Everything Gets Eaten, One Way or Another or: Turning into the something missing

I find a flower that at first looks like an orchid in my cupboard, it’s in plastic and maybe an unopened or unoffered gift. I take it out and it’s a red fake plant that needs pumping up or plugging in. When you thought it was something special and you realise it is actually not. Who told me that rare is best? Or, is mass production always a sign of destruction rather than growth? I too am becoming plastic, slowly digesting, slowly breaking down – it will take lifetimes. Are we obsessed with fungi and mycelial networks because decomposition is what the times call for? Whose lifetimes? What is the scale?

I mistook something left behind for a gift, something abandoned for a sign, this constant unconscious search for meaning and direction, is also a search for company, that is living. I’ve never been particularly fond of orchids and flowers seemed more frivolous and short-lived than leaves... I have been looking for things that last, but other than plastic and systems of oppression, I don’t know what there is and this concern with decomposing maybe it teaches us how to let go and how to die in secular societies. Everything gets eaten, one way or another. The something missing is conjured by the statement, absence asks for a name like the voices of ghosts. Sometimes I think that the life of my body, it’s vibration, is a call, a continual cry.

I am remembering that I need to clean my bike chain. I wish there would be someone else to take care of things like this, or just more time.

I go to the toilet and there are two very short men in the bathtub, like 50 cm tall. I ask them why they didn’t go to sleep somewhere proper and say I think the living room was free. They say they were fine and can rest standing still in the bath (I am not sure if they are human or sentient toys). I used to have many dreams about sentient toys – what is it with things “coming alive” at night?

The dream space, the changed light, the shadows, the altered perspective… It’s really so trippy that we go there every day. Is verticality ever restful? Night is horizontal and day is vertical, night is rest and day is movement... wait, is rest opposite to movement, is rest stillness? I think about charging. What are the body postures in which you feel yourself charging? For me, it’s spine down, snaking relationship to the floor, decompressing, kinks reforming... straightened out by the day and by the gripping of anxiety from all those encounters that if I stopped to call “micro-aggressions” I might not be able to keep moving. This is the thing I guess, or a thing – do I have to keep moving? Why? Maybe whenever these moments occur I could be still, not in the internal seizing up kind of way that turns my spine from snake to rod, but maybe I could choose to just stop and inhabit my body, fill myself back up, reset the flow of qi, the flow of blood, feel its warmth and not that icy stuff that immediately floods my body in the way that extremely hot things are so hot they are cold i.e. off the charts with no capacity to distinguish anymore. Maybe in turning to stone another timeline is evoked, another system of movement and imprint. This flesh is soft and tender. In my mind’s eye it is pink but I know that this is some internalised bullshit and I fill the imagined flesh-space with colour, burgundies, blues, mauve bruise-like stain, variations on red and white for the fascia, gristly sacs holding me together and I say thank you and I let the image go, feeling an internal tingling sensation.

In the house my teddies have been arranged all over the sofas and I feel annoyed about them being touched. Tropical astrology tells me that I have Virgo in my second house – these relationships are not casual. My feet are wet, my slippers squelchy and wet as though I have worn them in the snow – this is how unsettled I am by losing control of my things, things that I imbue with energy and allow to be my proxies being handled without my prior consent. I can tell these feelings that they are overreactions and all that happens is they slide down, and become this puddle at my feet, this sensation of psychosomatic damp. Traditional Chinese Medicine functions on the idea that if a body is not able to cope with changes in the environment, internal equilibrium will be lost.

I hated being there trying to avoid the inevitable. And now I wonder what I thought that I was doing that was “trying”? What are the strategies for outstepping fate? I think this could be the goal of my generation... maybe it is about affecting the pace of decomposition or what gets broken down where when with who...

I have this vial or jar of something like gold glitter and it keeps spilling. I know that when I am dropping things it’s because of a psychic disconnect. A year full of these circuit-breaker moments, schisms. I don’t even like glitter but it’s camp and out of control and it sparkles and I guess these parts of me were the parts I could not keep track of, spilling, attracting and repelling... The glitter is almost magnetised or something, the particles seem like liquid when they move as if it’s alive (almost). Is this what mercury is like? I am stooping down to collect a pile of it and get it back into my vial. Maybe sometimes I don’t want to share, because I also find it hard to know when too much has been given away and to just say no would be clearer, wouldn’t it? This vial of spilled glitter feels like my stupid heart.

Something glitches. I have a stick to fight with and I am feeling like I don’t have the energy. Later, my fingers swell and become lumpy. Heart meridian and pericardium meridian. Heart and heart protector. Here, vial and stick. But is protection about keeping away or keeping down or fighting off? I guess there are times when protection is about surrender – scaling up on the timeline. And when fighting is about surrender too. This, at a quicker rhythm of working with in order to overthrow. I am thinking about mass slave suicides. My body is tingling because it gives me chills to say this to you – who would want to hear this, who would want to go there? And why. This, not a question and the full stop holds the answer.

I wake hearing my own screaming in the dream. I have been practicing hearing, listening in dreams, so I am both impressed and distressed. Internal resonance is loud, reverberates into the day. I am in a strange land where things are made of metal and I don’t recall there being an outside. Metal is about strength but too much metal is about stuckness, rigidity. I am clearly trapped. And the trap is just what is, the trap is just the fact of being. Vivid invitation to let something go so that the virtual imaginary can shift. I suddenly notice I have been holding my breath as I hear the sound of my exhalation, chest softening and lowering. I often wonder about this “letting go”. Every full moon the internet astrologers and astro-followers call for a release and I wonder where this mechanism is located, what words, what opening and muscular unlocking I must do to let the demons out? And what do the demons even look like? My whole mind is a complex of toxic thoughts but who is mirroring who/what? I just had a vision of my head being full of tiny bats that would fly out of my mouth at the full moon. Is this what I should visualise during meditation at the next lunation? “Fly, my pretties, fly”. That green witch from The Wizard of Oz turning to water terrified me. Unholy transformation from solid to liquid and air – what is truly here and why is it that to be here truly means nothing to permanence? Where is an anchor? “All that is solid melts into air”, I’m told that Karl Marx said. Again, different scales of time, right? If I sit with a rock, it’s okay. Make it an igneous rock. Make it a rock that is the end of visible land on a beach. Angles, texture, formed by heat and pressure, time and presence, water, movement.

I think I end up smashing a bottle and ramming it into his head. I’m sighing, I can remember this fear-rage-fury at having to make this violent effort of defence. I remember the weight of holding the tension, this force, in my arms. I think he gets up and his face reforms, fills out again and heals itself. Do I have no impact at all? Am I just ineffective? A ghost in a virtual war becoming more and more tired whilst nothing around me changes? He has a long coat and pale waxy skin and a long nose. I don’t know that I dislike him even though he is a threat. Is this Stockholm syndrome? Or the fact that liking or disliking are perhaps not so relevant when being attacked? Or maybe he isn’t a threat and I am scared. (Am I dream-gaslighting myself!?)

Then I’m seeing another man who caught fire from touching something of mine. He uses some scissors to cut off the last burning bit of him and he also takes off a chunk of charred flesh around the collar bone. I think I hear the slicing off of the skin. I am wounding bodies. Again, this person is relatively unperturbed. Maybe they also have special healing capabilities.

I have gone to a sex worker for sex but it’s just not working; I am confused about how to get what I want so I don’t get anything. Is there a difference between requesting something specific and someone knowing, learning, how I like to (be) fuck(ed)? Is it the same channel that needs to be open for both, or is one about language and the other about other kinds of intimate communication in some level of trust and openness? What is language to feeling? Sometimes I just don’t know what I want and this is when maybe I am in the moment before. The moment before the clarity of an articulation in language. In a good way or in a bad way. Not to condone using binary and reductive words like good and bad or anything.

I am in prison. I think we maybe have gathered now that the “prison” is myself, and myself is also a sign as to the environment. I do my best to push the rules and get nice things like a floor length black PVC dress. One day I am wearing orange pleated trousers and PVC ballet flats, I flirt with a female guard who is new to try to get access to things like shoes and treatment for one of the women who has really bad feet, she doesn’t wear shoes and her toenails curl horizontally and her feet are hard and tender with fungus and dirt. There’s a confusion because sometimes I don’t sleep at the prison. It’s a tourist attraction or next to a tourist attraction... I go out and blur with the public. I don’t know what my sentence is

SERAFINE1369 is the artist and dancer Jamila Johnson-Small. Their work unfolds via a multitude of contexts, roles, collaborations and media, entangling bodies, temporalities, dreams and collective histories in a shared space that resists singular readings.