Issue 34: Sascha Akhtar

Music For Dead Dreams

The cocooning lighting draws me in immediately. The electro-most part of blue, digital blue is so soothing. A music my ear immediately recognizes as the sounds of a space that is not human-enacted, but human-generated using machine voices is playing out of the large screen on the wall.

I hear the lyrics sung in an ultra-feminized Vocaloid™ pitch, we have almost become accustomed to being assailed by. It is high, like animal frequencies. It is always soft and tender like this song. The chrome arms of the robotic invention sparkle in the artificial light of the staging, against the deep blue, highlighted like gems on a ring. It is designed to lull.

All of this – the modulation of the sound, the waves of the light–  there is a homogenization of emotion. We are held in this machine cocoon. The automaton has eyes, I cannot assess fully their colour. Is it that hint, just enough of menace, that makes me feel disturbed, yet gently rocked, as I hear her, the voice from the void, a sweet melody, that dutifully is written out on the screen – the robot is waving her arms: The World Is Falling Down, Down, Down, But I Feel Only Love, she intones repetitively. I personally, feel nothing. Just the death of everything and I cannot understand why this is on at the nail salon.

******

Sadness Sometimes, another offering– let’s only sing sweetly of this. This is the world she inhabits. When guitars kick in, they only kick in so far. The engineering of the audio will not allow feeling. It is a hypnosis. The image is still, no video. This is an especially created kind of music: Don’t blame me if I get sad sometimes. The image remains, frozen on the screen. Like our feelings. Frozen. As our world crashes down around us.

The Loop of Perpetual Sorrow

I struggle to assess what I am watching is meant to be. It seems to have a certain air of simulated reality that more and more spaces I enter seem to possess. Like, they don’t even have to try anymore to pretend. The ubiquitous value of ‘authenticity’, is not a thing to aspire to anymore. There is no genuine article to be had. For this reason, I feel a purity to what I am forced to watch. It has no artifice, while simultaneously being born completely of artifice.

I see a female form. Within several blinks, there have been several changes of swimwear. It uses all the markers of the ‘music video’ trope. Over the course of many of these packaged mindfucks I see a pattern. Names appear in title boxes as they do in music videos, yet these names seems to have been created to replicate existing ones that evoke a sense of loyalty, excitement and that exploitable message to self ‘ This is cool’. These hollow fabrications scroll on the screen.

The word ‘savage,’ coupled with ‘44’ acts as this placeholder for an actual creative title, signifying life within. I, the viewer am meant to insinuate that what is being piped into my auditory senses purporting to be music of an ‘upbeat’ sort has been forged of the creativity of ‘Savage 44’. Except this is not music and I don’t mean that in a ‘I’m an old punk/raver/goth and I’m telling you that this is not real music’ way. I mean this as an analytical assessment of the sounds. I can guarantee that the intention behind what I am hearing is not the same as music that we soak into our being, drown in, are bewildered and mystified by that emerges from a liminal space, orchestrated some say by angels. This is a device. It carries on, for what is too long to be a composition. It carries on, so that sound turns to total manipulation. It wants you to feel Chill! Happy! Sexy! Cool!

I however, feel myself connecting to an unassailable void, falling deeper the longer I am assaulted by these sounds. I am not the only one. I look around at the women in their chairs, hands splayed out in front of them, at nail stations.

Together, we are falling down

down,

down

but we feel only love.

Nazi Cupcake Petrichor

Ancient, sad, broken… disrupted. Fires. Fires, fires, everywhere! I have so many things in my head from the past, from the future; eschatology. Neuropathy. It begins as answers and ends nowhere. I cannot hold it all as the body weakens further. To become within what is without seems sure fire. (Burning, everywhere! And if not burning with fire then breaking down with water, earth moving faster in plates and the air spins higher off). And I am burning too. This is a within thing. Withering, escalating. The blaze is alive though as it crackles through the dried structures. Turn any window on, you see it. Gone beyond obvious ‘death,’ it is too sublime now, the death (s). Everyone is consulting everything. The planets they were born under to the infinitieth infinitesimal determination… because the desire for, the questing for knowledge, knowledge everywhere. How to drink it and distil its essence tho’. It doesn’t work. And we are coalescing in Dreamtime. Making connective tissue. A network of the deeper consciousness is fleshing itself out. It seems more turgid, corpulent. Innards that we must abandon our corpse for, heading inwards to those innards. Not these. The naming of things occurring that we cannot call more heinous than we have already called them and yet the horror grows. This is why the oppressed and (burning, always burning) through their surrendering orbs call out to us. Chastise us. They cannot process their own fate and we cannot process their fate, and everyone is trying. There is so much trying to save, trying to vocalise, trying to remove the gags, trying to take away those brutal hands. All they enact are ends. If they told us about a maleficent being that brings this pain, they hid the truth. I come back to the Ouroboros.  As without becomes within becomes without. As the psychic frenzy grows and armchair activists lament their powerlessness. That neural network grows too.  Some screams and cries are occurring in the elemental space, where the blood is feeding the earth. I can see everything.  I see almost every moment of the blood. In 1989, as a child dislocated in an ancient outpost of orphanages, tended to by dark nuns I saw the form of Michael every night destroying the Devil. The red light bathing him. Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep. I Pray The Lord My Soul To Keep. If I Should Die Before I Wake. In that 1989, it was the first time war came onto the mass stage. I lived and knew there was war occurring. It was in Iraq. There was not much more I knew. 33 years later, I have viewed with my own ocular powers devastation as and when it occurs. The shift of the paradigm is not a forward motion or a telescoping motion but its indefinable territory is invisible. How many paradigms have shifted.  It was short. There was no warning, how my consciousness was under attack, how swarms would be infiltrating my inner, vast scope. There never has been any ‘warning,’ per se.  How I stand at this moment, a tattered energy, fighting back the invisible in every space I enter without my body. I was not told this. I was not told that multiple smells would vanish if I wasn’t careful. Why did we become obsessed with the naming of the smell of the earth after the rain? Was it to hold onto an emblem? If we say it enough (and we know poets are the only people who really know anything at all) and read it in all our poems and keep posting digital plates with the word and its meaning inscribed on them: P-E-T-R-I-C-H-O-R, will it enable us to stow this inference of subtle tangibility, something only a human can detect, in our banks. What flows in between these banks. Is there a river? What does the river do to these banks? Memories we are reduced to, in essence. Al-khemia.  I know that’s all there is left. You couldn’t have explained it to me, but I whittled away and whittled away at the Redwood of what I was told was ‘living’. I have those powers. Minds do. I just wasn’t told that.

None of us are. Well perhaps some are. Certainly fascist babies. Those cupcakes[1]. They were just like any cupcake a child would be magnetized by, urging a parent to hand it over to smush into her gob, except it had a swastika on it, in frosting. Everything we need to know about the world today is imbued in that cupcake. Are we eating Nazi cupcakes, pretending they aren’t? Look closely. The cupcakes are making you sick at the core. We watched war on the television in 1989. It was one clunky television, in one building. I study the faces of Janus and am no longer certain that they ever change. The masks do. Whose face dominates?

There is no cure for the devolution. Everyone has a fire in their hand. You stare into it, the oracular rectangle that watches you. You thought you were watching it. Imagine if you could watch extinction occurring while you sit in your privileged existence, as safe as can be. Turn off the sound if you like. Extinction will come for us anyway. There’s a new smell. It will reach us, wherever we are located. We must prepare for the naming of it. It is gaining ground. It will overwhelm us. What will we name it? The smell of earth fed only by bodies; blood

after the rain.

Fires,

fires

burning everywhere.

[1] The Man in The High Tower. Philip K Dick

Sascha A. Akhtar is committed to decolonial praxis in art and methods in education. She writes short prose, poetry, essays and is a translator and Creative Writing lecturer at the University of Greenwich. The Grimoire of Grimalkin, published in a second edition (Prototype Publishers 2024) has recently been reviewed in the Guardian. Sascha is also the author of eight other books and the creator of the innovative course Breaking Through Writer's Block available as part of the Being A Writer toolbox at The Literary Consultancy, London. She mentors writers to great acclaim and often offers workshops at events and at Poetry School, London.

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