Sublime Scum
This is a score, not an essay. It was written so that someone other than me could perform the piece, somewhere, sometime, with their own body in their own room. It defines three things and then trusts the reader with them: the Sublime Scum, the word rejection, and the spectacular.
The text behaves the way the show does. Some of it is struck through but still legible, because rejected things do not actually leave. Other passages drift in from elsewhere and attach themselves, because the Scum passes through everything whether invited or not. None of this is decoration. It is the argument, performed on the page.
What follows are three short passages, one from each layer. The full partition is below.
The clean spine
The Sublime Scum is the inconceivable amount of people, plants, animals, objects, materials, substances, actions, ideas, directions, locations, perspectives, sources, emotions etc. that are at any given time pushed out of an individual's perception of the world. [...] Without humans, there is no Scum.
The rejected layer, still legible
Out of the sea of garbage comes a foam that attracts attention. Most times the froth is repulsive, but occasionally a rainbow or an interesting substance will form on the edge. [...] Going closer is repulsive, but moving away is a small loss for the heart.
The intrusion
Francis James Canova Jr. (born 23 December 1956) is an American electronics designer who originated the idea for the IBM Simon and has thus been described as the inventor of the smartphone.
(spliced mid-sentence into a passage about the word rejection, where it does not belong, and stays anyway)
The full partition, twenty-one pages.
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