Aliyah Winter: I am very fugitive

You wake up

I have been thinking about poetry, and how it functions for writer and reader, considering (exploring or inhabiting like buildings) three recent works by Aliyah Winter. This is where I went.

Two of these works, October 1935 (2023) and Rock, thorn, cryptogram (2023) are short films with titles that refer to poems by Ursula Bethell, 'October 1935' and 'Weathered Rocks' respectively.⁽¹⁾ The other is a hyperlink text game named after a poem by CAConrad, 'restoration fiber song'.⁽²⁾ These agencies are queer poets in the sense of their fluid articulation of sexuality and gender, and resistance to assigned categories, hegemonic and linear temporalities—and in their avowed plasticity.

Poetry is classified as non-fiction in the Dewey decimal system, but I think this misses its explosive potential to bring new (much needed and under-resourced, feminine) realities into existence, or to burst past a previous understanding of reality. Poems know the weight and traffic of words, and are like improvised spells—tune in, set intention, rhyme–repetition–rhythm, fix in language. They dissolve conventional sense (bruised fruit, empty meaning) and celebrate the birth of fleeting constellations or semantic blocs of fresh atmosphere.

Real witches—change-workers, makers of new realities—don’t use that word, and don’t follow books of shadows slavishly like formulae. Magic and poetry are made on the fly, and always proceed from not-knowing rather than prettiness. Poetry is the excess of information, something well explained in Franco Berardi’s The Uprising: on Poetry and Finance.⁽³⁾ It is semiotic dynamite, this language that exceeds itself, this transformation of language and reality, this running ahead of semio-inflation (an accelerating loss of reference) borne of language and subsumed into commodifiable substance.

The idea of working in the excess of knowledge is also part of an essay (time stops / a moment expands) pointed to as a wayfinding aid in the exhibition text that accompanied Winter’s first showing of October 1935 (at RM in Tāmaki Makaurau earlier this year): Tiffany Page’s 'Vulnerable Writing as a Feminist Methodological Practice'. As Page writes, there is a burden placed on non-conformists for their stories to do the labour of change, and, further, hegemonic discourses commit epistemic violence by seeking to control those that exceed their protocols of intelligibility.

This is poetry and art’s rebellion: acceptance of the vulnerability we experience in the face of that which exceeds knowledge.⁽⁴⁾ Or as Berardi puts it, it is the creative, amorous, intimacy of worldbuilding between lovers:

Poetry is language’s excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.

Poetry is a singular vibration of the voice. This vibration can create resonances, and resonances may produce common space, the place where:

Lovers, who never

Could achieve fulfilment here, could show

Their bold lofty figures of heart-swings,

Their towers of ecstasy.⁽⁵⁾

In poetry—or with poetry, or by poetry—we are made sensitive, receptive to plasticity, not knowing and to question certitude. This way, as Page writes (quoting Elizabeth Freeman in Time Binds), we live 'queer time', "researching against 'dominant arrangements of time and history' through interrogating the organisation of activities into consequential sequences."⁽⁶⁾ We look backwards, but with a non-linear temporality so as not to relegate what we do to a concrete history or tight narrative:

…temporal drag creates conflict and incongruity within queer bodies through the tautness produced in the pull backwards from identifying with 'historical' generations and terminology, and the pushing forwards to construct new social and political movements. Freeman focuses her attention on the backwards motion, reframing it not as a means of regression but instead as an essential component with the complexity of forces and energy needed for modes of living. The 'tug backwards', contrast to a desire to cast aside the past, can be a ‘potentially transformative part of the movement.⁽⁷⁾

Living according to non-linear time and changing tempo—"when the story is moved not only forwards but backwards, and slowed and quickened within each space"—saves us from ourselves.⁽⁸⁾ Our bodies are pulled tight should we decide our place in a stable schema of knowledge—even of self-knowledge—in a fearful effort to know and know what to do.

         O

      O   O

      O   O

      O   O

      O   O

         O

         O

      O   O

      O   O

      O   O

      O   O

         O

Your ears are filled with cicadas

Winter has drawn poems by Bethell—their operation, their method, their radicality, their bursting—into her works October 1935 and Rock, thorn, cryptogram, these titles calling to Bethell’s poems at almost a century’s distance. Bethell, who wrote almost all her work in her fifties, while living on the side of a volcanic hill above Ōtautahi Christchurch, did so in inspired celebration of the deep feeling she had that everything was connected, for the garden she made, and for her significant other, Effie Pollen (she, whose noun-name is the fertilising powder of plant sex).

'October 1935' was the first of six memorial poems written by Bethell to mark the sudden death of the beloved she called her consort. The cycle indexes her too-large sorrow, six springs in a row, for the loss of the woman to whom she would turn and say things. The poem resonates with Winter’s incantatory embodiment of voice, language, agency and the body—the entity that speaks, that utters, is desiring, reaching, longing. In Bethell’s elegies, this someone is trying to find the opening that leads back to the queer joy of becoming, through a door, gate, hole, mouth, the open 'O –' address of lyric poetry, that she thrilled in, lived in, but has lost in her sadness from which "all joy is lost."⁽⁹⁾

This confounding, horribly persistent state of being—is this how it feels when we are the only one who knows left alive? In discussing poetry and longing, Winter raised work by poets such as Claudia Rankine that embody this grade of disorientation and endurance:

Even now your voice entangles this mouth
whose words are here as pulse, strumming
shut out, shut in, shut up—

You cannot say—

A body translates its you—

you there, hey you

/

even as it loses the location of its mouth.⁽¹⁰⁾

Winter’s work October 1935 shows us a prone figure lying on her side, head on a pillow as though turned to 'us'—the viewer who might be lying beside her. But because she appears in a magenta-filtered, grainy, raining image, we are gently told that 'we' are not there, that she is in a film, and is probably a fiction. It is as though we see her (eyes apparently closed, like a cat trusting) through a tissue or veil in hot colours, like an insect might see them, lurid, and somehow throwing light outwards into the darkness of the frame before it, where 'we' are not.

It is her yoni–mouth that is most prominent as it illuminates the space around it from the inside. It opens and closes with an utterance, as if to an intimate other (the teeth suggesting the formation of words or consonants) in a deep rumbling bass. It is not entirely clear if we are expected to suspend disbelief or perceive this as the representation of the shifting of the earth’s core, as a black metal trope, or a game-meme. The light picks out the tip of a nose from time to time, and then the labial mouth stops, closed in silence for the last half of the work’s duration. Is this what love looks like imprinted on our retina and body memory?

The sound of October 1935 is the vastly slowed-down song of the riroriro, grey warbler, the little trilling bird that takes on the eggs of pīpīwharauroa, shining cuckoo; the tiny flocking friends invoked in 'October 1935' and another of Ursula’s spring memorial poems, 'November 1937'. Dragged back to a deep doomy register, the song’s cadences become clearer, the mouth mimicking the refrain of this drab, excitable bird. Harbinger, promiser, reminder, cherished by us—"our riro". A queer bird, to take on an unconventional arrangement without question, spring after spring, going off the path, year after year.

The refrain is an obsessive ritual that allows the individual—the conscious organism in continuous variation—to find identification points, and to territorialize herself and to represent herself to the surrounding world.⁽¹¹⁾

What we perceive here has the aesthetic of a club. Or a videogame, its portal warning us to pull back, but drawing us in at the same time. Or a horror film, an etheric mouth that contains a source of power, a visceral energy that might depict arousal. The light looks like it could come from an animal that lives in the deepest sea trench. The whole of it could be a dream about a living (even erectile tissue) connection between voice and body; like a psychic endometrium growing in the ‘wrong’ places with adhesions onto organs that cause the distortions of sensation and affect. It has the colour of auras or of what cats might see with their movement-sensitive night vision.

I am left with the impression of an old-fashioned flashing cursor, the rectangle on its end in green waiting for my text command. The poetic apostrophe addressing an absent object.

What will you do next?

What you are you?

Space opens when we call for it with our voice, our outpouring, our need.

A cry is a labyrinth.

          X

  X              X

<=======>

  X              X

          X

When you were not yet you

What might be out of reach is also the impetus for growth. It may be just out of reach, but what is not lost is her belief in the green shoot, that which emerges out of the dark and we trust to be fertile. Bethell wrote of it in the final lines of 'Time': 

Those that come after me will gather these roses, 
And watch, as I do now, the white wistaria 
Burst, in the sunshine, from its pale green sheath.⁽¹²⁾

When I searched for this poem, by putting in <sheath green burst>, I was directed to a stanza of Shelley’s 'The Witch of Atlas' (1820) in which the three words appear. I wondered if Bethell was channelling the magic of this poem. In it, there is a witch who foretold of a utopia where swords were turned into ploughs, timid lovers would have their desires fulfilled, the king would cede his throne to an ape. A miser would softly put his money into the laps of paupers, liars would tell on themselves, and religious authorities would give up their certainties and stock narratives.

It is not a stretch to introduce magical practices or nature-based religions to the work of Ursula Bethell. She was a Christian, but not in the submissive, tamed, ladies-a-plate sense. Hers was a religion more like animism, or the mysticism of Hildegaard von Bingen, who believed in THE ALL—it is pagan, elemental, alchemical, even heretical, in its refusal to cede to a nice, orderly sense of time, to hierarchies, to anthropocentrism)—"our small human enclosures."⁽¹³⁾

All life and matter was interrelated for this reader of Bergson—whose philosophy sought to interrelate metaphysics with science, thought and intuition, and in this way approached the absolute as pure duration—she who consorted with The Divine Feminine, cast as the great Mother in 'Pause':

The Mother of all will take charge again, 
And soon wipe away with her elements 
Our small fond human enclosures.⁽¹⁴⁾

Nor is it a stretch to consider Winter’s work in the context of occult or esoteric practice, but unfortunately these words other spiritual practices as if they are super-natural, and not part of life in this realm. The colouration of October 1935 seems to picture the extra-sensory, and what is proposed by the mouth is fantastic. What we are looking for is the way through that only opens to us because of our incomprehension, and because it is not intelligible, or as Page writes:

As well as exposing the fragility of knowledge assembly, a vulnerable methodology might be closely positioned with questioning what is known, and what might come from an opening in not knowing.⁽¹⁵⁾

Another recent film by Winter, Rock, thorn, cryptogram has been made with an infrared camera using spectrums that the naked human eye cannot see. Watching it is like being given the ability or gift to see an aura of some order; to know spiritually of these hard and sharp things. Hardened rocks, thorns, leaves, stones, lichens glow and fluoresce in red, purple, turquoise, yellow, magenta, blue, white; and day looks like night. Energies are picked up on, arrested, manipulated, and there is a ritual element to it as though things are being called in, and nature is transmogrifying. Its shifts in scale—grass becomes limb hair—the breath, touch and eye of the figure exchange vibrant resonances with the island, Gaia, as body, drawing up volcanic forces from the centre of the earth.

'Weathered Rocks', the poem that Winter’s title references, begins by venturing what it is that poetry does—harness desire via an extending system of resemblances:

Poetry is a music made of images 
   Worded one in the similitude of another, 
Chaining the whole universe to the ecstasies, 
   Of humanity, its anguish and fervour.

In this edge experience, sexuality is fecund, engorged, full of blood and novel. The eroticism is a window onto the discrete and private world of the Victorian, a monastic sort of enclosure from which love takes place undocumented, unwitnessed. Its arousal is of the fetish rather than explicitly shown in a more pornographic form—only a Victorian could be aroused at the turn of the leg of a chair because it mimics a woman’s ankle, visible so seldom from beneath long, long skirts. Love is declared and described in obfuscating code as a private image or even mythology.

The work of both women, Bethell and Winter, is queer in its hallucinatory production of the self (fictioning), its plasticity and its becoming, but also in its sense of the feminine. Like Catherine Malabou and Judith Butler deciding, in ontological philosophy by women for women (arguing agonistically rather than antagonistically) that our essence, if anything, is a void that makes a constant generative plasticity possible.⁽¹⁶⁾ Trans-generationally, dialectical feminine plasticity works against the conservatism of any establishment, and to whom it accords privileges, opportunities and agency (the straight and stable).

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

When I was not yet I

I, however, am fugitive. It is the demand of experience, of first-person intuition. Duration is a fluid concept and cannot be understood from a fixed position. Or, as Bethell wrote in 'Time':

'Established' is a good word, much used in garden books, 
'The plant, when established' . . . 
Oh, become established quickly, quickly, garden 
For I am fugitive, I am very fugitive – – –

I take Bethell’s words to warn against conservatism in thought or behaviour. We are extolled by both poet and artist to inhabit the radical but precarious position of not-knowing. Donald Barthelme described this role in his essay–story 'Not-knowing': "It’s appropriate to pause and say that the writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do."⁽¹⁷⁾ Page writes, in the now, that there is value in embracing the potential of knowledge as "a falling short", of choosing the vulnerability of not-knowing over trying to know in advance.⁽¹⁸⁾

These rebellious, rupturing, serious-play agencies of poetry are there too in Winter’s game work, restoration fibre song (shown in the exhibition Wild Once More at Te Tuhi in Tāmaki Makaurau, curated by Chris Ulutupu in 2022). This traces the passage of a subject from some kind of medical or scientific situation through an apparent myriad of existential outcomes, and then back to the same initial departure point. No resolution was ever supposed to be possible.

Voice, agency, body. Matrix, plait, spell.

The artist designed it with a circular logic, so you can never 'win' but just keep repeating in variation. In its making, she took inspiration from an episode of Aeon Flux (1995), where the characters are stuck in a kind of time loop. The format of a game suits the idea of agency and choice or the lack thereof—a near-death experience and the altering of consciousness into an extreme not-knowing and vulnerability, yet with great transformative power.

An extreme pleasure in writing code is in evidence here, felt by those who make channels for data to flow through. The words from each re-forming loop form fleeting stanzas of searching. The nouns are there, and the verbs, objects and actions, flowering, dying away, reproducing. We are led to question how our language affects us, and what it carries culturally. What it permits and prevents, and how poetry breaks that.

*           *

       *

*          *

       *

*           *

      *

When I was still you

Run game.

//

Consent up front.

How do we protect ourselves from the aggressions and micro-aggressions of others? It is so hard to talk to aggressive people about aggression.

Do you understand? You can signal your consent by raising your hand. You who cannot or should not have to speak. You are free to stay out of the realm of speech.

You are consenting to being changed or saved. To undergo a literal or figurative pharmakon. Kill or cure. Poison or medicine.

//

What is being figured is a transforming subjectivity. One that works in and out of others, who merge and become each other. Over long, long spans of time. They are not necessarily previous others in a linear-time sense. Maybe the time is more of a pile of leaves, like a book.

A child was asking what a vessel is. Her mother replied that it is something that contains things. And she said, "Like a book?"

Now I am thinking science fiction. Octavia Butler and Aeon Flux and animal–plant–alien sex. The All.

//

There is a ringing in my ears. Loud music, nervous energy, ADHD, or a visitation that makes my chest flutter? They are not mutually exclusive or even distinct. Words applied to reality that make it more concrete that it is. Nouns that spring prone from the field of information we are taking in. The experience of reading poetry that appears line by line in some sort of PowerPoint presentation.

//

Everything seen is NEW. A world we have just been born into with instincts and genes and inheritances.

It is spring and we are small birds, lambs, kittens, babies.

//

Cruel, not just frustrating.

//

We have no choice at this point. At a lot of points. We just follow the passage laid out for us. We flow through the canyons. We all just want to live.

//

Then, disaster?

//

No, deliverance.

//

>

>>>

>>>>>>

>>>>>>>>

>>>>>>>>>>

>>>>>>>>

>>>>>>

>>>

>

When you were the song

restoration fibre song’s text script was based on the Chronophasia episode of the early 90s tech-heavy animation Aeon Flux (the first adult animated drama rather than comedy), in which the protagonist lives through a series of outcomes that all start with her lying on a stone slab. She is told she has agreed to submit to receive a cure from a supposed virus.

Chronophasia could be confusion of or with time, or a loss of the ability to do something, earning something like the –phasia suffix of disordered speech. The show is a swarm of references, one of which is a boy’s remark that ‘everything that rises must converge’, a phrase cribbed from Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the Omega Point, an ultimate state of consciousness freed from time and space.

The beginning lines of the game’s script were cribbed from the episode, and Winter then began to write straight into the code out of a Google doc with wild colours, dense. The code has an inner logic looping us back to the consent–injection start after a brief glimpse of angels that appear. A hypnogogic glimpse. A near-death experience. (Are we preparing for this death?)

These angel–images relate to figures on Invocation, banner-works Winter made for a Physics Room show, For the feral splendour (2022). Winter had been looking at the biblically accurate angel as per Ezekiel’s vision—wheels within wheels, 1000 eyes—emojis being a way of expressing such an image in an internet aesthetic or channelled visual language. She also scanned her own face and added it in to make a strange, amalgamated entity, part-person, part-angel, parsed through the internet or a pseudo-artificial intelligence.

This work was made—the script and code for this work were written—in a space of curiosity about the near-death experiences of stroke victims. When offered a drug to reverse the effects of the stroke and to stop the damage taking place, often all they can do to establish consent is to move an arm or hand in assent. Choose to recover or not to recover. Choose something that is tough on your body to save your-self. It will pass through your veins like channels. You have some agency and some control only. Mostly not.

Our language is symbolic and recursive, and is like an operating system for our minds, linguists think. To them, language shapes how we see and experience the world. It shapes the way we reason and form memories. Our native language forms our consciousness and dictates what is perceptible. But with poetry ('poetry' in an expanded sense of life-practice) we can burst this and change the powers that words have and what they effect. This is how we restore freshness to a much-handled language, wrote Barthelme. Like Mallarmé, we seek a language in which art (over mimesis) is possible, for the as-yet-unspeakable. Can we too perform acts of poetic intuition that lead to the Absolute?⁽¹⁹⁾

            |

            |         

            |

            |

            /\

          /    \

        /        \

      /            \

You and I are entangled

Unsurprisingly—and speaking of seeking the poetic indefinite, the moving miracle—contemporary magickal film has had a certain influence on the making of Winter’s recent works. She has talked about a scene in A Dark Song (Liam Gavin, 2016) where an occult ritual known as the Abramelin Operation was enacted to get a wish fulfilled by a guardian angel. The huge man–woman entity called in has this sub-bass voice that rains gold, and this sparked her desire to replicate it in a different form for October 1935.

The strange documentary style to You Won’t be Alone (Goran Stolevski, 2022) has influenced how Winter filmed Rock, thorn, cryptogram. A film about a mute Macedonian girl who is made into a witch that can shapeshift into the bodies of other people and animals and live through their skins and beings, the poetry of its narration (in her inner monologue of broken Macedonian) has had its effect. For, as Berardi puts it,

Poetry is the voice of language … Poetry is the here and now of the voice, of the body, and of the word, sensuously giving birth to meaning. While the functionality of the operational word implies a reduction of the act of enunciation to connective recombinability, poetry is the excess of social communication and opening again the dynamic of the infinite game of interpretation: desire.⁽²⁰⁾

Winter has spoken of puzzling over certain arcane words in 'Weathered Rocks' at the beginning of making Rock, thorn, cryptogram—like 'cryptogram' (connoting writing in coder or cipher, or an occult representation or symbol), which is similar to another word, cryptogam (used to describe plants that reproduce spores, not flowers or seeds). She said she was elated when this was pointed out to her by Janet Charman, who cracked that line with the expanded poetics of plant sexuality.⁽²¹⁾ The growth, proliferation and deliberation of plants does demonstrate a kind of becoming that is feral, even queer in its imperviousness to demands for simplification or the assignment of categories.

I think it is entirely possible that the only place sexual reproduction was written about openly in books in Bethell’s young life were in botanical texts, steamy and ripe. But it is also entirely possible that she meant cryptogram to read literally as the rocks and thorns and other features of the arid landscape (exposed to time and the elements) as being able to be read—she, the reader, sensitised by peaking lucidity to the information they contain in their vegetal and geographic tongues, as if on acid, in love, grieving, or lit up by the moon and communion with nature.

I think it is entirely possible that the only place sexual reproduction was written about openly in books in Bethell’s young life were in botanical texts, steamy and ripe. But it is also entirely possible that she meant cryptogram to read literally as the rocks and thorns and other features of the arid landscape (exposed to time and the elements) as being able to be read—she, the reader, sensitised by peaking lucidity to the information they contain in their vegetal and geographic tongues, as if on acid, in love, grieving, or lit up by the moon and communion with nature.

Poetic agencies are free to go awry: denying required continuities or demands for intelligibility, they are empowered to exercise the right to encrypt, to operate on the level of symbol, to write in code. To not follow the accepted path, as Sara Ahmed has it in Queer Phenomenology, is to put other possibilities within reach with a politics of disorientation.⁽²²⁾ The excitement of this potential for the fullest proliferation of life is illuminating, filling being with light from the red and purple extremes of the spectrum; to swell, engorged, at the promise of new, lush hybridity and fertility.

To Winter, Bethell’s poems are like the landscape, but erotic; not necessarily sexual. Erotic like the personification of earthly forces: mythical, esoteric, arcane, religious, but like Hildegaard. Able to fugue out on vegetable growth. Winter shows us what it is to inhabit the time and space of a poem, and makes it so that we may too, in the physical space of the screening of the works. And of interaction. These poems demonstrate that a work opens a pocket of time with a cry of desire. The apostrophe in poetry does this with an address, an imploring call, the sound of want.

She looks at Ursula’s poems with the eyes of now, with an excitement and respect for its anarchic turning of language, for its queerness and paganism. For this is a poem about THE ALL. These apostrophic works, Bethell’s and Winter’s, mimic the shape of spellcasting: tuning in, calling in, ritual activity involving the elements, and fixing in words and images.

'Weathered Rocks' comes from the collection Time and Place and is near the end. The slim volume traces the four seasons from spring to winter, and this one comes from winter. Here, it is a volcanic landscape that is exhausted. It states what poetry is—the universe and ecstasies in intentional and pan-referential relations—to her public-private person. Publishing in her lifetime as Evelyn Hayes (haze), she flipped a European poetic tradition to the seasons of the southern hemisphere, and let her flowers raise their incense to the female solstice moon of summer.⁽²³⁾

\ \      / /

  \ \  / /

 ( ((.)) )

  / /  \ \

/ /      \ \

All you have to do is remember

Try something. Try something else.

There is an idea of a place–space–opening in Buddhist thought that exists between the time of our death and of our reincarnation called the Bardo. Here, our soul is buffeted by an intense storm that consists of an awareness of every un-skilled thing we have ever done, and our self dissolves. I am not sure in what order. What we are encouraged to do is to prepare for death—to practice the sensation of our selves melting in the altered consciousness of sleep, meditation, ritual, transportation; and to be no longer frightened of the evidence of our imperfection. We can play over and over to develop skill. If we prepare well, we will be reincarnated as a higher-order being. This to me has the logic of a videogame, or is that the other way around?:

When we move past the convenience of language and categories, every second manifests the bardo of becoming. Becoming and becoming. All phenomena always just become [...] When we sensitize ourselves to the subtle transitions of emotions, or of bodily change, or shifts in social circumstances, or environmental transformations such as differences in landscape and light, or developments in language, art, or politics—we see that it’s all always changing, dying, and becoming.⁽²⁴⁾

In games we can go over and over things, trying again and again to do better, to learn from our failures, to accrue skill. Gathering ideas, gathering more, combining them. I am thinking of an essay the filmmaker Chris Marker wrote about Vertigo, and how, to him, it’s a film about being able to play again. Is this impulse, this method, what we are acting out in a videogame? Going through a space, a passage, a campaign; going at the bits where we fail or are knocked back until we can get to the end, and the boss-fight before our end? Getting it right. Moving on. Doing it over. The only way is through with persistence, learning from our mistakes, perfecting our performances. Accruing skill—becoming more ideal.

I remember an early text-based internet game that my father used to play at work when I was a child. It involved trying to escape a dungeon or subterranean world of some sort with an assortment of weapons and strengths, and a variety of foes that had to be vanquished. It ended in a fight with a dragon that he had tried to kill for weeks. He lost patience one day in his laboratory and answered the question, 'How will you kill the dragon?' by typing 'With my bare hands,' which turned out to be the correct command.

My father’s was a text game of the hero’s-journey format—all weapons and assailants, hardships, violence, tribulations and victories. There are different stories, however, like Winter’s and CAConrad’s, that trace a passage through, and an unarmed entity’s accrual of power and agency. Here there is communion with mystery, of the non-intelligible order that Ali Smith wrote about in How to Be Both:

The word mystery originally meant a closing, of the mouth and eyes. It meant an agreement or understanding that something would not be disclosed.⁽²⁵⁾

                        *

            *                      *

*                      *                      *

            *                      *

                        *

To you I bequeath my inheritance

What is at stake in all three of Winter’s poem works—through a kind of medicine–bundle gathering of actions—is a generative transformation of our subjectivity by a composed fictioning narrative that is, as Ursula Le Guin put it, "holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us."⁽²⁶⁾ CAConrad headed their 'restoration fiber song' (a veritable technology of the self) "for the survivors". They start with a command, and finish with prophesy, and a reward which is a clairvoyant’s reading of the future:

Go back to where you grew up. Don’t let anyone know you’re coming if there’s anyone to let know. I went back, and the most important thing is to not write a single line of memoir, no autobiographical writing whatsoever. RESISTANCE is in the making, true resistance of the self. Immerse yourself with all the ways you felt about the world when living back there. Take notes without taking down memories, especially if you were suicidal. (…)

Happiness is the place you went to after leaving when you were old enough and brave enough to leave. Go home, to the home where you made yourself happiest, and leave this broken spirit behind, unsated, untasted, and completely unwritten.

I am mindful of the anonymity Ursula Bethell afforded herself by publishing under a pseudonym (at one remove) that could be the name of a man or of a woman, male or female, or fluid androgyne (named for a great great uncle that brought tonnes of earth from Ireland to Botany Bay to keep snakes out of his garden). But it did more than give her privacy—it gave the author, as Janet Charman so aptly pointed out "the opportunity to inhabit a subversive range of textual positions from within a first-person narrative."⁽²⁷⁾ Perhaps such acts allow us to be god-like, if our conception of the divine is beyond human gendering. Or to be Persephone and Demeter at once, if our conception of the divine is female and multiple, and with a passage of descent and rising.

The self is not made up, but plastic (in the sense of malleable) and real. Go to the edge and don’t run crying from the limit. Walk through the wall. Accrue skill by facing a lack of skill, and learn the feeling of your old self melting into a new self, an I becoming you (an other). An I that is reborn and reborn in a trail of YOUs like aphid reproduction. Paint a rectangle on a flattened sheet of newspaper and write SPIRIT QUEEN PORTAL on it, and suddenly we are a plural collective entity that has briefly escaped the self-limiting prison of language. Our bodies, voices and agencies are fused, electric.

This is where I went.

This is what I feel I have been offered.

NO FIXED SELF.

The atoms are singing.

~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~

~~~~

~~

~