Please welcome to the world … Steve Finbow & Karolina Urbaniak DEATH MORT TOD – A European Book of the Dead

Collaborationists Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak’s Death Mort Tod uses fiction, non-fiction, appropriation, cut-ups, and a series of over fifty unsettling illustrations to tour the dark sites of Europe with its millennia of genocides, mass murders, serial killings and suicides. A country-to-country death trip, a necro-travel guide, a Baedeker of bereavement, incorporating myth, folklore, maps, reportage, photographs, recordings, illustrations and poetry. Discover a continent’s thanatic history within a textual and visual reliquary – A European Book of the Dead.

Text by Steve Finbow
Images by Karolina Urbaniak
Foreword by Eugene Thacker
Afterword by Brad Feuerhelm

Softbound with flaps, 210 x 256mm
120 pages, 51 illustrations
Edition limited to 100 copies
ISBN 978-0-9927366-9-9

https://www.infinitylandpress.com/death-mort-tod

 

 

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From the foreword by Eugene Thacker
There is my death, and there is the death of another. There is the death of the individual, living being, and there is the death of others, of many others, of entire populations, entire peoples, of the embalmed multitudes that form the ramified, forensic architectures of human history. There are living beings, huddled together in temporary assemblages of meaningful organization (the polis), and there are the tombs, the mausoleums, the cemeteries, the archives of the dead that themselves form an entire city, a necropolis. There is my death, a human being. There is the death of the species, the strange event of extinction that leaves not even a final member of the species to bear witness to its own end…

…The innovation of Steve Finbow and Karolina Urbaniak’s Death Mort Tod: A European Book of the Dead is to inhabit the grey, opaque space between death as existential and death as stochastic. Finbow’s texts raise language up and break it down, dramatizing the enigma of being burdened with the capacity for being able to conceptualize death in language, but a language that is itself indelibly scarred by the finitude and mortality of the living body itself – something spectrally mirrored in Urbaniak’s contorted, anatomical reliquaries. The result is a view of death as an impossible life that determines every life. Scaled up as clouds of number and pattern, sunken down in elemental mud. Weightless ash, sunken data.

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A note – some chapters are cut-ups, mash-ups and bastardizations of ancient, classical, modern and contemporary poems, prose, epics, anthems, songs and outtakes from the literature of the countries concerned; some lines have been translated from their original source, other lines have been re-adapted around preceding and succeeding lines, yet others have been copied and pasted. In other chapters, journalistic and historical resources have been manipulated and used as source material, some are fiction and some are factual-mythical mutations, all of this in an attempt to provide an anti-identitarian focus, to avoid a totalizing version of history and to contrive a literature and continent without finitude.

All photographs, photomontages, collages, drawings and installations were originally produced to illustrate the text without use of any external sources/materials. Clay, sand, ash, animal bones, blood, paint, salt, thread, mud, or human hair can be found among a variety of used materials.

 

EXTRACTS

Moldova – Moarte
The man lies on his side on a bed of straw, blood seeps through a dirty bandage wrapped around his abdomen, drops onto the straw turning it a dark brown. There is a light hanging above the man’s head, a dim light, a light only so because of the murky darkness that surrounds the scene. The man is in his mid-twenties but looks twice his age; he is naked except for a pair of grubby underpants and, of course, the bandage. He is thin, his ribs visible under his skin, his head is shaved and his eyes bulge slightly as if trying to intensify the power of the light bulb. If anyone asked, he would say that he was a farmhand but he has not worked for several years. He moved to the capital Chișinău a year ago to try to find work and spent a few months sleeping rough until he met the Israeli. Painfully, he turns over and reaches for the simple cross he brought from his home near Dubna but it is lost among the broken wheels, the tin buckets, the sodden firewood. Rather than dying from heroin addiction, rather than dying by being shot by a gangster or stabbed by a gypsy, rather than dying of starvation, he had chosen the course that led him to be here in this barn bleeding to death. He had been arrested for vagrancy and the police officer had said that he knew a man who knew a man who knew an Israeli man who could help him with a backhander, bail, some money to live on, some money to go home with. When he had refused the offer, the police officer brought in another man who tied him to a chair, blindfolded him and pinched his fingers and nipples with pliers. After a while, another man came into the room and spoke in a foreign language, the police officer translated: the man would pay him $10,000 for one of his kidneys. He agreed, dreaming of buying a farm near his hometown, of employing his brothers whom he had not seen in years. The next few weeks were a blur. He was given a fake passport, put on a plane to Turkey, placed in a hospital bed, taken down to the operating theatre, anaesthetised. When he came round, he was in intense pain, they did not provide him with painkillers, it was as if he were already dead. After the operation, they treated him like cattle, herding him here and there until, when he could at last walk; they put him on an old bus and sent him back to his own country with $2,000. He was too ill to leave the capital, too sick to return to Dubna with his payment. He had collapsed at a so-called friend’s house after a night of drinking and glue sniffing to celebrate his windfall. His friend and others he had bought drinks for robbed him, he fell unconscious, the stitches ripped, the staples tore, the seven-inch scar opened. They stripped him and wrapped him in a bandage they found in the bathroom, carried him out to the car, drove him out of the city, left him in this place. A fifteen-year-old Israeli girl in Tel Aviv now walks the Promenade with a Moldovan kidney. Blood diamonds they call them.

 

 

Macedonia – смрт
In the reign of Argaeus, king of Macedonia, the Taulantii (Illyrian tribes) under Galaurus made an incursion into Macedonia. He tightened the telephone cord around her neck and watched her eyes bulge, he thought of his dead mother and his auto-suicide of a father, his tramp of a wife whoring herself in Skopje, his two children whose faces had become a blur, his memory pickled with alcohol and hate. Argaeus, whose force was very small, directed the Macedonian young women, as the enemy advanced, to show themselves from Mount Ereboea. This woman was sixty-five years old, the age of his mother when she had died, and he would write about the old bitch’s death in one of the newspapers he worked for – his reports would be the never-ending obituary of his mother. In a numerous body, the women poured down from the mountain, their faces covered by wreaths, brandishing their thyrsi (a wand of giant fennel tipped with a pine cone used in the worship of Dionysus) in place of spears. His other victims were sixty-four and fifty-four years of age, like his mother they were cleaners, they had known her, gossiped with her. Galaurus, intimidated by the numbers of those whom instead of women he supposed to be men, sounded a retreat; whereupon the Taulantii, throwing away their weapons, and whatever else might retard their escape, abandoned themselves to a precipitate flight. He made them all strip, beat them, the sight of their aged and bleeding flesh gave him an erection, they made him do it, they were to blame – he would tell their story as some kind of catharsis, some kind of compulsive writing cure. Argaeus, having thus obtained a victory without the hazard of a battle, erected a temple to Dionysus Pseudanor and ordered the priestesses of the god, who were before called Kladones (spinsters) by the Macedonians, to ever afterwards be distinguished by the title of Mimallones (Amazons). He raped them and ejaculated over their wrinkled bodies just as he had dreamed of doing to his mother, he took their soiled underwear as trophies, placed the items in a drawer with the torn wedding photographs. In a war between the Illyrians and Macedonians, many of the Macedonians were taken prisoner, and others fought timidly in the expectation of being ransomed if they were captured. He tightened the telephone cord and watched the life leach out of the old bitches, he bound them with the same cord he had strangled them with, trussed them, bundled them into nylon bags, drove them into the country, dumped them in the undergrowth. Perdiccas ordered the deputation, which was sent to negotiate the ransom of the prisoners, to declare on their return that the Illyrians had refused to receive a ransom and had decided to put the prisoners to death. The night of his arrest, he waited until the other three inmates were asleep and placed his head in a bucket of water. When all hope of a ransom had been removed in this way, the Macedonians in future fought with more resolution because their only hopes of safety were placed in victory. He drowned himself, committed suicide before his own words found him guilty.

 

 

Malta – Mewt
The room is dark, resembling a cave, yet also like a theatre, a stage set. The walls are of heavy stone, they could be dripping with moisture, they could be enmossed, the dark-green singular flowers like black velvet curtains framing the scene. Left of centre, beyond the stone doorway, is a structure made from rusting metal or rotting wood, it seems to serve little purpose but for decoration, to differentiate the light from the darkness, the active horizontal dynamics of the space. On the right, ropes hang down and pass through a metal ring. Was this the place where he had been tethered? Is this the place where he will soon be tied? This is an arena of punishment, a prison cell, a place of torture and execution. On the right also, a rectangular window – which could be a painting in its own right – is crosshatched with metal bars, through this matrix, two prisoners stare at the illuminated focal point. They are us, the viewer, but they could also be representations of Dismas and Gestas, the penitent and impenitent thieves crucified next to Christ. One stares over the other’s shoulder, witnesses, voyeurs, observing the other five characters, the actors in this drama. In the centre of this quintet, stands the warder; his hair is close-cropped and receding, his beard red and flourishing, he is dressed in a sleeved cape, leather jerkin and pale hose. Iron keys hang from an unseen belt. His right arm is extended down and he is pointing with his index finger. Next to him, an old woman stands head in hands. She is dressed in black, her grey-blonde hair covered loosely with a white headscarf. Why is she covering her ears? Why is she not covering her eyes? She has been identified as Herodias, wife of Herod II, mother of Salome, but is probably a stock figure of the believing Christian. Bending down next to her is not the lustful beast, the seven-veiled dancer enticing the tetrarch Herod Antipas but a lowly servant girl, her russet hair tied back with a butterfly clip, holding a gold charger in the position of the warder’s directing index finger. In the centre, consuming the light within the darkness, a muscular man holds a dagger in his right hand, it rests on the base of his spine, a silver cloth wraps around his waist and sits on his strong thighs. His beard is pointed and his hair tied back. His dirty left foot stands on a red robe and his left hand grips long brown hair. Between the hair and the warder’s left foot is a sword stained with blood. Between the executioner’s legs a man sprawls facedown, hands tied behind his back he lies on a lamb’s fleece, the red robe placed strategically to obscure the evacuation of his bowels as the executioner part severs his head from his body. A frayed rope uncoils from between his legs as if it were an umbilicus that once connected him to life. What will happen next? The muscular man will bring the dagger to the prostrate man’s throat, swiftly finish the decapitation, the warder will lift the head and place it on the gold charger, the servant girl will take it to her mistress. Blood flows from the man’s neck, pools and then forms the name ‘f. Michelang.o.’ Caravaggio.

 

 

Cyprus – θάνατος / Ölüm
‘Want another pint, Binny?’ ‘Yeah, go on then, Geoff.’ ‘Look at the Cube making an arsehole of himself dancing.’ ‘Yeah, he’s never gonna pull.’ ‘Hey, Allan, want a drink?’ ‘Scotch and Coke. And get some fucking tequilas in an’ all, you muppet!’ The three squaddies, members of the British Army’s Royal Green Jackets, are in the Jasmin bar in Ayia Napa, Cyprus. They down their drinks and leave, drunk and ready to fight or fuck. They get into Justin ‘Binny’ Fowler’s Mini Moke and drive to a petrol station. It is 16 September 1994 and Geoff Pernell is determined to get a woman for the night, whatever it takes – not like that bitch on the Falklands – and with Allan Ford, ‘the Cube,’ in agreement, they’re bound to get their wicks dipped tonight. As they pull in to fill the tank of the small jeep, they see a blonde woman get on the back of a motorcycle, the driver is obviously a local, but the woman looks Scandinavian. It is just after midnight. The three soldiers fill the tank, eyeing the woman. They get back in the jeep and drive. A few minutes later, the motorcycle carrying the local man and the blonde woman overtakes the jeep. Pernell accelerates, drives into the motorcycle and knocks the couple into the dust at the side of the road. They are stunned but not hurt. The jeep stops, reverses. The soldiers get out. They stand over the couple, punching and kicking them. The local man makes a run for it and scrabbles into the bushes. The soldiers drag the screaming woman into the jeep and drive off. They turn up a dirt track and stop. They pull the woman out and rip her shirt, exposing her breasts. ‘You fuck her first, Binny,’ the Cube shouts. The blonde woman is crying, snatching at her frayed shirt as the men pull at her jeans. Fowler pulls down his shorts but is unable to get an erection and returns to the jeep. Ford is on his knees trying to fuck the crying woman. After five minutes of this and after five minutes of punching the woman, Pernell replaces the Cube. The woman shouts and screams in a foreign language and the Cube hits her again and again, her half-naked body now a mass of contusions and cuts. After yet another blow, the woman falls sideways, her breathing ragged, The Cube takes a spade from the jeep, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head, brings it down on the blonde woman’s head. Throws it to the ground. The three soldiers look drunkenly at the body, now unrecognisable as a human being. They stare at each other as if they were in the dream of another, the nightmare of their violent history, their beaten girlfriends, their fucked-up pasts. The Cube takes up the spade again, uses it to dig a shallow grave. The three soldiers kick the body into the hole, cover it in the dirt, the dust, the sand of Cyprus. When the woman’s body is discovered a few days later, she is only identifiable by her rings and watch, the violence and thirty-eight-degree heat having rendered her down to mere matter.

 

 

Austria – Tod
My dear neoplasm. This coma may resemble natural sleep, or may be accompanied by so great a reduction of respiration and circulation as to be taken for death. Then, on his father’s death, sudden attack of anxiety with heart-failure, hypochondriacal fears of cancer of the tongue; several months later a second attack, with cyanosis, intermittent pulse, fear of death, etc.; since then weakness, vertigo, agoraphobia, some dyspepsia. A malignant tumour, an epithelioma. It seems as though this death-wish is directed in sons against their father and in daughters against their mother. While he was nursing his father he had seen him with a death’s head. A leukoplakia, a benign tumour, a pre-cancerous lesion of the oral mucosa. His right arm, over the back of the chair, had gone to sleep and had become anaesthetic and paretic; and when he looked at it the fingers turned into little snakes with death’s heads. They report that the most frequent content of the first memories of childhood are on the one hand occasions of fear, shame, physical pain, etc., and on the other hand important events such as illnesses, deaths, fires, births of brothers and sisters, etc. A severe postoperative haemorrhage. The prohibited seizing of the rod (in the dream an unmistakably phallic one), the production of fluid from its blow, the threat of death, in these we find all the principal factors of infantile masturbation united. His father had fallen dead in the street and had been brought home; when his body was undressed it was found that at the moment of death, or post mortem, he had passed a stool. A rigorous oral hygiene, replacing defective dental restorations, fitting gold inlays in certain teeth to help retain and support the obturator, and constructing a vulcanite surgical prosthesis. If there is no mention in the dream of the fact that the dead man is dead, the dreamer is equating himself with him: he is dreaming of his own death. A crater-shaped ulcer on the posterior aspect of the right maxillary tuberosity and a palpable sub-mandibular node. Let us add that a restriction of sexual activity in a community is quite generally accompanied by an increase of anxiety about life and of fear of death which interferes with the individual’s capacity for enjoyment and does away with his readiness to face death for any purpose. Ligated the right external carotid artery and removed the submandbular nodes. In the second he reflected a facial flap and carried out a maxillectomy, sectioning anteriorly through the right canine region and preserving the soft palate posteriorly. The chief subjects of this kind are paternity, length of life, life after death, and memory – in the last of which we are all in the habit of believing, without having the slightest guarantee of its trustworthiness. The maxillectomy cavity was lined with a split skin graft supported by gutta-percha on the surgical obturator which was retained by clasps. Without denying the omnipotence of love we may point out that both these instances were concerned with death. This involved ligation of the vas deferens supposedly to stimulate the secretion of the testicular hormone and hopefully rejuvenate the patient.

 

 

Switzerland – Mort / Tod / Morte
The last document to be signed by the member is the ‘declaration of suicide,’ which states that the member is voluntarily ending his or her own life, that they want to use the services of Death, and that Death has clearly outlined to him or her all the risks involved. This means that Death cannot be held responsible for any problems that might arise during the assisted suicide despite the most careful preparations. Members and those who came with them are then given the opportunity to say farewell. If desired, this can take place at a specific time without the presence of the Death assisted-suicide assistants, who will withdraw themselves for as long as necessary. To live with dignity. If all of the criteria are met and all of the questions have been answered, if the member has been repeatedly informed that he or she is free to return home permanently or temporarily and if the member still expresses a wish to end his or her life, and if the lethal medication is to be administered through the stomach, the medication to prevent vomiting can be given. Thirty minutes later, the member is questioned once again to see whether he or she still want to end life. To die with dignity. If they do, the prescribed dose of NaP (sodium pentobarbital) is dissolved in normal tap water and presented to the member in whatever form is necessary for the planned method of administration. When the medication is being administered, assistance is permitted as long as it does not in any way lead to someone else administering the medication. For instance, holding a glass containing a straw is allowed, but tipping the glass so that the liquid runs into the mouth is not. Careful attention is paid so that the “power/control over the action” always remains with the member and is in no way transferred to either of the Death assisted-suicide assistants or any other person present. Directly after the medication has been swallowed, the member – as described previously – is offered either a sweetened beverage or chocolate to remove the unpleasant taste left in the mouth. To die with dignity. During the entire process, and in particular as soon as the member has lost consciousness, the people who accompanied him or her are given special care. The Death assisted-suicide assistants monitor the process of the dying phase. When they are confident that death has occurred, they confirm by checking the pulse, breathing and pupil reflexes. If these indicators, also known as ‘uncertain signs of death’, are present, the escorts can wait until they are able to confirm the ‘certain signs of death’, in particular livor mortis. To die with dignity. Once they are convinced that death has occurred, they offer their condolences to the people who accompanied the deceased person, then use the emergency telephone number to notify. ‘Dear Death. My name is S**** F*****. I am fifty-seven years old and live in Langres, France. I suffer from severe pain…’ A few pages later, ‘I only wish that my country was humane enough to let a person die. Please consider my letter, I hope to hear a response soon.’ To live with dignity. To die with dignity.

 

 

Luxembourg – Mort / Tod / Doud
In Xanadu did Günter Ewen, a revenge spree killing decree. It is 15 May 1999, the man is in his mid-thirties. With his feathered blond hair and athletic build, he could be a defensive midfielder for Racing FC. He dresses in all black, not to look menacing but to not be seen and to not seem to be not seen. It is cold and approaching dawn, he has been driving through the mist along the borders, Luxembourg and France, France and Germany, Germany and Luxembourg. Borders, town doubles – Dillingen and Dillingen – thinking, ‘What is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one’s country; is it hate of one’s uncountry?’ He drives until he sees the neon sign, white on blue, stylized buildings – metonyms for civilization, Xanadu. He walks up to the door thinking, ‘Like all doors it is ambiguous, two faced. What is inside it and what is outside it depends upon which side you are on.’ And he is now inside. The music is loud, the lights flash across the dance floor, and he thinks, ‘No, I don’t believe in life after love,’ and takes the gun out and starts shooting randomly into the crowd – but this is not the purist surrealist act, this is revenge. He sees a man fall, blood pulsing in the strobes and then another, the sound of the shots muffled by the dance-pop and while shooting he thinks, ‘So sad that you’re leaving.’ Another three spin and fall in the hail of bullets and he stops shooting and thinks, ‘There’s no turning back.’ He leaves through the same door, no longer ambiguous. He drives to a house where he knows a man lives with his British wife. The man had testified against him, saying he was a thief. This time, doors are immaterial, he breaks in, shoots the man first, shoots the wife second, shoots the young daughter in the face. He leaves, gets back into his car, drives north, drives along the border, drives faster, switching lanes. When he reaches Sierck-les-Bains, a town on the borders of France, Germany and Luxembourg, he loses control of the car and crashes. He can hear helicopters and his own blood pulsing. He runs through the woods, shoots at a nurse out for a morning stroll. Runs along the borders, runs across the borders and back and back and back. He stops a car, a Peugeot, and forces the driver out and onto his knees. He stops at a house, breaks in, shoots another man. He drives into Luxembourg, thinking, ‘The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.’ He drives and drives and then in Strassen, on the edges of Luxembourg City, he finds a hotel, pays for three nights, falls onto the bed, the curtains closed, helicopters in the morning sky, sirens serenading the borders. Sleep comes occasionally, comes fitfully. He dreams of rape and prison, he dreams of the very edge of the world. He wakes and hears the footsteps on the stairs and taking the gun from under the pillow and placing it in his mouth, he thinks, ‘The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.’

 

 

Netherlands – Dood
For I saw that my situation was one of great peril and that I was obliged to seek a remedy with all my might, however uncertain it might be, like a sick man suffering from a fatal malady who, foreseeing certain death unless a remedy is forthcoming, is forced to seek it, however uncertain it be, with all his might, for therein lies all his hope. This corollary can be illustrated by the example of the sick man and the healthy man. The sick man eats what he dislikes through fear of death. The healthy man takes pleasure in his food and thus enjoys a better life than if he were to fear death and directly seek to avoid it. Likewise the judge who condemns a man to death not through hatred or anger but solely through love of public welfare is guided only by reason. Vanitas – still life with skull. A free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation of life, not of death. A free man, that is, he who lives solely according to the dictates of reason, is not guided by fear of death, but directly desires the good; that is, to act, to live, to preserve his own being in accordance with the principle of seeking his own advantage. So he thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation upon life. The question may be asked: ‘What if a man could by deception free himself from imminent danger of death? Would not consideration for the preservation of his own being be decisive in persuading him to deceive?’ If we turn our attention to the common belief entertained by men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of the mind, but they confuse it with duration and assign it to imagination or to memory, which they believe to continue after death. Vanitas – still life with skull and globe. When a great disaster or plague had at last reduced them to exhaustion, he succeeded in pacifying them, but their condition was such that they all preferred death to life. What can be more calamitous than that men should be regarded as enemies and put to death, not for any crime or misdeed, but for being of independent mind? That the scaffold, the terror of evildoers, should become the glorious stage where is presented a supreme example of virtuous endurance, to the utter disgrace of the ruling power? Those who are conscious of their own probity do not fear death as criminals do, nor do they beg for mercy, for they are not tormented with remorse for shameful deeds. On the contrary, they think it an honour, not a punishment, to die in a good cause, and a glorious thing to die for freedom. Vanitas – still life with bouquet. What sort of lesson, then, is learnt from the death of such men, whose cause is beyond the understanding of those of sluggish and feeble spirit, is hated by troublemakers, but is dear to the hearts of all good men? The only lesson to be drawn from their death is to emulate them, or at least to revere them. For before my death, fear of death would make me wretched, and after my death I would be nothing, and therefore wretched in being deprived of that divine contemplation? The only lesson to be drawn from their death is to emulate them, or at least to revere them. Vanitas – still life with angel.

 

 

Norway – Død
A breach in the very unity of life, a biological paradox, an abomination, an absurdity, an exaggeration of disastrous nature. Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. You can’t really allow yourself to be stopped by any of them as it will lead to your collective death. You will do anything to put out that fire despite the fact that they are trying to stop you. Demonic laughter your cremation, your lungs gasp for air but are filled with blood, a sudden crack as I crushed your skull. I have ordered 50ml, 99% pure liquid nicotine from a Chinese online supplier. 3-4 drops will be injected in hollow point rifle bullets, which will effectively turn it into a lethal chemical weapon. Life – that was for the beast to feel the play of power, it was heat and games and strife and hunger, and then at last to bow before the law of course. In the beast, suffering is self-confined, in man, it knocks holes into a fear of the world and a despair of life. I’ll send you to your maker, I’ll send you to your death. The bullet simply lacks the size required to fit a deadly dose. 7.62 ammo would be preferable as it is more than double the size. 9mm bullets are ok for this purpose. Evidence of infinity, procreation of the wicked. Man beholds the earth, and it is breathing like a great lung; whenever it exhales, delightful life swarms from all its pores and reaches out toward the sun, but when it inhales, a moan of rupture passes through the multitude, and corpses whip the ground like bouts of hail. Our choice of difference is what you’ll never know. In the pool of dreams the water darkens for the soul that’s tired of search. I completed the last purification batch of the unpurified picric acid and ended up with several litres of PA liquid that had to be chilled. I then drove to the local town and bought three portions of Chinese takeaway. Beef with noodles and fried rice, yummy! Cries of the (ha-ha!) suffering sound, cries for help to all their dead mums. Not merely his own day could he see, the graveyards wrung themselves before his gaze, the laments of sunken millennia wailed against him from the ghastly decaying shapes, the earth-turned dreams of mothers. Future’s curtain unravelled itself to reveal a nightmare of endless repetition, a senseless squander of organic material. Just learned that when acidifying the sodium picramate solution during DDNP manufacture, H2S and S02 is released, which is potentially deadly. The rain has stopped to drip from the sky, still dripping exists from the veins of a nearly dead boy. This house is infested with beetles. Just now I was about to reach for a chocolate in my goodie bag and a beetle had crawled in, ffs. I immaterialize and slowly drift into the unknown with the cold winds with soul the wintery plains lie untouched. Due to their great feast a year ago, the mosquito population had seemed to triple. Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness. From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic. Be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye.

 

 

Estonia – Surm
S***** had slept very little the night before, he went to church and fell asleep and did not awake until night. He rubbed his eyes and could not imagine where he was for the church was full of gentlemen. S***** recognised his former master who had been buried three months before. His master asked, ‘S*****, when did you die?’‘Three months after you were buried,’ answered S*****. ‘Oh, indeed,’ said the gentleman, ‘What do you think? Shouldn’t we go home now for a short visit? Won’t you accompany me?’‘I’m ready,’ said S*****. On the way, he found a frozen glove, which he put in his pocket. They came to the mansion and the master went to the stable to torment the horses and thought S***** would help. When the gentleman entered, the horses made no sound, but when S***** came in, they neighed. The master turned and said, ‘Listen, S*****, you can’t be really dead. Give me your hand to feel.’ S***** thrust his hand into the frozen glove and extended it to his master, who said, ‘Yes, you are really dead. Your hand is shockingly cold.’ Then he tormented the horses until they were covered with white foam. At last, the master ceased his spiteful work and said, ‘Let us go into the kitchen and frighten the maids and I will torment the lady. When it is time to depart, I will come for you.’ The lady screamed and sobbed with terror as if she was mad. The maids screamed too but with fun and frolic. After a long time, the master came to the kitchen, and said, ‘Let us make haste for the cocks will soon crow.’ He would have liked to have run away but he was afraid, so he went with his master. On the way his master talked a great deal about how his wife had searched everywhere for the treasure which he had hidden before his death and what she had done to banish the nightly hauntings, but everything was useless. ‘Yes,’ said S*****, ‘it must be a great sorcerer who can lay spectres and discover treasures in the ground. Perhaps she will never meet with one.’‘Ha! ha!’ laughed the gentleman, ‘No great cleverness is needed. If a living person was to stamp three times on my grave with his left heel and say each time, ‘Here shall you lie,’ I couldn’t get out again. But the money which I hid in my lifetime is under the floor of my bedroom, near the stove.’ S***** was delighted to hear this. They came to the churchyard and the gentleman asked S***** to show him his grave. But S***** said, ‘We shall have another opportunity, I’m afraid the cocks are just about to crow.’ The gentleman slipped quickly into his grave, when S***** stamped three times with his left heel on the mound, and said three times, ‘Here shall you lie.’ ‘Oh, you liar and scoundrel!’ cried the dead man from the grave, ‘If I had known that you were still alive, I should have crushed and mangled you. Now I can do nothing more to you.’ Then S***** returned home full of joy and told the lady all that he had seen and heard and done. The lady did not know how to thank him enough. She took him as her husband, and they lived together happily and honourably; and if they could have got on as well with Death as with the nocturnal spectre, they might be living still.

 

 

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From the afterword by Brad Feuerhelm
How Europeans craft an image of their decline as an entity of ends is beyond simple framing. It exists in the psyche, in the unsolicited desire to cache the ‘phoenix syndrome’ of its impoverished state into a catalogue of possible and triumphant if short reincarnations. Beaten, chained, whipped and scourged, the fluidity of Europe through centuries of shifting empires, gallivanting atrocities and unbridled warfare has created a European that needs to be hammered like the ploughshare of existence into a gleaming sword and then beaten back into a ploughshare ad infinitum. Without defeat, manifest dissection would not be possible. The cycle continues and the image that Europe caters to itself is ultimately that of failure, decline and inevitable collective death and rebirth and death and rebirth and Frankenstein’s monster and zombie preternaturalia. Optimism in the case of Europe is a simple pretext for the slaughter of its many guilty self-appointed prophets blinded by the oblivion of choice. And these images must be celebrated in order to continue with this baseless cycle of self-flagellation, lament and the desire to rise like the aforementioned phoenix only to be crushed by the opposable thumbs of destiny. In Europe, we find a primate fever like none other.

 

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Steve Finbow at Infinity Land Press & Amphetamine Sulphate reading event. London, September 2018

 

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About the authors

Steve Finbow
Steve Finbow’s fiction includes Balzac of the Badlands (Future Fiction London, 2009), Tougher Than Anything in the Animal Kingdom (Grievous Jones Press, 2011), Nothing Matters (Snubnose Press, 2012) and Down Among the Dead (Fahrenheit 13, 2014). His biography of Allen Ginsberg in Reaktion’s Critical Lives series was published in 2011. His other works include Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia (Zero Books, 2014) and Notes from the Sick Room (Repeater Books, 2017). The Mindshaft will be published by Amphetamine Sulphate in 2019. He lives in Langres, France.
http://indifferentmultiplicities.blogspot.com/

 

Karolina Urbaniak
Karolina Urbaniak is a multimedia artist and co-founder of Infinity Land Press. Urbaniak’s published work includes To Putrefaction (M.Bladh, K.Urbaniak, 2014), Altered Balance – A Tribute to Coil (J.Reed, K.Urbaniak 2014/15), The Void Ratio (S.Levene, K.Urbaniak, 2015), Artaud 1937 Apocalypse (S.Barber, K.Urbaniak, 2018). Her recent multimedia projects include the soundtrack for Darkleaks – The Ripper Genome (J. Reed, M.Bladh, 2017) and the audio/visual installation On The New Revelations of Being (M.Bladh, K.Urbaniak 2018) inspired by the work of Antonin Artaud. She lives and works in London.
https://karolinaurbaniak.com/

 

Eugene Thacker
Eugene Thacker is the author of several books, including In The Dust of This Planet (Zero Books, 2011) and Infinite Resignation (Repeater Books, 2018).

 

Brad Feuerhelm
Brad Feuerhelm is an artist and the managing editor for American Suburb X. He lives in Slovakia.
http://www.americansuburbx.com/artists/brad-feuerhelm

 

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To order visit: https://www.infinitylandpress.com/shop

 

 

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p.s. Hey. This weekend the fine folks at Infinity Land Press have grabbed the blog’s steering wheel in order to introduce us to the newest of their always beautifully designed and fascinating titles. I join them in hoping you’ll spend your local weekend scrolling, gawking, and inputting then potentially clicking where it says ‘order’. Thank you for your kind attention. ** Shane Christmass, Hi, Shane. Aces about the timing. Thank you about the Bookworm. I can imagine how prominent the Jake Bilardi thing was there. I scoured the heck out of that story, as I guess is obvious. Anyway, really nice to see you, and I hope your life is acting golden. ** Natty, Hi, man. That’s a very good reason to come over here, obviously, and I promise to do my small part to make Paris give up a decent portion of its considerable charms and goods. Cool on the dates. Just give me a heads up when you know what piece Paris will occupy. Very great news about your new novel’s progress, not to mention about its incestuous build. I’ll be rabid when it’s out and about. Have a swell weekend. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, David. You know Storm DeHirsh. I should heave guessed. Thank you! Bon weekend! ** Steve Erickson, Well, I haven’t seen the Morris film, but god knows this is a time when there are great demands on films about politics and its figures to be black or white, and Morris’s work has always and wonderfully been against that kind of gentrified, pre-pointed viewpoint, so I can only imagine that plays into the film’s problems. I haven’t seen ‘The Drowning’. I’ll find it. And I’ll read your new pieces. Everyone, please intersect your weekend with the taking-in of two new non-fictions by Mr. Erickson, one about Angel-Ho’s album DEATH BECOMES HER here, and the other an interview with music video director Shomi Patwary here. BTW, Corey Heiferman had a question yesterday that I think you could probably answer. It is: ‘By the way, do you or anybody else here know of a website that curates online film series based on what’s available streaming for free? Kind of like what you do here when a day is dedicate to somebody who works in film, but only with full films that are available, not excerpts (shorts are more than OK of course). For example, a programmer would write a little essay based on a filmmaker, style, or theme, link to full examples of films (from YouTube, Vimeo, Internet Archive, etc.), and give little capsule descriptions for each film that they link to. The idea would be to make it easy for cinephiles to find stuff to watch outside of official streaming services. I feel like this must exist somewhere already.’ Can you help him out? ** Sypha, Hi. Ah, what a terrific review of ‘Negrophobia’, man! Excellent! Thanks a bunch for sharing it. I always forget to look at goodreads for no known reason. ** Brendan Lott, B! Mellotron! Damn. That does sound incredible. Shit, okay, I will start checking the local gig listings as of the soonest available minute. Thanks, pal, and have a superb one. ** Jeff J, Hi, J. I still have not seen the Welles or the extended ‘ToL’. I must, must make a point of doing that. Kiddiepunk has the latter on DVD, and I just need to borrow a DVD player basically. I did watch the documentary about the making of ‘TOSofW’ when I was in LA, and that was fascinating. Thanks about the Bookworm episode. It was really fun to do. I got the Roussel post stuff, and thank you so much (!), and it’ll launch here on Saturday, the 17th. Gisele’s out of town but gets back this weekend, I think, and I’ll ask her about the PG stuff as soon as I talk to her. ** _Black_Acrylic, Cool. That ceramic piece does look good. Man, ceramics are really the hot, trendy contemporary art thing right now. A lot of artists I know are making ceramics. When did that happen, and I wonder why? ** Nick Toti, Well hey there, Nick! Really good to see you! I’m glad the post’s booty was a welcome sight on your end. Very curious about your friend’s film, yes. It does sound really beautiful in your description. Let me know it’s finished and public. Yeah, our film showed in LA. It went extremely well. Thanks for wishing you could have come, and I hope/trust the filmmaking that kept you away was interesting, exciting? What is the project, if it’s interesting to share? ** Corey Heiferman, Great, thank you digging into the film program, and I’m really glad you liked those two. I saw ‘Smithereens’ when it came out. Would be interesting to recheck it. Seems like it would be rather dated now, but maybe not, or maybe in a cool way. Wow, Robert Kramer. That’s someone I haven’t thought about in a long time. I think the only film of his I’ve seen is ‘Route One USA’. Huh. He seems like someone I should do a Day post about. I’ll look into it. Thanks. Let me know how you like those two films of his. Steve Erickson is probably the one to answer your question. I immediately think of MUBI. Great site, and they do that, but there are likely others too. Hold on. Okay, I inserted your question into my note to him above, and watch for his response. And enjoy your weekend both minimally and maximally! ** Okay. Infinity Land Press are your hosts, and please wander about thoughtfully in their post-shaped world, thanks. See you on Monday.