SPELLS

by Léo

By the time I will die, usually years too late
You will learn how to crack these codes. 

Encrypted language that has blossomed far beyond fear
Like a plague that will enable wider thoughts. 

Viruses that convey information they’d rather erase 
To prevent upcoming beings from salvation. 

Abusive violence from the well-intentioned 
Assumes a nastier, far more malignant form.

Parasites that metamorphose into those who care 
Are the most complete symbiosis with our angst.

For too long all shields, defenses, armours and so on, muzzled us 
From the marvelous effects of unknown spells.

A vigilant shadow looms over my nights

Lately, I no longer regard churches in the same light. The recurrence of an uncanny dream has perturbed me deeply. As I succumb to the world of fantasies, I find myself hurled down a staircase in rose granite, ahead of half a dozen steps, polished by the passage of countless visitors. Standing still, I am nearly petrified under the stare exerted by insidious forces perched a few metres above my body. They seem amused by my presence, and the circumstance does not allow me to discern their exact origin, nor prove their existence through any means. Yet I am certain, their translucent eyes of alabaster unceasingly look upon me, piercing my being terribly, incapable of reacting to the tiniest movement... After an interminable paralysis, my limbs loosen unexpectedly, and a pleasant-though-unfamiliar warmth spreads along my spine, against my will. Seizing command of my loins, it urges me to enter the church. Despite my reluctance, I am owned by this gentle coercion that permeates my belly and shakes my chest with mournful waves. And then, with a spasmodic torsion of the hips, persuades me to enter. My flesh is damp and tingling with shivers that I feel running beneath my palm just before it is about to grasp the handle. But at the moment of barely reaching the surface of the door, I abruptly awaken, soaked in cold sweat, as if having narrowly escaped an awful peril. Then I relax... Gently regaining my corporeal envelope. Breathless… And carry on with my daily routine as if nothing had occurred.

The gravestone slithers quietly into your head

You may pretend such oddities are of no concern. Not much to answer, I suppose, apart from the fact this nightmare has repeated itself for weeks at random intervals without any warning, plunging me into immense solitude. Sometimes the vision turns into a whole different scenario, especially when I am exhausted, unwillingly fading into diurnal boredom. By the time I fall asleep, I idly fly over the perimeter of this church, always the same church in rose granite. Slowly soaring. This peaceful lightness is blurred by the apparition of silhouettes emerging from the dotted horizontal cornices: overhanging drills adorned by demonic spirits and gargoyles multiplying incessantly. Each one of them eagerly awaits an opportunity to reproduce, and all it takes is for a vulnerable being to get close enough for them to turn into ocher stone. They clasp the innocent at the collar without warning, and sink their fangs into the bare neck, painfully rummaging inside the skull for what lies within, thriving on the least pure from the most morbid. Once there is nothing left to nourish, their skin turns to clay, their arms to legs clad in sharp claws, their torso covered in feathers and rigid scales, and their jaws planted with ferocious teeth. As their final breath joins the ever-denser ranks of these frozen creatures, their bust leans slightly forward as if impelled by an invisible strength so that their wide-open throat is cleansed of their sins by the discharge of filthy water far from the entrance of the Gothic monument. I nearly always vomit my empty bowels, and acid reflux scorches my gullet when I arouse and regain consciousness.

They pursue one suspect who resembles me

These gargoyles haunt me to the depths of my soul, day and night. To discover the reasons for these apparitions, I have desperately searched for a plausible explanation by recalling distant memories. Upon reflection, I have always, since my earliest childhood, harboured an aversion towards any form of authority, so it is not surprising that I am now despised by the embodiment of christian jailers, the gargoyles. I know that I no longer belong to those blessed spirits allowed to enter without resistance. Or would it be more accurate to say that we have not been of the same species for quite some time now. I have sinned so much. « Flesh, fornication, sadism, sodomy, acedia, debauchery, idolatry, malice, hatred, discord, jealousy, rage, dissensions, factions, envy, orgies, carousing… ». These words delightfully drift upon my lips and vibrate in my larynx like the psalms of a sweet melody. That is why it is not permitted for me to enter these holy places without concern for the reprisals reserved for the unbelievers by the gargoyles, nor being seized by the anxiety of not being able to deceive the vigilance of their apotropaic¹ guards. It has undoubtedly become a paranoid automatism², but I feel increasingly besieged by these polymorphic gutters. For good reasons: all they're trying to hawk me is a dogma that I had to flee at the cost of significant existential crisis and spiritual sacrifices. I want once and for all to absolve myself of their sermons. How can I free myself from these phantoms? But would not the most appropriate question be to ask where?

Nowhere to disappear, or perhaps another land

The absence of an immediate answer threw me into even further despair and loneliness. But recently, in order to foster another possible source for these nocturnal terrors, I wondered if this recurring torment was not the manifestation of something less imbued by my childhood. Somewhat on that particular day, I decided to delve into much more recent traumas, floating over my most immediate consciousness. This thought drew a bitter smile from my usually closed features. Drifting mechanically on the irregular surface of the ceiling above my bed, I was shaken by a lucid moment and murmured phrases in a loop, almost unconsciously: « The churches are empty, and the domestic interior has become the secular version of spiritual refuge, my bedroom is one of its arboreal chapels, my computer the crypt of my personal data, its relics. The churches are empty, and the domestic interior has become the secular version of spiritual refuge… ». The distress that troubled me was evident in my fixed gaze when I realised that I had consistently relied on screens to escape the grasp of my inquisitors. You, who are reading these lines, probably know this better than anyone³: computer became the only device that allows one to break free from the catechesis of normative education. Solely the everlasting evening spent wandering in an anachronistic flow of pagan bits and bandwidth have spared me from those well-intentioned gargoyles; these hollows of excommunication armed with the very worst of ethically correct claptrap that has invaded my reveries and, at such a young age, imposed their restrictive values on my imagination. For these reasons, I wish to continue spending long hours fulfilling unspeakable heretical desires —most of them online with just a wave of my meagre index finger, whose dexterity proves so precise when it swirls over my keyboard. I am so eager to satiate whatever fantasies that have been condemned by their gospels... I only feared God after I had learned to speak, after all. 

If we must play, then let it be hide-and-seek

Yet, it seemed that my digital sanctuary was not immune to all dangers. If I believe the caution windows that appear all the time, my browsing may be constantly threatened by the intrusion of suspicious programs, wicked files, and other cybernetic trojan horses. Fortunately, a myriad of antivirus extensions guarantee the protection of my personal data! Blessed be the antidotes! My keepsakes! The antiviruses act on my operating system (OS) by preventing the execution of software suspected to falsify, denature, purge, render unintelligible, or simply erase forever documents implanted in the random access memory (RAM) of my personal computer, a peripheral⁴ device, a USB prosthesis⁵. Certainly, those are only tiny fragments of sound and images⁶ being discussed here, many of them are erroneous or obsolete... Yet, these substances represent to me a treasure of inestimable value because they inform me about my utmost precious and fragile commodity: my existence. What a pathetic mind, you might think… And I couldn't agree more. I would even go so far as to believe that these antiviruses act like digital guardians, creating an invisible barrier against fictitious contamination while generating a sense of trivial security. One could make an even further assumption and assert that their modus operandi resembles the placebo effect⁷ generated by the gargoyles. By pretending that our programmes are unalterable, the message they convey therein stands the same, because they feed on the terror of their prey-turned-host. The antiviruses would therefore live in symbiosis with our fears; infecting other operators with the use of the same anguish that has made them indispensable... Only after, do they claim to protect us.

And if duped we are, awareness eludes us

Let us suppose that we could have been deceived; and that the antiviruses themselves are the malicious strengths they claim to combat —this paradox is undeniably recurrent in history⁸. Indeed, if the antiviruses have long since mutated into moral-policing without us being able to notice, they may have freely interfered with our power of decision, constraining the extent of our desires, our insatiable curiosity, and our most voracious wishes into futile aspirations and other apathetic compensations. Throughout all this time, we could have been misled by the antiviruses with a seemingly benevolent appearance, and alike their most faithful ally, sobriety and moderation, they have ruled us at the slightest opportunity. What an immeasurable imposture. So what about its reversible victim, the virus? The question of whether an electronic virus can present benign properties was never discussed before, as I recall… Even though there have been many situations where supposedly harmful elements have proven to be salutary⁹. This hypothesis assumes that viruses do not necessarily manifest themselves in lethal forms. For my part, I don't think it's necessary to defend against all viruses. I believe that some of these assaults, which we presume to have irreversible effects on our computers, have been programmed to spread insubordinate discourse, inducing mutiny within one reader’s mind. Other bugs may carry scrambled messages, magical formulas, enchantments with narcotic effects, and incantations whose perusal would instantly release us from the tolerance for domestication and passivity that we exhibit daily¹⁰. Hypnotic speeches that would immediately put an end to our complacency towards managers, bourgeois, judges, teachers, oligarchs, and all sorts of masters. This, and only this, could explain it all.

It may be time to proliferate, dear fellows

I presume we have all witnessed the healing effects of language. In times of suffering for instance, repeatedly saying the phrase « It is going to be alright » is proven to alleviate severe pain, anxiety, or chronic headaches. While it is admitted that certain speech and word combinations have served as comforting allies, what if others could produce mental disturbances when recited aloud? Could seeing and hearing letters, scrambled down to very small units of viruses, free the beneficiary from the burden of obedience¹¹? Are all those spam awaiting to stimulate a revelation latent in our bodies? We are talking here about an epigenetic¹² shock that would abbreviate docility forever. A simple electrical switch that would lift our conscience, lighting a permanent sense of revolt. Despite the hegemony of the antivirus embargo, viruses could reactivate the chemical flow of riot, well-dormant beneath the surface of our reptilian brains. This is certainly a matter for further research, although we could easily find out experimentally whether this assumption is justified or not¹³. Well, if this proves accurate, I wish all those barriers to be interrupted. I will declare the antivirus lockdown, if only briefly, sufficiently long enough so that you and I could explore an entire universe encompassing a wider spectrum of content than we have been forced to ignore. To the widespread virus and the taste of forbidden fruits: magic words. Spells, in fact? Let’s get ourselves contaminated with uncensored rumours, miscellaneous gossips, asymptomatic noises, meaningful verbal units, radiant magnetic fields, scrambled hieroglyphs, sonnets of vandalism, neglected sound effects, hallucinogenic slogans, telepathic broadcasts, not-happened-yet news, fictional events retroactively cancelled, mind-controlling proverbs, convulsive chorus, time-travelling quotes and insurrectional rustles. Silence. I sincerely hope that many IT gargoyles will fail in the task they have of protecting us all. Because it is only by exposing ourselves to the seemingly hostile forces they conceal that we will find the route towards salvation. 

I promise, 

Léo.

¹ Who repels the evil spell.

² Like the habit of changing sidewalks when one encounters a cop.

³ The author speaks directly here to the virtual anonymous experiencing the perpetual present and the ancient myths, at the crossroads of history and fiction.

⁴ The peripherals: thus are named the extensions grafted onto computers.

⁵ The prostheses: thus are named the extensions grafted onto human bodies.

⁶ Sometimes odours.

⁷ That can produce relief through psychological mechanisms. 

⁸ One need only recall the smallpox-infested blankets that British colonists offered to Native Americans for their protection against the cold.

⁹ For instance, the administration of an antigenic agent with the aim of stimulating the immune system of a living organism to develop adaptive immunity against an infectious agent.

¹⁰ Exorcism, lycanthropy, witch hunts, and burning-at-the-stake served only to consolidate the power of the dominants and incriminate their opponents.

¹¹ A loud voice like an electric hum, circuit bending, bit-rate reduction, hardware noise, and system errors coming from the trash of the cloud repeating « The time is near ». 

¹² We refer to the alteration of human development that does not involve mutation of the nucleotide sequence but results from environmental factors.   

¹³ Take a sample of volunteers, subject them to a pain stimulus accompanied by certain words-sounds-images and monitor the subject's vital signs, including artery pressure, pulse rate, and brain activity while the message is perceived.