An Interview Between DEAR§: featuring [x] & Elytron Frass
September 12, 2024
Manuel Marrero: The next generation of prophets face eternity like one might look back on the outcroppings of Eden and be transfixed by the horizon, pillared in salt. Then, in a sidechannel, with ether-gleaned precision, two anonymous actors perform the liner notes to a duet never sung, leaving behind double-blind epistles written to and for the apocalypse, mixing mediums and disciplines, effortlessly falling into hypnotic holding patterns, grinding against the grain on a dead server somewhere while a raging spirit of violence and destruction reigns in heaven. What is the apocalypse but the inevitable damnation of the fallen world? What is there to do for the self-exilic but clear the air, communing unto and toward their reckoning in call-and-response, listless as primordial opposites pulling away at every moment in which they come close without ever once letting go? An akathisia grips me as I thin the veil, clarifying for me that this is the last of a new internet. Alpha and Omega, before Abraham I am and always was, neurolinguistically a thunderer, at infraforensic latitudes I couple myself to their siamese forms in painstaking effort to deepen my understanding of the most private, difficult and mysterious coauthors I’ve ever had the privilege to publish. I too seek to be accurately understood.
[x]: We craft engagement bait for the would-be anchorites.
DEAR§ is a series of letters in the same way that being is. The form is false, the premise undermined, the experience wholly dependent on participating in it despite being uninvited from the divine presence.
Everyone lies to get into heaven, this is lying to get out of it.
Elytron Frass: And behind the scenes, or within ‘the hours,’ to crib your terminology, we were literally faking it to make it through. DEAR§ wasn’t only improvised from entry to entry, there was no premise, no backstory, and no prompt to speak of other than the two of us having come to the brief pre-agreement that this book we’d set out to write would be conversational, loosely structured like an epistle, and turn-based. Moreover, we hardly knew each other, other than having been familiarized online and having done a short interview together in the past. There’d been the occasional DM of course, but even now, due to our staunch philosophies and strict, anonymous lifestyles, we still have the pleasure of hardly knowing each other…in common ways, at least. There’s really no coyness to the certain concealments which I’m divulging upon. Yet, while it’s absolute truth to attest that I’ve never met you in person or that DEAR§ lacks a narrative, it is also absolute truth to attest that you and I have become very well acquainted by now on a deeply metaphysical level and that DEAR§ contains our signature multitudes, which are both real and unreal all at once. What say you to that?
[x]: It’s in anonymity that we’ve any hope for salvation; all our pale lies wither in the face of real confession. The fantastic and the fabricated are the hopes of the lowest dreamer—here instead we’ve scoured affectation until our façades are holy, until they’re worth their weight in unmarked envelopes. The not-knowing becomes sanctified, untouched by the hihowareyou that reduces us to acquaintance. The things we give to the voice in the dark are so much more tremulous and perfect than what we use to make ourselves better in the eyes of our notbadhowaboutyourselfs. We keep things bloody and gentil, we’re on our best behaviour because the thread between us only exists when we speak it, and so we speak it. I blame you, personally.
EF: As the one who invited you to collaborate on this, I take full blame. Flay me like Marsyas; scourge me with a wool comb until I’m martyred and bled like St. Blaise. The rules, however, were suggested by you, as was the wondrous layout. But why choose conversation as the mode of expression and form?
[x]: It’s hard to decide on an always when this particular project is so singular. We’ve always been conversant things, and the you and I that were born from it can’t really be expected to do anything but continue speaking through it. We’re creatures predicated on echoes—why else do we sing? But in this case, this always, the echo from the other participant makes our orbit a case of shuddering, rather than stateliness. You ask and I answer, I ask and you answer, and I’ve no better example of scripture in that regard.
What’s your excuse?
EF: Honestly, I just fucking rolled with it. I was more interested in working with you than I was in the specifics of what that might entail. I was certain, long before I’d roped you into this, that we’d generate something of magnificence, something strange, between perfect strangers, something perfect and rare. When you made your grand exodus from social media, yet were considerate enough to forward me your email in the process, I held back from writing you for quite some time but nonetheless reread your ebook on your website, evenunto.net
I took some notes and with the intentions to learn your selective vocabulary, your gnostic and often ecumenical figures of speech—not to decipher them (I’d already been onto the gist of what you were saying therein), so much as to amalgamate your diction into mine. Once I’d become fluent, that’s when I reached out. Everything I make is an elaborate excuse to metamorphosize into the new prerequisite creature capable of making it. I’d done so this time for the two of us, for DEAR§. This might sound like an admission, but it isn’t—because I wasn’t chasing. I was given permission before there was something to be permitted, for the sake of platonic roleplay. It’ll be some time before I feel the urge to approach the tribunal of penitence.
[x]: They’ve never built a confessional that could hold us.
EF: Indeed, but we’ve got to show this captive audience something, and, more so, show them the fuck up—even if our dialogs were never meant for public consumption—here we are now, vivisected and immaculate, dying alone together again on the internet for all to see. What compels an artist to justify such an alienating and self-indulgent work as DEAR§?
[x]: The alien and the self-indulgent, hand-in-hand with the Holy Spirit (a PR disaster, that one), gnashing our teeth in public as we put out press-release and/or scripture—what better compulsion? Every saint needs media training if they’re to break into the business of martyrdom. We selfless, magnificent things—we do all this from the goodness of our hearts, or near enough.
And only a single social media account.
EF: Please don’t remind me that I’m sole book-hustler in this collab. To paraphrase you: you’ve left behind grand mausoleums in your wake—the pristine shells of your abandoned social media accounts—while I’m still out here bearing the weight of my Twitter-cross for a lengthier than desired duration. But I do see your point above all that. What I’d add to it, or compliment it with, are the quintessential elements of arrogance and spite. I see those two as informing and inspiring both my solo and collaborative works more than any other motivation. The dialogs that scintillate throughout this text are hardly inviting to whoever might try to engage. I painstakingly intend for every section to read as if encased within a protective circle of salt and every individual word to operate as an apotropaic grain of said salt that should grind into any reader’s wounds. The reader here is an eavesdropping demon, an invasive afterthought, best warded off.
[x]: Your suffering can be the rock upon which I build my &c., it can be the bastion of a new glorious age, it can be the promise of blood to those beyond the threshold of us, the perfect advertisement for what we’ll never part with. We speak and know all of it and never make eye contact because this resurrection isn’t for anyone else. If I’m a dead thing, and I am, at least I’ve got the words to pretend at prayer, and you the words to answer them. To that arrogance, to those brittle, mysterious, difficult artists—what else would they have of us? We’re the angels we’ve had to be.
EF: But of course; we’ve never been given much choice but to be perfect. Most indie publishers who will say that they want us, have virtually nothing to offer. The publishers who might pass on something like DEAR§, pass on it mainly because they are too cowardly to confront it, to decipher its wordplay, to engage with its content, its symbolism, its subtext and metatextual interplay, and, moreover, to jump out from their narcissistic paralysis pools for the precious fucking hour or two required to read it.
The submission process and the act of submitting any passion project can be equated to harrowing hell; but with DEAR§ even the seemingly benign aspects of peer review (aka the almighty/forgettable blurb) were unpleasant experiences—esteemed authors blowing us off after agreeing to write one or grossly misinterpreting DEAR§ as either a work of romance or horror (which it is certainly neither). I’m for one very glad that we decided to throw all the blurbs that we did eventually receive straight into a digital trash bin. What were your harshest takeaways throughout this whole process?
[x]: That I’m not cut out for incarnation, not in the slightest. There’s a process and there’s a way to engage it and that means saying check out my new piece with just the right emphasis, to beg with trembling humility for engagement, breathless and coy and oh I couldn’t possibly, it’s too much, oh I’ll just have a salad while wearing the aching, forgiving, always gentle smile as a motherfucker sends you a 72dpi jpg logo for print because the second, the very second you wonder if perhaps this pillar of making it isn’t as capable as they insist you’ve lost, you’ve lost everything, how dare you forget to be grateful for their digital artifacting on the KDP trade you’ve submitted yourself with their blessing. Of course, everyone we’ve encountered is lovely, just lovely.
EF: Alas, I’ve grown weary of it all myself and look forward to ghosting these small-game killing fields once I’ve tied up one currently in-process project. Like perfect symmetry, I coaxed you out from self-exile to begin writing DEAR§, and that very self-exile is now the trajectory that is compelling me most of all. You must be looking forward to returning to that place in which the public cannot penetrate. What does privacy mean to someone so fervent in their anonymity; will you release anything else that you’ve got in-progress before going dark once again?
[x]: Your missionary fervour only fueled your descent (so-called) to holy (read: my) orthodoxy. We put away the world, withdraw to the anchorages we earned for ourselves and forget the languages we learned to speak with such vulgar tongues, because there’s no way in hell we’ve the patience to negotiate with heretics. If I’ve lured you into cloister it’s only because it suits us—we’re not meant for audience, only it’s not our fault we’re perfect for it. How could I not look to another withdrawal? It’s the only grace allowed to artists and yet so many insist on not dying, even when it’d be far more becoming. The death we have in store for ourselves is total, simply because we’re not sharing it. That refusal is all of it. Anything that comes after this had better be fucking posthumous. Let’s make sure of it.
You’ve been the forerunner, somewhat by choice, that silver platter made to order, accused of speaking for me when I never meant to speak at all—what do you look forward to being silent about?
EF: Good question. We explore anonymity-as-theme extensively in DEAR§, and it’s the element that goes most frequently over the heads of so many. Anonymity, for me, was that highly volatile and vulnerable zone of incognito from where I could artistically be at my least inhibited and most honest when interfacing with a world that no longer reciprocates adequately to such efforts. I don’t regret reaching out to a readership, but I do feel I’ve reached my personal limit of interest—DEAR§ feels like that final transmission, signaling at the threshold. I can only plateau from here or become dissatisfied with myself should I linger beyond this point. On the other hand, should I recede into exile, I’ll retain what dignity I still have—a dignity which had been taking a toll, which the continuous churn of the publishing and self-promoting process will quickly diminish. If we’ve timed our expiration dates correctly, as I’m sure we have, we’ll both be able to get out of the light with the cake in our claws, so to speak, to then eat it in perpetual darkness, in peace.
[x]: The world’s unwillingness to reciprocate is its own punishment; here we’ve demanded from each other the after that follows the ex nihilo, and the after that follows that, unto the ages of ages and oh you get the point, the one we’ve driven into every available wound we’re blessed with, that this backandforth is the intersection of our parallel banishments. We’ve no names between us because the hey you is its own baptismal sacrament. I don’t know you and it’s beautiful. Pass the fucking fork.