Rituals that Cock Up the Fly-zone

The killdeer's toes are red without health. They stub against the red mountain. This is an acceptable problem because We occasionally ventilate in the same way, although We will be the ones to solve it. If we had only been voted into Solutions, our passageways wouldn't waste this tender time grasping into empathy with the killdeer's imagined public scorn. Obsessive habits of repositioning/orienting its incubating mendicants have been documented without design in Powerpoint, but forget that. Really, we just want the killdeer to remove itself from harsh objects, from our local police station, from the cold bicycle chain we left behind.

Waving at the Rapture as You Would a Banking Airplane

The Rapture Hat hit us in mid-squat, one of us Using Our Legs to lift red mountain back on its sunken pedestal, another using the stereoplotter to pry loose a leg from some fallen natural scenery. Y'all see that? said another of us, waving overhead. There it went.

No, no, don’t wave. Use the stereoplotter. Oh, OK, I guess this leg can just remain Part of the Natural Scenery Forever, said the first another. Toss me the thing and I’ll totally hit that when it turns around in response to this Emergency, Attention Please! Wave I’ve got going on, said the second another of us.

Don’t be greedy. Keep working on the leg, just toss the other here, said the Waving one of us.

The Rapture Hat banked left far off in the distance, headed back.

It was obvious things were about to be different, and then they were.

Psst, say, said the red mountain lifting one of us, could you hold this for a minute? The one stopped stereoplotting the leg, which had changed by not being stuck. The one waving wasn’t with us anymore. The leftover wave dropped to the ground and didn’t break but rolled along its edge to cut tighter and tighter rounds as will a plate or a penny until it did a gyrate shudder and abruptly stopped.

I was just about to raise the Objection Flag to say we’re really going to need that but I looked up and saw how The Rapture Hat banked left far off in the distance.

Red Mountain Dilemma

We skirt the foot creases of the red mountain. We prepared for this by modifying our stereoplotter to help us map its unique contour. One of us might ask why we can’t just lay a ruler against the red mountain edge, and walk it? Another in the party could easily reply that it’s impossible to climb a structure whose cartography, partially represented, is not this



but is, famously,



and a real setback for photogrammetrics. If hollowed out and its Outwardly Creased Folds reinforced, the thickness of red mountain might give satisfying entry to the aphid escaping a hungry Seven Spotted Ladybug.

Perhaps one of our party would raise The Objection Flag, asking why we don’t just knock it down. Lying flat it would then be scaleable, really, by just walking along it until we got to the top. Then we could just use the ruler, the old Roman Foot. Then, with Teamwork and somebody to eye it up, we could set it back up again before anybody noticed, stamp it, and take some pictures.

The Rapture Hat, mapped.

Somewhere within the red mountain, we're there, the stomping grounds of the Rapture Hat. The mountain accurately parrots the one here, also cheaply constructed in two dimensions. Be aware before casting some consignment invective on our budget that it doubles as a sundial, a city attraction if we wished.

Thanks to Lawson's Body Shop.

vocabulary proposal, 1.

TREMBULARIUM, noun. Nominates the irrelevance of the impotency of the "book-doer" to wholly direct others' experiential pacing.

We feel that We can operate outside of a few normally advisable limitations and also that this intention washes us with successful feelings.

Two Examples of Hair as Nest

Sweeping from the top left to the mid-lower right of an unsuccessful deviation from the Rapture Hat's usual markings is a series of plattered nests in full crown, a handspring tribute to proper response, aka triumphs of nesting phenomenology.

"THAT" Landscape

The Lapland longspur, which winters in south Canada and north central US, experiences a compressed breeding season: wearied by a long flight and preparing for fertilization followed almost immediately by labor, incubation, and the desertion of whichever offspring runt, the mother rips out her own feathers as lining for the nest and waits it out.

The mocking cliff-chat from southern Africa intones and preens when excited. Couples defend their territory with an aggressive, precisely synchronized duet and ruffled threat posture. The "new" hair nest escalates naturally from the original animal hair bowl, splashing into an ornate stage replete with braids, extensions, applied product, and explicitly synthetic decoration. But as the mocking cliff-chat can be a fairly solitary bird outside of breeding season, the new nest continues to officiate a primary concern with privacy, soundproofing being an accessible, almost accidentally successful science.

"THIS" Landscape

The ivory-billed woodpecker, hailing within the boundaries of the Rapture Hat though miles north of our main button of concern, lives in a timeless cliché for stashing, eats one dwindling organic by-product. An overturned vase would make a good nucleus for setting off the lining. This is an example of preparing for extinction, of how the doomed of nesting phenomenology, in their internalized vanity, choose to behave.

The Rapture Hat or A Rapture Hat? A Fine Question for Solution Engineers.

Editorial Update

In reference to manuscript sample 3, the editors of The Rapture Hat having grown impatient with complaints concerning the RETRO feel of what so many have come to call “The What. Antediluvial Wig Tree?” and so have written an editorial that we place here.

–START OF EDITORIAL–

First, a defense:

One final retraction: for the past nearly 15 years, we have attributed the following quote to The Institute for Planetary Removal:

“If you've ever seen a paper wasp nest or a bee hive, you've seen a honeycomb. Honeycombs are used to maximize the use of materials. A honeycomb with a shell on each side is one of the strongest structural engineering designs. We use this idea for dome shells, walls, and virtually every other construction.”

However, we were recently sent a letter by one J.K. Mosely that the source of that often-cited quote was actually The Institute for Planetary Renewal. This was an embarrassing mnemonic accident that went too far, affected the entire spirit of our enterprise, and ultimately made necessary 15 years’ worth of detailed retractions and effectively put our previous editing company out of business.

Now we have simplified. The remaining staff and shareholders have restructured into our present company. But simplifying doesn’t guarantee a perfect system. We face already serious anti-We sentiments in the Letters to Us pages of our quarterly report, “First Us, Then You” (Us being, for readers unfamiliar with us, the publicity department of We).

The bottom line to our business is that Us, We, and You are Solution Engineers. Nobody knows more than an editor how passed-around the formalization of arbitrary titles can be, but the title Solution Engineer is a hard-earned one on the part of Us, We, You, and our shareholders billed collectively as Our. So we at the We Central Office don’t believe that anyone can fault Us for taking a hands-off stance concerning the bridge that Us has tried to gap between Us and our readers through our Distribution Department, You.

A recent complaint concerning our primary project, The Rapture Hat:

I am perfectly at ease with The Rapture Hat as a fair and accurate representation of where eschatology and brunch coincide, but I am not at all comfortable with the representation of your “wig tree”. Is this a sort of sectarian joke? As an inhabitant of The Rapture Hat, familiar with its pre- and post-flood zones, not to mention all the skirmishes in the Gulf of Mexico, it depresses me that your architects would see fit to let such an obvious pun go uncorrected.

It does not seem to fit with the established order of gestures. It is neither Good good (it does not avoid self-scrutiny), nor Good bad (it brings pleasure but has no punitive potential), nor Bad good (no revelatory structuring, as the tree’s lumber is merely pants), nor Bad bad (where’s the admirable and straight-talking Fuck You moment? Is a document of human error or not?)

We empathize. We believe this complaint stems from precisely the same sort of mnemonic error as was made with “Removal” and “Renewal,” only at a visual level. We don’t ramrod The Rapture Hat, nor are we its landscapers. However, we believe that as its editors we are gridded in well enough to answer, and correct, glaring misinterpretations. It’s a classic cart-before-th’-horse.

The Rapture Hat is not a document of human error. It is not a document at all, because what it documents does not exist—except in myth, not as myth, because myth refers to a dead system and there is no death in The Rapture. And it does not document human error because in the "Good good etc." grid there is no room for error, only inhospitable gestures that arise from an overproductive ecosystem. Think of a debutante ball, or a Civil War reenactment, or any practice that simulates inhospitality to declassify (thus reclassify) an inhospitable environment. Think of the endgamer environmentalist stance that our ecosystem has produced its own means of extinction. We don't necessarily take that stance, but the same thing probably did happen with the dinosaurs.

Think of whatever you wish. Just don't get so hung up on removal as a gesture, because it ain't in there. The Rapture Hat simply has no removable gestures. Thus, error cannot possibly be documented.

In The Rapture Hat, nobody goes anywhere. Pilots still fly the planes. The trains don't derail. The tillers still till the field. The presses still run.

But In The Rapture Hat, all of this reproduces, sexually and endlessly as anything that knows instinctually of an End in sight but has no actual end in sight. Imagine that a carbon molecule had a genetic memory. It would be one promiscuous molecule! And with no moral compass except "Good good, etc". Now that's living. Where else can one go? Suicide? Suicide is an act performed in defiance of living. But suicide is still a result of the genetic insistence upon improving one's quality of life. And we ARE talking about the genetic grid of the habits we inhabit. Right?

In this sort of pornography—the Permanent Vacation so longed for that is actually already here—does a Rapture Hat not promise a sensual result of the very timed human stay in an ecosystem that will not exist once its inhabitants are gone? Hair that is "a nest for birds?" Or pants-as-lumber?

–END OF EDITORIAL–

Rapture Hat, Theirs (grant proposal).

We distributors of the Rapture Hat, to avoid recall, monetary penalty, and scoldings by our grantors*, think it necessary to provide a short appendix to the verbal and visual gestures found in the unified body.



APPENDIX. APPROACH THE RAPTURE HAT GESTURE

The strata of image as it engages the strata of text can gradually eliminate any reason for a reader or a viewer of The Rapture Hat.

Reader and viewer should be perfectly compliant with this occurrence.

Reader's and viewer's compliances will transform either or both. This is a predictable Rapture Effect.

Reader and viewer will share their former, respective positions to serve the Rapture Hat as Observer. Observed ritually, the Rapture Hat may thus work as a grid of gestures.

Distilled through ritual (use of a grease pencil to grid one's daily observations on the document itself will bear this out), these gestures yield four essential distillations from the Observer:

1. Good good
2. Good bad
3. Bad good
4. Bad bad

These gestures accordingly total out the register of "cleaned" versions of countless Observer experiences in those abundant fields available to us through the Humanities.

*Note that the printers of Cabinet took time out to write a sharp letter chastizing the magazine's editors for their lack of editing skills. The letter was pasted into, presumably, every copy of the magazine before hitting the shelves. We don't need that sort of ad-libbing from our grantors.

**Note that use of the word "merge" is intended to imply not a convergence but a cross-lacing text merging into but not with The Rapture Hat's exploited visual field. This may or may not later lead into some talk of "treating image like sentence," to quote one Brazilian enthusiast.

A further parallel to "merge" lies in the title itself:

–Rapture– an object mapped into a "traditional view" of the Greek "aion" (forever, a period with a beginning but no terminal point).

playing dolls with

–Hat– an object mapped into temporary use, as in the linguistic once-over given to "aion" (a singular age, a terminal period of time).


There is no doubt that even mention of the Rapture-event maps one into the use of threat, of something unstoppable.

But our position is this: we map this Rapture-threat into Hat-objects, objects of position and termination, because it is simply better for you to know, geologically, in and out of cuckholding, that your right hand knows exactly what your left hand is doing.

–END OF APPENDIX–

Rapture Hat, yours.

The Rapture Hat may take a while to put on. By definition, the Rapture Hat is the hat you put on your head after the Rapture, which takes a while too. If you pay attention to the manual, you could spend millennia just picking up the hat, another millennia getting it on your head.

Not to be confrontational by saying "you," because it's not like that.

While teleportation will cease to exist after the Rapture, it's a good comparison. It's like that. You want it, it's there, covering your ears. Nobody has hair at that point, so that's good.

But maybe it's raining layers and layers of rain? Maybe sheets of rain, shooting out of a sorting machine. Who wants a 500-sheet rain-ream collapsing on him? Her? You? You just don't want it, and the Rapture Hat fixes the don't-wanting. And here you are, in the Rapture, saying out loud just how glad we are that our Hat can get here that incredibly fast.

Rapture Hat, ours.

The Rapture Hat, as a treatment, is specific to a landscape that continually mythologizes its own habits. We live there, currently. It is florid and comparatively inhospitable. We would like to declassify some of its symptoms, in order to bring it down. We are here to annotate a send-off to what is known in legend as the habitable South.