the looping trajectory of the baseball sketches the contours of a hegelian night in which all cows are black, an attempted transcendence that collapses back upon itself. the arc describes a flight from the particular only to be reabsorbed by the crowd, its historical significance dissolving into the undifferentiated touch of innumerable hands. j. edgar hoover's meticulous archive of domestic transgression reveals itself as the symptomatic management of a repressed maternal object, the filing cabinet a surrogate womb of contained anxieties. history is simply a system for managing the shame of one's origins.

i am trying to write about delillo's systems of waste and dread from a mcdonald's by the train station. the novel's paranoia is the national secret, official and immense.

every word i type about the cold war is an encrypted message about her. she is the kgb agent on the line. she is the fallout shelter in the suburban yard, a promise of safety that functions as a tomb.

my analysis of hoover's files becomes a catalog of the secrets i keep from her. my dissertation on the logic of deterrence becomes the silent war we have waged for decades over the kitchen table.

this whole project is a failed letter to her. i am trying to explain my own small vegetated life as a world-historical condition. literature is the confession a son makes to a mother who will never read it.

a cast iron stove. its metaphysical necessity resides in its relentless transformation of dross into actualized heat, a thomistic principle by which being asserts itself against non-being. lukewarm tea finds its ontological nullity exposed by the stove's igneous declaration of existence.

floor-to-ceiling raw steel shelving, densely packed. one section holds carmelite-approved early twentieth-century detective fiction; the other, multiple editions of aquinas. this ordered duality reflects creation's intelligibility. the summae provide ultimate structure; the whodunits, solvable chaos. lukewarm tea offers cognitive blur, detriment to discerning divine order or the murderer's motive.

a rush-seated chair from a defunct oratory. its severe form mandates specific posture, conducive to focused intellection. aquinas posits the body's orientation can dispose the soul. this seat demands engagement lukewarm tea betrays through its lack of definition and vigour.

passages curve, leading to alcoves faced with untreated timber.
seating: long, low plinths of stone, or a single, deep armchair angled towards an unadorned wall.
shelves appear, recessed and empty, awaiting a purpose they might never receive.
sound: the faint scuff of a shoe on tessellated floor, air through unseen vents.
light originates from sources obscured within the structure itself, defining shadow.
a small, perfectly symmetrical carving on a low sill, a tactile palindrome.
here, solitude becomes the absence of demand.
one might simply exist, a footnote to an unwritten text.
the pressure to be anyone particular evaporates.
a space for the interior hum, the unarticulated.
this quietude stands as its own destination.

the chipped melamine counter, sticky.
tastes of burnt ambitions and shared despair.
my skull feels like a poorly insulated server farm.
every thought a distinct heat signature.
the waitress humming off-key.
this relentless internal ticker tape of idiocy.
jump cuts and continuity errors.
i need to catalogue the precise shade of grey on that pigeon's wing.
the structural integrity of a sugar packet.
the sound of a fork scraping a plate.
a thousand tiny atrocities.
my brain trying to escape through my ears.
the rustle of her nylon uniform.
like bad foley work.
god, a mcnugget.
and that processed honey mustard.
a tiny island of caloric oblivion.
the granular texture of existence.
unbearable.
close the fucking blinds.

my practice articulates the liminal currents of multiplicitous becoming.
this becoming unfolds through rhizomatic convergences, an interstitial play within the given.
the haptic visuality necessitates a recalibration of the epistemic field.
this invites a somatic engagement, a traversal prior to semiotic capture.
the work is a generative matrix of différance.