Dejection

Have that care-away insignificance saying things to me, like I'm fine for feeling dejected when I see him post a heart on his she's page. Pin the jealousy on the asinine, that's the hour theme, and my left buttock has just been stabbed. I don't know why I like it - it's an extraneous feeling, not belonging to the spectrum I'm accustomed to describing. Yes, it's jealousy, it's been that way for a long time. I thought I'd moved on. I'd blogged about it. I wrote the feelings out of the damn emotion script so that I could have a different hue to my experiences. But even now, in the light of my reading light, I feel the same rib-xylophoning sensation, tenderly rough on my insides. It's jealousy, still tuning me out. I come alive with it, when I notice it radiate like some uranium in me, poisonous, toxic, but damn rich, damn rich and desirable because it's inspiring in some strange, dump, metal-container way.

That's what's talking right now. A disease. In the sense that it is not an ease but dis is a familiar ease by now. I have learned not to battle it and somehow I find myself liking feeling this way. Imagine getting accustomed to poison. I don't know how it works, I don't know what kind of bad it's doing to me. I have suffered suffered from it in the past, but I still take it. It's a chemical that my brain secretes though, and as such I feel some volunteer-freedom from it because I can't control it when the receptors receive and then poppy-send my opium down to the general torso area. I feel jealous. Or something to that super-effect. I feel not like I'm meant to receive that heart - not consciously - though there's a webbed shadowy corner that would be most pleased if it housed his heart. I feel more like there's a spider living there, and it crawls out when it sees potential prey play out behind the dining room table. Translate that to Facebook. I used to think much of this, now I think much less. I used to project a broom to thrash the wallfuck out of that bitch, crack the dwelling, yet I would be the one dwelling next time. It's what happened when conscious me decided it was time to move on, and subconscious me needed more time, a little more venom, a little more convincing.

It was decided then, that people would create, read copulate, and I would sit my sinister ass down on the chair to wait. So whenever another heart was passed over the table with the salt, and the spider came out of its den, I stopped chasing it with a broom. I strove to do what I'd tried and failed next to reluctance to do before - to love it, to embrace the feeling as a mother would embrace her crying child. I don't know then, if this is it. I feel jealousy, and although it has the same edge-of-screen red warning palpitation that being poisoned has had before, it's bearably accepted. I don't know why I still feel jealous, or maybe I know subconsciously, and maybe I don't want to think about it anymore. But I like the feeling. It allows me to write things like this post. It's a feeling with a fuel and a fire and somehow they combine. It's warm, and I like it when I can have my hands cupped and the wish comes true. Didn't even remember I'd asked for this, but it's here, so I must have, somehow.

Not sure if this is good or bad. I feel it's fine to just let it be. I'm eager to know what it means, but I don't want to interfere. That's correct, the presence of reluctance. It's in the building. From another angle, I can see myself longing, having that wonderfully scary picture of him walking away under an empty sky. There's freedom. And something tells me, it still hasn't been picked. Its fingers are just bent around the cliffedge, one right angle, the other trying to be right. I haven't picked freedom because I still had hope to be trapped. Genie grants my wish. But my shadow has moved far enough away that I can see it was only a half-wish that was granted, a brazen want broken-masted in the wind.

Wait for it to snap off, vacuumed by passing hours or the resolve that can happen within them. I am saying this resolve isn't going to be thought-out by me. No. It will come in its own time. Perhaps with its own blog post. 'Til then, I fester and the chemicals parade through my veins while I wade through the chemistry of nonmescript living.

Abjection

Now, I don't feel like self-censoring. I don't feel like watching the film play out and analysing the angle shots and the way the characters speak, even though I see myself in it, speaking in a particular way, walking in a particular way, keeping to myself in a particular way. I learned in my Writing Selves paper just last Monday about abjection, the state of being neither a subject nor an object. I haven't quite been able to put together words puzzle-piecefully enough to understand what it means but the feeling of it, I feel.

This is an attempt for my mind to stand under and pretend it has bare feet. Wordweb dictionary simply defines abjection as a low or downcast state. But that is the feeling of it. What does it entail, thought-wise, world-building-block-wise. Let's talk in one. If one goes about one's day thinking of oneself as the self, the self would be the subject. I realise I may now be getting simplistic. Bear with. The object of one's doings is usually outside oneself. I give cake to Anne. Cake is object. Anne is object. I is subject. Linguistics denotes these things. Linguistics mark the path for what our thoughts do, how they combine and imbine. Now, one can be both a subject and an object when one looks at oneself with distance, that distance implying some sort of consciousness unbelonging of the original subject but not able to be present as the object. So I screwed up the last sentence, and in that breaking of it, one can see the mutual exclusivity of subjectness and objectness. So if one is looking at oneself from a mental position that excludes the self, one is operating in an abject view; they are neither subject nor object but an absurdist atomised sobject. The abject state is thus one of looking-glassness, one of chained detachment.

I have experienced this state many times before, but with a name to give it now, and a Wikipedia entry existing about it, it somehow seems more... bearable. Like it's a thing. And I don't have to go searching for it because it's an idea that's crossed someone's mind before and that leaves me comforted to some extent. Permitted, say.

I feel perhaps it would be useful to also differentiate between the state of self-consciousness and abjection. While they blur, like tearful rain, there perhaps is some difference. Maybe they are like containers, one smaller than the other and in the other. Being conscious of the self is not necessarily inducive of a downcast state. One can be at peace with their inner body, with what they do. As such, I could say that being self-conscious excludes any idea of comparison with an external being or internalised external ideal. The focus is the self, and it is not in contrast to another perceived self elsewhere. Abjection, however, stirs in the pot of context and circumstance. One sees oneself as if from another inner mind, conscious that one is not fully embodying the experience of living because one is not fully unaware of oneself anymore. I notice here I imply that living fully embodied means living without awareness, or perhaps as awareness. Those two are different, vastly, but empty difference. From that other mind that identifies difference somewhere and thus is detached, kinda, the object becomes the whole of the self. And in the watching, one is thinking, one is seeing difference, perhaps because of what one has learned, perhaps of the situation one is in. As not the whole, one is not seeing the whole when one is in this abject state. Yet this viewpoint is rich in feeling.

This is the world viewpoint of the marginalised. I was reading a chapter from Frantz Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" for my Selves paper and felt that what he was describing was a state of abjection, of seeing the black man as a fact in dejective contrast to the more malleable 'fact' of the white man, the latter being privileged in the dichotomy. He was looking at himself from within himself, but seeing blackness, a frame of reference and a mental structure assembled by history and bequeathed by conflicts and attempts to figure things out. He was in an abject space, writhing, tormented.

I like this word because it describes how I feel oftentimes plimbing in the mond. I went to a 21st birthday last night. Was quite looking forward to it, partly because the birthday girl is a close friend, partly because I know her boyfriend went to a lot of organisatory trouble to put together a gift for her and I wanted to see her receive it. The party was themed, I went as a Geek, quite eagerly so. The costume allowed me to feel good because it gave me permission to act like a geek, or if that's not blurry enough, weird. I had an excuse (just for show) to loosen up. I don't tend to be loose at clubby-manypeopled parties because I generally don't feel appreciated by them. There is a lot of apathy going on, and I don't enjoy being in apathetic spaces. The theme gave me the boots to dance like a like a virgin on the dance floor dance floor dance floor. Felt good, not because I was dancing well as a geek - because it still felt weird {abject} - but the fact that people were laughing made me content with it. It was kind of like a reassurance that what I was doing, even though it was weird, was accepted in some way. They were unlikely to repeat what I did, or go that far - not sure they could, since their frameworks are differently shaped in this respect, I feel - but I got some feeling of okayness out of it which is why it pleased me to do it. That okayness overrided any need for mental analysis of what I was doing. I was aware that I looked weird, but somehow the space seemed okay to be weird in, and that eased my mind. It made me enjoy my night more. I still had attention on myself, as I automatically seem to have at such parties, but I was not downtrodden, or more mildly so. This was a minor state of abjection. Last week's 21st, for another good friend, was an occasion for more properness, properness which I did not feel I delivered and thus I felt more abject and apart.

I thank you [you] for coming last night. I realise there were times when I left to my own devices, and I realise it was not your space of utmost comfort. It was not mine either, but somehow I felt more at ease in it. You were there with me, and that was enough to make me feel at peace, like it didn't matter. You reminded me that I was watching a movie, a film where people got drunk and chatted during speeches. Not the best movie. But a movie you and I were playing in. You looked beautiful in the blue.

On the way home from the party, I wasn't very talkative. A friend in the car mentioned that I was tired and didn't want to talk. I let her go with that explanation. Truth is, I didn't want to talk, not because I was tired (though I was getting tired, too) but because I felt comfortable in my state of abjection. Apart, but not. That middleness had and has something to it, something I like. Yes it is a state of low energy frequency, but I feel a glowing river below it, a reminder that can translate to things always passing, things being fine. Maybe this isn't abjection at all. I like the word though.

Yours

The whole world belongs to you.
The other side of your forehead
is wrinkled because you wept
but mountains rose and valleys ran
over them anyway,
because; and the sun was sweeping
heroes off their hooves,
so they could taste the ground
with their shoulders.

What it is like to walk in their wings;
hanging from their halos
are carrions, playthings with insight,
spent on purpose; its
going spreads kindles under winds;
they pretend to run through forests.

Into you they go, 
swallowing into your poem,
your horse tinseled and parrot-heavy,
frosted by the glaze of your belonging,
taking it by you, to you; it's God
ranging from sweeping to slight,
scratching at the keys in delight
at his prodigy.

(The world is yours, final son,
missing no marks,
tampered with by no one else.)

The Borders of our Lives

There was a ring, I took
photos
of it being there being used
by men with big hands
and laughter.
It was a safe distance away,
until I was in it,
coiled having not read the signs
that never marked my way.
Didst thou know,
thy feature be thy hanging.

It's me, that man with the nose and yes, I happen to look like Mr. Bean and my dad like Dr Phil. Yeah, I walk faster towards the ground because I hunch, out of habit. Yeah, I talk with an accent. I'm like Gaviscon. I see people drinking in the laughter while I just ain't noticing it all happen. I used to think this was me needing to be with my little boy finger on ctrl, but something about the night that passed gave me another idea.

Fitting a circle in a square may not work or may leave gaps. Can't ultimately shape the circle into a perfect square, nor the square into a perfect circle. So now to scrunch up and dispose of that stock metaphor, I actually feel like there isn't a point to this fitting. Actually, what is the point? It's not that there's always going to be someone that doesn't like me. Rather, I feel like there is far too much I am unconscious of, and remain so, when I try to change one thing, that I can never really change all of it. It's not enough, because it can't be.

So, well... it's still going to get laughter, and oddreactions. What can I do? Rien. Non, rien de rien, je ne regrette rien. And who knows, maybe, maybe it's worth it somehow, that it happens. At least for me, I can now stop watching myself, and start watching myself for when I watch myself, and then remind myself that I'm looking at a film.

Shout Out to Ghost

With these words of art,
I write now
instead of calling out;
read hear that
if you need something 
that your eye can feather on,
feather on this field
of flowers
that you choose.
Pick one, give it to me,
tell me you love me,
I'll say it back
and we'll forever grow
apart.
The sky is empty
between us, there's
hands running through weeds
and a harp by an ocean,
but I'd like something other than
sunshine;
I'd like something else,
to remind me.
When we spoke -
my feet have sunk,
shadows of clouds have moved
across the earth.
I turned away
and then you reached out your hand
and I felt the distance between
my shoulder and your touch
and when I looked back
it was summer still,
but you were wearing a hat,
the wind in your black hair
caught and it dotted
my horizon.
I shouted out
I love you
and I caught a whiff of your thanks
when the ocean parted.

For My Boy

If you can hear the door creaking, that's me entering, and this is you reading while I stand here and act all of this out with my props, courtesy of your imagination. So what I've barged in today for - notice how I didn't knock - is a conversation, a versation con migo but that you can listen in on for the benefit of possibility. You might learn something. Back to me. I came here because I wanted to talk about things being wrong, in the way they feel, in the way the sets of dentures chomp analysis in between chewing on my cortex.

You see, dear imagination, I'm frustrated. Not in the sense that the moon is out and it's 14% bigger than any full moon this year and I'm sitting here and not watching it alight in the firmament. I'm frustrated because I'm frustrated. This is a mirror show, yeah. Since I came back from Romania I've had a period of relative bliss because I wasn't being hard on myself for things that weren't occurring to the norms established by Father Ego. Somehow, being out of my normal routine for three weeks reset some of the tumblers and they hadn't quite finished spinning from all that flying above clouds I was doing. I came back and didn't really absorb much, because normally absorption for me requires a passing through gates, kind of like those at the airport, except I tend to be much much stricter in my patdowns and x-raying. Flying in to my mental territory requires me to be scrutinous, but like immigration security systems in airports around the world, things slip through. And then they start rioting on my streets and I send out the riot police to calm things down and create order. Sometimes I'm harsh and destroy buildings. But this dandy process was turned on ??? mode and confused when I reset time zones. It made me feel more peaceful, and it was rare for the barriers to be down and for things to just pass on through. So I say I didn't absorb them because I don't know how much of them I did eventuate to process and hold as my own. Things just went on in and out somewhere else presumably - I wasn't watching the CCTV. I didn't feel the need to be self-conscious, because I felt somehow that it didn't matter if I didn't act a certain way here. The opinions the people I met in Romania formed would disappear soon enough after I left. They'd have no use for them when we were gone. 

Then when I came back to New Zealand, there was the resetting period, as I mentioned. Though soon enough, with my friends' attitudes and ways of being flickering once more on my screens, I felt the security system boot back up. Some of the parametres may have changed, but overall it was still shotgun-ready. I got the sense that whatever I do here matters more, and should be under more control, because I cannot simply escape from it as before. No wonder the boy in me feels alienated. It doesn't get to roam much anymore on streets with curfews and barricades in place.

I don't know what it is, exactly. But it scares me what people think. Not all people, just people in my life. Especially those I hold close. I try to be authentic towards them but somehow even that seems like it could be just a mask sometimes. What does authentic even mean. With the security system back up, it seems like authentic is a certain version of diplomatic immunity, or like a pass card. There's a certain amount of 'crazy' or 'awkward' I can be - a tolerable amount - before I feel critical and self-conscious about my fibrous body and behavior. 

Hmm this puts me back to that mind frame when it started. Looking at that picture, I was feeling low self-esteemed, and defined by what others thought of me. I acted a certain way, they reacted, I reacted to their reactions by making different chips, here there everywhere, to change the sculpture of me to something different - something acceptable. This was adolescence. Once that beautiful period of art was over, if I can even say it was over, I came to uni to learn and things. And the world grew bigger suddenly. The pressure got more intense and then less intense and then more intense and now I don't know. To change, I mean. To change, to be accepted.

Schtick: I'm not sure what is accepted, but the version of that concept that is plugged into my mainframe is virusing. I say that because I feel it changes. There are days when I feel whole, undefined, at peace, and I go to university and feel very free of being critical. Then there's days when I walk with my shadow on my back, it afraid to touch the ground behind me lest it burn on the concrete for not being good enough, acceptable enough. This comes from me, this criticism, this fire, starting in my heart, reaching a fever pitch, bringing me out the dark. The eccentrism and the uncontrolled qualities of hyperness and crazy and reactivity, these the security system doesn't want to identify as mine, to own them, even though I do them.

I do them unconsciously, those things. Sometimes it's funny. And it's funny how most people who know me can identify me by those traits. Those traits that I don't want to own. Those traits that make the riot police in my mind come out to water gun bitching out of office building windows. The riot police are, of course, a defense mechanism. I'm pinning me against other sides of me that the initial me doesn't like, the initial me having an idealistic picture of "Cris" that doesn't align with the trajectory of the Sun. That's why when it gets closer, it burns the image. 

Now it could be that I have sent the riot police police to crush the riot police. Otherwords, I'm being critical of being critical. Because I've been critical too much and I already know it makes me feel analysed, scrutinised, patted-down and emotionally injured. So now this is an interesting turn of events. The police gets policed. I wonder why I am being so critical about myself.

I don't let loose. I've been asked what I want for my birthday, for example. I don't really want things, nothing I desperately need that I can think of at this stage. I don't want something I don't need, though. Who makes that call though. Anyway. I don't like this question because the way I have thought about it is that I don't often let go enough to feel birthday-associated emotions like surprise. I don't deal well with it, not because I can't be surprised, but because it heavily, in my mind, implies expectation. If I'm to be surprised, I have to have a certain reaction according the surprise-givers. And, from the way my mind and emotions work, I don't get surprised easily, nor do I have outpourings of affection at those times. I have my affection-floods at other, perhaps more arbitrary/PMS-variant times. So it worries me, this, because I feel expectation to act a certain way I don't necessarily feel. It's not like I don't want to be surprised, I just don't want to be made to react surprised. Because I can do it. I can fake it. But at this stage of growth, I kind of want it to be real, and that implies not thinking about it anymore, i.e. letting go.

To let loose and act how I really feel... don't think it'd always line up with the way society leans. I'm probably quite conformist on the outside, but on the inside, I realise a) I cannot force myself to be and b) I have absolutely no need to be. The boy inside me, the boy being one of my 'selves', needs love, love that he still seeks from someone else but I know I have to give, because I was the one that deprived him of it when I was younger. He doesn't need skin, or squeezing, he needs affection. Forgiveness. Allowing. Words that in the outside world can cause friction.

Courage. That is then what it takes, to be. To actually just be. Because it implies not playing the game, not having police or immigration staff, whether in my mind or outwardly. Life guides everything. Why is it that we think. Why is it that we can. It seems to get us confused. But it's cool nonetheless. So it boils down to vulnerability, and trust. Trusting that it's okay to be and acting silly and however, and not being scared it is tarnishing the image which critical-me wants to become but won't because it's paperthin and unwhole and a lie, because it is limited. Or maybe being scared is fine. It's emotion. So trusting life that I can act however and even though I feel scared that it might be affecting what others think of me, to know that that is not my concern to manipulate. Isn't that a thought! Here, I'm going to act this way, and it's going to contradict ideas and things. I don't know who you think I am, but you're going to think up something about me. And then I'm going to meet you another day and perhaps reinforce that idea, or maybe challenge it, chip at it with how I behave. Maybe I'll act different. And instead of me going home and wondering, Jesus, did I just act that way, what will he she they think about me, and sending out the police to crush the thoughts who were committing the crime of existing and manifesting outside of the nebulae/passing through immigration, I'll actually have the courage to leave it to you, if you want to think something about me.

And if you, you who is close to me, no longer love that which I act to be, and you no longer want to be in my vicinity and instead in my outskirts, you can go.

That is the courage. Not to be sculpted, be changed, but to let go and evolve. And yeah I'm a silly sausage. I act weird and paradoxically, sometimes questioningly, sometimes hurtfully, sometimes self-destructively, too-often judgmentally. The moon still orbits elliptically. I have these thoughts about myself trying to fit into the world. I don't quite know why I have the desire to belong, but it's there and I feel it. Love me! I say, but I really really need to be saying it to myself. To forgive that which I don't love, accept it. Maybe I shall grow to love it. Only, only because it is. Because it is. Because I can't run from it or throw it out of the imaginary office window to its death, because its death can only be my death. Because it is, and I am all that there is. This comes back to trust, so here I go, letting the nebula speak.

Imagine the People and the Places

The pipe that carries gas 
le long de la rue was repainted
five years ago
- now is brown
rusty and orange - 
I do not remember what colour it was at first

- it doesn't matter.
There's the storehouse,
and our little cabin
repainted the same shade of 
green as the steel fence next to
the apartment block,
went inside
caught a whiff of nostalgia
then left to where I was,
on the uneven concrete
1,81 man
on holiday

- met with memories to the nostril,
but no eyes, no face,
an eyelash, freckles maybe,
lips and taxidermy.