[...]

“…anyway,” broke Daeva, “seeing as though we’re sort of all here and there’s still no sign of security, I propose we start where we left off last week, which, if I remember correctly, was entitled ‘undeath in the absence of God’… or something like ‘Gnostic ambivalence in strict nihilistic praxis, confounded’.”

“Sounds like it,” whispered Blix. “Now would be a good time for any closet Born Again Christian to come forth so they can be sodomized in favor of our heathen goddesses.”

The small crowd burst out in a roar of laughter, ringing out across the lonely field. Then we timidly huddled closer to form a real circle and dug anew into the feast lain there.

“So,” started a girl before gulping down a mouthful of mead, “the point I was trying to make is just – or the conclusion I’ve reached so far, anyway, is that when you get down to it, and I really mean… concentrate on the implications of the – I don’t know, complete void of any superior conscience of Being or whatever, you think and you start to realize, sooner or later, the limits to which you can expand your mind, right? We are strangers to the world. Now, of that uncertainty, that sort of grey, smudgy area you can’t quite encompass with even the greatest strain of consciousness, like, if there’s no God, then what the fuck could possibly justify, let alone hold together existence?”

Many hands were raised to reply. The fire was set. Blix was the first to speak.

“But iIt’s… no less absolutist to try and conceive God out of a conjecture. If conscience is limited and fragmented in itself, then any concept of ‘superior conscience of Being’, as you say, is still your own flawed, limited representation. Psychoanalytically speaking, metaphysical dogma is just compensation, integration of the whole, people trying to project a false self to deflect immediate relation with the only political subject, which is and can only be other people. But still, the debate is: how do you live without God, how to warm up to Chaos. I’m not saying there can be no God, I’m saying the notion, if it proved true, would still be too cruel for us to even conceive. Like monogamy. Or fucking Chtulu!”

Chuckle ran through the Circle. Then it was Daeva’s turn to speak.

“Well, to my opinion, saying ‘God is Everywhere’ as you put it, is an early and very potent paradigm of fascism, or simply, reification, which asserts for itself the possibility of conceptual order. Religion is articulate as the primordial stand against the Wild, which is Chaos, to be subdued with a makeshift piece of shit Order. And in this, it states that our destruction knows no bounds – we’ll never be good enough. This is Hope speaking, reminding us that every second is and must be agony.”

She paused to drink some mead, then as more words seemed to pile up within her she burst out again, nearly chocking on the draught. “But this is very interesting, ’cause you see, this is real, this is what humans go through. Fuck! Praxis requires that we undo these taints within us simultaneously. This is why we’re here, why we do these Circles. I think we’re all mistaken in seeing these fucken Judeo-Muslim-Christian-Bouddists and else as these rightist airtight titanium vessels who never question their faith. Rather, it’s the other way around, that’s why they’ve emerged time and again. The question is the problem of Faith itself, not the sects it spawns or the dogmas they build – though we feel them nonetheless. See, even the religious know very well what doubt is, maybe moreso than we do – having taken unto ourselves the perennial task of tearing the veil from grace. Any religion – not to exclude militancy or the almighty Left – acts on the foundation of Doubt, a doubt so deep and so pure that in order to merely function through daily life, must be sustained through devotion – a very complete patch, in other words, Beaudrillard’s doxa – prayers and symbols and all celebrations of ignorance. They live to perfect the lie, and they can see it perfected, and they’d die to keep it intact. Progress. Linearity. Order. Purpose. Hope. Sill, anyone, and I do mean anyone, who can just look into this world with eyes open, be it for just one second, will grasp life, true life – unmediated, unalienated, unmutilated – wordless and meaningless and sensual and raw. Faith doesn’t fill existential questions, it erases the need of critique in itself. It offers the comfort of collective delusion, self-referential and total. Yeah, they’re not right… but being right is luxury: at least, they’re not alone.

“As for us,” she continued, “we inhabit negation, a negation so pure and so complete that the dust of lies can never settle. There is very little reconciliation possible. Negate to dissolve repression from within… sort through all they’ve made us swallow, and deconstruct these lies one by one, ‘til there remains no symbols, no reified abstraction; no History, Art, Language, Agriculture, Number... and Civilisation.” She paused, then started anew looking in the distance of the graveyard, reflecting. “If our greatest nightmare is Theocracy, we should look, not hope, but look for a truly meaningless day.”

A certain silence settled.

“Revolution!” broke the other girl, jesting.

Then Blix enquired, half-smiling half-reflexive: “And then what??

“We become what we are.”

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