1.

12/28/2021

Is it about being seen or being used? What kinds of pleasure are to be mined from either or both? We are supposed to divest from the language(s) of extraction, capitalism, conquest, but I do not know how to deal anything other than what I am dealt—not without embracing fraudulence.

Muse is the lowest rung. What resources in my body, consciousness, subjecthood, can be extracted and deployed toward evil of all kinds? What is evil? Hatred of God: spitting in the face of what you are dealt. Unfurling a tongue of new weeping. Wailing, softness, decay, claws, skeleton. What does the negative space between myth and industry look like? Does it rumble? Does the ground yield life? Does it feed?

To feed: the urge to give of oneself. Is this one of those debased sentiments that lends life the thing called meaning? “To be a muse, you have to be an idiot.” Because it is both about being seen and being used. The model of the intervention has become the main thoroughfare to that slippery grail of “agency.” When I asked my grandmother how she met my grandfather, and if she had wanted offspring before she had them, she laughed in my face. Am I to conclude that she lived her life without agency?

1/3/2022

Dear Crystal:

Perhaps because I feel this strongly also—have since I was a child—my overtherapized adult brain wonders what is behind this cannibalistic desire to know someone fully: consume them, possess them, crawl inside them and flay them, turn them inside out. Wanting to know. Anne Carson in Eros the Bittersweet formulates boundary as the force that propels eros. The irrevocable fact that two cannot become one. The space between our bodies and souls—let’s call these vowels, we are vowels, abject lengths of utterance—the space between us vowels, the demarcations of our boundaries are what clatter against each other. Their hard edges create the violence of unfulfillable desire, and impossibility is what makes it sweet. Hovering beyond the limit of a concept: you cannot really know anything about anyone. I am a jealous person. My interior landscape is overtaken with worry and speculation about what other people are doing or thinking. But—what do they say? You are not responsible for your first thought, you are accountable for what you do with that thought.

If a lover could peer into my mind—render it legible—what would they find? Scorn and fatalism. A forever wandering eye. Raving possessiveness. History of inveterate and guiltless cheating, lies that I don’t even think about once told because my brain engineers them to become truth. Without boundaries—without consonants—this is what you would find in my vowel. What would be the point of knowing this? In practice, I am a doting, effusive lover and try to make my lovers feel cared for. Some things about an internal landscape you can never change. All the same I am, like you, obsessed with unpeeling the layers of these so-called truths. That one might equate the private with the truthful is a troubling notion. Truth has more to do with function and circumstance.

“The static electricity of erotic ‘shame’ is a very discreet way of marking that two are not one.” What orgasmic pleasure I have taken in this specific kind of shame. The shame that averts your gaze, lowers and flutters your eyelids, brings your hand over your mouth, presses your cheek into the wall when you orgasm. It is a surplus of self. The runoff. Eros must be deferred or obstructed. There are always, always things that one should never know about another.

For a time I was—perhaps still am a little—haunted by the notion of my grandparents’, my parents’, stories dying with them. I felt compelled to wring all data out of them in life, painfully or otherwise, before their transition into afterlife or non-life. What duty do we have to harvest and archive the stories of our ancestors? Where does consent figure in this? Joy? Trauma? Things get lost all the time and you can either retain the searing void of them, or. Know this—of desire—it is:

1.        beautiful (in its object)
2.       foiled (in its attempt)
3.       endless (in time)

It’s all endless. Vowels. The unsteady hand that smooths the horizon. It always extends as far as it needs to.

2-3.

6/23/2022

Unfurling a tongue of new weeping.

What is the appeal of seeing a weathered man cry? It has to do with rendering oneself prey, and then rendering one’s predator prey also. And then you find communion in that shared predicament of subjugation. Subjugation is sweet for the neurotic subject because it deals with relinquishing control. Subjugation is sweet for the wounded subject because it is in fact about asserting control in the execution of one’s own familiar suffering. I step onto a sailboat in the Aegean and the crewman winks at me. An older man with ropey, bronzed arms. Gelled crew cut. Missing canine tooth. I choose him immediately because I know that he sees me as a lamb, something soft and pliable, when in fact I can make him disappear. I can make him cry. And I do, ultimately, both things, and I do not even really tell a lie in the process. He tells me he was in the military. He shows me photos of his gun collection spread out on his mother’s floral bedspread. At 3 am, his boat rocks gently, anchored in the harbor. I lift myself through the ceiling hatch and sit naked on the roof, level with the dock. The dock is deserted. I look into the sky and see nothing, think nothing. The floor of God up there. He—the ropey man—has a large tattoo of an Orthodox cross on his arm, with the date that his best friend was stabbed to death. 27 times. The ropey man cries telling me this as we sit on a pebble beach facing the night sea. His boss has kicked him off the boat and fired him. The ropey man is on his knees looking up at me. I almost cry, too, being venerated.

I think I sought that out, some moment of rupture or leakage that I did not have to fabricate or provoke or coax out, simply wait for. Ed asks me a different time if I’ve ever seen Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac and I laugh. Duh, how we want more from the sunset. More colors. Subjugation is sweet because my drive takes my pleasure there. It becomes the only logical conclusion. Lately, in written correspondence I either lose control or have found the fortitude to be overly direct. A meme tells me to stop taking hints so as to force other people to be direct.

After Damian died, I did not write anything. I barely chose to think too much, directly, about it. Really I was dumbly preoccupied with the question of whom I would bring with me to the funeral, as if it were a date. In Greece, I told the ropey man about Damian, my brilliant friend, Damian, my dead friend. Damian who never judged me and perhaps himself not enough and maybe that is part of why he died. Did I help him make allowance for it? How long will it take for me to account for this loss? You, indeterminate reader, never knew Damian, and in many ways it is too late to begin telling about him. It feels like telling on him. I want to have more poignant things to say about addiction and loss and the mundane catastrophe of survival. I had a dream not long ago that J, my lover, was being very cruel to me, essentially laughing in my face for loving him, and the relief I felt upon waking up. . . Survival is the dream you wake from that remains wretchedly true.

Unfurling a tongue of new weeping.

In the middle of my work on the new reliquaries, Damian died. The final weeks of March. That confusion and despair, it rendered me literally inarticulate. I remain so, feel embarrassed and disappointed about how prosaic my concerns come out on this page. Unable to find form beyond the visually obvious. Seeking a Greek crewman to fuck me into a shape, to batter my limits so that I may recall where they lie.

4-16.

17-18.

7/22/2022

Dear Dorothy:

I asked you to watch a film I don’t really understand, about subjects and history I don’t really understand, by a filmmaker I know little about. Godard made One Plus One shortly after the May 68 riots in Paris. Revolution seems to have meant something different back then. People in the West were seriously Maoists. I guess it makes sense for Black Americans to have been Maoists. People had not yet left China en masse. The horror stories. I assume and understand that if the Black Panthers had heard the horror stories of the Cultural Revolution, they venerated Mao’s uncompromising cruelty, which may also be termed “resolve.” Either way.

What relationship this film has to white femininity, sex, the erotic. . . Almost every scene is charged with the scent of it. Sex. The recurring graffiti artist, the wife of the filmmaker, running around in her short coats and kitten heels. Is this sex about glamor or subjugation? When is glamor not the bedfellow of subjugation?

Feeling somewhat disempowered and unwealthy lately, I went ahead and set up an account on Tryst, a platform for independent escorts. I have wanted to do this for years, rather than lurking around vastly less efficient websites, and part of me ended up convinced that the only thing holding me back was an abstract and essentially meaningless fear. To take initiative in proceeding, then, would be a direct line to empowerment. (A falsehood, I have since learned. Empowerment requires a business plan.) I sought and seek glamor in my life. Ease. Opulence. Abundance. I feel humiliated by not having these things. If not humiliated: pathetic, impatient, paranoid. The white women in Godard’s film—originally called One Plus One, which feels to me both mathematical and like an allusion to a love affair, again this plume of eroticism obscuring the film—the white women are shot, executed methodically, after the Black spokesman has read a passage sarcastically extolling the virtues and superiority of the diffident white woman over Black women. Which has to do with both docility (of the white women, milky and fair and a stranger to labor) and vengeance (on the white man, on God, on perhaps their own Black mothers). I cannot imagine being Godard in the 60s and making this film that so heavily takes up Blackness and Black revolutionaries as a departure point, as a voice. Followed by Hitler and porn. It all seems to mean something obvious but when I try to corner the obvious thing, it eludes me. It feels not differentiated. The song featured in the film, Sympathy for the Devil, is some kind of political commentary, revolutionary anthem or reflection. And the white woman holds a press conference on philosophy and existential politics, then gets shot, except her death is cinematic and not real, her death is Historical—at the very least, worthy of becoming so.

Whose death—whose real death—does not become History?

19-20.

9/19/2022

Dear Crystal,

Lately I am in a cloud, driven to depths of distraction, embarking on a simple online task that takes me into hours, full days, of random reading: about Louise Brooks, the courtesans of the French Demimonde, the disappearance (and reemergence) of Brendan Fraser, the murder case of Hae Min Lee. This deep curiosity may stem in part from avoidance—creation, right now, feels unapproachable.

The project I am avoiding has in some regard to do with Godard, and when I began it I did not know that he was going to die this past week. When I began this project, I embarrassingly did not even know that he was still alive. Ed calls these kinds of confluences “synchronicity.” The film of Godard’s that my project deals with is called One Plus One, and it is a film that studiously avoids the gaze of the camera. Indeed it avoids any kind of address of the viewer. This is an interesting challenge for me to interface with, I who use “I” far too often. An old friend told me that once about my Tumblr entries, and I have since remained self-conscious about it but unreformed.

In One Plus One, the viewer is a fly on the wall of a recording session with the Rolling Stones. We observe this series of moments in cultural history at what feels like a great remove. Keith Richards is so young and calm and focused on his work. A fly on the wall is what I wanted M to be that day in the lake because I think with photography, observation itself yields the most interesting results. I do not like being directed to look at the camera because I tend to do so naturally. You and I may be opposites–you make eye contact in person and move with the charisma of someone used to their own body, whereas I avert my gaze (sideways, upward) in conversation and feel sometimes like I only know how to look like anything at all if I am in front of a camera. The camera reifies me. This soul-snatching territory is where I feel perceived and I have this. . . famished feeling for that. I am sad when lovers do not often take my photo, it is as if something finite is being wasted. I am not sure if that thing is time or beauty or memory or something else. Historical formation. Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse writes about the lover in hiding, in terms of the delicate dance one performs in deciding what to disclose, what to withhold, what to protect, what to give. I hate this dance. I do not know how to hide. My mother, I think, has spent her life perfecting the skill(s) of hiding, and either despite that or because of it, I thrash my way through life and other people, flailing the hollow carcass of my skin in a plea—will you apprehend this? Do you have the compassion and fortitude to hold it, with me, for me?

10/4/2022

Awaking beneath the wrong blanket, fleece rather than silk. The wrong texture against my bare back, leather. The skin of the dead against the skin of my back. How I slept like the dead. How the building rattles throughout the night with 18-wheelers passing on the BQE overhead. Awaking to the metal sheet of the roof moaning in the wind.

Being as ill-being. Where does being emerge? Culvert in the woods. Coming to in an unfamiliar place. Feeling unfazed. The sudden slant of alienated feeling that attacks ego like late afternoon light filtering through blinds. Heat. I am not me, I am not here, this is not right. It is right because nothing is right. Sense is what you think you know but you must forget what you know. Unlearn your own fundament, and follow every unprescribed intimacy into a space you can neither see, remember, nor imagine. You topple instead of walking. On all fours, belly low to the ground, how much ground can you cover? At what speed? How to differentiate in darkness—not through sight, nor through any outlines, with what then? My lover struggles with drawing because the world is not made up of lines, there are no lines in the world. I see things as lines because I need them to be legible, so they can be unwound and coaxed into sentences. Sentences manipulate. My lover sees the world as it is: in shapes of color. He prefers to paint. How do we apprehend one another? Shapes of heat. Unsteady breathing. My lover strikes familiar panic into me, tightening my chest.

The medicine I want to take: is it a bag? Something to hold me better. Containment. That is what straitjackets were made to do. My particular container has to be formless in order to give form to what lacks form. The space where form does not exist. The space of loneliness in the mind, the what-the-fuck points. The fuck-me-up points.

21-25.

10/4/2022

Dear Crystal,

What does it mean to turn everything into a tool? Is that reduction or elevation?

Is it shaped like a scythe?

A tool is wielded in relation to the axis of one’s arm and spine. Corporeal radius. What the body radiates in a time of deprivation. My lover and I argue about the quality of death by drowning. One of the most painful ways to die, I’ve heard. Your lungs set on fire. It hurts everywhere. My lover says no, it feels like euphoria, once your lungs start filling with water. He knows this from his friends who have almost drowned. Your lungs are deprived of one thing and are filled to excess with another thing, a wrong thing. How many times have you been filled with a wrong thing, and of those times how many times did the wrong thing try to convince you that it was right?

Recently I started a new medication and also a new writing workshop. It is not quite a class, more like a weekly gathering space. Universities more and more are calling symposiums not symposiums but “gatherings” and “convenings.” Etymologically they are all the same thing—at a symposium, you gather with fellow drinkers, inebriation the originary lubricant for intellectual discourse—but I wonder. What fear of history or the self is behind this name change? Last night, I toyed with the idea of changing my name to Cain. Cain, the first murderer. Is there purity in being the first of something? Catalina, my given name, means “pure.” What fear of the self or history is behind my own desire to become Cain? To become sullied?

I started a new writing workshop and it is about rapture and rupture. It leaves me thinking about ecstasy, which is something I have never felt without chemical assistance. My first several days on this new medication, I think I was experiencing serotonin syndrome—my muscles spasmed, my insides tickled unbearably, I felt overcome by swells of unnameable feeling. I felt like I was on Ecstasy at all hours of the day. I felt like my cheek was pressing against a glass ceiling too low for any body. Air going out the room. This euphoric chamber, this chamber of deranged revelry.

Then suddenly, after many many months of not being able to, suddenly: I could breathe.

The alteration that remains: my pupils are massive. They swallow the formerly brown province of my irises. In the livid dew of my new black eyes, I look like a changeling and wonder if indeed I am. What exactly did I trade out for this new, easy-breathing peace?

26.

10/15/2022

How people struggle to encounter the unsayable. . . Often in dreams, my POV is omniscient. I feel, through this estrangement, that I have distance and thus perspective on events happening to a version of me. Is that part of embodiment: expressions, episodes, that happen to various versions of a self? Unthinkable: that which renders me unexceptional. The banal, mundane fears that plague me daily and that I avoid addressing in therapy because they feel too unremarkable to take up that expensive and hard-won space. The death instinct: seeking continual change, turmoil, singular experience, entropy—is that my conception of what a life should be? Its structure? My allergy to the material of the life instinct: maintenance, continuity, nurture, pattern. My fear that these qualities will bleed into and through my life, rendering it non-historical, a non-event, a blip, an erasure. My shame in wanting these things, my suspicion of this want.

Refusing testimony or incubation
Radiant limbo

27-29.

12/12/2022

Dear Crystal:

Once, I described myself as a “body in the process of having left.” I was young and brave in the way that courage is not bravery. Bravery is courage absented awareness. I did not know, so I proceeded palms out and open. My interior world on offer. What does it mean to learn or grow? What is it that we need protection from? At lunch in the cafeteria today, the group of artists and writers I sat with spoke about finding community after death. They spoke without warning about death. My entreaty for a disclaimer had not to do with discomfort or trauma but with my capacity for witnessing, which was not present. I drifted far away and thought of how civilization is unnatural: the human project toward, what’s the word, kindness? solidarity? mutualism? is unnatural—which is not to say, undesirable. But it is necessarily intentional because there is nothing obvious about it.

Kindness is sometimes obvious but so is the demon that rears its head against control and threatens to tear apart essential social fabrics. A woman in the cafeteria knits her tattooed brows together and cries, talking about cremating her dog. The soft warm smallness of him. She wanted to bury him in the yard but she lives in the city now. She didn’t want to poison the water. The tear shed for the creature you wish would survive forever, convinced of the fundamental reciprocity of love. That unbreakable creaturely trust. My father, bathed in the amber light of memory (or dream?) beckoning me—five years old—to the malachite bowl full of dead baby chameleons. “Look,” he said, and instructed me to feed them to their mother.

Wandering into other houses; getting fed to the mother anyway. I wandered into a house celebrating that strange American holiday marking the dawn of indigenous apocalypse. I greeted the family. Goaded by the young blonde step-patriarch, I drank until I fell to the bottom of an inkwell. Nice Japanese whiskey. I could not stop drinking it because I knew that it was expensive, and you go to hell for failing to take advantage of something expensive. You get drawn and quartered and burn forever, being fed your own guts. So I drank my money’s worth. What did my vacated body at the inkwell’s base do? Well, they swooped in, the shadow archetypes of my ancestors with all their unfinished business, forever rattling me toward the most natural state in the world: the killing rage. I smashed the cleaver wildly through the undeserving pig on the table, clean through its aluminum tray casket. I threw my companions’ drinks to the ground. Left to our own devices, we go feral. I howled tearfully at the ceiling, raking my long nails over confused and frightened skin. Shock paralysis. In the morning, my only souvenir was a broken and sore thumbnail. The injury you cannot recall.

Why do we attempt to confront the demon chasing our families? Because they don’t let us alone. They are tireless in their dogged pursuit, in the submerged horror of our drive to live.

30-31.

12/12/2022

Power in horror: that unthinkable place. Going all the way there. A feeling of certain death if you do not. Finding yourself in the unthinkable place of the Other. Duras switches between first- and third-person narration as if it makes no difference. Or as if in a dream—which begins sometimes for me as a first-person shooter and ends as cinema, with handheld camera shifting focus and everything. Duras switches to third-person narration because she regards a photo of the young girl that was once herself and from whom she is now separate. She switches to third-person narration because we are always already outside ourselves.

Alienated.

Does jouissance have a relationship to alienation? Eating lotus, seeking flowers to the point of death. Finding resolve to follow one’s ideas to their “logical conclusion.” I am rethinking my relationship to pleasure-seeking. Or I am rethinking my relationship to identification. Why am I drawn to this strange, old, dated, racist text of Duras? What about so many dead white women’s work speaks to me? It feels primal. You wander into other people’s homes seeking a different family and get fed to their mothers anyway. Frying oil martyrdom or gin and tonic haze. Duras’ description of Cholon, and of Chinese as a language “shouted,” is racist, and it is also how I feel. I wandered through my education seeking a different family and was fed to the maw of history regardless.

You think there is control to be gained in unlearning—some would euphemize control as “agency”—but there my thoughts unravel. Nothing exists beyond horror. Duras shifts into the third person because it is a horror to be in a body. You use the eyes of your body to take in the world and pretend that the data collected by your eyes offers sense to be made. You think there is sense to be made of obsession and the kind of hatred felt so keenly that it is erotic. When I am very angry, I masturbate and finish quickly. Sexual pleasure has always walked alongside debilitation. You have to be close to the edge of something. This is observation, not dogma. These are not the things I’ve asked for—when you let things say themselves, when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes. I cannot sleep because I am trying to find it out, I cannot let the body alone. My dreams are haunted by spaces of washing and defecation: locker rooms, spas, baths, toilets. The portal to the whole world is a toilet and you have to shit in front of everyone. You can hear them and they can hear you, they are watching and shouting—no, no, it is you that is shouting. You are shitting and shouting. Because you thought that it was up to you, and you were not in love, you had no need of its flagrant fragrant inducements, you are better than it. You are better than your feelings. But ultimately in the canyon under the waxing moon, where your lover’s fingerpicked guitar tickles the forest’s inky branches, in this moment you think: I could or should die right now. Arrest me in this moment. It is a horror to learn in a body. You proceed only by plummeting.

32.

12/24/2022

Seeing the shape of a thing but not being able to make out the thing. Thinking you know the shape of a thing. The difference between seeing and comprehension. The difference between comprehension and apprehension. Why does “apprehensive” carry a connotation of fear?

The tender, hilarious, warm, jarring moments of my life that I am honestly shocked to have forgotten. Living is unexceptional. You get one try and mostly fuck it up. There are periods of my life where I spend most of the day wishing people dead. Not being able to get out of bed before 3 pm. Having no thoughts. Feeling against all logic that I am pissing it all away. Nothing is ever enough, I am never close enough to THE THING. I want to make a slit in the belly of THE THING and string it up by its thing feet and skin it like I’m pulling the sweater over the head of a young child and wrap myself inside its dripping THING skin that is how close I want to be to anything that I have ever wanted.

Where am I walking and where do I need to go? I want to peel off my own skin and re-wear it like a THING skin.

I feel entitled to a closeness that necessitates death. The way to mark time in the most boring way is through shitting and cleaning shit. Expulsion of the food we otherwise carry at all times like our own child. I am neither fascinated nor horrified by shit. For a time in high school I would get so constipated—my whole torso blimping painfully for hours, preemptively corpsing—that I couldn’t shit at all. There is no metaphor for what I had to do. I had to dig my own shit out of my ruined body-hole using my fingers. I got comfortable with shit then. It is boring, just a boring way of marking time. And white people are horrified by it. I am not afraid of it and so I am bored because at the slightest distance from horror, I lose all ability to see an outline. Reality dissolves, I disorientate. Distances make no sense, surfaces, spaces make no sense.

I want or need to commit this violence, shearing, to get close to myself. Because I lose track of the shape of myself, so I have to throw myself at the edge of myself. Sometimes I want a drink so bad that I want to jump out a window. A physical itch: when I drink my demon gets to come out. When I drink, I go feral. The walls that make no sense, they just fall away, I do not have to worry about the teeth marks left in the disembodied arms of people I might have loved who I wanted so badly to love me. When you go feral there is somewhere for the force to go you shove it into a pendulum that is other people who don’t love you well enough. Then a bungee cord of debt brings you back. Without the promise of release at the edge—? You throw your weight around with nowhere to go. And then where do you put it?

33.

1/9/2023

It is a horror to be in a body. When I was young, I exercised compulsively. The boring parts: weighing myself three times a day, logging the numbers in a composition notebook—88.1, 87.5, 86.2, 89. . . counting calories, rationing half a slice of whole grain bread, peeling the yolk out of a hardboiled egg, spooning ice cream into my mouth at 4 am and spitting it down the sink. Sitting at my desk during 7th grade algebra slowly, happily, fingering my protruding vertebrae. These were the boring parts of my discipline. Also: every night, running the shower while doing sets of push-ups, minutes-long planks, crunches and leg lifts that invariably dissolved into furious bouts of masturbation. It was not “self pleasure,” what I was doing then. When I exhausted my core—disgusted with the spent capacity of my body, its excessive breadth, bulk, softness, warmth, I collapsed into erotic punishment. I hurt myself, scratching and pulling. I ripped out my nascent pubic hairs with my bare hands, in clumps. These days I have a hard time working out, I mostly don’t, because it transports me to a time before I knew love. And was love really the difference? At a certain point love, too, calcified into addiction. Perhaps it had always been that. Food was addiction, starving was addiction, reading was addiction, intimacy was addiction. All my strange powders, addictions. For a time, cooking my powders into even stranger crystals, my lonely nightly ritual, destroying my hands and lips and gums with welts, destroying my lungs, my brain. I lived in a cloud. It was about oblivion. Outside the cloud, I did not like what I saw. If I so much as encountered a description of things burning in spoons, bruised arms, squalor of living, got a whiff of a sweet burning chemical smell—I got turned on. I still get turned on. It’s instinct. For a time I dreaded returning to the world unfiltered. I felt not pointlessness or hopelessness but that I wanted more, was terrified of losing this more-ness. Would feel, in my comedown, abandoned by it. Betrayed.

Sex is not sexy to me; the stakes have to be life-threatening, burn me alive. The act of opening oneself to the Other unseals a wound that must either be cauterized or it will fester into sepsis. To live as an Other is to learn to thrive in a state of sepsis. All systems under attack: deal with it. The total wrongness. Where do you get joy—manufacture? Harvest? Mining? When you suck it down greedily, does it run out? When it runs out, is it in fact being withheld? What are you not seeing?

34.

35-36.

3/27/2023

Dear Crystal:

Long ellipsis.

I don’t know exactly what happened that so robbed me of language since I last wrote you. Was I distracted? Busy? Depleted? The winter months passed in a blur. I have no memory of January or February, I spent them in bed, or drinking to excess, imbibing to excess. Inviting hangovers and withdrawal bad enough to make the days pass. Looking aimlessly for love or some approximation of it, headless and impotently flailing.

Who is it they say died of a broken heart?

I always believed that I could pull it off: the tantrum, going feral. Pushing. Sizing up the limit. I did not think I was indestructible, I didn’t think anything at all. My therapist once told me, “The only thing that will bring you to change is divine intervention.” And here I’ve had it: in the form of a chronic health condition. A blockage in the blood, in the lungs. It doesn’t get more essential than that.

Blockage: stemming from lack of movement. My old adversary, inertia. How I could lie in bed for days on end. How that is no longer an option. I needed divine intervention and I got it. I wanted to spend three weeks lying in bed with J, and God said no. Not this time, and not ever again. I was not ready to live with the fact that the last time we ever spoke in person, I don’t even remember what we said to each other. He left my house. It was a Friday morning in February. I think it was early. I said, I’ll see you in a few weeks.

I needed divine intervention and God delivered a killing blow. In those couple weeks of reconciliation—of having forgiven, of having been in the rare position to forgive—I felt drunk with fulfillment. It did not feel nasty or manipulative, it felt good and clean. It felt like choice and clarity.

I needed divine intervention and I got one in the form of a pulmonary embolism. Smoking cigarettes makes your blood sticky and thick like tar, slowing everything to a sludgelike crawl. Was it in Boston that all those people drowned in molasses? A blockage is deadly because if you stagnate, you die. I always understood this theoretically and affectively, but now I know it literally. Medically. There is more I want to say about playing with fire. More I want to say about steel, fire, and blood. There’s more I want to say about walking burned. I keep burning myself lately: hot dishes, hot water. I register the wound, clock the pain, but I don’t know the hurt. I feel—how does Catherine Malabou put it—simply interrupted? Like there are overlapping timelines within me now.

Nightsweats: harbinger of doom
Nightswimmer, false heat—
flared warning
Broken alibi of my affliction
Long ellipsis, then waking up drenched.
Sweat the bed, don’t sweat the bed.
Don’t stop moving.
Everything has to be different now.

  37-39.

40.

41.

Images in order of appearance:
1. Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’è la poesia?,” Poesia, 1988
2. Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, 2022.
3. Catalina Ouyang’s journal, 2022.
4–16. Catalina Ouyang, “The Weft Is a Journeying Thread,” Force Majeure catalog, 2021.
17. Anne Sexton, “Rumpelstiltskin” Transformations, 1971.
18. Jean-Luc Godard, One Plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil), 1968.
19.  Lucy Ives, Orange Roses, 2013.
20. Ouyang’s notepad, 2023.
21–26. Jean-Luc Godard, One Plus One (aka Sympathy for the Devil).
27–29. Ouyang’s journal, 2022.
30. Left: both Catherine Malabou, The Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, 2009.
31. Right: both Marguerite Duras, The Lover, 1984.
32. Ouyang’s ultrasound, March 2023.
33. Ouyang’s journal, 2023.
34. Lutz Bacher, Snow, 2013.
35. Kahlil Gibran at the Soumaya Museum, CDMX, 2022.
36. Ouyang’s chest X-Ray, September 2022.
37. From Ouyang’s iPhone, 2022.
38. Marisa Merz in Basel, Switzerland, June 2022.
39. From Ouyang’s iPhone, 2021.
40. Process scans from unable to Title  (a reordering of every word written to make sense of [                 ] for Catalina by Amanda, Amber, Amy, Andy, Annelyse, Annie, Ariana, Arisa, Avery, Brighde, Chelsea, Ching-In, Christina, Claire, Diana, Douglas, Edward, Elena, Geoff, Geri, Gowri, Hanif, Heather B., Heather N., Jacklyn, Jane, Jennifer, Jesse, Jessica, Joy, Julia, Julie E., Julie W., Jungmok, Kathryn, Keegan, Keith, Kelly, Kenji, K-Ming, LA, Lara, Larissa, Laura, Lillian, Liz, Luca, Lynn, Marci, Maria, Maryam, Maura, Meredith S., Meredith T., Mia, Molly, Muriel, Nathaniel, Nora, Paul, Philip, Raquel, Robert, Rosebud, Sam, Sara, Sarah G., Sarah S., Sarah V., Sennah, Sharon, Terese, Thylias, Victoria, Xandria, and Yanyi), 2020.
41. Ouyang’s CT angiogram, March 2023.

Catalina Ouyang engages object-making, interdisciplinary environments, and time-based projects to indicate counternarratives around representation and self-definition. Working with a variety of materials including hand-carved wood and stone, appropriated literature, and artifacts, Ouyang invents critical reimagings of historical formation wherein monstrosity and toxicity act as ciphers for the alienation of the minor subject. Ouyang’s work has been the subject of solo and group presentations at Night Gallery (LA), SculptureCenter (NYC), the Aldrich Museum (Ridgefield, CT), Lyles & King, (New York), Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (NYC and LA), Asia Art Center (Taipei), Galerie Kandlhofer (Vienna), and others. Their work is in the collections of the Nasher Sculpture Center, Columbus Museum of Art, Kadist Foundation, Pond Society, X Museum, and Faurschou Foundation. Ouyang received an MFA from Yale University and lives and works in New York City. They are represented by Lyles & King in New York and Make Room Gallery in Los Angeles.