Virus
At first there were only the markings—small bird-tracks of
proofreader’s punctuation etched like barely discernible anthers of delicate
floral calligraphy. Soon after, they began materializing on the liminal edges
of frequently used spaces; along the sides of bulkheads in interstate rest-stop
bathrooms, imprinted like esoteric hash-marks at the margins of concrete
expansion joints on suspension bridges, and splattered boldly across the cheap
stonework cladding of large shopping malls like a secret braille composed of
strategically strewn seagull-droppings. They even appeared mysteriously
emblazoned on film acetates, scrolling downward during the opening credits of
Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt action blockbusters shown in multiplex theaters, an
obscure code denoting unseen and un-mentioned artistic collaborators. Everyone
seemed to like them, and crowds would congregate in anticipation, hungering for
decryption every time a new ‘message’ was discovered.
Initially, the excitement created by the enigmatic patterns
was contagious, and it was not unusual to find assemblies of enthusiastic
acolytes arguing heatedly over interpretations and meanings in city parks and
office stairwells. In fact, such extrapolative musing soon became something of
a parlor game, a past-time that everyone could indulge in equally. The signs,
as they were arranged and construed, were wholly democratic, completely random
and dispersed in such myriad profusion that they could signify anything—or so
it seemed at that embryonic stage, before they began proliferating like a
feedlot infestation of E. Coli O157:H7;
semiotic manifestations of a refractory
Samizdat, ineluctably building to peak concentrations in the damp cultural
petri dishes of coffee shops, repertory theaters, university English
departments and artist’s lofts.
Later, they would evolve rapidly into a densely packed
hieroglyphics, thrown together in arrangements too complex for ordinary
explication; more like ethnographic maps conceptualizing the diachronic
propagation of hypothetical Bot Fly larvae than anything resembling written
language. No sooner would one interpret the tangled web of signs implied by the
close proximity of two of these elaborate pictograms, when a third might
conceivably emerge and change the entire context of the message. Yet, even at
that particular point, one was still predisposed to read the symbols as
discrete communications containing coherent linear meanings; a bias that
assumed that under the numerous layers of cryptic imagery must reside a fully
comprehensible Cartesian text of some sort. It was simply a matter of finding
the right code through which to interpret the evolution of the phenomenon. It did
not occur to anyone that the arcane markings would proliferate into an obscene
invasion—a metastasis of labyrinthine forms which soon secreted themselves
exponentially into the more privatized spaces of individual bodies, before
migrating to the discrete and solipsistic cul-de-sacs of one’s own dreams.
People inevitably began engaging with the phenomenon in
mysteriously personal ways. A man in South Bend sculpted a number of bizarre
friezes on the plastic panels of digital drive-thru menus at fast-food
restaurants, all showing detailed cartoons enumerating the transformation of
Kim Kardashian into a shamanic, rattle waving, incarnation of Freda Kahlo. Weirder
still was the boy in Alamogordo, who jumped off of a local tenement rooftop
shouting to a crowd of onlookers, as he plunged to his death, about liquid skin
technology, obstinate mechanical squadrons of low orbiting tuning forks and
strange gods of the magnetosphere whose electrical signals would provide the
correct bar code necessary to enter heaven.
It did not take long for such a peculiar and esoteric
madness to spread out and infect almost everyone with some personalized version
of a transformative fantasy. In California, hundreds of people clad in plastic
body stockings made from a mosaic of floor tiles, furniture-coverings and
decorative wall hangings, marched into the Pacific Ocean after telling friends
and relatives that they would one day return as telepathic cetaceans to dismantle Moloch’s invisible machinery.
It was subsequently discovered that all had drowned—with no interpretation of
the strange pronouncements forthcoming. Several days later, a busload of
Canadians was stopped at a Montana border crossing trying to enter the country
with several bushels of Ebola infected Zucchini. They later said that they were
merely attempting to even out the numbers
to make way for the arrival of the Insect goddess, who, one must assume,
planned her disembarkation on a later bus, as she could not be located amongst
the passengers.
Within a fortnight, electronic media was swept by the winds
of a virtual brush fire of strange reports: loincloth clad people wandering the
streets of numerous cities, en mass, silently displaying anatomies tattooed
with impenetrably complex designs, runes and occult markings; self-styled ghouls
attacking crowds at bus-stops and shopping plazas with homemade truncheons,
guns and even garrotes; stories so ubiquitous, in fact, as to be reduced to a
sort of informational wallpaper. Small groups of zealots were seen hurtling themselves in front of cars, trucks and
buses on interstates; while others jettisoned their expendable bodies from
rooftops and steep cliff faces like throngs of mysteriously afflicted pigeons,
too stoned on their own bombast to care which way they fell. Even the most
fantastic chronicles—detailed eyewitness descriptions of anonymous individuals
levitating over the outflow conduits of Boulder Dam, and apocryphal accounts of
entire cities suddenly lifted into the sky by unseen forces—were soon widely
disseminated through various instruments of mass communications.
Invariably, it became impossible to differentiate ordinary
information from the abundance of esoteric and recondite signs that polluted
even the most elementary queries and affirmations. A viscous grouting now
penetrated the brickwork of quotidian perception to such a degree that even the
most level-headed and unimaginative of people soon fell under the tidal sway of
an emergent confusion. We were becoming human artifacts of what had previously
been seen as an external entertainment; a puzzle of images and cryptograms that
had gradually transposed themselves into the very cogitative apparatus once
employed to decode their import.
These once “harmless” cartouches had evolved quite consciously
into a parasitic organism. Soon we would all be in thrall to its Venus-Flytrap
inducement to cheap epiphanies and seductions, garnered at the expense of our
ability to stand outside its garish contrivances and conceive of some method by
which to oust this new candy-coated tyranny of facile communion lurking beneath
a growing stratum of platitudes and trivia.
We were all caught in its mysterious undertow, savoring our
last moments through an ecstatic euphoria concomitant with the primitive
realization that we were drowning. How then to explain to the uninitiated that
just before passing on to the next level—the void itself—we experienced a
paradoxically terrifying and orgasmic rush of images, encompassing an entire
spectrum of opportunistic forms eating through a cocooned grotesquerie of
unidentifiable animal corpses, all suspended in the interstitial quantum
event-horizon of apotheosis; soon to unfurl like reconfigured RNA molecules
into a new and stranger mode of existence. But for now, we are frozen in
anticipation; baby crabs caught in the latticed nylon jaws of a tremendous
mechanical fishing net: food for unknown parties of an unfathomed ontology.
JZRothstein (comprehensive draft edit) 6/17/2016
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