xi-m-89

[xi-m-89]

brian

Are you Euripides when you’re writing this?

No. I don’t think so.

I don’t think so either, I think you’re Jill.

[xi-m-89]

My friend made a recording when he was alive that I listen to often. He made the recording five years before he would die and this project would begin, depending on how you count the beginning. One of the things my friend says in the recording is that in Ancient Greece the current science about sight is that your eyes emit rays that bring the seen thing into being. These days, we know that every creature is doing this. Every creature is seeing things into being with rays emitted from their eyes – even the rocks and trees and kittens – because the whole body is an eye, the whole rock, the whole tree, the whole kitten, is an eye. So now we know that what’s actually happening is a simultaneous and reciprocal coming into being that occurs through the sending of infinite rays in all directions by all creatures animate and inanimate. The sun is an obvious example. But all bodies do this. Like the Earth itself. The land is like our skin but if our skin were kilometers deep. And all the creatures of the waters and all the creatures of the sky and all the creatures we cannot see with our eyes, we are all seeing each other into being. I am doing this with my body under my cloak. I am the ray bringing everything into being and I am brought into being by every other ray, including the rays of the buried. And, as a once-lover said when quoting Roland Barthes: the night illuminated the night.

[xi-m-89]

trans(lation)

across, through, on the other side, complete change, transform, trajectory

[xi-m-89]

work iv

Thinking about myself did not help me get out of bed. The thought that kept me alive was that I am not really me, but part of something bigger. This something bigger felt most convincing when I could not see it. The bigger thing I wanted to be a part of I felt sure was invisible to me. e.g. the atomic world, the ghost world, the energetic world. And, of course, practically speaking: all the things other people can see that I cannot.

[xi-m-89]

i don’t know

I don’t know if all my tools and all my points of reference and all my writing and all my life have to be thrown out. I don’t know if reorganizing the past is a part of it, reshaping it so it can come with me, or if it will come with me anyway, something I will have to unlearn the whole time. Or maybe it’s something I have to learn how to see, I have to learn how to have the new special seeing I’ve never had before, and that’s going to happen now, at long last, after all this time?

[xi-m-89]

no play

How do I include my autobiography in the play and there be no attempted play-making in it? What is my job in this autobiography if it is not someone who is labouring at making a play? Like why does this person go to Greece? And why is there no play IRL? Why am I always trying to make a play instead of just making a play? And how hard was I trying, if there is no play to show for all this work? Hold up. What if the whole past ten years has been things that happened while not making a play? And if so, the play has been the framework for all this action and all this time and it doesn’t exist? Trying to make a play is the clay mold and my time is the melted bronze poured into it. All we’re left with is the life. But probably there should still be a play. Just not in the play itself.

[xi-m-89]

realization in dream

In my dream all my problems were solved when I realized I could write my play as Kendrick Lamar. Like from inside his body. In my dream the play opened with a line something like:

Even I will die.

[xi-m-89]

lost time

I was thinking about ghosts, for whom time is lost. About the Underworld, where the concept of time does not exist. How the only way for me to communicate with the dead is to suspend my normal life, obviously, but also, to suspend time.

I was thinking about walking, making love, etcetera: how I do these things inside a temporary space. How I do these things not because I can do them forever, but because I can’t. How I want to do them all the time.

Now time doesn’t really work that way anymore. Time is more like sensations and moods. Time is like small seasons within actual seasons, broken up by days and night, by the weather. Like a snowfall helps you know that today is not also yesterday.

[xi-m-89]

time as friend

I wish there were a magic trick where I could turn it all around and feel like:

In my life, I really befriended time.

[xi-m-89]

“We have no power of lifting. We have only the power of lowering. This is why to lower oneself is the only way of rising.”

- Simone Weil

[xi-m-89]

sweater

Sometimes the work is undoing the work. Like unraveling a mistake in knitting. I am thinking about Gwendolyn MacEwen’s diary from Greece: “Sophia was knitting a shawl; Irini was doing something I couldn’t make out, and the two (or was it three?) others were whipping up baby dresses. I, on the other hand, was not really knitting, for I can’t, but I went through the motions and told myself that the results would be a submarine, or possibly a bungalow, or something of that nature. At any rate it would be effective.”

What would it mean to create something effective? I remind myself that when I’m undoing the work, or retracing my steps, or throwing something out, I’m still going forward in time. I’m still making a sweater. This is part of the unseen and invisible work.

I just want to make a sweater. I don’t even need to love the sweater in the end. I don’t even need to start a sweater business and have really popular sweaters. I don’t even need to know how to knit or for the sweater to be recognizable. I just need to be knitting for a couple hours each day, to intend this particular sweater, and to trust it’s better than nothing.

When a group knits together, we want to make a sweater. I wonder if we need to believe it will be a really popular sweater, a really good sweater for every single person, like a sort of magic sweater that you want to go home and tell your friends about? Or is it more just knitting? No genius, no glory, no failure, no nightmare. Just knitting.

[xi-m-89]

turning life around

How Brian said the only way to redeem all this lost time, e.g. the way I’ve spent my life, is to put it in a play. And for that play to be good.

[xi-m-89]

work iii

How does life work? If you are tuned in to something, available to something, doing the work, do you get closer and closer to the story you tell yourself about what you are meant to be doing? Is this how life works?

[xi-m-89]

work ii

This play as a proposal for how not knowing what you are doing yet can be a way of working.

[xi-m-89]

seeing iii

Once I had a bad chemical burn in my right eye and could not open it, not even with my hands. Though my left eye was not burnt, it would not open either, because the eyes operate as a compassionate pair.

[xi-m-89]

seeing ii

In Athens I consider my coming blindness. I think: you can still write when you are blind, though you will no longer be able to read. Then I realized the act of writing is mostly reading. Well. That’s okay. I need a new job, anyway.

[xi-m-89]

“I got lost here to transform myself.“

- Lisa Robertson in the middle part of 3 Summers