Untitled – Damiano Bagli

January 3, 2026

Most undone, weak, my voice goes dead. How could I possibly have uttered such vast and
overblown words!? A decrepit tremolo of vowels wallows in my soft organs, unuttered, silenced,
forever withholding.
A thorough inspection of this dead sea of pre-existing words… I cannot escape the compulsory
condition of confessing that I identify with a dead voice, egressing the body like blood from the
neck of a sacrificed animal.
I have a range of choices about where the blood is flowing out from: the eye of a cursed arrow, the
smile on a tormented throat, the unjust slit on the back – just to mention, just to provoke… The
wound is marvellous, lightbringer, inspiring. Whereas the world sucks into blood, which falls
generously on the ground, provoking clamor, scenes of chaos, panic… producing effects as if it was
cursed language! I overthink the image, my overwhelming inspiration. The pure red of the liquid,
the curve it describes, true geometry of grace, unsure whether it’s the animal that is dying or the
image of death that is enduring its obscure project onto untouched life.
Not wanting to leave fate unassisted, and seconding a life saving instinct, I always keep my hands
free, open, and my arms raised high, for I know the suddenness with which I might be swept away:
the only hope for my abandoned body to save itself! …to become an X, a hopeful target, an
optimized grip pose, spreading appendices in the hope of adhering, attracting, catching.. making the
hands soft anchors, accidental hooks, furthermore roughening the skin to generate life saving
friction, generating at once secret desires for new complicities. And among the surprising features I
gave up on, I would want to mention and speculate about my inherent vocal antiprowess, parsing it
through visual obsessions, so that the voice, my most secret phantom limb, could be finally
understood as an even more secret image, distant, inaccessible, blackboxed into the epidermis of the
image itself, secured in a treasure casket, most secret, most wanted..
I don’t wish to approach the moment where I must articulate without ambiguity what word or image
I am referring to, for all my words are obsessively leaning on hatred, hatred, hatred of the next one!
I catch words, one at a time, eternally one, on an echoic sequence and that’s all. When I feel the
most inspired, I can take the truth of such a word to be an even and utter zero: I can, lyrically fired
up, be even more silent, more obscure, more, more, more, sounding like an eternal echo or more
ones. And in this abundance of negation, at the pinnacle of via negativa, I abandon… abandon the
integrity of a complete body. My head has been severed, eradicated, or perhaps just spawned from
nowhere in the very loneliness of being a lone head, scouting lands way ahead of me, way farther
than me, already at the end, having crossed countless checkpoints: that head, triumphant of so many
trophies, achieving nothing less than knowing the end ahead of time! And as for me, dancing on my
own grave, I am provided with one false head, a replacement operating on its own, to make my life
more acceptable, to normalize thoughts, to simulate having a head at all. Although not adept at
being seen abundantly, often unfazed by the significance of existence, I learnt the hard way that one
cannot simply go headless unnoticed. As soon as I uttered a vowel, of any kind and of any color, an
alert would draw attention, and it would be extremely wrong. I would be, for instance,
hyperwrongly seen, and my phantom limb would freeze: out of the magic circle, into scorching
shortcircuits, an oversized apple would occupy all the space. I remember a painting, teeming with
esoteric implications, of an apple, filling a room, consuming the space, devouring the whole room,
and it is a stealth obsession since then: I have stealth apples in my breath, stealth apples in my
voice, stealth apples in my eyes, in my guts.. The apple would ..make the walls of the room feel real
– I have to assume walls eventually, as I didn’t even figured that the treasure besides being an X, it
also had walls! – unescapably and relentlessly distancing the world from me: the more the X is
desired, the more it has to necessarily get distanced farther and farther from the whole world. I
would find out, as i certainly already had, that, scouting a three dimensional land, each step – but I
can assume one and only step: at a time, at all.. – would be a discrete manifestation, to me as a
spectator, of a flat landscape: an image, a picture, maybe an icon, i can only second and never
belong to. Thus I celebrate house keeping: I decorate the space with, by convention, meaningful
images, objects, idols, memories. I make the apple shrinking, for few precarious instants.
Nonetheless, I am not lying, i am still choking; or rather, words, bereft of their very flesh, accept
being an impossible structure made of discrete elements that cannot be adjoined in a coherent
continuum as if that were their only option to have dimensions, becoming an object, occupying
space. No one wants a new and, one by one, suspended breath: a rather perverse existence, eiliciting
copious options to entertain oneself with, LLARPing a resourceful corpse, silently mimic a mouth
that is talking, moving the tongue with the sole purpose of showing off saliva. There will be signs
that there is not a single 3rd dimension except its simulation. So, to be done with three-dimensional
things, to instead pleonastically designing them in the semblance of icons, lowering the pressure
that make my words so wrong, going hieratic, flat, formally real. I don’t need those icons to get
through my nose and the sense thereof, proved to be even insufficient to offset the two-
dimensionality of the landscape [and a dead nose would also prompt me with a bit more two-
dimensionality to attempt egressing the 3rd and finally accepting the 2nd as a norm]. Nor do I need
synesthesias, long gone with the faculty of preciously crafting them, so that the 3rd would be nothing
else than a depressive emergent quality out of inert senses.
I am left with one ambitious yet desperate option: make images alive, [Wisse das Bild! I read once:
a thought that, allegedly wandering, hitherto unread, finally unravelled into my head, certainly
unexpected but inevitable] Knowing that the feeling is somewhere, out of body? ..detecting it
through the most small window, an opening, a crack, an orefice, the most discrete concession to the
outside..
I am amused by this voice, so immense, vast and endless, as big as a room, or a nutshell.. nothing
more. I reside in a potentially boundless room, whose stressful furniture pushes against the wall
anticipating the optioning for new space.
There is a delirium of an image and a room which i try to be oblivious about, that is kin to the
world, and i know correspondance, a mute tear that grooves my false face I should not even care
for.
Day after day, my skin is totally irrelevant. Tears can penetrate, pierce, navigate me at will. I do not,
i repeat, have a surface. Whereas an image emerges by divine intervention, miracolously, accurately
..arrives too late.
The obsession of being such a visionary machine, in a proliferation of options, of intrusions.
To be penetrated a little more, a little longer, witnessing the image, an act of tremendously naive
worship, sensing the autonomy of it, monitoring the reality of it as a boundless landscape.
The ambition of a death by landscape resurfaces, an iconoclast instance, a simple irreversible
statement, a counter-icon, the burnt skin of the image, canonizing the 3rd dimension, making me
citizen of it, thirsty for belonging. I have one more pulsion: to belong to the nth, to inhabit the
hyperbole that makes the cycle of belonging more intense, more visceral, more unresolved, restless.
That is what happens when the feeling is utterly independent, automated, to some extent blind,
random, torn inside out; an image and a word enter a feedback cycle, a structure, a loop of an
inescapable signification ..a lethal vessel of yoking.
Fragile awareness of the body as a temple and vice versa, I can only see the image in the act of
feeling, I can only, with an act of absolutely redundant iconoclasty, peer at the image with my
longest and sharpest nails, inspecting it as if I were on the verge to commit an animal sacrifice. I
desire to catch the image in the very act of feeling, I want to hear the scream of it, the red-handed
image that silences my scream in turn. The pain, the space of its sound, the friction of its happening,
the interface effect of entering into a relation..
How blissful, to again sense the pressure of burying an image into a simulacrum, like trying to
squeeze oneself into the hole of a needle, the violent pressure, sadistically absolute, reaches back to
the pure bliss of perfect silence, the praeter-life, the totipotential dream of having universal joints on
all the surface of the body actualizing the complete match of skin surface and outside world: the Xn!
Can I really overlook this illusion of a machine, this hallucinatory positive feedback of parallel
minds that are reaching out, negating their own existence to perform some sort of unnatural
supersymbiosis, a principle of affirming the next thing and denying the present through actual
ecstasies and hyperboles, absolute travels, hypersleeps, ancient abandoned burials, chrysalises,
saliva, nonhumans, inhumans, advanced prosthetics..
I would really dare to examine this “outside world” if only I could be the expression of the visual
language of the image I am longing for! Apparently, though I’m bound to witness a machine whose
peak performance is to suffocate my voice in secret, dismaying ways, leaving me with a score that
in turn silences any of my dubious drives, reaching back, making my body an echo chamber of
silence.
Standing on the shore of an apparently lazy river, an image baits me to orient my thinnest ray of
blood across the body of water. If we think us, me and the image, as two, I am the sole target that
can get caught. That’s a mystery that comes undone. Do I have, after all, to believe the image? By
design – such an asthonishing blessing! – I am accompanied by a whisper that constantly suggests
where to place those nonlocal eyes of mine, regardless of the difference between me and something
else that i chase, alienated, as if presence were only true after a leap to a radical elsewhere. Is it just
another spectral invitation to become kin with the Outside? Am I that simple, if I trust the promise
to be, one day, inhabiting somewhere else? Or is it actually the premise of a critical failure, a mere
escalation towards the pathological, negating any world, another or this very one.
The landscape is silent and distorted. I am prepared to greet again the scorching awareness of
worshipping a bidimensional world. Abandoned on the shore, yoked to the body that I myself
abandoned and that I am parsing from an elsewhere that feels like a phantom-limb-like dimension,
an incredibly distant, perhaps forsaken space, I await a new vision of the body. It is predictable that
it will be found in crouched arms, cocooned by a world that spreads outwards after the canon shape
of the human-that-lies-down, a more honest [visceral?] version of the Vitruvian human. There are
odds that I will find it in a eccentric, ludicrous pose. The vision allows no haste so I wish for a
sandy, soft ground to which my weight would not be indifferent, recording my pose and securing
my position, at once. A perfect instant to be baptized as a target, to experience agony as an
expression, to unveil the structural iconography of the affliction, the external devices that make it
happen as an image eo ipso and nothing else.
I smile. Such a vast and intricate machine to just parse a feeling. Yet, adept at beginnings, I had to
learn how to speak, I had to figure out how, regardless of the isolation of the sounds and
fragmentation of the letters I personally cannot get over, a word can emerge as an option, an
occasion, a potential, a sorcery, a curse.. real mysteries of fluency! Though no word belongs to me,
proof of which I am chasing, breathless, occupied by a word too big, echoed within the vaults of my
chest, within which I imagine a drama of a feeling that cannot exist and that had to be enacted as a
ritual, an evocation, a requested fate, an empty vessel that I embody, that I design, that I cry over,
that I have no clue about, that I am lost about, how can something appear from nothing!? and I
enjoy the whims of fate and I appreciate the baits that catch me unguarded and I rejoice getting
caught, laughing, laughing. I extol the vacuity of my chest: it’s a trap that the echo of even a silent
word can trigger putting me in a position of understanding, if not hearing, an ancient litany, a pure
event, a pure beginning, an endless speech of a ventriloquized mouth that performs silence.
What words can you save for when, on the edge of abandonment, you know metamorphosis and
alienate into the unknown. I am apparently ready to dare a leap. Certainly some pressure might
make you desire to turn your back and embrace the warm core of affirmations. Certainly, the scream
within the innermost rooms is echoed all the way to your skin, which, as a consequence, begins to
wrinkle. It is said that the embryo commences with a fold so this is perhaps a new opportunity to
become and become and become. Everyone must begin as a taste of an X, softening the edges to try
to commence smoothly, but to take a leap, one must know the image. I wonder if my journey, from
a here to a there, is the gift of becoming an element of the whole figure that does not need to
negotiate the distance with spells because, to my knowledge, environments never utter. And as a
consequence of becoming landscape.. will I lose my boundaries, will I dissolve and become a
precise machine designated to take signification to a novel synthesis. Novelty produced as a
consequence of feeling, of thinking too obsessively. Is obsession a quality control to differentiate
life from something else? The image feigns form, I think I knew it, but my knowledge, born of
obsession, casts mirages out of dead, silent creativity. I was so certain of this ominous yet magnetic
potential: to feel without feeling, to breathe without breathing, to move without motion and to see,
seeing more..
And as I lie still, regardless of how far I have navigated the undulations, the shifts.. all the options I
have been granted… I cannot help but acknowledge the restless yet weak, almost motionless flutter
of my eyelid, smiling at how the entire lore of vision lures it into instrumentally enacting sight
simply activating the observing eye. I haven’t yet decided whether or not to read a word, and I
wonder if I could possibly identify with that opening slit, or if, perhaps, a new slit ought to be
opened elsewhere, maybe on the center of my forehead or, less expectedly, on the two sides of my
skull, therefore reshaping me as a marine observer. As I fall into my own disguise, even just a mind
game, I wish for diving into a nonhuman world of nonhuman parameters. I would find it delicious
to obsessively, endlessly, watch a word without falling for it, without being complicit with its
incipient pronounciation, with a lust for more akin glyphs. How blissful it is to transform oneself
into a nonreading machine, capable of witnessing as pure degree zero presence, capable of being
among, not relating with. That’s how i have been convinced to slit open the whole surface of my
body in tiny openings. Isn’t it what we got a body for, to experiment diverse ways of getting caught,
brutally but deliciously baited? Turning it into a mineral being, for instance, with crystal eyes, and
performing stabbing, cutting, chopping, finding out how soft a rock can be, how painlessly a
tormented skin can present its own torment.
And here… another stealthy, likely involuntary movement: the prelude to, the about to, the edge, the
singularity, the indifferentiation threshold: lips that are anguished, refusing to conform to the
stillness my pose demands, to the eternal lingering that I am identifying with.. They seek to break
the seal, enacting their visionary, probably delirious identification with a permeable access, with a
legitimately two-way open gate, and to be done with the burden of silence my existence has
provided, suggested, probably forced upon them and again to commit their innate pliability to a
canonic function. And whereas I would just entrust them with being a fresh oozing wound, that
could speak the flesh of the perfect image, I am ready to experiment a little more, just a little more,
to ease my idiosyncrasies, that are pressuring me with being ahead of myself.
I have been told, perhaps in one of the most desperate nightmares, and I am telling it as a shameful
confession, that I am an abundant words user and abuser, that I spit, in fact, like a snake. I am both
preoccupied and thrilled by the metaphor. I viscerally feel the correlation between words and mute
substances. They can produce a hiss, a hum, a click ..as a byproduct, an ancillary consequence of
their happening.. nothing more. And although I have some appreciation for the emissive act, if in
the form of a secretion of sorts, I believe such charges are just unfair and pathetic. I am certainly
producing some rumors, a noise that every machine produces, premises of their existence, those
stealthy buzzes that distress your night and penetrate into your dreams.
Would you then say that a machine is speaking? Or rather, would you really say so in a literal way?
But when a machine is working, with all the consequent auditory amenities, what a machine is
trying to say at all? Silence is a more honest word to describe the rumors around and about me,
allegedly produced by me, an allegation definitely proven wrong. However, unexpectedly, I rejoice
of such charges. There is not a single instant in which I get to touch the limit pushing myself close,
so close, to utterances. It’s a rather enjoyable time-killer, to linger so close to be blatant, to tell a
name, my name, to locate oneself within the reach of communication, to inform, to make up one’s
mind breaking the cycle of mute signification and assigning a word to a sound, a thought to a word,
a sequence of phonemes to clarity, continuity, intelligibility..
Yet, although it would certainly be an enormous narrative advancement for some, there is not, as far
as me, even an outside to where heading sounds to. Or rather, the room I am inhabiting, adorned
with querulous images, does not possess the luxury of operating on the assumption that meaning is
correlated with a form of communication and what are, according to it, the rules of a possible
affirmation. As if, once the word incredibly forces its way through the larynx, getting proximal to
the soft portal of the lips, a recoil, the nature of which it is unknown to me, would immediately,
almost ahead of time, timely ready, suffocate the voice by absence and the human by voice. How
subtle an alien element can invade intimately a host, stealthly brushing the tissues that I jealously
conceal and, most importantly, making itself derisively yet thoroughly, firmly perceived as some
sort of spectral intrusion, hyper-wrongly addressed within the released voice, the unknown of the
voice! An ephemeral earworm digging holes within the structure of the voice and sentences, erratic
yet precise, as if it were excavating a secret glyph. So.. what else is the voice even saying? Is it
perhaps addressing a mystery, something buried somewhere that, because I speak, I must find. An
instruction, an example, the definition of how I ought to look, the original or final form…
I wonder about the mechanics behind the silencing by the voice. Is it because of the encounter
between two alien instances that cannot carry their intimate purpose to actualization? Or perhaps
due to the nature of utterances that, once the silence is vibrantly felt, are capitalized inside the
mouth as in a rare casket, lips sewn with crossing stitches: it might feel like a frightening spectacle,
a terrifying and worrisome captivity.. actually, nothing other that what lies encrypted on a treasure
map under a pensive cross. The X, the ache as such, the fate, the thing that places two directions on
a cross, so deliciously disguised as a task, an identity, power. Getting ultimately stuck in the midst,
the definitive con, the X takes over the map. X, great attractor of the kind of apples, of bodies-that-
lie-down… When the recoil grows backward, a novel sensation is given. The X of the voice, the
silent voice outside the voice, a silencer, an ultimate target.