Second Collage
B developed a thick emulsion that he paints onto the pieces of meat on which he prints photographs. Then he photographs the photographs as the medium decays: senior class pictures: images of cattle; Edward Curtis portraits of Native Americans. He says: Decay is the form of persistence that is most like memory.
Soon these activities invade his thinking. He edits sequences of his past from the viewpoint of another who substitutes for his head a meat photograph and for his limbs aeroplanes and knife blades, serpents and wings. When his eyes are replaced by spherical lamps he becomes an electric fly. His buzzing is a multicolored glow.
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Author's Note
Number 60 from Edge Effects, A 100 Days Project
Other stories by stephen hastings-king
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The first paragraph is especially powerful.
Love the images you create in this. *
thanks for the reads and comments, folks.
this piece startled me a little, so am curious about how it works for others. one direction i've been pushing at in the larger project is memory remodeled by television and the two combining to produce a flattened, distant reality that one can only act on in trivial, immediate ways. so a kind of total powerlessness packaged as a retail space---you can choose from the commodities that are made available and so pretend you are "free" (in quotes because the conflation of political freedom with economic action is a symptom of the ideological problem/paralysis/collapse of empire that the edge effects project is trying to make maps of) but the range of commodities is determined by invisible supply chains and buyers inside of them all of whom are anonymous and few of whom see themselves as exercising power. like that.
This :
".. He edits sequences of his past from the viewpoint of another who substitutes for his head .."
is interesting mainly for its sequence of closed words: "of .. from .. of .. for" - which imply a type of verbal corollary for the visual editing your describing.