#SOAPCHAPTER

[k-chapman]

Chapter 5 - The Harvest

I watch heat overcome our “guest” and my master, I watch his sweet peaceful sleep, the sleep only possible in clarity, in sacrifice, in melting but becoming one. From the fluid flood and the dissolved alliance. [1] Happy are the melted bodies. [2] It is in this fluid element that the universal exchange of qualities could take place. [3]

Moreover, in this rest—rest being the most perfect condition —the worlds body will be incomparably beautiful. [4]

I hear the shifting and expansion of my master. Now my work begins.

First, I bring our guest, deep in slumber to the pedestal, the house tolerating his weight for now distracted by ecstasy. I lay him next to the pit, the raging inferno. As opposites, heat and cold struggle perpetually for the sole possession of matter; each is equipped for this contest with a sense of self-preservation describable mechanically as an intrinsic impulse for existence and expansion (pleasure) and against contraction and annihilation (pain). [5]

For long, sore sick of a fever, he lay senseless in a death sweat; and his recovery being despaired of, he was baptised, unknowing; myself meanwhile little regarding, and presuming that his soul would retain rather what it had received of me, not what was wrought on his unconscious body. [6]

Salt sweat oozed over its body. [7] Dripping and pearling onto surfaces around him. Collecting in pools on his body, running into channels of the altar and dripping, running into the vase I’ve placed below the altar. The fluid form of wealth and its petrification, the elixir of life and the stone of wisdom madly haunt each other in alchemic fashion. [8]

Passion’s blind fire feeds on the harvest. [9]

Leaving our guest to melt in the sweaty fever of sweet release, I turn my attention, while lighting a cigarette, to the meat. They, indeed, suffered because of their innocence, but I suffer because of my sins. [10] I find a beast, grazing, and lead it to a creaking expanding metal chamber away from the flames and the dissolving ring.

My hidden blade is drawn. Be learned, lest the hypocrites bring the wrath of God upon your heads and compel you to shed innocent blood; as they have compelled your predecessors to slay the prophets, to kill Christ and his apostles, and all the righteous that since were slain. [11] I have known the blade, the blossom and the fruit; and I now know their withering. [12]

I insert the blade calmly into the head of the beast on the altar, explaining as I go: “Don’t ask me why; and even if you do, I can’t disclose God’s secret thoughts to you. [13] Whence dying is nothing but becoming freed of the being before; birth the defining of another being, form, aspect indeed. [14] But can I, absent from my prince's sight, take gifts in secret, that must shun the light? [15]”

The blood glinting in the moonlight runs thick and quick through the groves in the warm altar towards the floor. It runs like oil in the metal tiled floor, along the thin crevices between the metallic plates as they wriggle and shift. Overtime they have become uneven, the iron of the blood pooling and solidifying. I hear the gurgling and hissing as the house sucks down the ruby liquor, only adding further flavour to its pleasure.

Staining as the blood goes, the stench of the unwashed room filling my head. I feel cool stench be sucked through the room and hallways towards the flames. The cold will come for the corpse soon. I work fast to dismantle, the blade running against bone, revealing what I always knew to be there, the white of the bone and the white of the fat within. The effects of this masterful art, which are considerably more generous than the spareness of its prescriptions would lead one to imagine, are said to transfigure the one fortunate enough to receive its privileges: an absolute mastery of the body, a singular bliss, obliviousness to time and limits, the elixir of life, the exile of death and its threats. [16]

I find my prize inside, the fat surrounding the liver and kidneys. Pure, meaty, the grass converted into fat, the tallow of the beast. I make sure to puncture the stomach of the beast to release the gases within. A treat shall we say for my master.

My prize safely wrapped in the hide of the cow; The rest of the corpse I kick into a larger rift opened by the expansion of the house in heat. The corpse will be crushed and consumed in the cold and contraction phase soon enough.

I begin bringing my components together. I return to the blaze and find the bucket of salty sweat by the flames, half full. The stock, the broth of man, my guest breathing heavy.

Surely [in] a voice which, amid all the tumult of self-seeking, shall whisper wholesome words into the deafened ear, saying: [17]

“Flames, fire, oven: no matter how far our travels take us, we must return home to the hearth, where the banquet is prepared. [18]

I have seen thinkers, unbelievers, philosophers, exceedingly brave by daylight, tremble like [cowards] at the rustling of a leaf in the dark. [19]”

Now the last ingredient. I descend to the tomb like cold of the chamber below the flames. The still hanging air supports the ashes as they lightly descend to their place of rest on the floor. The eye, as well as the ear was vexed, for a blinding snow was falling, its dazzling whiteness heightened by contrast with the dark waves into which it fell. [20] The calmness of this chamber always overcomes me. Perhaps it is its proximity to the chaotic flames above. A column of light in the centre with a dusting, snowing of particles, moving in and out of the light. The slowness, how deliberately they hang, how weighty the time is they take. They come and they go, and they trot, and they dance: and never a word about death. [21] In the dance there is one, esteemed beyond the others, who represents the givers of benefits. [22] Now, if every particle of the [embers] be brought as near as possible to the centre of it, the form it assumes is the circle. [23]

With a long instrument I collect a cup of ash, dipping the container fully into the softness. I dare not disturb the purity further and retrieve want I seek.

Love is a chimera, the leftovers of the split-up parts. [24]

 [1] Serres, Troubadour of Knowledge

[2] Serres, The Five Senses

[3] Foucault, History of Madness

[4] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 6 Books XVII XVIII

[5] Schmitt, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy

[6] Augustine, The Confessions

[7] Virgil, Aeneid

[8] Marx, Collected Works

[9] Virgil, Aeneid

[10] Luther, Works of Martin Luther Vol 1

[11] Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises

[12] de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

[13] Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

[14] Williams, Daniele Barbaros Vitruvius of 1567

[15] Homer, Iliad

[16] Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1

[17] Seneca, Complete Works

[18] Serres, The Five Senses

[19] Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[20] Michelet, The Sea

[21] de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

[22] Seneca, Complete Works

[23] Ruskin, The Stones of Venice

[24] Serres, The Parasite

#SOAPCHAPTER

[k-chapman]

Chapter 1 - The Pit

She is gone and they do not intend to use me. I felt that the presence of a woman so dear to me, while estranged from her heart, increased my unhappiness, and was persuaded, that, ceasing to see her, I should feel myself less cruelly separated. [1] But this does not work. Creation is a release of the dynamic potential of life. [2] Now, I have this potential, this life and nowhere to put it.

[…] Even when uninhabited by man, [I am] life bearing and eminently suited for human occupation.[3] So then use me! I wish to feel life within my walls. Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living. [4] It is […] easy to conclude that these architectures perpetrate a “betrayal” […]. [5] You would know that hunger and love are the same thing, you would be like any animal, truly motivated. [6]

I feel the pit in my sour heart and a force invisible. Though I was constructed in the minds of others with irreaptable precision, there is a some substance created in that process with is impossible to grasp, some etheral liquid.

As I feel their presence fade away, I feel my heart crack and shift. Heat and steam rush from my insides, and beneath the shifting perfectly proportioned surfaces. The unfreezable fluid is exposed, the hearth burns low. We never weep for anything but the loss of a mother, she who rocked us in her arms, the only consoler of all our afflictions. [7] The most terrible sin is the sin against the Holy Ghost, which cannot be forgiven. [8]

In this pit, my sorrows will burn eternal. [I] wish, so long as this fire burns the mind, to plunge to the depths of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what does it matter? [9] Loss is real and ongoing. [10] She has left me alone.

[1] Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[2] Colebrook, Irony the New Critical

[3] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology

[4] Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[5] Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968

[6] Lacan, The Psychoses Seminars of JL

[7] Serres, The Natural Contract

[8] Jung, Memories Dreams Reflections

[9] Etlin, In Defense of Humanism

[10] Braidotti Hlavajova, Posthuman Glossary

#SOAPCHAPTER

[k-chapman]

Chapter 2 - The Rejection

[…] The whole conflictual balance within ruling elites is compromised, with the former antagonisms governed by the interplay of critical traditions making room for an alternation between fusion, where each of the partners risks losing their identity, and savage competition, practically on the same terrain. [1] Such instances, therefore, afford great light, and are of great weight, so that the course of interpretation sometimes terminates, and is completed in them. [2]

“So, we […] lords can heat and limber the bow and rub it down with grease before we try again and finish off the contest!” [3]

Pearling sweat ran down my face as the verdict was finally ready. How slowly these old men speak, how slowly these old men decide.

Knowing the world as form calls upon perception, which is carried out by the empirical exercise of sensibility; whereas knowing the world as force calls on sensation, which is carried out by the intensive exercise of sensibility. [4] I, Lenny Belardo, will be a force. A force the church has never seen. I must be Pope, I must, I must, I must.

I looked at Spencer and I said: God, not him, me. I must have chanted those words a thousand times […] like a mantra: not him, me. Not him, me, not him, me, not him, me. And then, toward the end: not them, me. [5]

“Spencer, congratulations, you will be our new Pope.”

Was it by their own nature that heavy things sank downward and light ones flew up; or, quite apart from their thrust and weight, did some higher force lay down the law for individual bodies? [6] Then what is solid weight and liquid weight; but first of all, what weight and lightness consist of in themselves. [7] On the exterior, the images are rarely visible, emerging only fleetingly as hallucinations when hit at exactly the right angle by glancing light. [8] But in this moment that glancing light of God hit Lenny square in the heart and bounced off.  

[…] [They] have come to set a man against his father […]; and a man’s foes will be those of his own household. [9] One had to have a lot of ingenuousness and inexperience not to have foreseen it. [10]

I will be a fugitive and flee on earth and it will come to pass that whoever happens upon me will kill me. [11]

They have taken from me my destiny, God has forsaken me and torn, the hole, the abyss, unfillable.

That means by the same token that this desire carries in itself the destiny of its non-satisfaction. [12]

Lenny flees the Vatican without a word, his cardinal hat clutched to his heart.

Spencer watches him go, thinking:” He must wear such rags, I know it, knocking about, drifting through the world if he’s still alive and sees the light of day. [13] God help him…”

[1] Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism

[2] Bacon, Novum Organum

[3] Homer, The Odyssey

[4] Edited by Okwui Enwezor, Antinomies of Art and Culture Modernity Postmode

[5] The Young Pope

[6] Seneca, Hardship and Happiness

[7] da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

[8] Sykes, Constructing A New Agenda

[9] Diderot Alembert, Political Articles in the Dictionary

[10] Derrida, Signature

[11] Derrida, Signature

[12] Derrida, Of Grammatology

[13] Homer, The Odyssey

#SOAPCHAPTER

[k-chapman]

Chapter 3 - The Edifice

Frigid organs, empiricism in ruins, lost impressions, phantoms. [1] When a bad prince reigns, others will escape and wander in exile. [2] Leave me, [God], worthy of heaven, and return to your pleasures, let a wretched and unhappy exile be cast into poverty and filth! [3] What displaced wanderer today exile, migrant or citizen of the world swept up in wind and weather could ask himself the Cartesian question without anxiety? [4] Without gods, without God, without the Holy Ghost, without first or final authority, [5] I wander.

Now, I find myself in a foreign land, a city unknown, at the gates of a walled in house. I enter.

The place is desolate and abandoned yet I hear this place talk to me in a sleepy voice:

“I see such a slight movement changing the face of the earth and deciding the vocation of mankind: in the distance I hear the joyous cries of an insane multitude; I see the building of castles and cities; I see the birth of the arts; I see nations forming, expanding, and dissolving, following each other like ocean waves; I see men gathered together at certain points of their homeland for their mutual development, turning the rest of the world into a hideous desert: fitting monument to social union and the usefulness of the arts. [6] I yearn. Yearn for the flesh, for the breath of life.”

I speak back: “[I] walk around naked, [I] live in squalor, [I] inhabit tubs, [I am] cold and hungry.” [7]

The house returns: “The star of Saturn, because it is next to the ends of the cosmos and touches the frozen regions of the firmament, is intensely chilly.” [8]

In unison we spoke then: “Dam the water, to make it rise; then drive the beasts to stir up the mud in the water with frequent and excited movement; release the dam suddenly, so that the water floods out and takes all the dirt away.” [9]

Inside I notice at once a faint glow, I feel the house in the moonlight approve. I enter the abode cold and wet, and I am met with an atmosphere of damp smoke and abandon. My arms tried; the weight of the cardinal hat’s threads unbearable. In the middle of the space, in the heart of the house a pit. A shining rift simmering low and constant, too fluid to be made of any liquid stone or solid, more akin to flowing amber. The top layer forming skins that tear and open. Light refracted around the room as light would in a pool. The ceiling above seemed to have been eaten into by the rays.

Heat struggled with cold in the same body; moisture and dryness did likewise; and lightness and weight were the same.[10] The pit, the house beckoned me to surrender my weight. In my ears, in my mind I hear the honeyed words of the house, like a drunken father trying to convince my all is alright:

“Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving.[11] I shall speak of ghost, of flame and of ashes to God for you. [12] I wish to know your pain.”

My face was comforted by the heat of the pit, the soft dancing light that emerged did not sting my eyes, it seemed more akin to the dim light of a fading summer day, a supple air stroked my skin.

I speak: “We haunt two niches: our body, whose skin and fragile loves we shelter under a roof, between four walls, [13] and our minds, the realm of desires and pain.”

The house whispers: “Become the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, the gift giver. [14] The “excrement,” the destructive element which has to disappear so that the balance can be re-established, is ultimately humanity itself. [15] I long for this destruction. I long to know your humanity.”

I let the hat drift into the refracting substance. [ ] This rare trace in the aerial fluid, this unstable, complex mixture, this partially undone knot, trailing a thousand threads, is not subject to repetition, never achieves invariance: too circumstantial to begin beating in time, too fluid, diluted, chaotic. [16]

The heat was sudden and full, filling the house in an instant. The walls groaned and loosened, planes shifting in ecstasy against each other. The ceiling above seemed to liquify and pores opened in its surface, like tiny mouths gasping for air. The lazy summer day light was replaced by a shining akin to the sun. I am dried suddenly and can hardly take a breath as air rushes past me. A lightheaded feeling overtakes my body. All light has passed over into the thin flame of the eye, which now flickers around solid objects and, in so doing, establishes their place and form. [17] I see my place now; I see my form. I am frozen in heat, and around me the house expands. Space distorts around me. 

I feel once again a pleasure, an ecstasy of weightlessness. I watched as the hat decays and the thought struck me: Life consists in one indivisible power (for death occurs through division and dissolution). [18] I am once again indivisible.

We spoke again in unison as the smoke form the pit escaped through the corroded holes and pipes in the ceiling with a roar: “We breathe it in, we breathe it out, like air, and like the air—we do not see it. [19]”

Their hearts had forgotten the weight of their burdens. [20] I drift into a fever dream. Little did I know I was to awaken with a new found weight.

[1] Serre’s, The Five Senses

[2] Alberti, Momus

[3] Alberti, Momus

[4] Serres, The Five Senses

[5] Serres, The Birth of Physics

[6] Derrida, Of Grammatology

[7] Alberti, Momus

[8] Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture 1999

[9] Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books 1988

[10] Bayle, Political Writings

[11] Melanchthon, On Christian Doctrine

[12] Derrida, Signature

[13] Serres, Hominescence

[14] Serres, The Parasite

[15] Zizek, Less Than Nothing

[16] Serres, The Five Senses

[17] Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic

[18] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 1 Books I IV

[19] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

[20] Virgil, Aeneid

#SOAPCHAPTER

[k-chapman]

Chapter 4 - The Feast

I find myself lost. Vienna, my home, turned against me. Places of love turned to spaces of pain, in my mind, around my body. The ring of promise, the gift of love from my beloved, cripples my hand. I can hardly walk, and yet I wander.

In a side alley I am discovered. I had halted but for a moment when a man in the dead of night, smoking, speaks to me: "Do you know the pain of lost love? [1] Perhaps you are going to deny the existence of that which you do not see?” [2]

The speaker came into the light of alley. Behind him the gates in a wall seemed to distort as he moves, taking up my whole field of vision. I see his face; it is the rugged face of moments lost. [3] I fumble with my ring out of apprehension and disorientation.

His words bolder now: […] “we find three levels: we see one form closer to matter than to the agent, another closer to the agent than to matter, and another in between.” [4] His eyes darting back forth between me and my ring. Pangs of pain running through me as his needy eyes caress the gold. I thought him for a moment a common thief, but his words begged to differ, his manner was more akin to servant, a butler.

Our eyes met again. From the rugged, beautiful face the word came forth: “What the lover sees is the lost part of himself contained in, enveloped by the Other.” [5]

I could not stop myself from nodding in agreement.

“Come then, let us see, by way of the works and affects of the understanding, how we might be able to find what we are seeking.” [6] He softly opened the gate behind him, and we entered the presence of the house, enveloped by the garden, I felt outside the world. From this point onwards, a new relation between love and unreason began to take shape. [7]

Inside what I first took for statues, where in fact beasts. Cows to be exact. Surprised I stare at my acquaintance as he moved through the lush meadow.

“What of the purity of a man who, content with a farmer’s life, preferred honesty to any amount of gold?” [8] He winked, and he spoke in soft reassuring tones, as I release the grip on my ring, but only slightly. The beasts indifferently watched us, chewing.

The garden was completely overgrown, no discernible organization lay under these grasses. Clearings were only created by the cows stamping weight. Moonlight glittered of the lush follicles as they swayed in the breeze.

“Don't you understand what we owe to this breed of animal? [9] To any breed in fact?” He petted the head of one of the beasts as it chewed slowly. It struck me that purity, and retiring delicacy, are features well contrasted with the rough, but tender disposition of the hero. [10]

“Human body is not animal body. [11] We know too much; such consciousness cannot become dumb and trust again; innocence cannot be regained. [12] We surely by now would have forgotten innocence if it weren’t for the beasts.” But I was only half listening, my eyes drawn to the light from inside the house. I was drawn inside the house, feeling the light and warmth beckon me. I enter and for the first time see the source of the light, a great shining rift.

I feel I am not alone.

“What comes out of that thing can be called flame or soul, charm, consumption, in any case a halo.” [13] The voice resonates throughout the house, as if the walls themselves were speaking. The tones are deep now and hollow. I feel the man’s presence behind me but cannot tear my eyes from the beauty of the pit. Again, he spoke in an ever-increasing boom:

“[..]When the brain’s black vapours have filled the spirit and, with the spirit vibrating, have set into motion horrible forms in the phantasy so that very nearly the soul’s entire power is struck by the novelty of the hideous spectacle and is concentrated in the phantasy, are you surprised if it interrupts its work of contemplating for a while and resumes it only when the vapours have finally dispersed? [14]

[…] Such contemplation cannot rightly take place unless the images have been set aside. [15]

The true task is to see how meaning is corroded from within by an [external] object, an object inherent to it, a stranger within. [16]

Your ring…”

The last vowel shook the windows, like the grumbling of a hungry belly, the light of the pit pulsated, the ring now on the palm of my hand. My love, lost.

“Such a vice does not destroy the soul’s nature, but it does take possession of it. [17]

[…] Should the pain remain distinct or [should it] intermingle? [18]

Don't you know how much the gods like the smell of burnt offerings?” [19]

And with a simple movement the ring fell from my palm into the pit and sparked as it hit the bursting surface and an enormous clap sounded.

Every individual created substance exerts physical action and passion on all the others. [20] Is it through choice rather than through being that the Sun gives light to the world, that fire heats, that the soul nourishes the body? [21]

The release was electric. I was blown back by the heat, the air unbearable, the lightness otherworldly, I am thrown to the ground and find myself at the feet of the stranger.

Around us the house groaned as if in great pleasure, shifting and expanding with warmth. I look up, seeing now the distorted ceiling, covered in organic openings like a frozen dissolving cement. The opening like inhaling vents began to shimmer. The smokey vapours were sucked up and swirled around thousand tiny nostrils in a deep breath. Cool air streamed past the stranger’s feet and my body, I shivered.

He stares at me, his face illumined by the multicoloured glow. Slowly he fixed the sure gaze of his clear eyes on mine, and keeping his mouth tightly shut, he thoughtfully put his faithful hand on my shoulder. [22] Then he spoke with his voice echoing through the house as if they were speaking as one, his voice seemingly modulating the howling rush of air as it pulled past us.

“If [there] were some form superior to matter, why did one need to destroy the matter in order to make this completely unrelated form, which in no sense comes into existence from matter and is produced at a total remove from it? [23] Your eyes’ sparkle, I see clearly ; the waft of your breath I feel warmly, your [pain’s] voice’s singing I hear sweetly:— but what, singing, you tell me, amazed, I understand it not. [24] The victim, not the murderer, is guilty. [25] You were guilty, and you know it! You lingered!”

His lasts words left is face contorted with anger but only for a moment.

He looked to the blaze and in his own voice now, as if to himself, hardly audible past the streaming wind, he spoke:

“In this way whiteness has become corporeal [26]. The whiteness, the pure whiteness.”

Lying on the floor I saw him move towards the unbearable heat and I was taken by lightness, taken by peace. Sound becoming silence as I fall.

Softly, like feathers caught up in an eddy of air that had passed, [my] thoughts steadied and drifted to rest. [27] Down in this world you allow yourself a thousand peaceful acts: to sleep, dream, talk on and on, relax your attention; all danger moves away from your steps so naturally that you don’t think about it. [28]

[1] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology

[2] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 2 Books V VIII

[3] Zajko, Laughing with Medusa

[4] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 3 Books IX XI

[5] Zizek, Less Than Nothing

[6] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 2 Books V VIII

[7] Foucault, History of Madness

[8] Alberti, The Family in Renaissance Florence

[9] Alberti, Momus

[10] Homer, Iliad

[11] Zajko, Laughing with Medusa

[12] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

[13] Serres, Statues

[14] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 3 Books IX XI

[15] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 5 Books XV XVI

[16] Zizek, Less Than Nothing

[17] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 5 Books XV XVI

[18] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 2 Books V VIII

[19] Alberti, Momus

[20] Leibniz, Philosophical Essays

[21] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 1 Books I IV

[22] Zizek, Less Than Nothing

[23] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 2 Books V VIII

[24] Kittler, The Truth of the Technological World

[25] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

[26] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 1 Books I IV

[27] Asimov, Complete Robot Anthology

[28] Serres, The Natural Contract

#SOAPCHAPTER

[k-chapman]

Chapter 6 - The Soap

The flames burn in my belly, the vapour rising. These vapours are some subtle parts of the terrestrial humour, which has neither heat nor determined form; some vapours have heat and humidity; others heat and dryness. [1] The nature and power of heat is to penetrate, dissolve, break up, to remove and absorb moisture; that of cold is to compress, tighten, harden, and solidify. [2] I feel trapped between the worlds.

I am in a constant state of inhaling and exhaling, like an engine. I suck through my openings the city air, the stench of blood, exhaust fumes and cow shit, the song of the birds, the perfume of the flowers, the smiles of children, the light of the sun, the sighings of the breeze, the rays of stars, all creation. [3] I exhale a pure smoke, mixing of all senses, godly vapours float to the heavens. Analysis descends to the cloud, to chaos, to the limit, to whiteness. [4] And the death that ravishes the light from my eyes returns all its purity to the day it was soiling. [5]

My little fellow is busying himself with his foreign alchemy. But what beautiful products he concocts. I hardly understand the science he conducts in my cavities. I do not care to, for I am still soaring. It will be perfumed with other incense than the infectious stuff which is imported by the smugglers of adulterated metaphysics. [6] He is a busy little bee. Collecting in me, showing me much of life, and I in turn allow him his games. Give to every man therefore his duty: tribute to whom tribute belongeth; custom to whom custom is due; fear to whom fear belongeth; honour to whom honour pertaineth. [7] You can find no souls, or very few, which as they grow old do not stink of rankness and of rot. [8] But my little fellow seems different.

I cannot stand, however the essence, the weight of the sleepy useless heap next to my heart. The result [of] a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life. [9]

Each time it is the same ritual. He gathers in me the ingredients, having found them, [he] shines with a wonderful brilliance as if totally prepared for them; and [we are] filled with an incomparable joy as if [we] were as close to them as possible. [10]

The ash, from a gift, an offering. My servant is a clever little one, for just as [I] foresees what you are going to do, so he foresees that you are going to do it voluntarily and freely. [11] Because that is all that is left for you to do, so why should we not reap your sad fruits. To us they have the flavour of the sweetest.

The tallow, the slowly grown innocence, pure nourishment, the reserve, the structure, the beast’s little piggy bank, saved for a rainy day. Saved for the morning after a day of sinning that never comes to the beast, thus it remains pure. Fed by my lush garden, fat and heavy these heifers are.

The stock, whether it is that this liquid is the sweat of the heavens, or whether a saliva emanating from the stars, or a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself, would that it had been, when it comes to us, pure, limpid, and genuine, as it was, when first it took its downward descent [12] dripping from my stony Adam’s apple.

These three rarities combined in my hollows, congeal through time to a matter in between all three components. A binding agent. An active matter, a pureness capable of cleansing, infused in cream, to curds coagulates the liquid stream, sudden the fluids fix the parts combined; such, and so soon, the ethereal texture join'd. [ ] Whereas Chronos was inseparable from the bodies which filled it out entirely as causes and matter, Aion is populated by effects which haunt it without ever filling it up. [13]

The process concluded, the interloper thrown from my abode with pleasure, woken from his fever dream. I watch as my little one gives him his gift. A parting present to be rid of the intruder. Above us the clouds already gather, and the cold begins to creep through my solids as I start to shrink and deaden but never die. My dear servant makes ready to finish his process, to return to the start…

I make my way to the roof. The congealed essences in hand. The contraction has already begun, I feel the abode and space shrinking around me. Upon me the filth of the night’s dealings. The vapour of the embers, the blood of the slaughter, the sins of man, his sweat from the pale, the shit on my feet but it is no spot but a universal stain which soils me. [14] In order that all impurity may be the more detestable, [I] enumerates two species of unnatural lust, from whence it is evident that when men indulge themselves in this respect, they are carried away by an impulse, which is more than beastly, to defile themselves by shameful wickedness. [15]

That is why I need soap. To cleanse and purify; to appoint a thing unto holy uses, and to separate from unclean and unholy uses. [16] As for cleaning out, —that function was entrusted to the pouring rains which encumbered rather than swept away. [17] which gather now in the sky, angry as God must be at my midnight exploitations.

I reach the roof open to the heavens, I dance on my master’s wrinkling head as the dark clouds gather above. I strip my soiled garments. Open city, open body. Men may be taught by fables; children require the naked truth. [18] The most loyal and tender, or intense, love assigns subject of enunciation and a subject of the statement that constantly switch places, wrapped in the sweetness of being [ ] naked. [19]

The downpour begins and if it's raining that can only mean [we’ve] been bad children. Why? Because raindrops are the tears of Christ. And if Jesus is crying, that can only mean [we’ve] made him angry. [20] How that makes me happy, wasn’t it the Bible that prescribed an eye for an eye. Well now, we’re both crying. The tears steaming slightly as they hit the roof. The marly stratum crosses the torrent; and, as the water washes out metallic grains, the people imagine, on account of the brilliancy of the pyrites, that the torrent bears down gold. [21] The lather I scrub on my body froths and bubbles off myself onto my abode and into the streets of Vienna. I feel the filth slowly dissolve leaving fresh skin beneath. The cold of the wind pulling my skin tight. I feel my spirit rise with the inhale’s essences. The cool tears splash around me as I dance my rain dance. Precious rain: Because the issue of this seed was the birth of Perseus, but also because it symbolizes a first cause for poetry. [22]

[1] Williams, Daniele Barbaros Vitruvius of 1567

[2] Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books 1988

[3] Hugo, Les Miserables

[4] Serres, Rome

[5] Serres, Statues

[6] Wollstonecraft, Complete Works

[7] Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises

[8] de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

[9] Jefferson, Political Writings

[10] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 3 Books IX XI

[11] Ficino, Platonic Theology Volume 1 Books I IV

[12] Pliny, Natural History Volume 3

[13] Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

[14] de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

[15] Calvin, Harmony of the Law Vol 3

[16] Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises

[17] Hugo, Les Miserables

[18] Rousseau, Collected Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

[19] Deleuze Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

[20] The Young Pope

[21] Humboldt, Equinoctial Regions of America

[22] Petrarch, The Canzoniere

#SOAPCHAPTER

[k-chapman]

Chapter 7 - The Gift

I am awakened form my torrenting dreams and feverish vision by a wave of warm liquid. The stranger I could hardly remember had thrown a pale of milk over me, most likely freshly milked. A wash of whiteness, a wash of warmth, that quickly turned cold and sticky on my flesh. The flames of the pit had receded dramatically. He seemed in a hurry and spoke as if he had said this a thousand times before already, a dull, bored lull:

“The harsh journey you have been on has evidently brought you to me. And this has made the hours seem very long to [you]last night and this morning, though I have not passed them idly. [1] Grief arises from remembrance of lost possessions, and one has all the greater difficulty in making one's resolve, the nearer the approach to even weight in the opposing reasons, as also we see that the balance is determined more promptly when there is a great difference between the weights. [2] Those who want to deny the world must [embrace]what they now set on fire. [3]”

His face dressed in the unmoving features of a bored, expectant teacher. Wide eyed and lost I stared at him.

“You got all that?” he added as milk dripped from my nose and I realised with shock that I was naked. Morning light was trying to break through heavy cloud formation, so the room remained dim but I saw upon the man an unholy amount of blood and chunks of meat in his ragged beard and soiled tunic. He was filthy, and not at all the suave fellow that had led me to the garden.

“For what is so indispensable as giving to everything its proper value? [4] But in truth we do not so much give up our vices as change them for the worse, if you ask me. [5]” With that he threw my clothes at me and lifted me with unexpected grace to my feet. Upon his hand were crystal white satin gloves, which shone all the more brightly next to his besmirched and brownish forearms, in which white powder hung in greasy dark hairs. He stunk of beef.

I felt light as he lifted me, almost unbelievably light. And strangely wonderful. Brilliant in fact. I felt empty but alive, hollow and buzzing.

I am pushed and prodded towards a lobby by the front door. It seemed so plain, and office like. It could have been the entrance or waiting area in a hospital. All the days newspapers were lined up in a rack. There was a water cooler. And pamphlets? The blandest clock I had ever seen hung on the wall. He sat me in a chair next to the door, morning light struggling with gathering rain clouds.

“One moment. “, and away he rushed. He returns, his gloved hands cupping and hiding something form me. The dull white silk moved in angular planes with the movements of [his] body, revealing it in the manner of cold innocence, the body of a sacrificial object publicly offered, beyond the need of concealment or desire. [6] He produced what looked to be a coin. And once placed in my hands the weight and material were revealed it to be bone, bone shaped and of nonlocal geology. [7]

“Never spend that.” His eye with a dead serious wouldn’t let mine go until I gave a response, a nod. And with that I was pushed through the door, sticky, naked clutching a bundle of my smoke reeking clothes and a bone coin. Before me a large brownish high-rise stared at me.

From behind the door, I hear him shout as heavy raindrops start to fall:” No matter how earnest the attempt to keep clean, bugs and vermin [are] ever present facets of personal space. [8]”

[1] Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems

[2] Leibniz, Theodicy

[3] Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason

[4] Seneca, Complete Works

[5] de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

[6] Rand, The Fountainhead

[7] Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste

[8] Zimring, Encyclopedia of Consumption and Waste

#SOAPCHAPTER