#illegibility

                                                          the pen ran dry; what it said

                                        loud above the putt-putt-puttering engine and much too deep   ₁                                 puttering in the backyard, nursing his ferns   ₂   blue.                         Not much to the patch   ₃                 and no one could read what it said. I don’t even know if I could read it.   ₄         Oddly, the pen ran dry; puttering at the tiny sink   ₅  

—

nos. 1-3, and 5, from fiction by Valerie Miner; no. 4 from Deborah Anna Luepnitz, Schopenhauer’s Porcupines : Intimacy and Its Dilemmas (2002). details at 504  

I surround myself with people Who I aspire to be more like I realize only now How afraid I am to depend on others

I forget that if I don’t let my friends help me, I could never ask them to accept my own assistance When I need someone to help

All the things I care about in life, I built on my own And that pains me

I forget that filling out forms isn’t about true or false Logical analysis, or truth value… It’s about fitting into boxes, Molding yourself into categories, Whose porous shells leak with the smell of fear The danger of a self-portrait illegible

Money has to keep moving The day it stops swimming is the day it dies I’m not ready to lose my fins again

“You seem self-aware of your problems”

That could be the case But maybe, I’m just bad at lying to myself And that’s why I’m here in the first place Poisoning myself, by weaving disordered feelings Into reasonably ordered binaries, destructive contradictions

Illegibility should intersect with other forms of resistance against capitalism and social creation that seek not merely to evade capture but to reconfigure the very architectures through which power operates.