41 Bodies, 2026
Ruben Thomson
Written in response to HELL

“Your crucifixion storyline is meaningless unless you also include a resurrection finale” [1]

Bodies catch the wind in their drapery, huddled quietly on the street

Ritualised complicity. Piercing a membrane, a thin layer of muslin cloth
Inducted into a set of formal relations
Through the rabbit warren to some obscure corner of an office building, where hoof-like feet graze the stone floor

I read somewhere that aesthetic forms are a transposable organisational logic of repetitions, continuities, and differences; social form specifically concerns the arrangement of “bodies, goods and capacities” [2]. Perhaps ritual can exist as a political form – what are we if not a zen garden of maggots, these towering figures dragging their rake (or is it a crucifix? or the frame of a meat hook?) through, scraping furrows and skewering milky larvae. Vertiginous and strident, any movement is monumental, geological.

I find myself behind a structural pillar in the centre of a room, a partition dividing it into two vistas. Never visible as a whole, only available in part-scenes of situations, constructed or otherwise.

On one side one offers their hand to another, who brings a pin to their exposed flesh, screams reverberating;
the other side opens up to a roomier arrangement of bodies, their reactions less compelled by urgency, bracing against the convulsing limbs in their midst nonetheless

Lulled by this detached voyeurism until the scrape of shoes behind you puts you back in your place – grazing the floor, emitting a shriek that eviscerates the inside of your skull. Long hair brushes your back and suddenly you are taken,

Wrenched by the scruff of your dress, denied a place to stand, a kitten in the grip of its mother’s teeth.
You are just a unit in this grand design, a maggot. Get on your knees and witness. Pay tribute to the suffering you have caused. Chant with us in unison,

“It is well with the lord
It is well with me”
(ad nauseum)

Dirt is scattered now, mealy earth spilling out of a bandaged vessel, wriggling with translucent white.

The weepy walls of the office almost echo

Golden syrup dripping
Tangled in my hair
On my dress
Huddled again
Slightly tacky as we brush together on our way back out


[1] Rupaul, deleted tweet, 2013.
[2] Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, 3.