Amerika & the Density, the Destiny, the Sign and the Sign (prelude)

My love for the experiment had led us all to ruin. But I flatter myself (for who is left to flatter?) This is what I thought as I narrated to myself softly, huddled under the desk in the lab as things only describable by their shadows swayed outside and got worse.
Amerika and semiotics had invited me to share my research at the symposium, but as I made my way down the high street, the seasons shattered, cars heaving upwards through space, tracing beats and the screams jumped around like fireflies. I'd seen this all before, this apocalypse. In the summer of 2001 I'd recorded it, improvised its contours, edited its nuances, just as I had written the liner notes and submitted them now. But it was I who was submitting to the liner notes and the experimental method - the method that had opened and elongated like soft hidden flesh to manifest a sphere of dense pleasures. This is not a classic Frankenstein tale. This is a story about the density, the destiny, the sign and the sign.

I began with Acid (TM) and samples of the cultures (IN) which I had grown. Mixing these incongruous elements resulted in a series of defeats and challenges. I recorded over 10 hours of attempts, tactics, guises - entranced and ensconced in a strange house of wonders. It was as if this war-of-the-worlds that even now mutilates our home planet and eclipses our solar system (leaving us with nothing but the seductive cold of deep space) was foreshadowed by my perverse experiments.

My results were infuriatingly inconclusive, yet I knew I was on the edge of a terrible discovery. I was too close, hanging on a precipice, my feelings unnameable, my tragic flaw ambiguous. I wanted to dance and sing, but I just cut myself, my samples and my rhythms again and again. The Love Interest made various appearances but I told it that, in this story, it was only an object - I was so cruel. Little did I know that, between you and I, we both carried a womb and a seed of a madness, of a psychosis born in the incubation and synthetic fluids of a society ashamed of its own body and narcissistically devouring its own spectacle waste. Little did we know our love would grow into the end of our species, of all species, and worst of all, a stillborn specious hypothesis.

I was at the end of my rope, going mad. I could not stand to stare at the monstrosity a moment longer. I sent the strange work to Dr. Jon Vaughn, my close colleague and friend, who was safe in the flatlands, away from the ocean which threatened me and my institutions. I was reminded of Tarkovsky's Solaris, the cellulose of that film could only barely contain that malevolent and infinite tempest of dreams and desires. I needed a break and I went to the club where the young and the old devoured each other, forgetting their tenses and speaking alone in verbs and articles. Dancing to the beat, I saw your eyes and we made contact, touching ever so briefly in the carnage of one thousand years of rhetoric. You were wearing only technotechno and you said that it's the destiny, the density, the sign and the sign.

We had loved for months when Dr. Vaughn returned the work to me. It was as you and I and the others were lying on the beach. Waves of radiation filtered through our soft flesh and burning its memory into us and I can still feel it today, even in this body we could never have imaged. There won't be any more days like this I said to you, but you said that someday you would read these liner notes and remember me and how it was in the days before all of this nonsense and inter-tense and density. Dr. Vaughn had butchered my work in his mystical way, carving off hulks of meat, fat, sinew. In places he had added his rare secret seasonings and flourishes. I was pleased. I left you so as to run back to my lab, my heart divided as the earth itself would be only a few hours hence. I could almost taste the truth: that we would only see each other again in the reflection of a compact disk, each laser-burnt micron a tiny holographic reflection of the times we had spent together, waiting for what we knew would come but of which we could never speak.

Back at the lab, I assembled the necessary components, mastering with ease those flashes and edits. As I reacquainted myself with the mutated and matured work, its dark logic and desires were becoming clear. I was at once as cold and as hot as deep space and your deep spaces. Fear and exhilaration - I began to glimpse what I had done. Across the communicator came the vector analyses and graphical diagrams prepared by my colleague Dr. Gates, illuminating the dark corners of the project. My greatest hopes and terrors were confirmed. But as I worked, shadows grew. I was too blinded by passion and fear to see them. I collapsed after hours of work, letting the pieces incubate as I slumbered.

I am having a dream that you and I dance under a red sun, that we dance as four moons rise off a jade green horizon of a planet made only for us. A planet that was not a planet at all, but a sphere that we shared in our souls. I fell and I fell. I awakened to discover that Amerika and everything around it was gone: I knew this was it. The earth was coming apart, the sky was crumbling, the oceans were raging in their blindness and thirst. I knew it was time. Weeping hysterically, I secured what I remained of my tragic experiment in the shuttle. I would have enough for 4 more doses: 4 more chances to pierce space and time to nestle in the light of eternity. I picked my headphones, now covered in unspeakable fluids, off my desk and placed them on my head. I initiated countdown...

(Parts two-through-five of Chan Son In will appear in the near future, provided we exist to hear it).