[...]nfrontation between the comic and the tragic --> situates the trickster between the *world's balance and unbalance*

(migration or) migrant: (~= fugitive:) individuals who are reborn existentially precisely through the act of the escape, in order to trick their persecutors ==> survive
[=/= the juggler: Nicolas]

Mohaghegh's proposal: *to lie our way into the lie*

-how and where is my unreal located in my work on bestiaries?
past --> forsaken ancients
outside --> time of disappearance

seduction: immersion in style


our guardian: the thief

(learning from Mohaghegh and Cinderella to be/operate for each other) between:
orchestrator (influence, innovation, experimentation --> laboratory)
partner (equivalence, benefit, reciprocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. stands for: laboratory, alliance, bondage {bondage should be part of every (artistic or knowledge-intensive) practice}

the question/problem of: incompatibility of past and present, there and here

object of event or journey (expedition, venture,)

story of the “archive of...” : collection of savored differences

the unreal is not always imaginative or speculative
it is sometimes:
a drive (suffering, passion,)
a password (encryption)
a device (machine, guide,)
accidental and chosen

the character’s wisdom, impulse, cunning, courage (endangerment), innocence (purity), violence (rage, atrocity)

intelligence: diabolical perception

...................................

(to achieve) the perfect secret: a secret that when revealed remains a secret (a riddle, a puzzle ~= monster: confrontation of the raw unnamable)
future liar --> to resurrect (in the form of fable or rumor):
•fake archive (=/= real witness)
•buried forged artifacts in some gamble
•
--> future out of sync (hyperbolic commons) ==> (an aesthetic of) temporal deviation [=/= messianic time of revolution, historical time of modernity, chronological time of capitalism,] --> (the task of) **thinking untimely**:
•forgetting
•erasure
•recreative
(Artaud's vampiric schizophrenic untimeliness...)

(Sina + Mohaghegh's) *existential radicalism*

night: underground of time
where other things can happen
a phenomena where people encounter mercilessly anonymous indifferent impersonal inhuman nature of the universe
(Mohaghegh's work on the renditions of nocturnality)

(carnaval's) multiple forms [prototype after prototype] --> formfullness =/= (deconstruction's) formlessness

...................................

ordering ==> violence, exclusion, injustice, sacrifice =/= ~=> residue (of ordering --Serres--> its excluded inessential, peripheral, parasitic) *thermal exciter*
•the anthologizing, selecting, and ordering act @Marialena
•with the discourse of parasite we are at including and inclusion

now our relationship to knowledge is to be more extravagant and parasitic =/= economic and fast

every time we write (sometimes referring the reader to the dictionary) we are also reviving language

...................................

criminal's relation to the dark (fugitive, dealer, prowler ولگرد) =/= wanderer's relation to the dark (nomad, sojourner, sleepwalker)

Mohaghegh --on--> sub-identities whose survival relies upon a certain exact mastery of night's formulas + learning its conceptual-experiential relations to: time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, enigma, solitude, sensation, vision, secrecy, monstrosity, the body

night
•[where one] fathoms otherwise
•the time-space of the visionary, the imaginary, the unreal, the unknown, the elsewhere, the outside, the emergent
•[where one] letting fall those droplets of mad and dangerous consciousness
•[where] governing categories of human existence are suspended ==> alternative classifications (banned libraries, archives, catalogs, arrangements)
•
•
=/= light --promises--> a certain stability of Being

those with a pathological need to rule
those with a diabolical impulse to abandon (subvert, reinvent)
those with nothing to lose (desperation)
those with everything to gain (quest)

time of weeping
(mourn, “this should never have happened”) creation as error; being as error


solipsistic cruelty: no longer recognizes itself in anything else nor anything else within itself


[Mohaghegh, prototype harbour, night harbors:]
return of the full moon --> metamorphosis --> werewolf
return of the nightmare --> fright --> dreamer
return of the sacred --> resurrection --> redeemer
return of the curse --> vengeance --> enemy
return of the tides --> migration --> sailor
return of the banished --> hatred --> exile
return of the ancient --> power --> idol
return of the text --> evocation --> messenger
return of the threat --> intimidation --> extortionist
return of the dead --> disappearance --> ghost
return of desire --> obsession --> stalker
return of pain --> infection --> virus
return of the discarded --> waste --> vagrant
return of glory --> vindication --> fighter
return of the scene --> concealment --> criminal
return of dust --> mortality --> creation
return of instinct --> animality --> creature
point of no return --> irreversibility --> lost cause


masochistic skepticism
sadistic truth
(Mohaghegh's) *deception theory*


death of God + death of the Human + death of the Real ==> limitless epochal existential era of lying

existential forgery
ingenuity
deceit
treacherous play
fictive double-crossing
elaboration


(thief's, runaway's, insomniac's, hysteric's, sorcerer's, and other night-traveler's) sensorial orchestrations of the dark intervals

morphologies of the night-traveler:
•the old boat-passengers once placed under enforced isolation
•the exiles displaced from occupied homelands
•the marauding sectarian factions who patrolled city streets each night (darkness = ideology)
•the slaughtered minorities traversed into non-being
•night-revelers عیاش
•

militant storyteller
phantom ancestors
phantom offsprings


nightclub: a place of nocturnal survival

club manager
lighthouse-keeper

(catastrophic imagination --> fable of) slum = the true face of the city

persecuted, transient, unrescued

(wunderkammer) a cabinet of curiosities (~/?= pandora's box) of subjects, objects, atmospheres, associates, body parts

ontocidal: decimation of Being, both individual and universal


medieval islamic world renders us countless templates linking night to sacred and profane realms: stories of augury, mantic beings, and vatic utterances in circulation from all sides

Thousand and One Nights
god's turbulent relation to obscurity

crescent moon

...brilliant speculative accomplishment of the Golden Age of Islamic Thought now a dark age of its own

معراج miraj (Mohaghegh's Dante's ascension)
sky-voyage of the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and then upwards into heavenly spheres, filled with supernatural descriptive passages of guardian angels, paradisiac gardens, hell-bound valleys, meteorological orbits, fatal latitudes and meridians, and the gargantuan throne of God itself

night-journey: spiritual + corporeal --> prophetic night (of strange breathing apparatus <-- angelic wing)

angel's wing [that spans entire worlds] --reopens--> (the relational channel between) desire & fear
(descriptions of seeing an angel's body)
==> sarin, cyclosarin, tabun, soman
==> respiratory failure, diaphragm hyperactivity, fainting, pupil constriction, salivation, myoclonic jerks (muscle spasms), cardiac arrest
}--> synaptic breakdown ==> cholinergic crisis --> captive in a state of poisonous ventilation

buraq: a chimera of: animality + humanoid + gemological (multiplicies) + machinic + vegetal + spectral (virtues) =/= taxonomical purity of creation
•stretch the barometers of hybridity, androgeny, disproportionality
•zig-zagging, levitation, elliptical arcing
•like a horse, smaller than a mule and bigger than a donkey. Its face was like a human's face, and its ears were like the ears of an elephant...Its head was of ruby, its wings of pearl, its rump of coral, its ears of emerald, and its belly of red coral. Its eyes were like glittering stars, and its tail of pearl, and its reins of light
--> vehicle to traverse from geographical to cosmological space

journey-to-the-center or exile-to-the-edge

[title]
*the old-hag world*
being-in-the-world = old hag with an ugly face, practice of seduction, artifice, cosmetic embellishment, optical tricks, enhancements

the designer, the seamstress, the architect, the sculptor, the illusionist, the surgeon, the perfumer --> surat صورت =/=? facade

[infernal-geological finale]
I heard a voice, whose intensity caused me to tremble with fear…I said, “O Gabriel, what is this terrible sound?” He answered, “O Muhammad, know that on that day God created hell, a rock slipped from the edge of hell. Until tonight it's been falling down. It has reached the bottom of hell just now.
#darkness, zolmat, rock
•pit's conceptual trinity
•hearing/listening is closely linked to ominous experience (the bell's toll, the wolf's howl, the thunder's rumble)


some passive surrender to vague faith
any suggestion of intuitive-experiential awareness (gnosis)

subject caught-between

sitophobia --> the fear of eating anything
aquaphobia --> the fear of drowning everywhere

between lamenter and euphoriac

islamic insistence on the concealed (unseen face of God) ==> profuse dissension, variance, discord, agitation (infinite faces)

lohe mahfuz
the guarded tablet
quantification
institutionalized record
universal finitude

1. artifacts of hell
◦camphor --> link between the demonic and the aromachological (mastery of the psychological effects of fragrance)
◦chain --> experience of ligatures, cords, shackles
◦nail --> impalement potential
◦stones --> crushing effect
◦drink boiling water (hamim) and filth (ghislin)
◦devils force-feeding them Zaqqum
◦demons were placing fiery bits of corpses into their mouths
◦ichor was dripping from their tongues --Mohaghegh--> ichor interestingly refers both to the mythic substance that runs in the veins of pagan gods and the putrid discharge that oozes from fresh wounds
◦hell-dweller: scorpion, ideal killing-machine, back-biter, poisoned tips
--> ***nonstop leaking of the inward outward***
2. body parts of hell
3. topographies of hell

Mohammad's night-journey's hellscape, vivid orchestration of space
[...]in one direction, a “river of bile, blood, worms, and fire[...] boiling together, putrid and revolting” alongside another “black and rippled with fire[...] growling at itself with clamour and terror”

experimental cuisine (demand a certain oblique consciousness from the participant)

angel physiognomy (multi body, collective chant) ~= underworld scorpions
atonal angelic larynx ==> non-harmonic, anarchic, cacophonous image of the heavens (--Mohaghegh--> divinity as noise)
•prophetic listener (body became organs of hearing, schizophrenic audition of شش جهت six directions)

wind of barrenness
rih al ‘aqim (from the species of criminal wind bad-e dabur, God sends it to destroy things)
•blows throughout the placeless realm
•particular condition of absence (in taxonomies of ruin and chasm)
•their moon-like faces
•innumerable

[*]veil: transcendent invisibility, receptacle of competing backstories (of shame, conspiracy, superiority, covert, elite)

galleries of self-covering demonic beings

Gabriel: angel of revelation (oversees:)
•khasf خسف sinking into the ground
•maskh مسخ disfiguration of features


astigmatism (a type of refractive error, retinal tearing)
cartographical layerings



(Mohaghegh reading a Babylonian nocturnal prayer)

(old) god [divinity cults of ancient worlds]: signposts of an extra-human imaginary ==> consciousness trespass beyond itself

in the face of the night's obscurity (when the all-seeing shuts its eyes)
pastoral life turns murderous (at dark)

signaling the absence of fairness...
blurring of omniscience...
delay of verdict...
aimlessness of quest

•blindness to fill the void of divination
•wandering, detour, or stillness to fill the void of odyssey


Sin
moon-god
•enigma (“he whose heart cannot be read”) --> epistemic
•futurity (remote: “could see farther than all the gods”) --> temporal

somnolence خواب و بيدارى
==> branches of nonsense pervade (disbanding of the herd)

(cypress سرو) tree
inspector of cosmological space


in theo-terrestrial plane:
1. alluvion: the wash or flow of water against a shore --> inundation
2. alluvium: a deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel left by flowing streams in a river valley or delta --> detritus [residuum alone is left to control the universe?]


Ishtar
guardian of prostitutes
surrounded in myth by death and disaster
goddess of contradictory connotations and forces (fair play & enmity, etc,)


Lillith (derived from the Akkadian lilitu: evening creature, specter, or monster)
kidnapping sleeping children

(according to the Babylonian cosmology) night requires (non-identitarian) gods capable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related to the more expansive domains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (=/= archetypal meaning)


Tiamat
primordial goddess of the salt sea, darkness, chaos, and creation
from the time of permanent nightfall
a destroyer-deity and yet whose sliced body parts form the heavens and earth
represented as unconscious, reckless annihilation and yet also holding diabolical intelligence
bathed in eternal blackness and yet known as “the glistening one”


Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)


non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)

cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)


nocturnality and contagion

snakes and dragons of constellations

paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)


death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watching



The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow

egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude woman
cow arching over the earth
--> night does rule from transcendent distances but rather envelops (or swallows) whole the existent into its gut (or uterus) [<-- digestion?]
[metaphysics:] (away from) patriarchal gaze --into--> maternal stomach

Khonsu
•bloodthirsty (eating the organs of royal opponents)
•merciful --> [its creative epithets:] traveler, embracer, pathfinder, defender, “He Who Lives on Hearts”
one who resembles his own waning moon

Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “that which is hidden by moonlight”

Apep =/= Ra (the light-god)
giant sea-snake said to lurk again in the primordial gloom
evil lizard, *world encircler*
•defeating Apep: ba[...]