Susanne Sundfør - Ten Love Songs
1. Darlings
In patient rivers from jungle fronds flaming napalm drips, vegetation curling green and blue to ash. Slow birds erupt from foliage, wings evaporating as they scream into the smoke to thud against the low ceiling of the shrinking sky. A panther, or soot-slicked leopard, some big cat with ears laid flat, lopes across the blackening scrub. Destruction, indiscriminate. Lillith adjusts the stolen flamethrower's shoulder straps and squeezes off another jet of terrible light, a hot whip laid upon the night.
She feels no remorse. It is not a real night, not even a real jungle, but a environment cobbled together from ideas of what a jungle at night should be. It's strange, how the genuine flame intersects with the edges of this made-up universe: coated in burning truth, the microcosm crumbles.
The First Man by her side cowers. He crouches and pulls his matted hair and slaps his shimmering chest. Lillith wants to calm him, wants to hold his head and see him bare his teeth in pleasure one last time, but his face is no longer his own.
She hopes the other woman got out, somehow.
2. Accelerate
Deep in the Nicaragua jungle, Lillith's chaperones unload from the helicopter their scuba gear, padded cases full of microscopes, military-grade inflatable tents. Though she's given them no guarantee the equipment will survive the journey between worlds, great minds will risk anything to observe Eden - if that's what they're choosing to call it, against Lillith's advice. It's a two-hour trek from clearing to cave; the guns pointed at her head make it feel much longer.
She remembers her first dive, the cave's cool standing water curdling at her outstretched fingertips. Gravity flipped one-eighty and she rose again, the water now sun-warm, her lungs fit to burst.
Her heart, too. Something moved in the molecules. It felt like love, crammed into the empty spaces between quarks and neutrons in her body. Too big to define, it filled her up. It felt like coming home, at once prodigal and safe.
This second dive feels sacrilegious, as much as you can betray something you don't believe in. She knows what they'll do to The First Man - one of the inflatable tents is a mobile isolation chamber. Please, she thinks as she kicks towards the portal, don't be so stupid as to wait for me.
There he is on the other shore, naked and flawless.
Her shining, goggled, lycra-slick chaperones surface.
3. Fade Away
Her first trip to Eden, a memory in bloom.
Every inch was a new discovery that somehow felt familiar. Each species of fern or rose or sprouting bean was brand new, exactly as one might expect an primordial green to look and smell and feel. The fat ladybirds were impeccable, birdsong almost intelligible. The air was thick with the joy of everything being as it should, always was, ever would be.
As for Him? Absurd. Uncorrupted. Gym-fit and salon-smooth in the middle of the jungle. Coconuts dropped into his outstretched palms. He was strangely articulate in his movement. His odour, improbably fresh, awakened in Lillith an ache to sprint to the horizon in the hope the world was flat, and they were to start anew.
And he did not shit. That was her first big clue that this world was not real. It was too faithful a recreation, a simulacrum of beginnings, and one perfect beginning in particular. As such it deserved study, she knew, but examining felt like touching an ancient fresco not yet dried...
Which neatly sidestepped something else in here with her, permanently smudged, that Lillith could not look directly at.
4. Silencer
There are no stars in the night sky. There's no Mars, no Jupiter, not even a comforting Moon. Of course not.
Lillith and The First Man would lie on their backs in the grass and stare up at a flat veil tucked under the edge of the universe. For the world of things to exist, so must the sugared streak of the Milky Way, the ever-hungry Sagittarius A*, everything between and above, detritus from an entirely different idea that might one day be proven true.
He seemed content with its uniformity. Still, she told him where the constellations should have been, traced imaginary shooting stars across the black.
No such accidents ever happened in Eden, until Lillith tumbled in.
5. Kamikaze
Pitched against the latest model, The First Man doesn't stand a chance.
Tents fwoomp into shape on the golden shore. Sharp instruments glint in the sourceless sun. The new breed bind Lillith to a loose stump. She grits her teeth and tells them nothing. How far they've fallen from their ideal. They unpack Him infinitely. After all, He's nothing more than a concept, able to be turned this way and that to find new penetralia.
How he howls, how he howls, how he howls.
Beyond the perimeter, scales glinting under floodlights: there goes the other woman. Lillith almost cries for help, though she knows, were their roles reversed, she'd stay hidden too.
The slit-eyed thing is a prototype dreamed of contradictions.
On the third night Lillith wakes to wild electronic birdsong, spotlights sweeping over her guards' unmade bodies. Lillith cannot see the other woman, but she can smell her, blood and perfume, as she drags Lillith's stump to the water's edge.
The pool closes round her still-bound ankles, then her knees, then tilts her back to face the starless sky. Bullets pepper the waves. Her stump rolls. She comes up gasping, just the once, before her saviour dives.
6. Memorial
When the extraction team pull Lillith from the cave's dark waters she notices their military buzzcuts have grown out, and their pilot's eyes are more round than almond. The G-men stand taller, if possible, in their suits and sunglasses. In the course of her processing, the corrupt police chief's skin lightens several shades. Her cellmate's eyes are an uneasy mix of brown and teal; come morning, they're ice blue. Turfed onto Managua's leafy streets, she finds a bar to get shiftaced, and the barman's hair hangs glossy blonde around his jaw, looking like a wig, so bright against his dark skin. A mixed group of construction workers enter the bar. The men all wear their hair the same, all stand at the bar with the same stance, all watch her with blue eyes. She watches them back. One takes her home, generous and attentive and unlikely.
Some time in the night she feels him shift in bed and senses he's changed shape. She wakes up next to a stranger she recognises. They watch TV in the morning and the president of the United States looks like the First Man. Unflappable, the First Lady doesn't notice.
Nobody seems to notice, this sweeping regulation of Homo Homogenic. This must be what happens, she supposes, when you dissect the ideal man seeking answers, instead of questions.
There are worse hells.
Then the woman behind the drugstore counter wishes her buenos días with a forked tongue, and Lillith knows she can't stay here.
7. Delirious
Blood on the sand glues perfect granules into brown-black clods. The camp on the shore is ruined, deflated, spare one containment unit. The team, identikit, lead her there without argument or conflict. In pulling him apart they've inherited The First Man's temperament.
If not his innocence.
He's been stuffed back together wrong. The joins are invisible but Lillith can see whatever deconstruction they've inflicted is irreversible. His body shifts, interior forces stretching his hips, passing melanin variations across his skin like ripples in a wheat field. Semblances of others rise beneath to bubble on the surface of his face. His his nose flattens then snubs, his ears stretch, his eyes flicker blue, green, grey, each colour flooded with confusion.
In tearing into him they left something of themselves behind, conceptual contamination. Once the idea of a man, now the idea of many, his body can't contain the multitudes.
8. Slowly
Does his mind warp, behind eyes that shimmer with humanity? Can he remember her, their time together, or has the future memory of mankind overshadowed their time together? Lillith can't tell. She places a hand on the tent's window, hoping he might raise his own, unlikely clean fingernails and all, to mimic the action on the other side. He looks at it, as if the hand isn't even connected to Lillith, as if it never once stroked his face, or held his wrists to the ground in the night.
Part of her understands that this is closer to the truth. More apt for an idea of humanity to flux and flip and not know itself from moment to moment.
Less easy to love.
Still, he's nothing compared to his companion. Is it a punishment, how the team haven't even bothered to properly sew her back together?
9. Trust Me
The First Man was not Lillith's first contact with Eden.
She'd crawled ashore, struggling to breathe. It - she - humanoid, but barely - and it was a she, no need for fig-leaf modesty here - the other woman had watched her.
After the initial shock Lillith sat on the sand, wrung water from her hair. She took her time, getting used to being under that yellow-eyed gaze: not curious, not concerned, not surprised, not anything, not yet. Viewed direct, she was flat-faced and monstrous, dark scales perpetually pushing through her skin to slough off in palm-wide segments. Yet when Lillith looked out across the water, keeping her companion in corner-vision, she appeared pretty, in a conventional sort of way.
She advanced on Lillith with a smile made to catch rodents.
Lillith screamed for help, and the First Man came running.
At the time it felt like survival, but once Lillith saw how the trees shook their bounty into the First Man's outstretched palms, she saw her rejection of the woman for what it really was: unconsented belief bred in her like a thousand, thousand demons.
10. Insects
The flamethrower chokes out one last fiery tongue before the tank runs dry. Lillith shrugs it off and retreats towards the pool, dragging the First Man with her. she breaks through the charring treeline to find she's led them back to the camp. The path folds back on itself. Through the smoke she picks out a high point of land, fixates on it as best she can. Grass gives way to rubble. Climbing, four times she passes under the exact same rocky outcrop, though she can only have circled the hill once, if that.
At the peak, she understands: as man's idea of Man collapses into similitude, so too does his Eden, folding kaleidoscopic. You can see where the seams flip segments of the land back in on itself, trees and shrubs slotting together like pieces of a cardboard diorama.
The pool now a puddle, ripples closing over two clawed feet.
Good, Lillith thinks. She'll not find a welcome on the other side, but good for her.
The smoke shifts, and buzzes. It rises to crowd the tessellating sky with billions wings and compound eyes. The world folds once more to crush Lillith's body against The First Man. Tiny feet on her skin. Another fold. Tiny bodies crowd her mouth. Lillith struggles to breathe. There's no telling what the other woman will inherit on the other side, once these insects settle, sole survivors of Eden.
Perhaps better it mirror a mind of multitudes, than hold two flawed ideas up to the light like mosquitos bound in amber.
1. Darlings
In patient rivers from jungle fronds flaming napalm drips, vegetation curling green and blue to ash. Slow birds erupt from foliage, wings evaporating as they scream into the smoke to thud against the low ceiling of the shrinking sky. A panther, or soot-slicked leopard, some big cat with ears laid flat, lopes across the blackening scrub. Destruction, indiscriminate. Lillith adjusts the stolen flamethrower's shoulder straps and squeezes off another jet of terrible light, a hot whip laid upon the night.
She feels no remorse. It is not a real night, not even a real jungle, but a environment cobbled together from ideas of what a jungle at night should be. It's strange, how the genuine flame intersects with the edges of this made-up universe: coated in burning truth, the microcosm crumbles.
The First Man by her side cowers. He crouches and pulls his matted hair and slaps his shimmering chest. Lillith wants to calm him, wants to hold his head and see him bare his teeth in pleasure one last time, but his face is no longer his own.
She hopes the other woman got out, somehow.
2. Accelerate
Deep in the Nicaragua jungle, Lillith's chaperones unload from the helicopter their scuba gear, padded cases full of microscopes, military-grade inflatable tents. Though she's given them no guarantee the equipment will survive the journey between worlds, great minds will risk anything to observe Eden - if that's what they're choosing to call it, against Lillith's advice. It's a two-hour trek from clearing to cave; the guns pointed at her head make it feel much longer.
She remembers her first dive, the cave's cool standing water curdling at her outstretched fingertips. Gravity flipped one-eighty and she rose again, the water now sun-warm, her lungs fit to burst.
Her heart, too. Something moved in the molecules. It felt like love, crammed into the empty spaces between quarks and neutrons in her body. Too big to define, it filled her up. It felt like coming home, at once prodigal and safe.
This second dive feels sacrilegious, as much as you can betray something you don't believe in. She knows what they'll do to The First Man - one of the inflatable tents is a mobile isolation chamber. Please, she thinks as she kicks towards the portal, don't be so stupid as to wait for me.
There he is on the other shore, naked and flawless.
Her shining, goggled, lycra-slick chaperones surface.
3. Fade Away
Her first trip to Eden, a memory in bloom.
Every inch was a new discovery that somehow felt familiar. Each species of fern or rose or sprouting bean was brand new, exactly as one might expect an primordial green to look and smell and feel. The fat ladybirds were impeccable, birdsong almost intelligible. The air was thick with the joy of everything being as it should, always was, ever would be.
As for Him? Absurd. Uncorrupted. Gym-fit and salon-smooth in the middle of the jungle. Coconuts dropped into his outstretched palms. He was strangely articulate in his movement. His odour, improbably fresh, awakened in Lillith an ache to sprint to the horizon in the hope the world was flat, and they were to start anew.
And he did not shit. That was her first big clue that this world was not real. It was too faithful a recreation, a simulacrum of beginnings, and one perfect beginning in particular. As such it deserved study, she knew, but examining felt like touching an ancient fresco not yet dried...
Which neatly sidestepped something else in here with her, permanently smudged, that Lillith could not look directly at.
4. Silencer
There are no stars in the night sky. There's no Mars, no Jupiter, not even a comforting Moon. Of course not.
Lillith and The First Man would lie on their backs in the grass and stare up at a flat veil tucked under the edge of the universe. For the world of things to exist, so must the sugared streak of the Milky Way, the ever-hungry Sagittarius A*, everything between and above, detritus from an entirely different idea that might one day be proven true.
He seemed content with its uniformity. Still, she told him where the constellations should have been, traced imaginary shooting stars across the black.
No such accidents ever happened in Eden, until Lillith tumbled in.
5. Kamikaze
Pitched against the latest model, The First Man doesn't stand a chance.
Tents fwoomp into shape on the golden shore. Sharp instruments glint in the sourceless sun. The new breed bind Lillith to a loose stump. She grits her teeth and tells them nothing. How far they've fallen from their ideal. They unpack Him infinitely. After all, He's nothing more than a concept, able to be turned this way and that to find new penetralia.
How he howls, how he howls, how he howls.
Beyond the perimeter, scales glinting under floodlights: there goes the other woman. Lillith almost cries for help, though she knows, were their roles reversed, she'd stay hidden too.
The slit-eyed thing is a prototype dreamed of contradictions.
On the third night Lillith wakes to wild electronic birdsong, spotlights sweeping over her guards' unmade bodies. Lillith cannot see the other woman, but she can smell her, blood and perfume, as she drags Lillith's stump to the water's edge.
The pool closes round her still-bound ankles, then her knees, then tilts her back to face the starless sky. Bullets pepper the waves. Her stump rolls. She comes up gasping, just the once, before her saviour dives.
6. Memorial
When the extraction team pull Lillith from the cave's dark waters she notices their military buzzcuts have grown out, and their pilot's eyes are more round than almond. The G-men stand taller, if possible, in their suits and sunglasses. In the course of her processing, the corrupt police chief's skin lightens several shades. Her cellmate's eyes are an uneasy mix of brown and teal; come morning, they're ice blue. Turfed onto Managua's leafy streets, she finds a bar to get shiftaced, and the barman's hair hangs glossy blonde around his jaw, looking like a wig, so bright against his dark skin. A mixed group of construction workers enter the bar. The men all wear their hair the same, all stand at the bar with the same stance, all watch her with blue eyes. She watches them back. One takes her home, generous and attentive and unlikely.
Some time in the night she feels him shift in bed and senses he's changed shape. She wakes up next to a stranger she recognises. They watch TV in the morning and the president of the United States looks like the First Man. Unflappable, the First Lady doesn't notice.
Nobody seems to notice, this sweeping regulation of Homo Homogenic. This must be what happens, she supposes, when you dissect the ideal man seeking answers, instead of questions.
There are worse hells.
Then the woman behind the drugstore counter wishes her buenos días with a forked tongue, and Lillith knows she can't stay here.
7. Delirious
Blood on the sand glues perfect granules into brown-black clods. The camp on the shore is ruined, deflated, spare one containment unit. The team, identikit, lead her there without argument or conflict. In pulling him apart they've inherited The First Man's temperament.
If not his innocence.
He's been stuffed back together wrong. The joins are invisible but Lillith can see whatever deconstruction they've inflicted is irreversible. His body shifts, interior forces stretching his hips, passing melanin variations across his skin like ripples in a wheat field. Semblances of others rise beneath to bubble on the surface of his face. His his nose flattens then snubs, his ears stretch, his eyes flicker blue, green, grey, each colour flooded with confusion.
In tearing into him they left something of themselves behind, conceptual contamination. Once the idea of a man, now the idea of many, his body can't contain the multitudes.
8. Slowly
Does his mind warp, behind eyes that shimmer with humanity? Can he remember her, their time together, or has the future memory of mankind overshadowed their time together? Lillith can't tell. She places a hand on the tent's window, hoping he might raise his own, unlikely clean fingernails and all, to mimic the action on the other side. He looks at it, as if the hand isn't even connected to Lillith, as if it never once stroked his face, or held his wrists to the ground in the night.
Part of her understands that this is closer to the truth. More apt for an idea of humanity to flux and flip and not know itself from moment to moment.
Less easy to love.
Still, he's nothing compared to his companion. Is it a punishment, how the team haven't even bothered to properly sew her back together?
9. Trust Me
The First Man was not Lillith's first contact with Eden.
She'd crawled ashore, struggling to breathe. It - she - humanoid, but barely - and it was a she, no need for fig-leaf modesty here - the other woman had watched her.
After the initial shock Lillith sat on the sand, wrung water from her hair. She took her time, getting used to being under that yellow-eyed gaze: not curious, not concerned, not surprised, not anything, not yet. Viewed direct, she was flat-faced and monstrous, dark scales perpetually pushing through her skin to slough off in palm-wide segments. Yet when Lillith looked out across the water, keeping her companion in corner-vision, she appeared pretty, in a conventional sort of way.
She advanced on Lillith with a smile made to catch rodents.
Lillith screamed for help, and the First Man came running.
At the time it felt like survival, but once Lillith saw how the trees shook their bounty into the First Man's outstretched palms, she saw her rejection of the woman for what it really was: unconsented belief bred in her like a thousand, thousand demons.
10. Insects
The flamethrower chokes out one last fiery tongue before the tank runs dry. Lillith shrugs it off and retreats towards the pool, dragging the First Man with her. she breaks through the charring treeline to find she's led them back to the camp. The path folds back on itself. Through the smoke she picks out a high point of land, fixates on it as best she can. Grass gives way to rubble. Climbing, four times she passes under the exact same rocky outcrop, though she can only have circled the hill once, if that.
At the peak, she understands: as man's idea of Man collapses into similitude, so too does his Eden, folding kaleidoscopic. You can see where the seams flip segments of the land back in on itself, trees and shrubs slotting together like pieces of a cardboard diorama.
The pool now a puddle, ripples closing over two clawed feet.
Good, Lillith thinks. She'll not find a welcome on the other side, but good for her.
The smoke shifts, and buzzes. It rises to crowd the tessellating sky with billions wings and compound eyes. The world folds once more to crush Lillith's body against The First Man. Tiny feet on her skin. Another fold. Tiny bodies crowd her mouth. Lillith struggles to breathe. There's no telling what the other woman will inherit on the other side, once these insects settle, sole survivors of Eden.
Perhaps better it mirror a mind of multitudes, than hold two flawed ideas up to the light like mosquitos bound in amber.