written for HOME: AS A VESSEL, a REVOLVE x DITG installation led by Sonia Norris
read on Jan. 11 2026 between music. Performances by John Dieterich and Tashi Dorji
II. THE FALL
Part 1-
Sometimes, the deciduous leaves Fall.
Sometimes a forest will shed its hair and skin like tears. Sometimes a forest will burn down and it needs to— so that new growth can be born from the ashes. Everything could use a fresh start, you say.
Sometimes, a terra-cotta hued mouth yawns.
Sometimes it swallows you whole.
Sometimes when you are sitting in your blue house looking out the window at the blue sky, you open your terra-cotta—not blue— mouth to scream and no sound escapes. Instead a dead luna moth flies into it and you choke on it.
Cough, you say. Cough cough, I am so annoyed now by this dumb moth. Why did you fly against my tongue and against my will? That’s so invasive to fly down into the depths of my stomach. Like what the fuck stop fluttering in my intestines. I feel everything. What if a luna moth tree begins to grow there like a seed , a weed. What if I birth a tree, like what the fuck? Do I really want that many branches and insects in my body?
Sometimes there are just too many branches and too many insects, and your hope
is to purge them out so that you can release them, into the wild, away from this cocoon. Afterall, kudzu can take over your body and maybe you don’t want all those vines and violet-colored blooms moving underneath your limbs like an alien. Maybe you don’t want to feel uncomfortable at that moment, at that hour, so early in the morning or whatever. Or ever.
These are hard questions to consider when you are the vessel. Whether you are a sailing vessel or a vase to put your dead flowers in. Your body is a vessel of lost flowers. Lost ships. Lost containers. It did not find its way to your mailbox this time or next time. I guess your chances are up. It is a postcard lost at sea.
I am still waiting for the passenger pigeon to bring that to me.
This civilization needs to Fall. Fall like the season. Fall like the patriarchy that I’d like to see fall. The same one I see in your gray eyes, in all of us, dear friends. Humanity is a mushroom, where the mycelial networks are invisible to an untrained eye. Your shooting yourself in the goddam foot. Your eyes are gray because they are reflecting the smoke and the ash I saw in our future. But is there even a civilization to Fall, you ask? We are just an echo’s echo echo echo echo, a feedback loop— the real world is already gone because we killed it already. We killed the world in a past life don’t you know that? Don’t you know this isn’t real. This isn’t real. this isn’t real. Even if our consciousness exists somehow, perhaps there’s no chance we exist in a body anymore. Instead -everything is imagined. Bodies are some distant memory saved in mason jars with formaldehyde. Like what you do with butterflies, hair, fingernails, your favorite cupcakes, maybe a bird or paper wasp nest. This world is made of someone else’s paper. This is someone else’s story somewhere, somehow, maybe a different you in that other dimension some years ago—the real you who actually wrote these words that are now just falling out of my mouth like a tumbleweed memory. You become nostalgic for once having a body, as you remember this.
Some people say that civilization fell in 2012, the time when time began to speed up. Everything is passing faster, haven’t you noticed? Everything is more of a caricature than it used to be- don’t you think? What you remember learning as a child is now different, with different rules, and a different world. What AI creature made this shit up? What fucked genocidal, oligarchy tech-shit world are we existing? Whoever made this up really, really likes a sick satire I suppose. I need to know who did it because when I jump simulations again- I tell you dear friends, I’m going to fucking kill it- so take me to your leader. You might want to imagine it to be a beautiful woman on a white horse don’t you? We all love a beautiful myth, a long blanket of hair cascading down from a tower, a unicorn, you drink its blood for sure. All of us are a beautiful myth. Your ideas are not your own you finally realize. You realized you had a home, and it shaped the way you are. Your home made you. Birthed you from the roof. Like a chimney swift. Have you ever wondered all this, sitting there in your blue house, as you smear indigo on your exoskeleton — trying to disappear into these walls. My question is now—Who do you become when you never had a home besides your mind? Sometimes a house is not your home.You may have lived in houses in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Thailand, France, Saudi Arabia. A Catholic boarding school in Australia. For some, sometimes your only home is your mind.
Sometimes, you are sitting in your blue house. Sometimes you are asleep in your blue house. Sometimes you are cooking in your blue house. Sometimes you are doing both ugly and beautiful things in your blue house.
And no one can see you, luckily, because you have painted yourself blue too.
Part 2
Leaf, ashtray, tangled thread.
A pistol. A bit of cocaine in a locket ring.
Some forgotten lunch on table.
It seems like any other day but…..
So why are our friends being hunted right now? Are we ducks?
You know you didn’t write this story, because you know you actually should’ve died most definitely on April 2024, if not before. So you really didn’t write this story, but somehow you still have consciousness and think you did. You still feel alive, and people seem to think you’re alive somehow too. Its like you’re a magician. If you have an imagination, you’re a magician. Sometimes I look around wondering which ones of us are ghosts and who has the ability to jump bodies too. And it keeps re-happening. That’s how you know nothing is real. You look at your hand and arm and wonder if I chop it off today in this blue house, will it grow back? So far the answer is yes. Everything, so far, can grow back. Whether or not its the same form is a matter for debate.
The taste of a preserved lemon. You save the seeds. You sew your tongue to a pomegranate because you like the taste.
All I see is a bleached Luna Moth. Bleached by the sun to an alabaster white from the many summers of slow fading.
So we have been talking about this simulation, we’ve been talking about, how you died many times trying to save the angels you see. And each time you take an iridescent marble and put it in your ear canal, tip your head to the side, so that it could roll into the crevices of a non-existent gray mass. But sometimes you hear it make a squishing sound. Eventually there may be a lot of marbles. They may clink and rumble, as they move around in your head. But maybe this is all just because summer was a recent memory and the ghosts are more alive tonight.
You’ve heard the sound of rolling marbles across the hallway floor your whole life living in a blue house. They are past lives in your hallway, you spoke to those ghosts. They weren’t mean, or trying to do you harm, even if it felt like it sometimes- they were just sad and you were a medium. They are just stuck in their liminal world. Its like snow globe, a terrarium full of the most beautiful plants you can not touch.
Every once in awhile, you could open up your head, like the lid that it is, like the terrarium it is, and take that marble out of your head and roll it slowly across this floor, down each step, past that railing, down into that blue house. That blue house is your memory. Look at it there. It could hold so much furniture- desks, chair, coffee table, do you see your couch, your sink? Do you see yourself washing the dishes, the water running over your palms, warm to touch, warm to touch. But then again, some homes are gardens. Not all them are houses. Not all of them are nests, a hive, and/or + a coral reef. Some homes are what becomes. Some homes will manifest from what you first build. The material could be anything.
Wait. I thought I was in the house? What am I doing standing up here now, on this second level? Lets roll another marble across the floor.
Sometimes, in the Fall, the deciduous leaves burn on the ground.
It takes the world with them.
Simulation or not.