The Ephemeral Altar

PAUSING TO READ

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The Altar’s Surface: The Shifting Sorcery of Self

Inside of ourselves (selves are inclusive of physical and energetic and other components that form our being) exists the power to create entire worlds, imaginary parallel universes. Due to humans’ general lack of telepathy, these spatial visions remain accessible only to us as individuals, unless we choose to share. The giving and receiving of ideas, disrupts the illusion that we are separate from each other—separate from our creations, separate from mineral and plant and animal constructs. So I invite you to this imaginal foundation of self—my self that is essentially mortal, that already has been lost and reconstituted on, at minimum, cellular and memorial levels. I form this series of reconstituted fictional memory fragments into a surface where offerings to Decomposition are laid. Come sit with me in front of this ephemeral altar—we can read tarot cards, sit within a floating grave built from decomposing sites, and interpret digital outputs of coded algorithms.

I was born with a vagina and thus raised with female pronouns. She/her/hers didn’t phase me too often growing up. As a toddler, I was too busy to care about gender. I spent my time being so in love with my dog that I shat in the dog house. I think it was some form of two-year-old, misinterpreted mimicry. I knew the Katie-Dog pooped outside and I knew the house was hers. I pooped inside my house, so wouldn’t she poop in hers?

As I got older, there were moments of thorough identification as a girl—refusing to wear a Mickey Mouse hat my dad got for me because they weren’t Minnie ears. I spent years five through eight as a fairy princess. One of my earliest altars was a container covered in seashell paper—something from Michaels that I filled with my budding cosmetics collection. These years were spent wearing pink tutus with sequin trim and light blue eyeshadow (when my mom would allow it). I yelled at my mom’s mom, “I hate you,” when she made me wear pants because the weather was cold. Tide-pooling, hiking through parks, stealing puppies from my dog’s litter—these were and are skirt-appropriate activities. To be fair, it is only my present perception of my no-longer-existent childhood self (laced with years-long memories of society ordering life into the two categories of masculine and feminine) that gendered any of these experiences. I dressed how I wanted to and did what I wanted to because some mysterious impulse (and probably biology and upbringing) bade me do so.

Even so, there were also years of distancing from my prescribed gender. At nine, I refused to wear skirts or dresses anymore. I asked my dad to stop his yearly tradition of getting me dresses each Christmas. I took up a uniform of green Dr. Marten boots, green jeans my dad had thrifted for me, and a green turtleneck. This apparel-rebellion against femininity didn’t stop me from doing as I pleased, though. I still painted my nails blue and wore gold wet n wild lipstick. I kept reading my fantasy books and watching Star Trek with my family, not realizing society had placed these activities into the born-with-penis-and-thus-must-be-male bucket. I was left to my own preferences and my preferences always led me to ignore the boundaries and boxes I might have fit in. Why not eat scones off of floral saucers while wearing sweaty soccer clothes? 

I had tea parties every morning. My mom and I drank out of mugs from Ross and China tea cups that my grandmother had collected. The formica table would be laid out with everything we needed to feel cozy—frozen waffles heated up, butter, syrup. The 1996 adaptation of Little Women played on our TV on the other side of the green-brocade couch placed by the pink desk from my mom’s room in the 80’s. I took my English breakfast with copious amounts of milk and sugar. 

In the bottom of some of the more ornate tea cups, there were embossed cameos of people I assumed were womxn. They had glorious up-dos. When you tipped the glass up to get the last drops of tea, or in my case, to lick out the sludge of sugar I had intentionally made in the bottom, you could see the profile of this person backlit by the sun or fluorescent lights. The outline of their curled updo and ruffled collar seemed to indicate the ornate fashion of the victorian era. Who were they?

I tipped the cup farther and farther back to get all of the sweet and try to see the womxn trapped in my dishware. The tea-soaked granules of sugar dripped onto my face. The bottom of the teacup opened up. Looking closer and closer, the porcelain shifted into a bright overcast sky. My sweet droplets became spray crashing against the rock my feet were now standing on. The wave went by me, settling down, and I tried to get my footing on the seaweed covered stone to avoid slipping into the tide-pool. 

Sighing from the familiar slip into a new space and time, I was fairly combobulated. I had trained myself to accept unexpected shifts in my location through rigorous study of fantasy novels. The characters always seemed to slip through portals into moss-filled dimensions with vaguely evil fae. I made my way back to the smoldering bonfire on the beach—leaping from sea-slime covered boulder to barnacle cluster to pebble patch. I surveyed the beach to find evidence of what I must have done that day. Agate hunting was a likely assumption. My dad and I must have spent some time on the driftwood fort, the remnants of broken trees blooming into a new structure in our hands. Spires of salt-smoothed branches jutted up from where they were deeply embedded in the shore. The peaks of our monument were crested with seal skulls, with dried out chitons, with lingcod skeletons. The beach was a treasure trove of particulate conglomerate—barnacle covered rope, shoe soles, bright orange and blue foam buoys with chunks casually missing. Our fort was a place we could find shelter from the waves and the wind. It was made from the ocean rot we would eventually become. Time to head up the hill for dinner.

I grabbed a rock from the edge of our made-today-gone-tomorrow fire pit, and put it in my sweatshirt pocket to keep me warm on the walk up to my dad’s house. After eating, I read by the fire. The next day, I snuck alongside the creek. I crept below the winter-barren blackberry brambles until I was all alone with the sound of rippling water. 

Three pebbles under the water grew until they were three cards. The center one was a series of black and red rectangles framing a crying figure. She was Persephone, my favorite goddess, the queen of the underworld. I didn’t know of the violence that preceded her title yet, only the births and deaths the world rejoiced and mourned depending on her location. I placed her back down on the expansive, black dining table, laying my offering of love for cosmic cycles at the central altar in my mother’s home. 

As my fingers touched wood, the laminated card stock fluttered against the solid surface. The image on the card turned into a crumbling tower. Expecting to touch a wooden plane, the nerves in my hands were surprised at sinking into table-transmuted, descending into an aqua blue scarf made of airy silk. This was an altar made for offerings to fluidity. A few months after pulling 16. The Tower, I would experience one of my identities crumbling, and the pain caused from resisting dissolution. Somehow I had lost the ease of transmutation, and become stuck in society’s need for eternally rigid selves. My body and mind had been feeling increased anxiety around desired creative prowess. If I didn’t create interesting pieces of work, was I a worthy person? If I did make beautiful posters, and logos, and labels, would my life become a series of corporate projects done in order to eat? Thankfully, we have anxiety and depression. This lovely pair will take over if you spend years ignoring your intuition, and give your being a full shutdown (and hopefully a restart). In that moment, though, when I picked up one of the most-feared cards in the Major Arcana, the square edges began bulging out. 

Humans are a generative algorithm iterating on Tarot—an algorithm being a set of processes to achieve understanding and generative meaning something that creates. Human’s create decks, yes, but this productive process also incorporates sharing iterations of decks. A deck creator informs other artists, other mystics, other spiritual leaders of their new cards. These new people, in turn, see this new iteration of the arcana, refine all of the parts according to their worldview, and generate their own set of cards. These archetypes captured on cards, that break up, decompose, the human experience to help us process existence, are created over and over and over again. They are not working towards some ultimate perfection, but towards a truthful multiplicity. These encompassed facets can be more indicative of universal experience than any singular item ever has the hope of being.

Now, a round card was in my hand, 21. The World. My best friend was at my house, her dog in her lap. Jumping from place to time to salt spray to cozy home, had revealed a congruence between moments. Their edges would blend together as they were recalled and lived. The pink cast surrounding my broken wrist turned into a decrepit flip-flop found on the beach of the same hue, turned into short-lived floral blooms at a cemetery, turned into a face lit with fuchsia light for pandemic-induced video conferences. The pieces were all there, blended and globular. The sun streamed through sliding glass doors. I put the card down on the taupe carpet.

Little hands (likely mine) were pulling small lavender cards, a half inch by an inch and a half. Printed on the surfaces were angel illustrations and inspirational words, platitudes, like oneness, like presence, like rejuvenation.

Inside of me, inside of you, we can create a room to read the cards, the wonders and devastations of our lives, the tools we use to decompose.

Offerings to Decomposition: Holistic Perception through Bits of Rot

Generally, altars are filled with offerings. To whom and what is given are both malleable. When showing reverence to Decomposition, any object, idea, or other construct will do. Eventually everything dies and disintegrates—plastic left in the sun, a cicada carcass being picked over by ants. Eventually our sun will die, taking our solar system with it. Eventually the accelerating universe we exist within will contract. Seeing the vivid green of new pine needles in the hue of the shiny Plasti Dip on your jewelry pliers… is the point. So fill your altar with shells—the abandoned home of dead sea creatures. Fill it with drug store press-on nails and extra nails from your tool box. Offer Decomposition your childhood memories of death, reverence for interconnection, and the understanding that true horror is not found in our end but in injustice perpetuated while we still identify as ourselves.

A magnolia was planted over the grave—roots slowly reaching down. Water and nutrients and little symbiotic creatures were magnetically drawn up from the decomposing human and ephemera. The magnolia grew. The magnolia willed blooms into existence, and they burst forth—swapping out molecular form, trading air for surly leather petals. 

My occipital lobe played me this scene as I pulled 1. The Magician. I held this master manifester with the cheese-dust from my service station snacks under my fingernails. I placed it on the dew drenched lawn on the ground by my rental car. The moisture burnt through the card, like embers had been flicked onto the paper—circular holes causing structural damage, changing fiber to dirt. Ash coated the green blades instead of water. I stepped over the incomprehensible happening, and made my way from the silver Corolla to the back of the lodge.

I had arrived on the edges of a cemetery nestled between Rochelle, Micanopy, and Gainesville, Florida. Here there aren’t cement vaults filled with metal caskets. The graves aren’t filled with embalmed bodies. The corpses aren’t filled with preservation chemicals. The dead veins are filled with decomposing blood. The bodies are sometimes shrouded in fibers that disintegrate easily, cotton or wool or similar. Sometimes the corpses are enclosed in caskets made from wicker or untreated wood or cardboard. A year or two later, the remains are mostly just soil. 

Walking along the trails beside palm fronds and beauty berries you wouldn’t guess you were in a cemetery—until you noticed mounds of recently turned soil cocooned in pine needles, some of which are covered in carefully laid flowers. This convergence of shaded sandy soil and sun drenched clay fields is open to whoever can get there. The cemetery has been a space for cattle grazing and a hunting ground for imported animals. Once, while the land was still being used for trophy hunting, a storm hit. A fence was downed and the animals took advantage of a perceived escape. Instead of freedom, they died by different hands. Locals shot the animals out of kitchen windows—Florida law only protects native species. All around the cemetery are sites where the Seminole Wars were fought. An hour away is Saint Augustine, the first colonial Spanish town in the U.S. 

When I entered the cemetery office, staff told me there was going to be a burial in a few hours. The grave had been hand dug in the meadow the day prior—a very precise rectangle debossed 3.5 feet into the earth. Tall grasses interspersed with yellow black-eyed Susans and invasive hairy indigo spread out from the hole. We dropped pine straw off at the site, to be used later to top the filled-in grave. Riding in the golf cart, we went to the patch of grass designated as the parking lot to wait for the family, and for the body.

Instead of a hearse, a white cargo van drove up Cemetery Lane. The funeral director wore a back brace. When she opened the back doors of the vehicle, she turned to me, asking if I could help pull the body out. I hadn’t anticipated the possibility of handling a corpse and my surprise caused me to pause in place. Before I could help, a cemetery staff member stepped in and loaded the shrouded body onto the burial cart.

The mourning party arrived. The husband of the deceased was not expecting a burial in what seemed like a park with no visible headstones—another family member had arranged the funeral. The white cotton cloth, carefully encasing his wife, was not a shiny metal casket. Where was the bodily preservation to keep her from rotting? He needed to see his wife’s body, so the funeral director uncovered the head. In contrast to the enlivened, embalmed faces of the deceased I had seen at other funerals, the eyes on this body were sunken deeply into the skull. The skin draped down around the underlying bone without any force acting upon the slouching flesh but gravity. The man hunched over the woman he loved and cried. He wanted to know if she could be dug up again and buried conventionally. 

The cemetery staff provided order to an orderless, incomprehensible experience. They assisted the family to the plot, through sun touched stalks, with trees draped in Spanish moss framing the experience.

The body floated to the grave, surrounded by loved ones. 

The body was placed on slats above the grave, with the help of loved ones. 

The body was lowered into the hand dug grave, by a husband, some sons, and grandsons. 

The body was buried, loved ones guided the shovels. 

I also shoveled heaps of earth onto the body—tossing it from the back of the pile of unearthed soil over the lip of the hole. The rhythmic thudding of dirt covering the corpse covering the bottom of the grave, seemed a stand in for the once beating heart. I wanted to watch the body get engulfed in the ground, become re-assimilated into the terrain. It didn’t feel like there was a way to look without being in a space that wasn’t mine. Instead, I handed off my shovel to sons and grandsons. Got people water. Offered a hand. 

The husband expressed how grateful he was to “take care of his own.” I don’t know whether he still would prefer his wife be buried conventionally. However, the appreciation he expressed for directly tending to her body stood in dramatic contrast to his initial aversion toward conservation burial.

My memory overlaid my mom on top of this man’s face. She was saying how sad she was that she hadn’t been able to see or touch her dad’s body before they cremated him.

The faces circled and seated around the grave began to ripple. Before me the brown, newly-turned earth filled in with lawn in an embodied time-lapse. Glancing to my left, I blinked. My eyes focused on a familiar view of the Pacific Ocean now visible through the trees in the Florida cemetery. A wave crashed against the trunks, toppling the once sturdy plants. I watched as a forest was reduced to logs, swept out to sea.

Turning back, the people around me were no longer strangers. I saw my dad in a dark blue shirt patterned with white blooms. His long hair was tied back with a green rubber band. My Oma sat in a wooden folding chair with her best friend beside her. We were telling stories about my Opa, a project he had to make the perfect chair, the impact he made on his students in the wildlife department at the local university. We had come together on our sun illuminated lawn. We were preparing to scatter my Opa’s ashes into the ocean beside our home.

Raven’s Roost, colloquially referred to as The Roost, is home to my dad’s family. It’s an altar in the shape of a half pipe, on a berry bramble encrusted hill, in the midst of a daffodil studded, rain-watered lawn. The Roost is filled with offerings from the four generations worth of family members who have lived there. My life there was spent in fog-shrouded weekends, fire-warmed mornings, and chilly afternoons spent in the company of gritty-gray rocks and happy-damp dogs. Mythology has it that Edgar Alan Poe's nephew is the one responsible for moving this Quonset hut to the coast. In it’s past life, The Roost was a WWII aircraft hanger. Now it’s firmly planted “up the hill” from the overwhelmingly large Pacific Ocean it looks over. 

“Down the hill” though is a different world. To get to the Pacific you have to walk on a path that winds through toxic foxgloves and ferns, under fallen trees and beside the trickling creek. The trail opens up just above the beach to an area we call the flat space. It’s a clover covered valley filled with California poppies, vivid blue blooms, blossoms from a seed packet marked “wildflowers,” and multiple artichoke varieties that a friend gave to my dad.

When I was little and afraid of my dad dying, he told me to taxidermy his body and prop up his remains in my room for company. Later, he suggested I mount his head on a plaque, like a talking trout so that whenever someone walks by, a pre-recorded phrase would be shouted at them in his voice. He would like to be rolled off of the path between our home and the beach so his body can disintegrate, so he can be eaten by animals. 

Decomposition is not a solitary act. Disintegration of a corpse is collaborative. Some of it is eaten by carrion birds, bones might be ground down into sand, flesh ends up in the dogs’ fur and in divots within soles of shoes. The water evaporates from the body, liquid returning to the air or draining back into the ocean. Oneness is visible in blending anatomy with landscape, flesh turning to energy within a digestive tract. 

Dissolution can be emulated formally. Visually a frame can be filled with melded forms—with motion blur and translucent fabric, with distortion and repeated exposure. 

As I have grown older—old selves dissolving into dust later found on window blinds, and news selves bursting forth through dry patchy flecks of skin that shed off of my face—my attraction toward death remained. 

A person was guided through seven gates of the underworld—shedding bits of self at each impasse. A woman shared her story of accompanying someone while they die.

When someone close to the cemetery dies, a board member or a friend, Carlos creates an installation in their grave. In his own time, he gathers vivid emerald palm fronds and dusty gray green Spanish moss. 

I was handed half of a milk carton filled with bones collected on Carlos’s rounds of the cemetery. I laid them out on the table. Jaw bones and vertebrae, at least one rib. What are they from? Freddie says the jaw bones are probably from doe.

The alligator nudged out of the plant covered pool to go nose to nose with the doe. The soft deer skin covered with a fuzzy layer of fur nuzzled the cold and damp and weathered hide. The gator crawled closer curling, slender crescent. The doe lied beside her counterpart, curling, complimentary, surrounding the gator, warming their body—head lain on the gators back. Over the years they solidified, crystalized, calcified, fossilized—gator would kill the doe for dinner, doe would dodge the menacing jaws and the gator would starve. 6. The Lovers enacted a cross-species ritual determining who gets to eat.

I grew up with farm birds getting eaten by foxes or bobcats, maybe bears. When the spotted hen went missing, my Oma told me that the chicken had been eaten by a “critter.” At home, I saw family battling chronic pain and objects purchased by family members who died before I was born. I grew up on a beach filled with seal and sea lion carcasses, all getting picked over by huge turkey vultures. 

I’ve watched my grandparents’ generation age and start to die. A close family friend died from a stroke. I got the news while eating Brussels sprouts in a kitchen I didn’t like. It was unexpected and I cried. My great aunt died in her Davis, CA home on Alice and Chestnut. Her backyard was filled with a persimmon tree and a cumquat tree. It sat across from the dog park and was where I would go in the summer to eat peaches from farmers market, hide from the heat in movie theaters, and take walks to the sticker store. My great aunt would get sheets of her iconic adhesive ants and ladybugs. They always adorned mine and my cousin's birthday cards. My uncle was the one to find her. 

Through high school and college, my entire family witnessed progressively more horrific effects of my Opa’s diabetes—swollen feet, yes, and also decreasing consciousness, decreasing access to the realm of human “reality.” My Opa died in the Murphy bed my dad built for him in my childhood bedroom—where I learned to read, collected dolls, and battled moths for access to my bedside lamp at night. I think his body was there for a day. When I go home, I still sleep there—in the bed once filled with his living self and then his corpse. 

Before dinner at the Roost 5. Hierophant says a prayer. 

Thank you Jesus. 

Your tender mercies.

In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit, Amen. 

God bless you. 

We just have so much to be thankful for.

When my Opa died, my Oma’s memory started to deteriorate. Now my dad keeps track of doctors appointments and makes them both dinner everyday. He stays downstairs for an extra hour to watch Hawaii 5.0 with his mom and makes sure my cousins and I talk to our Oma when we call. He fixes heaters and does taxes and, and, and. He’s the one who has seen the boat in the courtyard disintegrate. When storm-felled trees smash decades-old motorhomes, my dad is the one who cuts the logs up into firewood. 

When I’m home my dad and I take mo(u)rning walks on the beach. Sometimes the potency of seashore smell intensifies and we find a pile of ribs attached to an eye socket filled with goo, emerging out of the short-haired hide of a thoroughly dead sea lion. My chocolate lab, Brownie, would role in the carcasses. My dad collects skulls we find along our route. Skeletons of lingcod, with their many rings of teeth, are scattered around where we lounge. We fish for lingcod too. We kill them. We eat them. My dad’s recipe for fish-and-chips has spoiled the meal, made by any other hands, for me.

My piece Mourning Room failed. Simply designating a white box, in a school full of white boxes, as a space where it was okay to feel the hard and heavy impacts of grief wasn’t enough to make it so. I lay shrouded on a table and expected the people who came in to feel deeply, even though I wasn’t being equally vulnerable. Did the low lighting, dark fabrics, flower laying, naming being who you are mourning, narrow the expression of grief too much? 

Denying the need to grieve and fearing death, both benefit the businesses who profit off our labor and the systems that keep those in power comfortable. When we are drained from our work, it is easier to be complacent, to stay in the cubicle. We stay in shitty jobs because we need to stay alive. Yes, we have to be practical, eat, pay rent. Yet, complacency comes from avoiding that our time alive is limited. If we. We’re allowed to remember fondly and we’re allowed even to say missing someone is hard, but only if we are composed. There is no space for grief in a society where your only value is productivity. If we are weeping, are we working?

Different people are at different risk of death. The farther someone is from being white, pale-skinned, able-bodied, thin, young, middle or upper class, neuro-“typical,” cisgender (ideally male), and straight, the more their risk of an unjust death increases. Black womxn are not trusted by medical professionals when reporting their own pain leading to death through malpractice and they are four times more likely to die during childbirth. Fat people have to fight with doctors to get their symptoms, instead of their fatness, treated. The lack of gender affirming support given to trans teens is in large part responsible for the percentage of their attempted suicides ranging from 30–50%. Police enact gun violence by murdering Black and brown people without fear of consequence. Gun violence in the U.S., often perpetuated by white men, has embodied prejudice through murdering gay and Muslim people. Egregious miscarriage of law enforcement reinforces lack of prevention and justice for missing and murdered Indigenous womxn. Black and Latinx are more likely to contract and die from Covid-19 due to often being essential workers, living in multigenerational homes, using public transportation, and lacking a cushion of generational wealth which would allow them to shelter in place during the pandemic. 

The comfort and the ability to deny-death that white, wealthy, and otherwise privileged people have, is predicated on living in a society that values their lives over the lives of those who are marginalized. Increased privileges result in decreased proximity to bigoted death. What if our own deaths were less scary to us than the current confinement of babies, children, and adults in ICE detention centers?

In the U.S. distance from death is contingent on other people’s closeness to death.

However, the cost of survival is high, not just monetarily but existentially. This system keeps people exhausted, especially people who are already in poverty or in violently marginalized communities. Living in societally perpetuated fear of death and living in capitalist-benefitting exhaustion blocks access to energy and inspiration needed to make change.

I came across a group of artists, scholars, activists, and doulas dedicated to re-exposing the United States, and other parts of the world, to death. They have created a parallel universe where the word died is used instead of passed away, and the fear, grief, mystery, and wonder around death are openly expressed. They work fervently to bring their envisioned reality into a commingled state with the many other worlds that exist on our planet. 

Humans are ephemeral. 

Embracing our mortality is a reclamation of our full humanity. 

Mourn in all ways. 

Reject rhetoric used to make us fear “others” who “threaten” our lives. 

We are going to die. 

My Opa’s parents, Dessie and Gary, purchased the Roost when their landlord decided to sell in the 70s. I regularly think about the link between death and transference of property. If you have the wealth and are afforded the privilege of property ownership, you can give some amount of security to your children in the form of a home. Even with this huge privilege, families must have steady access to large amounts of money to preserve their property. Do you know how much it costs to re-shingle a house? Some nights, when I’m kept up thinking about how far away I am from home, the Roost seems too unwieldy to maintain.

Like much in U.S. society, conservation is a bandaid on top of a gaping wound that requires much more intensive treatment. Within the capitalist structures of the United States, sometimes it seems like the only option for non-human nature to continue and for human-natures’ ephemerality to be embraced is to buy property and dedicate the plot to immortality in the guise of conservation. We as a society, or at least white people, wealthy people, people who benefit from our oppressive systems, still trust conservation trusts and wealthy people to care for land, instead of actively working to give land back to Indigenous nations. Conservation is an attempt to care for non-human nature, from within, and as a part of, an extractive capitalist system. Can a tool that perpetuates the absurd idea that humans own land be morphed into an incantation that summons anti-capitalist space? 

Within conservation cemeteries lie an attempt to recall that we as humans, our soda bottles, sky scrapers, and strip malls are all nature. Here our bodies are allowed to decay alongside dead mushrooms, wilting flowers, and animals who died too. People picnic between graves adorned with gnarled branches. There are deer spotted leaping as you traverse around an oak tree, gators in cypress ponds, and humans walking through the meadow or seeking shade in the woods. There are eagles flying, bats that eat bugs at sunset, and large banana spiders making equally large webs. 

The eagles and bats and spiders can mourn their dead, but can we? There is no space for grief in a society where our only value is productivity. If we are weeping, are we working?

The Undoing: The Anti-Immortality League

Permanence is a convenient marker of quality. If an art school is almost a hundred and fifty years old we no longer need to look critically at how it treats its students. Enduring is signifier enough of its inherent morality. But what payment is required to ensure a lifespan of forever? Caring for buildings instead of lives. Instead, let's reimagine eternity to incorporate inherent evanescence. We have prostrated our intangible selves to form an altar’s surface. We have built up, dug down, and surrounded this surface with offerings to Decomposition—crumbling landscapes and beautifully decaying bodies and embracing mortality. What is left but dissolution? Let my flesh slough off into fantastical vignettes. Let meat be devoured off the bones of institutions and their skeletons repurposed to activate true care. Blooms can burst forth off of these architectural corpses to house humans who have been prevented access to homes. Those who are hungry can be nourished from the floral nectar. Then we will wilt and die, and so too our ephemeral homes. Next will grow fungi or nurturing fuzzy creatures. The patterns of our beings nourishing sublime evolutions of existence.

Strata of different settings flickered in and out of my surroundings. Through my eyelashes I saw my feet on exposed dirt. Yet, the surface of the ground was at my waist. I was digging a grave. I paused, shovel in one hand, to wipe sweat off my forehead. As my eyes re-emerged from behind my arm, my legs started to float up and I began to tip. My head was level with the forest floor, as I felt the bottom of the grave rise up to support my body. Soil solidified, turning to taupe and rust colored winter comforters. Pine needles shuttered and became whiskers. Now all I could see was the grey fur of my cat, still asleep, curled up by my face.

My eyes reluctantly remained open. In an attempt to stay awake, I lifted my eyebrows and stretched my eyelids as wide as they would go. The skin of my face spread taught around the new piercing that I had forgotten about in my partially dreaming state. I rolled out from under my covers and went to the bathroom. Looking in the mirror, I sprayed saline solution on the scab encrusted exits of the stainless steel barb now jutting through the skin above my nose. 

My heart pounded as sleep lifted from my mind. An infinite to-do list lingered over me, a plethora of tasks made urgent either by their relation to me getting paid or the need to fit them in around work. I resisted productivity because I had promised myself to take time each day to reflect on my life—my supposed existence and how I was interwoven with the humans, buildings, and other lifeforms around me. I sunk into the couch with my coffee, double blinked to open my holoscreen, and pulled up my favorite Oracle Generative Adversarial Network, Dissolution OGAN. 

As I uploaded batch images tagged gender, home, and decay, I wondered how the developers had experienced death and decomposition in their lives. How had their interactions with dissolution impacted their code and thus the results people generate, that people pray are portends? Someone explained to me that any OGAN used to gain insight into your life involves a forging algorithm and a detecting algorithm. Eventually the forging algorithm creates forgeries of the initial assets that are so good, at least on the binary level, that they can’t be detected as fake by their paired bit of math—and that’s when the querents, like me, generate their results so they can see how their assets have been reflected back to them in new ways.  

Part of what drew me to Dissolution OGAN is that all forging algorithms (in all OGANs) thoroughly deconstruct the assets they analyze. This allows querents to generate outputs in which we can look for patterns to create associations with, and hopefully activate our intuition. I appreciate that the Dissolution OGAN developers embraced the decomposition core to OGAN structure in their code. What are associations if not experiences we decompose and reorganize? We are getting better at decomposing ourselves for more thorough access to our lives.

I started sifting through the abstract amalgamations of fuchsia blobs and orange stripes found in the image set I generated. I paused on a gray square with warm yellow streaks and green bursts shaped into the pattern of cracks in sun-hardened sand. I loved that the charcoal plane was broken up with vivid hues. I wanted to dissolve monotonous days into time spent feeling fully alive, and this image seemed to do just that. I could swear the green began to move in the wind and shadows changed yellow to orange. 

I widened my eyes to bring my holoscreen closer to my body and gestured. Starting with my hands together in front of my chest, I then opened my arms wide to zoom in on the frame. I was too close to the image, my holoscreen slipped behind my field of vision. I expected to see my living room, but instead I found myself tipping forward with nothing for my feed to stand on or my hands to grasp. Was I slipping through the frame onto the Dawn Treader? Was I falling down the rabbit hole? Why wasn’t I enshrouded in Alice’s petticoats when I needed them to slow my descent through the rushing air? The rustling wind started to sound like words. As I focused, 4. The Emperor whispered a story to me:

Had the bank (that had previously leased the building belonging to the lot) still been alive, it would have left an angry review at the haphazard maintenance of “its” parking spaces. Did the city government not realize that each space, surrounded by broken yellow lines, housed crucial fragments Wealth’s, Opulence’s, and Abundance’s eternal souls? Instead of a negative assessment written on Yelp, the bank made do with communicating its grievances to the lot’s landlord during their standing seance each Saturday night. Post communique, the cracks in the parking lot were preserved by an eight-foot-high chain-linked fence. The asphalt rolled its figurative eyes at the attempt to cauterize its decay.

The asphalt wasn’t always called “the asphalt” or “the lot” and wasn’t always itself. It was a piece of consciousness located in one physical dimension and in at least three temporal dimensions. The corporeal edges of the lot blended into other locations and therefore the edges of its holistic self were inherently, equally blurred. The asphalt casually slipped part of its consciousness into a womxn scrolling on her phone.

The present human society, the United States, is startlingly death phobic for a species that dies and decays so frequently. Many humans are so intent on immortality that they are conditioned to believe every trace of themselves holds utmost importance. The asphalt has seen old computers and phones, the urns of text messages from different eras, abandoned and preserved in dresser drawers and plastic storage bins. Their social media reminds them of what their lives were like three years ago and five years ago and eight years ago “on this day” (as if all their days weren’t happening simultaneously). Their devices are used to capture and transfer and preserve human essence (or at least, that essence as defined by giant tech conglomerates—a concept the asphalt has come to understand through reading articles about Facebook through the eyes of many humans). The lot felt movement on its primary surface.

Circled up on top of the abandoned asphalt, the embodiment of Instagram advertisements, Her Holiness the Algorithm, sat facing a disembodied Instagram story. The holographic plane incorporated a face with snakes for eyes. Their slithering undulating bodies appeared and disappeared as a hand struck alternate temples of the face. To the left of the prismatic plane sat a .gif of a Calabi-Yau manifold. It was seeking advice from Her Holiness regarding the importance of color.  

She responded, “Why is this important to remember during this public health crisis? Once we merge with digital technology the sooner we will overcome our biological susceptibility to hereditary, developmental, bacterial, and viral illness, as well as injuries. Likewise, the analog aspects of our beings will prevent cyberattacks on ourselves in the form of hacking, viruses, and bugs.” 

The Calabi-Yau sighed as Elon Musk’s spiritual advisor continued to preach. The manifold shifted into a bright pink red blood cell and pondered if it was still the same being. The cell decided it didn’t matter if it was still itself and spun slowly, reveling in its form. 

From beneath this circle, the asphalt formed into a hand with knuckles four feet wide. Its skin was a mesh of roots connected by tar, with grasses sprouting at its knuckles. Gently, the hand rested its fingertips and palm on top of a copper plate. In return for the touch, the metacarpus received an advertisement from which it could intuit the tenor of its day. The asphalt breathed in, deepening the cracks—the plants within grew a little bit more.

The lot laughed, tickled by the fluttering impact of dead leaves as they fell from winter-dead trees and landed on the ground. The constant death and rebirth the asphalt experienced, made the human’s dedication to false immortality that much more amusing. They can’t predict which businesses will stay alive, preserving their data, forever. They don’t control how much server space Google allots to each of them. 

As they hit maximum storage in their inboxes, they start to delete old files, scratching the dead digital dermis off of the parts of themselves that are mechanical. 

The asphalt had incorporated the perspectives of two humans a few blocks before they reached its central location. As they stepped amidst the abandoned lot’s cracked lung-like bellows, it decided to make use of their eyes.

Maybe a fire will consume old electronics filled with personal archives. 

When the lot needed mountain dew it seeped into one of its human extensions. It just opened a hand gripping a fluorescent filled bottle—sugar crystalized in gravel pocked orifices.

Maybe their old devices will just be recycled when they die. 

The asphalt held court as a neon plastic pylon, turning brittle and UV cracked. Its throne was a hole corroded through the lot’s superficial layer, cushioned with reddening leaves. 

Social media accounts might go forgotten, their accounts never memorialized. 

Maybe there will be a solar flare. 

The body, imbued with the asphalt’s sentience, appeared to be hovering above the broken-open pavement, gown grazing ground—not held up in the same manner as the figure—balanced on strong arms, bent at 90º degrees (celsius), biceps and triceps sprouting sinew to firmly seam upper arms to rib bones, forearms turned to rebar perpendicular to parking spot.

Maybe the forthcoming San Francisco earthquake will irreparably damage the servers where they immortalize their lives. 

Fingers tented up and stretched longer and longer—skin translucent now, expanding to its limit over lacy capillaries, reinforcing bones extended four times their original length. 

Small hands made concoctions out of jelly pink Suave shampoo and the tips of grass picked outside and the petals of flowers, plucked.

The ends tripod ding the body up. 

Back under the brambles the girl got into the stream and floated on her back. She switched locations and sunk her tender fingers into shard soaked clay, so only her feet were swallowed by the high tide waters. 

The fingertips boring into in between, creating in between, between tar soaked stones siphoning siphoning siphoning.

She spanned depth and surface, felt entirely the mesh enshrouding all things, the stitching of being through being. 

Her toes kicked up a lingcod. Green and tooth filled grin, it soared out of its element. It was the size of the entire girl. 

It landed in her mouth and went down her throat whole.

Her stomach expanded into a large sphere. If light made it through the girl's organs, it was broken up into rainbows. The prismatic illumination danced over a rotting arm, some teeth, and a slightly withered magnolia flower.

The fish, now dead, swam high above the girl’s stomach acid to meet its interment fellows. The magnolia’s petals enshrouded the lingcod. The hand extended to cradle the intertwined pair and the teeth settled upon the body like cuts of floral stems. Together they disintegrated into each other, suspended in their tomb. 10. The Wheel of Fortune turns.

The Floating Grave