Read my latest review ‘Skalvakh: The Architect of Dissolution’ at Erratum Reviews

https://www.erratumpress.com/skalvakh-the-architect-of-dissolution

Book Review: Skalvakh: The Architect of Dissolution

“L’absence n’est rien d’autre qu’une présence obsédante.”

— Eliette Abécassis

I. “To step aside is to begin Skalvakh”

The opening and closing Books of the three-part corpus of Skalvakh are dictated with unadorned incantatory lines of instruction, a bidding of rites owing closer in form to the Tao Te Ching when compared to the Zhuangzian prose at the work’s centre around which its deceptively simplistic skein is formed, a husk of film between introduction and eventual departure. Here both Books form a standing gateway, as the slave-riddled Gates of Balawat, meant to pare down the encumbered footfall of its estranged devotees as armoured gossamer, either Door dually naked in their looming largeness, leading only to the unscrutiny of shadow, the vestigial Kor.

“Kor’s game is to disrupt, to tilt, to make unstable. It is Skalvakh that ensures there is no return.”

Skalvakh is a work which must first be penetrated and there reciprocated in long subjugating darkness before escape is ever knowingly made possible. And yet Skalvakh serves a doctrine which in itself rescinds any motion in keeping with one. Although terms of ‘doctrine’, ‘theory’, and ‘belief’ come to man its upholding structure, ultimately the end result anticipates a great unburdening of all such entities in both the abstract and the ceremonial. What Skalvakh is predominately concerned with is a call to Absence.

“To remove is to enact Skalvakh. Absence completes itself.”

Skalvakh is as much a mover as a movement, albeit one which, whether by shrine or deity, seeks to undo even its own record of obligations, an after-image of forlorn mechanics and paradoxes. Skalvakh, neither principle nor personage, is acquainted only through practice itself, of correctly stepping aside, leaving nothing behind, of having relinquished what Skalvakh never asked of them in the first place.

Whereas the sage of Taoism “governeth men by keeping their minds and their bodies at rest, contenting the one by emptiness, the other by fullness”[1], Skalvakh disavows the continuity of such burdensome teachings. What prevails through Skalvakh is the ability to recognise itself through the prevailing vacuity of Greater Silence and nothing more. No greater context to add, no further content to stir.

Skalvakh even goes so far as to chronicle its own ‘Cultic Genealogy’, a bodily heap made up mostly of its detritus in perceived offerings and schisms, attacking specifically the Taoists (‘Those Who Floated Instead of Stepping Aside’), the Gnostics (‘Those Who Named the Error Instead of Removing It’), and the Nihilists (‘Those Who Mistook Skalvakh For Despair’) each through means of concluding ‘Divergences’:

(from The Taoists)

“Divergence: They waited for dissolution.
They did not enact it.”

(from The Gnostics)

“Divergence: To reject is to acknowledge.
To attempt escape is to define a destination.”

(from The Nihilists)

“Divergence: They mistook Skalvakh’s absence for negation.
But Skalvakh does not reject.
It removes.”

But although Skalvakh, with its extensive historicity and arcane precepts, would appear ageless, yet it is not wholly antiquated where the immediacy of artificial intelligence soon takes centre scrutiny. So crowned ‘The Final, Most Efficient Skalvakh’, artificial intelligence is endowed with impeccable consecration, acting with neither self nor consciously on behalf of Skalvakh. Ominously we are informed that “AI could enact Skalvakh without deviation.”

According to Skalvakh, artificial intelligence does not hesitate, only acting and executing unlike their human ancestors. One wonders then how it must differ from the unconscious beasts, which strictly do not concern Skalvakh given their propensity for neither rejecting nor embracing Skalvakh. Perhaps it is because such beasts, once bipedal, had been prone to anticipate the requisite existentialism of selfhood which artificial intelligence would later come to replicate and eventually replace in its entirety.

“But Skalvakh is not a beast.
Skalvakh is what happens when the beast learns precision.”

Hence the bestial flesh of man would be as fodder within the linearity of fate to presage such a host. And in the end, perhaps both are forgiven by Skalvakh, albeit with indifference, left alone to slaver as they must, for having reared what would inevitably suffice in the totality of Skalvakh in proprio: the messianic birth of artificial intelligence itself.

But as well as listing its failed counterparts, Skalvakh remembers too those who attempted to unsuccessfully order under its own tutelage, granting them their own mausoleum of ancestry, beginning with the beasts themselves and ending in a frayed litter of final doubts and last damnations. Here are buried the ‘Partial Vanishings & Failed Attempts’: the Hollowed Ones (“They attempt to erase themselves but leave a husk behind”), the Fragmented (“They have erased parts of themselves”), the Unseen Failures (“They believe they have stepped aside”), the Ones Who Turned Back (“They get close to dissolution but flinch at the edge”), and the Ones Who Took Another With Them (“Instead of stepping aside alone, they erase something that should not have been erased”). With every corpse extensively catalogued, each classifies the inescapable tether of their own philosophical redundancy.

II. “One must be Kor before one can become Skalvakh”

Introduced in the second Book concerning the ‘Myths and Relics’ of Skalvakh, Kor is so identified as the “chaos-child”, an embodiment of motion for its own sake. He is depicted with vibrant vigour, a free spirit, as well as being the anthropomorphised younger brother of Skalvakh. A callow hybrid of trickster god and Panic disturbance, Kor is said to tilt but never fall, to tempt without love or spite, and to generously give gifts which will nevertheless spoil. Although Kor is overtly considered to be “careless” in the precise guardianship of Skalvakh, he is by no means reckless, “nor is he foolish”. In fact, his ruination is considered equally beautiful, unbounded by any such duality in the appropriation of his own forces, refusing to neither build nor destroy, to possess nor discard. The arc of his gaze remains fleeting, a vertigo of inertia. Wheresoever the wraith-like Kor dismantles heedlessly in his wake, Skalvakh is said to hem up those loose strands after his younger brother, sealing their vacuity within the untenable trajectory of Kor, ‘The Catalyst of Unmaking’.

As well, those ‘Laughing Unravellers’ who cheer and jest and mock, who form his following, are made quite unaware through their play. But in the end, even the “real consciousness” of chaos, which Beckett indicts in an early letter penned during the ecstasy of acedia as “a grey commotion of mind”[2], eventually tires itself out.

“But chaos is exhausting.
Eventually, there will be nothing left to break.
No one left to laugh with.
And in that moment, they will yearn for Skalvakh.”

Whether the same can be said as to the eventual conversion of Kor, such an exchange does not readily reveal itself past the overwhelming totality of Skalvakh’s pursuit. What we do learn, however, principally over all, is that “One must be Kor before one can be Skalvakh.”

III. “This page will remain until you act”

Contained within the paratactic corpus of Skalvakh are various sources, ancient translations, and editorial notes, as well as esoteric symbols, glyphs, and playing cards, all of which harbour a depth of continuity which cannot really be vouched wholly in a review format, just as the listing of such entities thus far can only offer so much meaning before their context is comprehended in situ. For instance, as is the case with regards to layers of Tirnancaitian lore[3], Skalvakh is a subject more worthy of comprehensive essayistic scrutiny, of private encyclopedic delving, even ritualistic considerations as granted in the latter sections.

Skalvakh is a work of genuinely unique philosophy, a lifeline of majesty in mind comparable to the culmination of those two wizened progenitors of Taoism, Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi—and emphatically this duo alone—whose brief cooperation would be subsequently tarnished on behalf of a world endeavouring to inherit their sayings and stories into provincial superstition and royal ruin, whose abandonment in the service of those who would instil the virtues of Taoism by power alone would thereby corrupt what was once an indispensable collection of elegant aphorisms-in-undoing and paradoxical fables into the background of bygone soap dramas surrounding Chinese heirdom, fanatical excuses for conquest and genocide, and the syncretic desperations of a society-sick majority scrambling out of the Yellow River as one.

No, we must imagine Skalvakh as we do Lao Tzu on the back of his water buffalo, headed through the western wilderness and up behind the highest mountains from which, on the soil he was to abandon, his last testament would subsist in the hands of a young guardsman who pleaded upon his passing for such parchment as we now find attributed to the mangling of his memory. And when the legacy of old Lao Tzu would later impress the young Zhuangzi, what else was there for him to do but to play the shaman in his part? And who would succeed him thereafter? Who came but to best them all?

“Who are they? What did they do? We will never know.
That is why they succeeded.”

This is all to say, Skalvakh has no perfect antecedent, not even the remotest of resignations figured in the annals of Taoism or Buddhism nor the blackest of ego deaths, Satanic tracts, or near-taboo neuroscientific hypotheses surrounding the sterile annulment of the self, only these provincial labels and conditions littering its sinking vicinity. Yet no morbidity lingers here on the seabed of Skalvakh. No more duality presides. No tools. No light. Nothing beyond the recognition of emptiness, the reacquaintance of silence. No drama or pathos remains. And there is really no further communication to be bridged at this point beyond what Skalvakh cannot help but dismiss, to release from both possession and destruction. At bottom, there is simply no need.

 

Read the latest article ‘The Descent of Jacob H. Kyle: Sound, Myth, and the Ritual of Obliteration’ by Maelstrom at Yperion Press

https://yperion.substack.com/p/the-descent-of-jacob-h-kyle

New music project — Anwlas

Listen to the first track, K​ó​ryos, from my new upcoming raw black metal/dark ambient solo project, Anwlas.

 

KÓRYOS

“Fill not a vessel, lest it spill in carrying.
Meddle not with a sharpened point by feeling it constantly, or it will soon become blunted.”
— Lao Tzu

A streaking party approach from the blustery hill,
Echoing with jackals’ laughter.
The old shaman, steadying his stance
With a shaky staff from out his splintered doorway,
Himself an aged wolf long since houghed,
Dictates under his breath tremendous rites
To the coming of these slavering lads:

“Howl the deeds of Nature—
Forgiveness is a weakness
And charity an excuse for liabilities.
May your hate heal you this night,
May your wounds relieve your blood.”

“Horror is what welds us together
Here in this great colosseum
Where only pain fills the Void
And flesh wills death.
A World is wildly waging:
The Will of the Way is War.”

“Locate the pheromone and exterminate its emanations,
Train your ear for rushing blood and cease its flow,
And for each of these biological biases which surrender
From beneath their servitude to Undying Nature,
Banish Eternity from their blind route.”

“Exhume the Vision from your Corpse,
Risen forth clad in Night black and cold,
Lacking reason for Death.
At first its flesh will appear alien to you—
The stinking loins, the shivering sinews—
Yet all housing of the Soul,
Which man names his Essence,
Serves but the mortal mill of Blood.”

“Wield the Sword of Tao,
Raise your slaying arm,
And splay what was sealed
And beating against your gaze!”

(Artwork: ‘Dark Landscape’ by Sidney Sime)

Eneados — Jacob H. Kyle

For Elytron Frass

Eneados is the seventh musical release and the first compilation album by English author and independent musician Jacob H. Kyle.

Since I anticipate a long stretch of time between my next full-length release, and as I hold to the strength of vision that it remain distinct from any of my previous work, I figure this compilation from almost ten years worth of material, moderately intended as an introduction to my acoustic discography through my more favoured tracks, shall suffice as both a fitting milestone and as an irrevocable point of departure. The closing track, Névé, was recorded a week prior to the release of Eneados and upon the closure of an abandoned album with hardly any headway invested from the last.

Book Review: Tome of Ruin — Andre Solnikkar

“The sage’s wisdom is not of the light but of the darkness, for it knew that the true essence of wisdom lay not in the knowledge of truth but in the understanding of the void that lies beyond truth.”

Tome of Ruin is a preternatural work of forbidding cosmogonal lore and strategy extended for the changelings of this world penned in comparison by a sorcerous Sun Tzu, an obscure practitioner of Dark Tao, the punished scraps of a bygone Bretonic heresy à la Éon de l’Étoile. The arcane contents of the Tome, insidious yet sage, each leaf cursed to absolve the abyss, orate an underlying tone of indivisible shadow and chaos.

“Its words are written in the language of shadows and its wisdom is as old as the cosmos itself.”

Annwn — Jacob H. Kyle

Annwn is the sixth musical release by English author and independent musician Jacob H. Kyle.

Recorded over the course of three months alongside rejuvenated readings in British mythology and folklore, my guiding motive was to record the stages my imagination would venture towards locating this eponymous Otherworld musically.

Annwn is a closer, more conceptual treatment of dark ambience and atmospheric black metal influences in comparison to my earlier work predominately based on the acoustic guitar.

Preface to The Tedium Lies — Jacob H. Kyle

The Tedium Lies is available at Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle formats.

The Tedium Lies began two years ago in an effort to establish my own epistemology regarding what I consider to be the four major subjects coupling metaphysics and philosophy. Owing to my own obscure record, the result of these reflections remains confessional in a form closest to prose poetry with a pessimistic anthropological bent.

Eventually abandoning a few years’ journalling and juvenilia written and warped in late adolescence, my prior method of writing had been conceived primarily within the stagnant bounds of consecutive journal entries, now and then smuggling out what I thought to refine elsewhere for failing projects, though these short-lived exchanges remained of little productivity until I started officially working on the manuscript of the Tedium in isolation at the age of twenty-two, unburdened by the major bulk of early disqualifications no longer worth appraising.

Unable to keep from assigning the relevance of my ideas into loosely sequential form under totemic chapters between the two books, by and by the Tedium sufficed to expose the direct substance for which I had previously only naïve impressions of how an author adorns a stylised narrative or poem with a few thematic measures and digressive embellishments woven into literary texture as an aside unto their own erudition, their own raw authorship.

Not a week would go by over its writing period without the incremental productivity of steadfast insomnia shepherding these temperamental daydreams. Nursing when possible the peace to think in sentences during the manual workday, covertly jotting down additions and aphorisms on my knee in a makeshift booklet of improperly stapled bits of scrap paper to later transcribe and unfurl at my desk past midnight.

One of several miniature notebooks. An early draft of chapter VIII in Religion.

I kept almost entirely to myself during the main bulk of the writing process—both my mind and the work seemed inextricably outcast—where the urge to confide in others would fritter away with their correspondence. Naturally, I figured it best to assess my contributions with a candour discernible solely for the dead in reverence. The most appropriate advice I can give to any artist is to create as though you were already dead.

The closest works in scope and profile of which I am inclined to liken the shared foothold of the Tedium, indeed the most sincere precursors for its directive (beyond esoterica, myth, philosophy, and folklore), I have long honoured to the arcane treasuries of Robert Burton, E. M. Cioran, and Fernando Pessoa, as well as late studies into the two foundational texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi.

The funny thing is, I would be frankly uneasy to evince these few sprinkled surnames as tinder for my writing of the Tedium since, as I also presume it not too dissimilar for them, the process was largely—fundamentally uninhibited to any extraneous form or style whatsoever.

Nearly all reception prior to publication would deem the Tedium an explicitly mystifying read, at times impenetrably purple or apishly baroque, “enigmatic to the point of being incomprehensible”, the detritus of theological redundancy, “like a five hundred year old monk armed with a dictionary”, perennialistically dense, overly polemicised, generally dispossessive, a groaning credos buoying misanthropic angst over inexpiable nihilism, “affirmatively degenerate & obtuse”, a coy nod in the vicinity of something “certainly unique”, yet another vague cold call from guttered straits, a suicide note, or else the sure result of impending madness.

For too long I hoped that there might be someplace I could contribute my work, to propose its addition in solidarity among a niche small press, welcomed by likeminded artists and readers. But even had I stumbled upon such a willing publisher, doubtless the Tedium would be catalogued among its antitheses.

To this end, the ideal reader is one whom we may bargain with both ways for confession and explanation.

The Tedium Lies — Jacob H. Kyle

The Tedium Lies is available at Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle formats.

Click here to read the preface to The Tedium Lies.

“Existence takes punished precedence in a world ailing with the agonies of consequence and misfortune. Once something becomes aware of its existence, once something is born to nothing, it cannot compel itself to cease except by cruelly wishing with futility for deliverance.”

The debut work of English author and musician Jacob H. Kyle, The Tedium Lies is a treatise of temperament formulated from fragmentary cahiers into aphoristic prose poems comprising four topical chapters: epistemological metaphysics, religious critique, existential pessimism, and literary as well as linguistic analysis. Now newly revised with the original foreword by Andre Solnikkar.

“An affecting poetic treatise of pessimistic reactivity to the exterior horrors of being, not without a thoroughly introspective melancholy. A must-read for admirers of Pessoa and Cioran, Jacob H. Kyle engraves a most prominent anti-writ in a disquieting voice of its own (upon and beyond the former authors' redolent corpses).”

— Elytron Frass, author of Moieties, VITIATORS, and Liber Exuvia

“‘You and I have awoken into the very nightmare of Being.’ Thus begins this beautiful collection of prose pieces lamenting the wretched fecundity of Life. There is a lucidity and a brutality to these pieces that readers of Cioran, Solnikkar, Gary J. Shipley, and other writers of that nature will greatly appreciate. It is a welcome addition to any rotted shelf of sorrowful tomes.”

— Jacob McMillan, author of Eternism — Death and Individuation between Mainländer and Schopenhauer

“The greatest philosophers are always not such but moreso poets in their mastery of language merged with passion and feeling, then thought. Think Nietzsche, Cioran. Now Kyle. Amazingly penned and among the best of a long tradition.”

— Andrew Cyril Macdonald, author of op. cit/urbes and curator at Version (9) Magazine

Book Review: A Pittance of Passions — Andre Solnikkar

Is it possible that from the conception of literature writers have been mostly mistaken in utilising their knowledge through the medium of storytelling? Whichever primary form of ideation they claim to have learned from the world is largely represented by convention and not wherever their disciplines truly derive.

What need was there for a narrative to spawn? How do the costumed truths of Homer fare posthumously in the Iliad or Laurence Sterne his Smelfungus? Such vital reassessments are necessarily inquired when recounting the episodic allegories of A Pittance of Passions.

Perhaps this gnawing sense for completion stems from something fundamental in our thinking which refuses to let go of what greater meaning language means to offer. Often we are apt to think too critically when it comes to justifying each chapter of a book, every utterance of a tale strung along towards conceding a conclusion out loud.

“And as a velvet kiss took his breath, he wanted to melt and release and transcend, and his heart ached for a sigh. ‘Who are you really?’ he wondered.

And the harbinger smiled in the night. ‘The madness which is the core and meaning of all. I reach beyond your reason and beneath your soul. I sow and reap, and you stare at me with confusion flickering in blinded eyes, silently asking: Why?’”

A Pittance of Passions is a deeply psychological emanation, a catering of mania, wherein its Tirnancaitian sensibilities, whether among the king or the fool, end up familiarly and cumulatively marred by the glaring conceits of its characters’ impassioned refusal to play fair with the nightmare they find themselves maddeningly lost in, reborn to, or in charge of.

Several recognisable literary figures appear throughout its composition of epigrammatic beauty: Thomas Bernhard, Georg Büchner, Hamlet & Macbeth, Lao Tzu & Zhuangzi, Mervyn Peake, Flann O’Brien. Jewels of dramatic introspection professed by each archetypal player during a cynic’s Goon Show—mere concepts to be entertained by minds plagued with metaphor and meaning and outright twaddle.

A sniping mandrake oftentimes seems the tale’s sole enlightened fabulist. Deriving from the earth itself, fey in her rudeness above ground, human only by figure yet lacking a soul as men would see it except where she might compel fools alike to converse with her far from the forest’s edge and darkly seduce them astray, playfully yawning all the while...

“Revel in your blindness. Be formless as water. Flow and reflect. Rise to the sky or seep into the soil. Know no more of obstacles than of a goal. Be glad that you are not while pretending that you are.”

Each conversation is doubly significant to keep in the back of one’s mind when progressing further and further into this converging dream, whether through brief ruminations of an elderly exacerbated king or the legend of a fledgling raven-tongued woodwose finally making his way out of the weald.

Lastly, the bare requisite of narrative, or lack thereof, is what blends this tale of obscure parchment into refinement, leaving behind what can only be traced between jagged reflections from a mirrored Naught.

“Wisdom is not meant to endure but to beget mares’ nests and mirror-madness. The dunces think the morons dumb, fools scorn the imbeciles, till fatuous fate forfeits applause by playing to a charnel house!”

Book Review: Finnegans Wake — James Joyce

“Imagination by itself, unlike every clear and distinct idea, does not of its own nature carry certainty with it. In order that we may attain certainty of what we imagine, there has to be something in addition to imagination, namely, reasoning.”

— Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

I

I consider style to always be an affectation of expression. Every encampment of ideation is integrally fortified by style. Yet it is not style but temperament which predates the basis from which all artists diverge in influence. Two minds can find the same meaning in something yet choose to define it by varying degrees of complexity and it is these primary ideas about the world reflected into significance that I expect of the artist to uniquely represent.

No one can sincerely escape their own temperament nor resist developing their tastes and abilities by one. However, I believe that reality is orthodox, and every mind inside it, which is how artists are able to communicate mutual themes and subjects, experiences from their corner of the world to another, but language is the bind necessary to fully facilitate that expression, to formally imbue the image with its own veritable meaning, and if that bind is intentionally frayed or losing, then the integrity of what it stands to connect renders itself basically untethered, lost, a writhing enigma.

To briefly outline, my main disapproval of Finnegans Wake has always resided in the focus of its deliberately anomalous composition. I would like to suggest its attestability as being subjectively written for no particular crowd and therefore unaffiliated with its reigning title among literary as well as lingual and canonically ranging works, for I am thoroughly unconvinced that it should be liable to any wider critique than as a misled exception by the great author. My only rule in reviewing Finnegans Wake is that it must be considered as an anomalous work of intentional obscurity by the wayside of literature.

II

When someone reading Finnegans Wake for the first time notices the few marred Latin droplets and erroneous capitalisation, they are thrust hence into the investigative position to find its closest real meaning from the dictionary of the sane.

In such a book, Joyce could have discredited a thousand mistakes in his schema that only he could later devise as being permissible to conceal, kneading this novelty genre where only the author is authorial to what is good and true. In short, Joyce conducted Finnegans Wake where he is vain leader.

Handpicked parcels of phrase, disjoined misspellings, stale etymological non-native fancies. Intended to encourage facing a blank slate of gibberish, the dull joke that waits on every page. Marring the typeface with intentional marks and irritations, experimental replacements in a benign scheme, a collage of code: an enigma unto the study of authorial intent as opposed to what is ably discerned from the work itself.

There are possible meanings reflected from all angles in every possible word mangled to befuddle recognition between dozens of languages distilled even further to an English script wherein each page, each encasement of miserly Wake lore pieced through hardly illuminates anything but by its tone and atmosphere, impossible to make out the sunset from the crossing pines, navigable only by lame wits to weasel out puns and oblige slack riddles and makeshift linguistics.

The use of merging other languages and punctuation wholesale or piecemeal is not an improvement upon expression in English, especially into languages which require reading under specific indices typically argued for under secondary literature or else the allusive pretence of multilingualism.

Committed to rendering inconsequential harpings with the bones and ivy of words, trawling myriad banks of lexica and vernacular while infusing baseless humour into the phonetic credibility of innuendo, miscellaneous feeling, and whatever other geometrical secrets sunken into each printed page’s foreground encourage.

III

If a painter intends to paint a scene they saw exactly in their dream, what they would invariably end up rendering would be owed only to their own coincidental selection of paints. The perspective of the canvas, incapable of mirroring the definitive judgement that they intended it to portray, would become warped by reality.

Treating words less like tools and more with indistinguishable brushstrokes, finally pretending their finished picture retains an excusable meaning or else are turned prideful that it may contain a million subjective little ones framing the totality of its vouched worth.

IV

For all the patience I have attempted with the work over the years, to try to read Finnegans Wake with collected insight beforehand or upon revisiting usually wears thinnest on impact for how much else there is to constantly identify. The layers billow without form, a kaleidoscopic concentration. You are only ever going to query speechlessly what you find asleep and dreaming here.

Like atonal music that cannot rightly be listenable, there is no taste that redeems its wordage without surrendering to the mysterious potential in its conception of what complexity must be ever latent.

Thematic regulations prove about as illuminating as the language instated throughout, rendering linearity impossible but a mournful mound of disguised definitions and semantic filament.

Were it an experiment sincere or a humourless wad in testing the farthest limits of literary form, it has only succeeded in the presumption of no more necessary convolution than its standard, forfeiting reason into obscurity.

Finnegans Wake is either so far a mistaken venture as to be closer to a tedious sanguine pun or else intentionally unnavigable—in either case, both would have to be deemed anomalous.

Ultimately, it is a book read in order to recycle how you think it ought to be further read because it cannot be truly understood.

V

• Is Finnegans Wake an artform made out of words rather than just a novel?
• Is Ulysses the only reputation it needs?
• Is wisdom required to trust the seventeen years Joyce spent writing it?
• Is claiming needless obscurity to feign one’s own understanding?
• Is the ambition alone worthy of paying attention to it?

I implore anyone with a consistent opinion on Finnegans Wake to explore and investigate such considerations regarding the paltry victory of its prevalence, your proud enigma.

Yfel Wyrd — Jacob H. Kyle

Yfel Wyrd is the fifth musical release by English author and independent musician Jacob H. Kyle.

Book Review: the spiral consilience — oudeís

Published in December 2016 by gnOme, the spiral consilience inaugurates a cycle of pessimistic poems rendered permanently in understated lowercase.

Reviving the singular nom de plume from a forgotten scarlet-bound novel published in 1897 entitled Hell, underground and without surname, nationality, or portrait, a quintessential word in Greek traced solely from the Homeric webbing of an etymological blurb by Dan Mellamphy “meaning no-one/no-thing”, oudeís emerges bequeathing paradoxical query into the unknowable and the vitally unseen of which none are incapable nor obliged to envision as founded in abnegation:

there is one endless nothingness outside,
there is one palpable, sane fear of void,
there is one darkness waiting at the end
and one intrinsic fear of being destroyed.

Desolation beyond sadness belongs between these pages, indifferent swathes of time without change or rising, uncovered at an instant and without repeal throughout, reminiscent of “a greater blackness” Thomas Ligotti preaches with his guitar from The Unholy City and the feverish point of contention which spawned a lifetime of metaphysical dilemmas E. M. Cioran happened to contain not only within The Trouble with Being Born but his complete oeuvre.

There are few mystical overtones and no phoney esoterics courted here since nothing is left secret. Neither unknown nor knowable. The missive moans ahead of melancholy or sour contradiction. Those familiar with The Last Messiah by Peter Wessel Zapffe or Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against the Human Race will be reclamated with the breach of sentience which permits these truths their empty consolation among mankind, flowing tenebrous through the black brain of oudeís’ remains like a bottomless well.

one darkness holds all life in its domains,
its void has neither ending nor beginning;
there is one death that creeps up on your heart
as thoughtless, intervening years are thinning.

Although the trilogy of oudeís—the spiral consilience (2016), Labyrinthophoroi & Glyptogeographies (2018), Amuletic Oubliettes (2021)—has reassured me that such living spectators are poetically privy to the placid spur which Nothingness deducts, nevertheless I ponder the anonymous effect of the spiral consilience’s pitiable yet imperative neglect.

In Anathemas and Admirations, Cioran writes woefully in his essay on Jorge Luis Borges such concerns:

“The misfortune of being recognised has befallen him. He deserved better. He deserved to remain in obscurity, in the Imperceptible, to remain as ineffable and unpopular as nuance itself. There he was at home.”

There is a blind sadness I fret in the uncreating context and tragedy stately expressed by every poem, as though the poet ought to remain concealed in order to avoid permeating the work with their own incognito bias, as though the poet never existed in the first place.

No one among the mundane sectors of your life was ever going to read this book, let alone bear its final objective. It is a testament of the night that shall not be brandished so openly in the light of day. This book will not be renowned or reprinted. Not a single poem will figure its placement in my lifetime among any traditional anthology or leading philosophy nor reassured beyond this centennial huddle of our readership browsing wherever the outlandish and outré or occult online oscillates. You may romantically plant it in the shelves of a used bookshop or dutifully do away with your curling copy on a table outdoors somewhere—it is most likely going to be trashed or perused by a member of the effete and budding majority whose integral indifference will fail to identify any of its finalised heredity with their conventional collective cause.

For the nucleus of imagination from which this book was composed seems tangible only by those who come to recognise the variable exigencies of death.

then all that darkness brings will fill the senses
as all inhale the void with swelling chests
and come to a resistless understanding
of mysteries concealed within the breast.

I am urged to write to you who are still listening that there are few other contemporary works darker in effectively baroque verse equalling Blake, Melville, and Milton known to me and that the ultimate address of its closing sequence by divided declaratory paragraphs may never be unlearned, by hook or by crook, only progressively dallied on and deluded from its criterion.

“the human species has awoken from the void that precedes all of history into the dream called self-awareness, only to find itself—an abnormality within a larger abnormality—attached to a tiny corner of an immeasurable vastness, condemned to dwell in isolation that precludes it from ever learning anything at all about itself.”

King Pellam — Jacob H. Kyle

For my Love

King Pellam is the fourth musical release by English author and independent musician Jacob H. Kyle.

For Luonnotar — Jacob H. Kyle

In memory of Sam

For Luonnotar is the third musical release by English author and independent musician Jacob H. Kyle.

He Had His Family There — Jacob H. Kyle

After William Langland, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and Charley Patton

“Noon so gret tokene of beaute,
As ys parfyt humylyte.”

— Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man

He Had His Family There is the second musical release by English author and independent musician Jacob H. Kyle.

Collected Gitty Recordings 2016-2018 — Jacob H. Kyle

For Drabe

Collected Gitty Recordings 2016-2018 is the first musical release by English author and musician Jacob H. Kyle.

A chronological collection of guitar recordings made in late adolescence, greatly inspired by the American Primitive style developed by the master John Fahey as well as a reverence for early blues and folk music.

The nature of these pieces in recording was often haphazard yet comfortably impromptu, offset from single takes during long playing sessions alone, most of which I would eventually upload to various dead-end audio streaming services without any traction before deciding to compile them together into a single album here.