Fever Theory

M. Brock Moorer - Objects, words, images, animals interacting. The universe translated by a feverbrain. All words and images This work by MAS is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

[fevertheory]

Diagnosis

I fell in a hole. A deep hole. And it hurt. But when people came to help, instead of getting me out of the hole, they stood around the top and asked me how I got in the hole. What I had done to make myself fall in the hole. How deep was the hole. How long had I been in the hole. When  I asked them to just get me out of the hole, they said that they couldn’t because I would just fall back in the hole. They had to know why I was in the hole before they would or could get me out of it. Maybe I secretly liked being in the hole. Maybe I’d put myself in the hole for attention. Sometimes they measure the hole and take pictures of it (the walls, the ground, the sky) only to tell me there is no hole that I’m in. They show me the pictures of myself, the ground in the hole, the walls, the sky, and say, See, there is no hole. You are the hole that you’ve made. We can’t do anything to help you out.

[fevertheory]

Pain and the world, we are in it

In order to think about my own consciousness, I have to take a bit of my consciousness, a bubble, and separate it from  the rest (or I think I do) so that it can watch the rest of my consciousness going about its business. This process is somewhat easier when you are in chronic pain and separating from your self anyway, but no one believes the mind when it is attached to a body in pain. This process is similar to what scientists think they do when they're conducting 'experiments,' collecting empirical evidence: they take a bit of the universe (including themselves) and separate it from the rest of the universe (are you beginning to see the problem?) in order to watch the universe working.

I began thinking about my own consciousness when I was trapped in my chronically ill, chronically in pain body. I'm still trapped there, but I've learned to take that bit of my consciousness that senses that body and turn it down a little. Until I can't anymore and it comes roaring back, expanding in size until it is the whole bubble (consciousness).

We've been taught to think this way by our culture and language. To think of ourselves as separate (even while we imagine the rest as some giant bubble of out there that only rarely divides itself into 'people' or events we think of as separate and therefore like us. Everything in our language from the pronouns we use that about ourselves that are singular.

[fevertheory]

Pain language

What would a pain language look like? Sound like? Written, I imagine on the body and the sheets, clothes and pillows, shit and blood. Projected like movies.A stuttering, irritated series of marks with an almost rhythm (always almost). For neuropathy it would be written on shoes and socks, gloves, the steering wheel, keyboard. Charred and raised red, engraved in boiling marks, for the sizzling sound that should be there. Like bare electrical wires hissing as they buzz and threaten out of sync.

The aching would be the terrible drone of wailing mourners, the white hot broken place that’s cool to the touch. The written words would loop and loop, letters  and symbols heavy, scribbled on top of each other, an indecipherable, weighty pile of muttering, whimpering pleasestoppleasestop.

The headaches a series of spikes and blades for letters, curved deep and deeper into the skin, the eyes, forehead, scalp. Too obvious? Fuck you. It’s always too obvious to me.

Migraine a scratched out, scribbled mass that throbs with the beat of another cruel heart. Laser-etched permanently in pulsing grooves carved in places that only the migraine can uncover again and again. Migraine grammar twists tighter and tighter until nothing escapes the knot, not even meaning.

[fevertheory]

Pain Language

Words often used to describe pain:

Burning, stabbing, searing, mind-numbing, terrible, excruciating, hard, unrelenting.

Words rarely or never used to describe pain:

Luscious, lovely, pretty, soft, favorite, beautiful, cute, giggly, fun.

So pain is 'masculine.' All the words to describe it are 'active,' the words we use to describe maleness on the binary. The hard words. Pain is never the soft words. Pain is something done to you. Pain is active and we are passive. Pain makes a woman of us because what else could we be when acted upon?

[fevertheory]

stars - Moorer (2014). 32″x 48″ graphite on paper

[fevertheory]

A German activist group called the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) addresses the internalized desire to work by casting the relationship between patients and doctors in a Marxist framework. For the SPK, everyone is sick under capitalism. For some, their bodies make them more aware of this. The SPK was formed in 1970 and existed for about a year. Before their dissolution, they managed to put out some fiery propaganda. Their slogan was, “Turn your illness into a weapon.”  They also wrote, “Sickness is the condition and result of capitalism.”  As a perpetual patient, this rhetoric is refreshing. The chronically ill are often cast as victims of fate or genetics. Rarely are we politicized or allowed to relate our personal experiences to larger social or cultural phenomena. As far as doctors are concerned, our diseases are empirical facts and not much else. Following the logic of SPK, being ill appears to be a de facto resistance to the established social order, to capitalist production and subsequently to the engendering of material relations between humans. Disease necessitates unemployment and unemployment is a social disease. When we are sick, we enact unintended resistance to an economic system that privileges efficiency over resilience. Of course, illness predates capitalism, but the physical impairments that make the condition of wage-dependence unlivable were not always disabling. The social model of disability maintains a clear distinction between disability and impairment. Impairment is an illness, injury, or congenital condition that causes loss of ability or partial ability to function. Disability, in contrast, signifies a particular relationship to one’s environment. Disability is the reflection of barriers that prevent people with impairments from participating in society. For example, when I have difficulty walking, it is a physical impairment. I am disabled not by my physical impairment, but by the fact that many buildings don’t have ramps or elevators. Capitalism is an economic system that assesses bodies in terms of labor power, designating certain bodies as useful and others as not. Physical or mental impairment as an excuse for exclusion from social or economic life is endlessly reinforced under this system.

How to Be A Person in the Age of Autoimmunity by Carolyn Lazard (via fevertheory)

[noosphe-re]

When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.

Nikola Tesla (When Woman is Boss, Colliers, January 30, 1926)

[roseiaghost-deactivated20220105]

sketching more this week.

[gumaasaat-deactivated20170103]

[warmsoftsun]

i wish to melt (ice blue), Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, 2009

[fevertheory]

fractal

Once upon a time, the universe is held together by us all because we are holding onto each other. The universe is held together by us holding each other and ourselves together. We are the universe. Everything we do, think, feel is the universe holding itself together.

And all of these things holding onto each other are a story. The universe is held together by a story. The universe is a story. It is stories all the way down except there is no down; there are only more stories and stories about stories about stories. That’s why it’s a multiverse because stories never really end or begin and there are always more stories out there and in there. You think you’ve reached the end, but there is just more story. That’s all a fractal is or ever was.

[shmuelaa]

[sweetheartsandcharacters]

PIONEERING FEMALE FILM DIRECTORS: A sickeningly short list, most of these directors were also actresses: Alice Guy-Blache, Lois Weber, Paula Blackton, Ruth Stonehouse, Dorothy Davenport, Grace Cunard, Leni Riefenstahl, Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino.

(Sources: www.moviepilot.com/ www.findagrave.com/ www.listal.com/ www.underthehollywoodsign.wordpress.com)

[darksilenceinsuburbia]

Kevin Peterson

[fevertheory]

Superposition: we are touching, we are never really touching. Moorer (2015) 22″x 22″ acrylic, charcoal on paper. 

[visual-poetry]

by tim etchells (+)

[aspenanomie-deactivated20201101]

How the Pope is Chosen

By James Tate

Any poodle under ten inches high is a toy. Almost always a toy is an imitation of something grown-ups use. Popes with unclipped hair are called “corded popes.” If a Pope’s hair is allowed to grow unchecked, it becomes extremely long and twists into long strands that look like ropes. When it is shorter it is tightly curled. Popes are very intelligent. There are three different sizes. The largest are called standard Popes. The medium-sized ones are called miniature Popes. I could go on like this, I could say: “He is a squarely built Pope, neat, well-proportioned, with an alert stance and an expression of bright curiosity,” but I won’t. After a poodle dies all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven. They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up and then he’s the new Pope. He is then fully armed and rides through the wilderness alone, day and night in all kinds of weather. The new Pope chooses the name he will use as Pope, like “Wild Bill” or “Buffalo Bill.” He wears red shoes with a cross embroidered on the front. Most Popes are called “Babe” because growing up to become a Pope is a lot of fun. All the time their bodies are becoming bigger and stranger, but sometimes things happen to make them unhappy. They have to go to the bathroom by themselves, and they spend almost all of their time sleeping. Parents seem incapable of helping their little popes grow up. Fathers tell them over and over again not to lean out of windows, but the sky is full of them. It looks as if they are just taking it easy, but they are learning something else. What, we don’t know, because we are not like them. We can’t even dress like them. We are like red bugs or mites compared to them. We think we are having a good time cutting cartoons out of the paper, but really we are eating crumbs out of their hands. We are tiny germs that cannot be seen under microscopes. When a Pope is ready to come into the world, we try to sing a song, but the words do not fit the music too well. Some of the full-bodied popes are a million times bigger than us. They open their mouths at regular intervals. They are continually grinding up pieces of the cross and spitting them out. Black flies cling to their lips. Once they are elected they are given a bowl of cream and a puppy clip. Eyebrows are a protection when the Pope must plunge through dense underbrush

in search of a sheep.

[fevertheory]

How to be a body in multiverse

Maybe dark matter/energy is moving faster than light, that’s why it is dark. So it can’t be in this universe.

Like you. You are always in darkness.

Always moving toward (away?), but never arriving.

No matter how much desire there is between us, folding space and time. Pulling us into that event horizon that is bigger than the universe. We are never touching. There is no stuff to touch. Scaling down and down, in and in, there are only fields of radiation moving against and through each other. That’s all touch is.

Maybe you are another universe.

With different physical laws.

And we are just trying to communicate and cohabitate in multiverse.