procedures for forgetfulness have been approved, submitted.

objective: who summarizes an incident

exposure is social. an imposed co-habituation. it’s not even that mother goose hung from multiple stories dangles verbal consent to what body. it’s not even that the balancers dare not expand upon what “a time” “like this” dare suggests. it’s not even that a freedom of information request could illuminate “a time” “like this.” the people who manage other people scrub their accounts in the name of public safety, public trust in governments. who will scream in solitude not to wake up the dreaming.

§  this is forgetfulness around you.

scope: it’s not even that who does not know. feel. a great account that is the daughter of victory is not a pro-rated day for compassion. who commits to mutual purpose scraped off the radix of despotic delights. grifts further feeling. knowing an in-person account hopes to find who all mosquitoed on the fence.

§  this is forgetfulness around you.

there is no good. it’s not even that there is absolutely no good time for business trips, rejuvenated puffy lips. who pays dearly for freedom while whom becomes a plannable plan. it’s not even that the crack of techno-fascism ensures the company new orders smooth culture. it’s not even that the people who manage other people post a communique about taking a human approach moving forward. a human approach in comparison to what exactly? a non-human approach?

objective: what is the opposite of human?

alien, angelic, divine?

scope: who wants a divine approach to this historical moment considered insubordinate at best never genocidal at worst.

§  this is forgetfulness around you.

there is no good. it’s not even that some body must simultaneously contemplate lockup, escape.

§  this is forgetfulness around you.

in labour consumption is utterly thrown back on some shelf awaiting further sorting. working so hard on whose lunch break who asks.

objective: how can who remain static at “a time” “like this”?

scope: who reports how sand spills effortlessly once thrown out a window.

such a reset is not even a violent some body turning the other way. imbeciles hardly polish their feathered neckties. it is the sovereign always conflicting.

objective: what role does some body play without a container does some body have another way to gather?

safe spaces conceal information concerning some body’s a bloody liberal.

§  this is forgetfulness around you.

it’s not just that. it’s not even that. it’s more than that that and that that and it’s not even that feeding which class which gasoline which level of class designed to enforce the other to re-enact which new play with which old actors. the company says this now too, well-versed in wellness power pointing. it’s not even that that that and that that. it’s not even that some body asks for everything in specific categories to support beginning from a blank penal colony ground-skin. if it is not written down there is no position. some body can eventually be written up to provide some body with more content to describe this historical moment to future dead babies.

§  this is forgetfulness around you.

it’s not even a moment. it’s not even splatters of paint drying. it’s not even that. it’s just that the longue purée is overwhelmed at the seams it didn’t even know it had. it’s not even that the crux of action in greek tragedy is one of violent emotion. it’s not even that some body charts the effects of events that occur so slowly as to be imperceptible at work. it’s not even that there are still less chairs than some body can fill. it’s not even that some body can fake a cough to leave early easier now. it’s not even that the chilling effects lodge themselves in us. it’s not even that. it’s not even that. it’s not even that.

A pill is offered. 

Maybe after your stomach gets tight or your eyes get dry.

It is called Joyful. For niche tastes, like sick pharmacology. 

Not a happy pill, another kind of pill.

That happy pill is for the worried well to calm and carry on, but Joyful becomes frenetically digested by the admixture thrust forward by Subversion. 

Not quite dead enough to aliven you relative to “we are in a time when there is a lot of violence in the world.” 

You didn't need a prescription and it's available to anyone who wants it. 

You took it because your thoughts became circular to the point of conspiratorial. 

You started to believe that a working group could fix a burning house. 

The professional managerial classes are concerned, they display this with a dutiful gaze they learned about on Zoom. 

You are aware they have families, young children learning about colonial history in school. 

They find it concerning when their child comes home in full regalia. 

Currently, it is not compulsory for primary or secondary school students to be educated on Britain's role in colonisation, or the transatlantic slave trade. 

They find this concerning too. 

They are concerned children in Gaza have suffered “relentless mental harm” but they still heart an internal communications post likening a keffiyeh to terrorism. 

You appreciate contradiction, but not anymore. 

They are worried about you because all work is bad and they are overworked by choice. 

You lock eyes with one in the wild at a farmer’s market tearfully hysteric that harm is their new buzzword that you once swelled by. 

What is the state currently if not enacting power to keep people in line with their deluded quests for freedom while respectfully waiting their turn.

You are pilled to suspend your rage into joy. 

Manufactured dopamine hits institutionally to encourage self-care routines intentionally offered so that workers may eternal return refreshed after downing so much clarity. 

Let’s come back to the data file later. 

This pill, not that pill, is glibbed for your terror. 

Drink Joyful with milky Subversion. 

Ajax, zoo sauce, egg whites. 

The way you described fun as a spunky teenager. 

Bookmark the original issue, bottom’s up a tummy filled with Joyful Subversion. 

Joyful Subversion allows you to be pluralized like in French. 

It also allows you to decimate the French language in French. 

Helps with empty promises ensuring language is dangerous again. 

And food is a human right for everyone but not according to Israel and the US.

Nothing is mightier than destroying everything you’ve fucked, hiding the history you don’t heart. 

With Joyful Subversion it doesn't matter that your job is on the line, you care little about trivial things.

Wikihow recommends you burn your own books and you comply.

You’re good at taking direction, depending on the source material.  

Soon those will be lit up too. 

You are hopeful you will implode like a character from a realist novel. 

Oh, and you have many times, my love.

And that’s not even a fucking side effect. 

These are: 41 years old, anti-authority, truth breaking, laughing in the face of your enemy, autonomous grassroots nuclei, killing your rapist after fucking him one last time, hysterical astral travel, more authority undermining, skull fucking inclusion, the will to live, a will to change, turning concepts into objects, man…

Don’t even start on liberation, my love. 

Is Joyful Subversion agentic, you say yes, you say yes after gulping back and your intestines collectively pirouette on their own terms.

You precisely distinguish between a sash and a scarf, a wrapping of another culture, you are afraid in 20 years, once EDI has been complete as per the professional managerial classes’ last email, the culture will be properly distinguishable from the politics. 

Also, remember, you are sharing your facts. 

But by all means, if you do want to share your story, don’t start with it. 

So you take another that isn't hard to swallow at all. 

It gets easier as it moves and breaks down the whole into parts. 

The only rules that exist are the pathways of the body, and those act up eventually without benefits. 

So you take another. 

Not your image reflecting back at you. Joyful Subversion doesn’t treat deficiency, it ensures available receptor sites are reminded for whom and what they work for. 

Still, you take a dip in a pool and giggle you're stillborn.

You were here the whole time! 

See Dorothy!

Fuck you, you fucking fuck! Fuck you, you fuck!

So you take another. 

You decide Joyful Subversion is necessary to take just in case there is a part of you that ever forgets partial limbs are no way to measure a whole body. 

It helps to plug your ears, close your eyes when a work post censors intellectual freedom in the name of intellectual freedom. 

So you take another. 

You've been requested to celebrate life without choosing suffering as your default. 

You understand that this is not martyrdom. 

Cue getting almost hit by a car here. 

So you take another. 

Your freedom is inconsequential by comparison. 

So you take another. 

What is demanded of you is to do something objective like how your first rape fantasy was an excuse to get out of work. 

So you take another. 

You smile sincerely, abandoning the logic of work to live sovereignly with your new self yesterday and tomorrow you drop your antagonisms towards old selves who unanimously decide the stakes are too high to quit.

A sustained durée is what it offers as this concoction conditions you for a decapitalized world that was possible yesterday.

Audre Lorde is a likely reference to discuss joy as the greatest form of resistance, but you burnt all your books and have no way to look it up, so you close your eyes, envision loose quotes. 

You’ve been burning for a long time now. 

And it's okay that your owl can't take flight without it.

You’ve been burning for a long time now. 

So you take another. 

So you take another. 

So you take another. 

So you take another. 

Categories of Abuse

I was today year’s old

that time I King Konged your chest

after you raped his Vina

before she douched vodka

baked in a flakier thrust.

Annotation

“The literary text plays the contradictory role of a producer of opacity. Because the writer entering the dense mass of his writings renounces an absolute, his poetic invention, full of self-evidence + sublimity. Writing’s relation to that absolute is relative: that is it actually renders it opaque by realizing it in language. The text passes from a dreamed-of-transparency to the opacity produced in words.” (Transparency + Opacity, Édourd Glissant p. 115)

There are different relational scales to consider transparency and opacity. For Édourd Glissant, he’s writing of and on behalf of a Caribbean resistance to Otherness. Transparency in this context is a means to capture, to contain, to then, in turn, enslave the oppressed in perpetuity. Being for opacity, then, is a means to resist this kind of thingifcation; if you cannot be detected, or understood, then you will not be subjected to any kind of box waiting to be checked.

There are great demands for transparency in relationship to who holds power: we want to know what leaders are doing with their power because we already know what they have done and will not do with their power.

People employ language differently and cunningly so as to evade demands for clarity. What do you want? What do you need? Someone says one thing, but means another to someone else. Without a shared vocabulary and a shared application of a shared vocabulary, these become impossible questions to answer. They become impossible only insofar as transparency becomes a required outcome of any interaction: if I fully know you then I can fully trust you. If I fully know the literary text then I can fully trust the literary text.

This understanding, in this context, on opacity is, almost ironically, clear. The quote’s subject is “the literary text” as it is the vehicle for the delivery of opacity. (Note from Lisa Robertson: “Glissant’s typology of 3 opacities — the text, the reader, and the social collective, all mixed together in shifting proportions.” Right now we are focusing on the opacity of the text as it is received by the reader.) What’s conjured in dreams is immediately made diffuse once we wake up. So we make attempts to recall, to represent what was once so clear in slumber, what was so clear while walking past the same rock over and over again. It’s exciting, it’s arousing, to get a little close to representing a dream, or thoughts on a walk, even when it's so far from its source - the unconscious.

What are the ways words like opacity and density are used as in the pejorative? Poetry is often lauded in this way before a relationship with any text is even considered, dismissed for its difficulty, its challenge to transparency, its opacity, its density. Poetry is the ultimate concatenating tool, method, expression for this contradiction between opacity and transparency, because it be/labours over meaning and expression with something as ordinary (transparent) and affectively charged (opaque) as language. Anyone can write or speak a poem. Its opacity is available; its density ready. The poem’s audience is for those special social subjects who can and want to share in a willingness to reside in the contradiction who can and want to replace words like dense, that mean difficult, for words like dream, that mean lets walk together.

Recall

I could manifest a list of things that I can recall: the way he caressed my hair while he thought I slept; that line in Anita Phillip’s A Defence of Masochism where a pining pathetic masochist has nothing to do with the pains that come alongside unrequited love, but a true relishing desire to be alone; certain movie lines, the entire script even, from a certain winged bat; a painting, but not the artist’s name, that captured body awareness so well I felt the trigger aimed at me … that’s not the point.

When something goes awry with recall a signifier has been forgotten, dislodged from place, or it was never there long enough to leave the necessary mark to whip it (up). The missing signifier is not so much free floating otherwise it could still be grasped by its balloon string, and could be brought down a bit lower to read the fine print. For an analyst it’s a glitch in the signifying-code, covered by this particular, constantly itchy flesh sac, that is to reveal something about a history.

Here are some funny to me moments of recall gone awry: During an interview in 2019 I said, in a point-blank-don’t-miss-your-target kind of manner, that eternal recurrence was a Freudian concept not Nietzsche’s greatest insight while journeying along the shores of Lake Silvaplana. Perhaps recall could not serve me because of all the burgeoning nerves that may or may not have sprung forth from being documented, or, perhaps, the very attempt to recall anything on (self-constructed) command is just scholarly self-flagellation I tend to shrink from. During a solo book launch over Zoom in 2020 I misheard or mistook the word “transmute” as a newfound traverse-ability to mute and unmute people, to hear and un-hear any speaking subject on command made possible by the tap of a finger, and provided an response on how I have recently applied this phenomenon to how I now engage with my practice as a research poet. During a trip to Vienna in 2011 I came to the realisation that the pouch for “negatives” at the back of a Moleskine notebook was not strictly a clever spot for me to house all my gnarly “negative thoughts” to process later, but a now-turned anachronistic place to store transparent plastic film to develop later in the past. (Insert a conversation here about how to use the word vestigial in a subsequent sentence but choose to leave this parenthetical interjection as is.) During a heated conflict in 2018 a misquoted line from Mao was hurled (hauled) at my sad drunken ass, which I was stupidly upset over to not at all recall a few years later in 2020 when the conflict was jokingly parodied for relief and levity — as time can only offer any of us a chance at objectivity. During a semi-rough acid trip in 2021 I couldn’t differentiate between the Russian revolutionary Bakunin and the Russian philosopher Bahktin — all the diverse areas of human activity involve the use of language or nihilism? If it was an actual ego death the difference would not have mattered enough for me to consider my death over a problem with recall with such ferocity. There have been enough times I’ve soggily woken up bruised thighed and having bruised an other, but I don’t think this experience is the same as those I’ve listed before it but rather the product of being a really fun drunk.

Yes I can look it up. There’s a Wikipedia article for everything. There’s a well-written book on the shelf across the room that’s not going to reach me merely through osmosis. As the great hysteric Britney Spears once said: you better read and retain, bitch. The desired telos, or “hot body” I’m after, is one where this patient (this arm chair parodying analyst) admits how exemplary precision is always a joke and that the glitch experienced is a self-negation that holds some meantime available for unconscious subversion (perversion, monstrous thinking).

I rely on the signifying chain to have some reach with others and it can be frightening when it is altered by old bouts of stupidity, amnesia, forgetfulness, let alone an alcohol rich diet. There are so many factors that affect the capacity to recall: some social subjects are trained to recall their mistakes more than others, attention-altering devices and technologies, and physical and psychic pain. In what ways could the aftermath that follows a signifying collapse incite a new response that still commingles with fear but + more! (The point is not to elide fear but to cultivate other parts to gleefully join the party.) Like Nietzsche’s ill-rot mind willing movement by forcing his ill-rot body to walk past the same scenery, the same self, the same rock, over and over again to inaugurate a whiff of difference, I am at this moment building off of old contexts and narratives to recall the name of the artist I could not recall spontaneously. The colour and texture of the paint and how they created a figure of folds to fold into. If marketing strategies are always co-opting our time and movements, could we not co-opt their strategies to recall what really matters to us at the peak of an acid trip?

During the last day of 2022 I gathered all the cursory approaches to understand what’s gone awry with recall and measured them against the last three years of attachment theory, self-diagnosis as identity, trauma-informed take-your-pick, partial hauntings, Wikipedia articles, and well-intentioned infographics. I threw every inundation the way you can skip a rock three times for the tide to bring them back smoother, that much more marketable.

There’s nothing more to recall here that hasn’t already been respectfully ordered without prejudice.

OFF WITH Is HEADS (PART ONE)

Recently I held onto the longest breath possible to examine how long I could last. I doesn’t offer too many tickets in, only when provoked. I paid a tattoo artist to cut a solar plexus wide open, wide enough to show off all the nerves in lacking charm. I got sick off I the other night, too many introspective expectations anticipating the rollout of a new true I. Cut off I for the sword is the footbridge to a clearing in the forest lacking all clarity, all fascistic logic models need not apply. We must escape our heads like prisoners their prisons. We must escape our inboxes like mourners their melancholia.

As below what does it mean to be headless? For Bataille et al it is about a response to political madness’ reified logic, on the right, on the left, suffocating the masses by its strangle hold in perpetuity. Off with logic’s head, off with dichotomies rendering the subject nil, the Achéphale posits an old religion with a new program. Take up perversion and crime. Remind every reader that Bataille, Masson, Klossowski never sacrificed anyone, but anticipated the possibility of death at the hands and feet of friends. Wonder why this annoys. Maybe some Is are bound and don’t hate fixity as much as some academics might aspire. The Kobe Cannibal casts a shrug from above. I prefers to traverse the contradictions on no sides for no one.

Headlessness is not to give up our imaginary position as the centre but to refuse the polarization of politics, dichotomies of any ilk, and rather open up to madness without losing oneself down and towards a bottom. Like a clever pole trick, Angelos Evangelou describes this as an ‘an exercise in acrobatics’ and I concurs. With so much attention to wellness, something in I prefers to tend to madness, because madness disturbs as well as arouses release. More often what disturbs is other people’s madness especially if it gets in the way of I’s own. That ego response is for an I with a head … how might an I without a head take it? At the root(s) of every sensibility without any claim to reception. Nevertheless, life demands to be freed no less from the past than from a system of rational and administrative measures. I without a head owes no one their introspection on demand.

I, in all its headlessness, is not willing to transgress towards an imaginary radical and communal past (the left has taken on nostalgia just as much as the right albeit all the more led by rational hopefulness the right rejects) nor willing to traverse old contradictions to get to no, where. It’s all negation, all the time, because it’s the only way to sidestep ghosts and principles, traditions and costumes on all sides, the only way to refuse a future bound to a past, which is why I must turn always to literature, or the prospect of sex and death, to be free.

Eternal Infants Looking Like Death

Selfies are made to appear casual, vernacular even, but they are far from. More often manufactured states of morose facial undress, the selfie is a casual snap of a serious endeavour in self-representation. Right now is the time of death chic, a death stare turned corpse bride, the new phenomenon in selfie taking is mimicking our best death bed look. Of course there are the smiling faces of some next to a jar of sourdough starter, a smile too thick and performed it makes you wonder how dead they are inside. I suppose there is more left to the imagination with the latter. Who isn’t rotten and dying inside, let it all burst forth on screen, however perfectly contained via post. While not strictly gleaning waif-like and emaciated bodies, but still fashioned with the calculated positioning of the chin, the cold stare, the vacant disposition so vying for depth it comes up shallow, this selfie phenomenon points towards a collective form of self-representation reminiscent of how the 90s heroin chic look reacted to the 80s health craze. Drowning doesn’t just happen. Is our new death gaze one that’s a reaction to the recent inundation of self-care rhetoric, that brand of wellness culture that instructs you to go back to work after you get your nails did for your funeral? What does it mean to pose an ideal self that looks closer to death than alive while also nagging for and craving not merely admiration but confirmation of one’s existence?

Selfie culture is self numbing. I am annoyed by my own participation and delete my image or have concocted a way (#educatingmarie) to still play but differently by snapping pics off the hip with the best possible view of my nasal cavity. Anything but a top right angle. A dopamine rush exists regardless. The unattractive angle is still perfect with its faults. I’m reminded by a follower: “you are a significant goddess and you pull off this angle better than anyone I know.” The experiment failed with that aggrandising comment when the intention was debasement. Thumb my self turned object with all those precious wee hearts.

A number of thinkers and writers have aligned the selfie with Lacan’s mirror stage. How could they not? The mirror stage is that moment of separation from the caretaker in conjunction with that moment our self becomes unified, becomes seemingly whole, to us, rather than perceived as parts interacting with parts. Now this mouth belongs to this body and that breast belongs to that mother. Furkan Sorkaç notes, “The selfie, if I may call it so, is the second stage within the mirror stage, a toy for the eternal infant by which he will continue the struggle of building a self-image and overcome the misrecognition he realizes unconsciously.” Yes, we are eternal infants, we are baby, compulsively identifying ourselves in a sea of others compulsively identifying themselves, both gestalt and ungestalt configurations towards actualizing the self by way of recognition by others. This part, this post, is how different from than that part, that post? We are eternal babies, because we are eternally addicted to the promise of self-realization that is perfectly espoused by the mechanics of the selfie. It is hard to stop looking at others and our constructed selves. It’s all make-believe until you clock how much time you might be spending swiping. That’s life not spent but spent.

Visualisation is a powerful tool that can fix ourselves to time and space. With one click you have become object, with one post you have sacrificed your self, you as subject, for the momentary bliss of being seen by friends and strangers, followers. A mirror replaced by multiple layers of glass and plastic, made highly conductive by other’s finger tips. The heat transmitted is mightier than any representation of a wee heart. The paradox is found in the confluence of contradictions that lend to the compulsive act to post a dead look: it’s a serious look that barely hints a smile, it’s a mug shot devoid of character but brimming with intensity, it’s tamed and regulated hysteria, it’s vacant, it’s nothing, it’s step-on-me-come-hither, it has to be seen in order to exist. It is dying to exist even under the absurdity of late capitalism. Nevertheless, the selfie has altered our relations to others and ourselves, this is also how we have adapted to late capitalism’s absurd logic. I think all of the dead eyes out there are haunted by this.

Rome + Las Vegas

The truth is I hated Rome. I immediately turned to Las Vegas, conjuring up an even less familiar analogue to circumvent a single evening alone. The crowd density was enough for me to lean in to this comparison in order to get through to my suicide flight the following morning.

What do these two landmark-ridden consumer sites share? Rome is littered with Las Vegas-like tourists, subjects rendered predictable and immobile, utterly governed by the panopticon pull of what to consume next. It’s not like this isn’t happening on a global scale, let alone a digital one, but it’s made explicit by the material effects of monumentalism. Simply put: here lie the remnants, the remainders, of an Empire’s hubris.

Las Vegas’ hubris makes itself known especially after you’ve traversed the desert, the strip becoming rapidly in competition with the natural world to its left to the point the natural world is replete with touristic selfie taking enough to eviscerate fifteen of them on an annual basis. The Grand Canyon turned hyperreal means you don’t have to watch your step until you have no steps left to take. When in Rome everyone wants to capture it, capture an image where they stand at the forefront of an Empire that fell. Summoning the body count discovered on Phantom Ranch, tourists in Rome also don’t watch their step, flocking to capture Rome’s still-standing memory and some byline to do with crisis and ingenuity.

Both sites are perverse variations on reality, harkening to Jean Baudrillard’s philosophical treatise on Simulacra and Simulation. Las Vegas is terrifying as is Rome. Sure, it could be the mass, the scale, that did my small by comparison psyche in. But maybe it also had something to do with the capitalist machinery blowing behind the ears of these two monumentally stacked sites. Idealism, egoism abound intermixed with precisely the kind of truth relayed to me by some basic understanding of simulacrum: that which musters together a merry assortment of signs and signifiers to create some version of reality to believe in and have your desires totally determined by. That’s precisely what terrified me: to be completely immersed in reality, in a truth that does absolutely nothing to conceal itself. In Rome and Las Vegas there are no unknowns. Everything is available. Like someone new wanting too much, I want none of it for more than an evening. When everyone’s pasta is the best pasta because everyone’s mama is the best mama, that in concert with my own company finding escape by way of the search for the best, is enough to want to hide under the covers in some insomniac state of too much self-awareness.

The remainders in Rome are not, of course, a copy, as is presented by what adorns Las Vegas’ sprawl. What could the following stage of the sign-order look like when the maintenance and conservation of the Colosseum becomes its own kind of copy? I suppose this is also an encounter with the Disneyfication of the world, where a trip to Rome conjures memories of a past trip to Las Vegas, rendering these experiences as the same in order to better understand the pull of one over the other. The overarching sense of uniformity among the tourists is frightening when you are one. Where’s that cliffside when you need it? The thing is I never hated Las Vegas.

The Text and the Sound

/You text me /complica/ted ditties / about a /bummer / struggle./

You text me / how impact / play rarely / forks. Does it  / ever hurt? / Ticking

/ for what it’s / worth? By effect,/ the common /denomin/ator / finds it / 

/ strange. Sea, the / good kind of  / pain embrac/es complex/ity, / ravages / 

sorries. I / ruined / this perfect / beautiful / thing for us, / but it was

/ never / perfect. / Whisper: does / it ever / hurt? Yes, or / if it doesn’t

/ take it back. / What’s the good / kind of pain? / Perhaps our / favourite / 

place to be. / I can be / free just for / you like a / sign waves / It was, / 

has been, / and still is / scary to / love again. / Was it / worth it?

/ You don’t have / to exter/ nalize / your good cock. / Endless / suffering

/ opens to / endless poss / ibility, / and the un / fathomable / improv-

/ improbab / ility / of being / here, now, alive, / and knowing / each other,

/ at this / exact moment. / Soft seduct/ion makes us /heavy / makes us/ 

 irre/levant rot. / You text me / that you came / by to swim, / but I / 

wasn’t here, / now, nor / anywhere. / Paranoid / collisions. / You text me  

/ beautiful  / sequences / like an / equation / but that runs / backwards / 

and forwards. / At the / time, it looked / like a loop, / morbius / strip, or / 

boomerang / to me, / about you. / You text me / really good / ideas / 

about a / complica/ted plan./ Just quit / texting how / my pussy

sounds like / riddled suss. / Text me: / I like / panting at / your ear:

it’s ille/gal to boil / lobsters / alive. I’d / boil you, / just apply / 

some heat. / Needs not / apply. / I’m not go / ing anywhere. / Except to

/ our darling / place that /thrashes,/ elicits, / and detours / construction. 

october 7, 2018: an introduction by danielle lafrance for ryan fitzpatrick's cloth reading of deal with it, with edits by deanna fong and josh rose made on july 21, 2022

1. During a cloth reading, pay attention. Be still, fidget, wait. Hold onto applause, hold onto response, hold onto aplomb. Hold onto yourself for once. Hold on so tight, so tight so as to strangle what’s left of any object of desire. And then release. Now hold onto tact.  

2. Today ryan fitzpatrick will read his manuscript, titled Deal With It, from start to finish, in its entirety. After the cloth reading, time will be here, on our side even, for us to critique and respond to absolutely everything the manuscript contains, along with all the sensibilities it so finely attunes.

3. In Deal With It everything exists to be unflappidly prodded, seeped in gaucheness, to be dealt with, to be held. Ain't that cute? To list is to overwhelm and to assume these things relate to one another without pretense: what is love’s relation to the couple-form, what is the couple-form’s relation to compulsory heterosexuality, what is compulsory heterosexuality’s relation to sex positivity, what is sex positivity’s relation to slow dancing, what is slow dancing’s relation to gender binaries, what are gender binaries relation to Freud, to Lacan, to Zizek, what are Freud, Lacan and Zizek’s relation to categories, what are categories relation to ryan’s categories, what are ryan’s categories in relation to cis-white men, what are cis-white men’s relation to Danielle, to Deanna, to Haida, what are Danielle, Deanna, and Haida’s relation to all kinds of ideologically derived and desiring structures, etc. ryan may poet that “a poem cannot construct anything” – as in the poem, on its own, cannot erect nor dismantle an oil rig – but it can shovel more discourse atop more discourse until you can almost, but not quite, see a hole filled with gravel that covers the spill. 

4. In the poem “I never wanted to say anything," the reader confronts how they read: “In the contemporary poetry market, every book ought to have a discrete framework that shapes how a reader can read a book.” After a reader reads several books on subjects –  like love, war, or particle physics – it is assumed the reader has broadened and deepened their knowledge on a given subject. There are radical benefits to reading. One might say, after traversing through the aforementioned topics in bed with a friend, therein lies discoursing: from a book to a body, from one hole to another, keenly willing another body to, well, deal with it. Foucault describes discourse analysis as “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak." I'm certain ryan would describe discourse analysis as an assemblage of being(s) that hinges on relations between things and people and objects and spaces and feelings. What is happening between us is what is most curious and worthy of investigation. No self-investigation, no right to emote. How do you read a room like a book, a book like a room, is the type of question that wants to find out how people collide and concatenate. Reading is a lonely practice and sometimes so is being in a room filled with character(s). 

5. ryan quotes Marx ranting about a“ruthless criticism of everything existing." ryan draws attention to what is. He’s making lists of everything existing and asking questions about why such-and-such exists next to this and not that. He draws our attention to what is already there. As Gemma Corradi Fiumara insists: “There is a whole world yet to be discovered, not of unsolved issues but of relationships among things we know, of ways in which they might fit together.” It isn’t going anywhere, that whole world, until you fucking deal with it. 

6. Deal With It begins with the following epigraph from Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy: “The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.” The poem is always left justified. Is the left justified? Puns aside, let’s assume charitable intention. Let’s take this epigraph at its word, that the point of the matter is not simply to make a rational argument, to concede to any hegemonic voice, including our own, that knows what’s correct and incorrect critique, but to get a real sense of how critique can bolster our sensitivities to one another. To be able to intuit meaning from social constructions, without reproducing essentialist categories of relating to one another, because we have all this rich information, all this history, all this discourse we've fashioned together and apart. 

7. The more I return to these old notes, the more I really need to give ryan a call. 

8. It’s “a hard time for white dudes” a white commenter comments. I suppose I agree when I think about all the hard and necessary work it takes to learn how to love and to unlearn how we’re instructed to love. There is relentless accountability in these poems, constant questioning with 212 question marks scattered across 95 pages. The question marks intone a high-rising terminal, or upspeak, which I cannot help but read into these poems. It’s a gendered tonal pattern often associated with a particular sociolect, a valley girl. According to a 1986 report, upspeak is typically used among women, it subtly indicates that the speaker is "not finished yet" perhaps discouraging interruption. What if a question mark and an ellipsis lost their right to bodily autonomy? That’s the joke…

9. ryan's lyric “I” continues: “Men are the most difficult when they want boundless extractable love.” bell hooks quotes Barbara Demming on male violence: "I think the reason that men are so very violent is that they know, deep in themselves, that they're acting out a lie, and so they're furious at being caught up in the lie. But they don't know how to break it.... They're in a rage because they are acting out a lie – which means that in some deep part of themselves they want to be delivered from it, are homesick for the truth," to which she adds: "The truth we do not tell is that men are longing for love." At the end of it the patriarchy brutalizes everybody.

10. Are we doomed by a kind of discourse where everything is a target, everything is scrutable, everything must undergo "ruthless criticism" in order to get to, what, some kind of truth nestled in the nook of a speech fact? Sometimes it’s just enough to list your truths rather than assess them; sometimes you need to burn your list and wrestle meaning from what's scorched. Point to it rather than get re-traumatized by it. What do we have at the end of ruthless criticism? Ruthless relations? Humans have a tendency to see patterns everywhere. The lyric "I" musters, “It’s tough, the viscosity of space. The relations that put everyone in place. The complexity of it is overwhelming.” Remember: lists are overwhelming. It is important to see patterns when making decisions and judgments and acquiring knowledge. Unfortunately, that same tendency to see patterns in everything can lead to seeing things that don't exist. You might begin to see falsities, misinformation, and run with it, not deal with it. Meanwhile, the lyric "I" muses, “I try not to miss the non-sequitur for the trees.” Two incommensurable things enter into relation through this sensitivity. We all really need to hold onto one another, right? But not in ways that bind us to antiquated regimes of coupling ourselves to false dichotomies and equivalences. Not all privilege is created equal. We can fall in love while covering that spill.

11. Let’s all now welcome ryan fitzpatrick, in its entirety.

How do you feel about cutting this section? It’s not as focused on or tied to the concept of structures/aftermath as the other ‘notes’.

Here I am being asked to comment on cancel culture. Thus I will comply (cum p lie). At the time of writing this text I felt I was past the moment of the “call out” and skirting around an embrace of the “call in.” Now we’re all the more in the moment of cancel culture. I have been trained to say yes to things I should say no to. I fight against that training every single fucking day. This text I am writing is about what we continue to contend with after we’ve said everything must go. My impulse is to do away with the terminology all together so as to not be bound to it. Cancel cancel culture. In the past I have addressed how the “call out” can be perceived as too angry, it’s too loud, there isn’t enough thought behind a quick all-capitalized screed. In 2016 many cis white male poets complained about a lack of critical nuance. I disagreed. Often, those crying over a perceived shift toward an illiberal democracy are actually crying over their irrelevance to would-be supporters, those whom they might have previously used to consolidate and maintain their privilege.

What and whom are being cancelled? Who’s calling it cancel culture? They call it cancel culture, we call it abolitionism. One recuperates those who have been systemically canceled and one does not. Cancel culture is what those who have been called out have weaponized against those telling them reality and the language that shapes reality are changing.

The difference between the “call out/in” and cancel culture is illuminated by how they relate to one another: the former are components or features of the latter. Cancel culture is the structure and the call out is the apparatus. We have to understand, both by knowing and feeling, the consequences of our structures and the ones we intentionally subscribe to, even when subscribed to temporarily. The consequence of cancel culture is not that a precinct burns. The consequence of cancel culture is that it can replicate a carceral model, a model that is one of the violent apparatuses of white supremacy, the structure that needs to go. If it does not matter at all what someone says or does to attempt to remedy a wrong, because they are wrong regardless of the most well-written and intended apology, it points to a kind of systemic and structural damage that is irreparable. What complicates things is how immediate recourse gets caught up in all of this. If we’re at all looking to tend to broken relations with care through online platforms or through text(s), then expect perpetual disappointment and stress.

Just as I wrote above that the ground is uneven for “we” so too is what we aim at. We are damaged in different ways by structures and systems, and disproportionately more than others. Disproportionality is the word of the pandemic. It is almost impossible to ask what is needed in order for those of us harmed to be made whole when the damage is already done. Particularly when the harm is repeated upon repetition. The call out, cancelling, whatever they want to call it, it’s merely the first beautiful and ugly defiant step in collectively saying no to defunct legacies. 

However, we must be vigilante with our aim. Post less algorithmically generated social capital.

On my part, I feel it necessary to believe people and structures, and our relationships to both, are capable of transformation. Not transcendence. That would deny a history of violence and its current cuts. I believe in bell hooks' writing on the will to change only so far as change will only happen when willed and wielded. Not coerced. Some of us have already voluntarily complied to the new regulations of our COVID 19 times. What about the will to change a structure we have relied on to hurt us and others?

TENTACLERASA, 0.3 cm in length

Born in a tiny hole under a large rock. One of ten thousand eggs. Clean up nice once sucked off by my mom.

Watch while you’re shown.

Propped atop eggs like a deep-sea hen, she strokes & blows us all until her final days when she quits eating, atrophies. Optic gland secretions speed along an eco-terroristic death spiral, wrenching off segments of chemical cues, sampling the wasted tips of her six arms & two legs.

Watch she wastes.

Post fertilization you’ll get to watch your self bang your head against the sides of your tank’s reflection.

LOOKINGFORADIVINGBUDDY, 37

I am a creature that wants to fuck. It’s almost too depressing to toot about really. 

The underwater world has far more natural abundance & diversity than the terrestrial world. The thought of controlled buoyancy has me secreting collective turn ons.

If you have six arms & two legs & enjoy a world that differs markedly from the world above the surface show me & then fuck me.

EDUCATION IS ONLY VALUABLE FOR KEEPING A CUNT

Mao Tse Tung’s assertion does not educate
but does investigate a thirst trap for knowledge. You spittle spattle criminal translations while a blinded man gropes his fishies. Such cuntish dispositions stem from a cuntish decision
a cuntish decision stems from a cuntish judgment
+ a cuntish judgment stems from a Thoreau
+ necessary recuntaissance
+ from Poundering on
+ piecing together a Dada of various cunts gathered through recuntaissance. With zeal a thirst trap for knowledge is hobby-cock. Does a hobbyhorse have a hickory dick. Does a fish still have fellow feelings after discarding a drowsy dross. All these applicable accounts
Marlowe minds
already maid to proceed a study of imaginary dyes. Besides
a study working out plant sex organs cuntpletes a process of knowing a situation’s visions
tastes
refusals
+ projects. Petraches an enemy’s situation retaining a true fool edging closer to a butt’s cracked petal. Eliminating false cuntsciousness so as to stick to limits of investigative capacity measured in cuntparison to weight gain frenzy threatening to smack upside a head with a dislodged bookshelf.
Thank you for not pushing all this oxygen
carbon
hydrogen
nitrogen
calcium
+ phosphorus up a bookcase. You grabbed all this potbelly
snurgling pathedick. Thank You for applying all these possible
+ necessary methods of recuntaissance
cuntpaining about adoring a condom after sex. Writing planners speak detergently so as to manner a social cipher swelling to pin down a laser Marx on paparus. A preposition threads one word to another so a baby understands a reference other than mama. Remain superficial or get to a cuntrete essence or a walnut will replace this throat
filling it with accounts of one's shelves. Silence’s rights. When I finally lobby this shelf to speak a decision becomes nil from heavy drinking. So I drink only water
+ as a special treat
filth.

Critical Abandonment - For Eva Hayward

I raise an index finger to prove a point. It is true You have always wanted love to be hurtful. Hurt is a masochistic enactment when You claim an animal lacks

waiting

panting. Is wanting everything. When You inscribe any kind of intentionality on a pet You bind disappoint to a future rippling clause. Fleshy indifference is a rhetorical term for animals measuring off human proclamations of animality. It is true You are of a body. It is true You are a good puppy. Such a good puppy. Such a good puppy. Such a good puppy. Such a good pussy. Everything is meat cereal to a cat. A lot of animals straddle a beauty they are unable to pass on without projectile inferences. It is true words focus attention. It is true too many words disembody. I hesitate to plagiarize a future. Tomorrow is a long way off. I do not want to be alone. It is true. It is true You engage materialism at its most radical. Transfixed You slice an index finger off to embody an encounter with proven points. Translucent possibility without a cut is impossibility. It is true a cut is unlimited because materially it does exist. It does exist if I could point to it. It is true You are not hurt You are healing. You are healing because You told I so

+ I believe what You tell I. You are full. You are full. You are full. You are so delightfully full of telling. I show colourful pus from what is left of an index finger. I cut off what is left refusing two sides to every story. Save a middle finger grind a rest whole. I stick a severed digit into existence

it smells of everything.