BENJAMIN LALLIER
LYING IN THE KITCHEN
MAY 3 – JUNE 14, 2025
Lost High
by Steven Warwick
Since I crawled out of this primordial soup I’ve had wet feet. Why? I’ve left the water. I’ve evolved. I’ve gained intelligence. I’ve learned to reason. Everything around me is unformed. It gains traction and then simply dissolves again. Truth be told, I myself am a shapeshifter. And I didn’t mean the wet feeling metaphorically. I literally had wet feet. Sometimes cold, sometimes warm from an all nighter. Sweat. Precipitation. Clammy perspiration from a limp handshake. Who’s in control. I read in a book on body language that one should always stand on the left of a photo opp to establish dominance and control. Superpowers adhere to this. Another trick is to simply arch arms in the middle of a peace deal to show a holy trinity. And guess what. You know who’s number 1. Balance. What a wonderful thing it is, eh? I gain weight in the winter and shed it all in the summer. That is if I’m not schmoozing on a beach somewhere. Fill ‘er up! I’m at the gas station. In fact I AM the gas. That’s part of the secret.
I tell people I have overactive sweat glands in my hands but really it’s just a ruse for being you know, a gelatinous petroleum based entity. Normally I can hide in plain sight. Don’t worry I’m not a shadowy elite. I’m just me.
I have been at most major world events though. I’ve seen a lot. I’m kinda eternal, or close to. I can evaporate and then hang out in a rain cloud for a bit, do the Charleston with some ions and one, two taps of a cumulonimbus and I’m BACK! It’s musical. The whole thing is that I didn’t sign up for this. I’ve been around so long I even invented time because I thought. HOW MUCH LONGER DO I HAVE TO TOLERATE THIS?! That you could say was the teething era of this process. This journey. When I was just a tadpole of what I am today. I created it all. Truth is, I’m one of the most dynamic, versatile and addictive states of matter around. You can paint me on your canvas, I’m powering all those records back in the day. I’m tugging those chugger boats backed up in whatever canal it is today. I’ve spent enough time on this planet, maybe it’s the only thing older than me. The sun? Pfff! That’s like the Daily Mirror for me. Pepsi to my Coca Cola. Apples and Pears. Michael & Latoya. You never see both in the same room at the same time.
Look up to the sky now, what do you see? Infinity? Stars? Planets? Heaven? Me? Chaos. Like hell, it’s a bit of a pornographic sexed up word. Really though. What is the order? Why is everything in its right place? Does the creator have a master plan? Who’s tidying up while I go to sleep? Why does that sun look so profound as I exit a bar? The silent assassin of an electric car versus the screamer that is an old Ford pick-up truck. Once there was a lot of water and then after that a LOT of ice. It was freezing. This is still in my tadpole journey. I was swimming up a river, avoiding bears biting me as I tussled over the rocks. The attrition of the rocks. It was really beating at me. Swimming upstream is no small feat. And then I crashed out and washed up on a muddy beach somewhere. Drying out with salt crystals solidifying on my skin. If I had skin that is. The salt almost just bounces up and down inside and outside my porous defence shield like a waterbed in a gap year. Oil floats on water like a water boatman gracing across a pond, or the balsamic vinegar on olive oil waiting to be soaked up by a bruschetta.
It’s only really a couple hundred years since we really pretended to be modern. I remember the new money, the Boulevards, the oil. When I was squirting out of the ground and making a killing in Stetsons. The Pen is mightier than the sword and the globules absorb all capital.
It dances across the page like a freshly signed cheque. Entrapment and fields. Order. Grids replaced concentric circles. A new natural. Too much information breeds conspiracy just as familiarity breeds contempt. Liquidity froze back down to sanctions and gold standards. Someone once tried to paint me in gold but my exterior could repel the matter. It didn’t quite agree with me, you could say. I’m like a lotus eater, high on my own supply. If scarcity brings need, then what about when you’re alone at the top? Shrugging?
You join me now at my own very Mount Olympus, I’ve added a whirlpool function to the oracle just to spice things up. I’m making things move. Noone likes stagnation. Once I slept for over a thousand years in a peat bog. I was coming and the gasses were so inert I was almost disappearing in front of my own eyes?! Thankfully, being encased in said peat. I managed to reform and solidify, or rather liquify. There’s a hack of being buried alive where you punch and then push the ground down towards your knees. This eventually created a air gap chamber which stabilised the decompression so I didn’t explode like a coke bottle. Once I got out, there was a whole new series of jagged curves, depressions and summits. The flood had done a real job on this lot. Someone goes overnight from being a molehill to a mountain. There’s a snow cap beret, and some vultures circling.
Cuckoos steal a nest of other birds but what if I just stole the nest? Then where will any eggs go? In my mouth. I’m not sure if it’s the mountain air or the altitude but it can do really funny things to the mind. Once the circulation was so thin that I tripped and was saved only by grabbing a stray piece of root which itself was about to snap, dislocating my shoulder and I rolled down into a huge eagle’s nest like a coin spinning around a charity box. Imagine I’m zooming down about to splat on some newly formeds but I managed to counterbalance my left thigh, bend my knee and dive bomb into the straw. And somehow, it broke my fall! I think this is the end, but it’s more like a puffff. And then I’m buried again in this sac. I myself feel like an egg, in utero and remember simpler times. I stay there a while my cushioned fall healing my shoulder and the warmth of the eggs provides a symbiotic support structure. Then one day it gets really warm. I’m sweating. Suddenly I’m getting prodded by this sharp object. OUCH! I cry out. Then I’m rumbled. This knife is coming at me like I’m in a slasher movie and suddenly my Edenic time is over. The straw settles and suddenly I see a huge eye. Then feather. And it’s a beak. Then a tongue. It thinks I’m one of its offspring. Sniffing around, I’m at first viewed with suspicion. I can pass with the gelatinous surface as amniotic sac residue. This big bird tries licking it off, but then shrieks at the sound of the oil. And i mean SHRIEKS! Have you ever been high up in a mountain range with all that mountainous reverb? And it’s not just that, this SCREAM not only terrifies me, it triggers a major avalanche. DRAMA! Suddenly big bird flies off with me in its claws and all I can see below me is clouds and clouds of endless white expanse. I’m terrified it drops me in there. What sound would it make? A plop? How far would I descend? The grip of this bird is pretty intense I’m not gonna lie. And sure enough those talons do indeed open up and I’m spiralling down down down. PUFFFF.
It’s not so painful, the sound is fluffy and I again feel comfortable on the web. I will stay here for a while. I doze off. When I come to it, everything around me has melted. Sand covers me. I get up and see my imprint. There’s a pipe I’m sucked up into and now I’m riding the wave floating in the air. Slowly evaporating in the heat.
And suddenly I find myself coming to, lying in the kitchen.
****** references/ addendum
Sodom and gomorrah
Saturn looking at the stars from brueghel
Striped paintings w collages of brueghel
Varnished
Trees
Window
Image of light on floor
Circus
Dancing
Finding balance
Choreography
Equilibrium
Space – agnes martin – dancers
Goya see saw
Proverbs painted on varnish
Videogame grass
Crickets sound.
Woodcut mannequin
Folly
Out1
Cocteau
Daydream
Breughel
Woodcut
Fake Plastic Trees
Simulation
Astroturfing
Mask
Angels to Some , Demons to Others
Fairytale
Frog out of Water
Ben Lallier.
A frog comes out of the water, like the fish losing fins and navigating a new sphere. Does the frog stumble? What is this brave new world? A snail on a razorblade made of astroturf. It stares into a puddle and wonders if to go back. The mirrored reflection is a form of artificial communication. An oracle that feeds back it’s own bias. The belief in the imagination is the only thing separating us from the abyss. A grotesque is maybe the truest sense of beauty. I’m not deranged I’m just dreaming (casually).