Mesh-Gate

1 | We are laying across the floor of the temple—each of us—wearing symbolically important garments. I am dressed in a pair of green linen shorts and a short-sleeve linen shirt. You are wearing a denim jumpsuit. The woman between us is wearing a black robe. It might be made of velvet. Together we form a straight-line. Leading from the entryway to a small quartzite tablet. The woman in the middle hums very quietly. And I am thinking about grapefruits or citrons or something with tentacles inside, like a pomelo. The language that the woman is using is an exclusively sonic language. It does not have any glyphic counterparts. When she cries, her tears are large and buoyant. They float up into the atmosphere. I think that they are integral to this ritual—which is a ritual oriented towards aligning our bodies with some kind of ethereal or non-corporeal connective tissue. I am sorry that all of this seems so vague. The importance of the ritual is to formulate a syzygy. I want to be connected to the pomelo. I want to thrive with the same interior life. Tendrils made from thin membranes and nectar. Every fibre saturated with this sweetness. This is not necessarily a distinctly human desire—although there is the distinctly human desire to be not human anymore. Is it too much to want to improve yourself? To become more than you are now? I do not necessarily desire the not human but rather a new iteration of this body that is more capable than what I have now. The woman between us is still humming but now she is expending more air. Her voice is so breathy and quiet. It illuminates the quartzite tablet and renders the surface smooth. This body will be a corpse. Her voice accentuates the potentialities of an ossuary. We manifest the room of bones. We connect our bodies at the hands and feet.

2 | Laying flat on the ground, dressed in these linens and holding these feet. We form a mesh. The mesh is a screen of intersecting and overlapping threads. The threads do not necessarily need to be of a specific or consistent material or to be of a set stress. What’s woven might be loose or tight. The mesh is a planar surface which accentuates the barrier formed between interior and exterior. The act of thresholding—crossing the threshold—becomes unavoidably noticeable. Without objects to occupy a room, every action in the room is central to the experience of being present in said space. It is anavigational. Or rather it does not promote horizontal, but vertical movement. I wait to see what will pierce through the floor. But these actions do not necessarily need to be so violent. A bouquet of phalluses grow on the loose weave of the mesh. They bud and pulse.

3 | And when I stand up to examine the mesh, I can see that the flesh of the bouquet is soft and flabby. When I cut it open with a metal scalpel I can see that it’s made purely of adipose—human fat. It is only a replica of the phallus. It lacks basic anatomical elements (vas deferens, urethra, etc.). When the bouquet is cut open, the fat inside begins to seep out and expand further. Globular nodes which I pluck from the cavity like an eagle. With my teeth / beak. The debris of my feast is scattered as flecks across the mesh and I can see the woman smiling. She can taste the same fat that is in my mouth. She can feel the soft coarseness of my linen clothing. The tongue is a tool for operating the bardo loop. Uttering death and pulling the body back from it. Do you remember the woman’s language? This unwritable speech? Our tongue does not have the same grooves. These are unique to you and I. But their topography is still similar. The distinction that has formed between the woman, you, and I is an error in earlier mesh-gates. This ritual is an inevitable repair. What is she saying? I imagine this language must be a kind of reine sprache. Something primordial. A part of the body. Like blood or muscle or fat. The fat that is pulled by my tongue from the open cavity. That I move around in my mouth and press against my inner cheek.

4 | But I have yet to speak. The woman and I are connected—somehow—in the same way that I’m sure that you and I are connected. But I do not share her capacity to speak / make noise. The mesh-gate creates the potential for our bodies to fuse together once again. Now that it has formed a threshold between superior and inferior. With your bodies arranged right now in the inferior. Her - posterior. You - anterior. And me feasting in the superior. As we both move towards this ingress. Weaving ourselves into the mesh-gate.

1 | And feeling the thin sharpness of the mesh-thread cut me in half. And forming two new potential syzygies. We are 3::6, I and the woman are 1::8, you and the woman are 4::5, my two halves are 0::9. The aleph null. It is engraved on the face of the quartzite tablet. I suffer three dreams about Borges. One where I am wandering through the Library of Babel and two about strange amalgamations assuming my identity (A Pierre Menard and an Asterion). On the superior side of the mesh, I am able to analyze and arrange the surface. You and the woman are watching me crawl around carefully, pressing my palms on the stable weaves and inching from one side to the other. I am waiting for you and the woman to cross the threshold. Or for the woman to hum something that will sew my halves back together (0+9). But nothing happens. And I watch as my legs float through the room and eventually stabilize over the quartzite tablet. And the aleph null begins its own humming, which resembles the woman’s.

2 | My head is clogged with unfamiliar neural structures. Skeletal frames (cube, cone, pyramid, cylinder). Thick red and black wires. Plastic topography plates. I feel like I am being stripped of my primal reality. By an elaborate architectural system. Beautifully arranged porcelain ornaments and intricate wallpapers. I want to press my hand so hard into my head that my skull bursts. I want to reveal the pink matter. Its delineated grooves. To see what is where and witness the pulsating electricity of the neural. If I am already in half. And this distance between body and self has already begun to manifest—as I am watching my legs levitate in ritual practice above the tablet. What part of the brain do I occupy? The simple answer is all of it, but I do not know if this is the case. Or if I am a thin film of something spread across the pink matter. Or if my being can be extracted from blood / urine / bile. There is no reality in the woman’s humming. You cannot hear it either. Braindead ape screaming into this abyssopelagic portal. I beckon the ancient reptilian brain. I say something like Sever my head and my hands. The mesh-gate is capable of both creating and dissecting syzygies. It is a tool. All tools are passive before their usage. It is their interaction with the user that determines the malady of their performance. My hands pass through the mesh-gate and become their own pair, 2::7. And they move towards the tablet and they perform a series of esoteric gestures (which I am not familiar with) and the woman is still humming and I catch the English word, haunt on her tongue and under examination I do not know if it is intended for me, my parts, or the three of us as a whole. I am still as present in this ritual as you are. I have not gotten the opportunity to step away and analyze what has happened to us. It is so easy to become entangled. The aleph null sheds hues of pink light in response to each new hand gesture. I watch myself participate from a distance—torso clung to the haphazard surface of the mesh-gate.

3 | But now I’m slowly prying the front-face of my skull away, carefully unsewing the amniotic sutures that formed in my genesis. And when it has been separated completely I am able to place it on the mesh-gate and use it as my own kind of makeshift tablet (faux-quartzite. Another potential syzygy of 1a::8a between inanimate nodes). Mimicking the actions of my body, I do all of this through muscle-memory. Something that I do not know but that this container does. It is more well-versed in the occult then I could really claim to be. It performs each movement with a complex understanding of their bibliomantic / numerological / hermetic implications. The woman is pleased by this. She hums something plosive. The nodes of the bouquet continue to grow outward and create stable platforms across the mesh-gate. I feel this intense desire to pull you through. Even if there is the potential for severing / for creating further pairs / celestial twins. The skull-bone slab is rattling and dripping with blood. It jettisons fluid across the mesh-gate. Like a molluscular siphon. Superior to inferior. Letting my blood flow onto the temple floor. Submerging you and the woman (4::5) in a shallow pool. The humming plays as soft vibrations across the pool. I can measure the distortions of her voice in blood. Denoting excitations in each wave. Analyzing its relationship to the two tablets (1a::8a). I press the open-face of my brain against the mesh-gate and push through. I feel my head as it falls onto the floor and the blood floods my mouth.