(continued from 11/23/19)

31 pieces of the auto-sedition quilt

(xvii — xxi)

On 19 January 2020 Maria wrote in her journal:

It’s been six days since I fell through the crack.  I’m spiraling down depression way again.  The crack has been widening and if I don’t do something about it — San Andreas be thy name — you unholy fucking fissure!  This is a familiar landscape, I’m never too far from my stepping through it, into it, farther and farther down — canyon-like — now in a skirl of whorling minimalist notes, repeated and repeated until I am tranced-out and lost.  

Having lost six days now I ask myself: what’s next?  Which way do I move?  What direction?  How do I get out of this, and here I am writing again.  Is it fair enough to start like this again?  The only option really.  How did I get here again?  How do I avoid ending up here again?  I don’t think I can adequately answer the latter, but the first question must be asked always because it presupposes awareness of the situation.  And here is where I usually make the pivot, because a pivot is required.  The only other option isn’t really an option.  Is it?  No.  

So here I’ll start again, and content myself with starting again.  This is an acceptable… No, it’s a good step forward.  It had to begin somewhere.  Why not right here?

***

The next day, the 20th, she wrote:

I exist in meaningless patter, in the trifling titter of expense and abuse.  I persist in this dominant issue of breaking a standard that I once pretended to.  I perform unlimited horrors on my own discernment and troubled world view.  I will disengage from timbre and search for a tone so acute it pilfers life itself.  This signifies nothing within nothing.  

But Thoreau said:  “Write while the heat is in you.  The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with.”  And that’s why I persist with this thumb tapping.  To use what little heat warms these fingers attached to a tepid body sitting on a cold toilet.

***

21 January 2020

The tincture of blood, an anodyne for the misery of the loveless.  How does one evaluate the loneliness she feels with her pain?  How does one put a price on relief? 

***

The last week of the month started dismally.

The boy, nouveau riche and Booker-Prized now, went through freshman year tossing humblebrags until the day he didn’t anymore.  That was during spring break, which that year just happened to coincide with Mardi Gras — and in those rare years when they coincided Loyola University became a madhouse, despite its Jesuit veneer.  It was in that hothouse-madhouse that the boy — his name (why deprive?) was Maurice — came upon Derrick.  

Derrick did not suffer humblebrags in his New Orleans — especially when the humblebrag was dismissing his mother’s insistence that he accept a Porsche 911 instead of the Porsche Cayenne that he drove about campus with ABC, The Fixx, or Haircut 100 blaring from the Blaukpunt radio in the car.  Derrick hated 1980’s synth-new wave — the worst epoch for music! —  he claimed in a drunken stupor once.  Derrick befriended the friendless boy Maurice that day, a smile and a raised thumb worked its magic.

***

Subhuman, Subhuman…

The boy Maurice was surprised by the abrasive quality of the music he heard before he opened his eyes.  To what?  What was this place?  Why was he tied up?  The first half minute sounded like a squall of detuned guitars strummed wildly.  He was told the lead singer was named Genesis P. Orridge, the band called Throbbing Gristle.  Derrick was screaming along to the song:  “subhuman… subhuman… drinking dirty water… you’re a disease…” and so much else the boy Maurice didn’t understand.  Couldn’t.

Then the music shifted as if it fell off a precipice.  The singer modulated to a lower register at a fraction of the volume he was singing before.  Derrick went silent.  It scared the boy Maurice.  Then a ball attached to leather mask was foisted over his mouth and face, and all went dark for the boy Maurice.  It never became light again.

***

(continued tomorrow)