12. Program

Nuke all urban centers where more than 100000 people live. There are 4037 such cities. The United States have 5244 nuclear warheads. Russia has more. More than enough. Almost seems…. There will be leftovers. That is, leftover warheads. Spend them wherever. Nuke the Moon, perhaps, why not give it a try. There will be leftovers. Survivors. Without infrastructure. Logisticsless peasants. Who knows how long they’ll last with their…. Agriculture. In time, mechanical decay will set like cement. A system of embedded hells. A system of embedded Suezes, hijacked freighters off the Horn, set sidewise across Lafarge’s great works. A system of hells, embedded inside. The Houthi are terrorists. The Hutu are fine. Don’t lose the thread. Act when the sea is beset. Obsidionally speaking, the Red Sea is beset at all times. Logistically speaking, great works are little bottlenecks. Braking distance cannot be reduced by vigilance. Unfortunately kid. The Swiss have villas in the Alps. The Alps are beautiful in the summer. The summer is beloved because it ends. In 1816, it did not occur. Tambora’s little outburst, remember. The Villa where Mary Shelley thought about Frankenstein was Swiss. Lafarge is Swiss. You’ll say it’s pretty thin. It’s nothing, is what it is. Lafarge is a great company. Cement sets. People who make cement are nothing in the world. People who are terrorists are worse than nothing. There are people in the world who make others make cement. Those are the top performers. Nuke all urban centers. A system of hells, swallowing each other. Dante placed himself sixth in the list of greatest poets after Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil, of course. One must remember : Dante meets the poets in Limbo, the First circle of Hell. That means : 96% of the Divine Comedy was unwritten when Dante considered himself the sixth most important poet to have ever lived. Dante was, it’s true, a top performer. Simenon was a top performers. Yuri and Francheska are subpar performers. Anatoly Korbokov spent thirty-four years writing a 176-line elegy. Which was never published and is now lost. Korbokov : subpar performer. Taylor Swift will become the president. China will invade Taiwan. The world will decide who goes to hell and who not. A system of hells, embedded inside hells, swallowing one another within one hell. Desire is freedom. The foot is bigger than the sun. Nuke all urban centers : the comfortable ratio of cities to warheads. Statistics stick. 96% of Dante was unwritten when he was the sixth best poet of all time. Next to Ovid. Ovid, it is known, took after Lucretius, who took after Epicurus, who took after Democritus, who took after Leucippus, who might well be apocryphal, for all we know. Took atomism, among other things. Archimedes reckoned he would count the sand. Alaska will gain its independence. The vast majority of the time, a church is vacant. God is tricky. God is statistics. God is a great terrorist. God made Syrian cement. Syrian cement sticks like statistics. Lafarge has no body on the planet. History is written by people who have no body. Lafarge wrote its own history. A system of embedded hells, swallowing hells ever deeper, surrounded by one hell bigger than the others. How to write in a hungry world. Said Sartre. Taking on the responsibility for world hunger. People are not just hungry for bread, JP. Spreading over the civilized world. Thank you, Tony. Embedded within hells, the six best poets take on the charge for the world. Pastoral thinkers. World leaders. Top performers. High-level managers. Chief executive officers. Impossible lovers. Kropotkine saw the help in the desert. Russia will invade the newly independent Alaska. Alaska is a red state. By this we mean : right-leaning. Before that, the reds were the Russians. Blood is the essence of the law : it tastes like iron, and anyone whose blood is as white as snow can become the president. In 1816, the summer did not occur whatsoever. When you are about to lose the game, stop playing. Undefeated winners may be one-time players. Nuke the urban centers. Putin wants a territory. When you are about to lose, nuke all urban centers. The United States have 5244 nuclear warheads. Putin has more. I am the State. Says the CEO of France, once. As is Putin. Putin wants to read your emails. I want to eat a pizza. Putin kept a photo of Berzin by his bed, as a boy. Berzin made the GRU. The GRU became the KGB, where Putin became a man. Now, the KGB is become the FSB. Wonderful story. LePen, the father, tortured in Algeria. It’s good to remember. He forgot his knife somewhere, later. Dementia decomposes the subject. The subject is held by a story woven of disparate facts, episodic memories. Each night, the subject is unwoven, a little. The subject dreams, perhaps. The subject digests the events, sets them. Unweaves. Each morning, get to weaving again. Weaving on the unwoven spot, or, perhaps, elsewhere altogether. Microscopic specks of meaning foaming at the surface of the morning coffee. Inconsequential epiphanies. Each morning, weaving the subject. Sleepless subjects weave themselves out of the canvas. Like Penelope, the subject weaves faster than it unweaves. The sprawling tapestry soon exceeds the field of vision of the eye. The eye is constructed, it has a story. Russia has more nukes than America. They both have enough to clean up the planet. A system of interlacing hells, enmbedded within hells, through which one falls, endlessly. Sleeplessly, the subject conceives of a new kind of hell. Sleepless, the subject doesn’t dream, doesn’t digest, doesn’t unweave. Thread closely : sleep unweaves. Think carefully : what is the meaning of a tapestry, never unwoven. Program : nuke all city centers. Additionally : put everybody to sleep. What to do. Stafford took a big risk giving Allende that control room. Quick update on Marjorie : no new updates there. Update with me. Nuke all cities. Make shit pits out of piles of cement, in Suez and such. Cement sets. Cement is a great long-term storage solution, for bodies. Please disrupt. Please increase your output. Performance means : more with less. Less is more, sometimes. Not in this case. Generally speaking, more is more, less is less, and less with more is worse than more with less. It’s a matter of statistics. Proportionality. Terrorists are top performers. Leila Khaled was a top performer. Dare I talk about Osama. The State is a top performer, supposedly. The markers for performance are set by private bodies. Not the bodies of private nobodies, obviously. There are two kinds of bodies, remember. Judicial bodies set the markers for productivity. Those who are nothing in the world and those who are something in the world, follow their leaders. In times of need, they look up to the sky and wonder. In times of need, the birds can fly. That is how they escape the many disasters. In the mines, canaries are kept to detect carbon monoxide. Canaries come from the Canaries. But in latin, canariusmeans : dog. Pliny thought there were dogs in the Canaries. It’s important to remember : in 1933, the people did not know what would happen after. And so on. Air Force Statistical Control. Robert McNamara was a man in the world in the war. Robert McNamara was called the IBM machine with legs. Robert McNamara liked logic. Logically, statistics stick. Statistics are life. Planes go out on statistics. Punch cards reduce the people to holes and no holes. IBM provided punch cards to the nazis so they could reduce the Jews to holes and no holes. Control is through the holes. IBM gave punch cards to Robert McNamara at the Air Force Statistical Control, so he could reduce the planes and their pilots to holes and no holes. Nothing personal. It’s all about the holes. Planes come back with holes. People come back with holes. The instinct says : increase armor where the holes are. Fallacious, of course. Reinforce where there are no holes, of course. The planes that have holes are the planes that came back. People are holes. Nothing personal. Control happens through the holes. The abort rate for sorties was 20%. Pilots were aborting out of fear. We put a stop to it. McNamara was a top performer. More with less. One wingman lost on the B-29. Tokyo burned down. No night that night. No summer in 1816. 100000 civilians. Proportion : 1 to 100000. Very good performance. More with less. Tokyo : more than 51% destroyed. Majority shareholder. For a couple of wingmen per sortie. McNamara was a top performer. Performance means : more with less, as much as possible. McNamara thought the means. History is written by statistics. Statistics are means. Proportionality and performance. American civilians killed, negligible. McNamara believed in statistics. Statistics stick. Cement sets. Greeks believed in gods. They will return.Stasibelieved in control. Control is through the holes. Hole-fitted people. Stasibecame five or six in the tyrant’s ear. The par performers. It’s human nature, after all. A definitive statement. I will return. I will return endlessly. Beside a huge rock, that towered like a pyramid. I thought, I will return, again, forever. On a lawn in spring, in winter. When I return, I will be there for the first time. Eating cheese. I will fail, again and again. Braking too slowly, failing to react. I will not fail better each time. Losing my temper. I will fail each time for the first time. Crafting my eye. Until I fail for the last time, all my failures will have been for nothing. Waiting, weaving. My neutrality is meaningless. Waiting around the dead center. My tears did not change me. Turning into a giant flower. My failures, endlessly failing for nothing. Being decomposed. I will fail for the last time, and then, I will return for the first time. When I return, I will have learned nothing. I will have lost my tears and my neutrality. I will forget, everything. When I return I will be there for the first time. I will work through my failures again as if for the first time. I will learn nothing, again, and find myself at the beginning for the first time, again.




Copyright / Guillaume Menguy / 2025