LAYER 03: SPACE

dingy auditorium

 

"The new environment was clearly visible to him,"

- Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage, 88

he thought to himself as the visible world began to crawl back toward him. He stepped out of his dream into an environment he could neither change nor escape, for it was painted on walls infinitely out of reach.  In his dream he had wandered deliberately into an auditorium, where at the front a woman called Carol Emmons oracled aloud into a microphone, so he plopped himself down with his rodent companions (among them were rats, capybaras, pistachios, squirrels, etc.) so that he might glean how he was to die. Death comes only to those who wait, and especially to those who practice, and even more to those who specialize in such practices (did she not prophecy too that to practice is stagnation whereas practice is motion?). 

Carol Emmons, Cosmogony 2.0

How is practice practiced? Practice can only be practiced through practice, which is to say that only by practice can one practice practice.

Carol Emmons lept twenty feet into the air and never came back down. The curious rodents crawled up to the lectern to investigate. Through an anomaly in space, she had mounted a ladder suspended in the air by the Manus of Dei whose divine outervention received a standing ovation by all the audients (excepting the squirrels, who remained stubbornly unimpressed. Carol Emmons ascended the ladder and the audients strained their rodent necks to catch fleeting glimpses of her. Do not look at me she said, but by virtue of her altitude she became impossible to not look at, and in retaliation she flung paint at the rodents, so that whenever a drop of paint fell on the noggin of an unfortunate audient it would metamorphose immediately and with minimal drama into a small person.

Behold, Carol Emmons began to proclaim, I shall turn this dingy auditorium into a dank old house. She then began meticulously etching the aura of a dank old house into the floor of the auditorium, scratching at the walls until words fell out in white shadows, launching clocks and bowling balls to the ceiling until they'd stick. 

Sight-specific instillation of the visible, sight-specific instillation of the visible, it became visible, clearly visible even, to him, whose eyes had been born anew by the divine grace into orphic eggs, he nailed himself to a coffee table, adorned only in doilies. If his memory served him correctly, this dank old house used to be an auditorium, but who was he to trust his own memory? It was the family portrait inserted neon-lit beneath the table's glass that awoke in him another image of a dank old house, was it his family home, or someone else's. He wet and shriveled the doilies in the sweat he exuded while trying to output reminiscent tears.

Carol Emmons opened her mouth to speak, if you wish not for space to overcome you, you must claim your own. But he couldn't move his stiff small person arms, and as much as he wished to claim his own space, his anxiety and fear stiffened his joints and tendons until he could no longer feel. 

A week later the sight specific-instillation was deconstructed, but he remained small and powerless and wondered forever if it was anyone's fault other than his own.

Carol Emmons, Cosmogony 2.0

Those are the words the angel of incidence told me to give you. i hope i did not err too greatly in transcribing them. Old Man Hands, i trust you'd know much better than i do what they might mean. 

Might god bless you,

gave