Terminalian Drift

Jerry Gordon

Description

With its roots in drift, derive, psychogeography and mythogeography, this is a defining novel for city walkers.

Sujets

• Walking

Informations

• Publié par: Triarchy Press
• Date de parution: 10 octobre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781913743413
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Published in this first edition in 2021 by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, UK
www.triarchypress.net
Copyright © Jerry Gordon, 2021
The right of Jerry Gordon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBNs:
Print: 978-1-913743-40-6
ePub: 978-1-913743-41-3
PDF: 978-1-913743-42-0
Special thanks to Matt Azizi, Rie Hase and Pamela Mellott
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Afterword of Before
Also available from Triarchy Press
1
I was out on the streets trying to get used to a new skin.
It was February 23 rd . Morning. I walked down Midosuji boulevard and into the heart of Osaka City. I was carrying a thin stick and trying to make things right inside. Or, more accurately, I was trying to adjust uncomfortable conflicts going on between my insides and an exterior surface I’d recently started living in.
A new skin commonly takes some getting used to. It’s expected. But André Cadere’s skin had been feeling way too tight. Way too restrictive. Way too unwelcoming. So, I needed to change things a bit.
To be more precise, André Cadere’s skin was pinching the edges of my skeleton. My heels and hips, shoulders and wrists all felt like pointy points inside. The skin still seemed to belong to him. His skin tweaked me here and there. It was too taut at my corners and bony protrusions. The top of my head felt constantly pushed down by his shorter throat, and that compressed my spine. I couldn’t turn my head or look up well. Gullet-grip kept my head slightly tilted over. Continuously bowed. Or, so it felt—like I was always dipping under some doorway.
It was obvious that my arms are longer than his were, so his skin felt bindy around the elbows. Things didn’t bend quite right. There was no flexible flow. The skin didn’t let me reach and twist in ways I was used to. Parts of it were too thick where I needed thin, or something like that.
But, all of that wasn’t really such a big deal. Temporary misfits are pretty normal in a new skin, and I knew I could accept them.
But, the way his face restricted my jaw from moving was much tougher to get used to. I couldn’t just get over that.
The face is always the center of attention, both from the outside and from within. The face couldn’t be ignored. Talking, chewing, laughing and swallowing all became too self-obvious and kept reminding me of stuff I shouldn’t need to remember.
Yeah, the wrongness of Cadere’s face was what really got to me. That’s what sent me into the streets.
2
Of course, like I said, a used skin comes with some issues. The differences between a skin I change into and the one I change out of always feel irritating and bothersome in the beginning. Little things irritate and make me doubt the choice to change, at least until a bit of my sweat and scent start to soak in and territorialize the new.
It’s normal.
It’s normal that I need to bring the former owner’s claims on the skin to a more clear, or at least more believable, termination.
“Evict the ghost,” as it were. Make the other mine.
And, that was my goal for going into the city on that February day. That’s why I was walking the streets and drifting around lost. I was hoping to alter my relationship with the new skin. I was hoping to suspend its previously established arrangements.
The start of something needs the ends of others. It’s a basic and essential violence that existence survives on. It’s something that we can’t not live with. Live through. From condition to condition to condition, being goes from there to here, from there to here, from there to here.
A breath churns the air. A seed breaks—to open, to release a sprout, to start a tree. A sandwich kills a chicken.
It’s an ecstatic temporality, but, it’s also a process. Never a one time and finished deal. Not some kind of bim-bam-boom and done. It’s about degrees of alteration and a variety of arrivals.
There’s never any destinations along the way. Points of reference, sure, but not some big eventual. Stuff just keeps on keepin’ on.
And while some starts and ends in life can be marked by crossing a distinct physical line, wearing a new skin is more vague. Less definitive. More destabilizing. It’s hard to know when a skin really becomes mine. I don’t think I can say any of them have ever really been me.
But that’s not what I’m into changing skins for. If I was averse to unpredictability, I’d just have stayed in the skin I was born with. I like the dynamics of this practice, even when I don’t like them.
But, too much discomfort is just too much.
It’s not unreasonable for me to want to feel at home in a skin, or at least not feel like I’m constantly under the threat of eviction. I have a right to push back and press out. I have a right to shape what contains me. Maybe it’s even a duty. And from my experience over the years, part of the process of getting placed well inside a new skin involves heat and getting the skin to a point of a fitting flexibility.
Of feeling fitting, flexibly.
Walking can help work things out.
When a skin fits, I can be less self-conscious about the mundane stuff. I don’t need to think about turning a door knob or how my feet are placed beneath a chair. I don’t need to think each detail when using a fork or lifting a glass of water to my lips. When the noticeable goes unnoticed, that’s when I feel I’ve come to belong in a skin.
This sense of belonging definitely happens from the skin physically changing. Adjusting. Becoming more supple, flowing and pliable on my muscles, bones, joints, etc. It comes when the skin starts working with my habits of gesture. When it fits my movements.
But, it’s also about me changing.
A new skin makes me lose something inside. Makes me work with unknowns. Makes me become a bit other.
And that is a big part of why I do all this. It makes me become something else.
3
Histories either require upkeep or erosion, depending on which way you hope they go. Histories are layered and fitted together in ways that even if you remove some pieces, the shapes of absent parts pretty much make things that are gone still there. Traces hint at what’s missing. You can’t just cut out part of something and expect the whole to knit itself together as a seamless new. The gaps are always part of the whole.
It’s true everywhere.
Things removed leave traces. Bits of gluey residue from a sticker torn off a painted street pole still hint at the missing sticker’s shape. A skin graft informs about its source: that it came from an ass or a shin or the nape of a neck. Faded spots on a jacket tell how the wearer moves, sits, uses the pockets or lugs a bag slung over the left shoulder. Such details indicate and hint at what was or what happened. Details whisper their history like ghosts. They haunt.
And if details point at something that has been blanked out or erased, those departed ghosts can keep on muttering.
And, I like those missing mutterings. I like hearing from the ghosts of skins.
When I am looking into getting a new skin, I imagine the voices of those ghosts. I imagine what they might be able to say. I imagine how much they might accent my voice if I live with them for a while.
But, until I can break a skin in—after my own personal processes of wear and tear infiltrate the skin enough times—the flesh remains a bit too haunted with its previous history. The ghost stays too possessive. Too roommatey. At such times, a skin gets a bit too co-residential.
That’s not something to be unexpected, but it’s not easy to live with either.
A used skin is rich with references. A skin always comes with traces that allude to its earlier behaviors, habits, likes, traumas, addictions, triggers, etc.
Other energies. Other’s energies.
And, honestly, I deeply value those. I like that random abundance. Those urges. The beats of unknown pulses. The invisible density of inherited patterns and entangled ways. Marks marking the present with the past.
The presence of the past.
Callouses on a skin, for example, might show how much the person who had the skin before me worked with their hands. But more specifically I can tell if they were a guitarist, fisherman, nail biter, smoker or cook. Each person is always many things. And at different times. Selves layer. They pile up. And the body keeps track of them, marking those selves’ moments and durations. Wrinkles and muscles of special use. Unique skills and lacks. Blemishes, dents and deformations. Affective aspects.
Scars become readable, like captions of childhood falls, violent brawls, a disease’s crawl or periodic desires to end it all.
Each texture of scarring has a different script or intensity in its etch. A wri