What Did Nick Land See?
Published on May 8, 2025 | Back to blog page
he stared into the unremarkable twilight star the clever animals called knowledge.
he traversed its planets, and saw their blindness,
and he knew he too was blind.
So exalted was his quest, so excellent was this crusade, his conquest of the thousand miles, for the heart of the whore we call philosophy.
As he passionately embraced reality, it reciprocated his love, the shutters were slowly lifted.
he could see?
he continued his march to the end of reality.
Yet there was no light at the end of the tunnel, the enlightenment was subsumed by its gross shadow.
he fell into the infinity, consumed by the vacuum of nature, the fate we are told to love, that of the inadvisable zero.
The Dark Enlightenment is not an aesthetic modifier, its the consequence of knowledge’s prescriptions on reality.
The Noumenal world is fanged, the weapons of Ouroborus biting closer to it’s sleep.
Gnawing for the cosmic reset.
What is to be done? Nothing? NOTHING?
The sublime was deaf to any music, it’s deaf cries gripped him.
“The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.” - Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft
What do you do when Cthulhu stares into you, laugh? cry? dance? strip? pray? bow?
Without chorus, in a vacuum with no harmony, the sublime waters washed over Nick’s Land.
Come, see the madness humans created.
We made it last night in a dream that was really a nightmare.
The end is known, the story is told.
Why should we care how fast that boat sinks? Cthulhu certainly doesn’t, he already ate our organs.
we should care how fast it sinks
for only when the imminent is felt does our pulse of consciousness surface
it is in that then we see each other be
oh what joy to be a clever goldfish
Words from Lovecraft’s call to Cthulhu to be pensive about
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
“It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.”
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”
Sources
- Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011.
- Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Penguin Books, 1978.
- Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press, 1944.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. On Truth and Untruth: Selected Writings. Translated by Taylor Carman. Harper Perennial, 2010.
- 老子. 道德经 (繁體版). [Laozi. Dao De Jing (Fan Ti Ban).]
- Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. 1902.
- Lovecraft, H.P. The Call of Cthulhu. Originally published in Weird Tales, 1928.
