echo, at once dead and very much alive, alone maintains narcissus’ beauty. his claim to self, that, as gaston bachelard puts it, becomes as is reflected. “je veux paraître, donc je dois augmenter ma parure.” (bachelard, l’eau et les rêves, 1942, p. 34).

the gentle stream brims with cosmic rigidity. the bank of clear waters, where things rest and can be thought to have been made, is where they take the form they pictured. a demented slumber. hypnosis. really, it is only in the depths of cloudy/violent/ruthless bodies that material imagination is most potent. there we can truly delve into matter, to find ourselves in the midst of that most gentle and fragile condition: excess. only wade these waters.

wherein do we bridge and travel past form, into matter. to much relief bachelard affirms “la matière est l’inconscient de la forme”. it is within then. materialistic phenomenology allows us this oneiric passage from one into the other.

but echo is also 34 years old. it is the life work, masterpiece, of developer and new yorker stacy holt. where form is the passkey to matter. a message board of few members, it once held great interest for a kind of crowd capable of hanging together. artists, writers, students, politicians, musicians, designers, doers, all under the banner of “and now?” a place to congregate and produce desire. a moment of permanent instigation that has been housed in a thoroughly complex mechanical network. grinding out the signals into something truly malleable that allowed its participants to call and answer to “and now?” in plastic reverie.

indeed.

though it has always been that paste, this originating material of dreaming and entry into, this giving molasses, hardens and brittles when it is driven away from its source. gross doing. mean endeavor. potential in progress left solid. scorched earth, salted terrain, prey to a drying heat. crackling sound, echoing unto itself into a vast murmur.

who decided this?

because once it’s all finished, and what we bathed in can now be held, all that will be left to ask really will be “and now? “ by lsd