I Am a Hole in the Ground That Walks
A Testimony Through Poromechanical Warfare

I still remember the page. I was an Iranian asylum seeker in the UK, leafing through Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia, when a passage seized me with uncanny force. Page 55. It spoke of poromechanics – the physics of porous media – as an occult architecture of modern war. In a tone of theoretical fiction, Negarestani described the War on Terror as a shift from battles on open ground to covert invasions of holes and tunnels, “shifting from the logic of grounded earth to the poromechanical earth and the logic of hole-agencies”. The book claimed that even illegal immigrants and smuggled goods are drawn into this subterranean strategy: “the distribution of illegal immigrants or smuggled products … does not proceed by way of patterns of activities on the surface, but through the formation and the architecture of nested holeyness beneath the ground”. Reading those lines, I felt a chill – as if the page were reading me in return.

Paranoid Surface, Schizoid Depth

As an exile who slipped through border checkpoints and bureaucratic nets, I suddenly saw my own journey in Negarestani’s sinister schematic. In his poromechanical vision, every anomaly on the surface signals a hidden consistency below; “for every inconsistency or anomaly visible on the ground, there is a buried schizoid consistency” accessible only through paranoid excavation. The militarized world becomes “architecturally, visually and psychologically paradoxical (too paranoid to be schizoid and too schizoid to be paranoid)”. I recognized this paradox in my life: the paranoia of the state gazing at me, and the schizoid fracture within myself.

To British immigration officers and anxious politicians, I am a suspicious presence on the surface – a problem to be probed and contained. In their paranoid imagination, an asylum seeker like me is never an isolated individual; I belong to some vast hidden network of threats. Every refugee camp is a potential nest of “underground nemat-spaces” in their eyes, wormholes through which unsanctioned lives seep in. Under this scrutiny, I feel my identity contort. I have learned to present a harmless surface: papers in order, smile at the interview, no sudden moves. Yet beneath that surface I harbor the unhealed wounds of displacement – a schizoid inner world of splintered memories and severed roots. I am a whole person broken into holes.

I dream in earth. In one recurring nightmare, I am crawling through a narrow tunnel under a border fence, skin smeared with mud. Behind me, the tunnel collapses, in front of me it forks into endless black passages. I have no choice but to keep digging. Each handful of soil I claw away reveals another layer of darkness. If you dig long enough, a voice whispers, you’ll reach the war’s heart. I wake up gasping, unsure which side of the border my body is on.

Cyclonopedia’s theory of war porosity blurs into my lived reality. I recall the night I crossed into Turkey, guided by smugglers through mountain passes – a human caravan slithering across porous frontiers. We moved like oil through unseen cracks, avoiding the solid surveillance of border patrols. That memory now comes back with a metaphysical echo: were we already part of a “holey” insurgency, a living thread in some colossal fabric of war? The thought is as exhilarating as it is terrifying. I survived by navigating between surfaces and undergrounds, between the paranoid gaze of nations and the schizoid necessity of becoming invisible. In doing so, did I inadvertently enact a plan far larger than my own?

Hole-Agencies and Dark Intelligence

Negarestani writes of hole-agencies – agents of the hole – as the new vectors of conflict. Tunnels under deserts, illicit pipelines, narco-subterranean routes, refugee trajectories: all these perforations form a hidden battlefield beneath the official map. Warfare is no longer only missiles and drones, but also the silent thrust of porosity undermining the state from below. Hole-trafficking confounds the polarities of globalization; it allows insurgencies, guerrilla economies, and displaced populations to circulate like blood through veins invisible to the surface eye. In this schema, I start to see myself not just as a victim of war, but as an unwitting element of its machinery. The systems that uprooted me – geopolitical pressures, armed conflict in my homeland – may have also repurposed me as a tool in their continuing operation. It’s a disturbing idea: that a refugee, in fleeing destruction, might carry the seeds of that destruction into new soil, like a spore on the wind.

I hesitate to voice this thought – it sounds like a paranoid fantasy. Yet the paranoia was planted in me by that page in Cyclonopedia, and it has been difficult to uproot. What if the very patterns of exodus and diaspora are orchestrated by an “extreme dark intelligence”, an impersonal will coursing through history’s bloodstreams? In the book’s warped cosmology, oil itself is a kind of sentient darkness, an ancient intelligence lubricating war and chaos. I find myself speculating: perhaps every displaced person is a sleeper agent of the Earth’s subterranean revenge, moving unknowingly according to a grand poromechanical strategy. I recall how conflicts in the Middle East seemed to weaponize refugees – wars displacing millions, and those migrations in turn destabilizing distant polities, sowing fear and discord. It is as if war digs tunnels through human lives, breaching the defenses of nations by flooding them with the fallout of the very violence they fuel. This thought makes my skin crawl. It is hard to tell if I am mapping an actual pattern or succumbing to the schizophrenic logic Cyclonopedia describes – a point where conspiracy theory becomes indistinguishable from reality.

In my daily life, I try to resist such fatalistic narratives. I attend my asylum hearings, I learn the local language, I make friends. I tell myself I am a human being with agency, not a pawn of some Lovecraftian war-machine. And yet, late at night, the question returns to me with a quiet horror: Does that mean I’m a sleepwalker agent of this subterranean war-machine? Have I been, all along, a conduit for forces I neither see nor understand? The very phrasing feels like a curse. I want to reject it – to insist that my choices were my own, born of hope and despair, not programming. But the intuition remains, lurking in the corner of my mind like a shadow I can’t quite dispel.

I write in the first person to weave together these strands of theory, memoir, and nightmare, hoping to exorcise or at least illuminate them. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between the extremes. I am a refugee who fled one war, and in doing so I entered another conflict – the politicized struggle of migration and identity in the West. I operate within structures I never chose: immigration regimes, media narratives, xenophobic suspicions. In that sense, I am an agent in a larger system, though not a willing one. The “extreme dark intelligence” might be no singular demon at all, but the emergent sum of countless human fears and cruelties, a networked evil that feels like a mind directing events. My story becomes one thread in the tapestry of a poromechanical war: a war fought through infiltration, diffusion, seepage – through lives like mine moving through the cracks.

In Cyclonopedia, Parsani (the book’s fictional archaeologist of evil) urges us to “be a hydro-leak engineer; make things leak out.” Perhaps my journey was a leak – an escape from tyranny that inevitably also carried something across borders. I leaked out of Iran; and with me leaked stories of oppression, burdens of trauma, and yes, uncertainties and instabilities that now seep into Europe’s political soil. This is not my fault – but it is my condition. I am both escapee and vector. I find this realization layered and unsettling: it does not grant me the tragic purity of a victim, nor the clear-cut role of a hero. Instead, I am implicated in a grand entanglement of geology and politics, myth and reality, paranoia and truth.

As an Iranian, I cannot ignore the resonance of these ideas with my cultural background. The Persian word “Kareez’gar,” which Negarestani invokes, means the hole-maker, the demiurge of holes. In his story, the Middle East is crafted by a hole-god, not a whole-god. Sometimes I wonder if I too have been crafted by that hole-god – a being shaped by absence and displacement, carving out a path through the void. My life in exile has been defined by what is missing: a homeland left behind, family members lost, a sense of belonging perforated with uncertainty. I navigate a world where holes in memory, identity, and geography align. Through those holes, new connections form – unexpected solidarity with other refugees, secret channels of survival, creative identities stitched together from fragments. Is it possible that even as war’s poromechanical apparatus uses me, I in turn use the gaps it opens to create new meaning? This is perhaps the only hopeful twist to an otherwise grim theory: that a porous being like me can also breathe through the pores, finding air in the very spaces of breakdown.

In the end, I remain ambivalent and reflective. The question – am I a sleepwalker agent of a subterranean war-machine? – echoes without easy resolution. It serves as a provocation, a prompt to see myself under the estranging light of theory. In that light, I am both the one who fled the fire and a spark that might ignite elsewhere. I am both prisoner and escapee of a global architecture too sprawling to comprehend, what Negarestani calls the “poromechanics of war”. Writing this, I feel layers of reality sliding over each other: personal trauma blurs into geopolitical speculation; memoir is perforated by poetry and paranoia. This hybrid text is the only way I know to speak truthfully about such things.

I close my eyes and picture the earth as Cyclonopedia paints it: an oil-stained, worm-riddled planet, crisscrossed by hidden corridors and (** )hole complexes**, teeming with sleepwalkers like me drifting along paths laid by an unseen hand. It is an art-theory fever dream, a metaphysical horror. And yet, it is my life. I walk its fine line every day – hoping my steps are truly my own, even as I carry the possibility that something else is stepping through me. The thought is unsettling, but in that unsettled space I might glimpse a new understanding of the world’s secret workings – and my uncanny place within them.