black_waterfall

how can i try to tell you about it all. Everything, I mean. What kind of language and what kind of words could possibly capture it? Forget the catch, a touch would be enough. But how do i make my body ready to receive that kind of touch?

At breakfast, as a teenager, I would pour milk too quickly onto my cornflakes, into bowls that were too shallow to receive the force without overflowing. Those bowls, the ones left behind by my dead grandmother, seem like the only constant as we moved house and house again. Wrapping them up each time in newspaper, separating them from each other and the possibility of chipping, only to unwrap them again, and place them back on that same, old, heavy mantle made of pine.

words come/fall/are spat/run/leak/flow/seep/gush out/force their way through her lips/ooze/climb out. they roll in each others extremities and lose their boundaries. Its a madness in there, a mess. Or perhaps its not that at all, its a body ridding itself of all the words it never wanted, returning them thanks for nothing. an incantation of descent and refusal.

my grade 5 boyfriend put his hand under my shirt, and touched my back with his palm. I couldn’t make sense of how our skin connected, and this outraged me. I threw a shoe at his face. He hit me on the head with a hockey stick.

At night, I look at the night and am more peaceful. My lover and my body both slowly roll into the hole in the middle of the mattress, where they press against each other. This, a place where the symbolic becomes precarious and.

fluid - like that other, inside/outside of philosophical discourse-is, by nature, unstable. Unless it is subordinated to geometrism, or (?) idealized.

Woman never speaks the same way. What she emits is flowing, fluctuating. Blurring. And she is not listened to, unless proper meaning (meaning of the proper) is lost. Whence the resistances to that voice that overflows the “subject.” which the “subject” then congeals, freezes, in its categories until it paralyzes the voice in its flow.

And there you have it, gentlemen, that is why your daughters are dumb. Luce Irigaray - The Sex that is Not One 112

The four of us were in my bedroom. We’d patched the windows up so that it was darker, and without the edges visible it could have been a square. I couldn’t see the others, but felt that it was intimate nonetheless, as we meditated on Eo together. She was illuminated by a moving white iPhone spot light, her hand almost glowing - holding the microphone that at times disappeared with her face under her black hood. Rhythms overlapped and, pulsed and then non-pulsed.

I catch myself listening, but not to what is being said. So I close my eyes in the dark.

Airplanes are like eyelids. And equally, eyelids are like airplanes. Eyelids repeatedly separate me-via-vision and the world. I blink and reset my co-ordinates. The eye lid, the I lid. Am I a sealed subject with my eyes closed or open?

But that isn't the point. The point is planar

1. Within an air(-)plane
2. Across a surface.

Airplanes traveling across planes are like an eyelid - already an and or an or or possibly most precisely a hyphen. A planar hyphen though, that is presence and absence at once.

The blink and the flight are specters, sites of the undead. They are detours in the night, detours to a non-place.

But when everything has disappeared in the night, "everything has disappeared" appears. This is the other night….Here the invisible is what one cannot cease to see; it is the incessant making itself seen

Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Outside, The Night’

The eyelid and the airplane convoke - call together - specters of before and after and the sinces of past and future. “One cannot control its comings and goings, because it is always coming back”; the airplane always goes down, and the eyelid always comes up. The pit, the pendulum and the guillotine. The eye-lid-air-plane press pause on everything else. Or maybe they press play on everything else, I can't decide. Every exit is an entrance.

I watch red stars dance in vessels and honeycomb patterning and mauve islands lined with luminescence, and feel myself touched by a rhythm that flows.

In the dark, I capture less.

I can't say it so I'll start with an anecdote - two paradoxes for the price of one.

"For the girl had not a particle of modesty, nor did any man ever see her embarrassed, but she undertook shameless services without the least hesitation, and she was the sort of a person who, for instance, when being flogged or beaten over the head, would crack a joke over it and burst into a loud laugh; and she would undress and exhibit to any who chanced along both her front and her rear naked, parts which rightly should be unseen by men and hidden from them." PC pg. 108, Secret History.

But apparently anecdote takes its more common meaning from particular "unpublished" memoirs of the 6th Century, written from a province of Byzantium, called Palestine Prima.

The Author is Procopius (copious!) of Caesarea, and the subject of his "Secret History", or "Anecdota" was Justinian, the emperor, and his wife: one Theodora.

"And as she wantoned with her lovers, she always kept bantering them, and by toying with new devices in intercourse, she always succeeded in winning the hearts of the licentious to her; for she did not even expect that the approach should be made by the man she was with, but on the contrary she herself, with wanton jests and with clownish posturing with her hips, would tempt all who came along, especially if they were beardless youths. Indeed there was never anyone such a slave to pleasure in all forms; for many a time she would go to a community dinner with ten youths or even more, all of exceptional bodily vigor who had made a business of fornication, and she would lie with all her banquet companions the whole night long, and when they all were too exhausted to go on, she would go on to their attendants, thirty perhaps in number, and pair off with each one of them; yet even so she could not get enough of this wantonness." PC, pg. 108, Secret History

"On one occasion she entered the house of one of the notables during the drinking, and they said that in the sight of all the banqueters she mounted to the projecting part of the banqueting couch where their feet lay, and there drew up her clothing in a shameless way, not hesitating to display her licentiousness. And though she made use of three openings, she used to take Nature to task, complaining that it had not pierced her breasts with larger holes so that it might be possible for her to contrive another method of copulation there." PC -pg. 109 Secret History

Anecdote is from the Greek anekdota, meaning
"things unpublished"

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an = "not" + ekdotos = "published,"

And further, "ekdotos"
ek = "out" + didonai "to give"

So, the anecdote is the-non gift, the thing with-held, the unpublished, and yet I share and overshare.