Pablo Vision, a multi-media artist, is the madman behind the exterior of epic rites press publications.

The dead men are waking up inside me: I can already feel their sharp cold bones jutting into my pallid flesh; forcing their way out of the casket that is I. And, as the dead men rise, I fall, deeper and deeper, into the blank void.
I sense the days falling like clods of earth, and the years coiling around me like white linen strips. Devoid of hope, there are only vague, lifeless attempts to dispute their insistent claims, but, like a drowning man, it is the weariness, and not the cruel water, that drags me down. Signs of vitality may yet be detected, but the flatline beckons like a mortuary slab; it is embalming fluid, and not blood, that flows through my veins.

There is no court which would find her guilty of necrophilia, but it is with a corpse that she lies; it is the creeping rigor mortis I penetrate her with; the whispered words a desperate requiem. These post-orgasmic voids accumulate like small deaths: the umbilical cord pulling me deeper, each time, into the womb of the earth. But she, like others, cannot see this insurrection of dead men within me.

I am buried in this mausoleum with all my worldly possessions, but these inanimate follies are as lifeless as I, and they give me no pleasure at all. This universal fear of being buried alive is well founded: the rapacious undertakers are all around, suffocating us with despotism and kindness, in equal measure. But I remember, ten years ago, my fingernails scraping at the coffin lid, and my screams carrying conviction: a time before this dissociation made such a compliant corpse of I.

Then, I wrote words: angry, sad, accusative, questioning, but, always, fighting against an existence too unbearable to endure. It was said these words were of unflinching bravery and integrity, and some even perceived something beautiful within, and, although I only recognised inelegant inarticulacy, I persevered, oblivious to the futility of such ignoble pursuit. But it may have been these very words – words that I thought asserted life – which summoned the dead men inside me; and, fearful as I was of their lurking presence, I found myself to be more terrified of life.

It is not forging a pact with the devil at the crossroads that is the most eldritch of sins, but choosing - of one’s own volition - to take the wrong path. A pact with one’s own conscience, and the required martyrdom of desire, is the most absolute of all the sacrifices – more so than the death it invokes.

So I could write no more: I cared about nothing except for that which was far too painful, and hurtful, to ever commit to words - and although we all walk slowly to the gallows, and ultimately carry our burden alone - this enforced silence created an isolation so bleak, that entire cemeteries awakened within me. And, as if the ghost of Goya had painted dark images in my mind, I was drawn, deeper, and further, into the lonely gloom.

There are times when I dream, and I manage to escape my corpse, and the legions of dead men inside me. Often I am wandering through the fog, desperately searching for someone, or something; there are clusters of bright lights in the distance, and I cross bridges over many canals, but as I get closer I see they are just worthless diamonds (not precious emeralds); and the deepening fog, not fog at all, but crowding ghosts who carry me back to a dark crossroads to observe my corpse, and the agony of my death. In another dream, I am ascending a spiral staircase without beginning or end, before a voice transports me to a dark room: to the right, a woman’s face is illuminated by the fire in the hearth, and to the left, an old man; hands clasped together on his lap, and golden light from the arched window, revealing the depth of his thoughts. There is a winding staircase separating the two figures: the sensual and perfectly balanced geometry - and the light and the dark - imposing a complimentary duality. There is a sense of great comfort here, like all memory and awareness slowly dissolving into nothingness, but then a small wooden door – also arched – opens, and I move towards it, against my will; darkness consuming me completely. And once again I am searching blindly, and without hope.

When I awake from these dreams it is into the cold clutches of the dead men inside me, and the sepulchre of my chosen life. Ten years ago I carved my name on my own tombstone, and although the dead men have no need for urgency - their victory assured – they assert their claim with slow, but increasing, force. Each day, the difference between this death and absolute death becomes progressively more indistinct, and the company of others only accentuates the pain, and the loneliness.

The dead men are waking up inside me: I can feel their sharp cold bones jutting into my colourless flesh; forcing their way out of the casket that is I. And, as the dead men wake, they ensnare me with the promise of eternal amnesia.

© pablo vision 2008

epic rites press (2009)

The image is constructed like a Frankenstein’s monster from the work of artists/anatomists andreas vesalius, govard bidloo, gérard de lairesse and juan valverde de amusco.

You could say the rope/noose like Rob’s thin vertical lines of poetry. Or something about the cadaver inside waking up. Or books/knowledge/aspirations/order/etc all pointing to the final destination of us all. Or maybe pointing to the guts of man, and the guts of the book. Certainly the dissected horizontal man is not going to be ferried across to the other side (below is just the void). Hell, you can even see the abc’s on the guy’s ribs – still fresh with blood…

But you can’t judge a book by its cover (although I’d be somewhat sceptical of any book with a Norman Rockwell cover) – and it is the guts of this beast that are going to do the ass kicking. !!!!BEWARE!!!! & !!!!BUY!!!!

epic rites press (2009)

because you need to unlearn all of yr learning, and you need to undo all of yr grammar, and all of yr fucking commas and stops and dashes and colons and semi-colons, and you need to lose yr fucking similes and metaphors and all of yr fucking flowery descriptions, and all of this contrived shit that you would not say if you were speaking fast and wild and free, and you need to fucking type, type, type, and you need to type faster and faster, and you need to say what you are too fucking scared to say, and you need to say what you have not said before, and you need to stop reading other people’s shit, and you need to strangle words or fuck them, you most certainly, and absolutely, do not want to show them any respect, and you most fucking certainly and absolutely do not want to caress and to love them, and you have to create and mutate the fuckers to serve you, even if you give birth to some bastard-freak-fuckery-of-language, and you need to be screaming these fucking words onto the page, because, otherwise, what is the fucking point, what is the fucking point?
type you fucker, just type…

but only when you feel so angry you could smash down walls with yr fists, or feel so much like fucking that you use all of that blood in yr cock and all of those fizzy hormones in yr brain to write crazy dizzy demented jazzy shit instead, or when you feel like carving death into yr wrists, or when yr dreams torment you with yr reality, or when you have just betrayed yr lover in yr mind or with yr flesh, or when the smoke fills yr lungs and the poisons flood yr veins, or, at the very least, when that fucking feeling that drove you to yr addiction and to yr craving causes you to force yr nails deep into yr skin, or just when yr soul is fucking burning with yr own passions, and not the borrowed dead dusty words of dead writers, yes, type you fucker, just type, because you are alive, and because you fucking can, type because you just fucking can.

type you fucker, just type…

because you are full of lies or full of truth or full of ugliness or full of beauty or full of shit, or because you know that it is just letters and gaps, and it is never going to matter what you say or what you mean because of the futility of words and the futility of life, and you are too foolish to think otherwise, and because no one will know yr truth from yr lies, you can type with freedom about sucking cock or fucking yr sister or driving yr car at crazy-mad night-time 60 miles-an-hour drunk-stoned and with yr hand on some young underage thigh, or bribing some corrupt cop in mexico, or smuggling dope in the boot of yr car, or the day you killed yr fucking un-fucked sister, in life and in words, again and again and again, and when you type yr lies make them more honest than the truth could ever be, and when you type yr truths, ram all of yr pain and yr anger and yr sorrow down every other fuckers throat until you can imagine them gagging, because that is the only way you will ever find love, the only way you will ever find love.

type you fucker, just type…

because this is yr therapy and yr confession and yr emancipation and yr legacy and yr life and yr voice and yr words and yr meat and yr bones and yr screams and yr orgasms and yr love and yr hate and yr fears and yr joys and yr fingers on yr typewriter, typing yr words so fast that you bypass that treacherous and censorious motherfucker that is yr brain, type you fucker, just type, because it is all that you know how to do, all that you know how to do.

© pablo vision 2008

please click on the slideshow to visit the photo gallery of Pablo Vision.

under deconstruction