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diss

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5.
A small quiet drone has been circling the air above our rent-controlled house for the past hour. My partner observes that in this small part of the sprawling city, the neighborhood where we have lived half our lives, the drone’s presence indicates the speculations of real estate.
In the rural town where my family has been living through pandemic times, there is a natural spring that has been enjoyed for thousands of years. Sacred healing water, free by nature to all. For the past hundred and fifty years or so it has been enclosed as a private bathhouse and pool, its waters bottled and sold in plastic jugs. You can pay to become a member and you can enjoy it with other members. What’s the morality of this. I run into the tribal historic preservation manager in early summer, by the store that sells wildcrafted herbs and fly-fishing gear. She protects cultural sites from disturbance on behalf of the people whose ancestors enjoyed the spring long before settlers arrived, the people whose collective name means “people of the waters that are never still,” the people who now live mostly in Wisconsin because settlers forced them to move there in a series of coercions and evictions unfolding over generations. She asks if I’d been to the pool yet, if I’d tasted the water. It’s incredible, she says, her partner and child agreeing. It’s true, I find the water to be clear and cool and warmed by the sun and you can drink it straight from the earth. Protection, she shows me, in the shape of our shared enjoyment.
I no longer need a drone to see what a drone sees. Its vertical perspective is always available to me, irreversibly stamped on my imaginary version of the big picture. I compose a grid of scrolling frames. I face a world of distorted connections. A coalition-builder from my parents’ generation described this pattern of movement as a playful act of traveling between worlds; an exchange of loving perceptions, an open embrace of her multiple selves. It’s also the perspective of free fall. Moving towards earth against the friction of wind.
6.
New feelings manufacture new expressions, my face moves and holds in unfamiliar ways that make me more or less recognizable depending on the day. When I am less recognizable I join with other off-screen voices, outside of citation, in demonic grounds. I was dead once, and there are definitely moments when I am not sure I’m no longer dead.
A, B, C, D, E, F, L, M, N, O, P
Why does the alphabet have the sequence that it does? I know there are letters missing. Every word is a fossil.
7.
Whom can I trust? Would I recognize trust if I felt it? I am beginning to think that all connections are necessarily, normally, naturally distorted.
Which is to say, feelings are relationships. The once-abundant time I have spent conjuring links between thoughts, images, and emotions collapses into scarcity. Each act of searching, seeking, inquiring, and probing is imbued with a preciousness. It fits an ephemeral pattern.
I change tabs to check the grammar of “whom can I trust” vs. “who can I trust?” and I am delivered 6 Subtle Signs That You Can Tell Someone is Trustworthy:
1. They don't share others' secrets
2. They never say “I'm not supposed to be telling you this…”
3. They show consistency
4. You can count on them when needed
5. They tell you things straight up
6. They respect peoples' time
I’m not supposed to be telling you this, but traveling between worlds without love is arrogant. Arrogant perception is failure of identification, where all others exist by virtue of their usefulness. It is the systematic disintegration of whole persons by the perceiver, grafting the substance of their servants to themselves.
The smell of ripe passion fruit becomes overwhelming. Those who spoke the local language called it the fruit that serves itself. Five hundred years ago, passion fruit was a pedagogical tool: each lobe of the flower representing a wound in the passionate death of G_d.
I am afraid that synthetic odors and flavors manipulate my senses so completely I have fallen out of touch with the real fruit. This is a shallow dread. I am not that into technology but I get it. I prefer a caveat, I don’t trust the seamless continuity required to make predictions. I am in the midst of a thicket of dependencies, I am discrete; interdependent, alone.
My favorite medicine is chimeric, semisynthetic: rituximab, like any other monoclonal antibody, is a large, Y-shaped protein that binds itself to foreign bodies and marks them for elimination. Grown by a transgenic mouse who has been given a talent for cancer, the protein is humanized to cross back into my species, where it marks my own B-cells as other. Those mutated murine eyes give me my ethnographic point of view.
Writing myself into a place, a field, a persona, I look up and down and from side to side. The sun is warm, the air is fragrant. I am skeptical and careful. In the grammar above, the open question “whom?” is the object of trust. In this case, trust requires an object, even if it is a gap to be filled, a caveat. Something required is missing. Still, a notion of completeness is required before we can say “missing.”
I write about the changes I had observed when death became my guide: I am learning to speak my pieces, to inject into the living world my convictions of what is necessary and what I think is important without concern for whether or not it is understood, tolerated, correct or heard before. The world will not stop if I make a mistake. I intend to hold this thought of world-stopping in my mind for a while before I continue. Where else could I hold it? The world is unstoppable, with death as my guide.
To be clear, world-stopping is a flavor of world-building. World-traveling is another. In the late afternoon, decaying light bleaches the curtain a distribution of miniature suns.
8.
I hear that free-swimming larvae of tropical corals move toward reef sounds when they return from the open ocean. They listen to know where to settle, even across great distance. Again at a distance, plants respond to the sound of leaves being chewed, secreting particular chemicals. They do not respond in the same way to songs or wind. We segregate our fruits and vegetables depending on whether they emit, or are sensitive to, ethylene gas. Apples and bananas go in bags so they won’t speak to each other, so they won’t listen: Let’s get ripe. Passion fruit, too, emits measurably large quantities of ethylene gas.
At the cafe by my house, I’m reading about stochastic parrots, a silly name for synthetic language models. These models produce seemingly coherent conversations, but they do not, as we might say, communicate. True coherence requires mutual recognition, which the parrots lack.
I look up from the article, recognizing a friend, who reminds me that attempts at mutual recognition block totalizing coherence. When she and I communicate with each other we are both aware that we are sharing, and we can know the limits of our sharing. Communication is a jointly-constructed activity of modeling each other’s mental state. All technology is for communication. Even if what you communicate to me doesn’t seem to make sense I will interpret it.
Language gives objective form to my senses. Words help me to feel. At this point my friend cautions me to be mindful of the slippage between categories of alarm and real harm. What is at stake? A failure to recognize where our mutual thresholds lie means the one category has become the other: a false alarm causes real harm, an unnecessary trigger. We make an outline of the consequences together, in order to place our trust in the future. I come to see that this means, among other things, to lovingly perceive change and the instability of representations, as 6 Subtle Signs That You Can Tell Representations Are Unstable:
1. The world as I am describing it, both as memory and as presence, will have changed
2. People I don’t know will read this, and the people I do know will have changed
3. The meaning of the language I have used, however carefully, will have changed
4. The relationships between the readers of this text and the world as I am describing it will have changed
5. The relationships between myself, the language I have used, and my experience of both memory and presence, will have changed
6. The relationships between myself, the language I have used, my experience of both memory and presence, the people who read this, and the world as I am describing it will have changed
It gets better: All of this writing takes place in time. I write only when it is absolutely necessary. Today I wrote nothing. I inhale wood smoke with the smell of ripe passion fruit. It’s ambient at night.
9.
I find joy in moirés, multiphonics, iridescence, polyrhythms, and other readily sensible metaphors for holding or sensing more than one position. Metaphors break down under mindful analysis: a moiré falls under the umbrella term “z-fighting,” as a struggle in the dimension that moves from eye to horizon. Multiphonics, like all harmonic series, imply a fundamental frequency as their basis. Iridescence is a structural trait. Polyrhythms depend on an eventual closure, a unit of common repetition. I was smiling at you and then I realized you were a stranger.
I catch a glimpse of the skull clamp and take note of these blunt waves which pass through my lower abdomen, and across the edge of my hairline. Behind my eyes. It is a taut fact that the skull clamp clamps skulls. For the reason of slicing skin, peeling it back to bone. Drilling precise holes, clamping again, then cutting with a saw made especially for the purpose. By precise intent, through repetitive use, everything and everyone has its purpose.
This hardware, this sensation, this body. I search for the brand name printed in silver on the edge of its white metallic arm. Search results return images of even more abject products from the same manufacturer. Their spinal surgery bed which bends and twists the unconscious body in order to give access to the points of incision. The articulated arm with alligator clips for pinning folds of flesh in place. There is an inhuman economy to their directness: all body.
I only get the feeling from images of the skull clamp, also found under the sterilized term “cranial stabilizer.” When a royal blue, athletic-looking foam support is added, the feeling is gone. I’m not interested in a headrest. Not resting. What is a head?
10.
Walking down the stairs from the projection booth to the screening room, I am made aware of a cone of blue light projecting outwards a meter or so from the back of my head. On the narrow end, the diameter of my carefully sewn scar. On the wide end, a fringe of pale yellow-white and magenta light, a spectrum that swings as I move my head from side to side. The cone holds its unshakeable, orthogonal orientation to my skull.
I love scars. I was dead. My pride in showing you is too much.
I watch an IMAX movie of brain surgery: close images of a port being drilled into a shaved section of scalp, a tear in the sac that surrounds the brain, pulling back inner layers that resemble spider webs, tumor tissue that looks like crystals of mold or fat. Every frame is multiple stories tall. I don’t feel anything while watching, or immediately after. Three days later, I am obsessed by how every plane of my body is oriented, so pungently aware of having a front, back, and sides as if I were made of boxes.
11.
Face down on the examination table. A biopsy needle extends from my upper hip bone, through a dimple in my back, to the oncologist’s proud gloved hand. I am immobilized, failing to pivot on a stuck center of gravity. This act of extraction is one way to bring bone marrow to the surface. This is the reason we have dimples, to show where the needles go.
I can’t talk about pain without talking about categories: subtle differences or nuances (despite their similarities) that may be of importance to a patient who is trying desperately to communicate to a physician—and memory (to forget the experience would render it indiscriminate, unrecognizable). A pain not recognized is no pain at all.
12.
I visit an old acquaintance who lives by herself in an apartment downtown. She has been frustrated in her attempts to apply for grants from the federal government, in part because the login to the funding portal appears to be in my name (I had helped launch the nonprofit she now manages). My acquaintance has mobility issues related to her auto-immune disease and the nonprofit’s offices are at the top of three flights of stairs. She is ready with the organization’s mission, its dedication to inclusion, its provision of social good. I accept her offer of matcha. I am at a loss for words, a blocking-feeling that I classify for myself as disgust-memory. The symptoms of the world persist (long after our encounter) in the shape of a barrier, a locked portal and too many stairs.
However much time I spent going over the text, how would I know if I had understood what I read?
I am outlining systems for the reconstruction of activities and experiences. This is to understand how people spend their time and experience their lives. This is to better understand what biases we carry when we categorize and remember. This is, furthermore, to understand how we come together around coherent and all-permeating concepts such as “quality of life” in the face of asymmetrical life expectancies and standards of living.
13.
An ordered list of all the ways there are to tell you “I was dead.”
As for the question behind the questions, my friend at the café offers: “How civilized do I want to be?” And so I become a form of blanks to be dutifully filled in or left capriciously empty. A building with windows that crack open in special patterns to promote cross-ventilation. A sparse rhythm that throws a body into or out of balance. Freedoms of association I want to preserve, and freedoms that are no longer useful.
14.
The street outside my window traces the floor of a canyon rushing from hills to flatland. From three dimensions into two. I hear a pair of owls calling to one another, one’s voice is low-pitched, the other’s higher. They share the same pattern, in their respective registers. A thrust, quick pulses, deep insistence: hut huh huh huuuh huuuh. Each time, the sequence is initiated by the low caller. If the response from the high caller comes, it comes quickly. Beyond owls I hear the dullest of engines rumble, flattening itself across the basin. How much is call, how much is response?
Death loses its meaning. In a pattern made up of spiderwebs and snowflakes ambiguously blending at their margins. How much is spun, how much is crystal?
15.
We can’t find the source of a smell with our fingertips.
Why do my veins choose to collapse?
Leaning against the wall, I hate how waves of bass move through the architecture into my soft tissue. I didn’t choose to resonate like this but I’m so tired.
I will relay to you a lesson I learned during a visit to the morgue of a teaching hospital in Paris: When one is overcome by the presence of death, touch the corpse. This stabilizing contact, as a gesture of relation, serves uncountable purposes. Death becomes tangible, the cadaver resumes their humanity.
You press me gently to tell you more about the ghosts, how they require a specific orange flower, and strawberry soda whose deep redness exudes vitality. The ghosts communicate with latency: an alert, then preparation to receive, the waiting, then an image arrives. To reply, prepare, settle, choose a documentary image from one’s life, then transmit the image. This is not my story to tell. What I mean to say is that this is local knowledge, to extract it from its deep embeddedness is to make it incoherent.
The oncologist says grimly: “I don’t have a microscope in my eye.”
16.
The only assignment the activist gives her students is to produce unedited images of their obsessions. For the document: arrogance, vulnerability, and nudes. Sometimes there is coercion. Does the photographer learn to ask permission, alongside editing, printing, compression and its artifacts?
Images—in one’s fullest imagination of what depictions can be—become tools for realization, both familiar and strange. At the center of any hopeful link between time and place, affect and relation, the image introduces an agreement that either holds or breaks: Will I be seen as I am? Will I see from a perspective that is not my own? It is almost not a choice. Subjects and viewers either meet on level ground or they do not.
Felt through reflex, revulsion, attentiveness, discourse, and discovery, my consent governs my awareness of sensation. It is as automatic as it is political as it is intimate. A prerequisite for becoming legible, for having shared experience, consent is also an overture to pleasure, curiosity and exploration. To consent is to be authenticated, for all who anticipate becoming a pattern, an accumulation. I am reminded that in music, prediction creates a contract between performers, and with listeners. Even as we consent not to be a single being, we consent to the predictability of forms.
17.
The central conflict I experience with death as my guide is whether or not to trust the future. To trust the future is to enjoy the free fall of gravity. When I lose trust in the future, I am compelled to intervene, I expend energy to keep vapor in the cloud.
I am organizing a film festival where the size of each digital file is savagely restricted, an awareness-building tactic. When the image is viewed as streaming media, its resolution and complexity are directly linked to its environmental cost. In one film I see a clip of a robed body in free fall, clouds and sky and limbs and fabric and hair enmeshed within shifting and blocking compression artifacts.
Compression, even in its variability, is a process for making standard indexes from the stuff of life—predictable forms—through decisions about what material to cut as redundant, useless, dangerous, misleading, biased, obscene. I will identify those who do the work of deciding and those who do the work of cutting.
Before the festival of compressed films, I read descriptions of images whose surfaces, so present as to produce a haptic response, feel as if being touched on the eye. Making oneself vulnerable to the image, reversing the relation of mastery that a sharp lens imposes, limits assert themselves again. How much is cloud, how much of it is cloud’s image?
Early morning light through passion vines throws tiny circles of light across the painted floor. Do these miniature suns move? Do they show the effects of some force out there? Do my eyes move in my face while I watch? Do I? The world? What keeps still long enough to be a frame? These are morning questions. Oh, there they go: soft wind intervenes.
Images are important because they show how light is unceasing and dimensionless but still it carries information. And if this is possible anything is.
18.
It happens that I am, in my deepest marrow, part vampire. An ethical and unreformed thief, avoiding the cost of sunlight. Undying elite and full of care. Sadly my blood is contaminated. I can’t donate I have a disease. Critique makes me weepy.
I’m not a cannibal but I am an exceptional listener. In the city I grew up in, my closest friend took me to see a holy person who wrote a prayer for me on a piece of cloth. This person, with whom I was unable to communicate directly, whose language was unknown to me, rolled the prayer in hot wax, tied the small bundle around my neck with string, and instructed me (via friendly translation) to keep it on until it fell off. This was all intended to protect me from too much listening. I also carried a walnut in my pocket and took drops of walnut essence under my tongue. I still hear all the frequencies, but I’m not literally losing my mind.
19.
Everyone in this place looks so familiar. Normal is a distribution and we’re in it. How can you be sitting in the direct sun?
I want a metaphor for the difference between precision and accuracy that doesn’t rely on the image of a target, on being punctured by arrows. Who wants to be opaque, difficult or silly?
Precision and accuracy stay independent of one another. This is a generic framework for approaching repair. There’s no other reasonable path. You can’t just drink juice and hope to get better.
As I am seated, chemical heat on my inner arm, I receive transfusions of chemotherapy drugs—doxorubicin, cyclophosphamide, vincristine (red, clear, clear). While I receive transfusion: stevia, ginger, turmeric (leaf, root, root). As the poison takes hold: Chickpea flour shaped into a pancake. Green salsa on breakfast tacos. Cold brew coffee. It’s a disgusting walk from the clinic to the cafe with my father, who is, as always, optimistic. To be clear, the experience of one foot in front of the other is disgusting, the optimism is only ever ambient, I don’t touch it.
20.
It has been another bad week for thinking.
Several weeks since the last ripe passion fruit falls from the vine, now highly-structured flowers crumple inwards and wilt in place. New leaves, identically rounded ellipses, differentiate from one another as they grow. They transition to three lobes, then a distorted four, and finally a mature five-fingered form. A new flush of fruit emerges, green and taut.
These results are ephemeral. Accuracy is how close a measurement is to the true or known value. Precision is how close measurements of the same item are to each other. Accuracy means you already knew. Precision happens before you know, or alongside knowing. Precision is relational, accuracy is a matter of limits.
When no one can think, it’s time for passive synthesis. Sitting with habits and expectations, allowing inclinations to fall into place: a path is traveled, a route is recommended, a pattern is discerned.
21.
To those of us taking part in the die-in, a group of passersby shout “you’re disgusting!” And to these same passersby, those of us who are already dead shout wordlessly back: “we’re dissociating!”
With or without shouting, all mental life consists of components that can be split off and made independent of one another, as I will now demonstrate.
22.
That feeling of reading while thinking.
Oozing into indeterminate space beyond the margins of the page, you become aware of something just out of reach: a colorful abstract pattern on the wall of the building outside of your window. As daylight fades your focus slips, and you see this exterior image overlaid onto the reflected interior of the room in which you remain seated. In the mesh of all this, your own eyes, in the middle of your face, looking half at the page and half out the window.
23.
The recollected debris of any day.
My child is eating ripe guavas we’d picked from the tree that leans over the rusted chain link fence separating us from our neighbors. In my hands are six or seven sweet pieces of fruit, and I can’t carry any more. Bits of guava flesh, uniquely pink, thick with small hard seeds, stick to their face and shirt. I remember thinking: this shirt is guava pink’s blue complement. We play gratuitously with language: greeting one another repeatedly, we offer up sweet meaningless questions. We lay out details, real and imagined, of all the events which have passed between this time—now—and the last time—then—we were together.