"The "I' doesn't stand outside of experience, but rather appears, for lack of a better word, as the effect of a substitution: its relation to others is an obligation it is compelled to honor in spite of its impoverishment - "an experience of anonymity," writes Thomas Wall in a gloss on Levinas, "(an experience in the absence of there being anyone there to have the experience)," or an experience of oneself that remains singularly unpresentable." (2)

"...anonymity evokes different types of social prevarication - hiddenness, secrecy, deceit, theatricality - and thus implies that the ethics of disclosure and concealment are of a piece: they involve wider cultural, philosophical, and political claims about the ways in which the permeable "I" or "nonself" withdraws from the transparency of the public sphere, as well as continues to live and feel such withdrawals. Thus, instead of conceiving the subject in terms of a putative depth model, whose avowed confessionalism sustains the self through recourse to an inalienable plenitude, anonymity serves to remind us of a disruption of ontological certainty, and thus provokes insight into the troubling ethical bonds of subjectivity." (5)

Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession.

At a recent ceremony in a dark, cavernous auditorium, a deep male voice intoned in Mandarin: “I will live on happily in your image and always remember you.” Green and red laser beams shot out from the foreheads of three 10-metre (33-foot) tall gold-plated Buddhas as soothing chants and ambient music played from cinema-quality loudspeakers. Suddenly, a beam of pure white light from above illuminated the main attraction: an urn containing the ashes of a recently cremated person, sitting on a revolving pedestal shaped like a lotus flower.

"And to you, dear colorer, we wish fulfillment of all your aspirations. It will be by the use of your brain that you will achieve such fulfillment. May the knowledge and insights gained from the coloring of this book bring your potential closer to reality."
-MC Diamond/A.B. Sheibel / L.M. Elson, The Human Brain Coloring Book.

it has seemed impossible to write anything or say anything for a few weeks. face made of wet clay. all the way up and all the way down twice a day. and I can't work my face through its thickness. hatred is appealing to me.

I was so loving. I was so loving and I tried and there was a reward, I was loved. but I loved on a promise of becoming, not on a promise of love. I didn't want to love to be loved but to be loved to become. now you can sleep beside me if you like but lots of men sleep beside me. I like to talk. wouldn't it be nice for you if I woke up beside you? hatred is appealing. I remain untransformed. only loved. what did I leave behind me so I could be loved? the concrete signs of stupidity, making it all a suffusion. the rejection of your works, making me worldsly and incompatible. the awning of untrying. crassness and disagreement: the defense of stale horse's arseholes and the objection to pith helmets. honest inhabitation of laziness and  vile ignorance. not the vile ignorance. teaching high school in a cool climate. Judge Judy. a passion for drugged stupor and crippled lives. skewers, spears, hand grenades, hammers to your pyramid, knives to your tentacles which are not yours at all. how could you sit in the back of a taxi and say, 'the difference is what you chose to make of it. the difference is what he chose to make of it'!?

what did she choose? or you? to be born? to sigh at the third speaker or build a pyramid or feel pain or remember the name of the book? fuck off, fuck off. don't remember me, don't love me, you can cut up and eat your own disappointed hand. or stay and hate me. show me your aged legs and I'll say yes, you're old. no, I won't fuck you. no, I can't make it any better at all. I don't adore you I cannot speak and I cannot change. you're close to death and I'm a disappointment and the city is versace built up out of the sea on someone else's christmas sand. now the beautiful livings of the world end at their marble lobbies. if you want to leave the foyer you can fall out into the sea, where there's nothing to eat. and there's no such thing as a tent any more, there's no such thing as a coconut tap-root, no such thing as a damp hole for a crab. fuck off and leave me to it, fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.

periphery


that you bring that voice here and see everyone is deaf.

that the wild boar have been unhoused for the eco-centre

out from under that umbrella you escaped, brilliantly and with your voice,

that you come all the way here and I remain

several times over several days: I don't know why he doesn't put his hearing aid in
I don't know why he doesn't put his hearing aid in

a disappointment, I prefer to teach high school in a cool climate or drink poison

that the pied hornbills eat the fledgling mynahs, and shit all over the aircons.

that you folded up the umbrella and brought it with you for all of us.

After the day with the gas taps I migrated to the P.I. side of the classroom.

"Why you not sitting with your friends?"

Then they figured out what happened and they said don't worry, she was a real bitch and at lunchtimes they offered to share their stuff with me. Oranges and milk biscuits and lunchboxes of taro cooked up with veges. We made each other uncomfortable. I knew the answers they didn't know and it was worse if I was sitting with them and had my hand up all the time. If they made jokes in Samoan or Tongan I thought they might be about me, but they taught me how to say things to amuse each other. The strongest was Patricia, who both sides of the class were a bit scared of, because she was giant and would say things like "You shut up girl or I'm going to cut out your cunt and stick it up your arse." One lunchtime she chased me around the classroom with a duster. She caught me and flipped me to the ground and smacked my legs all over. I had white rectangles on my black woolen school tights forever after that. It was loving, it was nice. By the time we went on camp I was mostly ok. I fell over in a cow-pat and everyone called me Shit-Head and by then I even laughed too.

golden

new dancing a
matrix of leakage.

new dancing a

crawlspace


assembly of the off
of the offices.
the offices.
moving in cutting tiles.
moving in throwing tiles
for walls. light from
your nose unscaffed
fourteen she forgot
to tell you. she can't
do that with you any
more. not this afternoon
at the civic when there's
nanna. wrist up to new
walls hoddie. forgetter.
hoddie the light.
hoddie the light from your
5.15 sneeze.

nothing... nothing... nothing at all.

at all? not even a little bit of something?

...a little bit of school stuff

that's a something.

stealing the janitor's keys. the bomb shelter under the auditorium,  rubbish and cigarette smoke; or the cleaning cupboards, or the book storage tunnel, or windowless practice rooms and the decrepit pianos - no lights, staring competitions, watching and watching and watching until your face melted into something else in the darkness. and over the tiles to the bell tower. on our backs in that plaster spaceship, the rim of blue sky. skipping class. empty science lab. the gas taps. it's not like the last time they did this to you. it's not because you're not cool, or anything like that. but I feel like I constantly have to wipe your nose for you.

and at that moment my nose dripped. crying without crying. 

that's all the time we had money for