Published 2023.11.01
ARI & RES ARNAUD
EIGHTH MONTH
EIGHTH DAY
TWO THOUSAND TWENTY SECOND YEAR
Autism @ariarnaud
Attention haters:
@realresjino is the most sensitive individual you know
She is not cold hearted
She uses the 🥺 emoji in texts if I leave the room for more than 5 minutes
Let this change your view
5:00PM • MySpace
An extraordinary claim has to be exemplified. That is an absolute certainty. To win an argument a well-reasoned, thorough response will not surface. The exact purpose of conflict is contravention and a subsequence of embarrassment and a reduction in the target's standing. Victory is an ideal. This is why victory and war are mutually exclusive concepts - war is a feudal plot, war is a bank, war is a popup economy that seeks to strength the exploitation of land resources, from which are extracted precious minerals and total pastoral propriety. The true prisoner of war is the farm animal and whichever plot of forestland has been taken by history and fossilized to become coal. There is nothing human about control. Psychology stands in the way of control because control is the removal of anything exterior that can wake up one day and become indignant. This is not that. This presentation is necessitated not because I seek to gain leverage, or make the permanence of land new via claims of right but because Darling is a woman I am enchanted with and her behaviors laurel me absolutely. I adore her, my exterior, my finnicky, my sometimes futile. "Sweetheart come back to bed please i have a disease that makes my eyes hurt if i have you out of my field of vision for more than 5 minutes 🥺"
Love is not an economy. The asset is imagined but the held hand is felt. To make permanence new is not to restart it but to reasonably conceive that one day, should you succeed in sustained removal of the exterior, and should objection from any other organs of your standing not arise (or should those organs be dealt with as the dissenting exteriors they are), there will begin the building of plants for processing and there shall be established a monomanic monolith of agreement that is only you that for the time being can handle the resources, and then it will be conceived and promised but not necessarily delivered on that you will be the sole operator of the lever frame with which will derail the carts of freight onto the path of the newly decided, developing and indeed still fragile neophyte linearity. Love boils. The promise is a total infatuation which envelops nothing in the way of land but envelops everything in the way of seeing the prospects of land. The economy is a red underline. Love is a lighthouse beam that replaces the sun. The economy does not build the lighthouse, the economy promises that in time the laws of physics will be restored and the transgression of a searchlight existing before an emitter will be internalized. The emperor has no clothes and the lighthouse keeper is sane on dry land. Res Jino, or Res Arnaud as she is known in matrimony, is very cute and I would like to come back to bed with her very much. In this particular case, I construct a response thusly: "Sure because I have a disease that literally makes me freeze to death if I'm not in your arms", an ultimate truth having to do with the absolute demand of my regulatory organs for an exterior source of heat to mirror and build pipelines from. Why do metaphors fall apart when you exit the humanitarian and enter the anthropophantasmical?
The Large Bitch Collider @realresjino
Replying to @ariarnaud
Ok i was going to tell my followers about how clingy and affectionate you are but i stopped when i realized we would write something longer than the bible arguing in the replies which is why i love you
5:03PM • Twitter for Science Babies
To this day I still think that love governs all sense of meaning and connection in the entire world, which I understand is cheerful insanity, but I refuse to back down, no matter what anyone says, for I would describe the root of all melancholy as a lack of love, a bottomless pit which is paradoxically able to be filled readily. The immediacy of the pit tempts us to fall in, the rocky crags tempting us to impale ourselves, but here's what I have done to the contrary: I have filled it all the way up with discarded weapons and ammunition taken from enemies knocked unconscious, which gives me an infinite, enviable supply of love that goes exclusively to the only woman in the world who is allowed to call me 'darling' without ending up impaled, be it verbally or physically so. Ari Arnaud and I still don't quite know what to think of how we got to this point - there are an unknown number of dead bodies haphazardly tossed into this metaphorical pit after all - but we have learned more about each other than modern medicine knows about human physiology. I have discovered that Ari has a penchant for playing the drums and considers herself a multi-instrumentalist due to the intense mathematicality of percussion instruments, the ratios of their rhythms creating abstracted harmonies on levels not governed exclusively by progressions of pitch. She has told me, "Darling, give me a moment while I slice you into mincemeat pieces with a blade so thin you will immediately be pieced back together without any permanent harm inflicted upon you, especially given your immortal human phenotype," before doing so as promised and allowing my body to suture back up within mere seconds, unnoticed except for the statement and a slight pang of pain in slicing arcs. She is the only person alive who can make an affectionate threat on my life, for I can see the love in every motion she makes. Furthermore, I show her my devotion every day when I wake up next to her and tell her something crazy, like "The sun belongs to us now," in complete seriousness. She introduced me to a love I once reckoned impossible, an unbreakable love, a love between women, and I live it every day. This was never an exchange of emotional support; it was an unrestricted sharing in the beauty of being.
Once Ari Arnaud's sister beat my ass and I let it happen because I didn't care and I still don't care. Never did care, to be completely honest. To specify the sister, knowing the existence of both Rico Eisenberg and Orpheus Augustenburg, this is Rico we're talking about. I wonder what she's even doing nowadays, if anything, but I find myself at this exact moment at the Chateau d'Arnaud, nowhere else. I am not among the rare breed of immortals who can exist in a superposition. Given that no one's seen any of them in any of their two simultaneous positions in however long, they have likely hidden away somewhere in this vast place, Liminality, unavailable at the Chateau d'Arnaud most certainly, but that's not what I'm here to discuss. Instead, this is a story about Ari, a few fragments regarding her.
Ari Arnaud once sent me a series of texts describing how she had just planned for her own birthday. She had awaited her now-wife's falling-asleep with an eagerness to play a little trick and to upset the order of things ever so slightly. The plan, roughly as described, was as follows: Res Arnaud - then Res Jino - would wake up to find herself severed from the passage of time, but not by any magical means. For the stopping of time is strictly forbidden by every known code of ethics pertaining to magic, the windows of the bordering-on-penthouse apartment would restrict all shafts of any natural or artificial light from entering from the outside. Ari would hide each and every clock, watch, cellphone, or other timepiece, having already prevented every object in the from acting as a crude sundial, and she would let Res rest for too long, telling me that she generally does so without Ari or an alarm to rouse her from her sleep. Devoid of time or date, Res then unknowingly awakened a couple hours late, remarking that she had overslept while Ari repeatedly declined to mention anything about the true time at any available opportunity, as I heard. She then began to wonder if she had awakened in the middle of the night, only to find opening a window to ascertain the situation impossible, for they had been glued shut. "Ari, I am not paying the outstanding damage fee for this," Res remarked, with a hint of playfulness in her voice. "I'll give them one grand extra apiece for their trouble," Ari replied, on equal terms. The trick was only ever revealed when Res wondered where her phone was; Ari handed it back to her to reveal that it was indeed her birthday and Res had been too caught up in the mystery Ari had created for her, whereupon there was a great kiss.
I wouldn't say Auxe Ende cost me any hopes of a good childhood, I don't think she would even be aware, but perhaps her relation to Meio Ende really did me in.
Our daughters and their origins - their provenance, if you will - have something of a troubled history, but we have done our best to raise them as proudly as possible, without concealing them from the world except when the world wants to know too much. My affection for them is indescribable, even if the maternal instinct comes far from naturally and I will often awaken to see one of them standing upside-down from the ceiling without knowing if she glued herself there or if she's put to use some form of magic we haven't yet even bothered teaching her. There are occasions when we go impromptu hunting with them for everything from edible mushrooms to fully-grown bears, and mark my words, we always come back with at least something, even if that means staking out for a day. "Violet wants parboiled fly agaric and raw elderberries for lunch and dinner so she can experience the misery of the Germanic peoples firsthand!" I waver back and forth on whether Ari taught her that one because, while Ari has something far more than a grudge against the Germanic peoples, but I could've sworn she was at least a little partial to Sweden. This, therefore, must've been a new development on my daughter's part. "Haaaaa, Bela tires from the exertion of sitting still. Bela must rest by sprinting ten laps around the estate and passing out in an unknown location." "Violet will join Bela and reap the benefits of frequent exercise!" This is a day in the Arnaud household, what we as mothers see in the children we agreed to have six years ago.
Violet and Bela are names we did not decide for them; the negotiations with Bathys - or I suppose I could get away with saying 'my mother-in-law'...well, I probably couldn't - were what led to the nonetheless arbitrary conclusion that those ought to be their names. For Ari and I to have chosen the names would've led to an entire page's worth of additional middle names, all intensely symbolic and relating to some aspect of either our lives or our hopes for our children's, compounded into one another for each daughter, something which would've proven so inconvenient we wished not to curse our offspring and instead allowed Bathys to take up duties that definitely should've been ours, had we been any better at making anything at all truly practical. I anxiously await the day when they will ask me where their names came from and I will inevitably have to refer them to their near-perpetually dour cyan grandmother. I'm sure Bathys would give a straightforward answer, but I wouldn't be surprised were it something along the lines of "I bestowed the name of Bela upon you, for your face as an infant was reminiscent of that of a combat nurse I unceremoniously assassinated on the battlefield in 1815, the year I met my wife, but not the one to whom you're related; it just felt proper," although I know that that's completely wrong and chances are the answer is far more convoluted than I as a mere human being - even if an immortal one - could ever imagine. Is the question to be asked, I will ensure the presence of much family to provide necessary context if needed, and I'm sure Ari would agree with me on this.
Now, though, for the troubled history. Whiplash: the time I have spent with my daughters and with my wife has in turn brought me nothing but happiness, but I can't help but feel a sense of sorrow knowing what they experienced in the six years between their birth and when we finally obtained custody of them, shortly after firing lead through one another's crania amidst a burning building in a ritual false suicide and awakening, myself scarred with burns and deathly sore, in the master bedroom of the Chateau d'Arnaud we had worked so hard to build in whatever time we could get. Where were the children before this moment, the exact time of Bureau Hotel's end, once we had achieved power and promptly melted that power down? Here you are. The broken, hitherto all-but-empty household of The Evil, the one whose sentences all begin with 'I' and the one who prolonged the horrors of my childhood and adolescence from afar, took up our daughters and provided them with far too little, allowing my dears to suffer in understimulation and two-room captivity, something I have discussed with them only on occasion thus far and only with tears in their eyes. I am still trying to assemble the details into a complete picture to determine what Ari and I need to give them as their mothers to ensure that they transcend these great sorrows and always grow in a wealth of experience no matter what, but everything still stands. That we were unsuccessful for over half a decade in retrieving them despite our best efforts still plagues me, yet still, I can sleep soundly. Forward motion keeps me sane after all, and love is the law. This is what I know.
Perhaps this is unbiographable, it is for myself to decide later, but. It is always some but. There had been a short period wherein the two of our children, twins fraternal, had been in our custody before my second staged suicide in six years (one only written about as an escape route from an identity retired). It is in the soul-eroding, soul-captive city of Den Haag, where we had retired for two years after something unspeakable, and in the second year, Anno Domini MMXXI, we unceremoniously were brought our children temporarily seized from The Evil. There existed an uneasy game of rope tugged between Eris Augustenburg and Veiksme Eisenberg and The Evil, where Eris, upon meeting Monei, crumpled them up into but a discarded paper airplane and Monei pretended to be senile and unknowing of where they were, perhaps an impression of frequent client Goni Jino. Den Haag is a city fine enough to reside in. It is a rather unpleasant city to find yourself alone in however, after myself had regained temporarily to the ability to dream without every horrible thing ever infracted onto me rendered in a play by play, and in the midst of my temporary lap of somnolence the children had grown hungry, and desired something or other to eat. Darling, my wife, my treasure, is woefully Americanized. The Netherlands, unlike Asmundo France, was only partially uninfiltrated by Bureau and had accepted some cultural imports, such as a Seven-Eleven in Amsterdam, a city that Darling and the children had boarded a plane to, exclusively to acquire gas station quality sushi, donuts, pepperoni pizza (fatwa-worthy, but I forgive as Allah forgives) and some deep orange or deep purple brew of carbonated caffeine. Darling, as she later told me, had not bothered waking me, as she considered it too precious that I finally can rest after only sleeping in ninety minute intervals and having to be woken by Darling chewing my hair in my sleep, or hesitantly slapping me and met with piercing, beastly eyes, hollow with misanthropy and misphantasmia (the hatred of the magical?), until the smoothed, singular expression adorning my face at most times emerged: a smile of low, severely low legibility. In this time, I had woken by myself, in fight or flight, jumping out of bed at a perfect ninety-degree angle, crucified with nothing binding into motion, running a one woman search party across the entire estate, running rampant and rabid, and not bothering to look at my cellphone, having been confident for the two minutes of absential abreaction that something had occurred to those three, and it had to have been awful. Please imagine then the relief of myself as I checked my cellphone and saw a video of a full two minutes in length wherein Darling attempted to summarize the history of making sushi, inevitably triggering immediate demands for a taste of funazushi, the near-extinct, dynastically maintained fermented archaic form, the fish aged in salt for over a year. Upon Darling helpfully informing the two children that this is often made with wild goldfish, the twins had concocted a scheme to rob pet stores for goldfish in the pursuit of liberation, release them into streams (likely disrupting ecosystems, as Darling valiantly protested), and then fish them back out... and then realize we will have to hire a chef to attempt to turn the miniature, still life goldfish into the dish of authentic provenance. This would require an interpreter. Shiso Tengoku? That is a name of non-concern at this point.
I decided to stay back, knowing that for the moment no subterfuge occurred, and that Darling can hold her own on the battlefield of rearing, and knowing that I despise planes. It is not aerial sickness. I just consider their safety and elegance reprehensible. A many-ton machine that can stay aloft, made with specialty metals, the work of obsessive, rigid precision, doomed for longevity due to its engines' pollution. A pyrrhic flawlessness. The self-sufficient work of selective subjectivity that answers to nothing but the mortal world's propulsion fetish, their idea that hyperaccelerated natural speed is imitable and is just one poison cloud away. Should you see an automobile, throw a rock, steal the catalytic converter, pop a tire. Should you see a plane, psychiatrically qualify for a gun license, or rob an arms depot, preferably that of the American military, assemble a gun salute sniper regiment, and as the landing wheels retract, call for kablammo. The plane as an ascending (ha) symbol for class mobility is flimsy. The benefactors of the poison cloud are only the first industrializers, those who have been rehearsing for the vacation for the Earth since the day the first clockwork was sired or the first system of ropes and pulleys was conceived for the church to ring the bell. In those even more lost, disparaged months before the two missing years in the Hague, months excommunicated and burnt en masse rather than stored for archive, we took to the stratosphere of another planet on a black craft of death and turned the third Earth's sky into a perpetual aurora. The ultimate symbol of progress and mobility as cover for war was piloted by one woman who is outside humanity, and another who considers it absolute, but had doubted her love for the external inhumanity of the other. Wouldn't you like to know why I call her Darling? It's not that I found it cute or even adorable, but horse before the cart, Descartes before the lecture.