it's tiresome to keep up with all the needs of the body. i drink my cup full of water and need to go to the bathroom. i eat, pause, see if i need to eat some more; if i don't, i resist the temptation to continue on regardless, since eating is such a deep pleasure. i must decide to wait until my body needs more, lest i overindulge. always needing to understand tonight's dinner before the sunset hour, when it becomes too late and i enter the lethargic dark with irritated hunger for the future. no patience. it's tiring. i want to nap but resist rest, for new and old reasons every day. this also angers me. the continual cycle of maintenance is exhausting but more so because of the wellness ethos attached to it; as simon critchley says, the gospel of me. my highest potential. i often think of kirsten dunst from season 2 of fargo insisting, "i need this workshop to realize my true potential!"
what is with our obsession with utter and complete fulfillment? to both abandon our body in the hell of meats and, at the same time, to elevate it to the role of score keeper? well, which is it? we pump up our soul like a mamachari tire, at once deflated, worn, at the bursting edge; "authenticity, needing no reference to anything outside itself, is an evacuation of history. the power of now."
i have been pursuing my desire for presence lately, somewhat relentlessly. but what would true openness look like now? how could i ever receive with true acceptance the millions of "downloads"— from workshops to unsolicited advice to pop up spam games— without losing my mind along the way, like something that has absentmindedly drooped out of my pocket? maybe this is our modern path to marguerite porete’s total annihilation of the soul, to create a space for god's own self reflection. our own soul as god, self authorizing, but with the approval of tents and circuses full of that visible authority, visible approval.
may i insist, to myself, to not expose or lose the self "in the order of visibility?", to not always be demanding transparency. there is a brittle horror at the center of visibility, but i sweat truly in the dark invisible. make me opaque. i am not yours to decreate in a frame of carceral logic, rightness, gospel. but i am not mine, either. i insist, my desire, to only be governable by the edge of experience. . .
like i've stated with some cleanliness in the title (which does not match the messiness of the text body) breaking the line (poetry) is what breaks the bread (body) in my mind. clarity, too, can be breakage, that sudden pop that makes you look up. i don't want to waste your time with explanations and apologies for my absence, because i already, personally, see too much of that online. it's not that i don't owe you anything, it's that i am becoming more and more unsure of performance and how to navigate it. i think, if anything, that is the main reason for my disappearance into the glittering void. conceptual cleanliness in a title helps to clear a bit of that cerebral congestion. there's something there, too, about the nature of light and how it weakens the more it is bent, that main tool of derived houses, and the opacity of the those in our lives as stories of ourselves.. .
more to come, and for now, no questions, but plenty of hesitations, infinitely open to any thoughts you may have,
xo sarah