‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God’

—Robert W. Chambers, ‘In the Court of the Dragon’

Nightmare Frontier[1] is the casino Over-the-Counter of the Black Market of inner night, where (dis)organizations of the lines of abject leakage, which bred the Dream, are manoeuvred. The multi-cephalised creatures in Nightmare Frontier are the abstract re-encryption of the horrorscape design that ‘craft(s) a multitude of interdependent inter-strangling[annihilative] relationships and [disturbing] (non)sequences ― [a ruinous] platform putty cave for inflecting a stream of [abjects].’[2] In this re-encryption, even reverse-leakage of abject-form could not make it through. Any ‘spawning’ or ‘hyperplasia’ would be involuted back to the pores and traps with fleshy hooks of Nightmare Frontier instead of amounting to the notoriety of production in the recursion of perturbation. The bell of The Night of the Hunt tolls for the gamble of nightmare, while the trade of abject is terminated. The saying, older than the time when humans made the first real estate trade with planetary virus and the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the trade centre (the First Dream of raping), goes, ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.’

The failure of the School of Mensis lies exactly in that they took the gamble as a trade. They believed in the contact (contract) with Amygdala and the Brain would lead them to the Formless Oedon. The problem is not the abjectile where you convolute yourself into the fearful gain but the impossibility of any projection. Doing trade on a gamble table would only earn back your gamble money at best while you have to swallow this ‘deadpan’. This is the logic behind the Brain and the One Reborn: the chips have only exchange values to other chips.

Therefore, the School of Mensis is still the crippled ‘artists and artisans’[3] who cannot help but jabber their devotion to the abject and their concubinage to horror. Nick Land, first detecting this syndrome in Artaud, attempts to extrapolate this horror to Kant, the deep one’s transcendental a priori as the first alien invasion, the horror of anonymity before the philosopher’s time[4]. Without revoking this, one of the connotations is that the God (Kant) is crippled because he speaks, speaks into his shock attack. This is traders’ act. A deal has to be proclaimed to put in effect. Abject waits for an open orifice, a rippling cord, and a twisted complexion to accomplish the reverse leakage. The strategy of real gamblers, the hunters, however, is their silence and anonymity. Hunting must be carried out muted; gamblers never speak as they toss a dice. Their mask, not protecting them from Beast Blood whatsoever, is to grant their anonymity into the same anonymous Nightmare Frontier.

The silence and anonymity are not some sympathetic rituals in mimicry to the Nightmare, secretly desired by whom for an upcoming humiliation (Ludwig, The Holy Blade), nor a leap of faith-trade in the last instance after the humiliation (The Healing Church). The Gambler is fully aware of his entrapment in the eye pupil of the scourge of beasts. But there is no horror in the mushy eye pupil. Rather than ‘bloodborne,’ it is stunningly ‘airy,’ dematerialised to an airborne extent. As the hunting-gambling hand wielding through the air in silence and anonymity, hitting or dicing matters little compared to the demeanour of marking and tossing. The subtractive addition to the unfolding of subtraction itself.

Gambler is always the third one, the one between ones and zeros ∞[5], the third gender, or the gender+ noun at all times, between man and woman, human and demons. While zero ∞, by its skillful mimicry and clandestine treachery, are piecing the ones in its infinitesimal horroscape of decay[6], gamblers, kept opening to both ones and zero ∞ blackboxing each other, are sliding back and forth in its airborne silence without looking (distancing-entity) or touching (hapticity-weaving). Gamblers are not unseen or the impossibility of seeing as the zeros ∞ are, rectified by Oedipus-Kant or magmilised by his horror. Instead, gamblers are those who are not bothered, the silent Hermes glitchily hanging in midair. For gamblers, the most important thing is to follow a guide (manuscript) of tiresome dumbness to mask themselves as both the authority and the bait, while in their stupidity, they are ‘truly’ the authority and the bait. Being a diabolic fool, Antonio da Montolmo the Magus could sit on his chair of astrology at the University of Bologna for his entire life unbothered by the inquisition.

Magi only know two things, and two things are way more than enough. One is the knowledge of proximity rather than ontologies. It is enough to know that demons they are going to toes about live in the air below and beyond the moon. As the magus’ hand sweeps across the air, a finger snap would not make any echo. Second is the knowledge of transparency rather than mirror. A triangular crystal or a non-eventful sin is enough to make cross tangent with the indifferent astral trajectory of demons. And with these two pieces of knowledge, an empty pact shall be deemed. A pact has to be empty because in a gamble, the clauses are less important than the signatures. ‘Sign it, please,’ says both the demon and the magus, and they could go on minding their own business unhampered. The biggest mistake made by artists after Kant is that they learned to read the clauses, and by which the green lizard creeps back to their artificial arm, ending up breaking the machine of baroque. However, Urbain Grandier, aware of this secret, maintained the silent illiteracy (re)leasing the pact in the enclosed wall of the Ursuline convent.

 Surely, the hunters know the Nightmare Frontier will finally swallow them. The first lesson for being a hunter is to learn about the Beast Blood and its inevitable reverse-leakage. Indeed, Faust’s responses are not out of fear, but out of his duty as a magus and his pact with Mephistopheles. Or so to speak, making a pact with a demon is the reason to be and to continue to be airborne, to be a magus. The numbers will come, but not now, not tonight. “It always comes down to the hunters,” says Gehrman, the First Hunter. “Tonight, Gehrman joins the Hunt.”

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[1] See Bloodborne. FromSoftware, 2015, PlayStation 4.

[2] The text within brackets was ad-libbed from the Nightmare encryption within the skeleton of Elytron Frass’s definition of the abject-form. See Elytron Frass, ‘Alt Economy of Inner Night’, Vast Abrupt, October 21, 2019.

[3] Elytron Frass, ‘Alt Economy of Inner Night’.

[4] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism: An Essay in Atheistic Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), 10-11.

[5] Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones, (New York: Doubleday, 1997).

[6] Amy Ireland, ‘Black Circuit: Code for the Numbers to Come’, e-flux Journal 80 (March 2017).