Enlightenment is understanding that you don’t exist as an individual. A universal consciousness, maybe, if you want— But you don’t exist as a petite body-mind with free will and choice, and independence. You are not that small thing. You’re God. I am God. We are the same. I don’t believe anymore in the self, or that we have a self. I think there’s a body-mind, which is like a puppet, a rubber. I completely lost the sense of self.
“The Husband Stitch” by Carmen Maria Machado (2014) “You shouldn’t touch it, I say. You can’t touch it.”
Not long ago, while waiting at a bus stop, I found Her Body and Other Stories sitting on a concrete retaining wall. The area was dirty and littered with an empty bag from a bagel shop, a discarded pizza box, dried old crusts. I assumed someone had stopped there to read and then ate and left their trash along with the book they’d just finished. Part of me thought I should take the book, save it from decay. I saw that it was labeled with a library sticker from over in the next county. When my bus arrived, I thought best to leave it there for someone else to save, but made a note to get an ebook copy for myself. The next time I was at that bus stop, the book was gone. All of which is to say, fuck.
Some inside part is always going to feel like it’s different from yours.
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Deadstream dir. Vanessa Winter & Joseph Winter (2022) “I don’t want to be remembered as a douchebag.”
Sort of fun? But knowing how shitty some cult-of-personality streamers can be makes it less amusing to me. Then I wonder how much of what I see in past movies is amusing to me as someone who didn’t live through those times but is not funny in the least to someone who was there for it. Ultimately, this is another kinda horror movie that’s not for me.
“The Summer People” by Shirley Jackson (1950) “I wonder if we’re supposed to… do anything.”
This really got me. I’ve had aging and choosing a place to settle (if ever) on my mind recently and this just hits all the right points for me to feel creeped out about the future.
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“Don’t Go to the Island” by Sfé R. Monster & Kalyna Riis-Phillips (2016) “The skulls at your feet are laughing at you.”
It’s been almost all white American men in my horror comics this month, so I’m pivoting to other creators and eras. Fortunately, the Bones of the Coast anthology has that and also focuses on the Pacific Northwest, undoubtedly my favorite region. It’s a good pairing with the Jackson story. A moody coastal vibe, the gray sky threatening something that doesn’t reveal itself immediately, but instead lingers behind trees and corners, watching and waiting.
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Under the Shadow dir. Babak Anvari (2016) “Dead people can’t dream.”
This was great, in that it captures an intimate story of two people trapped by the weight of political erosion and violence very well. It’s a slow simmer movie, building up slowly and then explicitly, asking if anyone can ever really escape the horror they’ve experienced.
You’ve heard of “humans being severely injured to reveal mechanical insides” now get ready for a far more horrifying alternative: machines and technology being damaged to reveal meaty, bloody insides
Evangelion knew this and truly traumatized us in the 90s.
Ghosts remind us that we live in an
impossible present – a time of rupture, a world haunted with the threat
of extinction. Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are
bulldozed into gardens of Progress. […] Ghosts, too, are weeds that whisper tales of the many pasts and yet-to-comes that surround us. […] Worlds have ended many times before. Endings
come with the death of a leaf, […] the death of a
friendship, the death of small promises and small stories. […] Whereas
Progress trained us to keep moving forward, to look up to an apex at
the end of a horizon, ghosts show us multiple unruly temporalities.
[…]
Some kinds of lives stretch beyond our ken, and for us, they also offer a ghostly radiance.
The lichen that grows on tombstones is one example.
Every
autumn, mycologist Anne Pringle goes to the Petersham Cemetery near
Boston to trace the outline of individual lichens, watching their growth
on the gravestones of local residents and dignitaries. They grow
slowly, and sometimes some disappear. Some are probably the same
individuals as those that first found a place to settle when those
dignitaries died centuries ago.
For fleeting creatures such as ourselves, lichens are more-than-ghosts of the past and the yet-to-come.
Lichens
are symbiotic assemblages of species: filamentous fungi and
photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria. Lichens are themselves a kind of
landscape […]. Many filamentous fungi are potentially immortal. This
does not mean they cannot be killed […]. Until cut off by injury, they
spread in networks of continually renewed filaments. When we notice
their tempo, rather than impose ours, they open us to the possibility of
a different kind of livability.
Many kinds of time – of
bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and Western colonialism – meet on the
gravestones of Petersham. The ghosts of multispecies landscapes disturb
our conventional sense of time, where we measure and manage one thing
leading to another. […]
These temporal feats alert us that
the time of modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our
metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters.
—
Text by: Elaine
Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction:
Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.
shower. not a bath, a shower. use water as hot or cold as u like. u dont even need to wash. just get in under the water and let it run over you for a while. sit on the floor if you gotta.
moisturize everything. use whatever lotion u like. unscented? dollar store lotion? fancy ass 48 hour lotion that makes u smell like a field of wildflowers? use whatever you want, and use it all over.
put on clean, comfortable clothes.
put on ur favorite underwear. cute black lacy panties? those ridiculous boxers u bought last christmas with candy cane hearts on the butt? put em on.
drink cold water. use ice. if u want, add some mint or lemon for an extra boost.
clean something. doesn’t have to be anything big. organize one drawer of ur desk. wash five dirty dishes. do a load of laundry. scrub the bathroom sink.
blast music. listen to something upbeat and dancey and loud, something that’s got lots of energy. sing to it, dance to it, even if you suck at both.
make food. don’t just grab a granola bar to munch. take the time and make food. even if it’s ramen. add something special to it, like a hard boiled egg or some veggies. prepare food, it tastes way better, and you’ll feel like you accomplished something.
make something. write a short story or a poem, draw a picture, color a picture, fold origami, crochet or knit, sculpt something out of clay, anything artistic. even if you don’t think you’re good at it.
go outside. take a walk. sit in the grass. look at the clouds. smell flowers. put your hands in the dirt and feel the soil against your skin.
call someone. call a loved one, a friend, a family member, call a chat service if you have no one else to call. talk to a stranger on the street. have a conversation and listen to someone’s voice. if you can’t, text or email or whatever, just have some social interaction with another person. even if you don’t say much, listen to them.
cuddle your pets if you have them/can cuddle them. take pictures of them. talk to them. tell them how u feel, about your favorite movie, a new game coming out.
Circulating. Seasonal depression is creeping around now.
