Routine Acts of Violence
Routine Acts of Violence
when the words become living:
hey there,
so, i’ve been sharing my work in real life, at readings, and it’s doing something interesting to me and my work. there is a lived aspect to these words that i’m understanding i need to engage. i’m still figuring out what that means for me. until then, here’s the piece i shared yesterday at Fiona Duncan’s reading series Hard to Read. i’ve been a long-time fan of hers and to share my work there felt entirely fateful. the audience was sprawled outside of a beautiful house in echo park during golden hour as the readers read on top of a garage. imagine that scene while you’re reading this. it’ll almost be like you’re there.
There is something at work. It is not faint anymore. The ringing has gotten quite loud. I drown it with excessive spirits and over-obsessively scrolling tiktok. But, my body has caught on and is beginning to punish me for using these deterrents. It’s resorted to extending my withdrawals and profoundly sensitizing my eyes. My body is asking for me to stop. Ignoring it just isn’t worth it anymore, and perhaps is now impossible. I’d zombify myself to forget what I was noticing, what was happening to me. To dupe myself out of wonder — then wonder, where wonder might be.
I’m too afraid to listen, given what I may hear, what is uttered to me, may make me so rigid it will give me no choice but to change my life. I have already changed my life. Will I have to do it again? Do I always have to be the one driving the change? I don’t even like driving. I’m much better suited to be a passenger. That is, unless the road is open and clear. So, my mind opens and I stick my left hand out the window and focus on the glide. The serenity of eyes being closed, while they are still open. At peace, at rest, while somehow still in motion.
My body is not a passenger anymore. It is the one driving the change. I have spent so much of my time powering back the areas of my body where the light had not been installed. Now I am operating with so much light emanating from my system, it is un-ignorable. It is too strong. My mind is now the one that must dim.
It’s daunting because I’m a writer now. And it’s funny because nothing really has changed. I just put a label on it. I get to label all of this as “writing”. Where before I was an “actress”, but that left out too much. Which writing solemnly picked up all the pieces of. So yes, I am a writer, because the page is where none of me is forgotten. The arena where I am the most free. Like good driving, the roads are always open and clear.
Because in life, I’ve gotten really good at forgetting. Forgetting key, core parts of myself, as a way to keep blustering forward. So, as an actress, in a job where I am to forget myself, I was painfully forgotten. You could try and justify this reflex, calling it a survival mechanism. This act of thoroughly placing forward different facades given varying situations. Though does what I call living, this experiencing of pure self, always have to be in a state of survival? Is there a way I can remember who I am and still feel at rest? Where I can show up as a whole, un-fragmented human being and it doesn’t feel like a complete risk to my safety. And this safety — is it even worth protecting? How much can I routinely dissuade before parts start to atrophy? Where muscles, where memories, begin to go to waste.
See when I’m writing, it won’t let me do that. Where in life I strap down my tongue, with the pen I am summoned and like a trance, the words tunnel out of me. I become very violent. The act of it that is. I surge, I lacerate open, I’m gushing on the page. I wipe the blood, continue to write, and needle back together into a purer form. In the emptiness of the white I see a calling to spread. To stamp a multitude of black letters, black words, to create a contagion of my thoughts. An infection of my story. Where in life I was muted, existing only in another’s pause. Here I am screaming and urging into a vortex of pure un-interruption. releasing my atoms and hurling them to all sides of the space I am not asking to be given.
That could be why I am the most afraid of empty space these days. My body is ready to live as the pen does. So, I clutch impulsively at any distraction to deter myself from what I’ve been learning from his uninhibited writing. Frighteningly, life is growing indistinguishable from the page. And that violence that circles my pen has now been creeping into my body. And the white page, the empty life that surrounds me, is looking more and more like a place to detonate my blackness as it catapults into an inferno of unbridled color.
My unflinching writing practice has terrified me as a living human being. I must now absorb the consequences of a body that is being freed.
This is the certain kind of violence that I live by and perhaps juxtaposes the idea of violence that we have been given. I keep a stillness that shakes within me something reminiscent of a self splitting in half, multiplied, open. To be judged. To be eaten. To be affected by everything. Raw. That kind of violent life is the one I have squeezed out of me and chosen. And maybe it’s not so much of me choosing it, but one of me coping that this is the only way I can routinely survive.
I look at myself, the seed, that which has burst open, and I am marveled by the sheer audacity of this burst. To burst for nothing but the feel of the burst. The impact and what it may do. How it may infect my life. I took the juice, the poison, whatever had excreted in the process and coated myself with it. So as to douse me with a sense of purpose created by my own doing.
I lay what I have been through like a sheer veil over my body while still maintaining somewhat of a clear sight. Not all things I want to do away with, but only enough so that my vision does not become opaque and I lose all sense of future living. I long not to dispose of what I have been through or make a sacrilege of what has died. But maintain a type of homeostasis, a protection, of where what is dead and what is living can meet upon me as a celebration, a duty, that dresses my body so that I never forget. This is the violence that lives within me. The pounding I choose to suffer through. It beats the life into me, and beats what comes after it, too. This rhythmic beauty of death at the cusp of pure aliveness.
Flowers sift across my windshield dropping notes from the ether. Today I am reminded, there is no deficit of pink and violet flowers. They fall like millennia. There is so much more to give.
And it could be that I’m a fighter, caught in a peacekeeper’s body. Because the way I choose to fight is long and durational, and as if it could take a whole lifetime. And if only it was something other people could see. Because when I strike it’s not a swift pass but a gigantic booming thud that takes years to motion into.
I am still waiting for my first fist to reach the jaw.
so good!