Tragic HeroLines:
Beyond the pale, beyond the embrace of failure, or conscious reclaimation of the sting of a short life: how to map and when to unmap
The clink of the morphine bottle when I throw it in the recyclable bag - it still makes me feel like I’m hitting rock bottom, and I’m hitting rock bottom in an ecologically responsible way. A sponsor once said that we were both borderline junkies. My problem is liquor, but I have to be careful, and if this all turns out to be a long game for morphinem, and I’ve somehow managed to fake terminal cancer, well…that’s pretty c, b, p (cunning and baffling and powerful). The recycling junkie. Lots of glasswork. I hate when I’m thinking about it this way, or thinking about it at all, because thinking about drugs always makes me feel like my denial part wakes up right away, my rationalisations hit me before desire does, that’s what happens when you stick around in the rooms enough, you start to develop a reflex so you can see your thinking work on you before there is even a trace of temptation. And even now, 21 years after a drink, 14 years after trying something to step out of my head just for a break, I wonder if I am actually lying to myself about having cancer. That it’s about this breakthrough dose and trying to stockpile or something that I should do if this is my addiction talking to me (* note that I’m very goddam grateful there is not a bottle of rum on the table, and this is true every day). Even though I have the kind of pain that requires something more than OTC, I want to be here for all of it. I keep my eyes open during motorcycle crashes. I’m keeping my eyes open for all of this. It’s terrifying and fantastic. I want to see my death. That doesn’t sound extraordinary to me in the least.
One of the most worrying things, though, was the way I jumbled during the seizure and realised there is indeed a point where conscious deep breathing doesn’t take me out of a terrible moment and bring me back in more gracefully. I know there is a point where I really don’t know what I will do or what will happen, and that is I suppose what the practices are practicing for. It’s difficult. Or maybe it isn’t difficult at all, I haven’t done it yet.
Massive support from all sides, professional and personal and spiritual and everything else that matters, and there are new old faces that keep popping up on the screen of my life, what I look into and see looking back. Old friends fill the spaces, like Hollywoood Squares, or Match Game (this is my childhood). & they keep changing, and new old friends is so touching. I cry a lot. I didn’t used to. The odu on the matt often come up to tell me I cry too much on my own, and it’s taken this to open me up so that I can let Oshun reach into my heart and pull out the dross (this is how I experience it, maybe you do too).
I love how my clothes become more androgynous, the little touches of makeup, my moving (I dance alone) and my talking, becoming or slipping or easing in to my own queerness, how much I wish I could have ticked that box when I was younger, and I keep falling increasingly in love with folks who challenge ideas of gender norms, while I am becoming more comfortable in my own skin (but honest confession I like my skin and shape, although I wish we could do something about that neck).
More moments that tell me this cancer stuff is real: Like the way I struggle more simple things, typing is harder to get right,, breathing is a little deeper and more laboured after moving, and I’ve been hiding this from people. Except that’s changing too. Because. Now suddenly, as I write this, this is happening right now, watchout! I see that I can finally slip into the role of the tragic poet. I got the disease that kills the poets and artists of today. Well, one of them.Others would be addiction (sure I got that, but i manage to stay sober every day so far), and ok there are lots of terminal diseases. I don’t want to exaggerate. Nor do I want to minimise this experience. It’s bad. It was 18 months. It changed to 6-months. And now when i ask the question a silence fills the room.
I want to lean into the tragic role because I practiced it for so long, and honestly I don’t want that again, i want to be here, leaning into everything about this moment So leaning into this would look like…?
Reverie. A man is trying to organize things into teams. We all agree with his logic just have no idea what this will build except distrust. We don’t want teams. I come out of the reverie with a useless list of numbers, and he is fading from light, trying to convince the world that there is a numerical operation that could make sense of all of this, and I think he might be right. 😁 don’t really trust men so much these days tho.
From reverie we move to:
Courting the tragic hero
Pros and cons:
P: Cool clothes. Secrets whispered about you. Lots of leeway in terms of identity formations, ability to make new discoveries as new identity.
C: None I can think of, oh, except the pretentiousness of it all. Oh and the way it usually means no sense of humour. I am nothing without my irony. I even gave in to eating cheeseburgers recently because of my lack of irony. (Now I’m moving back toward vegan again, I just feel better, and tragic heroes can certainly be vegan (and eat cheeseburgers apologetically and with remorse).
How to dress: Darker, looser, flowy, political (Free Palestine, Trans Rights, Free Ukraine, Fighting the rise of fascism and right wing extremism. The spectre of Frida Kahlo being carried by a team to protests). Better with lots of buttons and snaps and ties, although I’m learning that it’s better to be dressed for a sudden hospital visit. That is not the sexy. I am sorry but the hospital bag is not dressing for the sexy. It will take future generations to fix this. But they have so much to already carry. Let there be sexy hospital bags on earth, and let them begin with me. I have 2 dear friends who have sent me hospital bags, and they are sexy, and they need more morphine maybe but that might just be me today because the pain is high. Pain is not sexy. After pain, maybe we carry something of an edge, but at the moments, it is hard to see the sexy there.
Music: since in this scenario I am painting myself as tragic HeroLine, then the music is what I listen to, which is this: Ashes to Ashes (hard to beat this one), werewolf (coco Rosie), Anteroom (EMA), Cosmic Dancer (T Rex), The Universe (Death Valley Girls), Sword of Damocles (Lou Reed), Fast Slow Disco (St. Vincent), Mountains of the Moon (Grateful Dead), Roll the Credits (Danielle Ponder), Something for the Pain (She drew the gun), A Thousand Kisses Deep (Leonard Cohen), and 5 Years (Bowie). More to add as time goes on. As long as time goes on,
Perfume: Anythingb Patchouli, the Guerlain Absoluts collection (esp Patchouli Ardent), Shadow, Psychedelique, Sana Jardin ‘Tigers by her side’, nom nom nom, that last one I will happily roll around on the floor like a happy dog and get it in every pore.
Go to drink: kombucha, homemade or with pretentious names.
Philosophers to follow: Rashida Phillips, Rachel Hann, Christina Sharpe, micha cárdenas, Legacy Russell, Rayna, Morgan M Page, um, at this point I am starting to lose my recall. I recently had that seizure caused by a newly discovered tumor in my left frontal lobe, as part of the metastatic spread, and today had a TIA, or mini stroke, so I might blame some of my recall issues here but that will get old fast. I remember names through clusters, though, which is good to know for me going forward. There’s so much exciting new work out there, and all of it is absolute in the realm of the sexy, and of the dead, breaking through the old ways of keeping things kept. I feel like my child is in good hands with you all to guide her, and see collectivities of mutual aid forming that make cry they are so beautifully wrought, and I really wish I could be around to play a small part in how we can keep each other alive during rough times.
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Pain in m is biting dog
Just stoop the dog
0pain it’s a biting dog
Pain. Is a biting dog. It does not stop and lets up only to let you forget it so it can remind you. It is not necessarily punishing, it just wants to be known. I know you, I’ve come to know you very well, you’re my companion. You white biting dog. And you know that I’ m more wolf than dog, and I think that says something about toughness, but who am I kidding, none of us get to live forever, and the slow bites have been going on for long enough now that you know I’m resistant, but that I also break down eventually.
This is the part that gets back to this idea the tragic HeroLines, and we need new models. Something that can measure the intensity of this experience, where living with (not through, not likely through) makes us more intense, cooler somehow, but we need better role models. Like my own contexts mean I look a little sideways at maybe like Nick Nolte or the Mickey Rourke’s or the other rough beasts of the 80s, and we need new ones, and we have new ones. Something about the way that Billie Eilish is literally figuring out her shit in the coolest ways publicly, and the cover that Kristen Stewart worked to reconfigure a hundred codes of desire, Chappell Roan, St. Vincent’s reinvention, and I’ve already left out too many people so I get written off as not cool, which is a weight because, let’s face it, it’s too heavy, but I can blame even this on what’s happening lately. But we’re not done with the suffering artist.
After this mini stroke, I should be cooler and more experienced now in the world, facing death, except I am not actually facing death, not looking into the mouth of death, this is something else, this is much more like just dying, and that’s a very different thing. Not sexy or dangerous, but the thing that we don’t want to do, the thing we all just don’t want to do.
It’s all re-creation. Heavy doses dealing with heavy pain bring in the sacred geographers and they know how this is to be mapped. You have ways of working through abstracts and when they touch bases with emotional bottoms, not rock bottom but feeling the weight of where I am right now and it’s a heavy place. I have weight here and gravity here is where there is power. Or recognition of power. I am in a soft game of balance . Maybe 🤔 it’s not about holding or claiming
But parrying.
It feels like the universe is playing with me like a rubber ball, I am being tossed far and wide and in some of these vistas I can see not in miles or kilometers, but in years. I can see 10 years in that direction. In that other direction there was a second divorce, maybe 3 marriages, maybe a new family lives somewhere in Redondo Beach, or Malta. It’s hard to tell. I wanted to change her mind so hard in that one version of our story, and she wanted me to change my mind in another, but we finally fell into the best love story anyone could have asked for, even though we don’t have a way to measure these things with the usual boring instruments or ways of knowing. And. In this other direction I can only see for two minutes but with surprising accuracy.
In this direction I can see for one year if I look straight up, it hurts my neck and I’m also sad because I can’t see all the way to the top.
However.
If I look down, straight down, caves and cenotes of the world, there is no limit. I see through the land of the dead and I am in the land of the dead, and I am not where I don’t want to be, this is not the dead of the ‘I am ready my lord’, it’s not the dead of ’he is in heaven now’ it’s not ‘hey look at me man’, this is all, more than you would expect, and so much so much so much more. Look down.
Keep focused on loo,ing down.
Do you believe in the devil? That there is some satan thing coming at or with the fork? If you do, be very afraid. But if you don’t. You can keep your focus looking down. You are ok here. This down is not hell. Hell is being trapped in a room of joe rogans amd they all want to explain things to you. Your hell is a room full of terfs and other gatekeepers; that is to say, your hell is social, which means your heaven is social.
A table for two on the grass and you’re eating cake with someone who is asking questions about dance and embodiment and sacred movement. Your abstracts are geometry and they are intricately connected to the social,l and this is wheel you are in touch with the power, where you are able to access the pulse of this. It is a web. I see it here.
In line directon I can see one conversation. I didn’t get to finish.
I would like to spend my days finding the unfinished conversations and let them play in the background like audible. I want to hear you talking to me until the end of time, until we forget time, and you keep telling me the stories that make my light up and I don’t have to do a single thing except look deep into your eyes and remember everything.
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