Tina
Feels like the world is drooping, sinking, choking, crying, stuck … I’m not heading into a
lament here. Although I feel like from my safety perch with an audience to witness, I hear
millions of voices wailing. This isn’t some convenient metaphor that writers and art
producers use to convey some sort of empathetic credit. All the cv fodder, clever
vaniculations – not sure if being this cynical is helpful but how do we not criticise our own
milieus.

Language nauseates me. Trying to make the sentences fit, some ppl call it craft. Sometimes I
hear it as classist and neurotypical tongues. I feel stuck in between writing-as-power to
writing-as-market protocol as personal fluffing. We (lets omit pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us’) can
still be affirmative in amongst this planetary hospice. I think creative action with others is a
respite. Artist-as-world rather than self–diagnosed extraordinaire.

Shifting through the narrow Universal as humaversal, imagine there was a universal right to breathe. With a large number of people dying of chronic and severe illness in the world – these are the Mn(p)ne(u)monic songs of the contemporary condition. It feels as if this current planetary epoch of relative wellness (I am thinking about the last 10,000 years) is a memory in the making. What are we (this we being us on the page right now and the reader) writing into-reading into? How can writing twirl itself into more-than-market possibilities of sharing stories (rather than more website dressage – circulating within the vacuum of a pat-on-the-back arts culture) embroiled in living states and dying states – where being undone is inevitable and celebrated. Where the creative act is always-in-action and you are just the participant.

In the beginning (never a beginning – only a middle) there was creativity … and creativity created the Catholic church! (Not many people know this, but Alfred North Whitehead belonged to a collective of heavy metal singers in the 30s who began each rehearsal chanting this very saying).

*wax on bubble wrap

Peta
And come back to this page a couple of days later. After a walk. After yelling at a man who
walked beside a masked woman, while wearing his own mask as some kind of unfashionable
bandana. Clearly he finds it unmaskuline to be seen to give a flying fuck about other humans.

But then I think, was there ever a cultural moment than the ronageist more fitting to the essay? It’s trying to rain, as I write this. Everything is a mere attempt. This is a tilt at an essay. This is also the bit where you need to know the lineage of the essay, the French word bit, the Montaigne bit, but if you’re tuning in for this I’m guessing you are across that. So, I’ll spare you. I’ll spare you.

Essaying into my own wordy weave from the full ventage point of my dotadolorage (22 July 2020). After yelling at the lads on the bicycles that they ARE SUPPOSED TO DISMOUNT AS THEY CROSS THE BRIDGE.

I’ll spare you if you’ll spare me. Spare me the niceties, the apologies.

Spare me the introduction or the back story. Spare me any kind of protocols of preparation and let’s just get in, in here, into the essayesque, inside the essaying, as an active practice of simply trying, for its own sake.

After pointing, like some kind of violent mime, at the woman on her phone while her dog delivered a giant steaming turd on the shoreline and she failed to see it, to do her civic bit and scoop it up. I know what this is now. We are seeing it everywhere. Uncivil disobedience.

After screeching through my mask at the owners of the off-lead dog who gets a fright when my on-lead dog turns and ‘goes’ it and after a seemingly playful invitation. I know the feeling. I am ready to turn at a moment’s notice. To commit wrathwoecide. It seems I am angry. I am having road rage, yet going nowhere.

*grandmothers wailing