CAENIS/CAENEUS
I want to write a story where innocent people get into deep trouble and by twists and turns are forced to confess their guilt. It would be easy enough to draw on personal experience, but I am not comfortable with personal experiences; there is never anybody really in them. Personal experience is like a beach washed flat, that, because the ground is not quite even, looks like there might be something on the beach, perhaps a stick, but as you approach to see what is there, it vanishes; it is just a hollow in the sand. You and me are on the beach and it turns out we are just hollows and folds in the sand. It looks like we are here, but as soon as things start moving it is hard to be sure. I want to write a story where I reveal that magic-writing is the natural voice of the suppressed and the vanquished. Magic-writing is powerful, but can not help you escape your condition. In the story my character is a writer trying to escape from this magic-habit and wants to write like a modernist or a psychopath or a mathematician, but instead she writes about being alienated and how she will one day wake up to the fact that being alienated is a buzz. She woke up and knew there was nothing that she was alienated from that she cared about. It was just a gnarly feeling like being aroused. Now she has a problem with her neighbour; he is a fucker. She tells herself stories to help deal with his fucker-ness. This neighbour is walking up the hill and she sees him and runs up behind him and times it so that she catches up just as he passes behind some sheds. There she raises a big stick in the air and brings it down on his ugly head from behind and he is felled in one motion. She throws the stick into a hedge and goes for a jog. The police investigate and at first she is able to play innocent and they believe her, but as the interview goes on it becomes harder due to the fact they have found the stick. Perhaps she killed him with a screwdriver instead, then she could keep it with her on the jog and wash it in bleach when she gets home. But the screwdriver stains her clothes with blood so she is in the same position when the police come. The police are beginning to ruin all her stories no matter how much she changes them. She can't keep her innocent exterior separate from her murderous interior and the police always end up suspecting her. The fantasy story is ruined, (the police always suspect the neighbour), and even imagining driving to the country and doing something horrible to some random stranger does not help dissipate the feeling. She is thinking about voodoo and curses as follow-up strategies to help dissipate the feeling. These strategies are good because they involve disturbing the cosmic field of interconnected relations rather than blunt weapons. Interconnected relations weigh down on you like a mountain of trees. Blunt weapons polarize a situation in a satisfying way that allows you to win, though winning is never truly satisfying in itself. It means you have to believe that there is no field of interconnecting relations and instead that it is just you and the rest of the fuckers.
Caenis? And is gender is polar? Like the two other ends of a stick is Thrown for a dog on a sandy beach, Treading flip-flop foot-prints from each end: He, she, he, she, he Steps she steps on the seashore. Then Poseidon dissolves it in a wave of foam. He/god she grabs on the seashore. Caenis is brought to rest, is Caeneus.
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Master'd by this half man. Whole mountains throw
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We fell to earth to live inside David Bowie who is playing Thomas Jerome Newton who is playing a human. Remote planets are in danger, but in the meantime we survive by selling diamonds and impossible technology for hotel rooms and drinks. We are in the business of medical transplants, not transplants between the same species; not allotransplantation (from the Other), xenotransplantation (from a stranger) beyond species. We are interested in xenoplastic constitutions. Cyborg/ parasite/ mad/ animal/ slave.
We are a strange host.
While David Bowie sleeps, we climb out of his body to look at him. He is very much like Thomas Jerome Newton. It is surprising. In his room, carefully picked furniture and decorations remind us of the interior of a hotel room in a hotel chain. The furniture has been selected to look personal in a standard way; there is dust from packing boxes but not dead skin. We are not sure if behind the curtains there is much of an opening. On the floor we find a notebook, it says the planet that was in danger is now very far away. Any attempt to help it will arrive too late. The only hope for the distant planet is that the distant planet is entangled with our own planet and so Thomas Jerome Newton must save our planet to save the distant planet. But that would mean that our planet is in danger. We do not believe our planet is in danger. If there is danger or not it will not change what we do. We start to go back into David Bowie; he stirs and opens an eye. He sees us. We can tell because some flexibility leaves his body. Quickly we climb in. It reminds us of something. Living inside David Bowie, inside Thomas Jerome Newton, is not like being David Bowie or Thomas Jerome Newton. It is like being someone else, someone we saw one night standing over our bed. Now we slip in, writhing in a thick jelly oozing between limbs, slipping over each other, soft, firm, feeling through bones, amphibian. What is pleasure like for you?
Sam Basu & John Dryden inside Ovid
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