Above is a catalogue essay compiled from select fragments of text to accompany Roy Ananda’s exhibition ‘The Pale Dossier’ at Post Office Projects, Kaurna Country/Port Adelaide in July 2023. The essay takes the form of found snippets of text, collaged together. They appear in their original font, and as a result bear minor grammatical inconsistencies. A transcript of the essay follows:
“Tell me, Wraith and Reader, Tell me: Do you believe in Ghosts? Although I cannot claim that these often complex diagrams were not directly related to our studies, there were abnormal or spontaneous production of messages, drawings, etc., on sealed or unsealed plates, said to the be work of spirits. These ‘phenomena’ are almost on par with spirit photographs and many other examples of a deformed or corrupted scientific notation. These signs appear to be spirits, finer than flour, more dangerous than silica. Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium.
There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all other. I refer not to evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. I once longed to compile its mobile history, a long way off or a long time ago. To those who studies the stars, the infinite eyes which night hath opened within us accumulated death and starlit burning, in order to return to the very site of the first blind and blinding gaze: a baroque rapture, a private myth. Let us recall, now, that paradox. When science and enlightenment are pushed far enough, they yield conclusions alarmingly similar to those already anticipated by mystics and theosophists. Five or seven years of metaphysical, theological, and mathematical apprenticeship would allow me (perhaps) chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and future ages. It may well be impossible to go any further than that by eye alone, but in some cases a paranormal knowledge of the future cannot be ruled out and taking into account quantum uncertainties, communication into the past cannot be dismissed as impossible.
Many people say they cannot understand it: for ten years they searched archives, examined original documents, delved into controversial and uncongenial books which in some manner are the history of the far future. The spirits of the dead contained the space and the future of the library; as if the word were already infinitely greater, more abyssal, than the desert of the real itself. The voice of ink now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek: “we are you in the future.”