saturday early october_after nina power

all over the place messy writing messy thinking media things lecture audio
needs care alone proximity

Some date in early October, Saturday


being without use of my right hand isn’t horrible but id like to cut off the hospital band on my left hand and i can’t. my hand hurts where it is ripped open with the blue stitches that seem too sloppy and big and make it look like its pretend. i am making up a funny type habit now but its still slow and hard and painful and strange. please excuse the lack of cases or typos and spaces.

it is interesting to be handicapped-lite here in the netherlands because generally they are on the far end of the service spectrum, in the negatives end. by now i know this is not an actually negative as in bad and if you ask specifically people will typically help you in that exact way, no further and no less. the best explanation of this literal-orientation i have yet encountered is in Rebecca West’s novel, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, where she describes the reaction of her Slav friend, Gregorievitch, to two situations - i will record the passage here because it is lovely in its full context (68-69):

If you don’t care to listen, the main point West surmises is that “Gregorievitch… cannot see that the factual elements in an experience combine into more than themselves.” she describes that as a lack of imagination. 1

the different kinds of imagination are curious to me. wit is a form i am so incredibly fond of and i quickly love those i encounter who share theirs freely. my mother is a delight for her wit and puns and stories. somehow her ability is signified in the big dark hair she had when i was little. curls i would dig my fingers into when we would fall asleep after reading to keep her from being able to leave the bed when i would fell asleep.

i have been working on writing my video series about girls communicating across spaces and times. for one proposal it was to be in the form of a dramatic narrative, but details take me captive. my dad has asked more than a few times if I’ve ever taken a storytelling course, that i should because i talk too much and write too much and i can’t expect people to listen and read that much. this used to be infuriating to me because i am not interested in selfimprovement for my personal success in career-effectiveness(or is this my idealised self?) by simplifying, flattening, my thought and its communication which is intrinsically marked by its formation and the movement from formation to expression. this is the same to me as toulouse’s lines. the texture of the life of the thing. West’s book, giant and slow and embedded, russian doll-esque tangents that are completely relevant, has no apologies in sight. hurrah!

despite my storytelling difficulties, i have some visions of my story and scenes and its world. i remember the night it came to me and i called phoebe in exclamation, quite buzzy in the apartment alone, attempting to break from times of high anxiety.

i can imagine the set, the desires, the rooms. i cannot imagine the stories. phoebe asked me, what happens. what happens indeed. I’ve thought since during the not unexpected yet fully uncomfortable speedinghead wetbody similarly seeded bouts of anxiety 02.00-04.30 Notemaking Primetime that, if the series is for learning, why not focus on characters built from things observed that have been most meaningful or impressionable in people and places. maybe the story is based on these effects.

but, as I’ve learned in the 1st class of my online learning course for plot making, a character must have a want, and a weakness, and the weakness needs to be more interesting that the character’s strengths. when I’ve sat down and written my attempt at the 250word first assignment, I’ve failed quite miserably, getting lost in pop personality analysis (like, someones strength is the same as their weakness) and worlding-descriptions.

i pass by children’s schools and see the glued colored paper together making images of daily objects in the windows. i remember the last time i played with you. we were both anxious and i dropped to the floor crawling to the dark kitchen darting between furniture to get to the electric kettle for the pfeffermint tea. i made you whisper with me to hide from them.

schnitzel palace.


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last night Nina Power gave a lecture at the Sandberg, a longer version of her talk from Sonic Acts in February which i enjoyed then too. decapitalism. the talk was lovely and smart and fast and i felt very at ease and cozy settled in in her image and word analyses.

at a point now that without a doubt i cannot not read things, which some people see as negativity, stopping the joy in things...i don’t know Nina Power but having an hour of sociopolitical close reading IRL feels like a hug amidst the ‘badness’ pinned onto making and reading objects regularly and hard. 2 ]

Power was expressing her interest in the mundane acts of care, which are oft devalued, hidden, when in fact they are most important for the maintenance of life. indeed though, and where adverts come shining in, are to make the maintenance of life in support of the glory of living. tooth brushes look like cool sneakers, tools for hairless bodies for sexysex. an old roommate had the most amazing body wash once, something like key lime pie pillow mornings for waking up your best self… i only ever saw the container half to nearly empty with the chubby plastic a bit jammed in. like its gooey fluoro green was born as a prop and not found on a shelf after truck shipments and factory making and design agency with research focus and advert strategy meetings and target and secondary audiences determined from crossset data analysis and pitched to reckitt benckiser for the inspo spring bodywash line.

of course what is desired to be made glorious varies in culture, history, place and on so. maintenance of life though is also the perpetual reminder that we are finite bodies. And, the specific conditions of our finite lives.

in adoring them as making them socialized bodies rather than dying bodies - is one way to capitalize on our condition - and particularly so when the maintenance of the finite body in the superglobal era is most distanced from community in support of its perpetuation.

the selfie is the self-care object showcasing to its audience (even of an intimate audience of 1) it is, and performs, its referent’s sustenance.


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i can’t cut the hospital band off my wrist, which is eventually necessary for aesthetic social norms and possibly sanitary reasons. i am reminded i do not have a loved one near enough to me to offer or for me to ask - i have people around like roommates and coworkers but i have to make a point to remember to ask them for their help, further reinforcing socially my limitations in self-care. i have friends who message but messaging back hurts because my hand hurts and i want the phone call. and i want the physical proximity.

in a haphazard moment some months ago i shared a space for two days with an acquaintance. there came a time when i was not capable of doing multiple mundane errand-tasks due to timeframes and my physical condition. the acquaintance asked if they could take care of them for me. i was shocked and touched. i had already accepted the tasks would go undone, especially as they were not critical tasks in any way shape or form. the moment of offer was at the end of our meeting and i didn't align an ulterior motive (conscious or unconscious). i also had not deciphered stewardship as a particular part of their orientation in the world. i accepted the offer and i was even more surprised when the tasks were taken care of without exhaustive, or nearly any, explanation.

volunteered support of tasky minutia is not a regular encounter, especially in sites of shallow relations. awareness or attentiveness to others moves is involved, and a worth - of familiarity? the kind of things that are relevant or to be seen when spaces and days are common or in proximity if not spatial or temporal or of common type, or previously these things, and there is willing attention to the others moves. investment in minutia, as different than the orchestration of order and well being.

considering the structures of hyperwork and living independently it is not common practice in my world (Living Independently in a Globalized World, one book stacked below How to get a PhD: a handbook?*) the gift of support and the willingness to accept, i shout with ferver: not blasé!

i wonder, am i just looking for someone to be my parent? no, i think i am truly an ideal neoliberal subject dripping for proximity based giving and receiving in my transient digital terrain.

complications and irony of the effects of yearning for this proximity-exchange surfaced this week when I needed to go to the hospital. this was only was determined as a necessity through two WhatsApp conversations with friends in different cities who I see every few months and every few years…) 3

i had asked my two newish coworkers to have drinks that night but then i ended up accepting i needed to go to the hospital. one of the coworkers who i have spent more time with in the office offered to come with me. i wanted her/them to come with me very badly. i declined a few times, and she accepted my decline. i was holding back tears 4 . i knew i would also push quite intensely if it was someone else in my situation that i would come with them.i would have bought a bottle of wine for us on the way there and tried to make jokes which I’m very bad at or tell stories that aren’t really stories but descriptions. 5 she even offered again later to come be with me and let me stay with her. that is exactly what i wanted and it is sad to me that it is so difficult to let that into my life when it is what i need and yearn for and moan about on here.

bitmoji sublimation.

i am tender and i can’t get to it, i seem to prefer to press the bruise over and over again. yes the blue comes back still.

is it the potential awkwardness or responsibilityfor another behind this? to be affected by?

here yes I am thinking of a text i started reading Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude by Adriana Cavarero.
inclining towards another-s. bending. willingly moving away from a singular,self balance. and, how this is different than an exchange, where the body remains pulled back and straightened armor, and a hand gestures angularly forward.

community of care.


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In extremities of life, change, pain, the material reality that the mundane maintains cannot be avoided or disregarded or hidden or not felt or not seen. The mundane becomes a gift. and disregard of the mundane is an indicator of the present of extremities, and used as a reason to mark this body as undeserving of the mundane and pushing the body into not extremity but ideally invisibility, and on the in between, an illegitimate mass between body and death.


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an article that was shared with me yesterday, Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London by Ruth Livesey, about the deserving and undeserving, based on house inspections comes to mind. quite a lot to with mundane care - what permits practices of care to be worthy of being supported to be actually adequate to a society with one acceptable concept of it and when are material and practice significations of home and hygeine indicate instead lives not worthy of being fundamentally supported or cared for.

the one type that was considered acceptable “…middle-class women visitors in this period frequently misread the survival strategies of the urban poor in their belief that bourgeois domestic arrangements were the only correct standard of home management” 55 Livesy - the making narratives of private spaces, in determining the capability of the people [or sub people] are at hand.

“Every object had its meaning, and some suggested a character so far fragmented that the C.O.S.[Charity Organisation Society] had no role to play. 55” fragmentations were construed as “failures of will and habit,” - the failures are not considered flexibilities of conditions, and or, more pressingly simply issues of capability - in extremities of conditions of course, one is not capable of maintenance of the mundane in idyllic ways.

‘Private property, argued Bernard Bosanquet was ‘the unity of life in its external or material form’: the tangible ‘expression corresponding to a moral self’. What one owned was ‘the result of past dealing with the material world, and the possibility of future dealing with it’.55

captures of property, whether private or the private in public, as the tangible expression of the self has been captured in art..and news.., digressing from reference to the moral self, before and after victorian destitute -

in the article, the home was therefore imagined to lay out the possibility for an internal stock-taking in this vision of a world where choice and purchase was shaped by ideal ethics rather than class impoverishment. After carrying out a home visit, caseworkers thus pieced together a narrative of moral character, deservingness and ‘helpability’ from the scattered objects of the life of the poor: pawn tickets, clothes, crockery, jugs of beer, bread and ‘scrape’, closed windows and crippled children.’ 55

spittling in now as determining trails are the inevitably technocapital exchanges, information trails turned narratives by (world)-shaping platforms, continue the cases of class, and conditions concerning the maintenance of life and its worthiness.

to not fall into this trap [necropolitics],or appear to not fall into this trap to ourselves, some, are presented with classes of exchanges in which affirmation is felt that we are participating.
a legitimate body whose mundane is worthy of personalised support and capital veneer, the harder and faster we rub in the desertland it does not become softlush. in our overwork and images of messages and notifications and selfmicromanaging in clockingin another task and desire and deliverable exchange through the devices of self and facade of continuity is an affirmation that i am needed, i am important, i am real, i am here, i am not alone. iterations proxy for life sustenance.

needing maintenance with a value not further than material/psychological requirements to keep moving does not legitimize being.

the former exchanges as sensation of life presence, as gcal as life organizing as a form of assistance-sustenance, life affirmation-is the act of slow death through stress and anxiety with care completely removed, - practice of self-support to be functioning enough as an engaged, working body, worthy of social presence. management of life, slow inductions of stress as life affirmation. the opposite of life-sustenance].


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with love,
constant companion.

🝏