A giant spider with a girl’s head sidles up the embankment
We know about her
Kicking up the dust
Making sculptures from time
Keep the ghosts of memory close
Surround yourself with images
Representations of security
Jaded
Going backwards now
Fragments and then fullness
Return from the swarm of bats
Widdershins
Sounds so sinister
But it’s only unfamiliar
Untrodden
Black licorice swamp
Where the spider-girls live.
The perpetual radiance of the muse blinds me to his peculiarity. Sticks and smokes; posters and dreamcatchers and gifts of betrayal. Light one up on the veranda beneath a pale moon. See our breath [know it’s real].
On the surface, all is still. But I know that beneath and around the flesh something is shifting; the soul is undergoing some vital surgery.
His strangeness presses deep, and he talks about the spiders and their knowledge of weaving.
“It is not at all serious,” he says of my trouble. “It is simply an enormous childhood.”
I understand, but the paper cut-out in a business suit doesn’t like it. Dancing dollies.
“Cut it up and weave it back,” he continues as he sways. “Positive break, endless fantasy, mad projects.”
He tears the flimsy puppets easily; makes confetti of them. They blow on the wind towards the beck, where she will chew them up and repurpose them in her sculptures. Unrecognisable but for their metaphysical form.
“All things are circles. All things renew.”
And with a puff and a snap, he is gone.
Stemming directly from the Journal Sequences project, Parallels is part stream of (un)consciousness, part exploration into recurrence and association. Spirals of awareness. Rhythms in thought. Accidental spells in everyday life, hidden beneath the surface. A series of loosely formed vignettes to mythologise the instant.
China Mieville / Clarice Lispector / Brom / Aleister Crowley / Robert Anton Wilson / The Enlightenment Machine / Autumn Christian / Fragments of Perception / the Abyss
Header Image Credit: Leonardo Yip via Unsplash
C.R. Dudley 