PicoBlog

I once again recognized that the Crawler was an organism. A complex, unique, intricate, awe-inspiring, dangerous organism. It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture — or my science or my intellect — but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.

— Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation (2014)

1.      It scratches the shape of my body on the surface of the world — someone (something?) creeps somewhere out of sight, whispering words coagulating into tissues, into muscles, bones, bodily fluids that rhythmically pulse through the thicket of channels in the biological machinery that makes my existence possible, and resounds in every word as I utter it, placing a part of myself in the ephemeral matter of air — dropping fragments of myself everywhere I go; filling the space with the vibrations of words I have taken over from someone (something?) else, the one who (what?) lurks in every shadowy corner, every building overwhelming in its size and immovability, every breathing element of the space constituting me, in every touch of another human being, as the cold shudder of the realization passes through me — that something always deconstructs me, disrupting my sense of a fixed center. Something always suggests words before I utter them: the Not-Self, woven into the fabric of the Self.

2.      The painting emerges from a jumble of fingers, tools and surfaces, to the accompaniment of a beating heart and steady breathing, amid the noise of the street outside. It emerges from the opening, from the breach it has made in reality, re-arranging its meaning and thus changing the way the artist looks at himself as he abandons it, pretending to have finished it — an object, a commodity, something ownable. It emerges, bringing "the there of a beyond" (Nancy, 2005, p. 125), though the beyond remains nonexistent outside of the moment of opening that the painting signals. The painter walks away from the canvas changed; he walks away someone else. The painting, silent, blind, and deaf, exerts pressure on the fragile world it has entered, carved out of a tangle of colors.

3.      Thought forces itself between me and the space I occupy, like an accurately aimed axe piercing through a small, natural crack in a piece of wood prepared for the fireplace. Thought violently makes its presence known. I arise in its image (Nancy, 2005, p. 7) — I arise as an image of space, alien to myself and yet present in every dusty street-side billboard. The city, rumbling with the echo of the wind pushing foreign words into my mouth, absorbs me, only to spit me out a moment later, half-digested, dirty, and alone. Each step reverberates with the sound of a vacuum — each step carries the weight of time — each step has the face of someone who seems familiar (I see them in the windows of the stores I pass; I see them aging and changing; I see their disheveled gaze caught in the trap of visual culture and incessant, semiotic production).

4.      The Not-Self, inseparable from the Self, spatial, completely material and endowed, as it may seem, with a divine (forgive me for not defining what I mean — out of sheer malice) power to change the image of reality as I experience it, and make me perceive it as my own — as one in which I move autonomously, relying on no one, wearing a mask of liberal solipsism — takes its place in the echo of my beating heart, like a piece of glass stuck in a smoothly working, hot and moist, organic machine, threatening to disintegrate at any moment when it seems like it might come loose and flood the whole system with blood; which makes its sting a welcome sensation, in some cruel, endless joke with no punchline — a joke that makes me weave my own identity from the dense fabric of the threat of annihilation woven into the wires and motors that make up my functioning body.

5.      Something creeps into my thoughts: it has jaws, and vines, and claws, and roots, hard walls and soft hands, black hair and a familiar voice, and it screams, and whispers, and howls like the wind, it tears my heart apart and makes it beat, it turns my words against me so that I can see through their echo like a mirror, it radiates the orange light of the setting sun and smells like a rosy dawn, it bears every name, someone, something, no one, it writes when I write and lingers like an eternal fear in my stomach, burning, carrying the smell of the forest and the exhaust fumes of the engines, it goes out unspoken, like the moan of a dreamer who wakes up when the first words hit the page, heralding the descent into the next circle of hell.

6.      The cogito always has its source in extensa, always exists in the world, entangled in the forces that govern it, knowing itself in an endless process of reflecting, dispersing, shaping of one body by another, marking the path of both movement and thought, since the res cogita does not for a moment observe the res extensa from the outside, uninvolved and infinitely rational — it does not stand over ordinary, uninterested matter like a despotic, disembodied inspector — on the contrary, every thought arises from touch, erupting among overlapping affects: "cogito, ergo extendor" (Nancy, 1996, p. 170); I think, so I touch myself through a space that contains and shapes me; a space that bears my imprints — a space that reminds me at every turn that I exist because I leave something behind, because I root my memory in places and things, because I know that someone waits for me somewhere, because I hear the wind carry the voice of passing strangers through the window.

7.      I remember every moment in which I fell apart. I might have just lied. Maybe I want to remember them because I don't allow myself to think of decay as an inseparable part of life. Compost allows new green shoots to grow. Decay does not always herald evil — sometimes a decaying body becomes a home for new, vulnerable life forms; the beginning of the next phase of an endless cycle. Maybe I want to explain to myself why I'm always on the verge of collapsing like an old, abandoned building — and see no way out other than wading further into nothingness, hoping to find something to grab onto. Maybe I'm waiting for an alien force to devour me whole so I can think no more.

8.      The space, pregnant with the words I put in it, gets to know me, reacts to my presence, like the Crawler — a fungal creature with indescribable characteristics; the center of Area X's ecological anomaly — which writes an endless sentence on the wall. Words that give the impression that it has forcibly extracted them from the thoughts of the characters of Vandermeer's novel — torn from the ganglia of the brain, which at some point ceases to understand whether they actually take part in creating what appears as private reflections, or whether the thoughts flowing out of them have existed from the beginning, suspended somewhere between bodies, in a perpetual limbo of transience, clashing between knowledge and something that creeps in unnoticed to undermine the foundations on which we stand, and to invade our insides — scatter its spores; to transform us into something unrecognizable. 

9.      Space doesn't complete me, nor does it accentuate my inner emptiness, because I don't lack anything — me, as a subject who arises on the edge of a decay constantly on the horizon, not in the futile effort of searching for an object of fulfillment; an object of happiness, leaking through my fingers as they almost curl around it — on the contrary, space seems to conduct an uninterrupted invasion of itself; fighting for a place in my body, just as the body seeks to carve out a piece of it for itself, to create boundaries that give a sense of autonomy, although individual functioning paradoxically exists side by side with the impossibility of complete separation, of existing sui generis, as a self-sufficient organism that does not allow itself the thought of the generative role of decay.

10.   Has the edge of destruction I speak of become my home? Does disintegration, echoing here like a distant refrain, bring me comfort? Words, repeated endlessly, become foreign, lose their meaning, only to gain a new one, unforeseen, terrible — and disappointing, when they prove incapable of capturing the transformation I undergo as I write them, sculpting my thoughts with my fingers, waiting for the moment of revelation that will give me the ultimate thought, capable of challenging everything I know. One that will not succumb to the onslaught of nothingness. I continue to believe in it, although the slightest gust of wind uproots me. I write so that I can decompose and sink into the warm ground of letters and images. Words betray me, condemning me to eternal repetition in search of adequate expression.

11.   Longing gnaws at my insides — longing for what always stays beside me, surrounding me, permeating me, and in the midst of which I imagine my own body as a toxic waste, something incompostable that always remains alien, doomed to repeat gestures of compliance without comprehending what they mean; doomed to play the travesty of a space pulsating with life in the hope that no one will notice that nothing can digest me, and that everything that pervades me slowly dies, stifled by the poison I bring with me into an ecosystem that operates smoothly without me, as I write about it, usurping the right to point out the laws that govern it, while life wilts with desire under the yoke of dry theory, collapsing under the weight of its illusion of grandeur.

12.   The world changes before my eyes; the world rots and blossoms, following a complex clock filled with many overlapping rhythms permeating one another, folding into bodies like mine, constructed of waves devouring each other, existing for a moment, before one rhythm, snapped off in the middle, before it reaches the end of the phrase, will pull others with it, and what I know will disintegrate forever, and nothingness will appear in its full glory — as the Not-Self carrying on its shoulders the contradictory identity of the Self — rearranging everything from scratch as the consuming earth turns my remains into one of the myriad, microscopic, elusive and incommunicable beginnings of new life.

13.   How can we not mention love when we talk about the incommunicability of what stands before us, shaping the space according to its own incomprehensible rules? I saw her face behind the glass door even before she raised her gaze. I felt her approaching, although I didn't look in the direction from which she usually comes. I've known her for years, but I continue to love her just the same. The street, twisted like a body in agony, froze. Somewhere in the distance, one of the church bells chimed another hour. I thought about how far away I strayed from the ability to capture the moment when a fleeting glimpse crushes everything I know and I no longer want to exist in any other instant — I want to remain in that extraordinary state of existence outside myself, seeing a familiar face that becomes, for a brief moment, the whole world. Jean Baudrillard said that "glass is the most effective conceivable material expression of the fundamental ambiguity of ‘atmosphere’: the fact that it is at once proximity and distance, intimacy and the refusal of intimacy, communication and noncommunication. Whether as packaging, window or partition, glass is the basis of a transparency without transition: we see, but cannot touch" (Baudrillard, 1996, p. 41). Glass, as a surface that separates us from what lies right in front of us, exposed though distant, heralds the impossibility of complete description and the constant loop of processing, changing, searching for an expression that manages to do justice to the way the world shapes it.

ncG1vNJzZmilkZi1qrrInKqpnZOpsrO%2Fjaysm6uklrCsesKopGioX6m1pnnCq5iwpJWn