#carcosation

"This place is like somebody's memory of a town, and the memory is fading. It's like there was never anything here but jungle."

The whole clip is perhaps a good mission statement for this piece, but thank you, Rustin; that's a good start. (This post also has a good comparison of this scene to Bierce's "An Inhabitant in Carcosa", for the interested.) Another thing worth mentioning from the start is that while (for clarity), beyond this link I've never seen anything else mentioning it, I did not write this wiki article, so at least one other person on this planet has at one point had a similar convergence, and while my personal experience is not exactly as described on that page, I think Dionysians could probably find a fun thing or two to swing across on in there if desired. Other existing works at least similar enough for interesting work would be John Tynes' "The Hastur Mythos," which I believe informs Dennis Detwiller's work in Impossible Landscapes, and while I'm not sure if there was any direct influence, I think it dovetails nicely with the above quote (and much of TD KiY in general). Without cosigning for or against on Tynes' theories re: the KiY/H****r, The King In Yellow as a "curious manifestation" and Carcosa as a "strange ghost-metropolis that consumes other cities whose vice and melancholy draw the grim feaster-city towards them" get us yet closer-- if you want to turn off on a different but related fork, my experiences and thoughts around 2016-17 specifically regarding Carcosa can be found in a fragment here, and they actually later led to this entire ongoing "project," for lack of a better term.

A picture starts to emerge, but having the 7-day experiment with a certain time limit involved combined with the urge to specifically direct this towards him/them brought up the question of why precisely I felt so moved given that the "goal" or requests of the prayer are mostly unchanged in the Carcosa remix vs. the original, and I think @echthr0s did actually hit something similar from a different angle (whether you subscribe to the aformentioned Tynes divide or not), but the KiY, especially in the conjunction with Dionysos, an entity extremely and intimately connected with mortality, and in an attempt to get more specific: "minority reports" or anomalies in a system, often those places that have a similar hunger to his own. Urbex is perhaps the low-hanging fruit here in terms of a similar "attraction factor," but consider the subtle difference between a boarded up strip-mall with a thousand copies all the same, versus a speakeasy cast into eternal night, the black mold creeping up the curled and yellowed wallpaper now no different than the air itself, boarded up long ago when the city's tunnels fell out of fashion. The town where mostly streets remain; the shallow sinkholes in their borders making you wonder if its builders had fathomed to where exactly it might sink. The man who would be the heir to the Last King, the king who eats the wolf's heart; the one to both fungi and microbes sing as agents of his price and pleasure and sick-sweetness, as do artists of every vein-- but of course, his roots go back to drama.

He is the Ivy-Choked, Crumbling Mask, an extant form of life which cannot be killed in a way that matters; the name of his god Unspeakable and his spiral maw twining its way through realities. He opens the pine curtain as he carves soliloquies of madness into your gut and muscle; the inexplicable fascination that draws beings from every twisted angle of time and space in search of a signal found in flakes of burnt sun off iron; the arrhythmia of the heart pumping it's vivid mirror when it comes to a place that is becoming by virtue of its own fertilization. You could choke on yourself, little ouroboros, but that would ruin the fun, so I suggest you keep dancing.

The prose has obviously purpled itself, so perhaps a sign to make one last turn, and I suppose the most obvious question is why. To a certain extent, because he is and I am moved to acknowledge it, but on another front because while I do not seek anything like the repair of reputation (a bit off-brand even, perhaps) on his front, one may perhaps also consider the gold of the chrysalis and the brew within-- and how one might be wise to not linger inside that shell too long.

As is hopefully obvious, even if one tried to hold that one particular mode or mythos branch was "the true one" in a stringently literary sense, I think attempting such with either of these guys alone would be an especially laughable feat that I'm not interested in trying at. It is, hopefully, some context, and perhaps a staticky few minutes of Carcosan radio.

I'm Johnny Carcosa, and I've got a good feeling about all you listening.

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(Edit 12.10: My brother pointed out this first quote from Bakkhai (tr. Carson), re: cities, which then brought to mind some other ones, so hardly comprehensive but certainly on brand)