Day One

When I pick at the edge I mean are you Available? When you represent one thing using one word I am in awe. When I order money on the internet it arrives. If I eat this cookie, then my body must create space for it. If I go outside, then I will be seen. If I am visible, then you exist. Unintentionally falling asleep is never not at least a little frightening. I didn't realize how I had come to rely on my dreams as an assurance that all this was going somewhere. I want to make less and less sense. I want to be like her. I want an audience who doesn't require care. My care. I want an audience like a hallway. I want it all, open. Really. I just want to read every book that has ever been written. I want to know everything beautiful and monstrous. I want to stand at multiple stages of its construction inside a cathedral. Cathedrals. Everywhere. You do some of the work now. I wake up early. You are the complement. Walk down this hallway and into my skin. These eyes want to close. The weather changing, new books divulging. How smart am I? Can I ever write about anything other than myself? Permanent soliloquy? One view of many. A distraction inside me with tendrils of you. Disastrous mistrust of separation made vegetal by our touch. 

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

DISEUSE, excerpt from Dictée. Transcribed by Clara Kim.

She mimicks the speaking. That might resemble speech. (Anything at all.) Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words. Since she hesitates to measure the accuracy, she resorts to mimicking gestures with the mouth. The entire lower lip would lift upwards then sink back to its original place. She would then gather both lips and protrude them in a pout taking in the breath that might utter some thing. (One thing. Just one.) But the breath falls away. With a slight tilting of her head backwards, she would gather the strength in her shoulders and remain in this position.

It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void.

From the back of her neck she releases her shoulders free. She swallows once more. (Once more. One more time would do.) In preparation. It augments. To such a pitch. Endless drone, refueling itself. Autonomous. Self-generating. Swallows with last efforts last wills against the pain that wishes it to speak. 

She allows others. In place of her. Admits others to make full. Make swarm. All barren cavities to make swollen. The others each occupying her. Tumorous layers, expel all excesses until in all cavities she is flesh. 

She allows herself caught in their threading, anonymously in their thick motion in the weight of their utterance. When the amplification stops there might be an echo. She might make the attempt then. The echo part. At the pause. When the pause has already soon begun and has rested there still. She waits inside the pause. Inside her. Now. This very moment. Now. She takes rapidly the air, in gulfs, in preparation for the distances to come. The pause ends. The voice wraps another layer. Thicker now even. From the waiting. The wait from pain to say. To not to. Say. 

She would take on their punctuation. She waits to service this. Theirs. Punctuation. She would become, herself, demarcations. Absorb it. Spill it. Seize upon the punctuation. Last air. Give her. Her. The relay. Voice. Assign. Hand it. Deliver it. Deliver.

She relays the others. Recitation. Evocation. Offering. Provocation. The begging. Before her. Before them. 

Now the weight begins from the uppermost back of her head, pressing downward. It stretches evenly, the entire skull expanding tightly all sides toward the front of her head. She gasps from its pressure, its contracting motion. 

Inside her voids. It does not contain further. Rising from the empty below, pebble lumps of gas. Moisture. Begin to flood her. Dissolving her. Slow, slowed to deliberation. Slow and thick. 

The above traces from her head moving downward closing her eyes, in the same motion, slower parting her mouth open together with her jaw and throat which the above falls falling just to the end not stopping there but turning her inside out in the same motion, shifting complete the whole weight to elevate upward. 

Begins imperceptibly, near-perceptible. (Just once. Just one time and it will take.) She takes. She takes the pause. Slowly. From the thick. The thickness. From weighted motion upwards. Slowed. To deliberation even when it passed upward through her mouth again. The delivery. She takes it. Slow. The invoking. All the time now. All the time there is. Always. And all times. The pause. Uttering. Hers now. Hers bare. The utter.  

 

Exit Interview

"I feel ashamed and grateful and sad and angry and confused and frustrated and i wish i could do it differently."

Layers of myself become visible to any eyes as i weave truth out of untruth, seeing out of unseen

As i watch the moon pass i am reminded of the other side of the coin, the hand and the cone and the rod and the chromosome, the other. The continuous room of my being which only knows itself, has never seen itself. A perfect bead lacking consciousness of its own change which has never committed a crime or been the cause of guilt or blame. Something unchanging of me. Something that looks back at me. Someone who is not me but not separate from me. Something persisting outside and inside me. An I as me as transitional fluid. Both and neither. 

Why do these kinds of abrupt departures keep happening? What’s the pattern of behavior here? They walked up to me and gave me 30 minutes to pack. The people who i thought would protect me and not hurt me. They showed me kindness and generosity even in the final moments. Am i separate from this kindness and generosity? Am i a stain to others? It scared me when they told me they don’t want me anymore. It scared me how empty their words sounded in the echo of my numbing chest. My head out the window. What were they feeling in those moments? I couldn’t show them my tears. Can only allow them in darkened moving vehicles. Can only be anonymous in this aching. Can only be a direction, forward, in this receiving. 

Working with

Falling as : embodiment of chance, entropy, impermanence, unknowability, risk - function of gravity - mode of connection to earth - an expression of resilience, intelligence, presence

Remembering / forgetting as : access to recognition of nonlinear thinking, to alternative logic, a deeply personalized time; the deceptiveness of our minds

Seeing as : connector, transitional fluid, attachment or dis-attachment to “our universe,” manipulable, immediate and reciprocal function of being in/of the world 

Return Policy

 I would not be here without the kindness of so many 

I am here due to the kindness of so many