(vaguely) that's my narcissism playing up.

I'll do this - have her back under my hand. looking for the sacrospinalis, their balance, and finding only one sheath of muscle, one arch of a coil, ready to go. little almond eyes, all blister and no infection.

having done everything and found it replicated itself into everything to be done, still the thing isn't done. I look at another thing and find it is focused replete giving formful. I look at this thing and it is blurry and fades out before i can fix my eyes on it. where's its centre? it gestures towards. when is it's thought from? 1991. it falls over and groans.

tea, tea. less seriously. seriously less seriously. ok.

waking into confusion and flatness. painful eyes. how to continue today? how to work?

a series of permissions. tea, weetbix if there are any, strawberries. wear a better t-shirt. wear a cardigan. stretch. do the admin, but do it later. make a list now and do it later. water the plants, taking note of the green, the light, the beautiful tablecloth. where is my sister? will she forget me? how will I remember the things I have to do before I leave and how will I finish promises?

strawberries first, tea. stretch. it's not too late. it never is too late quite. someone who listens will be kind, and that is the person you talk to. Strawberries, tea.

holding pattern

what I miss about it, not consciously but gapingly, is the experience of emptiness as a sacred state, a cherished and valued state.

now I'm back at hatred again, the hatred of forgetfulness, dumbness, passivity, hatred of being a receiver, a follower, of the clamoring listening and the attendant inability to retain, the patternless waiting, gaping, gaping, the terrible void and the degradation and worthlessness that seem inherent to the state.

but I want to write down to remember: I was a follower, sought after and protected, and I had a place. And the quality of my forgetting was loved, the clarity of my reception and my given emptiness, silence, utterly open. night after night. by one, by several, by many.

"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.