Conversations with Ghosts
This is where I write in response, following the moments I encounter ghosts. Every book, artwork, gallery floor, landscape, every sentence typed…carries the imprint of another being, their thoughts, their memory, their words, their paint, their fleshy fingers. Often I find I cannot write because the topic of yesterday’s reading is no longer interesting to my AuDHD brain, I’ve latched on to a more recent thought or idea. SO this is where I write with: the thing I'm reading now. The work I saw today. The phrase someone said that won't stop circling. Each entry is a trace of that meeting, between the living and their hauntings. Typos will be had. Errors made. Revisions necessary.
Fragment by fragment, ghost by ghost. I encounter them and something moves between us, a conversation that started before I arrived.
Clarice Lispector + Susan Stryker
NO. 02
Talking Monsters.
No. 02
A conversation with Clarice Lispector via Agua Viva and Susan Stryker…with a touch of Mckenzie Wark.
I don’t like gender. It doesn’t feel exploratory. To be “read as ___” is boring, and falsely assumptive to me. It negates the work of learning and knowing another, it negates the necessity of curiosity. It assumes too much and does too much work that then inevitably is undone. Or if it is not it flattens and mimics. Maybe my mind will change. Most thoughts do. Or they mutate to be premised in meaninglessness. But i also need you to not need or expect me to change my mind. This is important.
Reading Stryker I wondered out loud whether monster was useful for us to identify with the Other as liberatory practice. Wark said of course. For some reason this made me angry. Stryker said it is like reclaiming whore or slut or gay. No it’s not. It’s not. Maybe it’s still useful to Be Monster, but it’s not the same. To be gay whore slut is only bad or wrong if the thing it describes is assumed bad or wrong. The terms themselves are not indicative of a description of “badness” itself. Monster - is. Monster reflects the subjective speaker. It does the work of communicating that which is harmful, ugly, and feared. It does not generate or prescribe specific actions or traits as whore slut gay do. Monster does the work of being flexible, to be specifically and exclusively defined by those who use it. Monster is the judgement itself, not the identity or practice that is judged.
I did not say any of this to her. Why would I when I wouldnt be heard. And Wark did not explain or change my mind. I was disappointed by this. I learned nothing. I changed my mind later. I changed my mind when I embraced the monster for myself because i didnt want the human described as human by those who use Monster. Which is almost exactly what Stryker said. id rather be the creature they feared. i would rather be the thing feared than the boundaried saltless human they want. To them, I am a monster and she is a monster. But, to me, so are you. And so the speaker of Monster is Monster. They just don’t know it yet. Which really means we are all human again too. It all is the same metaphor for the same creature. Mary tried to tell us.
Monster isn’t a slur to be reclaimed, it is diagnostic of the speaker, diagnostic of their prescription of “human.” But as with gender and race and most things, human and monster equally drift, shift, blur, glitch, slide, drip.
Boundarilessness is wordlessness.
Sometimes it’s hard to speak words when words mean everything and never nothing.
How can I speak when not all can hear and how can I gesture when not all can see and how can I touch when not all can feel and how can I whisper when you are so far and how can I shout when the wind snatches thought and how can i write when youre not there. And how can i share when i cannot feel. What is left to be said, communciated, shared when it is all and all everything and you already know anyway?
Like photoshop attempting to distinguish one pixel from the next to form an edge, a selection. How often it gets those pixels wrong. A corner of a nose blends with the skin of another’s stomach. Even when we tell it which pixels to look for a shirt rubs off on the moon. How can I gender when it’s boundariless and how can i race when it fictious except for how we live it in body against body atom against atom and so we speak in poems and riddles and metaphors and analogies and monsters and words. And so words become genders become races become types become categories become All of us monsters, but not all of us Narccissus. That is the secret. We are all monsters. But speaking to no one. But us.
Etel Adnan
NO. 01
NO. 01
Poems from thoughts with her each morning for a month.
train
“one foot in the grave and the other in the coffin”
doors. are. closing.
doors. are. opening.
doors. are closing.
bird bite the breadcrumbs of tortoise shell silences
bread swells the nests
tortoise shell vases
lounge with weighted sighs
hoping for a branch
that is not olive
the olive tree swells with righteous indignation
it licks the skies their
branches stripped
ceramic bulged protrude
like dicks in pants
swelling at the prospect filling their molds
lick the edges of the fan with eyes
wished it were fingertips
lounging at the edge of tortoise shell laughter
tomorrow’s day swells as tortoise shell molding
shields my eyes from the whispers of another day tired
breadcrumbs of thoughts catch the fans gaze
they glatten against yesterday’s
unexfoliated skin
he turned the POS face toward me
filling the coffee to the brim
brimming with the false cheer not so false
in my coffee-throwing days
ceramics chirped loudly
the bar burring
piercing the throbbing hum
of pairs
pairs of shoes
pairs of grinders
pairs of eyes
pairs of ears
pairs pockets
pocket-dialing
3:03 is it too late in the day to drink coffee?
Etel Ednan said
[the] sea is a body
is a world
is a house
is a hood
all i could think is a house in the hood
David Hammon’s lone hood
Black on the White wall. hung.
the Gugs didn’t pay Ashley enough
the candle smells like sage
i can’t find anywhere online
the cards told me to write a love poem to
i have not met you yet
i have smelled your fragments
edging the sea
dryness crusts its head outside by chest and flakes
to not be a stranger in a strange land
to touch the bones each year of the dead
someone else picks up the pencils on the way to the studio
the clothes piled yesterday tomorrow
today they half concealed the wet wipes
new underwear unopened
silent before the 66 the AC hummed
fingertips reak of the lemon ginger wings
made by hands carried by hands
plucked by hands
sheets carry the burden of the cat that always wanted more
“clay had memory” youtube echoed and she echoed as she
handed me her phone share her IG
ghosts everywhere
tomorrow again the day smelled like
todays cool summer AC
white t shirts scratched at the door of yesterday
the hardest thing to do is live just once
ghosts of our present pull us out
out of the body encounters
opie twitches nervously next to me
for once demanding nothing
he’s decided he only likes the porch
when i am there
even the birds don’t save his terror. i do though.
maybe fear recognizes fear
fear keeps us safe
his whiskers whisper warnings
car horns
cob webs
yellow lines
sans serif fonts
do too
the size of this morning only as long as the block
and the trash bags only as high as piled
i cannot remember his name but he looks up at me on the porch
my jadeite mug
he just rolled out, actually
today he wears a different blue than the bags
i don’t see that blue on this block
i see it in the tides when they slide away though
Ednan’s thoughts drip
like a faucet
i wear mine
on my sleeve.
drip.
i make J’s image most mornings
i take it Mark Sealy
i do take it. later, when i ask, i make it.
i make it out into the living from and to my nest
where i take J’s image
with paint this time
rosemary’s branches crack
i dont water you enough
tides flow in
but mostly out
its branches arch like the pines spilling the coast
where i was raised
where i raised
myself
i followed the gaze of the branches
turning heads toward salty air
the air whispered back
and bless me with memory
memory - the scents and sense of time
i ask her to pick up the cards for me
i gave mine to my mom
i lean too heavy on a house of cards sometimes
but i needed those cards
this time (where does that phrase come from?)
the river
the manta ray
the gazelle
the river was upside down
i trusted her hands to tug out the individual cosmos
the cosmos - winding paths, gathering pools, meets of cleanses and quenches
tide in
tide out
drip
all day tomorrow
i slept
dreams of today
regrets of yesterday
we regret to inform you
i regret to be informed
but
here we are
out for delivery
an oyster shell cradles the half burnt
half lit
candle matches
it used to smother weed butts in my studio
10 million years ago it shrouded an oyster
i didn’t realize it was a fossil until just now
chatgpt told me
the color of the fossil matches that of the mans shirt on the block
hands crack with
yesterday’s clay
stomach aches with a lifetime
of tomorrow
the impossibility of fireflies fossilize their
magical liturgies
some call it a dance
but that’s not quite right
they buzz without buzzing
alien ships like bouncing marfa lights up
and down
but, with more
tenderness
sliding in and out of darkness
their vernacular hums without humming
measured subtleties
the accent marks i forget the keyboard shortcut to
constellations, of course
but that’s too easy
haikus-ish
negative space
to dip hands into
the dips of the air around
my hips is to plunge
uneven wood under the same boxed wood on top of
our wet stained apple
box
its the stain and the uneven placement
all slightly off
perfect
pick up the table
on the sidewalk
it’s free!
on mars
“it’s always clear skies over there”
over here the table
heavy with words fallen clumsy mouths
wooden tongues lick the dust off
the legs
clay bowls bow because
the dust hold their memories
like cookies and cache
recycling is a myth.
brown paper and plastic boxes
tied up with string
wait to be crushed
cardboard air cardboard lines
with white lies and white lines
richly smothered
im too shy to breath cardboard air to ask the
uhaul hussle man how much
to wash
my car
need a van?
need a wash?
need a backbone?