Decapitation diary
romp through the ruins of Empire, as usual
As usual it took a while to absorb the landing, lolling around in one of those hotels with wall-to-wall bedding. Elizabeth picked me up from the lobby and we went to the museum where they gave us free reign. Let us pick chopped-off heads from the catacombs, pomegranates from the underworld. Do a little catwalk in the grand hall, playing pretend VS Angel. The piece was a temporary arrangement of cracked iPhones, frothy white lace, affirmations and theta waves. Jade had placed us there on purpose, on a big platform in front of the Vaccaro painting. I was surprised, up close, by how much fear was in it. Looking up into the severed head, speared all the way into brainmatter and hoisted to the sky for all to see. But then again, who hasn’t felt fear at what they’ve done. Horror at victory, and irreversibility.
I had on a huge resin collar which made a lot of movement impossible. We started to read in the million tongues of the crowd. The tongues of persuasion. A touch of the divine. Unusual words; off-kilter and threatening. Eruptions of beauty. Strange, unforced pearls. Don’t change the lighting, I said, when we were trying things out during rehearsal. We were surrounded by masterpieces. It was already ultraluminous1.
“That was lovely, at the end,” a visiting curator said after the performance. We were talking in a different, brighter room that was full of classical nudes, with the sudden joint awareness that I was basically naked. “When you took each other by the hand and escaped history.”
I went to see a tarot reader because all my friends were doing it. She said I was surrounded by angels and I could channel their voices through automatic writing. I thought about bloodzboi saying:
“I don’t have many memories… I write all of my songs after I’ve taken a lot of sleeping pills, after midnight. That’s the only time I feel like a real person, that I can feel any real emotions. In the mornings, I’ll go through them to see what they’re like. I trash the bad ones, and leave the good ones.”
Close enough, I thought. Surrounded by angels. Messages received without a source. Cleaning out my tiny apartment, I found one of the paper targets we had all kept after a day at the rifle range. My shots were crooked; I had been on a lot of pills. That was the point, I guessed. Scrambling my inherent drive toward precision. Because it all disappears, I take nothing for granted.
The morning my friends flew away, I used my last Swiss hours to go to the Patek Philippe salon. I liked the airlock entrance, how the first glass door opened and you were held for a beat in a silent velvet chamber. In general, I like security theatre at this level. Safeguards against heists that make you, too, feel precious and protected. I didn’t want to take the elevator; with apologies, they said that there were no stairs. On the upper levels, the workshops were lit for high detail. Fixed and lucid, contrasted with the perfumed dark dreamworld of sales and persuasion down below. I always appreciate patience with my stupidity, indistinguishable from curiosity. There was so much I was ignorant of—I was always suspended, not in disbelief, but in the lag between knowledge and understanding. It turned out that the watch I’d inherited was working just fine. The technician showed me how to calibrate the mechanism. “You can’t do it on your wrist,” he said, gently. “You have to wind it in your palm, like this.”
“I realised that I appreciate people who are particular,” I said to Arvida, in a new city by now, still thinking of someone else’s watch in someone else’s palm, how it was my responsibility now. The minuscule beat of the quartz mechanism, limp and alive as a window-stunned songbird. We were in a cafe that served excessive swirls of Chantilly cream2 with sugar-dusted strawberries for 19 euros. It was packed, but everyone was smiling—nice. “High maintenance of the soul.”
There had been an irregularity in my schedule and I was in Paris “pointlessly,” I said, staying in a huge house by myself now for no reason. It was far from everything, far from my friends, which I thought would be good for writing and inner peace. Since I have a phobia of the countryside (if I have to go solo), the city periphery was fine as a working substitute. But I couldn’t help myself, I kept taking superlong bike rides through the bois and then the wide, famous avenues, blasting Bliss by Yung Lean and fka twigs on my little missions to find new and old friends. To stay open to love and money spells. To have something to do after dark, that would scramble my precision, that would hone it in another, deeper way. Female agents assigned to honey trap operations in the Soviet Union were called swallows, I said to a new friend, about to drop into dreamless sleep3. You will see swallows soon here, he said. As a first sign of spring.
Natasha had been doing spring in Chantilly proper: “Lace, and cream,” she said. The most feminine place.
Quoting Bogna, from something we are working on… more soon. <3