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Wound of Wounds
WOUND OF WOUNDS
An Ovation for Emil Cioran
A Mount Abraxas Anthology
Edited by
Damian Murphy & N
With Art by Louis Soutter and Edvard Munch and various Photography by Diverse Hands.
*
"It is of no importance for you to know who I am, since one day I will no longer be."
Emil CIORAN
To You,
Who Kneel before Altars,
To You,
Whose Blood is made out of Words,
To You,
Who have the Will to Bliss,
To You,
Who are World Weary,
To You,
Who has no Country and knows no Borders,
To You,
the Aesthete, the Blasphemer, the Pornographer
To You,
The NIHL
Let our wounds bear witness to the cult of the irrational, to the ultimate futility of human endeavor, to the inevitable spectre of perpetual decay and to the scandal of the first act of Creation. Who can deny that history is but a shadowplay of vanities and borders; that our prayers are snuffed like candle flames in the all-encompassing indifference of the Absolute; that time itself is weighted against us like a river that cannot be diverted from its course; that even our bodies are built to fall apart, incapable of withstanding the terrifying essences for which we suppose them to be the vessels? We cling to destiny with the ecstasy of shipwrecked mariners, though we know it to be a dead end.
Let us glorify defiance as our last remaining virtue in the face of the tyranny of incarnation. We’ve retained the freedom, after all, to spoil our own lives; to embellish or evade the humiliations due to us; to embody, not without a certain dubious honor, the last among men in an empire of insolvency. And let us not forget the humor of the gallows, the one true solace that remains to us who wander through the ruins of a future shattered by the scourge of insidious utopias.
O this impetuous void, this vast archive of nothingness that negates the very possibility of inquiry! Our legacy is a book so profuse as to obliterate all meaning. We’ve succeeded, in our insatiable thirst for wisdom, only in crafting a poison so subtle as to dissolve the means of comprehension. Our highest efforts have left us with a temple fallen, an altar erected on insubstantial grounds, a doctrine of dissent and mutual suspicion which is useful only as a weapon against ourselves. Even the revelation of the highest god compels us to self-annihilation. Let us pray, then, to oblivion—the match that strikes the brightest flame is worth far more to us than the most erudite of the tomes in all the libraries across the world. Let the smoke that rises from their blackened pages exceed the splendor of the sun!
Let us proceed with fiery sermons and scathing condemnations, written over the course of a single sleepless night, scribed beneath the light of our afflictions and sealed with the blood of our iniquities; we’ll pen testaments to the intoxication of the exile, the self-abnegation of the poet, the secret narcissism of the mystic, and the immolation of the saint in the intolerable fires of perfection; what is needed is nothing less than a full-scale assault upon the bastions of fate and servitude—black epistles written on discarded cigarettes, smuggled in the broken hearts of the defectors, on the merits and the tedium of the labor of abandonment.
It falls upon the poet, that most specialized of idiot savants, to exalt and overwhelm the mechanism of despair. To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege—how much more so the voluptuous sensuality of the mystic? Is there any freedom greater than that of absence, to remain unknown even to ourselves, to indulge in the luxury of self-abasement that we may, in our negation, smash the last remaining idol? He who knows no shame is the greatest ascetic of all.
This is for Saint EMIL CIORAN,
who dreamt of Spanish monasteries on women's breasts.
Table of Contents:
Misanthropos by Eugene Thacker
The Infinite Error by Jon Padgett
The Aristocracy of Weak Nerves by Justin Isis
Obsolete Systems by Adam Golaski
Bach’s Marionettes by Douglas Thompson
This Disquiet Demiurge by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
The Translator of God's Silences by Thomas Stromsholt
Saint Severina's Fire by Damian Murphy
He is Heading Your Way Already by Rhys Hughes
Decade by D.P. Watt
The Genealogy of Night by Andrew Condous
Horrill Hill by Karim Ghahwagi
Dead Engrained Skin by Jonathan Wood
The Treasons of the Rue de L'Odeon by Colin Insole
The Funeral Cry by Stephan Friedman
The European Monster Part II by Adam S. Cantwell
Untitled by Charles Schneider
A 11 pages PDF Preview is available at: exoccidente@gmail.com.
For inquires and details, write to: exoccidente@gmail.com
An Ovation for Emil Cioran
A Mount Abraxas Anthology
Edited by
Damian Murphy & N
With Art by Louis Soutter and Edvard Munch and various Photography by Diverse Hands.
*
"It is of no importance for you to know who I am, since one day I will no longer be."
Emil CIORAN
To You,
Who Kneel before Altars,
To You,
Whose Blood is made out of Words,
To You,
Who have the Will to Bliss,
To You,
Who are World Weary,
To You,
Who has no Country and knows no Borders,
To You,
the Aesthete, the Blasphemer, the Pornographer
To You,
The NIHL
Let our wounds bear witness to the cult of the irrational, to the ultimate futility of human endeavor, to the inevitable spectre of perpetual decay and to the scandal of the first act of Creation. Who can deny that history is but a shadowplay of vanities and borders; that our prayers are snuffed like candle flames in the all-encompassing indifference of the Absolute; that time itself is weighted against us like a river that cannot be diverted from its course; that even our bodies are built to fall apart, incapable of withstanding the terrifying essences for which we suppose them to be the vessels? We cling to destiny with the ecstasy of shipwrecked mariners, though we know it to be a dead end.
Let us glorify defiance as our last remaining virtue in the face of the tyranny of incarnation. We’ve retained the freedom, after all, to spoil our own lives; to embellish or evade the humiliations due to us; to embody, not without a certain dubious honor, the last among men in an empire of insolvency. And let us not forget the humor of the gallows, the one true solace that remains to us who wander through the ruins of a future shattered by the scourge of insidious utopias.
O this impetuous void, this vast archive of nothingness that negates the very possibility of inquiry! Our legacy is a book so profuse as to obliterate all meaning. We’ve succeeded, in our insatiable thirst for wisdom, only in crafting a poison so subtle as to dissolve the means of comprehension. Our highest efforts have left us with a temple fallen, an altar erected on insubstantial grounds, a doctrine of dissent and mutual suspicion which is useful only as a weapon against ourselves. Even the revelation of the highest god compels us to self-annihilation. Let us pray, then, to oblivion—the match that strikes the brightest flame is worth far more to us than the most erudite of the tomes in all the libraries across the world. Let the smoke that rises from their blackened pages exceed the splendor of the sun!
Let us proceed with fiery sermons and scathing condemnations, written over the course of a single sleepless night, scribed beneath the light of our afflictions and sealed with the blood of our iniquities; we’ll pen testaments to the intoxication of the exile, the self-abnegation of the poet, the secret narcissism of the mystic, and the immolation of the saint in the intolerable fires of perfection; what is needed is nothing less than a full-scale assault upon the bastions of fate and servitude—black epistles written on discarded cigarettes, smuggled in the broken hearts of the defectors, on the merits and the tedium of the labor of abandonment.
It falls upon the poet, that most specialized of idiot savants, to exalt and overwhelm the mechanism of despair. To dissect a poem as if it were a system is a crime, even a sacrilege—how much more so the voluptuous sensuality of the mystic? Is there any freedom greater than that of absence, to remain unknown even to ourselves, to indulge in the luxury of self-abasement that we may, in our negation, smash the last remaining idol? He who knows no shame is the greatest ascetic of all.
This is for Saint EMIL CIORAN,
who dreamt of Spanish monasteries on women's breasts.
Table of Contents:
Misanthropos by Eugene Thacker
The Infinite Error by Jon Padgett
The Aristocracy of Weak Nerves by Justin Isis
Obsolete Systems by Adam Golaski
Bach’s Marionettes by Douglas Thompson
This Disquiet Demiurge by Alcebiades Diniz Miguel
The Translator of God's Silences by Thomas Stromsholt
Saint Severina's Fire by Damian Murphy
He is Heading Your Way Already by Rhys Hughes
Decade by D.P. Watt
The Genealogy of Night by Andrew Condous
Horrill Hill by Karim Ghahwagi
Dead Engrained Skin by Jonathan Wood
The Treasons of the Rue de L'Odeon by Colin Insole
The Funeral Cry by Stephan Friedman
The European Monster Part II by Adam S. Cantwell
Untitled by Charles Schneider
A 11 pages PDF Preview is available at: exoccidente@gmail.com.
For inquires and details, write to: exoccidente@gmail.com
- GenresFiction
212 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 2017
2 people are currently reading
73 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 12, 2018
I admit that I have not, so far, read any Emil Cioran, the Romanian philosopher to whom this tribute is dedicated, but that did not spoil my enjoyment of this book at all. Common themes in his work seem to include “alienation, absurdity, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease", and those themes are represented well in this excellent collection from Ex Occidente / Mount Abraxas press. My favourites on offer here included ‘The Treasons of the Rue de L'Odeon’ by Colin Insole, ‘The Translator of God's Silences’ by Thomas Stromshol and ‘Horrill Hill’ by Karim Ghahwagi, but everything was good. The absolute highlight for me was ‘Saint Severina's Fire’ by Damian Murphy, which was simply stunning. I read it straight through a second time after I finished it. It is an absolute masterpiece, and one of the best things I have so far read from Damian Murphy. Overall, a wonderful book, absolutely stunningly presented too…pick up a copy if you can find one.
April 3, 2022
Commits the egregious anthological sin of opening with its worst piece--a pithy catalog of complaints from Eugene Thacker which, if I'm feeling reeeeeeally generous, I suppose I could see as being in dialog with Cioran's aphorisms, though it's a stretch--but thankfully that piece is not at all representative of the rest of the collection, which picks up considerably with Douglas Thompson's excellent "Bach's Marionettes." The humor inherent to Thompson's story was a welcome surprise, and thankfully it was this strain which the rest of the collection picked up; the stories by Justin Isis, Karim Ghahwagi, Colin Insole and particularly Jon Padgett all contained a pitch-black humor I did not expect to encounter in an anthology dedicated to arguably the most famous pessimist in philosophy. Elsewhere the reader will find excellent pieces by the likes of Thomas Stromsholt, Rhys Hughes and Damian Murphy, who in addition to editing the collection also provides its magisterial centerpiece "St. Severina's Fire," a piece so massive in its thematic content every other piece seems sucked into its orbit. It's a testament to Murphy as editor--if not copy editor--and the collective skill of the stable of writers Mount Abraxas has cultivated that even the lesser stories (outside of the previously mentioned weak opener) are still phenomenal but just can't help but be overshadowed by the fantastic pieces I've already named.
July 3, 2024
Various (Editors: Murphy, Damian and Ghetu, Dan) - Wound Of Wounds: An Ovation To Emil Cioran
A collection of riches here, whether you are a follower of Mr. Cioran or an indifferent skeptic.
Snapshots include Thompson’s account of an encounter between Cioran and God (the Almighty wearing the skin of J S Bach) which brews cheerful cynicism with laugh out loud humor.
Mr. Isis exhibits the zoo of the extinguished and the malcontents, observed by an audience of the listless and the bored.
Rhys Hughes offers a suicide. An elaborate device of giddying complexity, and not without a fistful of chance. Rube Goldberg, shooting craps with the Reaper, would chuckle at this.
Wood’s “Dead Engrained Skin” left me reeling. Perplexed, baffled, I felt as if I were trapped in a stalled elevator with an overwrought madman philosopher. Gems of insight wash past in a cascade of words. To mangle the author, a tale best read, then “eschewed,” with the bitterest coffee.
The undead philosopher, one Mr. Cioran, debates meaning and existence in “The Funeral Cry.” He also acts as ferryman between the bigoted small town and the cruel metropolitan underbelly.
“The Infinite Error” catches a grand evacuation, poised before the selfsame ‘infinite error.’ Everything - nothing. Exuberant release, infernal blockage.
Charles Schneider mocks the writer. Frustration, indecision, doubt. He omits the joy during those rare times when words array in splendor. Then again, oh, how fleeting such joys are.
A collection of riches here, whether you are a follower of Mr. Cioran or an indifferent skeptic.
Snapshots include Thompson’s account of an encounter between Cioran and God (the Almighty wearing the skin of J S Bach) which brews cheerful cynicism with laugh out loud humor.
Mr. Isis exhibits the zoo of the extinguished and the malcontents, observed by an audience of the listless and the bored.
Rhys Hughes offers a suicide. An elaborate device of giddying complexity, and not without a fistful of chance. Rube Goldberg, shooting craps with the Reaper, would chuckle at this.
Wood’s “Dead Engrained Skin” left me reeling. Perplexed, baffled, I felt as if I were trapped in a stalled elevator with an overwrought madman philosopher. Gems of insight wash past in a cascade of words. To mangle the author, a tale best read, then “eschewed,” with the bitterest coffee.
The undead philosopher, one Mr. Cioran, debates meaning and existence in “The Funeral Cry.” He also acts as ferryman between the bigoted small town and the cruel metropolitan underbelly.
“The Infinite Error” catches a grand evacuation, poised before the selfsame ‘infinite error.’ Everything - nothing. Exuberant release, infernal blockage.
Charles Schneider mocks the writer. Frustration, indecision, doubt. He omits the joy during those rare times when words array in splendor. Then again, oh, how fleeting such joys are.
January 9, 2021
What a monumental, literally overpowering book! It is physically and spiritually unique, one that has pleasured me over the Christmas period, complete with its instable gestalt.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is its conclusion.
The detailed review of this book posted elsewhere under my name is too long to post here.
Above is its conclusion.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews