Oh how words tend to baffle us, footloose as they are. You see they trade places like mad, so as one may stick, the next shakes at a chance to stand in for another. And this trickery brews such a mess to unravel. ‘Perhaps more might have been said about how language acts when it stops needing to make sense and registers on other more affective, intuitive relations’. Just look at how language has been closed down, by all the character limits that sanction it. To write the same, only with less words they asked. But we like to ramble, that is all we know; so hark at the counsels who narrow language for their innuendos to race quicker from eye to ear. It seems they chase ‘a roman style transparency’ – for the language and structure to be so clear as to almost withdraw entirely, and from there, to let us focus not on the words themselves, but to other ‘lines of escape’ – perhaps things more real. See the ‘word is master’ and ‘directly gives birth to the image’, and that is what an image is, a representation of the real. But if this is really the case, then there must be something they depict, and that’s it, images have been rendered so very small, that any chance of identifying that subject has been given up. The image is no longer of, but is. ‘Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.’ Think back and know it is not the memory itself that’s recalled, but a return to some version that appeared in the last moment that memory came forth. It is memory now, then back again years later, to be remade for a third time the next day. In between these moments, a few exaggerations will fall in line, and some details forgotten too. See memory is a mess, an amalgam of images, cramps of one thing or another, some hazy, others obtuse, all in an orgy of exchange and rewriting. Though they would never claim any credit, if left to pixels, all the risk of this mutation departs. We can keep everything here, and we do, so the routine yellowing is polished away, and memory is consistent. Thank the pixels which preserve our dearest memories; they aren’t deceptive as cynics may say, no, these images, all cute in their organised grids, they remember better than I do, so I trust them, even with our most intimate histories. ‘Now as the honest observer would believe’, to keep everything as we do is wrong. Memory, and image should, as anything else, be subject to decay. See that which rots makes space for the new, as opposed to layers of crap after-thoughts piling one atop the other. ‘Try resembling Adam in the garden, and call each thing by a name, the desperate way of winning one’s way back into righteous relationship with external objects’, but with so many of them, so many images and words, there is no hope of registering every particular. To do so would require glossing over most and tagging only a few. I suppose that’s how we read now in a way, all very much ‘a literature of distraction’, by the things on the periphery that will fall to the centre and then pass. Each of these things cannot be named – there are not enough letters to do so, and so they slip to the undergrowth as strays. All these orphans, oh so many. Just words alone are plenty, you see they are no longer univocal, and steal each other’s definitions so plainly, like a fact really, the way just mere statement declares one word to be here and another that. Both beg a second question, for tell me of a fact ‘which alone can give solidity (inhalt) to our conceptions?’ No, there will always be something to ask after, of what came before, what placed it here or infact who? And why that word, and what should it be taken for? Only after an investigation can something be known for certain for it isn’t ‘a question of belief, but of proof’. At first, the image appears as a copy of something else. ‘A little bit of playacting on their part, an innocent bit of deception’ to appear as the object they depict, and with memory, perhaps the whole transaction is as honest as it seems – its subject is a friend, and that friend is familiar. But away from here, in the vast land, images are passed through untold sieves one upon the other, and at every stage a copy is made – one and then two – and while detail remains masterly, a little of its history falls away, until the subject is so far removed that any copy assumes the exact property of its original. Oh the simulacrum. What if with things turn so small and brilliant they begin to break? If copies scatter far enough to substitute the real by its copy? And if the original is so far out of reach are the images now their own? What if objects are images and images are signs? What then, if ‘everything reduces to the molecular, and all information fits on a chip’? Then watch as we return to the dreams of a Khan for whom ‘all the images rose up before him as things’. Panic, oh panic. Take a look at the book cover of HEATH, specifically, Untilted Heath Ledger Project, its third section surrounding the actor’s death. The words are not the authors, instead they are clipped from the mess of sources he pulls together, a mash up of ‘RSS texts, handwritten postcards,’ search histories, a coffee stain, footnotes, autographed photos of Jackie Chan, and category tags, all split with formatting issues of multiple copyright structures designed to, as they say, ‘protect’ the information. Most of the writing has been outsourced, and much of it plagiarised, yet it’s difficult to know which – you see the citations are poor, and the author’s syntax relies on repetition as opposed to explicit punctuation, so in crude patterns, the likes of ‘Homer recounts’, or ‘Cocteau noted’, insistent academic citation stumbles, and questions of error and originality poke at conventions of scholarship, for its words are authored, but by who and from where? So ask is the author distinctly an author, or a collector of sorts? and how would we read as messy a collection? One answer is to skim HEATH, alike any other unserious literature, to ‘relax a little and move freely though a text’, then snag at one point before tripping at a next. There need not be a critical eye cast for every section, no, critical reading is often tied to the notion of an original and specific kinds of value, yet here there is no such thing. See with HEATH, the authors are plenty, and when it’s made difficult to classify the work of others, skips between the original and the plagiarised are incessant. And the apathy is troubling. You see as I reach the end of HEATH, I look back at its face to find ‘the cover does not say Untitled Heath Ledger Project, but Untilted’, so what should I make of it? It seems I chose to do nothing, to just glance the superficial and then a next distraction – yes, that is reading as I now know it, and by its end, ‘I feel I should have read much more closely’. Then again, even read as it is, HEATH seems a mark on our tendency to gloss over writing and the ‘assuming we already know what it says’, so the work is still critical, amongst all its senseless mess, and HEATH redirects any formal distinctions of sign and subject, in plagiarism and the original. It would be bold to suppose that the original and its plagiary mustn’t exist together; for all their perfect details, the very questioning seems problematic. ‘We have studied them, given them names, tried to help them along, to ennoble them, and so on and so forth, but their deception’ as a copy remains, and that is not the ‘copy’, no, for remember there is no subject to which it can be pinned. Now the copy must be recognised as its own, see, ‘the best weapon against the simulacrum is not to unmask it as a false copy, but to force it to be a true copy’, and this way both are submitted to criticism independent of the other, else there would simply be no meaning at all, just constant bargains, of copy supplanting the real and real appearing as a copy, and that wouldn’t be a language at all, no. Put simply, all things should act as signs to the real, and there is no meaning to being a copy beyond just standing in for its model. I am wary of generalisations, and won’t claim the situation has arrived just yet. ‘But on the basis of my own observations, it seems’ we must seek a degree of ambiguity and write as we speak, only to conceive of it afterwards, to repeat ourselves, cite poorly and write insensibly as if a sketch, which forms neither a story nor a novel. And so write for language that point towards itself, as everything else does, and I understand you to be hesitant, but write as Proust did a letter, or Kafka a story and it turns clear. Now Proust’s solution is to excise all separation by excessive closeness, ‘the closer one is, the less one will see’, and so he writes letters in such intimate proximity, without any emotional respite for his subject. And from here, language can go mad, for who will read it. Then there is Kafka, who favoured an opposite – to write with great distance, just for himself, addressed to hollow subjects – copies in a way that will never behold his words. And so ‘the spoken subject takes on all the movement while he, the speaking subject stays in bed’. The irony is this movement comes to no end, as if the ‘investigation of a dog’, down endless burrows that appear as lines of escape, but are mislead, towards nothing but a return. There may be an animal, but why and where, and who is this animal – human or not? Will it flee, or manage to cure itself? And so all things remain unanswered, as each escape reaches a wall at which there is no other option but to return, to the writing itself. Now I repeat and write more, against language closing down, with more words and more, to use repetition in broken citation, plagiarise badly and let the copies exist as their own. All I know is there is no origin to a copy, no, they are original themselves, so write about copies and go no further, describe the false intimately and as ‘one steps back with the naked eye, we see them with greater distinctness than we should otherwise have done, not merely recalling the cold notion of [a copy] but expressing the reality of it’. In all its ridiculous mess, written again and again until ‘all fuel is spent, and the fabulous animal dies’, amongst this monstrous contagion, hope all things become ‘realer than real’, that each thing points towards its opposite, and the very madness brings an understanding, that language is truly ridiculous.