e[x]iting to e[x]ist ~on [x]’s postscripts~ - Elytron Frass
September 15, 2025
DISCLOSURE: I’m not much of an essayist or reviewer. I’ve published very few, only a handful of which I’m sufficiently proud. The format itself rarely compels me to fill it with the permanence of opinion it demands. Consider this, then, a personal exception and forgive me should I go on to ignore its conventions.
This article should be received as eulogy and not as a sordid exposé on the anonymous and reclusive multidisciplinary artist, [x], nor is it solely critique of her novella-length suicide note, postscripts. Though such will assuredly be incorporated, my most intimate reminiscences of [x] — a fellow outsider with whom I frequently collaborated and continue to admire — must take full and immediate precedence. That said, [x]’s postscripts, as well as our collaborative novella, DEAR§, her untitled work on evenunto.net, and her recent album, PENANCE, bleed from the harrowing heart of this: my enduring mourning process. While grief often renders anecdote difficult to express, I wish to embrace that thorn-laden difficulty as the crown of this tribute, as it was also the crux of [x]’s self-martyrdom: both as artist’s statement and means to artfully cease to exist.
[x] once wrote to me: It’s the wound itself. My ribs constrict around it. The rhythm we’ve spoken of is the only means for me to hold it as my own, rather than simply withstanding it; rather than kneeling for the martyrdom that would be so much more pleasing than the refusal I intend. But you know this.
Indeed, I knew it then as I do now: that certain time signature to which she and I would often brux our teeth — giddily, darkly, defiantly — riding out tremors of mirrored cosmic trauma. And for quite some time, throughout our anonymous sessions, forged solely through remote correspondence, we found rich sustenance within each other’s present sufferings and troubled pasts, enough to keep us from reaching for exit bags of finitude. Despite relentless collaborative endeavors, our livewire rendezvous, fleeting surges of humanity and presence — which, for her, only speed and opiates permitted — [x] knew she’d play at living only for so long because the act of living cost too much. Above all, there was dignity at stake: the sort of dignity an accused mystic loses in leaving her cloister to proclaim here’s the latest manuscript I’m pitching, illuminated and then some, should anyone wish to read, publish, or, moreover, witness. [x] was never one to prostitute her gifts.
It should be said here that I’m not confirming [x]’s passing so much as confronting it, regardless of her status — I’m suspending my suspicions and beliefs, conceding to her masterful conceit that I have read and am re-reading — for this is exactly what [x]’s last will and testament, postscripts, demands. This is why I and anyone who seeks out her novella must go all in or not at all regarding the matters she conveys within. With postscripts, [x] becomes the self-annihilating, self-fulfilling prophetess of her own hours — expediting the inevitable, waxing hysterical and philosophical with effortless sophistication, devoid of feckless indulgence and padding.
I was let into those sacred hours, into her 4AMs, her process, lending my eyes and offering counsel, as she’d shared with me, chapter-by-chapter, her fragility and anguish in the making of it. Throughout the writing of postscripts we’d read the same books, mostly the Symbolists and Decadents — some of which I’d recommended, some which she had, just as we’d done while coauthoring DEAR§. It’s because of this that I know just where Remy de Gourmont’s La fantôme spills in, just how Schwob’s Le livre de Monelle informs a particular lament, and just when [x] slides against Catulle Mendès’ Méphistophéla. I have the timestamps to prove it. Other than her, I’m the only one with such granular insight into the process and, thus, the optimal choice to decode its hyper-stylized diction, to vivisect its cryptic turns of phrase, to properly review it. As a reluctant essayist, I feel morbidly honored if dutifully put upon, but so goes being left with the suicide note of a friend.
We only love the asphyxiated and I can promise you I’ve never ever breathed in.
I want to give myself and the world a crown that’s entirely self-engendered even as I self-immolate. I want to give a deliberate account of giving up without ever giving in, holy and perfect in my conviction, the flesh debased but that’s why we read this sort of thing, isn’t it? The laceration of someone at once made for the horror and able to transcend it. God and I have extremely particular kinks. — postscripts, [x]
In her geminal, first-person account of a junksick, sequestered ex-vocalist, [x] dances between fearlessly pathetic and furiously scornful. According to its author, postscripts is neither a work of fiction nor one of autobiography. When asked in a pre-release interview if postscripts should serve as the author’s solo debut as well as her final publication, [x] ferociously testified:
There is nothing more gauche than continuing after a suicide letter; there is nothing more gauche than affectation; so, if we’re to be affected we should mean every fucking word of it, every gesture, every aspect…To be ‘neither/nor’… is to be martyred in the present tense. I can’t believe in fiction any more than its opposite. So that being, neither/nor, is strung not between but against. If this state is consciousness, then it’s a death sentence.
Taken literally, the author casts herself as an emotionally deflective yet dually-vulnerable wretch-cum-gentry in a reimagined À rebours by way of Les chants de Maldoror. She shrieks her torments, both amused and disgusted by her myriad eccentricities, gloating about her misunderstood genius and the pitiless vacuum of alienation. Catholic martyrs and classical monsters are subsumed and further elevated within her feminine pantheon where cosmological tragedies are reassessed as twisted victories — the gorgon, Medusa, canonized into incorruptible sainthood.
To precisely identify [x]’s subtext, rendered marvellous and occult by her opulent patterns and symbolic figures of speech, one must commit to her language, to learn it, to then truly hear it, and ultimately to detect the exactitude of that cruel sense of irony, humor, and revelation of heartache which she deliberately buries. At its black, injured core postscripts is a sumptuous work of divine power-fantasy achieved through self-termination. With gnawing yet lyrical wit, viciousness, and intelligence — strategic Huysmanian rantings, Lautréamontean ravings, and Cioranian bon mots — postscripts reads like quality postmodern autofic should, if autofic weren’t principally written by meme-deformed, tedious amateurs running amok in New York, or Glasgow, or Tokyo, or wherever the fuck adult children pretend at avant-gardism these days.
(Entire paragraphs, more, have been slaughtered in the name of [REDACTED] because this letter was addressed, once, and now it’s not.) — postscripts, [x]
Written not by an unreliable narrator but to an unreliable readership, postscripts, as suicide note, knows that it must endure as a letter without a recipient, devoid of an active listener, a confidant, of a single, bearable witness. As someone sworn to secrecy regarding all things cited under [REDACTED], I can merely lament and (hopefully, through eulogy) bear witness. Despite such veils of omission, each [REDACTED] in question can be viewed as a placeholder for a specific time, place, person, or thing and the destructive meaninglessness that it’s contributed towards its own necessary erasure.
As Julie Reshe writes in Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: “We might more clearly recognize that what we are, foremost and inevitably, is a tragic connection with each other. The other is what hurts in us, what resonates with our pain. It is not only that love and attachment are impossible without being secured by our ability to feel social pain. Ultimately, it is the only manifestation of them. They are social pain. We are terminally ill with each other. And this illness is us, individually and collectively” (p72).
Equipped with eloquence and poise, [x] articulates her own [sub]version of this understanding throughout her bruised and wondrous body of text, where both the perceived and actualized wants of these others too often result in the utmost untowardness and trespass.
I speak and the hum of that is undisturbed by anyone threatened by the existence of something that wants nothing of them, that leaves them to their own want, the thing that they’re so frightened of. I’m not anything, or at least not anything that could possibly bother about it, but the want in them is so loud their pulse scatters underneath it, chambers rupturing out of the terror that they’ll see their lack and know it as their own.
…
Removing what they called amour from the board couldn’t entirely defeat want, but it made it something unfamiliar, and that’s usually threatening enough. Want reveals itself as something that wholly defines the absence and not the so-wanted. And in seeing that outline it was easy, so easy, to know what they lacked, and to speak to it, as gentle as I could be as a monster, and thus appear to have seen to the heart of them.
…
Being careens between itself and want and sometimes it’s so fucking hard to know the difference, to carve what exists into the shape I’ve made for myself and I’m writing this against the now that’s between breaths, the now that stutters between when I write this and the idea that there’s a you that reads it and yes I know there isn’t, but please understand that I mean this so much, that it’s never gotten better, that I’m still staring at the mirrors of a thousand thousand clubs, mirrors filthy with want but I know what I am, sometimes, and that makes me worth killing, je pense — postscripts, [x]
With equal measure of vehemence and absurdity, [x] articulates an unrivalled treatise on want. Her enshrouded public persona, an extension of the decadent character study depicted in postscripts, could be described as a power-play of refusals. She exited from social media ca. 2021 (as I have as well, almost a full year prior to writing this), abandoning her various accounts. These visible track marks, like her novella, chronicle a deserted performance, a once-presence, now functioning as mausoleums of expression. Having done the same, for similar philosophical reasons (cited within a joint interview with [x], here), I can zealously vouch that such withdrawals are quite artistically freeing and not the creative full-stop which others fear and insist upon.
Taken purely as allegory, postscripts stands as one of the utmost discomforting works I’ll encounter—illustrating how the horror in which we exist holds us captive as victims of both consciousness and the other, whereby we are gradually lulled into various states of paralysis, so that the indiscriminate compulsions of the mind and its externality diminish and rape us repeatedly until we go mad, seek our next exit, or both. Driven towards that grim, inevitable conclusion, the only willful choice we have, argues postscripts, is to take our own lives, not merely to spite intrinsic or extrinsic want, but to reclaim ourselves from its clutches. At once a last gasp and a solo debut, [x]’s novella is a triumphant showcase of far more than its deathdrive. My sincerest regret after reading, rereading, re-re-rereading, is that I couldn’t lend a more considerable hand in [x]’s exquisite, authorial demise.