by Patrick Zaia.

In a pivotal scene from William Faulkner’s novel Requiem for a Nun, an experimental sequel to his notorious potboiler Sanctuary, the character Gavin Stevens cuttingly remarks to an evasive Temple Drake: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Despite issuing from a relatively marginal work in his otherwise remarkable oeuvre, this aphoristic statement vividly encapsulates the central theme underlying Faulkner’s grand, apocalyptic vision: that human consciousness is inexorably shaped by the non-linear passage of time, wherein the spirits of the past hauntingly intermingle and play out within the undulating landscape of the present. As Faulkner’s fiction routinely details, the effect this has on the mechanics of human thought and perception is often disorientating and maddening, resulting in a violently torn, splintered and paranoid subjectivity—what Faulkner himself vividly described as “the human heart in conflict with itself.” Yet within the psychic lacerations that savagely mark his characters, we can glimpse the dark romanticism that brutally throbs at the core of Faulkner’s work: the twisted and ultimately tragic nature of humanity’s enduring search for purpose and transcendence within a cold and fundamentally unstable universe.
        Today, as enlightened liberal subjects who exist in a thoroughly technological and secular environment, we are perhaps poised to dismiss Faulkner’s discomforting insights as archaic or outmoded concerns of a past that no longer applies. But as the course of the 21st century has shown so far, the past does not die, and in the wake of the alienation, confusion and malaise engendered by our current social conditions, the ghosts and myths of eras gone by have reemerged to disrupt and challenge the established order. Indeed, whether we choose to accept or ignore it, we are still entangled in the spectral webs of history.
        Peculiarly, however, contemporary artists and writers appear unwilling or unable to properly address this in an artistic context. Even when an attempt is made to broach the subject, the result is often a disappointingly reductive and cliché-ridden reinforcement of the hollow ideals espoused by major institutions and corporations alike. Felix McNamara’s Atrocities is a notable exception to this.
        Published by Hyperidean Press, Atrocities is a contemporary work of experimental poetry and prose. Taking place between the years 1994 and 2024, Atrocities moves irregularly through the “incoherent rubble” of the so-called end of history, in which “art, faith, and paranoia unite in comedic rebellion against contemporary culture”. The result is a fractured and mosaic-like portrait of our present era, weaving together a turbulent assortment of artists, writers, politicians, murderers, television shows, political thinkers, terrorists, mystics and videogames into a kaleidoscopic, Bosch-like tapestry. As in Faulkner’s work, history is reconceived as a cyclonic mesh of intensities, whirling and spiralling, contracting and expanding, non-linearly across time and space. Like the co-mingling of the high and low, along with the real and the imagined, the past and the present are engaged in a tense and baffling dynamic.
        While seemingly disjointed and confused on the surface, McNamara marshals this motley collection into an array of linkages and dialogues: the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin analyses the opposing animation styles of South Park and Beavis and Butt-Head; Steve Bannon, Antonin Artaud, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Michel Houellebecq engage in conversation over a game of golf; Michael Alig and Varg Vikernes are paired as Pagan Priests; William Blake speaks to both Tucker Carlson and Norm Macdonald; and Mike Kelley, David Lynch and Marvin Heemeyer are interviewed on Oprah. While indubitably comical, these absurd scenarios and couplings unearth a deep sense of rage and disgust at the sterile vacuousness of the contemporary world shared amongst this eccentric crew. Moreover, within the framework of Atrocities, they are emblematic of a rebellious alternative to the bland utilitarianism and meaninglessness of contemporary culture, whether that be through religion, esotericism, violence, aesthetics or art.
        To this point, Atrocities opens with a tortured and despondent view of the 21st century thus far, memorably termed, later in the text, “the tyranny of Fukuyama”. In this section, the poem fiercely describes the depressingly inert and monotonous state of the world, its worthless reduction to a series of flimsy categories and tags, and the coddled, self-interested infants who revel in the crude spectacles left at history’s end:

“All said before, characteristic – 

Of dead history, Post- this and that,

Post-all kinds of twats, miserably,

Needing to label, everything,

Needs its brand apparently, needs its

Demarcation, against what, same stuff,

More or less, schizoid toddler lost in time,

Needs rescuing from what, from freedom,

That thing that was sold to itself as freedom,”

The “schizoid toddler” caustically referred to here develops later into the dreaded, greasy face of contemporary technological liberalism: the Nerd. With a biting and punkish sneer, McNamara venomously describes this pathetic figure thus:

“Man of today,

Gross little nerd,

Regardless of belief he betrays always,

the basis of anything we’d ever call a principle.

He knows nothing of principle,

Integrity is a word he’s not even the minor of,

Understanding of,

For inside him is impasse –

Amoral oils grease machinery churning envy with pride,

Nihilism is his slur for anything close to meaning,

To art, that thing he hates,

Those oils paint no masterworks,

His culture is sewerage,”

The Nerd archetype serves as a concentrated expression of a thoroughly nihilistic and philistine culture. Its art is suspect, its eroticism is digitised, its sentimentality a sign of weakness, and its narcissism supreme. Atrocities relays this with a sharpened sense of musicality and rhythm that adds a poisonous, confrontational swagger to its pronouncements; it almost feels as though the poem is spitting these lines at the reader, teeth bared and spoiling for a fight. Yet, while this scathing assessment is undoubtedly accurate and satisfyingly cruel, the angst-stricken tenor of the poem transmogrifies in later sections, blooming into an almost optimistic register. This surprising tonal shift signifies the deeper artistic aspirations of Atrocities and elevates it beyond mere cultural indictment.
        We get a sense of this when the poem introduces the trope of the episcopus vagans into its contents. Loosely translated as ‘wandering bishop’, the term was used pejoratively against bishops who operated independently and without proper institutional appointment from any major religious organisation. Atrocities adopts the episcopus vagans label and applies it to several mercurial intellectual and artistic figures of today. Using poet and artist William Blake as the primary model, Atrocities sees Michel Houellebecq, David Lynch, Norm Macdonald, Mike Kelley, Sarah Kane and Tucker Carlson (to name a few) as modern-day episcopi vagantes, in that they defiantly strayed from the mainstream—along with abandoning its attendant institutions, ideological tenets and political binaries, in the name of some visionary quest for truth, redemption and authenticity.
        In addition to fuelling Atrocities’ bizarre humour, the chaotic diversity of this grouping demonstrates the long-standing nature of this existentialist search and the mutant forms it has taken throughout history. From William Blake’s lone, romantic mysticism to Tucker Carlson’s hyper-mediated political commentary, the underlying impulse animating these subjects remains the same, forged by a visceral feeling of alienation and misalignment. Regardless of how one perceives these figures and their potentially dubious motivations, they all tap into a perennial undercurrent of angst, distrust, and outsiderdom. Moreover, despite their vast differences and contradictory allegiances, the anxieties and insights expressed by this disparate gathering unexpectedly coalesce in a communal desire to cultivate an aesthetic and spiritual consciousness that transcends the staid business-ontology mindset of the contemporary. At one point, Mike Kelley defends the purposelessness of art and its need to be regarded as a separate entity; Tucker Carlson ruminates on the demoralising effect of the office cube and the lack of beauty in contemporary architecture; and David Lynch describes a unified field of pure consciousness which constitutes the wellspring of both mind and matter. By threading these divergent yet interconnected musings together, McNamara underscores Atrocities’ main assertion: that beneath the sterile, corporatised surface of the 21st century, the primeval desire for transcendence through art and aesthetics remains unyielding.
        Thankfully, Atrocities never outwardly declares this as its mission. Despite its combativeness, the poem is highly impressionistic and possesses a hypnotic dream-like quality, wherein the pop cultural figures and events revolving throughout the text appear like spectres, mythic beings or psychic projections. The strange, digitised drawings and prints that accompany the poem further enhance its ghostly atmosphere, suggesting by their strained linework and degraded black-and-white colouring a distinctly post-apocalyptic aura. Indeed, this sense of apocalypse and potential rebirth becomes increasingly clear towards the poem’s end.
        Via a series of bizarre dialogues and associations centred on the topic of ape violence, the poem unveils the haunting presence of an ape-like demon once banished by William Blake. Beginning with Tucker Carlson recounting his experience of being mauled by an evil spirit, the poem interweaves Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, Ciceronian scholar William McDermott’s essay ‘The Ape in Roman Literature’, and Charla Nash’s interview with Oprah (to name only a few references) to form a transhistorical portrait of this mutable demon. All this terminates in Jeffrey Epstein being dragged down to the fiery pits of Pandemonium by a “demon monkey-rat” which has crawled out of his prison cell toilet. The exact meaning of this remains ambiguous. Is the reemergence of the ape-demon a sign of an impending apocalypse, of inevitable civilisational collapse? Or is this entity the psychic manifestation of a renewed poetic spirit issued from Goethe’s “independent second world” of art, where the morals and considerations of the everyday no longer apply? Or perhaps, more thrillingly, the ape-demon signifies the interpenetration of these two seemingly opposite impulses, constituting what may well be the end of the end of history.
        For all its bite and snarl, a twisted breed of optimism squirms within Atrocities’ rippling cascade of associations and citations. While at times disturbing and bewildering, what the poem so vividly portrays is a will to salvage and rebuild a cultural consciousness out of the dying embers of the contemporary, which smoulder and burn with furious, untapped artistic and metaphysical qualities previously thought dead. The effect is mythic and incantatory, without devolving into nostalgia. Whether we like it or not, the webs of history continue to spin, spooling and coiling threads of the past into our knotted present, manifesting an array of mutant recurrences and beguiling fusions across the political, social, religious and artistic spectrum. While some shriek in horror at the monsters this may bear, and shrilly gesture to the lacerations this could inflict, Atrocities reckons with this chaos, locating within it the potential to usher in a revitalised artistic and cultural spirit.