to be honest / sept 26

So, it comes to you on a Wednesday morning. This is while you’re still dreaming your last dream, before the Sun’s up. Your body isn’t yet your own. You can’t remember the last time you’ve eaten. All the same, you’re feeding a cat who’s sicker than she knows. You don’t know if she’s been fed before, but all you want is another hour of sleep. You don’t particularly want to return to the dream, but in that small and darkening garden, you know your role. The cat asks if you could sit with her while she eats. She lets you brush and scratch and bother her. In return, she makes you promise to kill the thing that plagues her. You don’t want to get sick yourself but you pet and comb and bother until she says she’s had enough. She asks how long she’ll be living here for, and you don’t have an answer. You add a little water to her food, and position yourself at an angle against the cupboards. There’s the smell of a cold gravy of fresh meat. In the corner of your eye, you can see the corpse from last night’s arachnid. If you look up, you can see the pair of living spiders above the backdoor. You don’t know how they met but they gorge until they are full.

In no uncertain terms, September has been the first month in a new year. There are old animals for a changing nature. There are blossoms, but your senses of smell and taste are intermittent after years of plastics, sickness and carcinogens. Still, you’ve made it to September. The charm of autumn flirts on a condensing windowsill and all this is becoming. You’ve lived this part of your life a million times over. Fuck it, you’ll live it a million times more. You won’t see the season change every year, but when you do, dude, you’re going to want to see this. Here is a glimpse into the realm we call heaven, and brother, take my hand. You’re going to lay your eyes upon a visual nebula demonstrating a life that breathes, that knows itself, that is both becoming and exhaling beyond any duopoly set upon it. Seriously. And, it is beautiful, even just as you’re breathing, like the hazy sort of beautiful, where the colours are tricking you into thinking you’re an animal, and all you need to do is run, and burrow, and find warmth where you hide. Take my hand and let me draw its outline. Let’s walk the walls of this garden. It’s not long, and it’s not tall, but once we’ve done a circuit, we’re going to go our separate ways. This is what happens when you leave the dream. This is what happens when the season changes.

There’s a placement where this imaginary ideal ends and the life I’m living begins. If you don’t let me go, I’m cutting off the hand to prove I still bleed. This dividing line is here to keep you out, and to keep me in. I’ve got the shapes in my skin to show you. I’m establishing this New Self by a swift and violent dislocation.

I’m one to avoid the fetishisation of genesis, or artificial beginnings, but this thing is the next part of what I am. Vvv briefly let me talk about your new year's resolutions and change as a verb. Your list of goals for the year are situated as communal exercises especially in that of change. These are instituted by an exterior, boilerplate timeline. You may see it as the time to commit to something, because the date is convenient, and has been there forever. This is the first step in identifying that to make this change a core part of your being, you must separate yourself from external factors, and see change as a means by which to continue your living existence.

You know how this dream goes, so you seek to change it. You know how to instruct your nervous system in the regimen of shifting, adapting, and becoming. As such, the muscle of change expects spiritual treatment, in a spiritual topology.

It demands tedious quantities of attention, and tenderness, and care. Rarely do we embark on change rather we dip our toes in its constancy. See all things, including this spiritual change as a body of moving water. We’re taken adrift, momentarily succumbing, warmed and warped, until we return to a bank in the river where we feel we can keep afloat. Maybe we can stand on the bed of silt. Maybe the waters only buffer you gently. At any time, we can be hoisted back out, through the mouth of this rapid. You know how this dream goes. You know the endpoint as informed by all conclusions you have already drawn about yourself. How do you intend to draw breath for yourself again?

You might see me out there, far, far out at sea. I’m just looking. I’m just seeing how far I can last. I’ll make it home for dinner. I’ll need to feed the cat this evening. You might think I’m drowning. I will try to tell you otherwise.

Listen, kitchen-floor-girl-leaving-and-throwing-her-academic-career-out-the-window, stop worshiping your own misery. Your insistence that this is good for you is degrading your belief in what you are. You’re growing detached from the realm you’ve drawn. The wire is thinning because you have chewed it. Your teeth are the only way you talk, so why do you chew on your own wound? Listen girl, if you’re waiting for the visitation of angels then don’t be surprised when they use their divine hands to shred the skin off your bone. You can’t live by the needle and expect your one shot at living to be painless. This is as close to living as it’s possible for a thing like you to get.

Put it like this, it will smell of the onions from last night’s dinner and your legs will stick to the vinyl floor you hate and the dead spider’s broken legs will start twitching. The spiders above you, this near triumvirate, will come to life and consume one another again. None of this passage into change can stop. You’ll cry when you’re still. And, when you let yourself be still, the poison that lies dormant in your head will try to release itself into your bloodstream. All you’ll be able to do is cry, and see change from underneath. There are words for this. You don’t know them yet. All the words that you can think of sorta underwhelm and dilute and recreate the image, rather than the meaning of the image. You sound them out. You’re on a kitchen floor with a hole in your pocket and the taste of dying nutrition burning through your tongue.

It doesn’t matter that you don’t know the words. You can’t pronounce change correctly anyway. Instead you resort to a sort of glossolalia, shange shh-ainge kh-hainge cha-N-sh ch-age ch-agne and this whole business is beginning to sound like a dreary, tepid political manifesto.

Please, meaning, I need to tell you what I am trying to say.

Spit it out into the palm of your hand. Wash your dried eyes clean and go again until you’re happy. Get it right. Taste the words before you slip them between your teeth, and spit them out for fear of introducing another toxicant into your metamorphic ego-self. You’ll say the words this is what I am, and you’ll feed the cat, and you’ll live another day, and you’ll stretch on the mornings where you remember, and think back to a conversation you had with a friend on the pier. None of these meditative states are easy to stay in. You must must must make the words your own.

Listen, there’s no step by step way to learn this, either. Don’t stop crying. Cry when you clean the house, the litter tray, the sofa, the bed, the shattered remains of your breathing corpse. Ball up the hair that’s coming out. This is a confirmation that your ontology is still manifesting itself. Your flesh is still flesh. Your blood is still your blood. Your spirit is changing. This is the nature of all spirits. With your hands on your own face, please seed the notion that this avatar is not an allegory for its own suffering. You must continue to open yourself to recognise where you are. You’re in your house again, a space where you only half-live, spending your sense of self-worth on a hundred million replays of moments of folly. It gets better when you remember that you can leave. So you leave.

This is what you are. You can try and forget this. You can try and manipulate the plasma, but you’re wrestling with angels now. You can be trying to find yourself. You can spend a month travelling, quitting, sacrificing yourself, your savings, your future in search of where you position yourself. Buddy, the sword only points to where the sun should rise, and we both know the angel doesn’t say when it’ll come back. You’re going to be stuck looking like a flea without a host. You’re going to be detached from all sorrow, and all joy, until you learn the nature of change.

Listen to me girl, this is how it goes. You will write almost every day, and on the days you don’t, make up some distractive reasoning as to why you abdicated. You will replace the hair on your face with the edge of a razor. You will take great liberties to go outside every day and rangle with the fact you’re not living a philosophical nor spiritual life, that instead you’re just sorta bumming about until the words get written and occasionally move up the hierarchy towards a state called edited, then read, then stagnant. The wheels are off now. You’re going to live and you’re going to be like it. You’re going to think about killing yourself, as you have every day for the last fifteen years. You will know this isn’t normal, but you gotta keep your options open in times of great and continual distress, right?

Listen to me, girl, this is how it’s going to happen. You’re going to keep waking up and know that the deadline is lurching nearer. You’re naked in front of the mirror. Your body is healing well. You’re getting closer and closer to curling your hair the right way, but the month is holding on to summer like a dog and its pull toy, and you’re going to think that you’re becoming something you don’t quite recognise. The hormones are working. Your technology is working. Your balancing of digital and analogue worlds is fair, though neither really see the upside of the split. But you’re becoming, and now the words aren’t enough, and you can’t write you way out of it. You’re chumless, bro. You’ve given up every element that allows you to interface with the people who know you — this is how you outline the circumstance for a change in which you drown. And brother, let me tell you, I’m pedalling like a dog at sea.

So, here. Let’s unwork the tension. Let’s sink into skin. My friends get into car crashes. I watch from the window. I’m called a twink by a man with a thinning, fraying beard. It’s 13:00 on a Sunday, and I’m reading The Myth of Sisyphus in a pub I used to love, still love, but the whole thing’s different these days. I’m not the same animal and the space knows I’m sick. I don’t drink these days. I don’t live here, not any more. All I do is measure my worth by words written for every twenty-four hours of breathing. I don’t know why he calls me a twink. It’s nearly apropos of nothing, other than a broad discussion of sexuality. I see it in my body, for a minute, there’s a reflection in my skin. I see her wrong in the moment, but I look again. There is the thing I’m becoming. Fuck it, maybe even Guy From Pub was right. This is a funny thing: but not an important recognition. Listen, I’m trying to unspool the self here, and I’m finding fishhooks in the thread. My fingers are gnarled and mangled. Maybe this is twinkish? Maybe this corpse is seeing herself in a new way, and simultaneously rejecting it?

Maybe there’s a death standing over me. Maybe I’m letting it in. Maybe it’s grown in the arboretum that lines my guts. A constellation of thoughts like these cannot come from nowhere. There is no way this perspective I have of myself, this understanding I have of my own meaning is seeding or sourced from anything exterior to my own sense of self. This has grown here. This is my own. It has long burrowed into the root of my being, and flowers intermittently, and you’re seeing it here. When you take your hand over this corpse, see how this plant has grown. Its colours are pale. The flesh of its petals are gnarled in ways I am trying to figure out. I pull and I pull and I pull and wrench at the soil. All the spills is lost. I don’t think he meant it in such a direct way. I can’t hear it in any other way.

I spend the day waiting for emergency services to get back to me. I’m doing this completely off medication, and have been for years. I want to write a story about cynocephaly, but I don’t know the words. It doesn’t matter where you work. You wake up to rejection letters anyway. If you know The Wolf Warrioress, you know the dogstory, or the idea I want to write. It’s because I’m lurching like one now, teeth sheep and breathing. I’m having these dreams where either nothing or everything is clear to me. I know the exact meaning to take. Or, I’m going to stay adrift until I’m dead, and brother, that’s about the best we can wish for. I have to think I’m a dog, breathing, to let myself fall asleep. The woman who called at midnight says you need more sleep to improve your mental wellbeing.

Earlier in the month, I look at The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, and I look at Saint Mary Magdalene by Guido Reni and I look at a Young Man holding a Skull (Vanitas) by Frans Hals. I become complicit in a cycle of creation and recreation and reproduction until all art is digestible in a single diminutive line. The bogus religiosity which now surrounds original works of art, and which is ultimately dependent upon their market value, has become the substitute for what paintings lost when the camera made them reproducible. Its function is nostalgic. It is the final claim for the continuing values of an oligarchic, undemocratic culture. If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so. I’m a passenger to my own perspective, right? I say that there are too many tourists for me to see what I want to see, but if you hear me, it’s a disconnection from my own vision. I cannot see clearly. I cannot think clearly. I cannot replicate this feeling clearly. Here are the chewed plastic edges of art, a solipsistic digestion of fault that I just can’t get enough of! The adjacent rooms are always quieter, but there, tours pass through with a want to drink up each and every image as they find themselves before more. I lose sleep over this. I’m happier now though, I promise. The brain has just like, dislocated from the muscle, or the bone called Skull. I live like this, or something.

What this is, I should clarify, is a means of finding where I am within myself. This is an essay about internal echolocation. I’m reaching out, using only my fingers, and trying to find my own hand. Only when my two hands are connected will I be able to live. I must ask permission to know myself. There’s a circuit here, a closed loop where I am okay. There’s the shadow self, sure. She’s been adrift forever. I must understand the shape of my own body, so I know what I must be. When death ceases to be a barrier, agony is not foreboding. Nobody can have this, except you. Playing it safe causes the wound to split so much further than you can know to anticipate. This is what you get for seeing the future as a place to know yourself.

I am before The Art. I am asking it, how do I stand alone with myself? The Art offers no voice. It cannot speak with an outside voice. These are the symbols of disposition, and I’m going to need you to hear me out again. I’m a body out of sorts, and a brain dented. One way of reading this blog post would be as a distillation of the month of September. Another would be as a reaction to that same space of time. Another way of reading this is to take it as a sign of life. Another would be the abandonment of spirit. Each of these are positions laid before me while I look at The Art. Sometimes, I am in it. Sometimes, I am able to see the halo, or the light, or the flickering, or the momentary lapse, or the opening of your heart. The only thing I’ve learned from a month to myself is to adhere to a mantra. I’ll tell you this. This is the last way of listening. I want you to hear me, and I want you to remember this, if nothing else. It’s not called change. Learn the mantra from a misspelling: May your heart yawn.

In a couple of days from when you start to write this, you’re going to be accused of stealing your own bike by two independent strangers. It’s been a weird one. It’s really hard to make a case for yourself, obviously. You’ll be filmed while you use your keys to lever the lock from between the frame, the chain-wheel and the pedal. It’s an easy mistake to make, and one that’s borne of anxiety. This is your bike. This is the most precious thing you own. It is an authentic extension of your body, and often times, the only place where you are able to talk to God. Here and now, it’s stuck to a metal pole around the corner from where you live, and you’re sweating, and clarifying as best as you can ‘it’s my own fault. I’ve done this.’

Two further days in the future, you’re going to dream about someone who used to teach you. He’s going to ask, with a voice that holds no trust, that has abandoned all potential and promise once seen in you, ‘what are you doing?’

You won’t have a good answer. You never will. There’s no rhyme nor reason for this. Your best choice is to wake up from the image. The cat will call. She’s still hungry, or lonely, or stuck. See yourself coming back to consciousness, hearing her yeowl like she’s the last living thing. You’ll hear her words first, before the fizz of lucidity wraps around your stinging head. Breathe the air. Stare at the sun. Drink until you are warm. Become rattled, and irritated and futile, but feel and feel and feel with no burden to your soul. You are led by your own yoke, so you’ll get up, you’ll clean up after her, you’ll apologise for being late, you’ll ask her how she’s doing. She doesn't say much back to you, except that you are performing a taxonomy of the shell you live within. Later, before the moment of reckoning, you’ll point to where your ribs end. This is where the stomach is. This is where I keep my intestines. You’ll have to lift your finger to your left breast. This is where my heart goes. This is where it’s supposed to go.

So, now, she’ll feed. None of this changes what you are, and you’ve got to carry it with you until you’re better. To live in this body needs you to move, to go and displace yourself so entirely that all prospects of selfhood can be laid out before you. You are watching the long shadows lay out over the rocks. Tell yourself this or tell yourself nothing at all. May your heart yawn: On the floor of my own bedroom, licking the wound that bleeds for the first time in seven years. On a pitch in the north of the city, in the rain, watching the ball go between our goalkeeper’s legs. At the lock of the bike. At your desk. At your desk. At your desk, watching eyes fall back inside your own head. On the floor, counting your lucky stars. Tasting the blood on your tongue. Savouring. Numbering the days. Adopting anything that’s for sale in the middle of London. Everything must go and everything will find its dutiful place within this world, except me. I’m awake at four again, and I’m trying to find anything I recognise. I’ve been sick again, this time in the bathroom of a Morrisons. I don’t know where I am. I’m running cold, but I can feel my skin from the inside now. Through all the tumult and the strife, I hear the music ringing. It finds an echo through my soul. How can I keep from singing?