Notes from the Crawl Room: A Collection of Philosophical Horrors

193 Pages·2021·1.319 MB·English

by  A.M. Moskovitz

Notes From the
Crawl Room
i
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ii
Notes From the
Crawl Room
A Collection of
Philosophical Horrors
A.M. Moskovitz
iii
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iv
Contents
Introductory Essay: Uroborotic Horror
by Susan K. Lang 1
Th e Ring of Gyges 7
Cousin Vincent 15
By which we learn that “Snow is white” 29
Empty Man I: Th e German Logician (1902) 39
Th e Gravesend Institute 45
A Response to C.D. Baird’s Reading of the Pitwell
Phenomenon 55
Empty Man II: Th eodore (1999) 69
Bare Substrata 75
such brittle bodies 83
Empty Man III: Marcia (2010) 95
Th e Locked Room 101
Campus Rumpus I–IV 109
Th e Master’s Delight 121
v
vi Contents
Cloakroom, 1984 131
Empty Man IV: Abbie (2018) 143
Mycorrhizae 149
A Manifesto for Horror As Critique of Analytic
Philosophy 157
Appendix I: Recurring Characters 163
Appendix II: Quotations 165
Select Bibliography 175
Acknowledgements 179
Credits 183
In 2018, these seventeen short stories were found in a desk drawer in the
former offi ce of Dr A.M. Moskovitz. Th ey are collected here for the fi rst
time. All characters and events in this publication, other than those
clearly in the public domain, are fi ctitious and any resemblance to real
persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Nevertheless, the following
pages contain references to violences, both institutional and
interpersonal, so readers are advised to continue with caution.
Introductory Essay:
Uroborotic Horror
By Susan K. Lang
I must admit to being slightly surprised when I was fi rst asked to write
an introduction for this compendium, since Moskovitz’s academic
background in analytic metaphysics lies several leagues from my own,
in psychoanalysis. I knew something of his story, but few of the details.
Nonetheless, I agreed to look at the submitted manuscript. I sat at my
kitchen table and leafed through the pages – and the more I read, the
more I found myself turning away. I was repulsed by the content of
the stories, their form and – yes – by what little I knew of their genesis.
Th ere was something interesting in this repulsion, however; it came
from somewhere obscure within me.
Readers may be tempted to fi nd in these peculiar texts some
foreshadowing of the incidents for which the author later became
known. For present purposes, it will be helpful to bracket off the
reports of the fi res, the collapses, the disappearances (which were
anyway well-documented, online and off ). Better, I think, to try and
1
2 Notes From the Crawl Room
understand the conditions that produced these writings as they were
written (an activity we can engage in without fear of legal reprisals).
Th is project leads me back, as all my research eventually does, to the
concept of the uroboros and what I have called the “uroborotic
subject”.
Th e uroboros or ouroboros is an ancient Egyptian symbol depicting
a serpent engaged in the act of self-consumption, the consumption of
its own tail. Th e earliest instances of this motif appear in the E nigmatic
Book of the Netherworld found in the desecrated tomb of Tutankhamun,
and date from the fourteenth century BCE. Th is millennia-old token
is taken to symbolise variously: eternal cyclic renewal, the circle of
life, and the transmigration of souls. For the Jungians it is the basic
mandala of alchemy or, sometimes, a representation of the pre-ego
“dawn state”, depicting the undiff erentiated experience of the infant.
In my own work, I have found it productive in relation to psychoses of
self-reference. Th e uroborotic subject is horrifi ed by their own
subjectivity, their agency and – at a more schematic level – by circular
reasoning, the infi nite and the paradoxical. Th e stories collected in
this compendium are all, in their diff erent ways, encircled by this
logic.
Uroborotic horrors sometimes manifest in anxieties around
architecture. Reading Moskovitz’s work, I was reminded of the case of
one “Michael P.”, who alongside other neuroses exhibited a peculiar
form of nominal inversion. During our sessions together, I found he
frequently confused the architectural and the organic; he would refer
to walls as “skin” and eyes as “windows”. He complained that he could
not “fi nd a way out”, except sometimes by way of a set of “stairs” which
led, alternately, “nowhere” or “all the way down”.
In classic psychoanalytic theory, the building oft en stands as a
cipher for the subject’s body. Basements are the bowels, where the
unconscious trauma sits and frets. Th e attic is the head, the space of
Introductory Essay: Uroborotic Horror 3
reasons – a place of special horror for anyone trained in analytic
philosophy. As the author comments, the ivory tower is “carved from
bone and body-parts”. Th e boiler-room, meanwhile, is the heart, where
the “canker sits”; it is the centre of the circulatory system which pumps
poisoned blood and other toxins around the body via a network of
corridors, stairs and chimney fl ues. Th is conceptual intertwining of
organic and architectural bodies, which I saw with Michael P., is made
explicit in this collection (e.g. “Th e Gravesend Institute”). Th ere is
no obvious anus here – and that, again, is a distinctive feature of
uroborotic symbology.
Like Michael P., Moskovitz’s characters fi nd themselves trapped
within architectural bodies. Th ey fear embodiment. Th ey are horrifi ed
by their physicality and take great pains to disassociate from it. In
doing so they simultaneously reassert their bodily presence. Th is is
the dualist’s nightmare. Th ey are running from their ability to run (the
horror is compounded). Th ey are the corridor down which they are
themselves pursued.
Uroborotic logic also explains the author’s neurotic engagement
with language. In 2006, I treated a graduate student, “Rebecca S.”, who
came to me to discuss her “writer’s block”. Th e block in question was
of an unusual kind; she would only ever write in negations. She would
compose, oft en in quite beautiful, elegiac prose, the precise opposite
of what she actually believed. Likewise, the characters here (and the
author himself) seem drawn to un-write what they have written.
Th ese texts turn in on themselves, revile themselves, and possess
interminable contradictions. Th e author attempts to distance himself
from these cycles through processes of ventriloquism and the use of
pseudonyms (Benedict March, Cousin Vincent and Susan K. Lang).
Sitting at my kitchen table, I remembered the conversations with
my partner about the various apocrypha circulating around these
texts. Moskovitz was said to have written them in a dream state or