A River in the Animal is Damned
My close friend and collaborator, Mika Johnson, asked me to contribute a poem to a project he was developing with multiple artists. That poem, A River in the Animal is Damned, was based on a dream I had and a short story I had never completed.
In the dream, robots floated over the city, raining down terror and destruction with their laser-beam eyes. I descended from a rope hanging disembodied from the sky. Then proceeded through dream logic to encounter scenes I’ve since forgotten, though their mythic sense and atmosphere remain deeply influential.
In the short story, a detective was led by his intuition to a rental, run by a hoarder, near the wharf in a coastal city. There, he would set down his briefcase on the bed, empty and filled only with blank pages, and go to sleep. By the morning, those pages within the closed briefcase would have text written upon it. He conducted his investigation in this way: through dreams, through conversations with inanimate objects. These elements touch on recurring themes in my work.
Years later, I again tried – unsuccessfully – to complete that short story for another project with Mika. Its title was, Theta Noir. That short story was eventually set aside again, but that title lives on now as the name of our collective. So many unexpected and beautiful things can emerge from what remains unfinished.
———— Credits:
Poem by Peter Hlinka
Video by Jakub Krejčí
Music and sound design by Justin Evans
Voice performance by Mika Johnson