M. ELIZABETH SCOTT

PRELEST

What persists on the retina when stimulus gone 

gloves peeling off as striptease, the slow reveal

I looked for no reason, something made me look

Mourning woman collapsed with Liz Vicious, early internet goth porn saint

corruption and innocence as one image, no separation

Eternal siblings, same inability to consolidate

same need for mythology to make it bearable

pure conduit for what's in the room

And I'm showing up as this American goth intellectual angel with short skirts and poetry

the mirror selfie in cropped long-sleeve and plaid skirt

woman with matching doll: the uncanny double

the I that splinters while speaking

Present melancholy as gothic aesthetic (translate fucked-up-ness into articulate analysis)

but melancholy isn't "hot" because it's sad

it's "hot" because it hints at latent depth 

I'm imagining myself as future outsider martyr =

romanticising my own potential marginality instead of asking 

what would make sustained practiced survivable

–because that narrative ("I'll be like Spicer/Cameron/Collobert") is just another performance,

still "I need external validation" even if posthumous even if being just "a figure" –

is it jokerfied or just removal of constraint?

–but the Greeks held five versions of Leda and the Swan, all true

Theatre = ritual = beauty = truth = social cohesion = power consolidation = psychological mapping(no contradiction)

Now art is either authentic individual vision (Romantic lie)

or spectacle/commodity

no ritual function no collective cosmology

Strange attractors, emergent order from complex systems

real-and-invented

interdimensional beings keeping humanity asleep

like my own night-terror self-forgetting

My ex's vision on acid – the thing on everyone's head keeping them asleep

and his choice to put it back on because being the only one awake was unbearable

–real information about consensus reality

how it's maintained

–but also: trying to take that thing off while embedded in this world is dangerous

even to someone who finds innocence "pornographic,"

who has devil tattoo, who's the goblin-king

What was that Orthodox word for religious delusion? –

I was using it as a theoretical phrase, adopting it, recycling it 

–prelest: mistaking image for reality

R.D. Laing's flat: boundary-dissolving accidentally performed in his space

UFO photographed, but invisible to others at bus stop

The fetch appears on the road ahead

beautiful precisely because it can't be possessed

(only exists in wild, dies when you try to cultivate it)

–like when Jung said "psyche and matter are two aspects of one reality"

he meant: the inner pattern and the outer event are the same phenomenon viewed from different angles

–or Seraphim Rose's take on UFOs as continuous with medieval demonic phenomena – 

I found the most coherent framework even if I may not believe it literally

Scotland was always: the place that holds what left me

the longing is real AND it can't be satisfied (what makes it beautiful, also what makes it hurt)

– but if the piercings are just grief-aesthetics

then the night terrors will return sometimes 

need to become the kind of person who can survive not being saved

Forms aren't necessary, the delusion that they are is what drives creation

quantum physicist: things like this happen, no further explanation

loved-and-still-lost

but the REAL ending = the orchid stays in the swamp 

(un-possessed, wild, beautiful because forever uncaptured)

M. ELIZABETH SCOTT is based in Glasgow.