Review

I

I

NT
RODU
This is a book about things that are not
important. Perhaps, actually, we can
think about it as the things that are most
important. In reality, it’s not like any of
this matters anyhow?

One of the most interesting things about us as
human beings is how we decide to assign value
to things. We somewhat arbitrarily decide what
is useful, what is important, and what we don’t
even need.
But are we ever correct in our judgements?
4
Introduction

5
Maybe everything in this book will seem
useless to you. That’s fine. Perhaps, even,
that is the point.
Bring forward what was originally sent back.
Introduction

7
There was once a merchant in the famous market
at Baghdad. One day he saw a stranger looking at
him in surprise... and he knew that the stranger
was Death. Pale and trembling, the merchant fled
the marketplace and made his way many, many
miles to the city of Samarra, for there he was sure
Death could not find him. But when at last he came
to Samarra, the merchant saw, waiting for him, the
grim figure of Death.
“Very well,” said the merchant. “I give in. I am
yours. But tell me: why did you look surprised
when you saw me this morning in Baghdad?”
“Because,” said Death, “I had an appointment with
you tonight – in Samarra.”
Recall

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9
The life of the humblest African
farmer, herder or hunter, is permeated
with music, but royalty
perhaps feel more conscious
of its many uses. They use it,
among other ways, to attract
the attention of their subjects
on festive occasions, as seen in
this Dahomean representation
of a royal procession. A court
without music would be a court
without power indeed.
The history of the crops grown in the Central and West African forests
has special interest. Cultivation of root crops probably developed
naturally from the foraging of Stone Age hunters. A date for its
beginning is therefore difficult to fix, as the presence of digging-stick
weights does not prove that the people using them relied primarily
on cultivation; they may have been used only for gathering wild
plants. However, cultivation of wild plants with stone hoes may
have started as early as 4000 B.C. in the Congo. Cereal crop cultivation
is more complicated than vegeculture and scholars differ as
to whether it began independently in Africa. Certainly today’s economy
rests as much on plants, and on those introduced from the
Americas by the Portuguese in the 16th century, as on plants
indigenous to Africa.
Revive

This image of Africa was made by assembling hundreds of photographs
taken throughout a year by the TIROS satellite operated by the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Carefully
selected so that no clouds would obstruct the view, the pictures in the
composite image covering northern and southern hemisphere areas
were all taken during their summer, the time when each is pointed
toward the sun.
It would be surprising if the Colima artists had not modeled the parrots
that occur abundantly in Western Mexico. The smaller of the two
seen here is a whistle with the mouthpiece at the end of the tail. The
simple jar with a curious human head as a lug or handle is a less common
form. Below, what probably depicts a rattlesnake - considering
the markings at the tail end - is modeled with less realism and, perhaps,
more comedy.
Extremely rich in ancient remains, these countries of lower Central
America offer many varieties of fine painted and modeled pottery and,
in some regions abundant stone sculpture. Especially fine jade carving
has been found in Costa Rica, and graves of both countries have yielded
many gold ornaments, examples of which can be seen elsewhere in this
hall. Despite the richness in objects however, no remains exist of large
settlements or permanent buildings We must therefore conclude that
Central America did not see an advanced stage of culture development
as in Middle America to the north or the Andean region of South America.
As the land route between these centers,Central America undoubtedly
played a role of great importance in American Indian history, but
much has yet to be learned about the area archaeologically.
10
The Maya of the Late Classic Period developed outstanding skill
in modeling clay and produced a great variety of refined and elegant
figurines such as those shown below. Many of these have come
from burials at a site on the island of Jaina, on the coast of Campeche,
where a particular abundance of well preserved figurines exists. They
depict both men and women in elaborate clothing and headdress,
probably dignitaries dressed for ceremonial occasions. Some are individually
modeled and others were made in molds; many serve also as
whistles or rattles. The large tubular objects at right, from Chiapas or
Tabasco, are of unknown use but may have been stands for incense
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burners. The large mask, center, is a fragment from a very big tube
of the kind next to it. The standing figure, left, of late date, probably
comes from Yucatan.
This fragment of a door lintel was discovered in 1905 at the site of
Naranjo, Guatemala. Installed as part of the so-called Hieroglyphic
Stairway, it had obviously been cut down to fit its new location after
removal from its original placement. Portions of the hieroglyphic
inscription are missing, including a whole column of glyphs, left, and
half of the last column, right.
11
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EMO
EM
EMO
EM

VE
OVE
VE
OVE

When we travel, do we experience the
places that we visit? How do we define
these places, and how do we define our
experiences? What stories are we creating?
What stories are we in?
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Remove

15
Remove

RETHINK

INT. ‘74 CHEVY (MOVING) – MORNING
CUT TO:
An old gas guzzling, dirty, white 1974 Chevy Nova BARRELS
down a homeless-ridden street in Hollywood. In the front seat
are two young fellas – one white, one black – both wearing
cheap black suits with thin black ties under long green dusters.
Their names are VINCENT VEGA (white) and JULES WINN-
FIELD (black). Jules is behind the wheel.
JULES
– Okay now, tell me about the hash bars?
JULES
Well, hash is legal there, right?
VINCENT
What do you want to know?
17
VINCENT
Yeah, it’s legal, but is ain’t a hundred
percent legal. I mean you can’t walk into
a restaurant, roll a joint, and start puffin’
away. You’re only supposed to smoke in
your home or certain designated places.
JULES
Those are hash bars?
VINCENT
Yeah, it breaks down like this: it’s legal
to buy it, it’s legal to own it and, if you’re
the proprietor of a hash bar, it’s legal to
sell it. It’s legal to carry it, which doesn’t
really matter ‘cause – get a load of this –
if the cops stop you, it’s illegal for them to
search you. Searching you is a right that
the cops in Amsterdam don’t have.
Rethink

JULES
That did it, man – I’m fuckin’ goin’,
that’s all there is to it.
JULES
What?
JULES
Examples?
VINCENT
You’ll dig it the most. But you know what
the funniest thing about Europe is?
VINCENT
It’s the little differences. A lotta the
same shit we got here, they got there, but
there they’re a little different.
VINCENT
Well, in Amsterdam, you can buy beer in
a movie theatre. And I don’t mean in a
paper cup either. They give you a glass of
beer, like in a bar. In Paris, you can buy
beer at MacDonald’s. Also, you know
what they call a Quarter Pounder with
Cheese in Paris?
18
JULES
They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder
with Cheese?
JULES
What’d they call it?
VINCENT
No, they got the metric system there, they
wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter
Pounder is.
Rethink

VINCENT
Royale with Cheese.
JULES
(repeating)
Royale with Cheese. What’d they call a
Big Mac?
JULES
Le Big Mac. What do they call a
Whopper?
VINCENT
Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it
Le Big Mac.
VINCENT
I dunno, I didn’t go into a Burger King.
But you know what they put on french
fries in Holland instead of ketchup?
19
JULES
What?
VINCENT
Mayonnaise.
JULES
Goddamn!
VINCENT
I seen ‘em do it. And I don’t mean a
little bit on the side of the plate, they
fuckin’ drown ‘em in it.
JULES
Uuccch!
Rethink

INT. CHEVY (TRUNK) – MORNING
The trunk of the Chevy OPENS UP, Jules and Vincent reach
inside, taking out two .45 Automatics, loading and
cocking them.
JULES
We should have shotguns for this kind
of deal.
JULES
Three or four.
VINCENT
How many up there?
VINCENT
Counting our guy?
JULES
I’m not sure.
20
VINCENT
So there could be five guys up there?
JULES
It’s possible.
VINCENT
We should have fuckin’ shotguns.
They CLOSE the trunk.
Rethink

EXT. APARTMENT BUILDING COURTYARD – MORNING
CUT TO:
Vincent and Jules, their long matching overcoats practically
dragging on the ground, walk through the courtyard of what
looks like a hacienda-style Hollywood apartment building.
We TRACK alongside.
JULES
Mia.
VINCENT
What’s her name?
VINCENT
How did Marsellus and her meet?
21
JULES
I dunno, however people meet people.
She usta be an actress.
VINCENT
She ever do anything I woulda saw?
JULES
I think her biggest deal was she starred
in a pilot.
VINCENT
What’s a pilot?
JULES
Well, you know the shows on TV?
VINCENT
I don’t watch TV.
Rethink

JULES
Yes, but you’re aware that there’s an
invention called television, and on that
invention they show shows?
VINCENT
Yeah.
JULES
Well, the way they pick the shows on TV
is they make one show, and that show’s
called a pilot. And they show that one
show to the people who pick the shows,
and on the strength of that one show,
they decide if they want to make more
shows. Some get accepted and become
TV programs, and some don’t, and
become nothing. She starred in one of
the ones that became nothing.
They enter the apartment building.
22
Rethink

INT. RECEPTION AREA (APARTMENT BUILDING) –
MORNING
Vincent and Jules walk through the reception area
and elevator.
JULES
You remember Antwan Rockamora?
Half-black, half-Samoan, usta call him
Tony Rocky Horror.
JULES
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the
brother fat. He’s got a weight problem.
What’s the nigger gonna do,
he’s Samoan.
VINCENT
Yeah maybe, fat right?
23
VINCENT
I think I know who you mean, what
about him?
JULES
Well, Marsellus fucked his ass up good.
And word around the campfire, it was on
account of Marsellus Wallace’s wife.
The elevator arrives, the men step inside.
INT. ELEVATOR – MORNING
JULES
No no no no no no no, nothin’ that bad.
VINCENT
What’d he do, fuck her?
Rethink

VINCENT
Well what then?
JULES
He gave her a foot massage.
VINCENT
A foot massage?
Jules nods his head: “Yes.”
VINCENT
That’s all?
Jules nods his head: “Yes.”
VINCENT
What did Marsellus do?
JULES
Sent a couple of guys over to his place.
They took him out on the patio of his
apartment, threw his ass over the balcony.
Nigger fell four stories. They had
this garden at the bottom, enclosed in
glass, like one of them greenhouses –
nigger fell through that. Since then, he’s
kinda developed a speech impediment.
24
VINCENT
That’s a damn shame.
Rethink

25

27
The Crane Man.
Reform

I am the crane.
No, wait.
The crane… is me.
I’m a genius.
I hate you all.
A breeze dances through the room. The man’s hair
follows its moves like they’ve been partners for years.
Everything seems to want to join in on the dancing.
The birds sway from side to side. They rustle gently
against each other as they stay in constant motion. The
air is cool. The cold blue light bounces across the surface
of the birds and onto the man, who sits idly.
I am God.
I am the creator.
He runs his fingers down the smooth surface. He can
feel the bird underneath his skin. His tongue slowly
caresses his lips.
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Rise. For I have made another.
The man’s slow exhale joins with the breeze. His chair
screeches as it is dragged across the floor. The man
proceeds toward and through the doorway. His birds
follow his every step. He stops. His eyes graze across
the room. He stands there expressionless. Gazing.
What have you brought me?
He moves on, the birds still rustling in the perpetual
breeze. He feels some of the birds slightly nudge him as
Reform

he moves, and the edge of his mouth pushes upward in
the slightest of manners as they do. He opens the fridge
door and is greeted by a flood of white light. He glances
around and closes it. He moves toward his sink. His
spine can be seen through his shirt as he leans over it.
Give me what I deserve.
He coughs. The red of his blood shines in the sink. He
can slightly make out his reflection in the splatter.
You’re disgusting.
He continues to stare at himself. He slowly moves his
finger towards the blood, and lightly dips the nail in,
just enough to have a small drop stick to him. He tastes
it. He lets his blood flow around in his mouth, rubbing
up against his gums. He swallows.
29
Refreshing.
Reform

How long have I been God?
His hand crawls across the table and grabs at another
carcass. His eyes prance across the smooth body. He
grasps it gently. He takes each corner and presses
them together. Each fold is quick, yet solid and gentle.
Hours drone by.
Fly away, for you may have a better life than I.
What is an hour, for I have felt a lifetime.
He erects endless amounts of creatures. He stares at
them. None return any sense of gratitude. They look
blankly into him. Through his eyes, they do not see his
soul, but an empty, unwanted man. A drop runs slowly
down his cheek. He does not break his gaze.
Give me what I want.
30
The air is heavy. The man feels his sweat roll down his
face and dampen his clothing. A beam of light bursts
through a crack in the roofing, shining onto the left
side of his face. His bags are accentuated, as well as the
bald spots on his head and wrinkles in his face that had
started to form. He stares. He stares and waits.
Reform

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still waiting
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Susan Einstein.
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Donald McClelland.
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Bill Ballenburg.
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The Lord of Sipan was buried with three pairs of ear ornaments. The
most elaborate portrays a warrior carrying a club and shield, and
wearing an owl’s head necklace and a nose ornament. The photo at
left shows this ear ornament as it was found. The photo at right shows
the same piece after cleaning and reconstruction.
Some stone tools were shaped by applying direct pressure with a
pointed tool. These two fragments of sloth rib bones were probably
used to finish tools like the knives and points shown here.
41.1/1985 (2)
A row of sculpted heads and carved
Labs of volcanic son adorned the walls
of the temple at Chavin de Huantar.
The images here are rubbings taken
from the stone slabs. The row of eagles
appears on a single slab, thought to
have rested above one of the principal
entrances to the main temple. The monkey
holds a strombus shell trumpet in
his left hand.
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The relatively flat tropical rain forest was crossed by great rivers. Its
wealth of plants and animals supported cultures with characteristics
distinct to the area. Though they never directly controlled the region,
Andean peoples nevertheless obtained several important products
there, such as the feathers of exotic birds to adorn their clothing.
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Sheared alpaca wool.
Photo by John Hyslop.
Photo by Steven King.
Photo by Harold Schultz © National Geographic Society
Tukano slit log drum.
Bone needle with yarn. Cashinahua. 40.1/4289
Waorani women and children inspect one another’s hair for lice,
which they kill by biting.
Two Mekranoti girls wearing large ceremonial headdresses like the
one on the right.
Varieties of maize, Zea mays. Amahuaca; Campa. 40.1/389 A-C;
40.1/2459 B
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Adobe frieze from a wall at the Chimu capital, Chan Chan, northern
Peru. Designs include stylized seabirds, fishermen, waves and geometric
motifs.
Pouch made from the head and neck of a tayra, Eira barbara, a relative
of weasels and otters. Chiu Chiu,Chile. Eye sockets and part of the
mouth have been sewn shut. 41.0/8703
The usnu, a reviewing platform in the center of the Inca City of Huanuco
Pampa (shown in the city model nearby). Photo by Craig Morris
Giant trees with plank buttresses spotted with fungi and festooned
with vines are common in the rainforest. This full-scale model of such
a tree does not represent a particular species.
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RETHINK

INT. APARTMENT BUILDING HALLWAY – MORNING
STEADICAM in front of Jules and Vincent as they beeline
down the hall.
JULES
Whaddya mean?
JULES
You don’t think he overreacted?
VINCENT
Still I hafta say, play with matches, ya
get burned.
VINCENT
You don’t be givin’ Marsellus Wallace’s
new bride a foot massage.
47
VINCENT
Antwan probably didn’t expect
Marsellus to react like he did, but he
had to expect a reaction.
JULES
It was a foot massage, a foot massage
is nothing, I give my mother a
foot massage.
VINCENT
It’s laying hands on Marsellus Wallace’s
new wife in a familiar way. Is it as bad
as eatin’ her out – no, but you’re in the
same fuckin’ ballpark.
Jules stops Vincent.
Rethink

JULES
Whoa... whoa... whoa... stop right there.
Eatin’ a bitch out, and givin’ a bitch a
foot massage ain’t even the same fuckin’
thing.
JULES
It ain’t no ballpark either. Look maybe
your method of massage differs from
mine, but touchin’ his lady’s feet, and
stickin’ your tongue in her holyiest of
holyies, ain’t the same ballpark, ain’t the
same league, ain’t even the same fuckin’
sport. Foot massages don’t mean shit.
VINCENT
Not the same thing, the same ballpark.
VINCENT
Have you ever given a foot massage?
JULES
Don’t be tellin’ me about foot massages –
I’m the foot fuckin’ master.
48
VINCENT
Given a lot of ‘em?
JULES
Shit yeah. I got my technique down man,
I don’t tickle or nothin’.
JULES
Fuck you.
VINCENT
Have you ever given a guy a foot massage?
Jules looks at him a long moment – he’s been set up.
Rethink

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Rethink

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53
Shields of
leather and
appliquéed
fabric, used
in the sport of
stick-fighting.
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For Entry Access
Please dial the extension of the person you are
visiting on the silver intercom. If you are unsure
about an extension, you may dial x5160 or x5156
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Please
do
55
not
knock.
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Remove

E
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59
The Meme
Renew

The notion of the “meme” was introduced by the evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins in the late 1970s as a way to
describe what he called a “cultural gene.” Memes are units of culture
and behaviour which survive and spread via imitation and adaptation.
Examples of memes are dances, catchphrases, greetings, hairstyles.
On the internet, they can be pictures of cute cats, images of unicorns,
they can be Rick Astley videos, or perverse sexual images. Memes play
a distinct role in protest; they seem to be the resistance of today, just as
“political posters” were yesterday—the embodiment of shared ideas
in a community. They can be JPEGs, or rumours. Indeed, part of their
appeal is that memes seem to spread spontaneously. Paul Mason, the
BBC’s traveling chronicler of all things crisis-related, found that “with
the internet [...] and above all with the advent of social media, it’s
become possible to observe the development of memes at an accelerated
pace [...]. What happens is that the ideas arise, are immediately
‘market tested’, and then are seen to either take off, bubble under,
insinuate themselves into the mainstream, or, if they are deemed no
good, disappear.”16 Mason contends that “[for] activists, memes create
a kind of rough alternative to representative democracy.” But he
seems unsure as to their potential for permanence; are they anything
more than “small cultural portions of zeitgeist”
Richard Dawkins was looking for a model that would explain how culture
spreads and disseminates among people. In doing so, he applied
Darwinistic principles to phenomena of human creation and imitation.
“Cultural transmission,” Dawkins said, “is analogous to genetic
transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise
to a form of evolution.” Genes are replicators. What is their cultural
equivalent? The unit of transmission or imitation proposed by Dawkins
has itself proven memetic; it is a ruthlessly pervasive idea that
applies to phenomena we see all around us. He explained the name:
‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greet root, but I want a monosyllable
that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me
if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively
be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French
word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream.’
60
There are three qualities which define the success of memes: longevity,
fecundity, and copying-fidelity. Longevity indicates how long a
Renew

meme can last. Fecundity applies to the appeal of a meme, whether
it is catchy and thus likely to spread. Copying-fidelity is about the
strength of a meme to withstand mutation in the process of copying
and imitation. It determines how much of the original core remains
intact when the meme is in transmission. All three criteria also apply
to jokes, but the joke was not mentioned by Dawkins as an example of
a meme.
61
Some suggestions in this direction were made, however, by the cognitive
scientist Douglas Hofstadter, a friend of Dawkins. Hofstadter
was convinced that memes looked a lot like self-referential patterns,
which would render them not only survival-minded and selfish—but
also fundamentally absurd. An example of such self-referentiality is
the Epimenides Paradox. The Cretan thinker Epimenides stated that
“All Cretans are liars.” The intricacies of this message, which says, “this
statement is false,” were explored by Hofstadter in his seminal book,
Gödel, Escher, Bach.19 Hofstadter brought memes to the attention
of the readership of the Scientific American by the early 1980s, right
before the idea caught on with the general public. Jeremy Trevelyan
Burman reconstructs: “In January of 1983, Hofstadter published an
essay that directly discusses his interpretation of the memes proposal.
This was inspired, he said, by letters from readers of his previous columns—in
particular, letters from Stephen Walton and Donald Going,
who suggested that self-referential sentences of the sort discussed in
Gödel, Escher, Bach (e.g., ‘This sentence is false’) could be described
as being afflicted by a kind of meaning-virus: self- reference parasitizes
language, makes it inconsistent with itself, and then encourages
the reader (as carrier) to find or construct new instances of meaning-breaking
self- reference.”
As Burman notes, “[both] Walton and Going were struck by the perniciousness
of such sentences: the selfish way they invade a space of
ideas answer manage, merely by making copies of themselves all over
the place, to take over a large portion of that space. Why do they not
manage to overrun all of the space? It is a good question. The answer
should be obvious to students of evolution: the sentences do not do so
because of competition from other self-replicators.”
Renew

Memes are not phenomena of language; they are phenomena with
language. From words which simply “annotate” a meme, conveying
its minimally required meaning in a given context, to words which
become an integral part of the meme’s functioning. The standard
internet meme is an image captioned with heavy type, superimposed
on it “for humorous effect” (says Wikipedia). The sentences that are
thus part of the image create some kind of strange loop or self-reference;
but they also involve tacit knowledge on the part of the viewer.
An example is the portrait of the Boromir character from the Lord of
the Rings trilogy, captioned with a sentence starting with “One does
not simply...” In the original film, the actor Sean Bean says: “One does
not simply walk into Mordor. Its black gates are guarded by more than
just orks.”22 The “One does not simply...” meme has this sentence
completed in different ways: One does not simply grow his dick six
inches in three easy steps. One does not simply topple a Ugandan warlord
by pressing “like” on Facebook. One does not simply log out of a
friend’s Facebook without making him gay.
A fictional, but widely known, point of reference is tinkered with to create
new implications, to the point that one no longer thinks of Tolkien
and Peter Jackson at all. But the remainder of that commonly held reference
point, the tacit knowledge which is that I know that you know
that I know that particular part of The Lord of the Rings enables the
joke, any joke, that follows. If, for instance, the same sentence would
be based on a film that no one has ever seen, its mention would never
achieve the same immediate impact. A meme can tap into a collective
memory and transform the “outcome” of a commonly held starting
point to different ends.
62
Further study into the nature of self-referentiality was done by Susan
Stewart in her legendary book, Nonsense. For Stewart, the category
of “nonsense” is opposed to the category of “common sense making”
through which what we think of as reality is established. By categorising
something as “nonsense”, “the legitimacy and rationality of sense
making was left uncontaminated, unthreatened.”
It is not difficult to see a fundamental political procedure at work here.
Isn’t it exactly the day job of most politicians to manage reality and
sense-making, deciding what others get to see as nonsense and what
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as legit? One is tempted to think here of Labour leader Ed Miliband’s
June, 2011 condemnation of nationwide strikes in the UK. In a BBC
interview, Miliband gave the same answer to each different question
posed to him by the journalist. “These strikes are wrong ... both sides
should put aside the rhetoric and get around the negotiating table ...”
Time and again, Miliband hammered out the same words. His dronelike
repetition of a single, studied phrase laid bare a structural protocol
of governance, an inability to deviate from a script—even more
preposterous when you think that Miliband is supposed to lead the
opposition rather than govern the country. “Milibot,” as the curious
speech exercise became known, is an example of what Mark Fisher
subsequently labelled “reality management.” It showed the impossibility
of conducting “opposition” within the governing neoliberal
frame, and the desperation of a politician trying to stan [sic] inside
of it. Indeed, argued Stewart, “all discourse bears reference to a commonly
held world. The discourse of common sense refers to the ‘real
world.’ The discourse of nonsense refers to ‘nothing.’ In other words,
it refers to itself, even though it must manufacture this ‘nothing’ out
of a system of differences from everyday world—the common stuff of
social life—in order to be recognised as ‘nothing.’”
63
Nonsense also involves an element of “play.” Boromir’s “One does not
simply...” bounces off from a widely known, and also slightly ridiculous
phrase, and then it goes on to take completely different directions
with it. Stewart notes that “Playing at fighting may not be “not fighting,”
but it is not fighting on a different level of abstraction from other
kinds of not fighting such as kissing, skipping rope, buying groceries,
or singing “Happy Birthday.” Play involves the manipulation of the
conditions and contexts of messages and not simply a manipulation
of the message itself. It is not, therefore, a shift within the domain of
the everyday lifeworld: it is a shift to another domain of reality.”
Memes take on a wide variety of forms and formats, but they do their
work right in the human brain. Time, explained Dawkins, constitutes
a major limit on the success of individual memes. No one person can
do more than only a few things at once. Consequently, said Richard
Dawkins, “if a meme is to dominate the attention of the human brain,
it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes.”
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Digital networks and social media do not dissolve the limits in attention
that the human brain can give to any meme, but they do more or
less solve two out of three criteria that, according to Dawkins, determine
a mem’s success: longevity and copying- fidelity. Longevity of a
meme in a digital network is in most cases guaranteed; a file may very
well never be erased, and exist as long as the server exists that stores
it. Then, copy- fidelity is guaranteed if a meme spreads by forwarding
and reblogging a digital original. The meme’s distribution into
the gene pool is then completely without loss of quality. If a meme
spreads by imitation, changes made in the process are still traceable
when compared to an “original.” Memes tend to be most successful if
they get both copied and imitated.
When it comes to the meme’s intrinsic fecundity digital networks
don’t give easy answers. Fecundity can’t be presupposed just by something
being on the internet. For every successful digital meme there
are many thousands of failed attempts.
Many internet memes share distinctive features shaped by the
unwritten rules of their commonly held world—be it software used,
the online forum inhabited, a language spoken, or a set of aesthetic
preferences. This, in turn, has led to the predictable misconception
that anything produced following those unwritten rules is bound to
become a meme. This is not the case. Successful memes balance their
reference to a commonly held world with an element giving them a
strikingly new meaning. The more “advanced” a meme is, the more its
meaning will be implied by manipulation of the context in which the
meme appears.
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On November 18, 2011, Fred Baclagan, a retired FBI agent, sent an
e-mail to his contact list: Hello all, I was very disturbed to find this in
my inbox this morning:
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www.youtube.com/
watch?v=oHg5S-
JYRHA0
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To whom it may concern, you’ve found another love, I know. To whom it may concern, my heart won’t ever let you go

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Let’s never come here again because it would never be as much fun.
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Laura Coombs to Noah Semus, April 28, 2018 // 10:18 pm
Noah,
Did you listen to Kanye’s new track?
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Not only do you share a common interest of subject matter, but it’s
interesting to think about this as a ‘presentation style.’ I don’t think
anyone really knows if it’s a joke or not. It’s sort of his ‘methodology’
for lack of a better word—to do the opposite of what we expect. He
used misdirection in the form of trump tweets, perhaps to turn attention
towards him, before revealing the track. I bet all this behavior is
very intentional, and highly planned.
The Kanye way of story-telling.
How’s the Noah way of story-telling coming along?
Do not turn this singular email into 20 memes either.
Laura
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Hola buena suerte en tu e

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ntrevista. Te va ir muy bien!

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The link leads to the music video of Rick Astley’s 1987 UK
Charts, and Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 hit, Never Gonna Give You Up.
The video is posted on YouTube under the title “RickRoll’d,” and has
been viewed 66,833,023 times, and counting. Baclagan’s two Gmail
accounts had been broken into by a hacktivist group called Antisec;
his messages had been dumped online and Antisec made Baclagan
aware of this fact by just sending him the Rick Astley link. Such is the
power of a successful meme’s manipulation of context. In common
parlance, being “Rickrolled” now means having been hacked and
knowing it; Astley’s song is a kiss of death. Baclagan was, in turn, inadvertently
rickrolling his own contacts by just forwarding the Astley link.
The origins of rickrolling lay in an amusing prankster meme on 4chan
and other internet forums, where a seemingly promising, interesting
and relevant link would lead an unsuspecting user to Rick Astley. It is
a gotcha of sorts, which brings you “face-to-face with the ridiculous.”
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Instead of merely entrapment in a false choice, the rickroll transports
the user to what Susan Stewart called “another domain of reality.”
Instead of some parallel dream world, this is more of a conceptual
overhaul in which all prior sense-making is erased, including the original
meaning of Astley’s own video.
Astley floats on an all-in, ready-to-roll commonly held world; like
Boromir, there is tacit knowledge involved, of an audience’s awareness
of Rick Astley and his song. This is knowledge of the type “it’s that
guy/that song again” rather than “this is a young rick Astley performing
Stock Aitken and Waterman’s 1987 monster hit.”
But unlike the Boromir meme, the Astley video, as a meme, comes to
imply a whole new set of things even without the superimposition of
any new content.
The economist Thomas Schelling, in a 1958 experiment, famously
found that when two people are to meet in New York City, but have not
agreed on a place and time to do so (and have no way to coordinate
their movements), they are likely to expect the other to show up at the
clock in the middle of the Main Concourse of Grand Central State at 12
noon. Schelling called such a space-time convergence a “focal point.”
Focal points arise not out of a prior agreement, but out of expecta-
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tions. Memes can be focal points in man-made information space, in
absence of a prior agreement. For example, the word “Tahrir Square”
is a meme, a shorthand, for the entire Arab Spring. Many (in fact, too
many) people who have never been to Tahrir Square refer to it with
intimate familiarity, and expect others to understand what they mean
when they utter the word “Tahrir.” In London in 2011, “Tahrir Square”
street signs began to appear; streets seemed, indeed, to become psychologically
primed for revolt; its possibility was being introduced to
areas where people might not have otherwise expected it. Tahrir in
“memespace” converged with Tahrir in “meatspace”30 as a self-evident
focal point.
While Schelling laid bare the “prominence or conspicuousness” of
focal points, later analysis compared focal points to conventions, or
“common expectations or regularities.” It is a meme’s ultimate reward
to achieve the platinum status of “regularity”; but it is also the moment
that its evolution has come to a halt. Never Gonna Give You Up
has achieved such status; even retired FBI agents now get the in-joke.
In an ecosystem of expectations, memes cash in on the primeval
instincts which both sustain and continuously undercut the order of
common sense that determines their place. Richard Dawkins claimed
that a meme’s dominance can only be curbed by rival memes. Any
rival of a dominant meme must cash in on the same type of lowly
desire which makes you devour tabloids and horoscopes; if one
meme is low, its challenger must be lower, until the cycle is broken
and a new one begins.
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Some of these open secrets of fecundity have been probed by Bill
Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, founders of the subversive British acid
house group, the KLF. Their Manual to create UK No. 1 chart hits is
extremely relevant to meme creation. In it, the duo sets out to amusingly
prepare the reader to write, produce and release a UK Number
One hit single. Drummond and Cauty develop a fairly comprehensive
view on what it takes to reach a top position in the charts in the late
1980s. A Smash Hits music journalist named Neil Tennant had already
laid some groundwork for this with his Pet Shop Boys seminal hit West
End Girls—a UK and US Number One in 1985, its mood and lyrics
alluding to, but not spelling out, class war in Britain.
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Drummond and Cauty, in their song writing and production, promote
a ruthless exploitation of the oasis of fecundity that is our gene pool.
They reserve special praise for Stock, Aitken and Waterman—the latterday
golden boys of the mixing room—who wrote and produced one
hit after the other and dominated all the charts around the last half
of the 1980s. Drummond and Cauty appear overjoyed at the inherent
fecundity of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s production of monster hits.
In particular, they admire Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley.
Right when Astley “hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it
was all over—the Number One position was guaranteed,” write Drummond
and Cauty:
“I’m never gonna give you up”
It says it all. It’s what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to
hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:
“I’m never gonna let you down
I’m never going to fool around or upset you.”
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GENIUS.
Stock, Aitken and Waterman produced not just songs but also entire
acts. They “invented” Bananarama, “created” Dead or Alive, “developed”
Rick Astley, and “engineered” Kylie Minogue—each of them
were a platinum meme by itself. Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s primary
genius was, for the KLF, not so much in the overall stories their
songs tell, but in the way the catchy phrases are used. Stock, Aitken
and Waterman are “able to spot a phrase [...] a line that the nation will
know exactly what is being talked about, and then use it perfectly:
“Fun Love and Money”
“Showing Out”
“Got To Be Certain”
“Respectable”
“Toy Boy”
“Cross My Broken Heart”
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The three producers were themselves invisible, almost anonymous,
behind the one-hit wonders they produced. They achieved their
outcomes “masked” as Kylie Minogue or Rick Astley; looking like a
baroque lollypop Marquis de Sade on one day (Dead or Alive), a proto-Rihanna
R&B star) Princess—whose hit song is aptly called Say I’m
Your Number One) on the next. Appearing as photo model secretaries
(Mel & Kim), or pre-cybernetic, exploitative glam punks (Sigue Sigue
Sputnik), each of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s avatars landed in the
charts’ top echelon out of nowhere, but always well below the bar of
good taste. They changed the memetic landscape forever, and then
disappeared.
Rival memes are rival dreams—the game is on not for a little bit of
attention, or a little “like” here and there, but for a massive attack of
the lowest common denominator, a rapture of the underbelly. Stock,
Aitken and Waterman understood how such a project might be structured.
While, indeed, internet memes use many elements floating in
the common gene pool, these elements are almost always original
acts by others; focal points and common references in a sea of information.
Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s “anonymity” behind the identities
of their one-hit wonders was later eclipsed by the more overall
facelessness of electronic dance music.
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Enter the Lolcat
Stock, Aitken and Waterman are the original “coders” of Rick Astley
and thus, by proxy, of the “Rickroll.” The trio is not known for its political
activities, but that doesn’t matter; the internet mem version of any
piece of original work is not likely to sustain any of its intended values.
The inherent ridiculousness of Boromir and Rick Astley qualifies
an indifference to their original meaning, which is why the Rickroll
meme is disruptive as a form while its “content” can consist of pure
Stock, Aitken and Waterman.
Many contemporary electronic images found on the internet are mere
byproducts of the omnipresence of digital cameras. But they may
lose that sense of innocence. A good example of an innocent image
supercharged by the internet is the Lolcat. Lolcats are pictures of cats,
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superimposed with texts. Things are at their most hilarious when one
tries to describe this type of image and its intended effect in a neutral
manner; Wikipedia on February 21, 2013 found that a “lolcat (pronounced
/’lɒlkæt/ lol-kat) is an image combining a photograph of a
cat with text intended to contribute humour. [...] LOLcat is a composite
of two words, ‘lol’ and ‘cat’. ‘LOL’ stands for ‘Laugh out Loud’ or
‘Laughing out Loud’; hence, lolcats are intended to be funny and to
include jokes.”34 There is also something funny about seriously discussing
‘I can haz cheezburger”, one of the best-known Lolcat memes.
It is hard to discuss this trying to make sense. Cats are not eager to
please; they are not likely to give in to any false choices presented to
them. A Lolcat is the exact opposite of a Milibot; whereas Milibot desperately
tries to force his puzzled listeners into “sense-making,” Lolcat
jumps out of the frame in which the false choice is offered still seems
to make any sense at all. Cats are today’s political animals.
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Every era, every generation, has to construct and reconstruct its political
beliefs, and subsequent visuals, out of the stuff that surrounds it
at any given moment. Protest signs will be made out of the cardboard,
paper and textile available at that given time and place at a local hardware
store; there is no hardware store selling “political” cardboard, so
even at that material level, a transformation always has to be made.
The same goes for the visual stuff of the internet; every generation
will construct new, “political” beliefs out of it; out of all kinds of stuff
which seemed initially non-political. This is especially striking when,
in Europe , a not merely “non-political” but “post-political” generation
grapples with its own politicisation under the aegis of austerity,
neoliberalism, and financial- managerial-political corruption. For
example, the cutting-edge Leftist political journal Kittens, published
in London by The Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society of Greater
London / Kittens Editorial Collective, features radical leftist writing
only alongside photographs of cute kittens. The strangest thing is that
this combination further radicalises the message; Kittens acknowledges
head-on the self-politicisation of an information space in which
we were supposed to merely enjoy ourselves. In the absence of a
“properly political” visual expression at hand, the stuff that is readily
available, the internet’s equivalent of cardboard, gets politicised just
like Astley became the “Rickroll.” In other words, every bit of visual
information on the internet can, through the spectre of self-politici-
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sation, become revolutionary, because it exists in a shared gene pool.
Cats are especially useful and relevant. In Wired magazine, Gideon
Lewis-Kraus has tracked the origins of the Lolcat back to Japan, where
it is tied to a culture of online anonymity. In a sense the Lolcat is to the
average person what Sinitta was to Stock Aitken [sic] and Waterman.
Lewis-Kraus races why cats are so successful as internet symbols; he
cites research about the relation between depression in humans and
domestic cats. Indeed, “your cat will like you best if you pretend that
you don’t desperately want to play with it all the time. ... The more
neurotic the cat owner—the more desperate for fuzzy comfort and
nuzzly security and unconditional affection—the briefer the interactions
that damn cat would allow.”
And so, “What we do on the internet is mostly “like” things, and while
liking them we wait for our own content to be liked. We check our analytics
as we await retweets. This is where the cat comes in. A cat will not
retrieve some dumb object so that you can throw it yet again ... That
goes against everything cats stand for. Or more often sit. It’s not just
that cats are unable to be anything but real; it’s that cats both know
they are performing and couldn’t possibly care less about how their
performance is received ... What an internet cat does is thus confront
us with how cravenly we ourselves court approval. A cat, if it decides
to love you, will do so only on its own terms ... and the less you need
it, the better loved you are going to be. The reason the lolcat says “oh
hai” is because he only just noticed, and certainly doesn’t care. ... He
doesn’t worry about y our o what you think. ... Thus is the internet cat
the realest cat of all.”
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The Harvard University professor Ethan Zuckerman has put forward
what he calls a “Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism.” Zuckerman proposed
that with the user- generated content of the “web 2.0,” “we’ve
embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their
cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do.
As a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful
for activists.” Zuckerman maintained that the network standard built
for sharing innocent cat pictures has the resilience to then also carry
the exchanges of political activists. Memes prove that this network
standard can politicise the forms appearing in it—from Rick Astley to
the Lolcat.
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Memes on the internet descended from the in-jokes of the first, academic,
users on the earliest bulletin boards. But in the mid-2000s,
places like 4chan mass-produced and weaponised the online meme.
They were vehicles of trolling and pranking to achieve the “lulz”—the
open-ended making fun of the ridiculous. This is what drives 4chan,
the anarchic culture around it and, to a certain extent, Anonymous.
The internet, to 4chan, is a refuge from work, obligation, class, and
name. It is a place where nothing really makes sense or is supposed
to do so. Its single objective—the lulz—made 4chan into a pressure
cooker for internet memes, and later, hacktivism. In a leaked 2011
threat assessment about the hacktivist network Anonymous, the US
Department of Homeland Security National Cybersecurity and Communications
Integration Center mentioned the meme, defining it as
an “idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within
a culture,” whereas the lulz is “often used to denote laughter at someone
who is a victim of a prank /malicious activity, or a reason for performing
an action.”
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Memes offer no explanation as to exactly why some of them work and
others don’t. They are hard to orchestrate at a larger scale; their success
is always also an accident. Memes can be compared to the evolution
of the blues, and are perhaps a new “slave music” for the internet.
Drummond and Cauty in The Manual recall how every music is a
reconfiguration of what came before and how “the complete history of
the blues is based on a one chord structure, hundreds of thousands of
songs using the same three basic chords in the same pattern. Through
this seemingly rigid formula has come some of the twentieth century’s
greatest music.”
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REVIVE

In the cult of the Thirty-seven Nals, practiced in Burma, spirits of
varying powers and properties are ritualized. Its many followers
recognize ghosts, monsters and witches as well as spirits of good.
Each Village has its own hierarchy of such spirits, and each has specific
ways of dealing with them. For example, preventive and curative
rituals are carried out to offset the work of evil spirits, believed
to cause disease. A villager may be a good Buddhist with a strong
sense of the Eightfold Path and also participate in rituals directly
related to the power of the spirit world.
Plan and reconstruction of the ceremonial area of the Shang city of
Anyang. The river is shown on the left of the plan.
Chinese Technology
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Technological development in China was based on the premise that
there should be a tool for each kind of task. Generalized tools like
the hoe, rake, adze, and axe of farming were, of course, standard in
Chinese villages, but artisans, including cooks of town and city developed
an enormous repertory of tools. The knives shown here are but a
small part of this Museum’s collection of such tools gathered in North
China early in the 20th century. It would have been unthinkable to use
a knife created for one purpose on another task.
The cycle of plays known as Hsi-yu chi (Journey to the West), shown
to the right illustrates a mixture of Taoist Buddhist and Confucian
thought. The young monk Hsuan-tsang travels to India to obtain Buddhist
scriptures. Among the supernatural characters accompanying
him to seek forgiveness for various sins is an extraordinary monkey
Sun Wukong (Monkey King), the chief figure in the story. Other companions
include Sha Wu-ching, once a marshal of the hosts of heaven,
now transformed into a monster with a shark’s head because he broke
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a crystal dish; Pai Lungimea, or White Dragon Horse, who has aroused
the ire of his father, the Dragon King of the West, by inadvertently
causing a fire in the palace; and the pio-faced Chu Pa-chieh, once a
marshal of heaven, who has been banished because he misbehaved
with the moon goddess.
The two kinds of performance that developed east and west of Peking
are often referred to as the Luan-chou school. The figures shown here
are East City types of Peking They are made of donkey skin treated to
make them translucent. Craftsmen cut the intricate designs then apply
natural dyes to achieve a gemlike coloring. A finishing coat of tung oil
is added.
CHINA-THE GEOGRAPHIC PREMISE
The huge expanse of China with its outlying territories is mostly mountain
and desert. Only about 12 percent of the land can be cultivated to
support the world’s largest population. Most of China’s people live on
the alluvial plains and in valleys facing the China and Yellow Seas.
Here is the seat of China’s ancient civilization and the homeland of
China’s classical tradition, both illustrated in this section of the Hall.
China’s population has traditionally moved south, but in recent years
there has also been movement northward into Manchuria and Mongolia
and westward to Szechuan in the middle Yangtze valley.
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General translation of Chinese calligraphy above:
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Wherever
you go in
the world,
your heart
is still with
your ancient
home.
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The bull which represents strength and power, was a central motif in
western Persia. Bronzes at left and right date from the Achaemenid
period. The central bull is probably a thousand years older.
A Painted wall plaster
B Hogback brick
C Clay cattle figurine
D Greenstone amulet
E Objects of bone and shell probably used for adornment
Animals prepared by R. H. Rockwell background by A. A. Jansson.
With deepest appreciation, the Museum acknowledges Kathryn W.
Davis for her generous founding support of the MAT Program.
Leadership support for the MAT program is provided by The Shelby
Cullom Davis Charitable Fund.
The MAT program is supported in part by the New York State Education
Department, the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers
DRL-1119444 and DUE-1340006, and the US Department of
Education under Grunt Number U336S140026.
The farside Highlands
As the Apollo 16 astronauts began their trip back to Earth, they captured
this view of the Moon never seen before the space age - from a
distance of about 1600 kilometers. The image centers on the boundary
between the lunar nearside (left) and the Moon’s hidden face. Clockwise
from upper left, the dark lava plains, visible from Earth are the
circular Mare Crisium, Mare Marginus and Mare Smythii.The heavily
cratered farside consists almost entirely of the lunar Highlands.
Apollo 16. April 1972
Photograph by Kenneth Mattingly
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Returning to the command module
Ascending from 11 kilometers above the surface to its rendezvous
with the command module, the lunar module Orion is framed by
the Crater Schubert B. The crater’s diameter extends 54 kilometers.
Apollo 16, April 1972
Photograph by Kenneth Mattingly
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This map shows the age of the crust that makes up the continents and
ocean islands.
A Slice through the Earth’s Surface
The model hanging above you shows that the Earth’s crust is just a thin
veneer lying on top of the mantle. The lighter rocks of the continental
crust float higher on the mantle than the denser rocks of the oceanic
crust. The relief of the Earth’s surface - the difference between the
deep ocean basins and the high continents - is caused by this difference
in density.
MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE PILLOW BASALT
This example illustrates how pillow basalts grow. First, a pillow structure
forms, then increasing magmatic pressure fractures part of the
surface. Lava is squeezed through the jagged fracture like toothpaste,
forming a striated pillow tube.
Provided by Prof Charles Langmuir
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
Columbia University, New York, New York
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An important synthesis was published in a 1968 paper, “Seismology
and the New Global Tectonics,” by the geophysicists Bryan Isacks, Jack
Oliver, and Lynn Sykes.
Donated by the Dofasco Company, Strathy Township, Ontario,
Canada
The white dot on the Moon model to your left indicates the collection
site of this sample, between Mare Imbrium and Mare Serenitatis. The
panoramic photo to your right depicts the Lunar Rover on the Moon’s
surface, with David Scott setting out on foot.
From the project FULL MOON by Michael Light, 1999
The Museum also gratefully acknowledges major funding from the
Charles Hayden Foundation. Presented with special thanks to NASA
and the National Science Foundation.
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Dark Universe was developed by the American Museum of Natural
History, New York ( www.amnh.org ), In collaboration with the California
Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, and GOTO IN Tokyo, Japan.
Our Senses is generously supported by Dana and Virginia Randt.
View of New Amsterdam, by Johannes Vingboons, 1664
VARIOUS DIORAMAS FEATURING MARINE MAMMALS, FISHES,
INVERTEBRATES, REPTILES, AND BIRDS ARE LOCATED ON THE
LOWER LEVEL.
Southern bluefin tuna (Thunnus maccoyii) are perfectly built for cruising
the open ocean. Their swimming muscles are rich in red muscle, or
myoglobin, for endurance, and their efficient movements and streamlined
shape enable them to travel up to 90 kilometers per hour-faster
than most submarines.
Ron and Valerie Taylor/Bruce Coleman Inc.
Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) grows where the Earth’s rotation and
weather patterns cause upwelling of cool, nutrient-rich water.
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With a scythe like upper lobe of the tail as long or longer than its body,
the thintall thresher is among the most easily recognizable of sharks.
These migratory, OPEN OCEAN GIANTS feed mainly on small schooling
fishes and squid, which they round up and stun by thrashing the
water with their tails.
Trawling for bottom-dwelling fish like this winter flounder (Pseudopleuronectes
americanus) scrapes many other life forms off the bottom.
Collecting fish and shellfish by trawling has been compared to
knocking down entire forests to catch deer.
BACKGROUND: D. Allan/OSF/Animals Animals
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Amos
Nachoum
(Seapics.com)
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RETHINK

He starts walking down the hall. Vincent, smiling, walks a little
bit behind.
JULES
Fuck you.
JULES
Man, you best back off, I’m gittin’ pissed
– this is the door.
VINCENT
How many?
VINCENT
Would you give me a foot massage – I’m
kinda tired.
The two men stand in front of the door numbered “49.” They
whisper.
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JULES
What time is it?
JULES
It ain’t quite time, let’s hang back.
VINCENT
(checking his watch)
Seven-twenty-two in the morning.
They move a little away from the door, facing each other, still
whispering.
JULES
Look, just because I wouldn’t give no
man a foot massage, don’t make it
right for Marsellus to throw Antwan
off a building into a glass-motherfuckin-house,
fuckin’ up the way the
Rethink

nigger talks. That ain’t right, man. Motherfucker
do that to me, he better paralyze
my ass, ‘cause I’d kill’a motherfucker.
VINCENT
I’m not sayin’ he was right, but you’re
sayin’ a foot massage don’t mean nothing,
and I’m sayin’ it does. I’ve given a
million ladies a million foot massages
and they all meant somethin’. We act like
they don’t, but they do. That’s what’s so
fuckin’ cool about ‘em. This sensual
thing’s goin’ on that nobody’s talkin
about, but you know it and she knows it,
fuckin’Marsellus knew it, and Antwan
shoulda known fuckin’ better. That’s his
fuckin’ wife, man. He ain’t gonna have a
sense of humor about that shit.
JULES
That’s an interesting point, but let’s get
into character.
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VINCENT
What’s her name again?
JULES
Mia. Why you so interested in big
man’s wife?
JULES
Take care of her?
VINCENT
Well, Marsellus is leavin’ for Florida and
when he’s gone, he wants me to take
care of Mia.
Rethink

Making a gun out of his finger and placing it to his head.
JULES
You’re gonna be takin’ MIA Wallace out
on a date?
VINCENT
Not that! Take her out. Show her a good
time. Don’t let her get lonely.
VINCENT
It ain’t a date. It’s like when you and
your buddy’s wife go to a movie or
somethin’. It’s just... you know... good
company.
Jules just looks at him.
VINCENT
It’s not a date.
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Jules just looks at him.
Rethink

129
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I’ve waited too long.
My beautiful darlings.
Look at me.
The birds start to glide in the breeze.
They pay no attention to him.
The birds sway. The man’s face grows dark. His blood
starts to rush to his head. He extends his arm and
forcefully grasps one of the birds.
Look at me.
He starts to crush it.
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Look at me.
He starts to rip it to shreds.
Look at me.
He lets go.
Look at me.
And the bird flies away.
Reform

Frost covers the house. The man opens his eyes. His
body is sprawled across the dirt ridden bed. He slowly
rocks himself out of his bed.
It’s cold.
He heads toward the bathroom. He is greeted with his
grotesque reflection.
Who am I?
His hair has become long, patchy, and disheveled. His
beard the same. His blue eyes pierce out of his thin
face. He catches a glimpse of something behind him.
My lovelies.
He turns around to see his birds flowing in the cool,
dancing breeze.
You’re so beautiful. You know that, don’t you?
132
Reform

The man wakes up and grabs at his stomach. He sits
up and groans. He looks back toward his pillow to
see more of his blood splattered there. He looks back
toward his birds in the other room.
Help me.
No.
The man rises. His body is thinner than the day before.
He steps toward his birds.
I love you.
I love you.
He gets closer.
133
Go away.
He gets to the doorway.
I love you.
Stop.
He stops. He looks at them. His blue eyes pierce them,
as much as they pierce him. They stand there.
I love you.
Go away.
He closes the door.
Reform

It’s bright out.
The man is dozing off. He tries to lift his arms. He can’t.
The man looks at the birds in the other room.
The birds are silent.
The birds are looking away.
Please help me.
Please.
Help.
134
Reform

135
Reform

Reform
136

The birds start to chirp.
The man’s lips rise slightly.
The birds start to fly.
And the man flies away with them.
...
137
Reform

V