when things are other things
corrupted jpg in the subliminal
i’m unsure of myself.
that’s not right.
i don’t know myself.
that’s not right, either.
i’m hieroglyphic to myself?
that’s the closest words are gonna get, i think.
articulation can be so sisyphean.
…hey, what are your thoughts like?
if i say “elephant” what appears in your mind?
do you envisage real-life footage of an elephant?
do you conjure an animation like Dumbo (1941)?
or a CGI composite like Dumbo (2019)?
does a pachydermal horn blare in you?
do you think grey, big ears, a trunk, ivory?
do you visualise the word elephant?
i think, i think in amorphous blobs and ghostly structures.
i don’t visualise a clear image of an elephant, cartoon or otherwise. its true nature is blurred, like every representation of an elephant i’ve ever known is collapsed into one form behind a breath-fogged glass. i can conjure an echoey recollection of the classic elephant’s trumpet—you probably know the one—but it’s devoid of any auditory heft. it’s like the skeletal architecture of a sound. it bursts (in volume), blasts upwards (in pitch), then rolls off (in pitch and volume).
the abstract shape of an elephant’s trumpet.
my beliefs, feelings, ideas; all lavish, blurred behind breath-fogged glass.
to think this way is as tedious as it is useful.
example: if someone starts a riveting conversation, there is no steady accumulation of my response. the amorphous blob of my opinion bursts into being immediately and its up to me to use the propellant of language to orbit the blob until I can decipher the correct linguistic velocity that’ll bring my point home. its probably why i’m so verbose. get to the point, Inigo. houston, i’m trying (over).
i crash-land all the time. i’m convinced that so much of the struggle to articulate myself comes from the fact that english, my first and only language, is a stepmother for my tongue.
of the small-small yoruba i know — i often think about the word: pẹlẹ
it means sorry but it’s more than sorry. it means i’m sorry you’re in pain or i empathise with your pain. it means all of those things and not quite any of them. my mother would say it to me when i was young and ill and it would feel like a blanket burrito, warm and plump, far cosier than just sorry, yet sorry is the closest word english has.
there’s a whole language, indigenous to my bones and teeth, filled with warm plumpness that could probably get me closer to articulating the true nature of my thoughts without crashing all the time. and i can’t speak it.
i wonder if the breath-fogged glass is an ancestral language barrier. i’ve been curious about the breath-fogged glass recently.
have you ever thought to stop demonising your “negative” feelings? removing the moral anvil of good and bad and welcoming your emotions as signposts directing you to a clearer vision of yourself? i just figured out that i could probably do that.
it made me realise the breath-fogged glass is in front of my feelings, too.
touched on something like this a little bit. after doing some self-reconnaissance of her disdain towards certain writers (hope i wasn’t included) she deduced that her hatred is actually jealousy in some way (…maybe i hope am included).it threw me back to a conversation with my former best friend, who once vented to me about the relentlessly jobless people who were dogpiling her on the internet:
“why you hating on a nigga you should be learning from?!”
anger is such a curious blob, isn’t it?
a collapsed mass of all the times you were under-appreciated or taken advantage of.
i hate anger. its hot and blunt and urgent. i hate anger until i’m angry. then its heat is like an embrace from a celestial body, its bluntness bludgeons all obstacles in my way, its urgency announces that i’m a priority.
the breath-fogged glass makes anger seem hotter, and blunter and more urgent. if i orbit it enough, with words or footsteps, i find the true nature is just hurt. pain is never blurry — it’s always crisp and angular.
i wanna get better at getting to true natures, even if it is blobby and vulgar. especially then.
of anger, of hate, of love, of men and women and the modern chasm between them, of a wilting society, of food, of haircare and skincare, of Blackness, of language.
when it feels like i’m orbiting my amorphous blobs like lemme land, am i actually just wiping circles on the breath-fogged glass with a rag of words?
is that what i’m doing? or what i should be trying to do?
maybe, i’m just stirring metaphors. either way, there’s spirals.
i might need a change of perspective to see whether they’re burrowing or rising.
love this!!
Beautiful