Why Reincarnation (3).zip? What pattern even is that? I suppose, for me, it conjures Generation Loss. Close my eyes, visualize Reincarnation – I see the clear-xeroxed forms that my grade school teachers used for their overhead projectors, each plastic sheet more pockmarked than the last. Each student handed a crisp white worksheet with photocopied ink smears.

The pejorative adjective for generation loss is ‘lossy.’ Lossy data, copies of copies of copies. And yet, here we (reproductive beings) are: carnal fornicators and formal reincarnators! We products of a ceaseless evolution, predicated on randomized couplings. Losslessness through aggregation and mutation. Out of repetition, something new!

That’s all to say that Reincarnation, like any of our patterns, is taken quite broadly in this issue. We are actually imagining three separate kinds of events, each with its own definition of creation/reincarnation. The first is bodily recreation, where the outer facade is replicated but the interior – i.e. the soul – is not. The second is the inverse, classical reincarnation where the soul is moved between differentiated hosts or into new forms. The third and final reincarnation event is the clone or the copy, where the soul itself is duplicated and maintains the same form, even if a little lossy. 

In all of these, we find Reincarnation is a question of iterations and cycles, of rupture and recurrence. Here’s an example of perceived iteration – I’m always seeing guys out of the corner of my eye that look like Jeremy Strong on the streets of Brooklyn. Is that a reincarnation event? Or maybe balding men are like converging crab evolutionary paths that become Jeremy Strong. Either way, we find ourselves with the problem of copies. It’s a problem in cutesy nautical paradoxes. It’s in carbon-copy science-fiction & horror premises. It’s in today’s inescapable zombified ouroboroi named Artificial Intelligence. It’s in goopy lazarus resurrections and The Resurrection. It’s there when a wizened phoenix has wet dreams about its next rebirth. It’s in ctrl-x digital shortcuts. It’s in the divine transubstantiation of souls. 

Of course, this would not be a spiral manifesto if we didn't return back to our own cycles of libidinal desires! Leaky, lossy, bodies must enjoin to recreate – reproduction | reincarnation. Imagine: our midnight red innards working ceaselessly; always secretly plotting to bear the self toward resurrection, toward immortality. Our corporeal being is designed to maintain the reproductive cycle, promising immortality. Battling eternally with our death drive, the drive for eternity finds a dialectical synthesis in the child – we can have our cake and eat it too! We die / We live! Look at us there, on the other side of the river!