spectacular bear

設計家 第七期

(1968)

玉川紗己子 - Please Call Me Tonight

the piece is called clinamen v.2, created by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot and included as a part of the Soundtracks exhibit in the moma - i saw it in san fran, and this photo is from a showing in new york:

the exhibit is a large shallow pool filled with white ceramic bowls in varying sizes. the bowls are pushed around the pool by a gentle current, and the sound created as they hit each other is somewhere between a wind chime and a haunted bell.

i sat there for a solid ten minutes just watching the bowls move around while listening to the sounds they made. it was absolutely hypnotic…

me:

In my dream I was standing on the back deck of a rural cabin that overlooked a beautiful Vermont/Scottish Highlands landscape of unspoiled wilderness. It was a crisp, perfect autumn morning. I held a cup of cooling coffee in my hands as I leaned against the railing and scanned the perfect rolling hills in the midground, behind which the great patterned mountains with their snowcaps marched on until they blended with the horizon: #aesthetic

As I gazed at a distant meadow clearing in the trees, a pair of brightly coloured humanoid creatures emerged from the woods and began to dance for each other. It was an esoteric, beautiful mating dance, a strange combination of instinct and choreography. I felt awe washing over me. I marvelled. I felt a deep sense of wonder and peace as I observed this vanishingly rare encounter that I had never thought to observe in person. These animals were instantly recognisable but had never been studied in the wild. I felt incredibly humbled and privileged to witness this behaviour - I knew that I was the first human witness to observe this behaviour - and I reached for my phone, wondering if I should film it, so it could join the scholarly record, where it NEEDED to be. This could change everything. But then I held back - something told me “no,” to let the creatures have their privacy.

Ok, I can’t go any further without telling you that they were Teletubbies.

A red one and a yellow one. I know. I know. Stay with me here.

The cryptids melted back into the woods. My subconscious drew a discreet veil over the rest of their mating ritual, but I knew instinctively that this had been a dance of courtship. I was busy pondering the implications, because they were critical. You see, although the creatures were instantly recognisable as Teletubbies, as I had studied them, even at a distance, I had an incredible realisation.

They were adult Teletubbies.

This realisation dawned on me and in my dream I understood it fully. The ones that we know of - the captive ones that we have seen on television - are juveniles. In fact, they are the equivalent of toddlers. When you see the adults this becomes obvious. The garbled speech and silly movements of the four captive Teletubbies we know are the babbles of babyhood, a private primal toddler-language brewed up between sentient beings who have never encountered an adult of their own kind.

The adult Teletubbies have more branching, complex antlers and shaggy coats. They are less brightly coloured. They are terrifyingly large. Their strangely human faces, emerging from the thick fur, are unquestionably adult; remote, serene, reproachful. Their television screens are glitchy, esoteric and unknowable. They are cryptids whose public exploitation has undermined their rarity and their strange, alien dignity.

In my dream my feelings of awe and peace turned to great sadness at the fate of the captive toddler Teletubbies. I realised that I had to be the scientist who brought this discovery to the world and raised awareness of their plight. And I also questioned: are Teletubbies like axolotls? Do they exhibit neoteny? (Axolotls, the cute aquarium pets with flaring gills, are actually juveniles of an amphibious species - if given the right conditions they’ll grow up into land-dwelling black newts. But they can breed in their aquatic juvenile form, and most spend their whole lives in this form. Deprived of their wild potential, will the Teletubbies ever mature? Or are they merely experiencing a long childhood, natural for a species that is unimaginably long-lived?)

So in my dream my husband came out onto the back deck and I began to share these discoveries with him and before I could even bring up the axolotls he just said “what the fucking fuck” and went away again.

I woke up disgruntled and unable to capture the feeling of peace and sadness. I then tried to explain this to my husband in the waking world, and he said “what the fucking fuck” and walked away before I even got to the explanation of the Teletubbies being toddlers, which just goes to show that you never know someone as well as you think you do.