I picked up a pencil and wrote a Decadent Short Story - ElegantArchiveAI

 My first post on this new blog will be about the one decadent short story that I finished.

Anti-AI users on X have been telling me to pick up a pencil, and it has gotten 50 000 impressions today alone on X. To prove that I did in fact once pick up a pencil, and that I wrote a masterpiece of elegant literary prose, I present to you this text that I wrote on the top of my head over the course of two days.

Cyanide

Back again If you find yourself slowly coming back to life, tied to a chair in an old and abandoned mansion which reeks of cyanide, do not fight the fact that you have ended up in this situation. Merely try to charm your way out of it. There might be no one around to receive your verbal and non-linguistic repertoire of smitery. No one will see your hand-made Karl Lagerfeld suit which rests tailored to the tee along your vivacious limbs. Gone are those young ladies whose fathers have handed down to them a genealogy that ties them to every princess in Vienna. You’re alone in a mansion, where no one seems to reside, tied to a chair, surrounded by cyanide. What do you do? The floor is tiled in white and black. It runs endlessly through the hall with walls clad in red velvet, as if the Lord’s boudoir had escaped and grown like a Rhododendron, too grand for itself, now covering entirely the expanse of the beholder’s eyes. Harmonizing perfectly, and aligned in such geometrical precision as to make Haussmann jealous, masterpieces from Italy, France and the Netherlands align horizontally throughout the walls of the hall. You gaze left and enter into Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. She captures you. Her divine beauty is unmistakable. The golden braids sparkle with every piece of sunlight which pierces the vaulted windows beside the ceiling. She incarnates before you. Is she real? Venus exclaims to you: “In ancient times bygone, A poet with no son Left for us inscribed, A testament from time Come, my dear, who reclines on this throne of oak and brass. I’ll tell you of his tale. It started with the golden age. Nature and reason were in harmony, justice and peace reigned. Unceasing spring excited men and women into purity. The trees poured of themselves honey, milk and nectar raced the rivers, no labor was required to unearth the wheat. No evil nor desire crossed the lands which bliss called home. Mighty Zeus, king of Gods, ruler of mankind, rearer of skies and weather, forced the Golden Age to its extinction. Cronus, King of the Golden Age, of departed heroes, he rebelled against, and ushered in the Silver Age. That faithful fidelity which paradise instills was over. Seasons now changed the hearts of men and women, who built shelters for protection from harsh, blistering precipitation. The plow ran endless courses, and instead of intuition men followed harvestry for their time-keeping. Agency was handed over to mothers, as men were adolescent for 100 years. Ultimately, mankind became fallen, and Zeus slayed them for their impiety, ending the silver age. Courageous god of war, Ares, possessing fiendish brutality, became revered in that depraved age where mortals played life and death versus each other. This era will remain in obscurity, concealed even from the wisest sage. The bronze age is better left unknown. Last came the cyclical rupture of Ovid’s four ages. An age so foul that virtue dared not enter its realm. Instead of gods, honored were fraud, deceit, violence and guile. Mankind sinned, and every man and woman worshiped none but themselves. The age of iron ended the cycle of the world. The all-consuming factor which only revealed its apocalyptical element in the last age, was for Ovid fallenness, decline and death.” Venus’ story ended, and the chained man sat gazing agape at her incarnation as she quietly drew back and found repose in the picture, and became still once more for history’s wish. Was what he experienced a mere conjecture of his mind, or did history make an appearance in this abandoned mansion where no one seems to reside, except this man, tied to a chair, surrounded by cyanide? He toured the hall with his eyes and saw in the distance a work of art which he recognized from his early childhood home. It hung in the hallway right next to the kitchen door. He remembered it was in the form of a poster and had an inscription from an exhibition that his parents had visited when they were touring the art galleries of Spain. They mainly sought to experience the surreal wacko whose paintings first strike you as traditionally and experimentally sound, but which at closer inspection you realize are full of abominations even to the most hedonic bon vivant. Even though the painting was far, far away, those distinct stars never failed to make an impression on his deepest of sensibilities. Suddenly, a door slowly creaked behind him. Unable to turn around and ease his utter despair into which the risk of horror had inadvertently flung him, his only course of action was to invoke a chant of good luck: Per lucem ad astra And then a voice, filling the whole atmosphere of the room, answered his invocation in a tongue reminiscent of tulip inflation, Rembrandt and conquest: Door licht naar de sterren Could it be? The 19th century Rembrandt, whose decade of artistry directed the hand of all painters coming after him, forever sitting in his shadow. Vincent van Gogh had come to life before the man tied to a chair, in an abandoned mansion, smelling cyanide. The Dutch master spoke thus: “It is vital that you use, An avant-garde excuse And with the pencil’s might, You paint the Starry night. One morning in 1889, from my window, at Saint-Paul in Saint-Rémy, where I was sent after having punished myself by cropping, I saw the morning star. Venus appeared majestic, and as splendid as Helios, whose chariot was yet at rest. I observed its splendor, and tried to remember it as best I could. I brought my vision with me which I had conceived in my room. I wasn’t allowed to perform my talents there, so I had to station myself elsewhere for the completion of my piece. With the fields outside of the asylum as my view, and the vision of Venus to guide me in the fulfillment of my task, I summoned a masterpiece which still enraptures the loftiest minds of Europe. The starry night was born.” The young man caught a glimpse of his childhood hero, as the ghost of Vincent made his journey back to his soul’s asylum. For decades gone and decades to come, the Flemish landscape virtuoso dreams of olive trees, cypresses and that guiding goddess whose scintillating shimmer exalts tragic young men into tortured elegance, beautiful decay, heroic downfall. “Who am I to question the truth of what I am witnessing from the vantage point that is my imprisonment?” thought the young man to himself. Now hopefully proclaiming, to himself, and anyone whose ears may hear, wishing for a spectre from the past to echo his nervous cry, he cries out “libère-moi de ces chaînes, j'en ai fini”. This time, he was sure of what he saw. He could swear that this person was real. His senses didn't trick him. Who was it that he saw? The physical phantom’s fleeting impression became clearer and clearer with every forward step taken. He now stood right in front of the young man. “C’est moi, Céline Louis-Ferdinand. Auteur des Voyage au bout de la nuit”. The young man, whose expertize in that endemic lingua franca, proclaimed by its native speakers as the peak of verbal lavishness, could nothing but regurgitate in absurdum a few hand-picked, to his own liking, quotes stated by those Barons of the word whose feathered swords of ink never lay sheathed when divine inspiration commanded them to spell out the breath which animated their souls. His lack of French fluidity always struck him as embarrassing. In order that he may enter the palace of the endemic lingua franca, he had resorted to clothe himself in sleazy Balmain, Athenian Mireille Mathieu, pompous Champs Elysées, artifice, existentialiste pour mort and liberté. France only exists in theory. Céline struck the young man as peculiar at first sight. He didn’t look like anything you would expect. Funnily enough, he resembled in looks his heir of sweet nihilism - Michel Houellebecq. Both called Enfant terrible, forbidden fruit, dirty penchants of the word everyone wants to utter but are tabooed out of spank… speaking. Slandered, exiled, tried, on death row and survived, they always shook the literary fields with another storm and thunder. The young man talked for hours and hours to Céline about his vital literary indulgences. Night entered and exited. A sprinkle of rain dashed the beautifully vaulted windows. They entered a state of ecstatic autophagy as they fed themselves with nothing but noumenal bread. Depravity is a precondition to philosophy. Only a Parisian survives such a diet. Eventually, even the most ennuied poet of the soul must perish to the body’s hunger for carnal gifts, so Céline went to consult the local butcher’s shop in order to indulge in immeasurable amounts of ox meat and oyster. The young man’s ascent into the noumenal worlds slowly faded as he became conscious of himself and his destiny again, tied to a chair, in a mansion, where no one seems to reside, except this young man, who drinks cyanide.

A few years ago, I did pick up a pencil, and this is what I sketched. I know you'll be surprised by this fact. More to come!