John Biscello

Memories engage cosplay in the dark, in darkened rooms.

Who are all these strangers? Where did they come from? Why do they feel so familiar? The guests are all ghosts, cosplay specters, and they mingled with you in such an agreeable manner that you are gently coerced into a realm of further ghosts. This is where things gets interesting. This is where everything breaks apart.

With every level penetrated, with every node of descent, you have to rid yourself of former notions. Shedding and revision are essential components in the equation. When the ceremony of cosplay in the dark moves you from ghosts, to further ghosts, one thing that becomes lucidly clear—there is no singularity, no singular identity. Dissolution becomes us in destroying the notion of us. What you thought of as your uncle or grandmother, what you imagined to be the ghost of your dead lover, is only a portrait hosted on the first level. As first level. Further ghosts means more of the ceaseless nameless immaterial and less of strict and maximal identity. Your dead lover, for example, when it comes to further ghosts, is, you could say, an assembly of blue bubbles connected to other blue bubbles, the flirtations and orgy of symbiosis. These are blue bubbles which align to the cause of serial bandwidth, mutable multiform theaters, if you will, that clarify forms and faces mired in general recognition. When we recede from life-as-we-know-it, or advance beyond it, depending on your perspective and semantic outlook, there is the imprint and echo of what we call first ghost, that which belongs to specific storyline and narrative, that which bears an individual history. That is the operating principle of first ghost. Once you move beyond first ghost into further ghosts (there is no second ghost because first ghost is an illusion, a fable, which dissolves as soon as you move beyond first ghost—we go from first to many). Does this mean that your uncle was not your uncle? Your mother not your mother? No, it doesn’t mean that. It means that a significant mask and existential wardrobe of identity was connected to your storyline, your narrative, your karmic genealogy—your uncle was your uncle, your mother was your mother, same as your uncle was not your uncle, your mother was not your mother, same as your uncle is your uncle, is not your uncle, what is uncle, uncle is fiction, uncle is fact, uncle is blood, uncle is blank, uncle is one slant and potential view in the jazzy fusion of blue bubbles getting busy. How to get to this realm of further ghosts? One way is to realize that your memories are playthings, plastic and elastic, they are lumps of unmarked clay through which you can mold according to intent and desire. How you create, what you make, may function as avatars modeling keys which unlock implausible doors opening into the realm of further ghosts. It is like having a séance for a séance, watching a film about a film, like taking a flight of stairs all the way down to a flight of birds.