Over this scene, Terese is reading a monologue: it might be audible, it’s about the Apocalypse and its seven signs, first something about how the internet is drained, then about waffles contorting in their waffle irons, next about snowing streetscapes covered in white – it snows milk cartons, yoghurt cups, fish balls and grated white cheese – then she shouts that the goat’s cheese will go rancid, and that the white and grey speckled wool sweaters will all simultaneously split their seams across the country, and the IKEA shelves, the IKEA chairs! Look! They’re transformed into pick-up sticks and falling apart. We should never have chucked those Allen keys.
Then the skies fall, and techno and black metal, too. Lightning and thunderbolts strike across the country. Classroom set after classroom set of the New Testament fills with black ink. They rub out their own content, turning white to black. Soon The Old Testament follows; the chapters eat themselves and leave hundreds of pages of black monochrome, until Adam and Eve and the myth of creation and heaven are darkened and the earth is stuffed and backfilled.
Prawns.
Now the world prints a map of itself in 3D, in tones of blood.
Now the 3D printer prints two plastic people.
It’s Terese and Venke, embracing each other like lovers hugging, or like newborn twins, or yin and yang. They suck each other’s thumbs. They are smoking, they are hot, melting into each other until they resemble a puddle.
The chicken keeps squeaking.
Then the material gets colder, colder, cold.
The Pool
Look! We see Terese’s and Venke’s bodies fall, legs first, head and arms last. They are dressed in swimming costumes and fall in slow motion, so slowly that it’s almost unbearable to watch. Centimetre by centimetre their feet come closer to the ground, which is shaped like a pool apparently filled with water. Since their movements are so drawn out, their bodies seem already stuck in something, something viscous, as if they are hanging in the air, as if we have opened a space between time once more, and the two are stuck in the mass between the milliseconds.
The beginnings of a shout can be heard in the distance, far inside the muscles deep down in the throat, extending into faint white noise that drones quietly in the stagnant room.
The two figures rush toward the surface in a long arc, making the skin on their faces, on their thighs and breasts and around their ankles, wobble infinitely slowly, like the heavy layers of stage curtains drawn up and down. Their skin is so elastic that it threatens to split and fall off, both upward and downward. In this infinity Venke and Terese look like unborn foetuses but also corpses, twisted by coagulated time, on their way to the underworld, the underwater world, the amniotic fluid world, down into the subculture.
Then we notice that the pool isn’t filled with water, but with jelly, and that it isn’t a pool, it’s a cleverly made aspic shaped like a pool. Huge bits of prawn and peas the size of tennis balls are hidden in there. Eggs as big as rugby balls are scattered around, split in half or in quarters, but with red, not yellow, jelly yolks.
When Venke’s and Terese’s bodies finally hit the pool’s surface, there is no splash, only a jiggle, and the gelatin swallows them both.
Aspic is a voyeuristic fantasy, a fantasy about being able to see through structures, through matter. We see straight through the form and into the contents. We see corpses in the ground, penis in vagina. The impenetrable web and enclosed surfaces that we’re used to seeing on almost all other objects disappear with aspic. In the objects’ place, the eye senses the possibility of hope, an alternative to the systems, an alternative that illuminates the mysterious and shows us what we ordinarily can’t see. The aspic is like an X-ray; it stops what flows and opens up what is closed. The aspic gives us access to eternity.
The aspic, set in savoury gelatine, is in this way an invisible container, without air, gravity or time; it’s 100 per cent texture. First concocted in the Middle Ages, it develops through centuries, parallel with the witch trials, reaching its peak in the 1950s. As the atom bombs and the hydrogen bombs are detonated and towns and landscapes and humans and animals are pulverised, thousands of cartons with aspic are congealing all over the world, and inside them are meticulously sliced fish morsels, seafood and vegetables.
When dinner is carried to the dining table later in the evening, it’s the notion of creating a space for what’s been blown to pieces that jiggles between the hands of the housewife. The soft but congealed world of the aspic dissolves gravity, and breeds absurd foetuses in its jellied, salty amniotic fluid, binding the chaos of the world as it quivers against the housewives’ bodies. It’s a draft of an alternative form of expression.
Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth.
Aspic is the original internet.
Aspic teaches me to write.
Aspic is our own man-made blasphemy.
I send Venke and Terese into the aspic. They’re lying there, fixed, perhaps with their
