I come from a place where I am full of desire
Text, audio transcript & digital animation, displayed on https://cherriharari.com/timeloop
I come from a place where I am upside down and dreaming.
Dreaming of a future. Dreaming of our bodies. Dreaming without time.
J,
I once read, that the sign that the end had come, would be the eclipse of the sun and the moon. Checking for this eclipse, I would stare into the sky. Looking for light, looking to know it was not the end. I would stare into the sun to check the light was really there. I thought I would know when things got bad, because the light would leave. But when things got bad, there was no eclipse, but rather a large set of jaws, that slowly got closer. Pointed teeth that pierced into my projections. Crushing the sky to pieces. Under this pressure the stars, once mine, now fell about me in sharp pieces.
I didn’t know what to do without the sky.
Those teeth bit me and my sun so hard, they destroyed my belief in future, in time. I don’t think I really recovered from that. From seeing this cascade of what I was meant to be.
From the drips, I tried to construct a life. Not utopic, that was gone, but edenic. A form of life that is not pulsating forwards, but one that loiters through the intensities of form and force. The life I desired, was gentle, lush, verdant and full.
I tried to construct a vision, a vision in which we would measure time in moments. Holding onto the right moment, the opportune. The perfect moment. The new world takes a breath and in the pause before it exhales, fates can be changed.
I was upside down and lost in the words.
I was lost in the question of structures, of a way to be unbound to all the constructs that felt too hard. Of time, money, work, capital. This is the hardest question to answer. But it is the only one that interests me. It is the only thing.
There is always only one thing.
I was lost in telling you who I am and who I am not. I didn’t have the answers myself, and I still do not. What I can tell you is my body is always in motion. My body is anti-formal, pulled into the distance, peeled away from the surface of the day. My body is queer and out of focus. I know now, that we oscillate.
In our oscillation, you tell me the which we are not, and cannot ever be, is no dream to hold. To make one's self legible--to be legible--is a fixed point. We should not hold desire to be fixed in this manner, but I am burnt by the desire to be seen, truly seen. This world has so many beautiful eyes. I want their gaze upon me. I ache for it.
I want your gaze to move with me.
In my searching, I look for allegory, I look to theory, to the poems, to the people. Falling through anthropomorphic metaphors of mycelium and communication, of the whispering acacia trees. I read about kelpies and their constantly dripping manes,how they would entice people to ride on their back, before taking them down to a watery grave.I read about the flesh of corruption and how it seizes the veins of the post-revolutionary state, pumping, circulating & blocking in a synchronised manner while unleashing shape shifting forms as its residue.[i]I read about desire as a life force. I read about the warm hues of possibility and the generative waves that will wash our bodies clean. I cling to dictionary definitions, holding their last gasps of purity and substance. I carve words into candles, and burn the wax to wishes. I am flooded with undirected faith. I look for answers, direction, open hands and love.
In my searching, I steal the words, to write my future. I write to manifest a garden, a place in which something can and will always grow. This is not a generic utopianism, utopia serves only those who are already powerful enough to project a dream.[ii]The blind and naturalised future is only seductive if you already hold this power. Power that is held in the hands of a few. Power contingent upon individualism. The individualism is a naturalised sickness that generates fear and greed, leaves us divorced from our pasts, emancipated from life beyond us. This sickness steals the breath of dreams.
To dream is to project power.
To dream is to open the door to desire.
For desire is medicine. A medicine that keeps me alive in this world.
Through the malleable practise of language, we blow the casts that will one day hold us. The lexicon that affirms and creates. Language built upon the inextricability of pleasure and pain, it hurts until it doesn’t. I write through memory- using the past and the present simultaneously to construct the possibility of what is yet to come.
You help me skim the material by-products of past failures, using our failures to write the poetry of a different future.[iii]Bridging then to now. You let me be wrong and uncomfortable. You let me speak in statements. Let me be right, indulgent and queasy. Let me be irrelevant, frivolous and lost.
Just stay with me.
Speak to me in spells, speak to me in the moon, in folklore. I want to think and feel and write outside of my body. I need to leave, so that I can return. Running from the kelpie, the siren, the more-than angelic, the more thans. Using the more-than as a way to exist within the almost. From the tail end of light, wrapped in a shadow, day breath almost tasted, could have. Spilled out in the fractured moment that is broken, pulled apart, sudden and true.
You give me your heart, which transforms into a vitality. You help me be born into a resurgence, held with life. Allow me to stretch myself over the frame of the day, before at night, I lose myself to the ghostly formlessness of prayer. Help me dissolve into another dimension. Walk me to a landscape, where we look shame in the eye. Hold the glare and see a reflection, see it rise within you.
Come and be a pirate with me, trespassing upon the imaginary sea, a plain along which to flee this world.[iv]
Bringing us ever closer to a horizon imbued with potentiality, where new life will grow. Our unbound edges cutting through the waves. The encroaching tide of time crashing under the helm, as we sail out and through. The sea is torn to scraps, and we are gorgeous rovers gliding through the divine wake of failure. Our sails powerful and full.
Let me know, that if it is impossible to fix something securely in the past, that the present holds the same unlocalibility[v].That our memory can serve to unravel all we know to be fixed. That we can and should swim amongst our amnesic gaps in consciousness. Jump off our ship, diving deeper.
Remind me of the tenderness. How the tender can act as a catalyst for the irrepressible love, the love that keeps our exit wounds wet.
Drop your post-capitalist desires on my tongue, let me taste you and your dreams.
I want to be within your becoming.
I want to be within your undoing.
Together to breed more life,
more honesty,
J,
Let us leave our bodies behind,
let us light our bodies on fire
let us hide from work
let us swallow the morning whole
You cannot throw the memory of yourself away
You can only wash your hands in the basin of the earth.
You can only fear beautifully
Fear lovingly
You said to me - ‘I hope you are not too afraid of the ways you are asked to come in contact with your body.’
And I replied.
‘I hope, I will take my shoes off more.’
https://cherriharari.com/timeloop
[i] Natasha Ginwala. ‘Corruption: Everbody knows’ in Supercommunity: Diabolical togetherness beyond contemporary art. E-Flux (2017) p.263 [ii]Terike Haapoja, Three Modalities of Futurelessness.(2019) http://www.thisisnotablog.co/2019/05/08/three-modalities-of-futurelessness/
[iii]Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press (2010) p.68
[iv]McKenzie Wark, Wild Gone Girls, E-Flux Journal (2018) https://www.e-flux.com/journal/93/211935/wild-gone-girls/p.5
[v]Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Duke University Press (2010)p. 76