from Dead Letter Game
I got used to the idea of craftwork as strategic self-defense. I could never finish and so could never lose, or win. Practice, as rite, defined every moment of every day. Nothing escaped.
Today I force back a grimace while reading through these records (the “electric diary” and other sources). No sense judging, even while the marks of discontent are obvious. The desire to self-incriminate (a kind of psychic house-cleaning) remains.
Informing assumptions included an unconditional faith in the power of language as intermediary, go-between, like the trussed effeminate body (medium) receiving spirits on behalf of a small group of anxious, hyperventilating live ones. The trips and false starts (muco-seminal dribblings) of an ear-bent consciousness would lead the way, find the channel, and in the wake of this experience an attendant flesh-node (me) could lean back and be impressed.
The work was scholarly in its effort to mine the research moment. A kind of “reading,” sure, but more the ruse of eliciting perception “nuggets,” later told true in the imprint, the finished sequence. I see it now as bullshit but that’s hardly the point.
Playing this game is like scanning an old yearbook: the faces rise up afresh but as they have always been, secure and encrypted, perfect little corpses.