The spectacle is non-porous. It’s well oiled and frictionless. Like a water slide, which grates with annoying joins, it funnels movement. It’s plasticity knows no bounds. It acts on us and we on it. It reflects desire and dreams and infuses everything with the appearance of substance without tactility or flaw. Not the heart though. It grabs. It pierces the spectacles thinly veiled vernacular and sends ripples through space and time. It holds. It ruptures complacency and creates a displacement in the fabric of your day. It’s threads are delicate and strong. The world slows, unravels, flips. Welcome this disruption whenever it arrives and watch your personal spectacle crumble all around you.
* * *
Travel ruins you. It reaches depths not fathomed previously. It guts like a mullet, and tears at your spleen. You beg for more while you bunk and slumber. No one should do it. Stay put. Sleep longer. Meditate. Drink. Seek therapy.
* * *
If I were a monsoon, I would swoop down on you. I would circle you and rain hard. I would wrap myself around you in a wet embrace, writhing and drenched. I would compress you, elongate you. I would be your shroud, your cloud – for that moment.
* * *
I wouldn’t recognise Herman Hesse in the street, would you?
* * *
You are space-time. You are continuum, careering (in the finest sense of the word) toward oblivion.
* * *
Your order is necessary. It signals a kind of control you are complacent with. It’s shrouded in archaic density. The kind that thwarts freedom. It evokes self-pity and a lack of something real. You don’t need a scapegoat. There is only one way to behave – without fear, but with passion, with grace. Be slack and carefree. Shuffle on, oh delicate one…
* * *
Your elevation is by design. It does nought to struggle with words of less efficacy. Only through the bow breaking does the heart sink. In the meantime hulls and keels hold their weight like dolphins caressing the crest of a wave, never breaching, always at pace.
* * *
The last of the deities was put to rest in 2056. There was resistance but it was overshadowed by the relentlessness of the plastics industry. Their design, and their desire, was simple. They sought strength through a seamless and bipartisan approach to non-attachment. A world made effortless through absence. Nonporous surfaces were omnipresent. Efficiency did increase however, this much was true. Once in a while an eye catches another eye and the universe implodes. A connection somewhat unfamiliar dislodges the tupperware-like state of the rational. And we melt once again.
Written by Chris Bennie
Chris Bennie’s text is 7 pieces of prose in response to viewing the Makeshift Monuments series of photographs by artist Bridie Gilman.
Image: Makeshift Monuments VI 2014, Archival pigment print.
