Diary 41
03.06.24
BLIND FAITH
Unforeseen, the bellwether killed itself by walking off a cliff. I keep vigil by the quarry and realize the softness of stone. It doesn’t take guts to dissolve the very fibers of resistance for conformity’s sake, so the whole flock followed suit, one by one falling to their deaths. Imagine a world without bread, without ballast. If the fingerprints led anywhere there would be more light, they say, but it’s all artifice. I braid flour, water, and salt and leave the house with wet hair, exalting the resiliency of humanity. The screen goes black as the water recedes to reveal a death knell on the horizon. The day I found out you were dying, life emerged as one demarcation, my writing was deemed uncouth, I pledged to overexpose every image—a white moth flickering through blades of sunlight unflinching. Passing between poles, it becomes clear that the final translation of you is in me. I step back, hollowing myself out to be filled, and refuse to feign indefinite shapes. Imagine the flock sliced down the line. Unforeseen, the precipice makes two animals of one—here is where the distinction is made: Before falling, you choose to put faith in either white moths or butchered puppets.
03.08.24
Looking for a new scent, I found this perfume description:
freshly plucked sage crushed between fingertips saturates the skin with its exhilarating oils. Blue cypress and Texas cedar temper biting essences of California sage and laurel leaf while earthy cannabis flower wrestles with resinous elemi to create a robust scent grounded by notes of the desert sun
About the same perfume, a user on reddit wrote:
dry, woody sage that reminds me of my summer hikes out to the watering holes where I’d go cliff jumping
In an article from The New York Times:
it’s meant to evoke the smell of Joshua Tree in the early morning. She (the maker) added a touch of cannabis flower, as a nod to what “a lot of the people do when they go to the desert”
Whose job is it to write perfume descriptions? I want it.
How does scent inform our environment, our identities?
Incense maker Hyungi Park wrote, “scent is slow, embodied, and generously allows you to come back to yourself…it creates an opening for context and the study of relationality to your environment and encourages deep exploration. Scent creates an immersive opening for subtleties that can transcend fixed planes and collapse time because of its interplay with memory. Building our own worlds and extending them towards the unconstrained facets it helps illuminate is not just possible but may be necessary in fully understanding the contours of life.”
03.11.24
Text from my friend Jezabeth: “The most depressing window shopping I’ve ever done is looking at caskets. One of them named after an ex boyfriend, the Winston model.”
03.19.24
Walking through a market in Tijuana, I found a book of poems titled mirando hacia enfrente para no variar, which translates roughly to “looking forward so as not to change.” As I was holding it, I was struck by the idea of poetry being a way to look ahead, poems as vessels between the person you are now, and the person you will become. I’m not sure if this is entirely what the author intended, but it got my wheels turning.
03.20.24
Three excerpts from True Stories, by Sophie Calle:
“I posed nude every day for a drawing class, from 9 am to 12 noon. And each day, a man who was always seated in the first row, on my far left, drew me for three hours. At noon he would take a razor blade out of his pocket and compulsively slash the drawing he had made. I would watch. Then he would leave the room. The drawing would remain on the table as evidence. This was repeated every day for twelve days. On the thirteenth day, I didn’t go to work.”
“I was six. I lived on a street named Rosa-Bonheur with my grandparents. A daily ritual obliged me every evening to undress completely in the elevator on my way up to the sixth floor where I arrived without a stitch on. Then I would dash down the corridor at lightning speed and as soon as I reached the apartment, I would jump into bed. Twenty years later I found myself repeating the same ceremony every night in public, on the stage of one of the strip joints that line the boulevard in Pigalle, wearing a blonde wig in case my grandparents, who lived in the neighborhood, should happen to pass by.”
”I saw him for the first time in December 1985, at a lecture he was giving. I found him attractive, but one thing bothered me: he was wearing an ugly tie. The next day I anonymously sent him a thin brown tie. Later, I saw him in a restaurant; he was wearing it. Unfortunately, it clashed with his shirt. It was then that I decided to take on the task of dressing him from head to toe: I would send him one article of clothing every year at Christmas. In 1986, he received a pair of silk grey socks; in 1987, a black alpaca sweater; in 1988, a white shirt; in 1989, a pair of gold-plated cufflinks; in 1990, a pair of boxer shorts with a Christmas tree pattern; nothing in 1991; and in 1992, a pair of grey trousers. Someday, when he is fully dressed by me, I would like to be introduced to him.”
03.21.24
I’m officially in the throes of Game of Thrones, and wild horses couldn’t drag me out of it. Most recently, this scene where Queen Cersei walks through the city naked has embedded itself in my mind. For context, she’s been tortured and imprisoned by a religious group that’s accusing her of several sins, and in order to escape imprisonment, she must undergo a ceremony of confession and atonement. She’s brought before a crowd, stripped of her clothes, and forced to walk forward, swarmed by violent, angry commoners, trailed by a woman chanting the word “shame.” Symbolically, it’s extremely potent. Visually, it’s both stunning and aggravating.
