Tuesday, July 7, 2020

Collected Material Evidence


"The Dream (The Bed)", Frida Kahlo


Faded color photograph: A decrepit, single-story wooden shack. Sagging roof. Surrounding foliage is overgrown. Trees in background are partially consumed by kudzu. The river is black with silt. Strong wind bends visible branches. Sky is dark grey with clouds yet to rupture. Door is hanging open: interior cannot be seen.

**

Faded color photograph: Interior. A splintery wooden crib, filled with stained rags. Peeling yellow wallpaper. Pattern indistinct. Mildewed stuffed toy with limp neck.

**

Unreleased podcast excerpt: "It's like...say you have a giant tub filled with LEGO, and all the pieces are moving around and bumping into each other. Then two pieces from one particular set click into place, just like in the directions. And enough time goes by and the circumstances are just right and those two pieces fit together with a few more of the correct pieces and now you have a little cluster that's been built just according to the pattern.

Then you start getting another cluster forming, and all the pieces are different and they fit together in different ways, but it's still part of the same set as the first one, right? Different page of the directions, different pattern, same set.

Eventually, enough of those separate parts will come together, and the set's complete."

**

News site printout: Dated 02/05/2022. Headline: ANCIENT HUMAN REMAINS FOUND IN LAKE VOSTOK

**

Scrap of paper: "...the quince is the sole member of the genus Cydonia..."

**

Unpublished manuscript excerpt: "It was only ever an optical illusion. A plateau shaped just so, that a grainy black-and-white camera high above would send back images of a pallid, masklike face.

**

14th century woodcut, German: A skeletal woman weilding a hand sickle cuts off the arm of a recoiling peasant. She is exhaling a cloud of smoke and flies, and looks to have emerged from the ground.

**

Portrait: ("Old King Jeremiah", Anonymous, c.1830) Elderly man in yellow turban slouching in his chair, holding his face in despair. Table set with ornate, but tarnished, place settings and rotting fruit. In the background is a large portrait of a distant, snowy city has been set afire. A woman's form can dimly be made out in the shadows behind him: she is laying a hand upon his shoulder.

**

Damaged hardcover book: No title, author, or publishing information provided. 151 pages. French. Knife scars on black leather cover with few remaining traces of original embossed icon. Text has been heavily redacted by an unsteady hand.

**

Digital photograph: Graffiti on highway underpass. Location unknown. HER MOTHER WAS HER SISTER

**

Porcelain mask: Slim, androgynous appearance. White glaze shifts to pale gold at the edges.

**

Recollections of a dream: an open expanse of sere grass and stunted, dead trees, enveloped in a thick, grey fog. Still muddy water stretches out like a glistening mirror to the horizon, where stands the barely-visible towers of a distant city.

**

Suspicious mondegreen: "hidden in the branches of the poisoned creole soil..."

**

Viral computer application: カル コ サ.exe

**

Color photograph: Blurry image of a woman in a yellow dress, back turned to the photographer, surrounded by dark overgrowth. On the back, in faded ink: "Melinoë, saffron-cloaked nymph of the earth..."

**

Digital photograph: Graffiti on brick wall. Location unknown. Unidentified symbol in yellow paint (covered by other tags) accompanied by partial text. LE ROI N'A JAMAIS VECU LA REINE RESTE SANS FIN

9 comments:

  1. "The Yellow King is an infectious idea" is possibly one of my favorite pieces of horror.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I see you've put the idea to good use. Exceptional post.

    ReplyDelete
  3. The yellow wallpaper- do I detect a Literary Reference?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Indeed it is. The King (or Queen, in this case) nature as a self-referential meme-form is so much fun to play with for exactly that reason - you take the core ideas (a royal court, an ancient city, a mysterious lake, a banned play, a symbol, a mask, the degredation of the mind) and then just start drawing links.

      Like this whole thing got started because Mon linked me that Melinoe article - a nymph who wears sickly green-yellow and is associated with madness is good enough, but the specificity of quince as the color takes the cake because you can draw the link between that fruit and the Cydonia region of Mars where, as it should be no surprise at this point, there is a geographical feature that resembles a great pallid mask.

      Delete
  4. This is very tasty, though it's a shame Melinoe wasn't one of the Hyades (but that might have been too savoury a coincidence).

    ReplyDelete
  5. Well this is delightfully ominous

    ReplyDelete
  6. "Unreleased podcast excerpt" is my favorite of these. It's the least explicitly creepy, but I love the implication that the Carcosa meme resists entropy, that it defies conventional physics and *reverses* entropy. That it is creating something. Building up to something. Surrounded by imagery of decay and collapse not because it causes such things, but because it alone survives them untouched.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Beautiful and haunting. "Carcosa as memetic prion" is always something I'm here for, and yet fear. Good use of True Detective S1; The Handsome Family has a lot of unsettling/evocative tracks. (I'm particularly fond of "All These Golden Jewels," which can be read as the literally toxic relationship between capitalism and nature)

    ReplyDelete