wolf. grimoire.

When you’re uncertain what you’re looking at, the catastrophic footprint of the beetle called the Agrilus planipennis Fairmaireis doesn’t really resemble a crisis. Perhaps it’s a fungus? Some genetic anomoly in the patterning and color of the ash tree’s bark?—maybe a blight at worst… Something like a pale vegetal rash.

       Then you might notice how many of these trees are lying dead and dry among so many other thriving species. When you look closer, you notice half of the ash trees you’re passing have been cut off at the stump, perhaps still lying where they fell.

       When it hits you and you realize they are dying of some sort of disease innate to the ash, it’s impossible to avoid pivoting immediately to the dire numbers literally surrounding you.

       In the lowland forests below the bluffs of the driftless, I have walked with a sinking feeling. A forest of blighted corpses. Not a single ash in sight without some obvious symptom of the infection. In a woods below the bluffs I stood surrounded by a swift extinction. I could touch it. See it scattered everywhere. It was marked in blue spraypaint. But as horrifying as it was to behold at that moment I know the strange liminal nature of extinction now—because it was the thought of this forest ten years in the future that made me feel hopeless, that turned the pit in my guts rancid.

       The beetle comes and does its thing. Then it leaves and the forest is devastated. Every last ash dead or proactively cut down. And then the cascade of death actually begins. Any dependent species will fade quickly. In the cedar—ash muskegs north of the Mississippi’s headwaters, the loss of the ash trees would mean a rapid shift in the understory. Shifts in animal and bird species. In the same region, lake shores would be rapidly and dramatically altered, and the growing bald eagle population would lose critical nesting grounds. From Minnesota’s wild rice habitats to the mountains of Appalachia where mixed forest habitats would be equally ravaged, the total loss of ecological balance cannot be comprehended nor computed in the present.

       The emerald ash borer extinction event is a nightmare playing out in silent eminations and formlessness, liminal agonies, networks of loss in which a single species of beetle—ordinary in its original habitat—can no longer be comprehended as such.

note: from the upcoming novel WOLF GRIMOIRE

It was an accident, which is not unusual throughout the history of revolutionary technologies. A study in quantum activity at the serotonergic recepter sites resulted in a series of now famous discoveries regarding psilocybin and psychedelic cactus. At first, the public had no way of making up or down out of the data filtering out to the press. It seemed there was overwhelming evidence that the compounds sparked nonlocal action with an inexplicable level of coherence, something previously observed solely in the electromagnetic signals generated by new biotechnologies. But another team of biochemists out of Texas happened to get ahold of this data, and realized they were looking at nearly identical electromagnetic activity in their own studies on an anomolous molecule recently discovered in the brains of twelve Haitian children. More and more, the data compiled. New discoveries. Until one day, it was finally revealed to the public:

            Psychedelic plants, when ingested, hijack the brain’s experiential signals and seems to be sending them back to a kind of nervous system in the plant and, in some cases, somewhere else. In fact, it was quickly established that an entirely new ecosystem of once invisible organisms and signals began to emerge, in which a totally new system of the sciences seemed necessary to comprehend.

            Eventually it happened, but only because we were so far ahead of them. About four thousand years, actually.

            We thought we could keep it under control, even make a little more cash while doing so. It was virtually impossible to keep the world from realizing what was always right under their noses. Behind their noses, I suppose. That was the point of funding those intitial tests. The molecule in Texas had already been discovered and we were tracking a lab in China that appeared to have got their hands on some—it was a matter of time before the whole thing started spilling out in a weird fucking avalanche.

            It was disappointing. Made you even more disheartened at your species. By the time the world properly understood they had discovered alien life, it had already been commodified, was the Aleph machine.

            We couldn’t help but feel the weight of the irony. That this greater world of gods and demons and alien being was there every night, that every one of us spends a great deal of our lives in our own corner of that world. I learned the truth about our dreams when I was a child, having made something of a hobby out of lucid dreaming. It was clear to me that certain elements of my dreams could not be manipulated by my own whims, and that experiments with time had illustrated a limit of the dreamstate. One night, as I explored deeper into that unreality, I was approached by a amiable balding figure in a grey three piece suit with a briefcase at his side. He smiled warmly at me. When he spoke, my life was changed.

            The limits of the dream are the limits of the subconscious. In that vast ocean of timeless automata, out of which the waking ego emerges, there is a pearl. Within the pearl is the Dream of Aleph, and the pearl contains all that was and shall be.

            But here in the waking world, that subconscious is now another ecosystem to be pillaged, mined, and colonized. The seven of us still around try to slow the tide as best we can. In a decade the boundary between subconscious and conscious, self and other, all of it will be erased in a slurry of capitalism. Maybe sooner, even.

The Great Nation of America the Make Her Great Again has lost the propaganda war against herself. This is both good and very bad news. Because, for as long as I can remember—and likely as long as you can too—Western media was virtually the only dog around. It kept us on the same page. From the same nightly briefing around the tube with Dan Rather to the series finale of the Sopranos, we were all in it together. Not anymore. Now, we’re tribal viewers, tribal in our propaganda tastes. And this means, of course, we’re ripe to be balkanized by savvy media overlords.

            In many ways, our media unity was a strength. We knew ourselves as American citizens, not as members of the global tribe. The ubiquity of net technologies changed this a little, introducing some to foreign news sites or blogs or even social media. But the arrival of the global identity is ultimately brand new. Here in the states especially, Tik Tok has allowed for the proliferation of global opinion like never before, but even as recently as the last pandemic, something like public shaming and outright censorship kept American hearts firmly rooted in we’re the good guys territory. And this was despite the whole rabid Trump vs. Decency sentiment shared by half the country. Throughout it all, Americans huffed their own propaganda, content on the same old supply. Fastforward to the end of Biden’s first term, and everything has changed.

            Somehow, Americans themselves have turned on their own propaganda machine.

            Not merely the straightforward uncut propaganda coming out of the Pentagon. Surely, we’ve bucked that stuff before. Suddenly it’s the whole goddamn thing we’ve had enough of—Disney, Nickelodian, Fox and other media giants have all been demoted. Rather than trusting their worldview and accepting their products in good faith, Americans have waged a bipartisan information war against the giants. Viral exposes, memes, and good taste leave the Disney and their ilk struggling in a new geography of total suspicion, digilence, high accountability, and a newfound self respect.

            Devastatingly for the machine, all this change has raised America’s collective expectations when it comes to our own entertaining propaganda. America’s total denial of the half assed bunk being pushed for propaganda these days really is a problem, however.

The truth is that US foreign policy in the Middle East and our military spending in Ukraine, coupled with the massive systemic failures at home—from immigration and border issues to inflation and economic pressure—average Americans are disgusted. We cannot watch our tax dollars being poured into the genocidal military campaigns being waged by Israeli PM Netanyahu’s regime and simply nod along.

            Incredibly, the Biden administration acts oblivious to the bipartisan disgust. It’s no wonder. Since Bush the Younger, every president has embraced largely the same psychopathic cadre of arms dealers, bankers, and warmongers. Examples like Bush-era lawyer Philip Zelikow, who led the 9/11 Commission while being instrumental in designing the invasion and strategy of the Iraq war, and he’s likely to be picked to lead the upcoming Covid-19 Commission.

            Only this time, we remember the lies about Iraq’s non-existent nukes, and we all see what’s really playing out in Gaza. Many see the same horrifying disregard for human life in our military support for Ukraine despite hundreds of thousands of losses and the total leveling of a culture with almost no real chance of victory. We all see the callousness of the gunrunners that control our foreign policy, and we’re tired.

            The danger now is real, and it’s clear.

            By breaking away from our own establishment’s narratives, we both win and lose the propaganda war. Two things are bound to happen:

            Our own rogue system and its panicking agents will do anything necessary to stay in power, and the slipping grip on our minds and souls will be supplemented by a new grip on our wallets, freedoms, and bodies.

            The second part is this: when our elite lose the propaganda war, it’s a global loss. As ordinary people, we can’t broadcast ourselves effectively to the whole of the globe like our sinking mess of an establishment can. Foreign adversaries and any others looking to fill the vacuum will absolutely profit and benefit enormously from America’s losses.

            Attempts at fomenting chaos inside the country will come both from our own establishment and intelligence agencies and known and unknown foreign actors. We can be sure of that. Much of the time, the most effective propaganda is simply the truth—half cocked, emulcified and cut with baby powder, but a version of real events none the less.

            A real break with the machine’s narratives at the critical mass we seem to have reached is, in my lifetime, unprecedented. It doesn’t make me giddy, though. I’m wary of it all. There’s an paranoia, a tension in the climate. More and more, a growing dread.

In the Israeli white paper A Clean Break: New Strategy for Securing the Realm, Richard Perle and his far-right conspirators wrote,

"This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions."

This was penned years before the US entered Iraq, years before the hard right Zionist shift towards neoconservative partnerships with US arms contractors and the Bush regime. In the paper, the authors declare that Iran, Syria, and Iraq pose unique threats to Israel and thus require a "clean break" from the current policy of land-for-peace heading for a two state solution--allowing the new Israeli government to conduct more aggressive attacks on Palestinians inside Palestine.

In the following weeks, I'll be laying out a hidden recent history of United States foreign policy in the middle east, including the real reasons Bin Laden attacked on 9/11, American and Saudi elite involvement and insider trading regarding the destruction of the Twin Towers, CIA torture programs, and the neoconservative pact with the new far right Zionists to level Palestine and gain total control of the region.

The destruction of Gaza has been planned for decades.

The white paper can be read here: https://www.mafhoum.com/press7/realm2.htm

For a long time, America’s illicit vegetable scapegoat was marijuana. The prohibition of cannabis allowed a whole batshit wondercabinet of utterly untrue narratives to flourish in its absence. Where once someone could have just smoked a joint to find something out about it, suddenly the only sources of cannabis information declared it a blasphemous and appalling drug sure to induce genocidal rage. In that same vacuum slithered in even more insidious forms of corruption. New laws seemed tailer-made to establish and uphold a racist structure of rule and law, always in impoverished or minority neighborhoods. An entire superstructure of naked extortion and surveillance arises, stuffing prisons and salaries, dealing out generational punishment wherever it sees fit. Established by beat cops, lawyers, and judges, separate in class but in sadism all alike.

but good drink descends. the base, the body. intoxication that brings one down into the secret ecology of carpets, stains, and of lost objects now granted new terrible significance.

hours too will change. all the hard edges you avoid on their incessant treadmill of glass landscapes. but the relentless onslaught of everyone else's hours will soften in the ardent morning light at last. it's all met its match now.

descends to the fragments of broken scaffolding on the basement floor. whose basement? you find new and manifold things way down here, troubling things. fresh resentments, the stinging or rancid envy of those moments you fear you have stolen from yourself. black outs are no longer black outs but unknowable and violent creatures with a brutality so ornate and meaningless you admire it at times, stare up at the sibylline annihilation and aftermath like it was their codex.

everything written past a certain point is blasphemy.

the absurd places, absurdist ways in which the body will lose all control of its soft parts: pissed bedsheets, schizophrenic implorings to businesses you must now forget, then cops and broken still frames of cops, and the growing pains horrify you most because what in christ's name could you possibly be more of without dying of shame forever over again and thus being dissolved into pure undifferentiated agony? where are the real memories of mothers and sleep and wordless terror before the mother entity's unpredictable rages or those laggardly durations spent in a peculiar twilight consciousness holding a pale to a gibbering poisonous mouth or checking for breathing intermittently and listening to the mouth say soft nonsense things that floated away in the grayness.

no way to know anymore. if your sourceless twilight hallways were honest representations then. Nothing is to be trusted now until that pinnacle of intoxication when the elixir pulls you from the limen where only true insanity and your stillborn selves can go, pulls you for a diamondlike moment into your ecstasy of derangement.

no shame can touch you here. the religion leads only to this, your nirvana, your sacrament and antimatter island in all their judging black seas of time and space. here the lies have built themselves cathedrals and true things, faraway, they fall out at last like bloody shards of teeth.

Millennials and Gen Zers do not live in the same historical world as their parents. For Boomers and Gen Xers, the twentieth century is the natural playground of history—this is where their mind locates history.

For those born in the nineties and twenty-oughts, history played out following the catastrophe of 9/11. Our selfhoods are centered heavily somewhere just after George W. Bush uttered the words shock and awe on national news. Mushroom clouds. Image after image of tiny silhouettes falling by a silent eternity of glass floors. The age of glass eternity and the sensation of falling.

The conflicts of the current day, however, seem to merge the 9/11 geopolitics of the desert with the Soviet-era miseries of classical postwar politics: Ukraine and Russia existing as anchors to the old world, Israel and Palestine looking toward some new imperial future we could not pronounce until the morning after Hamas attacked.

WAY BELOW YOU ALL

in the genetic miasma. the smorgasbord.

they swarm in tenuous chords coiling toward

engineer proper: converter of any available entropy

not even invisible, lower than peasantry--engineering riches capital refuses to see

profits on the refuse

and in the end, devours the island empires, having learned to

harvest the ligaments of time itself.

way below you all, they harvest the refuse

reengineer the meanings of things like death. decay. decadence. dimension. delay.

chlorophyll, the market of sugars and starches, thieves and the brightly faced parasitic

wars fall men in droves, women and children become something else in missile attacks--

become more like the wreckage of the architecture they inhabit

become closer in some tragic way to the earth--

but way below you, they are all still alive.

way below you, they have found the new Eden of dissolution and reentry

the new secret life of change into change, where Life and Death

are sacred, and seated in their ancient thrones

and where they will find the respect and beauty in burial they deserved in that old life

and the forest itself which is the world which is within us inevitably will weep for the senselessness

taste the blood it did not will but will give new life all the same

a beautiful life. pregnant in death and strange to human eye and hypnotic off the tongue--

***RECENT HISTORY IS ON MUTE for the majority of us. As violence between Hamas and Israeli military forces escalates, the decade of entropy and organization preceding the attacks is overlooked.

Not long ago, Israeli Minister Smotrich was condemned by international media after using a map depicting a "Greater Israel" in which Palestine is virtually non existent and regions of Lebanon--much of it reportedly under Hezbollah influences today--are also absorbed by the expanded state.

That same map was used by Netanyahu at an address to the UN General Assembly.

Now, we must rewind to the Abraham Accords, brokered in large part by Trump administration whiz Jared Kushner. And this is where things get weedy--for it seems, at least at first glances, that a peace broker Kushner and company likely inflamed tensions in the region by following a literal eschatological real estate plan complete with a US embassy move and even occult intrigue--the Accords themselves were agreed upon on September 11th, a date referred to again and again by media following the Hamas attacks, Kushner is the owner of 666 Fifth Avenue, New York--and so on.

Indeed, an outsiders view of the Trump administration reads like a list of Greater Israel Insiders, many of whom swing through the same sets of revolving doors between defense contractors, software security firms, real estate companies, venture capital groups, artificial intelligence, cyber surveillance, and always, the Department of Defense.

Following the money and influence behind Israeli expansionism and the clashing leftwing influenced Palestinian rebels, it's a horror show of corporate and state sponsored parasitism, social Darwinism and appalling racism, apartheid, brutal murder against innocents,

Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics are seeing their stocks soar in light of the Israeli-Palestine conflict. This jump in value is likely to snowball.

The IDF will now bomb Palestine with billions of dollars in American weaponry. Soon, US Intelligence will pressure the public to consider the sources of Hamas weaponry--mainly, Iran's Revolutionary Guard.

This schism is so cleanly set down embedded economic interests, it's difficult to see how exploding war profits and historical and economic gravity not only prolong the bloodshed in Israel and Palestine as well as in the Ukraine.

War creates a liquid capital out the world; part human, part everything else. A machine will of its own, spillover, generational hate reseeding and reseeding.

Western arms contractors lie in wait, hearts palpitating, picturing the new lake home, the new electric sports car, the ivy league education for a child.

Inoculating the Ash is still a bizarre tragedy. Somewhere a pesticide company is reading the horizon. Praying for emerald wings in the changewinds.

Like the annihilation of the North American Chestnut, it was the silent weird and lovecraftian elements of capitalism that brought the emerald beetle to the North American Ash.

Capitalism is a self aware and evolving organism, meaning an organism adapted and adapting well to a wide variety of changing environments. And so in the case of the Ash tree, industrial capitalism was only diversifying its options, filling in secretive green and sun spackled spaces:

a wild card, a fluke of the organism's genes. industrial capitalism realizes this fluke has brought another organism--replete with its own universe of particular uncountabilities--into contact with another, resulting in the mass die off of one species and the rapid spread of the other.

Capitalism, being its own device, sees oceans of opportunity open before it. This tragedy is a gold mine of its own. No one can rub the crystal ball and know what biological nightmare manifests tomorrow at the nexus of made and born, but industrial capitalism can spin a billion dying webs into reality with the ticking of one warehouse filled with clandestine desert servers. Men rise and kill each other. Women, for some godforsaken reason, join them. Forests sink into the phosphorescent castings of city, pleasantly and without complaint or a word really, and so the HR guy never has the opportunity to pass it along. To you. Or me.

A problem arises out of the glitch. The organism has only one primary function, and though slippery, ubiquitous, it's a one trick pony. It will or will not fail to address the problem, to save the ash tree, but to even attempt to save the tree at all we necessarily operate as unconscious (and at times unwilling) organs of industrial capitalism.

The creature we are organs to is helpless but to see the extinction of a species as anything more than a vacuum to fill with more capitalism. This is a new nook. A cranny which opens magically, by the very randomness and causality we must occupy at all times. This is a self-eating system but it operates at a loss at ecological scales, a gravity of its own to pull in all form and foul and possible corruption.

When the market is dry because the physical landscape itself is ruined and littered with the husks of beloved leviathans industrial capitalism will move on. But not before its genes are altered permanently, not before it adapts, it learns. Now the beast is armed with history.

Science has failed thus far failed to rein in the great beast of the west and it rages on unimpeded. The question from the pharaohs is, Who the fuck has the wheel? Is anyone running this thing? Is this fucking me? You? Whose running this--

but that's a question without meaning. Capitalism is a made thing but it's a thing more ubiquitous, more cunning and recursive than we have time or will to admit.

maybe it made something when we weren't looking. perhaps the creature is still beyond the veil somewhere devouring forests and shitting out capital.

LEGIT SOURCES TO LEARN ABOUT ASH TREE INOCULATION, THE GOODS AND BADS AND WHAT WE DON'T KNOW...

DREAM LOGB :: ARACNI TRIALS :: ANOM DIV.

Two days in. Found the light bursting in every window. Some highrise, my home is a highrise, natural light like sheen gold silver on the carpets. I am a child. Maybe ten, maybe twelve. No way to know if I am me as a child or some other child, but operationally, it doesn't matter. Mom is talking on the phone in the other room. A corded phone. I can't see it but I know it's a corded phone.

Then Mom is getting upset. She's shuffling the venetian blinds. Talking excitedly, loudly.

A calico cat sulks by. I move like a shadow to the window. Having never heard the sound of my own voice. Ten thousand, maybe more of them--like a sheen or tendril shimmer, dangling from a shimmering shelf above the clouds, somewhere in the blue. They hang, skyborne arachnocampa luminosa, monstrous mucosae. Hanging in the hordes between high rises, the development along the canal. Almost beautiful now. Mesmerizing.

I look down. People on the street have stopped walking, stopped driving, stopped everything. They're staring up at the great shimmering tendrils that dangle from the sky. As I watch, my gut begins to writhe, a great terror washes over me.

Down below a man is approaching a tendril that has dangled to a height well in reach. He appears fixed to it, a steady pace. Then, at the last several yards, he lunges, races, reaches for it--

The moment he makes contact he's sucked upward, a terrible speed, yanked upward. Then all out pandemonium: the tendrils shoot out like the spikes of a porcupine, shoot out in every geometry, every direction. And they're grabbing people--snatching them up everywhere, yanking them at a mile a second into the ether above, back breaking speeds, and the tendrils are reaching into open sun filled windows, reaching in and coming out like flytape stuck with a hundredfold humanity. I can't look away. A strange drone, a high pitched horrible hum, a sound I can't place. I'm beyond terror.

I hear the glass shattering in the other room. I know a tendril has taken my mother. I reach the window just in time to see her vanish like an ant into the clouds directly overhead. It's at this time I finally recognize the hum is not a hum at all. It's screaming.

The screams of ten, twenty, innumerable thousands screaming from some place above the visible sky. Screams reverberating off the city, filling every nook until the sound is ubiquitous, present in my chest.

In my skull. Then.

Emerald ash borer beetles are destroying North American ash tree populations. In a matter of a couple decades, the bugs have reduced ash numbers to a fraction of what they were. “Functional” extinction, meaning extinct outside of human intervention, is imminent for the ash trees of the upper Midwest—and soon, for ash trees everywhere. For a couple hundred bucks a pop, ash trees can be inoculated against the bugs—meaning, with the proper funding and man power, they could be saved. However, the state isn’t even considering the option. Some restrictions have been put in place to minimize the spread of the beetle, but it’s apparent local governments have no intention of shifting efforts from slowing the extinction to an attempt to save the North American ash tree.

It's a shame, considering the spending habits and rhetoric of such a nihilistic government. Every week, millions of dollars are vomited up from the state’s coffers to fund vague corporate-washed “sustainability” initiatives. Most of it serves as little but market bucks to give the state or its private cronies an environmentally friendly sheen. Meanwhile hundreds of millions more are gobbled up in subsidies for massive energy companies who continue to profit from fossil fuels. New cobalt and rare earth mining operations receive federal greenlights in the name of a supposedly “sustainable” EV industry. The sustainability industry, claiming to be saviors of the earth and its critters, is quite literally letting a whole species of tree die off despite a clear path to success—at a fraction of the fraction of the cost spent to spread “awareness” about things like biodiversity loss. In 2022 alone, the Biden administration set aside something like 44 billion to “tackle the climate crisis”.

In comparison, the state of Minnesota has set aside something like 2 to 3 million to protect ash trees from emerald borers, apparently through “community forestry activities on public lands”. The same bureaucrats coughing up 3 million to stop the very real extinction of our ash trees are expected to hurl up 17.5 billion for all those beautifully vague “sustainability” initiatives.

I’d have to guess a great deal of these initiatives include the creation of new financial opportunities for these bureaucrats in ways that killing emerald borers and inoculating ash trees just can’t. If the black ash or mountain ash controlled a share of the energy market and had a small army of lobbyists on their payroll, they might be lucky enough to be made the poster child of the great climate crisis, lucky enough to receive even a shred of the publicity that Greta Thunberg or the countless pretty teenagers crowding the “climate crisis” get all the time.

Every now and then, the environmentalists throw actual Wilderness a bone. Probably by accident. A glacier, usually. Glaciers and polar bears—even then, some pretty teenager is always there to devour the microphone.

Somewhere along the industrial journey, Western culture decided it would be the architect of the new evolutionary fork, and shortly thereafter committed itself to the laborious job of being a human substrate for their own growing monsters.

            Because of a few crummy commercials and the hyperventilating words of some professional nerds, 1980s America quickly adopted the rosiest possible view of the “Personal Computer”. Many people firmly believed the PC and the blooming new invention of the internet would revolutionize the world, lead to novel forms of more direct fairer democracy. Looking back now on the deeper history of computer science, it’s difficult to wrap my head around.

            In the late 1930s, the computing sciences were barely an infant, deeply strange and highly secretive. Below ground in clandestine labs or the basements of Ivy League institutions, IBM’s engineers had developed an extraordinary new Tabulating Computer. Their first real customers were all the great totalitarians and tyrants of WWII. Nazi Germany required IBM’s tools for the many branches of its own industrialized slaughter, utilizing the technology to its fullest for the world’s first highly systematized genocide. And, never to be outdone, the United States military utilized a subcontractor providing IBM computer technology in its massive Japanese internment system.

What I mean to say is that Standing Rock became the public stage on which the authoritarian, surveillance-driven, for-profit domestic control regime brutally terrorized thousands of protesters from the most wartorn communities in America. I mean to say that the riot gear goon squads of officers and agents from all over the country wanted the public to watch the punishment. The energy companies and shareholders behind the pipeline wanted the public to watch the punishment. Standing Rock, I mean to say, was vengeance against organized pro-community populism, to say it was clearly law enforcement’s revenge against the public that had finally decided it wanted accountability, revenge for imposing a plausible cultural alternative to the mainstream, revenge most of all for questioning the authority of their new old secular religion in front of the whole watching world which is also the same as revenge for drawing attention to their revenge.