thinking ‘silence is the science of the world’ & ‘science is the silence of the world’ are both equally true
originally posted to substack — Dec 23, 2021
Like when breath condenses to water, as I’m masked
How it feels… against the skin, depthless lacquer in place of speech. My own spit on my face like gloss, the glass adjacent the mask, how a mirror is made – reflective layer backed by protection. Am I talking to myself. I learn to speak and become a split subject anyways. I give myself up, parts of me go missing into the tongue, I pass through it, it translates me into society and I’m no longer solely mirrored, I’m filtered and not beheld, ideal. Maybe that’s when you become you and not me, this other me – masked
x x x x x x
Though I’d like to think otherwise, that I could silence myself into a habit repetitious enough in weight to scale the holy asymmetry it takes to see gxd in the world, during the practicing failure of self-other boundary differentiation
– I wanna belong only to symbols, like a saint. I resent being thrown into succession, so I don’t speak
Isolated (imaginary) I have no filter, unmasked of course. And the mirror is pure, I can sense the inner witness, the ghost or relation between me and the other not in reflection but in the gloss between, drawing light towards the eye, synthesizing
Gloss or wet-light: something that catches the light, but is not the light itself; amplifies presence and puts at a remove simultaneously; the distance between gxd and black, or the gxdblack shine of Fanny Howe’s thought in the night
x x x x x x
Masking is also a language, what autists do to cope in the world, to relate, to hide their failure
x x x x x x
My missing parts become the lack in my speech. I can only really think there, in that silence-like failure. It’s an ascetic clarity sharp as the sterile wind that rushes the gap between fantasy and self
Faces lose depth under the mask and the libidinous qualities of orality are lost. Seeing is also a byproduct of speech, and part of sound’s seduction. But an organ under prophylactic – no, condoms are never sexy I’m sorry and I say I’d rather live than survive but at this point it’s only theoretical, the difference between the two when everything is eyes, everything sees but silently and sound comes w/o visual warning or context. Sight and sound don’t sync, like bad dubbing. The irreality of non-native speech like science which is a spell but one I can’t contain – already dead and not even sick
The paternalistic failure of a certain kind of fear gleaned from confusion – authoritative inconsistencies, an enigmatic impotence which is then religiously deployed as resignation
…this congestion of the spirit and my already shallow breathing, barely moving through the transitional object of the mask (the not-me)