Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Contingencies


--after Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno


All these penguins just chilling out

It’s so dark and all the ice is melting under our feet
The feet of the transcendental subject

Now that there is only horizon and inside and outside this drone
In my ear not even mine, but not yours either

What they are gathered for, the penguins
They love being together and warm each other
While another world ends, the world that is our only one

Machines talk to one another, adjust the thermostat
Inside this earth

A moon rises but it is not the moon after all,

Nor is it the sun either, this light source
But a suddenness of places we can’t gather

Far away the birds dream a fog machine in Central Park
The anti-moonlight of their minds eye teleporting damp

Light sources that are only lights, glissando lights

Dry ice communicated between objects
As if just any moon could rise.

*

The wall moves without you
But this isn’t so strange,
And the lights flicker and go out
But this isn’t so strange,
And the posters on the wall glow in the dark
But this isn’t so strange,
And there are robots which
Reproduce Marilyn Monroe’s
Handwriting on hotel stationary,
But this isn’t so strange either

And it isn’t so strange that the sound
Of a dog rustling in the grass
Or of insects buzzing is amplified,
Or that an anime character is speaking to me
And that she has a live body double
Played by a teenage girl,
Nor that a balloon rises over the houses
And looks like a moon at this scale,
Nor that the room can contain a microclimate
Or that penguins gather around a light source,
Or that a piano plays by itself while an
Ash-like substance falls to it
Dusting its lacquered surfaces—no

What is strange is that we are here at all
And that your face is lit-up suddenly
In a building that seems like a ruin but
Has recently been renovated,
And this feeling of having lost you
While we wait for the orgy scene
And that the cops have to break up the marching
Band as they play “Hava Nagila” in tandem with
A-ha’s “Take on Me,” the crowd booing the police
As we queue up outside the Centre Pompidou,
And that your Paris apartment is so similar to
Your New York apartment, and that one would
Eat a plank of cheeses for dessert.

*

And then we realize that we were the aliens
And then we realize that we are the monsters
And we never did understand why they created us
And we never will understand why they want to destroy us
And so it must be something that we didn’t know we did
How would we ever even know the intentions of an alien?

If a machine could talk what would it say
I don’t think these pianos are playing for us
I’m pretty sure this wall wouldn’t care if it crushed us
When we lose our faith in Marilyn we have lost our faith of humanity
Listening to the world like I was Christopher Knowles
They were building an arsenal against their only world
They were tracking a message because they didn’t know who sent it

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