New Story (2/24)

Yesterday I didn’t take Vyvanse for the first time in a month or so and I felt like a mop. I took a nap with B. and woke up when the sun was on its way out of town. B. was in a lot of pain, trying to call out of work, but figured out a way to work that felt possible for them, so when we got up I said bye and took the dogs to the park. The sky had some pink. I thought about the way Vangeline, in Butoh class, indicates “coming back to neutral,” fingers pointed inward towards her chest, stomach, crotch, back of the fingers and hands pushed together in a heart shape, drawing a line parallel to her spine in front of herself; I thought about the tandem (I don’t know how to spell this word or even really how to pronounce it, I tried to look it up and I asked B. and I even emailed the Butoh class, we’ll see what they say), which is the place 3 inches below the navel, which is a center, and a place we’ve practiced moving from. In Butoh on Thursday I finally found it, I think. We did an exercise of flinging the arms like the car wash guys, trying to move from this center, and coming back to neutral each time before we did it again. Through flinging I discovered that center, and when I was walking, sleepily, pink sky, mind wandering to mean places (I was feeling anxious about the weekend, about being a good friend, there were several readings I wanted to go to later that night, I didn’t know how to communicate about whether or not I would have enough energy to go to either, let alone both, had a haunting option to stay home), I thought about returning to this center, to this neutral, and I wonder if this is the closest I’ve felt to having a self. 

M. sent me an essay this week that I’ve been thinking about a lot, “The Hole of Ordinary Psychosis” In it, they write:

I have not been given the violent gift of a conflictual home in language, and so words have not found a home in me. Thus, I do not feel strong personal possession or affiliation with the words that I say or the concepts, people, places, or things they represent because I have not been positioned within or through them. I am always speaking at a remove because the ‘I’ from which I am meant to speak is not, has not been, cannot be, securely positioned. Words float around me, conditioning and reflecting my floating. This experience is, unsurprisingly, difficult to describe: a suspended incoherence, a presence marked only by absence, a distanced but sensing nonbeing, an atmospheric hovering or sudden humidity. Not outside of language—lost in it—but not held.

M. sent me this essay because it reminded her of a piece of writing I’d done about holes for her class in 2015, which was called Reworking the Subject. My subject was holes. The class emphasized returning, again and again, to a subject. There was some discussion of what subjectivity meant, and also what objectivity meant, and I remember these concepts being very difficult for me to grasp. They still are. 

I did end up going to both readings last night, and I really enjoyed both of them. Most of the poems at the second reading, Gemini Moon theme (maybe part of the reason I was keen on going to this is because I share this placement), were somewhat about sex, or they were sexy, or I knew that the writers wrote about sex elsewhere. N. hadn’t been sure whether they would make it either, we’d both had covid the week before and we’re both sometimes (often) wrapped in fatigue blankie, but when I got to Woodbine they were sitting on the rug. Megan Milks was the first full reader I heard, and I was happy I didn’t miss them; I’d seen them on a panel called Bad Boundaries at &Now in 2015 in L.A. that I really liked, and maybe again at AWP or something? The essay they read was great, in the form of Möbius strip, (they described how it was on the page, but I’d like to see for myself), a form stolen from Samuel Delany, who had also been their teacher, and part of the essay was about his pedagogy, or pedagogy in general, and moments in class when no one speaks, and whose fault is it, and this is all stuff I like to think about, because I like being in class, and speaking, not speaking, and also now I teach, and what questions do I ask, how do I encourage people to talk, is this even what I should be doing, etc., so cool to hear some other thinking about this. Then someone named Kyle Carrero Lopez read, one poem about a fancy fire island party with an infinity pool. After that, some poems by the organizers, Sloane Holzer and Zefyr Lisowski, who share a birthday and a moon placement and are both white transsexual women; Zefyr read about heterosexuality, wind in the hair with her girlfriend on the road, and Sloane read about a Redwoods rave, peeing on trees 4 times one’s age, and then they read a sort of list poem they wrote together, Sloane was on a plane, their sameness and differences, and they hugged long at the end. Afterwards I told N. that I like it when people write about complex sex lives. They asked why and I think I said because I like to know that people live very differently than me, but I don’t think this is what I meant, and I don’t think I meant what I said, exactly.  I don’t know if I care about sex lives, but I’m reminded of writing by Eileen Myles that I like, and I think what I like is that these people live with what seems like a self, and they do it in a way that’s interesting to me. They interact with others, they try to be good or bad, they have sex, and they can narrate it in a way that I find exciting. How do I fit into that type of narration, or how can I make one for myself? N. mentioned they’d seen I’d started a blog. I asked them if they’d had a blog, and we talked about internet presence. Theirs has a long history. I haven’t ever really had much of one, I told them, and I wondered aloud about whether this is related to my feeling of having no self, or just identifying more with this person who wrote “The Hole of Ordinary Psychosis,” that a center as a hole is more relatable—I’ve always been so astonished by people who can have an internet presence, this type of alias, or alibi?, or being witnessed this way. It’s not exactly that I’m shy, why I don’t have one—it’s just…I have no idea how to do it. 

In Butoh on Thursday we did a partner exercise. B. and I were partners this time. We were to choose one person to lead. That person would close their eyes, and the other would mirror them; both were to move from the center, and the person following was to focus on the pelvis, rather than the outer limbs. We switched roles, and then we did an improvisation, and Vangeline asked us to pretend like someone was watching us—to follow our centers in our minds, as if from outside of ourselves. In the moment in the park when I remembered to go back to my center, I also imagined that I was watching myself. I thought, “I am in the park. The sun is going down. I just took a nap.” Someone was watching me, so there was a me. 

With N. I feel like a child sometimes, that I can sort of try to say things, and maybe I amuse them, but there is something impenetrable about them, and I feel embarrassed about not having a self, or only having a baby self. Telling them about this feeling made me feel like they knew me a little better though, reminded me that they’re interested anyway. I wonder if I can’t see them because they can’t see me, but I know we’re trying to see each other, and that’s special. I feel pretty sure that they have a self, but feel like they’re open to the option that some people might not have one, too, which I don’t think many people who have selves are. We’re both polyamorous, in different ways maybe, somehow I feel like that’s relevant.