The terms of your day, night, life
Con/Jur/d, 4/6/2026
“The following … offers a brief meditation on
the concept of the score as a condition of possibility
(a necessary condition) for an intermedial work to exist.”
Hanna B. Hölling, from Unpacking the Score:
Notes on the Material Legacy of Intermediality
Issue 51: ONCURATING: https://www.on-curating.org/issue-51-reader/unpacking-the-score-notes-on-the-material-legacy-of-intermediality.html retrieved 4/6/2026
HEY YOU! we call out, CAN WE GET A SCORE?
HEY DO YOU KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS?
WHY NOW? WHY ME? DID WE ASK FOR THIS
INTRUSION?
(seeing we successfully dodged the thrown shoes)
HOLD ON!
-- sound of rummaging from the open window
it’s about 3 am, and we had run
out of cocaine, and were trying to reboot
the temporarily deadened synapsis, above
below the dark/dark wooden eaves come
comic sounds of a single bark, a single meow
and a single elephant trumpet interspersed and
punctuating what could have been a broken clock
performance of 4′33, crickets, distant cars and
a chorus of WHOOP WHOOP substituting for
the unpacked instruments, while out of the window’s maw
drawers being forcefully opened/closed, with a faere
tinkling of broken glass, the head reappears
partially covered in discarded unisex undergarments
holding a scroll like page, you know with certainty
is vellum, although you have no idea what vellum
is or may be
HERE IS SOMETHING IF YOU WANT IT?!
We check each others bloodshots
and knowing the bars in this hood
are soon closing, and the suspended
late night awake but dream timing is about
to be interrupted by drunks and other
acquaintances, we nod, to THE NARRATOR
(no one else wanted the role) to whom
we appear to be fish rolling in a preindustrial river
the streetlights glinting off our sweaty exposed
and metal studs, assorted earrings and buttons
with band names and pseudo anarchists slogans
OKAY!
{clears throat}
FROM NOW ON, (Dave groans, Todd shushes him)
A police car drives by, slows, sees who it is
and continues on, THE Narrator continues
at a normalized volume:
treat everything as a conversation, that started pre-
birth and will continue post death, for the rest
of your life, you will always be walking in on
listening in on, as if you are in the middle of,
THE REALITY MONOLOGUE, the I am
the first-person singular, knowing its reasons
were explained and codified long, long ago, before
your ancestors, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals
before dinosaurs, before fungi, before the whirling
of hydrocarbons and the pools, never be repeated
INSTRUCTIONLESS YOU MUST live your life
as the ongoing experiment it already is
(Mike the scientists gives a thumbs up)
just acknowledged, be honest about it folks…
REMEMBER
you are the emptiness
through which this stream of conscious
flows, the idea of a hypothesis or a story
that will make sense of this, give it meaning
does not exist, cannot exist
HOWEVER, this is conditional
on making new hypothesis, performing
the experiment, testing and gathering
the results, when you stop it all stops!
there is a rustling, and he shouts, GOOD?
We look at each other and you say,
WAIT! That isn’t poetry
The Narrator scoffs, looks back and forth
across our collected heads, the milling
of bodies, improbably, arranged outside
THE WINDOW of a million possible
windows, in the middle of the night
in a tar and garbage smelling urbanity,
before the distributed/digitized BRIGHT/BRIGHT
lights, after, the switch from gas,
in the lull between boss battles
pausing mass murder as a business strategy,
and an actor as president was still a novelty
not a prerequisite and NARRATOR says, quietly
yet, we could hear in the silence within t
row houses canyon
What is these days?
SLAM
and with the shaking of glass, the sound of
drunken voices, echoes increasing in
volume, someone calling our names?
we knew the score, and
needed to play it.
Much love,
Con/Jur/d, 4/6/2026