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Lea Porsager

FOOD FOR THE MOON – Sluggish and Well-lubricated (2013)

Inkjet print

100 x 100cm

FOOD FOR THE MOON — Sluggish and Well-lubricated bounces off of Armenian mystic George I. Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson (or, “An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man”), the first volume of his massive work All and Everything.

Gurdjieff’s Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson is a complex sci-fi novel about Beelzebub’s journey home with his grandson on the spaceship KARNAK. In one of his many arduous monologues addressed to his grandson, Beelzebub speaks of his encounters with the “three-brained” (i.e. human) beings of planet Earth and the catastrophic consequences of an ill-placed organ. According to Beelzebub, it all started when a violent collision split two fragments off of Earth and flung them into space. For fear that the rocks might break free from their orbit and cause havoc on neighboring solar systems, a cosmic intelligentsia decided to “take certain measures”: By letting the two rocks feed on the three-brained beings’ vibrant energy, the intelligentsia insured that the rocks remained close to Earth. In a subsequent act of increasing paranoia, the cosmic intelligentsia placed a new organ inside of the three-brained beings, at the base of their spines: The KUNDABUFFER. The purpose of this operation, and the talent of the buffer-organ, was to generate a cognitive flip-flop that would prevent the beings from ever revolting against their fate as fodder. The Kundabuffer would effectively block the three-brained beings from realizing their newfound role in the cosmic economy. In fact, their woolly post-buffer brains were unable to even recall the names of the two rocks that started the whole misère. They ended up naming the big one MOON, while the existence of the little one had entirely slipped their minds. According to Beelzebub, the cosmic intelligentsia removed the Kundabuffer when they no longer deemed the rocks—or the three-brained beings—a threat. But it was too late. As it turned out, the alien organ’s spinal block had left the three-brained beings in a permanent topsy-turvy state of buffer-induced delusion. Despite the bufferectomy, their once flipped reality could not be flopped. They remained enslaved by the Moon. When trying to recollect his grandfather’s tale, Beelzebub’s grandson actually confuses humans with slugs.

There it is, the account of how the three-brained beings of planet Earth were practically shocked out of their soulful mind-pits by a nervous cosmic intelligentsia, only to emerge as horny, belligerent, senseless, sleepy slugs. FOOD FOR THE MOON — Sluggish and Well-lubricated surrenders itself to the grandson’s confusion, staggering between three-brained humanity and no-brained (all-brained!) sluggishness. Embrace the worldly slugs! Or, as Beelzebub-Gurdjieff calls them, the “parasites who destroy everything good.”

Imagine how, in sleep, equipped with kundabuffer-sized holes and rubber organs, the slugs twitch and twirl in the dark womb of forgetfulness. Portals closed. Fire-snakes snuffed out. Imagine that, to this day, as the shimmering disk shifts and stirs in the sky, the slugs wear their rubbery bufferness like a shock-absorbing suit! Freaky, to say the least.

In FOOD FOR THE MOON — Sluggish and Well-lubricated, Gurdjieff’s Toast to the Idiots (idiot, from Greek idios: “one’s own”), serves as a structuring tool and as the basis for the works’ own IDYOT. Toast to the Idiots derives from Gurdjieff’s Science of Idiotism, a spiritual system complete with twenty-one stages of idiocy. Toast to the Idiots was a therapeutic “drinking game” practiced by the members of Gurdjieff’s women-only group The Rope. The ritual was designed to de-automatize patterns and hence get closer to one’s essence—one’s own. Alcohol was used as the agent of choice for producing the desired effects on the consciousness, allowing one to move through the stages. It was never to be practiced apart from a sacramental meal and always with spirits (i.e. Russian vodka).

FOOD FOR THE MOON’s somewhat stupefied state might suggest that it has been guzzling its own inflamed moonshine. Give way to rigid idiocy! A drunken toast!