it's always right now until it's later.
everything is still everything.
“we aren’t moving towards _____, we are in [it] and have been for a very long time.” [prompted on ig]
I don’t want to shock you, but in the end, this is a case for poetry. we’re just gonna ride the wave until we get there, yeah?
in my practice, I conceptualize silence as a polytemporal, rhizomatic structure. (say that three times fast.) further, I suggest that silence is not extra-linguistic—that is external to voiced language, but occurring with/in language, such that silence of the American Gulf South is a dialect and dialectic of that spatialized experience, and is distinct from, say, the silence/s or silenced of other languages, places, histories. I address how B/blackness articulates itself in vernacular, sensual, and sonic forms, exploring resonance with/in blackened histories. particularly, I orchestrate what I call ‘Sankofic attunement,’ a critically erotic composition of B/black maternality in the afterlives of reproductive enslavement.
in my view, silence, B/blackness, and maternity presuppose an in media res relationship between subject/object, flesh and affect, meaning and language, reality, and incalculability. silence, B/blackness, maternality -- these are syndemic syndemics.. and they are ecological systems replete with complicity, metamorphosis, impurities, plasticity, and invisibility, or invisibilization. all this to say, I’m preoccupied with wombs, holds, suspensions, dark matter into which we enter in media res and that we extend in our lifetimes, and I’ll probably write more on that this week #getexcited.
with these thoughts in mind, I'm approaching the prompter’s nudge toward instrumentalized uncertainty and what a mentor of mine calls '“methodologies that enter the realm of certainty and wrench this complicity through compromise.” where discomfort is equilibrium; in practice, I am particularly untangling ideas of frequency, dysfluency, and discontinuity through the lens of Blackened maternality.
really, I’m thinking of poetics and poetry as methodological suspensions of and with/in healing where healing is not a site or fixed point in future, suturing historical fissures or illness or violence, but rather a symphonic and ongoing rupture, wound, ache constantly recalibrating itself in the dark.
here, my guide for this logic is Dreaming in the Fault Zone: A Poetics of Healing by Eleni Stecopoulous, one of my top five reads of the past year. in this brilliant, howling text, the author endeavors to “write healing not as self-recovery but infinite extension to others, to write under the morbid systems of hypercapitalism, with increasing numbers of people starving for the lie of scarcity, increasing evidence of what we know in our guts: that inequality sickens, it kills, anthropogenic disaster drives millions from home into the violent impasse of borders. Into the widening gap, the growing chasm, as Greeks say.” (4)
I share her rage and demand when she writes, “I [do] not want to be consoled. I [do] not want to disavow complicity or reject ambiguity in the service of pronoia. I [do] not want to turn healing into absolution or absolve healing from its entanglement with harm.” (4)
as a Black mother living, working, and solo parenting in the American South and within the afterlife of reproductive enslavement, I am, like Eleni, “suspicious of charisma as a mystification of power,” and healing, repair, reparations hold a unique and alluring charm. I’m suggesting that epistemic immunity is as captivating a response to numbness and obfuscation as the mythical suggestion of a ‘healed state.’
she continues. “Healing is not an accomplishment. victory. the antithesis of illness. Healing cannot undo the disaster. reverse time.” (7) healing is not synonymous with cure. “Cure seemed easy a lure of capitalism. Of course, the perception of ease is central to the lure,” whereas “healing was complicated and often violent: experimental, rhetorical, magical, an effect or spectacle of time…healing had an unknown destination or had no destination.” (8) in this way, healing approximates the ruthless incalculability of silence, maternity, Blackened flesh, time.. no beginning or end, but a methodological practice in the mi(d)st of the fog.
I’m wondering if those of us sickened by womb-bearing, by racialized flesh, by language, are we “those whom cure eluded, or d[o] we elude cure?”
such ungovernability seems, to me, central to the sonic work I build materially and on the page, in its penetration and inescapability, and to the nature of countersyndemic practices. one particular methodology is incubation and dreaming. “Incubation: sleeping in a sacred place to receive a dream…bears the figurative meaning of ‘covering a dream like a still-incipient entity.” incubation submerges the subject in the matrix of the wound; thus, “[t]he dream is nurtured by the wound and born from it.” (11) descent alleviates while it exacerbates, healing as suspension not resolution of symptoms. “The dark could heal trauma’s grip on time.” (19)
“Symptom: is a falling-together or a falling-at-the-same time, where inner and outer manifest each other.” (15) this is echoed in the etymology of psychosomatic, arrived through sóma kai psyche, meaning body and soul at once, syndemically. thus, for those of us ‘eluding cure,’ or curative measures, we know our psychosomatic experiences to more specifically address the “holism of reality, the inseperability of psyche from soma, rather than being an observation, or accusation, of pathology.” (17) we are not hysterical; “...in antiquity, the ‘symptom’ is an expression of the sympatheia, the consensus, the cognato or coniuncto naturae, the point of correspondence between the outer and the inner.” (18)
soul as conscious materialization. symptom as bodily consensus with inspiration.
“The dream does not transcend time and space; it reveals the ‘multiphasic’ character of reality, the fourth dimension.” it is in this dimension that I echolocate silence, B/blackness, the womb.. through these dreaming endeavors we might find that “[d]reams were symptoms of the collective, where the same accident befalls us, the same forms and patterns emerge, where places and times remote from each other coincide, where people are at once themselves and others who live in the time…”(32) so, “the dream is not simply about interpreting the past (wound) or foretelling the future (healed) but the vehicle that renders time as dis-ease–unmoors it, sends it out to sea.” (43)
healing is a frequency without origin; “healing is our condition…There had always been pain. There had always been imbalance…There was no prior to redress…In the tale of time travel, the apocalypse precedes the world, precedes all attempts to avert its destruction.” (36) indeed: “[t]o be symptomatic, then, is to align your body with the common plight.” (33) “What does it feel like when there is no victory…No collapse then soar? When there is no crisis, in fact–no turning point?” (47) “The difficulty of all that beauty. The things seen, said, and done. The lying still and the rage. The initiation or the refusal to undergo initiation. The jeering at the rich along the sacred way. The being driven out, the no escape. And every other vestigial infinitive.” (52) the dark, the fog, the womb, blackness—these methodologically afford a “listening and seeing without sound and sight…” where “[f]orm doesn’t come from walls but moving points of sound.” (57)
in the end, I suggest poetry is a non-curative antidote to epistemic immunity, but also a necessarily countersyndemic practice in that “[p]oetry…becomes the instrument of re-covering psyche through myth and image…It is us in becoming. In incubation.” (39) ultimately, “[p]oetry reorchestrates the malady.” (41)
thus:
poetry may allow one to orchestrate silence and dark matter and decay syndemically; it may be and be in the atmosphere of entropy we occupy without curatively resolving harm; poetry is the wound and the incubation and the womb and the dream and the symptom at once, in media res, in fog, in silence that is material de/composition. it is medium, channel, and psychosomatic healer toward non-repair. poetry is a necromancer, an elusive liquidity; an antivictorious, incalculable, ungoverned, fugitive grammar of and with/in dis-ease, where the discomforting, disquieting, violent chasm is a critically erotic vocabulary of imperative aliveness arrived by through attunement. poetry is ecstatic maroonage without escape; poetry is our blurred condition, a frequency for attunement.
this is just a long-winded, full-throated ‘yes:’ we are in it, and have been for a very long time.