They say scientists have visualized fractal patterns in quantum matter: persistent formations observable even on the most fluctuating micro-level of reality, which span all scales. How should that make one feel? For the past few years, PGS has been writing a detective novel with images and words, both borrowed, stolen and of its own flesh and blood. Don’t be fooled: like everything else, the lines of this narrative swerve. The story has split many times, swelled and multiplied only to reassemble into a new whole. Now that we seem to be putting our finger on the final sentence, sliding towards the tip of the serpent’s tail, we cannot escape the vacuum of its fanged lips, pulling us back into an all-too-familiar self-similarity.

At the beginning of his journey, we encountered the detective consumed by the city, failing to distinguish between a once laboriously maintained self and the world “out there”. Dreading the possibility of absence, he opened himself to the unfathomable monstrosity of relation – of myriad connections to the ever-expanding between of all “things”. They say it’s all a matter of perspective. Several years later, the detective wanders (still, or again?) through the sprawling bowels of a city that digests millions of moving bodies at once with its centripetal force. Turn the corner onto 52nd Street on the right day and hour of the year, and the blinding red light sits right in the middle of the spiky, narrow cityscape – “Manhattanhenge”, they say. Thousands of eyes, organic and precious metal, come to consume the concentrated warmth amidst the rotting husks of capital. They say that Stonehenge once encircled the Sun at a moment of peak communality, the alignment of celestial and mortal bodies locked in a shared gesture of belonging. The celestial paths have long since changed. They say there is a right time for everything. Is it absurd to feel something genuine while waiting for a light cast from a dying sphere of burning gases to slide right where we think it aesthetically pleasing? Perhaps. The solar system, the tectonic plates, the horizon line, the street, the pavement, the tile, the germs between the teeth of the two people who just kissed, commemorating this moment with a love lock – everything is right in its place, flowing into the here and now. There are no coincidences, only patterns of incessant movement that draw us together.

They say one should be able to look at things from a distance. That’s why we love to have models for everything – to ensure we know where we are, what comes next. The largest model of New York City got its own Sun cycle, orbiting in alignment with its big brother. They say there are at least eight rats for each head in this city. The model doesn’t have rats, sadly. What would be their map, sketched with tails from the festering sewage beneath? There is a Czech animated film unfolding in a wooden model of a gothic city with greedy puppet citizens where human-size rats take the lead – until a hooded stranger lures them out with a spell of his flute. They start pouring out of holes, escaping the town in waves until their lungs fill with cold river water. But we all know they will be back.

They say anything goes if you have faith. In the alchemical tradition, copper has Venusian properties that cause it to amplify the power of thoughts. Is that why they keep all the pennies around? “Exchange rate” hits different when it’s money melting in a bubbling cauldron: a ghostly metallurgy of melding distinctions between brain rot and spiritual warfare, between the Brooklyn Tower and Sauron’s eye, between fact and fiction. As William S. Burroughs once put it: “Sometimes paranoia’s just having all the facts.” Those who have been following this serpentine story since its inception remember the detective once tried to trace the outlines of the swirling chaos by pouring lead into the river. But one cannot outsmart painful complexity with folk divination. Even if there was time, there is no future to foresee, and since long ago, maps don’t capture reality. They operate on it.

They say beauty is in the details. If you look close enough, things stare back at you. Karen Barad writes that while touching something, “an infinity of others – other beings, other spaces, other times – are aroused.” In touch, we encounter an “infinite alterity of the self”: From the perspective of the enfolding of matter, you are the universe touching itself. You are the fedora on your head, the lit pipe on the edge of your mouth. You are the city, the garbage, the rats. No frame could separate what could yet fit into this image. Like a giant snowball rolling down the hill, things stick to you at every step. The detective has seen this, he knows the mess of relations can’t be cast away. There is no cheap trick for this, no pied piper’s flute. He knows the only way out is through – to become everything you’ve ever touched and a million threads more. To dissolve in this shared moment of alignment. The last glimmer of light hits the horizon, leaving the audience with a blood-stained, but peaceful aftertaste. Now, who can draw a heart without cringing?

— Noemi Purkrábková