Jason Garwood
Beside* Glitter
Jason Garwood
Beside* Glitter
Jason Garwood
Beside* Glitter
Release, beseech, reorder, uncoil, pray, retwist, propagate, rise, swallow, surface, hear, call! Bestow, beg, summon, make, shape, come.
We must make idols of every monster this world-machine fears, for they suggest the shapes of worlds yet to come.
LEVIATHAN Susan Stryker
There is an incredible tension when tracing the coasts of the continents. Their curves, cracks, and creases mimic one another. As these forms inversely reflect across expansive voids we call our oceans, ancient fossils provide evidence of their preceding union. I often wonder if this phenomenon exists beyond the earth, body or the physical.
Evolution inspires me across scales; does its breadth extend beyond our behavior? Can it extend past breath? This zine is a collection of future fossils that reveal simple organisms evolved through desire, not just through survival. The continual enactment of such has pushed them beyond efficiency or endurance.
The ever-influential Trans activist, scholar, and historian, Susan Stryker, positions “appropriating life itself” as the “power move at the root of the long contest of civilization.” Understanding “sovereignty is an artificial soul,” she argues that “modernity and enlightenment practice necromantic arts that raise up a constructed being thought to animate itself through the substance of all that it consumes.”
This project looks to harness this power to reprioritize the uncalculated and incalculable. Through the conjecture of ancient bones that exist in a potentially distant future, my intent is to question the motives of togetherness and the ambiguity of body.
When writing on Experience, Ralph Waldo Emerson stresses: “The individual is always mistaken.” This is because we do not and cannot exist as individuals. May these future ancestors inspire you to rethink your bodies in relation to one another and the spaces you inhabit. It is mythos as propaganda, basically, for propping up a particular ordering of the material world.
To postulate materiality’s inherent lack of animacy, and then to attribute the liveliness of the world to a superhuman entity who intervenes in it and proclaims dominion over it, was to assert a historically new onto-epistemic regime: one that symbolically kills the preexisting world, deems it insufficient without a metaphysical supplement, and restores it to human use through human artifice. That is, it imagines artificially creating the conditions of human life from lifeless matter. Susan Stryker
These are the Apeirogons, they live long ago in the future. Like our own, their language is inspired by their bodies. Unlike our own, their language is not limited by their realities; they have had more time to evolve and respect their desires. There is evidence suggesting that their continual evolutions exist beyond what we can grasp today.
these aRe the apeiRoGons, they live lonG aGo in the futuRe. like ouR own, theiR lanGuaGe is inspiRed by theiR bodies. unlike ouR own, theiR lanGuaGe is not liMited by theiR Realities! they have had MoRe tiMe to evolve and Respect theiR desiRes. theRe is evidence suGGestinG that theiR continual evolutions eXist beyond what we can GRasp today.
Psychoanalytic psychotherapist Adam Phillips writes that “of all self-comforting or autoerotic activities, the most ludicrous, the most obviously unsatisfying, and therefore infrequent, is kissing oneself.”
kiss has evolved beyond this definition.
This creature is an autoerotic beast that is endlessly bound by its own pleasure: the infinite kiss.
Kissing, though, is a sign of taming, of controlling the potential -at least in fantasy- to bite up and destroy the other person. Lips, as it were, are the next thing to teeth, and teeth are great educators.
Adam Phillips
At certain periods of our lives, we spend a lot of time plotting for kisses. It is worth wondering, perhaps, what the wishes are in kissing.
Like kiss, this next discovery is endlessly self-ensnared. However, eMbRace defines their body through tangles, touches, and knots.
Upon its first discovery, the double spine perplexed researchers. Later data was able to prove that eMbRace is not dissimilar to humans today.
Proving this, philosopher and gender theorist, Judith Butler establishes: Our Lives are knotted together or, perhaps intertwined. The restrictions stop me from acting in certain ways, but they also lay out a vision of the interconnected world that I am asked to accept.
If they were to speak, they would ask me to understand this life that I live as bound up with other lives and to regard this “being bound up with one another” as a fundamental feature of who I am. I am not fully sealed as a bounded creature but emit breath into a shared world where I take in air that has been circulating through the lungs of others… we are quite literally in each other’s bodies without any deliberate intention to just be there.
eMbRace questions intention in both evolution and desire.
Some eMbRace have been found to be so tangled that their helix spines join to form a head. No matter the evolution, the multiplicity of their consciousness is unknown.
This next specimen is a unique discovery. Its fossil reveals two manifestations of the same evolutionary impulse: to constantly multiply as one.
conJoin is endlessly combining and separating. This generative beast developed incalculable layers of bone. In reality, such qualities typically lead to extinction.
Like many other earth species, conJoin fluctuates effortlessly between forms. Still, the bone structure reveals that conJoin do not exist as pairs. Instead, its fossil exists as a foil that is constantly reconfiguring across binaries, gradients, and space. These different manifestations live effortlessly beside one another.
As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick understands it, “beside is an interesting preposition because there’s nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another... Beside permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that enforce a dualistic thinking.” conJoin has mastered being beside, a quality we should strive for.
Once upon a time there were two sisters and one got married and one didn’t. Or, once upon a time there were two piglets and one went to market and one didn’t, or, one was straight and one wasn’t. The point is, whatever they did or failed to do, they were a great disappointment to their poor mother. Luckily for them, the two sisters loved one another. When they saw that their mother was growing more and more unhappy, they proposed to her that she cut them in half and out of the two good halves make one splendid one. Their mother refused in high indignation, but she was so wretched that the dutiful daughters went to a surgeon. The surgeon obligingly sawed them in half, then interchanged halves and stuck them together. But there were still two of them. This was a problem. So they went back home and said to their mother, “Now choose the good one.” But their mother was furious that they had even thought of such a scheme. “You did it to mock me,” she told them angrily. “You are both bad children.”
When the two sisters heard her say this, the Good One wept, but the Bad One smirked.
Snow White and Rose Green Suniti Namjoshi
You are both bad children
You are both good children
caRe evolved from the desire to care for themselves, yet do so in an inverted way. At first, caRe may appear to be a bit more selfish than their siblings. In actuality, their plumage makes them one of the most giving. While their spines wrap around to reach themselves, their ribs reach outward, exposing most of their vital organs where they are most vulnerable. caRe’s strong internal core provides the species with enough strength to continually reveal themselves.
The self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde, understood that “visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.” It is this truth that actuates ca R e ’s evolutions.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
William Blake
For what is the ‘heart,’... but a ‘spring’; and the ‘nerves,’ but so many ‘strings’; and the ‘joints,’ but so many ‘wheels,’ giving motion to the whole body” intended by the Artificer?
Thomas Hobbes
In an ironic way, Rest evolved from the desire to be still.
Despite this impulse, Rest, like their siblings, display signs of unbounded transience.
José Esteban Muñoz shares that “the here and now is a prison house... but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact better pleasures; ultimately new worlds.”
Evidence suggests that Rest evolved to find repose despite existing in a constantly moving environment.
Instead of truly being still, Rest accepts the challenge of change and finds solace in movement itself.
If there is nowhere to rest at the end, how can I get lost along the way?
If it exists, it is natural. When did the fallacy of the mutant become a method of othering? Are your lungs, skin, and heart not all mutations of a previous form?
The truth is that nothing ever stops, not even for a moment. While we have language to describe and communicate our various forms, we are ever-evolving faster than we can or need to decipher. Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz defines the very thing that drives me: “Queerness is not yet here… Queerness exists as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’ domain.”
Such an assertion positions reality as in potentia: in the process, on the cusp, of becoming this-thing or that-thing in particular. While we can never truly become such-a-thing in particular there is incredible merit in the movement toward it.
