"The holes of oblivion do not exist.

There are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. 

One man will always be left alive to tell the story,"

writes Hanna Arendt.

* * * 

Here's to being the last one alive in a long series of catastrophes of my own making.

Making no more, at least not for now.

Presence, greater than oblivion.

At least for now. 

When I'm in a panic I, what I would like to be forgiven for.

Two people. One starts speaking in poetry; the other starts speaking in poetry. They're getting along.

What do I get from this?

This translation of the face. This translation of touch. This translation and mistranslation of identity.

Yours and mine.

Bend the mask, make a fold in it. What's below it -- if anything -- is suggested.

And isn't frightening!

What if what is below this level of me 

(the one in which I act and walk around and desire and try harder than I knew I could try to be upfront)

isn't disgusting? isn't wrong? isn't a monster?

Isn't a Monster.

Yesterday I heard a discussion at the Contemporary Arts Museum, a short talk led by a psychotherapist.

It was billed as a response to the art on view now, but mostly the therapist explained how memory and lies worked on a physiological level. He was enthusiastic but quiet. He talked about his own shame, kickstarted as a child, and I felt kinship with him. Not because of the shame, not because of the childhood. Frankly, those sorts of mystical, tingly, psychoanalytic resonances skip over me these days. But I recognized something in him that I see in myself -- we both think we might be monsters. And the rest of life is hiding it, exposing it somewhat to see if we are right, being told we are right by others, being told we are ridiculous for such lofty and egotistical ideas of ourselves, being unseen entirely when we feel the monster -- in glittering regalia -- is in full view. 

Of course, being a monster would forgive any barrier I trespass. Any personal territory I colonialize.

That would be easy, taking away the need for all the hard work.

Being a monster is the ultimate victimhood! 

And not even the active victimhood -- the lazy, boring one that doesn't even have to ask for forgiveness. 

Pah. 

It's more correct to say I thought I was a monster. Now I know where my responsibilities lie... 

or at least I'm working on knowing. 

Earlier in the talk he asked for a volunteer to share their earliest memory.

A woman on the far right side of the room shared a dream (her earliest memory).

It included a portal in her closet that led her to Disney World. But the first person from Disney was wearing a utility belt full of machetes and axes. She woke up in her parents' bed. She remembers the smell of the bed.

The second volunteer, to the far left, I cannot remember her story, but I can see her body language clearly.

[WAIT! I am adding this ten minutes later as it came to me. She was a child, less than two. It was dark outside. She was alone in the backseat of a parked car. She was strapped in a car seat. She was peaceful. Outside, her mother was frantic. She'd locked her child in the car with the keys. A fire truck arrived. She remembers being confused (a condition she said she experiences a lot as an adult). The people she loves subsumed with guilt and fear while she calmly sits in the humid dark and watches from an internal remove.]

Next he asked for a volunteer to share their first remembered lie.

Again, on the right side of the room, another woman spoke. She described answering the phone as a child. A man asked her name and then said that he could have been her daddy. He wanted to speak to her mom. The child said she did not know where her mom was (a true story -- she'd vanished long ago and left her child with the grandmother). The man asked the child if she knew how to get ahold of the mom. The child said no. This was only a partial lie. The child knew she could ask her grandmother for more information or put the man on the phone with someone else. 

Across the room someone else wanted to share. It was a man standing very close the woman who'd been locked in the car as a kid. He described playing with a toy in a store before accidentally putting it in his pocket. Finding the toy in his pant pocket in the car later, he was horrified that he'd stolen it. Afraid of his mom, afraid of the store, afraid of himself. 

We want to explain ourselves, our why. I often confuse the who and the why and the how.
Instead I often look below. Not just the psychological below. The physical below.

What's below the bed on which we sleep? What's buried below the lowest tree trunk in my back yard?
Often I attempt to get to below by going through. By toggling at the surface. To see what shifts.

More and more, it's nothing. More and more, if I shift myself or if I shift you, everything looks the same.
Just clearer. More distinguished. More accurate.

It's always been easy for me to recognize beauty, especially where other people ignored it or couldn't see it.
This is different. This is a merging. This is the opposite of disappearance.

I don't fear it. I crave it. It's not out to get me. I am not the monster. But only because there isn't one.

In 1961, Louis Aragon supplied the answers to a Proust questionanaire:

"If I’m indulgent towards something that passes for a fault 

that’s only because I don’t consider it one." 

When he came to the question, "how would you like to die?" 

Aragon answered, "differently."

* * * 

Means You Prefer from Traci Matlock on Vimeo.

Favorite glossaries 1) associations 2) a dwindling

Left much exception behind

Liberties appear for taking
Imitations of asterisks describe chronologically,
therefore deleting all but carefully considered

Frequently, backwardly, each.
By seldom and patterns my own hesitation
Think of ellipsis as disorganization
I need only difficult conclusion
After interval of several hundred passages
Her own hand rough reluctance
Deep suspicions of imaginative exception
He was unable to perhaps because

He was introduction. I inside impulse.

Set me the example of seldom composing
I can't poem anymore

"Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening we drink and we drink." & "What propels this strangeness, this “too-muchness” of a lyric voice? Why such urgency?"

Carl Phillips writes,

Given inconstancy, the resistless
affair that has been my body (as if
there were no place to go from anywhere except
deeper, into those spaces the hand makes by
tugging the flesh, where it is partable,
more open, or as if I believed, utterly, what
legend says about violation -- how it leads
to prophecy, the god enters the body, the mouth 
cracks open, and a mad fluttering, which 
is the future, fills the cave, which is
desire, luck and hazard, hazard and luck),

I should perhaps regret more. But it's grown
so late: see how dark, outside?

The swallowing parts of the body are restricted to foreplay.

My feet are the most swallowing parts of my body,

tearing out roots each night 

(is that not foreplay?). 

In reference to Wallace Stevens, Simon Critchley writes,

"This is why we are metaphysicians in the dark.
The only light with which we might view objects has to be kindled by us, by our activity.

So, the darkness here is not at all frightening,

it is rather that if we are in the dark, 

then it is a question for us of finding that which will suffice..."

  

Use This
(to lock in or out)
(( this time at least, you/we can see the details))
 

Guidebooks around every corner, dusted or polished.

A policy of Good Enough:
 able to resist both expertise & the imagined Ideal.

Synonyms include: Suffice.

(an excerpt from a Ron Padgett poem that brought me here today)

* * *

God get out of here

And he runs off chirping and chuckling into his hand

And that is a wonderful thing

... a tuba that is a meadowful of bluebells

is a wonderful thing

and that's what I want to do

Tell you wonderful things

* * *

Today is my 39th birthday;

therefore, here is a photo of

a baby 

holding a snake 

while the two of them attempt to spill a cup of water

with the brute force of a gallon jug

by rolling off a plastic tarp

laid haphazardly in the forest.

The audience watches from above.

I like this metaphor for today, but I don't know which I am --

the snake, the tarp, the jug, the cup, the baby, the leaves, the watchers.

(Lie. Obviously I think I'm all of them.)

* * *

Thus far, to celebrate (naturally), I've folded clothes, washed dishes, drank a green concoction that tastes like fish food,
cried leaving a voicemail (I think from happiness, but I'm not sure),
received flowers at my doorstep, pointedly ignored the birthday box on my kitchen countertop,
responded to social media birthday wishes quickly so I don't get overwhelmed,
fantasized about watching a specific movie that comes out in Houston tomorrow,
put on a pair of banana yellow socks, added chocolate to my coffee, and signed into university classes again.

Also, I stuck my hand under the running water from my faucet and got lost in the refractions,
how the water seemed to not touch my fingers at all but move around them in an anti-physics cascade.

* * *

You know, don't you, that I'm writing these ridiculous details as a prostheses for my own memory?

Why am I not putting this in a private journal, then? Do I require an audience and if so, why?
Will I be more honest with you here? Less honest? Does it elevate the mundane details to the significance of myth?

I don't know. 

You're blurry at best. 

I try not to overthink you, until I overthink you. 

This morning I'm keeping you at arm's length.

There is one thing I would have liked to do to celebrate my birthday, and that opportunity has already passed.

I work two jobs today and then am doing a bunch of nothing tonight. Maybe that will change.
No art projects, no bike rides in the sunshine, no romantic interest looking me in the eyes to assure me.... of anything.

I feel relief and terror. Mutually exclusive until they are not.

I'm not sentimental (so I keep saying).

I adore growing older, I like the way my body changes as the numbers increase.
I prefer the way my mind changes, more doors closing these days than opening.

The New Year never gets me. I make hazy resolutions and keep up with them in the same layer of gauze.

But January 14th shifts. What do I want from myself?

(I meant to ask, what do I want for myself?)

* * *

Have you ever done the quirky psychological test, The Cube?

My cube was clear but transparent at the edges where the corners met.
My ladder was rickety but climbable, leaning against the cube so that the climber could stand above it.

Selfishly, predominantly, my goals are directed inward(ly).

Maybe I imagine I can climb atop the self to see it and control it?

If I ever succeed, I hope I look out at the landscape and not down at my own toes.

Not only down at my own toes.

I hope I'll send pictures.

But we both know I'll never succeed -- not in the climbing, not in the atop.

So what is the landscape like from here?

Because their shadows formed a tent for beating time,

I gathered the younger clocks: a festival

 with its dull finish needling everything;

 a marble fountain

 with its whorl of water cast out

 graying daily at the neckline of the park.

a poem-ish from one page of the table of contents of the book I'm reading, no words removed or out-of-order:

* * *


Almonding you

there stood

the swelter

who like sea oats guard

a ring, for bowdrawing.

The radiance,

you.

Come.

A bootful of

the trumpet's part

the poles

the kingsway -- 

there also, I drink wine.

Something shall be

nothingness

strangeness 

in the bellshape

as I.

Illuminated.

Wittgenstein writes, "If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit."

Sometimes, perhaps, I photograph myself touching variegated, longevity-delicate objects
to satisfy a future fear of temporal dissonance.

Not an I-was-there, therefore, I'm-here proof that can be self-evident, deductive,

but as a shaky clause in the premise.

Somewhat more accurately, I fear that in the future I won't feel dissonance.

* * *

What really annoys me about my experience in the world: I need constant reaffirmation of my own existence;

meanwhile, material phenomena seems unrelated (and unrelate-able) to my doubt.

So what's with this, 

my only self-portrait in a two hour hotel room, 

shot at the beginning of the first hour,

my camera and my body disappearing into the anonymous darkness,

darkness that becomes a doorway,

doorway that leads away from reflection

framed with guise of capture?

I'm finishing the Maggie Nelson as I sit at the computer. 

Here's an excerpt from the chapter "The Brutality of Fact" with additional linebreaks: 

Writing, especially autobiographical writing, can be a hothouse of self-deceptions,
but it also has the uncanny ability to expose self-deceptions
with the formidable exactitude of surgery.

Most distressing, perhaps for the reader and writer alike,
is when both function appear to be underway simultaneously.

This is not rare.
It could be one description of "the writing process."

It is also a good description of the particularly acute vacillation
between insight and self-delusion that characterizes addictive thinking [...]

* * *

I argue (here, often) that self-portraits (and perhaps photography in most cases) works in a similar vein.

Also, I have been called out on having used self-deceptions in this blog
to perpetuate (or at least mimic) 

my own addictive thinking.

The self-portraits are included.

[The irony of me writing all this, among a battlefield of personal writing/photographs has not gone unnoticed.]

* * *

Earlier in the chapter, she writes this:

* * *

I've been on both sides of this experience and won't tell you which I hated least (or loved most, depending) --

writer vs. the one written about

(even as the writer brutally self-exposes)

or 

photographer vs. the one photographed

(even as the photographer brutally self-exposes).

I've been on both sides of this experience within my singular self.

I've been unwilling to know myself even as I microscoped my flesh to count the scissor marks and cells.

Deceit has been part of my knowing.

I've taken pride in the concealment/revelation.

I never imagined you/I couldn't see through it.

Sometimes, only, I feared you/I wouldn't.

 

Lest you think my quiet is disquiet.

* * *

I come here today to write about Space.

Having not looked at this blog in (what I only right this moment notice is) exactly one month,
I see now that my current intended subject was the intended subject of my last entry as well.

Following my own suggestion (this is why I do this, after all! -- to give myself [not-so-subtle] suggestions),
I maintained desire via space.

* * *

Last night, a few minutes after 8pm, I finished my last final for the year.
Aside from paying my bills, I have nothing specific that must be done for the next few weeks.

That said, I woke up at five am so that I could begin reading.
My personal reading list is FAR longer than the 43 books/plays I read for school in the last few months. (actual number)

I'm starting with Maggie Nelson's Art of Cruelty, which I highly suggest.
I've already scanned one entire chapter and sent it to a couple of appropriate readers.

The chapter is on performance art, feminism, sadomasochism & violence.
Pretty much my think-y, weekly bucket list.

(Send me an email if you'd like to read it. Because, you know, I have time to read email.)

Aside from reading twelve hours a day, I'd like to hike more, dance more tango,
and send people photos that I've been hoarding since this semester began. And did I mention reading?

I have a pile of ten books I want to start, a few I need to finish, and at midnight this morning I ordered five more.
I also ordered a lot of balloons. For which I want to do a project that involves my bucket list.

* * *

I've been busy. Yet.

Out of the three past weekends, I was a demo bottom at educational BDSM events during two of them.
And I was also the demo bottom at an erotic hypnosis class.

I have some pictures, but I can't decide if I want to share them here.
One is fairly graphic -- and beautiful -- and represents a challenging, personal exploration for me.

I keep thinking about photographic consent,
and also about the exposure of a side of me that's more vulnerable than any nudity.
 
If you live in Houston and wanna hear details, boy, give me a cup of coffee, and you'll have to beg me to stop talking.
But I can't seem to get up the desire (courage, might be more accurate? I can't distinguish) to write about it.

This morning, reading the Maggie Nelson, I had an idea to explore that would include my memory but not my words.
I wonder if it's possible for me to fully engage a project of this sort. I wonder if it's interesting outside of my own experience.

* * *

When Cristof and I separated for good (quite a bit of time ago now), I kept saying to everyone: I need space.
Like everyone experiences, I was asked again and again about dating, and I kept saying: I need space.

I found myself attracted to someone but kept saying: I need space.
I found myself attracted to no one and kept saying: I need space.

I've taken space. I've created it. I manufactured it at times; I was inundated with it at other times.

I feel like I could fire a spiritual canon into the distance,
and no one would come with the bloodhounds to look for victims.

I imagined being alone would feel this good.
I feared it was a distancing mechanism that would allow me the reward of feeling less.

It hasn't been. I've never felt so much.
I bring things home and process them as if they were silk envelopes to my heated, sharpened pairing knife.

I have to be careful with myself. Fuck, I'm breakable!
This is news to me!

I described myself for an entire month as a tortoise without its shell. I cried on a handful of shoulders.
I called people and asked for help. I stopped having nightmares; I slept the entire night through.

* * *

Here's what Nelson writes in the midway point in her book,
based on notes she jotted down while watching Chris Burden's shoddy Super-8 documentation of his performance SHOOT.

In this performance, he invited a very small crowd to witness him get shot in the shoulder with a .22 rifle

(a rifle wielded by his consenting friend).

linebreaks: mine:

Would I have attended such an event at the time? 
Why do I still feel morally uncomfortable watching this now? 
What are the differences -- ethical, sensory, aesthetic -- between being present for such a thing and watching a recording of it? 
What about between watching and listening? 
What are the differences between beholding -- or enacting -- self-harm versus other forms of harm? 
What's the difference between shooting yourself and asking someone to shoot you? 
How did the shooter feel? Where is he now? 
Who took the greater (legal, ethical) risk -- Burden or the shooter? 
What forms or contexts of inflicting harm, on one-self or others, should be allowed (S/M, suicide or assisted suicide, performance art, any other consensual scenario, and so on), and which should be discouraged or prohibited? 
Who defines harm? On whose behalf? 
Who has the power, authority, right, duty, and/or audacity, to intervene on behalf of another's body, especially a body that is doing what it says it wants to do? 
When and how (if ever) is it anyone's business to manage what we do with our bodies in our lifetime? 
Does anyone "have" the power, or is it always a means of asserting it, seizing it, inventing it? 
In what sense, under what conditions, can we say that a body knows what it wants?

* * *

Saturday night, in a room filled with many people whom I know, love, and trust,

some of whom I've known for over a decade,

I was hit so hard in the face it knocked me to the ground.

It was one of the hottest experiences of my life, and I would do it again if given the opportunity.

It was consensual; it was negotiated. 

I studied the safety aspects and experienced zero impact (save the obvious momentary one).

Everyone gasped. I was told all night how big I was smiling. 

I've been called brave occasionally for what I've shared here. 

This is the bravest thing I've ever written, in my personal opinion.

To admit to wanting (and getting turned on by) masochistic fantasies is one thing.

To say, 

someone I trust, admire, and consider a mentor

pressed his foot so hard into my face that I had a boot print for half a day 

is another.

* * *

I've done a wide variety of tricky activities during my kink journey, 

but going into them without any compartments, without my turtle shell protecting me,

without someone to come home to,

with all of my doubts exposed beforehand, every decision weighed in the solitude of my house and heart,

with every negotiation made to necessarily include who I am, with no secrets, not even to myself,

Not The Same Experience.

* * *

One page earlier, Nelson writes:

Space is distinct from alienation. 

It is fundamentally about volume, rather than about distance. 

Space also defies vertical logic of revelation, which insists there is something beneath the surface of our every day -- be it ultimate meaning, the face of God, our fundamental nature, a final terror, ecstasy, or judgment, or some combo of the above -- that will be revealed when the veil is finally lifted. In lieu of this logic, space offers a horizontal spreading, the possibility of expansion into dimensions no one yet thoroughly understands. 

Space is also intrinsic to freedom.

"A space must be maintained or desire ends," writes Anne Carson.

* * *

I heard Anne Carson read her own work a couple of years ago.
It was in a large, modernly-gaudy building created for dancers and the theatre.

Ashley and I had barely begun the transition back into friendship, and I hadn't spent much (any) time near him in public.
He sat in front of us, a group of our friends surrounding (not buffering: it was always easy to feel alone with Ashley).

As Carson talked, occasionally I would pick up my pen and open my notebook.
Upon shutting the book I noticed that Ashley had seized the same opportunity (inspiration) to jot notes as well.

It was comforting and disorienting -- I felt closer to him, and I recognized how our bond had shaped us indicipherably,
how much I could never be only myself, the myth of myself,

magically uninfluencable yet impossibly stable.

We become who/what we choose to be around, to a certain and fluctuating extent. And above all else, I admired how Ashley thought (still, now: how he thinks), so it's no surprise I learn(ed) from it, felt/feel urged on by it, built/d a sense of self around it, felt/feel challenged too luckily.

Our companions are not a reflecting pool...

but maybe a reflecting river with currents always changing the face we see before us (ours),
endless input morphing shut one eyelid and open one gargantuan mouth,
etc etc (horrifyingly) unique etc.

I know where this is. And why. And how. And when. Surprise! (August, 2015)

Lately I haven't put much thought into what I post. I let myself follow the instinct when it strikes.
I know growth is partially the conscious search and struggle, but I believe in waves

(enough to know I sometimes have to let my body be propelled by them,
both up for air and down for contemplation of the silt).

In the past, however, I have glanced at the overall arc of what I've been sharing and noticed a trend,
a material and fairly shallow trend.

For instance, lately I've been sharing a lot of self-portraits. (Lately, here.)
To goad the self, I decide to post something Other.

For so many reasons. Including to goad the viewer (that's you, the resistant you) as well.

I try not to do this any more. I try to not do it much.
I try not to play into the idea that what you think of what I make encourages the wheel to turn.

(And turn and turn and turn.)

Sometimes I cannot help it, I give in. (Today)

I want to tell you about the photos I make that I don't share here,
the ones that I love, the ones that are terrible,
the ones that are composed with the bones of an afternoon I have not forgotten. 

I write so much here that suggests I only love the indefinite, the ambiguous, the followable that retains its mystery.

It's not (entirely) a true story, or not one told to its full length.
I share as many, perhaps more, that have a large backstory that you are more than welcome to hear if you only ask.

As an unknown woman in Gallery 7 of the Whitney said on July 30th, 2015
(which I wrote down in the same journal with Anne Carson, but this time overheard very much alone),

"I fell in love, but I also never relaxed."

That is an extension of the story I continue to tell here,
the river reflecting the sky (with my face in it, yes, with the erotic in it, yes), all the time.

Cirlces & Circles

It was a fine cry -- loud and long --

but it had no bottom and it had no top,

just circles and circles of sorrow.

- the last line of
Toni Morrison's Sula

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

  The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

  The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data. 

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

  The plural of anecdote is not data

  The plural of anecdote is not data.

 The plural of anecdote is not data.

  The plural of anecdote is not data.

 The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

 The plural of anecdote is not data. 

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of anecdote is not data.