Page 251 - Flaunt 175 - Diana

EXCERPT FROM “THE MOST FAMILIAR STAR” VIA THE WILD BOOK OF INVENTIONS
SUN CREATURE I:
It’s time.
I had a vision of the outside and the before of this room. It’s the story of how the state came to Earth in the form of wa- ter, disguised as time. It was brought by ancestors from another world. This is factual but I skipped some important details to make the story more aesthetic. The state needed biological life as its means of existence, so it came as creatures. The upper
half was like a fish and the lower part was legs and hips. That was fine, because the state needed sexual reproduction. That was fine. The state needed patterns of genetic inheritance. The state needed the basic drives: thirst, hunger, desire. Later it was discovered that a drive is a circle drawn around its object, but thankfully the state didn’t know that back then.
Around and around and around, the remoteness of the object always returns like rain after a dry spell.
The state is an ambiance, very classy, continuously lit by a new day. In the unwritten time the state was a mist, tiny parti- cles. It was necessary to see the light. Did I mention the state needed eyes and a mouth? I saw the state naked and hungry, scraping around on the banks of the unstable lakes and rivers, which disappeared on the regular. If water had been more predictable it would not have been necessary to invent time. In Egypt they learned the year in the river’s swelling and falling, they learned the gait of time. If water had not been so engulf- ing, had not played so hard to get, there would had been no administrators, no bureaucrats. If our bodies like those of our ancestors had not been liquid, held in place by love and hate. Liquid held in place by membranes of love and hate.
The bowl of the earth was cracked and the sky was cracked. Liquidity spirals had come into effect, amplifying the impact of the first negative shock. The bottom line was bone dry. The price of oil tripled... shining surface like a mirror... value moved on the face of the lost waters like breath... Call the brokers, the regulators, the risk analysts; no one is going home anytime soon and home is so, so, so far away. If the tide never comes back we will have to forget our theory of tides, and the full moon will no longer make me feel romantic, like it did around the time I met your father, the comet, the state, the first water. The complex bureaucracy of our romance, the measure- ment of tides. We knew the timing of the water and were able at last to relate it to the movement of the light. We watched the stocks dwindle. Cash injections did nothing, we lay lifeless on what was once our marital bed. The state needs a flow to block. Seen from far away, I imagine, I imagine, big crowds of people move like liquid, pushing through the gaps. The state gathers all the drops in a cloud.
When I heard about the bankruptcy I handed over the keys to my office then I lay down in a dark and humid room.
It was the last time. I turned off all my notifications. There was nothing more to leverage. My throat was dry. Salt helps you float. I waited to be rescued by the money launderers. They re- sisted the charms of your father, the handsome state. They met in secret. Don’t think I didn’t know it. Now they would come to save me, out of guilt, out of desire, I imagine, I imagine. They came to Earth in a shower of sparks, bringing water, water.
SONG:
Some people work here as desperate hunters under the upturned bowl of heaven
which is the impossible fact don’t think it turns me on to tell you this
in fact I feel nothing
I feel the cosmic everything scientific murder
Some people work here
I once knew the outside of this room
some people work here under the heavens searching for food
For hundreds of years people thought that their eyes emitted light. But their eyes are holes that light falls into. Not me, I have beautiful eyes. I have eyes made of a star. I have eyes –– I have eyes and I can see this world. I have great eyesight, long-term eyesight, so I can see social forms getting invent-
ed and lapsing out of use, cities rising up out of nothing and falling back into it. I see the first people the first animals before there was such a thing as first and last coming into the light of the first fires. Before the first and last I see the first and last, I see eternity in agricultural rows. I think in the long scheme the long game so I don’t have to think so hard about what to do with my fifteen minutes per day of life.
I dreamed revolutionary dreams but people can’t come together; they’re fixed in place and only move according to the sun. You’re faced with the material parts, with the wind and the ocean. It all seems to spring up and fall back down by the same force and there has to be a word for the force so you invent it. The breath on the water. Thinking apocalyptic thoughts in the car home, I imagine, I imagine. Life is so, so, so disappointing. But however broken down and fragmented everything gets, there will always be the stars with which to begin a process of planetary understanding.
What are the ethics of getting born, I ask myself daily but it’s too late.
1.Creation from chaos 2.Earth diver 3.Emergence
4.Ex nihilo
5.World parent 6.Divine twins
SONG:
Creation from nothing
Is love’s dream
A creature who is nothing
Is obscene
Creation from something
Is called society
A creature who’s something Forgets how to feel
Creation from everything
Is universality
A creature who is everything Cannot breathe
Creation from anything
Is technology
A creature who is anything Has to learn what’s real
(Sternberg Press, MIT Press), Out Now Written by Hannah Black
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