Writer, essayist. Psychologist

19. A Prosthetic

He wore a heavy mid-blue denim waxed cotton jacket with six brass buttons and a striped blanket lining. A type 3 Resistol, with a pale untanned leather collar, crudely sewn over the stock collar with yellow contrasting stitching along the front right edge of the jacket. He buttoned it to the top, not seeing the purpose of a button unless it was to use it. He left the bottom button undone, he guessed for ease of movement when sitting down, but thought it may be a generational inheritance or a lost disorder of English heritable dysfunction. He would walk the rough square of his rough land with intent, feeling that the more he did this the more he could inhabit it, that he was creating a space in order to occupy it. 

He didn’t worship these experiences. He had moved here, to this house, these fields under the watch of the giants he could hear passing between the trees skirting the hill fort, to integrate them. Feeling it wasn’t enough, he was happy that living with pain or daemons shouldn’t change him. His were precision ligaments in a biological manifold; he was an engine. There is a set Ω of possible states of the world, or ways the world might be. A complete specification of the universe, a formal machinery of decision theory, with consequences across states. Saturated with information, making his last decision correct in all the ones that came next; the least curated part of it. His life was that of interiors, his hobbyist introspection fashioning its interfaces with the natural, external world. Turned in copper wire, in incompatibilities of plasma environments, a core of alloys twisted into a perpetual entanglement; it was a self sustaining motor, a loose construction of free energy that undermined otherwise sound logics and gave will to uncertain fields. He was the raw data, his adolescence was a generative field, a world view extended in years and in having lost them, a Nephilim, a violent offspring before and after the flood, a fragile containment that had become incompatible with intimacy. 

In micro adjustments in tone and mathematical architectures of music, he walked through reciprocating mechanisms that may or may not be projections of an extended brain. He had learned to do things entirely for the pleasure of experiencing them, in intricacies of delight. A sudden absence of fear or pain, a coincidence of inner and outer landscapes, he expanded his awareness without effort. In an indirect process of accumulation, he was listening to the house. These were encounters framed as presence, not authority. His was a reluctance or refusal to return, outside linearities of time and perhaps through oxygen deprivation, in neurotransmitter flooding, a lack of data or neural shutdown. 

He had trained of sorts, in forensic analysis and worked only to please himself, applying it to archaeological dig placements for hedge fund speculators, search algorithms for downed commercial flights and bilateral linguistic analysis destabilising military incursions into previously unstable hostile states. He had an incremental wealth, enough to pay a long lease for his plot of land, this atypical hologram, satisfying others of his anonymity and made up of three outbuildings and a sufficiently secure plastered and brick house. He kept a steel shipping container adjacent and perpendicular to an outbuilding, half heartedly hidden. A rubberised three phase electricity cable was sealed into its chassis. It was a bright divide in a mute landscape, a Zeppelin, an iron lung. It had a heavy brass straight shackle padlock, enclosed in a steel casing. Inside, it was shelved on both long sides and had a cantilevered walnut burr plywood work surface built into the length of one side of the unit. It was clad and insulated and painted sea foam green, in the belief that its colour should be functional and that this specific colour conditioned interest and calm. It was a colour derived from the control facia of the site for a plutonium and uranium enrichment plant in Tennessee that was part of the Manhattan Project. There was a safe box lined with carpet, a white Knoll office chair, a North African flat weave rug, a pale grey indented safety floor and four green enamel lamps hanging precisely midway along its length to light the working area, preferring their light to tungsten or fluorescent, wishing instead to illuminate the darkness. He had intended to fill the space with books, believing that a library would give him a consistency and contingency beyond the yard and the fields. Taking time to add each one, he would leave it on the liquid surface until he or the book was ready to relinquish or to occupy space. 

He found it harder to hear her here. He was by now circumspect and over engineered and wary that any future exchange with the receding world would require him to be something incompatible with life. That would attract anger and reproach in lurid requirements of attention and cause him to make constant indiscernible corrections in his interface with the images and objects that stood for the world. They would disrupt this fine rare metal veil in which he travelled, this copper mesh, a material praxis, the knitted gold sail, a deployable radar antenna made from a fine, gold-plated tungsten wire mesh. Holding his breath, in what might eventually become a fatal equilibrium, falling objects in gravitational flux, thought diminishing into quiet reflections instead, a non local consciousness, a dynamic attractor state, a suspension in equilibriums of systems in flux. Order collapses, fading stability through feedback loops, a new order must emerge or the system dies. He was either running out of time or could see it running, the yawning landscapes of pure immanence is pushed aside. He tries to be light without being careless, present without promising too much. Trying to see it longitudinally, to see what he had forgotten while trying to survive. He was then a containerised weapons system, a covert strike capability, a highly mobile horizontal gene transfer, he had become a genetic advantage within contestable states.

She was studied flautist, her breathing creating more power and precision than others, while barely registering traces of cognitive intervention. Practiced in circular breathing, an historian of disruptions of will, of interrupted desire lines made in yellowing snow, in blood, hair and fluids. A biologist, she would metastasise the provenance of violence, a chemical analysis of fear and cruelty, typically examined under ambiguity, risk and attributed externally. She was unusually good at catching things before they could hit the ground. She seemed able to plot complex trajectories before they were discernible to others. A student of anatomy, of bone marrow density based on skeletal remains, of identification of unknown human remains and analysis of unidentified bodies. She theorised enactments for Interpol, Plassdata, the Fraunhofer Institute and Bundes Kriminalamt. She would construct 3D models of craniofacial superimposition or skull reassembly. She studied bugs, particles released in disruption, she opened windows in midwinter rituals, ecosystems exploded in freshened winds. She liked being barefoot, drinking from a glass, the Bajan fishing life. She liked to play fight and could hear mermaids even from the hills. People would give her things that she could not keep, but would keep anyway, storing them in drawers and purses. He no longer hears her. He hears her architecture instead, a non‑linear threshold event. He was saturation diving, in turns repressurising and equalising. He was an external life support; superheated, removing and oxygenating blood, ionising into plasma, becoming a fourth state of being within uncertain grey-green fields.

18. A Museum of Western Approaches

She was intricately embroidered, her tattoos an account of ancient maritime histories and haunted isolations of an institutionalised life; large bitumen crosses on the heavily freckled concave of her chest, images seen and drawn on beaches and in chapels of Moorish Sardinian landscapes. Her nipples and fingernails were brown and large, her fingers noticeably long and hesitant. She wore old philosophies and cashmere jumpers; slacks bought from the men’s collection of a department store in St Christopher’s Place. She collected books and read them in the dark. Her left arm and leg were inked in their entireties; birds, mermaids, ships, gunpowder and soot, alchemical and circular symbols, some divided by distinct lines into more crosses, some hardened into cartographies, each one a record of something that was owed to the dead. A dandelion, a snake, a peacock feather covering her thigh. She had a sea monster; a feathered whale across her shoulders, its tail falling along her spine. Her round mouth would become wet when busy, her lips exaggerated into archetypes of womanhood, his a desire to be swallowed whole and never to be seen again. She had a submarine logic and a shamanic education, she would talk in sentences punctuated by sailors, sonar, sirens, inertial systems and instruments. She was centrifugal, double hulled, she used search grids as grinding flirtations. She had been raised in a commune, in a semi derelict former school, stone topped pillars and a gatehouse, surrounded by Scots Pine and Copper Birch, Rhododendrons leading a mile up to the permanently unlocked front door. There were always dogs. She was French Italian, her mother technically Swiss and she struggled to name things she hadn’t found in books, at times she heard colours and tended to speak in short sentences, becoming nervous in words that required complex or nuanced placement, or that might otherwise give her away. She found it difficult to dance. She was intolerant of movement and light, a visual processing disorder that required her to wear glasses with gently coloured lenses. They were steel rimmed and he liked it when she wore them. If they went out, she wore penny loafers, an oversized coat that she loved and a pair of his white underwear. Walking the house, he listened to speech as if it were wave patterns, leeching linear meaning and binary information and instead of music, he heard libraries and centuries and the slow measurements of the Fates. 

When it was enough, when there was enough form, enough weight to put it into words, when the room had settled into a stasis around him, he could only then pick it up. He was in the kitchen of his house, two tables had been pushed together, forming a whole. One a large extendable table permanently assembled at full size, names scratched over time into its layered white leaves. Different paints had been used over time, a strip of post office yellow quietly prominent on one corner. The other he thought there since the buildings were first occupied, a three plank elm table, with turned legs and one side drawer, standing on a H shaped stretcher base, it smelled of spiced oils, themselves suggesting a sluicing of knowledge, of earth moving in increments beneath its legs. It happened when he relaxed, when he was staring at the gun, dismantled, cleaned, reassembled and humming on the oversized tables. It’s repetition and engineering regulated and absorbed him. An inertia return system, high intensity short recoil, a conservation of equal momentum, each movement of its mechanism a return. In reduced neural activity when stimuli are repeated; each is a suppression of neuronal responses, a social adaptation, his a unique association with self‑injury. Repetition destroys meaning through over precision, becomes a maladaptive plasticity, a closed mechanical loop. A brutal dyad, a field strip, a pilot.

England is haunted she said, the Romans knew this; Istanbul is the centre of the world. She spoke in laminates of inherited migrations, a grotesquerie without purpose, a sternal hollow that she filled with electrical width, she had become a resonance chamber in dispersals of surplus engineering, of structures that evolved for one environment but persist in another. She was a diaspora of algorithmic artefacts, a computational analogue of her biological drift, of noise mistaken for signal. She said that electricity had ruined us and that technology has failed us, that there is a straight line to the Bosphorus Strait. In logics of pepper and salt; a charged insurgent, multi-scalar, from tiny to vast. In ivory, aromatics, holy wisdoms and whalebone; she was an insurgency decommissioning non-local stimuli. She appeared in shrapnel and flechettes, as hand stitched bidirectional restraints. Sex had become a safe pursuit, a retreat, a pastoral pursuit, a pale homestead in frontiers of affect, a theocracy in topographies of blame. Self possessed and autonomous, his teeth and jaw broken, he was kept awake by his dreams.

17. English Electric

St Anne’s Limehouse, a superposition collapsed into rigidity. Absence and presence were phase dependent sense relays, an early warning system, a globalised infrastructure constructing a low frequency flight path. Dunwich, Orford Ness, 17,576 positions, in descriptions of velocity, range and direction. Essex Road, Broadway Market, Cubitt Street. She was 2794 kilometres away, an absence as dislocated from the unravelled man as he was from the broken boy. A copper alloy, a mediaeval field pattern resisting sleets of progression, playing out in singular philosophies of access, he had become a folklorist of mnemonic signals, of mislaid inference; describing what was lost only by describing what was left. Hearing voices to the right and to the back of him, they would tend to talk about sympathetic systems of engagement, limbic structures of separation. He was followed by a diurnal inevitability, a deranged continuity, a mashed potato mountain seen from windows of moving cars. Lesions, spasms, a flexor extensor movement in an asymmetrical discharge made up of 26 jacks of 26 contacts each, ratcheting incrementally, his body crushed up to his pelvis. In a railway car park, briefly detached from the course of the Lea; glints of the city’s bright cruelties and incoherent height behind dimly repetitive dormitory flats; 44 pax, 40 foot, 20 metric tons, 295/80 R22.5 wheels each as tall as half a man, slowly diminished him to a series of images an inch thick, frame by frame, each specified in mechanical iterates as if intended to remain embedded in laminates of retinal encryption. 

In Shepherdesses Walk, then Underwood Street, a man with a hot pink transparent envelope holding only loose fifty pound notes, stood in its basement and took what he could. He was uncomfortable in himself and within his suit, easily drawn to rage and cruelty, his long American station wagon parked outside. The building had been reclaimed and constructed as a creative undertaking; stepped, black tiled and brick rooms filled with bright, oversized screens, prints and paintings sequentially paced across recently exposed walls, with partitions of opaque hinged plastic. The woman, appearing later as a reassurance, was facet cut, brighter than the room she stood in, inhabiting it before the walls, lamps and floor could adjust. She liked to fuck in lifts, appearing as necessary and distinct as low-background steel, hers was a moral act, maintaining entry speed without compromising the exit, collecting people as ideas, driving slightly too fast. She liked that he had dreamt it was possible, that he had arrived like David Niven, easy and smiling, jacket folded and stored in the locker above his head, indifferent to what came. A pretence, then a crash; LAX to Sydney via Honolulu; he was coming in heavy, explosive decompression, so slow as to become a meditation. Only his docile faith in the analytical mind differentiating the organism from the ecosystem, even as the fuselage collapsed and equalised at 0.301 bar at minus 47.8° standard atmosphere. Her organising principle dismantling extractive industrial logics, unable to release themselves from the source, more resilient to harm, her buttocks, armpits, legs, genitals, breasts and nipples, her will removing them from unwanted outcomes. She was a world service, arriving in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets, she would become molecularly changed, an Argentine picana separating in channels of extreme heat, in electrostatic discharge and ionised drop-outs, pantographs of intent jumping an air gap. Be quietly productive, she would insist, oscillate between intellect and regulation, his death, any death now would be incoherent. He had discovered much later that they had all used heroin, some exiting and negotiating thin frameworks of equilibrium in well meaning group conferences in English seaside towns, others, keeping only their shoes and appearing occasionally at knitting festivals, were diminished and final. 

But they were special, they had their own language, effectively a cult, a conclave, a franchise of disinterest, a deranged necromancy. A charismatic wing, a personal calvary, a burning examination of an extractive model. An inflection point, they both knew they were going to die either way and they were no longer afraid of killing or being killed. It never happened, would never happen until it happened again. With a god like mine, she said, whether desired or undesired, you must persist. In that moment, he was happy to cease to live, a rifling of desire, not a compulsion, not to die unheard and in despair, just to feel the clean release of a 9 x19 millimetre parabellum drilling through neurons, glial cells, water, fat. But not now, this is not the right kind of death. Instead, they would keep forgetting that it was over, that it was never coming again, their briefly enmeshed vanities resembling a physiology of coherence.

Machine tooled in titanium accuracy, from images of all of them, he had constructed her in a hegemony of ideas, into soft laminations of skin. She was pneumatic, pressure tested at currents as low as 30 milliamperes, meticulously turned and milled into a geometry of human biology, individual, cross-sectional machined in the body’s internal structures. Stacking her in x-ray attenuation, becoming more affectionate and consumed within her internal chaos, in simultaneous predictions within exact tolerances, she became 80,000 curies of vented debris. Together, they were not haphazard, instead they had been material expressions of something vital, she had been a stratagem, a hive efficiency, an open-source intelligence that insisted on his attention.  She was precision tooled, medical grade and he chose to decipher her as such, within ecosystems of kinetic evolution. If he could perform, maintain an exhibition of sensibilities and favour, then perhaps he could go unnoticed and in turn loved, be assumed to be operating normally, that the space he was occupying could become exploded codings of legitimacy, a fungible hypothesis, a longitudinal existence measurable within modulating definitions of sex and death.

She was an armada, a Papa-class velocity; her intelligence an education in a bloodstain pattern analysis. A dreadnaught, a submerged nuclear intelligence calibrated in ballast, riding low forward in 5 short tons of water, he could live a half life in her before surfacing into dark seas. In her, he pieced a distribution of discrete events oxidised and recovered in Scapa Flow. A scalable verdigris, an ecosystem of corrosion, the instability of its appearance apparent in her quick movements, forming a traceability in polarities of enactment, negotiations in a collapsed core of irradiated steel, no longer able to differentiate between her sonar inflected infrastructure and god’s own plan.

16. The Invention of Reading

Requiring a position in his resistance, in his distribution; he was meticulous, a microscopy seen in his microbiology, in what he gave his attention to; a ball of cells that forming early in development and in axes, mediated a reduction in the precision weighting of priors. He was touch encrypted and for now, he had to be alone. It was a two-storey brick and plastered house and an adjoining outbuilding with a brick-faced bottom storey. It had been weatherboarded with steep pitched roof now of black corrugated iron. A small door hung low in a rear wall with an overhanging sack hoist on detached, blue brackets. Part of a wall had collapsed, still supporting a water tank. You go to meet the meaning. It doesn’t come to you. He became a cure for uncertainty, a standard model of being, internally coherent within recursive failures of inference, a thousand things to worry about; the unknown was rampant here, a thirteen on a ten scale. The only one ever used in flight, it was tiny in its inconsistency, frail in its gold laminate sails. At first, he thought they would be asphyxiated or burned to death, but in it, he flew between worlds distinct in their heuristics; in networks of safety, of excitement and days spent in oversized beds, in evolutionary models of an insistent life. A loam smell he knew, petrichor, beetroot, tomato leaves, her neck, her muscular back rising in winter sun. Sweet, wet, her Zurich bought watch worn loose; she wore shorts, a photographer’s bag, heavy silver. Geranium, artichoke, musk, cucumber; fresh notes on vellus skin and dark hematite pulses. In elaborated models of predictability, in spatial representations of hope, it had a rotating complication that held the escapement and balance wheel, continually changing their positions to mitigate errors caused by gravity, its internal logic having been held in a vertical position for too long. She valued accuracy and insisted on touch, she would eat damsons in early morning markets; Nine Elms, Columbia Road. Drifting lean-to tents in marsh wick woodland along the Lea Valley, housing migrant workers who sped fork lifts at New Spitalfields, darting like video games in dark milk and two sugar mornings. She held stories like others held cash. She said;

“It’s how they designed it, it’s why it works” 

What appeared as a cellular division was atomised, a dismantling of a cartel, a pragmatism of systems regulating an eventual stasis. An aphasia, a hagioptasia, a sublimation of volatile materials; his was a phenomenology held in systems working within networks, in architectures of survival, operating in neither higher or lower praxes, just more complicated and contextualised in a chaos of delight. A spectral brightness in luminous molecules held together by a singular resistance, in trajectory refinement, reduced speed and photoluminescence. Intimacy displaced, a stratified shifting towards an inner solar system, leaving de facto high register cascades where a body should be. In what had been a telemetry, a heritable, transgenerational differential; a collection and transmission of data, a powered descent in an elliptical orbit, became an absence of data in an artificial gravity, a demineralisation that in time had become inevitable. The crash, a high gain antenna operating in a near perfect vacuum; an inheritance, would come slowly and then all at once.