At the wall where graffiti is erased, near the shower bath of the great patronisers, and beneath a curtain of underlit grey rain that billows and ripples but does not fall, a holographic Jane Fonda sits cross legged, like the lady of shadows, redistributing toys as activist front of house for the standard troll factory data grift whilst the spectacle of pseudo-Arab nationalism passed into an infinite regress of mere clientelism, and which for negentropy’s sake gladly draws fire off Russia’s inexorable and yet futile reincorporation of its perpetually wayward satellites. But we are two dogs scarpering through the department store in that sort of Modern Times roller skating on the mezzanine sense, in that live-streaming steadycam bande à part dog’s eye POV round the corner sally way that we had back then. And we are pushing on amongst a very narnia of fur coats, pushing on and pushing on through for whatever doesn’t already bore us. I am little dog, like in Matchbox, a sort of baptising prophet for big dog. You are big dog, messiah and maybe Elvis, who has come along to see what this little puppy done. You gather the people round you at the get me another woollen counter. You say ‘If you were 45 in 1965, then you shall be 145 today, that’s when we are.’ Then you flop down, maybe wagging, maybe lolling, ears somewhat lowered - this is how the parable of the london plane appears amongst us. Big dog says, london plane (Platanus × acerifolia) is a natural and fertile hybrid of an artificial and forced encounter between Platanus orientalis and Platanus occidentalis. The hybridisation event, a historical site for a biological process, is set during the 17th century in the garden of a Spanish plant collector. Under no circumstances but those driven by imperialist expeditionary science could such a meeting between these two species from separate hemispheres have thus been arranged. The fortuitous fruit of this union, London can take it, would only achieve its maturity 200 years henceforward, perfectly timed for a heroic intersection with, and thereby its elegant processing of, the great polluting smog smothering London in the age of crash industrialisation. What captures is captured. What is captured will capture. Traffic lights. Fire hydrants. London’s tree of life is the only arborescence to flourish beneath blanket pollution. It also happens to be steady state’s most efficient agent at removing small particulate pollutants in urban areas. The city metabolises. Such are the historical accidents and syntheses amongst all those leaping things untethered from lifeworlds, released from the muck of ages, and funnelled into the épistémè underpinning what shall become the global market. Things jostling about, that tide of flotsam jerked forward and yoked together, umbrella knowing sewing machine, by some recapitulating intelligence, which exists, as if in anticipation, already in the far future. Mankind thus uncovers inevitably such solutions that it is all too prepared to problematise, since closer examination will always show how a solution arises only where yet further tech-tonic lurches have drawn it into the world as both chronically unready and terminally too late. Just as in dreams where our punches come to rest with a slow and sedimentary lightness, so we find our answers to emergent crises always half-formed, as in a neotenous condition of fatal obsolescence, as one born directly into a grave, as the silver chick carried off in the beak of a nest-robbing crow. At a loss, we ask ourselves how might we prise our own fingers from these fixed and overvalued ideas? And how, in the swirl of events might we invent the new ways that are also not solutions? How is it we can only imagine something greater than what we are? And so it is, we must witness hurricane force accidents amongst concrete things, worlds colliding like billiard balls, this massive storm surge of all extracted materials, which having worked themselves loose then, acting in concert, murmurating as one, sets in motion the short and passionate moment of end times as lived amongst whirling individuals. The wee small hours are characterised by strange meetings, stranger combinations, unlooked for conjunctions and confluences, the uncanny hybridisations and unique but then repeatable syntheses that constitute the world as heady but self-concretising picaresque. Such is the forever passing romantic phase that is drawn eternally across the event horizon of real abstraction where all things must recapitulate the transition from brute and clashing experience to the conditions of possibility for their measurement, exchange and thus, inevitably, their ubiquitous resting state of infinitely flat interchangeability. And yet, addicts of the trump card as we are, just one more thing, it's only wafer-thin, we picture how real abstraction’s universality, wherein all things may appear equivalently before each other, naked but also not as they really are, must also then stand naked as if beneath the judgment of a next great era (let’s say as Brel’s au suivant) wherein the universal, kicking off mere exchange, thus enters a phase of colloidal immediacy and abstraction shalt be rematerialised, becoming variable and thus deliciously malleable. This is why the nationalist struggle against the realisation of empire is subsumed in its inevitable defeat by abstraction’s own struggle against the realisation of an emergent post-equivalence. Such is the conflict that defines our moment - those arguments for origin and indigineity made against the emergent relations of ‘colonisation’ only gain currency where the totalising apparatus of abstract equivalence is itself soon tilting and buckling beneath the approach of big dog singularity, the veritable philius philosophorum, that capers, skittering vastly, across the surface of a conscious ocean. Little dog pricked its ears at all this and yapped back most merrily, ‘Prithee master, the most venomous spider shalt have the softest fangs; and even before general intelligence may fashion a more efficient delivery system, let it first consider George Bernard Shaw as insect-o-cutor to Isadora Duncan’s bland musings upon the possibility of selectively breeding beyond the vitrine: ‘Yes, but now imagine if the worm did nothing, and I did everything!’
