#i’m not delulu! i don’t have spiritual psychosis! fictionalising and sensationalising real elements of my life and the way i view the world

[dandelionjack]

when i was a kid my worst intrusive repetitive nightmare images had to do with an excess of fingers. growing on mine or on my friends’ limbs, protruding from all the wrong places with the consistency of cartilage, rubbery and stiff, snapping at all those unnatural angles, wiggling into orifices, gently stroking cheeks. i’d wake up in a sweat and be afraid of looking at my own two hands, to check and discover that it had not been a dream, that i’m stuck forever with these warped vestigial appendages.

with the rise of ai the abilities of which we never could have dreamed of at that age, sounding more like science fiction that anything if i’d have heard these self-generated pictures described to me then, it seems that these night terrors were yet another ‘mundane oracle moment’. who would believe cassandra if her prophesies were absurd and inane and silly even? who would care about distilling an omen from an imaginative child’s overreaction to a dream, from their impassioned tale of twisted thumbs and split wrists? and if seven-year-old me, dreaming of what implied another ‘death of art’, could have been listened to, what course of action would they have deduced from it?

technological ‘progress’ is an unstoppable force, restriction and regulation does not prevent it but forces it to continue operation in hiding. louise’s daughter in arrival (2016) could have kept sculpting the alien’s forms from black play-doh forever, but the shapes wouldn’t have conveyed any meaning to the linguist before abbott and costello had first shown themselves from behind the mist, before the temporal paradox revealed itself. in that lies the uselessness, the futility. i’ve had a sizeable handful of similar moments, but the sum of their accuracy amounts to nothing. there is no good in post-factum revelations. canned laughter track erupts from behind the screen