And God created plasma nights
Andrei Navrozov
"Most of the material in the visible universe is in the plasma state."
Donald A. Gurnett and Amitava Bhattacharjee, Introduction to Plasma Physics
Are those chestnut trees over there? Or oaks? Birches, perhaps? Man stares at the forest with pared eyes.
There was a time when he kept pigs, fed them acorns. How sweet the fat on them prize hogs. Come Sunday he would go to the bathhouse and have himself whipped with birch twigs: "Give us some more of that steam, young fellow!" Once there were the boulevards of Paris. Chestnuts in bloom. Silken petticoats. French francs, jangling on zinc.
Now all is just a green mess in the middle distance. Pointillist mannerism by the yard. A continuous screen attached to the fence of Hyde Park, running images of nameless trees, anonymous artists, taciturn orators. A hologram of life as it once was, only better for trade because in just two dimensions. The third dimension is money – pay as you go, and word becomes flesh.
The fourth is no more – gone the way of the farthingale and the sweet hams of acorn-fattened swine.
Eternal: e. life, e. delight, e. glory, e. passion, e. friendship, e. now, hope springs e., e. triangle, mine e. jewel, thy e. summer shall not fade, ah there it is: e. feminine, what's happened to that? I mean, if oaks and birches and chestnuts have become abstract trees, what's the story with the Ewig-Weibliche? With the Carmen, the Helen, the Gretchen of all those yesterday's Goethes? With that mystical chorus, you know, that launched a thousand ships?
It has become plasma, that's what. Radiant matter for man to stare at with pared eyes, a terminally ill inmate of the nursing home watching a children's morning programme. It is tumescent beneath its smooth surface of hyaline, bulging with excitement like an erect nipple, an aquarium of colour and flame wherein nude commerce pulses. He is hypnotized by its aggregate energies, suckling on them as if it were a life-giving fount, never realizing that it is his own energies, in particular, that this global teat is suckled on. His and the other suckers'.
Women seem to surround him like a swarm of she-o-matic bees, pushed up, pumped up, plumped up to the point of suffocation. They leap out of red cabriolets at zebra crossings, sculpt themselves into toothbrush handles, get plastered on walls, leer suggestively from shop windows; their procrustean skirts, Machiavellian stilettos and apocalyptic glosses confuse all incoming signals, like the jamming posts erected under Khrushchev to suppress Radio Liberty; and that's just the urban lunch hour, with Lucifer still safely in his moonlit pen and God's gentle breath upon street asphalt and office desk.
At twilight, as plasma begins to phosphoresce, shadows darken in cleavages; olid musk and synthetic violet are mainlined into olfactory receptors; mirages of Arabian olibanum and Russian oligarch are served like cocktails. He is agaze, agog, agape. He is alone, marooned on a desert island with the picture archive of Hot Babes. "Better than nothing, I guess," everyman-the-voyeur in him mutters to himself as everything dissolves into plasma.