I’ll begin by saying that objects can be unintentionally beautiful. Consider the simplicity of three or four self-aligning ball bearings, the economy of a compass. Brilliant, no? We thought so. We had confidence in architecture and design beyond the base commercial. Stage settings, furniture, typography, everything came with a moral mandate. The machine was important, of course. At four o’clock in the morning ideas came effortlessly, as if out of the air, the way a teapot or a pan comes cleanly out of the cupboard. In the blank space between the following day and the previous night, you see the beauty of a propeller, for instance, and think, yes. I want that silver metal to mean something more than just flight.

Relative to status and state, one often finds the strategic depiction of an implicated myth: man v. god, fire, female, followed by a beeline drawn to the end of the garden. Outside, the concrete sky and a clamor that might be described as a deafening mechanical distraction, the basic rhythm of which has been set in advance to match a harsh song that goes like this: metalwork-always-outlives-fabric. That mess of a crumpled net dress at the bottom of a wardrobe might be a refusal to accept the notion that possibility is something one puts on to go out: a woman for example could still wear the dress but where would she go looking like that? It would be an error to describe her as someone who doesn’t know how she is supposed to act, when in actual fact she is acting. Her eyes are open and she is acting like someone looking into a box of scattered catastrophes, saying to the man next to her, “Look at these. Which one would you like?”

One man is many. I never said he left me but he left when he thought I was. Yes, and I too had thoughts that went on over time. Duration extends into the future, wraps around the past. Can anyone avoid saying, I once was. Of course now you have your test tube babies. Your nuclear transfer animals. My brother was at one point making a film that moved forward while we stood still. Looking isn’t always gawking. That requires a degree of stumbling open-mouth wonder. What’s wrong with that? If you had seen what I had seen. My brother is reading Kafka. My brother Franz. An incidental doubling. I told you before that I spoke English. Or did I? You know it now. You also should know that I communicate through showing how an object acts on me. I’m either in it or I’m behind it. One or two more. Will you some day really bring everything back from the brink?

I remove my heart from its marble casing and grind that shell into glass dust and force the dust and the occupational core into a box barely big enough to hold them and watch while the self-sealing lid sets itself. I then take the contraption to a place to which I doubt I will ever find my way back, even if I wanted to which I don’t. I have zero desire for what has been buried after having been done with like that one that was once. With such rigor and exactitude does the end come and more than once, which is a way of making a statement about the infinite duplicity of a suffocating blanket.