Tag: impossibility

A Given Thing

and love doesn’t need to destroy you any more (Weyes Blood, ‘A Given Thing‘)

Our love – ‘For there to be a gift, there must be no reciprocity’ (Derrida, Given Time). To keep loving is the gift, smoke emitted from wormholes, arterial flow of words in their fuck supplement. Had I experienced the kind of crush economy that results in debt and ruinous loves that smudged off years of existence, I would be that smoke. When I realise so much what that love was, given to me, not even to have been noticed, that is the gift. Derrida states of the gift: it is ‘Not impossible but the impossible […] It announces itself, gives itself to be thought as the impossible’. When you are still in love with the love (afterglow) you remain in that trembling verb, having the state, quality, identity, nature, role etc of one in love, given the fact of your waking each day in dream to get worser and worser. I declare this a gift: love bleeds out of me. We were conducting lightning not making love.

sometimes we confuse the dream for one another
we’re just screaming to be closer to infinity
to love everlasting (Weyes Blood, ‘A Given Thing’)

The gift starts and never ends in time: ‘Not only does it make simultaneous what is irreconcilable—gift and exchange—but it occurs only within and according to the form of a preexisting gift: the gift of time itself. […] We are situated within time, we receive time’ (Marcel Hénaff).

That we end is only that our gift is impossible.

Our love is chronic, cupidity, personified time. Our kisses encourage temporal knowledges.

Recall the wormhole scene in Donnie Darko, which is not a wormhole so much as a ‘Liquid Spear Waltz’, theatrical cut of television, the family and the liquid come out of our chests and bellies. I love myself loving this movie. Would it not take you through to the place of conception into the wardrobe of the thought you’d never been here at all, not once, they hadn’t borne you into things, and the smoke that passes over you is not god, but an airplane. Can determinism accept the gift? If I was destined to give it until I am given time in return. Time is all you take from me. You’re spending too much time. I’m all out of time. That is not death but jet lag. Nausea and healing.

‘She can no longer take her time. She has none left, and yet she gives it’ (Derrida, Given Time).

Kiss / episteme / chronos.

Our love is impossible.

We’re all out of time. An earth signature.

We are no longer making it. When the water comes of chorus, the same thing again.

It was that we could never be solid in the first place. Before. We were liquid people poured into the vessel our love would otherwise vapourise, like a couplet. The gift is when you forget. I don’t know why I gave you this in the first place. Love’s amnesia forgets what you were before each other. Loving many people is our ruin. We’re not being love we’re forgetting to live. Literally it lives, this giving to forget we gave each other, and you and yours and our love forgotten is a hole on the other side of the world. It never was a heart-shaped wound in the sky. It was love. It would have been the same if never we made it.

Love satiates itself in the giving over of the word, more language, semantic ever-after: it is perfect when I forget that I love you.

The time leftover of perfect echoes.

The tiny glass statuette of a boy you are polishing.

Chamber music.

 ❥

Reading

Derrida, Jacques, Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press).

Hénaff, Marcel, 2019. ‘Derrida: The Gift, The Impossible, and the Exclusion of Reciprocity’, The Philosophers’ Gift: Reexamining Reciprocity (New York: Fordham), pp. 11-29.

Weyes Blood, 2022. And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow (Sub Pop)

Our Amazing Bed is the Future Garden: The Poetics of Dream Ecologies

This performance lecture takes flight from the shape of a question: what is the relationship between poetic language, sleep and dream in the anthropocene? Combining poetry, journaling and critical inquiry towards the ecologies of sleep, I will consider how dreams may be the site of impossibility, drift and low-carbon pleasure in a time of ’24/7′ where, in the words of Jonathan Crary, our ability to ‘daydream’ is blocked by a constant barrage of the internet’s attention economy, the demands of late capitalist labour and ongoing crisis. Taking this as a serious political disempowerment, I look to writers whose work alters the ‘operating speed’ of daily life to make room for dreaming otherwise. Exploring the formal interventions of writers within feminist, New York and Language schools, I focus on how these works tend the unruly future garden through daily reclamations of dreamtime. If many of us are at surge capacity, how might poetry attune to various kinds of ‘slow violence’ (Crary) which often go hidden in mainstream narratives of extinction and climate crisis? How might poets borrow from the logic, content and impulse of dream to offer alternative visions of coexistence, commoning, time and compassion for other species?

Recorded at the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Humanities Seminar Series, hosted by Charles Pigott and Hannah Proctor, 4th October 2023.

Hypercritique: A Sequence of Dreams for the Anthropocene

Pleased to announce a new journal article, ‘Hypercritique: A Sequence of Dreams for the Anthropocene’ is now published as part of Coils of the Serpent’s ISSUE 8 (2021): IM/POSSIBILITY: ON THE PRODUCTION, DISTRIBUTION, AND ARTICULATION OF THE POSSIBLE AND THE IMPOSSIBLE. With thanks to the editors.

You can read the full issue for free here.

What sort of coming belongs to a dream? Existing suspended, to come, now, is to place impossible faith in the possible: that passion for “something” which answers as closure, fulfilment, echo, return. The conditional tense, “to have given us to believe”, as though this were the very text we were each receiving. And I call you from dreams like the siren, and I am more of each line, the outwards spread which you circle to end, ellipsis, still typing, which you centre but do not settle. The anthropocene, this hypothetical epoch of the lived, the literal extinction, asks us (and could it) to see ourselves coming as pure expenditure, general economy, the discharge of species.1 And so I ate the lure and let me go.