Whitehot Magazine

Fiction: The Right To Carry (Our Rapidly Expanding Company)

By CHRIS CAMPANIONI, APR. 2017

To come back to the part where the protagonist wakes up, having dreamt that their recent death was only a dream, a consolidation of memories about other people’s deaths during sleep, what we call offline memory consolidation. & what is a dream if not a preparation for waking life?  & what is death if not a preparation for another life? We might play dead but only for fear of actual death. Think of “The Balcony” & what it means to jump off, on stage.  It’s all over for me, except in my mouth, which is open so that I can seek employment elsewhere. Celebrity is the ability to expand rapidly in the consciousness of others. Moving images & static snapshots are a means to an end, which is still loading. Early experiments to influence dreams using manipulations such as films & images failed to predict the effects of waking experiences on dream visions. The appearance of a complete stranger in a dream, for example, relies on knowledge of the visual characteristics of the human face & on schemas for typical human behavior. Think of everyone you’ve ever met, & everyone you will never meet. Online & offline, & on a long, long line. Think of them in their living, in their loving, in their learning & in their leaning. Think of them in their sitting, in their sleeping, in their drinking & eating, in their laughing & their crying. Everyone is inside of them; everyone is reminded of someone else when they are sitting across from this person, when they are holding hands with this person, when they are making love with this person or in love with this person who is not you. & over it all, something floated not floated away but just floated, floated up there for us to stare at & situate in our screens. Our rapidly expanding company announces a position of a business correspondence proofreader for everybody who speaks English fluently to aid in communicating with our exterior customers. What distinguishes our exterior customers from our interior customers? What remains universal in a world designed to service our individual desires & prejudices, our carefully-curated re-presentation of reality? Everything eventually converges, in sense or on screen. Your job duties will be looking through our business letters & correcting spelling & grammar inexactness that might occur in the text. I am aiming for complete exactitude. I am exacting a heavy price for what might otherwise be repressed, or forgotten. Both animal & human studies demonstrate that patterns of brain activity first seen during learning are later “replayed” in sleep, suggesting that dreaming of a learning experience is associated with enhanced memory for that information. The right to carry. & I want to carry everything. Give me your mouth & I will groan. Give us the runway & we will lift the world. This is a proposal for a show. The proposal is the show. In this show we aim to exhibit containers & receptacles of desires, & the desires that form them. In our aesthetics of accumulation, we begin by collecting an arrangement of encounters chosen “at random.” Doing your Saturday thing? Go Live & let your friends in on the action! Famous last words were not words at all. WM

Chris Campanioni

A writer based in New York City, Chris Campanioni writes for a variety of international publications and teaches writing and literature at Pace University and Baruch College

 

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