There is myself and then there is what I do - between them a great jumble of soft tissue. For the last weeks it was almost with hate that I sat at my work table. I worked slowly, made frequent excuses. Inaction is stability too. The old paradox that the donkey - equally thirsty as it is deprived of food - when placed between a bale of hay and a bucket of water will postpone its choice until it eventually dies. This apparently absurd thought-experiment becomes useful only when we strip away the metaphor - back to the real suffering of the imaginary donkey. Then, and only then, after seeing the animal's indecision in the flesh, can we re-inscribe it into the realm of metaphor.

But I am tired (too tired for that). Each day begins early and ends late. And when I finally sleep, I dream about islands without shores and rivers without mouths. Everything is perfectly sealed, without orifice or entry.

I imagine how death in America tastes different than it does in Europe. Freud was a button-down misogynist who saw death and sex everywhere (even seeing sex in death and vice versa). And always clothed as wolves, and wasps, and walnut trees, and endless, endless metaphors of castration. I fantasize that death in America is younger, more virile. We can discount the cliché of the hooded skeleton carrying a sickle as a pure lack of imagination. This kind of metaphor (death is a person) speaks to a lazy anthropocentrism that can only imagine the world composed of intentions analogous to our own. At any rate, it is too banal, too expected, completely lacking the fascination and vertigo of death as it operates in the real world. Death is pure potentiality. It is an island, a fast car in a parking lot, fast food as suicide in slow motion, the stability of a system not in operation. It is the donkey that collapses rather than cast its vote. ("All this and more!")

As from the position from which I'm writing these words, I am already (thoroughly) biologically dead - deprived of even metaphor to clothe me.

Thanks to Henry Andersen

Curated by Bunk Club