March 2013
1 post
I have felt myself hardening in the air. Slowly the moisture and motion leaves me and I ossify. All is desiccated. I would scream this stillness had I a voice left, but my throat is cracked and brittle. I am hollow and scorched, a gourd. I dream of tides that will not turn, rains that will not come. There is only this fire without flame. There is only dust.
November 2012
1 post
7 tags
Clawing at the shoulders of giants, I have their skin beneath my fingernails: coagulated testament to my thefts or appropriations. I could suck it out, attempt to swallow down this persistent witness, thick soft filth, but I let it remain. Mime sleep, Mime not writing. Let time wax to a featureless grind.
Once, in a dream, one turned and chased me. I thought it was the end. I had no choice: I...
July 2012
2 posts
Global Warming's Terrifying New Math - Bill... →
Bill McKibben’s excellent and devastating article on global warming.
May 2012
2 posts
“the constellation of your face, something unsubstantial that fleets when you’re...”
6 tags
Snot, etc.
Sublime disorientation, under a head-cold, I’m floating and the world has grown less distinct. Everything an inch or two off-kilter. The sky is a supreme blue and the paintwork is glowing me a headache. Halting, I lean into the wall and try to swallow myself into its darkness, try to be still, still, as the sunlight laughs through the frailty of my eyelids. But if I remain still for too long the...
March 2012
1 post
and even if I unfold myself completely for you, to you, endlessly—being from now on only and always this unfolding, a work that will never have been done, but that is forever to be attempted—even if I make this attempt, the creases will always remain, indelible, the traces of folds that will not be effaced (for one cannot erase that which does not have the structure of a mark, but is rather a...
February 2012
2 posts
10 tags
THE STROMATOLITES
this world is the child of catastrophe.
how would it be—if there had never been an extinction, not one? if there had never been the great dying? it would not be this. big—old—dead. (deep time.) it’s like we can’t even think it right. what is ancient? ancient egypt, sure. just like yesterday, but without daytime tv or microwaves. I can take that. but 250 million years ago? No.
(and we’re all...
January 2012
2 posts
9 tags
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
So. Synthetic biology. No more ‘natural’, as if there ever were such a thing. The university of Utah has bred goats with the silk-spinning genes of spiders. Luckily (I suppose) the said goats do not have eight legs, but rather look almost disappointingly goaty. They do however produce, in their milk, the protein which spider silk is made of. Spider-silk-goat-milk, now there’s something staid...
3 tags
A Case of Ontological Uncertainty
Believing myself to be a caterpillar—indeed, having no reason to believe otherwise—I duly, when the time felt right, began to ensconce myself in cocoonery, fully expectant, of course, of emerging after an appropriate interim as a butterfly. Not being one to do things by halves, I constructed—and I think you’ll agree—a cocoon of no shameful proportions. That done, I settled down and awaited my...
December 2011
3 posts
4 tags
AFTERMATH
There was an earthquake. None survived. Except those who, without particular tenacity, or hope, or wish, but merely through the dullness of chance, did somehow manage to cling to life, in spite of all. Indifferently they clung, and this indifference evinced a profound (albeit momentary) hatred from those that died in the vicinity—their last sight of the world being those that lived without...
VAST, GLOWING VAULT with the swarm of black stars pushing them- selves out and away:
onto a ram’s silicified forehead I brand this image, between the horns, in which, in the song of the whorls, the marrow of melted heart-oceans swells.
In- to what does he not charge?
The world is gone, I must carry you.
*****
(From Atemwende, by Paul Celan)
14 tags
TODAY'S LEVIATHAN, or: A SURE CASE FOR...
“For by art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMONWEALTH, or STATE … which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended…”
Such a body I have never seen. Glutted. Vile rolls stacked, bulbous, overflowing, over ankles, over knees. The genitals: obsolete. The vast expanse of stomach...
November 2011
2 posts
DEATH FANTASIES
(your naked hands)
Why I eat breakfast with my left hand
I’ve been training myself to use my left hand for all sorts of tasks, in preparation for when the time comes that I can no longer use my right. It will happen on the 22nd of January, in one of three ways: Either, whilst cycling to the shop to buy a banana, I will be overtaken by a bout of heavy sneezing, which will cause me to career into the middle of the road, where an articulated truck,...
March 2011
2 posts
6 tags
MOURNING DUE
Unnatural early morning, hauls back and repeats the sensations of earlier early mornings, like waking up at four a.m. to go on holiday when you were a kid. Brushing your teeth is strange, something has happened to the mintiness. The aftertaste of sleep lingers round the gums and says it is too early. Outside, and it’s cold, your skin attempts to shrink under itself. The darkness sits...
January 2011
2 posts
a supernatural and paradoxical phenomenality, the furtive and ungraspable visibility of the invisible
Two types of unfolding: like paper, and like a rose. He said this was like the second type. Gaining, rather than losing complexity. If we were to unfold everything like a rose, well, there’d be no end in sight.
[That’s enough !
What’s enough?
Enough of that !
‘Enough’, as in: the right amount? or too much? Either way, that’s not nearly enough, there can never be...
December 2010
1 post
4 tags
‘There it is, I can see it.’
‘See what?’
‘Reality. It’s over there. If only I could get to it.’
‘You’ll be needing a pick-axe.’
November 2010
2 posts
I see there’s War in Hell [Cesky Krumlov, September 2010]
We looked: there was no sign of anything anywhere, or perhaps it was that we could not see the things for the signs.
They clustered: all around, a web, a world, the only knowable; yet it is a house of bricks built on a sodden marsh.
Realisation: the bricks sink and flounder, or at least they would, if only the marsh were not called a marsh.
August 2010
1 post
POINTBLANK
where do we go from here? (OR: whither world?)
July 2010
5 posts
Time is the fire in which we burn
Time is a cruel thief to rob us of our former selves. We lose as much to life as we do to death. Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey
I’m currently working on a time machine, using a wind-up pocket watch and a diving bell. It will work in two ways:
Firstly, it will allow the user to travel, as an observer, backwards in time, to retrieve that which now exists only in the intangibility of...
5 tags
the fishermen
6 tags
AUTO-DESTRUCT
We are forever the agents of our own demise.
4 tags
Keeping Up Appearances
Eric Gill was a very strange man. Behind a façade of the pious catholic family man and craftsman (he carved the stations of the cross in Westminster Cathedral, amongst other things) he also had a voracious sexual appetite. Unlike many of his associates, who were often celibate, he seemed to think it was quite all right to have sexual relations with his sisters and daughters.
A diary entry...
June 2010
6 posts
I can't get no sleep
It’s bizarre how the endless night distorts thought. Fears which are non-existent in the morning have a way of expanding into every corner of the mind. And a battle plays out between the exhausted body, which thirsts for the restorative sleep, and the hyperactive mind which just won’t STOP.
6 tags
All change please, all change
The dog days are coming; my life is emptying.
(A shade upon the mind there passes…)
4 tags
“Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from...”
– John le Carre, 1974
Despite what seems here to cement the inherent solitariness of man, there is also something affirming: we survive our madness and isolation, and lay claim to our lonely lives.
4 tags
2 tags
A beginning
Beginnings are funny old things. They don’t really exist. Even me typing the title to this post, just a few moments ago, is now an action that is already in the past. In the very action of beginning, I have already begun.
Time is slippery like that. We live each moment, and then it is “gone while we try to apprehend it” (Walter Pater, The Renaissance). Fortunately though, words...
