mMouth hHouse pPanic cCathedral

So much has happened.

Nothing has happened.

I am busy staying alive in inhospitable times.
‍

‍
‍Hospitable. Host. Hostile. Hostage.

The “majesty and murderous stupidity” of structured space-
time—Chronos—a time that is linear, progressive,
economised—is not a home, not a refuge, not safe—is a
prison for the non-normative, barbed by intersecting, often
unsurvivable conditions.‍


Time has stopped. There is no time. There is only times—entangled, warped, thick.  

There is a hectic gasp between instants, I am suffocating in the web of timespacemattering. The past and the future have collapsed into the present, undifferentiated.

Each aeon breaks under the tongue as I travel towards death, tongue clacking uselessly.

‍
‍
Panic aion lets us peek into a timescape that is fluid and
travels in many different directions simultaneously. We find
this under the earth, and deep in geological formations.
‍Panic attacks function as a queer technology of temporal
disruption. They introduce chronological discontinuity,
rupturing the illusion of a stable, integral present where
moment follows moment follows moment. Where boot
follows boot follows boot. Magdalena Górska writes that
panic is a temporal disorder and panic attacks are
“powerful temporal moments … and powerful temporal
durations—that break normative worlds apart in their
captivating, exploding and immobilizing, failing, exhausting
and reconfiguring dynamics.”
‍
Panic enacts a necessary violence on normative time—a
queer refusal of temporality-as-discipline. It embraces
failure and resistance, creating the conditions for
something else: a breathable, liveable time that is spacious
and messy and elastic. This temporal refusal registers first
in the body, before it can be named.

‍THIS ESCAPE FROM THE PRISON OF TIME IS NOT WITHOUT PAIN

This is a quantum violence—not just psychological, but
ontological—disrupting the very falsehood of time, space,
and matter as siloed, stable concepts. Panic rends the
fabric of normative space, time and matter, revealing
instead their enmeshment as spacetimematter, revealing
their instability, their potential for reconfiguration.


The BUSYNESS of staying alive looks like NOTHING.
The body not moving, the mouth not moving.
Hands: still
Legs: still.


The eye can’t perceive EVERYTHING. The primacy of the
ocular is blind to the energy of affect. The chaotic lines of
flight that characterise affect are imperceptible. The eye
focuses, its aperture opening and closing as it focuses on
the near and the far, recognising, identifying, categorising.
The eye orders a body into a visually comprehensible unit.
The eye CANNOT see the body in panic, as the panicked
subject exceeds visible boundaries. The eye cannot see
dissolution, cannot see the face melting, electricity sparking
from the fingertips, the belly shuddering, the head floating
away, the jaw opening so wide that it cracks.


‍It looks like sitting on the edge of the (death)bed with the head bowed refusing the sun or looking out into the orb—being swallowed by the sun.

I am waiting for something like a spirit or like a g/host to pass through me, for I am a vessel ripe for possession or emptying. Or both.  

Maybe I am the g/host? Always already dead.

But the something never passes. It circles and doubles back

It comes in through my back and out through my mouth without pause. Again and again.

it enters like a blow and exits like smoke, but the body—still still

The nauseating eternal return—a queered temporality.

When the body is on the edge of the (death)bed, there are often tears, choking sobs, snot hanging in strings

I note the irony of weeping, sobbing: “I just want to be normal” when normal is what poisoned me in the first place.

Purpose, productivity, value and worth make me sick.

Being a productive entity has broken me. I am out of order. Or rather, being a non-productive entity has made me feel worthless. This is a sickness I caught from the system.


This sickness is a corpo-affective technology for revealing
the world as it is, not as it seems. My body is the vehicle
that has been pained and panicked, and this shapes the
way this body sees and produces knowledge. The affective
state of exiting productivity shapes a social and political
body.


Mind you, it’s not a sickness I believe in, and yet, here I am, participating in the “numbing and ceaseless production of the same”


Sartre uses the term “seriality” to refer to what he identified
as “the field of our servitude”. The routine hum of life which
harbours powerlessness, loneliness and a bleak
inevitability. These daily activities which MEAN NOTHING.


This sickness might be due to drowning in the ambience of late capitalism’s normviolence, or it might be due to navigating a relentless affective surge unleashed by ongoing localised stings and bruises.
‍
These forces are entangled. They produce one another. They produce us.
‍
What will you do with your one wild and precious life?

I will spend it in “desperation and longing, debilitation and empowerment, immobility and activation"

WAITING at the threshold of death or perceptibility is what I do with my one wild and precious life.


TO AWAIT the passing of the present is a task that
requires the kind of stamina that is inconceivable. Waiting
on the "unvoiced and silent presence".of death, the
constant companion. The person-in-waiting, laid to waste.


‍WHILE WAITING

I detach my head, my legs, my arms. I put my throat in a vice and my breath in a vacuum.

Name 5 things
Smell 5 things
Touch 5 things

I open my mouth to speak myself into existence, but every word is a stone, dropped from a height and disappearing into the blackest black.

That lack of light is the centre of my being, full of noise, unheard


The mmouth that seeks to speak panic is caught between
the symbolic order and the expressive body. Discipline or
leakage. The mouth is a leaky house. Is the mouth a
home?

The home of the tongue, curled in its worm cave.

This worm-tongue is a stranger in my mouth, the
“unheimlich mouth”, struggling to find purchase, to form
shapes, to flow.

The mouth is not made for saying everything. Say a body? Say a body with the mouth?????

Panic expels grammar and catches a wild line of vocal
flight that vibrates with each ragged exhalation, each
spike of excitation that leaps into the heartthroat. As I exit
“I”, subjectivity evacuated by extreme affect, I also exit the
house of language and enter a vocality in excess of
language.

Saliva floods the lake ridged by gum and teeth.

Into this swamp noise is born.

To find our way out of the dark,suffocating house of being
we need to fall into our animality⎯out of grammatisation
and towards the plenitude of speaking in community from
all bodies, from the stars to the rocks to the bees to the
meat and bones of the self.


The mouth can never purely articulate, from its swamp, from its worm-nest. From its growling burrow. It is a site of affective production—where language is felt, chewed, spat, swallowed before it is understood. It is the bridge where matter and meaning press against each other.

It is a threshold that cannot fully close. A place where what we try to contain returns.

And so the mouth becomes a kind of architecture—

not a house of language, but a cathedral of affect, resonant, echoing, impossible to empty.
The first place where we learn to pray.
‍PLEASE! And HELP!

(the first and last words)

And the first place where we learn to panic.

The world is a doomscroll. Now moreso now than ever in my life before, though truth be told, I never needed the doomsday clock to be shifting closer to that final silent sound in order to feel doomed.

I was perpetually a second away.

AND THEN—THE BELL TOLLS FOR ME—AGAIN