About the Work
A journal written over two and a half months, moving through Prague, Kutna Hora, and Florence. Each entry is anchored to a place. A cathedral. An ossuary beneath it. A hilltop piazza above Florence. The writing presses against Nietzsche, Kafka, and Hesse while fluidly exploring the pursuit of gnosis until it finds something more antagonistic. Sacred architecture, Renaissance sculpture, the noise of traffic off medieval stone. Recurring preoccupations: heresy as authenticity, the body as counter-argument, grain and road and clock as modernity’s three original sins.
Excerpt
Saint Barbara’s Cathedral, Kutna Hora — February 18th
Ah how sweet is my heresy, how sharp this refusal feels. I cross the tabernacle and do not kneel.
Pity, Nietzsche cries, is the killer of strength. How wrong he is — so blind by the story he forgets the flesh upon the cross, that most damning final cry — the sound of Pandora’s final flight — dear carpenter, I will tell you why he has forsaken you. In the garden of the infinite where you drank our sins, did you hear your friends whisper? Oh there is none more tortured than you, poor man of rebellion — should you rest above, do you see how we pillage your name, how we baptize ourselves in the blood of the lamb and feed ourselves to the Lions? And you are not even allowed that kindness of pity, for we have made mountains out of your bony body, stretched your sorrow into infinity — it is the opiate which binds the body to the chemist, not the embrace of warmth for which you died. I do not weep for you, tears mean nothing to a dead man.
So I must use you too, carve into your flesh with this ink, define your last words with what feels right in my palm. How cruel, to cast you in gold and steal away the organic anointment for the burning avarice of man. All echoes fade; eventually the flames of hell, that music which we provoke upon our journeys, fades and finally we may fully return to where all gods go — nothingness. Yet for two thousand years you have endured our torture; we have slain, sinned, defiled all in the exultant heat of your hell. My wish for you is to find what surely came in those final moments where your profane divinity failed to arrive — the gift of silence. I will pray only for one thing: that you may one day be released from this circus, this mortal hell, and never again suffer that death-awakening.