Sterile Kingdoms: Las Vegas, The Mormons & Howard Hughes
1966. Enter.
Welcome to Las Vegas: a black hole bolted to a canopy of breathing stars. A key synchronised to fit a failing lock. Its hostile terrain is smothered by a sleek illusion as props emerge, transform and define like a cabinet of artefacts, windowless and sealed – My cathedral. Its false paths spool like tape; its walls of sound cling like syrup: their base drone breathing out a spectrum of luminous vapours that glow like an ember cupped in the hands of an invisible god. The physics of its equilibrium is arranged in lustrous codes, with quarks and neutrons pirouetting in an electrified field of angry dream psalms: sodium beating out the black, burning holes into the night – I made this happen. I will make it happen again.
Felons, in a stone-eyed search for prey, fusing like spores to the side alleys with the stillness of basking butterflies. Their restless guns record the exact number of murders per square inch. Traffic channels through shards of neon: graphs manifesting synthesised treasure in concise formulations of insect scribble – Buy/ Prophet/ Sell/ Profit/. Tourists scroll along endless mazes of etched concrete, boiled pink, swarming like clouds of gas through a chaotic tableau of warm plasma, where the least curious perspire the most, splashed back against their cooling shadows – Vectors for disease. Ants. Purge.
Observing it all with utter detachment: Howard Hughes, the Great Illusionist, fathomless and mercurial; saddened with the luggage of archetype, archived to the easy chair – I built the illusion and now I am trapped by it. Using his familiarity with scale, he seeks solace in the linear progress along closed horizons; eyes knitted to terrestrial ghost fodder; comforted by the soothing placebo of chemical detachment – Morphine is love, is Ava Gardner, is Jean Harlow, is Katherine Hep my mother. Money shapes his chromosomes, the blunted tools of pre-birth vectors, fizzing with the slow ionisation of nerve-endings, like a singular creature in the thralls of metamorphosis – I am vibrating at the frequency of a collapsing star. Stained pink, his exterior pigments diffuse like petal gradients, dispersing to an unworldly place. His sublimated shell, entropic and sexless, bolted to an opaque Nevada tower: its masonry striates, secret and transformative, roots lengthening into a carpet of still chambers, their geometry tethered to the alien cold of ether and plague pit energies – Did I build this place, or was it always here?
For him, the act of seeing is a cage, a preserved arc of myths; sublime, infinite and hermetic, expurgated by a looped vortex of soft scoop and celluloid: its negative print etched into the skull of tectonic plates – Ice Station Zebra/ eye-stained cerebra/ switch on/ off switch. His brain is an emulsion of poisonous urges; a roman candle of ferocity fanned by the models of suspicion, like a seed trapped in a bone vessel under layers of silt, incubated by the metaphors of a paranoid language. Sublime dramas enacted with conjecture, prophetic and manifold, in a fusion of impulse motors – I am safe? No. Never. The doubtful corneas, melted by ghost acids, oscillating with prescribed brilliance and the encroaching relics of opposition: blank cyphers to be scrutinised with a forensic eye – Closer. Ever closer. The notation of obsessive impulse; the totemic stagger from suspension to event and the torment of purification by the machines of insanity in an endless cycle of warm oxygen and cold matter monologues – Big Oil. Small people. Playthings. Am I in a womb?
Other-controlled by a chain of sentinels, under contract, shimmering with greed and soft scriptural overtones that shine, fever-bright, as they pick at the Sunday pamphlets: spoiled parables purified like a ghost thought remembered through wraiths – Not servants: vultures. Textbook puritans, stiff with guilt; pale faces absorbing dark synthetics. Cautious disciples with a slow plan of dexterous butchery, scrubbing the meat off him in delicate layers, like rice paper, as they wait for the rational to reconnect with a crucifix and a contract – Is this a baptism? Does God like the smell of lint and rubbing alcohol? I was a God. I was Godlike.
A tapestry of scrabbling insects in the depths of his treacherous blood; the random fluctuations of compound chemistry; the cones of decaying matter; open sores and connective tissues oozing like mercury pulled through an ever-widening crack. A deathbed witness with divinity bleeding out and hands unmade with acquired stigmata, as the heavens close in like a black velvet bible – How banal. How utterly disappointing. No heroic test-pilot fireball for him, just a heart, corroded to static in a discord of impenetrable stutters – the effect almost magical – as spoors bloom and fluids become vapours under the assumed delicacy of death: the transformer transformed by the details of decay – The fear of death derives from the fear of life and I am scared.
The sharklike forces of his sterile audience, burying their annihilating fists into his affairs with an unknown velocity; an ellipse of pink hands, merged in prayer. Sermons, litanies, and the algebraic calculations in the workings of it, mapping the endless streams of money. His communion, contained in the details of a forged will, like the weightless hieroglyphs of a hymn book – You. Get. Nothing. You fucki…. The bird-eyed surveyors of detachment, making a sequence of incisions under the polythene, looking for signs of fire in the cooling momentum. A concise opera of glacial monologues charting the distilled murk of entropy and natural conspiracies: his fingerprints proving it. The erratic trellis of blood; the slow menace of the spilt brain, forming the illusion of constructed mythology – I sculpted the shape of my fear into a counterfeit halo.
1976. Exit.
