Finding Connection in the Age of Solitude
An English Capstone and Künstlerroman by Your's Truly
authors.note
this piece is the interwoven thread between every conversation i’ve had, artwork i’ve engaged with and star-crossed ideas furiously melded, catalyzed into a checkpoint, marking my position at this transition point in my life. italicized texts are repurposed from my last two years of writing projects. almost all are located here. ultimately, this assemblage seeks a connective tissue both between self and other and between writer and project, my golden record for parting the tides of alienation. if you'd like an annotated version, message me however you might do so! footnotes were a little complicated to implement here. now enjoy!
intro.
It’s here that we unearth that which lies at the beating heart of all my projects, academic and artistic, undergirds my morality and temperament. In spelunking through the shadows between lights, I forever seek the red thread, that which determines a coherent throughline of self, stake and soul. may my ink dye you seen. Connection is the connection (at least battling alienation, but I like to stay positive). Relationality. Kinship. These words ring in brutal neon, sopped with buzzings, but vigour all the same, profoundly plucking each aching strand down which I travel. Behind the self-reflective immersiveness of a screen, behind my fears that language is not enough to touch an errant shadow, that our minds can be more than prescribed, that our art can be more than beautiful, that beneath the cruel walls of urban order and the cruel labels in which our flesh is mired, beneath it all lies an aching alienation that need not exist. I’m a lonely broad, made or chosen doesn’t matter. What must be organized against is the cruel structures we’ve imposed on ourselves. The world we cohabit seeks to fracture, divide, isolate, the paradox of entropy deep in its code.
To be perceived is to be betrayed and reduced from our glorious being! It reminds us we are not the only thing in the world, even if just for a moment, that all pain and pleasure can be digested and nourished through images. It is a haunting prospect, reduction. Why have a stake in anything if we can be made so small? Add to that our existence in a story none of us wrote, bound ‘til the end-of-the-line to determinist futures built on “history” and “progress” as solved concepts. Why care about being called talented, cool or brilliant when all the glimpses of empowerment are lost to greater forces? If we can’t mount the world on our shoulders, why even bother fighting to support a droplet of it?
Thus, there is one project worthy of our energy, one will-to-power which itself requires a deep strength: the self. No one can take our little inner worlds, our sculpted islands. We mount them with ivory towers and trinkets, guarding ourselves from the razor’s edge, laying the foundations for a formidable future. It’s all we can do. If we can’t have the world, we can have this little island, right? Make it pretty. Our own private peacocks!
Oh, but what a gutless coward your dear writer is, reader! Comfort and convenience, through all the insignificant ways I challenge myself, are the guiding principles of our late-capitalist time. To outright reject them on behalf of other people is a bold ask, one forwardly sacrificial with how much of our lives are now entrenched in self-cultivation and performance.
I need to be transparent, to come clean, reader. I’m fucking exhausted. Spent of every cent! With every day under the blade, my flame of passionate resistance falters more and more. Beacons need oil, something one body alone can only make so much of. The vampires of emotional warfare linger in my senses and drought my supply. I’m sick of raging on a page, tired of feeling the answers are so fucking clear, but feeling so powerless to even guard those closest to me from being compromised. I’m sick of just reading books, of exploring beautiful art, of caring for my body, being presentable, keeping the flame of spite and passion burning deep in my core. I love all these pursuits dearly, yet I loathe them. I loathe them because I’ve lost my stake in them. Without connection, my creature comforts devour me. My body demands more than I feel like giving it. My mind is so obsessed with moral and intellectual perfection, but what’s the point? What’s the point of it all if it’s only driving more and more of a wedge between myself and the people I want to have these things for? What’s the point of a fancy tongue if I’m too guarded to say ‘I love you’, too motivated to just let myself agree? Too myopic to be a good listener? I’m tired of feeling the words of others go over my head, of hearing stories of strife and being unable to brew a draught, of seeing every attempt I make at changing someone’s life vanish in the sea of inner noise. I feel so powerless and so alone and the world is only getting crueler and the people closest are only growing more distant. My family and friends have spread out, my peers feel ephemeral and I’ve been told to believe that all love is temporary. We’re all just hikers crossing paths in a snowstorm… It’s all mediated by technology, by language, by fleeting minutiae and the organization of space. I have one authentic desire: that we can fuck each other’s feelings.
>> "We fuck into unity, love into resonance. We rumble in the belly of an acoustic guitar. Let my heart hum the notes of romance. Fuck my feels, not my flesh… Feel the tingle of my electric kinetics, my static-shock blazed thoughts. Fuck the spectral soul of intelligence. Love my kinetic matter as it tingles with profound philosophies, fireflies patterned after argyle mathematics and angular curvatures. Fuck my reading books on a breezy day. Fuck my long walks through a foggy coastal city. Fuck my idyllic reveries, my cotton-candy dreams. Feel the nerves tingle with the pleasure they give me. The brain will sing its final orchestra, soaking up the semen seeded with profound spermatozoa, with pure sensory luster and intellectual fluorescence. It’s hot to the touch, steaming. Each wrinkle a sterile neon-basked alleyway flooded with your milky ooze, exuding carnal and social life within its unobservable patterns and god-carved ruptures." (2-6-25)
Yet these hormonal erotics will never arrive. These fleshless dreams, deluded by trauma, are beyond the pale. A coalition, at the very least, the cultivation of a sandy little archipelago, a happy village of our boredom-built ivory towers. We need to touch. It’s one thing I feel safe in saying we all want. Crabs in a bucket no longer, my friends. No longer shall we adhere to the language of this alien world. In the mounting malaise of existence under global authoritarianism and capitalism, chained and soaked by the turgid ripples of colonial violence and assimilated bodies, it is more crucial than ever that we remember how to weave these webs, sink our heels into the earth we’ve been born to and claim our citizenship. We may live in a story none of us wrote, but to abandon the human project is to abandon each other, is to abandon any hope we have of being the ones to wet the pen.
Stories don’t end, history rolls on and contorts their form. Authors craft imaginings but it is the readers who carry stories in their genes (as relations, as memories, as feelings, as ideas, as legacies). Thus it is not my role to write the words people need to hear to guide them from such darkness. It’s an impossible task for one student of the world to pursue. What I can do is imagine for myself. I write with intrigue in providing myself the words and resistances, in crafting and motivating whatever actions might reroute myself from a cruel future. Galvanize, galvanize. If my words can’t be sticky and electric, if they can’t even move my lulled heart, what purpose do they have? I hope here to formulate a personal blueprint to overcome these social obstacles and concoct a form of writing that liberates futurity from pacified gall. If such is personally impossible, perhaps at the very least my project can be seen, understood, felt. An errant fucking spelled out in ink that can be wafted to those islands beyond me. If a single mind can be touched, if a single bridge can be woven, then the revolutionized future I so fervently desire can at least stand a chance.
phase.1 - fracture.points
[Breaking news! Conflict escalates! Bodies like yours are shot down and rot! I win again and damn your pathetic lives! Fracture point.] New territories are drawn, in all of which bodies are alienated, minds made doubly conscious. How many intersections must we stand at the crossroads of until we stand in solitude? [As many as it takes to corral them away from us. Another label, sir/madam? Our culture is under siege! Have we supplied you with enough descriptors for you to finally be with us, reactively outraged at the empowered powerless and the privileged clawed into equity?] Fracture point. [Noise pollution is praxis! Burn the bridges of those who dissent, who sing their irreducible ballads and assert us alike! This is war, private! They’re saying a body like yours can’t exist! Fracture point.] My goodness, reader, what an absolute crisis we exist in. We are in community only by the shared value of identifying radically against one another.
Noise bubbles away in our skulls, noise that makes us feel pretty when it swings our way and in-the-crosshairs when not. There is a daring kinship, even as roads and straits slice through our interwovenness, yet it is imbibed with militancy. [The nuclear family is under attack by woke radicals! Our collective culture is being eroded and must be defended from these dissidents!] These are the bonds by which we are galvanized: collectivity on behalf of preserving a perceived, yet hollow individuality where no language, no corpse is sacred. A weird, selfish age to traverse, where each of us is in some way under the heel, brutalized by brunt-force trauma in the war for the pen, over what story gets told and which vanishes into the mold-sopped corners of memory. To be condemned to the past, to be successfully excised, is the worst fear of those who stake their identity on the strivances of I-suffer-the-least ideology. [I need to do something, we need to do something! The battle for informational clarity must be won! Fracture point. Every rotten pronouncement is candy-sweet in the mouth of my kin!]
>> “Something must be done to ebb the growing threat of reactionary politics and its avenues of conditioning, to reject buzzwords and masked subjectivities from entering our understanding. For now, the best we can do is train ourselves to think critically, to know the face of deceptive conditioning, and to not cower from the task of combating such rhetoric. There is no good and evil but that which we birth.” (12-13-24)
>> “It is our responsibility to refuse technological immersion from controlling the movements of our bodies and minds to guard against naturalizing a consumptive worldview and in reflecting relationally, not in anticipation, of their continued presence in our lives.” (11-10-25)
Again and again, the didact resurges. Thee of militant morality! There’s stake in all this activism, no? What is it... think now… Ah yes! Like the worst of us, I just want peace for myself. The peace I used to have within the status quo. It’s a dead-end begging the big-wigs for scraps, when will you learn? The only form of mending is to be better, to think better, to not be fooled. That’s the thesis! Essay over! Has the calm washed over you yet?
>> “my investment in its misery businesses is consuming the innocence and charity in my soul. it keeps telling me to claw up the heap of my fellow starvers, dig my talons into their ribs. “join the subdermal power machine if you’re smart and based”. kill yourself. go play under the elephant’s foot. I’ve never wanted to live, but now I have to. part for the plot, part to resist.” (7-12-25)
And thus violence inescapably echoes. The mirror remains unbroken and reflects the violence back on its subject. Every bold individual boxed into a hall of mirrors where their own moral insecurities are inflated ‘cross all others. If I can’t be good, then why exist? What ideal are we chasing? The right to assert our belief of goodness onto others? Everyone thinks they’re after their own good, so you tell yourself, so you repeat to yourself. Fracture point. Because being good has never been objectively good. Fracture point. We all want more and someone else is barring us from it. The Kingdom of Ends is only a good idea if we are free to kill those violating it. It keeps getting worse, and every pointed hand greases the blaze.
>> "you’re no one. pathetic human waste with a smile carved in for photoshoots. no principles but how wet your dick can get and how full your belly is. you salivate at boot-stomping me because the subdermal power machines made you cry so much as a kid that you thought joining the big club was the only way to stop the flow of tears. now ain’t that just interesting. cunt. CUNT. roving solipsistic waste of semen. piece of spattered monkey-shit. gag on the micro-dick you so flauntingly embody. RAPIST of every bit of good and mercy. burn forever in the fires you penned to scare us! sorry, I have poor impulse control thanks to your subdermal venom. another lunatic girl struggles to keep her hate in… big woop. all I have left to say is rage in this ilk. just know I fucking hate you.” (7-12-25)
But I yearn for infernos, so I keep building strawmen, engulfing them in pent-up rage. I see their faces in all venues of media, culture and society. Through ink, I scorch them. Haha… oh dearly beloved schadenfreude! I’ve been told it’s rude to point, reader, but it’s the only way of being in community with people that doesn’t require lifting the pen. Violence-to breeds violence-from. My desperate craving for solutions, revolt, tumult, revolution arise from my incapacity for a non-violent subjectivity. The want to destroy both mirror-self and wrong-self. Relationality is a cool model, as it acknowledges mirrors as such. It’s the best I know.
Yet still, some information, even on reflecting on its role, engulfs you. What’s the result of looking into a mirror that’s already preoccupied with reflecting the conditions it was produced under? The mirror of internalized trauma is undullable, unshattering. There is only the subject in all reactions and relations, no connective potential that isn’t imagistic. People made pictures, scanline approximations of our gloried electric meat. It’s a haunting thought, yet one so banal, that pixels can hold me. Mirrors are the great insulators, where all conversation of form gets collapsed into discussion of one’s own. Reader, let us recollect. Perhaps the fracture points flow not from derisive division, divisive derision, but from the cruel visibility of having a body amidst the tempests of fire.
I’m a real narcissus, side-eyeing windows as I stroll past, intoxicated by my breadth and bubbling fingers. I like images when I make them myself. And yet I fear. Unfathomably, I fear. Fracture point. Powerlessness. Do I fear them or do I presume that which must be feared? The us vs. them of traumatizing form.
phase.2 - trauma.forms
>> “The bees hum a haunting mantra in a melody of needles as they close in: reality is someone else’s. Reality is someone else’s. Our reality is another’s. Theirs is mine and mine is theirs. The unspoken, unacknowledged curse by which all our feelings of hate arise. Around others, I do not experience life through my eyes. I experience it through theirs. My mind pours outward, filling them with molten metal that shapes into the deepest recesses of my insecurity.” (8-3-24)
It’s tempting to chase the Freudian seed of my profound fear of eyes. I have answers, we’ll get to them. In the writing session following the one I just quoted, and in keeping with the imagistic tradition, my proposal was that everyone is just a director to a camera seeking a compelling shot. Cute, right? They’re staring because I’m [pretty | interesting-looking | immediate | passively present en route to brighter pastures]. It’s not the common stumbles that arise verbally, the, “Miss, I mean, sir.” or the “It’s hi- he- theirs” or “What even are you?”.
Wanna hear a secret? Until last week, I’d never worn a skirt, hadn’t swam in four years. Until a few months ago, I never wore make-up out, or shorts, and refused myself outward romance and sexuality. I’m still a pushover. Asserting oneself is the stereotype, after all. I trained myself to smile when I feel uncomfortable, and sometimes people ask what’s on my mind. I touch my face for comfort when I’m anxious and people think I look pensive because of it. Or maybe it’s a stim. I don’t know, I’m not diagnosed with anything. “You’re definitely something” is my favourite of my diagnoses. I sit against the wall when I don’t know people and only speak very safely, never of myself, but I’ve been told it’s cool ( “if you’re hot, it’s cool”, as I apparently am).
>>“We’re going on vacation to [Red State] in December” >> “Not going” >> “You never come on family vacations anymore [You never go places I feel safe] / visit with your [extended] family” [they only see the dead parts of me. I might’ve known what love meant sooner without playing this game...] (a loved one. this week. fracture point.)
>> “Visiting the Middle East would be cool, sucks there’re travel bans” >> “I… there’s no way I’d go regardless [My body is illegal there] Not sure I’d be able to feel safe in any of these places” >> “Why? Not white enough for you? Joking” (loved ones. this week. fracture point.)
>> "How cool would it be to go on a month-long road trip around the country?” [I’ll run out of pills, I’ll need so many bathroom breaks at uncertain pitstops, I don’t know what red state eyes see differently, you’re all men and I’m not, even if you don’t see that, I don’t have any assumption of invincibility anymore.] “I don’t think I’d want to go with you (but don’t let that stop you…)” >> “What, why not?” >> “I, uh… spending that much money scares me. Plus I… I can’t not work on stuff for that long” >> “Always so obsessed with that… gotta lighten up once in a while” [I fear spending because every major venue seems only to reinforce the strength and validity of the system I’m alienated by.] (loved ones. fracture point.)
“He just told me…” >> “I love this old picture of you.” >> “Oh, he looks great there.” >> “Do you still love me, *******?” (lov- people who know better. this week. fracture point.)
Sometimes I need to remind myself these tiny, quotidian infractions are infractions at all. Every person I love has had at least one, after all, reader. I don’t hold it against you. I’m told they don’t mean it, believe they just don’t think about it. The sublingual power-systems they voice have nothing to do with them, just the past and future converging blindly on their present. [It’s just your irrational fear freezing you, they won’t-] I don’t know what I want. I have no right to complain. I’m white, well-off, broadly accel and was raised to pursue myself. I’ve never been sexually exploited, meaningfully injured or spent more than a day without security. Hell, I used to be on the straightest road there was. If I’m traumatized, what hope does everyone else have? The thing about being mirrored, fractured by binaries and labels, is that at some point, none are left without bruises.
>> “My Doctor says I’m traumatized, but I can’t help but smile.
I know no source, no one who’s burned, in ways can’t reconcile
Yet in every day and hour, I feel my flight from here,
Can’t focus on feelings, readings, schemings, all because I’m queer?” (10-9-24)
>> “I’m a faggot. I’m a filthy fucking faggot who deserves to hang from a tree. I deserve nothing but fragments of quickfire steel gliding through my scalp, fracturing my skull, chunks of bone permeating, rupturing my brain. That's what my country has decided this evening.” (11-5-24)
Trauma, as it manifests in my mind, has told two stories of our connective fabric: first that everyone is more traumatized than me and deserves grace, and second that everyone makes active choices to bring more trauma upon me and my ilk. In this cruel perceptual, when those beneath you need treatment and those above you need to be hidden from, with vague clarification of who’s who, alienating myself is the safest bet. How funny I’m the one to conclude my own seclusion. Over and over. Decisions made before the mirror are the hardest to test. My life is dictated by assuming cruelty and does nothing to challenge it to get to keep having friends. Challenge them on ideological, but not active grounds.
Bottling hasn’t been my mode for a while. Exiles hurt more than reduction, after a point. Over the last two years, I’ve written for therapy. Feel like shit? Open a google doc and just bleed out the tension. Blood makes excellent, fertile ink, let me tell you. My words became seminal, both to this project and my own little base of those somehow swooned by my rotting, sanguine fumes. These fumes, reader, this effluvia. Like the scent? Well here’s someone who did where it actually touched me. Put aside all the “you’re so talented” bullshit and… listened in the way I wanted to be read as. Eyes as justice. Take a look:
Not sure if this person knows, but this is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me. The most cutting at least, in spite of the fact they don’t refer to or compliment me at all. It’s just… my art they’re seeing. Just a blood-penned screed against labels that did something to help see someone else as they wanted to be seen in a vulnerable moment. They met me where I stood in the moment of writing that piece and, fuck if that isn’t what this all is for. Painting a beach for us to hang out on together so they didn’t have to long for one anymore, ha. The power, the beauty, the voice I craved and feared using in the physical world coalesced in visible form through my public pen, my scribble on a bathroom stall. United in grief, we found home in each other.
Six months before writing rottweiler., the game in reference, I was inspired to make games again. I was on the reader end with a game called Madotsuki’s Closet. A free fifteen-minute “game” by someone with the username Bagenzo. Her story gave words to my trans grief, my temporal isolation, my identifying with “perversion”, my loss of childhood and I weeped for an hour straight after. Through the tears, I wrote a “game review” (what I consider to be my first therapy essay) where I tell my own story and conceptualize art as bridges into the vast void between the inner worlds of individuals.
>> “Is the game a perfect product, is Bagenzo a perfect writer, or is what I have taken in a perfect addition to my self? I'm not going to bother answering... the void before me has listened long enough. Perhaps I've let one of you onto my bridge, perhaps not. Perhaps I appear self-indulgent. That's alright. As long as my bridge exists for now in this magical somewhere. Don't worry about me, I've made peace with most of this. But something tells me you might not have seen "me" here, right? Maybe you saw your own story mirrored in my words. If art is to be defined as anything, perhaps it's that.” (4-11-24)
Under the conditions of sincere trauma, art can serve as both bridge and mirror. Until now, I’ve supposed the two are juxtaposed. Yet now… can the self be a path to connection? Yes, when it’s beautiful. When it has the power to change how we view the world, move it from cruelty. Some of us have beautiful bodies, beautiful minds, beautiful personalities around which people flock. When I received that message, I was informed my blood had become beautiful, that I became someone else’s Bagenzo. But better yet, they reached out to me, made their inspiration mutual by authenticating that at last, I had something beautiful. Perhaps I owe the artists that made me more...
>> “There’s something beautiful, just beyond the fog.” (8-2-24)
phase.3 - the.necessity.of.stake
In the twisting labyrinth of mirrors, hardening against solipsism becomes a tough sell. When everything is illusory, why not project subordinance onto the sea of me-shaped sheep? Solipsism is the logical end of a liberated alienation, a firm claim to one’s solo objectivity. The internet, the news, the media, as a reality of screens, propagates viewing the other as degraded or mystical. Their words become their own reality, within which all are in response to the almighty I. As such, to stake ourselves in others is radical. To be sincerely invested, not in our ivory towers, but in the well-being of another, is a vulnerable move. Sincere investment is perhaps the most radical thing one can be in the face of entropy.
>> “Love has never been a popular movement. And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people… Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.” (James Baldwin, from Meeting the Man)
My quote just wasn’t as powerful as James Baldwin’s. His words aren’t just haunting my halls, they are me. We’re one under love. He’s one of hundreds, thousands of ghosts who have inextricably changed me, led me to the decision that is me. He’s part of the reason I can love my reflection. Thus, I return to the simultaneous bridge and mirror. Art is not the sole titan of heart-touching, but every person represents the possibility of connective bridge and empathetic mirror. The existence of others as worthy of empathy is in itself, so deeply radical. The bored service worker, the incarcerated man, a woman in Sudan, the richest men in the world, are all me. Equal to me. Understand what that means, reader. It feels plain to call these figures human, but realistically how little I shed for a lost life on the other side of the world. My connective web is only so wide, right? Why must it be? To be radically passionate about the human condition in every instance of being is to be a sincere, loving philanthrope.
When you love everyone at the scale we have, even as mirrors, otherdom is in no scarcity. Even writing these declarations, I’m hesitant to claim them. They’re Christian words, words that require me to adopt the belief that I shouldn’t wish harm on the Nazis, politicians and tech workers that stifle and lobby against my existence. After enough of us die for our sins as moral saints, the tragedy is dulled. These figures are all representatives for the loud absence of the undead: swallowed and regurged by bureaucratic, chauvinistic and dystopian dreams. To have stake only in the dead is to identify with alienation, as empowered as Ozymandias atop his ruins. Idols are always the last to die, the easiest images on which to hitch our stake, but it’s a bridge to nowhere, a love towards corpses, a longing for necromancy. Ask yourself, reader, where is your stake? With the living or the dead? On what do you lay your passion, your love, your empathy? Really, ask yourself. I’ll play along, too.
phase.4 - the.passionate.pen
>> “My goal in life is to become as electric as possible, to galvanize and enliven all that come in contact with me! ... Art can be made selfishly (pleasure-oriented, often unchallenging) or empathetically (seeking to disrupt a status quo/empower an underprivileged group). I want to produce honest, sincere and hard-to-swallow works and distribute them with the intent of moving those who engage to be more critical, educated and motivated towards change... I hope I’m using my privilege (of college/free time) to bring enough charge into my wool to later emit as brightly as possible. With enough bright lights and sufficient electricity, an issue becomes memetic enough to be unignorable and strength will stir abundantly in my oasis of ink.” (2-3-25)
Art is my stake, my passion, my heart, the only place that I show gall. At any given point, I’m either chasing or craving a drive to draw, to make music or code a game or website, maybe some voicework or sculpting. Foremost here, if not apparent, I write spaces, people, feelings. It’s safe to play in ink puddles. Tragically, none of these I can make load-bearing futures, condemned to the gorgeous realm of hobby-work. It’s okay, I don’t mind. I’ll keep my flow of language and wisdoms unfettered from unwarranted social scrutinies. Yet, across all my life’s strides, the title of artist is the most elusive and yet sought after. I’ve dreamt since childhood of a room of my own with a keyboard, library card, sketchbook and the requisite stimulant addiction. Creation is manic, sporadic, unabiding to capitalist time and, as I’ve been taught in my excursions through multi-media works, can easily be as free as continued life is to produce.
Wait, pardon me, reader. Mind if I make a weird move? I’m going to start section 5 before finishing this one, as this conversation will go nowhere without the two talking to one another as they always do in my mind. Alright, cool, cool.
phase.5 - the.passionate.mind
>> “Academics I hesitate with, for while it is a collective, supplemental career that can do a lot of good, I fear it too insular to serve the populations it often writes to. Academics have far more idealisms figured out than are actually in practice, fixate on the nuances along rarely-discussed baselines. I don’t think it’s malicious, just the consequences of operating at a very high level. But it’s writing on often inaccessible forums the most disempowered don't have enough knowledge or energy to tap into that gives me pause. I would prefer to disseminate my electricity through a medium financially and conceptually accessible to those who most need to hear it, but academics'll pay, it's something I can probably do and something I hope does good, but who knows these days.” (2-3-25)
I fear my tongue has grown too fancy. I fear my prose, as naturally as it flows, is riddled with abstraction and structural complexity. Neither is intentional, I just have a queer, overactive mind that likes to play with its ink-marinated food. I have an… artistically-oriented mind, one might say. That’s not an intrinsic quality, I’m just not sure if I can quantify all the guff I spew within bourgeois assimilation or whatever the fuck.
The academy is ancient, a longer-standing construct than most nations of the globe. It has operated without significant ceasure for centuries, as theory, science and research are essential to supplementing and quantifying the flows of imagination and identity. Decentralized, yet also the tentacular bind between all knowledge and theory that exists in sustained discussion. The stir of outsider art, culture and transgression is, no matter how hard it writhes, bound to capture by the threads of understanding. Academics respond to patterns, codify them into movements. Knowledge is power, so they say. Knowing the words for how one suffers does a lot to aid in responding to that suffering, just as knowing the means by which people suffer gives imaginative avenues to replicate violence.
. . . . .
The reason I’m combining these two sections is that art and academics share this word “response”. Academics respond to art, respond to ideas. Art is both responded to and a response to its lineage in a canon of ideas. Both are creative productions flowing from, hopefully, passion and stake in the human project, yet a part of me has always positioned them as diametrically opposed; there are two paths before you. A choice needs to be made. One needs to be the darling child.
Three years ago, during a year off from college, I laid the foundation for a writing project centered on two characters: Epol, a law student of refined literacy and taste, and Dion, an alcoholic drop-out who sees the whole world manifest in every object. Their names are a not-so-clever play on Nietzsche’s Apollonian and Dionysian, two opposed yet equally important forces in the creation of art and culture. In my version, Epol envies Dion, for in spite of his incredible ability to play the piano, recreating and articulating the beauty of masterworks, Dion seems to arrive at beauty incidentally. Dion creates and speaks simply to fend off boredom, while Epol orients his whole life towards a greater project, Dion’s free-flowing poetics a sort of muse for him.
In a way, I identify more with Epol, believing what I’ve read and seen are the sole reason my ideas bear any fecundity. Yet I like to think of myself perceived as a Dion, harboring unshirking eccentricities and spilling with saccharine ideals. Perhaps I’m both in one body, jumping back-and-forth when called for. Yet, I feel too much envy to be a Dion. I note the fact that almost all of my savoured relationships, all my most successful human connections, are built on a certain envy (I mean this term positively, or at least neutrally, a desire and aspiration towards some quality of a person). In spite of distance from my personal stake, my friends' unique routes through art and life leave me constantly beguiled. Silence is a vacuous space, so all which goes unstated gets filled with the best and the brightest of one’s own, leaving the limited others I respect to feel as if they’ve contained me as a discourse in their own superiority. Perhaps these friends arrived at a position before I did along more leisurely routes that escaped my obsessive, myopic attention. This is how Dion manifests himself in Epol’s mind, and how he ultimately ends up breaking him as an artist. Epol fears he cannot create art that is not a response to Dion, a negation of what he already knows. He overthinks it, misses the beautiful paths in being bound to viewing art as a guild of genius.
(back to 4.)>> “I stood in the open fields of the bad parts of purgatory until a swarm of bloated mosquitos flocked in, dazed by the reek of exposed encephalic matter. I felt each leg take refuge and nestle between my neurons. I heard the buzzes from the inside of my skull. A sickening tinnitus. My eyes glazed over. Repeat stabs by the divine entomic feminine, by hairy viral strings. Drink my art with thine unfurled liquorice-wheel proboscis. My blood is nectar, my art its sugar. Swell, swell your stomachs with my art. Every sip is creative violence. Every dot of ink spilled is ink spoken of. I am a finite reservoir. I bear only so much art. Please don’t take it all! But to make art is to have less art to give. One can only draw the same subject so many times before people catch on. My art is drinking my other art through motifs! Stop drinking or I won’t be creative enough to go any further!” (11-14-24)
The documentary-game A Beginner’s Guide, which helped incite this paper, explores the creations of fictional game designer, Coda. Coda himself is mysteriously absent from the text. Instead, his friend Davey narrates the spaces and discusses his interpretations of each set. Davey weaves a narrative from these spaces, dictating the motifs and the artist’s state-of-mind behind each work, determining their order and significance all with abundant kindness and praise. Ultimately, it is revealed Coda stopped making games because of Davey, because of the worship of his genius. Coda created out of passion, a want to learn and utilize the tools at his disposal, which only incidentally mirrored his state of mind. Davey’s impositions, including modifying Coda’s games with idiosyncrasies before sharing them with the player, boxed him in. Making games became a labour of upholding a perceived brilliance, expression no longer serving as an act of play. My take-away is, no matter how positively one receives and discusses a work, there is always a certain dissonance, an erasure of parts of the artist’s subjectivity that aren’t immediately apparent to us. Kindness is not always positive, nor is praise, nor is affection. Being a “good person” is not an objective metric for connecting with someone. Perhaps the best we can do is listen and care when even resonating with a work can be selfish.
(5.) It is here I feel great tension with the role of theory and education. I think of how almost every person labeled a post-structuralist or dadaist rejects the label, how being labelled negates and forcibly assimilates the very project they’re attempting. It’s a weird spot I occupy where both my production of art and production of analysis exist within the bounds and baggage of language. In one, words are woven from want for meaning that doesn’t exist, in the other language is imposed. I’ve felt great pause this semester in writing literary analysis that is prescriptive rather than comparative, imposing myself onto the text and bolstering such through the language and concepts of others as validation. As much as my academic works, when sincere, require an emotional bond to a text and its articulations, any speech beyond how I have been personally stirred, even if I’m talking completely past the text, feels unwarranted, a massive fracture point between artist and “consumer” [(4.) I’ve never liked that word].
To exemplify the harm in the prescriptive, I’ll return to my trauma section. I don’t like calling myself transgender, even if I am, for being trans and being queer mean fundamentally different things, hold different assumptions. My difference, not my assimilation, is my embodiment. I am inseparably other, yet impurely woman, both the spice of transgression. The descriptor “queer” is open, an anti-categorization, a signifier of that which is fluid. Queer sexualities, queer genders, queer races, queer minds, queer art all signify entirely different phenomena. Queer theory is the exception. It theorizes queerness, seeks patterns in the untraceable. Yet, even if they exist, as my dozens of conversations with other trans people certainly reveal, it is not that helpful beyond the initial re-imagining of oneself that occurs with a queer awakening. Queerness is a personal truth that needs articulation, not a standardizable form that needs to be described.
(4.) Such panting, tangential prose. I like my flow of ideas like I like my men. [Clarification absent]. This is why the inkweaver needs stake in others, in outreach! The fluid flow of dismantled structures and scrutiny sings in speculation ad aeternum. Stake is personal truth, one that emerges again and again through little linguistic sigils, and passion is the motivation to expound that truth into the left-handed world. Alienation is only so prevalent, in my belief, due to the disconnect between the labels on us and the person beneath. All our little taxonomies are vague as shit, and the shoe fits cleanly for the fewest few. Labels are tense anti-social violence, misplaced stake, a faux community by which to hold all your lil’ twigs in a bundle. Community under capitalism presupposes neat packages, individuals made marketable, targetable, brains contained in brains.
"We sure do love to reduce others to language, but scoff at the notion of becoming mere words on a page…I’ll turn the world into my jargon, my dissenting little memes validating the weight and momentum of my neural brilliance! To live through one's own words isn't enough, I want people to metamorphize into the language I provide, rebirthed as butterflies under my funky fresh descriptors! But me? Become mere descriptor? Fucking puke, dude! Take your labels and shove it!"- ((10/29/24))
Stake does not require being understood, but connection requires being seen beyond our pre-packaged memes, being felt as more than pleasure and comforted for more than pain. That’s the lingua franca. How radical it feels to be sincerely hugged, held tight against another’s body out of loving protection. How radical it feels to sacrifice one’s time and resources to gift a more peaceful life to another person, to treat someone ‘cus you feel like it. Thinking of the nicest thing I’ve been told again,how interesting or skilled as a writer and thinker is a fleeting nicety. But someone who emotionally resonates in their own subjective way with my scribblings? Spoken-to versus spoken-with. Gotta prime my art as a two-way conversation, or as a gift to one’s voice. I’d rather be thought a terrible writer that a few people really fuck with for reasons completely disconnected with me than a writer widely received as good. I’m having fun, ain’t I? Isn’t that enough to be infectious? Aesthetic quality is empty, interpersonal provocation is everything that I strive to stir, the fuel to my manic passion for putting words on the page. I don’t derive anything from being beautiful or interesting or admired. I don’t want to be the target of any of those words, but I would be honoured if the struggles I undertook through giving enough of a shit to keep writing could make even one person’s life better. I create gifts, not products, goddamn it. Lives beyond that can subsist without my, or anyone else’s, ‘objective imposition’ or analysis onto their form.
(5.) Can theory be a gift? Can a scientific claim survive being subjectively-oriented? I think that’s where I struggle with this whole affair. To go into academics, to become a teacher, to write papers that can build out how we think about the world, I need these things to service, not confine the cultivation of ideas. For my grad school essay, I wanted to propose an alternative perception of technology as something that immerses us in their reality, rather than extends our will. Even fancy-tongued, it’s seen as radical to remind theorists that they can exist in a relational, decentralized network. I was told that a writing sample is not the place for playing around, that it is the role of philosophy to press and examine existing knowledge rather than run amok without basis. That to be welcomed into the guild means pliability for being formed into a theory machine. I was told I need to confine myself to responding to existing conceptions before moving to hint at the possibility of what lies outside of further linguistic reinforcement. To theorize in a professional context is to critique what is, yet in a way where we isolate (“distinguish”) oneself from it, to alienate existing conceptions from our imagined ideological future. The only gifts here are self-destructive, either of theory or of the gift recipient.
. . . . .
The idea of achievable truths, of dedicating my life to chasing them, scares me. Stake is one thing, a conviction that realizes a value, but truth is a universal imposition, a tightening of the vice. I think of how Proust’s goal with In Search of Lost Time seems to be piecing together a version of himself on which he can stake his artistic identity, where memories float outside of time and re-emerge incoherently into the forefront of his attention until enough have been accounted for for a portrait of the artist to be built. Literature and other artworks, when oriented towards growth and not consumption, hold strong pull in steering our artist-narrative. It is what these works testify to in our own values, conveyed by our reading that makes art an evergreen interest, battles perfunctory consumption. The artworks we find most divine are beautifully personal, those that perfectly capture where our stake is hitched. A lifetime of prescriptivism is just plain silly. It is by our held differences in interpretation that we’re able to grow into each other, appreciate and witness the world through another person, both in experiencing the narrative told by the work and in how we mythologize and make significant in our lives our own love of some creation. Ultimately, art is the life I-
>> “The propagator of flaw is the rotten toad we all bear, doped off drip-feed wires. Drops of zappage, voltage demons, supercharged lithium ion fireflies beguile the toads tongue whip, crisp the toads tongue-tip into new stages of speech. The toad is stupid. Look how it walks into the electric fence over and over again and forgets there’s a reason it’s been corralled. All the pains of modernity are from stubbing one’s toe on the corral fence trying to run from the others. The toad moans and groans when it stubs its toe.” (2-23-25)
The stream won’t stop flowing. The voices won’t silence. I will never be unified. It’s all consumption, no matter the gait it meanders ‘round your skull with. How many touchstones does it take to visit the whole world, gift passion to your equals? When even gifts are capture-products, when art that resists you continues to engage you, when truths meant to free you only enrage you?
phase.6 - idol.hexlist
My core tenet of doubt, my tunnel-visioned bludgeon by which I bash at modernism has developed a taste for the sweet meat-chunks of fracture points. It is ravenous and conspiratorial to an end that seems only able to orient itself towards a primitivist future. Viciously Ludditious, baby! Every piece of social machinery mirrors alienation. Language, technology, science, time, art, history, theory, economics, social dynamics, media, every venue within which we communicate risks isolating the individual. In a world where individuals exist within the subdermal power-machinery through which all these forces are replicated and produced, it is impossible not to lay witness to the biases.
>> “I don’t think we have a right to be lazy. Not yet. We have to expend our bodies as much as possible to disassemble existing power, to assemble means of mutual aid and community undergirdings. If you have the passion and the stake to keep going, why would you expend it doing nothing? Even if it slows down the economy, it does nothing to imagine an after. We’re at the point now where it’s our job to fight for the right to be lazy later on.” (11-1-25, spoken)
I’m so tired, but I’m so angry! I have to keep doing something! What is it to be good anymore? What can I still hold with some sanctity… art! Literature! Theory! Games! These glorious texts remind me thought still mulls in this death-conspiraling world, that futures can rise from the muck by the might of language and imagery! I have free time tonight, so I pick up a book. I pick up something I’ve heard spoken of as brilliant or provocative, and I kill my evening, feel peace in my... ivory tower.
[[THAT WAS EASY, WASN’T IT? SIT IN BED AND DO NOTHING BUT CONSUME MORE ART. WOOP-DI-DO. I’M SURE THOSE STARVING AND RIOTING NEXT DOOR ARE SO HAPPY YOU STILL HAVE A PULSE AND CAPACITY FOR EMPATHY. WHAT A PRIVILEGE IT WOULD BE TO KICK BACK ALL COZY WITH A BOOK RIGHT NOW! WHAT FEW THREATS YOU MUST HAVE TO YOUR WELL-BEING TO GROW EXHAUSTED SELF-ACTUALIZING!]]
No! I’m- I’m setting myself up for the future! I’m arming myself with the tools so that tomorrow I’m better positioned to change the world, so that my words grow further armed to topple the “subdermal power-machines”, to "metamorphosize the masses”. I’ll… change the world… maybe. Not me! My ideas! I mean, I’ll make art and theory right now! I mean it! I’m doing it, reader, see? I’ll put all this ink I swallowed into practice and… and make something! See? I-I don’t just care about myself, I care about connecting to people, to giving them the tools to-
[[YOU ARE PROMOTING CONSUMPTION AROUND YOUR OWN AUTHORITY. THEY’LL REVERE YOU, THOSE FEW HUNDRED THAT CARE. MEANWHILE, EVERYONE WITH BETTER THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT WILL KEEP DYING. YOUR LOCUS OF JUSTICE, THE ABILITY TO CULTIVATE BETTER PEOPLE THAT AREN’T POSITIONED TO CHANGE DOES NOTHING. YOU ARE POWERLESS WHERE IT MATTERS]]
I don’t know what you want me to do! Stop beating me down! I’ve already started to feel I’m losing the battle to nihilism. You’re making me create less, giving me less energy to do anything but the bare essentials. I… I’m trying to show my friends I love them. And my family. Trying to help them change to see the world as more clearly flawed. I… know what love means now, finally after so many years of thinking it just another way to say goodbye.
[[YOU’RE DRAGGING THEM DOWN IN THE MUD WITH YOU. AREN’T YOU THE ONE THAT WROTE A BOOK ABOUT HOW IGNORANCE IS BLISS? WHERE YOU, RENAMED “BLISS”, WOULD FASHION HERSELF A MARTYR IF IT MEANT BETTERING THE LIVES OF THOSE PASSIVELY STRIPPED OF THEIR FREEDOMS, READILY SPILLING BLOOD TO THUMB THE SCALE? AND SO, WHAT, YOU CAN TAKE CARE OF A DOZEN PEOPLE? WHAT INCREDIBLE REACH! I’M JEALOUS OF YOUR TINY BUBBLE OF STAKE. OH, AND HOW’S YOU GETTING YOURSELF FUCKED IMPROVING YOUR COMMUNITY, EXACTLY?]]
All of my art is free online! Every time I post a new essay, I forward it to all the forums I have access to, and any time someone else is wrestling with a struggle I’ve written on, I send it along to them! I… I make them into games too, so that they can pierce consumptive spheres. My newest projects appropriate multi-media and spectacle to compel readers to think about forms of queer anarchy and the means by which we can shape the future! I’ve… sought publishing, and there was even one thing I- and I want to start printing zines, plus I’ve signed up for a few volunteer groups! I’ll try to go… when I have the time… I- I don’t know what else I can do without begging for approval from the very networks of conversation I’m railing against, er, at least the ones I’ll feel guilt about…
[[SO YOU’VE REINFORCED THE NECESSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND CONSUMERISM AND HAVE HITCHED YOURSELF TO SPHERES OF ARTISTS AND THOSE WHO ALREADY UNDERSTAND THE WORLD IS FUCKED? SO EVEN WITH ALL YOUR PRIVILEGE, HAVING NOT YET BEEN MEANINGFULLY PUT IN DANGER BY ONE OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S POLICIES, YOU ARE POWERLESS TO ACT, TO VISIBLY RESIST? WHEN WILL YOU ACT IN ANY WAY THAT ISN’T COUPLED TO YOUR PERSON, FACE ANY SACRIFICE IN FORMING THE WORLD YOU BELIEVE IN? WHAT WILL IT TAKE FOR YOU TO BE WILLING TO DIE FOR THE FUTURE YOU BELIEVE IS POSSIBLE?]]
I don’t know how to gather the people I need to gather, I don’t know how to speak without being misinterpreted, I don’t know how to look without upsetting people, I don’t know what jokes will land as awkward, I don’t know how I can go on living if I can’t do the things I have fun doing, I don’t know how I can continually grow without leaving people behind, I don’t know how to hold beliefs without having to argue them militantly against someone else, I don’t know how to hold any beliefs without doubting them as flawed, I don’t know how to listen to people who don’t listen back, I don’t know how to speak to people who don’t want to hear me, I don’t know how to ask someone for something without inconveniencing them, I don’t know who’s willing to be inconvenienced by me and when it is okay to inconvenience them. I don’t know how not to do the most for people and projects without putting all my eggs in one basket, I don’t know how I can express my love without risking our stability, I don’t know how to respond to someone I don’t want to respond to, I don’t know how to say no when it’ll make them happy, I don’t’ know how to stop bemoaning myself and dissecting myself and my projects, I don’t know how to ask for more intimacy, to want more labour and more action directly, I don’t know how to act in a way that puts me in danger, I don’t know how to live life or enjoy spending money or simply take in pleasure without it being bound to more potent emotions and ideas, I don’t know if I can live under this much pressure with so much wrong and ever taste anything without some bitterness… I don’t know why every system I was born under seems so cruel, projects its cruelty across time and space until all that matters is how one can survive.
[[...To think SO much and end up knowing nothing at all. Pathetic.]]
What does one do when every well has been poisoned, when every idol has been deconstructed and smashed? When one stands in the ashes of their ideals? When every road one may travel along seems nested with dissenting thorns? There is no action without bundles of thorns. If I’m too moral, I make people feel bad and get angry at me, ready to bite at any weakness. If I’m too active, care too much, I’m a saviour, I’m imposing against those going about their business.
This, dear reader, is what happens to moral saints who rest all their stake in their own purity, absolutes and absolution, for whom all unaccounted for in one’s global stake becomes a moral failing that must be violently transgressed and corrected. This, dear reader, is what it is like to be determined in response. No one should ever have to bear the world alone, view it in totality as a mirror. Scale is impossible, despairing. What to do when all this silence seems to beg the script for one’s own alienation? Disengagement does not entail alienation, much like gifting does not mean consumerism. The world is still there, unsmashed; befouled with the poisons of subdermal power-machines, but present, formulated, accepted. To wish its destruction is only to be a disciple of an ideology of death, indistinguishable from that we seek to challenge by being willing to doubt. To totalize all beings under equality is to miss so much of why we connect. Imagining a future where all that is is destroyed isn’t a utopia, it’s a reaction, a giving into one’s ineptitude and lashing out to try and claim it back. How daring would it be, instead, to be disciples of life? To paint our future vivacious!
phase.7 - ink.weaving
>> ”I sincerely hope that some reader is inspired to construct a new metaphor, colour it and stress-test it, much as I attempt here. As with most cultural movements, an effective coalition where as many perspectives as possible have a seat at the table is needed to exhaust the framework. My creativity is limited to my own experience. Let’s all share in the metaphor-making process until there’s enough tools to unite us all in understanding!” (4-9-25)
As much as I run from my destiny, bash at it, there are truths, confines to my freedom worthy of celebration. English is my vessel, writing is my means and art is my practice. In my head flows a lifestream, often of beautiful ideas by beautiful minds that give me any beauty I have. This beauty travels through my fingers and weaves heartbeats into each of these ink sigils. My legacy, my impact. It’s okay to be quiet, to be lazy, to be not enough, so long as, in doing all that, I am demonstrably alive, spiritually alive. Art and theory are my life, as finite as they might be. Epon and Dion are not at war, but in synthesis. That’s how the story was supposed to go.
Politics, culture, understanding is woven through stories, through one’s capacity to hold the pen. The pen decides our history and anticipates our future, but so often loses sight of the present, the now. It asks when the revolutions were and what the world will be after them, but not where they are. Change is only perceived in retrospect, but life is constantly changing. Our utopias are fluid, yet every day I bear witness to new art, new beauty, some new faith in why it is worth it to keep living. Sometimes that faith is warmth, sometimes it’s tears, but it’s because of this faith in the people, the artists, the traumatized, that they can paint the town brighter. What better can I do than honour their contributions to everything I have worked towards. Let’s name my ready-at-hand muses as we push back on means of alienation. Weave your heart too, reader.
redefining.space
Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy (7-24) taught me how space itself can grow horrifying and unfamiliar with age, how the creep of entropy by minutiae fundamentally alters the world we know. It led me to scrutinize the guiding framework reality is filtered through. A creeping wrongness realized.
>> “This is the barricade on which the mantle of ‘reality’ rests and demarcates itself from chaos… Space can be chosen, toured, manufactured through the chemical and electrical… Space is what is and has always been, the necessary prerequisite for matter, the underlying context to the potentiality of any meeting of souls… Yet even in our most intimate spaces we are mistaken.” (7-31-24)
Adrienne Rich recently taught me the weight of absence, how a space we’re so intimately familiar with can slowly morph to tell a story of absence, of what has been erased on the journey to the present, and that we need to learn to see that which our spaces have made to vanish. Dominique Routhier taught me about the Situationist International movement, that the very shape space is formatted through replicating hegemonic desire and conformity, that simply moving about it in odd ways is radical. Geoff Manaugh taught me walls are uncertain, that barriers are modifiable, that we are all only disciplined to accept the authority of barriers. Artist LilithZone that the digital can be used to render unfathomable, substantially anarchical, but beautiful and worthy spaces. In Bartleby, the Scrivener…
>> “The situations he creates simply by being unceasingly himself show how much we give up in submitting to capitalist logic, be it denying our own autonomy, as the other scriveners do, or being unable to act on emotion and empathy to serve the lives of those around us. Bartleby succeeds at infecting us all with literary situations and transgressive logic of how to break down the walls imposed, in text and in daily life, by capitalism and be ourselves in spite of it all.” (10-21-25)
Let’s imagine a future in which spaces, the lands and buildings by which we travel, are free to explore and organize around and within, one in which property [is a colonial tactic for controlling territory that asserts possession] need not train individuals to see the world in isolated instances. Where neither the land itself or the resources in it need a price tag, beg extraction. Let’s grow gardens, line the streets with fruit trees, and make radically accessible new architectures that can look beyond walls!
redefining.family
Sentimentalist and puritan texts revealed to me how the nuclear family recreates a micro-society which conditions individuals towards the normalization of patriarchy, gender and authority. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman (5-3-24) visualized how this cycle monotonously repeats itself beyond dissolution, in which those reared under it neurotically cling to its absoluteness, even in the face of encroaching chaos. Her other film, Je Tu Il Elle, portrayed liberated queer sex as the panacea to the droning malaise of domestic womanhood, erotic, beautiful sex as a form of kinship.
JRPG video games taught me that family is found, that the strength of its connective tissue can be a shared ends, or perhaps a shared value, atop which you can collectively fight to change lives. Xenoblade Chronicles 3, specifically…
>> “believes in the inherent good of people, in our willingness to form communities, make families of them through mutual aid in each other's projects, and form cross-community alliances of resistance to the empire of death and war that haunts every life of its world. Every side quest plays with some new philosophical or political question that is impossible to label, but seems in favour of anarchy. It is a game about organizing across an us vs. them, eroding power by doing good for and unifying a colony of foragers, an industry colony, a tradesman colony, an immigrant colony... I could go on. [And I mean, come on, the final boss is a man who controls and understands the world through the veil of television and the teleology of plot… that’s spectacle theory!]“ (3-4-23, newly reworded, as I was more Marxist at the time)
Family is whoever we are willing to give our gifts to, to have direct stake, intimacy and love, those we wish to remain close to far into the future. Family is not something that dies, so Toni Morrison’s Beloved (11-25) taught me. It’s something inescapably present in our heart and our actions, who even in the absence of, we are haunted. can’t help but feel the parts of ourselves exchanged in our collective growth. Last Christmas (12-24), I wrote poems for my family, a love expressed directly rather than materially, and it’s a tradition I seek to perpetuate. May art and conversation remain our bond, may I have the energy to give more and more my hand-made gifts and may each community I form bear this same drive.
redefining.death
Donna Haraway (7-24) taught me that we live in an age defined by death, the Cthulucene, rationalizable only by the kinship that arises by the tentacular webs by which we extend outward and between each other. Bratich’s On Microfascism (11-25) taught me that fascism is an ideology of necromancy, of fighting a war on what is to restore what was, where that which was is imagined psychosexual freedom.
>> “The old culture of knowledge-makers is forced to militarize itself as the new culture, the network of skeptics and necromancers assign themselves immersively superior for being ‘enlightened’ enough to contradict arguments insulated from their scientific, or even technological source.” (11-17-25)
Guattari explained that fascism uses this obsession with death to conquer subjectivities (8-25), make an army from reorienting individuals towards a common cause. Death is the weakness of masculine infallibility, of immortal conquest and power projected into the future.
>> “Optimize out the fucking human. The ads will write themselves. We will exist in self-replicating sludge. A video I saw recently claimed “the body is the feminine to technology's masculine”. Of course big tech wants AI, because they view the very fact of having a body, that they will age and die, as effeminate and weak. They see nothing but numbers. See nothing in art but colours. See no emotion beyond the pleasure of a bigger number in your bank account. It is a sick non-living perpetuated by a want to be the next great man.” (11-8-24)
Carl Schmitt’s ghost (3-25) reminds us that liberalism’s ideal of peace runs in contradiction with centralized state power, that so long as the imperial state reigns, fascism will rise again from its waning husk. Schmitt rejected anarchy without understanding it, assuming the state was a necessary bulwark against 'savagery'. Yet, I’ve also learned that crime emerges from desperation, that anti-social behaviour flows from trauma. Insufficient conditions run rampant when power is top-down, as do unnecessary death and a lack of stake in life.
To revitalize our communities means taking it on projects of organization “in the shell of the old”, so David Graeber (11-25) has told me, to lay infrastructure outside of what little the state’s cycle of weaponizing death will provide. However needs can be fulfilled, that is the path to renewed citizenry, towards refusing the state any optical power to dictate any of our collective identity and subjective allegiances. War is capitalism's perfect pawn, pure chauvinist fracture-point, pure necessity of power, pure re-conjuring a collective identity that lacks all significance. War is bad, so every artist living and dead chants in unity. Yet, the war-machine is an undead concept in the post-modern era, where so few hold any stake or glory in battle, a machine that simultaneously wants history to end yet keeps reviving it.
Death ought not be glorified, nor should it be the ends for which all is the means. Orlando (10-25) taught me life can resist a linear temporality, as well as a heteronormative one. We should remember death, but we shouldn’t let it defeat our ability to make decisions and hold stake in realizing what we decide.
>> “In the beautiful ending monologue of Metal Gear Solid 2 [8-23], the game asks three things from us: to be responsible in what we have faith in, to be cautious accepting information into our identity, and that it’s up to us to pass down that which makes life beautiful.” (10-29-23)
Life beats through everything we do, everything we are, and residual ideas echo through collapsed time. So easily can we lose sight of our vivacity before the stone face the world wears. Yet what we live for will survive us, what beauty we manifest out of a passion for that which we stake as true and valuable means something, stands in grand lineage with all which is and will be. Art can be excavated, revitalized, reconsidered under new forms and meaning, as can ideas. We exist in a stream with no delta, no fountainhead, no limits to the expanse and evolutions of form. I gather here works that may appear dead, but instead adopt them to find life, promote life, the shared tissue by which we all dance, can all scream, love and cry.
phase.final - fluid.utopias
>> “Hope requires no language to unify. It requires no logic except a drive for better things. It requires no enemy except the limits of its current capacity. If My humans are anything beneath the certainty of language and sense, they are dreamers who will do anything to reconcile their hopes… I wonder now: do I intervene? Give them reasons to hope so that again they can appreciate My domain? Or, in this affair, does only the human have the mastery over themselves to manifest such a will? Perhaps it’s best I leave them to navigate this fractured world. Let Me stand by and witness how this challenge spurs them on. I’ll keep watching from afar and, to thee insolent meaning-makers, I hope you find your own way.” (4-21-25)
And thus, the individual writer, alienated by an abstract mind and body that were captured by the promises of art and technology, has reframed these devices. It is not systems, but the networks that undergird them that she took such grand delight in. In the age of solitude, where community has been offloaded onto frictionless alternatives, accessible from the comfort of one’s own home, she let these alternatives become her and forgot where she was situated. Yet still, every artwork is a conversation, every discussion is a new imagining, every pleasure is a reason to keep going. These systems are not good or bad, do not need to be deemed so violently and militantly for their propensity for the status quo. Those are the methods of power-machines. They simply are, as are the powers-that-be: vague, strange forces that desperately spit out poisons so we’ll respond to their similarly lonely call, valorize them with attention, vivify them through dictating the real.
The individual writer, through this project, has learned that none of what she has done and created was done so alone. All has been in artistic community, even indirectly, in utilizing the tools at her disposal to find the roads she knows will take her to family, to the new-inside-the-old, to futures. Oh, what beautiful infections course through her, vastly outnumbering the desperate sigils of a death-cult. Solidarity exists between artist and reader, between friends, between lovers. It exists in giving: not just giving our ideas or morality or doubts, but in sharing in replicating and lifting our part of a global network of love, of staying passionate in hope of edifying beautiful things.
Connection is too intimate, too emotional to put a price on, a realm capitalist capture will never colonize. The link between us, reader, between any two people is hard to perceive, but if all this theory I possess does anything, it is to see that not yet coloured in. Oh, how many eyes look upon me from a distance, from the back of my head, waiting to see the road I walk. Stay close, friends. It’ll grow cold without you. Hold onto me, every word of me. And I love you. Sorry if this is your first time hearing it, but it’s been true all along. You’ve made me who I am, and thank you.
It is not anyone’s responsibility to fix things, to take the suffering of the world upon themselves, not the role of revolution to violently shock the world into instantaneous change. No one, no single movement will ever bear that strength. Yet love has never been a popular movement. Oh disenfranchised souls, hear our call, you who share our spaces, our networks, our homes. Your ears are your greatest tool in the age of solitude, for only through them can silence become mighty. There is no more significant project than bettering lives, than moving beyond names for things. We got so addicted to talking that we forgot our touch. Perhaps our hands start small in their outreach, for capacity never holds a candle to potential, but our strength can evolve, what we are able to love can expand as the networks we exist within.
Looking upwards has damaged our necks, and has forsaken our humility. The world will never be connected all at once. But think, reader: A group of friends fed, someone’s passion lit, a family founded, a local touchstone laid. Those are the little ways we can give character to our environment, can season experience, can revivify space and culture for use by the hands that built it. It is the practices we adopt, the beliefs we put stake in and passionately reproduce that determine our future. The ways they hurt and isolate us only make us more desperately receptive to hold fondly each other’s company and beauty. We don’t need to be perfect to challenge systems. So long as we can actively keep our values alive and do the right thing, we’ll transgress quietude and alienation, relate instead of reaction, and remember our hands as artisans of beauty..
So many nice endings to choose from as time and ideas echo on… so much finality with still so far left to travel. Choose your own end, reader, but for now, these are the best I have on offer.
Lastly, I hope this paper has been as saccharine and cringe as I fear it is, for it is through this unshirking love of the community of minds and artists that reared me that I am who I am, and to which I remain loyal and indebted to. So many nice endings to choose from as time and ideas march on… so much finality with still so far left to travel. Choose your own end, reader. For now, I think these are the best I have on tap:
>> “Life goes on, and it’s our job to seize it! It’s in our power now! Never forget today and the freedom you fought for to bring you here! Seems life begins anew today… and what a beautiful birthday it is. Even though we’ve our own paths to follow here on, I’m glad we got to share this step.” (from Soporfall)
>> “You want love? Receive it. Own your shit, bitch. Be there, be sincere, be tender-hearted and open-eared. Don’t just listen to people’s words, feel them. Don’t just look at people, admire them. In fucked up times like these, maybe jadedness is a choice you should reconsider.” (2-2-25)
>> “Finding joy and authenticity within [one’s embodiment] is not transitory, not ephemeral, not individual, but an unrelenting, shared fight to be who we are. If there is one lesson to be taken, it is that authentic expressions of [selfs, taken en masse] will overcome all to truly be greater than the sum of their masks.” (4-24-25)
...may I ask what yours is?
