[Photograph by Valya Korabelnikova, 2022]
A series of books: In Defence of Binaries, A Plea for Essentialism, Order for Beginners, Hierarchy for Dummies.
‘It’s dialectical’
‘But what about class?’ is the new ‘but what about identity'?’ says P
They have always lied about the sun!
I like the way undertakers wear their suits, not because they want to but because they must
the forgotten key workers
A young psychopomp walks through the estate, pausing to check whether his soles are dirty, his hands are in his pockets, Dickens
I’m sorry for your loss
.
A conversation about addiction
The sting the weight
take it or leave it
We play a little game: when you first ‘did’ X, whatever the thing was
your thing, what else did you think, or why did you do it?
M says to look cool, G to be attractive to women, and I say freedom (lol)
It’s not the thing, it’s the association
Someone has been posting these rogue adverts for AA in the neighbourhood
there is an escape! (not religious)
A man asks me, if you sat in a blank room with substance x for six hours with no stimulation, would you still enjoy it?
Are we allowed to write I ask
Yes
Well then, yes, absolutely
This argument doesn’t work I tell him if it’s not felt as an escape but rather an intensifier
It’s not the thing it’s the association
Why weren’t you sick the first time? I don’t know
I suspect that there are many things that are known that others think it is not wise for most people to know
Obedience is Freedom a new book, a kind book, by a man called Jacob Phillips whose mother belonged to Women for Life on Earth in the early 1980s, one group among the women who lived on Greenham Common. It is a beautiful account. He writes: ‘many of these women went into battle precisely because they saw themselves as the handmaidens of life on Earth, by virtue of being women’. He describes ‘Greenham’s celebration of natality’ and ‘the primoridial commonality between mother and child’
Today, he notes correctly, this project, this feeling, would be largely greeted with anathema. ‘Contemporary society values transience, optionality, re-invention. It fears permanent, unconditional attachment like that of parent and child.’
Phillips writes: ‘once a binary is broken, differentiation is lost because the other side falls out of view’.
Have you been good to yourself?
Have you been living a righteous life?
Have you been treating other people right?
Have you been staying away from adultery?
Have you been staying away from drugs?
Have you been keeping your faith in god?
Have you been following the ten commandments?
Johnnie Frierson/Khafele Ajanaku, ‘Have You Been Good to Yourself?’
Yesterday a pigeon got trapped in the kitchen
This has not happened before in a decade
Its little throat was pounding
Worried it would perish
A trail of seeds, leaving it alone led it not to keep beating its wings against a window that wouldn’t open any further, but rather through the hatch onto the table and back out to freedom