Feeling, Weaponized

 

1 March 2021

An era of weaponized feeling. That’s your feeling on the other end of the shotgun; its crossed eyes size you up before violent laughter explodes. The wound an open mouth, naked mask. Red plumes, rivers of blood lava down the torso’s escarpment. To be riddled with fissures is to glimpse the future while already mourning the past.

Turns out it rains in the rain forest. To be old and uninhibited and fat. To hold a delirious contentment close, because joy is too exhausting. To sit until the moss covers you, comfort in its confinement. The lichen tongue is, of necessity, less vatic.

Write two sentences that describe your room, then look up the most ordinary of the words. Find their etymologies, then explore the contradictions time makes in its words. Take these words and write an alphabet poem. The random arbitrary, a typewriter before Querty, a mechanism of pause. Her dissertation was a pause, because there are no gaps in capitalism. We provide these resources to you so you can get your work done and succeed in attaining your goals. Don’t stop to sense how little it matters.

In the rain forest, Lilith leads with her nose; smell pulls her forward, sometimes violently. Trace of pheasant, rat, cat, pig, another dog. Or, she sits with her nose up, catching patterns of air.

Care’s double-bind. The culture makes you sick, so you look for help; help reduces anxiety so you can remain sick, suffering less from symptoms that keep you from your work. You must never stop working. A large puddle in the grass withholds its reflections. My photograph came back to me without interest. Some grass in some water. The flatness of a puddle’s reflection is what gives it depth. This depth shrank to surface.

There’s a twitter account devoted to boring photographs. Table in a conference room, some dull drapes, the least interesting angle on a service station. It’s a stupid art. Makes me laugh. The ordinary really is banal sometimes. 

Anxiety is a self that wavers, doubts, runs the long corridors and then comes back, ball in mouth, refusing to drop it on the floor. Tug of war ensues, and anxiety gets the win, but it’s pyhrric, since who cares who gets the ball, and at such cost?

And then the ball is there on the floor. The ball is quiet, the dog no longer interested in it or in its squeak. We have left the ball to be ball. Perhaps it prefers ball-existence to the exhilarating arcs, the closed jaw, the morning ruckus.