AGLÆCA

(A CHANCE PROCEDURE POEM OF NO SPECIAL MERIT)

this poem is written in collaboration with my substack feed. i created a chance procedure whereby i darkened my laptop screen so that i could barely see what appeared there, then flick-scrolled through the feed, stopping at random, and squint-scrying the words and phrases that were still legible to me. which wasn’t many. i did a lot of filling in of blanks.

i wanted to play with this because tangential to my thinking/ reading around stupidity, a fiction writer i adore shared on her stack a conversation with chatgpt, where the algorithm attempted to talk her out of her catastrophising. and i thought “well, you’ve got a vested interest in talking us out of our catastrophising, don’t you, chatgpt?” by which i mean – as sianne ngai has pointed out – paranoia is often denied the status of valid epistemology when asserted by minority subjects, including, but not limited to: the poor, women, black and brown people, the elderly, the disabled, queers. our world is such that any attempt to think about the encompassing structures that govern our lives is apt to produce what ngai calls ‘a paranoid inflection, even if only by default’ (’bad timing (a sequel): paranoia, feminism, and poetry’, 2001). and perhaps paranoia – as a language, and as a way of apprehending life under late state everything – is not a pathology at all, but a rational and necessary tool for recognising our right to a totally legitimate fear of power’s abstract and holistic structure. which, yeah, i know, not new (althusser anyone. adorno. all the ‘a’s), but still, it’s when this denial is applied only to certain subjects that problems appear. as in, you’re prepared, we’re paranoid. who gets talked out of their reasonable concerns for the future, and upon what basis? age? gender? class? not only are we forced by the state of things to live in fear, but that fear is refused recognition or legitimate expression. gross.

okay then, so let’s do a poem that performs illegitimate expressions of “paranoia” by transforming the doom-scroll into a form of disempowered magical ritual. let’s create hysterical theatre from disavowed methods of mapping meaning onto reality. namely, stichomancy.

the title is an old english word that is all over the book of exeter like a hot rash, and appears in beowulf at least twenty times. it has been glossed in a variety of ways, and has proved timelessly contentious, so remains stranded somewhere between the monstrous and the exilic. it stands for fierce adversary, terrible other, miserable and wretched outsider. all of the above. which is very much my (and this poem’s) vibe du jour as well. enjoy.

…

/ we live in a gorgeous time.
/ [insert puke emoji].
/ the addictive time-sink of disgust.
/ versailles displaced. is gorgeous, no?
/ the scythe, its unwarranted comedy.
/ lines of blood and baffled eyes.
/ the reverberating mare of it: migraine, its brilliant skin.
/ or the hot shock of full disclosure.
/ we are stardust, annexed by russia.
/ a fluke of white loaves, lessons in patience.
/ coffee and cognitive overload. welcome to the weekend!
/ her calamitous shadow.
/ her malicious shadow.
/ her inevitable wreckage. the abyss rolls its eyes.
/ darling, you too could be: elbowed and choking.
/ to the boo-hiss of persecution.
/ a slow news day with added police.
/ my country, even in absence, refused to expire.
/ implicit, complicit.
/ unknowable, made of molten gold.
/ a changeling of malaise and rising water.
/ summer of nothing. european crusade.
/ symmetry, a slick ratio. faces. faces.
/ between the imposed exile of the wanderer and the voluntary exile of the poet –
/ it’s a long way down.
/ you’ve heard me mention the ravine.
/ 4chan. it’s unhinged mnemonic.
/ into which we are falling.
/ reclusive, obsessive, and cryptic. forever.
/ or stumbling, ill-imaged, thrashing around. in all the meters of supremacy.
/ darling, you too could be: soilpunk.
/ bogpunk. solarpunk. necropunk. biopunk. transpunk. thelimitsofironypunk.
/ the machines are coming.
/ our rhetoric is deluge, a cutlass crescendo.
/ come with me if you want to live.
/ and if i don’t?
/ to reproduce resistance.
/ inside the paranoid abdomen of power.
/ seduced. refused. reduced to –
/ therapy culture, original innocence.
/ wordle.
/ it’s like that old saying.
/ closure’s blood oath. the land is hungry.
/ a reality check and a marriage vow.
/ things i need like a hole in the head.
/ o, world. gather up your catalogue of atoms.
/ and get out.
/ it’s like pressing a button.
/ dysphoric with apology, nailing yourself to the door of the church.
/ not excessive, but irrational.
/ you are your own thesis.
/ you are your own anthem.
/ you are your own banquet of mermaids.
/ exempt inside this simulation.
/ fighting with an ice machine.
/ my clairvoyant relationship to language.
/ a discrete crisis in the head.
/ how meaning migrates. will focus and emerge.
/ collaborator language.
/ cursory language.
/ language of curse and incursion, quickly.
/ pls take this serious.
/ it was hannah. the world frightens me so.
/ hannah after all. hannah all along.
/ end days forms of received revelry.
/ the vulnerable flourish inside of –
/ dark humour, bitter irony. coherence. bromance. broherence, an inheritance of bros.
/ ugh.
/ old letraset labours. ghosts are floating.
/ gorgeous times.
/ of wrest and melt.
/ their lips fall on me like –
/ barley, gravy, crude stew in a can. like –
/ hail goddess.
/ hail sickest of sickos.
/ i enter the forest. betrayed and shaky.
/ see you in harvard referencing hell.
/ see you in hewlett packard hell.
/ see you in dark academia hell.
/ see you in –
/ nope. not if i see you first…