life updates

we had hoped to get this spell sent out in the first week of september but time had other plans for us. ultimately, we chalk the untimeliness of this post to needing rest to restore lost energy. whenever, we lose an ability we painstaking amassed over a long period of time in one fell swoop, we fall into a deep depression about how little of our life is in our control. it reminds us about these words from The Mighty user, Zoe Waters (@wordlover12), where she writes, "Leaving aside the positive aspects of disabilty, such as enhanced perspective and problem-solving skills-- those virtues so often shouted to keep "normal" people from feeling sorry for us-- life in an insurbordinate body or mind is hard." we really don't know what form these posts will take moving forward. it may be that as opposed to a month-long dispatch of ephemera and sundries, impressions are broken up into smaller bits that can be composed and published in one bed-flow.

we recently rigged a new workstation setup to make manuscript revisions and other writing tasks possible directly from the bed (eledumare willing, our next post will be an indepth post about the nuts n bolts of getting this workstation up and running because this is life-saving information for other poor disabled and chronically/dynamically/terminally ill artists, who do not have the means to shell out thousands of dollars on a customized zero gravity workstation). if this new setup works then with hope, our posting cadence might shift to a more erratic but more frequent updates. there are many more things we want to use this blog to hold beyond these spells but until this very moment, our working setup has made those things impossible with our unrelenting fatigue and limited energy.

SOUP FOR SPELL

muttering, puttering, lettering

my goal is to be thirty four percent ears, zero percent fists, thirteen percent hydrogen, six percent sass

   —— from logic by Bob Hicok

Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?
I blame the soup: I'm a primordially stirred person

   —— Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun by Heather McHugh

A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day
aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day

   —— Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!) by Marilyn Hacker

They are a little like sea monkeys but they can predict the fuchsia

   —— Michael Sleep from Small Prophets

...meeting Mr. Hope, it was like talking to and having acquaintance with the mystery of music, who explained not by the ruler or lip but with music. So from him I heard how to learn

   —— Ibn Ali speaking on Elmo Hope

...you say the thing twice because the first utterance builds the vessel, and the second utterance fills it

   —— Ibraheem Uthman from What the Muezzin Taught Me About Line Breaks

Caught in a cruel, ceasless cycle of crisis,
Crip clenched circumstance

   —— Sin à Tes Souhaits from On Crip

ARACHNEAN ERA

on bells, ghazals, dreams and water

on bells & ghazals

all month, we thought long and hard about repetitions and bells. i am trying to write a ghazal and have decided that it shall be about bells. i made the decision about bells before i knew why i made it. as for the ghazal, we never attempted to write one before now but after writing ourselves into quicksand, one after the other with free verse experiments this month, i reckoned working within a vessel or form might lead us to more interesting places. imposed restraints may open the ground allowing for bewildering leaps of transformation and absurdity.

writing a ghazal is like chewing gum; the form invites you to take a word, phrase, sentence you think you know then asks you to chew it, stretch it, teeth-mold it, blow it, pop it, texture-slack it until you can't remember if it tasted sickly sweet or minty fresh when you first threw it into your mouth. but that is the beauty you see, it is the same word/phrase/ sentence but it has been changed until it is no longer recognizable just by the mere fact of repeating it across five to fifteens couplets. thus, repetition becomes the very engine of transformation in the ghazal.

we live a repetitive life, my loop of repetition may be more tightly woven than most but i suspect each one of us does. after all, we wake inside the repetition of noisy mornings, food habits, highway routes, and dark roar of moon-lit nights. Yet each repeated day cannot be reduced to the previous one. what then do we make of this fugitive difference? it may be for this reason that the ghazal appeals to us. i want to dip my pen into the sea of hours and draw out true words, true moans. screams and shouts. True gasps as we live them each day. without artifice. without adornment.

that is the work we must undertake.

on dreams and water

every time we wake up from a vivid dream, we flirt with the idea of a dream diary where whatever loose, incandescdent film we remember in the heat of waking up can live within until we decide what to make with them. but this idea remains mostly an idea because whatever will o' wisps remains usually steams out of the bathroom window during our morning trip. we are left with an impress on our senses that the dream was a potent one. But one genre of dreamscape we always remember long after the hours of dreaming are water dreams.

in my waking hours, i am too petrified by the immense power of the sea to even consider wading beyond the shoreline of a beach but in these dreams, we slip through sea forms easily. from dolphins to manatees to manta rays to turtle to eels to whales. the feeling of swimming in currents, breaching the surface for air, cresting a wave, squirming and burrowing into sand, feels so tactile and real. these dream fill us with a sense of buoyant anticipation and exhiliration. waking up feels like grief.

we lost the last of our upright mobility to the water. it was 2022 and we naively believed our doctor at the time's primary diagnosis of fibromyalgia. her recommendation for the stiffness and muscle pain was hydrotherapy: thirty mins in warm, moving water doing gentle stretching exercises. we found a physiotherapist working out of a YMCA close enough to uber. during our first appointment, he put us in the jacuzzi section of a heated pool with a giant ball to help with the exercises which he demonstrated before leaving. Ten minutes into the session, my head began to spin and i began to feel nauseous. to avoid a full faint, we decided to get out of the water. the climb out was excruciating, those six steps out of the pool felt like we were trudging the summit of a great mountain. gravity combined with the exertion turned our legs jelly. when we finally pulled out of the water, our body felt so heavy we couldn't move it. we laid shivering on the cold floor for almost an hour before mustering the last of our energy home. when we woke up the next day, we couldn't get out of bed. we had become bedridden.

whenever we get these water dreams, we feel a powerful urge to get back into water, to experience that indescribable lightness of the body floating on top of an even denser expanse. it has been so long since we felt it, we have almost forgotten the feeling. in a body weighed by it's own terrible density, these dreams come almost as if they are being pulled out of the depth by my waking longings.

if the water keeps on calling, then should we not in turn respond? we figure we know more now about our limits than we did then.

in orbit,
eégúnjϙbί