The Eye (2012) & Ancillary Diary Collage (2020)

The Eye (2012)

When you're getting over a near-death experience, the word "fear" doesn't mean anything to you anymore.  In a roundabout way, the reminder that you're vulnerable--that this great steel wall of your skin and brain is penetrable by something greater than you--makes you feel invincible. You become numb to small things, but you're paradoxically vigilant. God threw down a pair of golden glasses that cured your nearsightedness. They hit you on the head.

You're told since you're young success requires fearlessness. Success is to nurture everyone except ourselves. Everyone's slowly dying from being a slave to success. This sacrifice is a universal phenomenon.

I could never be successful enough. I fast-forwarded a death process by not feeding myself. When there was nothing left, I consumed my soul.

I, I, I, I.

You're told since you're young perfection requires success. Perfect is a harmless word with fatal signified.  It's scientific on paper--a harmless semiotic jumble.  Perfect means happy. Happiness is perfection. Neither concentrated entity exists in space and time: it's effervescent brain foam that exists over an invisible horizon. Nobody here is happy until they reach the enlightened state of Objective Happiness.

Happiness in my early twenties has been goal-oriented.  Every dream I realized has led to another dream.  This turned into an obsession, and then a disease.  I wasn't disillusioned with life; I was fueled by it. I poisoned the riverbed. People loved my success, and my own love for that success disappeared with the love I had for any part of my being, physical or not.

So, love signifies attachment to everyone except yourself.  Self-love is a sin in the name of counter-production. It's an idea we all take for granted that we understand. But then we stare through it on purpose. (We can't stare into it for too long.)

unbinding lotus feet: ancillary diary collage (2020)

This is a piece written in 2020 from words in my own diary from 2011.

january 2nd, 2011

i'm publicly unbinding

my own lotus feet.

a pretty name for

what beauty demanded.

everybody, look!

[you don't need]

[to know me:]

approach my mom 

tell her i'm gaunt and sick

and ask her 

[. . .]?

then message me online

to tell me her answer

the way 

clothes drape,

my body [is]

[like] a hanger.

tell me!

i question 

last month's

"recovery" 

and sometimes

if i'll wake up

there's a fog of apathy there. 

to my friends 

i was [. . .]. 

so, we don't talk much

[in the way you don't talk much

when you're at a funeral--]

because we all 

don't understand

[our] shock

reflected in windows

my sister expressed 

she felt insecure

[in the yawning pall]

[that stretched from]

a skeleton [home]

with [shadow-bound] 

lotus feet

and she

transcends--

she embodies [the true love]

[that has consistently throttled]

unenlightened

self-indulgent

secondhand embarrassment

shame and

reason NOTE: The title invokes the historical practice of Chinese foot-binding as a metaphor for the bodily harm imposed by patriarchal ideals of feminine beauty. The comparison is not intended to equate these distinct experiences.

ACCOMPANYING PLAYLIST