The blind is my body, where I appear as prey – a strategic communication in which I gut myself to make room for love
originally posted to substack — Jan 12, 2022
What’s autofiction if I never leave my room – a ghost story. I become my own prey, I hunt myself. Accruing life powers by how many demons you can get under your control is a quantifiable form of black magic but also boring like self-help
An inferno of the same 1
As if by appropriating my own self-hate I could burn fantasy to a crystalline lust that would finally cut me into reality in the way that I wanted – with enough gravity to vilify love, and make myself hard to the touch
So what if it’s not my intent to be open, to life – wanting instead to be opened, up, radically. So what if what I seek is something other than affection. I know I can only desire what’s not t/here. I’ve never been able to touch myself in a fashion authoritative enough to split into an oppositional kind of practice (discipline). I can’t apply the division myself, apparently. Not with the proper asymmetry though I’ve tried
…openness comes from the Outside, not the other way around 2
So I have to become a lure, a target for another, the radical 0ther that my fantasy both signals and obscures. Fantasy does not exist territorially and the 0ther is always approaching from elsewhere, out of sight, placeless for all I know
The blind is my body
— a redoubt, which is also about finding limits b/c borders point to somewhere, else and only by their failure does the 0ther appear. The unmappable 0ther when I am only ever here, in my room, territorialized by my own solitude
The Ancrene Wisse is a 13th century anchoritic manual – which I’ve read, so maybe instead of alone I’m anchor-held – it works to distinguish between Inner Rule and Outer Rule so I know it’s meant for femmes but feels applicable cross-gender as society(?) is so BPD these days that there’s hardly any conception of either, of 0ther, or even of borders at all, just as if existence has become one, as I said
Maybe there’s a strategy there – like internal refraction in place of relation, charging the distortion of self-reference with enough of a shock to exhaust subjectivity
It’s possible to talk oneself out of a pronoun I think. At the loaded end of silence we’re deaf in the choir our own polyphony, bodies lined in hot silver and light so violent it magnifies and refracts until anything extant inside is delivered to ash
Openness is a war, it needs strategies to work.3
One could hope (but only). If we could anneal ourselves to the barren heat of pain so when we break we break uniformly & infinitely like tempered glass
Because I’m nothing if not the vanity through which I’m terrorized
and my faith in the terror to make me stupid
and my terror of the stupidity that makes me faithful
This stupidity – I’m myself for no other reason than description