People with dysmorphia concentrate on seemingly real illusions.
Dysmorphia is a condition where people focus intensely on a specific, and see the whole it is part of through the specific’s optic. The specific becomes larger in importance, disproportionately – just as profit margins, which form a small section of a company’s finances, are elevated in importance. Where profit is incorporated into all financial decisions, the company sees itself through its dysmorphic lens:
A thousand container ships launch into a long perspective. Each day from east to west, on the boundaries of day and night, not quite veiled, blindfolded or hid, but ever-passing segments, circles and charts, bend graph lines that gleam in bland powerpoints. Lightning from a horizontal sun breeds half grabbable, made grabbable, unknown worlds. Along swelling cloud ridges planes arrive from airfields in India, North Africa and Iraq, and from Air Transport Command stations in Liberia, Ascension Island, Cairo, and Karachi. Pursuit planes are traded for additional cargo ships or retained for emergency invoice duty and small parcel service; trucks are procured and used for short-distance road hauling. Along a profit margin, people harvest toothpaste in vats and draw Listerine out of sunken wells far from the healthy breath of morning. They caress their bellies adoringly from time to time as though to reassure themselves they are still there. People pot noodles quickly in the summer season or work rudely at in-n-outs on Christmas Eve. People toil in fields, parenting seeds into grains, tilling and ploughing. Factories pregnant with link belts that grow link by link, month by month, feed accounts with an ever-sprouting green where inventors are muscled out of copyrights and patents in new mergers taken offshore in shifting winds. So these incomes come and go. To profit, the Earth is seen to be a stock of passive extraction with low costs and high yields – but is it really so?
Profit can reform into different sensory systems: the changing position of the sun and the orbit of the earth create harvest moons and spring high tides, dilating growth rings and multiplying heartbeats on the boundaries of day and night. Profit exists naturally in its unnaturalness: biological systems reverse and time re-collapses to run backwards, popping profit into bubbles, gaps and gains. But the natural world has its limits: it plays with its own sense of profit where it disrupts these strange financial optics between what is imagined to happen and what actually happens with droughts and storms, ecosystem regulation and climate change responses. Profits can skim, soar or dive through quicksands and whirlpools. Both the natural and finance systems have their own idea of what is real. Polestars multiply and lead voyages to new places, their cargos moved here and there through a network of transport links, optics and life.
People with dysmorphia concentrate on seemingly real illusions.
Dysmorphia is a condition where people focus intensely on a specific, and see the whole it is part of through the specific’s optic. The specific becomes larger in importance, disproportionately – just as profit margins, which form a small section of a company’s finances, are elevated in importance. Where profit is incorporated into all financial decisions, the company sees itself through its dysmorphic lens:
A thousand container ships launch into a long perspective. Each day from east to west, on the boundaries of day and night, not quite veiled, blindfolded or hid, but ever-passing segments, circles and charts, bend graph lines that gleam in bland powerpoints. Lightning from a horizontal sun breeds half grabbable, made grabbable, unknown worlds. Along swelling cloud ridges planes arrive from airfields in India, North Africa and Iraq, and from Air Transport Command stations in Liberia, Ascension Island, Cairo, and Karachi. Pursuit planes are traded for additional cargo ships or retained for emergency invoice duty and small parcel service; trucks are procured and used for short-distance road hauling. Along a profit margin, people harvest toothpaste in vats and draw Listerine out of sunken wells far from the healthy breath of morning. They caress their bellies adoringly from time to time as though to reassure themselves they are still there. People pot noodles quickly in the summer season or work rudely at in-n-outs on Christmas Eve. People toil in fields, parenting seeds into grains, tilling and ploughing. Factories pregnant with link belts that grow link by link, month by month, feed accounts with an ever-sprouting green where inventors are muscled out of copyrights and patents in new mergers taken offshore in shifting winds. So these incomes come and go. To profit, the Earth is seen to be a stock of passive extraction with low costs and high yields – but is it really so?
Profit can reform into different sensory systems: the changing position of the sun and the orbit of the earth create harvest moons and spring high tides, dilating growth rings and multiplying heartbeats on the boundaries of day and night. Profit exists naturally in its unnaturalness: biological systems reverse and time re-collapses to run backwards, popping profit into bubbles, gaps and gains. But the natural world has its limits: it plays with its own sense of profit where it disrupts these strange financial optics between what is imagined to happen and what actually happens with droughts and storms, ecosystem regulation and climate change responses. Profits can skim, soar or dive through quicksands and whirlpools. Both the natural and finance systems have their own idea of what is real. Polestars multiply and lead voyages to new places, their cargos moved here and there through a network of transport links, optics and life.