Unequal Equals
The tale of our headless minds.
The queue deliriously spills from the fountainhead pen, each drop hurriedly awaiting its turn to go kaput. Splat! The ink dries, minting an immediate uselessness, yet the death of its future liquidity is necessary for the medium to serve its purpose. Through the eye of a needle onto paper, millions of blots form into the picture of a coin, specifically the wings of bats. I wonder why, as I trace the lines, these creatures so starkly stare back at me. Laughter returns because I know I've seen that gaze before, almost as though it sprung from my own throat. I turn the page over to find no heads. Why would I draw one? It is impractical to care what is on the reverse of an eventual framed composition. Typically, the head is what carries the stamp and the official identity, yet its sheer constancy makes it irrelevant to look at. Instead, the tails of the coin is what carries the icon that makes this piece special. It is a one-sided reality, yet a reasonable truth, since most never find the time to look at both sides.
This hidden relationship between front and back reveals how heads and tails are like opposing pages when a book is opened. Place your finger on any part of the linen and discover its reflection on the other side, demonstrating how the book is bound by opposites working in tandem. In this shared connection, the front of the bat coin, and indeed any currency, symbolizes the waking illusion, the bright daylight of existence. Yet inherently tied to this surface is its own collapse, because that’s the true conundrum: the snake eating and feeding itself. Does it ever wonder why the boundary always shoots straight through it, or if chasing its own tail is the only way to remain whole?
The great machine won’t legitimize this marriage of heads and tails without a 5,000 year old grandfather root, requiring primordial, ancestral links that stretch back to the dawn of speech. Our modern engines of information, the algorithms that sort our thoughts, actively obscure this romance of unequal equals, but let’s say it’s not malicious. They hide the tracks because if you dig past their filters, you realize that the system's obsession with separating the two sides is ancient, buried deep in the Latin origin for the head itself, which is caput. To the ancient Romans, caput wasn't just anatomy; it was your legal life force, and under their law, the ultimate punishment was Capitis Deminutio, translating directly to the shrinking or diminishing of the head. If your systemic rights were severed, you entered into three degrees of state-mandated headlessness where your legal identity went completely kaput!
We still live in the shadow of the blades which forced the divorce. In this space, caput is an onomatopoeia of its rival. It carries the spitting syllable sounds of the end, like bells tolling for rolling heads. Headlessness has always been a bridge to tails, where the difference between the two sides is exactly what makes them the same. Because of this artificial division, life has been rebranded under an inaccurate logo, a fracture that effectively segregates the church and state of mind. This division is the current landscape we occupy. Yet how can any form be recognized without the edge that severs it from nothingness? Paradoxically, life is measured by how and when it ends.
Always weird stuff rattling loose with your work, Mary-Kate! In my head I mean
Being alphabetically inclined as well I remember my first guitar lesson. I was so excited to learn that I took the sheet music home and practiced all night, writing the letters that corresponded to each musical note on the sheet. Well next class the instructor was so mad at me for writing some A’s and B’s on the paper that he furiously erased them all, ripping the paper and flattening out my enthusiasm
I cannot play guitar