In a dream, (cycling-link: bind $class, "there was a hole in a lake in a limestone cathedral","I am not the imaginary friend of the loneliest creature in the universe", "she wants skin and I run from her knife","I am an art critic reviewing a farm with ten thousand horses").
In a dream, I asked you whether your eyes are (text-colour:#74c0fc)[[blue]] or (text-colour:#83bd5b)[[green]].
You never replied.
(text-colour:#74c0fc)[In Legacy Russell's lecture, "(link:"On Footnotes")[(open-url:"https://www.veralistcenter.org/events/aica-usa-distinguished-critic-lecture-legacy-russell")]", they wonder what happens when we turn our attention to how a text reveals itself in its own footnotes, to witness what happens in the footnotes — what methods of critique and study by Black and Queer writers occupy the subterranean materials of a text. They ask ](text-colour:#a9d8fc)[//"How can we use the footnote as a protective enclosure and strategic locality to quite literally hide in plan sight? How can we create encrypted portals for thought, language, community, being, becoming?"//] (text-colour:#74c0fc)[Russell envisions the footnotes as "(cycling-link: "a love space", "a congregation", "an archival space")"[. Annotation as the vessel of
(align:"<==")+(box:"=======XXXXXXXXXX===")["counter-text, subtext, and hypertext".]
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^^(click: "subtext")[Blue is the colour of my margins — the detritus of love, thumbprints of devotion — and say, [[software->cyborg]], alternative medicine, and the [[sea creatures->groper]] I searched for last summer.]^^]]
(text-colour:#83bd5b)[Recently, I revisited Chi Tran's lecture "(link:"Attention is a form of prayer")[(open-url:"https://soundcloud.com/acca_melbourne/writing-concepts-chi-tran-attention-is-a-form-of-prayer")]". It's a stunning piece in which Tran explores the space occupied by writing, intention, and gesture and the modes through which writers can attend to (but not necessarily answer) the failure of language. She acknowledges "witnessing as (cycling-link:"a form of generosity","a kind of ceremony")" and ponders the rhythms in which we sense, shape, inform, and make kin — these beautiful inquiries into the problems of language.
[(click:"intention")[I think my devotion to the colour green is my inquiry into the problem of being alive. (click:"alive")[Green as in: bright-eyed rookie, offerings, sea glass, wingspan, decay (the attention of time and air). Green as in Gwendolyn Brooks and Ross Gay and the poems that saved me, that I have tucked away in blue folders. Green articulates my will to live, signals my intention to [[stay->flow]].]]
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(click:"failure")[^^"There are no new [[pains.->cyborg]]" — Audre Lorde in "Poetry is Not a Luxury"^^]]]
(text-colour:#74c0fc)[Find a blue groper.]
(text-colour:#60a35a)
[(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXXXXXXXXX=========")[(link:"patch of seagrass")[You find two luderick contemplating the day ahead.]]]
(text-colour:#b7ba8c)[(align:"==>")+(box:"=========XXXXXXXXXX=")[(link:"rock")[You startle a school of garfish.]]]
(text-colour:#b7ba8c)[(align:"==>")+(box:"===XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX======")[(link:"rock")[Oops, you've collided with another snorkeller.]]]
(text-colour:#41918c)[(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXXXXXXXXX=========")[(link:"weedy hollow") [Watch your fingers! Sea urchin! ] ]]
(text-colour:#41918c)[(align:"==>")+(box:"=========XXXXXXXXXXXXX")[(link:"weedy hollow") [You find a blue groper! You pull yourself down towards it and the groper rolls its eye around to gaze back at you. [[Later]], you wonder if that was the closest you'll feel to hovering in space over a blue planet.] ]]
(text-colour:#60a35a)[(align:"<==")+(box:"=====XXXXXXXXXX=====")[(link:"patch of seagrass")[Something moves under the sand but you don't hang around to find out.]]]
(text-colour:#b7ba8c)[(align:"==>")+(box:"====XXXXXXXXXX======")[(link:"rock")[A glint of light. It's a rare Pokemon card.]]]
(text-colour:#b7ba8c)[(align:"==>")+(box:"=XXXXXXXXXX=========")[(link:"rock")[A crimson-banded wrasse pokes around the sediment, kicking up a cloud of a mineral that settles into new shapes.]]]
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(text-colour:#74c0fc)[I’ve begun learning to code but sometimes I find it hard to stomach. I know I can just cmd+c and cmd+v existing script from other people, but not understanding the exact discrete function of each meticulous keystroke feels jagged and hazardous. But I wanted to have a knack for coding because I want to believe that being able to code will bring me ever closer to my final form:
(font: "Silkscreen") [a cyborg in love.]]
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(text-colour:#87c8fa)[^^(click: "hazardous")[Sometimes I'm a pedant about pain and want to withstand the way it pulls and pours and puddles into me so that I can have some strange kind of omniscience over my body. Each morning I take stock: pelvis: hip: bruise: knee: foot. Who am I to ask for a painless life? (text-colour:#a9d8fc)["When I am sick, I don’t want to simply wait to get better. I want to believe that there is something hiding in the center of the suffering moment: a pinprick of light, (link:"a morsel of beauty.")[(open-url:"https://beccahuman.substack.com/p/the-meaning-of-suffering?r=28eo4&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post")]"]]^^]
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(text-colour:#9bd1fa)[^^(click: "closer")[ In her essay "On “Sourcery,” or Code as Fetish" (2008), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun writes about our relationship to code and software against the grain of denial and entropy. She argues that (text-colour:#a9d8fc)["if code is performative, it is because of community (human and otherwise) that enables such utterances to be repeated and executed, that one joins through such citation." ]]^^]
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(align:"<==")+(box:"=XXXXXXXXXX=========")[In a dream, I asked you whether your eyes are (text-colour:#74c0fc)[(link:"blue")[(open-url:"https://www.are.na/block/3268043")]] or (text-colour:#83bd5b)[(link:"green")[(open-url:"https://www.are.na/block/2338606")]].
[[You never replied.->Start]]]
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^^(click:"dream") [I can't decide if it is a feeling of agony or resolve that undoes me when I hear Miles Davis' "(link:"Blue in Green")[(open-url:"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLDflhhdPCg")]". Listening to the whimper and wails of Coltrane's saxophone and Davis' muted trumpet, silhouetted against Evan's heady, searching piano. Where do I go from here? Where do I go from here? Where do I go from here? Where do I go from here?]
(click:"whether")[In some languages, (link:"blue and green are barely differentiated.")[(open-url:"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language")] Perhaps all along, my question was actually, to cite Chi Tran, "a mission of wholeness."]
(click:"eyes")[Taylor Swift mentions blue or green eyes in no less than ten different songs]^^
(text-colour:#83bd5b)[A list of things I give my attention while you've left me on read for months:
* A family of three magpies at the local park. I call them "Billie", "Babitha" and "Baby".
* The spaces between my ribs. Imagining my body as a slinky.
* Academia
* The blue gropers in Gordon's Bay.
* The traffic between here and Gordon's Bay at (current-time:).
* Questions such as: Can the internet be a forest? Why should we let tech billionaires continue to occupy and determine our experience of time, space, work, pleasure and identity?
* Ayo Edebiri in //The Bear //(Seasons 1 and 2)
* (if: $class is "there was a hole in a lake in a limestone cathedral")[The dream about the hole in the lake in the limestone cathedral.] (if: $class is "I am not the imaginary friend of the loneliest creature in the universe")[The dream about the loneliest creature in the universe.](if:$class is "she wants skin and I run from her knife")[The dream in which she wants skin and I run from her knife.] (if: $class is "I am an art critic reviewing a farm with ten thousand horses")[The dream about reviewing a farm with ten thousand horses.]
* [[Music, as always.->Later]]
]
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In a dream, there was a hole in a lake in a limestone cathedral.
In a dream, I asked you whether your eyes are blue or green.
You never replied.