C
π₯β So. Our children & their sole grandparent have become lethal enemies with only one casualty π΅π©π¦πΊ π΄π’πΊ. What a witchy world! Of all creatures to carry a disease - better than religion's plague or propaganda - creatures that taste & interpret the world at the whorls of their fingertips where, in those deep spiral valleys π hides without wanting to hide, needing to hide. We have no real images of π to go on, just the under-the-microscope images where cellular invasion plays out in a galaxy of celestial pink & pretty, writ large & red by news media & mapped onto a world like it's already too late. Incy-wincy with water sprouts won't do. I rub my thumb & forefinger together - Did you know a sliver of space exists between skin-to-skin due to gravity? "Rub" is the word of the moment, in its obvious action sense but also phraseology β rub someone up the wrong way β rub shoulders β rub noses β rub it in β rub one's hands β the rub of the green β rub someone outβ Not since the recession can such eerie quiet be imagined in closed galleries or protracted exhibitions. I think of Genieve Figgis' ghostly gentry with mascara'd skull sockets at IMMA & how Rousseau defined the bourgeois mentality by their "terror of death"; Or Neil Carroll's βBrocken Spectreβ at RHA waiting for that lone individual to catch her own shadow & godliness in the sublime grey of nature but feel miniscule in its eye like the viral life that lives in the valleys of our embossed identity on the tips of our fingers. Isolation is the temporary antidote although exposure will be the final cure for good or ill. David Markson's 'Wittgenstein's Mistress' is a tour de loneliness of experimental fiction with an afterword by David Foster Wallace that other tour de loneliness. The novel tells the tale of Kate, a painter & aesthete who drifts in a kind of Einstein space-time of lucid reality or psychosis as the last person on earth who visits empty museums & sometimes leaves messages in the street. I search for a review of the novel after completing & there, at the top of a Guardian book review from 2015 - 30 years after its publication - is an image of a typewriter & make πβ
MARCH 14, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night