THE LIONESS ONLY SWIMS WHEN SHE HAS TO [EXTRACT]

The weatherman turned around and yelled:

“Can you not see I’m a woman?!?”

We gathered, eight or nine of us, that night.

We built houses out of live fire and sat to watch them burn into shape.

You said: “I wish I was an email so I could travel anywhere immediately.”

I said: “I wish the ground was all warm water, so we could sail through it together.”

Arthur complained about the veggie sausages.

PLATEAU FINDING, ONE AND TWO

So, if I am to feel anything. I should first try.

ONE & TWO: They were exhausted and they were bored. They were also angry. They were also frustrated. They wanted something else. It wasn’t working for them anymore. There was nothing left but struggle. They were done with this game. They wanted to make their own plans. They wanted to build. They wanted to have control. They did some research. It was time they faced facts.

They had been avoiding this because they didn’t know what it would be like once the inevitable came. Thirds could see that there was no inevitable, only ritual and trust in probability.

Time was up. Fourths had said that their time would run out. That they would both break, that it was in their nature. They were too alike. That’s what they were told. Thank you Fourths.

They should have asked Thirds. Thirds would have said that there was no nature. Only reaction. Only decision.

*        *        *

Now, here they were.

ONE comes in from left to right, straight down the middle.
TWO comes in from the bottom, stops, looks around, sniffs the air.

Cold the greeting. Facing forward facing to the side. Unforgiven. Charged, wanting fizz, wanting release, lying in wanting. Crying already.

ONE sits down. Forgetting. Now here, now committed. ONE is loyal to chronology, ONE wants things from life, wants to know that where ONE leaves ONE’s biscuit it will still be there when ONE returns from the toilet.

TWO leans against the wall. TWO sticks to things, they say ponder. Wants to believe, really wants this. TWO questions being here but trusts in the inevitable. But firstly TWO questions the stability of the wall now leaning against.

They both wait for the other. Cold the greetings. Tensing. In for the long wait. But then…

IT BREAKS. TIPPING. GOOD GOD WHAT A MESS. TEARS AND NOISE AND MUCK.

*        *        *

ONE: Oh shit, god…oh god… I didn’t think it would be this sudden.

TWO hyperventilates whilst trying to cry, vaguely manages neither. Has to keep moving, searching for the cry and the breath, keeps moving but can’t find either. Touches things. Picks up and looks under. Diverts, diverts, moves, gasps, grasps. Just wants to wail, can’t find it. Wants and then wants.

ONE rubs. Pushes. Fourths would say ONE pushes, presses, pressing eyes back into sockets. No tears, pathetic. What to do? No fourths here now. What did they say, think! What did they say? Push, try pressing. Press toes against ends of shoes, wanting pressure. Never enough. Not strong enough to re-break, take the breaking on. Stuck left pushing, can’t break. Stay calm. Oh yes, I have training. Pressings, curl and hold, hold – hold.

TWO panting. Fourths, where are they? They said I grab and wail. That’s wrong, I can feel the wail and the breath follow me, it’s here like fourths said but it’s not for me. I can’t get it near enough my mouth for a swallow. Not for me after all. Sniffing. I taste wail, I
want you, I want you, you here, me here, but you say no, you turn me away. This not faith, you and I. Grabbing hands, TWO.

*        *        *

Stuck in. Fourths said torture, TWO was afraid, ONE under illusion of preparation.

Thirds said fear is an opportunity to work, take, this is advice. Don’t listen to Thirds. Pure box. Energy still holding. This is felt ONE + TWO. Bodies feel, shapes are pushing in shoulders and chests and toes. Crude, turning against muscle and organs. Energy still
holding, shouldn’t have eaten. It takes long, running out is feelings, sore panic. Still here. Still here. Close eyes. Still here. Open eyes. Oh god, still here. Panic. Still here. Body bits in muck. No wipe – muck fills.

The privilege of time passed (only ours). Only cultured. ONE + TWO no liberty after all. Should have listened to Thirds.

Just to wait for change now. Catch up of sight to soggy shapes. Muck. Finding ONE + TWO, plateau finding. Thirds say no change. Thirds say no catching up without work, submission. And ingesting, trust no finding without patience.

ONE + TWO here. Saying no both.

We need to sweat, now. Please? No sweat without hard work to ONE + TWO.

We had no idea it would be this way.

Fourths dead. ‘You’ve begun to notice that its always in/on another stage that things are brought to their conclusion’. Fourths died.

THIRDS: But just when its time for the story to begin again, begin again “It’s Autumn”. That moment when things are still not completely congealed, dead. It ought to be seized so that something can happen.

LOST IT

AN INTERSEMIOTIC MISTRANSLATION OF CHRISTIAN MARCLAY’S THE CLOCK (BOOK)

IMAGES OF THE CLOCK (ON TOUR) BECOME THE INCESSANT REPETITION OF THE MALE GAZE: PATRIARCHAL FOREBODING / CARTESIAN TRANSPHOBIA / PREOCCUPYING SEXIST DISTRACTIONS

MOVE THROUGH TIME AS A FLUID, FULL OF EMOTION – DISRUPT LINEAR (PATRIARCHAL) TIME – READ FROM A POINT OF VIEW – RE-ORDER AND MISREAD

TRANSLATIONS ARE ALWAYS (CONSCIOUSLY IN EXPERIMENTATION, UNCONSCIOUSLY IN TYPICAL TRANSLATION) PERSONALISED AND NOT DEFINITIVE

WANNA DIE
+
UNTITLED

MURDER, NO MYSTERY

THE FABLE OF THE IMMORTALS

The giant fuzzy rocks crumble down to the southern Cornish shore like the neglected playthings of some massive toddler. Soft and cushioned by lichens, they make for a padded descent to the sea. Near the bottom we (the famous five) spy a large resin statue lodged between the rocks, partially obscured by an eroded flip-flop.
It conjures the Ronald McDonalds of forgotten idyllic service stations to this salty afternoon, which would otherwise be timeless.
Warmed by the sun, the hollow fibreglass mesh emits a sticky faintly bodily smell that prickles and is so animal yet chemical at once. You can almost hear the friction of children’s skin squeaking
(fine hairs standing on end)
as they would clamber on top of it, hoping to animate it. I was never sure if that smell actually came from the material itself or from a coating of spit and grease left by these kids.
(the sort thing my mother would look upon with a horror turned inwards, demonic germs dancing on the insides of her eyelids)
Perhaps one day I’ll make a giant resin nose and get to the bottom of it.
Though in truth, this salvaged figure was not all that different from all the other plasticated beach-side detritus.

So if time were a sieve attempting to homogenise history into a fine powder, the ceramic crockery from the middle ages as well those from IKEA, would get caught in the mesh.

But it was positively ‘Druidesque’!
Sporting a hooded cloak that concealed its implied body entirely. An influential prop!
Perhaps used to convince some hapless-Discovery-Channel-watcher of an Atlantis where citizens have laser-cutting eyes.
But because it was resin, and because it was hollow, it was also light and we carried it with us along the coast path.

A biodegradable coffee cup is melting into the puddles of rainwater on a granite bench, bolted to a floor tiled with bricks in a brutalist estate that resembles a stylised version of a future half-submerged metropolis, built on the fallen bricks of the London Wall.
A duck ascends the stairs out of the modernist water feature, placing its naked webbed feet on the tiles where one imagines there is a murmur of residual heat, making a soft ‘pat’ at every step.

And they were born without skin. Organs and bones falling out of a body like a shopping list.
But the horror of surface area!
Tangling exposed veins connecting, living, like the streets of Naples.
Streets that branch off ever more intricately, to then just stop, as if at the border of some invisible membrane.
Sprawling and blind, spasms at the base of a volcano.
Pebbles cast into the abyss
In biohazard bins they grew skins.
Written off to the custody of biowaste with only morbidly curious doctors for parents.
Someone thought to skin them to see if they could grow some more.
They did.
The mortals poked the immortals and they both gasped at the feeling.
The immortals grew older, they realised that it was unnecessary, merely decorative, but they took a human form so as not to disappoint.
All the while, the mortals harped on about organs. And so the immortals taught them how to grow them. Rows of lungs, and what marvellous livers! And both did giggle in delight when the mortals fashioned their very first limb.
But somehow the flame was lost and they started to drift apart.
Without very much thought, the mortals set about building cornucopias of flesh without cadavers.
Ecstatically pasting bodyparts to eachother.
They really weren’t very nice to be around anymore, kind of rude even.
In fact, the immortals couldn’t see the point of even looking like them anymore.
There really wasn’t much else to say, so they hid their new forms under loose fitting robes and left.

Song for Winter at the Bus Stand/ Poem for the apocalyptic wet dream

The daylight is frail and uninterested,
Winter days here are like a stillborn squinting.
A crumpled grey eyelid peels itself apart slowly
Only to muster half a glance,
The size of an ashen Clementine segment,
Then wearily shuts again, returning to a dreamless sleep.
And in this dreamless sleep
the Evening Standard’s stack high in the corners of the evening,
With only one day to live.
Doomed to become some rain watered paste that plugs the holes of porous buses.
Freshly showered commuters stink of shampoo
Yellowed by instant coffee
And it’s hard to take a joke at a bus stand.

The whole world collapsed to span of one stretch of road. Like in old video games with static frames. Whatever vanishes from one horizon will appear at the other.
And the same boring litany of sounds.
Coughing drink tins
Other buses, clattering through other potholes like trapped metal in a welded frame.
Chafing receipts, Carrier bags scuttling
(Which no poetic eyes can gild)
And the pathetic rattling bone dance of the twirling leaves.
(Don’t they know that in the movies they prefer to use crisp packets for that sound)
Boris says I should get a bike.
And it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the bus coming around the corner.

And so mortality wasn’t even rushed to the hospital. It died in the middle of an Olympic stadium. Spasmodic convulsions captured in floodlights.

Its death rattling wheeze,
only just audible over the din of slightly perturbed murmurs.
Sweat and neon sports clothing pasted to its body, icy in the summer’s evening.
The other competitor’s pending in their positions, drawing with their feet on the Tartan Track™
unsure if the race will continue and suspiciously eyeing each others movements.
No one even attempted to revive it, and the paramedics sat there watching like lemons.
No one even thought about how this was the last time anybody would ever see anyone die.
(They probably did think about it later)
Mortality spent its afterlife frolicking in the animal kingdom where it would never die again.

But something here was a little amiss.
A metallic smell of dried blood in the air
Crusty bandages.
Harvest Clinics moving into vacant fast food shops. One resin mascot replaced by another
Something fetid and pink stinking
An intestinal cloud slumped on the dawn of this utopia.
(not quite the luxury yachts and fruit juice we had in mind)
And it’s the ‘give a man a fish’ proverb all over again
This technology is stilted in the hand of man,
Backward and verbose like
a shoddy sentence that one, try as they may, cannot make juicy.
It was then that they noticed for the first time that the immortals had left them. All ready, tail between legs to apologise, to beg forgiveness, to prove their maturity, to beg to be taught about what they didn’t understand, but it was too late.
And the sheepish cogs of their sheepish minds creaked.
“Perhaps they’d come back if we honoured them?”
said a voice, not even believing itself.
So they made half-assed resin statues.
(based on the eyewitness accounts of a handful that saw them go)
More pebbles into the abyss
Adorning each clinic’s parking lot.
And pumped up this Frankensteinian turn best they could.

Live for the Weekend feat. YOLO vs. Eternity
If hedonism tripped over a log in a wood, would anybody care?
Toilet Taoism for the teenage pot smoker
Nihilism couldn’t be more chuffed, puffing away with that ‘I told you so’ look on its face.
(my mother used to keep Being and Nothingness next to the toilet paper)
So what does happen when a late capitalist society simply cannot die?
(Providing, which is true for this fable, that everybody is extended this privilege)
Some sort of overjoyed singularity?
Where would we put the prisoners?
Banished to a Nutraloaf land, with Nutraloaf clouds that scuff their bellies on shrivelled volcanoes.
A reproachable mild breeze blows
the ‘lifers’ lazily graze
licking the ground
(trying to remember what salt tastes like)
outside the ostentatious immortal city.

WILD MEANINGS

SOME IDEAS FOR RACEHORSE NAMES [EXTRACT]

STAYING IN TOUCH:

I: SMALL QUESTION, ARE WE IN SPACETIME OR ARE WE PART OF THE CONTINUUM?

A:HEY ISABEL
EINSTEIN’S EQUATIONS (BASICALLY) ARE
CURVATURE OF SPACE-TIME = MATTER-ENERGY CONTENT
I.E. AS FAR AS OUR CURRENT STATE OF KNOWLEDGE (GENERAL RELATIVITY) GOES, WE ARE IN SPACETIME, WHICH IS CURVED BY OUR PRESENCE.
HOWEVER IT WOULD BE NICE TO FIND A THEORY IN WHICH MATTER-ENERGY CAN ALSO BE EXPRESSED AS PART OF SPACE-TIME (OR VICE VERSA), AND THERE ARE PLENTY OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE SUCH THEORIES… I WOULD RATHER THAT MATTER-ENERGY COULD BE EXPRESSED AS PART OF SPACE-TIME SINCE THEN EVERYTHING IS NICE AND GEOMETRICAL.

ETC.

27/02/2012 – PRESENT

A: I study the turbulence of the solar wind. The “solar wind” is a plasma which flows outwards from the sun throughout the solar system. “Turbulence” is the chaotic motion of a fluid (or plasma!) on a wide range of length scales. One everyday example is stirring milk into coffee: making a relatively large motion (on the length scale of a spoon) injects free energy into the system, which is “cascaded” to microscopic scales by turbulence, allowing the milk and coffee to mix much more rapidly than without stirring.

The turbulence in the solar wind is a little more complicated. It might be important because if a large solar flare goes off, we really want to know what we should do so that all of our communications satellites don’t get fried, causing the collapse of civilisation as we know it. The environment that the energetic particles emitted by the flare propagate through is the turbulent solar wind.

I don’t do “real” experiments or observations – I simulate things on computers, normally several thousand at once. This has some advantages over working with real world data, since you know exactly what equations you’re simulating, and you know the data much more precisely. But we still have to talk to the people who make real observations, to know what to simulate, otherwise the whole exercise would be pointless.

I:The collapse of civilisation as we know it! Sounds exciting… do you find it helpful (for your everyday sanity) to think about your work as being potentially ‘important’ to civilisation or could you not give a shit…?

A: Honestly I just like thinking about physics. But you couldn’t really justify giving money from the rest of society to science if it had no benefit to them. That benefit can be pretty indirect or far in the future and still be worth it, however. Probably the same with art, I guess, except you’re improving the quality of general thought, directly or indirectly.

I: Improving the quality of thought – what an abstract purpose! I think you’re rare, as a scientist, in that you are able to think about what you do and communicate it in broader and more philosophical terms than lots of facts and terminologies,. A few years ago now you gave me Italo Calvino’s Complete Cosmicomics, which made a huge impression on me. I wonder how you came across it first, and whether you feel there is a place for fiction in scientific thought?

A: I’m not sure I’m that unusual really – science is certainly not just a list of facts, they are all connected into an interlocking system. I would like to think all scientists exhibit “love of wisdom”  in some sense. I first read Calvino when I was 13 or so, I probably didn’t really understand it but it made quite an impression on me too.

If there was no room for fiction, or, maybe a better word in this context, imagination, there would be no science. Anytime someone does something new I would argue they have imagined it beforehand, and at that point it is fictitious. So maybe science is the act of making the fictional real, in some way.

I: The artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) has said that artists are not seeking the truth, but the fictions that reality will become…make what you want of that! There’s this psychologist/art theorist Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007) who tried to classify a ‘psychology of creativity’, you could kind of apply his ideas on ‘visual perception’ to mathematical perception I guess…

A: Probably any attempt to classify human thought into several separate spheres isn’t very reasonable. Kind of like species (remember all that growing up?..), its probably just a continuum.

I: Haha of course – you love a continuum!
It seems as though the deeper we ‘look’ mathematically into the structure of our existence the more out of kilter the question/answer ratio becomes… Is a ‘General Theory of Everything’ (a term coined by science fiction author Stanislaw Lem) still a tangible dream for physicists?

A: I think a tangible dream is a slightly oxymoronic statement :).
But yes, its a dream. I think its a common occurrence that the more we know, the more questions we have. Imagine the sum of human knowledge is the interior of some 2D region. The neighbourhood of the boundary of the region is what we know we don’t know, but the space outside the “known region” stretches out for some distance, and we have no idea how far it stretches out, potentially forever. Learning something new pushes out the “known region” slightly, but most of the time this will just make the boundary longer, increasing the amount of stuff we know we don’t know about.

There is a theorem due to Godel which is (very roughly) that in any logical system as complicated as arithmetic, there are statements which can’t be proved true or false. For example the undecidable nature of the statement “This statement is false” is a related problem. So I don’t know if this dream of explaining the whole of nature is actually realisable, or if explanation doesn’t in fact rely on proof.

Another point: even if we were to understand all the basic interactions of particles, etc, we still wouldn’t understand the world. As soon as you have a few very simple particles their behaviour becomes chaotic and impossible to predict exactly. That doesn’t mean that its pointless to try – for example, turbulence is inherently completely insoluble mathematically, but there are quite a few things we understand about it now, by making approximate physical models.

I: It’s a strange thought; even if, potentially, we could observe everything from cosmic to sub-atomic; we’ll never be able to link it all up in our puny, insufficient brains. Although maybe its actually a relief…it leaves space for (as you call it) ‘imagination’ to kick into action, a kind of undefinable ‘leaping’ of the brain that I think is key to our survival as a species (there’s lots of this feeling in AN-ARCHaeologY). Perhaps the lack of ‘leaping’ will eventually be our downfall…

A: Actually we can’t observe everything, but that’s a different story… Yes I think it could be our downfall. I’d rather we went out with a bang and made something better at leaping than ourselves, than slowly becoming stupider and stupider. I don’t know which will happen or whether we’ve even started along either path. Probably not.

I: I’m sure I’ve told you before that I took this wild module at UCL called ‘Magic to Science’. It explored the shifting (and inseperable) relationship between religion, magic, the occult and present-day science. At some point in our history as intelligent bipeds, FACT became more important than FICTION (in science anyway). Thus, over half of Isaac Newton’s work is carefully ignored… I wonder what you think about the future of science as a technology (the ultimate fact-machine)? I.e. Does it go MAGIC –>SCIENCE–>TECHNOLOGY? I’m thinking of the kind of weird anti-climax of observing the Higgs Boson as a particle physicist at CERN…the grand manifesto of this ridiculously complex technology is kind of a dead end really once fulfilled, or is it?

A: Yes I remember that!
Like I already said, I think there is always an element of fiction in science. However nowadays with grant proposals, etc, people have to attack increasingly small and easily solved problems, sometimes to the point of not doing much new at all, which is quite sad. One interesting thing for me, as someone who’s maybe more involved in the theory side, is that you make an (educated) “guess” as to whats going to happen, and then, sometimes, it does… I think its undeniable that facts are really important: the earth rotates every day, and so the sun rises every day, and “facts” like these allow our existence (by the way, there is no reason to really regard facts as facts, we just have a really base intuition about induction – if something has happened before, it seems like it will happen again). But to understand things there has to be a model that formalises our inductive intuition  in a more concrete way, like the model of the earth rotating. In some ways any model is fictitious, in my opinion.

Technology: I dunno how connected it is to science, really. I guess it uses the models that science comes up with. I wouldn’t put it in the same class as science or magic though.

Yeah, the Higgs boson thing is a bit odd, because it was always definitely going to be found by the LHC, so to me that whole thing seems a bit of an anticlimax, which doesn’t really appeal to me personally – CERN are very good at PR though :). Lots of the people who were working on finding the Higgs are also working on other things that the LHC does, so their work continues, in maybe more interesting areas. What put me off that kind of physics is that we are rapidly approaching the point at which theoretical ideas can’t be tested by machines like the LHC anymore… so either we are stuck at the fiction stage, or someone really smart will come up with a better experiment.

Also, to go back a bit, having the Higgs does raise other questions, which they are now trying to answer – like you said, the question/ answer ratio keeps getting more and more out of kilter…

One final thing: In some ways I kind of like your scheme of MAGIC —> SCIENCE—>TECHNOLOGY: first of all people make up some model for reality (magic or myth), then test it and if it works in more situations than the original one, it becomes science; later, someone can come along and use that model to actually make something; technology.

I: I guess what I’m trying to ask is, do you worry that physics will eventually become a kind of enormous technological experiment that doesn’t actually require humans apart from to operate it? I’m thinking of CERN as an example of the enormous effort required to design a technology that is only the enabler of a relatively small and specialised field of science. It seems to be more about the innovative technology than the actual ideas / theories in a way. There’s lots of art like this too I guess…my feeling in art is that this kind of stuff is just dodging the difficulties involved in actually using ones brain. Like, REALLY using it…like Pythagoras or Diogenes…Technology seems to be the kind of ‘useful’ excretion of science, which makes me think of the quite terrifying example of Los Alamos and the legacy of the Manhattan Project whose shadow Grandpa must have worked under.

A: If there were no humans involved the LHC would never have been built. Its like a modern day Great Pyramid or Stonehenge in some ways. I don’t think we can really say its just an enabler of a small field, most of the technology has other uses, for example similar superconducting magnets will be used to make fusion power plants, etc, which could save us when fossil fuels run out… But yeah I’d rather we found a smarter way to do the same thing. However actually scientific projects like this consume not that much resources compared to hyperconsumerism or the military (in the US), and I personally think its much better to spend money on projects like the LHC or a new art gallery that could potentially enrich human existence than wasting it on every person buying a new car every year or new stealth bombers…

AFTER THE BASS AND BEFORE THE TEXT:
SPELLS AND VERBAL REMEDIES COMPILED BY SIMI THE CURSE