Slow, grinding, tectonic movement of North African ground. Somewhere in the strata are Paul Klee’s Lovers. Amber in sequence of Walter Benjamin’s film reels, a blue and orange Matisse segmented in-to sequences. The mechanical reproduction of Geology or the law of superposition is a single picture prescribed by the preceding ones.
The Impressionists were too immediately sensuous. It’s easy and undialectical. I drink coconut water now because the diluted milk is refreshing, it softens my soft, baby skin. I saw The Rose at an exhibition and it is stored in my mind in the same place where I recall Hegel’s Phenomenology.
A grid interconnected by points like these: converging plates of crust, red layers of soil, the aestheticization of politics, negation dreams (Gauguin), commodity Buddha, a little orange book… They make a torus. Lacan said:
“If I wanted to give an intuitive representation of it, it seems that I would have to resort not to the two dimensionality of a zone, but rather to the three-dimensional form of a torus, insofar as a torus’ peripheral exteriority and central exteriority constitutes but one single region.
This schema represents the endless circularity of the dialectical process that occurs when the subject achieves solitude, whether in the vital ambiguity of immediate desire or in the full assumption of his being-toward-death.”
The ideal momentum of the mind occurs between the petrified interior and the indeterminate exterior; a circulation of the torus without slipping away. The difference of the interior and the exterior is not a boundary but of distance. Therefore, you and I can meet if we follow the correct points in the chain. The praxis involves a type of text-making that I call “deskilling.” Contact desk1ll [at] proton.me with your work for the next issue.
A state predicated on glue export. Adhesives and pastes are sapped from rich rubber-tree forests. But a dry climate marginalizes the glue-foliage to the borders of expansive salt flats. Alternatively, wild cows that roam the desert produce natural resins in their muscle, though, international law has rendered their harvesting as illicit poaching. Anaerobic Control Zones: the state spent nine billion after their gum-quarries were accused of environmental compromise. These kilometer-long warehouses manipulate atmospheric chemistry to promote surface glue growth. Realistically, they hide resin-cow slaughterhouses that farm for the near-entirety of the glue trade. Abroad, Vladimir Tatlin waddles to the department store, bound up in a tight coat. His constructions demand for exotic glues, and his Corner Counter-Relief is made of catgut string. The Corner Counter-Relief is a Modernist drug mule in Moscow; animal flesh posed as industrial material. At the 0, 10 Exhibition, Tatlin was quoted with the following: “all the modern things have always existed, they’ve just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment.” He died in 1953.
Deskill and the urban grid: notice I named it after De Stijl. The cubist grid purified like Kandinsky’s blue triangle, the space of a Kirchner street scene reduced to its plastic properties. Notice the issue is two columns long: it’s a micro-zine. Like the micro-videos and micro-posts that emanate from thousands of micro-lights, deskill provides [points in a series] for little commitment and little attention. Contact desk1ll [at] proton.me to contribute to the collective.
My skin is going dry and pale, the space is thin and cold. I shave white flakes from my chin and save them in a cocaine baggie of dandruff. Curled brown hairs pulled from my braying donkey.
The square frame of the shoulder, elbow, and ankle. The flea’s thirst is greater than its parts. Emily Dickinson said that the shape of God is a fly. The flea in Lynch’s radiator sings in the spotlight of a shooting star, bitter black water bubbles from acidic raisins. The felt black coat hangs thick over rigged white skin. When I lean over, my lean skin ripples over white bone.
The 2007 cover of Reflections is an interconnected map of the city. Benjamin argues that mental being is linguistic being. Human language is distinct because it names things; humans are an agent of language. Through theological means, Benjamin renders naming an act of creation. I agree until he refutes that language is an arbitrary set of relations. Language cannot be mimetic if it is creative: Kazimir Malevich said that “between the art of creating and the act of copying there is a great difference … the artist can be a creator only when the forms in his picture have nothing in common with nature.” The Suprematists developed the avant-garde gestalt to maturity when they abolished the subject. Gauguin criticized the Impressionists for having “no such thing as a landscape that has been dreamed, created from nothing … they focused their efforts around the eye, not in the mysterious center of thought.” Agnes Martin painted with her back to the world.
The following are principles of our theoretical sphere:
1. A deskill is a point on a grid.
2. Deskilling is the act of reducing a text to the speed of modern computation.
3. Deskill is an index of keywords. It assumes access to a search engine. The deprivation of immediate information is an attempt to restore activity within mass consumption. E-mail desk1ll [at] proton.me to contact us.
Melopepon is a donkey-woman. She lives on top a mountain in Tar province, PML. It is a lone peak in a flat landscape of snow-white salts and sands: the clouds in the white sky do not cast a shadow. One lipid in the Mule names the landscape the White Court. The Mule and the Lipid live in a rock-hewn lime-stone: a kitchen and lounge to the entrance and a bath and bedroom in the back. The room in-between contains a supercomputer that feeds on a pit of dried apricot.
Today the Mule prunes the stone’s excesses. Curled sheets of industrial material grow from the pores of floorboards, baseboards, and drywall. They can form into unpredictable mechanisms: once a kitchen cabinet exploded after a naturally-occurring car engine and bike pump collided. Today the Mule is armed with a sticker scraper. She crosses the computer to the left side (it stands in the center), and then scrapes tin, aluminum, microfibers and mesh fabrics from the door-frame.
The Mule dispenses of the materials in a tall trench to one side of the mountain. When she nears the cliff, she kicks white salts and sands down a long fall. When she drops the first material, it glows in the dark and illuminates the ancient earth-strata. The next material is a loop of paper twisted into a non-orientable strip. It drifts down silently. The third material is a glass shard that scrapes an edge on its fall and croaks like a wooden-frog guiro. The fourth material is a strip of Velcro that returns the sound of a splash from the bottom. Melopepon offers to every material her undivided observation, naming all their qualities until the limits of her senses are passed.
Later the Mule looks at her computer wallpaper. Right now it is an El Greco of a man with too long of a head. His eyes and ears pop out in different directions, like something invisible pinches at his elongated temples. Then the Mule passes the computer to the left.
The following are principles of our practical sphere:
1. Download .docx from callus.neocities.org/archive/p-i-s/deskill/
2. Print (landscape, double-sided, 2 pages per sheet)
3. Fold horizontally Contact desk1ll [at] proton.me with questions.
Today the Mule does her groceries. Saddle-bags on her back, she passes the computer to the left side. Her lime-stone shines blindingly below the morning sun. The trot down the path to ground-level will take an hour. Melopepon clops over irregular limestone pavement that spreads out like pudgy fingers of corral, and she passes tall white sand-tower-karsts that point to pierce the sky. Bright clouds expand endlessly over PML, moving and morphing as quickly as a timelapse. The White Court appeases the Mule and intimidates the Lipid.
The Mule waits at a lonely bus stop where the rocky mountains end and the salt flats begin. She kicks at lines of white sand that connect into thousands of natural polygons across the desert. The bus runs over the erosion of its own desire-path. The mule braces for air-conditioning; she prefers the heat and its silence. She sits across a large bat. It looks like it’s chewing on something until she realizes it’s its nocturnal reflex of echolocation. She wonders about her image in the bat’s mind: a graph of several horizontal planes, or a spiky ball confused by her thousands of individual hairs, or her being transposed onto sheet music, or in the grooves of a vinyl record. But, when the bat leaves for its stop, she notices it really was chewing on something: strawberry-kiwi gum.
Later Melopepon returns up the mountain with her groceries. She stops to look at her computer wallpaper. It is a pen and watercolor Blake of a nude woman under black drapery. She looks to a mule grazing on grass, a large-eyed owl that glares straight-forward, and a type of reptile peeking behind a rock. Then the Mule passes the computer to her left.
desk1ll [at] proton.me
Melopepon is a well-known general of the Armed Forces. Her image is characteristic of an arctic-fox-fur-hat shaped to glove her tall donkey ears. Today the Mule trains her favorite unit, CSDB-9. She passes the computer to her left and walks out into a grey day. Sometimes the clouds fall under the sun’s light. The lowest cloud shrouds the mountain in a fog of cold wind.
The training ground is a tall point in the middle of the mountain-side trench. Soldiers crowd, ready to perform excessive, exaggerated exercises the moment one hoof of their donkey general sinks into the mud terrain. They flail around as autonomously as a concert dance. The Mule assumes his position entirely for the lethal ram horn hidden under his white fur-hat; a red-curled bone that protrudes from his forehead, painted in blood. But this state-secret contains another state-secret: there is no horn. It’s a secret guarded in the national collective mind: everyone knows there isn’t the space in his hat for all of that.
At the end of the day, the Mule looks at her computer wallpaper. It’s a Klee of flowers etched into a rock. They’re reduced to simple shapes and mathematical signs. Above the rock is a stone-tablet stylus. Then the Mule passes the computer to the left.
He teases me, dulling his teeth on my skin and leaving me his drool. He leaves a ball of spit in my bottle and five nail marks on my face. He grabs my un-plucked brow with unwashed hands, burying it in his neck. One long hair grows under my belly-button: he doesn’t look at me anymore. Everyone is making fun of me. “Like vermin boiling eggs in pesticide, a recluse anticipates her abduction” (I wrote that 1+ years earlier).
You can contact me: desk1ll [at] proton.me
A mound of stitched skin and a plastic leg brace pushed back until a ligament is stretched sore. The numb metal ball in his knee bores into the car seat.
Today the Mule attends a class. Fitted with a saddle-back-pack, she passes the computer to the left and joins the heat outside. It smells of summer. She takes the bus to Asphalt, the capital city of Tar province.
Today’s Musicology lecture is dedicated to the percussion category. Percussion organology: idiophones, membranophones, aerophones, chordophones. Percussion instrument production, famous percussionists, percussion pedagogy, percussion semiotics … but into the second hour, Melopepon is unsettled: the professor theorizes about an observed synchronization of percussionists’ performances and their circadian rhythms. Melopepon notices a student tapping their pencil, a student bouncing their leg, a student’s blood pumping in their wrists, blood pumping in the Mule’s ears … Melopepon is sickened from fear. She sweats, afraid to make a movement that could disrupt the predestined intervals of the Absolute World Rhythm, causing a lawless eternity. The Mule is frozen for hours. Until a pain sears in her forehead, and she rushes to grasp at the curled bone growing from her head that knocks off her white-arctic-fox-fur-hat. But it recedes as soon as she moves. When she leaves the empty lecture hall, its acoustics amplify the clops of her hooves.
At home the Mule looks at her computer wallpaper. It is a quiet, cool oil painting of a woman in black next to a dark-wood piano. There are a lot of right angles. Hammershøi places his shadows arbitrarily. Then the Mule passes the computer to the left.
You and I can meet if we follow the correct points in the chain. Use the address desk1ll [at] proton.me to e-mail me.
Today the Mule cleans. Normally, she is a brown furred donkey to her neck and a brown-haired human to her cranial crown. Today, she wears a human skin suit, a complete integumentary system that compliments her human head. It provides bipedal mobility and a height of five feet and one inch. The Mule is not troubled to walk, passing the computer to the left like normal, though her other movements are less intuitive. When she scrubs the salt dragged inside from the donkey’s hooves, one leg squats and the other sits on its knee. Her elbows rest on the floor and her chin floats close to the ground. When she dusts the kitchen wall-tiles, she lays on her back over the counter, confined under the cabinets. One moment a leg dangles from the edge, the next moment she straightens like an Egyptian corpse prepared for death. And when the Mule wipes at the bathroom sink, she kneels on a pillow, aligning the counter to eye-level.
When she’s done she sheds her human suit and circles the computer room to the left direction, re-adjusting to her quadrupedal nature. Something changes: the wall’s new growth buds of excess material disappear prematurely. Melopepon walks another circle: her fruit bowl appears refilled. After another circle, her head feels lighter: her fur hat now hangs in her closet. Another circle: her human suit lays folded over her drawer.
The Mule stops to look at the computer wallpaper. It displays a Paula Rego oil pastel of a woman hanging from the corner of a bed. One foot pulls at the bed sheets, and her other three limbs crawl on the floor. Her head looks back at the mattress between her things. A white shape appears in the corner of the monitor: a little white flower. When she looks away, the flower remains in the corner of her sight. An excitement is generated in the donkey woman. She blinks hard and fast, and the lily remains. She shakes erratically and the little white lily remains. But a force in her body suddenly grips her violently: the pink Lipid pushes Melopepon into a panic, and she rears into a counterclockwise run to the right of the computer. And as quickly as the lily fades away, Melopepon slows down to a trot. The end.
You and I can meet if we follow the correct points in the chain. Use the address desk1ll [at] proton.me to e-mail me.