POST-GESTALT FICTIONS (14)

 DOWNSTREAM

The argument went this far, and thus far only. On a positive note, an upstream or overstream entailed no backstream at all, no tired old characters, no wilting ghosts, no exhumed monsters, indeed, this was a turning of a page to something far more tangible than even Andy Warhol paintings as physical objects. Recast as miniatures in dress-brooches or tiny wall-frames. Tins of soup, canisters of brass polish and unsprinkable salt-cellars had now become silkscreen images that did not exist other than flat-out as lifted paint on porous surfaces. The actual framed results, though, could in turn be lifted as discrete things-in-themselves, wagged and wiggled about, then inspected with single eyepieces. But once upon a time such methods of materials-handling and heat-exchange took human hands to accomplish; later in history, with controllable claws of metal cranes or mobile vices on wheels. But, even more recently, it was easier with manoeuvres of an Ai’s robotic jaws or padded paws instead of gloves with hollow slots for fingers and thumbs. The manipulation of miniatures now derives not from manipulation, but from surface to surface tensions. Friction grazing friction, with sense data sandwiched between. Churlish Tontine couldn’t have made it up, even if he since developed the imaginative ability to retrospectively airbrush his unlikely name first.

He was, in fact, the last nameless person left standing. Then handled and lifted bodily to a prizewinner’s plinth made from concrete bricks no larger than Lego ones. It was a sort of domino rally, with a single domino left upright after the first one was tipped over and he was that very domino. Downstream or upstream, the rally’s ranks did teeter dangerously closer but he never looked back. Remaindered as a specimen of what a human being had been and put in a miniature museum along with other antique items of Pop Art to match in scale. Were humans and their artefacts always that tiny when compared to what or whom? Inevitably a rhetorical question disguised as an empty probe within an endlessly muffled pause.