Hypothetical #12
What does this mean?
There is a house you live in at the top of a hill. I climb the hill everyday, once in the morning where I request from you a long draught of pearls. Every morning you tip the pearls down my throat, you call my thirst immoral, and you massage my bared throat to ease the beads down, as they sometimes get stuck. I stay with you for a few hours after that; I clip your finger and toe nails and place the clippings in a soft bag you keep by the door. Every day I use the same bag for clippings, but the bag is always empty. I never ask what you do with the clippings. I comb the hair on your head, and on your genitals, and sometimes under your arms. I have special brushes for each hair; I have a very small one for your eyelashes that I made out of a particularly thick toenail clipping, with notches and grooves along the side of it. You enjoyed that when I showed it to you, commending me for my “immoral ingenuity.” It was then that you told me I must start filing my teeth so that they would grow faster and stronger, because when they are stronger you could give me emeralds too, and opals, which must be eaten and not swallowed like the pearls.
Around midday I walk down the hill to where I stay. There I read, file my teeth, and answer emails. I make a light lunch of fresh greens, maybe a piece of fruit, usually a stone fruit. Mostly, I read.
In the evening I walk back up the hill to see you. Upon greeting me you hand me a copper bucket and instruct me to sit on it under a cluster of “very fine trees” as you always say. I pull my pants down and sit on the bucket. I push out the pearls that have, by now, mostly been pulverized by my churning, desert stomach. We look at the shining immaculate dust. Before we collect it into small vials that you keep by the door, we look for any shapes, but typically it is just dust- to which you say things like “that immoral and immaculate desert stomach” or “the immoral perfection of your bowels.”
Hypothetical 12.5
These days you prepare for me a paste from the shining dust of my immaculate bowels, dubbing it “Miracle’s Tendency” and dousing me with years of my own movements. We laugh at how handsome this makes me. The paste is applied in a series of small movements that you assure me are not random, but a part of “The Language of Application.” The Language of Application would, at first glance, appear to be two people moving in and out of concentric circles, one arm occasionally smoothing the paste across a throat as the circles pass. In some cases a glance is all you need, but determining those cases often requires a second look. To explain to you what “Miracle’s Tendency” does to the soul would be pointless, so instead I will tell you how it makes me look: I look very handsome. When you laugh at my handsome, I feel like an incredible beetle perched upon a touring wind, with “Miracle’s Tendency” scraping off at my velocity.
You instruct me to let the paste harden from shining dust to iridescent shell. During my process of hardening, I do not do any chores. I walk down the hill to where I stay and I do not do anything but dance. It is not hard to dance inside of “Miracle’s Tendency” for every day the shell gives a few more inches to move within. The birds in my neighborhood compliment the shimmer that falls from my mustache when I eat. Sometimes, I take videos of my dancing, and here and there I write messages to far away friends.
Every day after my lunch dance, I walk back up the hill to see you. You reapply the paste in parts that, as you say, reflect my immoral ingenuity: under my finger nails, in the dip between lip and nose, between chin and lobe, along the spine, and obviously the nipples and belly button. While you do this, I chew on the opals you have set out for me, grinding them to a fine dust that I breathe into your mouth, while you whisper things like “the immaculate body” or “the indeterminate nature of your grace.”
