I listened to a podcast today about the beauty In chronic illness. That resistance can come from being bedridden, because you are already operating outside what society deems as productive. “We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others” (Woolf). Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. Sickness is solitude. Sickness for me, ignites an unconiousness that chips away at all sense of attachment. Interesting, I think. Then the podcast, which took place at Spitalfield farms in London, at a performance art exhibition, invited live-attendees to grab elderflower tea, broccoli bone broth and vegan brownies. Funny, I think. The second half was dull and illustrative, and I shut it off. I listened to this podcast on the elliptical at the climbing gym. I spent the whole bike ride down San Pablo feeling nauseous, but I did a very good job today not thinking about it. Now, I sit missing everything familiar.
“The dream was marvelous but the terror was great; we must treasure the dream whatever the terror; for the dream has shown that misery comes at last to the healthy man, the end of his life is sorrow.” It is not sorrow, but loneliness. Not to be confused, Gilgamesh.
[Here’s is what really makes me dizzy-in-words: eating at night, new friends, relationships, feeling like I have no exhaust; except when at 2 pm, after lunch I have the urge to all at once disappear into a blade of grass, have a bunch of sex or watch wholesome porn, and take a long, sunny afternoon nap. Now back to dizziness: my inability to drive or bike safely; the lamp; These big bad words; regifting; This lecture about takingupspace in the perceptionlandscape; duality, or whatever that means; my perception doesn’t matter; all I can be is a vehicle; Getting slightly drunk off a cider; gatekeeping; where I will live; who and what; the absolutely atrocious Jeffery Lewis show I saw this weekend; part of my teenage self that died during it; How much I enjoyed the new people I was with; And being cared for; how sweet; Being-able bodied and mind; my vast urge to be a line cook again; job full of incels insomniacs and very lonely people; with a crude and lovely sense of humor; my absolute disdain for Anthony Bordaine; The sexual tension with my therapist; ]
“Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable” (Woolf)
Where do I come from? That’s what a lot of poetry is about; Maybe all of it; It’s collage. A lot of art only resonates when you see it’s done live; or the real-physical-thing. But poetry is music; which is mediated subconscious; which is memory, seems always; And when does a play begin? Don’t you remember? I rack my brain for the who, what, where of what we did and how we felt and how the sunbent; the to be seen; to be is to be seen; My desire was red. The lake opened up; There was a landscape to sit in; to do nothing; I wrote almost not at all.
Where do I come from? Some quaker crackers in Virginia. Some potato farmers in Ohio. Hardworking people, unreliant; bat-shit. Some of my ancestors, the Quaker ones, believed in nonviolence until they didn’t because it was the civil war. Maybe pacifism is privilege. They kept with them the practice of sitting in silence; to feel the divine. It’s an innerlight, they say. I would like to one day, start my own form of a Quaker Meeting, because all the ones in the Bay are so old, fruity and self-righteous.
“Nothing, I believe, can really teach us the nature and meaning of inspiration but personal experience of it. That we may all have such experience if we will but attend to the divine influences in our own hearts.”
~ Caroline Stephen, 1834-1909, A quaker cracker.
They call each other ‘friends.’ I text my friends all the time, all the time. My friends and I danced so hard last night; Dance is silence, it is floor speaking; We couldn’t hear each other, but David mimed being a witch and I jolted. My friends are geniuses. When I felt sad, Maya took me into her fur gambit jacket and I was surrounded by sound; I forgot pain and all at once experiences all of it. There was a landscape to sit in; the river opened up; desire was purple into inner and outward light at the same time; My ancestors were proud and disgusted; happy with my black long sleeve shirt and long pants; Pain is quakerism; pain is inner life; pain takes me outta this ratrace; pain gives grace and gift; pain is the ability to think, create, and question;
Fuck the healthcare industry for royally fucking me over; many other people too. Many women; Fuck the healthcare industry for giving inner-light, and distorting others. Fuck a painful body.
Here the dancer stops, to regain balance. The risk is always part of rhythm, from all raptures of within and without.
“Now I remember, the play has begun,” — from all raptures of this body.
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