Paynim. The Anti-M3ssiah. ISBN: 9798662985919. 114pp. gnOme. 2020.
There can be no preamble to what follows. In many ways the words contained herein form the outline of a catastrophe in thought: an aberrant epistemology stolen from the future; an egg poached from the claws of demonic time.
“For centuries, scholars cloistered in the shadowy halls of archaic historiography have suspected that the mystery cults are in fact alive and well in the modern world — and that the sacred gases of geologic chasms at Delphi are in fact part of the atmosphere itself, beamed through each of us in the form of aphasic code. The strange cryptograms of Paynim provide us with further evidence of this. They are axiomatic and kataphatic, they are executable and self-annihilating.” – dòmisòsyè, author of The Book of Hallowed Annulments
“2020, and on my way home I pass an ad for Guy Ritchie’s 2005 film Revolver. By nominal/nominative association, Dennis Ritchie and his 1970s programming-language (C) spring-to-mind, along with their C++ OneUpmanship/StroustrUpmanship (another 1970s creation; my mental associations run back fifty years, it would seem). Back at the casa, I log into the old laptop only to find a little Gift—Capital-G as in German—from Gnome Books: a gnomic text with a Roman C page-count plus a bonus page, following that, upon which appears the statement that “books are never closed” (Merci Monsieur Möbius). Prior to the endlessness described on the end-page—page C+I—is an admission by the author of the text that the text itself was an οδός (or an ωδή to the οδός) and that the road taken (the οδός) has already been paved. What we have here, in book form, is a work of roads-scholarship, and just as was the case in a film released eight years prior to Ritchie’s Revolver—Lynch’s Lost Highway—the road wraps round itself, revolving in a monstrous Möbius-Loop qua collapsed Figure-Eight (∞). It occurs to me that I received this text in a manner not entirely unlike that of F·M (Fred Madison) in the A·M—mid-morning—opening-sequence of Lynch’s Lost Highway; is this, then, some kind of demonic diary or diabolical dialogue that I have been given? What price must be paid for the perusal of such a publication? Paynim, its pseudonymous author, is, after all, no thielevchinosekian paypal: rather s/he is some sort of nietzscheo·nakamotonian pagan—paynim being an Old (or rather, Middle) English translation of the Norman paienime, itself a translation of the Late-Latin/Lost-Highway paganismus (‘pagan’). The price of perusal might very well be a pseudonymous paganism or paynimity: a becoming-pagan the better to bear witness to the titular Anti-M3ssiah. With a nod to Nietzsche’s Antichrist and Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Beyond Good and Evil), The Anti-M3ssiah sets out in its set of six—6⁽⁶⁶⁾—poetic parts or song-sections to be a ballad of the blockchain, chanting/incanting ‘the inverted gospel’ (Paynim’s phrase) of the latter’s ‘robo-rebellion’ (Paynim’s phrase) and ‘ascetic re-definintions’ (ibidem).” – Dan Mellamphy (@youtopos)
“The Messiah comes and saves and completes, his antithesis arriving backwards to imperil and confuse and leave us unfinished. The Anti-Messiah will throw you to the wolves, to the lions, to the dogs, to the ideas of these creatures: all bite and no substance. And then you’re in bits and he’s the space between them, like nothing had a name. He is not he, is not she, is not anything, but a nothing professing to be everything, the last ghost light before the dark, in the heaven you deserve of endlessly becoming less. Open parenthesis, close parenthesis, and forget to pretend there was anything else.” – Gary J. Shipley
“All hail the Anti-M3ssiah, a cyberdecadent Maldoror coded among the ruins of a romantic hell, sampling aphoristic chants across the necropolitan blockchain! A mad collection of theory-poetry and parenthetic wisdom, this anti-evangelion of Zarathustrian superartificial malgorithms will haunt forever our lost necropolis of love.” – Germán Sierra
“A paean to this Age.” – E. Elias Merhige
A-M @ goodreads
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Aoibheann of Elphin: Poems I-LXXVII. Foreword by Liesl Ketum. ISBN: 9781691900961. 106pp. gnOme, 2019. $7.00.
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