Ghosting

Ghosting

I don't really know, I said, turning back to the paintings. J.S. turned away and finished rolling his cigarette, even though we weren't here to smoke, J.S. and I.
//
Yet we were involved in a peculiar way.
//
The questions, traditions, encyclopedic series, iconography, heraldry, emblems, ultimately memplexes, engrams, that converged there, being called up and out, just like that, in a nutshell: it was all up to us.
//
So I started considering the paintings again (from their interior outwards, my new method of getting closer) and tried to get in lane, to find out which direction things were heading in, with J.S. and me, with the paintings. I proceed tentatively, one foot in front of the other, to avoid pitfalls and ambiguities. I never step on the lines – a game that I'd mastered in my kindergarten days. By now, it's taken on a neurotic character, but what's that matter if it makes you feel safe?
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What kind of space have we found ourselves in.
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Particularly beautiful: small, senseless routines that give you a sense of footing, standing up with the left leg first, writing with a certain pen, tapping the can of Sprite with your fingernail before opening, never drinking from the same spot on your glass twice and so forth and so on. Just minor magic.
//
The space's interior is congested. Bodies jostled against each other. Those who found it too tight moved to the railings. Arms and legs extended as though lying in fresh snow or on the grass in spring. Shielded from themselves, from their own contours (‘Likeness’ would have been the wrong word here. It was better for the two red ones staring at me, crazed and anxious.), or rather: surrounded by an outline. And yet again it was about enclosure, that's what it's been about from the very beginning.
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For example: When I had laid down on the floor, and J.S. drew a line around (about) me in white chalk, let's say on fine-grained asphalt maybe. For a brief moment, I was grateful for this line, this boundary, otherwise I just wouldn't have known how to deal with all that freedom, lying on my back, without beginning or end, without contour.
//
By the next moment, I had lost any idea of what was going on, back then, on the street, and the chalk dust, chalk powder (others paint their faces white with it, and there are only gestures, the whole day, performed as work nonetheless) was washed away by the street sweeper's water, or even better, it's faster, a torrential downpour. I love everything that flows, I thought.
//

Underground Resistance say somewhere that disappearance is our future.
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Disappearing like a stealth bomber in a sky-blue sky, like a styrofoam airplane in the hedge by the garden fence, like a black-plumed bird in a sky-blue summer sky, tilting in the end (of what actually) into pink-orange Miami colors.
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The methods are many: camouflage or mimicry, randomness, noise, dazzling, becoming invisible, becoming ghost, becoming mind, idiosyncratic forms of absence. Dissolution or divided identity, hyper-camouflage as the total identity of surfaces. 'They Live'-Style, except without the shades.
//
J.S. lit the cigarette, smoked it hot and let glimmering ashes fall to the floor. I looked over and caught myself shaking my head, which really could have meant anything. It definitely wasn't an accusation, not even meant disparagingly, and especially not a moment of shame. Maybe I just saw something and reacted that way: stimulus-reaction. I'd forgotten ages ago what drove me to it. Just the brief flash of a question: why did I decide to take J.S. with me? Then it was gone again.
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Mark Fisher says somewhere that it's the lost futures of modernity that haunt us, i.e., 'Heimsuchungsmoderne', parked somewhere between future backlash and future shock. (It's the kind of situation where you don't know which direction the arrow's pointing in anymore.) When you see it like that, we're already living after the future, and that opens completely new possibilities.
//
Magma, glowing core, and fireplace in one, in the center, in orange-yellow, somehow a pulverized center, elliptically framed by a black blue, like a bowl. The bowl is held by a fragile stand (who could be sure whether this constellation would support itself?). I found myself again in the light of the rising sun, that was the mood, the blaze, the green of the plants, the cacti, or their reflection.
//
A whole jungle of binaries, reduced to black and white, structures, patterns, textures, glazes, emulsions. I saw it in the blink of an eye and didn't know where it was taking me anymore, couldn't follow myself. I turned around, and there was a flash, a pulsing blue-white speck in my field of vision. A polaroid that first slowly develops an image out of the light, only to much, much later disappear into a tarnished grey-green surface. Before: mostly fanning.
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In order to photograph certain plants, the cameraman must hold a fan and act as though he were dancing.
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Searching, I look over to J.S. leaning on the window, behind him, J.S. again, doubled in the pane of glass. A transparent mirror, I thought, behind that, bluish night. If only I, I thought, and there it was again, keeping up with myself.
//
Deleuze and Guattari say somewhere that man and nature don't exist anymore, only processes engaged in reciprocal production, coupling the machines, producing- and desiring-machines, which they describe as schizophrenic-machines. I and not-I, inside and outside don't have anything left to say. Everything becomes a machine, in the drive of the machine vocabulary: the body, life, desire, society, economy, language, literature, painting, fantasy.
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An interface with a ruby-colored fire in the head, immediately behind this enclosure of the skull. The gates like eyes, giant gateways, and first the hinges, especially important, this much is clear. The hinges are the Α and Ω, context, connection, nexus. Add a little oil or blue-electric current as fluid. Also somehow minor magic.
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Fire is an amazing thing, if you know how to cultivate it, to plant and nourish, to stoke it so that it grows and flourishes (e.g., the easiest way: pouring oil into the flame). A green elevation, the houseplants are like a jungle, verdant. But more on that later.
//
I dragged on my cigarette, then flicked it in a high arch, almost parabolic, into a river hemmed in by concrete, not far from the hotel, and that disappears into a shaft under the city shortly thereafter. I love everything that flows, I still know, I thought. Oil, current.
//
Now I was slowly getting the hang of it: structure, pattern, trace, that's what everything was made of. Sampled, recombined, drifting from black-and-white to color or from color to black-and-white, monochrome and everyday, no clear zoning, the transitions as diffuse fades, or even as unmovable edges. I felt the grain of the wood, the smooth, cold stone. It's always been about enclosures from the very beginning.
//
Marcel Duchamp says somewhere what? Something with machines, bachelor-machines. Can't get it together, forgotten. Next.
//
Getting back to the matter at hand: It was definitely the first time J.S. and I were dealing with something like this, and no one had told us how it would happen, or which roles or positions we would have to take, which one to play, or anything about acting at all. O.K. so of course we attributed a bit too much to ourselves, took things too personally, as they say.
//
Before, in the hotel lobby, which exists in the same form – everyone suspects – at least a hundred times all over the world, there was a cold fire burning in the stove. I could regulate its color and height via remote. If it made us shiver, we could have simply hooked up the heating. With just the push of a button. But that's not what we did, we ultimately kept ourselves under control, maybe we weren't even cold. With just the push of a button (ultimately a question of interface).
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Detritus, things, objects (others might have spoken of residues), which function as witnesses or symbols that fit in as parts and especially as surfaces within a larger configuration. Photorealistic reflection, dust glaze, imitations, what would it be like if I, or have I already become?
//
Someone had come to fetch us. J.S., sitting in a mint-colored wing chair, leaned all the way forward and tied the laces of his Reebok Nomadics into unbelievably tight double-knits. And I thought: Does J.S. know something I don't? And if so, why not talk about it? And then: Who the fuck actually cares about sneakers?
//
From then on, the memories fade.
//
We got into a very small Mitsubishi minibus and drove off. To where exactly, I can't quite say. The glass was coated with mirrored foil on the inside so that I could only see J.S., the others, and myself. The driver whistled a reggae version of 'Gimme Shelter', and it occurred to me that I'd always liked reggae but didn't listen to it often enough. And so we drove around until I fell asleep.
//
Was that really everything? Did I forget anything?
//
Breton and Soupault say somewhere that it's impossible to get bored (since it would impair the caress and soon we won't be there anymore).

[[Text: Jan Schillmöller]]