What happened to all the moments in between? Surely in their darkness they hold the key to all this. Or have I truly moved from one scene to the next as though through a portal?
Where do we go when we’re inside a portal? Where are we when we’re in between? We are liminal people, who’ll later fill in the gaps to make a complete picture [circle]. Make our own cell. If we didn’t fill in those gaps we’d see there was a way out all along. It is the solid line that forms our labyrinth.
The tunnel now all the more sinister, of course. Its neon tags scream and taunt. Someone was here. Someone was off the grid.
But how can I stop the continuity, the endless perimeter? The continuity stops when you accept – truly accept – that not everything has to make sense.
I adore urban exploration pictures. Photographers sneaking into abandoned buildings – hospitals, fairgrounds, mines. Emptiness echoes. Mirrors.
People long gone, replaced by vegetation on its own clock.
Our prostheses will outlive us.
My draw to enter those backstreets, forgotten staircases and alleyways has got me into no end of trouble, and yet it has also brought me to see what others rarely glimpse. A two-edged sword. Paths that lead off the beaten track [grid], but paths nonetheless.
Memories stored in bricks I’ve never seen, but something in their configuration is mirrored in my mind. Memories stored in bricks but loose and drifting, as though they are air and the psyche a wind.
The moment we embarked on our journey. Our trip. Nothing so easy as a railway or a road. This was something that followed no such lines, though precision was required in measurement of dose. This was a rocketship that would take us far away from the human grid.
The tattooist, our leader. A position of trust. All of us fleeing conflict. All of us fleeing our own prisons.
As our sickness becomes more convoluted, recommended treatment becomes more specific and more clueless. Take this pill in the morning before you stretch and that pill [no other] at night before your eyelids start to droop. Interrogate this trigger in therapy without thinking about road signs and always whilst gnawing on the eye of the new[t]… Until the treatments simply bolt themselves onto the sickness to make even newer, more complex compounds of madness. Crystals.
I’m trying something out here. Looking for patterns, rhythms and connections in journaling and beauty in fragments. I’m looking for the point at which communication breaks down between writer and reader, where intrigue fails and where the key to subjectivity may lie. I join personal beats with character perspectives and notes for plot, a ever to play with the boundaries between fiction and reality. I’m looking for the line to ride.
The photograph in the header is my own: prostheses displayed at Wellcome Collection, London.
C.R. Dudley 