Babel

Sometimes he felt like he was outside of himself, looking with slight disdain at the expressionless features of his face, but still feeling his face somehow, numbly, like putty. This happened a lot in taxis. Often, he was attached to his body the way the lens in a phone is connected to its owner as it snaps the selfie in a mirror. Sometimes it was worse, much worse. Sometimes he felt like he was just a volume of paper thin skin encompassing nothing, a human balloon terrified of pins, trying to pretend to everyone that everything is normal, when he was actually terrified, rigid with worry that he might just pop at any given moment. This mostly happened in the build up to office socials. Occasionally he was overcome with remorse. He would feel like he had been entirely unfaithful to his previous selves by attaining so little, by forgetting their dreams, by allowing their passions to be slowly doused in alcohol and BBC reruns. This mostly happened during hangovers. His generally applicable panacea of aimlessly surfing Vimeo’s Staff Picks would no longer work in these instances, so he would walk. Preferably up and down things, like ramps and stairs, regular repetitions of similarly sized steps, but outside, so he could feel the cold or heat on his face. This left few options in his vicinity that were suitable, namely the assortment of multi storey car parks whose ramps and stairs he would ascend and descend in alternation, up the stairs, down the ramps, down the road and up the ramps then down the stairs and so on. The guards were always too busy chatting to notice him and incrementally, with each step he took, he would fill out. Not feel good or anything like that, just that the terror would go away. As he climbed he would slowly lose the feeling that he was his own double, or that there was nothing inside him and he had to hide it, or that he was only the sum of other people’s opinions of him. These walks, usually at night, lit by neon, were the only times he started to feel that the grammar-less 20,000 word email full of misspellings that he usually felt himself to be was sort of fixing itself, adding full stops, using spell check, becoming legible. The car parks were his tower of babel. He was building with his feet, up and up, piling on top of each other, ever higher ramps and stairs and stairs and ramps. Precipitously, endlessly, he was reaching for himself, for his one unitary self, whole, sure and pristine. But every time, sure as with the biblical tower itself, the moment would come when he would shatter. Like a warning that you can and should never try and approach an ideal, even yourself, let alone God, just as he was able to gather a glimmer of relief, each and every time, he would splinter back into a thousand anxieties, a million viewpoints, each with their own language, lost and confused. In the broken wake of his collapsed edifice, he would return home haunted each time with all of his facebook pages and twitter profiles crowding around him and shouting at each other like demented and vengeful spirits.

Lick

It was on the second visit to this girl’s flat that he noticed the vase, in the corner of the room, partially obscured behind an aspidistra. With her he was just going through the motions, being polite, maintaining for the sake of form conversations in which he could never really give his opinion, since the way she expressed hers clearly implied an absolute intolerance towards those held anywhere near the other end of the spectrum, which was where his tended to reside. He mostly mumbled agreement. And what went on in the bedroom left plenty to be desired. Lights had to be off, pitch black, lots of no go areas, no noises, or sometimes deadening, theatrically unbelievable ones.

It was during her interminable “chats” over mugs of cold tea that he developed an attraction for the vase, which was directly behind her end of the sofa, meaning he could study its contours, become intimately acquainted with the play of sunlight on its glaze, whilst appearing to be entirely concentrated on whatever infinite list of right-wing platitudes she was reeling off at any given moment. The uneven, translucent turquoise of its bulging central section glinted and shone from within like shallow summer waters. Shadows from the agitated aspidistra were passing clouds, they served only to emphasise the vividness of that which they would so briefly hide.

Where she always presented herself as flawless, her vase was full of imperfections. In one place there was a deep crack filled with shiny lead, looking for all the world like a river seen from space as it catches the sun. Nearby on a particularly broad expanse of diaphanous light-green, there was an area of finely interwoven, multi-layered crazing (fine cracks), as if the vase were a thinly frozen lake, and someone had just walked across it.

Its blue had more depth, and more intelligence than the blue in her eyes. Its curves gave themselves up to the sunlight, to delight, to his eyes more freely than she would have ever dreamed of allowing herself, and he found himself coming over more and more often, found himself saying how much he liked to “chat”, found himself waiting for each time she went to the loo.

Within the confines of its S-curve profile, its three different glazes and their varying depths, he discovered an entire world that he feasted on not only with his eyes, but as he drew close when she would leave the room, with the tips of his fingers, with his whole palm, cupping each protrusion lovingly, with the tip of his tongue, tickled by its alpine coolness, the occasional powdering of malty dust, the thrill, the sheer tingling release of running the full way around, from top to bottom, side to side, with the entire surface of his tongue, spread out at full sail and sliding with total abandon.

It was delicious, a delight. A pile of clay, a dusting of sand, some minerals, fire. It didn’t say a word. It didn’t do anything. And yet it filled his senses, pricked his desire, drew him back. He felt an affinity with the Hebrews who believe that human life originated in clay, that the very first man, Adam, was really also the very first piece of ceramic, fired in the breath of God. The vase was definitely more alive than the girl. He was even beginning to feel like it was more alive than him, like it was an object out of time that required his veneration, needed a weekly tribute of caresses, attention, adulation and passion from a mere mortal or else it would silently bleed itself away, disappear into an attic, die.

After a few weeks, already suspicious as to why he kept coming over, especially since their relationship had ended and they didn’t exactly get on like bff’s, she pretended to go and write an email in her bedroom, watching instead from her room as he surreptitiously crept over to her plant, kneeled down next to it, grabbed the urn which used to contain her great grandmother’s ashes, and started fondling, licking, and practically necking it like he was some disgusting, deranged dog in heat.

She pushed him to the door shouting things along the lines of ‘what the hell is wrong with you?’ and ‘get out you freak’. She never replied any of his texts after that. Luckily they did not have any mutual friends.

Me Me Me Me

It is the act of copying/modifying itself that keeps the thing being copied alive, maintaining its bloodline, sustaining its aura.

Its imitators, its satirists, its defacers are all just further validation of its genetic vigour.

The larger the number of its progeny the greater its value.

Every single distorted copy transforms the original to the exact degree by which it differs from it, so that the increase in value of the original is a direct outcome of the degree to which it is being constantly transformed.

Every reinterpretation forever alters the manner in which the thing being interpreted can be understood in the future.

This is a story of instantaneous genetic evolution, millions of Galapagoses a year studied with wonder from the little HMS Beagles of our laptops.

Beneath the biological matter coming and going and breeding and dying, it is also a geological tale.

It is about the slow sedimentation of layer after layer of meaning, compressing infinitesimally into something durable, cohesive, hard and representative, a collective landmass of superficialities layered so high they have become the very incarnation of depth, there for us to excavate before the whole thing slides into the sea.

The Arctic ice cap is melting in inverse proportion to the rate at which the internet is growing. 1 gigabyte for one cubic metre.

Less is more : Mies Van Der Rohe

Less is a bore : Robert Venturi

Less is a snore : Gianni Versace

Yes is more : Bjark Ingels

More is more : Gianfranco Ferre

I am a whore : Phillip Johnson

Yantralection

Oh my god, the first collection is done: hashtag WANT. Seriously, if I got one of these, I think I would be happy for a few minutes, seriously, maybe even more, like an eternity 4 me, 4EVER; but you, if you got one, I know you follow instructions, like 2 the letter, perfect early-adopter that you are, you'll love yours endlessly, like a little car crash in your living room that you can't help constantly looking at, slowing your life down just 2 stare, little monstrous piece of kryptonite that it really is, instructions say "Immolate me in your gaze, and as I burn each time, you will be slightly more free". lol. Yeah, and eating Special K evry days gona turn me in2 Kate Moss. Still #want

ps, u can buy this stuff, in evil little limited editions (hey, the artist gotta live).

Contact me at adamnathanielfurman@gmail.com 4 more info.

Grrrr!

Yantrament

When we indulge in our daily practice of controlled distraction, we become more and more familiar with the labouring processes of our consciousness, and in particular we learn to recognize the unstoppable movement of the mind, the indefatigable energy of our being which we usually experience as feelings, unquestioned drives, nervousness, anxieties, but which here we can observe objectively as so many insubstantial thoughts, drifting past like thunder clouds on the horizon.

We do this by using an object of meditation to provide a contrast, a counterpoint to what is running through our head, an exterior reference point to which we can come back and through which we can regain a state of observation over ourselves. As soon as we go off and start thinking about something, losing ourselves in the worry of having not answered this or that email, or the unpleasant sensation of our muffin-tops pressing against the waistline of our trousers, awareness of the Yantrament will bring us back.

Yantralicious.mov

Yantralicious from Adam Nathaniel Furman on Vimeo.

Despite trying to get some work done, his gaze twitched nervously across the various objects on his desk, skipping over them in quick succession, ever so briefly touching each one with his mind in a carousel of table top distraction. A porcelain figurine, a flashcard reader, a camera, some cables, a soft toy, a plastic character of graphic nature, measuring tape, mug, crystal ball, gilt frame without photo, souvenirs, speakers that look like flies eyes, some costume jewellery. Where he would usually be compelled by the invisible hand of his anxiety to check if anyone had posted on instagram every 10 minutes, recently his mental escape from the computer screen was refuge in things within a metre of him that he could reach out and touch, and which he took to moving around, reorganising in little groups, brief collections that made sense only to the edges of his reasoning, but which were gradually exerting greater and greater gravitational pull on his eyes away from MS Word to his right, or left, depending where he had placed them that afternoon. The pursuit recalled the endless fascination of playing with building blocks as a child, their willingness to absorb the implication of stories without anything being too clear, but this was more calming. As he turned them over repeatedly in his mind, the objects often merged together, sometimes one way, sometimes another, appearing in his wandering attention when he was away from his desk, so that on the tube, standing in the queue for the post office, waiting for the lift, he could turn his thoughts towards these collections of things. Shapes which now in the light of his imagination began to evolve away from their primordial beginnings on the desk next to his computer, sometimes reaching dazzling heights of kaleidoscopic inventiveness, always exercising his freedom of focus, enlarging his field of awareness to include and enjoy the creativity of distraction.

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Yantra
a two- or three-dimensional geometric composition used in sadhanas, or meditative rituals. It is thought to be the abode of the deity. Each yantra is unique and calls the deity into the presence of the practitioner through the elaborate symbolic geometric designs.

Delicious
1) very appealing to the senses, esp to the taste or smell 2) extremely enjoyable or entertaining
Origin, C13: from Old French, from Late Latin dēliciōsus, from Latin dēliciae delights, charms, from dēlicere to entice; see delight