Katya, I fell for a skyscraper.

It’s already five hundred years now that a perfect Venus has been lying at the centre of the canvas, intertwining the wine-making prairies of Tuscany with divine design—the pin-prick of the artist who has so harmoniously constructed existence. And everything in this is perfect, only there is some trifle missing, some crumb, some blood, a column on which to elevate human greatness before nature—Burj-Khalifa.

Baroque curls, snakeskin shoes, the grace of the voice of an opera singer—things of such vulgarity that, if they solicit feeling at all, then only unappeasable disgust towards the culture of consumerism as such.

Velazquez, El Greco—dark veils of religion, the smears of Manet, Monet —nausea, the same for Boucher, Bouguereau—saccharine corpulence on the water, Warhol—the inundation of design, there also on the shelf are Pollock, Malevich, and Rothko, and all the others, da Vinci, Raphael, Picasso, and Dali, Courbet, Schiele, Hockney, all standing firmly on the souvenir stand.

And all the same all the avant-garde—respite for the sore eyes of man from man, to look upon man and not just man has become impossible, in particular, still lives and landscapes are intolerable—the words themselves trigger a gag reflex, and if we don’t want to notice this, then they will notice it for us, the curators, carefully extracting the rubbish of past eras from the torture chamber of the museum.

In these words there is no condemnation, only prognostication on the day of tomorrow. Aesthetics is not at all an empty word, irony smelting idols into circulation—it is total oblivion, the coming new barbarism of the hydrogen bomb, fettered in neural networks.

The culture of appropriation and annexation—a fact that has already taken place, at first we did it ourselves, now we have solicitously passed all our rights to artificial intellect and unbeknownst to ourselves substituted ethics. Lenin’s revolution is taking place now, it is now that the seeds set in the soil so long ago are growing, fertilised by war and triumphant victory over reason.

Ethics has at last been inscribed into the black square—the presence of the utmost absence, that is, chaotic interbreeding of forms of reality, everything resides in confusion, the lows and the highs are so tightly intertwined that only rare rays reach beyond the limits of a great black hole. At the same time as simulacra and surrogate thoughts are unendingly born, copies, doubles—sham shadows of things re-covering a lacklustre light, and this in an impassable cave.

The invasion of squares is akin to the plagues of Egypt, and there is no media in which infinite duplicates of things have not multiplied, veiling their theft under a mask of substituted citation. And so behind the sweetness of a skilfully selected copy hides the poison of deadly connivance. To abandon the mansion of reason and put one’s past up for sale to another—and consequently one’s future.

And yet, Katya, why did I fall for the skyscraper? Because it is impossible to stand anything else, a perfect sunset, a blessed prostitute, or an another pyramid of skulls, recalling death, and conversations about death, and conversations about conversations about death—all to waste. Apophaticism has turned into an instrument of pressure, the academy has become a backward civilisation.

The skyscraper is the loftiest manifestation of foulness, the worst construction of mankind, the Tower of Babel—homogenisation, urbanisation of boring uniformity and not to mention the architecture of the phallus—the essence of the phenomenon of the new god, woven from leaves of metal.

Orpheus will sooner or later turn around and see his Eurydice. The better the sooner we scrutinise the colossus that follows blind humanity with commandant tread.

But how are we to scrutinise that which doesn’t exist, where is that bridge and that place, where the gaze of each can converge and find a common subject of dialogue.

At some time, let’s say, during the Renaissance, it was Christ, later communism and mechanisms, machines, the cosmos—but today, when it is impossible to look at anything? When all the fundaments have been shattered, betrayed, the final rubicon. To scrutinise the reflection of the epoch: the line, volume, relentless logic—the square is the quintessence of nothing.

Thomas Mann Ganno draws a line, cutting himself off from the genealogical tree, not from family, but from Adam and Eve, from Copernicus, Descartes, Aristotle, and yes also from Bohr, Joyce, Lamar, from everything and everyone.

Back to things! Back to language, to the word! This is not the sanctimonious cry of a conservative, but a return to the first foundations and principles of civilisation. Luddites burned the machines for fear for their work, attaining only a comic panegyric on the pages of a history textbook, but today’s Luddite is one who care freely gives themselves to the mechanism, becoming a screw in thoughtless consumption. To discern the text, to hear the craft of deception, to make clear the fragile DNA of history is the only chance of not resisting the new reason, but of existing, continuing the time of humanity for some one hundred and twenty years or so. This is not a struggle for the future, this is a fight for survival and perhaps sometime someone better than us will propose something better.