MOUTH HARNESS, THE — 1. Device for trapping and containing the head. Mouths are often stuffed with items—the only objects legally defined as suspicious or worthy of silent paranoid regard. A claim is therefore made that we eat suspicion and become filled with it. The harness is designed to block all ingestion. Gervin states: “His mouth will be covered with a wire web. He shall never eat. Nor may he ever take what is outside and bring it inside. His stomach will forever devise upon what is within.” 2. A system applied to the head to prevent destruction or collapse while reading or absorbing code.
GERVIN — Deviser of first fire forms and larger heat emblems. The
Gervin exists in person form in all texts but is strictly a symbol or shape in the actual society. To gervin is to accommodate heated objects against one’s body. One may also gervin by mouthing heated items of one’s own body: the hand, the eye, the cupped rim of the lips.
KENNETH SISTERS, THE — Devisers of first food spring — blond-haired, slim-hipped, large, working hands. They dug the base for what would later become Illinois. They lived to be, respectively, fifty-seven, seventy-one, nine, forty-five, eighteen, and forty.
STINKPOINT — Moment of odor slightly frontward from the producing body. Since all odors issue first into a fraction of the forward air, allowing them to fall into a member advancing in time, any member achieving or arriving in a stinkpoint is also said to be a creator and coconspirator of any smells and smell systems in the society.
SHADOW CELLS — The visible, viscous grain deposited upon any area recently blanketed in shadow. The cells may be packed into dough, then spread onto the legs or hips. They may darken or obscure the head for an infinite period.
SPEED-FASTING EXPERIMENTS — Activity or practice of accelerated food abstention. It was first conducted in Buffalo. The record death by fasting occurred in two days, through motor-starving and exhaustion, verbal.
STORM LUNG — Object which can be swallowed to forestall the effects of weather upon a body.
TOPOGRAPHICAL LEGEND AND LOCATION OF FOOD NOOKS — System of overmaps depicting buried food quadrants, sauce grooves, and faults or fissures in which grains and beans are caught. The cloth form of the map can be applied to the bodies of animals, to clarify areas in which hollows might have amassed.
ODOR SPIRALING — Tossing, turning, and flinging of the head so as to render radical, unknown odors in a locality.
THE HOUSE
THE GOLDEN MONICA
There exists in some precincts the phenomenon of the intruder or mad invader, who enters the American house in order to extinguish himself in the presence of the mister, the female, the children, whomever. The man powers in, arranges a prison of wire or rope onto the members of the shelter, and settles onto a comfortable area — the rug, a layered blanket, the soft membrane of the floor — to attain a posture of attention to his own body that will render its demise. They are forced to watch, the family. He lights a fire, this man. Or he arranges the appliances to emit the sensations of music, acquits himself of the gentleman’s dance in the center of the room, queries the animal likeness carved into his garment. In other versions he strips to his skin and manifests a final saying to his audience. Make no mistake, they are bound such with the wire or rope that they are forced to acquire the status of audience to this act, and then further to the self-created corpse, which singularly occupies their attention until rescue arrives. The condition of corpse is achieved with a lotion, usually. The intruder might apply a final wound onto himself with pistol or kerm. This knife is curved, fluent in the obstacles of bone and cloth.
What is interesting, as always, is the aftermath. The body, as such, lies often coiled on the floor. Whosoever sits bound at the perimeter must witness its stillness. The television, when activated, accompanies the temperature of the room with a purling forth of warm air, casting the captives under the bluish gild of the broadcast runnel. Thereafter, through unspecified elaborate means, a single figure from the bound hostages — and plural it is, always — manages to delimit himself from his lashed state and escape the site. It is this figure — the escapee who abandons his bound gang for some place of lesser tension — who not only is accused of a murder but confesses to one, thus absorbing the suicide as his own act, despite the weirdly meek pleas of his family, whose claims for his innocence sound hollow, fictional.
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 ENEMY IN HOUSE CULTURE
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.