‘Liquid Lattice’ is the result of a second collaboration between 0rphan Drift and CCRU, commissioned by John Russell for his ‘FT 3, New Ultra Becoming’ – the third volume of ‘Frozen Tears’ 2005, collections of writings from the edges of society, sanity, taste. Completely fantastic.
(ISBN 1-873352-59-X www.frozentears.co.uk)
From: Maggie …
Date: March 3, 2006 8:11:15 AM GMT+02:00
To: Ranu Mukherjee
Subject: panic slightly
heyu, 1hr elec power in the last 24. hope battery lasts long enough 2 send this. was writing by hand then typing in by torchlite. no time yet to allocate place for the texts. hope we have power 1hr this eve then i can recharge battry wen i bak from work. and finish. i’d dig if you hold on sending final to jon til i slot these in. if you have hours to spare, you can do it but assuming you wont!!!! my fri eve your fri morn hey? thats wen i finish.
xxm
The Rubbish Dump god.
The R310 runs along the most beautiful of desolate coastlines. It’s suddenly desolate. You notice that slowly. An inexplicable 30km of prime land, deserted except for the passing traffic and the huge numbers of gulls wheeling over the mountainous civic dump hidden in the dunes. Invisible behind all this is the endless sprawl of Khayelitsha. The smell of squatter camp fires mingles with the salt spray. Trash blows with the sands encroaching onto the coast road.
The city’s peripheries are these spaces on the townships edges. Haunting no mans lands where most of the muti killings take place. Mostly they are toxic wastelands where even the poorest wouldn’t set up home. This one on the wild shoreline is unique in it’s eerie beauty. It is ruled over by the Great Heap of Rubbish, entity from the underworld. He appears, huge and glowering, surface covered in growths of drift flotsam deposited on torn branches by raging floodwaters. He will tear you apart.
At night on this road, you don’t stop or get out of your car for any reason.
A refrain:
the devouring and reconstituting of you.
incidental detail:
the ancestors sent a robot shark and many artificial fishes to carry them away.
you cannot know what is being experienced in those aching, blackened teeth.
The Abomination.
A strange sight on the deserted beach. First you see a dolphin with a woman beside it in the shallows. The woman has a silver face and rolling eyes. Eyes so exactly the colour of the ocean, it’s as if you are seeing the water through two holes in her head. Something is snapping against her silvery skin. She sways to and fro, gesticulating with webbed fingers. You locate that slapping sound- two long slits opening and shutting loudly on her chest.
She has no legs, she is the smooth dolphin aswell. Thin seaweed falls from her head- tentacles of brown, silver, green, black and grey. She is tapping her tail in the surf and staring. Her throat constricts and swells to produce clicks and hums. Her mouth opens slightly, revealing little pointed teeth in pronounced pink gums. She makes a layered undulating whisper sound, like the sea in the distance. Strange and intelligent. To you, a slimy abomination.
The Dead.
The Dead took off their masks and hoods and other hybrid contraptions and their mingled bodies fitted together like machinery. A kind of horizontal evolution operates among the Dead- members of the system can turn into one another.
Their mass, floating in a luminous green algae, gives off a static charge. They all have patches of skin graft, electric blue veins tracing through translucent jelly. They have grown ribs with raised markings and terrible indigo scars. Their flesh is soft and porous with ribbons of muted colour in maps all over the surface- a carapace of protection against acids and heat. The Dead program an AI and the AI programs the Dead. That was the beginning of the dreaming. You need a high tolerance for chaos. Witchdoctor Radio relays a storm of deconstructed sonic jetsam: undone narratives in a sensory and cognitive environment of time so looped and braided, the paradoxes lie six deep.
Unribboning.
the devouring and reconstituting of you.
The power cuts.
Mostly you’re in the dark, a small circle of light, fuzzy round the edges, goes ahead at all times, coaxing objects into your path.
The current recedes into the other side. Again. Stealthy withdrawal in mid pulse. And sinister in it’s quiet. Enough power running through the channels to kill, maim, blind, fry, boil, shred, explode… unexpected that it moves with such seeming softness. And reappears after so long a crippling absence, like a familiar ghost in its camouflage of containment. Still unnervingly silent. It surges. It will blow your mind and your machines, were it to escape its regulated pathways and return to the lightening.
The Trickster.
Abstraction, accumulation, obscurity, omission and containment are some of the tools of secrecy in the Ancestors. Process is always being re imagined. He is the figure who deals with discontinuity and change. He springs out of nothing, crosses time and disappears. Mimetic with the outside. Be modified by every other world. For this, you need a fascination with orifices and dissolution. he is an aberrant fluid, returning matter to the potency of formlessness. Out into the wild epigenetic spiral, no interest in linear evolution. Catalyser. finding a seam between zones. giving shape to the dark.
