Excerpts from Past the sun (2-4) and Bodied call (5-6)

Francis de Lima

Icarus won't leave, or letter against absolution

When someone moves into your space and won’t leave it's easy to be consumed by the idea of the non-imitable soul such as this shoelace being atoms arranged to be my shoelace. We had all decided to be demons that spring to actually do something for the sake of the oscillations of heat and thunder through the suburb and in it the parakeets thriving off the excess heat. Fundamentally, shooting them seemed both unkind and contrary to the political apparatus of non-state sanctioned violence and none of us owned a gun anyway. Having said that, Icarus was busy trying to glue together a series of carved up floorboards, found in the attic, building a sort of makeshift prism of a rifle. This'll show them he said and we gathered in the kitchen, an inverse town hall, in the sense of it being both not in the center of a town nor open to all. We intimated on the bourgeoisie-inheritance of the townhouse we lived in; it’s possible etymological linkages. Someone had stolen the blueprints for the nearby Amazon Fresh which we planned to rob, until Icarus reminded us that out-of-date groceries were now available in an app. No need for dumpster diving. Just ask the app not to track. I think we should eat our phones but what do I know. At first having him around was a breath of hot air. There's a performance in the first crack of knowing that comes from the presumed tensions in the cartilage of social personhood. Icarus seemed to disagree you're all being fucking stupid, we should be blowing up a pipeline. Crass, naive, the tendency of violent protest becoming just that: the state, remade, in the states image. But the butterflies are disappearing haven't you noticed? I no longer have wings, but rational compassion was never limited to aesthetic similarities anyway. The atoms are no longer compressed. Electrons are watching each other. Sitting next to each other on the bus. The explosion needs to happen. Feedback. Eat the microphone. Eat the sun. We kept mother-in-law’s tongues and spider-plants in every room of the house in hopes of cleaning the air, adding some lungs to the cadaver of the city. But really drops in a petri-dish. Icarus kept sprinkling ash over the plants. I'm trying to immerse you in the experience of the eco-disaster. Eventually, he flooded the shower. Just preparing for the inevitable flooding, New Troy will be the tonsure within an ocean's scalp. And I'm the dandruff. I'm just giving you a taster. Get you acclimated so to speak. You should think about flipping the house. Maybe selling. Buying something in Oxbridge. Sometimes you have to have appropriate distance, we argued. To rest and recover. Self-care is important. We were considering a permaculture garden in the backyard. Cioran says we're always late to our own deaths Icarus declared and smashed every lightbulb in the house. We'll be early this time. Get used to the dark. He kept eating vegan hot wings and making a mess of my couch. Sometimes he did a little dance after sticking them into the dehiscences on his back. Look I can fly again. Look I'm doing my part. Look I'm the butterfly. We were asking him, kindly, to leave. Kept changing the locks to no avail. There he was, every time. Re-reading The Guardian on the couch in the TV-room. Outside the thunder was a closed fist over the sleeping body of the city.

Icarus moves in 

In the meeting housemates also 

activists also political bodies also 

conscious of also of consent being also

a poor and temporary also remedy also 

to the notion of also

dying 

THE MIND IS A BODY IS A BODY IS A BODY IS A BODY  

Icarus wonders about 

the dream of consciousness

what remains? 

Icarus asks a discarded 

coat or gloves arranged in neat piles but 

isn't that just

a coatrack? 

NO ETHICAL CONSUMPTION NO ETHICAL

two question marks tectonically together

look like a heart so they might 

be a heart or a dead pigeon 

or so Icarus argues anyway 

humour 

is easier 

than joy 

so we laugh 

about the 

wings

updating 

satellite imagery 

of the Palisades 

and Icarus has chosen 

not to leave our house 

we have no say

NITROUS OXIDE

the contingent patterning 

of the mine shaft in Lancashire

is the corpse of a night well spent

on Earth

beautiful day 

to help someone move

in to out of Camberwell 

A DYNAMIC ALGORITHM A DYNAMIC A SELF-REPLICATING  

Icarus lifts an

oily hessian sack

over my head

in the big house

he has 

moved in 

on the couch 

and won’t leave

the couch 

is dripping

seawater 

I stand outside the house

with the sack on my head

and scream 

BURNING IS BURNING IS BURNING 

Icarus stands on the doorstep with a coffee

good. channel 

self-immolation. 

but remember auto

destruction shouldn't

be a trend. really 

believe it. 

then they'll 

offer you a permanent

contract at

the Starbucks.

 Also I've been thinking a lot also 

I've been also the ice cores also 

the rocks and fossils also the glacial retreat also

ocean acidification also the methane 

the ozone also we fixed the also 

GRIEF IS A SELF- IS A SELF- IS A REP- 

catch us child proofing the sun

NATURALLY THE RADIATION OF THE SUN WOULD BE REFLECTED BACK INTO SPACE

That summer the heat brushed us into the ocean. There is something in the knowledge of the ending. Having said that, the middle might hold fully, in its own right. An attempt to describe the gradient effect of the ocean permeating the boundary of the sky is made, and a successful result is recorded. From within that, the floating islands are an affirmation of a kind of fiction of perception, which we might call beauty, or the extension of the aesthetic experience into the immediate. This is a formulated argument about the notion of memory. What wounds you in the recall is different than what wounds you in the body. Suppose the daily notes are moments of constellation. A child, spending their life on an islet, is apt at naming the rocks jutting from the ocean's note stand. This is neither a question of melody, nor of silence, as those who have come to understand the world through binaries might argue. The spectrum of noise is this: at some point, it coalesces into silence or sound, but really, we are talking about the existence of margins. Moving to the center is what affect means, but we must recall the ability for boundaries to move, which implicitly changes the absolute point of the center. This can be taken as an argument for relativity, but only in moments of oscillation. The waves lap over the granite, until the wind dies down totally. Low atmospheric pressure creates intensely vivid colours by bending air molecules through a prism-like structure. We apply filters to our own sight, both physiologically and cognitively. When we set out for the swim, the water is olive oil, deep in the well of its own colour. The seals have excellent sensory apparatuses and notice us immediately. They emerge, like diacritics, and splash down on the flat back of the water, as soon as we turn. There are six, eight. Young folks, hair down to their backs. Floating, eyes south, the sky is an absolute shade of purple, the facade the only constellation point in the observable periphery, water snapping up the boundaries between the sunglow, aspen, rust, sandstone, saffron, thistle, and heliotrope, into impossibly sharp detail. The only thing in the word is simply cover, the surface, the read. The decision is to recall in the moment, and acts as an anchor-theory into the improbability of existing in breath, in the body, and the ability to access it from afar. Laying down railway sleepers into our own cognition. Being able to retrace a series of steps without missing one seems unlikely, but we do it every day. If we are the sum of concurrent systems, then what might emergence entail? Someone, perched on a rock, waiting for the accent of the seals tail, landed into a body as a unit of labour, observing an ecology, ecstatic at the ability, the desire, to report the impossible totality of their perception.