In this forest sounds crawl, samples drift, and bodies feel woven to infinity. Read a sonic fiction by the writer and artist Anne Lesley Selcer, an excerpt taken from their in-progress novel CLUB SPACE.

I start to text, I see only with my body in this forest. Its wallessness makes human time unfurl. But I spot Paradise sitting on a gigantic felled redwood, scribbling those words in her notebook. She smiles up at me, her skirt and petticoats spread out in each cardinal direction. Her parasol is folded by her side. Paradise’s smile is crooked and outside of time. A familiar sample drifts out of the speakers and upward toward an ambivalent sky all your symbols are shattered, all your sacred words are gone where the unclear binary of night and day heralds similar news.

Pleasure is a place, sweet and bright. We are being hosted inside these trees where henosis1 dwells before it’s born. I feel for a black satin pouch underneath my vestments. I sprinkle a pile of dry mugwort into my palm and light a match. Paradise lowers her head, inhales sharp smoke. I taste metal at the edge of her bright red hair. There is no path, there is no path what’s that from? I wonder, lifting my eyes toward the gigantic speakers washing the maenads2 in decorate time. I watch every person here dance. This hydrates my beauty which in turn I offer to thee, I say this to Paradise, kiss her on the forehead goodnight. Drive safe. Take care in and of darkness. «Text me your dream».

Now the techno turns insolent. A plenitude of nocturnal creatures flock to the dance floor. The sound crawls sideways with a pickaxe, then slows down to a gong that bounces off four copper walls, six copper walls, eight copper walls. Copper begins rippling into its own sound. Venus’ mirror is pulsing, undulating now. The walls are an instrument of human time.

I arch back with masculinity in high black platforms, as dark leather force flies fast at us from the deck. It expands right and left simultaneously in weighted layers of hyde, opaque, latex. My wingspan follows. «The unconscious deals with infinite sets that have not only the power of the enumerable but also that of the continuum», a scrubby twink in a ballcap behind me explains to her girlfriend. Day climbs brightly above the trees, the sun facing off with the moon, an impervious love affair. The lightening sky resonates as sadness in my bowels. Morning feels pushy, like the bright smile of work or school. We’re not ready. I want to stay.

I’ve noticed a counter-tendency taking shape. It’s mostly in the forest but it’s spreading. Cassie’s been reading a book about militant girls. She’s been texting me bits, «I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world».

I’ll check it out, I text back, can she send the PDF? She starts blowing up my phone, GENDER IS A MYTHOLOGY FOR THE BODY! APPEARANCE IS A PLAYTHING! Her words now. She’s texting a manifesto? In the forest, our bodies are woven to infinity. We understand others as pure energies.

Outside, daylight and darkness alternate in the steady dramaturgy of human life, a fixed mythology of how the world seems, of what is possible, what is dying, closing down, as in the early night of winter. Some think it’s already happened. Some think it’s coming. Tripping through a tangle of their affections and outfits, a gaggle moves toward the front to dance in messy synchronicity, I get dopamine anyway I can drifts by. MOVE WRONGLY UNDER YOUR SIGN! MOVEMENT IS THE OPPOSITE OF CAPTIVITY!

This is an excerpt of the in-progress novel CLUB SPACE. The book creates future mythology through a moving portrait of the dance floor. The section begins to imagine the forest rave as an ongoing lifeform. CLUB SPACE asks, what are we when we are together? How could we arrange life, and rearrange time? Additional editing assistance from Vesper Guthrie.

• 1. The classical Greek word for mystical oneness, union or unity (Wikipedia 2024).
• 2. Associated with Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, poetry, madness and ecstatic states, maenads are said to have created all night revels (Wikipedia 2024).