9 June 1977
Plato wants to emit. Seed, artificially, technically. That devil of a Socrates holds the syringe. To sow the entire earth, to send the same fertile card to everyone.
— Derrida, The Post Card
He goes around sliding things under doors. When I answer the buzzer he coughs through the speaker. Is there something for me? Impossible to tell. He clutches bundles of luminous, anonymous catalogues. But there is mostly paper, less of noise, in my dream. All the colourful paper is folded into neat little butterflies and cast about a room somewhere, a trillion paper butterflies made animate by a ceiling fan. They swirl up and hover and tremble, they display the fact of display. If Damien Hirst were kinder to hyperobjects. The butterflies are destined to live for only a day, but their larvae live on and on, reproducing in squirming punctuation. The home screen was full of these icons, butterfly icons, but the state that I am in…well, I saw them as colours in kaleidoscopic array, you could say formless because they were almost utterly without origin. I tried to click through the butterflies to open a window. The word broadcast has its origins in agriculture. I see him at the edge of things, broadcasting his literature; dreaming of that broadcast whose discourse would finally slip into ‘Stone in Focus’, fully looped for 1:17:10 duration. The butterfly paper of things we were supposed to purchase. Palimpsests of unspent ‘truth’, a kind of solvent tonic for wounded text. What folds is the secret of objects, their identity prior to products. The butterflies fly, land, twist, secrete. They become tiny wedges. I want to gather up quantities of plastic and watch it melt between my fingers, the putty of a capitalist extinction. I kinda wanna call him. One day the fan will stop running and that will be the end of the day. The paper is better than plastic, by a mite.
That is what I write to you. A little shard of a page. I can pinpoint its scene of writing, the place where the walls are real moss and everything is green and utopian blue. The signs are over-scrawled in washable ink: fill up the kettle after finishing. A world slides out of focus when I write to you. No one cares. The point of a sentence is itself the long-tail; maybe I had not converted the file right, maybe I had not stretched this line as far as it wanted. But it broke apart regardless:
. . . . . .. . . . .
. . . . .. . . . . .. .. . . . .
. . . . . . .. . . . . .
. . . . . ….. .
. . .. .
I see last year’s city in a flowing grid of water. The artificial channel of departure. I am trying to remember the blue of the plane, the blue of a single window. It seems this journey annihilates the next. The weather is unavailable to me. I was up so late, crunching chocolate eggs between my teeth and reading Dodie Bellamy. Everything said was fibrous, electric, painfully or even exquisitely wired. I was in San Francisco, I was in a flooded New York; I was in my hometown, even more underwater. The prose came in streams but it was hardly mine. I leaned in to suck the smoke from your face. What everyone needed was chamomile, a breath of the air by the river.
At the end of the world, the butterflies drown. We mourn them very quietly, last of our senses stimulated. The muscularity we made of our work is immaterial now. I’m trying to swear myself into a rhythm of perfect sleep. What comprises a wake up call, the fuck fuck fuck of it. Alarms are sent from afar to hold me in the punch of 400 words, Plato’s postcard. I wake to her dreams in WhatsApp messages; I split samples of songs I don’t like into ringtones. Something slips into something and the dark looks different. I walk home and catch variant scents of spring, mixed up with the fumes from the late-night buses. I rub blossoms and leaves between my fingers, trying to intensify the feeling. I am incredibly nostalgic for Chloé perfume, when I hug her goodbye. Magnolia, freesia, honey and cedarwood hidden beneath. Often those moments are so sweet I have to stand there in the street and text myself about it. I have these texts on my phone:
05:12: It’s just sunset, stupid
01:01: My legs are full of equinox
23:42: What if we wrote a line for every hour slept
02:34: Orchid.mpeg remembering futures
In Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, the only safe place is the cave. But the cave is more like a teepee, it has no walls; it opens out onto the cinematic event which is this massive planet colliding with Earth. So there are no walls, not even ones made of moss, woven with pollen. It is not exactly a place ‘to go’. The cave at the end of the world is a triangulation of lines, a diagram. It points to the sky. The inside of the cave is the outside; it is a geometric skin; it is infinitely double. I think of the cherry red skin of my hotmail; at what point in my life did I choose that? The interior kitsch of human flesh, rendered plastic. Sometime in the month I write: I want everything to be tender but I had no idea it could be this bad. When the hail comes, when they salt the road, when the snow comes, I think it is ending but I wake up as before with the equal ache. Sunlight (?) Statistics lisping the roof of my mouth, as though writing itself would produce an allergy. I lay down my stuff, just as he is walking in, and my tongue in my mouth and the blood in my veins and the thought—indistinct sense of where the year will head. But I am looking instead for the tail. Already curling back into itself, the significant events of January chase me with flickering imagery, they are a personal narcissism. If I could boil them down, attain a clarity; shoot them, syringing…
I roll up my sleeves for airborne beams of vitamins.
She tells me how gorgeous the ghost was. The coast was. I keep thinking about the chestnut taste and the kisses of light, the packet I put back on the shelf. The world was wrong; the supermarket made me soft enough to go, checking the mirrors in financial departure. Incredible sponges, dying at the bottom of oceans. Someone holds the syringe but not for me. Someone holds out for loose change. I lose specialness daily in order to live. I dream I have a daughter who stands by a fireplace while I clip a starfish pin in her hair. She can’t say the word. I perform the tiniest sweep, distracting her gaze. She doesn’t want to go outside, she will scream and clutch the radiator if I tell her. The word is literally unnameable, I wake up with it gone from my lips. But the word exists! There was surely a species. It is only a technicality now. Secretly I write the word down, days later when it returns to me, burning. To write it here would be to violate that, to cheapen its life with a summoning. I realise the daughter is only the version of self that I didn’t fuck up. She exists elsewhere. I swear to her:
Anne of Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalysis:
“I dreamt that a little girl came out of my body, the spitting image of my mother, while I have often told you that when I close my eyes I can’t bring her face to mind, as if she had died before I was born and carried me along into that death. And now here I am giving birth and it is she who lives again…”
(Kristeva, Black Sun)
The daughter as a twice-lived avatar of futurity, the mask of what comes before as pushing through generative time; mothering and lusting and screaming for our place in their state of absolute melancholy. Be with me and share this pain. In the anthropocene, we accumulate a sense of primitive, foetal lostness (how many times have I curled, cried, questioned); the world is our fragile, amniotic sac. We float, we are starved of good air; we trap the heat. We can’t trust the way we damage it, extract from its boundaries the richest juices; the way we carry it; the way we absorb and are absorbed by it; the way we circulate in the midst of our mutual toxins. But the Earth is nothing so essential to us as mother, and no blood-ridden cloud of cotton could stop the daughter, screaming all through my sleep.
The longest comedown, the longest night. Where mist is mostly the way of him holding a note, and it is not instant, it is not like the drug or the river that drowned him. It is the name with so many consonants. It could shatter a language with time. My dreams are thick and long but my sleep is short. I like how many times Sophie Robinson mentions her inbox in Rabbit. I check my own and the number surpasses 50,000. Spending the morning in turmoil, wanting to write back to the sunset I missed. Endless proliferation just is. It is something like, hold simultaneity in blockchain. Mathematics achieves a weightlessness. I’m sorry I’m sorry. Pieces of skylight I can hold in my head, granular blue. I’d let myself into the rain again. I need a very tall building, a stairwell to make the blood rush back to my extremities. You tell me not to.
Remembering the summer where all I could do was measure the slenderness of other people’s legs, in a numb, inexorable kind of way. This felt relative to my sense of extinction. It was something about, what do we put in our bodies and where or why do we want to go. I was suffused with the sense of the need elsewhere. How do we blend into a world, make of our souls these chalk pastel auras. If you could terraform Mars with memory only. The drift was the weight of an email, it was rainbow and stretched as far as my childhood. I saw her by the river, holding a piece of glass to the light. She hitched up her skirt and waded in. The voices subside in the rush of the current. The image fades, because she is anyway there, chastising my choice. I wonder how ever we lived without each other.
Heartburn and techno. Reasons I want to fold this away, why I walk along rivers regardless. The latent burn was only as far as the beat could measure. After the movie, I felt a depression so immense it was like I lost touch with each muscle. The doorbell. Friendships fraying like so many neglected threads. Coal emissions are rising like shares or something. I ran and ran in the dream of the land I remembered. I could smell wild garlic along the river. My brother was already home for the match. I ran and ran to get back to the gym with the moths in the showers, stuck to curtains. 91%, 69%, 43%, 1%. Even my phone is dying. Little white eggs in your palms are lyrics. What if the lilac tree were more than or less than life itself? Lilacs symbolise the beginnings of love. Being earnest, accelerationist, plugged into the HEX account of refresh, streaming language. What colour is it that flickers in time? I have been ignoring innumerable messages. I want to dwell in the missing hour, the split that occurs when the clocks go forward. It’s just like the extra cappuccino, the final stamp on a loyalty card. It always resets.
She is no longer there. It was so simple, letting the blood of the thought away. Dark liquids filled my days: cola and Guinness and the black, oozing matter you see in the water in Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Dreams of petroleum slick I saw in the sky. Oily dream of the Essay of the Book of the Essay. Literature seems almost impossible now. I needle myself into the heads of writers. I want them to pierce the myriad empty pores of me, tiny molten residue eggs. This imagination, waning. White cracking liquid black on the page. I was taking pleasure in texture and loops, cutting my tongue on a shout. I don’t know how to write! Mostly I would lie in bed reading D.rida and peeling the skin around my fingers, leaving tiny strips of red underneath. The cherry-rose flavour of Rescue Remedy. I needed something heavy; like an extra river, proplus, nicotine gum.
Transducer: A device that converts one form of energy into another.
I wanted to be online forever and I wanted that status to annihilate the fact, I wanted to erase onlineness from the web and I wanted the result to be world, oblique exchange of realities, and people uploading their papers forever, and a sweetness, whatever it means just to speak. I wanted the spider to eat the fly. I wanted to read behind the lines until I became signal, and my signal was a force behind the language I wanted to speak, and it was prior to me. I went to the Tower and forgot they were having a party. The white wine tasted like sugary air. There was a video I watched, ‘Pyramid Song’ performed in Egypt. What doesn’t care to be sent. The egg won’t open its hatch. The complete terroir of relief in southerly regions where I cram all my life into multiple time zones, the sibylline remainder of day. Mysterious she beckons with fat grapes squashed in the O of her mouth, all rotten fruit I could smell from the train going south. She designed a very careless outrage and I realised there wasn’t a single shout inside me. She twists out the stalks like dead capillaries. I confront the thought of something terrible happening. So many times and I could not shriek. Later, tiny black seeds spill into my palm. I can only cherish them.
Facebook is the broadcast of Earth. I try to straighten the mirror, as though the spatial urge were innate and not just void. It was not the same book that I had ordered, the Book of the Essay. I had already set forth on the impossible project. I struggled to review. I had not even written the fact of it yet. There is value and heat to this project, even in its moments of stretch and collapse. I would put writing through the machine that makes water effervesce, missing the ease of waitressing. When ‘Beyondless’ came on, I felt infinite again on Great Western Road. Short-sighted, I missed the faces of every stranger. I wrote this sestina called ‘Lucozade Blues’, but I had not the stomach for any orange energy. Would you like ice with that?
The cave is a kind of triangle. Facebook is the vending machine, dispensing the glitches and beats of our life. It is as one, invisible crowd of desire. I want to say swarm. I want to say seed, but the burst spent seeds that lie in the dust of the archive. And she does calisthenics just to stream them live, and she lays her beautiful eggs. I am obsessed with the rhythms I can’t keep, lunar cycles for mindless complexion. Someone comes along to clear us west, they have had enough of our westerly airs. Sometimes I long to smash the windows of my local Tesco after midnight, just to boost M&Ms off the shelf, scatter them along the coated floor and crunch their acid colours one by one with my shoes. I want a whole lifetime to tread in my shoes. The pause when you stop in the walk to tie your laces, and you look so lovely with your leg in the air; a kind of ballet occurs in suspended time. Everything about this sentence is soft, it has to be. Plié. It subjects me to a slenderness, elsewhere a song. Bend and taut. Fear of the dark or the light, lilac wiiine. Somebody else is always between us; somebody else is the cavalier world, riding its way through galloping matter to get back to the point at which this becomes anti. And later I stroke your hair in the stable, and later we find him, and later your dream hair is all I can smell and scrunch when I come up for air or salt in the morning. And you are smaller than I ever remembered. We do things we shouldn’t exactly do. As if all this could be written in cafés!
I felt sick all semester with radial thoughts, and when I woke it was spring and the circle made of my mood a halo, it would be the same mood to return forever. Sunshine, caffeine, approximation. A loop the butterfly pages can fly through, and we chase them, baby-fisted, throughout the night. I want to be this clumsy and look at you straight in the eye and smile. Faster, the butterfly pieces of colour and light. Faster the streams of warmth and the morning gulls and something that comes on astrological. Supermoon channel. It is only you that makes me angry. Spring arrives solely in Getty images. I could just download all this weather, I want its data to supplement; I listen to ‘Eudaemonia ’ on repeat and remember the future we were yet to inject, starbright direct to our arteries. I’m sending a sort of word to Socrates, I’ve got this whole card—
~
Drugdealer, Weyes Blood — Honey
Sky Ferreira — Downhill Lullaby
Grimes — REALiTi (Demo)
Ess_Gee — Bubble Queen
Hand Habits — are you serious?
Stella Donnelly — Tricks
Julia Jacklin — Body
Pocket Knife — Custard Cream
Kelly Lee Owens — Lucid
Youth Lagoon — Daydream
Them Are Us Too — Eudaemonia
Tim Hecker — Obsidian Counterpoint
Sarah Davachi — Perfumes III
Logos — Menace
William Basinksi — 4(E+D)4(ER=EPR)
George Clanton — Livin’ Loose
HEALTH — LOSS DELUXE
Bliss Signal — Floodlight
Frankie Cosmos — Eternal
Strawberry Switchblade — Trees and Flowers
Galaxie 500 — Fourth of July
Silver Jews — Trains Across The Sea
Her’s — Under Wraps
Burial — U Hurt Me
The Durutti Column — Love No More
The Walker Brothers — Orpheus
Nico — Somewhere There’s A Feather
Talk Talk — I Believe In You
mariaology 