Natural (?) Conclusions

I don't know if my blog has come to its natural conclusion or if I am just sick of it in general. Perhaps it is time to go back to simpler forms? I don't know if I have had a sudden attack of privacy or if I have said all I can be bothered saying. I know this sounds stupid, but everything dies at some point, and surely if I leave this space untended and uncared for for long enough, it too will die. Right now it is live/alive. But I suppose because anything 'on the net' is ephemeral insubstantial crap, it can't exist for very long. Is this one of the things that makes me hate the internet, and ipods? The idea if vitual space? Perhaps I like for things to exist more physically, and with evidence. I don't like the traces, or hints of the physical that we are all so fucking smug about these days.

Another reason for stopping now is that I have that overwhelming sense of who gives a fuck. And I know that last time I mentioned stopping I got all sorts of responses, but this time perhaps it is me who, after all this time, doesn't give a fuck. I think to start off with I had an urge to put my thoughts into the world, no matter how rough and unfocussed they were. Now I feel a bit aimless. This is aimless isn't it? And does that matter? Do you think anyone really cares other than me?

Although the thing that scares me most is the volume of what I have made, and I don't really know how to manage it, what it is for, why I did it, how it can be used or misused or what its destination is. That makes it a strange concept. And scary. What am I doing and why?

I am again reading depressing stories about AIDS (why am I so drawn to disease/epidemic/catastrophe writing?). This time by a guy called Adam Mars-Jones. One of the first things I wondered when I started to read was whether or not kids at school called him 'martian', or said he was from Mars. I probably would have found that really funny in primary school. Or perhaps not, considering I was, and continue to be afflicted with a mad and terrible surname. And perhaps I was less of a swine then than I am now?

Slatternalia

Ah, what delight I take in fucking and swearing, and their inherent similarities. I swoon with the sheer intensity of both activities, and create mucal rivulets between my lips, of which there are many. I'm constantly drooling at the moment, from whichever orifice is happiest and runniest. I am at the point of exploding with a feeling of visceral aliveness. Have I felt like this before? I am beginning to wonder.

Some things are too important to metion flippantly.

Mother Cake

Why do our bodies prevent us from sleeping? I woke during the night, at 3.30am. The room is quiet and when I look around I desperately want there to be light. Everything becomes strange when there is no light. I imagine that is how the world will end.....all the light will disappear.

When I listened to a particular song last night I felt like I needed to cry (it said "how could I love a breaking thing?"). Partially as an expression of tiredness and alienation from my usualness, but also as a reaction to what has been happening (internally and externally) recently. Although I feel good, this is a huge upheaval and one I'm not always sure I am ready for. I don't want to be tentative, I want to throw myself away like a rotten thing and be consumed by the bin. I'm as dirty and messy as any tip face today, and yesterday, and for the past 2 weeks. In some way this is still about letting go, but it is about picking up too. I am having to explore things I have hated for 2 years, and this process of renewal, the newness and unsurity of it, is terrifying. And I feel as if I could fall out of myself. I don't think I have ever been entirely sure of what I have wanted. There have been times when I have almost been sure, but I am a stupid and fickle person, and overly zealous yet underly committed often. How horrible it is to know this about myself.

I can't concentrate. My parents are going to court today, to settle, which is ironic because more than ever, today they are stirring up 32 years of murky water. Water that 2 other human beings emerged from, somehow clean. I remember a certain point of total resignation post MP that made me feel ill. My mother is still clinging to half baked/boiled/fried answers that clang with a resounding stupidness that I find difficult to stomach. "Maybe men are just...." and I hate to be on the receiving end of it because despite how hard I work against it, there is always an element of indoctrination. She is my mother after all, and she gave birth to the world! But she spouts a dark and apocryphal tea that never quite convinces me of the spineless cruelty of men. Interpretation mother, you must try to read the world differently, and not that I necessarily want you to be like me, but I need you to see differently, and further, and wider, and more cleverly. I know there are extenuating circumstances, but they won't always exist. One day you might realise that you are bitter and old for no good reason.

Parents can never seem to understand that parenting goes beyond care and nurture, but that parenting means being perfect. When I think of the Virgin Mary, I imagine an aromatically intense pleasure - mother smell. What is a mother really? Is it a model of virtue and chasteness, as we imagine as children. Or is the mother allowed to really exist, dirtily in the world?

It is a luxury to look out this window, and to be here, on a bland Tuesday.

Science is Sexy

There are times when being looked at is unbearable. I love and hate that knowing gaze. I'm going through an intense period of readjustment I think. And it makes me feel like crying.

"The Sudden Smell of Burning Flesh"

**'s cousin disgusts me. Even his teeth and lips, the way his gums appear when he speaks. The curve of his mouth and the almost sneer. I find him fascinating to look at, yet repellant. On Saturday night we were drinking after dinner, and I don't know if he was drunk, but for a moment I wasn't sure if I was offended or amused. I wasn't drunk. He talked about shooting black people in South Africa and leaving bodies to rot. I thought of the song Strange Fruit, particularly the Nina Simone version...."black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze". I become sarcastic and barbed in situations like that, and attempt to humiliate people into agreeing with me, or at least pretending to. I wish I didn't, and I wish I could truly accept difference (I even want to accept the idea of hating people, wanting to kill them and watching their corpses decompose, yet I rankle immediately at that, as if I was implanted with that horror pre-life) but I can't. How can you accept something that disgusts you? This reminds me of my obsession with violence, with Le Differend, and with our inability to recuperate anything from experiences/people/actions we find abhorrent. We like to exclude and demarcate until the cows come home (where were the cows anyway?), but acceptance is almost impossible. Yet there is also the tendency toward complete assimilation. Perhaps along with the desire we have to fuck each other, we also wish to consume each other (or are they the same thing anyway?). And do we fuck or consume with a view to changing or reformulating the other person? It is a strangely partisan system of control and exchange. I am often surprised by my desire to submit quietly to the person who I wish would fuck me. And despite my consistent ebullience, I want sometimes to be tamed to death.

Vellum: Paper or Skin?

Last night I dreamt about leaving a job. I know I am wracked with sleepless fear at the moment. It is a strange sensation. It was constant 2 years ago, and I would lie awake, elecrically charged, all night and my eyelids would not stay shut.

I think a lot about surfaces and substances, and how things are really made. And about the changes in substances that we are unaware of. The body changes so dramatically, and yet we don't even see its evolution. And it isn't because we aren't watching. ** showed me a piece by a live artist whose name I can't remember. He took photos of himself every day for a year, in the same room, in the same position, in the same clothes. He changed significantly in appearance over that year. But I don't know if we only see superficial change and are blind to substantial change. Even the supporting structures must change. Do we not see it because we refuse to believe in the idea of substantial instability?

And surface too. I remember as a child being astounded by the body's ability to heal. I wonder if children experience the horror of wounds that can't heal before they realise that they can? ** and **'s cat has had a wound that can't heal for about 2 years. It stinks, and I am alwayts uneasy about it. Children's incessant scab picking is perhaps because they don't understand their skin as a preservable surface, but just as an opportunity for prickly, naughty pleasure. Scabs were so fascinating when we were children.

I like the idea of X-Rays. There is something funny and old fashioned in the name even. I used to often want to have them taken just so I could look at myself. Now I want an MRI. There was an artist, although I can't remember her name, who was part of the same exhibition as Char Davies at ACMI who had done amazing stuff with MRI.