To write.
I had convinced myself fairly strongly that I wouldn’t or couldn’t write about the beginning of the plague years because, topographically, rather than happening around me, it was happening with and on me. (They are still happening with me! These years) With us.
We had been told that, due to a forced poverty of sexual activity, aspects of our personalities would emerge that had been kept dormant, lending a renewed aptitude for everyday social life. Learn crafts, the art of something, living perhaps. Going on Zoom dates. Seeing this as yet another axiom in line with self-care capital-extraction, I convinced myself, with regards to myself, that there was nothing left to learn. However,
This was what autonomy earned. Scrolling back and forth through my matches.
Walking in the Arnold Arboretum with C., then back to her house where I was promptly saluted and sent on my way, despite being promised a cup of green tea. Thinking it had gone well. Walking across Harvard’s campus—from the Radcliffe Quadrangle, through the square to Felipe’s, up Broadway—with L., with whom I was excited to meet again, though not in the headspace to continue, or make of our time a process. A process I didn’t wish to renew. Walking, one morning, across Perry Park for iced coffee at Broadsheet with A. in the middle of the summer. An agreement we’d made immediately, to acknowledge each other’s turn-ons. She told me to take my time with it. With what, presumably. She chipped a nail on my belt.
~
I’d refused to begin writing this, I told myself, because of time. Since this was happening with me, and seeing as I have (writing this) no indication of when it will end, the only conclusive point I am capable of imagining (having at hand, very literally) is that of my own life. The end of my life. The threshold of a time period is the point past which I can no longer be said to exist in it, except in the memory of those who have loved me, which is to say, those who have allowed my bones to be broken and buried.
So that that won’t do any good. You can’t write out a suicide.
Dear Suicide,
Make yourself at home.
Sincerely,
Riding it out.
Not wanting to be honest with myself about my stupidity—not lack of knowledge, but its limit, its founding limit. I hear 2.01 million worldwide and can’t attach such a number to human lives. Rather than investigate this, I forget the number until someone says it out loud again. I feel nothing in regards to loss of life within the expression of a number. Rather, I feel the emotion behind such a number I can’t comprehend. To quantify, in a way, is comparing two objects. Surplus value measured out in rice in a Tik Tok helped. 1.4 million Americans attempted suicide in 2020, I’m told by a graphic. I wasn’t one of them. You cannot count the desire. I feel nothing other than the hope of being one of them at a point in time where I will be able to look back. 48,334 suicided (in the US). 22,000 students enrolled at Harvard, across the three schools. Birth rate of 11.990 in the US. How many is that? Google wouldn’t tell me, or doesn’t know. The truth is it’s all of them. It’s all.
May I have a model for loss
May I have the diagrammatical strength of a number
May I have it all
And it all, someday, will end. Which is to say, for an us. As it, I would be remiss to mention, has been ending—and may have as well already ended—for some, for those on the outer circle, what we call “bodies,” concealing the guilt of how we’d previously identified them.
~
“You did this type of breathing,” she said, and exhaled, slowly, twice through her nose, “and so I thought you were asleep.” “I wasn’t asleep,” I said, “I was emotional.”
I tried hard to think about what a world in which 2.1 million people had died would look like but I couldn’t see anything. When they say “no alternative” (w/r/t Capitalism), I think they mean no positive alternatives come to mind.
Are we in the disaster? We are. A reality we don’t need to read about. We can’t even imagine how it could be worse than it is. We can’t even imagine how bad it truly is half the time.
I set out to write my life as I was living it: like the ‘talking poem’ or ‘tape for the turn of the year,’ but, as I told myself, I wouldn’t hold myself to a schedule. Whenever a writer says “schedule,” it means that they don’t have a job. Academic poetry isn’t a job. Keeping appointments isn’t a job. Running errands, even for family, isn’t a job.
To write one’s life off-schedule, so to speak, meant never talking about what was important to the world at any point in time, because talking about what is important feels too much like a job. And I already have two. To write one’s life off-schedule: it meant a sex life, my vocation. It meant not talking about the initial Quarantine, the Uprisings (all over the world), the Great Harmonic Disarticulation, the Great Concealment (and those who conceal), the virus, the so-called election, the so-called Insurgency, the collective desire to burn, the collective desire to break quarantine.
But rather sex, kissing people during a pandemic, learning to be lovable again, walking, writing about walking, writing about Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Henri Bergson, William James, Maurizio Lazzarato, Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Part of it? These words have not scaled the levels of memory high enough—in my regard—to be considered poetic. This brings up troubling distance, once again, between revolution and aesthetics. What I hoped to show in my writings was the emergence in the smaller aspects of life of a new sensibility, ethical and aesthetic, endemic to time. Of a period.
Were I to add dates, I asked of my writing, would it correspond impartially to events in the life of the reader? As their eyes process the page data. 1.17.21. Like that.
Today I mourned, more personally, my grandfather. I walked around Watertown with B. The froyo shop owner asked me to come back later for a sample of something dairy-free. “It’s the oldest food known to man,” he said.
I feel like going against orders, but against whose command? God came back in focus in a very God way.
~
A day in the life of White Buddha: I name this particular performance grateful to be living when nothing threatens my living. Inhale bagel and coffee. Grateful to my living when all I do is threaten what is outside the status quo with obliteration. Image of a canyon, introduced. Image of a white guy shirtlessly sitting in state, in a state of calm, in a State of violence, to fend off the violence that doesn’t even look his direction. I know my love is pure. I know my love is only so pure.
Violence that he’s known only in between those events in which he’s “let go.” When I pay attention to the love the State offers me I’m held protected like a white couple’s child. Like a pooch in the back of a Land Rover. Like a cake in the back of a Rav 4. Like a vegan Christian Q-Shaman. I can be bad and pay for that being bad without having to prove that I’m good. There’s no such thing as it. Anyway.
May I let this cat in the house
May I please have a cat
May I be granted immunity
From harm
1.24.21
This love (N.’s love) exhausts: not financially, in the sense of depleting the means of my purchasing power—although, at some point, after all this mileage, I’ll need a new car. Exhausts creatively, or approaches that which I had thought of as the threshold of exhaustion and obliteration (what one finds past the threshold takes three forms, only one of them virtual: 1) more exhaustion, as in, the prolongation of a limit [the outbounding of a multiplicity]; 2) sleep [we all know what happens in sleep, what comes during and after, a person-less duration]; 3) catatonia as the model for death, which necessarily does not include dying, the actual act, the bye-bye, hush-hush). Pushes me to experiment, which is to say, pulls wool over my eyes, then milk over the wool, naked as a. Jaybird.
Walking had been a way to exhaust, or test a potential. I was replaying The Wild Hunt. What else could I do with my body to teach my body to learn? (Walking) meditation should not have a goal, which doesn’t preclude any other incurred states of being an effectual standard. An expectation, I should say. Anticipation?
Some cold hard facts of my being have repeatedly cropped up in my thinking, in those unusually clear hours of my commute, like:
I can no longer aim down the sight of a rifle due to an astigmatism in my right eye.
What implications do such claims pose to my life I am living?
When I sit and place one hand to the other, crescents touching at their tips, it’s as if I’m being cleaned.
2.1.21
In the beginning, I tried but failed to grasp an impact of so many deaths. That is, I couldn’t produce a reaction from within myself adequate to the loss of life that I was enjoined, by Liberals and Leftists alike, to bear witness. And not just any kind of witness, but the witness of grief. Instead, my mind centered on precarity, on layoffs. My own and others I cared about.
I began, though not with the intention of drawing a connection, to read memoirs of AIDS. Close to the Knives, Crazy For Vincent. The latter contains one of the most tender moments, in a posthumous archive of tenderness, involving a sage-like Foucault.
Unlike us, those who suffered AIDS at its frontline only had the tally of their own ghostly abscesses to justify their grief. They reacted politically, what we can call molarly political, to the cessation of the political visibility of what we can call their molecular politics. Wojnarowicz famously: I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america.
I watched the clip from David France’s How To Survive A Plague (from PBS’s Independent Lens)—where the ACTUP members, as well as other activists and family members of the dead, surrounding the Capitol hoist one another up to toss the ashes of their lost onto the Presidential Lawn, the chorus of “shame,” the chorus of “change,” the chorus of “I love you, Mike”—one hundred thousand million times.
~
From the blog Splintering Bone Ashes: “an aggressively enraged sense of injustice, committed to the idea that, because I must endure increasingly austere working conditions (wage freezes, loss of benefits, declining pension pot, erasure of job security and increasing precarity) then everyone else must too.”
But also the glory.
I read more articles than ever before now, forced to work, and also somewhat relieved to work, behind plexiglass shims with an iPad and a clicker to count the people who wander in. Often unmasked. Often perturbed by the apparatuses of biopolitical management made visible.
May I have your address
May I have your home phone
Signature: n., the boundaries of usage considerably shifted while the semantic material remains indifferently there.
Signature: n., as in heat, as in the residue we carry unaware.
We called it a Death Cult because it only cared about sparing some of us, and because those of us who didn’t care believed we would be among those who would be spared because we believed it.
May I have ease of well being
May I have what was owed me
May I not have to justify my living while making my living
May I see it so clearly
This was a symptom of all we had to work with, which is language, which is never enough.
I am not thankful to be working.
2.9.21
All of a sudden, the only way authority could operate was via emergency powers: compensation came by way of “paid emergency sick leave,” to which everyone was entitled and identified-by simultaneously.
People said: I would have never believed the public library a place of such bitter labor dispute.
But this is how labor works everywhere.
A library, unlike a University (in its current form), is a workplace. The University is still just a factory. A workplace is carpeted, run by part-time, non-benefited ‘overqualified’ gig-workers. The work-place, importantly, looks and sounds like a workplace.
Auctoritas.
~
I have nothing to say other than the saying of these notations. Disenchantment doesn’t return the enchanted thing to its original state. It edges
Notation as a non-totalizing way to go about theorizing from beneath the bomb-shards of the Global Civil War. War enrages my impotence. I don’t want to publish. I want to write fragments like the ones from the work computer, titled From the work computer, August 2020 and From the work computer, September 2020.
2.4.21
Sweet, White Buddhism: the day after my birthday. We’d driven out West (Western Mass) to, among other things, visit the Leverett Peace Pagoda. Snowmelt. A statue, not far from the entrance. Woman and Serpent. Cambodian Monastery means snakes galore. Though born a rural Missourian, not my cup of tea.
Call this performance Not necessarily knowing what to expect, though certainly not expecting serpents, enlightenment, or either of the passions of the tribe of calamities: the feeling of having just profaned an ageless ritual, the feeling of having flubbed God’s instructions.
Is it correct/respectful to have said Woman and Serpent?
A tough layer of snow had covered mostly everything, except for some of the statues which, seeing them uncovered, I imagined either resonated enough internal heat or drew to their surfaces enough visual heat that ice couldn’t take hold. The kind of imaginative flight I’m permitted on vacation. New sights generate new physical logics.
N. claimed to remember the path to the pagoda with the vocal assurance she uses in every claim, and so we parked and walked between what looked like hastily fashioned cottages presumably for worshippers? groundskeepers? I wasn’t sure how holy places worked. I wasn’t sure if this was a holy place or the simulation of one. The ice further alienated me.
The way to the pagoda led uphill, a boon to the non-traction my Doc Martin’s lent my mobility.
Uphill in a foot of snow. Boots digging in and slipping further with every. Snow really fucks with the so-thought unslippable surfaces of the world.
There was the sense of seeing something we weren’t meant to see, as well as the sense—the steeple of the pagoda lit up in gold and sunset light—of seeing something ‘you don’t see every day.’
No one around but the presence of ritual, the space of ritual that lays out a path. The pagoda is circular, meant to invite one to walk a circumference in contemplation. And we did, through the snow. Every 45 degrees there sat a golden Buddha on different stages of his journey. Who knew how to decipher it.
Once around, I googled whether or not we’d done it right. We hadn’t.
~
White Buddhism allows for a pastiche of religiosities to compete for the interpretant’s titling. Life, as most religions conclude, is inherently (and eternally) wrong. I tend to believe that if your arm moves in a direction your arm moves in a direction that it should. I tend to believe in Pragmatism as an anti-humanism, which is antithetical to religion but not, as I’m reminded, religious experience.
I remember first learning the word anathema in the metaphorical relationship of a poet between a father and son. Seemed about right. I remember learning the concept of sitting, or of meditating. Someone said, it’s like you’re balancing at the edge of the world. Whose world. A woman I desperately wanted to be my one and only love relayed to me a description of meditating from Ginsberg: like a thumb wiping the dirt off a mirror (the brain). Later in life, Deleuze would call the brain a screen.
Screen upon which-is is projected, not a screen door one passes through. Glass, as a child, acted a lot like speech: bisecting one from the inside, and from within. This was not a transcendental synthesis yet, but the breaking one off from a group of things. Like a statue.
If meditation is a practice of courting multiplicity why does there remain a trope of withdrawal?
I chose, as always, the Whitmanesque immersion over the secluded, occluded denial of influence. Influence: abrasion, inculcation, implication and contagion; of it all. Even the early Desert Fathers discovered retributive care only by remaining open to harm.
2.23.21
Washington Post: “First migrant facility for children opens under Biden.”
White House Press Sec. Jen Psaki: “This is not kids being kept in cages. This is a facility that was opened, that’s going to follow the same standards as other HHS facilities.”
This is not ____ being kept in cages.
This is a _____ that was opened.
I’ve been practicing the five minute rule. If a task takes less than 5 minutes to do it, I do it.
“Compounding these smaller tasks,” says a stranger on Tik Tok, “creates momentum to complete the bigger tasks.”
To the camp counselors (administrators of the United States government, private contractors hired to build such structures—in this case, a shipping container manufacturer—and individuals to watch the detained—our only eyes, whose recorded data remains invisible to us) their duty is to the stewardship of these extra-legal beings who are nonetheless on their way to one of two ends: the extreme of so-defined extra-legal exclusion (death), or expulsion from the between-space of the camp.
“...an apparently innocuous space...actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civility and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign” (Homo Sacer: Soveriegn Power and Bare Life, 174).
~
Suffering. Not much more, goes my contention, should ever be said about suffering. The apparatus through which so many have justified. So much.
People love being, being reminded.
All the while, stepping back from their role as a witness. Where do I place this in the narrative of my life? Modern life, such as it’s mediated, can only see deja vu-vision. The immediate commodification that cuts off possibility from tasting of its divine place-taking.
~
These notations. In the beginning I still had the experiences of reading Bellamy’s Pink Steam, Tupitsyn’s Picture Cycle, Lisa’s Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture, and of course Dictee, engendering compositional possibilities.
I didn’t want to start a blog for the thousandth time. I wanted to continue the Walk, as it had begun in my mind, with Guattari and Oliveros, their coupling, their catastrophizing of my world, their interlinking, their belief in belief.
Justification of the writing-machine, by and through which I attempt to write my life as it is happening, comes from a desire to escape the dipolic impulse of autobiographers to either relinquish singularity in the form of a romantic universalizing by which the narrative of their life could have an end, or produce a stultifying but nonetheless en vogue archaeology of what one calls one’s trauma (which is not to deny the presence—the ever-presence—of traumatic symptoms acting like speed limit signs on the personological and its deterritorialization) in the service, as far as I can see it, of amending the dominant “story of history,” ultimately contributing to what will have become a truer or neglected archive. City of lost toys.
I likewise hesitate to call this writing fragmentary, because I believe ‘to fragment’ has lost all potency in such a stage of compartmentalization of existential possibility. Paratactic, rather. That attests to the continual, renewable connection across a breakage, void-river. Paratactic, strobe-writing: void-rover.
~
I didn’t want to write about the plague years as they were happening because, just a week ago, someone tweeted “I feel like we’re all just now beginning to process all of this.” As if process were revolutionary end.
2.4.21
Trudging through the ever-melt, the renewing freeze, up to—what N. assured me—was a structure that I would not, in my travels, want to miss. Being in the presence of. There is a peace pagoda. Western Massachusetts, like a Christmas Store, always stuck in season. Gold light: “The Golden mountain is in California.”
Feeling as if I’d stumbled upon a secret. What is the form of the secret, or is secret the form of the divine? The mystery and the ministry. I feared what I was looking at, in being a place of worship, was looking at me—or at least was visible, in a way like a portal between places of seeing, the world and the other world.
Not the Pagoda. A pavilioned shrine. Statue of a figure with big bright green snakes peeking out from behind both shoulders. Candles and smaller statues laid out. Strange coins in gold or silver bowls. A bunch of rugs laid down. A bunch of eyes, facing out of the pavilion. On a post at one of its corners, a donation box, for dollar bills.
“Let’s walk a little further,” N. said, “But this doesn’t look familiar.”
“Did you hear a car?”
“No. Nothing.”
~
Another pavilion, though boarded up. Technically a very large shed, like the one in which my father built us four particle-board rooms to sleep in during the summer-fall-winter of 1999, while we were building “the house.” To the previous pavilion, there’d been steps within which we could add out tread, but to this other—with its thin boarded walls and cellophane windows—no artifact of past explorers existed. Maybe the trail picked up elsewhere, beyond the structure. Possibly snow covered. Looked like a construction site. Wondered what they were building. We entered a doorframe and shuddered at the sight of a sleeping Buddha in orange, made of plaster? Enormous. At least 15” high, 50” long.
“Is this the pagoda?”
“Absolutely not. This…”
“Is something else.”
How do you get to the top of this hill?
Through the trees, the golden top of the pagoda shone like a thumb just taken out of a mouth, glistening.
~
A month later, transcribing all of this, I’m compelled to research the places we visited.
To my interest and embarrassment, the place we’d visited had been di-parate: a kind of Buddhist amusement park? The Cambodian monastery Wat Kiryvongsa Bopharam, where we’d seen the snake divinities, the heads in the snow, the sleeping Buddha; and the Nipponzan-Myōhōji Peace Pagoda, built by the eponymous Japanese Buddhist Order. Nichidatsu Fuji, who founded the order, I’ve found in my reading, was so deeply affected by the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and dedicated the remainder of his life to building these structures across the globe.
Wat Kiryvongsa Bopharam had been established after Nipponzan-Myōhōji, who were invited to Western Massachusetts at the latter’s request. The Peace Pagoda won approval of the town of Leverett in 1984, and very immediately construction began, aided by local Catholic nuns. Should I change the essay or just tack on a correction at the end, I text N., caught up as my accomplice, who deemed our ignorance. N. texts: “The whitest Buddhism of all?”
~
All of this.
All of this matters, though it doesn’t necessarily strategically mean. Though it may someday, or already may for someone, whose voice has never been given.
What can the monastery be in America but a mirror of defeat? A bare architecture gesturing to nothing substantially timeless, though it purports to have access to that. To whom does it give this access other than a people whose trace is already in the process of being defiled? Can one sit here, can one sit for an hour here.
“To exist to be being, when I’m already being.”
May I be free from pain
May I have
May I have freedom from pain
May I have not the shock, but the grief of pain
May I have something for which to show my forgiveness
May I be aware of the Great Harmonic Disarticulation
May I have pencils
Pencils
May I have White Buddhism as a salve for burning real pragmatic
May I have
~
Tell him
That we who follow you
Invented forgiveness
May I be
May I have
May I be
May I have
May I be
May I be
~
Futile — the winds —
Hours before, we’d been on top of the covers in the Allen House Inn (the William Morris Room) fearing we’d sullied the doilied coverlet with our fluids. We’d been mistaken as two on a honeymoon, so we followed suit. Pained — like wet leaves blown onto a tree — conjoined, sharing a breathing. Whatever one of us bent over the other. Episodes of Jeopardy in between. The ‘leaden donkey.’ The ‘load.’