a quiet writing room
reaching as ever —long, irridescent lance unbroken a touch hackled mist in stillness, ever as[
] what branches dance when emptied a sigh awake with frost —!
dreaming as ever —known, starsweet voice of pause a kiss pressed petal in silence, ever as[ ] what wounds bank when placed a forge tendered rending —?
shaping as ever —current, glyphstave knife unknown a root carved prayer in singing, ever as[ ] what sap inks when vined a word spun orbiting moons —;
the dissatisfaction intensifies. i am looking for something to fit a process i cannot name, and therefore do not know what will fit it. a word? a concept? something to roll around and consider from various rough-hewn angles until i see the shape of it with enough clarity? will it become smooth, mirror-like, by my considerations? will it wear down, a boulder to a pebble in a river's stream of observation and contemplation? will it be a colour, evoking life again? will it be a feeling: frost cold air, brushy fir needles, tufty kitten fur? will it be a sound: new music, or old; a robin's returning song; the stellar's jay's croak; the drip of rain; one or the other bathroom fan left on again, or the trip of the fridge i can hear like a background jab from a bully at the playground; fingers popping as they bend to work; keys clattering; my own breath?
i feel i cannot trust my senses any longer. learning to distinguish the subtleties, the worn care, in created works versus those gorged and spat out by humans hypnotised by generative software, becomes a faster and faster dance. is this just what it means to age, in a digital world? to feel the pace of technology (originally a mantle of weavers, mind) outstrip you and everything you love while entrapping enough humans to keep it fed, keep it growing, a cancer mining out our very hearts. i cannot trust a game — a game, a fun playground, art, joy — to not be fused to the slop machine; i cannot trust a composer or musician — artists who know and have used their relationship to instruments to create before, and thus have no excuse — to not generate an entire symphony that has never existed beyond a set of prompts.
when i read things against such generation, there are outcries of retaining artistic purity that i cringe at. there is indignation against theft that is easy to support, at first, before people claim copyright as a force of control rather than acknowledge the overlaps in individual and communal agency. and there is the betrayal and trickery of asking for connection and being given a preprinted love letter, with perhaps nothing more than a hasty signature on the bottom to declare the person did, actually, honour your request, and feel demeaned, demoralised, and decidedly un-connected, despite such templates being touted as progress to accessibility needs and thus, if disagreed with, maligning one as a soldier for ableism.
yes. i am dissatisfied. i am tired of being stabbed in the heart. i am weary from trying to differentiate while knowing i cannot stop, even so, or else i'll blink and another seven years will have gone by and nothing will be recognisable enough for me to survive.
so i ask myself: why must i survive?
the horrid pace of capital, the self-destruction of empire after it has destroyed everyone else, the way it eats and eats and eats to become the only mass alive: everything i do is to squeeze through enough cracks, to gather enough joy to mend my heart at day's end. only to know anything could rip the seams again the next day, and probably will. you'd think that learning to be covid competent in a world that wants to forget access to clean air and public health are essential would have given me some stamina, some endurance, after seven years of isolating, slowing my own pace, redefining what is possible again and again and again. but all it's done is make me more tired, more exhausted. day after day, someone else unhinges their respirator, the one that keeps us all safe, and lets it drop into the growing cancer of surviving this hellscape. day after day, someone else decides to generate a poem, or an article, or an image of a deity, or balance their checkbook, claiming help for a disability or neurodivergence. 'you don't understand,' they say. 'i have to. it's the only way i can get it done. you don't understand.'
maybe i don't. everyone's disabilities are different, after all. should i be glad that despite only just beginning to recover from autistic burnout, despite chronic pain i don't yet have a name for, despite mental illness i do have a name for, it hasn't been 'bad enough' for me to need to take off my respirator and get back to normal or befriend a chatbot who will do the hard work for me? as if the hard work is what i'm looking to replace. as if normal was ever a place i could breathe.
things overlap, my dissatisfaction and heartache intersecting with the fervent fire of my curiosity. i want to know why we can't do better. why some abandon others to a life of responsibilities they were never meant to shoulder on their own, and therefore can't, and so, get left behind. why some abandon what should be a safety for them because other dangers press harder, and they must choose which way to die, which isn't a choice at all. why the solutions presented to what are considered issues and tedium rather than connective tissue and skill are generated by some billionaire's fever dream, rather than our own effort, our own hands, messy and failing but trying all the same to stay together.
i think about trying to survive and what it will mean if i do, and if i don't. i try to imagine decades spent in this way, trying and hoping i am building enough skills to meet the next wave of slop apologetics and evangelical intellectualism and disinformation cults. and i my weariness becomes the dominant perspective i cannot see past.
so many times i have been asked by people, 'are you over this yet? are you ready to be normal again? are you ready to participate again? are you ready? are you ready? are you ready?' while spewing disease and wearing uniforms of genocide, shocked to tears every time i say no, or when i say no louder, or when i say FUCK no after they tell me i'm unreasonable for wanting connection and community that will not abandon me or disable me or patronise me or in any other way try to cut me into preferred shapes and sounds other than the ones i am.
why survive? i have been. it's all i think i know how to do, sometimes. survive until i don't have to depend on them. survive until i can figure it out. survive until i'm somewhere safe. survive until i can get help. it's still like this. only now, how many times will i go to grab a bandage or balm and find that it's been replaced with plastic and botulism? how many times will i have to play twenty questions just to get to the point where i can read the fine print? how many times will i have to directly email or phone someone to ask what their policy is on the generative consumption of art, or their community care for the disabled, only to find there is no one to ask but their own very special boi chatbot who never lies and can answer me better than any human voice actually could?
the digital world has become my main window for relationships since 2020. it was a fun window before that, like an airplane window, somewhere to take me places i could eventually physically follow to meet people and make art together. now, it is the primary window of my house. the one i have to have mail pushed through, food pushed through, medicine pushed through, friendship pushed through. i think, if i had not used this window first as a tool of fun and connection, i wouldn't survive using it as a necessity. even still, the lack of mobility and access feels like becoming a ghost. especially when i watch, grounded, as other people still use their windows to fly. especially when those windows turn into approximations of windows, gibberish scribbled over them and the frames wobbly from a computer's perpetual inability to be anything other than a concept constructing concepts.
when i think of surviving now, i wonder: how much of this started from a place of joy? of aliveness? of wanting to stay connected to the sunsets, to the changing shade of evergreen trees from spring through winter, to rattling purrs or the sound of a loved one munching potato chips too loudly in the other room? what started as necessity rather than play? what would happen if i tried to make it playful also?
and so i go again, rifling through words and images and senses, trying to relearn them in this landscape, that they may become ever more dependable, ever more supportive, skills beyond survival. i'm not sure if it will work. today, three heartaches to mend. yesterday, only one. tomorrow? who knows. but today, the sky pales after the rain, darkness still pressing swift and cool, a tender hand on my tired brow. i will watch the stars sparkle. i will delight in the barely discernible difference between the silhouettes of the cedars and the pitch of the sky. i will enjoy fresh laundry and hot tea and many many blankets near enough to watch the kittens spiral between play fights and naps. i will hope it is enough to return myself, however fragmented, to the slots from which i was taken. maybe the fragments don't fit the same, or maybe they get mended back in crooked, but that's okay. that's real. something no software could ever generate for me. something no amount of cognitive dissonance could breathe for me. something that will, i hope, matter.
into the soft grey, awaiting (they are swans) fields flocked, golden straw a scent beyond the scarlet dawn
—and here! found! something glimmers a crack in the chest
would that the ink and rosewater (a flavour beyond despair) soak seeds without potential instead, invite
how then? the ripeness and depth? not clutched but brushed —
an open passage, sailed (they are starlings and robins) while fibre and bark mix threads to warm the hidden cover
portlight steady [ ]otherwise?
sails we lay down and yet[ ] upon the vast deep: a song — echoing chasms and the gentle tail of starwater.
we, tipper-timbre, long stalks dreaming in evergreen coats ...filled with quiet smoke[
]hold on, hold on, hold on: fresh, sweet, cold; glittering.
libra star, pierced the ages 'fore crystallise patterns into rings scales adjusting: what betrayals come to pass?
yet
rings will spin and splinter dark the spear haft cleanly through three times three times three more eons the elder you, a kind of current rivers do —
again.
panic i will not, then to see another wound and trust a misted trail rumbling against the orbit:
(again)
a lull in the air. patience in the sky between rainfall. softly covered grey, and i, alone in the house. a rare treat. we enjoy the passing river and watch in trepidation as it floods the grounded ones, the falls, hoping despite destruction this might be an end to a years-long drought. hoping the reservoirs catch enough. hoping it feeds what needs to be fed, and the carrionslink of capital stays well away.
i am alone in the house, but grandfather maple outside is being mended. a winter storm blew through on early schedule, before the sunset-plum leaves had a chance to fall, and shattered his trunk. i say mending because the arborist knows, says we can trim away around his scar and let it heal over clean. that it will matter, and grandfather maple can remain sturdy, if shorn, next to this house he loves so much. isn't that the best we can hope for, in these times: to perhaps have a thimbleful of beings who care enough to stitch us into a future where we remain with our loved ones, however changed?
despite letters being the same and words being what we have, writing begins to me to feel like the ship of theseus.