wrk / pain 

wrk / pain 

wrk / pain 

hi. it’s been so long.

i’m waiting. for the last part of my book. to happen. i did uncover. some asterisks. under the darkness. it was a surprise to me. to see them there under something so dark / a block of sky. briefly. i considered ordering some test tubes i can fill / photograph. With what? Collection / Agency. What will it look like? How will it feel? 

(a text from just now: “my bb would prefer not to and to not not to”//// there is a passage in Howe’s The Nonconformist Memorial I haven’t read lately but have been prompted to think about via proximity to my love.)

for now, Ferrante is again making me think of a refusal i felt when the yoga teacher said, “resistance is suffering” and i thought, no. resistance is technology / what i think i meant is / i whirl: 

“I wanted the past not to be overcome but to be redeemed, precisely as a storehouse of sufferings, of rejected ways of being. 

Here, for a better understanding, we should speak of how suffering modifies the image of time. The eruption of suffering cancels out linear time, breaks it, makes it into whirling squiggles. The night of time crouches at the edges of the dawn of today and tomorrow. Suffering casts us down among our single-celled ancestors, among the quarrelsome or terrorized muttering in the caves, among the female divinities expelled into the darkness of the earth, even as we keep ourselves anchored--let’s say--to the computer we’re writing on. Strong feelings are like that: they explode chronology. An emotion is a somersault, a tumble, a dizzying pirouette. When suffering hits Delia and Olga, the past stops being the past and the future stops being the future, the order of before and after ceases. Even writing about it has that movement of confusion. The “I” calmly tells a story creates clear accounts, makes events go slowly. But when the wave of a feeling arrives the writing arches, becomes excited, spins around breathlessly absorbing everything, putting into circulation memories, desires. Delia and Olga have to gradually calm down so that their narrating “I” can retun to the slow course of the story. The return is of brief duration. The pace that puts events in order is only the moment of gathering energy before a new tornado. This is an image that is useful to me: it allows me to think of a period of suffering that hits us advancing like a whirlwind; but also of a writing about emotions that has the sonority of breath, a wind from the lungs that, producing music, swirls the debris of different epochs and finally, whirling, passes. 

Delia and Olga tell their stories from within that whirling. Even when they slow down they don’t distance themselves, they don’t contemplate, they don’t carve out external spaces for reflection. They are women who tell their story from the middle of a dizzy spell. So they don’t suffer because of the conflict between what they would like to be and what their mothers were, they are not the painful end result of a female genealogy that moves, in chronological order, from the ancient world, from the great myths of the Mediterranean, to end up at them as a visible peak of progress. Suffering derives, instead, from the fact that crowding around them, simultaneously, in a sort of achrony, is the past of their ancestors and the future of what they seek to be, the shades, the ghosts: up to the point, for example, where Delia, after taking off her clothes of the present, can put on her mother’s old dress as the definitive garment; and Olga can recognize in the mirror, her own face, as a constituent part of her, the figure of the poverella-mother who has killed herself.”

-Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia 

wrk / pain 

(I FINISHED THE BLOOD BARN / I’M GOING TO USE MY LUNCH HOUR TO BUY PIZZA INGREDIENTS AND CRY / THINKING ABOUT HOW SURPRISING CARNATIONS + FISH = BOOK)

wrk / pain 

wrk /  pain 

wrk / pain 

wrk / pain