This is a space where I can be confused by the world, think hard about its mysteries, and work out how a myriad of reclaimed and seemingly random pieces could all fit together in some fashion that can make some kind of a sense.
Because I know others are as flummoxed by existence as I am, I thought I would share the resultant outcomes of my puzzling, fragmentary and partial as they may be, in case it helps others in some way.
It is also a small act of reclamation.
origins
A ways back, I wrote the below to two friends. This is where the process of reclamation and piecing things back together began for me. This is how I began to find my way back to my self. The journey is still very much in progress.
I’m fucking delirious with exhaustion right now and shouldn’t be sharing this with anyone, but…..
A decade of loss…For the past decade I have reveled in the loss of small detail that is our sacrifice to the modern state in exchange for security, comfort and “freedom”. The slippages and cracks through which those details were lost, into which they flowed in vain efforts to hide from the state, the spectacle’s ever reaching tentacles and capture, the memory and visual gaps in which they nestled hiding from our very own recording mechanisms to evade these systems of slow banal death. For a decade I reveled in this loss, distracted from my own losses of self, of desire, of time.
Until finally I realized that I didn’t want to lose anymore
I didn’t want to lose more to the state
To the machines of modernity
To the systems of labor and exploitation that offer us such complacent security
I went in search of the little vestiges that remained to me
And found them in a photo of myself at age 4
What remained was a tiny speck of marshmallow on the edge of my lip as I stared into the camera with a burning look of hunger for life, for mischief, for more marshmallow – demanding give me the marrow, I’ll show you how it gets drunken!
I remembered that force
I remembered that demanding desire
And that is where the reclamation began – a tiny piece of marshmallow became, became a neon green flight suit dropping from the sky at high speed, became a decade of reclamation
A decade of hunger, desire, of piecing self back together out of lost fragments, lost details
Not only old things that were mine but also things that others may have lost to their journeys through time
Their lost details
Their lost bits of self
A decade of reclaiming things so that those things, moments, experiences might feel loved again too
They might feel desire
And not be whitewashed into complacent or fearful acceptance of modernity’s spectacle
Or be lost to time
Or lost to the great data archive that consumes me and all the “evidences” of my love for them, of my small acts of reclamation.
the start