Not Dry: ii - Marigold and Butterfly

March, 2021

We are following, somewhat, the topographical path observed, loosely, in a Brett Whitley painting. It has brought us here to this little town that I know like the inside of a calculator resting in the palm of my hand which is to say only somewhat, loosely (make sure to replace the round plastic backing of the calculator lest the numbers slip onto the ground of the little town and turn upside down). This will be the first evening of the trip that I will, verily, leave my wife in the hotel room while I head out for dinner, as who knew that one of my mates had moved here for cryptoagricultural work. He has a table reserved in a Thai restaurant. See you later tonight, I call out to my wife who is busy sitting cross legged on the smooth white bed covers of our, to my mind, Chinese decored room, illuminating the gold lamp shade, the gold and burgundy sash across the foot of the bed (red and gold sunset was, for Whistler, a landscape mirror for the slides of blood he had observed beneath microscope in the seaside maternity hospital of his autumn years), with the glow cast from the holographic sculpture she is curating with a platform of light emitting diodes and penny tealight candles at her feet.

Against the windows of the restaurant a light rain is gradually raising its dynamics. The food is wonderful and we are efficient with ordering and consuming. We talk all things crypto - cryptoagriculture on the blocksupplychain, cryptopastoralism rewriting the history of sun smudged wheat fields and the religions they harvest, cryptocurrencies which are nowhere near abstract enough for us, we wish they did not translate to real money at all (it is the concept we want to invest in, we want to become conceptually rich). After eating we head out into the rain which is now in full symphony, cryptorain perhaps in torrents, and my mate he says I know a bar the next block up, so we strafe puddles beneath us and awnings above until we get to the bar and of course, the pandemic, they have already met their quota for the night. The girl on the desk looks at us as if to say, how could you not have known, and how about not asking me if any other bar will have occupancy because I have enough to worry about here, while you want a clean well lighted place to have a drink we are just trying to survive. So we say no problem and head back onto the street where, between the darkness and the rain, visibility is in low supply.

We try another bar but we are both so utterly drenched, so heavy with water, our shirt pockets billowing with raindrops, that we cannot be sure if we are turned away because of our flood aesthetics or because this inn too is full. Time to wrap up the night, my mate hails a taxi and when the driver peels the window down a crack he yells at my mate, you better have a towel, to which my mate replies, you know we are like sixty percent water, and the taxi driver says yeah on the inside fella, come on, and I wave and head back to the hotel. I drip in the foyer, I drip in the hallways like I am twelve again and returning from the pool with squelchy rubber thongs on my feet and an itchy towel that will not hold up around my waist, and then knock knock my key is too wet to work so my wife opens the door and I let my heavy clothing slap on the floor until I am in the warm shower and then in a dressing gown on the edge of the bed.

My wife with her antique heartwood bangs squirreled into a patch of gingham, coke bottle lenses (loupes, microscopes) pushed right up to the light wireframe lines of neon cast from the arrangement of LEDs and tealights networked across the bedspread, the outline of a marigold from the stem up through the leaves to its immense floral head, and with its legs ingested in the glow of the petals a butterfly with its head bent south, within reach of being able to sip nectar from one of the moist florets, quote within reach unquote the critical term here as it is intentionally ambiguous as to whether anything is actually happening between the marigold and the butterfly. Ontologically speaking. After all, the seeds of the marigold are redacted and the butterfly can offer it nothing in terms of conveyance. This is not untoward code, this is literally the foundation of their nature, as observed. And yet they dance. To be sure, on a structural level, her architecturally shifting light pillars, yes say geodesic polygons lowing, no doubt they move now into bends, the lines subtracted into each other, replacing the overlapping waves with negative space and, of course of course, they bend into the shape of vowels and expire into hyperventilated panting.

There are what they call dead malls, empty shopping centres no longer frequented with money, that, my wife says, you, that is me, fetishise. And there are shopping centres built across satellite districts in China that are never intended for use, their economic function is solely in their construction. So, she says, to the west you have expansive tiled amphitheater voids that have lived and died, and to the east you have ones that have been born but cannot come to life. Which one, sweetheart, most resembles your soul. If only, she says, I knew the genealogy of your infatuation with lonely places. Yes, your parents cleaned empty libraries, after hours tourism depots, midnight council buildings all echo and cathode ray tube screensaver laden, distant train lights behind the carpark tundra, but is this really the reason you love me.

We stare up at the ceiling, at a field of starlight residue cast up there against the pressed metal by the fading LEDs now sprinkled across the carpet, haphazard like the distribution of seeds in a country garden. The tealights are extinguished and sit smoldering faint gray plumes like those that might rise from the chimneys of toy houses that little well dressed bears and mice turn into toy homes. My wife says say cosmism but time stretch the consonants. She says that is the sound the universe will make when our minds reach peak intelligence and in a moment of revelation will set fire to the universe. You do not believe me, her words, staring roofward, our bodies parallel landscapes of milk and dynamite, I cough and she says, put yourself in the ethical shoes of Nikolai Fedorov, his vision of salvation where nobody would miss out on enjoying the results of future societal progress because death would be unimagined. Those who fought and labored for the fruits of other generations to receive, they would not need die, because you see technological innovations, say cryptocollection, The Collector, will gather all the matter of deceased humans together to reform them, piece by piece. Look at the stars. Do you see Evald Llyenkov up there, now we live in a post death world, he says that through communism we will continue to evolve and flourish and develop to peak intelligence, I am repeating myself so you know the punchline, how in this post death world we will reach maximum consciousness and in a moment of cognitive bliss all matter in existence will be spontaneously set ablaze, causing the second Big Bang, resetting all creation so we can begin (be bang) again.

The bedhead has a radio built into it. We listen to Japanese city pop, the same genre of tunes that Les and I listened to in the simulated Hong Kong apartment, those eighties pop gems from Japan that recreated the sounds of the Western seventies that had been pouring out of America. But we enjoy the facsimile versions so much more, not only because we cannot understand what the Japanese artists are singing, but because of the gap, the spatial delay, that this copied aesthetic presents. It is not just that the copy is inherently better, most often the songs are technically identical, although the Japanese tunes do have more synthesizers which is really cool, but you see it is rather that the distance between the copy and the original gives us the space we need to really allow ourselves to fall into it wholesale, to submit to this sudden dream without forensic criticism, to lose ourselves in photocopied melodies like, well perhaps a little like Warhol, but more like a filter on a photograph of a landscape that improves its colours to a condition of inebriated simulacrum that nature could only aspire to. Sensory drunk on having been transported to a parallel version of your own history that feels more vivid in present retrospect than your own banal memories of the lived same. Kind of like how you fall in love with the image rather than the person, the empty shopping centre instead of the vacant head, the poem removed from its homeland, the analogy no longer with any family alive in these parts or, from what well versed authorities can ascertain, any other.

Minutes from sleep we open the Internet Archive and look for a free text copy of our biographies to read. There are five million plus biographies on the site and we find our own separate life stories fairly quickly but it takes a little longer to track down a version of what might be our joined history. Each time we think we find our story, there is something in it, a detail, that casts us with a perspective that is not quite us, or at least it does not seem to be us. I turn to look at the face of my wife as she scans the screen, the wavelength of her cartilage, the country garden dice roll of her freckles, arcade machine blue glow eye tutti between vanilla sclera refreshing, exchanging pixels with the monitor, and again with reference to Proust it was like how he saw the three steeples of Martinville and Vieuxvicq from the carriage, how they shifted into new ontological states depending on the perspective he was able to access at the time, so too as my wife turns her face I think, that is not her, that is not her, that is not her, ah yes that is her, there she is, revealed to be herself at a seventy three degree angle obtuse from the pillow. Turn the page and what about this one, that is not us, that is not us, that is not us, oh wait it is us to a tea.

I see a book on the site that I read many years before, C.G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Book of Two Friendships, by Miguel Serrano. When I was a teenager twenty five years earlier running high on Germany philosophy I relished reading the warm conversations that Serrano, who had traveled all the way from Chile to wander through the rural outlays of Europe in search of these two men, had with these founts of insight into consciousness and spirituality and the impact of world war on what it was to be human in those days. They discussed archetypes, art, arbor metamorphosis and so on, all the things a fifteen year old craves to know about to help navigate nineteen nineties suburban life. Well imagine my surprise when I read an updated biography on the Internet Archive that describes this seemingly balanced man, Miguel Serrano, this diplomat and yoga enthusiast who delivered these gentle conversations with our twilight luminaries on the lessons of radical kindness we can take from boys who turn into trees, how he, Serrano, on this very same trip to meet Jung and Hesse, was already deep in the vaults of Esoteric Hitlerism. So the website states he believed that the Aryan race was descended from extraterrestrials, he believed that Hitler had escaped Germany to live under the polar ice of Antarctica, possibly in dialogue with other Nazis who were living in the centre of our hollow earth, this was all in nineteen fifty one apparently, only a decade before Jung and Hesse would both be deceased. I lay back and look at the ceiling full of formerly deceased Communist souls being reconnected and brought back to life for celestial revelation. Wagner had Parsifal say that a wound can only be healed by the sword that made it, and maybe this is why it was so easy for a man who seemed devoted, through his recorded conversations, to the freedom and dignity of all humans, to also believe in the most bizarre and abhorrent ideas possible, because polar opposites are more intimately connected then disparate notions without any charge.

The next morning I wake early and see that my wife is still sleeping. Hungry, I walk to the rooftop of the hotel in order to scan the horizon for sources of food only to realise that there is, hooray, an edible garden right here on the rooftop. Of all the luck. I start with some Tuscan Baby Leaf Kale, then Oregano Cleopatra, some Boxwood Basil and Cha Cha Chives, Seychelles Beans, and then I taste something crunchy, dry, cereal like in texture it is, of course, part of the sandstone facade necklacing the garden. I scrape my teeth against the coarse surface and allow the detached particles to dance on my tongue before running down the back of my throat. They are like tiny seeds, similar to those found in tropical orchids. Luckily I have always enjoyed many calcium rich products across my thirty seven years so my teeth are diamond strong. After I finish the sandstone wall I move onto the roofing tiles that crunch like crispbread, then down into the ceiling of the hotel where I eat the air conditioning tubing, the electrical wires, the dust, swallowing as I walk to the wall and eat through the plasterboard, the bricks, the glass windows that crackle in my mouth like pop rocks, down through floors twenty to sixteen, I drink the pool water and eat the towels and diving board on floor fifteen, then proceed down through the subsequent floors until it is my wife who is awake and standing above me, my plump body spread out on the footpath outside with a heaving stomach, sure earlier I was quote hungry unquote but not necessarily quote eat a whole hotel hungry unquote. Well, my wife leans down and speaks into my eyes, she says, at least it was mostly hollow.