A finger is bent double, its second joint, sat just behind the nail of his fourth digit, strains under the pressure. And its grease has slipped to the surface. Each capillary swelled, fatter at the skin towards a reddish blush around the nail. The finger is pressed hard as it takes a second touch, one more, and a dull shine falls in its wake. The grease has slipped further. Another swipe and another scratch, words upended and scrolled. And there is a pattern in the grease, of misshapen circles slumped over one another – each crevice is clear, walled like a maze by the fat skin of his thumb. Each print of the finger is an action recorded, and maybe he is guilty. So prosecute the surface for oily slaps and may it be dissected as evidence. Objects have a tendency of telling the truth. Each one has a minor version of history, yes, a personal history bruised with action. They record our dancing skin with their own. It is an object like any other, all we must do is observe that dull shine in its wake.
There are after all, a lot of letters in numbers.
In a late conversation with a close friend of mine, she mentioned in passing the phrase America’s Next Top Victim. The conversation had steered itself around turns of President Trump’s White House shenanigans. We were speaking of those caught in policies, of victims. The phrase wasn’t hers – she had read it somewhere. I took a note of the words and let myself turn them over. Leafed the scrawl of my shattered pages, and the words reanimated – the Next Top Victim. VICTIM! The rhetoric is so loud. And loudness seems so uncouth in a land of the free, or at least it used to. The page returned months later and at my own annoyance, I had forgotten to jot a source to the reference. The words stood alone. As much as I had enjoyed them sat atop their nameless podium, I needed the source. Reluctantly I quickly punched its letters across a tab: A-M-E-R-I; relentless guesswork took hold – American Eagle, America’s newsroom, America’s next top model – I didn’t have time. The clues would slip away embarrassed. ENTER, and a list of articles fell from above. I was only looking for a source. That’s all. Perhaps I would read a jaunt or two, but only a few – I didn’t have time for the distraction. It was all very quick, the search, the load and click. I slipped to a page of NBC News –America's Next Top Model' Contestant Mirjana Puhar Found Dead. This wasn’t it. Excusing the exceptional circumstance I quickly returned to the list. Next one – Life in Prison for Killer of ‘Top Model’ contest. Again, wrong, again exceptional – I began reading.
I am stuck here in the bog of the two, yes, I am stuck, my foot is caught between the prongs of withered branches in barking oak, the other foot is free to roam but under the leash of my hips, yes, my hips, yes, there’s also my hand, or, I don’t know, my legs. Already I move my hands, they clutch at another needle on the tree next to me, its thick at its foundation but quivers at its nose’s peak; I am trying to reach the nose, ‘noses like fallen towers!’ the higher, the better the moment, yes, the moment, a term of physicist jargon, another language which stumps me. I am not a bi-linguist, yes, nor a bi-linguist, I am stuck here in the bog of the two, my legs rooted as I reach for the nose to pull my body free, I am getting wet now, the grey is overhead and wind breaking my leafy skin, storm Eowyn is stalking me, yes, storm Eowyn, of course Eowyn, who else, yes, Eowyn is right, but I am standing here, my feet in the ground and Eowyn is moving, and I am wet. I am in an odourless bog and I am wet, and Eowyn is not, Eowyn is moving across this great mess, ‘upon which men work and which works upon them’. Do I reach higher? I try but I can’t reach its nose, I can only reach the needle at its waist, I pull, yes, but no matter, I am stuck and Eowyn is not, I am to go with Eowyn, I must do if I want to leave this bog, but I can’t, the nose points too high and my hand is clasped above my up-tilted head. I lie down in the bog, as the lungs of Phlebas did in water, I lie down and its smog waters my face, it is hard to see, not quite dark enough to be blind, but hazy enough to squint, I also cannot hear, yes, I can hear little, it is murky and wet, I see words are shouted but aren’t quite visible – bad sounds, half-words if anything, split by its tongue and in the cacophony of breath, I still hear them, Eowyn, yes, the spikes of rhetoric, snagged between each pant, one clause, then another, but what was it, what was said who said it and when.
Within cells, ribonucleic acids (RNA’s) generally have a transient role. The central dogma of biology declares DNA as the library for genetic information. Its genetic instructions are translated by RNA and synthesised into proteins by the actions of certain enzymes within the cell. This is a complicated transference of nucleotidic information into touch by a translation thought to only operate in a single direction. In the 1960’s scientist Howard Temin speculated that tumour-causing viruses could translate information in the opposite direction, from RNA chains into DNA. This theory was proved alongside the biologist David Baltimore in 1970, when the pair discovered an enzyme within tumour virus particles thought not to exist. It could translate information in the opposite direction, hence the name reverse transcriptase – an enzyme that reorganised the hierarchies of a genetic library. RNA used to act as the medium by which biological information could translate into the physical space. It now acts as the original text for translation, the medium as the massage, towards a cancerous version of the original cell.
Suppose the author is the Flemish man they suggest, one Christian monk holed into his cathedral priory. He must have written feverishly to copy as many texts as he did, and all with such a divine significance, though are any of them really his, as he was only scribe – simply who should take responsibility for the words, the first saint or his parroting monks that repeat him. Of course our Flemish monk couldn’t be the plagiarist, but if not he, then a few others – perhaps they are the guilty ones. I investigated further, and at a side of the page, there was a line of mashed letters that must have formed some kind of a test. How messy they are. All know that first marks are often the most feral, and here, ‘the buoyant child survives in the man’, so they must be his first marks, just look at how innocently they dance, with cursive free, no syntax, only childish play in its shapeless folly. It seems the words don’t matter here, no, this is writing for writings sake, a probatio pennae – scratches to test a quill’s edge. If you thought it difficult to write without regard to justice or responsibility, for the monk it was simple – beside Ælfric of Eynsham’s sermons he would recite a rhyme, likely the words of his childhood in the Low Countires – ‘Hebban olla uogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu uuat umbidan uue nu’. I read it and find myself at a loss for this is no language of mine, no, nor exclusively any others. You see these words are Old English, yet others read Old Dutch, and now we are at a loss once more, for the verse is both and neither. The earnest monk, ‘devilish in his innocence’, dared to frolic with language at its most trivial, and in the margin where a language forgives significance, he chose to amuse himself with by crossovers of two dialects he finds familiar, so the verse remains as this, ‘All the birds have begun nests, except for me and you—what are we waiting for now’.
Here, there; back and forth. Franz Kafka writes under limbo, between half-wake and sleep, two states that oppose one another. In the ‘blank day’, his mind is tired, slogged from flat to office. His ‘thoughts of work gradually gain the upper hand over everything else’ and the torment of his sleepless night seems the furthest it can be. The days make sense to Kafka. They are coherent and uniformed. Each day for the last twenty years he has worked in insurance, the same kind, under the same name. It isn’t a position that he enjoys, more one he accepts, see Kafka is a realist, he works feverishly and with little complaint. Any other would petition for acknowledgement, but not Kafka. ‘Such work demands strength’ and when snagged by the excessive tasks of his unrelenting superior, little else manifests in the mind of the businessman. He simply repeats himself, day by day, yes, that’s what he does, see the night is very different, a time in which his prudence is exposed and regular designations fall into metaphor, where the slipperiness of language butters his fall to the obscure. Although for him even the night is not night enough.
Those, and I count myself among them, who find ordinary moments in a day oddly redeeming, would probably scorn at the constant need for an event to be LIVE. LIVE must be dramatic, LIVE must be loud. Oh the self-importance of it. Now, it is of note, and unfathomable to the many who shrug at the same thing as I; that in 1930, the British Broadcasting Company began their daily report with: ‘Today, there is no news’. All day, all evening and even the day prior; among the day’s raising, raiding, uprising, quelling; these minds that devoted themselves to the documentary of such events had with baffling neglect, pronounced April 18th as a day that we could forget. Instead, the fifteen-minute broadcast was substituted by a piano rendition of Richard Wagner’s composition, Parsifal. Oh, for that piece to come again. Faced with monotony like this, would it be fair to recognise LIVE as an exact opposite to the moments we once could be encouraged to forget. Because now, there is very little we can afford to forget without proper documentation. LIVE is here, and needs unwavering dedication, an eye roams and what was LIVE is now past; there is no LIVE immemorial but a now, only now. At the centre of LIVE there is always a chance that some mistake could spoil the event. Yes, that’s a reason to watch as how comical would that be? I was there – I could say: I saw it LIVE! This is what LIVE really means, that you were present. As one might already be aware, there aren’t many borders anymore; at least not a broadcast, not unless its radio – and it rarely is – I can hardly recall the last time it was radio. You see if something is LIVE, there is very good chance that it is also original, and oh! What that means to us nowadays. You can’t doctor LIVE – not really. LIVE is honest. It is an opposite to all the paragons they sell us. Just hope the presenter will trip, or the roof will collapse, and a Bronco escapes. That way I can say I was there, I saw it myself – saw it LIVE. Just let the fiction take control and then what, sat here, where might I go? Oh, so exciting. There is such a catharsis to LIVE. Here I am, being led me towards my very own what if: Oh what if OJ had really escaped. Look how lousy we are now, with no say in the happenings of LIVE broadcast. Unless it is an election, we are merely bystander to the outcome, planted in waiting of a thrilling disaster. At one time, an individual en plein air meant an engagement with a now chief principle of representation – that to engage with whats happening, one must without question be present at the event he intends to depict. This way, they would sit and look, in a way becoming part of the event. There would be no separation but a complete immersion into subjecthood. So, as was bound to happen, if Constable had painted by LIVE recording, then in its fractious relay of scene to eye, an unnerving suspicion of the painter as a witness to the event would quickly form. How can we be sure he was ever there? And the argument turns to medium; of the means by which the painting was completed. This in mind, LIVE is its own medium.
‘I really should have paid a little more attention to its borders’ and their very blankness. But you never heard the least bit about a page’s skirt, no, you see it sits at the fringe, far from any word, and while I have wanted to look, I find I never do. And let me apologise too, ‘I am sounding fairly abstract, as people always do when they start talking about concreteness’, but that as it may be, I am studying the margin for a reason, and not in a fit of curiosity, I am digging for a remedy, away from the academy, towards any respite from so-called authoritative words. ‘This is not said with any animus towards the author – not at all – we would rather hate ourselves because we are not yet worthy’ of his literature. And that is why for a page, I am not studying its central column but the white by its neck, at the skirt where ‘there are no laws as such’, because here language can afford immaturity. ‘It is really only possible to express this in a kind of contradiction:’ a margin that has a vast blank will tease, because no author would reject the chance to stain its white grey, but a margin is discreet, and for the most part out of sight, so here any stain is meaningless. Surely that’s right, as for a sign to have meaning it must first be seen, and it is only really possible to spot a thing in the margin if one knows where to look; but you see I do, and so with a newfound calm, I accept the onerous task of reading this desperately skittish hand as best I can.
It was crap, all of it, shat with these bastard-things that had been ripped from ground miles apart. Some are sharp, though most were blunt by the thrashing. Morsels of these objects were piled one atop the other, and the piles were plentiful. One lolled by his feet, and set just aback, slightly to his right, stood a door-like bust, palely outlined with a large hole where a knob tends to fix itself, but there is no knob, no, just this rectangle of holed wood. It was leant against the wall, a wall, he thinks, that was once part of his forebearer’s home. Tis hard to ascertain if it were ever really a home though, see it had been rolled on its neck and now lay there in such an odd contortion of the body. It was so peculiar, he thought, and on the inside, the bedlam would endure. Chair necks had been split, and there was a small basin, flipped over a table at the fore. He muses over the object and its corners for a while, so well rounded he thinks, with a gnarly crater at its centre, but there are no taps where he tends to imagine them. A sink maybe, but no, how can it be a sink without taps. Such an oddity, this little white tub, brickle and tap-less. He pauses at the anomaly, and everything seem stagnant, it just is, and the mess is a part of the ground now, as objects tend to fall when left for a while. They have been rubbed so hard until they are plain, just materials, yes, no pattern or brand, just materials, that’s all. And still the smell. He thought he could smell plastic, although how would plastic smell, like a smoky metal, it isn’t one, no, he can see through it so how can it be metal. How strange, it’s a harder kind of waft, difficult to pick out really, but he smells it, he knows that, and he sees it too, blues and pinks of orphaned oil caught by these swipes of wind, one of the few objects that animates by a gust. So thin, he thinks, and a push of air lamps them further into the corner. It folds repeatedly, and subtle creases always follow. That’s what he is looking at now, crumpled piles of coloured oil, stretched thin and pricked to the corner. He should pick it up, all this rubbish, someone should start to clear it away, yes he thinks, the ground needs ridding of it. Its rubbish, rubbish needs ridding. So he walks towards the plastic, and the fuchsia carpet parts beneath his determined stride, but he was careless to be so quick. There is all this rusted shrapnel littered amongst the fabric. Maybe the wind put them here, or in the chaos of the house turning over they fell from swelling tacks at its ceiling. Still, his shoes scuff and a small mark appears on the leather, bare and white, and now the raw cow feels the wind too, hard and fat. He notices the cold prick at his smallest toe and realises a hole is there now, yes, he has scuffed his leather shoes and now they are useless. What a fault it is, for a shoe to let wind spike at its toe. Useless he thinks. No matter, he takes a second step, and scuffs the shoe once more, this time he stalls, and so he bends at the waist to slowly reach a finger towards the plastic mess at his feet. It swings itself at him, and he raises the plastic from its floor, then to his pockets. They are deep pockets so he knows the rubbish will fit. It collapses to a ball, a trashy ball flecked with colours of pink and blue, and his hands are sweating now. Against the plastic his skin affords little room to breathe, and it needs a breath, as any object does. The palm unsticks itself from pearls of sweaty glue and with a small flutter of his wrist his hand slips to the side. He looks back at his shoe and the wind still swings at his idle toe. Useless he thinks.