Here I sit in my Compacty Blacky's (black version of tighty whiteys, you're welcome), last night's sweat breeding a gummy, urine-colored layer of film over my body. I must have rolled around a lot in fevered dream convulsions, and I also happened to finish New Juche's slim book before bed. It feels apt that my body appears to have come to blows with venereal phantoms throughout the night, since
Mountainhead is a hypersexual masterpiece of venomous propulsion.
It is part autofiction, travelogue, memoir, incantation, and exorcism. A journal of a man I grew to fear and respect, full of prose so vivid I could feel the soil of Southeast Asia clogging my veins. There are pictures, as well, to help orient you. Juche explores this landscape not as an expat or an observer, he inserts himself primordially, assimilating with orifices of the living and the dead. Trees, animals, mushrooms, and prostitutes.
New Juche is exploring this humid continent as a deviant despot, but one with a Freudian compassion and beautiful lack of control. A lack of control only for the sensual bounds that most humans don't even attempt to explore. In a normal person-to-person transactional sense, Juche is a blessed, if frenzied compatriot.
Pod and I not only tolerated, but derived a curious pleasure from washing Martin's exhausted body and laying it down carefully on his cot...We would fold his leathery wings behind him in silence...Martin's skin would become damp, and then cursed with a froth of creamy soap...which fell away like scales...I was especially gentle and respectful with the papery skin that covered his thighs, and the wooden, vegetable quality of his kneecaps...When Martin is dead, I thought, we'll roll dice made from his kneecaps.
In ascending the mountain with Juche, I had the youthful urge many times to drop the job, the fiancee, the cats, walk the earth like Jules and assimilate with foreign and dangerous fauna. This is a dangerous book if you are of a certain constitution that flirts with arrested development and nihilism. Juche slowly expatriates himself from humanity and I am not certain what he found on the mountain, even though he narrates his journey exquisitely, because this is literature so personal and fevered that I came to tears. All while Juche
came on the world, jism as a sort of language, as if his penis was constantly mourning.
I nuzzle and rub my face in the mud as a passionate apology and feel blood pump sparingly but steadily into my penis, not because of the soil or the rain, or the sensation of it on my face and eyes or in my mouth, but out of the satisfaction I derive from my virtuoso gesture of sensitive capitulation. And then there is that visceral spasm that my language has yet to capture, that draws from the liberation attained through abject behavior, and the Great Warm Ecstasy that one feels absolutely beside one in these moments (do you know these moments?), like a giant bubble that could be leapt into, but only ever recedes like the object of desire in a dream. And you'll agree that my harmony is the touchstone, my attribute, and that the danger and hunger I bravely endure are real and necessary, and have qualified my ascension.
This might even be a harmful book for young, explorative minds. If I had read this in my teens, I might've continued on the path of pain that I eventually veered from before it was too late. But then again, what options do Generation Z, or whatever they are called, have? The sacred is evaporating, burning up, empty overgrown tracts to fornicate upon (mentally or otherwise) are
peopled and
walled in. We ain't in Walden anymore.
New Juche is buttressed in extinction, and I imagine he will die there before the Main Event, crying and smiling and masturbating as it all burns away in front of his eyes. He seems to be alive and well right now, and I need more.
