I have been in a bad state lately. I am trying not to reinforce it through acknowledgment, and certainly won’t dwell on it. However, there has been a certain siege, multiple plans bungled by the idiocy of white men, and my own failure to speak, my choking, drowning, stunned ambivalence, the core of hopelessness and confirmation. It has been hell, and I want a new name. I have looked at the sky these past few days, and I have wondered, who was that person, who could tell the entire story of the world, different everytime, with only the prompting of clouds and light. Who was that person? I don’t even have a camera right now, just my phone. It is unsatisfactory. Who needs photos? Shouldn’t I be able to describe what I see, to explain the precise curvature of the arc, using words like illumine and nascent and vertices, to speak of golden ratios in an ordinary sunset? Shouldn’t I be able to tell the stories, to articulate the feeling of joy absolute at the thought that the gods of the governing forces arranged the vapors to appear as the countenance of a baby animal, a bear, a seal, a hedgehog, a bird’s nest, and then the revolt, the disgust – as if lashed into me by the sky itself – at my own self-absorption, to think for a minute that it was about me, to know that those baby animals, those delightful baby animals, are dying and dying and dying because of the idiocy of human beings, and that the only reason I ought to exist is to fucking do something about that, and all the rest, too. Today, before radical mental health meeting, I was advised to go and see an exhibit on Market St, on the corner of Eagle and Market. It was in an upstairs gallery, up several flights of broad, wooden stairs, in a room beside another room. I signed in and stood in the first room, because a man was talking and I wanted to be respectful. I looked at the carvings of ships’ halls, cut into flat form, a cross-section that showed the forms of bodies as plain black shapes, lined up like keyholes. I remembered who I was, and what I give a shit about, shuddered a little, as the man went on and on, about the neighborhood. I squatted down on my haunches, because it was more comfortable to me. Three people standing around me, talking and listening, and that is when I saw her, a life-sized concrete form, human with distinct features, a set of sorrow in the mouth, a weariness in the shoulders, a plaster-cast person who is alive somewhere, out there, not concrete. Her figure was chained at the wrists, and mounted against the belly of a ship made out of charred crate wood. I hadn’t seen her, but then I saw her. The people paused in talking, and the man said, “You,” gesturing down at me, where I was resting my elbows on my knees, squatting because the effort to stand was just too great to bear at the moment, “you need to go in there.”

The room was filled with sculptures chained to ships, all of which were held to a large, gouged-wood carving of E Pluribus Unum, the insignia cut into splintering wood.

It was remembering the times I had felt the ghosts of bodies washed ashore, had seen their eyes all crab-eaten, and the disgust the sheer disgust toward this past, this present, the apparent peri-apocalyptic future.

All I am supposed to do is prove god with clouds and tell stories. I am a failure because I cannot figure out how to do that. There is some trick, where if a person simply does what it is they are supposed to do, what it is they are passionately certain they are intended to do, then everything works out. I don’t know. This shit is banal. I have been depressed. It feels like a disease. I’m alright with that, mostly because I am ambivalent about a lot lately. I was not ambivalent about seeing that room full of sculptures today. No words had made feel anything so big and real lately, no long text, no wall of verb and adjective.

10:25 AM (11 hours ago)
to me

‎I am already forgetting their name now, The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists. That is their name. I just learned about them today, and I don’t remember exactly how, something related to perusing Henry Kissinger on Wikipedia. In any event, after reading this passage, reprinted in an article on [], I was struck with a tremendous flurry of ideas, all coalescing. Recognizing that I was feeling passionate and inspired by the story of the Boxers, as I had felt passionate and inspired by the story of the Children’s Crusade, I went upstairs to vacuum thinking, “Yes, it really comes down to this, a fundamental incompatibility in interests and priorities. I cannot sit down to write an essay about madness, defense, and magic in the colonialist world. I don’t have time to think about these things.”

 

[in my walking and talking life, a roommate is moving in, beginning today, a young woman whom I have known for a while, and her dog, whose name is Artemis. My elder dog is aging fast now, all of the sudden. My younger dog looks like the Fox Swordsman, Didymus, in the movie Labrynth. Just now, as the sirens scream down by the hospital, I was watching her walk around, down in the yard. I wrote a sentence, and then didn’t see her. I called for her, and she didn’t come into sight, and so I moved, to try to see her, to make sure she hadn’t gone through the fence and all its wires somehow. As I walked down the front steps, those wide concrete steps, I caught sight of her, by the fence. She had something in her mouth. I crossed the yard, with the thought that it may be some old, encrusted cat feces, or part of a dead bird, something surely disgusting. She came toward me and I reached down to brush and feel around her mouth, and a single skeleton bloom, with a single green leaf caught within it fell to the ground and I swear to fucking god it was the most beautiful gift I have received in quite sometime.

 

 

[It will go into a shadow box.]

 

As I was saying, I don’t have time to even write an essay about the fact that any interest, longing, or truth that lies outside of the…oh, it seems so stupid to even say, lies outside of the realm of cultural norms. well, of course, that is socialization, that is enculturation, the direct and subtle pressures that dissuade particular interests, ways of being, passions. People can any array of interests, a multitude of video games and blood sports, arts and technologies, but there are certain areas of passion that are not especially well-accommodated outside of speciality and niche academics.

 

Oh, there are so many sirens today. The other night, I read for bit, from The Self Made Tapestry. I miss reading. Now, all I read are emails, google docs, and posts on digital pages, maybe a newspaper, a magazine. When people are getting their families blown up by nationalist militant forces, is it disgusting for me to feel so sad that I no longer have time to read.

 

Time has become strange lately. Fast, then slow. My temporal anchor has loosened in shifting sands. My subjective experience of what an hour is and what can happen within 60 minutes is highly variable.

 

I have to go take a shower, clean the house.

 

[I just brushed an ant off my arm. It wasn’t going to hurt me. The other day, a yellowjacket made friends with me, and then another fellow, whom I was standing near. Neither of us appeared alarmed at the insect on our hands, near our faces. Some people are like that. The brushing off of ants is a habit, an animal instinct, a cultural gesture.]

 

[What are all these garbage trucks doing around here? Garbage trucks or fire engines. So many engines today. I hear a plane right now, a small aircraft. The sun just broke through the clouds and a small breeze started to blow. It feels like the coast of Georgia, c. 1989.]

 

I have to go to work, take a shower, wash off the rest of yesterday’s swordfighting. I got shield bashed in the face, and actually flew backward, knocked off my feet, my birdhat pushed back. There was a moment of wondering if I’d gotten hurt, but then I stood up, put my hat back on, and continued trying to capture the flag.

 

I’m a little old for this, to be in a field, battling with young people, wearing in a birdhat‎. Yet, it is easily observable that something about this practice, of fighting in fields and wearing a birdhat, something about it is good for me, who has been still and weary for so long.

 

I have been able to do a lot, but everything I have been able to do I have done at the cost of not having any energy left – things being what they were – to be able to do the things that are good for me, for my life-force. To play, to do art. To make good food, to take care of my home. Oh, boo hoo. Life is hard, only the lucky ones get to choose the life they live.

 

I don’t know if that’s true. I do know that if ever I manage to have a life that suits me more, that is more appropriate and sustainable, then I will need to always, always, always remember that anything I have, I have by privilege and luck and that I owe it the circumstances to do whatever I need to do in order to contribute to change, restitution, and liberation.

 

Again, we return to the matter of what is and is not appropriate for people in various roles and scenarios to believe in, care about, or pursue.

 

As the mother of a 10 and 12 year old, who is not sanctioned by the exceptional titles of ‘academic researcher’ or ‘writer’ or ‘artist,’ I have the impression that I’m not supposed to be spending any time at all whatsoever even half-thinking that I ought to have any part in global movements for peace and justice. In fact, if I had called my mother and said, “You know, when I taking all those pictures of clouds, I was thinking about what might be a unifying idea, something that might explain everything and level our understanding of what it is to be human. [not something I ‘needed’ to be thinking about in the first place] and that maybe there could be to help people everywhere, in all the states and nations, pause, take inventory, and re-asses their histories, begin again…and it really was about peace‎.”

 

Well, she would possibly think, “Oh, that’s lovely, and are you okay?”

 

I am not supposed to be thinking about these things. ‎I need to go do work, which is actually a vehicle for my participation in any sort of change, but also – possibly – a shenanigan, which is sucking my time, neglecting my skills, and filling my headspace with things I don’t need to think about in the process of attempting to complete work which is uninspired and fatigued.

 

I am feeling like it probably would’ve been a keen idea for me to have gotten on disability, since even these ideal jobs prove untenable, as my preoccupation with art and a sense of vocation re: re-presentation and story tend to strain my capacity for rote tasks of little consequence, my tolerance for occupying roles that strain my social aptitudes and require dramatic manipulation of my expressed self is exceedingly low lately.

 

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I’ve had moments of desperation lately. Little stretches. It’s silly, a tedious crisis of faith, an indulgent fear, a false narrative of impending scarcity and failure on all fronts, the woe of worst case scenarios when – really – their are people who would spit on me, as well they should, for feeling anything short of pure gratitude for just being alive, starving and bombed as they are, by the country – either directly or indirectly – that I live in.

 

It would be an interesting visual diagram, the rise and fall of global conflict, the geographic regions and conglomerates involved. I’m sure the United States would have, since its inception, a great many red lines leading from it.

 

Someone from swordfighting posted some pictures of kids battles on social media and there I am, with my birdhat on and my legs looking strong between my socks and leggings, with odd looks on my face.  In one picture, which I am not in, my oldest kid – who will be 12 tomorrow – is laughing with his face wide open at a fighter who is rolling silly on the ground, a foam ax on the ground beside him. In some pictures, my daughter’s strong legs are in a fighter’s stance, and in others her swords are dangling as she stands looking around.

 

 

The other night, I was walking with a friend on the evening of their birthday and we noticed that the shadows of the leaves as cast by streetlight were angular and grid-like, a screen door, a crystal matrix, not the boughs and curves of leaf and branch. We could not figure out why, other than the possibility that the light itself was moving much faster than we could see, that the shaking showed up only in the blurred and layered lines of shadows. That didn’t really make sense, but the only other explanation was that we may be living in a poorly constructed and faltering matrix of reality and impression.

 

 [The trees were still, no wind. The shadows of their leaves looked like boxes.]