The weather is much colder now than it was—I need to protect myself just to make my way across the city.
I prepare by layering insulating, waterproof, and abrasion-resistant clothing. I am thinner these days and less capable of enduring pain. There was a time when I could not be hurt by other people, when they could cut or burn me without any response. But that was many years ago. There was a long period of uncertainty, it could have gone either way—and then I decided that I needed to change, because in some obscure way I was allowing myself to be killed. The death would have appeared painless because I had learned not to respond to pain, but the whole situation was violent and unbearably sad.
This is not how I live any more, and I am grateful for the shift, but it means that I need to protect myself from the cold, and also from things like the fumes of burning plastic, or mould spores in the rooms I live in. Invincibility as I have encountered it is an artefact of hallucination and projection, or the massive overcompensation of capital, or the impunity of legalistic, cop-like violence. I am vulnerable to illness and the infiltration of rot; of carcinogens, toxins, and tough, cutting fibres, in exactly the same way that I am now vulnerable to physical pain. I try to be careful. The clothing I use to protect myself in the city: thermal wear, cotton tops and trousers, heavy wool, fleece, kevlar. Especially boots that have been treated so that they are completely waterproof—for some reason getting wet while navigating the city makes it easier for me to be hurt. Each of these is important, and once I acquire a functional item I will wear it until it rots off me.
My body is a sealed unit out from which both vision and breath escape to form assessments and maps of the spaces I move through. I walk steadily. I take in air that is either fresh or polluted, but my body processes it without discrimination and my limbs can work on both. My body would steam in the cold air if it was not buried in protective gear. My skin is red and shining. My face and neck are exposed but they are tough appendages like smokestacks and lighthouses; they facilitate my breathing and my vision.
I think that the light in the city is very beautiful, even in the cold air of winter. When the sun is out it picks the details from the facades and trees and ancient churches, and presents these in perfect and undifferentiated clarity. The colour of this light that covers everything reveals the city as really a contiguous volume, like the working insides of an engine. Its hostile aspect is not the introduction of something new..
I walk and walk, and eventually I arrive at the building where I am working these days. It is a scrubbed-out maze of cheap timber cladding. All of the panel walls are painted to resemble different surfaces— concrete, brick, steel, or sometimes painted exteriors (fantastic exteriors, colours I have never seen before, pillars and fields of flame that are air and earth at once, a blazing world, a world of possibility and mutable form). From the back, all of the partitions are the same, so you are reminded that the entire territory is made of one contiguous surface. And not only the same substances (paint, screws, concrete floors, lighting systems rigged to micro-specificities of control), but also the same degrees of planning and instantiation. A robust, modular, and professionalised apparatus that can turn any surface and any series of rooms or maze-like corridors into any other; can create stand-ins for whatever you can imagine. What you can imagine also needs to be describable in terms of the maze of sheet timber and painted surfaces. There are some difficulties here, but they can, with professional effort, be disappeared or ignored. There are many ideas and even the good ones have a species of equivalence. The ideas are images that appear in formal series, and form a superstructure which, shaped by the contingency of surfaces, also consists of absolutely contiguous materials.
There are other systems of risk-mitigation. I could wear a cruciform, or one of the jackets I covet, laced with pearls, trimmed in chiffon, its texture and colour delicate; I might be able to enter into a seeming with others such that they would know me invincible. Would they know me invincible? It would depend on the seeming, the care and intention it was crafted with, my own capacity to nurture this craft, my energy, my access to the money I would need to fuel it, my capacity to ignore the pain of it, or to hallucinate the pain away. My capacity to once again assume an attitude of invincibility; to once again open myself up to, in some ambiguous sense, my own death. The choice of this.
There is some continuity here, but I do not have the training to perceive it. These days I also do not have the time. I know that the controls of this decision space are built from one flexible and invisible superstructure, but its nature and construction are obscure to me.
When I arrive I am dressed in new clothes. I am strapped into a harness with anchor points on my chest and hips, and fitted with rigid plates that protect my organs and sit firmly over my genitals and belly. My throat is likewise armoured, but not my head, which must remain unprotected for my movements to be convincing. The new materials are kevlar, steel, velcro, aluminium, fire gel. The lighting is harsh where the specialists swoop down to check everything and then soft again for the cameras. The painted timber surfaces pass behind me in succession. Pulp scenes: a stone cave that looks like a skull, emerging from a lake of boiling blood at the centre of the planet; some sort of human-built probe of black metal, drowned in a torrent of liquid coolant that sloughs away from it in opaque sheets of steam; the layerings of a city that houses millions, built dense and vertical to fit them all; a forest in the evening, when beneath the failing light, the trees are again like the earth that they grow from, and like the brambles between them, and like the insects in the brambles. And then from all of these images comes a single coherent song, a song without words or music, a song of the mind and of the vision. Some fantastic place of ease where people are free to love or hate one another without thinking of labour. The ocean, with its coldness and depth and fantastic clarity. All of them pass in front of me, each painted with precise, practiced skill, and I prepare myself for what must come next.
THE MATERIAL PLAY
Kevlar
Woven synthetic fibre, close-knit, tough; flexible substrate across which others may be layered. Protects against the abrasion of the skin where otherwise it would be rubbed away or torn open. Rated to high speed impacts with bitumen and concrete, but only minimal padding to protect against blunt trauma and impacts. To maintain its effectiveness, a kevlar shell is tied to the body at points of natural flexibility. Mine is fastened with heavy strapping at the throat and waist, beneath the armpits, around the genitals, and at the knees, elbows, ankles, and wrists. The fibres are dyed black, and when I hit the abrading surface at speed it leaves its imprint across me, traced in the softest white scoring.
Steel
Heavy and rigid, extremely hard. Painfully cold against bare skin. Here produced in fitted plates that are layered across areas identified as high risk—stomach, chest, groin, throat. When possible for the scene, the head is protected in a close-fitting, padded casque. Plates are always worn padded: sewn into a customised jacket or harness, or each manufactured with a bespoke strapping system. Will turn cutting and stabbing edges, but without padding does little to mitigate transferred kinetic energy and the associated trauma. You will still break bones and rupture organs. I hate wearing steel. It is perhaps the layer that best reveals the incapacity of the body it protects. A body of steel would be rough, cold, and heavy. It would hide nothing vulnerable. Its surface could be painted with anything at all.
Velcro
Synthetic universal fastening system, excellent sheer-hold but peels easily and quickly. A triumph of 20th century machined usability. Usually applied to strapping but can also cover large areas and act as a universal medium for attachments in arbitrary numbers and makes– most often across the broad area of a chest rig.
Aluminium
Bright, unpainted, light, hard. Light on the body, and in the sun it flares white like fire. Rigid but bends under force when worked thin. Used mostly for clasps and attachment points; sometimes for small mechanical clips and locking brackets.
Fire Gel
Thick and translucent, derived from the lighter petroleum byproducts. Low burning point, burns at a low temperature, does not emit smoke unless premixed with a specifically manufactured smoking compound; this burns black and oily and fierce, too hot for a body and too hot for a set built from timber sheeting. And the smoke obscures the vision, which is dangerous because of course the safety technicians may not be able to see the signalling from the body that has been set alight in the chaos and obscurity and opacity. So the gel will be used unmixed on me, smokeless, low heat. When they apply it, it is cold and sticky and viscous enough to hold its shape. The surface of the gel shows the rippled, oily, rainbow residues of spilled petrol, so faintly that they are almost imperceptible. Petrol colours across skin, clothing, harnessing, and also across the sections of the set that they have decided will burn with me when it happens. Each covered with about half a centimetre of the gel—on the set they have also installed a series of remote-controlled starters in case the flames wrapping my body fail to set the rest alight. I know that the starters will be unnecessary, but I don’t tell them this because there is no way that I can easily explain how my body and the others surfaces that will burn have entered into a kind of material co-contamination which completely ensures ignition.
Smoke
The gel will burn without opaque fumes of any kind. There will be fumes, as nothing combusts at such a low temperature without releasing gasses and particles, but these will be invisible and appear to the cameras as nearly identical to the heat shimmer that would envelop me if the flames were hotter. No smoke, so they have had to prepare further contrivances. There are aluminium canisters attached to something like a large glue gun, with a trigger that can be locked in place so that you do not need to keep it depressed manually. They have four of these with them. The nozzle of the gun needs to be lit on fire with a lighter or a long match, and then the compressed gas or fluid in the canister can be fired through the flame to create thick, black, oily smoke. They can be placed such that my body will be visible to the safety technicians. I will be framed in petrol smoke as I burn. In an interior like this, these machines can be used for fifteen-ish seconds at most, before the entire visual field is completely obscured and shooting becomes impossible. There is the frame of smoke and the second frame of the rapidly unfolding opacity that the smoke introduces. A frame made from smoke for a body that burns cleanly: foregrounding of formal artifice. After each deployment, the smoke must be cleared mechanically with a series of enormous turbine fans that have been installed like sentinels across the far end of the room. I have heard rumours that the fans will serve another purpose, more directly relevant for the framing of my burning body—that as the smoke is released from its four static generators, the fans will be switched on to introduce storm winds into the scene, to blow that thick oily vapour across, through, and away from me, such that it will catch and snatch at my limbs; that my body will be placed within a chaos of fire, wind, and vapour. But I can’t speak to this. It would seem to go against the comparatively staid set work of the timber panelling and the corridor. I know nothing about staging and cannot speak to this formal process of decision-making.
Fans
The turbines are about two metres wide, black steel and wire, mounted on collapsible steel stands. There are six of them, enough to fully cover a whole wall of the set, but I know that they have infinite stores of these machines in other places in the complex. There is no upper limit to how many can be deployed if they think that they are needed. They produce a solid wall or sheet of air that pushes through everything in front of them and introduces a directionality into the scene. A second, imagist directionality, after the visual, ray-like, POV directionality produced by the movement of the cameras.
Lights
What can I say about lights. The lights are everywhere, pointed at everything, spreading their friendly, precise, clarity of illumination without discrimination. If the cameras and the movements of their professional manipulators are the ones that create the picture it is surely the lights that police their creation; the archons and the executors.
The lights are of every conceivable size, from tiny handheld point-machines, to the truly monstrous assemblages that require industrial machinery to move and power– that can light whole sections of the countryside brighter than noon. I have seen them squatting at the edges of the set, and I have heard stories of their operation—each use its own monumental logistical exercise. The largest and brightest are arrayed inside steel scaffold attached to automated crane systems and tracked crawlers that look like mining equipment. The directional facing is made up of thousands of individual bulbs, and when they are switched on, they can only be used for two hours at a time because the filaments burn hot enough to melt the crystal. After each use every single bulb must be replaced, at truly unimaginable expense, because the casings develop microstructures in use and are vulnerable to bursting and raining molten glass over everything beneath them. Nothing like that in here, but the ghost of an arbitrary scaling-up hangs over the smaller machines. There are heavy Par Cans, LED banks, diffusers, reflectors, lenses and mirrors, projectors and various lasers and other pointal systems. If there is a chaos of flame/smoke/wind, if these things form a volatile sort of screen, then their interactions and relations will be: held in soft diffusion; cut through by laser projection and hard blue-tones; added to by the introduction of images across its shifting surfaces (what would the smoke frame, what would the fire frame); reduced to unreadability by darkness. All at the option of professionals whose faces and expressions will be invisible to me from my supine position in the smoke and wind.
What can I say about lights. The material play that my body has entered into—I can relate to that series of dependencies, can even talk about it. I can offer it my vulnerability, even wrapped in steel and kevlar. But the lights are above me and around me and I can offer them nothing. It is better to say nothing about the lights.
The Scene
The scene is simple. I will be attached to an industrial winch by a series of anchor points on my torso harness, then lit on fire and dragged across the floor at high speed, before crashing into one of the panel walls. Then I will lie still and burn until the cameras have their take, and I am extinguished. I understand that the camera angle will be static and that my burning body will be introduced moving laterally across the scene—I will appear, moving at extreme high speed, and be stopped just before I exit on the other side of the frame.
THE FUTURE
They attach the winch cable to me with carabiners, then they retreat to the edges of the set and signal using their hands. All clear? I go through a quick series of checks: I check that nothing will wrench or twist my limbs, and especially my neck, while I am dragged across the floor; I check the integrity of the harness, and that the carabiners have been securely locked. If one comes loose, then my (mostly intuitive, derived from experience, impossible to outline properly in language) understanding of how my body will impact and drag will be thrown off, and I won’t be able to guarantee that the forces will distribute safely. I check in with myself as well. I want to make sure that nothing in this scenario has any punitive flavour, any stink of suicide, in whatever soft, cloudy, distributed way. I am fastidious with my checks. I examine my motivations, my material circumstances, the resources that I need to live, the money I am making– but also the human contact that I will make with the engineers throughout the working day, and when I signal all clear. The woman who will light me on fire smiles at me, and I can see that it is with genuine friendliness. There are many other people in my life who would smile at me with that same ease and generosity.
I will give them the all clear that they are waiting for (all of my checks are go), but first, I want to take a moment for just myself. I am the only one who can give the all clear, and they will just have to wait until I am satisfied with the circumstances.
I said before that the timber board maze carried within itself an equivalence and an arbitrariness. I want now to take advantage of that, of what it allows. In me I think that it allows a transposition into the future; or if not the future, then a future. A future for me.
What are its qualities? It is framed in smoke and chaos, but at its centre is a calm place where the thing that looks out from behind my eyes has its peace and has its primacy.
The light that falls on me in the future is soft, although it is tinted red by the smoke. My body there is tall and strong and proud. My eyes are kind. I am capable of reassuring people with just a look, with a smile.
I am in no trouble, there are no material needs that I cannot meet. Especially my body is free from stress and the wear of it. I am healthy again, and my freedom from contingency allows me to practice kindness from a position of serene detachment.
Alongside these feelings, there is a noise that I think also comes from the future. It is like thunder but loud and continuous, rolling like artillery, shaking the earth to pieces.
I can feel that sound reaching back in time towards me from the best future. The sound is how I know that the future is coming—the shaking of the earth, the skin-feeling of its unstoppable approach—how I know that the smoke and the red light and the tranquility are real, that they cannot be questioned or denied by anyone.
Is it finally time for me to give the all clear? Am I prepared for the terrible force of the harness? For the flames, and the moment when I hit the wall and have to lie there, burning, while the cameras take what they need, before the engineers can extinguish the inferno?
If I tell you that I can hear the image of the future, coming closer to us day by day, hour by hour, second by second, would you affirm it with me? Would you tell me that this image is also your image, and this peace your peace?
What I am asking you is this: can I trust you not to hurt me in the time that stretches out between me signalling to you with my hands—between the all clear—and that distant place that I have seen, where the light is soft and kind and the air rings with sounds like artillery, and where we will be able to rest?
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