to think of something to punch that wouldn’t break any knuckles. I said stopsign and they went straight out of a 5 star hotel in Chicago and started smashing the side of the nearest street sign over and over with their brass knuckles. If you don’t touch the bar in the middle, it just snaps back. he got arrested for disorderly conduct, but the cops didn’t find the cocaine stuffed up his vagina. They didn’t find out about the prostitution or anarchist organization we work for. I paid bail and we moved on. It tends to goes like that.