insecure about my voice (both spoken and written) – reading Rae Armantrout, Eileen Myles – brusque way w/ words – bluntly line them up but somehow also smoosh them into each other – like bricks, but before they are bricks – like clay (maybe what I mean is the sound is choppy but the rhythm is fluid and the images fizzy between the two)
I want to luxuriate on the floor of their words floor of their worlds sinking in some places and supported in others – like each letter a nail on a bed – linguistic acupuncture

how to push against the wall and escape? I feel like I’m conceptualising this like a pocket being turned inside out (moving from one space to another, the same but somehow inverted)
pop you swing through and you keep on running
pop isn’t really the right word but fuck it I’m done trying to find the right words – I guess that’s why I left academia (and why I’m going back again)
feel like I’m pushing against wall in this analysis – or reaching for something in the dark, trying to find a pouch I can’t see / don’t know is there
like I lost my keys and I’m mentally patting myself down (but maybe I never had any keys, maybe I never had any self – maybe neither of these things exist without material/on the inside)

wonder what Benjamin would have thought about Rosenburg’s side eye at Brecht’s socialism – well placed criticism that England wasn’t all white (or all cis- either)
this is why we need a carrier bag (or pocket) theory of fiction – but this is an aside

and another – it was in the late 17c (so just before Sheppard was born) that men started to have clothes made w/ pockets incorporated – waistcoats breeches (women’s remained on string tied around waist, worn under dresses to be accessed via a slit)
so its really only in this time that in reaching into men’s pockets, Jack can reach into (and steal from) their masculinity – before that, it would have been external, but the contents are now something integral or integrated into their person/manhood

what Benjamin and Sheppard also share is a sense of the paradoxes of the pocket --> its both a container and an opening

sentence that really puzzled me near the beginning of the book: Jack’s lying in his loft bedroom in his employers’ house, chained to the bed feeling trapped, thinking about how he’s never been anything but trapped and I’ll just read it… ‘his confinement became the door inside him between his waking life and something still unwoken, something lying close-packed like a bomb at his core, poised to shiver into a coruscated, glinting shower of – of – of what, he knew not. But there was Something just beyond the door inside him.'

I mean
I’m just going to leave that there
but I think if I had to say something it is about the necessity of disappearance to revelation
the self you currently inhabit having to take a step back, having to give up on survival, to risk something new
Rosenburg describes Jack doing this ‘thames-trick’ which didn’t make any sense to me until I started to dissociate
pretends the waters of the thames are rushing over him, so everything seems quite far away, even himself
but its not quite right to say this is a deadening of senses – this blocking out is at a piece with the world around him
its like Benjamin said – the veil and unveiled are together
not like you can unlock yourself from the world – the lock is the world; if you see what I mean?

anyway, Jack’s trick with the thames (and this is why I brought it up) reminded me of Gloria Anzaldua’s writing process

she says she goes into a kind of trance and … actually its important so I’m going to read it too, hang on:
When I create stories in my head, that is, allow the voices and scenes to ‘be projected’ in the inner screen of my mind, I "trance." I used to think I was going crazy or that I was having hallucinations. But now I realize it is my job, my calling, to traffic in images. Some of these film-like narratives I write down; most are lost, forgotten. When I don't write the images down for several days or weeks or months, I get physically ill. Because writing invokes images from my unconscious, and because some of the images are residues of trauma which I then have to reconstruct, I sometimes get sick when I do write. I can't stomach it, become nauseous, or burn with fever, worsen. But, in reconstructing the traumas behind the images, I make "sense" of them, and once they have "meaning" they are changed., transformed. It is then that writing heals me, brings me great joy.
To facilitate the "movies" with soundtracks, I need to be alone, or in a sensory-deprived state. I plug up my ears with wax, put on my black cloth eye-shades, lie horizontal and unmoving, in a state between sleeping and waking, mind and body locked into my fantasy. I am held prisoner by it. My body is experiencing events. In the beginning it is like being in a movie theater, as pure spectator. Gradually I become so engrossed with the activities, the conversations, that I become a participant in the drama. I have to struggle to "disengage" or escape from my "animated story," I have to get some sleep so I can write tomorrow. Yet I am gripped by a story which won't let me go. Outside the frame, I am film director, screenwriter, camera operator. Inside the frame, I am the actors – male and female – I am desert sand, mountain, I am dog, mosquito. I can sustain a four- to six-hour "movie." Once I am up, I can sustain several "shorts" of anywhere between five and thirty minutes. Usually these "narratives" are the offspring of stories acted out in my head during periods of sensory deprivation.
My "awakened dreams" are about shifts. Thought shifts, reality shifts, gender shifts: one person metamorphoses into another in a world where people fIy through the air, heal from mortal wounds. I am playing with my Self, I am playing with the world's soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el espiritu del mundo. I change myself. I change the world.

Isn’t this something?
I mean, it’s a little dramatic – heroic even – and when I first read it I was a bit embarrassed / put out by it --> like this really isn’t how I write
but why would you write about writing and keep all the frustration and failure in… and maybe this is where Ursula le Guin is wrong, or right, when she says ‘that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato’
maybe we want our heroes to be rabbits, or potatoes – or dogs and mosquitos – or us
maybe its bad to want to have that power instead of destroying it, or to collapse that power with confidence as if there isn’t a softer, less violent, way there
but its also like, I wouldn’t know what to do with a spear if I had one, and so it would be kind of like the spear that Ursula imagines didn’t really exist, it would be something else like maybe a needle with which to stitch a pocket

Anzaldua also says that being a writer feels very much like being queer, by which she means a lot of squirming and thrashing against walls, or a lot of floating and waiting in a boundless, undefined limbo
and really I wasted so much time thinking about pockets when this was probably what I was trying to say all along
a folly which Anzaldua also reassures me for, because

That's what writing is for me, an endless cycle of making it worse, making it better, but always making meaning out of the experience, whatever it may be.

I don’t know why I need permission to be interested in the struggle --> I guess its another way neo-liberal neo-feudal whatever-stage-they’ve-decided-we’re-on capitalism has to separate our creativity from our lives, to try to make us unable to see that our creative and structural struggles might be related
so I guess I’m really asking – what kind of person is so afraid of materiality?