You slipped past the when. Hesitant, taking one step at a time. Your feet like feelers, your toes take forever to reach the ground. With every step you’re anticipating a renewed lack of friction. Moving through the organism centers you within it.

What does it mean for this Now that you have a mirror image but no shadow? Has the speed of light lost its velocity? Is what your feet are slipping on the residue of time ingested, digested, an excrement of temporal physics? You imagine orifices oozing, containers spilling over, informing each other when their secretions meet. The substance will cover everything soon, if cause and effect are still relevant here. Where to firmly place your next step appears to you like a decision of monumental proportions.

The Trickling Sparks of the fluids show you only light, no You in their fragmented, bubbling reflections. And yet you feel yourself in them. The same organic matter, the leaks of your physical self, constantly emitting. A substance of the double You, confusing who’s the You and who’s the Double. The surface of your form morphing while suspended in slippage, both in hazy twilight and stark brightness, a simultaneity of weather. Does being both mean the Now is now endless.

Ever the Ambiguous Slider, you wind your steps around the shapes and puddles, more careful now than ever. Straight lines have been rendered obsolete, and it’s been a long time or no time at all since your Puny Self last reconsidered its expectations. Rather, you meander, two steps forward, one step sideways, a slip backwards, and it’s both horrifying and comforting that you’re still in the same system you know only too well. Whose path will you cross, you wonder, and will it be in time or space or both.

As your eyes slip over the remains of familiar shapes, long exhausted, the textures draw you closer. Chemical or alchemical or fungal, something other has taken possession of the objects. A Something larger than life, certainly, larger than idea, maybe. Your travel over the smooth surfaces, latching on the image, your bewilderment transforms into a sense of archeological discovery. When you find that the reliefs cluster into language, not your own but not unfamiliar, your steps become lighter. Silent reading conjures sounds like a whisper in your ear. Rather than a sign, it lands like good advice.

What’s my position, you ask yourself as certainty slips through your fingers. A Confident Slider, you give yourself to gravity, no longer thinking on your feet. The slippery slime all around you, volatile, easing you into horizontality. No longer concerned about rising, about more and less. Slipsliding, slipfalling.

Text by Titania Seidl