I was expecting some anarchival qualities to come with the rolls of film that I brought from Denmark. I've read that the X-ray machines can produce undesirable effects on the pictures. That's everything I ever wanted; to have some ghosts in my images. However, I developed the first film, and there was nothing. Only reinforcing my idea that it's hard for those ghosts to appear when there's a particular and determinate desire of the aesthetical form they should present themselves in (like when I used to expect to finally be abducted by aliens during my sleep when I was a child). Well, also I've read that that affects only film with sensitivities higher than 800 ISO and the X-ray in the checked luggage is way stronger, which made my will almost impossible with the Snappy camera that accepts only 400 ISO and the low cost flight of WOW // spoiler: I bought a new camera on eBay, and it's really weird but still didn't arrive // Maybe I should put them inside an MRI machine, which also is one of the first scenes of Riget (I love to watch this tv-show again). But also I figured that the ghosts are there in another form that was not detectable by our figurative way of looking into pictures. We should attend more to the minimal beings that are hardly visible only with the sense of sight. Maybe we need more haptic ghosts. Should I answer you more directly? I feel that I never respond to what you say, at least in a typical way… I'm super happy about the stripes!! But also super sad about the body in stress/restless. I guess it's a kind of media apparatus we could work more with, appearing and disappearing letters, like when you did the wet reading (but also like those pens children use to cheat on exams, that can write and be erased really easily…).
There is no inside or outside, but rather modes of insiding or outsiding. I want modes for making and writing that directly relate to and consist out of sharing, caring, glancing, being together, fluidity and fragility. Mirrors, ice, and glass are surfaces that can be related to writing surfaces. One numbs experiences or encounters when one does not know what to do with them yet; they freeze, to be defrosted when new compositions of words arrive. Transmission and reflection do become not only immediate forms but also attitudes. Sharing, with oneself, with others, with creatures, or with thingies. What is between them, as the flows, as a wet approach to assembling, editing, and gathering. You’re boarding right now; I feel so strange.
I feel the waves again, my head is space-y, I wish it was Späz-ey, but unfortunately it seems like the panic attacks will reappear. The future is restless. I really understand the temptation to accelerate everything, if there's no future why not drive at full speed till the velocity distorts even the fabric of its own time?
I guess if you would tell somebody that, always a different self, they would put you in some category of a multiple personalities disorder. But variations of the same are always through and through and not happening on the superficial layer of how skin is often approached containing some self inside in a world outside. For that to experience has nothing to do with mental health categories but with something like paying attention, an attunement. Although I’m not sure about that phrase, maybe better a certain sensitivity. And then I don’t mean sensitivity as if it used in neurotypical situations as a trait of an individual. “Oh you’re so empathetic” but as a sensitivity all around. I was a bit surprised when I first met you to see a tattoo on your skin. If I think of tattoos I get a bit nervous. A note of a moment scares me, but also all the notes of moments that were not made scare me. So it is not so much about a specific tattoo but also about all the tattoos that didn’t come to be there. This counts for all the other events just as much, but a tattoo is a simple example to think about. I guess yours is a bit like the notes you wrote for the ghosts of yourself, or better the ghosts of a self. One of the few things I cannot be without is my necklace. I am still surprised that there is something I feel comfortable wearing everyday. So many clothes or jewelry I have I like one day but cannot imagine having near me the next. Maybe that’s why it sometimes takes hours for me to put clothes on. I love staying in my bed after a shower, first with the towel, but then always losing the towel between the sheets. I stay there reading and writing. And I simply cannot get dressed because I cannot determine my mood or my self, or better a self. Sometimes, or often, everything feels wrong to wear. Except my necklace and towel underneath the sheets. But then always this moment arrives in which being in bed for too long becomes suffocating, I feel myself turning into the grandparents of Charlie & The Chocolate Factory, and I need to move. Like you every morning. I would watch you lying in bed, waking up, watching the boring people on the Instagram, but then suddenly there was this move, you had to move on this move, there was no choice. Even if I asked you to stay, you would give me a short hug but I felt in everything that there was no time for a hug, you had to move on that move. Sometimes, or often, the move was simply a few steps towards the table to sit on the chair and do not much more than “just sitting”. But I felt it was not about what you would do, more about the directionality of your body. A body had to sit, it could not lay anymore without getting too sad and drown in the bed once more.
I can't read. There's something wrong; anxiety came and brought its worst symptom: blurry view. I need to read and answer an important email and the corrections you made in The Lure of the Ghost, but it feels for me that I can see only amorphous shadows floating into papers and screens. Coding also seems to be impossible or editing. I wish I could write back using the same amorphous shadows, but it looks for me that anxiety is an accelerationist machine, eating the time from the doomsday clock. Its process of digesting the time makes it impossible to generate buffer time, and I'm accelerating to confront full defragmentation. Yesterday a friend said to me in a Telegram group: "do you remember when you accidentally put your hands in a hedgehog while we are at the university campus, like ten years ago?". And I couldn't remember that I am sure it never happened. But my friend is confident that it happened. It's strange since I usually have perfect memory even for small details, but I've forgotten complete scenarios at the same time I remember so many things that are so tiny… Or maybe it wasn't me, or this version of me that touched the hedgehog. If at least it had left me some scars, those are another kind of memory or external device (that's not external) to remember things, like the little one I have on my mouth from my german shepherd dangerous playing. Does the other creature have the same memory of my encounter with it? I just looked into Wikipedia, and Brazilian hedgehogs only live from two to five years, so, unfortunately, the creature is probably dead. I spent so much time looking into lifespans of other animals, but how long do clothes survive after several and several sessions of laundromat washing? My oldest t-shirts, I guess, besides some that are already into an advanced state of degradation and only used for sleeping, are from 2014. Although I have to say, they're not so old because my older ones were not 'usable' anymore, but yes, because they were not 'usable' in another sense. The body entered into some mutation, and it couldn't receive the textiles anymore it was used to. (a) body was showing some signs of allergy (redness, itchiness), I did all kinds of exams, but nothing was happening, I even had some of my clothes analysed by a laboratory, and there was no sign of contamination: nothing toxic, I could donate them later. I knew that there was nothing physically wrong, but I was too sceptical to believe that those clothes were clothes for a creature that ceased to exist in its then actual form even having the same weight, height, etc. I'm afraid if I continue in this cycle of constant displacement, I will start to take out my skin out, like the clothes that didn't fit anymore.
Strangely, we're now on the same timeline (or time zone) no?
I'm watching a presentation about waste and empty environments. A very normative and boring presentation. But at least it reminded me of a Thai restaurant I loved to go in Milano that was usually empty before 1 PM.
That's a way of anarchiving no? For me, it has to do a lot with care techniques, but not care related to the identitarian or unitarian people but to the events that mainly include other creaturesque ecologies of non-human or more-than-human. But it's impossible to write or read anything right now because they're cutting onions in the kitchen of the cafe. I don't like this sensation; it seems to me there's a lack of care; everybody is rubbing their hands in their eyes. Maybe I’ll have to come back to this document later. What do you think about onions? Do you remember when we used to go to this cafe and this sensation contaminated everything? But this café also brings me memories of the Danish dog around your house nearby. I just developed a roll of film. Look who I found:
Somebody on my Facebook just posted a quote by Peter Levine “Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.” Do you like quotes on trauma on boring social media accounts? I’m not sure about the inside, the absence, the witness, the text, the font. I like our font better; it’s called spectral. I’m glad that our texts are soaked in spectrality, says more about ghosts from the past than any part of that quote, don’t you think?
Yes vrey, I’m vrey into you. x
“It's vrey vrey nice to see you again, my old friend”
Did you see me typing?
Should images be added?
Yes I think it’s very important to have images be part of this.
Why very? Or not vrey?
You don't like vrey anymore?
Oh, out of habit. But apart from that, I think just because vrey exists (and you know how much I love it), doesn’t mean very can’t be used anymore. Very is a different mode than vrey.
Also, it’s so nice not to know where something is taking, or should take. There are not so many places where content does not have to be speculated before starting. Starting should start in the middle.
Also, it just came into my mind: you still haven't bought the I'm very into You book/exchange of emails by McKenzie Wark and Kathy Acker. That's so funny, but that’s also why this looks so anarchival :) Only qualities and tendencies.
I just thought it would be nice to put this here because I remembered the assignment you needed and we tried to transduce the strange words into the typical normative text from the university's humans. Anyway, the university may be doomed, and changes are needed, but I'm still looking for grants. I'm restless, the ghosts of the future are closer than ever. I think my dream would be to do a second PhD right now. Most people would think that's crazy, but I guess that the activity of writing a thesis (obviously I would look for something like a creative research but anyways…) is plausible with the multiplicity of characters that can be created using the multimodality of media platforms that make possible to release of all kinds of ghosts. A more typical ghost would write a thesis for 2 hours a day, and then all the other hours would be free to populate multiverses doing their orgies, films, pictures, coding, etc. Obviously those worlds are not separated. And it would still be a thesis that would be evaluated according to reaching acceptable parameters in the typical system of the university. It's a technique to create time. I understand other people have difficulties writing a thesis and things like that, but on the other side, when I think about a regular job in the “physical” world, then the equation is too much complicated. Thirty seconds being in the middle of humans exhaustively showing both their requirements and “important works” are equal to at least five or six hours of anxiety and anger. Which means if I stay in a kind of work like that for 8 hours a day my body would start to feel the accumulated typicality and then, peeing blood, headaches, vomit, until my body would completely expel itself to be eaten by the microorganisms that populated this world before us (fortunately they will still be here after the disappearance of the human species from earth, even with the disaster of climate change reaching its beak - I do care a lot about the interspecies holocaust that is already happening because of the exhaustion of this world).
Interesting anarchival/(an)archeological piece of media no? Wtf, media is way more than that, as Andrew Murphie would say.
How to write about an event? How to write with “I” without ever meaning “I”? “[Celebrating] the fragility and the persistence of the minor gesture, perceiving in it more potential than in the self-directed “I” that stands outside experience and speaks the major languages of the brands of individualism and humanism that frame neurotypicality as the center of being.” (Manning, 2016; 7) What about fabulation? I saw that my art school has I’m Very Into You in their library.I’ll go there on Monday and get it. I still doubt, though if I should read it, but again, I think it’s good if it’s here in my bedroom.
Somebody, who I always thought hated my writing, asked me if she could have the text I read last week. Parts of it came out of here, so I put it as a reference, only to find out after I hit send that the autocorrect turned it into I’m Very Into You. Maybe I should still send an email now five days later: “I’m so incredibly sorry, but please, you should know it’s VREY. I’m vrey into you. I’m vrey into it. I’m vrey, I am.” Seeing the little red waves dancing underneath all its iterations. What’s nice about giving presentations is that it’s easier to steal words and to weave them like your dreams would, naturally and mischievously, your own and others, well they were never anyone’s to begin with, always a leaky sense of self, never personal, always intimate, always repeating. “Language is always ambiguous as to the exact proposition which it indicates. Spoken language is merely a series of squeaks” (Whitehead, 1978: 264). A wet vocabulary, a strange turning point cd-dvd-record shop, a fabulatory portal pore, a lure, a doubling of entering layers, a reading with, a translation of already felt but not yet read, a materialising-there-there spin-out-with-and-and yes.
From the moment he stepped into my apartment, he fell into one big pool of stress. He saw that everything in my house is a bit ‘broken’. I would say instead, wobbly, or funny, or stubborn, or working in a less neurotypical sense of what productivity is. He immediately started analysing everything and fixing things. He noticed that all the clocks were on a different time and started synchronising them. The one near my bed does for every minute forward three minutes backwards, for example, but no, he thought it should do one minute as the sixty seconds which he believes to be a minute. At some moment I yelled: “Stop! I like it this way; everything works beautifully and makes me happy like that. I don’t need aligned tickings of time, I love my slow bedside clock, ticking backwards as the room walks on.” Stopping clocks one at a time, covering all cabinets one step at a walk. The sheets slowly accumulating all the dust in the room, to make sure that the particles - read presences- don’t crawl into the cupboards. Dust that was just mostly skin anyways. I started sleepwalking again; I started sleeping with the big soft living room for the first time, practices of sleep haunting my days. Dust is ineffable, making me want to jump into all its particles and discover whatever is speaking. Every gesture a question, to which the adventure responds according to its bent. Reunions like gatherings with all that disappeared for a little or long while. Constant correspondences that only want to express processes of growth and causation; how to write with these horrible languages in a way that doesn’t repeat these trajectories.
Yesterday I was sitting in between all my boxes filled with stuff and just had to cry. Suddenly it hit me. I’ll be in Amsterdam again for a whole year. You tell me you write here because you feel like you have to, but that I shouldn’t feel pressured to do the same. I said the wandering albatross to come to see the words moving here again. Yesterday I was so restless and started unpacking, hoping that by moving with the things I would feel a bit of joy. I saw so many thingy-friends I almost had forgotten about. The only things I was excited about seeing again were my plants, but they all looked so sad. Brown leaves, dried out, hanging down. The person that was in my room for the time I was in Montréal didn’t take care of them at all. It is because people consider themselves more important and always think about themselves with other persons. The only thing he left me was a bottle of wine and a little booklet laying on my nightstand. I opened the booklet, is a curious creature, but also because I didn’t trust him leaving something behind like that. I know him, and I knew he would’ve taken everything he cared about. The booklet was empty, except that the first page was ripped out and the second page said: “Anouk is beautiful x [his name]”. I wish he would’ve expressed his love for me by taking care of my plants like I asked if he wanted to. I saw my brother today, and he told me I should rip out that page as well and use it for my own words.
I looked into all possible combinations of V-R-E-Y:
VREY
RVEY
EVRY
VERY
REVY
ERVY
YRVE
RYVE
VYRE
YVRE
RVYE
VRYE
VEYR
EVYR
YVER
VYER
EYVR
YEVR
YERV
EYRV
RYEV
YREV
ERYV
REYV
I prefer to be a creature than a thing to speak like that. With no disrespect to Bruno Latour, we've been using the Parliament of Creatures or the Creatureteque to talk about the non-human or more-than-human appetites that emerge and need to be talked out, obviously not through a presentational mode of putting ourselves into appearance.
I put some tuna/salmon cat food outside for the stray cat. She visited me today and is less afraid of me. It's hilarious to think that my preferred meal (Tuna/Salmon bowl at Kazu) is similar to the food I use to feed my cat friends. I guess they deserve it. Although deserving is a very human/typical concept, so maybe not.
Oh yes, that's true, and I just realised a strange thing, I couldn’t find references for Mister C saying vrey, but then I put the scene description on google search and found a lot of Reddit posts talking about it, but as YREV. Maybe VREY was invented or manufactured, out of novelty, perhaps he never said vrey but only yrev, that's ‘very’ as it's pronounced in the red room language reversal arrangement.
Ohh ! That’s such a beautiful realisation. I was already thinking “how did the r just jump like that”. But now that I know about YREV… ! Makes me want to record you saying very (if I ever catch you though… you very often say vrey lately) and try to play it in every different way... very, vrey, yrev, yrev. 4 letters make (4!), 4x3x2x1 combinations possible, no?
I love reversal speaking for recordings, to say vrey I would have to say yerv and then revert it with the audio editing tool. Yerv is a nice word, no? We can record it on the bathtub, no?
During a Saturday afternoon, I found a typewriter in a cupboard in the attic. I had to get used to writing with it because I had been working on a computer. Some letters worked less well; others got stuck even before they could make an imprint on the paper. But after I while, I was completely used to the ticking sound of the typewriter. Even though I had gotten quite agile, I couldn’t imagine writing an entire book on it. My typewriter had found a beautiful place in my bedroom, on the desk where the sun would shine most often. I would write on my typewriter all the time; it was a bit like a diary to me.
I would stay awake the entire night to type away the darkness. At some point, my parents even gave me a special room that was soundproof so that they and the neighbours wouldn’t wake up from all the typing sounds. Whenever I told my friends why I had dark circles underneath my eyes, they were astonished. “Writing?!” they would say “I only stay awake to be on my computer or iPod, but not for some dumb typewriter.”
Often I felt lonely that nobody understood how I felt. Most of the people got very angry or painted to do something with all their emotions. But I just loved to hear the ticking sounds of the typewriter. It was as if I belonged with the typewriter; it was like a friend to me. It felt like I must have been a typewriter in the past, or maybe a famous writer. Could it be that I had returned to earth?
In a flash, I turned from nine to nineteen years old. I chose, although it didn’t please my parents, to keep writing.
Twenty-three years old and on a trip all by myself to a different city. I told my parents that that would be the best way to be a writer. I met a lot of new people that were like me: obsessed. Once in a while, I sent my parents a letter about how I was doing, so I could be doing that still practice my writing.
Two years later and two hopeless books later that no publisher wanted to publish. My life in a different city wasn’t as I had imagined. Shouldn’t I have done something else with my life? No, I had gotten this far, and if I stopped now, it would all have been for nothing. I kept on going. Just as in the past, I kept on writing day and night. I read a lot and took walks in the park.
One day I read a story about a young man that didn’t feel like he was in the right time just like me. He found something like a time-stone in an old monastery, with which one can travel to the past and the future. I didn’t know whether it was invented or real, but I was sure that I had to go to the time-stone. In the back of the book, there was an address. It was in another country. I collected all my last money, and I took the train. The next morning I was already there. The people I met there knew the story and were happy to tell me about the time-stone adventures. The young man went to Italy in the times of the Roman Empire. At that time, he wrote the book with the message that he had had a pleasant journey, had arrived and felt like he was finally at home. He also wrote a question asking the people in the monastery to spread his words so everybody could know about the possibilities of travelling with the time-stone.
There I was. At the place where I felt like I could travel to a home. With the time-stone. I made one last call. If it made me happy, I should try it. So I went away for a week. Oh, I had such a good time! Finally, I went to the time of the first time-writers and cellphones. It happened I was there. It was delicious, but on Sunday I had to go back again to the ‘normal’ time.
Soon after, though I went back again. I stayed there for the rest of my time and typed just like everybody day and night away on my typewriter.
I found this, written on a typewriter, from when I was about thirteen years old.
I would love to be in friction with those swans and ducks, maybe feed them, not sure if I would like to feed them because they're already too much fed by the humans that think that they exist to serve their desires of cuteness. I was afraid to interact with them because the parents of the child would find it strange - a 30-year-old person interacting with their young daughter. It was funny, though, there was a constant tension because I felt like they were going to bite the girl any time soon. On that sense, I liked that the parents let her feed them and get bitten, at least she experiences another less cute-human oriented version of animal politics than the usual servitude they expect from creatures that are not considered ontologically equal but as servants of guilty photographing. I think the image of the almost leaky tea not only has this uncanny tonality, because of the camera that used to take it… It's so funny that we have the same camera, but like you, I’m a bit tired of having it. It always fails in something, well, I like a failure, but I think my Snappy is going to reach absolute failure soon, I hope after I end this expensive trip to Denmark I'll be able to finally buy a better analogue camera from eBay or find one in the group of traders. Also, the almost-leakage of the tea reminds me of the leakage that caused your keyboard to act strangely, as the pores of your body, no? It seems that all machines are contaminated by this feeling of failure sometimes, and there's nothing we can do besides waiting. Them to disappear, break, or new machines to appear (what usually involves a lot of money…). At least your pores are working again no? Every time I end a paragraph, I feel that I didn't answer anything that was commented before, but yes, maybe I have serious problems with linearity. Eventually, those answers are not answers. Instead, new questions will appear or will have appeared in a future that is also a past. Is it future, or is it past?
Oh, those pores. I really don’t want to see the camera, the keyboard, or the skin, as something that ‘works’. The keyboard was an accumulation of humidity and dust, the skin an infected pore, the camera stopped making contact with its energy source, which came down to a simple closed item not wanting to close anymore. It’s all the same if you ask me. Spectres of the future haunting me, being very very persistent. They are suitable for fabulating, but also bring a lot of anxiety, which asks for techniques and relays, as always needed at the edge of an event. But I think it was required, those pores questioning actively. The ‘o’ on the keyboard not working anymore and adding o’s to all the other letters, creating a lot of jumping o’s, asked for new writing techniques but also forcing me into a practice of moving through thresholds, those of medical care, Apple Care, similar sites with stressed humans and too much air conditioning. Only way out was to fabulate with the jumping o’s. The skin copied the detour of the keyboard… but how to write with a skin of jumping o’s? Maybe there’s potential in the accumulation or stretching of the skin as dust itself. Isn’t the most significant percentage of dust skin anyways? I wonder how those insides and outsides relate to the spectres of the future and their multidimensional portals. For example, Je t’aime Je t’aime not taking into consideration the body going into the past, but then having a set design that was so skin-like. Pores as portals? To other dimensions! Jumping r’s, vrey into you. Intimate but not personal. What about net bags?
Every day I'm so excited to write but then when the time comes to write I'm simply exhausted from all the forces; all the neurotypical tasks and expectations like having a clean body and clean house and being in time and responding to people and emails. The only possible way of response for me is to disappear, but since I still don’t know all the techniques of that practice, the closest thing I can think of is to fall asleep. I opened The Lure of the Ghost again, and it said: “Welcome back!” It’s vrey yrev good to see you again, old friend. It makes me sad; this morning I slept in late and read a nice text in bed with a coffee. I had so much energy and beautiful words floating in my head, but then I had to go to the university. Now, I’m back home and just exhausted. All the words got sucked out of me. My stomach and skin have been so upset this week, first signs to sleep more and drink water to wash away all the typicality perhaps. Blurry words and images caused by your blurry view can be beautiful, though, a bit like ghosts. Filenames deliberately misspelt, passed on through the internet as lures. Writing against memory and forgetting at the same time. Editing lure and jumping from page 60 to 82, because the end of the first page and the beginning of the last page looked exactly the same when I squeezed my eyes. Writing before your addition and after your addition from this afternoon at the same time. I miss flirting with you; now I can only flirt with the ghost of you here (hoping the ghost of me there also does some flirting) and with the boring digital words. Sending you one more compilation of a < and a 3 is going to make me cry. < and 3 always implies a less than 3. But it’s always so much more than that! At least the ghosts make up for that; they know a lot about such things. Still, the I love you makes me very glad to say to you, but also makes me just want to sit next to you and say nothing, maybe just cough once.
Ye language, you, me, it feels harder and harder to connect to. Everything is rendered to verbal modes. We didn’t even talk that much, which was very important. It is more a company, a soft-skinned, thought-flirtatious, same-variousness, ghost-lurking company. I love this kind of writing; going back, going forward, reading what you’re typing while I’m typing, changing things some creature said first because of things some creature said later. It is necessary. It has to be non-linear. I will not write unless it’s non-linear. There cannot be a pretending of a chronological dialogue between us, because there never was one. Me being vrey into you cannot be translated into a conversation between person one and person two since it never was and never will be like that. A non-coordinated non-linear talk between ghosts of us within and throughout all modes of being.
You referred to The Perfect Mango a couple of times, but somehow I knew I didn’t want to enter that text yet until today. I just read the introduction, and it brought tears to my eyes. It is everything we talked about, and all the reasons why we keep making and living, to make life without reducing it to a simple living being. There is a world to be invented; a world always being invented, and this is the world that keeps me alive today. I think that is why I cannot live without fabulation, and it’s often the only thing that keeps me writing, I don’t mean actual words on paper, no, writing as living.
Today I moved to downtown for a little more than a week, because my house is falling apart - the underground must be rebuilt. You saw the cracks in my house (look at the picture I've just put). The workers are going to fix the basement to make the building not fallible; they're going to work against the infra world that is trying to connect with the ground of Montreal. I'm also leaking: I was so anxious that I cut my nails again, too much. I am bleeding again. And my new temporary apartment is almost falling apart as well: they're blasting the building in front of mine with dynamite, the street is closed in the direction towards Rue Ste. Catherine so to go to Kazu (which is 60 meters from here) I have to go around the block. Today they performed some blasts, and I felt that my whole building trembled. On the other side of the street, they're also demolishing! I forgot how this is still possible in Montreal, well, at least only in Downtown. It's so funny because some years ago I did a course of creative writing with a lovely Brazilian writer and he said that the possible genre in places like São Paulo or Shanghai is the chronicle. The buildings appear and disappear so fast there that entire pieces of old brothels, bars and small structures simply get out of the realm of existence (at least on the way they used to be) in a few days, and only a chronicle would be able to narrate so quickly the daily life stories of those places. Well, I said it was funny, but I didn't tell why. Here in Montreal, I feel like we're ALWAYS under construction. But also that things stay as they always were. Maybe they're not efficient on construction business here, and who needs efficiency, anyways? But yes, I forgot that downtown has other agreements and laws that allow the construction of big buildings.
I guess so, not sure if describing, again and again, my traumas would lead to anywhere interesting! It resonates with something I've heard during the conference in Aarhus. The person was talking about her trip to India, and she said: “That was the only place in the world where I couldn't cross the street”. Well, I guess I wouldn't be able to cross the street there, but also the only place that I feel I couldn't cross the street is this world itself, and all of its iterations, from East to West, up and down. Crossing the street is always a difficult task. But yes, I think I prefer the alleys, Montreal has many of them. One of the things I like about the city is the possibility of not having to walk through the street full of people and talk to them but through the alleys and interact with the groundhogs and dogs and stray cats, well, I don't even know what interaction is, but to be-with. And also with the broken washing machines…
“Do you always check a ditch when you walk past one?”
“Check for what?”
“Are you afraid of bodies of water in general?”
“Hmm.. don’t think so.”
“Do you have a partner?”
“In one way or another”
“What is that supposed to m- ”
“Well, there is somebody I love a lot and talk to every day, but I wouldn’t call my partner.”
“Alright”
“Do you have a child?”
“Not that I know.”
The questions of this morning just as easily proceeded during the talk of this afternoon.
“We still need your report from SenseLab, will you email it shortly?”
“Oh, really? It feels so strange to capture it like that, can’t I give a slideshow or talk with you instead? I have a lot of pictures t- ”
“Don’t make it to hard for yourself, just write the thing, we don’t need to see a hundred pictures.”
“Ok, alright, then.”
“Oh, and could you also send the assessment from SenseLab’s part?”
“Ehm, oh I didn’t know you needed that”
“Yeah, we just need like a page and a grade.”
“Oh, a grade! But if the spz is gonna grade I-”
“Just send us the page, and we’ll grade it instead.”
That’s why I asked to at least write the page collectively. I refused to be ‘assessed’ by one person if I never was with one person, how can one write it, I wish the spaz could just do the writing instead. This collective word file is the simplest and closest thing to it I could think of for now.
“I thought for the second reader it could also just be under the name of the spaz, instead of one per- ”
“Oh no, it has to be a person, and that person needs to have a PhD.”
“Ah ok, I think I’ll choose someone I have had sex with.”
Too bad they never heard that last comment. I think I really broke my foot. I heard you can break it gradually, instead of having one instant in which the bone breaks. This is often caused by exhaustion. No wonder my left foot has decided to no longer carry me through these sad streets! This day has had a lot of interesting walking techniques already. From sliding to hopping to taking the elevator, walking on the toes, to walking on the heel, to making circles instead of straight lines.
“What happened to your left foot?”
“I started sleepwalking again. A practice from the old days.”
“Do you have a hard time falling asleep at night?”
“No, but I do wake up from the nightly visitors nibbling on my toes. I guess that’s why my left foot stopped being able to hold my weight pressed on this world by the neurotypical forces. My left foot is the one closest to the window, you see.”
“Do you often strangely experience reality? Like you feel as if your senses alter things, or you hear or see things other people don’t.”
Oh, the answer to that question she liked. Whenever she likes the question, I hear the sounds of her keyboard. As soon as I hear the first fingertip on the key, I quickly alter my answer. Nooo, I don’t want her to capture me this way! What if we had this talk 1 hour earlier and I would’ve felt completely different, the sun rays had entered the room on my knees instead of the tableside close to them. I see best when I hold my fingers on the side of my eyes and push the skin backwards. It is tricky to bike like that. I don’t like ghosts expressed in too human vocabularies. I’m listening to a song called The Visit. I tried to find back my notes from this afternoon, and I see I didn’t write after the ones from last week, but, hop! in the middle. It was out of the ordinary, but obvious in the nameless place. We were met on the visit.
“Don’t you ever feel the smile on your face as a form of a self-inflicted wound?”
“Hm, well maybe after some weird social event. Like the time I met the family, I had never met before, but they wrote me letters for ten years. When I arrived, they had a little sign saying ‘Welcome [my name] to our home!’. After all the presents and hospit(ypic)ality, I felt my smile burning in my cheeks the whole ride home.”
“Do you sometimes feel as if time moves in a way that is out of joint? Like a film in slow motion or fast forward.”
“Oh yes very often, don’t y- ”
Again, the typing sounds. A ball being kicked around outside. Clothes were parading on the laundry rack.
“I am meeting someone at 10 ‘o'clock.”
“Who are you meeting? What’s the name?”
“Oh I’m not sure, I was already glad I made it here, with the ferry and the bike and the broken foot.”
“You should really come more prepared next time.”
It’s good you keep on writing even when I don’t. I keep telling myself I’m too sad to write and I have so much to tell you that I have to find the right moment. But the things is; I never find the right moment to write and only keep getting sadder. I’m glad you keep the pace, and remind me that we should just keep pacing and trust that anarchival tendencies will bring us back to the writings, so we can write what we wanted to write even when we will never know what we wanted to write.
I can't stop imagining the peoply people saying: "WTF those guys have a can of Altoids attached to the entrance door with magnets and a label made in one of those old mechanical labellers glued to it. That's so tacky". At the same time I got so sad because this is just another confirmation that there's not so much space in the world that accepts diverse modes of dealing with art materials which are not focused on the really tacky art market, or in the academia without having to deal with human-oriented constraints, which is eating out each pore of my body because I figured I don't have much time to find places to escape.
You know the picture asking “Is there life after death?” and answering “Here to discuss it are three dead people”? It’s a fascinating conversation, too bad it’s still all dead white man though, even the death seems to remain typical. On September 2nd around 2 am I asked a friend that exact question to which he said: Didn’t you send me that image already in an email? Then I looked into my inbox and saw I posted it on September 2nd 2017 at 01:17. We were at the same party back then because of our mutual friend’s birthday; that gathering sparks something reappearing! A blanket said in its washing instructions “wash inside out”, I wonder what that means. Somebody told me she’s collaborating with someone she never met before, and now they’re doing something at the same place for the first time, but still, they’ll make sure they will never meet. Somebody else told me that often when I’m talking they have no idea what I’m talking about, but then sometimes suddenly they recognise some words I spoke about before and by that they understand what I’m saying just for a brief moment. Makes me want to go there where they can hear the grass grow. Somebody told me that poetry, to exist, needs to become itself forever not; always chasing itself out of its form. Unfortunately, most of the forms we encounter are the ones we’re getting to fill out, perhaps even forming our thinking. When poetry happens - and here you can read anything instead of poetry - it’s going to be unrecognisable because then it is not becoming or chasing anymore, and thereby not happening. The novelty is temporality split into what is ceasing to be and what is in the process of becoming. It’s always strange but eventually beautiful to notice something like a change of taste; suddenly loving a kind of fruit. It turns taste into a never-ending question, as long as I notice the difference, I will forever chase the taste. Let’s drink some chinotto!
What if the assignment lends itself, rather, to a set of sociopsychic affects that are incompatible with the intellectual practice? The completion of the assignment only ever prepares you for the next assignment, which requires one to consider the purpose of the neverending proliferation of assignments. The logic of the assignment is a logic of calculation. It makes it possible to construct a mode of quantification that imposes value upon human endeavor. (...) Another way to put it is: grading degrades intellectual practice and that we must consider, again immediately, is what the relation is between the degradation of intellectual practice and the maintenance of the already existing order of things. What I am trying to do, as emphatically and absolutely as I can is refuse the administrative function. (Fred Moten)
Not sure if I have a piece of clothing that I couldn't live without, like your necklace. Well, you could say I use the same boots every day but I don't do feel that it's a necessity, if I had to use another pair of boots or sneakers it would be okay. What I'm sure of is that some pieces are necessary for certain situations, I would say again it's the patches and the pins. During the book launch on Friday, I was using two pins: the Welcome to McDonald's one and the Dougie Jones. Still, I needed more. Too many people are performing their not so interesting appetites (very straightforward ones and situated over a certainty on the success of language). I believe in the failure of the language, as Derrida or Butler would say.
Sitting next to each other and don't talk but still talk may be one of the things I love most. Every day I wake up excited to write and to plan things but mostly that feeling disappears when I get up from the bed. I've been putting so many alarms for the early morning version of me that everyday is a huge and difficult task to find the one that I have to deactivate. And they all look like the same: "find grants", "answer emails", "send emails", "finish the film", "write this", "write that". Blablablabla. I've been looking so long for a way to delete all those alarms, apparently that was possible in early versions of iOS, you just had to send a voice command: "Siri, delete all my alarms" and that was done. But this is not possible anymore. Maybe I'll die suffocated in a sea of alarms that never reached their desired outcomes.
I love frictionous, or frictioness, or fricticious. Frictional, fictinal, fabulational. Fabulation is vrey frictionous, don’t you think? The versions of me and you writing, and capturing. It is a good thing that we have the same camera. It makes so much sense. I feel like your film roll was in mine, and I developed your captures, or we developed my capturing fabulation, or you captured our frictionous development, etc., etc. I want to wonder more about frictionous relating to fabulation relating to capturing. I’ll leave some space here to come back to that soon. Or you know what, I think we are already coming back to that by writing this. Also, did you see I included the picture of the spread-out tea, slowly falling out of the tiny hole in the bottom of the cup? What I like about that image is that it only works on a particular scale. If it’s small enough, it blends, everything backgrounding, but then when it is just a bit bigger, it expands, everything foregrounding; by being blurry, it never will. Which is beautiful; it cannot foreground because there was no specific capturing. I certainly do not think that enlarging relates to foregrounding, or that by enlarging something gets foregrounded, but for this instance, I think yes, that’s the case. Or better, it tries to do so, but at the same time can forever keep on doing so because it will never fully come there. Imagine, the picture expanding and expanding, falling off my laptop screen, falling of yours, onto the picnic table, along with the street onto the river bank, greetings the swans, into the water.
For me translating is like writing fanfiction, or an anarchival practice. Is this a fanfiction? It would be a bizarre kind of fanfiction since you still didn't read the 'original' text. I kinda like this "strangeness", although I have to say the book that activated the title of this book is really good. Do you remember that fanfiction I bought in Drawn and Quarterly, I Love Dick - A fanfiction? I'm looking into it right now, resting and sitting on my table. I don't have a lot of books in Canada. Some years ago, I used to think that I could never move somewhere if I couldn't carry all my books, which would be a bit problematic since I have many. Now I don't care about that. Of course, I would love to have all my books here but for obvious reasons (I won't pay a container trip for them without knowing how much time I have left here and even my books wouldn't fit in my little apartment).
Spectres of the future are always visiting me. I wake up, and they are already there. Sometimes I wonder if that virtuality of the future that decomposes me will really actualize or if there’s no future at all without the right conditions… Well, I know time linearity is not a thing, what makes me live the future that will not happen in the future right now, and it’s a kind of painful future. I wonder if, with accumulation, other movements appear. Movements that are not necessarily of accumulation but of dispersion. Like dispersion of the particles of textile every time I go to the laundromat, something gets lost, tiny particles of textile disappear by using, reusing, watching and drying everything many and many times.
I also know some things are attached to them by contagiousness and cross-pollination of adventures in the laundromat, or the salt from the sea that penetrates my pores and my swimming clothes. But most things get thinner, like the sole of my boots, I really like the sensation of touching them and seeing that they’re becoming smoother. You may have noticed that I do that oftenly. Repetition, or obsession, as some psychiatrists have said to me. I remember one of them talking to me that if I didn’t resolve the questions of repetitive behaviour, I would never get a job. Guess what, I’ll never address these questions because they’re not really questions but just false problems (except that I may never get a job, which will bring more spectres from the future and things like that, but well, let’s see). I really love new obsessions, saying the same words again and again and again. Of course, each time it’s, but most of the people are not able to see that. You know I really hate annoying things and boring people, but maybe repetition is something that bothers those annoying people or at least this kind of repetition that is less repetitive or in a less annoying way for them to put everything into the neurotypical topology back again and smile like everything is okay and working… I couldn’t continue to watch the Alain Resnais’ film after that. Well, I watched, but really bored. That’s basic sci-fi rules that were not obeyed, not that I’m a purist or something like that, it’s just that it doesn’t make any sense, even if it was supposed to be nonsense, it failed on that. It was more like a spiritualist film for me, in which the soul had to travel and see again and again what it did in a purgatorial way without having any agency - not that I believe in free will, but I believe in an infinitude of possible worlds.
I think I would prefer the octopodal mode of thinking through different tentacles that have their own desires, the lures that activate them... But I don’t really believe that cats cannot do that, or humans - or more-than humans (especially). The event knows itself to the order of what the event wants. I think an excellent and non-translatable encounter like ours happens when the creatures that compose the event-eventing are involved in some tendencies that can have different modulations but still can in a way interact and input contagiousness generating a kind of movement that is a bit not-coordinated but that carries a strange beauty. I talk about all the versions of me that exceed my body talking to all the versions of you (well, maybe not all of them, I’m sure some versions of me may not like that, but they are infinite...or at least I think they tend to infinity.) And they have this thing that is like a council, but not through consent or something like that, or not the council of Ricks from Rick and Morty, that I kind of like but seems to be held upon very linguistic agreements of what needs to be done. Well, I see more like an orgy than a council, not paying respect to those really boring people that describe themselves as “super dionisiac” but are still attached to the whole body/mind divide… If they ever read Descartes… But there also some people that don’t read Descartes and still contest him. Oh, I hate people. I really prefer the ghosts of me that “talk” to the ghosts of you, the ghosts of the future’s past, or the past’s future, something that has to do in a way with what Whitehead calls the “negative prehension” of an occasion or event that people who are too typical cannot really understand, but well, they have already all our jobs, I hope at least they give us the pleasure of understanding a *really* tinyyyyy part of Whitehead’s ontological system
I think I would prefer the octopodal mode of thinking through different tentacles that have their own desires, the lures that activate them... But I don’t really believe that cats cannot do that, or humans - or more-than humans (especially). The event knows itself to the order of what the event wants. I think an excellent and non-translatable encounter like ours happens when the creatures that compose the event-eventing are involved in some tendencies that can have different modulations but still can in a way interact and input contagiousness generating a kind of movement that is a bit not-coordinated but that carries a strange beauty. I talk about all the versions of me that exceed my body talking to all the versions of you (well, maybe not all of them, I’m sure some versions of me may not like that, but they are infinite...or at least I think they tend to infinity.) And they have this thing that is like a council, but not through consent or something like that, or not the council of Ricks from Rick and Morty, that I kind of like but seems to be held upon very linguistic agreements of what needs to be done. Well, I see more like an orgy than a council, not paying respect to those really boring people that describe themselves as “super dionisiac” but are still attached to the whole body/mind divide… If they ever read Descartes… But there also some people that don’t read Descartes and still contest him. Oh, I hate people. I really prefer the ghosts of me that “talk” to the ghosts of you, the ghosts of the future’s past, or the past’s future, something that has to do in a way with what Whitehead calls the “negative prehension” of an occasion or event that people who are too typical cannot really understand, but well, they have already all our jobs, I hope at least they give us the pleasure of understanding a *really* tinyyyyy part of Whitehead’s ontological system
First contemplation. The bar that moved is longer now. Or shorter, it depends on where it moved to, and its surroundings. In any case, is a meter here not the same as a meter there - in which the word ‘meter’ doesn’t seem to fit the equation. Because the meter, in the sense of a hundred centimetres, which means a constant, a once and for all captured size, is the proof of the changeability of things. I realise, however, that the meter, just as the things that had to be measured, by their move, changed in length, can keep the word of a meter. I want to remember everything what I considered this day very well. The length of the measuring tape changes with each movement, in the same way as the thing that has moved, the thing to be measured, that thereby, measured by the measuring tape, keeps the same length. With that insight can the line be maintained, that the meter, just as the distance, just as the length, never has the same size. What about translating? Is it a strange kind of writing practice, don’t you think?
It took me some days to gain some forces to write, here again, the Brazilian elections ate all my energy, and I couldn't complete any single task for the past two days. In a certain sense, I knew that I couldn't live there; not saying never, but right now the conditions are not favourable, independently of who wins in the second round. Of course, I don't want the far-right candidate to win. But a body that cannot sustain itself as the same body for more than two days (or two hours) cannot stay with all pieces together in a place that requires from you the constant positioning (in a sense of a subject that has to posit its views in a very clear and, I would say, typical way). I repeated many times that “Dougie Jones doesn't take a position”. I guess another way to say what I want is: “Dougie Jones doesn't perform their position according to the signs expected by both the macro and micropolitical eyes”. I imagine that some people would think that Dougie Jones and I are apolitical creatures. The issue is that their view of politics simply cannot understand that bodies are political and that bodies are what they can do - their affordances. Not in an essential way, I believe in plasticity, and I'm not also confining this kind of politics, I would say an animal politics according to what Massumi develops in his book, to the primacy of the experience. If I would, I would say that only those who suffer and experience the world not in the traditional way have a voice or can talk about it. If that was the case, this world had already failed. But people believe in hierarchies of both discursive and bodily enunciates. In moments like this, all the energy must be focused on the “universal” well-being, an universal that is a world-selecting, a world that can fit a lot of kinds of identities but not those who live in the thresholds of where I end and you begin: what would be the “performance mark” of those creatures, without having to pass through all the anxiety that comes with the faking performance of being a typical activist? That's why, of course, I would vote for the left-wing in Brazil, and I aim for their victory, but this world, the typical world, already won. I guess I'll have to stay far away from there for a while, visiting my cats, but not aiming to live there effectively.
I was browsing Instagram stories again. Maybe that's the most toxic thing I do, besides cutting my own feet to relieve the absent presence of the ghosts of the future. A proud mother every day showing her prodigious little girl playing the piano, going to manifestations, swimming, wearing a princess dress, learning English, everything focused on her face with a blur filter. Some people on a party, faces with logos, faces smoking cigarettes, faces smiling, faces with their 'partners’, faces watching Netflix. Faces, faces and faces. It's kind of sad that people understand faciality only referring to their human all too human faces. Then I stop Instagramming, look for grants to feed the ghosts of the future. Can't find anything, go back to Instagram stories: faces doing live videos explaining the importance of (... I can't even remember), faces drinking, faces celebrating the weekend, faces eating a vegan pie with gifs of faces around the food. Only human faces, of course. A girl who is learning to play the tambourine with her face painted, a boy showing his new beautiful haircut. I go back to search for grants, maybe even a new PhD, everything needs an interview, more frontal conversations feeding the ghosts of the future. No future and no past, I feel that those human faces live in a non-time, sucking energy, creating vortexes that suck all my will to live. Then I watched that little film again that Godard did in which he's joyfully browsing at full speed the pictures of his phone. I don't remember if there were many humans there. Maybe I should watch it again. But I assume he's laughing because he's already 90 years old and is leaving this world soon, ‘what the fuck is this world I'll depart from soon? Hah hah’. But I hope that doesn't happen; I don't want Godard to die (maybe only some of his fans). I guess people call that a lot of things, the spectacle, for example. I'm not sure what to call all of this, I just want to meet creatures with no faces or faces that are not over the neck, maybe that's what made me so happy when the airco-guy visited me for the first time (and until now, the last).
I started sleeping in the living room, to prevent me from sleepwalking in the living room and give my feet some rest. Delicious.
I was translating Erin Manning's Always more than one to Portuguese and look at this beautiful sentence by DJ Savarese I found there: “We might stop a movement. People think we're avoiding doing some work, but we're deserting our reasonable selves because we feel a fearful sound or see quiet green reassessed as approval”.
For five years, I would dream at least every week that a visitor came into my bedroom while I was asleep. I couldn’t see his face, it was one dark blur, but he was always wearing a winter coat and was as big as the door opening. He would say something like “If you say no, it won’t happen”, “If you just move away I won’t harm you”. But then I would paralyse, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t do anything. And as I was lying completely still in my bed, I would wake up, entirely again in my bed, being unable to move or speak just like he wanted it. I would feel myself falling back into the one bedroom and back into the other bedroom, it kept flipping and folding, I kept being unable to move against the flip or the fold. Every week I already knew this nightly visitor would come, I kept on anticipating, mostly expecting him on days it already felt impossible to move in this strange world. I knew that feeling would repeat itself into the night, asking me to act, but keeping me in an unavoidable and infinite folding. The week before I left, I had the dream for the last time ever since. Although it was very different, I dreamt I fought just outside the doorway.
The earplugs were not like those regular ones you get for free in hotels, but a bit more expensive ones that you can use for concerts. Somebody walked up to me and asked if I wanted to take part in a questionnaire. I nodded no, thinking of that if I have to answer always everywhere again, I will collapse. I saw he looked at my ears with the strange blue things coming out of them and said: “Oh, I’m so incredibly sorry, I didn’t see.” One of the few words I love being with is yours, as I’m copyediting The Lure of the Ghost I feel them floating around me for the rest of the day. The other(ness) voices finally found their way into this research-creation proposition and its other branches, but it's still important to be clear that when an "I" appears, it doesn't refer to a unified subject but as the actual occasion of the writing itself, that carries anarchival traces of all the spectres that inhabit and world this body-mind, a conceptual persona in its multiplicity and monstrosity. Sometimes during the following pieces, the murmurs of the ghosts appear as "I", they or (a) body. Again and again, drifting away but please let there be room to actual leak without being drained. I keep on thinking about how to incorporate those experiences and vocabularies into writing practices.
Not sure why I didn't remember this before, but once a dated a girl who had a partner that is a neuroscientist. Basically what he was doing in his research was looking into neuronal structures - markers for autism and other kinds of “issues”, and intervene on them through electrical stimulation, to stimulate the development of ‘empathy’ and other ‘social skills'. I'm not going to enter into the discussion if the scientific research was valid or not, you know I hate people who dismiss science. And obviously not judge those who want to change themselves, if possible (the research was not funded and ended). But to think into the world-bodies that are felt as necessary by the typical activists: ‘empathy’ is a necessity, bodies that feel it differently or not feel at all are condemned to judgement in the parliament of Facebook. (Empathy directed to another human subject or very well defined group).
good thing v-r-e-y has 4 different letters, because otherwise there would be less combinations ! if vrey had five letters it would be 5x4x3x2x1
if we made a word out of the whole alphabet it would be 1x2x3x4x5x6x7x8x9x10x11x12x13x14x15x16x17x18x19x20x21x22x23x24
but if we could reuse letters it would be 4^4
Oh yes, I was wondering, some of them even look like names, like YVER. I could imagine giving this name to a child. And it's also a gender neutral name. Well, all names could be like that no? Or they already are.
Beautiful name. I pronounce it like ‘hiver’.
I love the “Oops!” eraser in the spaz. I don’t like erasers in general, and they imply some strange idea of cleaning or perfecting. But this one is different, and I don’t think anything has ever been erased with it. It just lurks to look at the iteration of the spaz in a way that it could shift any moment, that it was something that happened but soon will happen in another way. It entails both the oops of making it as the oops of unmaking it. The oops still opposing into the now and popping the oops. Oops is totally pop, don’t you think? Also, to be clear, I think a lot of other thingies have the same kind of quality without needing a word to say it. The frog (before it got kidnapped to Germany) said “OopS!” so often! SpLaSh and OOps and pOp are all very duplicitous. Oops, vrey.
When they started building a new building, they got rid of the garden. Then like a slow protest, she put 500 tulip bulbs in the ground. The director found out they started growing and told all the builders to move the bulbs carefully. “The flowers are wild,” she said.
Something is happening again. I was told that when you go into an MRI scan, you go into such a big magnetic force that your balance organ is affected by it. While you’re sliding into the machine, it feels like you’re turning to the right, but ‘actually’ you’re just sliding straight into it. “Actually?” I said. “Yeah, you’re confused about what actually happened.” But then I thought; if you feel you turned right, then it still also ‘actually happened’. I really don’t understand when there’s a difference made between those things! It happened, again, and at the same, always, and again again. For me, everything I think, dream, feel, remember is just as part of what happened. And honestly, often I can’t even discern between those things. And honestly, it’s usually a bigger part of what happened than what ‘actually happened’. That’s why I really don’t trust someone when they can just get out of bed and wake up like hop hop hop. No, I need to transition! So much happened. So much happened again.
I went to a talk of Laurie Anderson, while she was talking and showing and making I wrote down some words in the dark. Reality not as something to recognise anymore. What are nights for? To fall through time into another world? Still living in a world of stories, soon you’re not telling the stories; we’re drowning in our own stories. And then something I can’t read. Gravity’s random, but could also be gravity’s rain down. When he appears late in the story, it is only because he simply wasn’t written yet. All the things I lost in the flood. For everything you don’t know; true or false. If ponies were people, they’d all be in jail. Sewing time. When dancing or fighting with a ghost, envision the ghost.
I feel very spread out now that you are in Copenhagen. I couldn’t sleep for the past two nights, I woke up so early, which is vrey unlike me. I think it is because I’m still synched to your sleep and I sensed that you already woke up being ahead 6 hours. There are infinities of you, and some are here with me, and some of mine are there with you. That’s perhaps what makes me feel so spread out as I’m accompanied by future spectres. Makes me think of how I met a spectre of you before I met you. Often the meeting is more recognising than a meeting, don’t you think? Something is here again. We feel a lot the same. Actually, that was the feeling I had when I met you. Not a meeting, but a recognising. I felt relieved because I knew as soon as I met you, I didn’t have to explain myself or clarify my presence. I knew that there was a mutuality, an understanding, which reassured me that bodies can be at places or in a company without having to actively relate in the exhaustive sense -which is often in neurotypical settings a verbal mode. The relation was already established in the recognition rather than an explanation.
But well, for now, during this night, I want to continue with the laugh because the ghosts from the future's arrival are always sure. Also, it's sooo boring to think that for them the art starts inside of the lab; that they cannot deal with any other organisation of things like an unusual arrangement outside it that could affect/reflect in its "precious" interiority (and I mean the entrance passage of their door)... Well, I guess that's the difference of art from artfulness. They don't know what artfulness is because it's a technique to survive the typicality and the thresholds of this iteration of the universe.
Speaking of judgement and condemnations, yesterday during the counting of the votes of the Brazilian elections, I was watching the new Lars von Trier film: The House That Jack Built. Not sure if I liked the film, but it has a lot of anarchival qualities. And the epilogue is incredible: the path to hell is through crypts, full of water, a hole opened into the ground, you walk through underworld crypts and voila: you're in hell. You remember that in Riget it's the water leaking into the land from the previous world of the bleachers that guide the transport of entities from one universe to another. I think both films/series happen in the same universe and there's a network of tunnels where water runs that can guide us to other worlds of the multiverse. We need more crypts. A cryptoverse, maybe (I’m not talking about cryptography or cryptocurrencies but actual crypts) - we have to find the right materials! -, like the Underspazz for example, but more rhizomatic. A world under our world (that's not really ours). If hell and the bleachers’ world, or laundroworld(?) is leaking into this world, I'm already feeling it.
If you don't show necessity in a typical way, it's not a real or actualised necessity for neurotypical eyes, and the ball continues to roll again and again over the bodies that are liminal or thin that cannot fit under an identity. I love the idea of liminal bodies or glorious bodies that come from early Christian/pagan philosophy or oikonomia, ghostly entities that have membranes that are so thin that they can be seen erroneously as purely incorporeal. Sometimes I think my body doesn't exist and I feel that kind of email messages or presentational showing only put more weight on a body that's already shattered and tending to the complete disappearance in favour of greedy interests of the truck-machine of typicality. Also I always like to insert the “glorious body” using a different font each time, a font face that would undoubtedly be part of a visual identity you would see in one of those very American delis that here in Montreal are full of smoked meat sandwiches, typically something like a red background and these cursive letters: “glorious body”, or like the one on my new pin of Ronald McDonald that says “welcome”.
If you don't show necessity in a typical way, it's not a real or actualised necessity for neurotypical eyes, and the ball continues to roll again and again over the bodies that are liminal or thin that cannot fit under an identity. I love the idea of liminal bodies or glorious bodies that come from early Christian/pagan philosophy or oikonomia, ghostly entities that have membranes that are so thin that they can be seen erroneously as purely incorporeal. Sometimes I think my body doesn't exist and I feel that kind of email messages or presentational showing only put more weight on a body that's already shattered and tending to the complete disappearance in favour of greedy interests of the truck-machine of typicality. Also I always like to insert the “glorious body” using a different font each time, a font face that would undoubtedly be part of a visual identity you would see in one of those very American delis that here in Montreal are full of smoked meat sandwiches, typically something like a red background and these cursive letters: “glorious body”, or like the one on my new pin of Ronald McDonald that says “welcome”.
I remember very well one class of my PhD supervisor in Brazil; he was teaching Spinozist ethics and especially talking about the fear people have about discussing the concept of God or the point of view of God in Spinoza. Well, it's the point of view of the event itself. And calling it god is not a problem, actually I like to call it god to irritate some secular friends that have other kinds, and I would say, way more transcendental than any Spinozist god. Anyways, he was talking about that and he said, "well, of course, it doesn't make any sense if you go to some cult, and the spirit that manifests through you or your guide gives you precise human orientations, and very moral ones, like "do not betrayal your lover" or "take care of your children", blah blah blah. So basically I'm calling forth those interdimensional creatures just making them speak in my boring human language? That's the opposite of anything exciting for me. I want hos(ti)pitality in dealing with unknown creatures; I don't need to say anything to the cats that visit me here because we communicate through our manifestations of appetites through non-linguistic signs. I guess that's what happened between us; we didn't have to talk humanly to know we already knew each other. By the way, can you believe I'm writing this while on the separate tab of my browser I'm watching Brazilian live television, more specifically a soap-opera? I think beside cats, dogs and some relatives, Brazilian television would be one of the things I would miss more, hahaha, nothing that I cannot resolve with my VPN and the right streaming websites. Well but you love The X-files, and there are a lot of humanised aliens there. Well, that's true, but there are many humans that have more-than-human tendencies in that tv show, including Mulder and Scully. Of course, as two creatures attuned to the more-than and sharing mutual interests, they would’ve taken the maximum of 7 days to sleep together and not seven seasons and one movie before it finally happened. It's funny that they also talk about The X-Files in the I'm Very Into You by Kathy Acker and Ken Wark. I'm not trying to create a parallel with their work, but for me, it's impossible not to bring anarchival traces from that tv-show since I both restarted watching it entirely from the beginning and following the last season that ended some months ago, which almost everybody hated but I have to confess I loved. PS: I still didn't find a place to install the patch "I believe" with the flying saucer from The X-Files, but I'm looking for a new iron (since you took yours back to the bitch when you left Montréal), and a unique t-shirt to place it.
OMG, it was so pleasant when I started to rewatch Riget some weeks ago. I guess they washed away so much the typicality that the uncanny spectres decided to stay around waiting for the portal to be open (red room?). But actually, I don't think they decide things through a consensus-based model of governance but only appetites (many-in-one and one-in-many always generate some detouresque action.) Anyways, I think I'm too tired to compose more complex sentences today. I just came home from the Späz. I felt relieved and for sure better while I was there, but now that I'm at home again I think that. Well, I don't know, feeling that the un-containability of the event of play with the things doesn't answer to a chronologic and limited time but I wish I could feel more right now what I had felt earlier.
Everything we write as an open question, that marks multiplicity, goes beyond the individual and is to be endlessly unpacked and explored. Techniques of reusing, rehearsing, reviving, revisiting, reviewing, and reciting. To think that we were not writing when we wrote it. In Very all of it is emails, which makes it a conversation, a correspondence, but in Vrey everything is in the live word file, making it at the same time and the same place, making it into a meeting rather than a dialogue. Vrey is perhaps written because we are neglecting everything that we were supposed to write instead; emails, tweets, to-do-lists, names for alarm reminders, LinkedIn profile, grant applications, answers to the same questions. No Vrey is written because it is not a neglecting; it is caring for everything we are writing here. I always like words but then when I attend a whole evening of people reciting lines at some point I’m just sick and sick of it. One person told the audience that they were wearing a wig and then suddenly all the other people seemed to be wearing one as well — lovers of bad timing. I wanted to go and leave all the words, and maybe there were just too many words at some point, I saw I had accidentally drawn a spaceship, or some aircraft, in my notebook. “What about all the things that go unsaid?” That’s such an annoying question, that’s the anarchive, it’s all about the things that go unsaid. Maybe that’s why when too many words are said; it makes me want to leave. Everything we write as a question, but not a verbal one, let me circle around you, take care of you, float away and listen to the things we never said. Makes me want to wrap you in, or it, not to hold away from what is around you, but to circle around until it’s happening again; to start unpacking — but not unwrapping until there’s nothing left, no, maybe rotating in the opposite direction to see all that got caught in the circles between. Or threading back and seeing all the dust that got hooked onto the needle’s track. Not unwrapping as in unraveling an essence, oh no, let’s forever forget about that. Unthreading as in starting the same question with different words. Or better; as in beginning the same question with a different temporality of letters: Vrey? Maybe it was always the same question as Very had, but with a different temporality of letters, and thereby with a different temporality of meeting. Like Dougie, and Cooper, and Other Dougie, and Mr C, and whoever more than that; a different writing, in the same document. Forever writing, circling, leaking, meeting, becoming, dancing, assembling letters - I wake up to your words that you have been writing while I was doing the same in my sleep.
I’m not sure about that; I don’t think any glad words will ever appear there. I have so many booklets with sad ghosts running around the first pages already. I moved around with all my stuff, tried so many techniques the spaz taught me, but my thingies still didn’t look happy. I hope soon they will again. I need at least one place in this city that will give me some rest. I was only delighted yesterday when I found some stones I had gathered from Denmark and Canada in a paper bag. There’s something about rocks and paper bags. Paper bags around stones, stones on paper bags, paper bags between stones, stones around paper bags. They like to be wrapped. Somehow I link that to the sensitive dishwashers of Riget. Those fabulatory speakers in the cellar know so much more than all the other persons running around on the ground floor and above. They talk about the events presenting themselves again, the building starting to cry, something hiding in the silence, things that come and can’t be washed away with water. One technique that is really important for me and I know it is for you too is taking a shower after a long day with a lot of typicality — or taking all my clothes off after being in a train with too many sad people around. It is a way to anarchive draining events. My grandmother had a lot of neurodiverse tendencies. I think she would’ve enjoyed a place where they were better understood. Or it is not about understanding, and it’s also not about having a place, because my grandfather was always very loving and created conditions, maybe even too much so (in a way that it hurt him), but perhaps understanding for herself in a way that is not yet verbal. I think she had a lot of tendencies but felt stressed because she felt like she wasn’t supposed to have them. She always took off all her clothes as soon as she came home, but nobody was supposed to know about that. She hardly ever wanted to have visitors coming to her house, but she never knew how to express that. My father only found out a few years ago that one of the reasons was because she always covered all the furniture in sheets and bed covers. It was merely impossible for somebody to visit spontaneously because then she had to take down all those sheets. Ever since I heard about those sheets I haven’t been able to stop thinking about them and covering up all the cabinets, white fabrics to hide from the world, just as how ghosts have always been represented in pop culture.
I went to the foot doctor to get new techniques for nocturnal sleepings in the living room. She let me walk on blue screens to get inky prints of the way I walk with the forces of this world. Afterwards, she felt my feet and let me invent all kinds of turns and bends and flexes. She said my feet were vrey flexible, no surprise they were so tired from walking, can you imagine all where they went to! To deal with the forces pressing, my flexible joints started composing bone-like textures. It’s hard to walk in this world with flexible feet, so no wonder the joints started fabulating, only appearing through blue and bents.
The turning point picture you posted reminded me of this cup I bought in the thrift store. Do you remember when we went to that store? The same place where I got that lovely piece of orange/red garment, a good velvet lure for creatures. For me the equivalent for “Heyyy! How is it back? How are you? You want to hang out soon?” is "Hey, nice to have you back here. What are you doing?", but the worst is "Ohhh, until when are you going to stay here?". I hate this presupposition that I have to leave at some point mainly because I know I don't have certainty for a lot of months, so it's a kind of enunciation that accelerates the process of intensification of anxiety. I have to say it's tricky not to fall into the supposed wonders of acceleration and velocity with the clock pointing to two minutes before midnight. In that sense, I feel that the end of this world already happened; it's just sending its virtual affects back into this time that will eventually be actualised. If it's unavoidable, what's the point of being here? I know this goes against all kinds of things we are supposed to support, but sometimes it's challenging to enter into this mood or tonality. I wonder, I think for me to live any place there should be a time of compressing and decompressing that takes months, something made impossible by the actual neoliberal regime of distribution of bodies. ell, I have to say most of my left-wing friends also have the tendency to believe in incessant work, they're so proud of it, they post every day on the fucking Instagram stories how much they produced and how much time after their regular work hours they stayed writing (specially journalists that have to work on weekends). Poor them, which reminds me that some years ago I was reading Wilhelm Reich, who is very interesting and had this motto about working and loving, but unfortunately when people talk about work is always the NT approach to it, chronological time, not a time that needs some time itself to rest a bit. I guess fabulation and powers of the false are the creation of time itself, if I'm not mistaken. So maybe, well, I'm not that certain that every minor gesture is fabulation or contain it but for me, yes, and I think it has always been. Some experiential glue is needed in cases of waking up as one person and leaving the bed as another one, which is not so well accepted by the judgemental society that likes to chunk people into a unity that is there to be judged and evaluated. But what if this constellation is not the same as one minute ago? I mean, I'm not sure if people understand that. I remember when I was younger, I use to leave notes to the other versions/ghosts of myself, or I should say, a-self, or (a)self, hmmm. The cup that reminds me of the image of the turning point was just tested in the microwave, to make an infusion of dandelion roots, not the best kind of tea and technically not even tea, but they say it's good for kidney stones, which apparently are not very active in my organism right now but I feel they can appear in the future again. It's happening again. I'm not sure if I answered your questions about the I, but maybe? I think so.
It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there's too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no "mal-de" can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d'archive. (Jacques Derrida)
I read frictionous instead of flirtatious during the first time (and that word doesn't even exist), but I think it's part of the soft-skinned conjunction to be frictionous, or frictional, what the orthography corrector says is the “right word”. Cats can be very frictionous, no? Or raccoons… I guess that’s the reason we don't put our names on the paragraphs, because it's a lot of people writing, and soon I will not know which version of you or me wrote which thing. I guess we already don't know that, mainly because it's not needed to know and point, take to the foreground...I’m feeling vrey sleepy, it's 12:24 AM in Copenhagen.
Your pace creates conditions. And that is precisely what we were talking about; a living-with. It is not about codependency (have you also noticed that this has suddenly become fashionable, like me talking with my roommate, noticing she was on the phone “Oh sorry I didn’t know you were calling someone” “Oh no, that’s just my boyfriend, we FaceTime when we’re not together, haha we’re so needy”, and me standing there with my eyes full of despair and my mouth full of disgust), but about survival. It is not about needing each other; it is about making it able to live, about creating conditions. I moved all my stuff back into my apartment. I promised myself this is the last time I move to this city, one year and one year only, my body can’t live here anymore.
“The owls are not what they seem” like this leather object is not what it seems. I'm writing this while I'm sitting on a sofa in the Spaze, with my boots on. That can’t be a good sign; I'm so sad that it feels that it doesn't matter for my body to be less or more comfortable since the most probable outcome of future ghosts of displacement is the death or the complete deterritorialization of the body. Normally I like to put my bare feet on the ground, even with all my fingers cut because of anxiety and sadness. I wish I could find a way far from self-mutilation, but also I think lethargy could rise to such a high level that even for that I won’t have the energy. Speaking of, I was so attracted by the Rick and Morty pair of socks in Urban Outfitters, but at the same time felt strange buying something with such clear human faces. Then we had that conversation stating that they're not necessarily human but more-than-human, in the sense that there are infinite universes of Ricks and Mortys so in most of those universes they could have non-human traits, even looking like a human, or even in the human-like creatures there's more-than-human. So I started to feel a bit happy again, resonating with this moment right now I feel a bit of happiness amid all this future displacement ghost that populates the instances of this body with sadness. I guess I will take off my boots a little bit to let my feet breathe.
Often I think, what will I write in vrey next time. I can’t imagine something new, but then somehow somewhere I know what to write. It’s tricky though, how to find writing techniques that open up for fabulation and move away from boring singular points of view. Maybe there should happen some anarchival editing soon. I found this book again that my teacher in art school once told me to read. He used to call me the log-lady, carrying something everywhere every time no matter where no matter when, caring for it and being cared for by it. “You don’t have an art practice. I would call it instead of a practice of living, where you just move and sometimes show us coagulations of those processes of movements.”I thought of the book again because - do you like thingies? - It is called The Things, written in 1965 by a phenomenological psychotherapist. It is a weird book, which talks about the changeability of things. I think I hate it but also love some of the writing. It has been very long since I read it though, I should read it again. It is very fubalotory, but always from the singular human’s point of view and methods accordingly, which just utterly bores me. I can only read it as some Husserl fan fiction.
I guess that the question of the ghosts has been changing a bit for me since my childhood. I always expected the ghosts to visit me, even not believing in any Western or Eastern formalised religion. But also - and it's something I wrote in the introduction for the book I’m finishing to write, and I'll send to you to review - my early childhood coincided with the release of the first seasons of The X-Files broadcasted on television. If I remember well it was released in Brazilian free-to-air television almost at the same time it aired in the US, which was uncommon. Cable TV was still not very popular there. But anyways, when I started to watch The X-Files as a little child, I became fascinated with the idea of the abduction by external forces that were either extraterrestrial or cryptozoological - well, yes, some episodes tended to more spiritualized cases, but they were not my preferred ones. Every night I wished to be abducted by one of those creatures and be tested, examined, etc. But when I realised that some beings or ghosts could be very human, I understood that I wouldn't like those so much. Well, I guess there all kinds of specks of ghosts and extraterrestrial beings. Including the ghosts of the trauma and repulse to neurodiversity that inhabit São Paulo. I think that's why the only way I go back to Brazil is for visiting parents and cats. Also it makes me feel really sad that conspiracy theory right now is so oriented to the right-wing, my whole infancy was built with fabulation with The X-Files, Twin Peaks and other TV shows with all sorts of conspiracy theories and that's what made me survive, believing and creating, fabulating a world in order to survive the burden of living with people. Even that they stole from us, remember Dr Amp in Twin Peaks: The Return? I guess I'll continue to my fabulation also if that means being judged by the alleged “politically activist” people that still don't accept any other kind of contract or agreement that doesn't pass through the discursive neurotypical bias. People think they're ontologically superior to animals, yes, and they still believe that they overcame transcendentalism with their secular faith: for me, any ontological division is a kind of secular-masked old system of belief or faith. But I have to confess sometimes I have so much disdain for the humans that I may put them on a lower level than the other creatures, including animals and plants. Well, I guess everybody has its contradictory tendencies (fortunately).
Funny logo printed on the faux-leather that covers the lens of my new camera (and make it look like a small wallet). I looked into Wikipedia on “PaineWebber” and apparently it “was an American stock brokerage and asset management firm that was acquired by the Swiss bank UBS AG in 2000. The company was founded in 1880 in Boston, Massachusetts, by William Alfred Paine and Wallace G. Webber”. Since this camera model was released in 1994 it may have been used by an employee of that financial company in its last days of decadence. What was it used for? I'm not sure, but it's very special because it allowed people to be very sneaky since it really doesn't look like a camera when it's closed, and although being so small, it still carries almost the same quality as the now a cult-following object Olympus Mju 2. I wouldn't say it could be used for espionage because at that time they already had a lot of better technical devices for that. I have to say it's not invisible but it's so visible as other thing, that it could be used for that.
Funny logo printed on the faux-leather that covers the lens of my new camera (and make it look like a small wallet). I looked into Wikipedia on “PaineWebber” and apparently it “was an American stock brokerage and asset management firm that was acquired by the Swiss bank UBS AG in 2000. The company was founded in 1880 in Boston, Massachusetts, by William Alfred Paine and Wallace G. Webber”. Since this camera model was released in 1994 it may have been used by an employee of that financial company in its last days of decadence. What was it used for? I'm not sure, but it's very special because it allowed people to be very sneaky since it really doesn't look like a camera when it's closed, and although being so small, it still carries almost the same quality as the now a cult-following object Olympus Mju 2. I wouldn't say it could be used for espionage because at that time they already had a lot of better technical devices for that. I have to say it's not invisible but it's so visible as other thing, that it could be used for that.
I can't stop laughing when I think of what the peoply people from the other lab said about the leakage of the Spaze's creaturesque environment. "The other lab complained about it not being attractive". I can't stop thinking about how it is to be like a chair or even that horrible piece of furniture that was taken outside to be devoured by recycling. And yet how those pieces of furniture would look at the typicality that exhales from those individuals: "Oh, really? You're REALLY not attractive".
By the way, I took a picture of the space leaking itself into the outside of the room because my guts somehow knew that something like that was going to happen, but it's on my new Olympus LT-1, which I haven’t developed a film from yet. I hope it will work because I didn't take a backup picture with my iPhone, I usually would, but yes, let's wait. People are waiting, and people are (always) missing. I guess I'm really sad these days and in a progression with all this uncertainty, one sign of that is that I have this film for like, two weeks, and only took 12 pictures. Normally a sneaky cat would develop even two films per week (during the Snappy times). Well, I hope this will change somehow. Is it a kind of affectometer, no? The quantity of film developed is somehow proportional with the qualitative aspects of my mood, or the mood of the ghosts that populate this body (yesterday I woke up with an excellent mood, but I knew that when I put my feet outside it would instantly vanish. And voila).
The more I try to understand why this city makes me so sad, the less I know. There’s something wrong about me being here. Probably it has something to do with ghosts. My mother always tells me I’m so sad because I have other people’s ghosts visiting me too, haha. Well, she would never use the word ghost like that, but that’s what she says; “You’re sad about things that are not even your own sadness”. When I was in Montréal, I had ghosts visiting me too, but those I could place much easier. Well not always, you remember that day when I couldn’t stop crying, and I didn’t know why? I think that is perfectly fine and even beautiful, but here I don’t feel just sad, I feel stressed and restless and weird.
Just before I left for Montréal, I wrote my best friend and parents a letter. I didn’t know if I could even come to Canada; I was close to giving up on all my plans. I felt nothing; I didn’t know anything, I was continually collapsing and on all levels. But I figured; if I have nothing else than wanting to die, I can just as well do it there. If death in Amsterdam is the only outcome, Montréal could be the fabulation of a world worth living. I wrote that I was sorry that every day they would find a daughter and a friend at their door that could only tell them she had to be with them to make sure not to kill herself. I remember writing the letters so. I couldn’t stop crying, and I couldn’t read my own messages, most of the ink even vanished from the tears, it was so dramatic.
What to say for the things you don’t want to put in words? What to say if all the words are one big bad cliché? I had to constantly be with somebody else, in company of another, because that was the only possibility not to feel my selfs floating out of my body until they floated so far away that even touching my skin, hearing my own voice coming out of my mouth, or looking into my eyes in the mirror would make me so anxious, to encounter something so unrecognizable, that I couldn’t feel, hear, see, smell, or taste anymore, making the best option was I knew that if at least they would recognize me as something like a body it must mean there still was a body. The proximity of the other bodies then allowed for me to latch onto another rhythm. Important when anxiety parsed everything into a single pace and rhythm. That, and the smell of cinnamon, cardamom, and Weyes Blood’ssong Cardamom were the only things that kept me from floating away entirely. We just met, but I have to confess; I knew you, before too; Summer is here; I have nothing to fear; Fresh new train of flesh for me to look down.
I was reading Nature as Event - The Lure of the Possible, oh I really want to finish reading it before I’m going to put it in your mailbox this Monday together with the herbs and the hvmans stamp card. But anyways, Didier Debaise was, following Whitehead, talking about the subjectivity of feelings relating to subjectum and superjacio, which offer a renewed thinking of the subject which is not just anthropological (57, 2017). The first translates to being placed below, or being thrown under something; the second to throw above, to hurl toward. Within subjectum the appearance of a foundation of feeling is never the aim, but rather the effect of a process. A thought or a feeling is then not tied to subject, but by walking along the lines of the process, a subject can be added, as a derivative. Well ok, I was saying all this because this can be written for all multiple centers of experience within nature for “the various parts of its body”. It comes from Whitehead’s Modes of Thought. Those multiple centers of experiences are still linked to one centre of experience, as entangled multiplicities (56, 2018). I kept on thinking how this multiple center goes across, rather than linking to one centre which can be traced. Anyways I think I need to keep reading because I’m not explaining those thoughts and my thoughts now. Maybe you can read the last pages? Also I don’t know, I think I was merely thinking on how this could be connected to spectropoetic contingencies. What about an orgy of entangled multiplicities?
I think it’s probably true to say that, unlike the sun god, and the Gods of monotheism, Whitehead’s god has no face. This God is far too immersed in the complexity and variation of world. It is not the face so much as relational contrasts (that is, intensities) that connect in process. This perhaps make the term “interface” redundant. (Andrew Murphie, not yet published)
I have been missing you too much. I find living vrey difficult, but it was so much lighter doing it in your company, being-with you. The world is blue, and there’s nothing we can do. Well, there are things we can do. We were talking about humans (not hvmans) only caring when things affect themselves. And that’s why it is necessary for us to keep writing and making and loving. It has been so nice to be in the same timezone as you, waking up together, going to bed together. September always brings a lot of spectres from the future for me. Spectrember? To flip back to the soles of your shoes... I have noticed you touch them a lot. They’re very smooth! Smooth like the arch of your feet. I had never felt such soft arches like yours before! It’s intriguing cause again and again and again you move with your fingers on your toes in painful ways cause you find it difficult to walk through life. A speculative finding of feet? It was necessary to learn to walk again, colourful band-aids in every corner of the feet. I always get so stressed when I am buying new shoes. Because I never know what size feels good, often each size does not feel good. And then there’s somebody working in the shoe store asking: “And how does it feel?” Which just makes me want to scream: “I don’t know how it feels!!! I can’t feel my feet!!!!” A person once told me I should buy heavier shoes to make sure I keep my feet on the ground. Strange how shoes are represented in neurotypical structures. The shoes I wore a lot in Montréal have coarse soles, which makes it possible for them to mischievously manoeuvre and take along things from place to place. Entering the elevator of the university, feeling that one of my legs was longer than the other, looking underneath my foot, finding a big pebble from the other dimension I was just in. Sometimes I took it out the grooves and put it on the floor of the elevator; sometimes I kept it there; keeping my one leg slightly longer than the other, somehow anticipating that that would come in handy later in the day. Leaving the big stone all alone on the floor reminds me of the one time that I was small, and I was at the dentist and coughed, something small came up, and I spit it on the floor. He got so mad and asked: “Why did you do that?! Would you’ve done that at your own home?!!” And I thought: “Yes I would”. I didn’t even understand what he meant with the distinction between my own home and other places when talking about coughing. I didn’t realize what I did wrong, but he made sure I still felt ashamed. As if certain things shouldn’t cross certain thresholds, as if I should have been disgusted by things coming out of my body. I think we could link this to relation to shoes. Somehow things from ‘outside’, or maybe better ‘some other side/site’ are not allowed to be left like that, taken along like that, manoeuvred-with. Probably if I would have been in the elevator with someone from the university they would have asked: “Why did you do that?” or at least look at me in a certain way. It is because I like travelling things, either from the depths of my throat or from the assemblage of big pebbles, I would have answered.
Today I went again to the Doggy Café. It's a dog-friendly café and restaurant. I don't understand why that's not the standard of any café. I remember some countries I visited that don't allow the presence of non-human animals inside their rooms. In Brazil, the law doesn't allow the presence of animals inside any place that serves food, except if it's a helping animal, like those dogs that are used to help people who are blind. I guess that's one of the reasons I cannot go to Brazil. But I was reading that one of the most famous cafés of Reykjavik had a cat and the health governmental agency asked them to not leave the animal inside of it because of the possible contamination of the food. But still, of course, I would love to live in Iceland and would go any time if I had a job that paid me in Icelandic Krona, so I guess that's one contradiction. Maybe I can't go there anymore because my body wouldn't survive a month that kind of environment. Sad but true. Anyways, the dogs were so happy at the cafe playing together. It's the second time I went there, and I was the only dogless person/human/creature. All of them were with their respective owners. "Owners", what a concept. In a sense, I became that kind of person that doesn't have a pet and keeps borrowing pets from other people. Not sure if I like the word borrowing in this context either, I prefer seeing myself as a polyamorous animal/non-human feeder. I hope that doesn't sound like zoophilia hahaha. Like now, the cat with the collar came here again and ate the food I put for the stray cat. She's in an advantage because the stray cat is super afraid, so if I put the food and she's nearby, the human-used cat arrives instantly and eats anything. I'm thinking of strategies for food distribution. It's kind of melancholic to think that I can't have a cat by myself, or I can't have a more serious care/feeding relationship (but non-exclusive) with another animal because of the idea of the future displacement of myself. I don't know what will be my future after seven months and I don't want to put this other creature in this situation of having to enter an aeroplane to be in another place of which I don't know how long I would stay there. Speaking of aeroplane trips, I decided that my next shopping will include a pair of headphones with noise cancelling. I've been postponing this for years because it's expensive, but it's a necessity. Not many exciting things in this message, no? I feel that it's the change of seasons...New weather patterns emerging.
Today I went again to the Doggy Café. It's a dog-friendly café and restaurant. I don't understand why that's not the standard of any café. I remember some countries I visited that don't allow the presence of non-human animals inside their rooms. In Brazil, the law doesn't allow the presence of animals inside any place that serves food, except if it's a helping animal, like those dogs that are used to help people who are blind. I guess that's one of the reasons I cannot go to Brazil. But I was reading that one of the most famous cafés of Reykjavik had a cat and the health governmental agency asked them to not leave the animal inside of it because of the possible contamination of the food. But still, of course, I would love to live in Iceland and would go any time if I had a job that paid me in Icelandic Krona, so I guess that's one contradiction. Maybe I can't go there anymore because my body wouldn't survive a month that kind of environment. Sad but true. Anyways, the dogs were so happy at the cafe playing together. It's the second time I went there, and I was the only dogless person/human/creature. All of them were with their respective owners. "Owners", what a concept. In a sense, I became that kind of person that doesn't have a pet and keeps borrowing pets from other people. Not sure if I like the word borrowing in this context either, I prefer seeing myself as a polyamorous animal/non-human feeder. I hope that doesn't sound like zoophilia hahaha. Like now, the cat with the collar came here again and ate the food I put for the stray cat. She's in an advantage because the stray cat is super afraid, so if I put the food and she's nearby, the human-used cat arrives instantly and eats anything. I'm thinking of strategies for food distribution. It's kind of melancholic to think that I can't have a cat by myself, or I can't have a more serious care/feeding relationship (but non-exclusive) with another animal because of the idea of the future displacement of myself. I don't know what will be my future after seven months and I don't want to put this other creature in this situation of having to enter an aeroplane to be in another place of which I don't know how long I would stay there. Speaking of aeroplane trips, I decided that my next shopping will include a pair of headphones with noise cancelling. I've been postponing this for years because it's expensive, but it's a necessity. Not many exciting things in this message, no? I feel that it's the change of seasons...New weather patterns emerging.
Yes, I feel the same; a variation of the same - it’s a nice feeling when I meet somebody, and I don’t need to jump into answering typical and functional questions like: “what do you do?”, “why are you living here?”, or even “what are your plans?”. That one is the worst for me. It’s so pleasant when I find somebody that I already know, or at least I know that I don’t need to put things into words with my mouth because communication is already happening on other levels and strata. Language hurts a lot and flirting with language is a feeling that I don’t know if I can still do. Since those things are said in different ways, and traditional objective consent is very typical and already a massive restraint for the future of a relation (between bodies or anything). Really anything, like when people enter the room full of thingies and just put the chair back where it “should be”. Does the chair want to be there again doing its repetitive “task” and helping those really boring asses that need to work? Not sure if I am anthropomorphizing things too much, but at least it’s the way I get to understand what is wanted (or what can be lured without having to express a single word).
This confusion is affecting my senses. My senses were always confused in the sense that, you may have noted, I’m very touched by some kinds of smells and colour, like the hate I have for any type of wasabi. But today I went to the Kazu restaurant line, and I thought, well, I've already eaten here this week, maybe I’ll go to another place. Then I went to the sushi place, asked for a place, took off my jacket and my backpack, but then the smell of the place made me puke. The smell was the same as always, so it's not their fault. But this body is changing. Then I went to the cheap Indian place, which also didn't feel right, something about the distribution of tables and chairs made me feel claustrophobic, but the distribution of furniture was the same as always. Then I decided to go back to Kazu, there was no line, which is rare, so I took it as a sign that I should sit there and eat the tuna and salmon bowl with the little soup again. Now I’m at the café writing this because it's the only thing I can do, not sure if there are forces to do other kinds of work today. Two guys were recording a podcast about coffee places in Montreal, and they were talking about how great coffee is here because of all the Italians that brought the tradition of good coffee. They emigrated to New York, but then some of them came here, and then there were also other populations which breed good coffee from Africa, Brazil, etc. Well, I don't know until now if I found the conversation interesting or not-interesting, maybe both at the same time?
PS: I'm listening to some Nine Inch Nails while I'm browsing youtube channels of people who collect pieces of the lottery. Hmm it's not a lottery, but those in which there are a paper and numbers covered with a metal-membrane-like material, you pass a coin over them (I love coins from Denmark with holes) and then you discover if you have some money to receive. XX
Both our bodies are expelling themselves. Anarchival practices of not being able to be somewhere or sometime. We’re very symbiotic creatures, dancing and appearing and disappearing. I’m so nervous for tomorrow morning, I know you’ll be here, but still you’ll be sleeping so I think I’ll feel like going in circles again and again and again. Waiting all those long few minutes for an extra stripe to appear or never appear. I heard that after the appearing happened for four minutes, you shouldn’t look at the lines anymore, because then a second stripe could appear without meaning it wanted to appear. It can just come without having to mean anything. The first stripe could even disappear without that meaning anything. It’s so scary to feel so much distance to my organs. Everybody’s asking what I’m feeling, but I’m not feeling anything anymore. The only thing I remember was my instancious feeling, and I think I should keep reminding that to stay calm. It’s not that I don’t want a ghost travelling inside me; something that escaped the event of our meeting and moved across the ocean, but it just doesn’t seem like it did. It would have been easier if it wasn’t across the ocean and maybe a year later. It is very strange, this possibility of not choosing to have something living with you, and having to remember and re-remember all the moments, repeating them in our minds; did something happen that we missed? Did something slip our memory? It would be beautiful; it would be very persistent; like most of our ghosts are. And it is so strange, something going on ‘inside’, while I don’t even think I believe in an inside like that. But still, having no idea of what is going on inside there. We can only guess. Often our guessing is affected by anxiety. Those two stripes, I’m sure I want to check them and see them again and again, flipping my eyes between the clock and the stripes. I can only look at them for four minutes, and then they won’t ‘mean’ anything anymore. What if the stripes turn into the arms of the clocks? I’ll see the two arms making circles, my arms trying to capture the stripe so I can show you and myself, the stripe appearing as one but maybe soon as double.
I’m getting sadder every day. There’s something in this city, something like it doesn’t permit a body to be unstable. I’m having a hard time trying to put in words how I’ve been feeling. Something like: always a leaky sense of self, but because a body can’t be unstable, the leakiness turns into a leaking that keeps on leaking and flips over in a drifting-away. I feel myself slowly drifting away and getting more and more unstable but as instability is impermited all a body can do is watch it being taken away from a body, all its drops, all its last energies. This whole process gives a lot of anxiety. It is not even that I mind being sad, I think I’m always a little bit sad, but this drifting and drifting is what scares me. So many people ask me: “Heyyy! How is it back? How are you? You want to hang out soon?” All I answer is: “It’s awful, but yes sure.” Like my psychologist wanting me to fill in this questionnaire. “Do you feel sad often? Never - rarely - sometimes - a lot - always.” While I was answering it, I just imagined you not even reading the questions and ticking ‘always’ everywhere. Yesterday I was on the train, and I got so anxious from all the loud voices and conversations; it felt as if the words were penetrating my body. I decided to put in my earplugs and left them in as I walked out of the train into the station. I was so happy to have discovered this new technique; I felt a lot calmer walking with all the bodies around.
Oh, today I met the landlady, and she said during the work they would do to prevent my house from falling apart I can’t stay in the apartment upstairs because they have no furniture or hot water. She'll rent an apartment nearby on Airbnb instead, which is okay. She's a lovely person and even offered me to have my money back for the next month if I want to stay in the apartment of a friend. I said well, it's better if you rent a place for me nearby for two weeks, and of course, she agreed because she's lovely. After work, they will make a vast clean on the house, which will save me some anarchival cleaning time.
It's funny though that my house is risking to fall apart at the same time that my body is falling apart. This quick displacement is the worst case scenario for me; I need some time to feel grounded in a place. I can't see the things and where they are from the moment I arrive there, even some weeks after (I just recently after four months living there discovered that I even have a basement). With this interruption, I won't have time to set myself up again to plan what to do in the short future, besides that am I already being killed by the two-week trip to Brazil in December. I guess those little things are preparing me to the absolute death next May if I'm not able to find anything for myself after that. But how would I be able to find anything while moving so much? I guess that's what people can't understand; some creatures do not work or cannot work with the chronological time set up by typicality. I faced death other times, but this is the first time I am facing absolute death in a few months. Absolute death could be a concept that cannot be accepted by the idea that we are in a continuum which doesn't separate what is dead and what is alive, but right now the ghosts that inhabit me are wandering around in this idea. I really hope this scenario will change but this state of affairs only makes me attracted to ideas of acceleration, I guess the only aspect that disallows me to fully embrace something like that is the interspecific disaster it could cause for this world (and it's already causing since the first anthropotechnical gesture that created Christ as a human-hybrid figure). I also love how this kind of theories remind me of The X-Files and the hybrids, but I wish we could return to the time when I was a child and conspiracy theories were things that more progressive people liked and not the identitarian-right-wing. Well, I guess this world passes through many phases, so many strata to be excavated.
I've been thinking a lot about the bike you gave me. She’s beautiful, no? Also, it is not something I didn't know before, but you love me a lot to have been going for months with me by foot to eat nearby, because I discovered I could go to those places in like, 3 minutes, by bike. But also some confuse feelings are affecting my body, like: it’s already mid-September, which means, well, in December there's snow and no biking anymore (at least for me), and then sleet, and snow, and snow again, and it's almost time to move back from Canada if nothing happens. Moving to nowhere because there's at least at this moment no future or past but just ghosts of a future that sound scared. Maybe that's the reason I don't like to stay at home, and that it took me a while to have a bike. Those things are like some root-producing devices (you know I don't believe in the ideas of rooting, etc), .but this displacement is so cruel that I don't risk myself to love a house because I know I will suffer when I miss it. Reminds me of some girl that came to talk to me two years ago or so at a party, they were releasing some Deleuzian books. “Well, you know, I'm here now, but I'm moving, always moving, I am a nomad. Blah blah blah”. I felt myself melting at that time, first because it's so easy for neurotypicals to play themselves as “alternative cultures” Deleuzian thinkers/artists, when they really never understood anything, being nomadic doesn't mean necessarily physically always moving, or at least not in the traditional sense of travelling, but also going to other existential territories. The movement of the nomad is not extensive but intensive. I think right now for me to move I have to be somewhere for a while, for some years. To move with the ghosts that inhabit and flood this body needs to be in a place, which I don't see much hope for right now, what makes me stuck and non-nomadic, if that's the right thing to say. Well, there's no right thing to say, but I would love to move with the bike being able to move my ghosts, which is difficult in this situation of displacement. “It's happening again”. Poor Dougie, I remember how much he travelled.
Imagine what would have happened to all these words if they hadn’t found their ways into vrey. If vrey never happened! Well, I guess it is only just happening again. A sweet person from my class gave me some Greek cream that will make my feet cold. She brought it from Greece because she had the same with her right hand as what I have been experiencing with my left foot now for two weeks. Can’t be a coincidence, my left foot, her right hand, diagonalising until we find the edge of the event. I woke up at 6 am today and lay awake until 8 am because I couldn’t stop thinking of the dream in which all my pores started to clog again. Those thoughts for some reason moved over in the visits from hundreds of ghosts from the future, asking what I’m going to do next year, next day, next minute, next second. To calm down, I read what you wrote here while I was asleep, rocking me back asleep again. Only to wake up again at noon realising I had missed all my alarms that were screaming “what will you do next second”, “what will you do next minute”, “what will you do next hour” — rhythm not as a temporal structure, but a continuous assemblage of intensities.
Makes me wanna beat out a rug, run through whatever it leaves behind, and sneeze as hard as I can. Oh, some skin of the dead got caught up in my nose! Literally, a leaky corpse accumulating with all the other skins; skins of the furniture, of the bodies, of the room, of the rugs, of the television screen, of the curtains, of the neighbour’s cat, dancing around on the dusty bed sheet covering the closet making sweaty shelves.
By the way, I just developed the last film of the Snappy period. Of course, I will use the camera again, but I want to try my new weird Olympus LT-1. I love the first picture of the roll where there’s always missing something (but also adding something). This is the room they rented for me when I was in Aarhus. The kid that lives there is called Alice, well, I think so… her name was on the door, some Lego-like letters attached to it, forming the name A-L-I-C-E, but then I accidentally broke the letter I. Now it's just A-L-C-E. It would be nice if they adopted this new name for her. It's “reindeer” in Portuguese!
By the way, I just developed the last film of the Snappy period. Of course, I will use the camera again, but I want to try my new weird Olympus LT-1. I love the first picture of the roll where there’s always missing something (but also adding something). This is the room they rented for me when I was in Aarhus. The kid that lives there is called Alice, well, I think so… her name was on the door, some Lego-like letters attached to it, forming the name A-L-I-C-E, but then I accidentally broke the letter I. Now it's just A-L-C-E. It would be nice if they adopted this new name for her. It's “reindeer” in Portuguese!
I went to my old art school because it’s one of the few places in Amsterdam that has a copy of I’m Very Into You. I also went there to have a coffee with an old lover, but as soon as I smelled his familiar smell I understood I didn’t love him anymore. It was a bit painful because in the way he encountered me I could tell how much he cared about me. He said as I was looking out of the window that my eyes always look as if I’m drowning in my thoughts. I said, oh yes, I drown all the time, to which he said I imagine your head as if it’s Atlantis. He asked a couple of weeks ago already if he could sleep at my place and I told him no. Two minutes after he posted a iPhone drawing of a vulva on his Instagram. I proposed to have this coffee. He said he had seen that one of my closest friends had been up to; weaving the sounds of birds in a little tower. I felt a bit pretentious, getting the Very book and another one from Deleuze. The person from the library was nice though, he let me take them even though I didn’t have a student number and they misspelled my last name. Reading the preface before I got onto my bike made me sad. They talk about a seduction, not about a love. It made me think whether this is for you also a temporary seduction instead of creating conditions, sharing sensitivities and having love for all variations of each other. I had to think about my dream again in which you told me you never wanted to see me again to which my pores replied by clogging until I died. I stopped halfway on the bike because I wanted to write all of this down, but somewhere where they were doing the piping so it smelled like poop and I moved to further down the street where the park begins with the little tower and the loom and the birds.
It is 26 degrees today, in the middle of fall, the warmest it has been ever since they started keeping track of the weather forecast. People are biking in summer dresses and drinking beers outside. Nobody seems to care that this world is upset; nature is confused; this warmth makes the periwinkle and rhododendron in the garden think it’s spring again. Just when they prepared themselves for winter, the heat came running through their leaves, stirring with all their sense of season. People don’t mind; they just want to make a tour on their boat and have sex with the doors wide open. Ever since we started talking about where vrey would go I haven’t written so much anymore; maybe because suddenly it’s moving I don’t know how to move with it. I guess I just need to compose with the new rhythms.
Somebody asked me today: “Oh, aren’t you going tomorrow to the manifestation against the far-right wing candidate in Brazil?”. And I said, no, it will be full of people. That reminded me of the time I matched with a girl on Tinder, while I was still in Brazil. It was a day when there was a massive manifestation against something awful that I can’t even remember because there were many things like that. And she said: “Well, I did my part. I went to manifestation today. Did you do yours?”. I tried to explain to her that not all bodies are fit to go to a place full of typical people who despite the multitude of affects share a collective voice because I would feel panicked and anxious. But it didn’t make any sense to her, “how come, as a man, you didn’t go to the manifestation?”. “Well, I’m not a man”. “What are you then?” “I have no idea of what I am”. Obvious that conversation didn’t go anywhere because besides talking in almost two different languages, it seems like in two different ontologies. Or worlds. That’s why I thought about the necessity of the “FUET memo” that was published on Inflexions. Fabulatory Unit for Emergency Times is needed, also because it vouches for kinds of participation that are neither representative or explicit, simply because those are modulations of putting ourselves into the political world that doesn’t consider the Spinozist conception of what a body can do, or how things cannot endure. Right now, what can I do? I’ll eat some oranges.
Shoes can be really good sm00th-operators, I am not sure if I will buy new shoes any moment soon because the soles of mine feel vrey sm00th. I really like to put my hands there especially when they travelled over carpets and things like that which apparently make them every smoothier. Although I went to the beach yesterday and my shoes are still full of sand, and they seem a little bit less smooth. The sea though is also a sm00th-operators for our bodies, especially cold water. Delicious. It's always those typical questions: “Oh, but what is your project, what is your research, what are you doing". Somebody that seemed really interesting said that they really liked my presentation and then asked me if we could exchange some things because we're working on similar things. "Ohh, nice, I thought”. Then I said that I would send her the project I'm working on and it would be nice if she could send me something of her. “Ohh yes, blah blah blah, I want to read yours but only after October because I'm sending a lot of postdoc applications, etc.”. Not that I disliked this person, but my body couldn't understand how that person separates time that well. I really don’t understand, because when I'm working on an application or something like that, I think that everything I'm doing is part of that (everything I’m watching, everywhere I'm walking, every picture I take). Not in the sense that I’m going to insert those things in a paper or art piece or something like that, but simply because I cannot separate what I feel during those experiences from what I’m writing or doing. Well, not only when I’m writing an application or something alike. I feel that everything belongs to a certain world-building, that sometimes can converge to a multiverse-building due to all the inhabitants that haunt this what people like to call a body. I don't really understand this process of ontologization that says that the format of an application and its “selected bibliography” is more important than reading what other people do or look at how the cats are chasing birds on the street. But people tend to do that, especially with time, departmentalised time, I guess that's one of the reasons why they get the jobs in this really boring world. At the same time, I’m really excited; it seems to me that Aarhus is a place with a lot of potentials for ghosts of the future and the past, or to be anarchivized, something that I believe is already being done. People would say that this kind of feet soles belong to individuals who never worked much in their lives, but I'm not sure about that. And yes, writing and loving and making is necessary to keep alive this continuum where nobody knows where one begins and the other ends.
I couldn’t believe that you can’t just stand up and walk out of it. You can’t even go in the train or car and you have to go for hours and you’re still inside the city. And this completely freaked me out, I was so claustrophobic, and I was so obsessed with oxygen; I couldn’t breath. I was trying to touch the buildings and scrape of the grease and try to get in touch with things. It was very scary. But then I learned to relax all about it and I found it kind of kinky. (Björk interview)
Unfortunately the only bobcat I saw was in the Montreal Biodome, a place that I think is kind of horrible, but I went there because the daughter of a friend was eager to visit it. I hope that bobcat escaped from the zoo, finding a nice place to live inside your dreams!
The heaviest things I have been handling are not actualised in a rock or something like that but are the emails I read when I wake up. Every day, at least ten notifications of proactive people trying to show themselves. It strikes me that it's so easy for typical people to put themselves into a formal text showing excitement and the incredible qualities they have that should be used for the further development of projects, etc. And they generate necessity or are putting necessity into motion, a very typical movement that involves a kind of presentational portfolio, or I would say subjectived into a single person portfolio, even when they're talking about a community-oriented work or something like that.
Strangely I feel something similar, although it goes in the opposite vectorial direction. I am afraid of the visitors I would receive when I go outside. At least in Montreal, I feel better about that. I decided to put the cat picture because, apart from being a beautiful creature, it's the kind of nightly visitors I would like to attract. I have to say the ghosts that menace me don't have the right time of day to visit me, but they're displaced across time and space.
I found the heaviest material in this world. It is as big as a grain of sand but is as heavy as a stone you’d generally carry with two hands. It’s laying in the palm of my hand. It would’ve fit on my fingertip, but my finger simply bends too heavily when I tried to hold it there. Carrying in my closed hand works, and then just opening it when I show it to everybody around me. I’m so fond of it, and I can’t help myself but show it. I must bend my arm a bit, and you can see my muscles flexing when I lower my hand and open the fingers. First, I did some research. I was naively googling things as “heaviest particle”, and I finally found the right material, it wasn’t that hard. There are so many schemes and indexes; a lot of humans sadly enough have always been obsessed with structuring.What’s nice about giving presentations is that it’s easier to steal words and weave them like your dreams would, naturally and mischievously, your own and others, well they were never anyone’s, to begin with, always a leaky sense of words. I just took some words from you and me and other readings I love. It’s nice to speak out both what you and I have written. Speaking our dialogue out loud, which was never a dialogue, to begin with. But to switch from my dusty pores to “a 30-year-old talking to a little girl” is extraordinarily beautiful. Luckily, I had a lover working in chemical engineering. He used to work on reactor membranes, which was tricky because the membrane had to vacuolize the right amount of oxygen but at the same time make sure to not give a particular reaction, like oxygenation. I drove to where he lives here in the Netherlands, really close to the sea, and when I got back home, I put it on a stack of fabrics. It’s so beautiful to see such a small grain making such an impact, drawing the fabrics to the wooden floor.
I guess today my topics were kind of really boring. Funny to see how many different tonalities we gathered here until now. Yours was really exciting and fabulatory and mine just boring. But I had a boring day. I just downloaded the chapter of The Lure of The Ghost with your comments and "corrections", but I think I won’t open the file until tomorrow. I guess I don't want to contaminate it with my boredomness!
If it is possible to assign the faciality machine a date- the year zero of Christ and the historical development of the White Man- it is because that is when the mixture ceased to be a splicing or an intertwining, becoming a total interpenetration in which each element suffuses the other like drops of red-black wine in white water. (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 182)
By the way, just a note, I think the beauty of the Telegram and Slack channels reside on the multiplicity of selves they accept. It's so comforting to know that the ghosts of me can talk freely, being so incompatible with one another. One of the doctors I visited during my life said that I had a multiple personality disorder hahaha. Well, not sure if it took as a compliment or as a menace.
Look at this Fred Moten's passage. I was reading his last book, Stolen Life (2018). What do you think?
Our actions are not twice behaved and disapparent stand-ins for standing, rather, they are animateriallity out and gone. They are neither the resistance of the object nor the insistence of the thing but something like a kind of negative relay between thingliness and nothingness that is given as an assertion, and in defence, of difference without separation, of consent not to be a single being. Our fate is not to become one and yet many; it is rather, to become a muni bird. (p. 244).
I love this :) The questions you had to answer at the therapy remind me of the forms I had to ask while going to a psychiatric evaluation when I was younger. I wish I could find that form again. Probably it went into the trash. I'll have a look at my house during my next trip to Brazil. Right now I can't type anymore, the day was hard on me, and a headache is here. I don't want to take painkillers because I'm trying to give a break to my liver, I figured that many years of antidepressants could be not so good for them…
Also the image of the cat makes me think about my methods of distribution of food. That is the stray cat that visits me, and as I've said before, she knows I have food to offer her but she's really afraid. And the other cat always eats the food before. I guess that's the problems with all distributions that are based on the FCFS method (First come, first served). At the same time, I would never refuse food to the other cat, but I don't buy enormous quantities of food, so the one that is risked of being without food is each time her. FCFS is always attached to the idea of performativity, I don't mean performativity in an elaborate conceptualized the common sense. If there's an opportunity, the performatic bees are already flying around, exhibiting their interests and appetites, while for some that's an impossible feature, or that costs too much for a body. I use FLCL (fabulation) against FCFS but it seems to me that it doesn't always work, or sometime it barely works. What gives me goosebumps, because there are other selves of myself that I don't want to reinforce, like the accelerated one.
I think I'm going to buy some packs of Cinnamon Altoids from Amazon. It comes in a can like tuna/salmon cans for cats. I think I started sleepwalking again. Every morning I wake up with my feet hurt and full of blisters. Sleepwalking is a bit like those pictures taken in 1989, don’t you think? I don’t meet the variation of you in the evening so much anymore, because that’s when I’m already asleep being in a different timezone. You know 1989 was the year when Taylor Swift was born, no? But now I started wondering if I even really sleep, or spend the night walking the corridors. Sometimes you hear someone say “She died of old age” and then I ask “But how does that happen?” to which they reply “The organs were just exhausted”, but then I think “If that’s dying then I’m already dying”. Some might say that the only way we know death is as opposed to life, but since events are never composed of like that, what do we even know. Often you kill me with your beautiful words. I guess there's a sort of connection. I've been waking up with a lot of scratches in my back. It's not something that my body could do by itself. And I've not been sleeping with anybody. But they look like scratches, and I also can't remember hurting myself accidentally. But then, what is the cause of those things? I would love to be visited by a creaturesque entity that scratches me. Don't take me wrong, I understand your fear of human entities visiting during the night, but I think the kind of visits I would love to receive is of the non-human type, as the stories from my childhood I've also been describing in Lure of the Ghost. But how to summon them through a non-anthropotechnical bias?
I guess this is the strangest place I (tried) to work, after eating the Beyond Meat burger in A&W. I know it has a lot of gluten, but I couldn't find forces to move beyond that point of Saint-Laurent Boulevard. At least this delicious veggie burger returned. I stayed there, waiting, and waiting. Then finally went to a pool in Montreal. I guess pools are very exquisite time-eaters, they eat time like all the other entities we've been discussing, but differently from the ghosts of the future, that eat both actual and virtual time. Now I feel that my body feels tired but nicely, feeling that I spent many hours in a determinate environment. We stayed for like an hour inside the pool, and even didn't do many exercises, mostly jumping. Sometimes the waves of typicality sucked us into doing the "from one side of the pool to another" swimming activity as everybody was practising. Still. It's 10 PM but I feel that it is already 4 AM. Don't understand this kind of time sucker that gives the sensorial impression of having all the time sucked but still having time until the body wants some sleeping.
Also, the image of the cat makes me think about my methods of distribution of food. That is the stray cat that visits me, and as I've said before, she knows I have food to offer her, but she's terrified. And the other cat always eats the menu before. I guess that's the problems with all distributions that are based on the FCFS method (First come, first served). At the same time, I would never refuse food to the other cat, but I don't buy enormous quantities of food, so the one that is risked of being without food is each time her. FCFS is always attached to the idea of performativity, I don't mean performativity in an elegant conceptualised way but mostly oriented towards common sense. If there's an opportunity, the performatic bees are already flying around, exhibiting their interests and appetites, while for some that's an impossible feature, or that costs too much for a body. I use FLCL (fabulation) against FCFS, but it seems to me that it doesn't always work, or sometimes it barely works. What gives me goosebumps, because there are other selves of myself that I don't want to reinforce, as the accelerated one.
I also thought if I could get a PXL-2000 pixelvision camera I could attach it to an analogue capture device that would forward the video to my computer; the video I could use as the source of something like Skype, and then we could set-up something like a little film called Conversations of a Future-Past in which we'd Skype and talk through time mixing the nightly -pixelated black-and-white cassette recorded image of the toy camera with the one you would give me back from your skype. Anyway, I'll intensify my search on eBay and also the thrift-store because they're expensive and very fragile. Maybe I’ll get a malfunctioning one and see if somebody can fix it. I was reading a piece of news by Indiewire in which they say that that kind of cameras is extensively used by “artsy” filmmakers, but due to their fragility, they're also killing this piece of media history. Not sure if I agree with this argument but it's funny to think about many things are dying: dying walls of my building, my dying body was looking for a place to live, dying devices. I hope this mood will shift somehow. Somehow: I'm not sure if I want to deal with this kind of contingency.
There's something that attracts me to the tower you posted. And you already know that because I took many pictures of that exquisite building. I still didn't find so much information about it. It looks like a water tower, apparently not being used anymore, and I've seen it in many pictures around the city. Only thing I know for now is that it brings calmness, like a place I could run to if the world started to fall apart more than it's already falling. Or the right place to film. But it seems, or it feels like a portal, you enter there, and you wake up in another place. I'm not sure whether in another dimension or just with a new perspective, belonging to another species of animal or plant after crossing that threshold. I want to be there, and I want to believe.
Yesterday something from the clothing line fell back into the laundry machine. I have no idea how it even did that. But I saw it happening; I saw my pair of panties fall off the line back into the machine. I should’ve responded to the movement, and put the machine back on. Instead, I put it back onto the line and let it dry. Now I’m afraid of what will happen next time I wear that pair of panties. It wasn’t ready to leave the laundroworld yet. Well, maybe I was just teasing it a bit. You and I were in the snowy mountains last night, and that’s where we met the jumping bobcat. We were also in the living room of someone we knew, and there the cat lived as well. We found out we had known the cat all along. “Ohh!! Are you the jumping bobcat?! But we’ve met you already.” The living room and the snowy mountains were the same places at the same time. Jumping bobcats make use of portals, and we moved along. A bit later, we were together again in another living room, and there were a lot of people I knew. You were just moving as you always do, just as you felt like doing. But then all the people kept asking me why you did what you did, and I had to explain all your moves. I was holding a baby, and it kept slipping out of my arms. I was sad that we had left the snowy mountains and were suddenly surrounded by all the questions, you were watching something on TV about bobcats sliding in the snow. Now I think of it, it wasn’t a living room but instead a waiting room. Who knows what we were waiting for. A non-anthropocentric incorporeal entity that keeps intervening in our daily lives through dreams and hallucinations. As Ludueña (2015, p. 44) says, “this point of view may make it possible to think dreaming without making it the secret guardian of our identitarian dreams”.
Since I still can’t walk on my left foot, I started applying some balm on it, which makes it go from hot to cold, cold to hot. The first night I put it on, I only massaged it into my left foot, but it was such a strange sensation to only feel one foot floating that last night I also decided to rub my right one. This morning my feet felt less exhausted, so maybe it helped. It was a strange way to fall asleep, with two feet going from cold to hot, not even in regular rhythms as if I was drifting away but also a bit like a feetly lullaby. The warm and cold made me at some point not feel my feet at all anymore and instead my head was as a bowling ball beating down the pillow. Feet and rooms haunted by the spectres of any kind of archive, analogue, digital - language, colours, stories, images, lullabies, footsteps, filenames, a shared online google docs like vrey, buttons fell from my favourite coat - traces that still float in the air like pollen. This idea makes me wanna sneeze. I’m allergic to both dust and pollen. Both I didn’t have until an older age. The dust allergy I think I just fabricated myself. I would hardly clean the room in the attic where I used to sleep as a child. Whenever my parents intervened and moved my stuff around, I would completely freak out. I couldn’t find anything anymore, all my gatherings of things - a stone on a stack of papers - weren’t there anymore. Instead, there were random stacks out of everything, of things that didn’t even want to be together so that the floor could be vacuumed. All these stacks that weren’t my stacks made me so anxious. I was given the task back again to do it myself, but often weeks flew by where I lost all overview and dust just kept flying around. Dust flying around, most of the dust is skin anyways, responding to the fluxes and rhythms of my breathing. The little box with all the extra buttons that come with a new garment, all the extra ones, waiting for a button to be lost so they can go along and hold two pieces of fabric together. After my grandmother died, we found out that the largest part of her closet in the bedroom she used for assembling all those buttons.
Neatly placed next to each other, all different ones, on two shelves, nothing else than buttons and dust that made itself visible once a button got picked up. There are (as far as I know Christian) practices after people pass away of covering mirrors and stopping all the clocks in the house. I think also windows and closets were often covered up with sheets until after the funeral. It is to keep the spirit of the deceased from getting trapped into this life and make it able for them to smoothly cross over to the other side. If the soul of the departed saw their reflection, they would be trapped and not able to move to the afterlife; with the possibility of them haunting those who remained in this life. Stopping the clocks would keep them from worrying about time, and for the dead person to begin a new period of existence without. Also, when the deceased person leaves their home, it should be feet first, so they can’t look back as they’re passing the door — leaving feet first, a bit like my feet stopping with walking and shifting from hot to cold making me float in bed. It would be nice to stop all the clocks in my home. It reminds me of that one time a person I met seven years ago in Paris, and I found it absolutely irritating, asked if he could stay in my home here in Amsterdam for one night. I thought, why not, maybe he turned out nice in those seven years. They say in seven years; all your cells are renewed anyways, so my expectations were not even that unlikely! He got here, oh and I first have to tell you that he works as a data analyst at some sort of big chemical factory and he has to predict when parts of machines will break down so they can in time be replaced.
I was at Café Nevé today and then watched this guy browsing a website with all kinds of dried herbs, looked like all those black markets in the 'deep web' that sell all possible variants of weed, even those that are too strong and are therefore not legalised by the state. Then I looked closer and saw it was a website with all kinds of dried spinach, with really fancy names (and very expensive), coming from many parts of the world. He was also looking for the best fresh pasta that could be bought online.
What do you think about when you see a green polyester textile bag from Dollarama? I went to the laundromat today and brought it as always. I always wash the container with clothes. But I think the bag is dying, or becoming another thing, for it's full of little holes. Funny thing that I've brought two of these bags to Denmark but when I've put them in the drier in the highest setting they both melted (I had to carry all the clothes in my hand praying that they didn't fall on the street, good thing I washed just a few pieces that day). Not saying that the Danish driers are better, and I guess Stig Helger wouldn't agree with that; just this specific laundromat. But I still didn't find forces to walk to a further laundromat with better dryers. Let's see if that happens during the winter that is coming. I also had coffee with a friend today. But didn't buy any books. Funny to think that you have very in your hands right now.
The appeal to agency, in other words, is a corollary of the logic of embodiment, of turning things in on themselves. To undo this logic is, once and for all, to exorcise the spectre of embodied agency and bring things back into animate life. As a bundle of potentials in an ever-unfolding field of forces and energies, the body moves and is moved not because it is driven by some internal agency, wrapped up in the package, but because as fact as it is gathering or winding itself up, it is forever unravelling or unwinding, alternately breathing in and out. (Tim Ingold)