explanations

hold your breath while i switch to prose for a sec. i need to clarify, wipe the fingerprints, till i’m see through again. i’m not saying you've taken us to court, but i need to justify.

did you get the joke? no, the other side of it. why the thing said last made me think of the joke. the connection. the intention. the part of it that's also a response. only a flow that belongs to either of us can be broken. so no, you can't break my flow, we're part of one flow. and all the currents and turbulence are by design.

but an explanation has a certain quality to it, arriving in the face of a misunderstanding, like a detour, into one self, like a coiled serpent, a spiral. a river without a mouth. the hope is to follow the train of thought to the light at the end of the tunnel. but it's hardly effective, and mostly only resolves by lucky semantic accident.

& if i swear to not look for that here, we're left with little else to do but anal-ysis:

we all grow up in way more elaborate religions than the blankets we've been able to approximately name. every power builds a cult, and you sift in and out of them like dunes in the wind. a code of conduct, a law of the land, of the nation, or company, or family, hangs like a sceptre above our heads, hijacking our pleasure-pain axis-ed nervous systems, our punishment-reward axis-ed behavioural patterns, building empires of convenient habits.

another way to describe this is surveillance, or foucualt’s panopticon. i struggle a little with this phrasing though. people often speak of feeling conscious in public, the effect of being perceived. to me, i come alive in perception, i become a person, i impersonate. being conscious has always sounded like a good thing to me. i am everyone you think i am. i am anyone.

but there is a fear for sure, of losing favour, of falling from grace. it comes with the desire & the meaning. if you want to win something, the judges have to like you. so that's when we start to explain.

but perhaps a simpler world can be imagined, where criticality isn’t judgemental. to be critical is essentially an attempt to find the shape of your trust, the contours of your knowledge. and then we can reframe the skepticism of our judge as the confusion of a learner. and we can invite them on a bouldering trip through the cliffs of our contours.

a cliff that only this cute mf of a trekker was as curious about.