notes on cool
A text by Nikita Sena
You can taste it on your tongue. The sharpness almost tender as the metallic tang spreads down your throat. You imagine scraping your teeth against its silver just for the sound of it. Echo, then faint, then nothing. Darkness tightens around a decision that must be made to smash or carve, break or assemble. Having been through the roaring heat of the blast furnace, the Star Son's Chisels now lay indifferent, cool, against a palm already losing its heat.
Frame by frame a question unfolds:
what if colour had consciousness?
As in brown contemplating itself, rippling memories of gold blurred by touch, indigonights where bodies bent by the heat of the day, the weight of the plough, loosen and recline against each other.
Brown sifting through its different tones. The pause before dusk sighs into an evening rustling Tyrian purple. The hue of red ochre smeared across the cave that first time. Brown as in mood. As in prince's purple swallowing monet's violet, as in sienna raw and burnt like the day after an uprising, as in miles rifling through green to arrive at blue, as in time travel.
If time loops round and circular and we can shape our future, might we be able to mould our past? History, neither static nor resolved becomes malleable. What would it then mean to rethink ancientness? Be all up in it! Do not confuse this for nostalgia. We knee-deep in the mothership connection baby! Does he know that when he runs in the Latter Half of the Quest, the momentum propels him, not forwards, but back towards the horizon of a memory he must construct himself?
To walk through circa, X, is to learn a jazzed vernacular. Degas' peinture à l'essence as disfluent rhythm. When the excess in oil paint is siphoned, we arrive at the most delicate and elusive of things. The essence. The core of the thing. The thing in and of itself, and yet different from what we began with. A matte field of chroma punctuated with flashes of the spirit.
(Coolness as drip, as in i see you out here shining nigguh!)
The flash blinds, then orients you into a vertiginous state of not knowing. Stay there. In the set of his jawline it may be possible to perceive his itutu, his mystic coolness. It holds you in a state of desire sparked by an act of withholding. A refusal to meet your gaze even as you are pulled in tightly. Are you bold enough to question the quality of your desire? The nature of your arousal, your eagerness to own and possess. Why do you want him so bad? Why do you want us so bad? The Last Shard gestures to a whole that will always slip past, elusive and unbothered. Sit in that.