Tuesday 27 October 2015

Against Trans* Manifestos

Because I suppose what we've been trying to do so far is establish a language space that deliberately alienates anyone and anything that enforces the gender binary. Pretty simple. Really easy actually; pinpoint every harmonic lie on the map and structurally dismember them. Every word contains at least five. And each five is an enforcement of the perceived two, the double in parallel, one set against the other in a kind of elliptical tragedy that leaves you feeling constantly paralysed. That paralysis, we decided, is stupefaction. It is imposed stupefaction, because if each word in English and in a great many other languages (and sounds, glances, throttles, gestures etc) contains at least five points of false harmony, and each of those five points is contained between two, two harmonic falsities, agh fuck, you get stuck with these five hammering voices barrelling and echoing through your head, you feel dead of them, dead in them,,,,, surrounded,,, agh, lost in an attempt to decipher any vestige of truth whatsoever; confounded by the impossibility laid out by the primal stupidity of language, of bourgeois life and of protocol. Because we feel that, and we cannot understand it, we tend to abandon language. I mean the royal we. So becoming more and more confused by a clammer of desperate stupidity that nobody can relieve you from, you get caught trying to explain yourself over and over again, to your comrades and your enemies; because essentially you are now an example: A stabilising system for those locked in the binary of correct protocol and assurance. That's why so many trans* dialogues have become lodged in a system of correctly assembling language in order to describe the observable. 

The observable is describable. That's a material fact. It's not often we'll make that bold a statement, but here we are. The observable is absolutely describable. This is a material fact that cannot be correctly argued against. But that is qualified  only when we realise that the observable is tenuous, and the describable is a derivation of the observable, and therefore exponentially tenuous. As the subject (insofar as I am generally observed as a non-invisible member of society) I am exponentially more tenuous than both the observable and the describable, because by the process detailed above I am observed and described. Hence: the visibly trans* subject's general allocation is tenuously derived from two tenuous processes. This is, in part, our constant alienation from the trans* narrative. To play into the hands of the process described above is to draw a map of your life that looks something like this:

Who I am now vs who I was then.
Who I was then vs who I am now.
Who I am now alongside who I was then.
Who I was then alongside who I am now.
Who I am now determined by what I was then
and visa versa. What I am now against what I will be
What I will amount to dispelling the myths
of what I was then, or what I am now, peculiarised 
by and into what I will be. What the fuck am I. 

This is only one crude and confused configuration trying to explain and discredit what a trans* manifesto can actually do. I feel if anything things seem to be moving backwards, which is good for our safety. More people are coming towards an understanding, if not a rather clumsy one. The understanding is not what we are, but rather that we perhaps shouldn't be killed. Especially in a liberal country like this, where we might actually have some use. Documentaries, inspirations, Ted Talks. That's a synical glimpse. Perhaps alongside use there is also the fact of the seam bursting and bursting until it can no longer be contained in what it was once contained by. Thus a larger container. And if you really squeexe your face you'll start to realise how horrible the word 'transition' really is. Determined as it is by a start and a finish, a false double, something that contains at least five harmonic falsities on a liberal map of social reality. Perhaps this is why we have a fetish involving cages; everything impossible to communicate. 

Saturday 17 October 2015

17.10.15

    There is no
reconciliation
                          in death
 
     there's none in life
there's no life
                       left.
 
...say grab a gun
                            all around me,  minds,  brains, 
 
love,,
love surrounds me
                               like a smell, everywhere
minds,  blasting,  screaming,   crying out:
 
 
 
 
I've started to sleep very deeply.

Dreams all the time,
                                  're everywhere I look:
 
  vivid,   fluid,
                        I thought
                        if I started to sleep it would feel better:
                        rest is the antithesis to stress: the enemy
it depends on it. Sleep and stress, sleep and stress, come back:
Help me, sleep and more sleep and still more, lashes flitting,,
send me a sister to sleep
 
to sleep in the lap, sleep and sleep and no help me:
 
 
I'm more and more anxious
                                             anxious all the time
                                             late
                                                     to everything
                                                         nothing
seems to start to move,
 
                                          brains,   falling,
     everywhere around me I can hear them
              what are they doing
              with me.
Now, opposite the sea, huge, patent
 
 

                                               you're underneath the sea
                                               In a galley   not yourself,
your family. Loss,   minds,   all the time
 
could rent a small room and sell
books and music
 
I can't believe you're dead and it's all
I can say it's stuck in my mouth
                                                     my voice is what it is:
 
marks on my skin
                             baffled
     where I scratch off the surface
     skin under my nails
     feeling so un-beautiful un-
childlike  I make friends
 

I detach. And scratch. I go into work
and drag you with me along the floor
through the doors, the airlock
                                                 and try to comb  my mind

a sudden cheering lurch
welling, hopeful, your smiling
skin,
is it possible
 to slice
           through glue?
 
 
********************************
 
"Say thank you melancholia, say thank you livid scent, say thanks to mandatory training, say thank you kitchen labour, say thank you CR02, say thank you supervision, say thank you horrible triggers, say thank you Venn diagram, say thank you 6am, say thank you PBS, say thank you departed friends, say thanks a million lawyers, say thank you 50% more likely to consider or commit suicide, say thank you bedded statistics, say thank you dragged from one task to the next, say thank you once jubilant work place, say thank you eroding sense of care, say thank you teeth of managers, say thank you for your change, say thank you to your tiredness, say thank you fair exchange."
 
 
 
....I'm sorry I've been coming here with
all my shitty moods but lately
my brain feels all loosed up
                                               and wrong
like imagine how it feels when you flush
out a tapeworm,
 
 
                            imagine how the tapeworm
feels; like that. All loosed,, wrong,
unable to care, panicked, ingested,,
 
 

hours and hours,,   upon hours
sleep and sleep, torn in and out of sleep and sleep
 
hello pretty: o sleep comes rolling back
my little
 
 
, this neon voice
flaring up before me, do not deviate
from your course
 
over and over again,, clumsy,, malignant
 
 
                                  when in fact waking up every day taking
one lasting breath
glaring up at the ceiling,, hammering
the roof out;
 

dress me in my favourite clothes, pick
                                                               them out for me
let me be arid and choiceless,
                                                  childlike, listening
                                                  silver graceless bells.