ICYMI, Part IV - Page 3

I was standing on the edge of the golden triangle, 11th & Speer, thinking how iris' MS was the pure expression of duality in writing, how simple phrases like "I dont want to be your friend." contain multitudes: I want more, I want less. I DIDN'T WANT THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE, everyone's mistaken.  

FM: A recent article by Imi Lo in 'Psychology Today' addressed a series of studies/references that suggest people with a high IQ struggle more with overriding guilt. 

ia: "A small child does not understand that the adults around them are complicated, flawed people whose unhappiness has origins the child cannot see. Children instinctively feel responsible for the happiness of their parents and siblings, and live with an exaggerated feeling that their inner world can shape the outer world. If the people around them are sad, the child assumes it must be because of something they felt, thought, or did... (Ferenczi, 1913; Winnicott, 1965). 

The child grows up and learns how cause and effect actually work, but the feeling that their inner life is dangerous to the people they love may follow them for life." 

Furthermore she concludes that:

ia: "Perhaps some of the guilt you carry is an old signal from a much younger version of you, a gifted child who saw too much and was given too little help making sense of it. The voice that judges you absorbed its standards from caregivers who did not understand your wiring, and from a culture that had little room for your intensity. If you look beneath it, you may find that part of what you have been calling guilt is grief: for the distance between the world as it is and the world as your mind knows it should be, for the relationships that could not hold all of you."

In this particular poem, it seems there is stentorian evidence that perhaps these theories apply to the narrative:

i was so little when i first met my mom and dad 

i carried on me a morbidly small impossibly soft body i remember i had the hiccups i was in a night-lit wood deciduous and coniferous wedded by mycelium and lichen all pulled a together a song sung with a sharp purple damp each next step receded into darkness behind me but the light emitting from my eyes carried me inchmeal on

my inverted yelps between green smells the trunks of trees’ knotted scowling at low boughs reaching for my one tiny human body from the shadows’ shadows created of their own dark i quick come upon a its like a tie rail with a roof and walls like an open front outhouse just sitting there amid the grimacing barks the night’s golden drone and the unknown

the darkness of the forest where i met my mom and dad had a dark that was bigger than the moon i gave a long burp but the hiccups did not stop my little red heart was hammering into my toes and

i looked into the tie rail yelping and saw knew it was my dad in there sitting on a bench head of black hair dripping off a side part shirtless nipples pointing down like wet cigarettes translucent blue hands legs sunken and soft like all the water was drawn out of his body like he was made of rubber and his mouth tightly open eyes bagged darker than night darker than hate he looked at me but did not see me and i did not approach him

my mom was there next to my dad in the tie rail separated by a flimsy interstitial also sat up on a bench caving into her own deflated body knees and elbows first like she was being slowly sucked back into the oblivion from which we all hail through her gaping navel face pointed at the ground round i could not see anything about her other than that she was my mom she looked at me but she was not there i looked into my moms eyes and it was just me reflected back on the surface of them and i reached for her tried to climb up into her lap i wanted to say please mom mom please but i did not have language at that time i was too new

she let me struggle to be held i could get a hold on her arm and pull myself up with also my legs but the slight slope of her lap dumped me back on the ground every time and i tried a long time at it until i stopped

imagine the sound of your own head hitting the ground being one of the first things you can remember

ia: "this is at least cut from that cloth, yeah. I feel this piece tries to address the particular sensate and existential learning experience of coming into the world bearing only needs and the world (as known to the ‘morbidly small and soft’ person—through their caregivers) will not or cannot satisfy any of them; grief is definitely the tone here. Grief is another large-looming theme for me—recognizing it, naming it, in trying to sublimate or transubstantiate it into something, well, else.

Because of my particular injury and capacity for resilience it’s hard to visualize that the grief changes or into what it would."

Do you consider your sound work in the same vein as perhaps cantos written for the new proletariat?

ia: "The sound work, I’m referring to as time-based poems, are meant to expose or illuminate a part of my process that isn’t normally available for the reader and to expand the reader’s idea of how poetry is formed, transmitted, and received—those are my overt goals there. 

In the sense that anyone who comes in contact with the work is my comrade in the class struggle, I could agree; in the sense that the non-owning class always endeavors to make safe and sacred a ‘space’ in which we can sublimate/celebrate/transmute/transmogrify the essence of being alive and so, let’s say, beset—I could agree…yeah. In the sense that the boundary-pushing I’m doing is more or less party to my rejection or externalization of the bourgeois value system, yeah. 

I am not, though, trying to figure out how to bring my philosophical praxis into ‘the work,’ per se."

Famous comedian Edie Pepitone was quoted as saying: 

"The only things stopping me today are: genetics, lack of will, income, brain chemistry and external events."

You speak of your drive for direct action and finding your niche. This MS certainly feels like an extension of that, specifically citing the following: 

what the pigs don’t like is to be called pigs right to their faces sure there’s lots of ways to call a pig a pig without using the word pig yeah it depends on how much effort you want to put into it alright and how much time you have solid porous golden hot on your whatever you have there baby

it’s not the pig that’s the problem it the problem isn’t even that there are things called pigs that aren’t crated womb to evisceration to incinerator but things called pigs which we have to deal with think about remember plan around deceive elude and evade the pig

in his car at his desk on his phone on the street the pig who lives in some house who goes to the gas station to find his oversized rubbers buys food that is all the same texture puts in overtime votes gets married gets a union contract and a pension the pig in the television and in the chamber of commerce in the classroom in the doctor’s office in the voice of god the pig 

in the mirror baby they need to hear you say it at least one time yes i am coming to kill the pig in your heart that is the problem

The act of defining particulates within reason and affecting said external events, invokes a sense that reformatting brain chemistry in spite of barring factors is feasible. I myself am a raze the ground for new growth advocate and think I've experienced that space between disassociation and realization several times over the last couple of years. 

I've often thought about my contributions to collective consciousness as shadow spheres traveling along geodesic arc patterns. 

Encompassing all this MS has to offer, do you think of this body of work as a testament to your endurance? Is it a slight against the unwillingness of society to hold the opposition accountable?

ia: "There are lots of different ways I want to answer this, which feels good—

The story I’m telling, “…how i endangered and then saved christmas…” takes places on a nonspecific and shifting timeline in a place that is figurative without being fictive and identifies characters or identities that the subject is in some way at odds with, including the primary object. Through the text, (the reader) trying to learn what peril the subject could have created for christmas and what heroics or what redemption the subject may have achieved in saving it from herself, the unwinding of circumstance is/has been a journey I am also on, with the reader. My time-based poems also have a dimension of simultaneous discovery, in that any iteration is unique to itself, the moment, the audience/reader. 

…

We’re all telling ourselves a story about ‘how’ this all is ‘going,’ with no real beginning or end—and doing a lot of work to filter our actions and the world forces we’re responding to through shifting/incomplete/inherited taxonomies of meaning and meaning making…like, what even is “christmas”? What is “crime”? Who am I? Who are you? 

I swear I am trying to answer the question…

One’s own particular story/life and the events in it, the people in it, are shaped by a World one can never have the capacity to shape so directly as it does. Subjects—all; objects—all. Maybe this is very on the nose, but my christmas isn’t another person’s christmas; my crime is not your crime. If we could find ourselves outside the forces of the World or society, you are not only are you a reflection of me but you are a part of me—and we sustain each other... not only are you a reflection of me but you are a part of me...

I don’t really believe society could be held accountable any more or further than we hold ourselves. I think if what I’ve written there is a testament to something, maybe it’s just saying yes when everything points to no."