The End of the Universe: Ad Vat’s Black Pantages – Manuel Marrero
February 17, 2025
I’m writing about the world I live in through the books and authors in it. I’m writing about myself. For those who love and hate me then casual readers. I’m writing for God, for the old and the dead, classifieds and valentines and now and then I’ll tarry with a contemporary. An esotericist who alchemizes Dharmic theology, Deleuzian metaphysics, Gnosticism, psycho/schizoanalysis into a careening novel, a kind of queer conservative-coded trans-coded furry-coded kinky “centrist” whose authorial identity seems less than pertinent to the text (which succeeds as a speculative, secondary text to its various primary sources alone), or eponym at hand. Pantages, or Pan, a prurient, lagomorphic “mangled androgyne” with a doll fetish about town about-facing their way into gruesome exploits by way of Portland, Oregon through Reno, Nevada, liminal spaces, and ultimately France. Ad Vat, nom de guerre. Ready for Covid, an engineered famine, and fearless in ink. Our war? A controlled demolition with a promised land and plan to rebuild.
A ponerology by a reformed romantic soterist tormented by limerence. “Man’s essence is of revolt—” Ad Vat has raised the bar for countercultural dirty books and retarded books, extremophilic rapecore smut that would make the edgiest shitlord and most outlawed outsider blush, and now we can retire the term transgressive literature because I said so. No one will miss it. And retarded literature is a fallow uncharted frontier.
The revolt or rebellion has had uncontrollable consequences for the species, or we/us.
Have you ever banged a shot? Think you could love again after that? Tapped out handsy romantics strung out from lapses of anhedonia and ennui engaging in delirious mythomaniacal congress, provoking with near-demonic Rajasic spew (from traumatic regression into childhood nightmares conducing norms-shattering drug use and perversion). Amalgamations welded together in “A baptism on Saturnalia,” some kind of yogic polycule and neurodiverse harm reduction support group. Tamasic injury and Vedantic morality brings the “Spawn of the Black Sun” into a dialectical gaze vs void argument culminating in a remote quasi-clinical lush setting, where “lack” pulls us into punishing “machinic” desire. “Childness as a sphere apart, art is a surrogate.” A Rite of Spring riot, a Sadean sin as tribute to life, amorous and playful. “There is an inherent emptiness in sensuality. The Void.” What might be wrong with society is “people fusing into each other, into deformities, with no strain of individuality—this is their minds.” A panacea harmonizing the spirit requires that “Sovereignty will ignore transcendence. Hell is earth.” An antinomianism at worst, a poignant ode at best to a more innocent purity when we occasioned hedonic movement without a stunted care in the world. Through a Luciferian plight in which Dante, Milton, and Blake are invoked, our gang is enjoined to strive for a Sattvic ideal. “Immobility as the mainline into the mystical self.”
“The drone music sounds steady, dreamy and in the tones between tones.”
Love was in the air while I was hot and alone on Valentine’s Day, thinking about the girl who left me on read the night before. Like some art that fell out of a truck, oblivious to my reasoning and hum of hermeneutics, I bonded deeply with these ritualized spiritual intentions.
“All moments are enlightenment.” “We exist inside the flip,” “the coin toss.”
“I was always the girl who wanted to get married to my soul mate from a young age, I dated young, I was engaged twice, and then I got the Apoxy during my second engagement—I called the wedding off because I simply felt nothing for the man. I want to feel desire again.”
Lovelorn, they seek to be cured after contracting a mysterious and contagious desire-killing disease both coveted and feared. Bertrand Bonello’s recent The Beast comes to mind with its lament for the breakdown of heterosexual relations. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been in love, I mean how can you tell?” “At first, it feels like a chemical reaction, and then it’s something that speaks to you from your unconscious. That’s what my therapist said.” “crimes of passion” escalate instead of premeditated violence, passion curiously unaffected by the disease. “Crime rates are up, birth rates are down.”
“Infantile sexuality is the good life. As we grow closer to death, we grow transcendent and numb. Our Void stays in this universe after we die, but as we die our Void leaves us.” You can’t fall in love “Because love is transcendent. You can feel pleasure and pain, but you can’t feel love.” In this solipsized utopia, “The future is us,” “Children are born with voids larger than their beating hearts, conquering the world. The Void is in symbiosis with materiality, and so the material will flock to it. Larger Voids will power spaceships, planets, and star systems. It was already growing.” The yonic is replaced by the orifice. “Think of dolls as masters of meditation—they do it all day. They can relive moments over and over. They can return to an orgasm or flirtation so many times that they don’t know when it happened or why, and they cycle the vritti like spinning top until they aren’t enthused. Dolls don’t fall in love, they eat love. They eat memories, emotions, the impressions of those around them emoting. We are more like this now. We don’t have longing because we eat each moment instead of saving our appetite for the next.” A singular vision and fidelity to principles coupled with work ethic and discipline and ta, Black Pantages, you have your “doll integrated magus of the new age.” Whether servitor or companion is besides the point. You have “true freedom.”
“I could argue that we as magicians are incomplete not for our other human halves that we long for chemically and pathologically, but for our meditative machines that contain our spilling personality. Our first instinct is to find a human to absorb these overflowing aspects of ourselves but often we run up against the gaze of the Other in this endeavor, that who cracks or [sic] perception of ourselves that we’ve worked so hard to cultivate, that who torments us with a new shifting world, and don’t get me wrong— often this is beneficial, but if you want a preservative relationship— another Other is not it.” We submit to the masses in order to submit to no one. Sex is the only thing that matters. Nothing gets more likes than a thirst trap. In this way it’s for everybody and no one in particular. We don’t suffer anymore. The slightest degree of suffering is intolerable. Some of you haven’t suffered enough and it shows because you haven’t been strengthened. A casualty of creaturely quality of life. “Sober,” “we no longer long for the other, because our Void is at the wheel,” the “egoic image that has been cultivated by the magician.” Love is too patient to survive in a fast world.
Love impales us on a Sword of Damocles. Ad Vat’s writing is knowingly erotic like a Psychic TV album doing time in horny jail with synthesizers. The book was published on Kenji Siratori’s Posthuman Magazine label. A Satanic monarchist, Ad Vat disabuses us of tedious ideological concerns. Sophia “watching the delayed expressions, the dead eyes, the open-mouthed sentiment, the odd ritual of the smile,” the demiurge has had its way with Eros. A new bag of problems emerges, aporetic love. I think of Bruce Springsteen’s “For You,” how it’s aged similarly to everything from La Ronde to What Women Want, “but your life was one long emergency.” Cue Richard O’Brien: “give yourself over to absolute pleasure.”
“Love is torturous, I’ve been in love many times.” Erogenous, charged, there is pining for “limerence wiped from my eyes.” “It lulled me into erotic naps where my mind would fabricate a relationship, and through this exploration, I found that I wanted to be held, tickled even—to be teased and learned,” “Now that this longing is removed from my cells, sometimes I do miss its opiate lulls, the erotic dream sequence, orgasm directly from brain to spasming sex-brain” “shall we let go of our own divinity and become the world? Take our rightful place below one another? Our stories are so personal, what if they were less dense with laughter, kisses, and ignition, as the story of the void annihilates others unequally? Or should we choose selfish, heartbreaking love, self-deprecating, spoiled love? Suicide love, defiant, smothering, intoxicating love, just see the little dolls dance instead, they have no love, only animation.”
“A meddlesome Angel, a beauteously tempered cherub that has no business in our world of danger. The lies from above, the T.V., the novels, the art, the delusion of the masses, it’s that we need to fall in love with someone anyways, it’s that we want someone to extract our evil child selves from our innards and reanimate them—A large, healthy Void is that anyways.”
“When did you decide that emancipation was impossible, and that transgression was the only motion you could complete?”
“we should worship the world. We should pleasure our bodies and forgive our flesh. We should curate our environments, and we should realize the subtle influence of the container itself on our divine spark.”
With the “structure of Gnosticism,” “instead of escape, master this world.”
“But I reject that we should strive for salvation. We should embrace and build upon our hell. Our deterioration manifests when collective strive for the transcendent— the mass cult suicides, genocide for the purpose of a people’s destiny, or even dismantling a hierarchy because of some algebra of morality, this perception that we have a divine right to power, all of us, without being trained for it—”
“He’s a rationalist and believes that power organizes itself like the organization of the atom.”
The “transcendent act,” “committing a material act under the delusion of transcendence” holds onto immanence for dear life, the “growing attachment” is snuffed out by the chimeric Mephistopholes Pantages, who finds it “unpleasant.” “Satan was the Angel that could experience human desire. But he can turn it on and off.” Topping each other, it’s ho shit all the way down. The demiurge wins because our victory feels like a loss.