it’s hard to know what to say about dandi meng’s incredible, generous piece on my work at Jacket2. i’m not that good at what’s pretty; i can only say how it feels. it’s the only thing i’ve ever been good at. i’ve read her essay now, three times over and it’s still a heavy thrill. not nostalgia, but the instant recall of deep sense memory and something else, what’s new for me these days–an immense gratitude in recollection. Of when i lived here on tumblr, now almost a decade ago. the parts of me that shifted and the parts that remain frigid in the archive, kept awkwardly on ice.
what dandi’s piece feels like: skin smear on my phone screen. in other words, what doesn’t get captured in the screenshot– that anticipatory feeling when your thumb hits send and you float your content past the digital boundary into the ether. suspended space of not knowing, when and how, and if it will glance past another person. maybe not. but then sometimes, the screenshot will return to confront you, emerging from deep within the scroll. i can’t quite believe it did. it feels really special.
i haven’t thought about Hunting Season in a long time, I haven’t thought about performing in a long time. i still hold all the movements in my body, neat tic of my wrist, teary vocal whine, pristine choreography of manufactured blood, but they’re drier now, desiccated. less from misuse than from no longer being able to push myself to the emotional limit where i can spill with my whole body, thread the edge of that gush. i miss it, the freedom of lapsing. the unclarity of it. it’s funny, when i stopped, i was so tired of the fritz.
i used to compare my performances to throwing trash in the air, repetitive, fickle facsimiles of myself. dandi talks about this, shedding data, she says, and the uncontrollable minutiae of petty affect. she’s right. maybe what was important was that i was present in the only way i could be, unprocessed, undead so i could be witnessed. i don’t know, i do it over and over again, make things specifically to court the complexity of other people looking, and no matter how it happens, no matter how i rig the machine, it still feels insane. in the end, a lot of people do look, but it doesn’t happen in a real way very often, like how it happened in her piece; being perceived.
i loved tumblr because it was as estranged as it was intimate, as democratizing as much as it was a space to admire, the glossy cool girls i put on a pedestal; @karaj, @whateverjeanne. tumblr was this aching, immutable surface within which, upon which i could endlessly project a series of emotions. relieved and fatigued, i never had to try to understand, and for no reason other than i didn’t want to. confession and its lie; an eternity of unmaking and reconciling and revising. others and myself; memory and affect too big to hold, it had to go somewhere, why not here. why not like this. i absorbed so much material and reproduced, repurposed it. thin ephemera, but it was a feint. at its interior, there was still work, a labor of living, a labor of myself, not veneered, but intractable, all twined up with painstakingly curated style. i did not want to admit this for a very long time.
dandi’s piece too, although i cannot speak for her, is maybe is a feint, in that it is comprised of analysis and screenshots and objects, of which my work is one. but it is just so full–on its own terms, and within its own context. so flush with the kind of unique thinking that can come only from writing critical theory by living it, and from choosing to experience oneself as an unmediated part of that critical theory. a mutable, organic project. i’m so hungry to hear more. i feel undeserving. so lucky and honored to have snuck in.
typing into tumblr, like i never left. time is a shell sometimes. hard candy. thank you dandi, for breaking it in your hands. i can’t resist; i crush. <3
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