Once on the red planet it will be necessary to carry things from home. Only the landguage of Earth will comfort and heal the lacerating effects of deep space travel. How far can one travel away from home before completing a full circle. There is something about infinity in this.
Good news, we have reached our destination according to prescribed itinerary. Rover pushes ahead, opening a path. We travel slowly in the crimson language of this space. It is accommodating in its hostility.
Sometimes, just sometimes, the photographers work is to see the gaps and absences rather than the stuff cluttering the langscape. The sticky feeling of nothing.
Metaphors come to us, they seethe in the bubbling miasma of the biosphere lying in wait for an unlikely candidate for infection. Like Burroughs’ Virus 23 that carries language and physically changes the body it infects to give it the ability to use a language; sometimes it hurts a bit.
This was the packaging from a bit of suturing I had done on my knee in Cuba a few years back. I fished it out of the garbage pail in the emergency room at the Varadero hospital I got stitched up in. I remain amazed at the brand name of the suture thread; ethicon. It has a somewhat Sci-Fi feel to it. The images brought to mind when thinking of a gash being closed up with “ethicon” are multiple and political, yet another item in the long list of landguage art-i-facts.
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| 4-0 Prolene, polypropalene suture, 13 stitches in my right knee |