Let’s begin without preamble. Yes, the cruelty is ONE of the points of Fascisms. But only one. Another point is hypocrisy itself.

Fascism is always about domination. One rule for me, another for thee, which I will apply with boot and gun, cos it makes me feel strong and full of this quality I crave that I call “power”.

“Power” says I can do the most ridiculous, heinous, absurd thing, and YOU have to face the results. I, on the other hand, am immune.

*I* get to decide whether things are serious or unserious, and can change my mind at ANY TIME and YOU have to deal with that.

Fiat Lux! And lo, the degenerate Darkness must flee!

Or, must bear bright chains that twist it into the preferred shape of grotesquerie for comparison and mockery of, and against the pure and righteous. They want their enemies to caper and prance for their amusement; those whose only permitted life is serving as jesters and/or scapegoats — existing solely at the whim of the Absolute Monarchs they believe themselves to be.

They don’t give a monkey’s arse about reality, about being consistent, coherent, or anything else.

Simply, all they care about is “Which Is to Be Master”, to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty in THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS. And that mirror, that reflection, that visual language of image and posture shall serve only them.

Of course, as Bayo Akomolafe reminded folks a while back, the Looking Glass has its own agency and agenda. What it reflects is not one-to-to-one. The Looking Glass, just like the obsidian shewstone belonging the coiner of the term “British Empire”, Dr. John Dee, has its own magical potencies, its own daemonic and angelic Powers and Principalities shapeshifting and fluxing through material realities.

Now, ask yourself — play with this with me — whether it’s interesting to you that, apparently, Dee’s obsidian mirror may very well have come from Mesoamerica.

Cortez “conquered” the so-called Aztec Empire in 1521, six years before Dee’s birth.

But it has always struck me that the deity Tezcatlipoca — the disabled Lord Of The Smoking Mirror — god of Night, Sorcery, and other such tricky complex things might be lurking about inside the heart of Empire. What’s six years, in this oh so speculative fabulation, to a god?

After all, as well as the shewstone of Dee, amongst all the artifacts in the British Museum (stolen, smuggled, bought, and obtained in countless other ways) there is a human skull, mosaiced with black and turquoise.

This is “believed to represent Tezcatlipoca”. Who says a crippled god of Darkness might not find amusement to keep a hand in? Or, more properly, a foot — for he is cyborg enough to have mirror there, challenging the anthropic outline, as a shapeshifter always does.

There, in that temple to the Muses (you thought a museum was otherwise??) on an island that exported many of the functional structures and ideas used by multiple fascist regimes, dwells a severed head that joins the whispers and ghosts and ancestors of so many cultures which bleed past and through the outlines of technocratic modernity. Whether it be IBM providing the hardware and software for the so-called Final solution, or the uncomfortable resonances of Oswald Mosely and Diana Mitford’s grandson being head of the UK arm of Peter Thiel’s Palantir corporation, there’s something Else happening, which we are amidst.

Because for all that “power” reserves ITS right to hypocrisy — all while damning, deporting, firing and imprisoning, and killing its Others — Humpty Dumpty is a fragile egg. And all the Kings Horses, And All The King’s Men?

Couldn’t put Humpty together again…

All the trappings of “power”, can do naught against gravity’s inexorable, ineluctable, sorceries. We can’t fight gravity — but neither can they. But they think they can. They are Masters, in their own minds, after all.

The cruelty is the point. The hypocrisy is the point. And trying to hold them to stability, to the norms they ride roughshod over? Trying to point out they are *incorrect*? Is doomed to fail, IF you’re playing the same game as them.

IF you want what they want, but for you and yours?

You’re fucked, bluntly. We’re fucked.

The world that was, the normal that was, that everyone was *so desperate to get back to* in peak pandemic?

That LED TO THIS.

You don’t have to believe me, as a crip who’s been amidst the Foucauldian matrices, the Deleuzeian mess of ableist desiring-machinery for his entire life.

You don’t have to believe me, as a member of a society that is fundamentally rooted in some deeply nasty eugenicist ideas that certain 1930s Germans might have called Life Unworthy of Life, A set of systems which found everywhere in racism, transphobia, sexism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, etc, etc; is as old as those dreams of Empire and classification.

You don’t have to believe me, no. You can call me Mad, histrionic — whatever. I’ve had worse.

But that world you thought you knew, that you thought you wanted, is undergoing its spasmodic death rattles. And it might take months, years, or decades, but ultimately, EVERYONE will eventually start to hear the howling sounds on, and of, the wind — like the so-called Aztec Death Whistle.

Fascisms want you THROUGH the Looking Glass, into *their* mirror world. But the shapeshiftings of the Looking Glass, the Smoking Mirror? They laugh with the grin of that skull, and tell us that there are MANY worlds.

So don’t look away. Keep your gaze broad, aware of the peripheral, the peri-feral, the presences that appear in the corners of of your eyes, materializing under the occulted covers of blindspots, the sensations the optics cannot bind. The things that vision cannot bring clarity to

This is not an invocation, or exhortation to be our own hypocrites; rather, in the words of Phillip K. Dick:

“Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.”

Neither is the above an exhortation to “resist”, whatever that means. Even the frame of resistance is a concession, sometimes. “They shall not pass!” as battlecry does not simply mean to hold a position, but rather to trouble the (held notion of) passage itself.

In the Dickian sense, “go along willingly” becomes less about acquiescence, or its lack, and more about along-ness and its more queer relationships to even the *idea* of “will”. One of the mythological hallmarks of the ghost, the apparition, is their ability to exist within a different frame of material reference. The walk through walls, travelling their own routes, seemingly regarding human structurings of physical space and time as irrelevancies.

They do what they do. Keep their own counsel, their motives mysterious and obscure, often seen as being on a mission of unfinished business that even death could not prevent. Where the human finds a wall, so the para-normal, the para-ontological, as Bayo might put it, secretes portal and passage.

This is difficult to articulate, until we consider that most reference to passage simply implies a route from point A to point B. A threshold, even a described liminality, exists as a marker of — or a space — of in-betweenness.

What if then, that which is contoured-as-passage, is in fact something else? The Smoking Mirror does exactly that. It does not reflect — it smokes, off-gasses, occludes, gives birth and death to atmospheres; to condensations and coalescences, like some troubling fog of incense.

And here is where the difficulty of articulacy provides a lump in the throat, a choking-off of easy messaging. A stumbling block. Something that dis/ables us.

The fugitive nature of it is not that of flight-to; there is no safety, no inviolate sanctuary where we are safe from fascisms. But likewise such sanctuaries as exist, do *exist*, and will exist, amidst fascisms and their logics. Because the raw phenomenological processes of life CANNOT be totalised. The deathgrip, the necropolitics of the necropolis is not total.

It is overshadowed by the simple fact that certain things cannot be known or captured completely.

This is the truth pointed to by Afro-Diasporic traditions which creolised and flourished in spite of and because-of the atrocities of chattel slavery, the poetry of Palestinians in Gaza, the laughter even amidst deathcamps and fields of slaughter worldwide. Millions die, and millions *live in spite* of that.

This is not a dismissal of suffering, of horror. It is an acknowledgement of it. This is the hidden logic of “They Shall Not Pass“. To understand that the world-that-was, and is, is rooted in all of that horror. Simultaneously though, the worlds-that-are-becoming?

They will never be pure, clear or sharp, shifting in shape like the faces in the mirror gazing back at you amidst the flicker and flame. The curls of smoke; the divine monstrosities surging up from submergent dark oceans and the cavernous vaults of heaven.

I am not being glib, nor arch, when I say the under-worlds, the grave-worlds the root-worlds, are the sources of life. I am not being glib when I say that those life-worlds are not places from which one can ever return, despite what Plato and Joseph Campbell might have persuaded you.

I am not being glib when I say you are ALREADY THERE. Which is here. Which is Now.

Same as it ever was.

They say that Demeter wept for the return of her girl, and refused to allow plants and crops to grow until she returned. Fortunately for life, she who was known as Kore? According to some tales, a compromise was reached, and for half a year, she was allowed to be with her mother. So it was, they say, that the seasons came to be as regular as clockwork.

Yet, still others whisper amongst themselves. Was it not the case, they murmur, that what is held to have trapped the maiden was her eating of a pomegranate, and the seeds remaining in her belly?

Seeds of the underworld, yes. But also: seeds — her mother’s very domain! And is it not the case that she, nameless, puissant beyond all reckoning, is queen, the Lady of the Underworld?

Some say she weeps there, missing the world above; others that she is more than happy with her beloved. Surprisingly, those whisperers already mentioned sit on the edges of the former camp.

There is indeed weeping, so they allege. But not for the reason you might think, for her heart is not heavy. Not at all. Indeed, as her tears water that earth beyond earth, and flow back into the rivers of the underworld, her grief is mirthful. Mortal ears fail to discern between weeping and laughing; between howling and roaring with merriment; between wailing and song.

And why? Because, the whisperers say, we are all rendered sightless by vision, made without hearing by our insistence on speech. Because, they say, She misses us.

Not because we are apart from her, but because we are ALREADY all cradled by her. All embraced, her cool fingers stroking our hair, and yet, we do not notice. Every single one of us, treated with care-beyond-care. Remember: care and grief share their roots, etymologically and otherwise.

The Great Goddess misses us, or so those whisperers say. They look with side-eyes that dance, never remaining still, gazes skipping like stones on water. We have forgotten the conspiracy of life itself.

So they say.

But that’s a tale. And such tales have little place under the pressures of fascisms and atrocity, surely?

Surely. Surely.

After all, nobody who had seen the atrocities of war and fascisms would ever tell a tale of a wizard on a bridge, deep in the depths of the earth, crying out “You cannot pass!”

Surely. And likewise, billionaires would never name their surveillance and data companies after the seeing stones of another wizard — one corrupted, with a mind like metal? Nor, surely, would they name their arms companies after a sword that was broken, reforged as a symbol of hope?

Or develop a bank/venture capitalist fund named after the mountain inhabited by a murderous and greedy wyrm, from whom an ordinary sort must steal, against all odds?

Surely.

Such hypocrisy, such misreading, would beggar belief — if, that is, such things could truly be confined, clearly delineated and recuperated in totality.

You cannot pass, cries the wizard. Cries the invisible para-ontological being, the song-singer and angelos clothed in human shape but exceeding it, beyond the raiment of any particular world.

You cannot pass, sing the angels and the daemons, the powers and principalities, because the passage is not yours to define, to hold, willingly, or unwillingly.

And yet the wizard, the wand-elf, echoes an old grey-bearded god that Tolkien drew upon as prototype. Suppose, in the face of everything, even in the dark, we might hear the laughter of ravens.

“You cannot pass!” has a corollary, revealed in the beating of Raven-wings, tricksters all — a fugitive para-ontological exhortation. You cannot pass, any more than you can escape. We are ever entangled, ever imbricated and encumbered-with-conspiratorial whisperings.

And yet, the language of the birds, the language of angels, which is nothing less than that of reality itself, provides pharmakon. Poison and remedy.

No prescription, just an understanding that all things exceed what we think they are, or wish they would be. So, the birds bid us recall the wizard’s last words, as he is brought to his knees and begins his plummeting descent, his katabasis into the deep world, which ultimately excises the last of his humanness.

And amidst the doom-croak, and the deaths-head grin of a striped skull, the words ring out, for all those jesters and scapegoats we talked of earlier.

“Fly, you fools!” he cried, and was gone.