Separation, anxiety and attachment are recurrent in our lives, but what are their sources? An individualistic culture teaches us to consult our minds as focal points, tethering feelings of anxiety, separation and attachment to personal, box ticking models of assessment. The onus falls on the individual to alter themselves within strict categories, whilst diverting attention away from the systemic, material manifestations of these feelings. Certainly, our childhoods bear on our later relationships and beliefs about our positionality and meaning – but how do private housing and nuclear family models facilitate dynamics between people? How do we retain autonomous relationships with our bodies when they are so heavily scripted? How do some bodies become objects and aliens? We are left with holes in ourselves to poke. My writing is this poking, this tearing. Inviting the possibility that you are not alone, and that such existential feelings are not entirely yours to solve. Sometimes the poking feels fleshy, uncomfortable and raw. Sometimes it meets something absurd and almost laughable. Writing is a freedom to switch and pocket ideas into each other, to rip their seams, to iron and scrunch them; to ignite them to nothing or to just hold them in an open palm, unflinching. The English language has its limitations, but through crafting, a careful slipperiness can come to form, opening doors between things through the strange and squishy pressing of words themselves.
These Lines
an audio-visual poem on desire in response to Bell Hook’s Eating the Other.
