instinct:extinct

There was a breach. And then a closure. Gradual shifts, hard to perceive. Power creeping in to fill the void created by your fear. You move in one direction, you circle back on yourself. The trick is to be like the fox. Like the rabbit. Like the octopus. It is as if identity shifts massively at some point to accommodate a new sense of multiplicity, and then gradually, imperceptibly, closes up again to one single dull possibility and then to the void of impossibility and then to nothing.

Questions with which to approach the context of two or more elements disengaged in an invisible non-confrontation:

Is there any fun to be found in stability, habit, routine?

Who/What is stopping you?

How much of this performance is scripted? How much is a reflection of laziness? Apathy? Fear? The threat of violence? Brute force?

The octopus travels sideways and in all directions at once. Its eyes are on one side of its head, its mouth on the other. When two of the animals mate, they join their bodies and move in such a way that there is no discernible front or back.

These words are an interface that mediates in such a way as to create an illusion of transparency out of opaque materials and electrically generated rays of light. There is no beginning or end. They bleed into one another.

Virtual reality is everything in a spectacle society. Our bodies join, we whisper tender messages, we rub interfaces. It’s all a surface play. The line between analog and digital is pixilated flesh.

Audience and stage.

The rabbit turns back on its own tracks to confuse the hound.

Instinct is extinct. We myspace each other until nothing is left but mirrored surface. We reflect back everything we refuse to see in ourselves.

A text message conveys “love,” or “lust.”

A blog conveys “meaning.”

We hemorrhage our selves in public and watch each other bleed. An army of amateur stalkers marching in bored little circles, click click click click.

These useless, itchy trigger fingers. These prosthetic plastic eyes. These images, transmitted for public consumption, for private scrutiny. We are the instruments of our own surveillance. We are the disseminators/consumers of our own lies. This is what we call community, friendship, love, sex. Abbreviated texts. Bored out of our minds.

*

I have been down here much longer than you imagine and I do not plan to come up again any time soon. There are something like nine levels to the underworld and I intend to approach each with the same degree of morbid, neo-Gothic self-seriousness and meticulously stylized rendering of Reality. I am sick of the living. No pulse, no engagement, no sweat, no reply.

I admire the bat for its blindness, and the mole for its blindness too.

I admire the octopus for its net of tentacles, its swift, ambiguous movement, its cloudy web of invisible ink.

I admire the spider for its web in the night.

I admire the beetle for its death march into the desert, it pushes the sun, it guides us along a confusing maze until we are hopelessly lost, thirsty, starving, and then devours us as we lie face-down on swollen bellies staring at the underworld with painted grins.

There is a diligence in these efforts. There is a fearlessness, an embracing of the dark. There is nothing familiar here.

*

These forms are ephemeral. They are designed to avoid confrontation and then disappear without a trace. When you see me now, it is not me. It is an after-image, a doubling back. It is camouflage. It is your memory of me erased. That moment when I first said.

Everything that I say is a lie.

Everything that I am is a lie.

hey you remember we met? it was a while ago, but what were you thinking at that moment? who were you fucking? who did you miss? nothing has changed, fundamentally, go back and erase that moment and everything since then and you will see that you are still you and i am still me and nobody knows anybody really, and none of us is

*

“Out of fear, they attempt to return to some safe point of origin, a familiar identity, a comfortable set of relational habits and routines. However, this backtracking is not like the cunning actions of the fox or the rabbit; rather, it is like the turtle’s swift retreat of its neck and limbs. In this scenario, the repeated protrusion and retraction of its head creates for the turtle the illusion of movement, while all the while allowing it to remain in place, motionless inside its shell.”