anywhere i can find to put words

I am secretly obsessed with sounding the boundaries of my perceptions: the taste inside my mouth, the reach inside my fingers, what my eyes see looking into nothing. The places my energies go when I begin to sense a situation crumbling. What can I patch, what can I move to safety? I try to understand that I don’t need to remind myself to breathe, but then again so often I trip an unanticipated stair down at the very bottom all alone in the dark. I am a slow spiral, perpetually self-renewing, moving inward with the same momentum with which i am moving out. At regular intervals I remember that every action requires effort, even inaction, especially inaction, sometimes, or have you never braced yourself at the door against another’s charge and wondered at how little it would take to put you down? At the beginning of stillness there is often violence in long need of being stilled. At the beginning of stillness is a wounding, a place all the pressures in the room rush toward. I’ve broken the seal, the seal is broken, the night gives out beneath me in a spray of bolts and splinters: nothing’s up to code, but then again not too many can be bothered to work that encryption into a message even an eleven-year-old could explain. There is no sure key to it, I thought to myself, fighting to open our vandalized mailbox again. What I mean to say is I am secretly obsessed with keys, things that lock, things obfuscated to the four corners of the earth, but so often I meet these matters with as much delight as sorrow. What I mean to say is I am secretly obsessed with secrets, those occult gathering at the edge of a glance. After all, haven’t we all needed to reduce a few tones from the final print? Conceal some matter from the ages, press it into our most fundamental structure, our defining essence, our armature, our frame.

it’s old i’m cold i’m blue, blue, blue

remember when we had a name for this? remember when we could afford to deny it, pick other opportunities, wait for better friends?

remember when we thought we were going places but we didn’t have enough momentum or gas or we did get there but what the hell is this place anyway just a merciless suck on energy and resources that’s blocking us from something we could have that might just be a little bit better and we think that’s all we need, just that little bit, just that smidge to the left, that slight step back from the center of the room and everything looks so much better! at least for a day or two. we’ve never loved like this before! we’ve never known this kind of love! love pours out of us, thick and iron rich, we’ll never know until it’s much too late what exactly it is we’ve been spilling away.



spill it, spill it now.

tell me where this is going.

tell me where i am going.

something like exactly, in the general vicinity of absolute precision. do i belong here? i don’t think i do. where else is there for me to go? just a merciless suck on energy and resources but aren’t all of us from time to time, at least when the path is clear, the girl is gone, the stairwell is empty as it ever was and nobody is taking your calls. double it over, double yourself through and wait, and wait, and wait and wait. there’s always more time for waiting. there’s always a chance that this time, it will be something. everything. anything better than this.

rattle out the memory
rattle it on down the line

5. is this yours?
6. was this yours?
7. was this meant for you?
8. the holy moment, that coffin's nail, that love gone too far. into the reaches of space, into the far reaches, into the slow spiraling in of our slowly spiraling galaxy. in those split milk arms, in the milky pale arms of the mother, the mother i never was, the mother i'll never be. in this, solace. only in this, solace. only solace in this.
9. what means solace?
10. what means solace, after this?

Help Judith Get Workshopped By Her Hero, pt. 2

part two of the crowd funding campaign for my upcoming (four months today) pelee island retreat with margaret atwood. note for anyone who is a lot like me: a higher resolution of my 10 to 15 year old assortment of "scraps scribbled at work" may be obtained by clicking on on the picture. and as some of you i bet are probably guess, i have indeed already thought: "there's a project in that there assemblage," though i couldn't possibly tell you what just yet.

it falls apart it comes back together it rocks it rolls it splits in two again it splits in two again

i used to think about it like this: i don't know if i used to think about it. i did things, i made things, i put things together. there are a lot of things like that, things i didn't think about, things that fell apart before i'd even realized they needed to be assembled. i used to think about it like this: there wasn't a damn thing to think about. i took a shower, i put on a skirt. i found one combat boot near the closet or maybe not even, at times these things end up in strange places. at times i end up in strange places. strange places, strange times. strange times for strange places. i took my shower without a second thought i put on a skirt without thinking about it real hard i did what i did and i said what i said and there was not this panic, this awful encroaching shame, about the resources i was wasting or the destructive gender norms i was enabling and where the fuck did my other boot go? i did have two of these things, right? i started out with two? i think?

space dyed fuzzy socks or kmart moccasins from 1989 aside with the rest of it, with the buttons-short flannel work shirts and the strathmore toned gray sketchbooks, the miso cup packets and elastic hair bands, the out of date library stamp, the empty pilots, half-knotted cords and partly burned sage bundles, lodestone scraps and scrapes of iron, the cracked up candle cups and everything else i intend to eventually fix, and books, and books, and books and books and books always more books, my books, his books, your books, with the things that had meaning and the meanings that had things: this meant something you know this was important this was something i was going to work on, something i needed to address, something i needed to put in the mail or make a call about:

now, where was i going with this? because i'm always going someplace from somewhere, whether it's to the kitchen or to austin, whether it's up the concrete stairs or around and around the roland water tower. i'm not always sure where it is i'm going, but go i do. hello again hello. hello again hello. hello, again, hello?

my first altar worked like this: i bought a seven dollar assemblage-required round lamp table from, let's say, target. possibly with a couple two foot tall unscented pillars and as many virgin vigil candles as i could reasonably fit in my canvas shopping bag. i screwed all three legs into that infinitely depressing pressboard non-construction and covered it with a black cloth. i placed on it, according to instructions: a green glass water goblet from the kitchenware store at the mall where i worked, an olive tree branch fallen at my father's recent pruning, a wood circle from frank's made into a pentacle with a wood burner purchased from same, an eleven dollar boot knife proudly mail ordered from the azuregreen print catalog and subsequently ruined with my enthusiasm for entry level wood burning. it should be simple, right? you plug in the thing, you let the thing get hot. then you use that hot thing to make marks on wood surfaces. the thing about wood is that it is all very different. some of it has been treated. some of it burns very fast. some of it hardly burns at all. one's first projects should possibly not involve quite so much intricate celtic knotwork, but go ahead and try to tell me that when i was a teenager. go ahead. i'll wait. or whatever, just go ahead and do it, i'll keep writing for now, maybe this entry will be finished when you get back. or maybe i'll still be adding to it, you never know with me.

the thing about making marks is that it is never nearly so easy as you think it should be, at least when you are trying to do it deliberately. deliberately, you say? deliberately? should you really be trying to do that, in this day and age? isn't there enough of that going on as it is? can't we leave one matter unspoiled? let it live on in our memory pure, virginal, unmarked? i might not be the right person to ask about that. hey, i didn't get to be a virgin. lots of us didn't. we lived. it only fucked us up for life.

whatever the case, i assembled my tools, the tools i was supposed to have, and i bought my circular table, the shape an altar was supposed to be, and i arranged my goods on my altar the way i was supposed to arrange them: this at an exact measured angle from that. it was my most minimal altar ever, including the one that was just a rose and a candle. it was my most meaningless altar ever, and i hated it. let me repeat that with some emphasis: i hated having an altar. let that sink in. it took up space. it got in the way. it showed every speck of dust. it looked like a cheap horror film prop. it offered no solace, just served as a reminder that i'd decided to be a witch but didn't really know what to do about that. all the same, it's what i believed i was supposed to have. in order to be a witch. so i dutifully set it up in my room at my parent's house; a year or two later, i dutifully packed it up, drove it to iowa, and set it up again in my first dorm room. woke up in the morning, looked at my altar, thought: there's my altar. the altar i was supposed to make. went out to class, came back from class, thought: there's my altar. i sure did make that.

when my friend brought over her current sort-of boyfriend one night before he took us both out to dinner, he walked right over to my buckland-perfect spiritual practice uninvited.* without a word, he picked up my athame, unsheathed it, and twisted the tip of the blade into his left hand. not hard enough to draw blood, i don't think, he would've had to work a lot harder than that: but still. i sat on my bed with my mouth hanging open. this is not a thing random visitors are supposed to do, whether or not they are sort of dating college bff. college bff noticed, but did not say anything: we were processing a thing where i'd accidentally convinced her to let me put a single wash-away streak of “deadly nightshade” manic panic in her hair and she did it, she went along with me. then she had remorse, extreme remorse, passive-aggressive remorse, remorse to an extent that seemed ridiculous in light of my full head of gloriously deadly nightshaded tresses, but nevermind about that. she felt it looked tacky. i felt bad. also tacky. all the same, she got me back for it, several times in fact, starting with her now-i-wouldn't-say-boyfriend desecrating my elemental tools while i sat there silent and gape-mouthed.

"you know i regularly anoint that thing with my menstrual blood," i thought about saying, but then thought better of it. not because, you know, way to find out more than i was ready to know about the iowa city fetish community and hey judith, think you could anoint some stuff for me? but because i didn't really do anything with witchcraft with any kind of regularity. clearly, i was a poser. clearly, this peculiar violation of my privacy - key word: violation, for i felt violated, i felt very violated. the athame represents the will. you use it to direct your intent. to establish sacred space. to banish that which you don't want: nineteen year old boys, unsheathing your consecrated object without your consent and twisting it into their palms -

but clearly, this peculiar violation of my privacy had occurred: to call me out as a poser. to put me back in my place. stop having ambitions toward positive change, woman, it only gets you violated in the end. that's what getting noticed does: it gets you violated. so do not get noticed. do not make a mark. do not make that entry public. do not even try to publish that thing. college bff waited until not-the-boyfriend had pulled the knife back to bump him in the arm. they made eye contact. their eye contact smirked at me. worse, their eye contact smirked around me, belching up memories of every grade school smirk around i’d been bruised with since judy germs eats the worms. why the fuck do even the people i thought i could trust respect me so little that they do this shit so i can see it? and then the awkward silence, the should i say something? the no, i should not say anything, the i only have a few friends, i should keep the few friends i have, i should keep my mouth shut: so shut i stayed. but i decided, right then, that i would work to not use eye contact as an act of violence against another person. around another person. i would not use my eye contact with another to make a third party understand explicitly that they were being excluded. i would not turn everybody else in the room against somebody with a glance. so i'm grateful for that, that realization easily compensates for my awful first altar experience: but i still didn't say anything to my triggers. the labels-are-so-limiting-boyfriend re-sheathed my dagger and dropped on the altar (no longer my altar) with a dismissive thunk. then we left for dinner.

i let the altar gather dust for another week and then i broke it down. i put my tools in storage or whatever passed for storage at the time. i gave the crappy lamp table to my then-boyfriend's mom. coincidentally, tellingly? she loved it, though she did use it for its intended purpose, which, to be honest, always seemed kind of wobbly and meaningless to me; as much as i liked her, that was her demonstrated aesthetic. eucalyptus swags in the bathroom. inched off the slippery couches by slippery throw pillows. everything rattling in a slight breeze. clean lines and way too many damn mirrors you were openly critiqued for standing in front of too long. i was always a little nervous in her house, but then again, that had absolutely nothing to do with her. i used to think about it like this: i don't know if i used to think about it. i did things, i made things, i put things together. there are a lot of things like that, things i didn't think about, things that fell apart before i'd even realized they needed to be assembled. i used to think about it like this: there wasn't a damn thing to think about.

so think about that for a change.

anyone seen my other boot?





* do not do this.

from THE SECRET DAKINI ORACLE, 1979
nik douglas and penny slinger


white lady, white lady, white lady. woman of the white waters. woman of pearls. mother of pearl. she who obfuscates the functioning surface with the very function of that surface: gossamer and pearlescent, the way color can be a factor of white: the way pearls come forth from almost nothing, from irritants and parasites, flushed over the surface flushed over the surface again.

white lady, woman of waters, mother of pearl. you are autonomous and you are desolate. you are tuned in to eternity at the expense of the here and now. wrapped in a sheen of a scarf and nothing else you wander the caves, caves in the mountains, caves beneath the sea, caves of limestone and dripping, caves of volcanic glass and wavering light. the earth beneath your feet is always gestating some thing, think of it as the earth negotiating an irritant, think of it as the great mother building up her proud pearl.

in the waters we are equals, in the waters we are sisters, in the waters where we came from we face off, we mirror, we bring a color forth on that strange surface: we make a pearl between us, in our shared gaze. in our shared gaze, in that place where our gaze meets. in our shared gaze, in that place where, all at once, we both know everything demonstrated back to us in the other's gaze.

sister of waters. mother of pearl. the straight blue weaving, the spiraling in. how a surface changes in the depths: here. here. the pearls gathered together, the pearls clacking against one another in examination. imperfect pearl, not quite a sphere, a hint of topography, of distinct locations. the pearl will not roll straight. the pearl will roll off into a digression. a digression of pearl: that milky white silver, bright as a full winter moon. and the chill of it, the neglected parts of it, the layer upon layer upon layer of it, the we are always this one thing and not quite another, the stumble and upend, the moment the moment the moment. the holy moment. the holy fucking moment.

did you know? did you hear? the white lady, that woman of waters, holy mother of holy pearl. fucking mother of fucking pearl. she is childless, for her womb is a labyrinth, a spiral spiraling in on itself, chamber again chamber again slightly smaller and smaller again chamber. chamber where matters are held, where matters occur, where things come together to be made into something greater than they once were. woman of waters, where are you going? and woman of waters, what does it mean? you are a woman without children, you are a childless woman, like me, in resonance with my own distinctions, and yet:

pearl calls you mother, pearl is made of that same silver milk that drapes your nudity into something more sensual than nudity, that draws the eye and trails your path through the great roaring caves of water echoing the sound of water: of water wet with the shapes of water: of water, water, again water. the ways water knows us, the way water makes us, how we are the shape of water, perhaps to say: the shape water takes. and yet there is something i have forgotten, and yet there's a note i've forgotten to make my words tumble out of me after years in her womb: my words that were irritants have become pearl. so listen then, to the sound of them, the rise and roar, the coming in, the going out, and out, and out yet further: the white lady watches as i stir this cup of pearls, mixing my words, making a sound, making a path through this mystery of mysteries, this mystery of me, this that will remain a mystery, this wrong that must never be put right.

do you hear it? again, i said, do you hear it? did you hear? are you listening? are you listening, still? what are you listening for?

deep inside my certainty i find a sliver of doubt.

"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

                                                                                                 - Jiddu Krishnamurti

out in the miles from it, out in the long-way-home.

the radio station gone abstract in the distance between. the night sky ancient in its visibility. utility poles lining the highway, one's only companion, one's only reminder of modern invention.

it's night and the road could be straighter.

it's night and it's cold and we've got nowhere to be.

it's night and we could be driving faster, i mean if there were any purpose to it, i mean if the place we were going were any better than the place we left behind. it's night and the radio has become a texture. an atmospheric augmentation. an augmentation of the atmosphere: sonic pallet in gray, nothing ventured, nothing gained; nothing offered, little observed. what had been a news report about death on the high seas now crashes in on an indeterminate shore. what had been a song about falling into something the songwriter originally understood to be love turned into avalanching falls of waste water from the nuclear power plant. what had been a traffic report. what had been a preview of all tomorrow's best shows. the story, the signal. the broadcasting tower just barely in sight. i remember. i remember.

the sky is old and getting older. the night is dark and clear. in the old sky, things are remembered. count the stories: the stories about personalities, heroes and villains. the stories about relationships, mothers and daughters, the discoveries of young lovers, the assumptions of old lovers, the hanging ellipsis of lovers that never were. a boy and his cat, a girl and her dog, the mistake and necessity of a hunter catching the eye of that animal he has most recently exiled from the living world, vital essence leaking out the spear's wound. we are all ever always at the whim of another's survival. we are all ever always living on borrowed resources. driving long distances in unfamiliar territory. driving at night under a clear and ancient sky. driving with the radio on, but what's the difference? driving with the radio on, but then again, who could say?

in this story, there is no protagonist. it's a story devoid of earthly structure.

in this story, you are a protagonist, but you might not realize it in time.

you've decided from this moment forward that all your stories will be about the elements of a story that are overshadowed by the devices of narrative: the quality of the light, the flow of one space into the next, the journey at night, alone on an empty highway, a utility pole another utility pole, the radio an experiment in abstraction occasionally stabbed through by incomplete thoughts.

jesus is watching, the radio stabs through each hand, all at once out of an opaque field of static. then: what will she see? maybe somewhere, maybe someone, maybe something will come to light. will she see?

the story, the signal. the broadcasting tower just barely in sight. headlights set every stage they skim over, ever en route to anywhere but. sometimes one cycles the windshield wipers just to give themselves something to do. the path is clear and then it isn't and then the path is clear again: squirt squirt, squeak squeak, all the while driving along, all the while just passing through. it could be about the destination, but tonight it's not even about the journey. it could be about the shape of things, the shape of time, but then again, what do you even know?

in the making of a story there are offerings to be made. people want to know: what is the purpose of this? and people want to know: what's the point? people want to know. isn't that always the way of it? so what's the motivation here? what's this character's end game? why did you construct this image, to what other images does it relate, is the character's reaction consistent with what we already don't really believe?

i used to believe i was driving to someone, when i'd drive alone long distances at night. i used to imagine this as embodying my longing. sometimes i saw it as an offering to my longing, giving it some purpose, giving it somewhere to go. instead as ever it went nowhere. instead as ever it was always a story without real purpose, no protagonist, no plot, the only stage i'd ever set a pair of headlights passing over a landscape i never really saw, a landscape i will not ever see again.

it’s been a week and i don’t know what to say

except that

i want screaming i want lawsuits i want fucking justice i want people to remember this is not what they wanted for themselves or their children or other people’s children or the rest of the world or the earth itself i want people to remember that and start to feel things other than bitter resignation or so! much! worse! lethally placating optimism about how this is america and how in america things always work out for the best and it’s only four years and they’ll be a rising tide of opposition right shake up the system right it’s the only way people will wake up right don’t you know after all the bush administration successfully served that purpose right and we’ll never have a problem like that again right and it’s only four years and “maybe it won’t be so bad as everyone thinks” and it’s only four years and nothing too bad will happen to us because it is america and as americans we are beautiful and the angels love us too much to let us come to any real harm

(tell that to freddie gray)

gray because it’s what my last name means gray because it is who i am who i’ve always been gray in the places between at the crossroads in twilight in the places not quite as a matter that can be labelled or fit into a profitable marketing demographic i don’t fit i can’t fit i’m not proud of it anymore i can’t be proud of it anymore if i was ever really proud of it in the first place there is no gray in red white and blue there is no place for gray in america i know that but i’m still here so come and see the blood in the portland streets those folks are proud americans those folks want a better world for their children those folks are just swell with their safety pins and their outraged petitions and their socially acceptable flesh tones we should’ve listened to baltimore this might not have happened if more people listened to baltimore yet! when it happened in baltimore we were chastised and ultimately erased when it happened in baltimore we are denounced as thugs when it happened in baltimore cnn reported that all of baltimore was buring and people all over social networks tell us: look out for those thugs! be safe! be aware! be good

nobody is “safe”
nobody has ever been “safe”
nobody will ever be “safe”
the notion of safety is a placating illusion
trust me
i have the rape history and medical records to prove it

the closest thing we as a society will ever come to actualizing the notion of safety is when we are able, in spite of everything, to hold one another in love in compassion.

not cherry pick who gets civil liberties.

not explain explain explain away to POC, to people with disability, to the LGBTQ community, to the poor, to people who are not christian, to women why their experiences are not valid and they really should shut up already.

not appropriate the protections of social flagging instead of doing the work to make yourself a visible and accountable ally.

not eviscerating the voting rights act then abandoning it to rot away for three and a half years so when the silencing of millions of americans with no-win bureaucracy results in, well, this, those of us who were able to vote have somebody ELSE to blame: somebody lazy, somebody selfish, somebody who “let” the bad guys win. somebody ELSE didn’t vote, so somebody ELSE can’t complain, right? so stop complaining, somebody ELSE! this is america.

fuck you. that’s victim blaming. fuck you. that’s racism. fuck you. that’s ableism. fuck you.

that’s privilege.

how about instead of blaming an undesired election result on all those somebody ELSES who didn't vote, we turn that scrutiny back on ourselves and say: we did not protect the rights of our fellow citizens to vote. we did not look at the big picture. in our bubble of privileged, placated optimism, we refused to examine what was happening. we did not work to preserve liberty. so whether we ourselves voted or not, we can't complain. not about people who didn't vote.

it’s been a week and i don’t know what to say
what to write
what to do
who to be
i don't even know that i should continue to leave this journal public
because
nothing is safe anymore




not that it ever was.