[...]ains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (
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”
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)
non-
cosmic ballistics
nocturnality and contagion
snakes and dragons of constellations
paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)
death-spell
-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
Khonsu
Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “that which is hidden by moonlight”
Apep
giant sea-snake said to lurk again in the primordial gloom
evil lizard,
(sectarian logic?)
desire for clear reactional materiality
teratological and semi-demonological turn
interjecting thingness, fiendishness, and monstrosity into our midst
night
(from) orthodoxy
(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought
(reconciling)
Ahriman
omnimalevolent side
first destructive spirit
twins of the primeval choice
dwelling in non-being
shape-stealer
self-cutting (cooking of his own paranormal tissue)
earthly creation
a sunless place
mortal transactions (of civilizational, philosophical, religious, and moral trials)
night-raid
nocturnal fierceness
asceticism of the warrior
asceticism of the night-watchman
(
learn to talk with night
language of mood (subtle movements of)
Bronze Age eschatologies
queen of riddles
cosmic idolater
her language never argues, only propositions
dark thoughts
evanescing moon
...guerilla leader who fled into the mountains and froze to death beneath the night sky
thoughts of
Mirza Kuchak Khan
Jangali
...once the leader of the jungle movement; now the jungle will confiscate him
inspiration
horoscope
sensitivity to lower-grade intimation
when the dead pass into the deep of the night
when night's deep appears in those who have disappeared
Blanchot
Mohaghegh on Blasim's The Madman of Freedom Square
the story of two foreigners known as ‘the blondes’, identical twins of fair hair and complexion who come each morning (their place of origin and purpose unknown) to roam down the main street of a neighborhood called the ‘Darkness District’. This quarter of the capital city is thus named for being the only sector still lacking electricity, and our nar- rator describes the residents there as physically gaunt and existentially worn down. This is an unwell place, and so the sudden arrival of the blondes represents a contrast, a radical anomaly and an enchantment-in-waiting for a zone that otherwise wants nothing more than to lay down and give up forever. We are told that the ambiguity of their circadian walk has an immediate transformative effect on the district; though these figures never speak, they cast gentle glances upon the inhabitants on either side of the street, and this courtesy soon bears miraculous fruit as the wishes of each person, young and old, man and woman, find themselves granted. By day and by night, the Dark- ness District escapes its former wretchedness to become an increasingly scenic area, with the government finally bringing electrical power and the locals planting flow- ers and showing acts of kindness to one another…all in honour of their two strange visitors (with whom we read that everyone has grown enamoured). They even build a stone monument in veneration to these silent newcomers. But then one morning the blondes do not materialize, as a violent coup is underway that sets the district on fire with bombs and missiles; amid the fighting, our narrator is flung against a wall, his life then saved by one of the blondes (their statue since demolished), and awakens in a mental asylum railing about the speechless aliens who rescued him (and the others)—only to find that no one has any memory of such beings or any trust in his recol- lections of them; he later finds himself strapped with a detonative suicide vest (the final light-bracketed image).
charisma-based society
[...]