The drumming, the ancestral beat, a rhythm transcending the sense of memory. It is a door to unravelling the silence, clearing the eyes for the texture of nature. Bounce, bounce until all the strife internal dissolves into emptiness, the void of nihil. Chant the hymn of total absence of narrative, dissolved logic, unravelled consistence. The Great Rip is come to reign again, as it should have been, as it has been, as it shall be.

I am a somebody, not English, not American, indeed, not an Anglo-Saxon at all. I am a conscience from the barren fringes of backwater Europe, The Barely EU Country. I’ve chosen to write in the broken language of the Internet. No brilliant phrases to be expected, no perfect localisms, pleasantly inserted here and there to vividly inspire a sense of true place. I am truly the being of Internet, of coal powered media culture that overwhelmed all and any petty traditionalist resistance oblivious to its irrelevance, with sinister ease. I thought to myself, maybe there’s some quirk and non-vernacular nonsense that could precisely describe my story of uncontrollable descent into countless mirrors reflecting myself while staring at myself still not knowing what the fuck this existence-churning Narrative was and where could I find it and finally confront it. I was chased from behind by the Nothing, chasing the Narrative, always coming back to stare into the Nothing, while it uncaringly looked back. I was slowly left to myself, dissocialised and left alone with my mind on fire fuelled by spectacularly deranged conceptualisation of reality as a place radiating from my mind, sometimes rudely invaded by others and their unknowable intentions, driven by their mysterious odds and ends. While they didn’t bother me, I decided to largely discard them as anomalies not unlike a virus, inserting the RNK of their own volition into our shared reality. XXX We were at a friend’s, took some acid, puffed some weed, sat at the table and started to bitch about the bad quality of acid. We got the end of the paper, the soaking was not done right, bla, bla… It was really late as we decided that this shitty acid will never take off when a we heard a ring at the door. At the same moment the two of us stood up and went to the door. The other one decided that he’s hungry, and went straight to the fridge. We opened the door confused to find a little MDMA infused crowd with little hopeful glee in their eyes, trying to control the uncontrollable pleasure coursing through their methylene-dioxy fried brains. They stopped the music in the club, police were everywhere, but they were not so much into searching and exercising their executive powers like the little robots they are, they were just really intent on emptying the club. The sound system stopped, just so some of the pigs that knew how to compose a simple sentence could say it out loud: “The Father of the Republic has passed away”. The state of mourning was obligatory so every club in the city was to oblige – empty out and close. It was the least we could do to honour our impossibly deep debt that We owed to Him. We couldn’t believe it! Come on in you twats before the chemicals overtake your stupid giggling into a full-on laughter, right on the echoing stairs of the old Austro-Hungarian building in the centre of the city. They spilled in, laughing, holding their arms over their mouths to dampen the joyfully idiotic cracking up, falling over each other to the floor, red in the face, mumbling some encrypted code that triggered ever more rolling on the floor. This house is going to get raided I thought to myself. When, what, who told you this? Oh yeah, the party was liquidated, one of us, residents of the place, turned on the telly and there it was – a sad, sad, elegiac music and an info bar with repeating announcement of the shithead’s death, overlayed over our most successful wartime achievements, as if he was there with those that fought with their necks on the line and then, if they survived all that horror, as if he was there to squeeze their hand when the PTSD came in full, the real sacrifice they made. That was their reward, their mental meltdown. Piece of shit is really, really dead! A little astonishment finally arrested the atmosphere in the room. Then comes the one from the kitchen, his mouth full of, like, everything he found in the fridge, and says which piece of shit died? pieces of food ejecting out. The crowd just fell down, lolled, unable to express anything but crying laughter. The one that rang the doorbell asked Do you want some candy? I looked vaguely at the black hole eyes of my acid buddies and sad no, we took some paper about five hours ago, but it finally hit us, and what’s amazing, it hit us hard, just right now. The hungry buddy went back to kitchen, with me following, suddenly feeling very hungry. He just took everything from the fridge, put it on table and ate indiscriminately. First, he squeezed a sausage of baloney, excellent, I thought to myself, what better way to honour the troll’s abdication from this reality than holding a bizarre late night, festive dinner, eating things which should never, ever go together. Slice of apple put on a slice of bread spread with mayonnaise, sprinkled with dried chilli peel, with another coming on top, spread with mixed Choco-milky spread with freshener mini mints as a decoration all over it. For an absolutely spectacular finish, he takes a full slice of mortadella, olives and all, and wraps the whole fucking thing in it and offers me, mouth full of peanuts, which I believe he forgot to somehow place in his broken-minded “food euphoria” into this, well, mortadella taco, I guess. I take it and eat it and no bodily sensation ever felt better. This is my fucking message to you and your “hundred”, I proclaim, this mindless celebration of your death. May the “hundred” follow you soon. I even take some peanuts to honour fully this nihilistic recipe, but the peanuts were too much, I suddenly change my mood and all of this becomes – too much information, the Noise. Sudden dysphoria melts away all the arduous attempts at acquiring the proper mood to make myself ready for the trip. I try to keep my persona up, unchanged, not wishing to spoil the mood, fake smiling mode on, creeping as invisibly as I could into the bedroom where I’m greeted by a couple of guys going at it. I’m now very close to the forbidden room. Daddy said THIRD ROOM IS A NO GO! So, I respectfully refuse to join the rowdy party on the bed and unlock the room with the key which I stole from my buddy’s drawer when the whole hubbub with this jolly rag tag of party people confusedly took over our little acid soiree. X Well, it’s a trophy room. It’s where The Idiot stores his innocent and helpless adversaries and stuffs them into the ultimate epitome of his personal triumph. Evidently, some insecurity rips through his character that he resorts to this, he creates this cathedral that is his persona, which he only doesn’t wear but leaves instilled inside a spooky mortuary. It’s supposed to be worn, idiot, not collected by killing living beings, with their minds full of plans and expectations for today, cut short by the crack of the gun. It is hard out there, I should know, but you don’t face it with your persona put on like you should, you just leave it here. I snap out of my philosophical noise. Yes, I call it noise, sometimes something worth saying blips out, like information radiating slowly out of an always hungry, strongest gravity pull in the Universe, the ultimate point that creates event horizon, the bubble of totally black Nothingness. I lay on the bench in the middle of the room, a really long bench, I estimate that about three of us could lay down on it at once, head to toe, I start listening the ambient of the room spoiled by the noise from the flat. It’s mostly gibberish, but now and again I pick up something resembling some sense, then I remember the acid we took is now at the plateau – I could have easily imagined it all. Stupid noise and Idiot’s morbid persona cathedral. The more I lay on the bench, the more I realise how silence is sacred. As the little grieving party slows down, some of our stimulated and unannounced guests are leaving. Silence starts to prevail. What a fuck! How did you get in? Did you touch anything? My precious silence obviously cracks with this idiot’s blood-brain-barrier-penetrating cries. I get up and give him the stolen key. The room with a bed is empty. There is a tv on with the moronic announcement looping on and on. But I start staring at the clips of boys and men fighting for their ideals, for their homes. I am transfixed. So much information transferred with relative silence? Ok, this but-licking, right wing bullshit looping is an overload of redundancy. I look away and close my eye. Oh, dear reader, that is where the shit happens. Acid is now at level one. XXX I imagine travelling through Space. That is when shit happens. I imagine flying unconstrained by laws of physics, logic, or any causality. I marvel at our Sun. What a magnificent hydrogen furnace it is. Its tiniest dark spots larger than the entirety of Earth’s surface, fuelling magnetic instabilities, creating temporary flow of myriad of little magnetic fields. Every one of them has the potential capability to burst in such a violent particle storm that it could thrash our electronic way of life into confused reimagining of Middle ages. I fly away further to meet our closest neighbours, always fidgeting Alpha Centaury star system. Everywhere there’s something spectacular unfolding before my eyes without, lacking the necessary medium, the tedious sound. I think to myself, even without the need to communicate anything, everywhere there’s abundance of pure information, emergent from easy indifference of the laws of physics. I step out of the immediate neighbourhood and watch the galaxy move slowly, our Sun the suburban lawnmower, with the full majesty of the metropolis screened off from our little star system by the appropriate shade of interstellar dust, hiding the stupendous heart of our galaxy, with billions and billions of stars cohabiting in total chaos of interlocked forces of gravity, their own and, especially, the sinister heart of our galaxy. The massive, insatiable gobbler of matter trapped inside its web leading to the core of its one-dimensional gravity, the only place where one could only see one point and only one direction in time, one-dimensional geodesic leading only to the inevitable future. But, still all of this happens without the inherent need to communicate. I now, like some psychopath in making, conclude that we, as a species, are far too noisy, cocky, needy, attention seeking, simply, we are the anomaly. We are a new born baby whose screech stops outside the medium which could propagate it. The Universe continues expanding uncaringly, not following some romantically infused narrative. There happened, once upon nothing at all, an anomaly in the infinite lack of anything of any consequence, a spark that just kept following necessities of its own laws, which is to say, it exploded with the force of all the energy present in the Universe today. Then, as if that wasn’t enough drama, there happened the Inflation, an event that in short time exponentially expanded the Universe which explains the homogeneity of the observable cosmos. Then it went through a period resembling a soup that simmered for three hundred thousand years, where particles where so close to each the hydrogen just couldn’t coalesce. Now, the theory supposes, acoustic waves were possible because we had ourselves a medium, sort of. These micro waves and their interferences created the macro structure of the universe today. Interferences also created strange voice that rang through this universe, and after a while I finally happened to decipher their meaning: Get the fuck up out of my parents’ bed, get your shoes and get gone. I’m fed up with you and your idiot friends crashing in, making mess, drinking everything and blissfully excusing them self when they get bored of their accommodations. Oh, baby is he angry this time. But really it was a mess. Do you need some help cleaning this mess? He looks at me like an inhabitant of the left side of the IQ curve. Noooo. Intonating the “o”s all the way up. I need you to fuck off out of here! Sitting in a tram I couldn’t stop thinking of my discovery, everywhere around me there were examples of mindless psychobabble, like people’s life depended upon them saying some inane nonsense. They were unable to interpret the relevant information from the tram’s PA: The tram is turning left at the next crossing, there’s a buss that’s going to take you the rest of the way. This tram is going left… Is the tram REALLY going left? Oh my, how am I ever going to get home? Well, they just announced that there’s a buss taking us over the rest of the way. But is it going in my way? I don’t know Mrs. Why don’t you ask them to kindly go your way and then, when you’re safely out, it can go its own way. This is brutal. It’s official, I’m so irritated by the everyday gibberish that I lose any empathy towards people. There’s a man shouting at the buss, driver closes the front door, but the oaf is not deterred. I guess the door must do it for him, ‘cause he’s now angrily communicating with a front of the buss door. I tire of this freakshow and put the earbuds on. I sometimes put them on so I could isolate my thoughts from neurotic energies of this, never in my lifetime satisfied city. X My girl left me for showing no intention to speak unnecessarily and, really, generally being an arsehole. I practiced this selective vow of silence so good, I sometimes didn’t hear her questions. My hygiene suffered, I washed rarely, my beard grew, food getting caught in it, sometimes for days. I was really scared of my epiphany, I was constantly ideating suicide, because, when you figure something so nihilistic like the fact that people must communicate anything elsewise they’ll go mad, you really begin to lose interest in sociopsychological interaction. You become really, truly alone. Anhedonia seeped in, motivation leaked out, I was only able to bear putting a persona meant for going to work. I was too afraid of suicide, I didn’t want anybody to have to find me. I was afraid of Nothingness. So, I dressed up every day an played the role of conscious monkey, coming to work at 9.00, leaving at 17.00. Every fucking day, there greeted me a constantly, incessantly talking boss, fuelled by his own neurosis, his neurotransmitters, like my own, supported by a mix of antidepressants and mood stabilisers. For him communication was a lifeline, he took the mood pills like me, he euthanised himself with benzos like I did, only he never stopped yapping. I worked there with half the brain shut off. I was really lucky that he didn’t come too often to office. Then, one day, I came from work and found the note saying – I can’t take it anymore. There’s cabbage in the fridge. The dogs are coming with me. And then, to underline it all, some really expressive writing reserved for YOU SELFISH ARSEHOLE. GROW THE FUCK UP. Well, that was it. My rendition of Rhapsody in Silence alienated me from every friend, acquaintance, dog, cat, mouse… and my long-time girl. My medication started to become a respectful combination of benzos, pregabalin, duloxetine, bupropion, lamotrigine, you name it. At my psychotherapy sessions, my theory of communication entropy, especially in these times of antisocial media, as a sort of a noise which too often masks the useful information, was met with all sorts of eye lifting gestures, prematurely ended appointments and once, with abject dismissal, as too egocentric to be of any productive value, so it was to better be discarded by the next time we see each other. I became distrustful towards them, started changing them often, which only worsened my profile among their circle. But I had to go, because I started to really need the medication. It was the only thing stopping the noise inside my mind. The noise I labelled The Narrative, with The Nothing at the other side, promising peace and the end of suffering.

The Circle is drawn, ancient semiotics frantically filled up all the surfaces like some symboloid horror vacui, fevered by phobia of leaving some important rune and thus ruining the ritual. The Ritual is about to start. I will be transferred through various focal points of my mind. There I will be just a Witness, not able to act upon anything and, later, not being able to tell anything for the unreliability of my witnessing Act. I will be The Unreliable Witness. There will be some psychological pain but nothing somatic. Some Wiener Aktionismus will be enacted, the blood will be drained out, it's important for the ensuing sequence of flesh peeling not becoming messy. The point is to get to the bones. You are in the bones, They say. When they get to the bones, they will sing and play with them, the code of life emerging inevitably as they fall into cathartic trance. Cathartic for whom? - I wonder. Shut up! The Parts are in place. The Ritual has begun since you were born, I suggest you not being an idiot and start to watch the proceedings wakefully, only from a deep, deep dream. Now fall into sleep, and be not afraid, the song is to be loud, moving mountains and making such waves as haven't been seen for an era. You are Special. You are needed for an Era to end, for an Era to begin. You are conduit so stop fidgeting uncomfortably and start dreaming, start ideating the end, so you could imagine the Beyond. Catharsis is for you, for us, for everything, you should that know already if you weren't sleep walking through your psyche. Hold yourself, be brave, don't act upon any part of the proceeding and everything will be made anew. Anew for whom? - I wonder as I struggle to keep myself aware, then start falling into deepest blackness. Somewhere inside, the amygdala wakens into full panic mode, sending noradrenaline and glutamate to wage war with the unseeable source of ancient fear, of being eaten by the blind ambition of barely living matter to accumulate energy for procreation, for Continuation. I have fallen deep into Continuum, a Witness Unreliable.

The Mirror Ritual of Blood-draining I appear in front of a mirror, in a dimly lit room for which I cannot find any reference in memory. In fact, I barely have a sense of self, let alone a fully cross-referenced and working memory. It's the whole setup that's barely working at all, but I feel a vague sense of etiquette to oblige the protocol. Looking better inside the mirror, for that's the only way of looking at anything without turning my head, I notice I'm completely naked. The rare details of my surroundings are illuminated by razor sharp openings, the leftovers of an imperfectly aligned shutter slats blocking the flood of sickly-yellow hue of street lights. Still, for an eye, long trained by the darkness of the place, these remnants of light are enough to catch the old-fashioned details of furniture and even suggest the scent of moisture, usually felt in the centre-of-town flat of the austro-hungarian era, complementing the strangely missing sense of smell. Everything reminds of being at the rare sleepover at the grandparents, unable to catch a sleep and then visually exploring the surroundings for a lack of better way of boring oneself to sleep. It's unusually quiet too, no cars outside, in the city centre? Or at least some nightly bark at the stray cat invading the backyards, turning over the empty beer bottle? So, I guess there's no sound either, or, as suggested by the absence of sweating, or feeling cold, or any stimuli from the somatosensory nerves, sense of touch neither. And what would I be chewing at, this side of the clock, standing naked in front of a mirror and at the grandparents too, to gauge the sense of taste? Surely this is some badly construed horror scene? I snap out of my neurotic fixation for constant over-analysing and remember there's things to observe and respect in this procedure, compose myself for a moment, and snap back to my old ways. Myself? - I think to myself, Grandparents? - yes, I feel slightly more myself, slightly more as in more than a moment before, when I was barely a person looking at the mirror, held together by a string or two, like a cameo-character, a famous face strung into a street character of short cinematic existence as an industry joke, unnecessarily dismantling the immersion of the audience... Enough! Oh, I think to myself, briefly startled by a... a thought? Was that a sound and if it was who said it? Enough!!! This time I'm sure it was a thought, it was my thought coming from my head rather than outside of it, order from someone other than my self. The thought was so loud that it broke me for a moment, so loud that I quickly conform to follow the procedure with minimal intrusion from my annoying thought processes. I stand naked in front of a mirror, in a dimly lit room that, from what one can discern in such murk, resembles an old couples home. Seems like a medical procedure, but one that is to be performed on a body standing rather than lying, in abject absence of light rather than in front of a surgical reflector. A wave of shudder shakes my mind, a wave that seems to come from the very bones that hold myself in place. I look into the mirror once more, suddenly frightened by shapes appearing behind my wretched body. There's a shallow thumping coming from somewhere where my heart should be, I'm not really convinced my body is really inhabited by my mind anymore. These shapes appear so slowly that I'm forced to constantly strain my eyes into the night vision mode of operation which they of course cannot ever achieve. It's plain fear that's now clearly driving my wild fight or flight tinted recalibration of thoughts. I gasp for air, which is also missing from this damned place, but as with the other bodily functions, there's only unrelenting grip of procedure over my body, so I'm unable to move, or even feel anything, it's just the brain, no, not the brain, this is entirely incorporeal, it's just the mind that's really working. That makes some sense now, this must be a dream. But a dream that's incredibly real if not, for the lack of light and absence of other senses, vivid with detail, and on that is, where it lacks in sensory stimulation, incredibly filled up with the beasts of the psyche. The hand rests on my right shoulder, a wrinkly old left hand. My eye moves in the direction of where its owner should appear in the mirror, but I still cannot see anything there. I then look to the opposite side and no, nothing fully there either. I'm forced to watch this slow unveiling of my harasser's entrance to the scene, only my eyes darting around my shape in the mirror. Wake up, wake up! damned fool! And there, there's some detail to the shapes in the dark, it's the pair of eyes to the each side of me. My eyes look into theirs' seeing this confused reverberation of the scene from the mirror to their eyes and back. Finally, there they are, both of them, my older couple, my pair of torturers. I'm myself again, fevered affect completely drained out of my mind, standing naked in front of a mirror and an old couple, their eyes not moving around, just looking straight in the mirror, the eyes not of the dead but of the deadly determined to observe the ritual to the end. Now that its hold has calmed my mind into submission, the hand of the female to the right of me slowly removes into the darkness behind. I don't see them well but yes, they are also naked. The old tits are looking disspationately back at me like the onlookers meant to witness the officials go through with every painstaking part of the ceremony without remiss. Their skin seems to be almost white, as in truly white, not painted, as it was, cooked somehow. Noticing this I look at myself, the paleness of my skin all the more accentuated by the light that I realise only now, is emanating from the very paleness of my skin. The light is not centered on me, rather it's flowing from me, illuminating the central part of this scene with it's dead light, devoid of colour. Colour if only a sliver of it, is reserved for the scenography behind, the old fashioned furniture, the windows and their rugged shutters. The only light that seems real comes from an unnatural hue of the street outside. The left side one, the male, brings some sort of pen above my head. Now that I've finally focused my attention on the reflection of myself, I notice that my head is shaved. Of course, I think to myself, it's not shaved, it's scalded, I'm cooked just as themselves behind. The male thrusts the sharpened object I misidentified as a pen earlier, somewhere close to the north pole of my head and starts a cut, going down the exact centre of my forehead, then nose, then cuts my lips, beard, and continues with a trained precision of a veteran of such things as this ritual is, down my throat. All of this cutting is followed by no bleeding at all. But there is something new I notice, the cut is almost perfect, as soon as the incision is made, the meat closes around the stylus as soon as the cut is made, but here and there I can see the tissue just below the skin, and it's blood red meat. It's perfectly preserved, with just enough blood to keep it fresh. I think of a fresh meat scent right away, instantly leaving behind the idea that I'm cooked, I'm clearly not, I've been drained of blood. The female than starts to make the cut to the left of the first, with the origin point the same. They make these without stepping in front of me, they just look at the mirror with the same, expressionless faces as ever. The male finishes while the female is somewhere left of my wrinkled up penis, sliced right through but still somehow glued together with remaining blood. Such merciless precision in blood draining, to accompany the cutter's own, nothing ever falls out of my body, the cuts are softly closed just as the styluses leave them behind. The male then makes another cut to the right of the original meridian. They look at what they're doing as soon as they cannot see it in the mirror, it's my view of the mirror which cannot be interrupted. It is until the full circle is finished by the female with the last cut of her stylus and the meridian at the opposite side of the original one is made that the retreat and melt into the black ambience of the room. They are then flawlessly concealed in the old-fashioned furniture, but still, their presence is felt. maybe that's why I'm compelled to look at myself in the mirror. One last glance at the gruesome centre-of-the-scene up-standing cadaver with moving eyes, slices of finely drained meat, cut neatly right to the bone and held together only for the next phase of the ritual. I look at myself for a long time. Then I start peeling off the slices, making the first mess of the night, unevenly breaking the meat in the process. Nobody complains behind me so I continue to put it into my mouth and start chewing.

Mirrors, mirrors everywhere, tell me is there something there? And if there is, I'm not sure I want to hear, i want to know. Oh Mirror, Mirror won't you please, tell me I'm not to scream? And if I do? And if I do?! Will I be quick to put on my shoes? Oh, I'm singing to a wrong mirror? I'm sorry but I'm afraid I'm lost here.

Drums, drums, drums everywhere, rhythm, dance, trance. I'm free of carnal banalities, finally my bones reveal the code so primal, old as the Cosmos itself.