This is an excerpt of an essay originally performed at Solaris (Berlin) in 2024, as part of the Berlin Project Space Festival. It was later revised for forthcoming publication. 

On January 30th, 1977, the composer and free jazz maestro Ornette Coleman reunited with the bassist Charlie Haden to record a duet album for Artist House Records. The label, founded that same year, was named after a loft at 131 Prince street in the newly fashionable SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, which Coleman had purchased and meticulously renovated two floors of in 1969. Artist House represented a confluence of long-time aspirations for Coleman: after years of moving between temporary accommodations, he had finally made a home for himself, and a space artists to practice and perform in outside of the typical environs of the avant-garde art and jazz circuits. 

The resulting record, Soapsuds, Soapsuds was positively, if unremarkably received. In Coleman’s discography, it sits between two more notable entries: 1977’s Dancing in Your Head, and 1978’s Body Meta, the first full-length album with his new fusion band Prime Time. Dancing in Your Head and Body Meta could also be thought of as two attempts at materially expounding on Coleman’s ‘Harmolodics’, a collaborative, democratic, mutable organizing principle that can be applied to all creative acts, but in music is expressed as providing harmony, melody, rhythm, and phrasing an equal position in a composition’s fabric. In Harmolodics, space and time are delineated within the present moment, through the formation of and equal emphasis on an artist’s own personal logic. Soapsuds, Soapsuds is considered a lyrical early manifestation of Harmolodic theory.

Curiously, the first and most frequently discussed track on the record is a rendition of a TV show theme song by Earle Hagan, itself an adaptation of Charles Earl Kingston’s 1965 composition, “Premiere Occasion”. The TV show in question is the short-lived soap opera satire, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, then in its second season. 

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman starred Louise Lasser in the title role of a white, working-class housewife from Ohio. The show is an uncanny departure from the topical kitchen-table comedy genre that its creator, Norman Lear helped to popularize in the early 1970s with hit TV shows like The Jeffersons and All In The Family. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is not so straightforwardly funny as those shows; in its embrace of suspended plot lines and schmaltzy psychodrama, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman more squarely parodies a soap opera. With each episode, finds Mary Hartman facing increasingly alarming events unfolding around her with vacant anxiety, outwardly expressed mostly through advertising platitudes and self-help jargon. 

In the first episode, Mary Hartman welcomes a young reporter into her kitchen, who is investigating the mass-murder of a neighbourhood family—barn animals and all. Hartman answers his journalistic questions with lumbering non-sequiturs about how her and her husband met in high school, and whether her soup is too spicy or not spicy enough (the reporter, playing the urbane taste agent to Hartman’s apparent proletarian blandness, answers the latter with a deadpan not spicy enough). Later in the episode, Mary Hartman’s entire family—husband Tom, daughter Heather, mother, sister, and father—are called to the police station to answer for Hartman’s grandfather, soon revealed as the town pervert (‘the Fernwood Flasher’). 

Mostly barren of either music or laugh tracks, and hobbled by the show’s relentless production schedule, episodes often appear improvised, if sometimes entirely unrehearsed: blocking is clunky, words are stumbled over, protracted silences pervade, and characters have a tendency to stare at each other searchingly for what should happen next. Events lumber and swirl around Mary Hartman, but for Mary Hartman, those events are merely microtones in an ambient hum, intervals indistinguishable from the waxy yellow buildup she can’t seem to remove from her kitchen floors, an errant flight path, or a distant war.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was an instant success, with Louise Lasser, once a niche New York actress and the ex-wife of Woody Allen, suddenly becoming a household name. Suffering from extreme exhaustion over the course of production, Lasser soon began to spiral into depression, experiencing the onslaught of a psychotic break. The boundaries between Louise Lasser and Mary Hartman were beginning to blur. In the Spring of 1976, Lasser was arrested in Los Angeles on charges of possessing about $8 worth of cocaine, after refusing to leave a boutique without a dollhouse that she wasn’t able to pay for. Months later, Mary Hartman repeats a similar dollhouse incident in Fernwood, Ohio. Morbidly aware of being tethered to her TV alter-ego, Lasser and Norman Lear decided that Mary Hartman’s psychological agony should be eked out slowly over several months, culminating in the first season’s finale. Mary was to be slowly asphyxiated, but would seek no blame from her surroundings. Lasser’s making of Hartman was, in her words, in pursuit of a “big hole of blankness”, inextricably linked to Lasser herself, but a corner of herself that she couldn’t quite see around, and so could only render through a mirroring effect of relentlessly, and rapidly developing Mary Hartman’s character on screen. 

Soon, Mary Hartman’s cheery coping mechanisms begin to devolve into sporadic oscillations of dread. As the first season winds to a close, and the melodramatic story arcs play out, Mary Hartman begins to appear possessed, intermittently fawning over her daughter Heather and shivering uncontrollably. She writhes in acoustic agony whenever an airplane flies over her house—an affliction that no one around her (except her handsome and sensitive closeted gay neighbour) seems to take notice of.

Lasser herself pitched the plot of Mary Hartman Mary Hartman’s first season finale to Norman Lear with a 12-page letter: Mary Hartman is invited on the David Susskind show—a popular real-life live talk show—to introduce a made-for-TV-documentary that she was randomly selected to star in as a “typical American consumer housewife”. The season finale aired on July 1st, 1976, right after the nightly news, which would have been largely occupied that night by the hijacking of Air France flight 139, intercepted on its way from Tel Aviv to Paris, and then flown to Entebbe, Uganda, where hostage negotiations unfolded. The hijacking was initially undertaken by two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations, a branch of the secular Marxist-Leninist revolutionary organization known at that time for pioneering plane hijackings as a form of resistance. They were joined by two Germans associated with the Revolutionäre Zellen and Die Röte Armee Fraktion. They were later joined by more PFLP operatives on the ground in Uganda, where they found support from the Ugandan president, Idi Amin. Much later, in 2007, documents unsealed by the National Archive in the UK asserted that Shin Beit, the Israeli Secret Service, was also involved in the hijacking, with the probable aim of undermining the PLO and preventing French and US American rapprochement to Palestine. The hijacking and hostage crisis was widely condemned by the PLO, the Arab League and several Arab countries at the time as tarnishing the reputation of the Palestinian resistance, by undermining diplomatic relations with friendly countries. 

In their demands, the hijackers called for Israel, West Germany, Kenya, France, and Switzerland to  release fifty-three freedom fighters, forty of whom were Palestinians imprisoned in Israel. Shortly before the July 1st release deadline, Israel agreed to negotiate, and 100 hostages were released following the controversial segregation of Israeli and non-Israeli nationals—a decision reportedly unilaterally taken by one of the German hijackers, Wilfried Böse, which would subsequently lead to the expulsion of the PFLP-EO’s leader and hijacking mastermind, Wadi Haddad, from the organization. Three days later, the Israeli military conducted the so-called Entebbe Raid, in which the 102 hostages were freed. In the process, 45 Ugandan soldiers, all of the hijackers, and four hostages were killed, and large swathes of the Entebbe airport, including several military aircrafts, were destroyed. Benjamin Netenyahu’s brother, Yonathan, was the only Israeli military casualty. The Entebbe Raid is frequently cited in Israel as a daring military accomplishment. At the time, the Egyptian government called the raid a “terrorist theatrical demonstration”. Following a UN security council debate waged by the Mauritian Prime Minister against Israel’s belligerence in Uganda, and Israel’s assertion of the right to self-defense, only the United States explicitly concluded that Israel had followed International Law during the operation. 

__

On the David Susskind Show, Mary Hartman is presented to a panel of media experts, who, after watching the documentary of her day-to-day life, launch into a live analysis of Hartman’s portrayal as a subject helplessly dehumanized by the artificial imperatives of peak capitalism: a straight, white, un-educated wife and mother, awkwardly unaware yet acutely overwhelmed by the conditions of her consumption, her labor, and social status, neither fully cognizant of her own desires nor of the larger issues that live just beyond her body. According to the experts, no thought is Mary Hartman’s own, she is merely a repetition. 

The experts bombard Mary Hartman with rapid-fire questions they expect no answer to: “do you feel this barrage of media exaltation to buy and buy and buy ultimately reduces the sensitivity of your personal life?”, asks one. Mary Hartman defends herself at first, asserting that she is neither incapable, nor a victim. But the depth she tries to muster starts to whither as she begins to convolute her sense of self with her sense of duty as a consumer and a patriot—one and the same. Overwhelmed, Mary Hartman enters into a verbal feedback loop. Things take a further turn when she blames factory conditions for her estranged husband’s impotence and alcoholism, an astute labor critique that she immediately regrets divulging on live television, imploring the camera to “erase, erase” while making swiping movements with her hands (a gesture that recalls a failed attempt at interacting with motion sensors, then a nascent technology). She does so, as if it were all already a simulation. 

Exhausted by the accumulation of tumult in her life, Mary Hartman finally stares directly into the camera and repeats, with tears in her eyes, “it’s too much, it’s too much”. In the next scene, we see a frontal shot of Hartman in a hospital gown while her family asks questions to a psychiatrist off-camera. She has been committed to a mental health institution. Topically understood in the US at the time as a commentary on the mental health crisis of “nervous breakdowns”, particularly amongst white housewives, audiences were given to understand Hartman as unraveled by the cycles of minor catastrophe around her, yet unable to contextualize her own grief or anxiety, because she perpetually accepts the Faustian bargain of consumer normalcy that binds her to the vanilla chaos of her surroundings. As the camera slowly closes in on her face, Hartman begins to repeat her own name: “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman”. Finally, in a break of the fourth wall, the show’s creator, Norman Lear, stands in front of Mary Hartman’s hospital room beside a fictional TV news anchor, to announce that the last 26 weeks of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman can now be relived in half the time, with relentless best-of reruns playing on television while the second season is in production.  

The scene at the David Susskind show was largely shot in one take, with Louise Lasser improvising her relationship to the fictional and functional TV cameras throughout. It was her magnum opus, the culmination of a minutely planned, slow-burn ruination; consumed by television, Lasser/Hartman’s rock bottom could only occur on television. In his essay Elegy for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, published in the New York Review of Books in 1976, the composer and longtime collaborator of Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, called it “a deliberate confusion of medium and reality”: the casually cruel acceptance of violence and plight in scripted television mirroring the “growing acceptance of, and indifference toward, the increase of live horrors in our news programs.” 

50 years later, such a critique would now be more aptly waged on social media, where the flattening of cataclysm, cuteness, and advertisement onto a single horizontal axis seeks to numb and stultify the breadth of human emotion. Rapacious accumulation of personal experience as ‘content’ further propels the frantic imperative to produce experience in the name of content. The resulting (and in corporate terms, desired) affective state doesn’t pursue meaning drawn out of attentive modes of perception, but simply expects passive gleaning of information attuned to basic sensory faculties: hearing, as opposed to listening; touching, as opposed to feeling; and seeing, as opposed to observing.

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I fantasize about the genesis of Ornette Coleman and Charlie Haden’s rendition of the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman theme song, and write a fan fiction: Two old friends and collaborators, for so long the breath to the other’s footstep, turn on late night television. They’ve been rehearsing for hours, tinnitus has taken hold. The 11 o’clock news is just ending, and the screen image flips to a still life in front of a window: a table covered in family photos and kitsch: a porcelain pony, a lamp made of an old jug. A swarm of melodramatic string music rises from the picture, and with it, the voice of Mary Hartman’s mother calling her name twice, the second time with increasing shrillness. Coleman and Haden are participating in a nightly ritual shared by millions of other viewers in the US, strangely soothed by this parody of a woman anesthetized by the second-hand information she blithely consumes, and that consumes her in return. 

I picture them chuckling and riffing, humming along and beyond the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman theme song, breaking down its strange harmonics as they toy, not unseriously, with the theme song’s reworking. Maybe they’ve been reminiscing about Coleman’s landmark composition “Lonely Woman”, originally recorded with Don Cherry, Bill Wiggins, and Haden in 1959. Coleman composed “Lonely Woman” after he came across a painting of a rich, bored-looking white woman while on his lunch break from the department store where he worked at the time. He later recalled, in speaking about it with Jacques Derrida, that he had never encountered such solitude in his life. 

People saw all kinds of things in Mary Hartman; guessing who watched the show was, apparently, something of a parlor game in 1976. There were sophisticates who appreciated it for its self-serious, uncanny humor, and there were working class midwesterners, who appreciated the show for its frank portrayal of lives that, for all intents and purposes, resembled their own. The country singer Kitty Wells released a song opining that while she sees herself in Mary Hartman’s scatterbrained world, recognizing all of the characters as her own family and friends, TV show falls short of her own stark reality. Mary Hartman may be working class, but she still has it “made”: the television rendering of working class life still provides a comfortable home for Mary Hartman, replete with brand new appliances and cleaning products. And then, presumably, there were viewers for whom no critique ought to be wielded over Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; for them, the show simply held their attention at its woozily dissociative pace, its aesthetic cues pacifyingly recognizable.

Coleman and Haden’s interpretation of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman has been called parody of a parody. The quintessentially postmodern definition of parody, according to Linda Hutcheon, “is repetition with critical difference”: a doubling of authoritative surface over transgressive subterrain, in a way that ultimately subverts and legitimizes whatever it comments on. Norman Lear maintained that the relentless doubling up of Hartman’s name throughout the show was an ironic commentary on the repetitive nature of soap opera narratives. But Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman is much more so a dual subversion and legitimization of the ex-nominative known as the “American Way”, as well as its morbid counterpart, the “American Dream”—a concept Christina Sharpe refers to as a “continually re-animated, deadly occlusion”. 

In Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, the greatest threat to the “American Way” is not just that it’s a total fiction of imperialist, heteropatriarchal racial-capitalism, but that the inundation of diluted information, sent to pacify and entertain people into a state of perpetual distraction, also distances them from their selves and their own beliefs, ultimately binding them to a caste-based status quo. 

Such concerns exist in close proximity to Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodics. At the heart of Harmolodics is an emphasis on an individual’s need to hold and express a logic that is entirely their own within the workings of an ensemble. The survival of dominant societal beliefs, according to Coleman, comes at the cost of personal logic; to him, the uniformity of knowledge is a form of conditioning that determines constructions of race, class, and gender. Art cannot and should not be optimized as information in the form of content. The pursuit of the non-hierarchical is not about reducing information to a flattened plane, but to bring about an articulation of many distinct voices in unison.

Soapsuds, Soapsuds, in that sense, might be a meditation on the abolition of caste systems through the dramatic inner experience of human life, the fleeting frothiness of it, and the insignificance of a single body in relation to all of the information that it holds. Perhaps, the exponential shambles of public reality carries relative unimportance in relation to the scattered void of private experience. “Trends come and go, whether they are movements, ideals, products, inventions, eras” writes Daniel Lockwood in his 1976 book on the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman phenomenon, “—but our inner reality, the selves we are and must live with, operate in a timeless zone”. 

In his liner notes for Soapsuds, Soapsuds, Coleman writes, 

“Information becomes information so we stay the same. We all know that a graveyard millions of years old is the study of archeology, not city planning. To save and give all information concerning all subjects one wishes to study would free all races from information genocide. What one does not wish to be known about them, only love and death remind them of what it is. Music tells these stories to all persons of age.”

This prose piece was originally performed at Cashmere Radio for Haus für Poesie’s “Poet’s Corner”, part of the 2023 Poesiefestival, Berlin. It was later adapted as “Another Vista Inferno” for the 2025 LP “the ears of animals” by bitsy knox & roger 3000. 

It’s not that I’m a different version of myself, just the version of that belongs with this place. When I return, I’m already here. 

I feel as if I’m running out of time. The reasons remain incoherent. I’ve taken the batteries out of the clock. I prefer the arrhythmic ticking of the electric radiator. There’s a merge in progress, assisted by offerings left behind from past visits: drugs wrapped in the makings of a tent, running shoes ravaged by barnacles, books deemed inappropriate for city life. I’ve just looked down and noticed that I’m covered in mud. You asked me if I’m still thinking about the “woman, alone” thing, and I can tell you that I feel the difference now. 

I’m staring at an edge. Past the rocks, somewhere in the Pacific, is an edge.

The edge is unconcerned with my attempts to mould it, transit or anoint it. It doesn’t rely on my belief in its existence. Like geologic time, it’s indifferent to human scale, to numinous appellations. It has no language for the ticking of clocks, it utters no language at all, because it attempts no communication, it is nothing less than and merely the first sound, an oscillation of tenses, the digressive angles of a Ring Composition of change: of air, fire, sex, and water as the agents of change, fraying continuity, illuminating incidence. The edge is not an ending.

I’m staring at the edge, and considering my approach. I’m considering the upper-body strength needed to pull myself up over it. I’m considering fear as an ingredient of conspiracy. I’m reminded to ask you about the erotics of danger, about enmity breeding enmity, about asking the wrong questions, about dwelling in digression, about falling into a chasm of collective decision-making, about the folly of meeting in person at last. Maybe it’s the woman, alone thing. I’m so risk-averse, isn’t that dangerous too? Isn’t there a febrile balance to staying or to leaving? Doesn’t change come regardless? 

I’m staring at the edge, and you are there, you’ve always been there, on top of it. You are its floating zenith. You reach for me in waves. You recall all of your past lives. Where you are is always somewhere else. It’s like the trick with rainbows—shall I ruin it for you? There’s no magic, it’s about position, separated spectrums. There’s nothing there when you get there. Only a vast middle. A middle, all atmospheric incoherence, all pliable distance, all time is contained in its stratum. A middle, prettily between us: a view. An eagle and a raven are in an ariel death match here. An economy has been written here. A binding spell is cast here, its choreography consists of turning your back to it, outstretching your phone, and taking a picture. When you show the picture to someone, the spell will be broken.

I’m still here. Night is setting in. I avidly await nighttime now, and with it the erasure of the edge, and the language to describe it, its economy. Nighttime is an introduction to the transformational properties of glass. The window: a mirror, an unwitting stage to a passive performer. I’m considering truth in reflective surfaces. I’m replaying scopophobic scenarios of trickster reflections, the calculated movements of a nighttime audience crouched in the velveteen abyss, awaiting a single lapse in my attention. What then? What then? I am attempting nonchalance, but I keep forgetting to breathe. My rabbit heart is fluttering. I’m thinking about fear, and its role in conspiracy. It’s the not knowing part, it’s something about control, about the desire to identify every angle of incidence. I’m thinking of the “woman, alone” thing. I’m thinking of a visit with the night sky. I’m thinking of joining its textures. I’m stepping outside, no light, no backscatter, I’m just outside, a long exposure. I’m testing my endurance like holding my breath underwater. I am, nevertheless, seeking the light. I turn to watch myself through the window, and I am still there, cosily hunched on the couch, no overhead lighting, no lapse in attention, attempting stillness.

I am in three stages of erosion: gravel to sand to mud. I am eliding the footprints of a day. I am compacting the artefacts of the day. Turbid currents carry me down mountains into submarine canyons. From this low vantage point, you are asking me to make a choice. You ask me to explain myself. 

I say, “The other day, I was drawing pictures of sleeping couples spooning each other. I was disentangling them, suspending them vertically, holding them alone in space; they looked like dancers clawing at the air. They looked peaceful, or maybe peacefully dead, caught in suspended movement, transposed somewhere presentational, observable from all angles, like Pompeians coated in the pyroclastic agent of their demise and enduring detail, the reflection of a day. The drawings were disappointing, I think it was a form versus concept thing. I went to the stream in the forest. I waded through the water and dug into the hardened bank, transporting hunks of it home in a ziploc bag. I didn’t ask for permission. On the back porch, I submerged the clay into a bowl of warm water and massaged it in my hands. Its pores squealed the cry of slowed lithification. Sinister grey worms and what appeared to be long strands of hair surfaced. My hands became covered in small cuts, blood mixing with clay slurry. I lean into mysterious demise, spectres of unsolved crimes, here at last, I was sure of it, it was so early, it was almost the end, it was already here. I was kneading the clay, imagining a curse as a completion. I looked down to find my hands attached to my body, my back hunched, my bottom lip jutting, my legs akimbo, mouth breathing. I looked up, and you were there, perched on a rock, awaiting a single lapse in my attention. 

(I screamed a real scream)

You said, there’s an erotics to unwitting performance. 

The edge is folding, I’m reclining into its digressions. Perhaps we will never meet. Ask me your questions. I’ll answer to their satisfaction. I feel the difference now. 

This story was originally performed at Kunstverein Bielefeld on July 30, 2022. Most recently, it appears in the film “Three of Cups” (2025) directed by Enotea and Mário Macedo, and produced by Morph Films, which is premiering October 2025 at Doclisboa International Film Festival.

We went into the basement, where it was cool. 

And to get the right experience, we all agreed to shut the door behind us. A startling darkness followed. Only a pin-hole thin shaft of light trickled down from a clogged drain in the ceiling high above us. The only movement we perceived was of dust falling in the lights’ presence. 

We were all in the light’s presence. 

With oo’s and ah’s we agreed that we were mesmerised by the light. We told each other so. We said, “This is a sublime experience, this might be a holy experience, perhaps this is a holy light, and perhaps we are in the presence of god, or a god more ancient than god.” 

In the light’s presence, we forgot that we were in a basement, and that there was a door. We forgot that we needed a door at all. The light became the centre of our existence. Nobody talked about anything else. All there was, was the light. In the light’s presence, we forgot that we had arms and legs. We forgot that we had heads, and hands, and feet, and genitals too. There was only the light.

And so to remind ourselves of our basic corporeality, we took turns waving our limbs in the light. We crowded around its shaft, our hands and feet reaching over shoulders and between legs in search of its brief anointment. In doing so, a few of us were hit quite badly in the face, and so we decided that sticking our limbs into the light was a bad idea. 

And yet, some of us let our curiosity get the better of us, and could not repress our desire to stick our limbs into the light anyway. We did so surreptitiously in extra-slow motion, our facial expressions purposefully blank. We hoped the rest of us wouldn’t notice our transgressions, although of course, the rest of us did, and were enraged. We called it a perversion of our collective values. To avoid the burden of deciding upon a punishment for this perversion, we decided that sticking any appendages—any limbs, or anything at all—into the light was against the rules. We decided that touching the light was too holy an experience for some of us, because some of us can’t control our impulses. One of us suggested that some of us are just jerks, and that the jerks were ruining it—the experience of the light—for everyone else, and so as a result, none of us should be able to partake in the touching of the light, because all of us have a jerk who lives deep inside of us—the appearance of whom is unpredictable and possibly stress-induced.

We all continued staring at the light. 

We stared at the light for long enough that we became enveloped in a darkness so total as to stop time and space. A fundamentalist contingent amongst us emerged, and declared that we no longer exist, that the only existence is of dust travelling through the shaft of light. At that point, many of us got on our hands and knees, and wept loudly. Others amongst us trembled in weakness, jealousy, or fear. Others of us audibly protested that some of us were bogarting the light, which wasn’t fair. 

To those of us who were indeed bogarting the light, the rest of us were only distant sounds, for we believed ourselves to be the most pious and so the most worthy audience of the light.

Those of us who were only distant sounds remembered that we were, in fact, in a basement, and that a door existed that had once provided us entry into the basement—just as it could provide an exit. Those of us who remembered the existence of the door began to discuss its possible appearance, disappearance, and location in whispers. From these furtive discussions, a growing mistrust of the light emerged. Some of us reasoned that the presence of the door signalled the presence of a world beyond the light, and that in fact, more light may be all around us, but we just can’t see it yet, because we’re in such a dark basement. One of us pointed out that the reason our shaft of light is holy might be because it signals the presence of a true light. We discussed the possibility of a true light at length. Some of us agreed that the door must be the true passage to the true light, and that the door must be of a human size, otherwise how could we have gotten here in the first place? Others amongst us refuted the existence of the true light, saying that the true light is everywhere, also inside of us, and anyway, who are we to judge what is true and what is not true? Maybe we’re all liars. Still others amongst us retorted that the light could not, in fact, be holy, because it made us forget about the door, and so made us forget that we exist, because existence is what is on the other side of the door, and so the light could be neither holy nor precious but actually a dark and nefarious force sent to torment us. Still others amongst us exclaimed that the dubious existence of the door was actually a test of our love for the light. 

One or two of us agreed co-dependently that there was no door at all, and that we’d always been in the presence of the light. At least one of us privately considered how much to charge for entry to the light once the door was found, including private audiences, VIP packages, and family days.

The trouble was, none of us could remember where the door was. Those of us who described ourselves as mavericks left the light in search of it. We tried different techniques to find it: Some of us closed our eyes, outstretched our arms, and fondled errant body-parts. Some of us tried echo-location by hooting into the void. Some of us joined hands, and shuffled around the basement in a tangled knot, until we fell over each other. None of us thought that that was a very good strategy to find the door, but those of us who remained holding hands began to fuck vigorously, and forgot which door we were looking for. 

The rest of us returned sheepishly to the light, apologising in prostrate for turning our backs on it in the first place. Others amongst us had never left the light, and those of us who had remained, privately believed ourselves to be its only righteous and true believers. Those of us who believed that we were the only righteous and true believers of the light began to chant in tongues, swaying back and forth and intermittently weeping. 

Then, one of us tripped on a step, and screamed out, “My knee!” in pain. Several of us remembered in unison that the staircase led to the door. We all froze in silence, our new knowledge in suspension—all of us, that is, except for those of us who were still fucking, and those of us who were chanting in tongues and intermittently weeping. 

One of us reached the top of the staircase, and pushed open the door. A new light flooded the basement. The new light was all encompassing. We shielded our eyes from its sheer power. We were dazzled. A few of us fainted. The new light dimmed The Original Light considerably; in fact, the new light rendered the Original Light nearly imperceptible. Many of us scrambled toward the overwhelming abundance of the new light, pushing and shoving each other in order to be among the first to reach it. Others amongst us formed an orderly line at the foot of the staircase, and muttered that the jerks always find a way to ruin everything, and that everyone will get their turn to experience the new light if they just wait their turn. Some of us fell to the ground as we desperately lunged and vaulted over each other to reach the door. One or two of us were trampled. One of us may have died. But others of us passed into the new light, and could be heard screaming into its void before becoming enveloped by it, and never seen again. 

Those of us who decided to stay in the presence of the Original Light cried out, “Close the door!” and “We must preserve the Original Light!” 

Later, we remarked upon how peaceful things had become once the jerks and the charlatans and the nymphomaniacs and the mavericks had left, never to be seen again. 

To celebrate, we took turns lying directly under the light, positioning our heads so that its beam would penetrate our third eyes. In doing so, we were all blinded.

This essay was published along with an annotated libretto of Chimera’s Still Warm Body, as part of the e-flux project “You Can’t Trust Music”, curated by Xenia Benivolski.

The double sacrifice is

already the triple sacrifice

For knowing the double sacrifice

is itself a sacrifice

The first sacrifice consists in 

reaching – all the way – and

finding!

While the second sacrifice

is only half-the-way in

Never reaching the called destination

But now — to continue, having once

performed these two eternal sacrifices, is

everytime — of each of its moments —

a new sacrifice which, again, is yet

another sacrifice unless what the 

continuation consists of is a 

repetition of the initial sacrifice,

which then becomes the eternal

sacrifice, the ever unsacrificed sacrifice, 

for which now everything becomes sacrificed.

—“The Double Sacrifice,” Catherine Christer Hennix (1)

In 1665, the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens observed from his sickbed that the pendulums of two clocks mounted to the same surface would reliably swing in unison, regardless of their starting positions. His was an observation of coupled oscillation (2), and of spontaneous self-organization; from the stillness of bed, nature unfurls in empyrean harmony. Huygens’s observation has since provided insight into popularized theories of emergence and synchrony—oft-conjured imagery of audiences spontaneously clapping in unison, or fireflies rhythmically blinking together across a night sky. Perhaps these phenomena reunite us with a teleological drive relating symmetry and synchrony to divine nature, further embedding notions of their intrinsic desirability (3).

In 2002, Yoshiki Kuramoto and Dorjsuren Battogtokh found that a ring of coupled oscillators would divide into two simultaneous spatio-temporal groupings, one coherent and phase-locked, the other incoherent and drifting (4). The groupings evolved simultaneously to produce a third, hybrid state, named two years later by Daniel Abrams and Steven Strogatz as a Chimera State, in which synchrony and asynchrony were shown to co-exist (5).

In 2016, a group of scientists at the University of New Mexico, led by Francesco Sorrentino, conducted a follow-up experiment to Abrams’s and Strogatz’s work, using three swinging platforms (6) and forty-five metronomes (7). In video documentation of the experiment, the control room is dark, save for the glowing blue lights attached to each metronome’s pendulum. The metronomes on the outer right and left platforms oscillate in mirrored anti-phase lockstep, transferring momentum back and forth to each other. Their movements are regular, but minutely imperfect: the smallest environmental and material variables produce aberrations, shifting movement with dust-sized incrementation. With these little changes, the anti-phase lockstep of the left and right platforms influences the metronomes on the middle platform. An air of increasing unpredictability emerges. The oscillations of the pendulums in the central grouping stray from regularity, wildening. As the metronomes to the left and right hulk out a rhythmic huddle, they appear to encourage the metronomes on the central platform, as if building up their emotional momentum. The central grouping of metronomes thus begins to swing polyrhythmically. Their jolting sways are a joyfully indeterminate act of searching: a gleeful rampage, a liberation, a disorientation. Connections emerge and are obliterated; there is no loyalty to past or future synchronization. While the left and right groupings of metronomes trade in predictability, the central grouping of metronomes resist expected movements. Their repetitions delve into small changes, producing undercurrents.

In witnessing repetitive action, one learns to notice aberrations, to look for patterns, and to find oneself reacting emotionally to errancy; we might find ourselves excited, displeased, surprised, or relieved. In his essay “On Reset,” Brian Blanchfield conjures Gertrude Stein’s notion of repetition, which is 

…never exact repetition, because the human registering it is different the second time. For her, the practice has implications, self-othering at the mark of the selfsame. … A marcher sounds off in tandem with one earlier in formation, to whom he’s now attuned. Two pairs of others uncannily have their ties blown north; they turn in lockstep away from the rest. Another by himself five rows ahead turns too, though his tie is tucked. The far marchers in the fourth, ninth, and twelfth rows drag their stride when each crosses a certain mark. Implacable. Anticipation tripped by surprise. Again the marcher counts himself and is answered by his partner. And as the troop moves through the course, the course is not used by the passage through. This is a dance (8).

Repetition isn’t threatened by the introduction of aberrant newness, but forged by it; there is self-othering in selfsameness. The Chimera State shows us that actions may be wild(ly different) or out of step, but the (hybrid) body is in a constant process of remaking itself through repetitive acts. Repetition as it pertains to rhythm is never perfectly ordered, but environmentally responsive.

The American jazz drummer, percussionist, professor, inventor, artist, gardener, herbalist, acupuncturist, and martial artist Milford Graves spoke of the heartbeat as the beat-maker (9), inherently asynchronous. The body, according to Graves, doesn’t operate metronomically but adapts to its surroundings and the forces that subtly shift its course. Graves famously set up an electrocardiogram machine in his basement studio after coming across a medical recording of heartbeats (10). In listening to the recordings, he found what he termed secret/possession/ritual rhythms: intuitive, deeply ingrained human rhythms related to the holistic interactivity of the body and the mind (11). Graves recorded the heartbeats of friends, family, students, and visitors over successive decades, producing substantive research into the field of cardiology (12). What he found was that the rhythms of the heart do not just have a pulsebeat, but—using customized software that measures the voltage of a heartbeat’s electrical charge—they carry a drone and a melody too. He found writhing patterns in the spaces between each beat. He made these patterns visible by isolating certain parts of their waveform using vibrational geometry to produce animations of dancing lines—a teeming void.

In their essay, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” Karen Barad speaks of the void as the first chaos. They associate it with the vacuum in Quantum Field Theory: a place of ontological indeterminacy. Like silence as an absence of sound, but never the total zero-sum of sound (13), the void/vacuum is not “…(determinately) empty, nor is it (determinately) not empty” (14). The void, the space between existence and non-existence, is “…a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The void is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what might yet (have) be(en)” (15). 

I would like to put forth the idea that the void is the in/determinate third space where the Chimera State, for our admittedly artistic purposes, lives. It is a spatio-temporal space that is not only invested in a continuous cycle of digestion, but also in a continuously shifting, simultaneous state. It is like the wild movements of the central grouping of metronomes; or Graves’ secret/possession/ritual rhythm; or the way in which Hennix’s triple sacrifice emerges through the double sacrifice, itself lingering somewhere within the cycle of the eternal sacrifice, so that the sacrifice remains continuously un-sacrificed. Death undoes life and life undoes death. The Chimera State reveals uroboric cycles and errant locomotion. It treads the muddy passage between mountains carved by fire and water. It’s where you are now, in the dark. Your vision searches for minute differentiation in shadows, inventing stories and confabulations as you strain for definition. “Only the shadows are actualized” (16).  

1).  Hennix, Poësy Matters and Other Matters, 91.

2).  A coupled oscillator occurs when two systems are intertwined to the extent that they mutually exchange energy between one another. This was the first published observation of coupled oscillation.

3). Connecting symmetry to aesthetics is a fairly perilous endeavor and requires lengthy discussion, taking into account the long and diverse discursive history around beauty and irregularity, possibly discussing the Zen Buddhist notion of Fukinsei (不均整), or Adorno’s assertion that, in artistic matters, asymmetry can only be grasped in relation to symmetry (“Asymmetrie ist, ihren kunstsprachlichen Valeurs nach, nur in Relation auf Symmetrie zu begreifen,” Adorno, 237). What is perhaps more at stake here is the simultaneous co-existence of disparate (a)symmetrical, (in)coherent, (a)synchronous forms: whether hybridity denotes a lack of legibility, and whether illegibility renders grotesqueness.

4).  Kuramoto and Battogtokh, 1.

5).  Abrams and Strogatz.

6).   The swinging platforms are also referred to as mechanical oscillators.

7).  Blaha et al., 1.

8).  Blanchfield, 125.

9).  Amiri Baraka speaks about rhythm as fundamental to the body and to life in his 1985 Naropa University lecture on speech, rhythm, sound, and music: “Because the rhythm keeper is what? The heart. That’s the human relationship to rhythm: boom boom boom boom boom boom…When that drum stops in there, that boom boom boom boom boom, then you have ceased to be.” (6:48)

10).  Geckeler M.D., 1949. In Nussbaum and Despont’s interview, Geckeler’s album is described as a 7-inch, called “Normal and Abnormal Heart Beats”, released by White Laboratories.

11). As when, for example, Graves drummed in tandem with dancer Min Tanaka’s dance improvisations for neurodivergent children in Japan; Graves said that he was drumming a ritual rhythm, one that the children intuitively understood. ​​Meginsky & Cloaca-Young, Milford Graves: Full Mantis, 00:40 mins.

In conversation with the Vodou priest Jean-Daniel Lafontant, Graves further described possession rhythm in relation to his heartbeat recordings: “These pathological heart rhythms were similar to the rhythms that a drummer gets into when in a state of possession. Everybody thinks a normal heart should beat like ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, but it might not actually beat like that. When a drummer gets into a state of possession you can hear all kinds of heart rhythms, not just ba-boom, ba- boom, ba-boom.” Graves and Lafontant went on to describe the lexicon of sacred percussion—rhythms of possession—in Vodou rituals: sacred rhythms that shift human physicality, vibrations and movement that spur healing, and trance states as well as organization and uprising—as, for example, the Haitian uprising against French colonial oppressors was scored by drumming. Nussbaum and Despont, “Healed by the Beat”. 

12). Graves died in February 2021 of congestive heart failure, related to a condition called amyloid cardiomyopathy. His studies into the in-between melodies and states of the human heartbeat were also studies into healing his own heart, and the hearts of others, leading to a patent for the preparation of non-embryonic stem cells with the goal of controlling the degree of their differentiation.

13). As John Cage would have it.

14).  Barad, 395.

15.  Barad, 396.

16).In The Raw and the Cooked, Levi-Strauss draws a parallel between music and myth in suggesting that both are languages that “transcend articulate expression,” but simultaneously need (and need to be able to deny) a “temporal dimension” in order to unfold. Levi-Strauss, 15. To open up the context of this quote: “Music and mythology bring man face to face with potential objects of which only the shadows are actualized, with conscious approximations (a musical score and a myth cannot be more) of inevitably unconscious truths, which follow from them.” Ibid., 19.

Somnambulant ray, I’ve seen you once before

I’ve side eyed you once before and decided—

No, known—that one day we would touch faintly, then

Still fainting, still feigning disinterest, still

Straining in shadows to hear your voice,

Lay down together on the floor of

What is the topography of your voice and 

How arduous is the trek to its rumble?

Towering firs of laughter I know I know I

Will never feel your aftermath, your

Steaming, your

Streaming, your

Underbrush silences unheard of but for a

Single late-day trail of your light: 

Late winter breath, signalling your hidden shapes.

• First read at Kwia, Berlin, March 12, 2022.
• Copyright © 2021 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

Stop asking if power is derived from ambiguity
And listen for asynchronous love

I’ll chew my mouth to shreds
Before I talk
Tongue scars in uhs like rubble
Sucking topographies
Like the bas-relief of pennies:
No discernible value left rubbed or made molten in your mouth

At first we thought of nothing but
Middle Aged Skin
Low tides in salty exposed pocks

Low tide—an emotion
Dormant until suppertime

We saw change unmoved but ascendant
Cooked in the shell for slurping hunters

Did you know
That you’re lit from within now?
Because I’m blind?
No,
In consideration of
Two Blaue Stunden in a day:
An exhalation and an inhalation
The thumb to the sun kind
(Ich erinnere mich an die heiße Erde)

This one’s at 3:30 am
Is no one’s lam
No temple door, but merely
Exposed—braided to a
Tshirt slept ragged
We’re all whores, remember?
Not anchorites in pristine cells

We produce logic with experience
Experience as a paltry bone
Traded with sweat on unfamiliar floors
The angles of a full bladder

We listen for stillness
And hear the voice
Of a constellation or lightning
Born in salt water and Hydra blood
A secretary to the creators of weather
A brother to her rider
Who sings

It wasn’t over when
Lava trumped fire and
I crawled into my still-warm cousin
Her jaws-of-life bones wheezing
My fat wings resting upon
Her deflating organs

She who was Frankensteined
In pursuit of terror
By opportunistic wizards
Swinging in the void

She who was once fire
Breathing from the earth’s pores
The better
To tell truth to fear
To tell truth to fear

That the next earth will not be human.

• This poem was read at Efremidis Gallery (Berlin), July 2020
• This poem was published in a different iteration in PORTAL (Tabloid Press, Berlin), 2020
• Copyright © 2020 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

To hum is to create the first turbulence, to deny the throat the first enculturation, to emmmmmmmmote the power of the first sound—the mmmmmmother ur-sound that denies the mmmmmmmmmouth—to perform shifting interior states in the heat of your own juices.

Shit, gas, sound leave. Perhaps they live in latency before being willed to escape. Expelling carbon dioxide and nitric oxide is a relentless participation in the swooping cycle of purification and (in)toxification that results in breath, speech, song.

“In our common sense, we believe the voice is the body, its very breath and interior shapes projected outward into the world as a way others might know us, even know us intimately” (Cusick).

Are we more in our bodies now? More in our minds, in non-verbal activity (“the non-manifest in full actuality”), shielded from the outside world? “The life of the [mmmmm]mind in which I keep myself company may be soundless; it is never silent and it can never be altogether oblivious of itself” (Arendt).

Let’s talk about openings: borderlands rumbling, and then happening. We find access points marked by sensory properties that are unreliable mediators of experience. The chimerical sixth “comm[mmmm]on sense” is experienced even while we can never be certain of its form (Arendt). Common sense is there to accustom us to the world of appearances, but it has witnessed nothing but glistening pools, trapped reflections of possibility. And then there’s the voice, “performing the borders of the body” (Cusick). The voice, performing relationships of interior and exterior.

We breathe different air according to where we are and where we are from, how we are made, and how we make ourselves in time. We make new music and take different steps according to the metrical and metaphysical shifts experienced through pressure, humidity, and heat. We move through the performance of ourselves as we live it. These are the sounds of shuffling, the sighs of frustration, the murmurs of love, the vibrations of slumber. We breathe in the world around us, and exhale our participation in its ways: fleshy and vulnerable tendrils in bloom.

This sound piece is a few minutes long. It will look and sound to anyone beyond 1.5 metres of your body as if you are standing still and silent in thought, when in fact you are privately trekking the borderlands. It may be helpful to imagine many people standing a couple of metres apart, engaged in producing the same thing, together. Stand until your feet grow roots, as if you have just been rained on. Take a deep breath through your nose, and hold the breath for a moment, then release slowly through the nose with your mouth closed: IN 1-2-3-4, OUT 1-2-3-4-5. Another deep breath IN 1-2-3-4, but this time allow the inhaled breath to hover toward the back of your throat as you slowly release it, lowering your soft palate and the space around your uvula as you do, so that you make a barely audible hissing sound (like gas escaping) with the back of your throat as you exhale OUT 1-2-3-4-5. Keep breathing into that zone, and as you do, start to think about the smallest sound you can make with that breath—but try not to make any sound yet. Try to locate the moment that your throat, your uvula, your sinuses, your nose—this entire system of inner chambers—connect to make a sound, and when you find that sound, the smallest sound you can make, try to stay with it. Don’t let it grow louder, just try to eke it out as a consistent, momentary practice of smallness. Meditate on the borderland between the inside and outside of your body as it is delineated by this fragile sound. Consider what it is: Is it the sound of the performance of the body? Is it the sound of the performance of your body in culture? And if so, who’s listening, and what can they hear? Is it the earliest communication? OUT 1-2-3-4-5. Notice the note you find yourself humming. Is it high? Low? Do you know what key it is in? Is it melancholy? Happy? Hopeful? Is the note that naturally leaves your body related to an inside state? Or are you in a call-and-response with an unheard worldly noise, the Big Hum? Are you, in fact, in a polyphony? Feel that your selves are alone with your body now, and that your selves are swimming inside of you, trekking the borderlands with your breath. Find yourself swaying, forget why you’re here. Your mouth is still shut tightly.

Cusick, Suzanne G.. On Musical Performance of Gender and Sex, p.29 in audible traces: gender, identity, and music, Jan 1, 1999

Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind. Harcourt, 1989.

• Published by S.W.I.M. Reader (May 2020)
• The accompanying sound piece for this text was premiered on Something Like #10: The Voice
• The sound piece was also performed for Luzie Meyer’s Situated Feminism in Sound class at Kunsthochschule Weißensee, and for Alex Turgeon’s Poetry as Social Action class at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.
• Copyright © 2020 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

Suddenly shit fuck surprise
Slackjawed mouth teenage scales
Gill agape in terror alerts
Bulging eyes that feel air first
Chickenskin talons you crush bone
Blind unencumbered pain
Snatching swoop from bubble muffle
Ecstatic O M G
Home home home home home home home
Beyond beyond beyond
Pain confusion hot and cold
No no no no breath realm
Talon through the heart yum pink
Swoop, dirty wings, new blue
Silver rip, crimson once blue
New blue so hot it’s cold
See! New sun realm darkness bright
New blue screaming wind light
Dead dead dead dead dead dead dead
Breathing windless no breath
Breathless no breath breathless breath
Black black black screech! No breath

• This poem was published by Undecimals Almanac, 2020
• Copyright © 2020 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.
• An introduction to this poem for Undecimals go: I saw a salmon fall from the sky. Its body had been dropped mid-air by a bald eagle killer—no one knows why. She’s a talented hunter, but a clumsy one, I guess. Surely when your priorities are food, sex, and sleep, you seek to hold onto food, sex and sleep whenever you can. The life of a Pacific Salmon is one of struggle and shock marked by periodic entry into drastically different realms. Adolescence is the exception, the passage of which is spent in the middle of the ocean and remains largely mysterious to humans. No one really knows what they do out there, away from the streams fisherman and bears frequent; one can only assume it’s erotic. What better way to await the next passage of one’s life than with an orgy in open waters. I imagine salmon know about patience. Vast, crushingly loud solitude. They await the voice of the sun or the warmth of water to tell them to go home and die. It was the look on the salmon’s face, distrustfully caught in my memory by a momentary pause in gravitational inevitability, that remains lodged. Stupefied and searching for sense, the salmon appeared to me as totally alive as it fell through the air. But then so do the humans who die in surprise. I tried to imagine the salmon’s surprise. Surprised by what one might imagine as the blowing heat or rushing cold of oxygen, by the sense that air, this terrifying new atmosphere, pummels instead of flows. Suddenly oxygen. Suddenly gravity. Suddenly shit fuck, surprise! The salmon was not waiting to die, but was snatched from life like a Pompeiian citizen.

• La Malade Imaginaire was written to be read in four ways.
• Originally commissioned for Perhaps, A Window, at Stadium (Berlin), July 2020
• A forthcoming sound piece was commissioned by Undecimals (Vancouver) in April 2021
• Copyright © 2020 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

I want it in last light / one trouser leg ankle-side / supine in cold sheets / arranging my ass in folds / I take off my glasses / I’m cocooned in humoral cotton / already sussurating / already blood dilating / already folds distending / the folds will develop their own heart beat/ this is the study of soft parts / this is a sarcology / it’s how the lizard lizard lizard pulls me further further further into its squishy nidifice / spooned by mammals and by humans in kind/ its opening is a cave splayed at the nape of the spine / I’m carried on a viscous button that I open my mouth to dampen / I breathe from my mouth to conjure its grand chamber / the chamber is a picture gallery / the pictures wince / they whisper my violence / they sell me my most private violence / they say limbs / limbs for sale / limbs / limbs / limbs / limbs / limbs / limbs nobody here has a head / they have mouths / eyes/ but no noses / no ears / no cheekbones / hands yes / fingernails no / no fingernails / this is the study of soft parts / these are my knees in rug burnt pain / these are my outstretched legs yes / this is my ass in the air yes / yes my trunk has shrunk / yes I am engorged in the light of eyelids shut to the sun / yes my fingers / yes these are my fingers they are titanics / yes this is how I make fucking pictures / yes these are the fucking pictures I make / yes these are the fuck pictures I make / they repeat / they rewind / they repeat / they make circles around the button that propels me on a limax trail / I slither through antechambers made of licked walls / they’re painted in fighting / fleeing / feeding / and fucking / they’re draped in velvet rubbed to oil cloth/ these are spaces I can describe no further / I’ve only glimpsed them in stroboscopic epiphanies / alias visions for two fingers / no three fingers / no twenty fingers/ hunting me like a stalking cat/ yes they call for me with familiar purrs / purrs I have known with speech if language is the movement of bodies / who praise me and treat me like shit / who exert their right to exist / whose memory lives under the mattress / in public toilets / whose memory lives on top of single beds / on hotel room floors / under airplane blankets / against table ends / who floats disembodied in metameric courses / serially repeating / sequencing DA CAPO/ floating in metameric courses / serially repeating / sequencing / serially thumping DA CAPO / serially thumping / who only knows me in here / who is totally available / who notices when I show up to the party with someone new / who is nevertheless an iteration / an ornamentation / whose words change / whose story is morphous but whose obsession is passim / whose new script is the same staging / who is a slut theatre DA CAPO / who is a slut theatre / who is joined this time by a special celebrity guest DA CAPO / who is joined this week by a special celebrity guest / who is joined by one night stands / who is joined by friends over lovers / whose guests are ambiguous even to the host / I am the host’s reprise/ who wanders into antechambers of to-do lists that are erotic too / whose dissidence is a submission / who is a repetition / a repetition / repeated in scales of dominance and submission / who “remains non-manifest in full actuality.”

• Performed at OHM Nightclub (Berlin) on the occasion of Mitch Speed’s book launch for his “One Work” Fiorruci Made Me Hardcore (Afterall Books), January 2020
• Published in TABLOID Press’, PORTAL, Summer 2020
• Copyright © 2020 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

Perhaps you forgot
Your gestation was
96 million years ago
Followed a raucous
Adolescence a
Union of mud and
Pre-creatures

Your chimeric body
Assured
An interesting life

You came here when your
Sisters lurched away
You settled nearby in
A slurry of debris
Excrement
Trapped in scar tissue
Cushioned or cemented
In common time

Your first lover
Introduced you
To consistent touch
Licked away
Extraneous matter

You are alive
Because you’re
Unfinished
A map of small time
Where water collects
You seek shape
Codependence in
Lapidary strokes
Your polyamory a
Politics of insignificance

She’s more
Wife than lover
She tends to
Business
While lazy, you
Relish in aloneness
Twice a day

She’s under the moon‘s soft control
So you are too

Some lovers make
Indelible grooves but
Most join in
Anonymous
Pockmarking,
Always been there
Ornamental lil’ erratics
Whispering secrets
Like parasites do
To their hosts
Obsequious, they
Pet you, blob queen
But lucky you feed
On wife wetness
Twice a day

You’re only one
Of many:
Lavished by the Pacific
Paid for by the moon
An unstable hierarchy
A deck of cards
Servicing many games

In polyparadise you suspect your wife of conspiracy. She wants to dislodge the groans from your nubbly kept body. She’s plotting new curves to the tune of her Pacific routine. She’s working in tandem with the one-night-stands whose numbers you save as pseudonyms pertaining to use. Their voices are so fucking annoying, you moan. You ask yourself how you can fall asleep to their polyphony of squeaks. But with them, you hear no more of the lie of your singular self. You bask in the multi-calmness of white noise.

Did you know your one-night-stands are 96-million-year old captives, scratching at your prison walls? Did you know that their revolutionary ally is your wife, in a war of attrition against you, waged with sex and stories? You’re Shahryar, not Scherezade as you’ve always believed, as your ego has always convinced you. Your retribution is erosion. Your panic is a sheen lapped away in morsels, crumbs, or ashes that fertilise obediently. Your fear is pointless in the face of inevitable change.

You will make peace with the following lessons:

1. Learn the contour of your shape, and accept that your shape is temporary. You cannot keep it, it is not yours. You may only relish in it as long as the tide is low. It’s a hitherto lifetime with no present. It’s all work, a career of dismantlement, and so a lifetime of eroding excess.
2. Caress the grooves of your shallow imprints. An unimportant tryst is still inerasable. Feel alive in the conglomeration of their meaningless secrets.
3. Watch as a human manchild smashes concretions to reveal your origins: ammonites, new dinosaurs, abandoned homes buried in your flesh.

At work we’re alive. In low moments we revel in aloneness, ponder death. We gnaw at present circumstances and question improvisations, which are forms of ornament made by expertise. Ornament, a process of revealing smallness—we’re so small—through elaboration.

Do you ever feel slow inside the day’s brevity?

• Self-published as the chapbook Meaningless Secrets, 2020, available at Hopscotch Reading Room.
• Copyright © 2019 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

The road to ruin is paved with good intentions
Hell is full of good meanings
Heaven is full of good works

The earth owes you precisely nothing
And you assume she will adapt to your needs!
She’d rather test how little you need
She decides how much she gives
Of what you need

I have a vision
Of panelled rooms in taupe
Carpeted richly
Reminding a nodding audience
That it doesn’t matter
(It doesn’t matter)
We were fucked last night and still slick tomorrow
It was a gross fuck arrhythmic, lacking eye contact
Comes with a squinty rictus, licked one index finger
A foreknowledge of deeds that say
I wanna dig and squeeze and scratch that itch, baby

It’s not wrong if grave consequences
Precede careful reasoning
It’s not our fault, it’s your profligacy
It’s everyone’s responsibility
Maybe it’s shielded in a film of good
But the results are perfunctory

He doesn’t know what to do
He makes excuses down the highway
On the scenic route
He tilts his head to the side
He furrows his brow with careful words
How do you think he pays for all this?
But he laments the light
Because he recognizes beauty
He should recognize the imperilment of beauty
He believes in law and government
(like I strain to)
He sits in the cold
Watching killer whales feast on herring spawn
(My negative number will not, instead knows)
Only exploded stomachs in technicolour stretches
Yeah it’s called plastic and it lives in you too

I have been led to another place
But the room I picture remains the same for 200 years at least
Nodding at hidden truths
We suspect but fear to acknowledge
Yeah the earth is dying, what’s your point?
How rich can we get and how normal can we make it?
“Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.”
So let’s get fucking rich.

We are extremely small
And have made up our minds too early
How long will we pray to the god of adaptability?
Like I add repetition to this song
Like I add chance to this unpredictability.

We accept the solidity of expiration dates
Death to ourselves and everyone else, to
The Pinta Island Tortoise
The Caribbean Monk Seal
The Canarian Oystercatcher
The Mariana Mallard
The Dusky Seaside Sparrow
The Mexican Grizzly Bear
The Javanese Tiger
The Saudi Gazelle
The Scimitar Oryx
The Forest Ox
Garrido’s Hutia
The Dinagat Bushy-Tail Cloud Rat
The Wondiwoi Tree Kangaroo
The Japanese Sea Lion
The Golden Toad
The Conondale Gastric Brooding Frog
The Black-Faced Honeycreeper
The Saint-Helena Earwig
The Morona-Santiago stubfoot toad
The Christmas Island shrew
The San Quintin kangaroo rat
The Kauaʻi ʻōʻō
The Socorro sowbug
The Scarlet harlequin toad
The Angel Island mouse
The Aru flying fox
The Cryptic Treehunter
Spix’s Macaw
The Monito skink
The Alagoas Foliage-gleaner
The Danube delta dwarf goby
The Sardohoratia sulcata
The Atelopus petersi
The Manombo
The Po’ouli
Chapman’s pygmy chameleon
The La Hoya minute salamander
The Eastern Puma
The Pyrenean ibex
The Central rock rat
The Yangtze River dolphin
The Kihansi spray toad
The Selmunett wall lizard
The Western black rhinoceros
The Northern White Rhinoceros
The Vietnamese Javan rhinoceros
The Plectostoma charasense
The Burdur spring minnow
The Christmas Island pipistrelle

Every single one of them is a miracle of evolution
A million year old teething splay of small change that is gone
Gone

We peer through portals
At blurry secrets
Of the sky and our futures
Pasts outside remembrance

• This piece was first performed at Schloss Salon, Berlin (invited by Sofia Leiby).
• A second iteration of this poem was performed with expanded sound and choreography at Soft Politics, Berlin Project Space Festival, July 2019, commissioned by Ashley Berlin. More here.
• This piece was released by Bitsy Knox & Roger 3000, and is available here.
• Copyright © 2019 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

Maybe I’ve always been a cozy animal

A bed bug, nestled in the seam of your mattress
Waiting for nocturnal stillness
Vampiric notation of midnight snacks

An eel, eminently slippery
Underbite crazy eyes
Waiting to crush you with toothy multitudes

Two beans, spooning in amniotic red
A new opening called a womb, later
A mouth carved from goo tissue

I wait in murk
Poke from my pook like a disobedient tongue
Sediment settling all around like a blanket
Like Nyx calling night
Like I sleep with my back to the wall
Safe from stabbing

I knew calcified little ways of eating by month three
Anticipated masserating remnants
Sucking cheeks
Tonguing at muck from birth
Sweet and salty memories turned
Agents of decay

There’s a way out
Of this heavy heat
It’s an obstacle course of infuscate chambers.
At the other lit opening
There’s a waiting room
Decorated in chairs, it’s
Where we’re sitting now
At some point everyone in this room learned to wait their turn
For ritual cleansing
For their scale of rot to be pondered

I have taken it upon myself to imagine us
In one routine orifice
Finally able to smell our own breath
We’re in one mouth
Droplets combined to make one patient reservoir
We have been underwater
Alone together we’re reminded of
What it feels like before and
After we’re alive

Fidgeting together we imagine
Private futures of streets and distractions
Of flicking buttons
Of hot Luft of
Hot bare legs of
Hot divets sealed with cooling agent
Whether rot is decay or digestion

We don’t believe in heaven
We believe in the passage of food

• This poem was published in Bastardos (Pure Fyction), 2019
• Copyright © 2019 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

I didn’t ask
whether it’s alright
If, atop the whale’s back
I can keep you here
And strip you of the aftermath

The eagles were eating their hunt
Two bleached trunks convening
nubs looking forward-
Benches around an erratic giant

Smooth, and millions of years!
Of angry and alone
As in wheelies in your father’s car
Angrily at night, when the ice is
Thawing with painful protraction

Your body revealed
Your body a crater
Your body a boulder
Your body a bolder version of –
Your body the very picture of –
Summer, millions of years
Ago the South Pacific yawned
Gravel grating
A mmmillion days so that I can
Rub my thumbs on the assailant

Isn’t she a
Child of angry glaciers?
Our cold and dirty grandmother,
Who formed the world
Embossed her under foot
and a porous body for us to
Dribble out from

She knows what a trillion years is:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Trillion
Trypophobics tumble over this
Sssomatic earth, aware of
Exfoliating my ass, home to
Nine gazillion barnacles
Cutting pink flowers into flesh

Imagine
The picture of
A truly awaited prickly embrace
Like when the starfish came back
Plague survivors clinging
Purple and slowly snapping
Their underbelly mouths shut
They’re stronger than ever
Together or alone
They’ll procreate

I imagined how it would start
Hand on thigh
Food for later
No,
Nose to nose
I’ll hungrily anticipate how your skin feels
It’s so warm and I’ve waited so long
To scratch your itch

I want to describe a kiss
I wanted to show you my best one

Tasty oxygen emits
Like apocrine glands
Stroking this excretory duct
That dribbles down hairs
Thicker when shaved an
Oily dribble percolation

I like my
Coffee with cardamom my

Soapy morning disappointment

Your eyes were shut

So I peered over your shoulder

Where garden snakes
Bump
heads and nuzzle cheeks
Horny
Unpracticed

Yes it’s totally repulsive
But over your shoulder
Keratin heard clacking
Feathers heard sweeping

This burned in my brain
Yellow talons on fishtails
Clumsy experts at
Tearing scales

That’s before I told you
I can’t stand to look at birds of prey
By which I mean fear
You were disappointed

But there are
Clumsy predators
Do not ask how
History precedes them
Millions and billions and trillions
of years, those
crazy-eyes

How could you do such a thing
For so long your
Eyebrow cocked
Saliva coursing down your chin

Why didn’t you just swim naked?
It’s as hot out as
Your tongue
Instead weakly perched bathophobic
Floating, my neck finds salt prickling
Dried to the pock-marked rocks

When I came up again
Liquid mercury slinking away
And later your best memory is of
Me wiping your glasses
Practiced since childhood
Better to see pyrite skies with
looming conflagration

Is this marrow
A sum of substance?

Blame the weather
this cadmium-sunset-weather
this sun
this cadmium sky
this cadmium sky cuts contours

Curling shapes need the sky
As if the sky is one body

Your breath thickens around my bones
Grows under calculating vines
Your flavour lost after too long

• Tomarrow was first read at Blake & Vargas (Berlin), for “A Guest List is a Love Letter“, invited by TABLOID Press, June 2019.
• Copyright © 2017 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

Who will you ask to style
your conversation?
Dress you in your words?

Sagging in boredom the
Customer agent
Answered with
Trrransactional Distance,
what you call
Emmmmmmmpowerment,
even though you are not
rich enough
for the shoes you wear.

As if to walk
to be either very cold or very hot
Are all cozzzzzzy impossibilities.

Wouldn’t you rather
Badinage (1) on
Thick carpets, cushioning
Your dissonant whimpers;
The luxuriant little puppy’s
Turned old grey dog

How might your gloveless
hand
tarry a moment longer
In the cold
to witness it’s condition?

I see its impressive grip on
Formality
a pretty grippable silicon mass
Shaped so
that glassy surfaces cannot slip
From doing limbs

Never have I said so little
Mouth and hand and back
Curled clockwise like
The boy in Asnières
My wrist my back limp
My mouth limp, I
Gaze at doing limbs
Gone lax and silent,
Written so:

“She came back now. She stepped so to speak from her tense trance-state like a moth from a split chrysalis. She stepped so to speak from her tense mood and laid a hand become suddenly nerveless, lax across the peak (she still half visualized it) of a minute mountain. The hand sank suddenly and she recalled exactly her surroundings. The hand sank down lax, nerveless as the cold of the fresh green spires of the inner un-sunned grasses (weeds of an inner green pool unfolded) it contracted, tense, shocked from its nervelessness to a marble quality of tension. Her hand lay, separated in her consciousness, a marble hand broken, separated. It was as if a heavy marble hand had been broken from the draped body of some exiled Muse or early unfashionable Aphrodite. An archaic hand, heavy, firm-weighted, of priceless texture, lay heavy white stone on the green floor of some tiny tide pool.” (2)

With this low gaze, comes “a
Woman,
In consideration.” (2)
Actual time in continuity.

When I die
Which we all do,
Don’t embalm me in a giant wax candle
Lying curled around a melted moat
of hot wick centre
Paraffin’s perfume like
my myrrh, my
mucous
Kept in suspension

No,
Let my stomach putrefy third
My larynx, my trachea first
My uterus last

Yes,
My sex is the closest to dirt
Fertilizes cotton

So,
compost my last meal
My final privilege will be
To enjoy it
All by myself

“…to flourish we must absorb more than we exude
Of elements, minerals, and so forth.
We call this food, and it fabricates us
From the inside.
But much does drip and escape
From the corporeal tissues and we use this
Excess to make belief.

It is normal therefore for the body to perish From incessancy of belief.

In the meantime

How about a milky pablum, nutmeats
Quickened with liquor, the iron
Our blood sucks from roots, the delicate
And ingenious bodies we call pastries
Or most intimate aspects of animals
Honey, sap and other lucky seepage
Various salts and the slightly bitter textures of leaves:
From a fortuitous concourse of atoms
Blond foams, dripping vineyards, these curved
Spontaneously out of the pleasurable earth.” (3)

I have knelt to feel the pleasurable earth
And found
A rotten mother
Shrivelled
Her tentacles reveal
her offspring
firm and many eyed

And here I plucked in pride
Her children alive as her body fed
The earth with her oozing putrefaction
Her body rendered excess (4)
Used up by proceeding generations.

When I die
Which we all do,
Don’t shatter me with sonic pulses

No,
Let my stomach putrefy third
My larynx, my trachea first
My uterus last

Let my last hummmmmmm
Be the longest expiration…

Tongue, low to the floor
Passing roundly through
Space, fills a
Saliva dark
Cave, its vibrating trapdoor
An incessantly vibrating trapdoor
Communicating ease
Making for humid conditions
Ripe for R&R
With red curtains to
Block out the light

To Block the Windows and Change the Date
Like Camilla said,
“Light is used to divide time flow and as a timeline to preserve from the rush of chaos. Ideas receive their date but the space is in camouflage…” (5)

Yes,
A pulsing orange curtain glows
veins pulsing this flesh glows
That only knows daylight

In other words
I’ll sit a little longer
In this state

It’s why the chest feels frost
In heavy moments
The way the saffron sheet rustles
Last year’s clothes, dumped
Or chewed
They lie dampening
Catching wet dust called mud
In cold light suspension
“Clots of rubbish washed up on shore became us.
Similar yet unrelated swerves hosted each

Fruit and flouncing pasture, which now with meagre effort
We’re hard pressed to husband.
We use up the cattle and their fields.
We use up iron.
Dirt’s tired of giving.
We sigh at our expired
Work, envious at the luck of our
Parents.
We walk to the bar again with stooped shoulders.” (6)

This life this
Apogetic thud
Autolytically dripping

I’ve seen excess dribble
From here, here, and here
In little spurts or shuddering flow
No cotton for dabbing.

In fact,
What surfaces absorb excess?
Floorboards or lace.
I will never see “the mucous, that most intimate interior of my flesh, neither the touch of the outside of the skin of my fingers, nor the perception of the inside of these same fingers, but another threshold of the passage from outside to inside, from inside to outside, between inside and outside, between outside and inside.” (7)

In front of us
The flesh folds
In fluid inflection,
Drips in continuity
Unbound.

The flesh who formed the world
A porous body for us to
Dribble out of

Its
mud and mire
Is a limax trail
Sliiiiiide or adhere to continue
Dripping from folds
And oozing on cushions

What is the timing of your liquefaction?
Jell-o liquefaction
Your marrow shudders
Under
A generation of hot lights

Born and died
Reborn and revealed
Emerged from
This slimy excess

Emergent from a red orange glow
Cooled by mucous.

Meanwhile we read
On a bed of rocks
That cackled as the sea exhaled,
We were
“Absorbing”, later “exuding”
Feeding on
Bread and cheese
“Synasthetic” (8) entertainment to a
Nervous little audience
And conspiring gulls

But then you hadn’t reached the part about
Leaks
Of tipping earth and furrowed brows
Consciously unfolded

I remembered then the hot breath
Glued shut by
Moist layers of
Fundament
I push a note
Through vibrating flaps
To a smile or a salty brow

And here I hummed
Because this does not suffice
To describe
The messy privilege of happiness

1.  Badinage meaning “small talk” in French, but also a piece by Marin Marais, which is particularly dissonant in the Baroque style of the time. 

2.  H.D. “Palimpsest”, p. 42

3.  Lisa Robertson, “Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip”, p.34

4.  Lisa Robertson, “Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip”

5.  Camilla Wills, “Block the Windows and Change the Date”, DRIVEN BY THOUGHTS February 19 – March 19, 2017

6. Lisa Robertson, “Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip”, p.34

7.  Patricia MacCormack, “MUCOUS, MONSTERS AND ANGELS: IRIGARAY AND ZULAWSKI’S POSSESSION”, p.110

8. Lisa Robertson, “Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip”, p.33

• Another iteration of this poem was performed in collaboration with Will Holder on the occasion of And When She Awoke, The Dinosaur Was Still There, curated by Kate Brown and Maurin Dietrich (December 2017).
• Copyright © 2017 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.

Hasty lovers
don’t understand
Don’t see this
little teat
Its presence
has no effect
But prickles
When cold

As annual lies
Written in dedication
Mumble in-absentia for

Thirty-four years:
Ear
To tummy
Listening for
whirring cells
Ouroboros tears or
The saddest mad joy
At the vessel
Its blackened lines
Proof of ancient
Female bathing

• Copyright © 2017 Bitsy Knox, all rights reserved.