Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains ————) I don’t know I had to google it too).

And all the bros that keep talking about physiognomy equals destiny somehow neglect to realize that they are walking corpses just like the pablum-conditioned hordes who pay their rent. every mirror they might ever encounter betrays a false image, one that is not so much graven as pre-constructed, the printer’s original cliche. So many mediocre remoras acting like apex predators, who on their best day could not render a cliff notes gloss on the baseline human condition:

Sacre Bleu, Mon Dieu!

And they won’t be able to recall in which late 20th century tome they read about a group of separatists who caused late night car accidents and a spasm of terror through the highway cruising public by placing mirrors just past the apex of a hill on two lane roads, which literalizes the metaphor of the realist credo. And they themselves, doomed to repeat a history of which they were never aware, will one night be traveling down a dark metaphorical road and encounter a rushing pair of twinned headlights appearing suddenly out of nowhere and no way to elude, elide, or avoid the reflected momentum.

And they will never understand: To get to the marrow takes more than robbing graves. Even the most powerful pair of jaws will require an intense drive to set them upon the precise point, at which it may be possible to slice through the tendons and ligaments and joints and crack open, with unapologetic glee, the ossified conventions which presently hold things in their place. Don’t sweat the obvious incoherence of the idea that the hidden, secret kernel at the center is somehow more valuable than the meat that sits shelved on it. I see your Gargantua and will raise you a Pantagruel

Their spiritual forefathers are copyists who couldn’t help but try to replicate entire disciplines of knowledge they had encountered in text, skimming across the surface of foundations they could not locate, much less fathom. Copyists who came across the bloated carcass of of a dog and for the first time recognized that all the plagiaristic striving in the world could not circle the square and create out of one passing second another that might add more length to this interminable instant, which is the same instant in which we are all bound to be vanquished. the paramount thing to be experienced is lost in the moment after it gets set down.

Oh to be regular and orderly in the place setting of life in order to be violent and oracular in the eating, so that the legacy would be embalmed in the just so stories of self-sustaining acolytes who might grow to a stature magnanimous enough not to be gleeful at the prospect of surpassing teachers whose still-warm examples braced them up and nursed them.

Have a self. Have two, in fact. No longer are the serfs and the plebes and the factory workers and the tradesmen the only sectors trod upon and denatured by the way things work. There is a kind of virus, whose proteins are encoded with lascivious and insatiable amoralism that is pegged to the bigger and the louder and the faster and the more pervasively embedded. When the virus seizes, it dispenses acquiescence and dribbles of narcotizing entertainment. If everything is permissible, whether in the way of making a living or making a libidinal puddle, then the longing for the return of prohibition aches with more urgency. the anger of the neurotic stops spraying mindlessly at what catastrophe might befall us and homes in on the absence of authentic authority, the disintegration of a bounded moral code, and the ceaseless churn when all limits get lifted on what might be fractionalized into monetizable components or services or affiliated attributes.

No one need feel hemmed in or prompted to eschew a belief in the inherent desirability of being unmarked, undefined, a chimera or chameleon. The real ones know that being inscrutable is the best recompense that soulless, back-breaking, world-shattering striving has to offer. But high agency in making hard obstacles will-malleable doesn’t redeem a world bereft a meaning.

Nevermind the powerful sense that never being able to wind back to the source - suffering from an incurable bout of ontological amnesia - isn’t just a deficit making invalids of rich kids with too much time on their hands or Catholics who like the feel of the rosaries in their hands. Even the wild ghouls and the pathos-inflected goblins feel overwhelmed by the intransigent rootlessness and the diminishing returns of nostalgia.

Yet, in the saving grace, there is no longer any need for a cosmic intermediary. When the dead are ready they will rise on their own. Or, as the case may be, they will tumble down into the abyss. The cogs and gears of cosmic judgment are automated.

And the weirdest little ghoul of them all will smoke another cigarette, get plowed on red wine, and try to put a silver bullet in the heart of the anxiety of influence, worrying not one iota about how his physiognomic oddities might obstruct the fate that his art is creating.