I am not big into end of years and beginnings of new ones. I am not big into resolutions or goal setting or new year/new me fuckery. Tonight I will go gently, be in bed as close to midnight as possible, and wake tomorrow entirely unchanged.
2022 has been a shit of a year. I have no desire to write gratitude lists or set intentions for the next 365 days as if they will somehow make me into a different person than the last 365 have. Though undoubtedly, because of how the passing of time works, I will be changed 365 days from now. Or at least, I have to be, I tell myself, because I am not my whole self just now and I am still figuring out how to live as this half self and I do not know that I can live like this for a whole year more.
The things I have to hold onto and let go of with the passing of the pākehā new year are small. A year sober (another year sober, again: I am not above admitting my terrible humanness when it comes to my sobriety, I have spent the better part of 3 years now sober and still I have fallen back into drinking and all that goes with it (for me, at least) in those three years and had to crawl my way back to the shores of sobriety once more, so 12 months straight is something to give reverence to). A year without a single sip, bump, or breath of anything that would ease or change the existence of being deeply unbearably human and very much alive. My sanity. Held onto by threads. Reclaimed from the depths. My family, whose presence I’ve been enjoying lately in ways I often don’t, who I have found my way back to after a period of less closeness and I feel like a small child again reaching out and calling “mama” into the long summer evenings, wanting my mama to hold me a little longer, searching for the smell of my dad as I walk into his house in the afternoons, grateful for the gift of simply existing in their presence, easing the sense of loneliness that comes for me at this time of year.
What I do have to offer this time of year is the same offer I had last year - my sparklets. For those of you who are unfamiliar with sparklets they are threads of text that have spoken to me over the course of reading throughout the year. Where the threads come from doesn’t matter. I assign no home to them, no book, no author, no name. They sit in list form in my notes app all in one document, emancipated from the text from which I plucked them out. This is on purpose - so that they sit not alone but with each other. So that they speak to each other and as I meditate on them I feel their call to each other and from each other and back to me. I rearrange this document with each new sparklet, copying and pasting and placing those that say something to one another, together.
This is actually a bible study practice known as florilegia. The word florilegia comes from the latin flos, meaning flowers and legre: to gather. To gather your flowers from your scripture, as if you were placing them in a bouquet. It was used between the 5th and 12th centuries as a preaching tool. Preachers would pull lines from the bible and place them together in one place and treat all the lines pulled as a new text, asking the new text to show them toward god. Like flowers gathered into a bouquet, the flowers are not on their own but part of something bigger. I am not a religious person, but I am a prayerful one. I too am guilty of turning to prayer most when I need or want something, instead of in times of contentedness. Gathering sparklets as I read reminds me to be prayerful in the still times, in the contented times, in the in betweens.
Last year I shared my sparklets on my social media, when friends of mine have writers block I offer up my sparklets too. They are both a prayer and a gift. A bouquet I can give away over and over again. So I offer you my Sparklets of 2022. Each one plucked from the text before me, and placed next to another with purpose. Each one a prayer, a call into the night, to a god I am still at odds with, to see me, to hear me, and the text upon the page.
Sparklets, 2022:
Commitments are always promises we shout into the unknown.
I am not the only person at sea with how to be a good person in this complicated time, where so many of us are disaffiliated from traditional religious institutions. I am not the only person who feels betrayed or let down by religion, while still longing for some of it.
Fantasies are hungrier than bodies
Sometimes I want to relinquish the burden of my agency, come what may
To share a single special and temporal moment
Terminally unique
My mother’s fantasy of a sovereign, impermeable self
Some things might be worth telling simply because they happened
The whole world hushed and hot and flickering
Being drunk and high siphons off fear, facilitates the perilous but deeply relieving feeling of having abandon, for once and for all, the ongoing project of your safety.
The meticulous arrangement of her body showed tenderness
The throws of feral ecstasy
Nothing short of a Kafkaesque nightmare
Watching their little bodies, I wondered where grief gets lodged in such small vessels
It’s too easy to exist and too hard to live
She came home smoking cigarettes
Dreamy, as if washed in milk
Skin is soft, it takes what you do to it
The want still cripples the heart
Created her and murdered her in the same instant
In my feelings for the mountains there had always been a tinge of Eros
Death happens once. Socks happen everyday.
To take that abysmal leap
A desire for a sense of the self as solid, just for a moment, whether it’s attained with merger or obliteration
They are not the stars - their orifices are. Let them open.
But then again, while he talks plenty about life, Plato does not say much about fucking
She is too busy asking, in this changed form, what makes a liveable life and how she can live it
I believe in the possibility - the inevitability,even - of a fresh self stepping into everfresh waters
It’s either mercy for everybody or justice for everybody and I am not personally in a position to face justice
Some people think of reading poems and stories as a way to practice responding to imagined circumstances, without having to risk the dangers of real life.
Draw the bone from the mouth of the living.
I would like to make poems out of real objects
A source of non-violence in the capacity to grieve, to stay with the unbearable loss without converting it to destruction
Mourning has to do with yielding to an unwanted transformation. Whatever it is, it cannot be willed. It is a kind of undoing.
The floor is the only thing that can hold me. If I could go any lower I would.
The art is too saccharine to elicit my tears.
What fragments of her history live in my body? What rooms does my blood remember?
The whole thing scattered about inside of me
Of all the lives a fish could lead; imagine it being this one.
I think if I can keep myself alive to it, it will keep me from going under.
It was looking back at earth that made Alan Shepard cry on the moon. Home. Where he came from.
From mythos to logos. From stories to understandings.
Plato believes in the eternity of the soul. Truth is infinite & immortal. So too is the truth seeker. Philosophy is to practice death.
Eschatology
An urge to jump affirms the urge to live: the call of the void
Refusing to consider the social, political, and cultural connections of produced knowledge is in itself a political act with downstream practice ramifications
To seek a renewal, a flowering of the mind
Wiley adolescent onslaught
To erode with others into a greater static is a luxury
A theology of fucking, a sense that fucking will either save the world or, at least, create a new world so beautiful that we won’t mind letting the old one die
A strapless dildo privileges the pussy as an active force in the fucking
Under that lovely round belly of his
Disappearing into an echo, a hollow whisper in my own cheeks
Look at me, I have just thwarted a clown
You should find yourself plotted on the course back to dick town
You must simply know what you wish: I am your servant. I make the cuts where you ask for the cuts; I make hard things soft and soft things hard in turn. Guide me.
That which will make visible the electric currents of my personal zone
It encourages you, exhorts you, languorously it begs you to curl its vesicles into your mouth, to dislodge them with your tongue, to find them pressed against your lips, to invite them into your own oral cavity, to paint the inside of your mouth with tiny jewels.
It is difficult to let out a desire so significant it will transform one’s body and accelerate the dialectic of one’s identity and One’s desire to an almost unbearably delightful degree, and keep one’s intellectual cool.
One never leaves a libidinal position voluntarily
Transness is utopian … transness is an offshoot of queerness, it is ineffable and unyielding to the will of knowledge
Trans people are exposed to increased risk, and are targeted for violence and oppression, but we are not doomed - trans life is wild and joyous and sometimes you just cry at a friend at the surprising possibility of it all
There are as many genres of transness as their are genres
No Freudian hunts a sexual motive with anything like the dogged perseverance of a gender critical activist
It might be dialectically satisfying to confront paranoia with hyperbole
The penis foyer
My body language, my shoulders already carrying me away from him
Helplessness? Grief? I felt those things but the rage was the most defined.
Rage and happiness hold each other up and make each more powerful. Anger is at the heart of most hopeful feelings.
The adventure can be showing up for the people you love. Know that that matters.
I won’t climb a mountain, but I think the view from here is as beautiful as Everest
A little bird under a mother’s wing. A home under a hospital white.
Forgiveness is a lesson he cursed you to learn
Thereafter I was such a person, a person who had been made a vehicle for a kind of prophecy that concerned nothing but my own feelings and actions
Summer days in the valley were the closest thing I had to religion there glass water in the creek, the abundance of the milk, running like the wind was carrying me against an earth full if bones. It was awe and repentance, holy baptism washing the soles of my dirty feet. It was daydreaming that felt really for survival. It was all sacred ritual, inadvertent and weightless as grace.
According to the National Park Service, an Irishman was buried for every mile of canal constructed.
I think about these bodies like rungs of a ladder. Lined up beneath the soil where I sunk my bare toes.
I felt so fucking powerful in his wanting of me, especially because I I didn’t particularly want him back.
To feel her softness against all that was hard.
No one enters violence for the first time by committing it
We loved anyway. Just not always well.
A synecdoche for the life I knew I might have someday
It’s the sinking deep relief when you know what you love with such certainty that it becomes how you make sense of yourself.
(When you think about it, really sit with it, the love built between young girls will knock the wind out of you)
I feel the weight of this loss as if boulders have been sewn on my chest
I am still toying with the idea that maybe if there is a hell, I should make decisions to avoid it
The enormity of it. Hearts and minds and muscles.
My life held precariously in the seeing/hands of others
May we not say there is probably some sort of transmutation of essences continually effected and effective in the human frame?
This is a book about bodies in peril
The idea of the body as a storage unit for emotional distress excited me.
Frilly cushions proliferated.
Painfully alert to my own ridiculousness.
It was part of why I kept coming back: to experience this newly lively, quivering body.
The element of the body that interested me was the experience of living inside it, inhabiting a vehicle that was so cataclysmically vulnerable, so unreliable subject to pleasure and pain, hatred and desire.
It seemed obvious to me that bodies on the streets were how you changed the world.
Following an uncanny instinct for where on one’s body the memories, the hatred, the fear, were frozen.
When he emigrated to America he established himself as a scientist, albeit one proudly uninterested in the process of peer review.
Libidinal joy pitted against oppression and threat
An ecstatic rain sleuces from the sky
In which love is conveyed as a terrifying force
This is the terrible kindness of the earth: she will always welcome us back, hers is a love that never dies, never says “I will take this part of you but not the rest.”
All she wants to do is offer her own flesh in place of what happened to her child, but she can’t
I hope these sparklets, these flowers gathered, brought you something to meditate upon. I hope they shared a little of my world with yours, I hope they inspired you to pluck out of whatever you’re reading moments of prayer and gratitude. I hope the evening is kind to you and you go softly, ever so softly into the new year with your tender heart loved and your belly fed and a promise of a kinder tomorrow - however that may look for you.
See you on the other side,
Lou
xx
Congrats on a year sober. I've been 3.5 years in sobriety too with three spectacularly bad relapses! 14th December was my one year soberversary which ironically was my alcoholic dad's birthday.
Thanks for the sparkles, I'm inspired to start collecting quotes too. I write them down on random bits of paper, but keeping them in one place is such a good idea. I really hope 2023 is easier than '22 xxx