On the 11th of June, 1993, I was born with an extra digit, an eleventh finger. I am told it was a finger, so goes my parents’ mythology, but probably there is some anatomical word which better explains the strange appendage attached to my left pinkie. Resembling a kind of lollipop, a glass candy, my eleventh finger was a long thin vessel of muscle or blood (what I cannot know or ask of that fact) attached to a kind of crimson orb, like a cherry. It wasn’t really a finger at all, but the unfinished potential of what might’ve been one, a mutation. This was accompanied by a strawberry-shaped birthmark on my inner left wrist which, my dad assured me, would fade as I grew older. The cherry finger was lopped off on the day of my birth, and the blood splattered the doctor’s coat, bright red upon starch white. Soon after, I nearly died. A lightning storm raged through the morning. I was placed in an incubator, I had some kind of viral infection. They furnished me with the supplementary khora, until I grew blonde and better. So the story goes, and already I have probably messed up the order.
But I want to say something of the number eleven. Eleven feels like a residue, an extra. The loss of this finger, which I do not write with and yet slyly it makes itself present as absence, constitutes a kind of originary erasure. Years pass in which I forget this secret was mine at all. Eleven, perhaps, is a statement of entropy, a chaos spilling over our familiar limits and even regressing or falling in loops. However we parcel our intake/outtake, our sense of personal energy. I test out images of eleven, of extra. In Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, the protagonist wants to claim his free coffee, the remainder, so badly that he buys ten cappuccinos just to get the loyalty card stamped, just to claim the free one, the eleventh beyond the card. A strange caffeination that remains incomplete, to come. Then there’s Eleven from Stranger Things as a kind of genetic extra; the number identifies her as a test subject. The number becomes name. That phrase, turn it up to eleven, when really the system stops at ten. Why is it we make wishes on 11:11, when did I start doing that? The wish constituted itself as extra. Over time, I find myself ‘catching’ this time more and more, glancing at the clock of my laptop when it just happens to be 11:11. And the wishes pile up at the forefront of thought, they take a while to resume as memory. When I am sad, I visit the Kelvingrove fountain. There is water and clarity, the hum of other people’s wishes. Sometimes this is better than poetry, it’s simply potential.
I knew someone who named themselves after the sky in Super Mario (with Ayrshire inflection) long before either of us had even heard of Cory Arcangel. We were born on the exact same day, same year, and we called ourselves twins. It took eleven years of our lives to find each other. Speaking to this person, I felt always this chiasmus of consciousnesses, a sense of keeping up, or ongoingness.[1] They were super beautiful with luminous curls and sports jackets. Their nights were spent up with consoles and synthesisers, and we messaged each other until our windows crashed, or our parents needed to use the phone. I will not quash the romance of the dialup connection, for it was real, the frisson of interruption. The sense of a moving into, the attunement that performed itself in the temporal interlude of a radio whistle, blow of white noise that had its sonic continuum, warping and twisting as though all these howls in the wires were coming to life, and we would sing through the modem our deepest thoughts. You would teach me a riff. We were each messaging the others at once. There would come a point where everything was just text in the end, the fragile reminder of each bodily fragility.
You wrote in cyan-coloured Comic Sans, before this was ironical.
Half of my brain wants a masculine state; the other half a quiet, feminine comedown. What is it to speak or sleep gender. I’d sip cider in the wee hours after the party, but nothing fragmentary said then was as good as it was on the computer. It was like coming to life, discovering what had not yet been told of a love or a taste. I suddenly felt affectionate towards everything, and the aesthetics of a particular website, the trajectory of a song, could startle me into tears. Everything grew fizzy and sugary; it was all too much. What we were supposed to say to each other. I was learning to apply eyeliner, clip bras and shed weight like a grownup. The environment was a diagram we drew at school, a set of names we recited while dipping for critters in rockpools, freezing our brains on polluted beaches. A joke that was told to the air before we could return to our games.
***
I never learned the word for what happened at my birth, what grew on me, this residue fruit. After a while, it broke away, the fact of it which was a specialness. I was losing that specialness the more I learned language. There was a solvent process of being okay with a long red line that meant mine or anybody else’s ‘I’. (/) A length of energy, a vessel snipped close to the richness. We invent names for ourselves on the internet.
Something constant was the minor chord shard in my heart, when I knew there was a thing awry. I could not put my finger on it, much as I could not remember what I wanted to do with my life, or what passion that had driven me to write as a child. For I had filled documents and jotters with my rambles before. What happened, if you can forgive me for inserting a narrative turn here, was a loss of story. Post-puberty, it seemed there could be no climax in my life. Events I had expected to effect a shock into existence had not occurred so; a long hard drag had occurred instead, slow enough to trick you into passive submission. Resistance became a case of daily withdrawal, decay. It seemed there was nothing to write into, now I understood the mysteries of sex, reproduction, death. I had written these epic fates about unwanted births, woman impregnated against their will in labs buried deep in violet mountains. I had a horror of the body inside the body, which was the same as the body inside the planet or the planet inside you. What grows, regardless.
There was a fragile voice I was waiting to hear on the radio. I had not yet worked out the temporal trick that was poetry, the way it could stop you on the blot of a page, by fact of its shape. What grew charged or tangled. I became interested in the way the body was just a body, something to be seen, something to offer up to bodies beyond you. I wanted to know its limits, its multiplicities, as much as its points of attunement. Like plugging in headphones to the library PC just so I can hear the electrical charge of each scroll as a sonic intensity. There was a time of mark-making, rigging lighters, taking steaming baths. Staring at other people’s ceilings. I practiced lying on concrete, feeling the dark cold of summer’s inversion travel up from my spine. I listened to music so loud that stars began splintering inside my ears, and so I would have tinnitus forever more. I burned my tongue on a minor chord.
And so the same sound would scream back, muted lagoon trapped in my ear a decade later, the splitting sextillion stars of that music. The melody itself was irrelevant. I was drawn to songs where you could fall between verse and chorus, and the space of that slack guitar was far more important, the way a man’s voice could break on a word. For some reason, then, it was always men.
What does it mean to be taught how to feel by the opposite sex? Things tilted and sweetened the weaker I grew. We held hands in west coast impressions of sunset. The word for weather was like whether to say I’m going offline. The fort-da pull of your endless sign-ins. r u okay?
Jean-Luc Nancy: ‘A corpus is not a discourse, and it is not a narrative. A corpus is what is needed [qu’il faudrait] here, then. Here—there is something like a promise that this has to deal with the body, that is going to deal with it—there, almost without waiting […] there is a sort of promise tacitly to hush’.
Thus the body is clearer in machinic absence. Thus this vast proliferation of forgettable text was the logic we gorged on, empty calorific haribo words. There was no vegetarian alternative, we were eating each other. I mean the sway of exchange, this sense to be dealt with. A hunger, sugar rush. I message you later. The pressure of reply, now we’re always online; transmission as love’s endless labour. Isn’t it exquisite just to hush, to disappear mid-conversation and relish the ellipsis for a future hour. In these small ways I was building a tentative next, but its openness was yet clouded by thought itself. I couldn’t think beyond three minutes, and that was depression.
***
I learned the deformity of my birth was a sign of witchcraft. I bought a bright pink book on the subject when I was very young, and tried to astral travel. I wanted to see things from above, but instead I found myself suffocated by their closeness. Children can smell sorrow, the weight of it dripping from adult expression; the way dogs pick up the mood of the house and embody it through quivering and whimpering. I burned incense and imagined an orb of lilac light spreading over my body, which became the mountain I buried my heroines in as a child writer, an amateur at fantasy. I slept with crystals under my pillow (I still do).
The wrongness of the world was everywhere. The way people spoke to each other. I could not connect. I leapt into situations where voices were just echoes back into the water they came from, where sentences shored up nothing more than the vice of their speaker. I began a long affair with silence. I stopped writing, and later I stopped speaking. For weeks at a time, I would lose my voice. It broke on the shore. I smoked little menthols in wind tunnels, listening to reality talk shit back to me. I was broken inside before I began; that was the feeling. Long walks could not smoulder it off, and the only calm I achieved was from the absolute lack of understanding I experienced in math. Not knowing was a clarity, one I still crave in the space of writing. The absolute sentence as a violence that closes all others.
Later, much later, I would discover this glitch was a crisis far beyond me, a crisis of climate, a crisis of world itself: so huge my child’s mind could hardly have discovered it. And yet, having said that, I was already halfway there. Halfway towards ecocide. As a child, I swore to my mother I would leave the planet on my fifteenth birthday. She almost believed me. Mars beckoned, with its fiery red swirls and its secret knowledge of an evil beyond. I liked the way the name felt ‘full’ in my mouth. When nothing happened, I drank myself into amnesia; I stopped eating. It was a birthday gift to myself, the hope that I might still disappear.
Hungover, I know there will be a point where I go and that is to die. The blank is like a name you forget at the point of recall. It is so much worse than that, as if we’d forgotten our own name and the name of our mothers and the E____ itself. And what it means to see the back of the tapestry and a trypophobic horror where every unloosened stitch, a tiny blank, is the signal of multiple (un)ending worlds. Consider the strawberry seen from inside, with its millioning glowing yellow seeds of light. My wrists replaced originary marks with marks.
There was so much to learn about what was happening. I needed to know what would be okay. It was just this whole impossibility of thinking the future. The word ‘career’ was hilarious. It made me think of falling through time, Scrabble letters tossed into void at light speed. That was the language I wanted, letters at light speed.
***
Silver foil, the metallic smell on your fingers from playing guitar. The way I could play through brass and acquire an instrumental breath, vibrations that slid out of tune because I had damaged my ears too much to listen.
As promised, the strawberry birthmark faded. It was like somebody had slowly quietened the white noise, so slowly that I could not be sure if what I heard was truth or hallucination. The distinction mattered less over time.
Dream where I can’t sleep, so I wake up to watch Super Mario Clouds on YouTube, so I relive the level without level.
Sometimes I feel twinges of pain in the bump where my finger was. This phantom sensation is strange because I have no working memory of the limb itself, if it can be called a limb. The-cherry-nothing-more-than-a-supplement. Wikipedia tells me that the pain of phantom limbs can be aggravated by ‘stress, anxiety and weather changes’. The supplementary limb, then, its existence as a constant play between presence and absence (I had the limb, and yet no memory of its function; the limb was extra and yet in having it removed I felt less than a ‘normal’ person, I am less than I was and in sameness still more), acts as a site of super-attunement. When the temperature gets weird, the tingles start over. The pain is a drift of cirrus.
If you press very hard on the bump on my hand, I feel a sort of convex nerve pain, akin to the ache of pins and needles, concentrated in this single location. I wonder if this is what happens to a cherry when you slice it in half, when you make of the round fruit a sudden circumference. Something fell out, a long long time ago. The tiniest stone.
The world is wrong. There are only signals. Nothing has even really reached us yet. So why leave?
Wikipedia tells me one explanation for phantom limb pain is ‘the result of “junk” inputs from the peripheral nervous system’. There is an overhaul of arousal just to live now; somehow the waste of this activity is concentrated in this mark of removal. Can it be called a wound if it is not a gap or a hollow, but something in addition to the skin, a geologic feature: a kind of tiny crater, a half-sphere, a mound? I imagine a tangle of thread-like nerves coiled up inside. Nobody has noticed this bump of their own volition. To mention it to someone, I was born with an eleventh finger, is of course to commit an act of confession, a gesture of intimacy.
Like here, you can nearly have my birth back. A gift to the Earth in you.
Derrida: ‘The wound can have (should only have) just one proper name. I recognise that I love — you — by this: you leave in me a wound I do not want to replace’.
I died when I was born, literally; I was born wrong. But in being born this way, I had to love the world as a child of enchantment. I had to trick myself into existing. It would be an obscenity to look back at those pictures, tiny baby with this slight extremity, this tuning fork of flesh, so easily severed. Who knew anything of a redheaded future, a salad of spent conditionals and love. And I want you to be free.
***
So what do we do with this extra? Knowing too much of the world and what the self cannot say of the world in itself. Autoplay is paused for the meantime, by which I mean the time in which we are mean. I remember discovering cruelty in the playground, where a boy would go round and hit us with strong red branches he pulled from a shrub that grew with some abundance around our school. And realising the marks made on the back of our calves were really just marks of a pain this boy had felt; a pain inflicted upon him from elsewhere, so that cruelty was something you transferred, a kind of heraldic ink you wore for your life, for your family. I would not explain these marks to my mother, or to myself, for years. My early experience of inflicting cruelty: throwing Chao against the wall, only to nurse them back into serenity later. Teasing the dog, watching a friend knock his head off a wall, deliberately fucking things up. Then the delirious pleasure: to throw one’s avatar off into starry void, a final sacrificial act. In Sonic Adventure 2 Battle, a game to which I dedicated many hours of pre-adolescent life, the villain Dr Robotnik has programmed his space colony, ARK,[2] to collide with Earth if the chaos emeralds are used. Such annihilation intends vengeance on ‘the government’ for condemning the doctor’s research and killing his daughter, Maria. Her request to Shadow, Sonic the Hedgehog’s Jungian double, is to help mankind. When Shadow plummets back to Earth, following the ultimate battle, ‘the Finalhazard’, he is happy, because he has fulfilled his promise to Maria.
Admittedly, this cosmological battle of heroes is little more than parenthesis here. I want to say something of my entrance into this discourse of annihilation. Shadow was a supplement: Sonic’s ‘double’, but also his genetic extra, his genetic remainder; both hero and villain, his narrative volition was ultimately self-sacrifice to save the world, and yet he was created to conquer the world. He embodies the eerie promise of a kind of living apocalypse, an ‘end’ to the world that does not end. I remember the final book of Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series, whose blurb used the word cataclysm, or cataclysmic, to describe the events that closed the trilogy. That word lived on in me as a wound, cataclysm: something sharp that had already cut me. It was a word I could not unthink. What actually happened in the book was terrible, was a battle, it involved the loss of life; and yet there was redemption. I knew then that cataclysm was not necessarily apocalypse, because one world of fantasy could open into the new, like a modified species. There were chain reactions.
But all this is just average Earth. Learning to like the light, to paint a thought with the similar blue, knowing it only exists in dreams, and the way she holds a note.
***
These days, everything mostly feels like transing times. I listen to a Jason Molina recording and realise that he is gone, he is missing from the world, and yet the warmth of his fingers, these arpeggios; the sound of sirens passing through the windows of his Chicago apartment. These are present but I discover them only after absence. I have to realise this over and over, to register the shock of this or that loss. I close one tab, only to open another window onto extinction: this fact of a text we can’t share, because the text is ourselves, and we have shared unto each other enough of the missing space. And someone else I once loved dies. Data is what’s given, it clots into so much hurt. We just are confusion, the two of us and the planet and what’s opening up.
Everything swells; a cherry-red globe recurs in memory. I drift on a lifelong melancholia that isn’t quite mine. I want to be able to parse this bodily symbology as a something beyond me, of course; I want to look outwards at the felt inequality. So many wounds between us. The word continent crunched sour in my mouth. These histories we can’t unpeel or remain in singular. I want to be able to understand the matheme, but there is a wilderness still. The breath won’t catch up. Scared I’ll fall off the edge of my mind.
What we make difficult for ourselves, these fractures in fact or family. Always a guilt that sticks. It is as though we were speaking underwater, our altered tongues; what we could only bring together as lyric.
I had all these dreams of traffic, and the traffic could only move in the night. I was at the edge of a slip road, but I could not merge. Are we closer, now that you know this?
whatever in the world behind closed eyes the doors whispered. let her be. let her be her. let us be as if we were not forever entwined in that, as if we were not able to unthread the conclusions, deliver ourselves of the plot. at that level she intercedes for you. she cries mercy at the feet of her father. she knows where he is at the far corners of the universe. he has removed himself. he has gone off to sit and brood beyond the pale of light. if not that then this. but we had opened it. the knife that cuts both ways. always. in the centre of it the rose. pure. the flaming heart, an artifact. believe me. this is not a special dispensation. this is a matter of life and death.
(Beverly Dahlen, A Reading)
And why did they give me the middling name of the Rose? There was a world tucked in and still to unfurl, and the rose was a planet with cloud tucked into its darkest heart. Let her be here. That time I set my hair on fire and everything of the world smelt singed for weeks. It happened at the funeral. She was at the mercy of a childhood memory, curled at the window as they came in the night to tip the car. And she remembers the way the oil ran down the road as rainbows. The sound of her parents on the phone and a knife that cut the silence of Sunday. It was a thick gelatine; the boiled fruitmeat of calorific lyric. The cut in the world behind closed doors, closed eyes, the lids we can’t keep on our possible futures. So we swim through; no, it gets stuck in our teeth. How can it be a matter of both?
Crank the anthropocene up to eleven. I wish we had been sweeter to each other. Like listening to the bees without meaning to. We’ll never know why we are born the way we are born, or whether that matters. And I’m pushing sleep for the pleasure of that stretch of the break: when you say the break of the sky and is it a pink cloud I see, or just blue. The 8-bit troposphere catching nightly. Facebook is blue because Mark Zuckerberg is colourblind. There is the overlay, the twice-lived light of the screen and the sky beyond, which is also contained in a window. At no point do I choose to go outside, as it were; for this is the happening of a necessary containment. I need to be able to switch between tabs, my brain still reeling. There is always extra, the bit we missed and have to pursue.
If I saw you again, and we were the same as we were.
Excoriations of time are like Facebook disavowal; don’t click, don’t react. They rub off on our skin as however many times we surrendered our diaries, only to take them again in our arms, cradling tiny diacritics. The first broadband was the rupture of a secret, something breaking out widescreen and hurting.
Narcissism: this essay. A name comes out the sky(e), its extra e for the isle, for extinction. The Earth is active now, this state of evil, eleven, never even.
We should be kinder to each other, said the tree to the thing that would grind it to pulp. When Justine eats the meatloaf and it turns to ash in her mouth. And you know that all this extraness, extremeness of death is from the other planet that is our planet. Just is. I put a bar through Mars, I pierced its fat red eye with the proto-knowledge of Earth’s erasure. That was my great stupid rebellion. It felt like a dreamwork of futile justice.
The fact is only an identity, a pristine midnight. Land lines of countryside glimpsed in the feed, I know the moon only this way until I leave the library. So sigh, milk silver of gaze. Instinctive descent occurs in dark mode, and we play it over, scrolling and scrolling. The hours between. For all I remember of that night, there is only the simple avocado emoji, and a thank you. You’ve been more than a friend to me.
***
What do we call for?
It’s like the first time I saw Jane Campion’s Bright Star and thought of something shimmering in the woods, that would not come as powder or song but simply as itself. And yet even that was split. Cancer moon/Pisces rising. I could sense it, and the morning hurt, and the continuum of pain whose fidelity remained still into the half planet smudged on the edge of my hand. The Earth is a cherry that lost its innocent self. You would interrupt our greeting in honour of the end of the album. That was the tempo we stretched for ourselves, syncopating sleep with the lights adorning our names with time’s ongoingness; eleven hours at the end of the wish again, after we stayed up past the chorus of dawn. And the world was shimmering in the woods. Our cut had barely interrupted the story.
- And ongoingness is, as Tim Morton puts it, the temporality of melancholy in the anthropocene, this sense that ‘nothing is determined yet’. This sense that we are not looking towards apocalypse but rather trying to be here, knowing this ‘here’ is not ours or fixed but is a viscous spreading of multiple subjectivities, bodies and times. Ongoingness is to look for pleasure as well as pain, to not look towards loss as imminent or behind us, but rather to appreciate the uncanniness of reality. So this person’s consciousness became for a while another half of my own, their thoughts would echo and remain in me, beyond pathology, warping from something raw and ‘live’ to a gentler articulation of being here, being-with. The enviro-mind, formerly-known-as…
- Incidentally, the Ark was a youth club I’d frequent as a teenager, beside the sea. The site of many formative drinking experience, it was surrounded by dunes of lawn and behind those dunes I’d learn my first versions of drowning.
mariaology 