this pervious prologue is a fragmentary portal, a slippery wormhole situating what follows upon the stage of an intracultural shit-flinging. it is directed from inside toward the strange familiar, self-consciously stuck in a tautological loop, fabricating spontaneous poetic bodies which could be plastic (for want of a better word) and i mean fragile or soft structures (Kid Kokko 2019), objects as bodies as porous and trans-corporeal (Stacy Alaimo 2018).

as an ars researcher i’ve had the privilege of being paid in a castle, in a fortress, near a tower to splice into privilege through ars looking for ways to rewire imperial minds but of course the questions still remain which empire and whose mind?

in the field of full transparency i intentionally offer this performing essay to readers of the paler kind, as an insider’s lamentation, a concatenation of sameness speaking to the different same.

not only bad people are racist.

if humxns don’t know and face our histories, if we don’t trace the past into the present we cannot engage with geo-political conditions in ways that are transformative

maybe

perceiving whiteness as a splintering of non-static categories has transformative potential

but there is a huge messiness inherent in enacting an anti-racist and anti-colonial practice

it’s slippery and easy to fall as a white you’ll likely have to extract that foot from that mouth several times there’s no doubt you’re complicit and culpable in some way continuing to benefit from un/acknowledged privileges

sub/conscious racism and all other kinds of suppressed-isms

even eternally volunteerist whites should know this about themselves

yet try not let that paralyze them/me from acts of solidarity and allyship

one paradox is this urge to actively use the voice i’m freely given for what i think is good which leads to taking space and realizing the necessity of shutting up and shrinking very small and becoming marginal a long while the practice of shutting up is not conceding to some kind of failure just as diving into the blind spot is necessary sometimes

perhaps even a generative spot to be stuck

staring tongue level into the muck a short while best to

climb out while

still having

energy

      to
             do
       so.
               getting stuck too much in the loop
               may just keep you there
               and repetition is key to this fuckery.

is this getting too didactic for you?
                      well piss off, i’ve got the mic
                      for now.

a clown cannot be anywhere else but the world they are in. at this moment there’s you the reader and me the one way wordy train forcing my and other’s thought forms and ideas and images through your eyes into your brain, penetrating your mind-zone-private space, inhabiting you a short while, colonizing you with im/material data, penetrating you with these words lines images on these pages on this screen.

is it comfortable for you, this seepage?

parody and satire for me right now seem the only option for ethico-clowning in a world where so many leaders are clearly potentially genocidal troglodytes. and by troglodyte i mean a humxn being with the mental agility of a tardigrade. actually let me take that back i don’t want to disrespect tardigrades, those mythological micro-creatures have provided me with an interminable amount of awe, they’re likely the most intelligent of us all. their segmented resilience has them surviving in extreme conditions from mud volcanoes to the Antarctic to outer space. let me definitely take that back. tardigrades must have some massive intelligence to have survived the ages. according to my best friend Wikipedia the Italian biologist Lazzaro Spallanzani named them “Tardigrada,” which means “slow steppers.” slow steppers. that’s what we need more of in the world because PROGRESS IS SLOWING DOWN. perhaps then we too can survive the Sixth Mass Extinction and still exist 530 million years into the future.

To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

(Samuel Beckett 1961, interview with T. F. Driver)

it’s a pity Beckett’s an old white guy. but i like him and Benjamin and Kafka and Kentridge and Spinoza, Socrates and a few others but that’s enough about them.

this writing is selective, intuited, automatic and not, taking full advantage of its precarity as research emerging from an ars academy where so much is soaked in often unacknowledged privilege which may just gobble itself up and cough itself out as a furball or lick its own balls like a curly dog lounging on a shaggy carpet or pink couch.

can i be intrusive on the page

poke your imaginary space

a literary pest or fly in the eye?

Welcome to

this carnage-val of simple complexities

otherwise

simplexities

well come to the carnival of

complex simplicities

just basic complicities.

this ars will never be ready, never finalized, neither set nor stable. these narratives are slippery, pulsating between memory imagination history fable and the everyday.

it all feels laced with contradiction and paradox

stopping motion to understand action, excavating pasts to forge fertile futures, facing ancestral histories of sublimation, migrancy and domination to reflect on the same present histories-in-becoming, masking up to uncover truths to make people laugh so it’s easier to cry.

shit

this begins to sound a pretentious artist statement what i mean to say is

these colonial/colonic/coloni©al sediments this mulchy debris

these remains of empire could be compostable

set alight and
burned they may
yield healthy insights.
or not.

memories can be shifty documents of shame wobbliness and uncertainty

this poly-genre thinging may be an explosion of singularities (Deleuze 1990 via Lepecki 2015) or reaffirmations of a univocal perspective. epistemic buffoonery unruly ambiguity this burrowing spidery sprawl is not ahistorical though upside down, shifting, idio(t)syncratic and blurry it’s aligned with the always already here, the ongoing dead ends and cul-de-sacs of history’s collective memories continuing to affect the vertical nows

nowhere but now here

haunting the future anxious as ever interrupting phantasms of splintering pasts and futures made discomforted and alive through the sharpening webs of all-that-has-been and the not-yet-met

imaginaries of the im|possible

im|material encounters seducing muses and muscles of the all-of-a-sudden [nunc stans] and

                and
and
         and
                        and                  and
now
i’m really trying too hard.

this is when seriously authentic pomposity sets in, me trying to be a clever queer academic clown, valiant do-gooder-white attempting ars-is-tic philosophies in Sisyphean style scaling slippery epistemic ladders, falling interminably to zero, to the fool stepping happily off institutional cliffs in pure trust after all what is fooling but footing
without a crossed t?

the question is what happens after acknowledgments and apologies are made, can radical subjectivities reveal relevant vulnerabilities, what does ripping off those unhealed scabs do, divulging those deep pus wounds, genocidal games of mastery and servitude that continue haunting our collective presents and potential futures

can we haunt instead delicious futures
sculpt collectivities
different            alone            together
and
can play help that revelation to occur?
in this virtual room can we be lost together a short while
still caring for
with-nessing
each other
a long while?

FORGIVE THIS SENTIMENTALITY OR GET OUT FATHERFUCKER

witness here this uprooted trickster navigating white panic under the comforting heavyweight Scandi-beige blanket of mundane safety confronting memory and denial and erasure sublimation and abuse

the shit’s hitting us all in the face no one gets out of this mess clean

making visible invisible politics of otherness and belonging

documenting the lived everyday and the poked and stirred past

an eclectic mashup failing better on frames on edges in awe of shapes of architecture, snails and every other body like collapsing trees and graveyards

this is a calling, a

TONGUEING

you will be seething with burning shame you will blame yourself you will point at someone else you will squirm to the central jointed segmentations doubled up and begging for forgiveness on your knees in your dreams and crumbling waking life. you may lose the feeling in your fingertips and hopefully start talking with random strangers. you may forget to breathe and come up for air to put your feet squarely on the floor wiggling the toes feeling the tip of the nose cool to the ends of inhalations.

feel the warmth of exhalation and don’t forget to remember

with tension comes release.

admitting your own racism is the turd you can’t flush down.

it keeps popping to the top poking its little brown nose past the meniscus of comfortable beige lives living on the curves of bourgeois knives. when footing crumbles remember decomposition happens from the inside remember carpenter ants benefiting from a dying tree aiding its decomposition from the inside while not actually the original cause of its demise

somehow taking responsibility for its end.

have you ever encountered an anxious ant, a vulnerable fly?

even fragility has its limitations.

attentiveness is key to coping with crumbling material and emotional economies

apocalyptic crises and political fuckery

hallucinatory detail prevents devastation it expands polyphonic imaginaries

and being with clouds and drawing slugs helps

even in awkward stops and starts

inserting humor has its slippery

consequences and

“Poetry is Not a Luxury” (Audre Lorde 2007).

Donna Haraway (2016, 111) writes, “shame is a prod to lifelong rethinking and recrafting one’s accountabilities,” and it’s true, this feels like a lifelong work. taking my cue from Haraway, i wonder, how is it possible to produce with and for each other the on-going-ness of making a difference?

what must i give more death to today to generate more life

which bones must i unearth

then sing for
then crush
then rebury

[t]he border between life and death is probably that utmost line which finally defines human belonging or exclusion.

(Tlostanova 2013, 22)

is this where this performing squirming essay must stop? with a dog licking a couch on a Sunday in Johannesburg with the comforting soundtrack of a not so distant cock crowing and the neighbor’s house alarm going off and on

on and off repetitively

for hours

and hours

on end?