just taking it all in

We speak into the silence and write likewise.

Recognition can ripple through the text as sequences of tiny transformations, one question into another, so that a poem riddles itself. Alternatively, the poem may unfold as a sort of suspense novel.

While a text may be difficult, relation does not fall away due to difficulty.

The billions of nerve signals that are filtered and processed every second before reaching the level of consciousness constitute a stream of raw data that is antithetical to being, meaning, personhood. But moment to moment, without awareness, we are created from it—from an obscurity which is by condition unknowable.

Consciousness is like a canoe on an ocean of raw unfiltered perception. We learn the skills of navigation, but moment to moment ‘know’ almost nothing of what constitutes our ‘experience.'

Recognition is extractive. It removes what is recognized from its constitutive relations. Thus, an instant of recognition creates an alien deformity which is experienced as clarity.

Privacy and insanity have this in common: shared meaning drops away.

A taboo is a place where language deteriorates, becoming both supple and truncated.

I’m not construing death as an abstract barrier. It’s more of a thin curtain drawn over the churning mass of former times—always present, always invisible.

I think that the presence of death in life characterizes language.

You discover, to your surprise, that belief can be aimed at you without being personal.

I’ve assembled a sexual identity that’s like another body—my personal Frankenstein. Bony and full of nerves & suffering. It includes me but is detached, like the mirror’s alienating resemblance to myself.

It’s odd to think of my sexual imagination as starting out empty, a blank that drew a body along behind it. Then bits of other people fell in.

I was only doing what anyone does, waiting for my mistakes. I knew they’d slither up to me like my own personal language. I just hoped I’d recognize them.

I think we are impossible beings. We ruthlessly evade scrutiny, yet recognition is the beginning of transformative emotion.

Narrative provides context so that the rupturing of identity is recognizable.

For me, writing grinds itself into what’s familiar yet unbearable.