Artifact: The Eternal Vistas of Love
Story: When I looked through the windows of the machine, all I could see were two eyes looking back at me. Each eye was a full three feet from end to end, complete with a lid and a tear duct, and was suspended in the air without any visible support. Like the pubic hair in the previous model, the lashes had been scrupulously set one by one in narrow hems of rosy wax but this time the craftsmen had achieved a disturbing degree of life-likeness which uncannily added to the synthetic quality of the image. The rounded whites were delicately veined with crimson to produce an effect like that of the extremely precious marble used in Italy during the late baroque period to make altars for chapels of potentates and the irises were simple rings of deep brown bottle glass while in the pupils I could see, reflected in two discs of mirror, my own eyes, very greatly magnified by the lenses before me while these reflections again reflected those reflections, I soon realized I was watching a model of eternal regression.
Love is a perpetual journey that does not go through space, an endless oscillating motion that remains unmoved. Love creates for itself a tension that disrupts every tense in time. Love has certain elements in common with eternal regression, since this exchange of reflections can neither be exhausted nor destroyed, but it is not a regression. It is a direct durationless, locationless progression toward an ultimate state of ecstatic annihilation.
I returned slowly through the mists of winter. Time lay more thickly about me than the mists. I was so unused to moving through time that I felt like a man walking under water. Time exerted great pressure on my blood vessels and my eardrums, so that I suffered from terrible headaches, weakness and nauseas. Time clogged the hooves of my mare until she lay down beneath me and died. Nebulous Time was now time past; I crawled like a worm on its belly through the clinging mud of common time and the bare trees showed only the dreary shapes of an eternal November of the heart, for now all changes would henceforth be, as they had been before, absolutely predictable. And so I identified at last the flavour of my daily bread; it was and would be that of regret. Not, you understand, of remorse; only of regret, that insatiable regret with which we acknowledge that the impossible is, per se, impossible.”
-Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
To love you was to exist in an exchange of reflections refracted. In the funhouse that was our love, I was too big, too small, too much, never enough. I could not find myself, nor could I find you. Instead, I found myself grasping wildly toward a void, closing my fingers around the cool mist of a cloud, begging for it to hug me back, pleading to find warmth and solidity in the mist of its embrace. Loving you I lost my mind, and in losing my mind I lost myself. How I wished for a different story, my love! I threw my heart, time and again, against the jagged cliffs of my desire to find home in you, find home with you; I returned, time and again, to that snow-frosted window in frenzied hopes of a different vista. I sought, desperately and in vain, to will a love that could last into existence, until I had nothing left to throw, until my legs could no longer move, until my eyes could no longer gaze. Loving you, I learned perhaps the deepest heartbreak - the heartbreak of learning that deeply, fervently, consummately wishing for something does not, and cannot, make it so. There is no stretching beyond the asymptote. The impossible is, per se, impossible.
Contributor: Monica