They've Taken Ori to the Camp

They've Taken Ori to the Camp

Week 201

I know they’ve taken Ori to the Camp. I’ve never thought or written those words aloud. I learned to not know what I didn’t want to know a long time ago. That’s what the beatings my Mother gave me meant to teach me and I learned.
Machi’s still gone. He’s a feral child and Im the wolf.
Why do I write?
Wy do I want to write?
Why can’t I write?

I started to write to please my father? Or because wanting to please my father was the way to finding my own mind. I wanted to write because my mind wanted to find itself, its deepest particularities in the hope that in that bedrock, that core, I would connect with other minds. I wanted to find truths and tell them. I wanted to combat my alienation. I wanted to enjoy my mind. I’d lay in bed at night all alone as a little girl, scared of the diseases I’d overheard my parents talk about, and the church gossip and intrigues, wanting to go in my mind to the places of fascination and beauty and wonder and magic and goodness I knew were life, were the truth about life. The truths that she was afraid to tell anyone, because they would take them away. Those were the truths she wanted to give to characters, to somebody else, in a form where nobody could take it away.

So then what stops me from writing? If I want to tell and protect my secrets at once, then why don’t I finish things?
There’s the problem of time. There’s the problem that writing is not my actual work, and so I have not social reason to make artifacts, to solve the problems on the way to making them. I’m still in bed at night, waiting for when at last it’s my time, and I can have my secret magical thoughts. I am addicted to the omnipotence. The onanism. And I’ve not succeeded in casting my writing as work out in the world. I’ve finished one novel in the old days when I still had little girl time. I’ve won two fellowships for stories that were halfway done. I’ve produced, directed, performed in three live video plays, I’ve read my work in maybe 30 public art events…But then I ran away from making art my work. I was afraid. I didn’t want to run for the blocks. I didn’t play.
There’s this place where I’m still my father’s little girl, writing for approval, not for real.
There’s a recording in my head: this thing I’m making isn’t real. I’m only playing. I have no idea what I’m making. What I’m making isn’t real. I have no craft. I don’t know what the real people would make. I can’t track the dominant mind would do here and I have no thoughts I can hold on to of my own. I am completely disconnected from that core I was seeking. Or if I touch it, by accident, I can’t hold onto it and cast it out into the world. I can’t survive scrutiny. There’s nobody there, there are no thoughts.

And then, what does it matter. The whole world will be under water. This is the last time before the flood.

So because of the imminent flood and imperialism and colonialism and dictatorships and pulled eyeballs and fingernails, there had to be politics. Revolutionary poliics. And from the politics there came a son. And because of the disappeared evanescent, arcade rabbit self and the politics, I was a wolf mother. So now the revolutionary life partner is gone and so is the feral boy. And the father is dead.