What was he up to?

Antonio Gaudi’s Cathedral in Barcelona as it looked in 1926

You’re reading this post either after reading a lot of others or hardly any. Doesn’t matter. As with everything I say here, I could be wrong. But I’ve been at it long enough now to think I’m not wrong. ARIFLIP (my name for him) was building his own cathedral, with spires and chapels and grand spaces and secret chambers underground and sacristies, and balconies, and gargoyles and doorways and tombs and choirs and altars. He wasn’t working in stone. He was working in words and images and voices and numbers. The numbers four and five were particularly meaningful in his creative endeavors. The five stood for the unifying medium, which he believed was consciousness. 

He never finished it because he ran out of time. Unless he always knew that would be the case. In all his work he was extending an invitation to readers and other writers and artists and architects to participate in completing the whole. 

He sent me all of this, which has links to everything, because it is all one work, fairly started but incomplete. This implication is repeatedly affirmed in different ways.

From ARIFLIP’s unfinished Vennich Manuscript

Why I’m writing this with the limitations he accepted. He followed his muse into privation and poverty but with increasing confidence in what he was creating to leave for unborn generations. He left enough works in print that collectors who eventually discovered him could glimpse the method in the madness and the depth of his artistic and spiritual vision.

The literary world rejected him as it had to. He knew that and wasn’t bitter or deterred because of that circumstance. Sending the messy pile of his leavings to me wasn’t an act of desperation but a response to intimations that he was finally, running out of the time in which he could complete his very grand conception. Why I began this post with the Gaudí Cathedral in Barcelona as it looked in the year of the architect’s death, 1926. 2025 was the year in which it was announced that his cathedral would finally be finished in 2026, a hundred years later. He paid attention to coincidences like this in his own life because there had been so many of them. Like Gaudi, he did not see himself as a messiah or saint or even as a priest. He saw himself as the recipient of a gift it was his responsibility to transform into something lasting as an inspiration for others to do come.

Gaudi spent the latter years of his life working without architectural commissions but as a manual laborer on the cathedral he had designed. He knew he had every chance of ultimate failure and oblivion. By 1926, the world he was trying to inspire had just survived a world war whose consequence was the loss of an entire generation of talented youth and the onslaught of a virulent nihilistic atheism born out of despair. It required no seer to foresee World War II, especially in a Spanish monarchy about to be toppled by the leveling of whole populations into slavery, murder, and suicidal wars on a scale never dreamed of before. Gaudi must have seen that the odds were against his grand project. 

Indeed, the ensuing wars left his cathedral and his detailed plans for its completion in ruins. These were also being documented in hindsight at toward the end of 2025.

From a BBC article series about recovery of Gaudi designs destroyed by the Spanish Civil War in the 1930#:

FTA: <<When architect Antoni Gaudi died in 1926, he left models showing how to complete his famous church, the La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

There was just one problem: they were smashed to "smithereens" during the Spanish Civil War. So how to reconstruct Gaudi's iconic vision?

Architect Mark Burry worked on the building for more than 35 years. "By day three, I was in despair. That would be an understatement," he says.

But then came a breakthrough which helped him crack the hidden secrets of the building.

"I don't know where it came from, but I realised I should stop thinking like an architect and start thinking like a map-maker, and what I was looking at were mountain surfaces," says Mark.

Painstaking work over four decades meant Mark and his colleagues were able to piece together the church nave and other important areas. The church is due to be completed in 2026.

Find out more on Witness History, including the spine-tingling moment when Mark heard music in the church for the first time…>>

Because of ARIPLIP’s bequest, I find myself in an analogous situation. I get to see what the work-in-process looked toward the end of his working days, when the software/Internet world on which his life’s work depended was being destroyed by a combination of AI junkware and cultural collapse in embattled western civilization as a whole. He faced the very real possibility that work he could not financially afford to rescue from oblivion would be buried or erased by the technological oligarchies in charge of it. He did not, I believe, regard this as a conspiracy against him personally but as a byproduct of the very phenomena he had devoted his life to defeating.

He had one fear and only one fear. That what remained of his work some years after his death would come to resemble this:

The notorious Winchester Mansion in California

How documentaries have taught us to view a remarkable building near San Francisco. As a madwoman’s prodigal and pointless building project to outwit death and damnation by building onto her house forever. Doorways to blank walls or open air. Staircases that dead-end against wood paneling or turn in themselves with no outlet. 100 rooms of insanity, hammer and nailed and meticulously crafted into nonsense.

Which, to be honest, is what the ARIFLIP Junkyard looks like on first and many subsequent encounters, except that it’s far more than that.

It has four principal towers in place, all but one with varying degrees of bomb damage or incomplete construction. It has multiple subsidiary spires with their own attached and connected interior spaces. It has a grand interior space consisting of an apse, a choir, and a huge nave. It has connected collateral buildings. It has a vast underground structure connected to every part of the overall complex visible above ground. 

And much of it is incomplete, even its originating design hidden from view expect by determined acts of archeology. Which seem to have fallen to me.

Here’s what I can tell you about the purpose of ARIFLIP’s intended edifice. It is an epic tale of the eternal battle between consciousness and unconsciousness, between light and darkness, life and death. It is based on principles of creative writing and art which stand in stark contrast to a hundred preceding years of blind alleys that are finally arriving at a destination of nowhere.

Think of it as a picaresque novel that consists of everything ever recorded in a variety of media by one man. The tale has a protagonist but no hero as such. He is a self aware literary device, living a life he knows to have been arranged out of order to ensure certain meetings, encounters, transformational experiences. The protagonist is not in charge of events but steered by them in predetermined directions that do not amount to fate, only vicissitudes of a universal underlying reality which insists on being known. The subtext is life as fiction as union with the oneness that pervades and binds and defines absolutely everything. In a word it is about meaning.

Sound like new age nonsense? Except that at every step it documents itself, quantifies itself, performs exotic calculations most people never dream of, especially the wordsmiths who have driven meaning into an ugly muddy ditch. It is a gigantic metaphor of the entire conscious human experience and the fossils of its growth left behind in the rocks if only we could read them.

What does ARIFLIP do differently from his predecessors? He accepts different rules from those that have governed art for more than a century. He believes copyright laws represent the determination of art to cut its own throat. (Stealing his stuff for your own use wouldn’t bother him at all; he wasn’t making money from most of it anyway.) He believes the extraordinarily talented Hemingway perpetrated a fraud with his “one true sentence” paradigm that sent generations of writers into solipsistic limbos of unpleasant confession instead of creative imagination. He believes fiction has degenerated thereby into only one or two plots distinguished only by the degree of idiosyncrasy portrayed in its ‘characters’ and authorly ‘’Styles.’ He believes meticulous structure in creative outputs is liberating and inspirational rather than confining and pedestrian. He believes the narrative ‘line’ of contemporary serious fiction is not indicative of a trip to the heart of darkness but a method of concealment that protects writers from having to disclose their depth or lack thereof in terms of education, philosophical convictions, political histories, artistic aspirations, and career ambitions. Writing styles focused on ‘transparency’ are intended to produce works without navels, books that have somehow written themselves in every respect but the byline on the front cover and the author photo on the back cover.

ARIFLIP does not seem to believe in finding your lane and staying in it. He writes prolifically about everything under the sun and beyond. He writes autobiographically in dozens of ways but does not use fiction as a means of revenging himself on his mother and father and siblings and friends and enemies and romantic partners. He moves freely from humor to satire to serious political analysis to philosophical speculation. He is unafraid of the realms of math and science and the inviolability of experts in every field. He is not dismayed by the fact that he failed to inherit his father’s drawing talent or his grandmother’s facility with musical instruments. So he fills the gaps in the areas by using available technologies to create his own artworks and to experiment with sound and meter and timbre in the media he employs to do his work.

His work. Which is one thing. All of it. Well over 6 million words and tens of thousands of graphic creations. The sum total is a life examined in full without doing needless harm to real persons of his acquaintance, living or dead. A particular life. His life. In which his very real talent for pattern recognition is the root of his imagination and creativity.

This may sound vague if you’re reading it early in the sequence of posts or self evident if you’re reading it after you’ve seen the many posts that explore part of the Junkyard in detail. That’s the self-contradiction of the operating mode of Blogger, which I am using because ARIFLIP has used it for years. It is not permitted to display posts in reverse order. Newest first is a perfect representation of contemporary culture.

Rest assured, everything stated here is explored in very great depth within this site. That’s the job I seem to have had wished upon me. I accept it because I am now part of his life as he has become part of mine. A notion I am comfortable with even though we never met in person. A lot of writers are part of my life even though they were long deceased when I first met them. 

If the details you encounter elsewhere here seem intimidating, bear in mind a central precept oF ARIFLIP’s world is that the whole is always contained in the smallest parts, no matter how deeply you explore the parts. Full understanding of one or two pieces of ARIFLIP junk. I didn’t believe that at first. I do now. But the view of the whole from there may be as different as the extremes of the seasons.

I have other posts to work on now. See you later or earlier as the case may be.