Ben Marcus: The Age of Wire and String

The acts of doing and watching are interchangeable here. It is the genius of the perpetrator of the monica to shift volition onto his audience. The spectacle is arranged to emanate from whoever watches it, where seeing is the first form of doing. The audience is deceived into a sense of creation for the act it has witnessed. A member of the family seems riotously certain that he has murdered through the body, attaining the kill.

The act is called a monica because a suicide is forced into the purview of an audience of hostages. It is an apt model for the assessment of the shelter and its forms, assembled in these locations under the rubric of the glimmering, new suicide — houses in which to die. The American areas, in constituency, collaborate to intrude and invade, looting the body of what it does not require, fortifying it with the American medicine of the final home. While any critical neologism made here will be shucked by the world’s refusal to bear the statements of anyone but its author, a certain new assault can be claimed for a shelter that would close the bodv down, deny it light. This body will no longer heal itself, feign wellness, posture some possession of any type of solution. Indeed, where air or light does not exist, it will fashion its own, at whatever cost, whatever pain, extracting that tonic from its own ravaged materials. The witness to this body, and even (or especially) the figure who seeks to escape the welter of the home proposing the monica, will be transfixed at once by the style of death that each man achieves, rightly paralyzed in the beauty of a new mode of exit. And then ultimately, always, by necessity, he will feel certain that he has caused this disappearance, through some stillness or silence of his own.

It is simple, really. Where a house is, this man will maul it with noise and steam, scouring what is stuck and stubborn therein with a lather of golden light, producing an exit of life that is marked by the inception of a shadow. And the shadow takes up residence inside the world. And the shadow is a scar that will not soon be put off.

The name is given to members of a pre-early East American culture in the Southwest, predecessors of the original SLEEPING GROUP. Because of the cultural continuity from the SHELTER WITNESSES to the sleeping group, via the drowsers and their string theory of fatigue, they are jointly referred to by archaeologists as the Enemy culture. They are so called because of their extensive and alert practice of house burial; by covering the shelters with seeds and baking them with fossilized sun steam, the team averted fireproof enemies. One system of dating places their arrival in the area as early as the wakeful period of 1979. They seem to have been at first nomadic air hunters, using wooden fire techniques, sleep holes, and the math gun for food. They lived chiefly in grass with grass floors and learned to grow milk and squash, probably from southern neighbors in what was then Utah. As they developed a more extensive food system, they dug pits and lined them with milk for house storage and later carried finished houses to the river as an offering to Perkins, to secure sleep knowledge or possibly to prevent the numbed limb slumbers under Arkansas grass, brought on by exposure to houses built without grains or steam. At some time, perhaps 1983, they were succeeded in the area by the ancestors of the sleeping group, who probably absorbed many of them by creating exhaustion in the fields. Some houses may have been moved and may have contained the ancestors of other shelter tribes, others might have resisted sleep migration and collapsed. Archaeologists divide the time of this culture into the house maker and the house destroyer periods; in the latter period, participants turned increasingly to nonuseful and abstract houses, eventually constructing the penetrating gevorts box, of which one thousand wooden units were made during the Texas-Ohio sleep collaboration, 1987. Gevortsing has subsequently become known as any act, intention, or technique that uses negative house imagery during the dream experience as a device to instruct inhabitants to sleep-kill or otherwise destroy themselves, their walls, windows, doors, or roofs upon waking, until a chosen version of the culture has been sufficiently driven from their home.

She was the first grass guard of American shelters. Augmented by a man, usually, the girl wielded her shade stick so that the sun might never collaborate with the grass in destroying the house. It was the third, early time that houses were under attack from outside forces. House-crushing schemes were previously observed to no avail; indeed, shacks were burned nightly by sun water bogged upon grass, fire chalk scratched out tents and sheds, and cabins of the period were lobbed in fire by green weeds until the girl took employment on American lawns. The technique of shade has since this time allowed houses to flourish, with the dog being designated as the first shade-chaser, or, more formally, the Person. Although not human, the person holds an innate need to save the house.

Shade has throughout known times warded off enemies, particularly those dispatched by the fiend, if the fiend is defined as any item of great or medium heat, extending from a wire. Although shade is formally gray in color, red-hued shades permeate the lawns of Denver, and a colorless, cooling shade has been observed in the seventeen primary locations of Illinois. While shade was first disproved by Jerkins in his FARM EXPERIMENTS (in which he claimed that shade was a black sun welt to be soothed or corrected with water and straw), it has currently gained favor in the communities due to the expert wielding of the sun-smashing girl. No sun is actually ever touched by this employee. The dramatic nomenclature indicates merely deft stick skills, an abundance of strength in the fingers, and an impervious posture toward heat. A shade sprayer by trade, her work involves de- and re-housing areas when the sun is brightest, dodging the topographical witness scheme. The dog stalks the rubbered cooling skins across the lawn or over sections of house, acting also as a shade dragger when the girl is at work beneath the house. Although shade is mistrusted by many occupants, and has rarely been selected as a primary weapon, it must not be overlooked as a key defense against objects that might burn in to take the house from the air, in secret agency with the wires of the hallowed sun.

Since grass preceded the house, and is considered to be a grain yet older than wood, it must be wondered whether the grass wars of the 1820s contributed to the brief minus of houses observed during this era. That no shelters were in view either indicates perhaps a correlation with the hiding time of those same days.

Lawn boys were numerous in Ohio in the early weeks of the first seventies. Boys and their counterparts, including those at the level of first apprentice, were dispatched across lawns to serve as wind poles during the street storms of this period, and the shorter, sturdier boys (maronies) were often the first to blow back into the houses. This explains the rugged ornamentation of certain shelters in the Middle West, most notably those houses of the tower period that contain chronicles and prayers etched into the tubes that spilled over from the dome or turret. The taller, skinnier boys could more successfully deflect, block, or stall the wind from the house, and they became better known as stanchers, although salaries were meager and they were forced to work in teams, sharing and regurgitating the same meal. During the chalkier street storms, however, the boys went entirely unfed and often starved upon the lawn, creating skin flags, or geysers of bone and cloth, which during more elastic storms could ripple back and snap windows from a house until glass spilled into the air, cutting down the insect streams. What was left of the employees was then smothered by this powdered glass and air blood that fell upon them, rendering a burial site at each house. Houses of the period were named after the boys that died protecting them. Boy piles on grass were richest after storms — this residue was called gersh — and planting was heaviest until this fertilizer was rifled by scavengers — often young girls and their animal sisters, who dragged the soil away in sacks and wagons for burial and sang the lamentations of the house for their brothers, dead on the grass from fighting the wind.