I got this cube.
It’s a heavy boy. Heavier than it should be. It seems like a magic curse. Someone did something bad to make it this way. Like it’s running downwards towards the magma, like there’s a bug in the simulation. Gravity owes it a favor after some kind of botched coup in the 90s—they don’t like to talk about it—their relationship is a fluttering mirage built upon collective traumas.
It squeezes down upon the palm. Of course I like that. We all like pressure. Big hugs, firm handshakes. Even the most hardened among us. We crave cradling, we look for the caress of a stronger being. The biggest boyfriend, if nobody was looking, wouldn’t mind an embrace from a bigger boyfriend. This is one form of the yearning for childhood, that motivator of many human behaviors. Pressure on our skin says to us, this is your place. You don’t have to move. You can sit here, fragile, empty, capacious, like a paper ladle. Cube will take it from here.
To hold it is to remember a more bodily life. For a moment you understand, really understand, that we once walked free on the earth, before we became puppets of the intangible weltanschauung. Perhaps we could just break free once again. But the wilderness beyond the highway simply shrugs when it sees our slumped forms. Our ability to cope with the infinite was, ironically, taken from us as soon as we tried to trap it with a vocabulary.
Cube got made by Midwest Tungsten. They masquerade as some sort of legitimate business that just so happens to also produce such poignant metallic talismans. But I think of them as jester spirits, which are the spookiest kind, having no agenda but their own. They loose this mass upon the world and watch as we just try to deal with the new thickness arriving in our doorsteps in little boxes. Of course this is the natural evolution of the Midwestern sensibility. Have you seen their casseroles? Mass is their fundamental artistic medium.
There it is, upon a little plastic stand. It is from a world of absolutes, of no porous boundaries, where things simply are, or aren’t. One and zero. Daylight or midnight. Ardor or terror. Such a position cannot be negotiated with. Cube is never leaving, for richer or for poorer. You’ll forget how you were before cube. Though it sits far from you, gleaming, you are inside the reality it proposes. You’ve stepped through to the far side. There was never such a thing as going back. There never was, really, a time before this moment. But there especially isn’t now.
Nice exercise is writing on an unlikely topic that yields deep and interesting thinking
Did you pay more than $3000 for a piece of metal that's practically useless?