Author: Lars Iyer

Is disgust a gift, even though it feels like a curse? Is disgust our elevation? Does it lift us into the sky? Is disgust a prayer – our deepest prayer? Even here, in the ruins? Even in the pit of the ruins?


Mother wants to taste your disgust. She wants to know it, your disgust. Nothing is alien to Mother.

A glitch in Mother. In the motherverse. A breakdown. The system’s hung. It’s buffering. Something’s failing to download.

We need a reboot or something.

Ah – Mother’s rebooting herself. She can do that, you know. Mother’s pressed reset.


A simulation can’t do the disgusting. That’s how you know it’s a simulation. The disgusting – the really disgusting – is the breakdown; the glitch in the matrix.

There’ll be gnostic … resurgences. Flare ups. Of sheer hyperbolic negativity. Intensities without form or limit. But they won’t tave anyone. They’ll just be meaningless … nothings. And nowhere. Just dead ends.


It’s gnosis. To taste this is gnosis. It’s not some … immanent conversion. It’s transcendence. This wine reaches us from without In inverted form. So what’s disgusting is really the sweetest nectar.


Gnosticism’s behind every revolution. All of modernity is a gnostic offshoot. The desire to have done with the world.


Face it: Livia gave us a posh name for our disgust. She called it Gnosticism. Like those zany second century boyos. Like those mad heretics, writing their tracts.


Gnosticism is the key to the West, that’s what Taubes thought. The source of all revolutions. It was this underground energy. Ready to break out. To break through the crust, like magma. Only it’s dark, not bright. Black fire – that’s what this is about. Flames of darkness.


The Gnostic is the disappointed apocalypticist, Livia says. The only who knows that that time for the end has come and gone. That the writing was only ever on the wall. That the end has only ever been nigh. That the signs of the end were everywhere.

Inspired speech. The speech of enthusiasm. In sentence fragments. In anaphora. In epistrophe. With exclamation marks! Question marks?

Protesting – against everything. Against ourselves.

An extremity of style – to match the extremity out there. It’s the world that’s extreme. And which has made us extreme. It’s the world that has given us this fever. And the need to speak in fever.

All we have is our urgency. Our intensity. Our sense that something must be Done. All the while – but without any notion of what it is that must be Done.

All we have is the certainty that this is not our world. That this is now how it’s Supposed to Be. But without any notion of how it’s Supposed to Be.

All we have is a sense of Mission. Without knowing what our Mission’s for – of what we could possibly Serve.

Our chorus. Our choral speech. Our speech together. Our assemblage. Our collective. Our speaking together. Our crying all at one. The overlaying of our voices.

The only thing we’re good at is degradation. And we’re really good at it.

Are we, though? Doesn’t it just happen?


We’re amusing no one but each other.

But are we still amusing each other?


Imagine – we’re still alive, still going. It’s obscene, isn’t it? Who’s allowing this? How have we been overlooked? Surely we should just have been … swatted.


Let’s drink at least. Let’s get something down us. It might help us not to be so meta.

We’ll just get drunkenly meta. Exhilaratedly meta.


Can we still count on it, drunken exhilaration? Do we still wake up like we used to?

The hangover of life is just too overwhelming. The hangover of … expectations. And no hair of the dog is going to help with that.

Never get above yourself – that’s the lesson. But never get below yourself, either. Never think you can descend – that you’re worthy enough to descend.

What if we have no depths? What if we bring our superficiality with us, no matter how far we descend?


What’s waiting for us below?

The same thing that’s awaiting for us up there: a new revelation of our stupidity.

At least it’ll be new. At least there’ll be some novelty.


Our pettiness – so great. Our concerns – so trivial. Our souls – so shallow.


What’s the opposite of an astronaut? What’s an astronaut of the earth?


They descended because they couldn’t bear the surface. They went down because they couldn’t stand the light, not anymore. Because they knew the light was coming.


Darkness is the gnostic element. It’s where Gnosticism bubbles and froths, like Livia’s wine.


Gone to ground. Buried. Lost. And just sinking down. Heavier than anything.


The descent into farce is still a descent.

A farcical descent.

That’s good enough.

It has to be good enough.


The failed katabasis is still a katabasis.

It’s a katabasis in spirit.

A katabasis in degradation.

But it’s not an actual katabasis.

It’s a katabasis from the katabasis.

Too clever for me.

A descent from the descent.

Like we’re not worthy of real descent.

So it’s not a descent then, is it?

It’s the shallows. We’re still in the shallows.


We’re not going down. We’re not descending – that’s the point. You need humility for that.


Surely we can’t be surprised by it anymore – our degradation? How far we’ve sunk. But we haven’t actually sunk.


Maybe we’ll find a version of the dead sea scrolls down here.

The Tyneford scrolls. Hidden in Tyneford boulder clay. Written in some ancient Geordie language. Why-ay, man. The Geordie Gnostics …

Hope is eternal.

That’s the problem. If we didn’t hope then we might accept our level. Our fate, such as it is. Our essential status in life. Our place in the caste system. In the great of chain being. But we do hope, right?


Who taught us to hope? Why do we hope? Why do we raise our eyes anywhere? By what instinct? Who implanted this inside us?

It’s our divine spark.

Divine!? It can’t be divine!

We’re better than we are. Or we want to be better.

That’s the problem! We’ll never accept that we’re IQ80 types …

The only language now is theological, postgraduates. That’s the only way we can express the horror.


We’re the last theologians now. After the destruction. After the collapse. Theology has had to go incognito. Has to lose itself, down among the idiots. But we are those idiots …


Theology’s slumming it. Theology’s in the gutter. Pick through its ruins. Seeing what it can find.


We’ve been left alone with theology, like some unexploded bomb.