Status Updates From Gliff

"We choose to be educated by things bigger than something so small it can be worn on a human wrist, I said. What other way is there? he said. I gestured with both my arms to everything around us. I don’t get it, he said. You know, I said. Being here. In person."

"My life? Well. I tell you what, Bri. It’s a puzzle all right and right now solving it is out of my hands."

"Well, people like to think they can control nature. They think they can make where they live look better if they do."

"A whistleblower means someone who tells the truth about something when other people don’t want anybody to tell the truth about it."

"I looked up to render temporary too, and discovered that rendering made walls more breathable and also that temporary render wasn’t at all a good thing for a building or any surface and was likely to crack sooner rather than later."

"Then it’s going to be about their own status as immortals, our mother said. Because nobody alive wants to believe, or actually can believe, psychologically, that they’re temporary. Though we all are. Everybody is. There’s no them or us when it comes to that."

"Were you called Oona for a reason like a song? I said. It’s because I’m the one and the only, she said. And simultaneously universal. No, I’m actually named after a grandmother. Though sure enough that grandmother was also the one and the only, and the universal. Also a goddess."

"listen, I’m seventy nine, I’ve a lifetime’s worth of experience in the pushy tactics of men and what he doesn’t know yet is I can keep this up all day and night."

"We can’t solve it. But we can still salve it. That was something else our mother’d say."

"Maybe people who’d been marked out with red paint were only allowed houses like this one, with nothing in it, so we didn’t forget we were that word temporary."

"If only people paid more attention, she said, to what history tells us rather than all this endless congratulating ourselves for finding a new way to read it. All the ways of reading are good, I said. She agreed."

"You are denying us the education that most kids our age are getting from their devices, I said. No I’m not, she said. Truthfully I’m amazed anyway that you in particular, Bri, seem to know, without anyone ever telling you, how to make devices do what you want them to do. But I’m asking you to source your education more widely and more dimensionally."

"There are different realities, she’d say, and the net is a reality with designs on general reality, and I’ll prefer it if you both experience the real realities as your foremost realities."

"Well, provided they weren’t invented by a computer collating thousands of digital images down into one single child then another and another, people who’d never existed. Even so, even the thousands of fragments of images AI would use to make a non- existent child had to have come from children who’d been complete children once."

"There was no such thing as AI children. You were either an alive one, or someone who’d once been a child and was now older, or a dead one; even if the children in the photo were advertising models– which did seem most likely the more I thought about it– then they were still children, or they’d been children once."

"I said she did this because she didn’t know how to say it, she said it was because she was taking some of a conlomerate’s power away from it by mis- saying it."

"This was a completely different sort of matter, the kind people say doesn’t matter when they talk about what history is."

"I reached and slid a finger along one of the spaces between the boards. If you could take these boards up and look at what had ended up down there in that under- the- boards space it’d look like just dirt and grime. But you’d not just have DNA galore, you’d have the actual matter of what was left of those people and their times."

"our mother always said, both to borrow and to lend what time we had while we could."

"Leif saying, no, because when you went to a new place it was like things were new to the eye and when you got back home your eyes stayed new for a while but not for long enough, they soon got old again."

"Even though they’re breathing and moving they’re like the things in one of those old paintings of globes and skulls and fruits and lutes, I said. Leif laughed then and winked down at me. Art hotel, he said."

"Like something vital had been withdrawn from them, for its own protection maybe? maybe surgically, the withdrawal of the too- much- life from people who could afford it by people masked and smelling of cleanness inserting the cannula in a clinic, its reassuring medical smell, one after the other the perfect family offering an arm."

"Now haud ye cheerie, neebors a’ And gliff life’s girnin’ worriecraw."
Shelley’s Flowers by the Wayside, 1868

"And now the form and nature of the flame has changed; it has become digital, invisible and cold – but exactly for this reason closer still; it encircles and envelops us at every moment."
Giorgio Agamben, trans. Kevin Attell

"Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void … The shapes of the chasms themselves become ‘verbal roots’ that spell out the difference between darkness and light."
Robert Smithson