On Journalling

Essay 32

I’ve started talking to myself again, to see if I’d still see far, to hear if I could make sense, to weigh on. We probe the hidden arcs of inner worlds like palates, you move your fingers—it’s a double sided echo if I talk back, wings beating. There’s no clarity in recursion as it never stops. And things splinter off and crystallise as repeated: a paradox.

I jot down languages I picked up on my way from people who chose to teach me or who were robbed. There’s an unreadbackability to journals, you want to write them, you don’t want to face them (that’s what posterity is for, or else why build it); on some days I open notebooks to go and find the stranger, the lines all touching and trite, one’s mother tongue pulsates vital and nondescript like a heart, the Caucasian chalk-circle literal, the signal-space where we appear everyone. And I read me and I sob sometimes because I know just what she means, I’ve had similar things happen to me, believe it or not.

When I write publicly I know who I am, I explicate like I’d do to another, in a posture that is foreign things become real, and natural, your face reversed in mirrors is what you know, we write ourselves, we show ourselves into existence from the dark. And I test my thoughts, and I look for holes, and I feel for gaps as if I didn’t see across a giant gorge my ladder, one talks to oneself to check if one is still above the surface, to see if there’s a rope to throw over. And you wrestle with who’s speaking because nothing throbs in silence, if no one reads the code, is it even code? There’s a fingerplay to practice, as information come in loops is carried on.