after forty.

notes from a year of in/visibility, quietude, and explosive ecologies.

Suppose I didn’t know where to begin, and in this fissure of thought, there produced a seeming silence, an unrecorded intangibility, and say I courted this irreconcilable presence transmuted through absence. That is, say I have been listening instead and let this account for all this seeming distance.

Suppose therein I orchestrated an emergent knowledge: there are no beginnings, but continuations, and the gap is not merely symphonic, resonant, vibrating, but a turbulent playspace. That is, I have not been away, I am not gone, I did not leave; this has been a whispered in/visibility, a fermata in time-space and language.

Words fail; this is as much a gift as an irresolution, for which I no longer seek to account or deny or forgive or explain. Words fail; their beautiful wreckage haunts.

Last month, in their performance at The Kitchen, JJJJJerome Ellis closed a thunderous, staccatto’d 90-minutes with the breathless note that, “I feel like I want to say something…but I don’t know what to say…so I’ll just…say thank you.”

Suppose we begin there — why not:

To begin with, I would like to entrust myself to words that, were it possible, would be naked. — Jacques Derrida

forty thoughts preceding this: my fortieth rotation

1. Desire gets a bad rap; to be led by longing is to announce oneself as in conversation with eventual knowing, or psychic witness.

2. I guess I will just never stop updating the website.

3. When in doubt, choose something with bubbles. You are always in doubt.

4. Monochrome is a potent methodology.

5. I fundamentally believe in public displays of affection. I would dare to name an imperative for this orientation, particularly in wartime.

6. More than the breast, the womb forms a “first object” of nourishment and deprivation and, thus, a primary site of first permission to be, that is to dwell, in thirdness, in the holding environment, with/in incalculable, fleshly, fugitive, co-created aspiration.

7. Absence is presence and is present. Hauntology is not a metaphor.

8. I am irreducible, particularly in seasons of quiet invisibility.

9. My nails are either bitten down entirely or talons, and I should be most feared in the in-between.

10. I hope no one tries to marry me this year. I have so much to do.

11. To touch pleasure, to seek it out and prioritize a devotion to its pursuit, is to routinely position death in the mind’s eye. These pleasures may be simple in earthly nature — a perfect bite, say, or the feel of oil across dry skin, or crepe myrtle along the driveway’s edge each spring; they may be spiritually monumental. Cataloging their intensity is dull, I find. What matters is the unwavering situation of erotic self-witness.

12. I like to get up and be left alone, left to my own inclinations, without interruption or conversation, for some hours. I am excitable, and distraction will lead me outside myself, so I awake twice: once, in the dark, between 2 and 3am, for a few hours of dreaming, pondering, patterning, and once again, after a quick dawn nap, to allow the day to begin. The best days are when the second awakening has no timestamp, no pre-determined expectation, and I luxuriate in a reprise of unmeasured witness to my thoughts.

13. That said, I don’t want to work for myself. I like to outsource my frustrations with capitalism, et al., and find it comforting to decry a “boss.”

14. Maybe I’m an Impressionist, I don’t know.

15. Coconut is purposeless in every regard. I will not expand on this.

16. I disagree that archival gaps require resolution. Moreover, beyond the question of should, or can, or how, or even to what end, it wouldn’t be my work anyway.

17. Writing is a form of reading; reading is a form of thinking. At times, one or the other serves and is producible. Infrequently, I perform both at once.

18. I don’t really like tools or machines or meditative gear. Perhaps this is what shushes my capacity to show up in digital realms; less the environment than the lack of proximity. I wanna be touched.

19. I can obsess. That is, I often do, and I give permission to this organic impulse.

20. I am certain feelings are material.

21. The sonic, as with the air and the cavities of resonance both internal and man-made, is a necessarily fugitive space and site of refugee creation — that which is acoustic is marooned, improvisational. Listening is political through its otherwiseness.

22. Expression and art are not synonymous.

23. Look, the space of becoming never is. Irresolution is the ground where soul is figure.

24. Truncated sentence, truncated life.

25. I am completely committed to the fantasy, and the grime, and their convergence.

26. When I say, “I am composing an opera,” this is literal and ongoing.

27. On ≠ in time.

28. The cavernous archive produces resonant, penetrable, undefended cavities, necessarily vulnerable to the violence of acoustic provocations. In this/these, amplification is possible, which is to say, “the gaps” are where light and sound get in, mirroring death’s looming. I am suggesting that the archive is animated by such potential, for better or worse, and this is precisely the human element.

29. Automation, even and possibly especially reparative automation, inscribes its own deadly potential upon creative production. Look to the subliminal, though for what, I am not yet certain.

30. My child will likely get their first period in this second administration, but I got my first period at Disneyland. I bought thick pads like diapers from the hotel gift shop and walked like John Wayne to character breakfast where Tigger and Goofy hugged me and my brother for a picture that my mother keeps in a corner like last night’s wine. I will take my child to Disneyland and hunt for Tigger and Goofy and, at breakfast, mimic my squirming in the chair, like a hot pink seat of viscous fire, and maybe I will tease the kid and walk through Epcot like John Wayne, if only it might distract her, like watery ink across the paper or sweat beneath the armpits — whatever takes her eyes for one moment off the glaring neon light box in the corner signaling no ‘exit.’ I will make the bleeding season a snapshot.

31. Vibes can be precise.

32. That which is fractalized is inherently boundless and replete in anti-teleological impulses.

33. In craft, memory may serve as a component to determine significance. In practice, memory is not a service. The structure of the mind precedes what it is perceiving.

34. Freedom: of, to, for, from.

35. Thoughts are not questions; I have many more questions than thoughts.

36. Quiet demands attention. Quietude methodologizes attention.

37. A reminder that ambivalence is not a lack of concern or display of disinterest, but the warring suture of conflicting emotions producing an affective third.

38. The imperative to “know thyself” is a post-modern unattainable. Secrets kept are selves unlocked.

39. When asked after my commitment to a yearning, erotic, desirous, intimate existence, I can only offer a keen sense that improvisation is the highest form of composition, and I am a poet, a creature of arrangement.

40. I still believe in Tuesdays.

xx, Adrienne