Decapitating Darden - Ritual, Magic, Human Sacrifice, and Secret Societies

 

Acéphale, by André Masson

I have previously said and I will continue to reiterate that Douglas Darden was likely more influenced by Georges Bataille than the Marquis de Sade or any other author of transgressive literature.

In my first post on Darden ever, I discussed in some measure the guillotine and decapitation in the self-portrait of Darden in Condemned Building. I would explore the guillotine further in my post on the title image of same treatise (Darden calls his Condemned Building a treatise in in 1995 resume).

To recap, there is some machination above Darden's head, accompanied by ropes and pulleys that imply that this device is a guillotine. This is reinforced in the title image, which indeed is a guillotine. The broken concrete foundation at the base of the guillotine has a curvature that is appropriate to lay a neck upon and a metal bowl on the other side to catch the decapitated head. Along the side of the guillotine's frame are the words from Moby-Dick: "How many think ye have fallen into Plato's honey head and sweetly perished [t]here?" (Neveu believes Darden has deliberately covered the "t" in "there" with a shadow to render it as "here," and I personally like this interpretation). This is in reference to the sperm whale that is decapitated in Moby-Dick, which Ishmael calls Plato, and the right whale head on the other side of the ship he names "Aristotle." We see at the top of the guillotine an object that looks like a beehive sitting upon a branch, but it also looks a bit like a whale head, with the blow-hole appearing quite like a vulva.

Returning to the self-portrait, in a way, Darden has decapitated LeQueu's nun and recapitulated her body with his own head. I am inclined to challenge my previous interpretation that Darden is exploring transgenderism, that he is part woman or becoming female, that he has tits. Rather, we should probably see it, not as Darden having breasts, but rather Darden has placed his head on a decapitated woman. This is obviously very different than exploring gender, and rather is exploring violence. (I will still stand by my statement that Darden was indeed exploring transgenderism, as that should be obvious, but also because I was recently looking at some materials that indicate Darden was absolutely fascinated with Joel-Peter Witkin, who explores transgenderality in his photography).

Title image (left) and self-portrait (right), Condemned Building

We know Darden was influenced by Bataille, and in fact he cites Eroticism: Death and Sensuality in his essay "The Architecture of Exhaustion." How much Bataille truly influenced Darden is speculative. Obviously he had an early introduction to Bataille, but how much of it stuck is uncertain. Darden could have read Story of the Eye and then said, "Hmmm... what a depraved fuck. I would rather read the Divine Marquis." True, the Marquis de Sade and Georges Bataille wrote smut, but they also wrote philosophy. Sure, you have to wade through endless and tedious paragraphs of pornography to get to the philosophy, but it is there.

Regardless, it is worth exploring a little further the nature of decapitation in Darden's work as it pertains to Bataille. Namely, let us look at Acéphale, the five issues of a periodical produced by Bataille, as well as a secret society formed by Bataille. It was largely created to explore Nietzsche and transgression in society and religion. Bataille was fascinated by sacrifice, such as in The Accursed Share, in which he explores how society is founded upon excess that must be sacrificed. If Freud thought society was inherently neurotic, then he would have had a field day with Bataille. Bataille was also fascinated by human sacrifice, and even offered himself as a sacrifice for his secret society, going so far as to write a legal document protecting anyone willing to be his executioner. Many of his followers wanted to be the sacrifice, but none wanted to be the executioner.

Hence, acéphale, from the Greek ακέφαλος akephalos or "headless." Bataille's fascination with headlessness likely has several sources of inspiration and point to several things. Firstly, there is human sacrifice. Next, one is reminded of the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution and the extensive use of the guillotine. But then there is one other thing: the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM).

Of particular interest in the PGM is the so-called Headless Rite (PGM V.96-172 "The Stele of Jeu"), as well as several mentionings of the "headless god" or "headless one." This is a god that is peculiar to Egypt, though there are examples of headless gods in other texts and other regions. Plutarch tells us of a headless "Molos" in Crete, and Pausanias tells of a headless "Triton" at the Temple of Dionysus at Tanagra. It should not be surprising that PGM III was acquired by the Bibliotheque Nationale in the 19th century, and it is exactly here at this library that Bataille worked in the medallions collection. It is possible Bataille had seen the peculiar image of a headless entity in PGM III.170. I have personally asked a few other occult scholars, and several have stated that in looking at the imago magica below and the Acéphale image by Masson, that they believe there must be some connection; too many similarities in ideas and adjacencies in chronology make it unlikely that someone like Bataille would not have glanced at PGM III in the BNF archive.

Magical image/charm, PGM III.170

One should not be remissed either in noting the similarity of ke-phalos (head) and phallos (penis). Perhaps this is why Masson illustrates the Acéphale Man (modeled on da Vinci's Vitruviuan Man) without a penis, but instead has a face or skull on his privy parts. One will note that the Headless One in the PGM is likewise depicted without a penis, and in fact its crotch is entirely absent, there being a whole gap in the linework between the legs.

Let us explore these concepts further. The act of decapitation is an act of dismembering. Darden plays with the Latin membrum ("limb") in his lectures as well as the production of Temple Forgetful. Remus was murdered by his brother Romulus, and Romulus is memorialized in Rome while Remus is forgotten. Darden frequently uses terms like "re-membering" to describe Temple Forgetful in some of his talks. It is curious that to recall a memory we remember, but to forget something we do not call it dismembering. Etymologically, when we remember, we are reforming a dismembered body of thought. Memories are limbs, and the act of reassembling these limbs we are remembering. So the concepts and ideas behind forgetting and re-membering/dis-membering is equally a part of Darden's body of work as the decapitation of LeQueu's nun and the image of the guillotine.

Furthermore, there is an element of ritualization in these concepts of decapitation, human sacrifice, Temple Forgetful, the Headless One, magic, Acéphale, LeQueu, et al.

The Headless Rite (or Stele of Jeu) is a magical ritual, and one that is quite popular to perform among many ceremonial magicians looking to get into working from the PGM, at least what I have observed. This rite in particular was first popularized by Aliester Crowley when he published a translation of it as the "Bornless Rite." Nearly all the magical operations in the PGM are rituals, and those that are not specified as having a ritual component likely still have some element of ritualization.

The acts of decapitation and human sacrifice oftentimes invoke images of ritual. Temple Forgetful, where we re-member a dismembered corpse, has an element of ritual to it, and furthermore when we think of temples we think of rituals. And to bring this back to ritual magic, Darden bases the layout of the sunken theater upon the Memory Theater by Giulio Camillo, which was a form of magic. It is likely he got this image from Francis Yates's The Art of Memory, and Yates was a very influential occult scholar and writer. Before the concept of the memory palace there was memory magic, particularly in grimoires like the Ars Notoria, which is an extensive ritual unto itself. Even the PGM has magical rituals for re-membering dream prognostications or just better memory in general.

Next, there is the fact that Bataille had created a secret society he called Acéphale, Headless, in which he sought to be sacrificed. Secret societies do not inherently have to have ritual components, such as the Freemasons or the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or whatever, but they frequently do. Depending on what definitions and criteria you follow for what can be called a "secret society," anything from realtors associations to universities can be secret societies. That being acknowledge, Bataille wanted to create a secret society and so he called Acéphale a secret society.

The impacts secret societies and rituals had on Darden may be considerable, albeit it is doubtful he ever joined a secret society (I certainly have never found his name in the registers of the Grand Lodge of Colorado, and I actually looked for his name in Masonic rolls). I think when we look at Darden's work, the movement through the buildings are ritualized. Night School and Clinic for Sleep Disorders probably have the strongest ritual procession.

One image that influential to Darden was a rendering by LeQueu called "Gothic House." This image is a cross-section through a temple space, and follows a ritual procession (from left the right) through the elements of earth (descending down the well), fire (smoking furnace chamber), water (descending into waters past a water deity statue), and air (dangling above a pit) before being admitted into the Temple of Isis and drinking of the waters Lethe and Mnemosyne. This entire image is a sort of "fan art" for Abbé Terrasson's The Life of Sethos. This was a popular novel at its time and was influential to Mozart's Magic Flute and this image by LeQueu.

Terrasson's novel was of course fiction, but conspiracy theorists and Freemasons and "scholars" of religion have taken this novel as source material for what went on in the actual Cult of Isis. Of course, we have no idea what went on in the Cult of Isis, as it is a mystery religion, and it is therefore a mystery. Unlike the cults of Mithras, that of Isis is a big question mark. We have artifacts, but what rituals and venerations were conducted is unknown. Yet somehow Terrasson's novel became taken seriously and taken as fact by many who want this fictional ritual to be real (usually Freemasons). Take for instance, the trials by the elements, which likely comes from Apuleius's Golden Ass, 11.23, in which Lucius says "per omnia vectus elementa" ("I was ravished throughout all the elements" — Addington translates it as ravished, and Hanson translates it as travelled, and various spurious websites may translate it as purified). This ritual trial by the elements has been adopted, based on Terrasson's inspiration from Apuleius, among Freemasons. I remember getting the rare opportunity to observe a Red Lodge (Scottish Rite Lodge) from Louisiana perform the Entered Apprentice Degree, and even got to assist with the earth, water, and air (not the fire) in the portion of the ritual for the trial by the elements. This is, of course, totally spurious and a late introduction into Freemasonry, but nonetheless, is a curious item in ritual. I digress.

I do know that Anthony Vidler's The Writing of the Walls was influential to Darden, and in that work is, not only explorations of Sade and Bataille, but also ritual architecture and Freemasonry. I do not agree with Vidler's explorations of Freemasonry — I think he relies too heavily on Abbé Larudan's exposé, so much so that I deliberately included a portion of Vidler's analysis on Larudan in my Wikipedia entry on Larudan, just to illustrate that Vidler is not always relying on best information. Regardless, Darden was familiar with Vidler and through Vidler had a basic introduction to Freemasonry and ritual in architecture. I digress again.

LeQueu has effectively rendered the entire initiation of Prince Sethos into the Cult of Isis into this image.

Gothic House, Jean-Jacques LeQueu

This image was highly influential to Darden. It illustrates not only narrative in architecture, but is one of very few examples of visionary architecture that is in-formed by literature. In fact, as far as I am aware, this drawing by LeQueu and Terragni's Danteum are the only two examples of architecture in-formed by literature (with the exception of Darden's work).

There we have it. A schizoanalysis of Darden's fascination with decapitation, dismemberment, re-membering, ritual, secret societies, the occult, and transgression through the lens of Bataille, the PGM, memory magic, LeQueu, Terrason, &c.

Is any of this out of line? Perhaps, but then again so was Duboy's comparison on LeQueu's work with Duchamp's work. There is absolutely no evidence that Duchamp was familiar with LeQueu whatsoever, and yet, many scholars and theorists in architecture, including Darden, buy into Duboy's analysis. Furthermore, who care? If we truly are embracing Deleuze and Guattari's concept of schizoanalysis, then such comparisons of Darden with Bataille and Acéphale and the PGM and the Headless One ought to be welcomed.

Schizoanalysis & Schizoschedio - Deleuze and Guattari's Influence on Douglas Darden

 

Charlie Day, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

While recently revisiting Darden's essay "Architecture of Exhaustion" (Pratt Journal of Architecture, Vol. 2, 1988, p. 88-94), it becomes abundantly obvious that Darden is all over the place — shifting from one thing to another, fluidly moving from idea to idea, inspiration to inspiration, without any segue. He jumps from eroticism and death in Bataille's work, inspiration from Tschumi, on to Herman Melville and Moby-Dick, Edgar Allen Poe, then on to Deleuze and Guattari, a mention of Faust, on to Baudelaire, a bunch of quotes from Barthes, et al. Not only is the essay itself confusing, but it is almost as if Darden wants us to misinterpret him, or at least find our own meaning in his ideas of the Architecture of Exhaustion (i.e. the Underbelly).

The fact that one of Darden's citations in this essay is Deleuze and Guattari is telling. I don't doubt for a minute that Darden read far more from Deleuze and Guattari than just some commentary on Kafka. Oedipus Rex was a work of immense interest to Darden — in Looking After the Underbelly he claims it to be one of the quintessential tales that illustrates the Underbelly — so I imagine Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus would have been in his hands at one time or another.

The following is the passage from "The Architecture of Exhaustion" that D&G inspired Darden:

In the elaboration of the sublime through the representation of pain and danger, the architecture of exhaustion emerges to enhance and counterpoise fact. By situation itself beyond the pleasure of utility, it registers the utility of desire. "Desire" is not form, but a procedure, a process. Desire, rather than its accommodation, represents an intention to signify life on a perilous edge, prompting us to peer into the pumping chambers of the chest and perceive the virtue of confronting our world as an exceptional yet exhilarating ordeal, by which we make our way through our lives and possibly to an "other" world.
(Bold: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward A Minor Literature, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986, p. 8)

Yeah... this passage does not make any more sense in context than out of context. I mean, you get what he's driving at, but it is just so badly worded. How did an English major (at CU Boulder) end up writing like this?

I don't think it is essential to prove or fully analyze how far Deleuze and Guattari, or even Bataille, were influences on Darden. We know they had some influence on him and that is enough. Whether it is founded or unfounded to dive deep into D&G and Bataille and then look back at Darden through their work and ideas, ultimately is not of much concerned. If Darden truly understood D&G or even Bataille, he would not find such interpretations to be out of bounds. If Darden were alive today, he might have given some clarification, but would not consider it unfounded.

On the other hand, I have found no evidence that Darden read William S. Burroughs, or really anything written by the Beat writers. Beat culture was big in Denver (where Darden was from and died), and yet there is no evidence that Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac, et al were influential to his work. He likely read their work, maybe, but there is no evidence they were influential to him. Thus, if I were to try and bring any Beat ideology into interpretations of Darden's work on the Underbelly, Sex Shop, transgression, &c, I would be out of line.

So what? What's the big deal?

Deleuze and Guattari propose the idea of "schizoanalysis," which might be best described as trying to put together a modern day conspiracy theory. Whether or not Jim Garrison actually read D&G, his conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination is very much in line with schizoanalysis. It looks for patterns, similarities, dispersed across the vast range of history and humanity. It is an analysis that is not linear, but clumps of genres and categories. It tends to be all over the place. Think of the image of Charlie Day in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. 

This is kind of how D&G propose we analyze things, in a sort of "split," disjointed manner. Their writings are very schizo (split, shattered). So when they analyze, it should be equally split and shattered.

So now I am going to do what I said was out of bounds: interpret Darden with the Beats. Brion Gysin and Bill Burroughs pioneered a technique called "cut-up." This is where they would write a poem or song or novel, whatever, and then cut it up and rearrange it. You may be familiar with this, as this was how David Bowie composed a lot of his songs. Burroughs would use the technique to conduction divination, magical prognostications (Dr. Alexander Cummins gets into this in his incredible essay in Mandragora, published by Scarlet Imprint). For Burroughs, the cut-up technique was just as valid for divination as tarot or geomancy. In fact, all divination techniques are a form of cut-up: we shuffle and cut the deck; we cut up the Mother figures in geomancy to create the Daughter figures; dream divination is interesting as our own dreams are cut-up, oftentimes non-linear and broken, and our own thinking tends to be cut-up (Dr. Cummins actually answered this question for me on the Glitch Bottle podcast, at the 1:35:29 mark... and yeah, now you know one of my aliases). Burroughs was deeply into the occult, and even helped pioneer chaos magic. In many ways, this is what is going on with schizoanalysis: cutting up and interpreting, even intuitively, and following mental patterns and conspiratorial connections. Psychoanalysis is dead. Let's explore the shattering of our own minds.

Now put all this in reverse: a shattered world, pulling from all directions, looking for patterns and ideas across the whole of human history and knowledge, exploring the wild and the dark side of things human, all too human, and creating something from it. This is schizoschedio. This is what Darden was doing. This is why schizoanalysis is not out of bounds to explore or discuss Darden's works.

Curiously, my first introduction to Darden was while I was taking some classes at the Boston Architectural College. I was designing a space for a schizophrenic that I named Abraham. My instructor told me to look at Oxygen House. Love at first sight.

Can one discuss Temple Forgetful without getting into memory magic, memory palaces, Romulus and Remus, bird divination, Roman archaeology, Hugo's Notre Dame of Paris, Terragni's Danteum, Basilica of Constantine, the Colosseum and the Capitoline Hill Plaza, the Temple of Roma-Amor, Janus, opposites of dry and wet, high and low, &c...? So many things to explore and discuss and play with. Or consider Oxygen House: how many works by Faulkner must one read to properly explore Oxygen House? How deep into Faulkner must one go to get a good handle on Oxygen House? And do we just stop with Faulkner? No. Faulkner is just the beginning. Darden's work truly is ergodic: he makes you work to understand him.

In analyzing Darden's work, one will inevitably be all over the place, connecting weird pins in a conspiracy board.

And I think it is hard to discuss Darden's designs without schizoanalysis. One does not so much create a linear narrative, but rather picks elements of his architecture to dig into, and then may (optional) connect those analyses loosely to other elements of the designs. One cannot necessarily say there is a "system" at hand to analyze Darden or his works. It feels more like Nietzsche's aphorisms — a bunch of loosely categorized thoughts — than a system.

I think the approach of schizoanalysis as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari would be beneficial, and perhaps a more appropriate way to discuss and analyze Darden's work. Is Darden not Post-Structural? Further, I think this approach is necessary, as in many ways this is how he designed: schizoschedio or schizo-design. I like "schizoschedio." It's got a nice ring to it.

Postscript:
As I am pulling together the materials I need for this post, I stumbled across a book by Chris L. Smith, Bare Architecture: A Schizoanalysis. Turns out he uses examples and has some discussion on Oxygen House in it. I guess I need to get this book. I don't know what Smith discusses yet, but I think it validates that I am not out of line here when I endeavor to illustrate the influence D&G had on Darden.

What does Darden mean by "Underbelly"?

Detail of self-portrait in Condemned Building.

An iconic term used by Darden to express his interest and fascination with taboo, transgression, the unusual, the obscene, the unorthodox, the inverted, the weird, et al is "Underbelly." He derives this term from the film Blade Runner, in which the replicant Leon is asked an emotionally provocative hypothetical question, namely a scenario where Leon has flipped a turtle over on its back, it's belly facing up and cannot turn itself back over. Darden analyzes this scene in the 1992 interview with Rob Miller, Looking After the Underbelly. He is alluding to this turtle in his self-portrait of Condemned Building, and further alludes to this turtle in the prose piece at the front of the book:

I am inclined while watching the
turtle to turn it over and study its
underbelly. From this unnatural
position I see how this platonically
solid creature makes its way
through the world.

Dweller by the Dark Stream

As fascinating at all this is — i.e. exploring the source of the term and allusions to that source — it is never entirely clear what Darden means by "Underbelly." Darden certain did not want to define the term, nor did he feel it could be defined. As he states in Looking After the Underbelly:

Rob Miller: Can you define the Underbelly?

Douglas Darden: No and if I could, I’d be ashamed of myself and I’d be ashamed of it [the Underbelly]. Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees and if you name the Underbelly, you have not given yourself the opportunity to explore the substratum of unnamed emotions in a pit of our stomach that force us to seek shelter in the first place.

I think we have a greater need to identify the Underbelly, which may be the source of this whole symposium [referring to Miller’s film project], than we do [with] what we would consider “that other stuff,” the good stuff, the stuff that promotes the way that we want to see ourselves. And because the Underbelly is not the way we want to see ourselves, then what we go about doing is naming it, is giving it characteristics so that we can be done with it, so that it will ostensibly go away, we’ve taken care of it.

In many ways, Darden's concept of Underbelly is the opposite, or at least is the dark twin of Christopher Alexander's concept of Quality Without A Name (Timeless Way of Building, 1979). Where Alexander expresses something numinous and sublime, Darden is expressing something subversive. Alexander cannot name his Quality Without A Name in the same way we cannot name the Divine, much less measure it (Shi'ur Qomah excepted). Similarly, Darden cannot define this Underbelly, which is less a name as it is a cute nickname. The Underbelly is as much a name for Darden's concept as "Tetragrammaton" and "Eloy" and "Olam" and "Adonai" and "AGLA" are names of God. These are names of God, but they are not the Name of God. They still possess power, hence their abundant use in old grimoires, but they are not the Name of God, if God even has a name. Similarly, the term Underbelly is evocative and certainly possesses a power to get our imaginations going the moment we hear it, yet it is no more the name of Darden's concept for the Underbelly than The Quality Without A Name was the actual name of Alexander's concept.

Darden actually had an early working title for this concept, which first appears in his essay "The Architecture of Exhaustion" (Pratt Journal of Architecture, Vol. 2, 1988, p. 88-94). The Architecture of Exhaustion appears to be an early working nickname for the Underbelly. He uses similar language and even phrases to describe his notion of the Architecture of Exhaustion as he does the Underbelly. For instance, one readily available based on Darden's words quoted above in 1992, we find him using a similar phrase in 1988: "Comfort is appreciated only insofar as the architecture objectifies the fear that sits in our stomachs and prompts us to struggle for shelter."

These words are essential later, especially in the canons and reversa of Condemned Building. For instance, Sex Shop's reversa is "Architecture objectifies desire" and Clinic For Sleep Disorders is "Architecture locates our fears." These reversa are essential in understanding how Darden formulates, not just his building designs, but also how he formulates his Six Aphorisms for Envisioning Architecture at the end of Condemned Building.

Think of Darden's Underbelly as something akin to RNA: it a virus's DNA that merged into our own DNA eons ago; an ancient plague that now resides within ourselves, is a part of ourselves. The Underbelly is to the Quality Without A Name as RNA is to DNA. They move together, replicate together, they need each other. They are separate, but not separable. They are distinct, but merged and inherently reliant of each other for propagation.

Alexander describes his Quality Without A Name as that sublime something, some quality that is replicated in architecture and anything good. An example he gives is a barn: someone builds a barn and their neighbor sees this barn and decides they want their own barn, then copies those conditions that suit their liking and needs. Next, another neighbor sees these barns and builds their own barn, barrowing those qualities they like and suit their needs in their own barn. And so on. These replication of features can be pointed to as distinct architectural elements, but there is something inherent in them, something nameless, formless, some numinous quality that is being propagated, and that is what Alexander is describing. (Such is elaborated upon in Pattern Language, which is kind of the practical side to Timeless Way). This is in line with what Leon Alberti says about beauty: it cannot be defined, but we know it when we see it.

Darden is similar, but the underside of this Quality Without A Name. If Alexander's concept is like beauty (I know it when I see it), then Darden is like pornography, to quote Chief Justice Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it." The different between smut and art, eroticism and porn, beauty and the obscene, is thin and wiggly and strange, but we seem to know the difference when shown examples. Yet Darden is not pornography. Nor is Alexander divine. This is just an analogies to understand the concept.

Just as Darden describes in his prose of the turtle as a Platonic solid, the Underbelly is a part of everything. All things have an underbelly, just as the turtle does. I have an underbelly. I have sins, fetishes, faults, failures, scars, immoralities, prejudices, et al. So do you, and so does your pet fish, and so does your car, and the US government (no shit), and your preacher, and Buddhism, and... name it. If it exists, it has an underbelly. Darden was interested in this Underbelly and sought to flip everything over, but more particularly architecture in general.

Thus, when we examine the canons and reversa of Condemned Building, we are not looking at Darden simply taking a canon and inverting it. No, it is not like doing the opposite of the Ten Commandments (e.g. thou shall commit adultery; thou shall have other gods before me, &c). Rather, it is looking at the existing underside of something. If a house is to live in, then by consequence of living, we must also die, so Darden examines and designs a house to die in (Oxygen House). If architecture gives us a place for shelter, then by the very fact there are refugees and world events that result in migrations, Darden becomes interested in architecture's role as something that displaces us (Hostel). Et cetera. Thus, the reversa are not inversions of Commandments, unchangeable laws, but rather it is the natural underside of principles in architecture that are already existent. Darden did not create the reversa. They were already there. Darden just flipped over the turtle to reveal the reversa.

And Darden recognizes that this act of flipping over is obscene. We are not used to looking at the underside of something. That's where all the private parts are. That's where pissing and shitting and fucking comes from. We're not suppose to look at that. We're suppose to see the pretty side, the top side, the side that usually is shown to the world, and the underside, well that's for whatever goes on behind closed doors and call them by Latin names for the sake of politeness (urination, defecation, and sexuality). Hence why Darden says, "from this unnatural position."

From a very early time in his career, Darden is looking at the Underbelly, long before he gave it that cute nickname. He is concerned with that which we do not like to look at or examine, because it is rude or makes us uncomfortable, yet, as he describes above, it is part of the reason we sought to build shelter in the first. Initially he calls this drive, this impetus to building "fear," but later broadly calls it "that substratum of emotions." Regardless, he says they come from our stomachs. This may be some form of humoral theory, such as the belief that ennui came from the spleen, or madness from the uterus (hysteria), etc. Whatever the case, Darden clearly believes it is not some grand and noble ideal or concept for why we began to build in the first place, but rather something that we would like to ignore, not discuss at all. That's because the drive to build comes from the Underbelly. Hence his motive to uncover and explore the Underbelly in Architecture or the Architecture of Exhaustion.

It is curious to see how Darden's ideas evolve over a few years from this utterly pompous and unreadable essay to something more digestible.