A Putting-Together

Adiff erentper sonImee t,adiff erentgreetin gtha tco mesto greet,fr omadif ferentmo uth. Iwond erwh atit isgo ingt obe li kewh enI meet upw ithth epeop lecomin gtom ybir thdayi nles st hantw omo nths. Onl yt opu tha ti ntoperspecti ve. Justi tstrik esm ea sint erestingt hatIc anb ediffer entt odiffer entp eople. Ev ent heot herwa yarou nd,peo plear ediff erentt om e,t oo,l iked ifferentlyre constituted,wi thvaryi nggap si nthei rknowled geabou tea choth er. Ho ledse lves,ho lierf romd ifferentan gles. Wh oreal lya mIgo ingt ob et othe m? It' sfu nnybecau seId on'tk nowwh atthe yse ewh ent heyloo ka tm e,a ndsometime sIdon 'tse eth emi nawh ilean dIl oset ouchwi thwh atIth oughtIap pearedt oth em. S oIr emakem yself,c onstructmysel ffr ompu ttymentall yknead ed. Th isi sm e,o rth is. Thethough tso fothe rssl ipth roughdifferen thole swh ileIa mmad ein tosome thingels eb ythe irpuzz lespiec e-pu tting-to getherability.

Ther ear egap si nt hemaki ng,pl ughol es. Wh oar ey out om e? Its trikesm ea sfun nyt hatIco uldb ediff erentt oyo u,es peciallyi fy oud on'tp aymuc hattenti ont owha tI' mlik ewhe nyo ud ome etm e. Wat chSurvi voran dth econt estantsa repl acedi nsit uationsth atpu sht hemt oc ompromisew hatt heyar ecomforta blew ithsh owingo fthems elves. It' sb eens aidtha ti ti sag ameth atinev itablys howsy ourtru ecolo urs. Wh atar eth ose,th oughr eally? Ther ea res tillh oles,f illertha ti sfill edb yt heimagina tion. Peoplear en otstra ngerst ofiction. Thati st os ayth att heyk nowh owan dt oactua llyfic tionaliseth eoth eri na natt emptt og eta nid eao fw hot heyar ereally. Fac tsa rebuil tli keto werss ot heyca stas hadowove rus.

J esu isu nputtin g-togeth erpa rle spensé esde sautres. J'a ip asd esouff le,o ud'ar gentd epoche. J'exi stese ulementd anst ontêt ee nc emom entd electure. J'a iu nevo ix,cet te-ciqu ipe utêt reju steu nchouchot temento uu nvo ixd'u nh ommequ et ucon nais. C' estt avoi x. Tac ontribution. J'a ij ustec hangéle sespac espou rqu et ulis esc eq uej'a iéc ritav ecu neau tredi mensiond'ésp rit. Qu is uis-j e? Va s,do nne-m oiu np eud eca ractère. Unp eud'arr ogancepa rceq uej 'aip arléd ansd euxlang ues? Etj' aic hangém esprop resrègle s,pl uso um oins?

I'me xperimen tingw ithh oles. Differen tarrangementso fh oles. Th ethou ghtss tillfi ti n,d othe yn ot? Giv esom eonedif ferentd etailsa boutwh oy oua rea ndunl essyo upur poselyerron atethe m,mis leadt he m,the ywil lpu ty outogethe r,o ra tle astaversio no fy ou. Ia mlea dt obeli evetha tsom ehowth etr uthal wayssl ipso ut,ev eni nfragments.

Rejoice and Be Glad

Amen.

Not Allowed to Be

Life gave me a hand but I haven't learned how to deal. So I sit here trying to figure it out, and I walk around the house in my mind, leaving to previous tenses and hypothetical scenes where I do something that I later take back. The steps lead me through the lino-lined corridor out of my room into the dining, then left to the lounge, where I look outside through the window and the white fabric curtains to the orange and red leaves still icicled on thin branches, and cars pass underneath, from onewhere to twowhere, and then I walk back the same way, catch a glimpse of a body moving closer in the mirror and then turning right down the corridor and into my room again. That is the pacing routine I carry on whenever I am at home alone and am thinking about something.

This morning I woke up with a sense of happiness that I see as a shadow in the light of the day. It begged me to think about how there are these contours drawn that slip behind and follow me. I look at the silhouette often, its loyal scraping against the furniture and lino as I move, never leaving a trace, except to me, except to tell me that it's there.

{Life's too short to even care at all}
Just below the morning lies a table sleeping. Its edges are round, if a little rough, and appear to expand and contract like a breathing chest. A too-short life happens on this table, taking place and space by the throat in some sort of not-always-memorable violence. On this table this morning was sand, powdered thin but felt awhole, into a face, mine. And this face only knew its contours to be of cheek and jaw and nearear through the fingertips of two familiar hands, drawing them. Their contact;- the contact brought within me a great sense of safety and warmth, one I hesitate to attribute in daylight to anyone, but under the morning, know well to be someone's because I remember the minute texture by the shadow the memory casts upon the day man.

{A dark world aches for a splash of the sun}
Below one of several passed mornings, at the curvature of the night I felt the same so-familiar ache of warmth and affection. It was as physical as I can call of that sleeping table. It was an else of an embrace, just a holding. And when the morning came above, I felt the affection dissolve under the covers, reconstituting a shadow that would be unveiled as I pulled the sheets off me and walked out of my room, trailed by it.

Daylight, as it corners rooms now, as it covers even the undersides of couches and hinges, yearns to reveal shadows. And the shadow, when I look back, looks back at me, grave-silent, potential, delayed deeply, deeply deferred by distraction, owned by destruction. I can't imagine it white. Yes, I can imagine it, and the limboing teeter-tottering undulates with a desire of a freedom I cut and remains.

{I'm waiting for this cough syrup to come down}

I'm no longer sure if I was ever sure that I had Aces in my arteries, because I've always hesitated to play them. 

Marrow

Was told to write into the gaps, to widen them with some filling so that they no longer feel like missing teeth. Yet all that seems to come about from sitting here are days after and descriptions of flowers that they passed by in their walks together. Think of one person, that isn't who is talking. Think of another, and no longer listen to the gap. Now it's covered in words, in things battered and oiled over for easy sliding. Care for me while I photosynthesise.

Don't know what days begin with suns and which begin with shadows that lengthen, because the doors are shut and they aren't opening for anyone but the fairy of fire alarm sounds. Each day is a new beginning, and I confess I have nothing to write about on this scripture of an evening. I wanted just to press. I found a gap and felt like imprinting it with some sort of code so as to vacuum up its contents days after and be content with having written worth. But this worth will be measured in moments gone, and it is those I cannot fathom how to count, because I look back and see gums receeding, progressing to that state of bleeding where it is no longer worth cauterising. That is a blind state. It is a state when I look back in the powder room of echoes and pretend to pindrop systems and logic onto empty platters. All I get is shrimp, and an empty tube in my cocktail.

Very safely, do I think about the moments that have gone with a layer of gossamer overturned. Over time, and over re-membering, I have sewn images into the fabric so that the background of stars doesn't feel so distant. But oh, I seem to be tampering with reality. No, I'm not, I'm just passing up the opportunity for reality. Memory works by disguise, by hiding itself in a cell and pretending to be the nucleus, even though it has already gone. Whatever I'm chewing on, captured thoughts from belowtimes or cannon ball prosthetics, the words don't feel like mine, and the words I use are really flagging down things that are no longer present.

It's why I call it re-membering (I am taking Bhabha's term without permission). My family is everything and anything, put together how I like it, or don't but do anyway. They are just gaps on the surface of the tree. Memory allows them consistent enough figures, but one's memory can faultify and then what remains are the gaps that are filled anew with otherthings. Hats. Defibrillators. Caterpillars. Words with more than one L.

What I am putting together here, is a dentist's work, a something, but I can see it crumbling between my virtual fingers and puff away in the winds, meaning it's nothing. And yet, I have probably learned something from the doing.

Correcter Abjection

t.here
in the.re
between u.s
neither of /u/s/
but i.s
seeming
dotted... dotted...
following otherwisdum.b
sill-hoo.est.t.est-ce
cut up
repre/ss/(end)ing
shoulds

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.