ERRATA:
a list of errors in a printed work discovered after printing and shown with corrections
also : a page bearing such a list
I first learned of erratas via cookbooks and knitting patterns— a miscalculated measurement of cream, meant to be cold not warm, the number of stitches too tepid for a secure hemline. Actually, don't knit two together, bring the yarn forward and expand their numbers. Char the eggplants on the iron and not in the oven.
These corrections are often small but minutiae in the way that an eyelash can swim, lazily, lost, in the swell of your eye. We navigate mirrors to pull out that single fiber, to dream of the end to the irritant. Corrections are also transformation. From one dream to another.
I dream for this newsletter to be more so of a correspondence between you and I. I have been feeling, a fuzzed brain overly concerned with coherence and errant thoughts, and a desire to share my dreams and maybe even the horaries I cast for them. I would like to share with you, like a slice of cake with knife crumbs stuck to its side, the errata of language and the urgency of its center through poetry both found and written, recipes, the ruins of the planets and our worship of them. While I hope to send out a letter to you once a week, I imagine it will be vulnerable to erratum. I would like to invite you to push on the edge of error with me and I warmly encourage you to respond, to anything and nothing here, even if its just to say yes yes, hello.
ON RELIEF AND THE END OF CANCER SEASON
Cancer season has brought with it a drag quality as the Sun descends from its most northern declination (summer solstice); the peak of summer just as much as the decay of warmth. The descent has already begun and as the Sun prepares to wring itself dry from the wet summer slumber of Cancer into Leo on July 22, I am ever fixated on both the concept and practice of relief. Impression as expression that, also, necessitates relief. It is also the refusal against "inquiry as invasion" which Tuck and Yang define as
a result of the imperative to produce settler colonial knowledge and to produce it for the academy. This invasion imperative is often disguised in universalist terms of producing "objective knowledge" for "the public."- p. 813, Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitive Research
To refuse to pour ourselves out constantly is to bubble up in your own body. That pillow land deed, only this time its just for you, thinking of that endless as eternal as we are animal— all for you. You are yours but not yours alone.
For me, celestial-poetic relief is the shape of the planets sighing, and of hearing that exhale rush on our sweetest Earth. It is producing the errata as a list that states no, no, no, no, no, no to objectivity, nonsense as unreal, to universalist coherence. What surfaces through the effervescence of language and Mercury? Through the borrowed light of the Moon? Relief to me sometimes looks like washing rice and seeing the bad grains float to the top. Skim them out of the milk. Save the milk for ritual.
Cancer is the domicile of dear Luna, that phlegmatic body, the crescent of spirit within which we can safely and carefully dissect the So(u)l of the Sun. The Moon is of flux and reflux, to move without skin, porous, the generation and corruption of matter so I ask through the words of Zaina Alsous- can the rot remember? (from Can the Dodo Bird Speak?)
Who owns the rot? The rot of what? Decay can only speak through its substrate, mute and fruitful. If the body is remembrance and memory, then the body is also a possession and a dream.
Without the Sun, a ghost. Without the Moon, a machine. The luminaries knit the body of the human animal. We hunt nocturnal, silver, cellular memories of soft stones and night fungi.
As a final scribble, I leave you with a quick note written on imagining my altar space without any of its talismans— the refusal of possession, emptiness as both shells of place, the quartz of time—
gold valued above brass and twice as soft. the cost of softness in the animal— elite, innate, proposition. when all talismans are taken off the dresser, the dresser becomes a dresser again. it houses the things that i enrobe me. the brick wall behind it, the goblin in the cement chipping away, shatter into the thing i cannot see. if i'm articulate simply, atmosphere or ether. the empty space: river of soft wood. the woods of ikea and single use screws. when it's empty, the top is just a top but the dresser is of promise or pedestal. when its empty, it (me) or me (animal) worries about what to worship. how to embolden my possession of my own skin. the shape of the body. alive now, the color of dispossessed utility later.
can the rot remember? (Alsous)
xo,
Sarah