Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

By signing this document, I enter into this agreement solely through my own choice, which I assert is mine to dispense. I have not been paid or persuaded to halt the viewable gestures of my body. If I profit from my ensuing stillness, it is from an arrangement of my own, though money I earn while physically still is fully taxable and subject to paralysis funds or other dowries initiated to support motion-free localities and persons residing there or en route to them. I hereby assert that I have not notified any member of the Silentist organization of a financial motive for stillness, a manner that stillness might be construed as employment, labor, or creative endeavor, subject to compensation, or gambled upon by persons betting on the outcome of the promise of stillness.

I agree that none of my garments, while I bear down into stillness, should advertise the interests of a foundation or individual other than myself, and in no way may I be marked, whether through tattoos or scars or text slogans burned into my skin, with symbols that can be construed as citation for anything outside of my own physical interests. Nor may I license my name or likeness for the mercenary aims of those not affiliated with the Silentist organization and its satellite groups. I remain fully accountable for the way my name is used, written, uttered, or in any way referenced by these outsiders.

Should my stillness result in personal debt or bankruptcy, I cannot assign that failure to any motion-prevention society existing now or in the future, and I forfeit any right to seek damages for any change in my wealth status or physical health or emotional condition that results.

Nor will I hold accountable any other woman, or person or animal masquerading as such, for the task which I hereafter set about to accomplish, regardless of the outcome, including the possibility of my disappearance or forceful demise or drowning down a well into the hell pool. That task can be described as the ultimate full stop of every action viewable at a distance of one arm’s length or greater, with the exception of fidgets and grimaces, magnified semaphore or rescue gestures, a stoppage also known as the promise of stillness, the life pause, the freeze, the Jane Dark.

The distance of viewable motion detection, if my stillness is ever tested, may not be assisted with motion-detection glasses, gesture goggles, body microscopes, viewfinders, binoculars, a pencil, action-detection wands, stilts, or eyesight-enhancement devices of any sort existing now or yet to be developed, including smart skin, dead face styles, or hand-to-the-earth tremor-sensing techniques of the Indian people and others trained by them. Nor should organic vision in excess of twenty-twenty be the standard eye strength by which the distance is determined, even if the twenty-twenty standard becomes, at some future or other time, an easily surpassed milestone of eyesight, whether through medical or vitamin enhancement, an exercise regimen, nutritional assistance to the head through such devices as the strength sponge, or self-surgery interventions designed to render the seeable far more vivid, applying a close-up filter to that which was technically once far away, a come-hither ointment rubbed on what was once distant, a coil device affixed to objects, pulling them into sight as they are approached or summoned. My body may not be treated with motion-detection jellies, circled by twitch-inducing dogs, smeared with bait to lure me into action, or prodded with an electrical rod.

Should the standard Ohio Motion Detection Device™, as worn by a Jane Dark representative, register natural movement of any sort on my person, or a wobbling palsy arising from my body, as with nervous hands, whether through tethers, leashes, or strings that snap taut if I so much as move, or a sonar device that alerts a Jane Dark representative, who might occupy an observation booth, of motion occurring from my person, this contract shall become void and may not again be undertaken. Nor might any future accidental paralysis of mine, or frozen body condition that I may adopt, whether through enforced stillness, straightjacketing, coffin incarceration, or any other unnamed method of stillness, including my apparent demise, even if it proves a real demise, complete with eulogy, burial, and headstone, or a real demise that lacks these rituals, but still occurs, such as my body flung from a vehicle and come to rest in a ditch, where it is never discovered, but is still technically in a state of demise, be indicative of a successful promise of stillness, but instead shall signify an aberrant or natural pause in my motion akin to a stop-time event in a bird migration, such as birds pausing midair to perform a shadow function on the land below — which in some cases is a system of messaging for those women equipped to read it — or some other unsanctioned event resulting in stillness, such as a personal gridlock, a crisis of motion, or a Syrup Action.

I recognize that stillness occurs by accident all the time, and agree not to confuse these forms of stillness with the stillness I herewith set about to adopt. If I do not know this, I admit that others sufficiently know it, and I grant these others the power of mind over me to know the things that I am not capable of knowing, to adopt the ideas I recognize to be in my best interest, however incapable I might be of holding those ideas on my own, even if I do not consciously agree that the ideas are in my best interest, and even if I actively declare these ideas to be harmful and alarming, or cry out in pain, or beg for help, or disavow the very words of this agreement, or deny signing this agreement, or claim no knowledge of the terms of this agreement.

I further disavow that which randomly or intentionally puts a halt to my body. I disavow bodies that stop through inertia, fatigue, car crashes, and other collisions or unions that bodies make when they persist toward solid objects and become stunned into torpor. I disavow the nonstillness achieved when bodies are acted upon, lunged, hurtled, or thrown into the landmarks of the countryside, including the insertion of bodies into slings attached to the long wooden arms of the great structures known as catapults, which, when activated, hurl forth the contained body into modes of extreme nonstillness, which can apparently result in conditions known as orbit, though often don’t, particularly when walls intervene, when trees intervene, or when the body itself windmills and rudders and otherwise drags on the air so much as to render its flight finite, and it crashes down to earth.

I disavow bodies that stop to pleasure sexually against other bodies, even if malicious in intent, even if incapable of pleasure, even if both or all of those bodies fail to gain actual, measurable pleasure from their attempts and instead only become injured, whether they break or bleed or carry the wound within, whether the pleasure attempt results only in sadness, shame and disgrace, irritation, detachment, or nostalgia, whether their bodies fail them or surpass them, whether they merely perform such techniques as cuddling, nuzzling, or cooing. The result of self-styled bodies seeking pleasure against one another is irrelevant to my purposes and I cannot confuse these results with my own goals. Seizures of pleasure that result in spells of rigidity or surges of paralysis, as with orgasm functions that produce even permanent collapse or demise, which I recognize to mainly occur in horses, or suspended postures of sexual rictus of the body that in every viewable way seem to duplicate stillness, are not applicable to elective stillness and cannot be counted among their legal modes.

I disavow bodies that use themselves as restraining devices against other bodies or animals, applying smothering or straitjacketing effects, employing techniques such as the dog pile, the clothesline, the roadblock, all in order to channel a paralysis style, to induce a person or animal, through force, to collaborate on a project of stillness. My stillness, should I achieve it, may not be contingent upon another person or thing. It must be summoned of my own power.