On Sundays, when I’m in Istanbul, where I’m mostly living these days, I read Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008). I do this because of one of those bizarre synchroncities, Ah-hah moments, that very occasionally come into my life.
Sometime in early 2024, I was sitting on a bench in a park adjacent to Tophane tram station, flicking through my X feed on my phone, when a mention of the work reminded me of my one-time intention to give it a read; an intention that had taken me so far as to actually download it onto my Kindle, which I had on me at the time. I began to read.
The tale began with a mysterious, and presumably Western, traveller arriving into Istanbul for an equally mysterious meeting with someone he’d met online. Istanbul, I thought, as I read the opening passages, that’s coincidental. It’s where I am now. The mysterious contact not showing up, the traveller ends up in a hotel in one of the city’s tourist areas where, after a few days of feeling very spaced out, he discovers a dust-covered package under one of the beds containing all sorts of mysterious bits and bobs, including a manuscript, a card for a computer repair shop, a handwritten PGP decryption key and a postcard with the address of a bookshop on it. I continued reading.
The mysterious traveller sets about trying to make sense of the contents of the package; checking out the manuscript, looking up the computer shop, and so on. He elects at some point to visit the bookshop, called Librairie de Pera, located at Calipdede Cadessi 22, Tunel, Beyoglu. Curiouser and curiouser, I thought. That must be only a couple of hundred yards from where I am sitting right now. I got up from my bench and started to walk up the hill toward Galata. I soon found the street but the bookshop, if it was ever there, seemed long gone. So I sat down on a small wooden stool in the street, that I assumed belonged to a nearby cay shop, though none was visible nearby. I continued reading Reza’s book. No waiter or cafe owner rocked up to ask what I wanted to drink, and so I sat there quietly reading for about an hour until a series of phone messages, telling me of a sudden family emergency back in the UK, caused to get up and hurry homeward.
Cyclonopedia, the book, is itself a colossus of weird fiction. Apparently written in the wake of Reza’s brutal encounter with the philosophy of Nick Land in the late nineties, it seems to reflect his attempt to both push back against the violently inhuman future Land depicted as an inevitability, and to articulate his own brand of virulently non-Western Shia futurist mysticism. The reader is quickly drawn into Reza’s world of Middle Eastern desert occultism, a place that exists in opposition to the nihilistic solar hegemony portrayed by Land as the inevitable direction of Western cultural development. If you’d like to read an excellent review of Reza’s book, before risking a crack at the densely written tome, check out that of Mercenary Pen on Substack here.
To the code, and also to give you proof that a Shia can write the same quality of weird and transgressive prose as any Westerner, page 177 begins in the following fashion…
Hypercamouflage, strategy rather than tactics, and contagious communication rather than transgression, Islam is taken as the diffusive axis of the draco-spiral. Techno-capitalist singularity replaces the escalating axis of solar hegemony in the draco-spiral model of War on Terror. This helical entanglement between Islam and Capitalism leads to a drastic divergence from conventional Apocalyptic and End-Time scenarios which presuppose an eventual chronological unity between Islam and Capitalism. Parsani warns that such a chronological unity never exists. For Islam and Capitalism, the end of time is mapped through chronological disunity on the helical-machinery of the corkscrewing motion. The end of time always emerges from the other side: while the techno-capitalist chronosphere harbors a chronological cataclysm for the Islamic front, Islam’s chronopolitics — saturated by the timeless desert of Qiyamah (Islamic momentary apocalypse which is constantly active and present) — is the cancelation, not merely of the technocapitalist chronosphere, but of western Time.*
The asterix at the end of the passage * directs to the bottom of the page where the following series of numbers and letters is found…
24 12 12 30 21 29 18 23 28 18 13 14 12 27 34 25 29 28: he vwme mil yeqbj; sw) avqkm he me mil kls swj jqt fc mil kls … swj he me mil defwmswv swj kisul mil defwmsvw Iwmvqlbt, aeq mil defwmsvw vk mil ktkmld ca mil yeqbj… zsqqt jlzqfskJ meysqjk jlzqlskl $wj zsqqt vwzqlskl meysqjk vwzqlskl
A code! I like a good code. And especially one that an internet search revealed to have apparently not been de-coded yet. Given Reza’s background around the Nick Land and the CCRU scene, I figured the opening string of numbers might be AQ cypher, this being very popular with those guys. Also because none of the numbers was above 35, the highest number in that cypher. This turned out to be a pretty good guess. AQ looks like this…
Thus the opening line reveals… “occultinsidecrypts” which I guess might be either Occult Inside Crypts or Occult Insi Decrypts. I’m not sure which.
On to the string of words. To my mind, it looked like a substitution cypher – each letter standing for another letter. I couldn’t figure out what any of the specific words might mean, a way to get a handle on the cypher. But after checking a few code cracker websites, I found one that solved it – https://planetcalc.com/8047/
Putting the string of words in, it came up with…
GO INTO THE WORLD; AN) FIRST GO TO THE SEA AND DRY UP THE SEA … AND GO TO THE MOUNTANI AND SHAVE THE MOUNTAIN HNTIRELY, FOR THE MOUNTAIN IS THE SYSTEM PF THE WORLD… CARRY DECRUASD TOWARDS DECREASE $ND CARRY INCREASE TOWARDS INCREASE
The mispellings seemed a little weird, but nevertheless it not only clearly made sense but seemed to be an indictment on Western cultural expansionism, a primary theme of the book. Another thing I spotted was that the opening words gave 666 by the AQ cypher, again another call-sign of the CCRU.
This also explained why the first word AND is spelled AN).
So I consider this code cracked. Case closed. If you see more, please do leave a comment.