[27 May 2024]: "Using the Word as Bait" — blind bisexual goose; green porno; slippery texts; sloshy belly of texts; eggs; love as curiosity + quantum mechanics; heresy + agitation; erotic consumption
blind bisexual goose; green porno; slippery texts; sloshy belly of texts; eggs; love as curiosity + quantum mechanics; heresy + agitation; erotic consumption
Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.
This is part of the newsletter’s “Using the Word as Bait” (Clarice Lispector) strand.
Read more about the newsletter rhythm here.
Writing Conditions
ᩣ Coming Home/ Blind Bisexual Goose, Penelope the Platypus, Green Porno, and Buffy
I am writing to you, and I am writing to myself. Hello!
I got home from a week of travel—from Los Angeles to San Diego to Providence—and have slept from Friday night until this exact moment I am sitting to write this newsletter. I am not documenting much on these trips; just trying to be present without the pressure of “evidence” or content. Upon opening Instagram for my allotted social media displeasure, I was pleased to come across a 2018 New Zealand story about the death of Thomas, a blind bisexual goose in a love triangle. At this point, I think we are all aware of my not-so-casual interest in the complex lives of our non-human homies. Y’all may remember my ongoing obsession with Penelope the Platypus, the interspecies feminist hero who, after being stolen from her homeland and then forced to make babies with some dude named Cedric, faked her pregnancy and escaped the Bronx zoo in the mid-1950s, never to be seen again. I am drawn to these stories because they remind us of our complex world, and the complexity challenges humans not to see ourselves as the main character.
In another timeline, I am a biologist who writes books and makes illustrations about the interior lives of non-human animals. Speaking of which, I came across Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno series on Criterion. As Criterion describes it, “With brightly colored costumes and paper puppets, Rossellini acts out a panoply of reproductive oddities […] Part nature documentary, part DIY cartoon..” This truly is my jam!
I love weird stuff like this and one day, I will make my absurdist film (I have already written a synopsis). I have just the right about of delusional time perception to create a science curriculum using these films as an anchor.
I am managing to carve out more space for myself. I am rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for no reason but to get to the episode where Spike calls Angel an Uncle Tom — yes, you read that correctly.
I blame Buffy and a host of other 90s high school shows for convincing me that high school would be a series of supernatural battles and cool hangouts to see artists like Rasputina performing Transylvanian Concubine at the Bronze!? I also watched Private Life with Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn. It tells the story of a couple somewhat obsessed with fertility and the lengths they are willing to go to have their own child. I liked the film, but also like Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn so it was not too much of a sell.
My watching assignment for this week:
1. Poor Things
2. Dogtooth
3. Plan 75I am excited about some of my long flights to Norway and France this summer so I can have some extended time to watch high above the ground. This week, of course, is Yorgos Lanthimos heavy! I think I am leaning into things that are death related as I ramp up for death doula training. By the way, this is not an easy process. After researching and getting into a program, I realized that I do want to go for an advanced certificate in thanatology. No one could have told me a year ago that I would be going back to school to study death.
ᩣ How to Read / Slippery Texts, Some, Lispector, Wilk, Stein, Love as Curiosity, and Heresy
I am trying to find my way back to fiction, starting with Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang.
My reading assingments for this week:
1. Finish Organ Meats (K-Ming Chang)
2. High Static, Dead Lines: Sonic Spectres & the Object Hereafter
(Kristen Gallerneaux)
3. Disorientation as a Learning Objective: Applying Transformational Learning Theory in Participatory Action Pedagogy (Barbara Brown Wilson)
4. The Baye Faal of Senegambia: Muslim Rastas in the Promised Land?
(Neil J. Savishinsky)
5. Dumb Meaning: Machine Learning and Artificial Semantics (Hannes Bajohr)
6. Language models can only write poetry (Allison Parrish)
7. TESCREAL hallucinations: Psychedelic and AI hype as inequality engines (Neşe Devenot)
Hold me accountable! I thought it was too soon to get back in Clarice Lispector after the rapture that was Agua Viva.
Last summer, I read Agua Viva alongside relistening and rereading parts of Malidoma Patrice Somé’s Of Water and Spirit Ritual Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman (1995). Both texts made for an unnameable reading experience. The books simultaneously gave me language and took language away from me. Both texts were slippery. A duo of non-cohesion. Slippery as in:
And I wondered if I would apply the last definition here – something that is deceitful. And yes, I would say that the form all these things had to take to be read and held in our hands presents a set of expectations that can never be fulfilled. Each time I returned to these texts, what I thought I read was no longer there, as if it had evaporated because they feared my attachment to the words and not the feeling I had while reading them. Reading these texts felt like a phantasmic experience.
I found myself rereading and rereading these texts, trying to gain traction, something to grip onto. These texts resist attachment, or affinity, or binding. And I wondered if it was a resistance to the texts binding itself to me or a resistance to the human desire to grab the word, hold it tightly, and imprison it in the moment of our perception rather than allow its infinite blooming.
When I remembered this summer of reading, I was tempted recently, and cheated by reading something from The Complete Stories before first sneaking a peek at Helene Cixous’ Reading Clarice Lispector:
Ooooofff! To be inside a text. How do we name our relationship to a text? And that process of extrication to analyze the text feels the most excruciating. To climb out of an engorged sack. I want to stay in the text but to speak about the text, I cannot be in its belly. But, I love being in the belly of the text — it is warm, sloppy, and agitating. I read the first few pages of The Egg and the Chicken, (thank you to one of my students,
for reminding me of this piece). Lispector writes:
Something about her writing makes it hard to read more than a few pages before needing a nap. See Helene Cixous’ reminder:
[…]
First, let’s talk about eggs. Every few months, I am repulsed by eggs. I am in that cycle now. I can eat eggs cooked by someone else. However, I cannot crack the eggs, whip them, or cook them without gagging. This cyclical disgust reminds me that I refused to eat white and off-white foods up through the start of high school. Eggs, cottage cheese, yogurt, mayonnaise…all a no-no. The first time I tasted scrambled eggs, I remember the smell and felt like I was eating something I was not supposed to eat. But, back to the eggs.
— “The egg is a suspended thing. It has never landed.” The chalazae already allow the yolk to be suspended, so what might it mean for the egg to be a “suspended thing”? I am taking up the definition of suspended as the state of something being held undetermined or undecided, awaiting further information or a pause. I consider this suspension a possible articulation of an unresolved state that has not settled into a specific reality — something imminent. Or, as Helene Cixous writes:
— “Understanding is the proof of making an error […] What I don't know about the egg is what really matters. What I don’t know about the egg gives me the egg properly speaking.” To claim to understand is arrogance? A presumption of totality? Anytime we arrive at the shore of understanding, is it our own self-satisfying delusion? What we think we recognize and understand may be more a projection of a desire to capture than an actual capture.
Sidenote: Would folks join a Clarice Lispector reading group/class where we slowly read her work and the paratext? I am thinking of something in the winter to keep us warm with her language. And I am thinking of something hybrid. If you’d be interested, send me an email studio@kameelahr.comᩣ Love is Curiosity(?)(!)
In a moment of the corporeal primitive hypertext Octavia Estelle Butler offers us, I was shuttled to another text. I moved my body to find a sister text of sorts and found myself back inside Elvia Wilk’s essay, Ask Before You Bite (an updated version is included in her book Death By Landscape):
At least for Wilk, something about love implies a certain “knowing” or recognition of the other person. But as Wilk notes, “recognition is inevitably also a naming…Recognition, if understood as a projection that disallows the evolution of self…” Here, understanding is not so much an error as much as violence. This is hard for me to wrap my mind around because so much of our socialization is about the kindness of understanding others. But what if that has been an unfortunate trap and not a kindness? During one of my routine existential crises, I asked myself — do I desire for others to understand me, or do I desire for others to be curious about me? I landed on curiosity because understanding me would require stability that I cannot promise. As a learner, I pick up and put down so much each day that one might have to quantify a blur; there are no fixed points. Learning is moving stations in multiple directions — a series of blurs, but not fixed frames; the cut, not the frame.
When I think about my frustration in all forms of relationships, it has never been about someone being unable to understand me; it has been about their lack of curiosity about me—a feeling that whatever snapshot they’d taken was sufficient knowledge to be in relation to me.
I think love is curiosity.
I think love is an investment in quantum physics — or an awareness of all ambiguous scales of being down to the microscopic — a desire to hold space for persons as dark matter worth being curious about regardless of your ability to define it. (For more on dark matter, see Sarah Jane Cervenak’s Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life and Amy Catazano’s work on Quantum Poetics). Catazano writes, “I often think of quantum mechanics as the most conceptually radical of the breakthroughs in theoretical physics to emerge in the last and current century, in part due to its claim that physical reality cannot be definitively observed.” The reminder that ambiguity trumps certainty shapes my life and my new approach to relationships, first with myself and then with others.
My desire for curiosity over understanding was illuminated by something from Patricia Meyerowitz's translator introduction to Gertrude Stein's How to Write:
Another gut punch: “Total comprehension would mean total involvement.” This sentence acknowledges the conditions for total comprehension, which are impossible.
ᩣ Heresy and Curiosity
One more thing! I am thinking about my spiritual practice—one flowing in the direction of Sufism, which reminds me of the impossibility of understanding the divine, Allah, and, by extension, much else. I read something by Ashon Crawley that introduced me to apophatic theology, or negative theology — the opposite of cataphatic theology. (There is an X-Files episode that references this concept) Negative theology attempts to describe God by speaking only about what may not be said about the Divine. I am still disentangling all of this, but in this process, I learned about examples within Islam and was reintroduced to the concept of tanzih (as opposed to tashbih), or an assertion of the impossibility of comparison. I am not a scholar and am still learning, but it seems that much of this is rooted in a question of to what extent we can understand the Divine. When I think about what holds me within a particular tradition, it is the inability to know fully because to know fully gives me nothing more to work toward and wrestle with. I have nothing to be agitated by — an unanswered question, a point of disagreement — opportunities for curiosity.
My therapist used the word heretic today when I spoke about curiosity. And yes, curiosity is heretical; it can be blasphemous. I can imagine someone seeing my search history on these topics then concluding that I do not believe, but I believe so deeply that I want to explore all the contours. And to be quite frank, heterodoxy and heresy are necessary forces of agitation. Agitation, annoyance, and discordance are all modes of learning for me. Agitation is slightly erotic — you are rubbed the wrong way, but you are still rubbed and the question becomes what does one make of that disruption.
The disruption is an awareness of oneself — to be able to identify a moment when something ruptures or upsets your membrane is to even acknowledge there is something that differentiates you from others. I enjoy agitation and annoyance — it is my pedagogical process; it is my spiritual practice. I enjoy the rupture of what I presumed to be a non-porous membrane. From Lispector’s Agua Viva:
I am the mother that licks the sack of fluid. I am her. And I am the kitten huddled inside the sack. Who is licking the sack to free me? Must I free myself? There are no saviors, and Lucille Clifton reminds of of such:
A short piece of writing during my train ride from Providence:
The mystic dies and leaves behind engorged sentences. Violently, I stab the congested sacks of language, and with my mouth round and ready, I place myself at the site of puncture to see what I can catch on my tongue. It is not elegant and nothing like what I was told. Am I brave? No, just desperate to taste the letter; to chew a wad of lapsed meaning.ᩣ Heresy, Haunting, and Wet Sentences
Heresy and heterodoxy sit as haunts, as spectres, as reminders of uncertainty and the complete upsetting of everything we think we knew. I am thinking about Avery Gordon’s renderings of haunting in Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination:
For me this is thrilling. Whether we acknowledge the haunt or not, there is always something waiting and available to unsettle our certainty.
So, how do we proceed? We write acknowledging that every sentence is haunted by the thing we do not yet know and may never come to know. We write wet, damp, and moist sentences. Something still liquid enough to be contaminated by new experiences, something liquid enough to change.
I write in the spirit of liquid, of water, or as Lispector says in Agua Viva
And over the past few weeks, I have found myself craving writing. Maybe it is that I am currently teaching a writing class at the School for Poetic Computation called Wayward Sentences. Whatever it is, I want to write. Yes, I still want to write about writing, but it is still writing. Sometimes, I wish I was a writer who enjoyed writing about “topics,” but I love writing about the systems surrounding topics, the substrates that make the notion of topics even possible. It’s like the natal cloud surrounding the star, not the star itself; or the paratext, not the text itself. I have felt a lot of insecurity about not having interests in this traditional way, but having never been good at fitting in, I will take this quirk as an invitation to carve out other ways to be part of writing communities.
Sometimes, I get so wrapped up in the poetics of a sentence’s possible structure that I never finish the sentence. I enjoy thinking about, and thus writing about, ontology (what exists) and epistemology (how we can know about the existence of such a thing/how we know what we claim to know). Because writing is this technology to articulate these questions and claims, it makes sense that this becomes the heart of my interest in writing. There is also my dogged fascination with religion and hoaxes, both things that force me to confront why people believe what they believe and then why they stop believing certain things. When I think about my art practice, I call myself a learner because I see that my work is a series of epistemological gestures — what did I think I knew coming into this; what do I think I now know having created this work; how does the existence of this work impact how other people are reflecting on their knowing; how does the process of making and unmaking impact my relationship to knowledge; what are the lengths I am willing to go to know something (consider my show at REDCAT, i want to climb inside every word and lick the salty neck of each letter — a desire to know through erotic consumption).
Again, what lengths am I willing to go to to know something (or to think I do)?
ᩣ i want to climb inside every word and lick the salty neck of each letter
For this REDCAT solo exhibition, I created 10 new video works. Four of these works were featured on CRT screens at the east of the gallery and all grouped under the title “...produces the pleasures of gastroscopy and of language”* (*Title comes from Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text).
As I wrote:
Since witnessing communion for the first time in Catholic school, I have been interested in consumption-based spiritual rituals. More formally since 2021, I have actively researched a number of spiritual rituals involving gastroscopy: kombe, the ingestion of liquified Qur'anic verses; the Holy Communion sacrament; Schluckbildchen, devotional pictures created for swallowing in German folk medicine; and baau, a Peruvian Urarina practice of whispering healing words into liquid to be drunk by the afflicted. Here, intimacy is corporeal and immersive — to read and to write is to consume and absorb — to transgress. Four videos mirror the escalation of physical contact and intimacy – from touch to consumption. Below each is a small shelf holding residue from the gastroscopic rituals captured on screen: a square of paper I have rubbed my body up against; a strip of paper I have licked; a glass jar holding the remainder of the sentence dissolved in water that I drank; and the watery remnants of the paper patty I created and consumed.
Rubbing the Word: “For I want to feel in my hands the quivering and lively nerve of the now…”*(*Title comes from Clarice Lispetor, Agua Viva), 2024, 1:52 min
Licking the Word: “The mother licks the sack of fluid so many times that it finally breaks…”*(*Title comes from Clarice Lispetor, Agua Viva), 2024, 1:48 min
Drinking the Word: “Like a priest gulping down his Mass”*(*Title comes from Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text), 2024, 2:47 min
Eating the Word: “We are gorged with language…”*(*Title comes from Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text), 2024, 1:40 min
I have not talked about the physical toll of this work. More on that soon.
Thank you for reading,
Kameelah 👽
Finally, while I do not organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this wee little newsletter could allow me to take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at $70 USD :)
How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL