Imagine a human body stripped of everything but its capillary veins… standing upright and moving just as it would if it were fleshed out. I saw such bodies, ten or twenty; but, instead of veins, these were green daisy chains intricately woven, tracing out the burst bodies of human beings.
I looked again and the green plexus had become red. Flesh grew rapidly from the white petals and covered the network of vessels; and then, what had once been an explosion of red fibers, was a hundred naked women running towards me.
I covered my head, closed my eyes tight and braced myself. They never reached me. I looked up. The sun was bright, but going down.
Notes on a Series of Hallucinations #01
Posted: July 23, 2010 by sam penman in Fractured Thinking, Fractured Writing0
Mamihlapinatapei (between a flea and a fit)
Posted: June 25, 2010 by sam penman in Fractured Doodles
There are some crows pecking a dead thing outside. A run over thing. Pecking a run over thing they are. Bones all shattered. Skin doesn’t shatter, does it? Some parts get torn off, run into the road, flattened. Skin gets flattened, doesn’t it? There can be pieces cut off, but it doesn’t shatter, does it? Glass shatters, does skin? They say dreams can shatter… oh dear, “did he just say, ‘dreams shatter’? Did he actually use the phrase, ‘dreams shatter’? I hope not.” And of course, we cannot use the phrase, ‘dreams shatter.’ Even if we occasionally like to speak in cliches, it is done with the most self-conscious of irony. No, never should we use such a trite old line as, ‘dreams shatter.’ In fact, the word ‘dream’ is banned altogether. What hippy sappy nonsense is this… dreams, indeed! We could invert it, neither ask the question nor make it so: “dreams do not shatter… ever!” No, no, no! The mere mention of the word ‘dream’ sends a shiver down our spines. Bones shatter, the spine can for sure… what about love? Oh no, “ees only gawn n’ done it agen… ‘love’ this time…” Love is out of the question, “boring love shit!” And yet, here it is appealing again. ‘Boring’ and ‘shit’ standing each side of ‘love’ mocking it, like two hefty bullies kicking shit out of the ‘sensitive’ kid. Oh yes, ‘shit’ is ok… ‘boring,’ even better! But what happened here? Making jokes about middle class angst is like shooting fish in a barrel… we came full circle! And we don’t know where we are.
I think it’s a cat… ah, the revenge of the bird exacted ‘randomly’ by a passing car, or so they would have you think. Does the skin shatter? The conceptual artist has something to say about it, although, what he says about it, exactly, is unclear.
A fellow systematically destroyed everything he owned: conceptual art. He became God! smashed a hammer down on all his possessions. He became God! And not just in that tediously obvious way that even he suspected, oh no, he became God! He destroyed all He possessed. He is all he possessed. But he also lived transcendentally above it all, above his self, his surface self. Creation is not making across the surface but, rather, applying. Creating is applying – God is a solipsist and possesses everything he possesses. But, even beyond the creation and the destruction, he became God in any case. He was art, artist and critic… or so his hammer had him believe.
scene 1. cows in a field
(music: [to be decided post production])
two cows close to each other grazing in a field.
(music fades out)
DAVE
(subtitled)
‘ere, I was talking to Simon the other day and he only reckons that our reality is part of some elaborate computer generated matrix which was created for the sole purpose of providing an infinitely replenishable supply of energy for our digital overlords. What d’you think Barry, is he talking bollocks or what?
BARRY
Well Dave, there has always been speculation about the possible illusory nature of reality and Simon’s contention seems to be a novel interpretation of a classical idea. But, it does beg the question, is it better to live in this fabricated world or face the unknown reality of a possible future dystopia?
DAVE
Funny you should say that Barry ‘cos he offered me these two pills and said that if i took the red one I would awake from my computerized nightmare.
BARRY
What d’you do?
DAVE
I told ‘im to stick it… tryin’ to mug me off!
BARRY
What’s Simon doing with a portal to the real world in pill form anyway?
DAVE
He says he’s the leader of an elite band of renegade freedom fighters who are in turn part of a complete underground resistance fighting to destroy the matrix and thus saving cow kind from its invisible prison.
BARRY
It’s a bit far fetched ain’ it? I mean, I saw Simon get pushed over the other day by two teenagers an’ it took him half an hour to get back up again.
DAVE
You’re not wrong. But Barry, one question… what’s a computer?
Me motions go all wrong in me knee, after daybreak the cold gets through – bends me all up, you see.
I can’t grow a beard anyway. Not for want of whiskers but for want of will. This doesn’t mean I’m scared of dying… I am though. In the dark night when me head can’t be still on me pillow, I think of being trapped inside me veryness, me very nothing elseness. All at once I’m jealous of this glass tied up inside itself: it never escapes. And, that’s all I am.
To think, I won’t reach out any more, wont reach out and be reached into anymore. I don’t want to die, but these perpetual escape attempts are exhausting.
The trouble with dying keeps under my pillow and evaporates when light through my window cracks the broke neck shadows on the wall that abstract what I cannot abstract anymore, until the trouble with dying is no trouble at all.
click on the image above to take you to KAN 2010 website.
Lo-Fi Spectral Bubbles
Posted: March 25, 2010 by sam penman in Fractured Images, Fractured Photography
The entire strange beast lurched through the hole in my… in my sink, the hole that let the water out.
The entire strange beast managed to collect my bones… all! but one by one.
Can you hear him rattling all them’s that rattle? who… who never swell, get fat, n’vr!
Collapse, oh how I ruined.
Now ees gone made the whole sink fat!
