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DISPATCH I | DISPATCH II | DISPATCH III | DISPATCH IV | DISPATCH V | DISPATCH VI
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A VISITOR
All the preparations have been made for the arrival of the Social (Malpractice) Anthropologist. Sean J Patrick Carney arrives after a week’s journey, with a thick stubble, a sleeping bag, and a backpack of field recording equipment. He quickly sets his myriad devices around our encampment and does some tests. I prepared for his visit by enhancing the Dentyne Ice Cape and making a fresh set of Our Hands for him to wear. I also made accommodations for him by removing a section of the Shelter that he could sleep within (see Week Five dispatch) since my companions didn’t think we should allow him into the sacred space of the Shelter itself. My companions, having spent so much time alone while I have foraged for provisions, have become distrustful of anyone that does not look like US.
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I am quite proud of the cape. Finding our grommet set, I am able to adapt formerly useful technology in the place of traditional clasps, buttons or decorative elements. I fasten the cape with a set of wired ear buds. With safety pins, I attach a series of iPhone 5’s to the bottom of the cape, so that their dull rattling might be heard as we trek through the blizzard-afflicted tundra. We will be able to use our hearing when our sight is impaired, to find one another in the blinding ether.
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Carney asks us questions about our time here. How did we get here? What are we doing here? What do we hope to get out of this endeavor? We have been so long here we could barely contain ourselves when he begins his recording. I sense my companions terrify him a bit: always lurking about, just staring at him with longing for Companionship. They have trouble connecting.
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That evening Carney seems quite terrified, and he departs earlier than anticipated the next morning. Although he slept as we have slept, and wore the hands that we have worn, and did his best to understand us, he was not one of us, not willing to become part of us. So he parted from us.
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A week later, he sends a dispatch of his recording:
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THE SNOW DRIFT
The state of this place is getting out of control. The evidence of our having lived and worked here for seven weeks is piling up. Not only have our bodies accumulated the scars of weekly surgical repairs, but the shelter has become rimmed with snow drifts. I shovel and sweep daily and the snow piles now contain the refuse of our survival: surgical gloves, hardened bread crusts, potato skins, the inky fuel of the Epson 9800, strapping material, scraps from the Shelter’s construction, parts of the dismantled Sled, by-products and packaging from food, tool and clothing production. If Spring does not come, I imagine we might drown in this sea of detritus.
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ANOTHER RITUAL
In the cold, everything breaks. The walls of the Shelter have been dripping bits all around. When I walk around the camp, my feet crunch in what must be snow, but sounds like grinding bits of plaster. A few weeks ago we broke the French Press we brought with us while trying to tap out the use coffee grounds. In a desperate grog I remembered my wife and I, in an Air BnB in California, conjuring a pour over coffee maker with some paper towels and a strainer. I replicate a similar thing here, so that we might build up that frantic coffee sweat that fuels our daily labors. Using gaffers tape, I adhere a strainer between two salad dressing bottles. The coffee ends up much stronger and less chalky than the French Press. Our weekly task is to build models for monuments to Our Tools, and I wonder whether this new tool will be remembered, or conveniently disappear into the tundra of my mind, until some future date when desperation strikes again.
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MODELS FOR MONUMENTS TO OUR TOOLS
We would be nothing without our Tools. Or rather, we would be something, but we would be lesser: desperate and quivering before the elements. But our tools magnify our labor and protect our hands, fingernails, feet and teeth. We cut and hammer and bludgeon this world into a shape that mirrors ourselves. We have no regard for the world as it lays before us. When we sculpt it into the shape of us, when it matches our perceptions, then we hold the world tight to us. We want then to possess it and share it with no one else. Those carved up parts of the world become our property.
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So many tools required to provide us with our needs, but I settle now on two: the hammer and the scissors. Striking and cutting, two of the most basic instruments of separating material reality from itself.
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HOPE AND FEAR
After another weekly forage, I return to find a dispatch from renowned artist and alter-ego pioneer Butt Johnson. He has sent by courier a drawing depicting my companions and our Shelter. This gives me great hope that we are not alone here. We hope to return in Spring to tell our tales. Yet my companions dryly note that I am not to be found in the drawing. Only them.
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When I try explain Butt’s drawing to my companions, it only deepens their paranoia that we are being perpetually watched. I try to calm them by reassuring them that it is we and only we here. That aside for our temporary Visitor, we are an insular group of like-minded intention. My companions refuse my assurances of “We” and insist we are “They”. As if we are perceived only from outside, by others. We are watched, we are watching. I begin to succumb to our blurry sense of truth and reality. We have no fixed vantage. We see behind, in front of, and beyond the horizon line.
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My companions move closer and closer to the edge of the camp and they will not rest, will not return to their Sleeping Pods. They stay perpetually upright like statues, looking ever in the direction of our Visitor’s arrival and departure. Do they long for something other than the collective US? Are “they” divorcing themselves from the “we” we once were? Do we, as group, long for something other or are we fearing that the other might arrive, to snap us out of our open-eyed slumber?
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They will not stop watching.