Mush

Bataille wrote ‘affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or a spit’. Losing the self in formlessness is ‘in common with erotic perversion’ and also ‘death’. I’ve always wondered what it felt like to have a galaxy embrace you. All the buried stars popping off underground where your meadow is a whole erogenous zone. Swish the mint wash around my mouth and spit. Blood. Sky stuff. 

O how I’d love to swallow wholly and be done with something, star self, in its millions. 

Bataille: ‘I propose to admit, as a law, that human beings are only united with each other through rents or wounds; this notion has, in itself, a certain logical force. If elements are put together to form a whole, this can easily happen when each one loses, through a rip in its integrity, a part of its own being, which goes to benefit the communal being’.

Open wide?

Our toothaches in sync and the sky gone down, its scroll won’t work. Clouds clot rain in our gums, I feel sorry for them.

What do I owe you?

Haven’t eaten anything crunchy and good for several weeks, I’ve lost count, there was that pizza at Little Italy that was the last good thing, dripping with goats cheese and artichokes. Formlessness. A gnarly tooth set back in your mouth, meaning something then the lack of it. We drank whisky where the doorman made me empty my huge bag and explain what Marxism was. I let alcohol numb my jaw and stumbled, I was upstairs, sleep weeping in lieu of sleep in a bed, in a travel lodge imagining myself like Sean said to be a larva in a honey colony.

Growing especially acquainted with mush again, less wisdom, I develop fresh desires for attachment. I’m baby for a while, wanting. Scrambled egg, porridge, cherry kefir, refried beans, applesauce, marmalade for no reason, chocolate ice cream, melted cheese, lentil soup, sweet potato, oat milk. Mush has sentience. In your mouth you have its true formlessness and you become one with it. Literally the last few days I’m scrambled, soupy, result of melt. I wanted to be licked thoroughly to nothingness, just this sweetness at the back of your throat.

Jealous of hard edges, hipbones, infrastructure.

Happy Cunny October.

Dentist with claws in my dreams, dentist with dog food in a bowl for me, dentist with a very tall pylon, dentist with a sabre the length of god.

Spider in my shower, spider tattooing itself to my nail, spider has form. Style. Spider in each of my eyes.

Redistribute anything of meat that remains. Bataille wrote of eruptions, necessary expenditures, ‘laceration’. No more content.

You must let the blood clot. No coffee for five days. 

Poetics of mush: reduce itself down, a sauce made with the juices released from thought. Tasty essences and tastelessness itself. V Covidian feeling: the only taste is mould, garlic, capers. Salting my kale. You said something.

It hurts to smile! 


~

Bataille, Georges, 1985. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. by Allan Stoekl, trans. by Allan Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

Upcoming events

Some of the lineups for these are tbc or you can follow the links for more info 🙂

Cherry Nightshade

A new pamphlet written in the ardent chaos of this spring, commissioned and published by Owen Fortunato Brakspear of slub press.

🥀

In the night, there is a garden. 
It is night, which overfloweth. 
Strange vines begin girdling the old lamp posts and the wrought iron fences, intertwining with ivy, with passion flower, and the nodding hellebore. This irenic incandescence overcomes the cinerescent, and the wee small hours become you in the hypnagogic glow of the only childhood left to you. Dreams of That which is still possible… 
there you stand, so much smaller now, beneath the Cherry Nightshade……..

🍒 🌚 

£8

Riso-printed by Earthbound Press on A5

53pp.

To order, click here.

fall vibe ’22

  • e-bikes 
  • insomnia 
  • auto belay 
  • protein oat flapjacks
  • oversized trainers
  • ragged cuticles 
  • kohl in general
  • murmurations
  • secret stick n pokes
  • the silver foil inside crisp packets
  • smell of shoe polish 
  • (sandy) alex g
  • high quality coloured pencils 
  • carbon stains on off-white garments
  • challah bread
  • lentil soup
  • excessive misspellings 
  • dissociative weeping
  • falling asleep with the light on
  • freshly-cut keys
  • corduroy
  • bath swoons with epsom salts 
  • the prose of Fanny Howe 
  • feldspar
  • lectures
  • one-off marlboro window smoke
  • ambiently watching sport 
  • whisky and soda 
  • The Commons
  • charismatic porcini
  • bleeding mascara
  • the movie 
  • vapours
  • horrible black tights 
  • cognitive aporia
  • barry m dazzle dust worn as highlighter
  • waiting lists 
  • cosy zoom 
  • forehead kisses
  • epistolary delays 
  • orange 
  • missed calls 
  • odyssey walks home
  • thigh highs
  • sonnets 
  • mortal dysphorias 
  • wet leather 
  • butterfly heart rate