&C.

You held up a jellyfish on the end of the stick. “It’s lost all of it’s tentacles.”

“Maybe something ate them.”

It hung there on the end of the stick, translucent and quivering, almost alive, but it must have been dead. A jellyfish is just a stomach with a body and a nervous system - but not like ours. The jellyfish has no center of consciousness, its nervous system is  present in equal amounts in every part of the body. Its consciousness is diffuse, a consciousness of the skin, of the body, like a newborn baby - temperature, shape. What must the jellyfish’s hunger feel like? Or its lust? Hunger of the body whole, lust of the body whole. Like the moments just before waking, when thought is just a hole opening up in the air.

[[Fig 2.]] //identical to fig. 1

Every morning I would take it and the one from the day before and a third from no particular time from my filing cabinet and lay them side by side by side and look for differences. There were always differences – you can’t take two pictures without there always being a difference, no matter how small. And I would sit down and take the time to find them. Often it was a shift in the frame, one millimeter to the left, one millimeter to the right. When the difference was a difference in the light, it was more noticeable. I took pictures not to capture anything about the listening station, or to see it better. It was a student who pointed it out to me. I had my three pictures on my desk and she asked what they were for, what they represented. I said that they didn’t represent anything, vis-à-vis their existence. I opened my filing cabinet and took out a manila folder labeled “September” and showed her the thirty odd-pictures of the listening station. She looked at me like you might look at a blind man stumbling his way through a crowded train station – what do you think these are pictures of, I asked. Pictures, she said, in a whisper. Now I know that’s what they were. I was looking for pictures, taking pictures of pictures. And the station itself had slowly faded from them, grey, and greyer. And on, and on.