Spiritual Vertigo

by N. Nosirrah

Genres: Absurdist Fiction

Synopsis

For the first time, all known works of the elusive N. Nosirrah are gathered in a single volume, including God Is an Atheist, Nothing from Nothing, How to Profit from the Prophets in the Coming End of the World, Practical Obsession, and Chronic Eros.

Who is N. Nosirrah?

Mystic. Madman. Philosopher. Confidence artist. Literary prankster. Prophet of the end of certainty. Or perhaps nothing more than a fictional character invented by his own books.

Part spiritual deconstruction, part philosophical satire, part existential comedy, these works systematically dismantle religion, atheism, self-help, materialism, spirituality, identity, meaning, and every other system unfortunate enough to attract Nosirrah's attention. Yet beneath the irreverence lies a profound inquiry into the nature of consciousness, freedom, love, and the human compulsion to seek certainty in an uncertain universe.

Written with equal parts humor, mysticism, absurdity, and intellectual mischief, Nosirrah's books explore what remains when every belief collapses, every answer fails, and every identity reveals itself to be a performance. Prescient in their critique of social media, algorithmic reality, digital identity, and the commodification of spirituality, these writings feel less like relics from another era than dispatches from a future that has already arrived.

Spiritual Vertigo is an invitation into the exhilarating and terrifying possibility that there is nothing to hold on to—and that this may be the beginning of genuine freedom.

Release date: May 17, 2027

Publisher: Sentient Publications

Print pages: 550

Sample

Introduction to Spiritual Vertigo: The Collected Works of a Mad Mystic

Perhaps it is important to disclose that this is not a conventional literary preface but rather an initiation into the destabilization that the title Spiritual Vertigo would suggest. Here collected in one volume for the first time are all of the known works of N. Nosirrah put together in an exploration of self that is a hall of mirrors, a kind of identity apocalypse that the reader should take seriously and once having done so, then proceed knowing that seriousness will be completely ignored. The belief in identity and Nosirrah are nothing more then an elaborated oxymoron as are you and your beliefs.

In short, the collected works of this era’s most important mystic is dangerous to you not because these works destroy belief but because they destroy the certainty that belief is designed to deliver. He is, as many have written, not an atheist or a believer, a philosopher or a nihilist but a dismantler of all systems including his own writings. It is thus that we find no plot unfolding in Nosirrah’s writings and in a reversal of normal roles, the only characters in these literary masterpieces are the readers’ assumptions.

Nosirrah himself occupies a place of inversion, the ambiguity between authenticity and performance, less of an author then a literary device. Is it that he truly does not exist or is that he wishes to be left alone, safe from the attention of those many readers who seek out his energetic transmission by being in his presence?

Who is Nosirrah? This is not just a writer, but a mystic, a cosmic grifter and performance artist, yet so little is known about this man. One could imagine a Kafka or Camus, a Nietzsche or Heidegger, a Van Gogh with ear sewn back on— not sewn on well but reattached substantially enough to stay put but perhaps upside down, as such would be the way of Nosirrah, a kind of living pixelating Starry Night with frame askew.

Nosirrah describes his life in great detail in his unauthorized autobiography Practical Obsession included herein, however it is believed that this book was entirely a work of diversion perhaps due the substantial number of his creditors at the time of writing it. We do not know if Nosirrah is even alive, as he has not been heard from for some years.

We know that the works in this volume make up all the known and published novellas by Nosirrah however Lydia Smyth, Nosirrah’s beleaguered editor indicated in her archived letters that there are at least two unpublished manuscripts which are lost somewhere in the slush piles of an unknown New York publisher, a book entitled Sardine Delights which appears to be a dessert cook book featuring a variety of fish based cookies, cakes and pies (note that these confections are found to be entirely repugnant, which itself is metaphoric and alluding to the Aghori left-hand path while guised as baking instructions) and a Taoist treatise Absolutely Still/Watch Screen All Day and Night: The High Intensity Interval Training Program for Minimizing Mental Health Before Dying Very Young — an incredible instruction manual for not moving at all while your attention span is reduced progressively and effortlessly until all critical thinking disappears which you won’t notice since your attention span will have moved to the next image and then the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. See you have already forgotten what is being discussed here.

The reader is forgiven if they can’t help but compare Nosirrah to Kurt Vonnegut or Phillip K. Dick. Nosirrah writes the future since he believes he is living backwards in time and is simply journaling what has taken place already, just in the future which is his past. It is Nosirrah’s regressing perspective which is, for us, what is next and it is that which makes him the prophetic writer that we know today .

Spiritual Vertigo is perhaps the definitive work on the modern day destruction of self-reflection in which Nosirrah describes the emptying of the inner life into the bottomless pit of belief and materialism. Nosirrah has apparently seen the existential apocalypse of a culture where the performative life externalized and optimized for the pretense of social media influence meets the feedback loop of artificial intelligence and algorithmic mirroring to produce a vast hollowing out of the felt sense of being alive. This shared emptiness emerging as the grasping for purpose in our lives becomes more and more desperate but is met only by digital agreement, a smiley faced emoji when we are desperate for an actual smiling face. Nosirrah has seen this and has told us clearly that no belief of any kind will fill that void, rather it is the void itself that is the portal to a new way of seeing the world and the feeling of the actual flow of life. Indeed Nosirrah celebrates the collapse of meaning, likening it to a short cut by way of the dark woods of mental disintegration to a life, a collective life no less, of unknowing. This is the invitation to the creative life of curiosity that is unbound by the known, unrestricted by belief, and guided not by authority from within or without but by the overpowering movement constantly taking us over the edge.

Spiritual Vertigo is the collected works of a mystic who knows there are only the few readers who will understand and even fewer who will live that understanding. To be clear, that understanding is that there is no understanding. This lived paradox cannot be taught and cannot be replicated. For a genius writer like Nosirrah this leaves very little to say beyond recipes for sardine cheesecake, yet it is his creative genius that he finds a way to communicate in a fashion one critic called “the writing of perhaps the finest novelist the English language has yet produced”. We should note that this one critic existed entirely in the imagination of Nosirrah himself but this might explain the confidence with which he approached his otherwise entirely fragmented psyche to extract from it the potent prose of his menippean novels.

We have organized these collected works in what may seem like chronological order, however keep in mind Nosirrah’s unusual relationship to time and that these works were published as discovered, not when written. You may notice that there is an evolution from an overtly anti-religion tone with later works becoming more mystical and self-interrogating. Noticing this progression however would be entirely a construction of your own mind as Nosirrah wrote without progression or theme. He is not anti-religious, rather he is anti-certainty nor is he self-interrogating having had a lack of success in finding any self to interrogate.

Nosirrah consistently visit themes of self-erasure, the collapse of belief, and the construction of all reality as a buffer against the fact of nothingness. He teases the possibility of an emergent state of being from the rubble of the disintegrating life however he is careful to never describe what is possible so that all the reader has to work with is deconstruction. However, for those who pay careful attention the life of Nosirrah himself is evidence of the radiance that emerges from the event horizon at the approach to the black hole of self. In Nosirrah we see a truly free being, unconcerned with how he is seen by others, unbathed, unkempt and with the odor of one who is beyond bathes. However, it is said that he also exudes the quality that so many mystics describe, the undivided, the unitary, the “I am”.

It is said that Nosirrah is always attended by an acolyte who is ignored by the mystic but still benefits from the devotional care they give Nosirrah and the inadvertent transmission from him. In Chronic Eros he describes in detail his process of erotic transference and we are happy to say that this volume is included in these collected works. Leave it to say that he is highly attractive due to his intense magnetism and despite the defilement of his body from the years of austerities and debauchery. In short, he is repulsive to look at. Yet his presence, like his written word, is intensely charismatic.

Spiritual Vertigo does not occur when one falls in the abyss of meaninglessness, it is too late then to feel anything at all. Rather, this vertigo is the the overwhelming realization that the fall is a possibility, and this possibility undermines the foundation that holds up a life. Nosirrah is not an advocate of meaninglessness he simply points out that life does not require us to assign meaning to it and that our compulsion to do so corrupts any possibility of a creative life.

As a publisher, we would like to say that we are very proud to offer this collection however that is not the case in the least. We are obligated by contract to publish this despite our attempts to negotiate a settlement that would protect the public from these searing words. We do not believe that humanity is ready for these transformative words and expect the inevitable attempts to ban this book ( with which we will fully cooperate). We hope that you have the good sense to avoid reading it. These works are not for the timid and certainly not for those with the illusion that they are brave, they are not for you or anyone you know, the works within this volume are for no one. If that is you, and you know you are no one, then you know you are not prepared and can never be, then you are the singular reader for whom these works were written.