Eliphas Lévi was a windbag if ever a windbag there was.
And he, like the rest of us, was frequently wrong.
But not always.
To paraphrase from Haute Magie : Texts invariably go where they should go. The rarest texts offer themselves without seeking as soon as they become indispensable.
Which is to say:
Yesterday we had not heard of Plinth.
Today we don’t want to imagine a life without it.
Which is to say:
There is no jot of Plinth that is not necessary.
If you felt a little something extra in the air this Equinox, as we did, that was the birth of Issue #2: Brad Baumgartner, Sarah Fox, Jamalieh Haley, Laura Ellen Joyce, Peter O’Leary, Aimee Parkison, David Peak and Eugene Thacker.
And of course TS’s own dark star, Johannes Göransson, who contributes “Beware of a Holy Whore,” originally written as part of a performance piece created with Cassandra Troyan and staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
Here’s an excerpt:
I’m undone in Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Stockholm… like an ad for fashion but with more squid… When I take off the fox stole it’s like I’m no longer underwater or when I take off the underwear with the cigarette burn I think I might be three bodies already cloned and with cutting disorders.
It’s so much fun to be hot in Berlin and the sugar drips on the floor.
Can I get a witness?
I’ll draw pictures on a torso.
It means I am cannibalizing your words: Dear Torso open your shooting range to the rabble. To the poodle. To Jesus Christ our Savior.
I take the fox stole off and look at the beautiful eyes.
I watch a movie in black and white but I turn it fox-colored because the declining star uses cocaine… My girlfriend poisons her mom with sleeping pills and kills the baby and gets put in jail and when the devil and I show up she doesn’t want to leave… It’s a movie about making movies. It’s called Kokain.
Also particularly resonant in the TS astral matrix is the work being done by Brad Baumgartner, Peter O’Leary, and Eugene Thacker.
A sampling from Brad Baumgartner’s “Eyes in Aspersorium Atop the Inverted Table,” a gorgeous piece we read as congressus cum daemone, a sort of Liber Samekh meets John St. John :
Nekroflesh of earnest horrors—blithe of brain and sewage vessels—corrosion of the imbecile, the infidel—the solace-bearing nave, where none are called to enter and all shall leave—enthroned upon the barren sphere atop the Mount, sifting, irregular, rapturous.
‡
Shrills, reveries, wailings—bows bent before the center of a wall—to be other than one’s onanism—recanting a cranial lust—accessing the pineal hammer—wallowing unhallowed at the apex of a halo—weeping—vanishing, perpetually, for Thee.
But what is Plinth, you ask?
& Plinth responds:
PLINTH collects & manifests an alternate canon. Forming poetry, philosophy & fable, the science-fictional & alchemical, from essence to possibility, PLINTH undoes boundary or makes boundary womb for birth. PLINTH murmurs untold stories, fragments, weird thought modes, preposterous expression. For PLINTH, beauty is the liminal, the grotesque, the sublime, ritual & devotional practice. PLINTH bridges stars….
Indeed.
Go now.
Join the star-splendor of Plinth.