Everyone Loves A Horror Show.
[[0 - Denton railway station, 2018]]
There's this impulse among people upon learning about something violent to say "This is horrible! This is grotesque! Can you tell me more?" but no one wants to admit that out loud really. They don't want to say that violence is the most exciting thing around. The truth of the matter is that everyone loves a horror show.
[[1 - Kansas City Union Station, 1933]]
It is a rather conventional wisdom that no one wants to talk about violence, that no one wants to talk about the shooting epidemic or the war that is happening somewhere. The news broadcaster turning to the camera and declaring some event tragic and going "I am sure that we" and it's always a capital we there, "that we would be talking about", some worthless foolish event, "than this shooting". A need to make clear that no one wants to talk about this, it's an entire public ritual. The problem is that the truth is that is not at all true, people love to talk about violence, look at true crime podcasts. An entire audience will get up and cheer about there being a high murder rate, it excites them1! The violent act is the most exciting act around.
But it is true that violence remains "the public's" (as much as this item does not exist it is its own character upon which certain traits have been given) favorite subject. Now the problem is that there are acceptable violences to talk about and unacceptable ones to talk about. And We shall always talk about these Violences as Violences, covering them up as oppressions or controls or anything else benefits no one who wants to talk seriously. We may use those words but at all times it must be remembered that Violence plays a vital role in these functions of civilization. To begin We shall name a few Violences, displaced violence, that is the violence that is said to take place elsewhere. Diffused violence, the violence that is spread out so thin it is accepted as part of the "that-which-is" of the world. Hard violence, violence with the blood and the gore and all that. And soft violence, starvation, illness, violence that is reorganized to be not aesthetically unpleasant and in the end deemed to be more acceptable. A single death due to an act of hard violence is framed as a tragedy, a single death due to an act of soft violence is framed as an acceptable accident of civilization. To be deemed as objectionable as a single instance of hard violence soft violence has to happen en masse.
[[2 - Al-Habboubi Square, 3800 BCE]]
Civilization2 is generally conceived as something that exists to lessen the amount of violence that happens overall, however instead of decreasing violence it merely transforms and organizes it. The unacceptable violence (starvation, lack of community, that is to say lack of environment, working oneself to death, all forms of violence that We think that most groups before the foundation of cities would not accept) turns into acceptable violence, and this "acceptable violence" is one that people are not allowed to call violence, it is the diffused violence. It, the thing deemed civilization not only does not prevent soft violence but employs it as means of control.
[[3 - Gare de Mende, 1764]]
There is violences that you can name as violence, of these violences there are ones that you can enthusiastically wish for, the displaced violence happening to one of the foreign other. And there are the violences you have to disavow and condemn them before you bite into them, before you feel the juice of the violence drip down your chin. These are the murders, the tragedies, society seems loves to talk about these types of things, true crime is not a new thing, there’s always been a show around crime and accidents. The Beast Of Gévaudan ever since it was encountered by Marie Jeanne Valet became a point of news for France and then the whole of Europe. The Beast Of Gévaudan has always been around as far as anyone can remember it seems, the show of violence. In the biblical account Cain, one of the first members of humanity becomes the Beast Of Gévaudan when he says “Come, let us go out into the field”3 (the field remains the favored ritual place for the spilling of blood) and enacts the first murder. We should note that Cain was the founder of the first city, funny that...
The show around the horror of the "unacceptable violence" pops up everywhere, think of how many books, videos, movies, radio shows, so forth have been centered around Jack The Ripper, an entire economy of sorrow and excitement. If the hard violence doesn't appear on its own (and even if it does in many cases) then it is manufactured in fiction, after all, Sherlock Holmes still captures modern audiences for a reason. The hard violence that does happen in what people have chosen as reality has to be disavowed and allowing oneself to clean themselves of guilt, this becomes an entire ritual, saying "It is so I know what to avoid" "I am curious" but never can one straight out say "I love violence! Yes I love violence that happens in real life, I admit it!" or they will be seen as mad.
Returning to Jack The Ripper, the serial killer is the sacred priest of violence much more than any general or war maker could be. The Zodiac Killer is easy to focus on now, by identifying him his robes were torn off, he went from mythology to reality, robbing him of a position of The Fear. An unknown killer is much more interesting than a known one, it turns into a show rather than a trial. Murder is a perverted ritual, the traditional ritual serves as a connection to the bonds of community and to reach the substance/marrow of The Something (divine, truth, ect), but murder cuts and forgets the community and the ancestral, the culture as well as seeking only to replace The Something with a foul thing (this thing being the Beast Of Gévaudan prowling and guarding the château of The INSIDE). But the ritual is many things, including a show, the act of murder is thus turned into a consumption of violence.
One of Us remembers a trip it took to Las Vegas, a sister declared to look under the bed just in case there was a dead hooker. The sex worker is considered a ritual object, foul foul series of events where we (I include you as much as me in this) have let a person fall into being a prop for someone else's story. I want to, perhaps We, want to highlight that the murderer is the center of attention, they are actor and victims props for the story. True crime digs into this feeling, making victims melt into the background.
[[4 - Union Stock Yards, 1918]]
One of the greatest inventions was the displacements of violence. Or rather, the lengthening of the distance between the performer of violence or the consumer of it and the afflicted subject. We use performer for a performer can barely be counted as an active element but rather as a machine that performs actions in accordance with commands, it is a series of movements that carries out operations, the soldier forced onto the frontline many times is just a performer. Other soldiers, the ones who lust for death are actors, they take on a persona, an archetype, there are many performers in an actor, they are an actor by the virtue of the fact they can choose what performance command to enact. An actor has some amount of freedom in their choices, the tone, the posture, they are allowed to choose from a range of options, the performer less so, We despise in some sense the performer as well as the actor. The crossbow is the classic example of a technology of displacement of violence, this tiny war machine with its stored power able to kill from a great distance, the hard violence it appears to enact is minimalized to the performer-observer-consumer thus allowing for a much smoother operation in the business of the rupture of war (the heightened violence, between two actor-machines, needing logistical support and an entire system of discipline, all of this goes into creating a scene within a theater commonly called a battle, get enough of these scenes together and you have a play, what war is in its common usage, or what We call Real War).
When a soldier falls from bullets and turns into a corpse it is not what you expect, a dead body seems like a laying body, as if they decided to fall asleep there. The displacement technology has changed our image of war, both in the sense that a rifle provides a cleaner death than the sword or axe and in sense we do not recognize the laying body as a victim, as a casualty, to be seen as a death one has to act it up a little as the phrase goes. The cinema is a better conveyor and speaker of battle than the shakey mobile phone video of battle that pop up after the event (We recall for this section a video of the aftereffects of the leaving of Afghanistan where the bodies were laying down). Of course many deaths of battle are still gory violent things but it is amazing to see that through the video lens of a reporter that the corpses no longer represent themselves as well as art represents them. War has been able to become something that can be consumed due to this displacement, war (in this sense We mean what some would consider Real War) has always been a profitable business, but more and more it has been able to be something one consumes. If one goes to a bookstore they will almost certainly find a section dedicated to this consumption of war, history books, memoirs, analysis, schematics of military inventions, media of consumption of violence. We don't want to have the reader believe this is a new thing, as history shows with Beowulf and Gilgamesh it is rather old, but rather there has been merely an increase in the consumption of violence. What primarily interests Us is the modern consumption of violence. War stories consumed by people who will never be threatened by Real War, suburban white women thrown into a feast of consumption of violence, men in tiny towns worrying about terrorist attacks. Gore shows, 9/11 theaters, nuclear wasteland radio plays, crime cinema, media of consumption have made it so people no longer see the tiny violences. One of the many problems is that consumption helps no one, it is merely a fear that manages, the woman limits herself out of fear, the man is hateful out of fear, they are both simply put, in their own ways, militarized.
The displacement technology has created the ability to have mass consumption of violence and funnily enough an objection to that consumption that is mainly made possible by the fact that the violence has been displaced enough that violence can be found to be unpleasant and in fact, foul. The deli is far enough from the slaughterhouse that it is found unusual for some. From the fact it is seen as unusual the person is able to object and question (there are many autistic beings and things that became philosophers, poets, mystics, and so forth due to the fact they were removed enough from the world to find certain parts of it unusual). The twin of consumption of violence is the consumption of the flesh, or rather We could put it "rather than eating with the eyes the act of violence one eats with the mouths the results of violence". We do not necessarily mean flesh in the literal sense. Mined ores, bleeding children, fresh fruit in winter in Chicago, sunburnt workers, sliced meat, dead animals, overworked people, immigrants covered in blood in the slaughterhouse. FLESH shipped all around, the butcher and the animal disappear in the distance.
[[5 - Piccadilly Circus, Year Unknown]]
“Devil-shaped woman, her woe ever minded,
Who was held to inhabit the horrible waters,
The cold-flowing currents, after Cain had become a
Slayer-with-edges to his one only brother,
The son of his sire; he set out then banished,
Marked as a murderer, man-joys avoiding,
Lived in the desert.”
- Beowulf
Violence is a pleasure4. Violence excites, it is a thrill ride, your eye latch onto it, the first drama, red art, tension wound up, release, wound. We saw the beast outside our cave, outside our town, outside our village, outside our cities, and We, all of us (Us and you) said it was beautiful.
Grendel come! Grendel! With the blood of Cain flowing through you come! Grendel come here and let us kill you! Tear our flesh apart and eat us! Let us tell stories of how we killed you, how you killed us! We love you oh Grendel! We need you! Holy Holy Holy murder. Holy Holy Holy flesh.
Knife out, sweet saccharine crimson candy, Coliseum duel, wild screaming crowds pulling at the body, claws biting in and leaking red. The tearing of the flesh brings redemption so they say.
"Should you be so lucky like St Sebastian
Preferring the ache to the aspirin
Swooning as they shoot the arrows
Through your narrow chest
Stripping naked in the Circus Maximus
With a martyr-eating lioness
Bartering with flesh for a little pain
Scenes like this give sadomasochism a bad name"- Momus, Lucky Like St. Sebastian.
Holy Holy Holy death, this is the closet they can get to The Real so they think. “I'm thirsty, I'm thirsty… Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit”5. Warm red beating sun screams-beats down onto the red earth, blood soil, bleeding soul, beating soiul, Abel slaughters the lamb bringing him no salvation-safety. How did he kill you Abel? How did the first beast kill you? Shouting at slaughter, the first disappearing act, in the fields far from any eyes where the traffic is slow the law ceases to be. The cruelty of the family. G-d kisses Abel with the lips of death and accepts his offering of his own death, the slaughter is not sacred. It flees from the divine.
“The surgeon John Flint South remarked that the rush and scuffle to get a place in an operating theatre was not unlike that for a seat in the pit or gallery of a playhouse. People were packed like herrings in a basket, with those in the back rows constantly jostling for a better view, shouting out ‘Heads, Heads’ whenever their line of sight was blocked.”
- Houses of death: the horror of life in a Victorian hospital.
COME ONE! COME ALL! TONIGHT ONLY!6
COME ON NOW! WE HAVE A SHOW FOR YOU! BLOOD SPLATTER AND OPEN AIR OPERATION! ENTER DEATH FROM STAGE LEFT! HE WEARS A SURGEON’S SMOCK! JUGGLING KNIVES! WHAT A LOVELY GENT! LOOK AT THE FREAKS HE CUTS UP! The music of the circus is notable for a heavy usage of orientalist themes, taking the viewer away from the fairgrounds and projecting her to a land to be colonized or one that already has been. The circus is a place of cruelty, George and Willie Muse7 kidnapped and turned into, well billed as freaks. In retrovision stories the circus is the nomadic place, it roams the landscape, the viewer knowing that its death is coming soon enough when the 1940s hit, a haunted place. It is a wandering location that leaks the fear of those eras, the outsider, the stranger, the gyrovague nation. But also a fear of insanity, of the Unstable8. There is, however, a pleasure in these notions, the only adventure that could happen anymore were ones of wandering areas already known. Once all the gray areas on the map were filled out there was nothing left to explore and seek and attention were turned to re-exploring and retracing. In Retrovision (which uses the terrain of history as its plaything) the wandering place of the circus becomes a thrill place due exactly to the fact it is a locus of the exotic wanderers. In the series Carnivàle the hero, Ben Hawkins is a nomadic traveler, his knowledge and skill is gained via a constant moving. Carnivàle is a story of characters on the move, the priest Justin Crowe being an immigrant but he differs from Hawkins for the fact he is always attempting to create a settled place, but gains a fuller power via a wandering (the fact that this takes place at an asylum should not go unnoticed). The act of wandering, of not even attempting to create a stable place, is thus portrayed as a thing that in of itself creates and gives power. The house of Justin Crowe is an unsafe place for guests and the maids he hires, the stable place in this retrovision history is said to be abhorrent. Safety here is gained by the fact one is always moving and not staying in any single place for too long. In Carnivàle the attempted slaughter of the priest Crowe is seen as something that if had been successful would've been a fulfillment of a wish of the divine, simply put it would be sacred. But moreover the story of Carnivàle is the story of The Hunt as sacred. Thus perhaps The Hunt with The Slaughter is sacred and The Slaughter without The Hunt is profane. And We should note that the attempted Slaughter in Carnivàle takes place in the field.
[[6 - 10^(-20) Angstrom Station, 303030]]
The king and the forest. Hail thee ye king, hail ye! Lord of the hunt, Lord of the land, Lord of The HUNT.
Esau and Nimrod covered in the stag’s blood, Nimrod, lord of Babylon!
Nimrod, you who moved too soon, you who lead G-d Our L-rd confuse our tongues!
The King and his forest, he who is crowned by the three divine, he who hath slain the beasts of the woods!
THUS this land is the Son’s land, thus it is the land of God!
Wtidufæstenn9 burns by the hand of the lord of the hunt, the woods remain safe no more,
Hail thy end thy lord, thus the hunt is sacred, thus the slaughter is most certainly profane.
End of death, end of joy.
The slaughter is the pleasure of those who do not move, those who do not express themselves,
It is a pleasure of the settled people then.
Now here thus lies a problem. Is the above an actual reflective statement of Us or is it simply a device? Perhaps it is a rollercoaster meant to give thought. I do not know, death exists and it seems like it must, I am scared of it, entranced by it. Maybe it is metaphor, maybe The Hunt is not a hunt, maybe it is something else, a transit, a killing of something that is not the white deer.
[[end of the line, last stop before sheol]]
“Do you suffer from
long-term memory loss?
(I don't remember)”
You remove the skin from the body. Revealing the flesh.
"Who did you see there that night?"
They can only be out for four hours, the customers don’t know that, they aren’t the type of people to work at delis. I see women acting as turrets and men eating flesh.
"Well, the Reverend Cretin Lovelace, he works for Equipment Express, that's based in the northwestern Indiana community of Rolling Prairie."
Chicken on the cart, four, a man comes by and says something, the world moves too fast for me to remember, bloom bloom bloom. Three chickens on the cart now, spray down the heating pads, I am thankful for the man. One of the chickens might become a ritual item instead of headed for the pit. Holy holy holy ritual of flesh.
"And what kind of company is that?"
It’s a deadly company, a deadly process. You remove the skin, it’s crisp and brown, all an autumn leaf of flesh.
"They make machinery for packaging liquids."
☐☐☐☐ said it feels that way sometimes, like we are machines. I think he said that at least. He doesn’t want to be a machine. I want to be a machine, easier that way, I can protect them, them, them, them. Remove the skin, remove the wishbone, remove the chicken breast, the white flesh.
"What kind of people work there?"
Who killed this hen, who raised this chicken, who cooked this hen, who packaged this bird. I don’t know. I am the one who removes the skin, less than 20 seconds, i am the one who separates the white chicken breast, no other meat from the hen. i i i am the one who puts her into the trash, her flesh.
"They are burly employees: violent, dirty, unruly. Many of these same employees are unemployed and express themselves with difficulty. They smell of promiscuous troublemakers' helplessness. 'To the airport!' they cry: the airport, in itself, a fortress."
Festung Europa, Fortress Europe. Fortress world. No one sees the flesh sludge, no one who matters anyway, the store is a fortress, hidden areas, supplies, it seems to the shopper like it could keep itself alive even without working flesh.
"What about Brunhoffer, what was he like?"
"Did anyone scream anything?"
I am 17, I want to scream. This flesh, it doesn’t fit. It tears and is foul. I think it is rotting. My heart is giving out and I am going to die I believe. I want to fall apart. Ugly ugly ugly thing. I don’t realize I am rotting.
"They screamed, 'Kill him!' as they ran towards him carrying large rocks."
Always the slaughter, Kain creates death with a rock, impacted damaged flesh.
"Well, David Novak, the chief executive of Louisville-based Yum brands, KFC's parent, said that back of the envelope, Kentucky Fried Chicken is the one big trend that's going on in the world today. Except we're the chicken capital of the USA."
She pours zippo lighter fluid over herself, full of liquor and hate. She breaths in, breaths out. It smells foul. The old sword wrapped in leather, it smells foul. Vomit covers her, lighter at the ready, matches if that doesn't work. Air in, air out, it smells foul, air in, air out. Readies herself. Blood scatters, this is the death of a family. Burning flesh and a whirlwind of blades. She is death, she is violence, she is grace. You bend someone too far and they break, they scream. Her flesh burns, in the morning the police will say it looks like chicken skin. Multiple homicide and one suicide. It smells foul. They hurt her flesh, worms of words, “Terror of spiders”10, they will hurt it again. This was the lust for death taken to its peak, closest you can get to the real.
She vomits, that doesn’t happen, she is still covered in lighter fluid, she smells foul, this is not The Hunt, a death like that is profane. It is more that she wants to die, she has always wanted to die, speed up to speed-stasis. She fears it, she cries. She doesn’t want this, she doesn’t want this flesh or this death, she vomits again, it smells foul. Something always smells foul. Death is not sacred, it’s a little lie we tell ourselves. Maybe. The Hunt involves no death, she stands up, she finds herself, the part that smells foul, she plunges the old rusted sword into him, the thing is dead. “In order for something beautiful something has to die” she thinks to herself, is it really dead? “I will outlast everyone” she says. She smells foul.
"Thank you very much, that's all for today."
[The Mountain Goats play].
If one wants to break civilization down into smaller bits then it could become “city-system”, a system of war and cities.
This phrasing comes from the Targum Onkelos. Onkelos I am sure We could talk quite a bit about.
Later in another publication We will speak of the ecstasy of death but right now We speak of violence.
Jesus Christ Superstar.
Entrance of the Gladiators is notable for being originally a military marching song.
The beginning of modernism was also the ending of The Stable, the world became a nation on the move. See Enda Duffy, The Speed Handbook.
Old English, meaning “a place rendered secure by woods”.
Bataille, [Dream], Visions of Excess.