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Every tree dreams of being a forest. 
We are that dream. 
We are that tree, dreaming a forest. The wood is felled and hewn into the side of a great ship. The ship is launched quietly, in the night, and now ears are listening for a wind.

A deflated void has an impossible weight. 

The mute language of onion skins is trying to tell me things.

In a meaningful universe one desperately seeks out nonsense.
Then, in a meaningless universe, one desperately seeks meaning, hunting it out from wherever it may be found. An infinite tide of greener grass on an equally infinite retreat.
Sinuous sputum, spectacular spatula, baroque stupidity. 
To portion out the oblivion of one’s life.

The forest is not destroyed by a wooden hut – nor will it be harmed by a gingerbread hut – it is the path to that hut which wounds. And if the sugared prison is broken apart by a savoury woodcutter, then the forest will begin to tremble. 


Nonsense is something of a revolving door. 
Anxiety in my ears, the septic build up of years, a waxy re-routing of tears. Not deep thoughts but slow ones.

No wind yet.

There is an injustice in having to be in one place at one time. One suspects that we are creatures destined to be multiple and connected; all points, all places; and then one will be very still.

The concierge says that the key is functioning perfectly. Perhaps it is the door that is causing you problems?

He was writing a novel and had to stop because everything he wrote came true. Someone suggested that he carry on but give the novel a happy ending. And who, he asked, would buy that?
He wrote: Jimmy’s amazing jissom astonishes his gang as it leaps through his blurred fist to dance before them in animated tableaux. His come forms an amazing cartoon into which they enter so as to rescue the Princess. Twice they succeed and twice she is recaptured. Jimmy’s friends are enthralled by this adventure and yet on Jimmy’s third and final orgasm his spunk is done and the vision gone and the gang are horrified for it is all over and the Princess remains locked up and they, although shamed to admit it, feel responsible for this. They suspect they have unconsciously conspired to allow for the easy recapture of the Princess. Jimmy’s balls are aching, spent baubles; all he ever wished of his special juices was that his friends would appreciate them. Instead those friends now turn on him, and ridicule him so as to cover up their shame for the failures of their inglorious adventure. 

The liquidity of thought will erode or otherwise attack any concrete expression. Through the dumping ground of brain and mineral heart this fluid, disallowed from common or open flow, is a leachate of dissolved magnificence and terror.

Eroded like a frozen lake skated upon, the mind has a regular pattern of grooves around its edge. In the middle it is empty apart from a gradually frosting over crack, a hole that opened briefly and then shut on top of a child.

The Skating Minister by Henry Raeburn
Go conk me pan: Waiting on the stupid inside of you like a classroom caught agog at the sight of a pile of books precariously held aloft by ajar door and door-frame. 
A spray of glitter, pillow stuffing for a prison existence. 

When digging a hole keep digging but ensure that one changes direction. Now one is tunnelling.

Beyond its stretch marks this universe is satiated with the love of its own conception. Stars and void suffer from a sense of loss. 
In separation anxiety there is a deep seated desire for connection simultaneously linked to an oft destructive wariness of intimacy. 
We are all twins of the broken bond, our better sibling abandoned in the womb.
We are both jealous of and saddened by this absence. 
We are frightened of the unspoken knowledge of how questions posed in one nebula may be immediately answered in another. If this is allowed, so will hurt felt in one place be immediately experienced by the entire body.

I lift my head above the parapet, a crown appears upon my head. I think it is a crown at first but it turns out to be a fortified wall.
I lift my head above the parapet.
I am crowned, the crown turns into a wall which make me safe, although my kingdom is small.
I lift my head above the parapet; the sight is astonishing, as if all the world were mine. From out my brow there grows a crown; it turns into a fortress.
I lift my head above the parapet.


Anxiety in my ears, septic build up of years, a waxy re-routing of tears.
Not deep thoughts but slow ones.

The estuary beats out its own time and we, at last, are quiet for a while.

Now we dare hold it, make a shape of it, and even dredge it for the untainted sun. 

The key works fine, do you have the right door?
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As the ways
of chivalry,

so the current ways of doing commerce will one day be arcane. The mysteries of the round table were also the tabulations of exchange. And in days to come, should those days arrive, then the mysterious manner of knighthood may be at least as distant and at least as impenetrable as the current urgency of exploitation and electronic usury and the leverage of false scarcity.


Yet the troubadour sung trail of the chivalrous is a dream which still marks our trail. The city is mustered around heraldic banners and its names are heaped atop of old stories, and those squeezed out, paled, redrawn, elaborated and once more forgotten memorials still run their course within our consciousness. 

Maybe these stories, sunk just below that which can be approached in the presumptions of rationality, are actually those forms around which the new myths of finance and banking take shape?


It all comes down to a moment when the red knight, the green knight, the white knight, and black knight commingle in a quantum affray. The white sheep are black sheep, the black sheep are white, they cross the river and reverse, they cross the river and reverse: the black sheep are white sheep, the white sheep are black.

I stand at the Cripple Gate, a solitary beggar awaiting sustenance from trade. Elusive trade of the city, my rags speak me as a poor traveller, a stranger. My manners are alien. 

Grand towers arise, sparkle and glory, the king-in-deed. The architecture is sovereign in expression, and its role is to make beggars stand at a gate through which royalty will never pass.


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Ownership is a drapery
and the deep is an act of the imagination
which cuts

a hole in the drapery.

I see through a hole the clouds. The enormous volume of these clouds, stretched height and length, give to the panorama an assurance of the land’s enormity.

John Constable, “A Cloud Study, Sunset,” ca. 1821.

And the volume of the land below, stretched and pushed, still conclude in the vastness of rock below. The visible land drapes across an invisible mantle.

The roots underneath and the clouds above and my time as a smeared volume running between. 
There is a mereness to the meeting. 
We can peek; these the meek scales, these the timings we cannot attain; these are journeys already made, the length which continues 

beyond and outside of the seen moment.

Our imagination is continually absconding from the tumult of dimensions, but vastness is the duty of imagining.

Here is the urban drapery.

Here is the studded surface of attentiveness.


The chemical and the electronic gather as the armed do muster in the feld and as castle formed the manor. The robes of the legendary are not long enough to cover our immodest awareness.

Often the shallows are as impenetrable as the deeps. 

Often the greatest depths will flit away without note, entirely insubstantial.

Often the surface of a building will stimulate one’s memory. Memory is another drapery.

The imaginable shallows are a drapery of heavy grief, sometimes lifted in order to flirt with the disowned and unseen depths.

Vastness is the calling, the horrified call. And response to the call devastates chronological time.

These devastation are moments of transition.

We are in transit.

We are devastated

therefore the drapery has been lifted ruffled cut

or otherwise

disturbed

other-wise is 
and will be therefore 
the irruption in moment. 

Non-time in time and no-place in this place. Therefore the irruption of moment in moment is this

and this is forever transformative.


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Estate map

The map of the estate is an eulogy for Utopia (which retreats with each brick laid down and yet might nonetheless exist, beyond the design, in some lived proportion not yet detailed and never quite imagined). The map of the estate is an epitaph (that architects and planners will habitually erect before some others’ tombstone while never once suspecting how they designed it for themselves). The map of the estate is an epiphany of symbols and silence in the long _ alarmed _ night.

Sorry, copyright restrictions prevent us from showing this artwork here


Artist
 In ven to ry  (founded 1996)

Title

Estate Map
DaSte19u99mmInventory is a group of artists, writers and thinkers formed in 1995 as a 
coMleledicumtiAvcreyliwc paoinrtkanidnmgarikneripnenteonradluimsicniiupmlinary spaces. These 
include published text, pDeimrfeonsriomnssaupnpcoret: 1in835pxu12b2l5imcmspfraamcee: 
1s9,33flxy1-3p25oxs9t0emrms pasted on the streets, an on-
Coglloecitinong research initiative called Inventory Survey Project and finished art-
Tate
works in sculpture, photography, collage, photocopy, graffiti, video documen-


tary, soAcuqunisditioanPnudrchpasierda20t0e2 radio. Since 1995 they have published an experi-
Reference
Tm078e3n9 Otnadlisjpolauy artnTaatel,BIrintavinentory, in which cSoomrrym, 
ceonptyarrigyhotnrepstorpicutiloanrscpurletvuernet, umsefdroimta-shoSwihngatrheis 
atrhtwisorkahretrwe
tionsExhoibnitiounr: RbuainnLulstife and arcane literary and philosophical issues jostle with di- 
verse texts found on the streets and an ongoing glossary of ‘phenomena’. In- ventory operates from 
a global standpoint expressing goals and at-

titudes ary
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The melancholy of flat roofs 
in a rainy town.

Drunken gestures overreach the pictorial space of sobriety. Neck and knuckles get hopelessly confused. Drop it in the moon; finish it tonight.

Anxiety in my ears: the septic build-up of years, a waxy re-routing of tears. Not deep thoughts but slow ones.

Ear – Door.Mouth -Trap door.
Form – Body.Content – Thought.  Process – Thought and body.
Meaning – Process convoluted form – Force.

Thus – Thought will erase itself in event – Pattern.

The liquidity of thought will erode or otherwise attack any concrete expression. Through the dumping ground of brain and mineral heart this fluid, disallowed from common or open flow, is a leachate in which magnificent and terrible residues are dissolved, to be then deposited in the elsewhere of our attempted communication. If you cannot bring yourself to God then at least be wary of all other substitutes.


Night is the first physical material with which consciousness must grapple. It contains the day itself, all imagining. Consciousness came as a sigh.

I listen to the clack of escaping skateboards as they tumble down the stone steps of civic buildings and I do not know if the force of human evolution has always been to get us off this planet or off our faces. 

There is an injustice in having to be in one place at one time. One suspects that we are creatures destined to be multiple and connected; all points, all places. It is discovered that a window in a gothic cathedral can be described as “not a hole in a wall but the abolition of the wall.”

And then one will be very still. Although keeping silent is a mistake, it is the method I habitually employ so as to try and prevent further mistakes. Mistakenly, I believe words irreversible while thinking the shush in between them may be redeemable.

The concierge says that the key is functioning perfectly. Perhaps it is the door that is causing you problems?

He was writing a novel and had had to stop because everything he wrote came true. Someone suggested that he carry on but give the novel a happy ending.  And who, he asked, would buy that?

Jimmy’s amazing jissom astonishes his gang as it leaps through his blurred fist to dance before them in animated tableaux. His come forms an amazing cartoon into which they enter so as to rescue the Princess: twice they succeed and twice she is recaptured. Jimmy’s friends are enthralled by this adventure and yet on Jimmy’s third and final orgasm his spunk is done and the vision gone and the gang are horrified for it is all over and the Princess remains locked up and they, although ashamed to admit it, feel responsible for this. They suspect, deep down, that they have conspired so as to allow for the easy recapture of the Princess. Jimmy’s balls are aching. All he ever wished of his special juices was that his friends would appreciate them. Instead those friends now turn on him, ridicule him; in the school playground they openly comment on his degraded appendage and how it came to be that way.

If given a choice of laughing at the disadvantaged and not laughing at all then, who would not laugh? Such is the human race’s tenacious wit and capacity for joy. There are remarkably few people who are not able to turn some minuscule ‘error’ or difference in the kin, the clan, or between neighbour into disadvantage, that is, into an advantage for humour.

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Anteater
A toothless mammal highly prized by the surrealists. The ant it eats exists in a complex social organization with agricultural abilities, sublime engineering skills, dumb tenaciousness and imperious, brutal tendencies. For its highways and “wars” alone the ant has gained  a fatuous, unflattering comparisons with the human race. In this anthropomorphic slippage we are suddenly allowed to wonder: what beast might an ant imagine as the harbinger of its apocalypse? Could the end of the world resemble an elongated, furry snout and long, sticky tongue?

Architecture (nomadic)
In due course all architecture is nomadic. If stating the obvious then this must be doubled by adding that this statement can only be underlined by being undermined. Soil liquefaction, concrete temporality; an earthquake makes buildings of the most unlikely materials.
Yet in its extremity disaster tends to disguise a set of persistent mechanisms. The grim familiarity of tent cities might imply a somewhere more stable, a city of stone and steel and certainty. But the surface of this planet is fluid. Wind erosion, flood, human whimsy, demographic spasms and shifts will – like earthquakes – tend to make buildings disappear, reappear, and like earthquakes these processes may seem very fast but are mostly unnoticed. A tent that has been slowed down is a castle.
Armadillo
Nomadic architecture + anteater = armadillo

Glossary

The stating of the obvious via a pendant’s passion for paradox and hoping that one will be able, within these tiny spaces, to open up by contradiction a claim on some portion of a reality. To imagine, against all the evidence, even evidence clearly doctored, that imagination will hold its own and be accounted as an equal to fact. To write a glossary is to suggest that a fact is a tent that imagines itself as a castle.
Original first published in Inventory: losing, finding, collecting. Vol.3 No.3 1999