XXX (Pentaptych)

Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words, which powers the engine of transformation. Perhaps it is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is "merely" a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien -- one that works through supreme acts of mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters. 

Jeff VanderMeer, from Annihilation

**

Ever since I was small, every once in a while, laying in bed, my body would feel like it's made out of stone, or perhaps a very hard plastic. Now as an adult, usually during extended periods of sitting, I still come upon this same sensation. It's very peculiar but also uncomfortable. During, I always receive the vision of a red plastic seat booster, the kind that used to be found at fast food restaurants in the United States during the 80's. I imagine scraping the seat with my finger nail, and that the feeling of the brittle plastic under my finger nail is the same feeling I recognize throughout my entire body. Once I move the feeling goes away. I've tried to sit with it and study it, though I've never been able to make much progress before the discomfort becomes unbearable. And so I wonder what it is. Is it a feeling? An affect? A mental state? How can I describe it, and what's the use anyway?

**

The Envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake. 

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet. 

I don’t know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing. 

For a year I watched
as something—terror? happiness? grief?—
entered and then left my body. 

Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out. 

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic. 

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing. 

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.

Jane Hirshfield

**

To name something as a "contamination" is usually to imply that its presence somehow devalues a context that would otherwise possess some "pure" or "authentic" state of existence (...) The intention here is to reconsider "contamination," to think of it not as an undesirable quality but as a productive process of cultural exchange, beginning from the premise that we cannot know what an "authentic" state of existence is (...) Thus the world is a contingent, partly perceived, partly understood web of relations and alliances in a state of flux, connections whose duration may be short-lived and almost imperceptible, or so extended that we do not perceive their rate of change, or indeed, the full implications of their contexts.  

Jean Fisher, from "Some Thoughts on Contaminations (Incorporating Parts Of The  Syncretic Turn)," as it appeared on a wall at the 12th Shanghai Biennale

**

Hold still, lion!
I am trying
to paint you
while there's time to 

Robert Creeley, from "Drawn & Quartered"