AngelStar 4: Inferno

It’s been a while since I’ve dropped a post, and it’s been a wild couple of years. I finally made my way to publishing my first and likely only poetry book. I finished writing my third novel last year, and spent the time since then editing as I sort out my plans for what’s to come. Now with 2020 and just about 2021 in the books, it seems about time for my third novel, Angelstar 4: Inferno. Here are some ideas and reflections as I put down the finishing touches and prepare for my latest release:

Depression, anxiety and shame, they almost killed me.

First a bit about the new novel. This journey will take us from the steaming lava-hot core of hell to the icy plateau of doubt, and into alternate future dimensions as Calugero revisits his faithless descent into hell’s bowels—reconquering the abyss in order to save his brother’s soul from the nightmarish realm of Inferno. Old demons will resurface, as they tend to do in moments of cognitive vulnerability. Meanwhile, this story will peer into the meta-dimension, focusing on “the Writer” and hir relationship with hir story as sHe struggles though depression.

The primary battle of Inferno is a battle against the self, or at least what darkness exists within the pressure, and anxiety of a world full of sickness and egoism. I’ll recall my last post on Possession and Mark’s failure to overcome the deformity, as Calugero, an extension of his Writer, struggles to stay human, and not become a monster in his encounter with monsters—the monsters that represent our illness in this world, the darkness and deformity of the human spirit. Furthermore, I wanted to explore identity, and the instrumentality of the Writer. We ponder the question: does sHe write the story, or is sHe written by it? An existential conundrum involving the mechanical apparatus of the mind, thought and spirit combined to form words, narratives, and give purpose. What is the purpose of the Writer?

As ideology rules the day, the Writer goes on wondering all the while about hir own origin, and whether or not sHe is truly in control of hir own story. The Writer like a mystic or shaman, pierces the veil to another dimension. There sHe encounters the pain and regret smothered down in subconscious juices. sHe rides a wave that flows from the center—somewhere in thought—a heavy flow. It’s as if sHe is simply drifting along with the waves, as the words come through from dimensions beyond. It makes me wonder, the more I use technology to aid in me in producing perhaps our most basic and oldest art-form—is the mind a mere machine like AI? And what of the soul? Is it but an imaginary object of the mind? And if so, where did it come from? And what of art and form if one day AI are able to tell intelligible stories?

Words come through me like i was a walkie talkie/ all i do is open up my mouth and just rock see.

The current automatic computer writing is something like the surreal automatisim of Andre Breton. He was interested in that dream world, the one I spent so much of my writing time fixating on. What happens when these computer-dreams become lucid? Can machines create, or is it all programing? And if our thoughts and ideas are produced in unconscious juices, is all art but mechanical reproduction? I don’t pose to have the definitive answers to these questions, but I’ve been thinking. Or maybe its the story that wrote my thoughts. Perhaps you’ll draw your own conclusion as you also take a trip through the dark realm of hidden abyss I call Inferno.

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