Two case studies of fate: updated archetypes for our time
I. Modern prophet
Between each clip a mechanical exhale clicks like a tongue, a brief black screen shifts scene, accompanied by the hospital respirator sound of a super8 film camera. The YouTube video is mildly granular, delicate somehow. Sitting on the bed, her voice is thin s’s, whistled t’s, gradual, gravelly, heavy r’s, like, you know,
Like this.
So, there’s my room, naked wooden floorboards, sun:
The molten stripe it lathers across the coffee table
I have a mattress, makeup bag, I have two mugs, my clothes, these beads
I bought them from this old woman who smiled like she knew things about you that you didn’t and
The thread joints between the beads , the knots, you know, they were sticky
With dust kind of like tree sap yellowy A lot of sun.
I own 28 items.
I used to have more, then less, when I was still squatting, figuring it out. Even then, something was sort of, like,
Coming to live through me. I always see the beginning of things backwards, you know, because events don’t exist until they’re named.
You could run from the naming but always the orphan time you leave will find you, always it waits in the wings.
Then there were the million views I woke up to. I realised the posting was the same as praying. It’s like there’s this form and it’s so beautiful, and its content can be almost anything. Because everything is shifting, too fluid to have form, in space - none - or in time - fragile. And people think it’s like a parody or something. The guided meditations. But it’s not. They’re not. I’m just fulfilling my place in things, you know.
The algorithm chose me.
And you can just list things on the internet now:
Lap of pistachio shells
My hairpin on the floor
Cat videos
Happy hour
Missing my ex even once I realised he was quoting True Detective
Bar of soap
Paper napkins
Are we luminous?
I think it gives us something to hold on to, the listing, icons to hold up to the party as proof
Proof of my life
That I care what you think
Look at these precious things I surround myself with
You can know these things!
You can know me!
In the same way
I have to keep making content to nourish this tender organism and
In pursuit of purification of the consciousness and my bachelor’s degree.
In this way I must be both universal and very very intimate.
Affirmations (universal):
[ Milk is more than milk ]
[ You are more than you ]
[ Miss what it was then ]
[ I am the reincarnation ]
[ of Copernicus ]
Diary (intimate):
Diary 10:
Think I swallowed a bruised stormy planet
On the evening walk heaving towards
Sickening feeling in my tummy
Quick exhale now everything is losing weight
But decide to radically accept this feeling
As proof of love Am a rationalist Yes
Proof! that I care about what you think
Can only walk wrap scarf hold phone close
Red flats lacerating the street
Traffic lights a sheen smeared vaseline in the night
Come to relish this little drama
The pub trip of epic proportions.
Diary 28:
I am a trained analyst categorising your words into most-to-least likely timelines
My memory of our conversations still is audio-perfect
Filed according to date place forecast
The smell of your collars (usually like cake boxes)
Because for a time 100% of my mental faculties were devoted to YOU
It made me physically sick
Proof! That no one could see
Because every relationship to God? private.
Diary 16:
Develop a photographic memory for a more coherent relationship with the object of your devotion.
This way you can more efficiently collect data to demonstrate your faith, to your faith.
Diary 30:
Eventually
The grass shone like cordial heavy smell of new mulch
I was being careful to think only pure thoughts
Because I fully believed you capable of reading minds
Then
Mid sentence slowly realising something
About the secret knowledge of how to live brightly, that I believed was in your mind, and that I really needed you
To tell me- Realised
I made it up so Knew it all already
Obviously
And also you can’t read minds
As in I caught you!
And your psychic violence
Although I gave you these powers too
Your actual ones are far richer
Diary 23:
What am I supposed to do now?
Consider the data?
Just sit there I guess…
Attached because we are always all ignorant. Even though God is in my mind, I’m just a girl.
Posting-prayer of this form functions because everything is more than it is and also less. When you blow up and reduce all of that simultaneously on an infinite plane, like a relative universe, like the internet, everything gets much much much much faster, as the drama of that car speeding up infinitely until it’s just an empty landscape, and, at the same moment, so still, and it happens as
The sound of a flip book
Ladders the world it’s all one long pair of sheer stockings
Flickering
How watches were only ever fine-tuned metaphors
There is this grand purrrrrrrr of dissipation
Now everything is losing weight (again see) and number and it's all just one.
The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen all at once.
If it turns out that I’m a false prophet?
Well, you are only asking for proof.
If that event ends up being named, then it was always going to be just that. I never asked to be able to talk to you like this but here I am. You know? You’re a part of this now. And who told you you have to be the best version of yourself?
Just a vessel experiment in the unified field of consciousness.
I too am whatever the algorithm wants.
II. Speculative dream dealer
In the LA studio of an artist who need not necessarily be named for this segment who was recently bailed out of one of those rapidly down-turning ingestion-oriented two-week-long weekends-away somewhere in the south of France.
I hate this. This is awful. No seriously awful - what, what’s that look on your face? Bemusement? Come on, you know this, though, no? I mean what would you call that? Like a febrile spray tan. Is this meant to underscore some superstructure of your psyche? Healing your inner child. Oh you see Angels but can only portray them here. Of course. Yeah I could be a terrorist but I don’t have the resources. Hahahahahaha so lucky. No no it’s good. It’s good. I’ll take it. I see potential in you. These three- bought. Bought! Yes I meant what I said. But it’s good, yeah, because I know someone who will like it.
‘Good’ means a throbbing but subtle potential for transmutation into a dream.
The ensuing process of selling to collectors
There is always a certain amount of phone calls -
Professional poker players, financiers, nightclub promoters, and corned-beef magnates.
Alongside continental lunch with the heiress to a Malaysian peanut empire, see
Art can be whatever I want it to be in this network.
Decoration ornamentation accent proof whatever.
Trust in me is the basis medium, an underlying currency,
And a bit of intimidation. It goes like this:
You have to buy one of these [XXXX XXXXXX] paintings wait ten years they’ll all be worth millions
If you don’t you will weep you will be weeping kissing my feet
Oh whyyyy
Yeah, anyway, come for dinner.
And most of the time I’m right.
You have no idea what is beautiful.
Don’t worry, even that doesn’t make you different.
Most of my clients buy from me without looking at the works first.
But no one looks at the works the gallerists put up before they’re up except the gallerists.
Do they have a special purchase on beautiful?
Is it pathological? Definitely Definitely some sort of disorder An excess of honesty and taste, Maybe some Manichean tendencies - I know what the world needs. Late stages of megalomaniacal paranoia? Whatever you want, want to hear. I’m honest.
Making good on the honesty claim
“I’m trapped by my circumstances to fulfil this role. A dealer-collector. A richman’s son.
Can’t like try to say ‘oh I’m not this and I’m not this, I’m actually this, I’m a self-made man’
You can only protest those kinds of myths so far.
You have to accept it, you have to embrace it.
This is who I am. Spoiled white fucking jew from South Africa. Had a bit of a rough childhood because his parents sent him to boarding school but at the end of the day nothing tragic. You know bullied a little bit here and there but like at the end of the day: Lucky man.
Blessed
Fortunate
Privileged
Overprivileged.”
At the basin, the mirror, at the marble island in the kitchen.
Glaze faced over a pot of protein yogurt.
The foil wrapper the centre of the room.
Who will want the piece about entrepreneurial models in 18th century Virginia.
Or, which Hollywood interior works with the colours of blood and jute sacks?
Some roles are better played than others. What’s yours?
Mythology mounts around anything visible enough.
As in, anything, seen, at all.