I. Blind landing. Two-and-a-half twists in the air. Back handspring onto vaulting table. Roundoff onto spring-board. Reversal to transfiguration. Roundoff-one-and-a-half-twist step out-roundoff-back handspring-arabian double front-front layout salto. Splicing motion, mutilating time.

II. The “becoming subject”— the becoming Olympiad-blind landing out of Amanar; the becoming American-teenaged-tattooed; the becoming female-Blaze Pink into camouflage-latent hunter drive. Engendering and gendering the sport, not by rules but by an “immanent sense of the game,”* shared in a field: the necessity of play for the players; the production of durability thru corporeal dispositions; the gymnastic elasticity of bodies, stretched by fabric and time.

III. But what ensures this durability? The extensification of Edison’s originary electric pen, naval homosociality transfigured too, subsumed in punk aesthetic; “the social life of things,”** objects traveling on their own damn course—in and out of commodity, body to conjugal body...and yet the question’s the same: what is the boundary of pain, where the sea meets the sky and death resides.

IV. The becoming dead- “Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment.”*** What is the process of this finding? Not annihilation, but incomplete destruction. The kind of time you start to see passing, death as anti-economy, vanitas in the Latin—futility of material.

Esra Padgett

*Bourdieu and Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. **Appadurai. 1986. The Social Life of Things.
*** Mbembe. 2003. Necropolitics.