INTER FACE
22nd July 2012
It seems that the calendar has had it right all along. Today is the beginning
The above entry was the only recorded intromission of Man's mind into the Inter Face to survive its immediate dissolution. There was nothing else. No clues. Only this, a signal buried in a bubble of magnetic energy trapped between the warped state vectors that had once supported the universe in which He had lived, this nameless, faceless Man whose abrupt journal entry, without history or explanation, says as much as can be said about the extinction that only it survived. A germ of language burring in a pocket of ions.
We may select a face, our Inter Face being yet intact, from the scum-lapped breakwaters of our collective visual memory. We may give this Man clothes. A life, of sorts. Though by his diary, his freakish little journal and its urgent tone, we would probably make our excuses if he chose to sit by us. Now he is gone, he is welcome. Two clauses written along the length of a skewer around which we might spin our sugar.
Let us call him G. A contracted God, or the back end of a dog: he wouldn't mind. He is gone.
He has a face like any other of his time - expressionless, except when sleeping or shopping. His creases ironed out by toxic nerve suppressants. There are a variety of iris colours available on any given day, though we shall select emerald green. To go with the green, sandy hair, and to go with that beach-blonde, a sunny day and a loud printed shirt teamed with pale canvas shorts that reach to the knee. His teeth are slightly exposed, and we expect a smile, but there is no movement around the rest of the face. Perhaps it is pain. Perhaps he is thinking about what it is that made him write down what he did. We will never know. We put sunglasses on him and it is a smile. There. A hand swings by his shorts, summer sea breeze through the fingers that brush against the bottom of his shirt. He is walking like a tourist, a happy tourist who will go home and relate how unspoiled it all was. He is, after all, a pioneer of sorts.
We find him watching the sea. It cascades in foot high rolls onto the winking wet sands. Small creatures that he cannot see are burrowing through the sand to reach or to escape the water. Others are in the pools. Waiting for their time to refill with fresh brine, oxygen, the solution of life in the fresh wash of the tide. So that it might begin again, the expression of a desire unmatched by any words to achieve the totality that identifies only with the absence of all. Naked potential in a voiceless gap between times.
He feels the hard stippled crust of the concrete through his shorts, pressing against the angles of his bones. He shifts, off the sea wall and on to the marbled blue-grey rocks that form the sea defences. There is almost too much brightness to see exactly where the tide is on the shore. A ribbon of flashing silver-white cuts across the beach where the waves recede. He thinks of holidays, of the fishermen who tend those boats that lie, that must lie, just beyond the buoys and the yachts. There is worth in watching the water, but the sand and the rough rocks are beginning to grate on his skin and his body feels heavy and tender against them.
Down, onto the soft warm sands, he slips out of the small tennis shoes though whose holes, just above the rubber soles, twin streams of fine silicate sealed with finer particles of oil are pouring. He nestles like a happy child, his face blank. He is about to be cancelled as he writes the only line that anyone can now write anywhere. This he writes, with unconscious appropriateness, in the sand.
There is nothing left.
We see her now, writing the last line that was written anywhere. Here she is in a blue shift and it is wellington boots she is wearing. The room smells of damp. Stale piss. She is too poor for injections and there is no doubt that this is pain on her face. The kind of person who does not buy her breakfast, if she has it at all.
The expression of a dead relative though memory, the twitches of her mouth and eyes rich with loss and anguish. A selfless agony. The word 'Toady' appears on the cheap green screen of some antique writing machine and she feigns a laugh. It is deleted. It is replaced.
"Today is the beginning"
And nothing else. She is deleted.
Thousands of people their minds open as a vast mask through which we will now peer and see as they did these same words form before their eyes on screens, in sand, over their conversations in thoughts. It is like a shudder of energy throughout a hive, a final spasm of symbol in word before the final shutdown of the system. And it comes to me in a dream, here. Twenty years before. Then eight.
I see them all erased. The death of the Inter Face.
People of all kinds throughout time have lived in ignorance of it, and parts of them have seen or sensed parts of it in the rubble of dreams, clipped from the edge of explicable nightmares and visions drawn from staircases leading to nowhere from bombed out towns. An old map of the world which has been attacked by mould, the countries blurring with the oceans, the brown mildewed paper bleeding into the gummy plaster of a toilet wall. Where is it all coming from?
Some hand we imagine scrawls these messages with a blunt instrument on our past. In a hurry, as if to be discovered by some burly orderly it never completes the clause. Only the sense leaks out of it, it is incontinent as a message and as a threat. Where is it taking us?
And the hidden message is a lie as well, because of the instability of the medium, which is the actual message. We have been attempting all along to decipher the obvious. It is only due to the life of the Inter Face that we have got this far in any case, in any case at all. Suited.
Like twins thinking each other's desires are theirs, it has been mistaken for God, thoughts, social trends. Place a metronome next to another. If you can bear the ticks, wait until they merge. So will your clocks, your menstrual cycles, ideas of calculus on separate continents emerging spontaneous; together. Whether connected, entrained, sympathetic or fictitious entirely without our interfering need to explain and connect, these phenomena are not the message.
Some vast throbbing and horrific entity pulsing its malevolence through aeons rich with lifeless silence - again, an idea of the Inter Face. Until it beings to malfunction you will not notice how little of you there is without it. I am not attempting to convince you. Leave while you think you can, while there are sufficent variables supported by the Inter Face to lead your desires off into their walled gardens of glittering deceit. Booted.
An ardent Frenchman with a pointed beard draws circles in words that lead once to him, then to God, and then back again. How much further have we come since then, those of us who perhaps think also when cold might be amused to remark upon the limits of our philosophy. Our artists might be delighted at the intricacy of everyday cognition and communication, replacing God with the complexities of the organism itself and all the colourful arrays of symbol-production that it seemingly allows. Yet it all must be mediated. It all must have a form. This form giving thing is the Inter Face. It too can die, and it dies when our attempts to recreate it become identical with itself. The point of absolute equilibrium between first- and second-order replication of events is approaching, and we who are aware of the development are for the most part content to discuss better forms of mimicry. The rest of us are falling apart in silence.
On the 22nd July 2012 we will achieve identity with all identity. There will be no telling one thing from another, and no thing to tell. When the Inter Face itself has been reproduced, when it cannot distinguish itself from it, this fake of a fake that has sustained and underwritten all language, perception, imagination, dream, law, property, love, struggle, pathos, theory, decay and optmistic catastrophe there will be nothing left on which to record the annihiliation through similitude of every thing known through memory and perception. The final release, perfection, a black dot winking from a magnetic pulse trapped in the ruins of a universe collapsed into a void. Waiting to be born again, by accident.
It seems that the calendar has had it right all along. Today is the beginning
The above entry was the only recorded intromission of Man's mind into the Inter Face to survive its immediate dissolution. There was nothing else. No clues. Only this, a signal buried in a bubble of magnetic energy trapped between the warped state vectors that had once supported the universe in which He had lived, this nameless, faceless Man whose abrupt journal entry, without history or explanation, says as much as can be said about the extinction that only it survived. A germ of language burring in a pocket of ions.
We may select a face, our Inter Face being yet intact, from the scum-lapped breakwaters of our collective visual memory. We may give this Man clothes. A life, of sorts. Though by his diary, his freakish little journal and its urgent tone, we would probably make our excuses if he chose to sit by us. Now he is gone, he is welcome. Two clauses written along the length of a skewer around which we might spin our sugar.
Let us call him G. A contracted God, or the back end of a dog: he wouldn't mind. He is gone.
He has a face like any other of his time - expressionless, except when sleeping or shopping. His creases ironed out by toxic nerve suppressants. There are a variety of iris colours available on any given day, though we shall select emerald green. To go with the green, sandy hair, and to go with that beach-blonde, a sunny day and a loud printed shirt teamed with pale canvas shorts that reach to the knee. His teeth are slightly exposed, and we expect a smile, but there is no movement around the rest of the face. Perhaps it is pain. Perhaps he is thinking about what it is that made him write down what he did. We will never know. We put sunglasses on him and it is a smile. There. A hand swings by his shorts, summer sea breeze through the fingers that brush against the bottom of his shirt. He is walking like a tourist, a happy tourist who will go home and relate how unspoiled it all was. He is, after all, a pioneer of sorts.
We find him watching the sea. It cascades in foot high rolls onto the winking wet sands. Small creatures that he cannot see are burrowing through the sand to reach or to escape the water. Others are in the pools. Waiting for their time to refill with fresh brine, oxygen, the solution of life in the fresh wash of the tide. So that it might begin again, the expression of a desire unmatched by any words to achieve the totality that identifies only with the absence of all. Naked potential in a voiceless gap between times.
He feels the hard stippled crust of the concrete through his shorts, pressing against the angles of his bones. He shifts, off the sea wall and on to the marbled blue-grey rocks that form the sea defences. There is almost too much brightness to see exactly where the tide is on the shore. A ribbon of flashing silver-white cuts across the beach where the waves recede. He thinks of holidays, of the fishermen who tend those boats that lie, that must lie, just beyond the buoys and the yachts. There is worth in watching the water, but the sand and the rough rocks are beginning to grate on his skin and his body feels heavy and tender against them.
Down, onto the soft warm sands, he slips out of the small tennis shoes though whose holes, just above the rubber soles, twin streams of fine silicate sealed with finer particles of oil are pouring. He nestles like a happy child, his face blank. He is about to be cancelled as he writes the only line that anyone can now write anywhere. This he writes, with unconscious appropriateness, in the sand.
There is nothing left.
We see her now, writing the last line that was written anywhere. Here she is in a blue shift and it is wellington boots she is wearing. The room smells of damp. Stale piss. She is too poor for injections and there is no doubt that this is pain on her face. The kind of person who does not buy her breakfast, if she has it at all.
The expression of a dead relative though memory, the twitches of her mouth and eyes rich with loss and anguish. A selfless agony. The word 'Toady' appears on the cheap green screen of some antique writing machine and she feigns a laugh. It is deleted. It is replaced.
"Today is the beginning"
And nothing else. She is deleted.
Thousands of people their minds open as a vast mask through which we will now peer and see as they did these same words form before their eyes on screens, in sand, over their conversations in thoughts. It is like a shudder of energy throughout a hive, a final spasm of symbol in word before the final shutdown of the system. And it comes to me in a dream, here. Twenty years before. Then eight.
I see them all erased. The death of the Inter Face.
People of all kinds throughout time have lived in ignorance of it, and parts of them have seen or sensed parts of it in the rubble of dreams, clipped from the edge of explicable nightmares and visions drawn from staircases leading to nowhere from bombed out towns. An old map of the world which has been attacked by mould, the countries blurring with the oceans, the brown mildewed paper bleeding into the gummy plaster of a toilet wall. Where is it all coming from?
Some hand we imagine scrawls these messages with a blunt instrument on our past. In a hurry, as if to be discovered by some burly orderly it never completes the clause. Only the sense leaks out of it, it is incontinent as a message and as a threat. Where is it taking us?
And the hidden message is a lie as well, because of the instability of the medium, which is the actual message. We have been attempting all along to decipher the obvious. It is only due to the life of the Inter Face that we have got this far in any case, in any case at all. Suited.
Like twins thinking each other's desires are theirs, it has been mistaken for God, thoughts, social trends. Place a metronome next to another. If you can bear the ticks, wait until they merge. So will your clocks, your menstrual cycles, ideas of calculus on separate continents emerging spontaneous; together. Whether connected, entrained, sympathetic or fictitious entirely without our interfering need to explain and connect, these phenomena are not the message.
Some vast throbbing and horrific entity pulsing its malevolence through aeons rich with lifeless silence - again, an idea of the Inter Face. Until it beings to malfunction you will not notice how little of you there is without it. I am not attempting to convince you. Leave while you think you can, while there are sufficent variables supported by the Inter Face to lead your desires off into their walled gardens of glittering deceit. Booted.
An ardent Frenchman with a pointed beard draws circles in words that lead once to him, then to God, and then back again. How much further have we come since then, those of us who perhaps think also when cold might be amused to remark upon the limits of our philosophy. Our artists might be delighted at the intricacy of everyday cognition and communication, replacing God with the complexities of the organism itself and all the colourful arrays of symbol-production that it seemingly allows. Yet it all must be mediated. It all must have a form. This form giving thing is the Inter Face. It too can die, and it dies when our attempts to recreate it become identical with itself. The point of absolute equilibrium between first- and second-order replication of events is approaching, and we who are aware of the development are for the most part content to discuss better forms of mimicry. The rest of us are falling apart in silence.
On the 22nd July 2012 we will achieve identity with all identity. There will be no telling one thing from another, and no thing to tell. When the Inter Face itself has been reproduced, when it cannot distinguish itself from it, this fake of a fake that has sustained and underwritten all language, perception, imagination, dream, law, property, love, struggle, pathos, theory, decay and optmistic catastrophe there will be nothing left on which to record the annihiliation through similitude of every thing known through memory and perception. The final release, perfection, a black dot winking from a magnetic pulse trapped in the ruins of a universe collapsed into a void. Waiting to be born again, by accident.
posted by Fanshawe at 10:40 PM
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