The Cassette (pt. II)

      You continue your progress down the sidewalk. In your hand, the scraping revolutions of the microcassette's reels vibrate throughout the shoddy plastic casing. You find yourself at a new intersection. The voice drifting out of the speaker, though flat and calm, awakens people sleeping in their beds. Some come to the windows and stare wrathfully down at you. In other windows, lights are turned on, but there are no signs of human activity. 

     A rabbit stands still under a rose bush near the courtyard of a building constructed in the mid-60s. It follows your hand and the voice inside of it with a blind, sidelong eye. Under a streetlamp, hardly visible flying insects collide into each other, gnawing off wings and legs. A pile of their dead lies directly below: an accumulation of black sand - in an hourglass. 

     The unflagging voice continues its monologue:

"...The Beast of Conglomerate Surface is composed of only surfaces that have been refined by human activity. This can include artificial materials or natural materials; but any natural materials must be delimited in some way by the sphere of human activity. To give this a more concrete definition: I am looking out of my window right now at sidewalks scattered with dead orange leaves... It's been raining today, so the concrete of the sidewalk is saturated and darkened... And then there are patches of grass, and these patches, due to the configuration of the road and sidewalk (encasing the lawn) are rectilinear in shape... And this rectilinearity is a form which changes the substance of the grass... And naturally occurring kinds of vegetation sprout up in various places. So there is a hierarchy of the Iptarian object: there are artificially refined materials and natural vistas. Usually, when it comes to microscopic inspection, it will be the former that is favored. The latter is often considered on a macroscopic scale. For example, a tier of mountains blocking the horizon. And, in any case, some part of the Beast of Conglomerate Surface will almost definitely be described through artificial means... That is to say: this project is by no means naturalistic... service to the beauty, or even the ugliness of nature. I think this is debatable, even for myself, but I don't think the vastness and unknowability of nature, the sublime, is of any concern to my program. But, nonetheless, there is something sublime about the expanse of the Beast of Conglomerate Surface... within a single field of human vision... or... sensory perception, a very clearly defined Beast of Conglomerate Surface will take shape. But, theoretically, at least - and I haven't yet proven this - the Beast expands beyond even that frame. Its body is only limited by the amount of matter in the universe. Or maybe I could humiliate myself and say that, actually, its matter is limited to that which occupies the space we refer to as Earth. And that space, of course, is subject to any moment of alteration or contingency, just like the Beast of Conglomerate Surface... But I can tell you what it has. It has an eye. Not an eye that sees for itself... the paranoid delusion of seeing... that's what creates it, what gives it form and allows it to take shape... [screeching interstate traffic]... Dancing through the air... the air isn't completely transparent... it is diaphanous..."