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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
One of the most widely celebrated artists of his generation, Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, developing a complex and deeply figured discourse around definition, wherein the impossibilities for sufficient representations of the physical, specifically corporeal, world — from computer generated imagery to bathetic poetry — are hysterically rehearsed. A Primer for Cadavers, a startlingly original first collection, brings together a selection of his texts from 2010 to 2016. 'Part prose-poetry, part theatrical direction, part script-work, part dream-work,' writes Joe Luna in his afterword, 'Atkins' texts present something as fantastic and commonplace as the record of a creation, the diary of a writer glued to the screen of their own production, an elegiac, erotic Frankenstein for the twenty-first century.'
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‘Discomfited by being a seer as much as an elective mute, Ed Atkins, with his mind on our crotch, careens between plainsong and unrequited romantic muttering. Alert to galactic signals from some unfathomable pre-human history, vexed by a potentially inhuman future, all the while tracking our desperate right now, he do masculinity in different voices – and everything in the vicinity shimmers, ominously.’
— Bruce Hainley, author of Under the Sign of [sic]
‘How can cadavers seem so alive, speak so eloquently? Atkins’ prose is urgent, sometimes even breathless, seeming to stumble over its own material conditions. His is a unique voice that captures a truly embodied intelligence.’
— David Joselit, author of After Art
‘Atkins’ writing spores from the body, scraping through life matter’s nervous stuff, leaving us agitated and eager. What’s appealed to us is an odd mix of mimetic futures. Cancer exists, tattoos, squids, and kissing exist – all felt in the mouth as pulsing questions.’
— Holly Pester, author of Go to reception and ask for Sara in red felt tip
‘If you had to pick one artist currently having a profound impact on his contemporaries, you would have to choose Ed Atkins… He programmes almost all his computer animation himself and writes exceptional stream-of consciousness poetry that feeds into his works.’
— Francesca Gavin, Dazed and Confused
‘Few young artists so instinctively grasp the zeitgeist as does Ed Atkins. In his films, computer-rendered avatars overflow with emotional monologues, and a virtuoso digital aesthetic is undercut by a fixation on flesh – death and decay are recurrent subjects.’
— Martin Herbert, Artforum
‘For writing which is so dense, so thickened, it moves quickly. It has the vertigo effect of the comments thread which has spiralled out of control, drawing our eye down the page quicker than we can take it in. Sometimes it says “etc.” simply, perhaps, because it does not have time to draw breath. That is also part of why it never finds the bottom, never settles for the worst, any more than it allows itself to be entirely intoxicated with its own motile, palpable, extraordinary pleasures.’
— Mike Sperlinger, Professor of Theory and Writing, Kunstakadamiet Oslo
‘I overheard someone say that Atkins’s installations are hard to like but impossible to forget. It’s not often that contemporary art scares me – but this sure did.’
— Daniel Birnbaum, director of Moderna Museet
‘Everything here lives in the uncanny valley, that strange space of revulsion that holds the almost human – what’s us, but not quite.’
— Leslie Jamison, Parkett
‘A Primer for Cadavers is a book I have been waiting for – Ed Atkins is one of the great artists and writers of our time. He draws attention to the ways in which we perceive, communicate and filter information by combining layered images with incomplete fragments of speech, subtitles, drawing and handwriting. He describes this approach as “an attempt to address the body hole, rather than privilege sight [or] hearing… the work finding its home within the body of the reader”. It underscores the ambivalent relationship that exists between real and virtual objects, between real and virtual conditions and between us and our virtual selves. A Primer for Cadavers is a brilliant book!’
— Hans Ulrich Obrist, author of Ways of Curating
‘Ed Atkins knows that “your body is deaf, mute, dumb, and, more, importantly, dangerous. No use talking to it, is there? Anyways, it’s busy.” Isn’t it weird to have a busy body, especially one distributed on many “platforms”, across media? In his writing, Atkins slows down that preoccupied body, puts it back together, thrusts it into the “imaginative context” of “particularly effusive relations”, murders it, zombifies it, tears it apart again in that old medium of the written word. He puts it on trial, he writes, but finds that it in turn tries him. File your amicus curaie. We all stand with him.’
— Andrew Durbin, author of Mature Themes
‘When it is, in years to be, that Ed Atkins incarnates his own adjective, aspects of the definition (high, low and all points in between) so laid down will dwell in part on this – (t)his fascination with how we tell the world through a medium that is not the world.’
— Gareth Evans, writer and curator
‘Ed Atkins comes across as a writer who makes art. His body of work includes screenplays, audio, and videos that are the visual equivalent of a poem: sentences of image and sound are layered rhythmically, punctuated by repeated motifs.’
— Kathy Noble, Art Review
‘Atkins’s arcane “Squinting through a prism of tears” audiovisual poetry, with its Ballardian bouquets of language, is impossible to imagine coming from any other time than Right Now. After watching one of his shorts you may have a sense of being touched in an obscure spot that you did not know existed.’
— Nick Pinkerton, Artforum
A PRIMER FOR CADAVERS
ED ATKINS
For Sally-Ginger
CONTENTS
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORK
Dears –
Millions of urgent, mega-bereaved children will hurl wills wedged inside denuded plastic bottles and at cursed lakes forever choked with same,
X. A little later, after-hours, lining the shore they’re, um, perfectly normally reflexively force-gagging one another with forebear’s forefingers – which come in stiff pairings (snapped off at the love), tightly parcelled in red paisley bandanas that are now, we understand, browning and sodden with an unchecked gravy of same,
X.
Said ramming home so said summoning asphyxial opinions and sadly so soon after our super-hot bodies disentangled,
X. My mind is in your crotch,
X, while I sit staring at this piano’s tremendously INTELLIGIBLE anachronisms; the acceptance of this pen’s disabilities; the blithe arrogance of a fat analogue wristwatch,
X. Conservatively speaking, the machine-chamfered tools of late phallic whittling abound and universally, so honestly,
X, very much capable of honing any stubborn shape into the absolute SPIT. Normally, blunt knives designed as such and held just so for really wholesome bruising, in the main (a particular pedagogic method: firm, spheroidal fruit wielded inside ivory, Egyptian cotton pillowcases). So very nearly a joke, right? A cut, then, is only WORRIED into the world once weeks are spent on one rose-maddening patch of WINNING inner thigh, which, er, resembles nothing so incisive as the act of a blade, but rather ripping or snagging of clumsy child portions from a dim source with your monstrous fingernails,
X – under which we will retrieve dark evidence of that vast out-of-town mattress of toxic green moss and a lover’s forensic picnic at the site thereof, comprising Alertec® ‘corroborated’ by kale and vivid yellow slime-mould, right? Recuperated, if needs be, post mortem. That’s a threat. Hence the urgency around will penning, if law is to be so very previous.
Other weeks the whole thing just feels so, um, dumbly squandered on worthily enervated abstinence; your sole vignetted eye kept till bloodshot and weeping on today’s such-and-such remedial shrine, fucktard. Remember,
X: everything here is edible; the keys, the shiny red car, the ring fingers, the police, those sad looking people queuing at maybe a product launch over there; the very tarmac, the very overcast sky – the very shit unfurling so conventionally down your leg. All of it perfectly cooked sous vide and in thin black bin bags secreted behind the wainscot and with zingy rats slashed and wrung out, concentrated – reduced – under really not the whole world’s scrutinizing gaze by that haunted dog,
X: apparently readily available at the deli counter in enormous, autocratic supermarkets, which I can totally believe.
It can take years to reach a wrong full term, I guess. Also, please excuse the quiet. Excuse the quiet in here. Caught between discounted stud-walls where eloquent, eminent agonisms once rehearsed for avid audiences who fucking owned the subtleties of understanding. Quarrels that danced slow and deliberate into a love already defoliated of all the travesty-heart-shaped and weaponized amplification equipment. And notably angry vestigial language delivered from vulgar podia, erupting as ‘red’ from one of the five or six noise-making rifts I seldom though now envisaging quality hecklers of this unwaveringly dysmorphic façade. Well, my darling interlocutory passerine, who tenderly repossesses the sorely possessed over and over and through a mouth rapaciously giving out entire hissing summers of wet green noise to drown out nothing so much as ignorance,
X, which tends to the long-dead blue-sky-thinking thaumaturges, whose blood is now so despoiled of oxygen they may as well be forcibly identified as dreaming acanthuses, leaves carefully lifted in the already known to be futile hunt for a pair of jewel-like lungs or simply something recognizable as genitals.
Generally speaking there’s been no DEARTHS identified with acceptance: of and under those factory-distressed clothes distressingly haired moles skin tagging and slowly peeling back in awkward equivalence to nictitating membranes, only without eyes to ‘get at’; all the better to prevent cowardice being rehomed ahead of more deserving, tax-paying parties – such as your terrifying, mercenary sensibility,
X – which no doubt the very headwater of your historic ALONE. Better to gag again,
X; better to express when you’re considerably dissembled; virtually deformed by the absence of sensory testimony and into some sort of mythical – né declawed – Monster of the Text, executed in long-handed blue-blood rope burn. So seeping out from the cuffs, the dock and the cute courthouse.
Whip pan to interior: this very real, tight bedsit, door bolted – and we might consider those two or three rectangular electrical recta that are getting busy the moment, merrily disgorging dark, rich, beautifully observed and oversized severed heads of handsome MEN – one by one and interminably; each emergent identikit countenance a stunning, flickering pageant of fucking superlative psychic expression! Most of which super-referents you’re oblivious to,
X, and how sad you might feel if that too weren’t a sensation out-performed with more coherent BRIO than you had thought attainable and not, of course, save for the shining, grinning plastic craw. O! the shame that flushes your system arrives simultaneously alongside a total disinterest concerning each expression’s unimpeachable, tear-jerk humanity, which makes the whole rig seem irreproachable, really. Enviable certitude presented similarly irrefutably – benchmarking and desktop delimiting the vernacular of possible/impossible experience and its insufficient representation. As in: what will suffice to prevent disastrous interpretative divergence? – The judicious application of exclamation marks? A deft shuffle of enthusiastic dark-haired auditionee surrogates? (A proxy for tears is creditable,
X, but of loving blood-stifled collapsing chest-cavity wha?)
The Mirror Stage retrieved at last, taken away from those principled elephants and great apes of flattering anthropomorphism, gifted with calm irresponsibly to the exposure-wrecked pigeons, staggering out from beneath frowning underpasses, feet eroded by sustained contact with fried chicken and potato guano, exhausted; soft skulls poison-shrunk from olid and discarded black seed on spiked sills, or the swing of dull, unchecked toddler’s fat leg. And it dawns: slowly rising flocks, the SMUT OF THE SUN, as if a beak could crack a smile over a thousand years. And here lies hope,
X: The London Met, humbled, hats off, numbers I don’t even need to see with water-cannoned eyes. And it isn’t, um, beautiful but instead monstrous, the heraldic crest of a troll emblazoned on everyone’s tongues to lick past wounds because they taste groundingly cheap.
Desperate regurgitation the denial of this economy’s omnipresence, even if and simply semantically. All there is left for me, gesture-wise, is the rejection of a huge thumb forcibly grafted for fingered value picked like a scab from the shea-buttered surface of every single plush tendril coming from your wondrous being,
X. The only way in which figuration is DE-violated and molecular-level insubordination could possibly repair otherness is how I just now liked to think as a description of love,
X. And fleeting: a bridge formed by leaping jets of whetted electrical current, subsequently misting in the blinding sunlight. The turning-down of productive, progressive use with just a cuddle,
X? Otherwise we might just fucking forget it and deservedly decamp: rejection the sole property of spirit-levelled sense-makers and, um, your home,
X, which is reaffirmed as a limited capacity pine lung stowed beneath sea-level.
No one hears you,
X. Though my searing wish would be to join you in there; with you and up against you. An unfettered pair of dampening husks curled together like savoured and pre-sucked Pringles. With somehow our lips and ears enfolded for whispering in circular breaths,
X, and aimless affirmatory conjurations and memories lisped with precise neurological terminology to simply galvanize the inaccuracy inside our heads and more than likely, tomorrow, as our brains turn to sparkling mush without curtains drawn and finally come together. Murmured try-outs of proper synonyms for love.
As in: I love you,
X. (Self-chiding for retarded vocabulary where it really counts: sighed into your face,
X. There’s an idea that adequate performance recognition is the line of contingency for affective conveyance,
X – whereas it’s v. clear that the irreproachability of you, sung to the moon in one of those perma-wilting falsettos, yields something that returns you to your embodied self, which gets loved as such and like a rash.)
Ergo, kisses possible not just for lips relish but applied thwarting warring apparatuses and rather than the tart foley of bullet on plate metal or breeze-block, sound-tracking instead in an orgy of agonistic stringed instruments bowed with taught and very willing vermilion guts and discordance is cherished. LIKED.
The need is unquestionable, though occasionally attempted dismissal with that self-same stately wave of the hand that labels evil though never inside of a young head. Ribbons of ticker-taped loathing drift down to no ground, remember? Like air-to-air ruination.
Will you write to me,
X? I will seldom respond, if ever. As wherever I go, there I am: beneath beneath beneath, sucker-punch doubled-over into stress positioned speech in nasty unisons – some benevolent thing seeming-listening with stupid honourable prosthetic ears while from the mouth a few inches down and degrees perfect rotation: a vituperative, electrical bugged buzz-hole both sooth-says all this unreal and unmeant encouragement while through an adjacent hot air vent sucking correspondent oxygen (which I require for living,
X) from my lungs well in advance of the hopeful trachea, the plucky larynx, the dewy-eyed tongue and comedy teeth, all earnestly poised to pronounce, errm, the simple possibilities of disliking anything but in supra-agreement, etc. And what if I want to disavow the possibility of abundantly replacing an experience with some Legion other’s mediated imagery?
RAZOR
Drifting off, I imagine a razor blade gliding along the central seam of my scrotum. The weight of the testicles makes the wound yawn
apart, disgorging the contents, silent-spulled across the small sheet and weird thigh room tween my legs.
It’s a recurring, pre-slumber thought that, once summoned, loops unresolvedly.
Lying there as an unfortunate patient lies on the operating table: senses dulled by anaesthetic fug while horrid quasi-perception continues to function.
Albeit like BROKE strobe and from some forensic perspective over there in the head
of some sort of man at the foot. I can see every glim a-snag of the razor’s edge, every tautening and subsequent slackening of the skin before and after the blade – every dull slip of my
private gore under the duvet.
Feels like something between that, um, lurch when seeing/hearing your foul enemies vomiting, and the subliminal shiver DONE certain pieces of music.
It feels internal and nervous and impossible and wet the spark of muscle and bone nerve like live copper wiring veins and plumbing the marrow, scoop-hollowing out and pitching me into absolute sensation.
A TUMOUR (IN ENGLISH)
INTRUSION
Extruded from a previously unnoticed orifice situated somewhere on your reverse. [EYES ROLL BACK]
Some sort of duct at the very centre of the crown – a tiny pinprick in the eye of the eye of that whorl of hair dreamt up by the skull. Somewhere near the root. Perhaps haloed by a few telltale white hairs, blanched by sheer proximity; SCALDED by hot zephyrs vented from the orifice. (Those hairs are thinner, too. Worried (as in ‘worried’) to distraction, they’re not sleeping properly. Perpetually bolt upright despite the considerable application of calming hair products. (Clays, waxes, mousses, creams, putties, etc.)
/
A grove of silver birch trees at night, signposting the mouth of a cave, are plucked one by one by the light of my torch. The light interrupted by a stooped figure. Not a cave but a slate mine, long abandoned. Abandoned but sporadically occupied by local teenagers. They go there in the nocturnal depths of summer to conduct their bored, occult ceremonies. Thousands of them, sat cross-legged on the soft soil and hard rock down there. A mile down. Breathing in unison, quarrying into one another and the slate-shagged earth with nothing but their combined languor and a bucketful of veterinary drugs passed hand to hand to ass to mouth. An orgy of fecklessness and animal despair. Then a disconsolate voice from the mouth of the mine confuses the scale and petrifies the trees.
/
An elegant hand, while caressing the head, lingers too long at the crown. A finger delicately tracing the perimeter of the orifice (an idle game at first, an infinitesimal sentence, tactile-signed quickly on your head. You understand that those peculiar etymological roots common to both ‘comfort’ and ‘vestigial’ are being discussed by fingers and skull. […] You understand more than you can speak). A tight black dot only apprehended as an opening and not a mole or a fleck or a biro-written full stop when you run your finger over it. A narrow jet of sulphur-inflected air FORTHCOMING. An inhalation to be taken for the alleviation of depravity – a geological vent VENTING the gas generated as a by-product of the process of maintaining the memories of forthcoming commitments – a wind instrumentalized by the distinct corrugations scoring the edge of the hole – the note, pitched in wasteland, is a kind of harmonic overtone between two inaudible voices, whispering down the precious, velvet network of a bat’s ear (a tear welling in the bat’s right eye) – a damnable draft, its true source remaining unknown despite your increasingly desperate search about the walls of the flat – we must submit to wearing an extra layer at all times – a stream of compressed air delivered from a canister, intended for photographic purposes but employed here to dislodge satisfying fragments of STUFF from a gap between the staves that make up the tabletop. An emergency TRACHEOTOMY – an incision made using a paring knife – an old fashioned paper straw jostled into the gash – precarious, gargling breaths drawn (praying that the wetted, sagging straw will hold till the paramedics get here) – a familiar whistle, through the chipped gap between your two front teeth (‘Camptown Races’ or whatever – a blowing, aimed as precisely as possible at the flame of a candle – the slightest ripple to interrupt its verticality (LIQUID SHADOWS across the walls) – the straining fan inside the old laptop. Etc.
/
Situated at the precise cranial antipode to the burnt tip of your tongue, as seen protruding between your teeth, just a little, like the cat’s. An idiotic, lobotomized expression landed heavy on your face. And the tip of the tongue burnt, a tiny hemisphere raised angry, red – a sore, snagged by the incisors with alarming regularity while eating, maintaining the sore, keeping it from calming, reminding you, with every sharp nibble, of the miniscule orifice at the top of your head.
One day, the escaping breath, the gas, becomes liquid – wetting the cap you’ve taken to wearing for shame of the hole. A dark liquid. Black semen. Thick ink. And an alarming amount. Discharged when you’re worried, maybe, too. When everything feels on the brink of collapse. You’re career, you’re life. – In those moments when you feel the shameful fraudulence of your existence, your undeserving, your absolute worthlessness.
/
You make your excuses and scurry off – to bolted toilet cubicle, to carefully unpeel the cap from your head in private: gluey black liquor extend like the ill mozzarella. Examined, rubbed between finger and thumb. Held up to the nose and fuck! Running your head under the cold tap, trying hard not to splash water into the orifice. For fear of exacerbating the problem – we’ll shave around it, maybe try to stopper it with some sort of makeshift bung.
I’ve noticed that the white hairs are spreading. I mean, there are more white hairs in the vicinity of the hole now. Spiralling out. And the smell is worse than before. Meatier. I can almost taste it, acrid at the back of the throat.
(Did you always have such a prominent cowlick?)
The next morning, there’s an object lying heavy on the pillow beside your head. A black amber to the liquid’s sap, it looks precious. Coated in that residual black amniotic SLIP. It looks meteoric; something perverse delivered from a vacuum by a blind midwife – birthed from a vast wet mouth attempting to describe a terrible fire. Coughed up on the table in the interview room – an audible *slap* as it hits the veneer tabletop – a disgusted silence falls. A pause – long enough to make the holding of a breath uncomfortable – then, as the screen FADES TO BLACK, ‘Die Moritat von Mackie-Messer’ FADES UP.
[And the shark, it has teeth,
And it wears them in its face]
MATERIAL WITNESS OR A LIQUID COP
My daughter says she loves to ice-skate. Which is utterly absurd to me: I staggered out of the fucking desert!
Or, when did you find out? – Or rather, where were you when you found out?
My answer will be an improvisation and not a meditation. Trace evidence. An interview being a crucial step in the processing of a crime like this. Also, a certain channelling going on here. Clairvoyant practice. Mediation. As in, I am a medium.
Or remembering thinking: I used to have a favourite dish but now there’s a mosquito bite rising angrily between the third and fourth knuckles of my right hand. And so,
How did that happen?
Or that you might begin by drawing a link between the distended tummy of an undernourished child and that protuberant bite. The mosquito here acting as a kind of intermediary of metaphor and context. A meta-topology of pregnancy in evidence here, also – the entry hole of the bite corresponding to the navel; the hungry belly the anaphylactic swelling, etc. Also, of course, the vaster, brute correspondents of famine, pestilence, etc. – the APOCALYPSE!, dawning in huge ebbing clouds of dry desert horseflies, read tentatively as if a kind of occult smoke signal or a flock of Scandinavian starlings. The drone to drown out your PLEAS, perhaps. Or that single, angry red eye of Jupiter, repulsing everything, sick to death of the sight of everything. Fucking hell!
– I use the hardback edition of The Great Red Spot and Other Vortices, as a makeshift weapon whenever required.
Or those phenomenally black plumes of smoke that suffuse the news. SUFFUSE everything.
At night I can’t even see you.
Black smoke emanating from some genuine tragedy: a terrible fissure in the rock.
Later, a sandwich-board near the site of mourning declares: ‘The Gestation of a Cosmic Maggot!’ on one side – and simply ‘OUT’ on the other. That easy, pub, pseudo-longhand – chalk pen with plenty of comic outline.
Or that sadly, I’m allergic to anthisan. To all antihistamines. Or perhaps merely INTOLERANT. – Though intolerance suggests some sort of ethical failure – that my reaction is unethical. Which is possible, I suppose, as regards some fundamental comprehension of the circle of life, SYMBIOSIS, etc.
Isn’t there some precedent for the administering of an analgesic by the mosquito? By CHOICE? Doesn’t their proboscis deliver something like an anaesthetic? – In amongst the cocktail of potent natural drugs to thin the blood and prevent coagulation? Aspirin?
Perhaps that’s what I’m allergic or intolerant to. Perhaps that’s where the unethical is righted. The perversity of the swelling in response to the mosquito’s generous administration of anaesthetic.
Or the Superior, Middle, Inferior frontal gyrus. In FORGET reference to the frontal lobe, Precentral and Postcentral sulcus: in reference to the central sulcus; Trans-occipital sulcus: in reference to the occipital lobe. There is an attempt here to get into the world – to get out of this unreal.
Or the admission that I bought a knife.
Beech wood handle and a high carbon XC90 steel blade. Preemptively. In preparatory self-defence. And I’d walk about in the evenings, turning it over and over in my pocket, fondling the soft-metal cuff that restrained the blade inside the handle. Catching the foolish eyes of passersby, firing a look as if to say: What I would do if you fucking so much as fucking, etc., You just fucking try it you fucking, etc. And, beneath: WHERE CAN WE FLEE TO NOW?
Manifest destiny stalking the streets. And – as should be clear to anyone present – not just mine but everyone’s. Shuffling inexorably toward the same wet hollow.
An ancient mass grave prophesied all of this – isn’t that amazing? The depth of the grave, the position of those interred, the way in which each was dispatched with a single SMITE, etc. Each characteristic of the thing to be read as another warning. From history. Though I don’t suppose there’s any other way of reading it. Like the kind of expression worn by the surprised dead.
Or the question of a weapon. A weaponized question.
Or the platitudinous, ‘As vital, thrilling and life enhancing as anything in modern fiction.’
Or a simple list, a curriculum of sorts: Black Powder, Black Magnetic Powder, Silver or White Powder, Fluorescent Powder, Black Powder Fibreglass Brush, Silver Powder Fibreglass Brush, Fluorescent Powder Brush, Camel Hair Brush, Magnetic Powder Wand, Black and White Lift Cards (100), 2” FP Lifting Tape, 4” FP Lifting Tape, 1 1/2” Plastic Tape, Scissors, Tweezers, Permanent Marker, Ink Pen, Pencil, ‘L’ Square (Carpenter’s Square) or folding scale, 6” Scale, Small ‘L’ Scale, 12” Ruler, 30’ Steel Tape Measure, Hand Magnifier, Blue LED Flashlight, Box of Silicon Casting, Alcohol Wipes, Dust/Mist Disposable Mask, Photo ID Card, Small Jar of Plumber’s Putty, Roll of Evidence Sealing Tape, Sterile Swabs (10 or 11), 16” or larger tool box with lift out tray.
Or the kind of uncomprehending expression worn by those confident mortals – those alien and most dangerous people – whose expression is one of bafflement that you didn’t just go to the doctor at the first sign. What’s wrong with the doctor?, they ask, IN ALL SERIOUSNESS. Their reading of the situation is always so terrifically BASIC, expedient.
For once, PLEASE don’t offer a fucking solution – just listen, PLEASE.
Or those arseholes grinning, laughing in the cinema as you silently weep. That sensation of utter, obscene disparity.
Or the crimson flesh, the crimson fatted mosquitos, those crimson skies, those crimson dresses, the crimson lips, that crimson flower, all that crimson blood.
Or the gap in the journal here. A few pages missing. The next entry – July 7 – simply reads, ‘?’, followed by a list of repeated consonants – the first capitalized, followed by a string of lowercase, as is customary:
‘F’
‘S’
‘T’
and, most ominously:
‘J’.
Being an attempt, perhaps, to document the language of the mosquito. At night, whining obscenities into your ear. Calculatedly obscene stuff, just before tucking in and blacking out.
Or necessary cowardice. As in, running away. The refusal to get caught up in the situation is, in some ways, the baldly ethical thing to do. Though I’m not sure you could live with yourself; always looking over your shoulder. Or jerking your thumb in some depraved parody of a hitch every time a fucking hearse rolls past.
Or the wings, the dangling legs, the weaponry, the flight path, the disease. Legible. – But again, should I try to READ a thing like that? I’m not sure the findings would HELP in any real way. A lifetime spent (SPENT) translating the devilry of insects.
Or the clumsy, ‘Elegance, verve and style!’
Being symptoms that correspond to the functions controlled by the area of the brain that is damaged by the bleed. Other symptoms include those that indicate a rise in intracranial pressure due to a large mass putting pressure on the brain. Intracerebral haemorrhages are often misdiagnosed as subarachnoid haemorrhages due to the similarity in symptoms and signs. A severe headache followed by vomiting being one of the more common symptoms of intracerebral haemorrhage. Some patients may also go into a coma before the bleed is noticed.
Or the risk of death from an intraparenchymal bleed in traumatic brain injury is especially high when the injury occurs in the brain stem. Orange peel used to rehydrate some ancient, prehistoric tobacco.
Or we return. Back to them plumes of black smoke.
Reading THEM.
A hushed, economic language. A neverending longhand – the pen dragged about, never lifting off the paper. A retarded, BRUTISH hand, as evidenced elsewhere as the disappearing actor of the disaster. No caps: a treacly runnel of lowercase ink, kerned to within an inch of its life. Monosyllabic words drawn out over pages and pages.
Two hundred words for ‘sorrow’, listed alphabetically.
No full stops, just ellipses.
The longhand of death, really.
Or someone once writing something about the difference between losing a limb and being horribly scarred. The former, a piece of you lost – the remainder still being fundamentally you. Whereas with the latter, you are irredeemably CHANGED, and entire. In the example I’m thinking of it was a burns victim. An index of tragedy. Interesting thought, however, to reverse it – to understand an absence as an index.
Or the deep folding features in the brain (an envelope), such as the interhemispheric and lateral fissure (a deep-sea vent), which divides the left and right brain, and the lateral sulcus, which ‘splits-off’ the temporal lobe, are present in almost all so-called quote unquote ‘normal’ subjects.
Or that my longhand is pretty much defunct nowa-days. Having amalgamated into a handful of simplified gestures: the swipe, the pinch, the trace, the drag. The tap. The jab. The Poke. My longhand now only employed if required to sign something – which is in itself an increasingly rarified experience. And each time I do I feel further away from any proper, expedient use of longhand. Writing my signature these days feels slowed, dumb – guided by a blind, obstinate hand.
Memories of SELECTING a signature, then rehear-sing the hell out of it. Such a simple seeming constitution of self. Today I plump for Grotesque or Gill Sans** predominantly; Baskerville or Century Schoolbook on occasion. As representative typefaces.
Or, I should remind, maintained only by ARCHAIC rituals. A once proud pragmatism, boiled down to a decorative tic. Like the sediment-gathering lip on certain amphora. Like fucking amphora, FULL STOP.
Or ‘expedient meaning’. What might that be? Sounds lazy, dangerous, to me.
– Well, it might be qualified somewhat as a kind of ‘First Meaning’. A meaning that’s simply sufficient to progress but is pretty much acknowledged by everyone as more or less intuitive. I remember Luce Irigaray answering a complex question from the floor like that. A long pause, then saying, ‘This is my first answer.’ I remember that. Something about provisionality, plurality, etc. Though I neither remember the question itself nor the event. Also, I think of Badiou or someone very similar to Badiou saying something like: ‘This answer will be an improvisation and not a meditation.’ Which is similarly SWELL, I think. Again, I can’t remember the question.
Or that, in an attempt to remember more, I had this pixellated quill and inkwell tattooed on the back of my hand. A pretty complicated image, I thought. A few good ideas in there.
A history of indices being one.
Or this tattoo here of an elephant (African) and this one of a piece of knotted string.
Or that an index of absence is an interesting thought. Like the missing limb of that amputee over there. The LACK at the end of the forearm as a perverse index.
Along THESE LINES I had this lack tattooed across my forehead. Made sure it was in reverse so that every time I look in the mirror I’m, um, reminded.
Or that understanding the relationship between the brain and the mind is a great challenge. A great challenge. One that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Do not underestimate your own mind, for pity’s sake.
Or the admission that, WELL, I’ve killed in dreams before. Wacky, soft-focus murder where PURCHASE with fists or whatever weapon was impossibly slow and treacly, with the result: sleight. Similarly, running away was always a problem. As if on a particularly resistant treadmill. This is classic stuff.
Or culpability. Cytoarchitecture. Which, incidentally, I have no real grasp of.
Or – picture it – cowering behind the low walls of some recent ruin, I’d pick off distant targets with an ornate silver pistola. Not that I actually ‘shot’ anyone ‘dead’ – just that my aiming and squeezing off of a round (quiet, wadded) would result in the DROPPING of some figure on the horizon. Death lurked some way off. Reality at arm’s length.
Or CONSEQUENCES, you fuck. Which reminds me: incredulity about the possibility of a mechanistic explanation of THOUGHT drove most of humanity to dualism. A terrible error with terrible, terrible consequences.
Or the admission that I’ve sleepwalked AND SIMILARLY. Oh, only ever doing banal, habitual stuff, like fixing myself a jam sandwich or pissing into a waste-paper basket. Though once I did apparently complete a particularly intricate Airfix kit. Transfers, paint and all. I remember the model was part of a subrange of model kits from pre- and a-human scenarios – in response to the demands of those children who had no interest in war machines, cars, architecture, humanity. Mine was a pterodactyl, though I distinctly remember a nebula, a deep-sea cephalopod, and a cross-section of an astral spider’s egg sac as other possible projects from the range. Complicated stuff like that. ‘The Ninth World’, the range was called.
Or that I might then quietly think of the case of the woman in LA who, one cool spring night, murdered her entire family. Slid out from under the covers, padded into the bathroom, retrieved the blade from the Gillette, returned to the bedroom, slit her husbands throat, went next door to the daughter’s soft room and did for her. Then, um, drove some fifty KILOMETRES to her parent’s home in her pyjamas and slippers – let herself in, PADDED up the stairs, and ended them where they slept. Drove home, crept upstairs, took a piss and went back to bed. BESIDE THE HUSBAND’S CORPSE. She’d been asleep throughout and was subsequently acquitted in court.
Or I say, in response to this and so much more, ‘That can’t be right.’
Or something like that. Diminished responsibility, at least. The thing that sticks in my head is that scene where she’s sleep-removing the blade from the razor. Such an intricate operation!
That and the look on her face throughout: complete serenity. A markedly beautiful sleeper, she was.
Or we remember Tarzana. Where she lived. Remembered in fragments with surf-rounded edges. Smeared edges. Legato edging.
No sound – slow-motion – tight focus.
