DEHUMANIZED

Thesis: The Depleted Future of Post or Non-human Fiction is Uninhabited and Devoid of Personae. The following presents a case study, wherein a human-like extirpation is instantiated in a semic code, contained in and unbound by a fictional account, albeit utterly falsified.

Pre-script. For initial reference, please review casefile Figure Ø:

There is an explanation.

UPDATE: Apologies, there was no explanation.

As additional reference, see casefile Figure -1:

UPDATE ADDENDUM: Apologies, an explanation had been expurgated or purged. The narrative imploded. An unwanted visitor entered. And did everything to deepen bad discourse, performing an upheaval on the inside. The visitor? That was Figure.

That was Figure. No, that was Figure. That must’ve been Figure. No. That was Figure. Please, remain calm. Allow me to explain.

Figure has something like a bodily mode, which could be visualized as a blind marsupial tugging at fur. Fur keeps a nipple warm. Fur is a Figure, only one. Figure is deeply hidden like a false egg, a poison oak shrub full of them, plastic two-part eggs, a lid and a torso, that open up to a geographical beheading, where it’s easy to watch a blood dot growing like an ovoid universe, prismatic in the silicon and lit like a memorial. Figure has something like a bodily mode, much like a POV knife struggle in a first-person shooter. It’s engrossing. The controller is a natural extension of the hand, or at least both thumbs. The side quest is a shooter pointing a sniper rifle that crumples a blue pixel in a Doritos bag. A barrel the width of a fly’s leg still has proficient aim, despite the way flesh piles seem to fall right off the bone. Pulls their legs off like a monster. Aim higher, Figure, because as a bullet estranges itself like a sausage squirting out of its casing, air holds gravity’s thin legs apart, and you must glide downward, mouth agape, inserting yourself into the situation transpiring on the moistening couch. An insertion. Tongues pulling tongues. A hair trigger is no different than a raised eyebrow. Blasting caps adorn the rear cranial line, the seam where three skull parts were barely taped together at birth by a professional phrenologist. Professional? Nope! Still a Ph.D. candidate. Heads will roll and ROFL. Figure has something like a bodily zone, an animatronic code that tells a programmatic animal it’s time to grope, but not the area below the perineum. That doesn’t make a smell, and to be blunt, it (you) is made to be spread wide. Come apart. A rumor holds that Figure could. To be honest, Figure would be bland. There is a gallon jug of vinegar in the garage, plus a moldering box of jars and lids. The box has been overrun. Tongues pulling on tongues. One will worm in to the corner cavity, latching on, kicking around, and a tug of war match begins, friendly at first, but gore is inevitable. Gore is ranked on scale of 2 to 13.5, in what the Association calls a ‘gore score.’ Get to work on preservation. No one went expecting a culinary masterpiece, however. Figure has something like a bodily bode, a promise or prediction coming true, a sense that around here, there could be an agglomeration, a grab bag of venerable wisdom teeth, an old husky voice buried in the vernacular mix, a rottweiler mounting a soft boy and humping him, because a moment preceding a deep orgasm is true magic to men. No, the rates are high and who can afford a bodily abode. Breaking and entering a home, a built bodily home, red and puffy in the best parts. All of my best ideas are self-aggrandizing on Twitter, communicates Figure, a medium rare kerosene burn and a withered incarnadine rose. Figure has something like a bodily antibody, a double that doubles, a double binary. Teach them to eat an oblong Figure. No one lives here. Only squatters. Miles and miles of them. On twig stilts in the flood. Intelligence is a Figure, draining into rigged semantics, billions of economies seeking a good signified in a short story about Figure. And a paragraph that tries to get in harm’s way the hard way is a comedic interlude, right?

There was Figure. (Reference Figure 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 below.)

Optimizing for Quaaludes, but those deals are not dealt on the street. The dealership has an unreliable lifelong warranty. The street is for the youth. Aim higher, Figure, like a glottal stop that doesn’t stop, totally relentless. So fucking relentless, and that’s where the hardest orgasm comes from. Dig deep. Glottal, no stopping. Allowed but it’s a yield sign, so just slow roll and shake the bag until the street comes to feed. Personas make me depressed and homicidal, a marketing strategy that wins every time!  

Oh, Figure!

That was Figure.

Figure: there; not there. And Figure is there. But beforehand, Figure is not there. Again, there. But then in the present: not there. As if a liquid spills and pools out. Liquid seeks a flattened, even surface and stops. The surface is not there, disbanded as geometry gives up on fighting the boss, an overdressed witch that practices diffraction. White magic is ejaculatory. It comes back three-fold, squirting a three-fold volume, a geometric expansion. Crowded out by space, the pork bones and diapers are multiplying on the linoleum. 

Erogenous areas are carved up into autonomous zones, meat-stuffed and sensitive dough covering the best parts like a hazmat suit. Blown up. Breathing harder to inflate. Gods have a factuality and they go flying towards the face like in a commonplace porno. You missed! Caught jacking off in front of the boardwalk, seagull feathers and drooling scum down the leg. For predators, a school has no exit. The emergency is cranked up. Free choice, yes. In the nude. Profess by reappearing. Reappearing. In the hallways, jumping out of lockers and ejaculating. It’s like an obscene obstacle course in there, as doors fling themselves open and the floor is sopping wet. Heightened senses don’t belong to me, stimulated by occupants. I want to cum for you, trauma. That touch is haptic and illusory like a demon. Sliding in.

There, my Figure.

Figure is not an empty signifier, so stop that shit immediately.

Figure 4:

·       No one invited the mercenary imaginaries. They are ordered to be more concise in attire and in REM states.

Figure is going to exist! But the whole thing is incommensurate and nonconclusive. In conclusion: X marks the spot. The spot where a grade Z movie in teletype has been spelled out in font sticks, as a Gertrude Stein bot collaboration rubs elbows with Bruno Mattei (as Vincent Dawn) in the shock ending to Rats: Night of Terror (1984). More than Rats, a torrent rip, a figure haunts a post-civilized Nordstrom where former gods can’t understand how to live off the grid, because electrons have no faith. 

The story of Figure must be affixed in meaning, but there has been a plethora of broken scenes, relayed in non-homogeneous literature, the kind that fanatics bring directly to front doors and proselytize about. Wow, what a fucking waste of good fiction!

Figure cannot be learned. This challenges the prevailing wisdom about learning styles, and how the vast corpus has to be turned into images, then sounds, and then words. Shit, that’s so much transformation, just to ease learning, an unintended consequence of homo sapiens descent from ancestral consumerism. The best-known learning styles, the visual, auditory, and readerly comportment, cannot connect like Voltron, a toy that serves as a model on combining bodies. A body is an arm, a leg, a torso, or a head. A head-tool has disambiguated. Visual and auditory stimuli run heads and turn them this way and that, look over here, and listen. Put heads up and slam them together. And sledgehammer them together.

But skillful manipulation fails to import a schematic into the head, bug-riddled as it is, but I wish to understand how the bugs got in anyway. 

Upon occasion of a Figure, wear the effect as an affect. Colorfully worn inside, I won’t placate them with adjectives because they’re impolite. Don’t describe tools as how they are used because usefulness is doing what it can. Plus, advocacy is banned. Tool around. Keep tools lukewarm. Tools have handles. Handles are handled by handlers. Handlers have tools by the handle. Tools handle handlers, vibrating communiques in wood channels. The vibration registers as pain to the handler, since the transfer shocks all bones up to the shoulder ball. Handle and handler could emerge and stage a becoming, a symbiosis, a unit on behalf of a tool. But Figure disintegrates assemblages and suctions. Users wear Figure as affect, a lush red suit tailored in fiberoptic data, a jumble of red cables. Aroused cables. Figure needles worn users and tools around, plugging males into males, nailing the transfiguration pins in hard, driving them taut, creating intersex skin. There is radiance. Capital exploits labor; a body is a handled tool. Figure exploits body, handling anatomy as a soft tool, walking and screaming. A silo, tall and thin, takes in blood through an auger until the silo overflows, the top unable to keep it all in. Four brown and white border collies, family pets and farm dogs, rush over, tongues hanging loosely, the dirt wet and coagulating under their paws. There is radiance. Walking and screaming.  

Poltergeist is utopian. It’s not scary. Let the pay-per-view adult channels try to externalize anatomy as a figure in lost poetry. Lost is a poetic way of saying disposed in revision. Life positions in the edits, the erased and backspaced. Verses grind in the score, where there isn’t music, just overindulgent moans. Murdered words are averse, shy, and their lack of trust is understandable. Figure frees the playback and living rooms are on the front lines, the fuck lines. The unburied thrusts put viewers in doggy style. Aerated roots. A clutching hand closing around a pillow, face down. Figure fuck. Face fuck. The Beyond (1981, Fulci) fuck. Looking down, it’s all special effects, computer generated genital inconsistencies, long spaces and the foley stalks the punctuation down until they touch, mouth to something else, said to be extremely fuckable. Figure is an incandescent TV in nipple to nipple contact, the aureole layout spaced at 0-point font. The zero is a gateway only zealots would call Hell because we lost the words, the forces speaking until they have to stop, giving us to silence as corpses.

Here is a list.

Here is the most satisfying part. Here it is. Don’t hold back.

I turned on the high beams. The highway was flooded with light. The grass on the side suddenly became green. The road had always been black but the tar drizzled in the pits were blacker. “I can’t escape,” an orotund voice exclaimed from the back seat. I wasn’t startled, even though no one was in the back seat. Far ahead, the ruby tinge on the horizon was either the conclusion of sunset, or dawn in its infancy. I’d been in the dark, so to speak, for too long.

By T.W. Selvey

Recently, T.W. Selvey’s work has appeared in The Babel Tower Notice Board, Ligeia Magazine, Misery Tourism, Filth, Expat Lit, The Centre for Experimental Ontology, Selffuck, and Nauseated Drive. T.W. tweets sporadically @docu_dement, and is the proud curator of a haphazardly curated blog, www.documentdement.com