Scenario:
You are a WEEPER. And the ground is wet.
Interior. Surgical suite. Performance.
We undergo trepanation. Your dura mater exposed.
And the cut-shard placed onto a metal plate.
Just listen to this, Mike (Ed Atkins)
The air is so much louder now.
Your skull is whistling with beautiful music.
An arrhythmic glitching of foot-pedals.
The scene. The scene.
You with your tongue out and eyes crossed.
The cut-shard belongs in an ossuary.
An ossuary is a pile of bones.
An ossuary is a small coffin for bones.
ENTOMBED. RUINER.
Performance of funerary rites.
Beginning with an elaborate march and dance.
The dance is built of small actions.
They are arranged into a field of choreographies.
Procedurally-generated veneration.
The RUINER leads the march.
The cut-shard hums in its wooden chest.
Hues of pink light.
Underneath the surgery there is a cave.
The surgery is not over yet.
We are still at the suite, looking on.
Your dura mater remains exposed.
The trepanation is performed with a trephine.
Mouth-arms long, folded (Aase Berg tr. Johannes Görannson)
It shucks the shell.
A skeleton is practically an exoskeleton.
The only distinction is a thin layer of meat and membrane.
Intracellular destruction / annihilation.
You play us a beautiful song as we examine your innard.
ENTOMBED. RUINER. Leads the march.
They hold a quince over your box.
This was the fruit of the garden of Eden
No no no a pomegranate. A palmagranate.
What a lovely thought.
They march to the beach-head and bury you in the sand.
The ossuary waits there for sixty-four years.
This is a magical number. It is simple numerology.
Every year a black dog is thrown into the ocean.
What a lovely thought.
Interior. Surgical Suite. Performance.
The gait guard sits with his back-fat scraping the chair-back.
Splinters root into the unnerved flesh.
There is nothing here to hold onto (Anonymous)
We thud the trephine against your hard head.
The dura mater dries in the open atmosphere.
And now you are healthier. You are cured.
RUINER rattles the ossuary. Becoming-ossuary.
It should have that nice kind of pink blush on the inside.
ENTOMBED. RUINER.
And you are a WEEPER. And the ground is wet.
And a gourd is laid on the beach-head in your honor.
We envision a great feast.
Boiled liver. Young capillaries. Aged piss.
Everything in life is kaput.
We have inevitably taken up residence in an exclusion zone.
WEEPING in a meadow of sea vegetables.
Something like wakame or kombu.
In the summer they dry into stone-trees.
And we harvest them for the ossuary.
To venerate the march.
To summon the RUINER and visit the beach-head.
The rest of the body is expendable.
All that we need are the cut-shard and the dura mater.
Excess material can be discarded composted recycled.
Make a new skull.
Grow a new set of materials.
Like grafting a tree or a patch of skin.
Milque-chocolate or anonymous fluid exchange (M Kitchell)
ENTOMBED. RUINER.
The tech on your face is wet.
Are you a WEEPER? Someone asks. Out of sight.
Interior. Surgical Suite. Performance.
The tech on your face is replaced.
Or it is sprayed with a hydrophobic residue.
What do you mean?
We extract the eyeball carefully.
And sever the optic-nerve when it emerges from the shell.
And place the eye back in its socket.
With the visage of an owl.
Your tuft and feathery exterior.
Exterior. Surgical Suite. Performance.
Trampling your feet on the RUINER stomach.
Making them wheeze and crumple.
The ground is covered in viscous juice.
Either pulled from the soil or spit from the mouth.
Trepanation is a procedure for creating an unnatural facade.
A hallucinatory mise-en-scene (Slavoj Zizek).
The small actions of the dance mutate into new mediums.
An expanded field of movement.
The trephine looks like an egg-cracker.
The dura mater is a soft white membrane.
Between the shell and the loose gelatin.
A cruciferous head blooms from the cut-shard opening.
You look like a fungal sprout.
You smell like sulfur and moss festering.
We attempt to sever your connection.
Fungus… is vilified for its damage (Ben Woodard).
The surgical suite fills with a dense spore cloud.
ENTOMBED. RUINER.
Every particle of dust contributes to calcification.
This is a field of stone sculptures.
An invitation to the annual beheading.
We all look on with glee.
RUINER lifts the ossuary from a mound of drift.
And lodges it in the neck of the guillotine.
And crushes your cut-shard.
Into dust.
RUINER. ENTOMBED.
What kind of a performance is this?
What a lovely thought.
The trees look like fennel.
The grass is short and dead.
You are a WEEPER. Looking on your shattered chest.
The wood is built into a fire pit.
We plan a great feast.