“Close you eyes and place both your palms on something flat and solid. The floor, a table, your chair. This will be your anchor point. Your touch is light, yet know you held solidly by this one point of contact as the world around you begins to change.
The air around you is starting to thicken. You feel a heavy mugginess wrapping around your limbs, trying to pick you up as your weight on the chair or ground gets lighter. Warm moisture is peeling off the air into droplets which grow thicker and fatter, heavier and heavier. Until all of a sudden the air rips open, spilling into pools of iridescent sludge that gush around you in plasmic torrents. You become totally submerged, yet you notice that your breathing has never been more effortless. In a moment I will invite you release your anchor point. But know that this contact is the last thing holding you to this body, holding to this reality as you know it. So, on three we will all lift our palms and place them on our laps. One, two, three. You are immediately lifted now into these reservoirs of primordial sludge as gravity dissolves and you are passed weightlessly through the folds of this cytoplasmic caress. Around you, you swim with your subterranean siblings in a glistening darkness teaming with microbial, bacterial, organic and inorganic life. You don’t know it yet, but you are the amongst the first life to evolve on this planet. Who do you share this beginning with?
Your processing speed has slowed, and you live now in the eternal vastness between each of your former human heartbeats. You sink first onto and then into the seabed, the bed of the sea and you’ve never been more ready to take a million year nap. Your body falls asleep amongst and within the geological residue and as the centuries peel past, you sink deeper and deeper. You may be still but you are far from inert, because I have to tell you, you are ageing gorgeously. Your body is being released into viscosity, turning rubbery and elastic. The edges of your once defined body have dissolved like running ink.
Right then you feel a cosmic kick. A mechanical rumbling that pierces through and into your dwelling. With a sudden release of pressure, your body is ripped from below its bed, sucked out of its core. Now that you have been released, can invite gentle motion into your body, fluid rotations and sways. Notice how your joints move like loose clay, squelching as they churn against the metallic skin that encases them. Your body no longer belongs to any fixed form but is instead infinitely reconfiguring. What a fabulous thing it is to be molten! In this petrochemical orgi, fossilised sunlight shudders from your core as you braid your limbs through the amorphous constellations of each other.
From this infernal machine your body begins to freeze now into cool inertia. Your edges become cool and hard, inarguably defined. You inspect this new contortion of a body, formed from the undead matter of your ancestral communities. You are as ancient as you are foetal and you will traverse many more centuries in this form. But you are no stranger to longevity and eventually this body too begins to fray and weather over time. You are divided and then divided again, pulverised smooth into dust. Your particles are churned through currents and clouds, digested through bodies and bellies. And in this distributed form you begin to gather in strange assemblages across the planet, communities of partially synthetic, partially organic matter. Your body is both ancient and novel, remote and local formed from the strange petro-biological alliances that have pervaded through time. From this remote future you inspect your body. Are you organic or inorganic, both? Is your body warm or cold? What life do you see around you? What ecology do you call home?
When you are ready I invite you to place your hands back down now onto the same surface as when you started. Even though you have mutated and changed a lot over the past epoch, your touch creates a bridge back through time connecting you to your primordial grandkin. Two points of the same timeline strung together into a loop. When you have done so, you can greet your ancestral inner child with your touch.”
TOAST 