“In a notebook in which Acker sketched out her final work, an unfinished libretto titled Requiem, she wrote, “I’m giving you the clues, but as yet you don’t know the clues to what.”
// what started as a continuation of the (previous) trauma post, long ago and old now, irrelevant maybe, re: the public display of “healing,” the sharing of one’s healing “journey” and the idea of selling that process — this thing i see over and over again in interviews and bandcamp write-ups. my nausea towards it… in other words — real bitchy:
can we please have some dignity and issue a provisional ban on the words PTSD, survivor, catharsis, empowerment, healing… in the bios of female musicians
this isn’t therapy, it’s art. and while i’d never claim one has nothing to do with the other, or that a person shouldn’t center their work in the endeavor to fully self-actualize, the emphasis on this type of narrative has become a marketing strategy at this point
there’s a pivotal difference between empowerment and exploiting your own pain, and real healing doesn’t require an audience. a witness maybe, but specific in its quality of understanding – more qualitative than quantitative
in fact i’d say it depends on a radical reclamation of interiority, which is only degraded when one’s “journey” is presented as a plot device made to serve the ends of a public-facing identity
// posted & quickly deleted but continues here, as such (still bitchy?):
i don’t even have to look for examples they just compile themselves in an instant / instagram – the phony, unholy (phone-y?) synchronicity of social media
[screenshots REDACTED]
like an audience needs numbers to be what it is, is most often there to be entertained
and is it, consciously or not, an attempt to be relatable, liked? on a personal and not like button <3 me level, but that too… not just saying but the constant repetition of it, or the need to explain
whereas i guess my instinct is to alienate11, but also why tf does it bother me. is it my own pain (not healed!), my own lack, my ressentiment in an age suffused with such — mass mimesis and the illusions that floodlight alterity until it all but disappears
we’re other-blind, eyes bright as our screens
overexposure, likewise &
the ready-made order of the self that rides as reality (they don’t lack like i do)
The entirely Other— the New —thrives only behind a mask that protects it from the Same. Secrecy and darkness often exude fascination. According to Augustine, God has deployed metaphors and obscured Holy Writ intentionally, in order to fan desire.
— Byung-Chul Han
yes i feel that it’s gxd’s job to seduce me. “Desire originates not in the self but the other,” says Han
BUT
the gap between fantasy/self and what rushes in, a vacuum — the rarified air of the 0ther, now, becomes sopped
— with info, like an ANTI-glamor
GLAMOUR: First recorded in 1710–20; from Scots glamar, glamer, dissimilated variant of grammar in sense “occult learning.” Bewitchment, enchantment, or ravishment — a violent removal
vs. the banal familiarity of parasociality — an antiseptic, a sanitary mirror, failsafe prophylactic against the violent removal found in distinction
it’s all so boring really — seeing ourselves everywhere, in everything, like we live in a pornographic society now and not an erotic one. no seduction just satiation, consumption and it’s palliative gratifications
every possibility for an imaginal world exhausted
not meant to know so much, only meant to want to — it’s a very contemporary arrangement
— in an (attention) economy of scarcity, maybe mere survival is the avant-garde of art [Aaron Moulton]
(but “healing”? a marketing scheme, stuck at the level of content)
the blind is my body, where I appear as prey
consider this, this — my WIP post, a ghost in studio BTS, a sortilege of words too nimble and quick to settle into sense. poetry masquerading as content, my dadaist marketing strategy, my MASK — on loan from your fantasy, imagination. the blind in which i can be had, consumed
I’m giving you the clues… (it’s an album, dummy)
— b/c the avatar is possessable, but the 0ther is not
- maybe i want my trauma for its cult value. to be made alien in my secrecy or alienate to the point of self-referentiality. turn my trauma into a symbol, push it down, push it away until i hide/forget the meaning — like a sigil
a symbol, a mask
bury it, metamorphic, also like a stone — forged and enchanted, activated
through distance, through depth ↩︎