What is this episteme? From which archive do I draw from? Language as a virus from outer space (Burroughs). My subject-position is the aggregate of all that has been said up until now. Hi.
I feel illegitimate on the page, illegitimate elsewhere, too. I am not some beautiful woman in Cornwall writing Romantic poetry. I am writing gibber-gabber, trying to hone in on something wonderful and alien. On the golden record they sent up to space Carl Sagan decided to include his son’s voice saying, Hi!
Trying to write a fiction piece about an agoraphobic woman in heteroglossia, i.e., what does the tea kettle she uses every morning have to say about her affliction? What about the terrier? When we give things speech, what power are they then able to hold over us? I would not like to hear the bad things my trinkets have to say about me.
ET’s finger stuck in the door, and he is hurting.
The problem with Foucault is that he argues everything comes from a certain discursive tradition, from a historically constructed (and developed) realm of epistemology and cognitive faculties but then what about HIM? Do his poetics allow him the transcendence needed to see the entire genealogy of history, of thought, of theory? I’m imagining a timeline, limp in space, and he is traversing it. And telling about it. Time-travel is possible, in this way.
At the beginning of Under the Skin (the movie), we hear the alien pronouncing different vowels, feeling out the sound of different consonants. P p p p p p, m m m m, ah ah ah ah… Loving you feels like I’m learning how to express myself all over again. We talk a lot about the sublime, about how some things can’t be distilled down to language. But in bed with you, bearing witness to the way your eyes crinkle up when you smile… all that comes to mind in those moments is poetry. But poetry-as-from-outer-space. Loving you is peeling back a layer of the external to reveal the internal, then the second-degree internal, third-degree, and so on. When I’m with you everything feels novel, and words become signifiers for new forms of meaning. It is also a melancholy enterprise, because in those moments I feel so condemned to meaning. There is no way to just float away—you make things matter.
And then I get to: constellations of meaning, meaning-making as mapping the universe. Each element has individual properties, is subject to things like gravity and inertia. There is a complex heterogenous set of associations in this universe—each thing is made from its relation to the other. P p p p p and m m m m m are multisensorial; they substantiate themselves in a sea of other letter-sounds. It’s not happenstance that I have galaxy lights in my room. It’s all part of inducing the universe paradigm, it’s my way of showing you the metaphor in star-stuff.
We spoke about love being ignorance, being an acceptance of such ignorance. But there is something very real and primal about my desire to care for you—something celestial in your hands. I am being sappy. But I do love you, and I don’t think it’s a delusion. In High Life, there is a dad and a baby in outer space. I think you would be marvelous among rock and dust and blackness; I think you would expand and multiply. You feel like linen. There is nothing more to say.