The Recovery of Belong: An Archive in Future Tense
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The archive was supposed to contain everything she had ever said, but when they opened it, the files were all in future tense. Asked to explain, she said: “Future people don’t speak in the past tense you know, it’s just not done.”
It’s all true you know, you don’t have to believe it but it’s the truth.
You might think the world is at odds but at least the albatross and the pine nut fisherman are comrades.
One of the archives I was working on, on the 5th of January, 2020, using my newly acquired n’circumvisionary powers.
Information was blurring all around the group, unreadable. We were trying to find out if anything important had happened the day before that could have affected the way in which things were now unfolding. I was disconnectedly following the flow of ideas in spare moments while working on my negatives and navels.
Eventually, we decided that it would be best if we didn’t waste anymore time and just continued on the basis of what was in front of us. So we did. Sometimes it’s good not to know.
04.01.20
While working on my negatives and navels in the Qwanon library, I met this stranger. He told me he came from an archive where all the words had been stolen. The only things that were left were people’s names.
Over the next few days we were consumed by a series of unexplainable, mysterious and surprising events until one afternoon he learned that, for a single moment in time, a new word – Belong – had returned to his world. The day this wonderful event occurred in his world was, of course, completely random. It was never supposed to happen.
In some sense, he was very lucky because Belong was his name. The stranger soon realised that, however much all things are connected, there was nothing that could explain how he had just been reunited with the word that was always in him.
Despite living in a world where – up until that point, for him – there had been nothing but silence but for names, he decided he needed to find out who his Belong-friends were, because now he knew they existed and he wanted to be with them. After all, if no one can be without a word, then not being adjoined to one’s ‘belong’ is to live in part as a stranger.
He had to do it. Even though he now knew that all things are connected and that nothing can be kept secret from the universe, he didn’t want to risk his ‘belong’ disappearing again.
What if, he thought, things become rattled when people are separated from each other? What if, for one thing to happen, something else has to stop happening? What if it transpires that ‘belonging’ is not a secret that can be kept hidden?
14.02.20
The stranger who lives in the archive where names are the only things left, continues to search for what it means to be not only in his world but ‘belonging’ to it. He has already been reunited with some of his ‘belong-friends’.
Everywhere he goes – without him having to be told – ‘You belong here.’ Drinks are set on the counter for him, ‘We’re waiting for your order sir.’ Doors are always open. He has been included on the guest list of parties he has never been to and is always given wellcome mats to find his way back home again.
Although the information around him has stopped making any kind of sense what is now revealing itself as usually takes time and new paths to form.
Many more of his friends have joined him, but he still wonders who the words belong to or, perhaps, if, when the world is full of noise, he is not, after a long time, feeling empty.
If he didn’t ask the obvious questions, Belong might have been now sucking air like a thumbsucker. But he learnt early on not to ask people questions he didn’t already know the answers to.
In much the same way as people like to be at a◆ About the ending
❧ About the title