Have a new piece! I tried shopping this around to literary journals and fantasy publications but it's proven to be a bit too weirdo for them so I'm releasing it to the Patrons instead. This is a metaphysics piece, the heart of Hingsajagra calcified like lightning.
Omniscients = Buddhas.
Devils = Buddhas.
All is Omniscient-Nature.
Watch: a fool born from the workers and laborers of the mountain terraces. She lies prostrate now. Worshipping no one but her Revolution and yet.
Yet, yet, yet.
A man clad in devilsteel and asurafiber weave—the telltale equipment of the oligarchy’s Militia; That is to say, the police—presses his heel on her bleeding neck.
The papers are strewn all across the floor. Half-finished papers—treatises—on the proposed fusion of Communist and Anarchist revolutionary forces, to re-establish the Selorongian Commune in a Tirjanggarian Repetition. That is to say, the repetition of an ancestral event with a materialist eye.
She will never get to see it, this daughter of a poor farmer. Scholar of Saint-Serafijaya University. An opportunity given to her due to her high Intelligence Quotient. A scale written up by the colonizers to erase Difference among the Colonized.
Jinah—that’s her name—does not weep. Her blood cries for her instead, seeping out of the flying blade wound gaping from her throat. Of course they’d go for her larynx first. It is her voice that she needs to speak. She can no longer cry out.
This used to be just a Book Club meetup place. Hidden in plain sight—an unassuming apartment rented out in Datojoranggung Street, in the Kungpyado Prefecture. The northwest district of the Metropolitan Selorong, built upon the bones of the dead god known as Revolution. This quarter of the metropolis is politically occupied by the liberal forces of the Central Yavinian Guild. The colonial arm of the Ressen-Nalenji Confederation, whose only goal is the colonization of the stars.
But someone gave the colonial state the tip off. Jojong said that they were never going to suspect a thing. “They think all the commies are dead. We’re all just Live Action Roleplayers to them anyway,” he said before.
Now his arm is torn from his heart and a spike of light launched from the gesturing hands and ululating lips of a State Militia Mystic has replaced his beautiful, beautiful brain.
Someone gave away that they were going to have one of the biggest meetups that night. The 12th day of Dog Month, on the Perfect Full Moon. It was supposed to be an auspicious time!Selorongians and those that come from surrounding probinsyas are ever beholden to superstition, to faith. In a world that is nothing but violence against human emancipation… what else shall you cling on to?
What ignorance, what stupidity it is to cling to the ideals of a revolutionary, thinks Jinah.
In her final moments she doubts.
Is this what Masangwa, that great revolutionary thinker, mandated? Endless and endless idealism, dreaming, theorizing of ways to fight for a better future, only to be trampled and beaten upon? Jinah, in her final moments, doubts and begins to spit on the ideals of revolution. It will only end in death, and one without honor, without family. In darkness and in darkness and in darkness.
“The path will be thorny and rocky until one realizes that this is the Royal Road toward Human Emancipation, where all will do according to their ability, and receive according to their need.”
What solace do these words give, as that one college guy she was supposed to ask out the next day stands bruised like a heart? As the Militia batter him with hellfiber clad gauntlets, asking him what his connections are to the Selorongian Liberation Army. He has no connections to that army. That boy, Sangtso… he joined because he wanted more friends.
Love for humanity is punished with undignified end, thinks Jinah.
Darkness swells now. Attempts to cover her. She utters no mantra, performs no mudra, and offers no professions of faith. Despite what her ultrafaithful farmer parents had told her to pray even in times of trouble. A prayer that confused Yenja the Savioress with Dattreya Wairini the Termagant Omniscient.
No invocation now.
Does she even believe in reincarnation?
And despite. Despite despite despite.
Rising from the blood, an altar to her despair: the six armed figure of Pusombulaw*,* the Crimson Heart Martyr-Saint. A pair of arms in mudra—two Ls formed with her fingers, forming a plus sign. A cross. She is naked, save for the skirt around her waist. Her skin soft and covered in a soft down. Her breasts firm against her chest.
This… this is her blood, Jinah realizes. From her blood arises uncertain hope.
Or is it hope in uncertainty?
The police don’t see the Martyr-Saint. Don’t notice the Martyr-Saint.
Now, Jinah finds her voice, and she knows that she has passed some threshold of Death’s Maw. That point where she doesn’t need her vocal chords to speak. Shall she meet the King of Hell, now?
She says: “Why don’t you help them?”
Pusombulaw Martyr-Saint’s face is perfect serenity, between pain and temperance. “Their time comes yet.” Her voice is indescribably soothing.
“You’re a Martyr-Saint, aren’t you?” Jinah says, and she realizes her head moves unnaturally from the stump of her body. Her spirit, at the point of death, detaches not from the body. It is at this point that Jinah, from a very primal part of her knowing, realizes but cannot verbalize the truth that her soul and spirit and consciousness is immanent from her body. Were the materialists right all along? Despite this, her anger is very real.
This anger, of which the feeling of is the closest to the ultimate truth of Emptiness due to its non-conceptual nature, allows her to say: “For fuck’s sake, save them!”
The Martyr-Saint replies: “They are already saved.”
“Cut the bullshit!” This is not how one speaks with the a being of pure-light, of pure-love, of non-existence. But how can she stand idly by?
The Martyr-Saint continues: “You are yet deceived by your own cloud of ignorance and aversion. I offer you a very singular and very holy opportunity: would you wish to find a glimpse of Emancipation?”
“For myself?” Jinah shakes her head. “I want my friends, this club, to survive! That’s what I want!”
“The stars burn even in darkness,” replies the Martyr-Saint. Jinah wants to tear Pusombulaw Martyr-Saint’s hair out at that moment. “Let us move like light.”
Time stops. The Martyr-Saint steps over; lifts Jinah to her feet, away from the pinning greaves of the militiamen.
“Will you not destroy them?” Jinah asks, as she turns to the militiamen committing tremendous violence.
“I do not destroy,” says the Martyr-Saint. “Violence is transformation, not annihilation.”
Jinah has to fight to keep tears from erupting. “But they’re going to kill them! The rest of my friends!”
The Martyr-Saint replies: “You are already dead, and so are they already transformed.”
Jinah quickly realizes that this is a spiritual vision that cares not for her present state of being. This is a spiritual vision that is attempting to show Reality—that traumatic, uncaring, inhuman thing. The real thing beyond our perception. It does not care about the current situation as we do. That is the reality of the world.
**The realization came like lightning and both stunned and confused Jinah all at once. When did I learn about that?Can she trust everything she thinks, now? Is the Martyr-Saint injecting her with psychomagickal implicature?
“Walk with me, as like light,” says the Martyr-Saint. She turns and begins walking. Jinah realizes she has no other place to go to. She cannot escape here: time has stopped. The fascist’s knee is still on her throat, her neck is mid-bleed out but she feels no pain. She has nowhere to go but to walk.
And so she does, as like light.
It will be difficult to explain much of what happens afterwards, and that is the greatness of the matter. Difficulty in explaining is not a matter of non-understanding but rather, the quality of that thing being difficult to express. It is not a failing of human thought but the triumph of non-human orientation. That is what is happening, as of the moment, to Jinah.
Her every step moves her through the Weft—spacetime.
As she follows the naked Martyr-Saint’s steps, she realizes that every stride is faster than light, and therefore moves them back through the Weft. What they are doing is theoretically an impossibility, unless you are completely untethered to the chains of this World-System.
What enlightenment arises at the end of light?
“Pusombulaw Martyr-Saint,” speaks Jinah, and she realizes she bears now only her slightest and most subtle body. her vajra body, the furnace upon which multiple aggregates internally argues in an ontological dialectic to give rise to a becoming in that instant. “To where do we stride?”
“The end of time,” says the Martyr-Saint. “Which is at its beginning.”
“What does the Martyr-Saint mean?”
“Time is always now, it is in-world perception that accounts for duration. Time is the Consciousness’ reckoning with its own ending.”
“I do not understand?”
“There is no ‘I’ that must understand.”
They moved through reverse-flowering galaxies. Through stars reaching out to fold its tendrils into itself. Through blackness and voidnesses of space. As they moved, they moved so fast that they never felt the becoming-pull of the each mass’ Spiral, their gravitational bend. In their temporal blitz they cut through fractals of reverse-destructions. The fractals intensified as they reached the end that is the beginning. Smaller and smaller circles of cosmic dialectic. Creation reversing into destruction reversing into probability. Causation in its reverse is impossible to understand. Back and back and back again as the great unfurling lotus that is the Primeval Fulmination—that big bang that created this Universe—furled and closed its tendrils, packed with weak and strong forces, nuclear possibility… until—
until—
until the until becomes the starting point. Until—
—the period becomes the first letter.
In the beginning of all things—and that is also to say, at the heart of all existence—there is Violence.
It is impossible to express nothingness. Even the word Nothing is something used in place of actual Nothing, because we cannot describe it. As with Being, “Nothingness” is an impossibility and that is precisely why it is real.
In the beginning|end of reality and cosmos was the Devil, sitting, grinning. She was a woman (a suppleance for a concept I cannot directly convey) and she was a man. He was a jouissance and he was a void of power. He was a singular moment condensed into time and he was about to kill himself, but he also existed forever.
“Greetings,” The Devil says, grinning.
“Greetings, First Abstraction,” says Pusombulaw. Jinah looks and Pusombulaw is also the devil. “Greetings, Ultimate Negation. Greetings, Omniscient At The Beginning Of Time.”
Jinah wonders where God is.
“Greetings, untethered one who sees beyond seeing. And what is this you have brought me?” The Devil was beautiful and gruesome all at the same time. The alluring promise of the void.
“An improbability stuck within an impossibly thin slice of the unfurling lotus of this universe.”
“That does not narrow things,” says the Devil, and it grins at Jinah, or where Jinah is supposed to be. In the Nothingness of Time’s Beginning if you are existence then you are impossibly only arising from the existence of the Devil.
“Is this real?” asks Jinah.
“As real as you can think,” says the Devil.
The Martyr-Saint is gone now.
“How am I separate from you?”
“You are not,” says the Devil. “We are the same. You, in the future, will be born from the selfsame cosmic stardusts and electromagnetism that binds all objects together. Nothing separates you from everything else.”
“What are you?”
“I am The Material, the ultimate negation of Idea. Your consciousness arises from me.”
“What does this mean…? Where are the gods? Are there none of them?” you ask.
“Sure there will be,” replies the Devil. “But they will arise from me all the same.”
“Where does the Material come from?” you ask.
“Pure possibility. Ultrachaos,” replies the Devil
“Where do Omniscients go?” you ask.
“Back to me,” replies the Devil.
You think fast: “Where do saints get their ability for miracles?”
“Entanglement and Advanced Anticausal Techniques,” replies the Devil. “Impossible to explain. It must be experienced and internalized in subtle whispers. This is why you call it magic. Magic begins where Science ends, and there will be an end, for Magic is whatever Science cannot formulate. You know how Quantum Physics is about learning about how much you don’t know and about how much you can’t understand? Magic is Real as Science is Real.”
You must be so confused. “H-How… how is any of this happening right now?”
“At the moment of death, as Consciousness ends and vanishes back into material reality and disperses and then arises again to create another sentient being—as you know that Consciousness is a product of material processes, and your cult would call this reincarnation—the last vestiges of your Consciousness is thrown into every possible direction, before it turns back into residual energy that pools within gravity wells. Consciousness is what arises when these vestiges are close to each other. It dissipates when it disperses. The Martyr-Saint, wielding advanced anticausal techniques, has taken a portion of your consciousness and frozen it and sent you hurtling through time.”
“Can this be explained?”
“No, it is Real.”
“Is… God real?”
“God is the synthesis of my negation. He arises from me.”
“Did God create this universe?”
The Devil shakes his head. “God rules it with an iron gauntlet but He is deluded.” The Devil reclines in his not-seat. “All Gods are.”
“Then why is the Devil real?’
“I am not the Devil,” says the Devil. “I am just the representation of your consciousness trying to make sense of the Ultimate Negation. Perhaps… it would be better to think of me as the Anti-Omniscient. But even then the synthesis of Omniscient and Anti-Omniscient is still Omniscient.”
“What is the culmination of Becoming-Omniscient?”
“Oneness with Negation,” says the Devil. “Or negation of Oneness. Or oneness with chaos. Or oneness with difference. Acceptance of flux and whorl. Let us step into magick: the Omniscients are those that have stepped out of causality. Their mindstream—the atoms that would’ve brought about the next reincarnation—is removed from the cause-effect continuum. Soon, when all sentient beings have attained Omniscienthood, it will be time for the Universe’s end. The Final Awakening.”
“What happens after that?” you ask.
“Primeval Fulmination again.”
“Why?” you ask. What’s the point in all of this then?
“Time is cyclical because time is not real. The world is real but time is the Consciousness’ attempt to understand the world’s processes.”
“Will there be an end?”
“Sure,” says the Devil. “Or maybe you’re still thinking too causally? An end presupposes a beginning. What if all of this has no beginning and no end?”
“I cannot…”
“Fathom? Then that is what is Real.”
Silence fills the void. You grasp for questions again. “All the paradigms are wrong, then?”
The Devil nods. “And all the paradigms are right.”
“There is no soul?” you ask. It’s a good question.
“Souls are emergent properties of consciousness in the process-of-becoming.” The Devil grins. “You use them to power yourself. To get yourself through life. To activate certain Cultivations.”
“Cultivators and esotericists have it right?”
“No one has it right. The esotericists are just narcissistic quantum physicists.”
“Heaven? Hell? The Omniscientfields?”
“The only way you can reach the stars and other planets are through entanglement. That is one thing that might happens to your mindstream upon death. Heaven? Hell? Stars, planets, galaxies.”
“Karma?”
“Causality. Nothing more, nothing less.”
“Why am I shown this?” you ask. Time to end this. Even though this is the beginning.
“Does there have to be a why?” the Devil grins.
“None of this matters to where I was,” you point out. “My friends are still dead and the Revolution still refuses to arise.”
The Devil shakes his head. “Then, let me show you the heart of reality.”
And so the Devil shows you. And it is two beautiful women locked in a swordfight. Every time their nuclear blades cut through their atomic flesh a new woman arises. This repeats until there are too many women in superposition, fighting against each other completely. They are possibility and impossibility in dialectic.
“The heart of reality is… toxic yuri?”
The Devil grins. “The heart of reality is hyperchaos. Probabilities within probabilities. Conditioning-unconditioning. Dialectical Reality. The heart of reality is Violence. From Violence arises materiality. Violence describes the process of probability as well as the effect of probability. Violence is the struggle. Violence is what caused the Primeval Fulmination—the first expansion. As Gods killed the Titans, as Demigods killed the Gods, as Humans killed the Demigods. The Violence Particle which is the Universe Entire and you reading Communist Theory within a dead god apartment complex with a book club of petit-bourgeois students are one and the same. You come from that particle of possibility. The possibility of expansion, and this is the universe where it did.”
“I… don’t understand.” Do you? Can you?
“If you must exist, then you must fight. Communism will not be achieved by teleological forces. It will be achieved by the peasant with a machete in his hand. Or the weaver with a spindle in her fingers. You are them and they are you and you are all expressions of the Violence Singularity.”
“Is Communism worth fighting for?”
“Communism is nothing but fighting for what you believe in. And you believe in a world where humanity is freed from king, god, oppression, exploitation, and market, yes?”
You nod. What else can you wish?
“Then internalize the truth that you are the Violence Manifest, and change the world. Else? Violence will be continued to be inflicted upon you.”
“But what if I do not wish to perform violence, this evil act of brutalizing another?”
“The universe has no such moralisms. That is why it burgeons from the Devil. Violence is a tool, inasmuch as ideology is a tool. Wield it to for emancipatory ideals. Believe not liberal pacification. That is how they colonized you in the first place.”
There is no time for thinking. You are shunted back into that place where you are. Jinah opens her eyes and she is burning with holy darkness.
The imperial militia steps off. “What in Yenja’s tits—?”
Jinah rises to her feet and pulls out a blade of pureblack from the wound in her neck, as it immediately sutures itself closed. She is different now. The other portions of her mindstream have left. The mindstream continuum atoms of her comrades came in to rebuild her. She remembers and hears their screams and ideologies even as it fades away into echo.
“Cut her down!” shouts the Imperial Mystic, as he performs the mantras to explode bullets from his mouth. Jinah’s hand performs a mudra that tries to express the infranuclear ideology of the Omniscients and the devil-saints. The bullets stop and crumple and fall in midair.
“Until all beings are free,” she says, and she knows this to not just be a soteriological wish, but a call to arms for emancipatory Revolution.
Jinah cuts down the imperial police with the serene fury of a Devil-Omniscient.