Thomas Bunstead

Where has it come from, this whole landscape of wounds?

– he says.

From bodies without passion, which are also landscape.

A person’s face does not exist in itself,’ Alfred Hitchcock said, ‘only when a light shines on it.’ An activity that is common but nonetheless just as strange as shining a light on people’s faces is the packaging up of things; we package up everything. The internet is only millions of metres of cable that package up the globe. Or take plants, which, left to grow unchecked, would package it up too. Or when people embrace: what is an embrace but the packaging up of the other, giving them a shape unknown to all but you. Or what is choosing one’s gender but the packaging up of
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sex. Meaning there is no need to wrap things up as gifts or send them in the post in order to give them an outline or an identity; light does that for us already. There is no face, once illuminated, that does not fill the beholder’s eyes with love. (Parcel love)

You and I are nothing.

– he says.

In a world whose only desire is to devour everything, it’s better to be nothing.

– she says.

And the years go by, and adult love arrives, which does everything within its power to invert this process, to turn it on its head: when two people are in love they are forever seeking a return to childhood, to create new names, new sexes, to invent a private language, to recast from inside all that is known and create a new roof for them alone; a place to take shelter. This is why the image, present in every culture throughout history, of a couple loving one another under what appears to be a sheet has nothing to do with modesty around nakedness but – in this improvised cave that is theirs and theirs alone – with
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rebelling against the language imposed in childhood. (Contra-language love)

Meaning that when we transmit information, we also transmit all of those forgotten worlds, although in a manner that we are still yet to completely comprehend. This forgetting is me introduced into the heads of others, is my life enclosed in that place, or the part of me accessible only to the person who – in the experience of love – has me inside their head, even though this person (I know) may have forgotten me forever. (Oblivion love)

This science we call economics exists and makes sense only in a world where resources are scarce; if goods and commodities were infinite, there would be no logic to it as a discipline, as it would lose its subject and have nothing to either study or regulate. Our societies have seemingly been constructed on the basis of this congenital scarcity in the world. In western culture, it’s already there in the Bible; from the garden that is bountiful without being worked to the disapproval of working for one’s daily bread, which will materialize without anyone breaking a sweat. The apparent crisis in the music industry, with its origins in the early 21st century, and the also apparently infinite availability of songs on the Internet, is only the panic experienced in the face of the move from an economy of (musical) scarcity – run by a handful of individuals – to an economy of abundance – the infinite reproduction of sounds at no apparent cost; a situation in which the economic sciences as currently conceived would cease to have any practical or philosophical meaning. Gender theories have something revealing to offer here: from the masculine/feminine binary, or an economy of sexual identity based on a limited number of genders, to the potentially infinite spectrum of genders in-between that an individual may adopt, a kind of economy of (gender) abundance comes about in which learnt social norms lose
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all validity, giving rise to a panic among those who do not wish to or are unable to give up control of that particular privation. There is a certain structural link between all of this and the incipient field of quantum computing. The foundational property of these future computers is the ability to work not only in binary states, not solely with ones and zeros, but also using everything between the two poles of one and zero, making for potentially infinite possibilities that in turn give rise to worlds and planes of reality not only previously unknown but unimagined, though not therefore impossible. What we could call Gender Abundance Love would therefore be the forerunner, the analogue speartip, as it were, of this other digital abundance towards which computers are heading. (Gender Abundance Love)

Looking at the world in silence, and in silence writing what is seen. Writing the silence itself. This is what it is to love the world. (Silent love)

Where has it come from, this whole landscape of wounds?

– he says.

From bodies without passion, which are also landscape.

– she says

The first time I touched you it was like coming home. A home I’d never been in before.

– he says.

Since being with you, I’ve lost my fear of routine.

– she says.

The lowest manifestation of realism is the extrapolation of statistics about the future. The most naïve manifestation of nostalgia, meanwhile, is the use of those same statistics to make extrapolations about the past. When couples split up, unbeknownst to them, each takes one of these completely opposed approaches.

When we don’t notice the night creeping up on us, it’s our vision that’s lacking, not the night.

– she says.

Since the Great Blackout, you’ve loved me in a different way, you’ve fed another flame.

– he says.

A body is also a silent avenue; extreme mute sex.