Spiritual Povera, Redacted Extract #1 (from Chapter Five)

████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ We make music. When I play them I am trying to break free from a Static position, trauma as Creation, as the Original Painter, but choosing Healing to move SeedTrauma into a new form. Healing provides a choice. Healing is a Sculptor. Trauma is an Original Creator, an Immaculate Conception. People Places Things, Paints, MIDIs, Theremins. Ancient organs, harpsichord, distortion pedal, Rowland S. electric guitar. Sitting meditation,¹ an opportunity to go into the subconscious and clean up the frequency range from below, like an Iceberg, what you see at the top in waking life is nothing. We must hack our programming ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ █████████████████ We must take back our lives. The idea of yourself gives. I write past this. Break the page. Prison abolition. This is a public health issue. Preventative medicine research. Epigenetics Painting Sex and Love Addiction co-dependency and trauma bonding. He gives her more than her family gave her, she loves him for that, it is against her Will, it is not her fault, this is the way it plays out. He picks these girls, they are his type, he needs their incessant overwhelming phantastical love, he feeds, it’s like shooting-up, it gets you so high it’s not even measurable with science, and then he can’t stand it, something about it, something clicks over, he can’t shake this feeling. She can’t shake this feeling. Dean Blunt. Meow. Meow 2. Suicidal Oil Piglet. Punk Café. Sophomore. Guzzler. Meow 3. Meow 4. ███’s Next Girlfriends. ███’s Old Girlfriends. ███’s Old Girlfriends.² Everything that came before it.³ Everything that will come after. Something new, a new number formation at the end of an old name, new names, new characters. Something so new I couldn’t describe it.⁴ Something so new I wouldn’t know if it was happening. It was happening. It happened. It ended. The best times are over they’re not coming back. It’s done. Variations on a theme. We are a row of slightly different mid-century drawer dressers, over time our design changed, at first subtly, and then to total re-categorisation. We walk down different paths, the paths veer, we get further away, at a point one decides what else is there to do but keep going ██████████████████⁵ I sit on the 3 down St Kilda Road to Monash elongating my legal time outside the house as long as possible, think about walking around stoned in spring taking photos of ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████ with you. We write about Anything. We hold hands, are kissing █████████████████████, I asked you if you wanted to, you said yes. It never happened. There is an electricity to SLAA and CODA. The opposite of this energy is to empty and detach. Disgusting! Dejected from my Paintbox. Source says I’m done. I must listen. To defy gravity you end up in a Gravitron. I am pushed up against the wall staring at old paints ███████████████████████, like trying to run in a dream. Old Paints paint together at a show, they Show1, they Show2, they Show3, and ride Gravitron, are hanging out, in ugly clothes, some designer. She’s in my clothes. I gave her my clothes when I bug-bombed my life. A fatal irrevocable split. On the other side of the room, pinned down by Gravity, submitting myself to His Will, I stare out at Old Paints partying writing probably laughing probably fucking. Sinning and I am a nun devoted to Nothing and regret it!!! Which is what I came for. This is the experience I wanted. █████████████████████████████████ ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████⁶ ██████⁷

A couple fucking in a Gravitron.

Narcotic.

A Vetements campaign.

Blake Barnes was from Adelaide. Leigh Bowery was Australian.

Massive Attack, Mezzanine, Virgin, 1998. Referenced like a memory. Not the actual album—the concept, it’s energetic, an Understanding of, a Reference, an Anchor, point at it.⁸

It’s crazy what can become of your life when you don’t have the right shoe. The right wool full-length kilted tartan skirt and lambswool or mohair sweater. Ugly people take pills.

█████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ I saw in Utero I did not get enough sleep, there was not enough red light. My mother was unable to provide herself with validation, she needed to get her self-esteem externally, this lowered the temperature of the womb, this was disruptive to my getting of sleep. I came to feel ████████████████████████████ to gap-fill the Impoverished Utero experience. Post-effects. Photoshop. History stitches together like a quilt. Sleep in Real Life is Re-Uteroization. Red lights at the right hertz and colour wavelengths ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ Traditional Chinese Medicine ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ playing out all at once. Every experience that ever existed and ever could exist is simultaneous, ███████████████████████████████████████ ascetic, a canvas, a frame.

Each piece of writing best functions as a brick. I was trying to make glue. A craftsperson only knows what they know at the time. We aim to develop our skills. And then there is anorexic zeitgeist whore New Zealand gallery Instagram.

████████████████████████████████████ Style is murder, He couldn’t love my waist circumference, I get it. Seduced by Elegant murder, make it more hateful. The wrong pair of shoes will get you killed (its metaphysics). The silhouette its metaphysical. It is not a problem of being fat it is a problem of being fat. Options are limited and the chances of making a wrong decision are higher, the margin of error increases, in life all we have is Action. We make choices. They lead to differing outcomes. Sometimes, most times, its too late to turn back. I take Action. Buy shoes online. Circumnavigate the essential problem of second-hand sneaker soles wearing down with excessive Stage Four walking—I chose the proletariat 3-eye 1461 for their sturdy sole, ambiguous normalcy, evading Stylised identity, just another person, just any other hipster on the street. Turning into nothing. Uncapitalised.⁹

I look over my shoulder at the past and no one is there. I made the wrong choice, the silhouette of the shoe is too chunky, I can’t get back to the past, and the shoe is not especially stream-lined. The shoe is not Old. It is New. They become red laser sniper targets tracking my inadequacy, apart from the Stylish Hate Pack, broken apart and split in half, unworthy, I left the other Half in Him and he won’t give it back, because he doesn’t care. If I live or die. To care so little, that it not matter either way. Which is to say he would prefer me dead. When no one texts I am forgotten. And I move and it doesn’t matter. And they show, and they show, and they do another show. There is no bread at the fucking bread bakery in North Melbourne. ███ refugee. Stupid fucking ugly shoe. ███████████████████████ in conflict. █████████████████████████████████ On the ground the shoe is wrong. I make bricks. I am building the first floor it is made of an exceptionally strong material. One tells themselves, and must continue to believe, to survive, any normal day. ██████████████████████████████████████████████████ It’s a “Just For Today” program. Just get one brick right. The conflict remains. ███████ full magazine. “Tensegrity” refers to the combining of two opposing materials to create super-strength in an object or structure.¹⁰ This brick needs its oppositional energetic to bind and create, Duelling Cosmic Elite level producers, workers, our children. He is Him. █████ He is missing. Our child is Unfertilised in my ageing womb a life robbed is a life murdered. Murder only matters if you Register. The building site is abandoned, the workers walk off the job, find another job, help each other get other jobs. They work for a movie production company. This job it is my only job, I labour on, you would hope I would.

Against the Stream.

The marketplace, as described by Houellebecq.

It is cold and cruel I hate my gender I hate the other one too.

Ageing in a long tartan skirt, one ski jacket and the wrong shoes rub, keep writing. Winter. Water falling.¹¹

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid. FRANZ KAFKA”¹²

“In the schizoid condition here described there is a persistent scission between the self and the body. What the individual regards as his true self is experienced as more or less disembodied, and bodily experience and actions are in turn felt to be part of the false-self system.”¹³

Between brick and glue. Self and the Group. The advice is to not stare at the sun. █████████████████████████████ reconnect to the Group. The black sun. ██ negative drain. ████████████████████████ game of autonomous Virility. ███ everything I want I can get it alone. ███ I do not depend upon The Family. ███ I am here and ███████████████████████ Paint- and Go Against the Stream ███████████ complete at the level of Seed, ReUterized █ I lay out in the Sun ███████ the Wrong Vibrational Frequencies burn off under Her Radiating Exposure. A moment of grace burns the karma of all life-times. The Group is a danger. [Dry out]. I love the group. I am the group. We are One.

The Tudor Revival style is an attempt to eradicate the corruption of the Black Sun. A cremé-on-cremé Tudor House is A Radiated Black Sun Tudor. But you can’t get rid of yourself.¹⁴ ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ I leant in so far I couldn’t get back up.¹⁵ True (Real, Metaphysical) Bleaching of a Shadow can be done through Acceptance.¹⁶ Plastic surgery highlights Lack. Clothing is Surgery too. There is strength in a Black Sun. Negative rotational Drain Pull backwards step. Head under water, stream runs over, ██ holding me down, I like it there █████████████████████████¹⁷ We had fun.

When you hide from your shadow you illuminate it. Radiating Repression it’s not Negative it registers as a Positive. Spiritual Povera despite its association is an abundance. We fill-in God shaped holes. Creation against creation. Marks make humiliation. Registering is a humiliation.

You can’t dissociate out of the shape of the house that you are.

I renovated hardcore I became a ghost.

██████████████████████████████████████████████████ I tried for something else.

This process of ██████ re-mineralising ████████████ comes with its own sacrifices ██████████ The vision of one world affords us the cost of all others. ████████████████ not the Right shoes. That is the price. The floor of Guzzler is dirt. The Co-dep Trio stand as a Pyramid. The world doesn’t need another ██████, yet ████████████████████████████████████¹⁸ first release.

I’m becoming something else now. I’m becoming Modern Tudor. An it-girl fractures out, renders into Evolution, can’t fit back where she wants to, doesn’t like where she fits now. Stateless, Godless. A refugee. Recategorised. Calls out Gods name, gets no answer.

The dream was to blank out like Him, hollow out like Him, Negative, full of Nothing, and now I’m here.¹⁹

██████████████ I am emptied. Finally, cruelly perfect. But not myself, something else. ██████ empty ██ imperfect Godless cup.

Godless is Loveless. One of the most negative things you can do would be to paint your Shadow to hide it. Negative camouflage. Cultural Marxist. Ten years ago, she said my work was Culturally Negative, now she is dead. Now I am dead. Reverse Dazzle is chaotically Evil. To be loveable I became something else and therefore I was not.

I think I’m on divine assignment.

She has a boyfriend, they live together, she is not clean, she lives in ████ she would not understand. She directs me to ███

“Applewhite and Nettles pondered the life of St. Francis of Assisi and read works by authors including Helena Blavatsky, R.D. Laing, and Richard Bach.”²⁰

I just want to talk to ██. A reluctant messiah, on the verge of a mentalbreak. Spontaneously relieved because I know it’s my path. A dancer folds her body into an Endless Knot. I tie my replacement Adidas all white Stan Smith’s ghost-ofYouYourShoe Variation1 into an Endless Knot. I dream and think of you and in grief and loss distort my mind into an Endless Knot.

I feel an Endless No.

█████████ I want to be Right and not Left.

An Endless Knot is a Koan.

A Zafu on a Zabuton.

I call my mum and ask for help. I drive around Morphett Vale in Adelaide and out of my driver’s side window, with the window down, look at dry palm trees flashing by, approaching suburban Glenelg. I have nowhere to go.

Here I am, a ballerina, weaving it all into a Tale.

It is called Culture because it grows and spoils and tarts in a petri dish. The petri dish has a 5km radius limit. The petri dish has a 10km radius limit. Online the petri dish talks of Network Spirituality. No one fucks.

The Total Overcomers. Higher Source. Just another MFA student reading the Heaven’s Gate Wikipedia page. I fuck no one.

Perspective is an equaliser.

“While the group was against suicide, they defined ‘suicide’ in their own context to mean ‘to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered’ and believed their ‘human’ bodies were only vessels meant to help them on their journey. Suicide, therefore, would be not allowing their consciousness to leave their human bodies to join the next level; remaining alive instead of participating in the group suicide was considered suicide of their consciousness. In conversation, when referring to a person or a person’s body, they routinely used the word ‘vehicle’”.²¹

I feel strongly that if I do not keep walking towards what is on the other side of this NoHope then I will be stuck reincarnating forever in a world I fucking hate, or worse. Just Living. The black sun pulls back and the stream moves forward.

There is not a pill for this, that works. I tried █████

The ██ pill I ███ need is ███’s seed █████████████████████

███████████████████████████ a Variation on a Theme of a Schizophrenic. A Text Book quotation. Katherine1. John Applesauce2. JohnJohn3.

“They believed that, ‘to be eligible for membership in the Next Level, humans would have to shed every attachment to the planet’. This meant all members had to give up all human-like characteristics, such as their family, friends, sexuality, individuality, jobs, money, and possessions.”²²

Which is the point of practicing zazen? █████████████████████████████████████ I have a negative interest in my security. ███ actively running up a schizoid state to pass time. The homeless on the tram stink.

William. Judge. John. Applesauce. Adem. Baby. Bunny. Ersatz. Katherine.

Father. ██ Jr.. Child. Name. Person. Place. Thing. Christian. Christ. Crystal. Pussycat. Michael. Michel.

Elizabeth and Flinders.

An obfuscatory pleasure and impulse. Ascetic deprivation. ██ is just frame with an Endless Knot ████ around his neck.

Brickolage.

Collage.

Sectioning.

The correct shoe is a fear based philosophy.

David’s collar is a fear based bandaid, smoke sign, highlighter hair, signs that point, BPD men bleach, a diet, going out, getting fucked up, announcing oneself back on the scene.

Traumas are all variations of an original Event, a break in the human made by the Angel to act as a Map to lead it back Home.

Adam. Mary. John. Capital.

Not us.

I am on divine assignment. A product of Eugenics.

██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ To quit or give into shadow is abortion. ███████████ Abortion creates a ghost, and a further shadow. I am in Vermont, Maine. ███████████ Mike Kelley’s apartment ███████████████████████████████ 3 Meadowvale Road, Springfield, South Australia. ██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ narrowing in ██████████████

Workaholism is a degredation of Reality and you can not rejoin your reality because it is unbareable so you lose yourself further in work. Workaholism is Lack mentality. I have a basic wardrobe that is clean, acceptable, neat, agreeable, no holes. All the basics are covered for work, play, outings, casual meetups with friends, sports, socialising, and impressing others competitively on the sexual marketplace. My wardrobe is covered like the basic inventory for a store: do you have enough underwear, do you have enough socks, winter tights?

“In phantasy, the self can be anyone, anywhere, do anything, have everything. It is thus omnipotent and completely free—but only in phantasy. Once commit itself to any real project and it suffers agonies of humiliation—not necessarily for any failure, but simply because it has to subject itself to necessity and contingency. It is omnipotent and free only in phantasy. The more this phantastic omnipotence and freedom are indulged, the more weak, helpless, and fettered it becomes in actuality. The illusion of omnipotence and freedom can be sustained only within the magic circle of its own shut-up-ness in phantasy. And in order that this attitude be not dissipated by the slightest intrusion of reality, phantasy and reality have to be kept apart.”²³

Spiritual Povera. Art Povera. Povera Today.²⁴ Charli XCX, How I’m Feeling Now. My boyfriend lived in Maidstone. The house had cross over with Ander, Rex, Aurelia.

Flemington Road Quest hotel the subject of a Hassleblad 500CM 120 medium format film landscape.

We all drive as a gallery to Castlemaine to meet Jenny Watson. Jenny Watson came to the gallery to talk to Calum and Zac. She thought Oscar was an assistant and kept asking him to get her water. Calum and Zac had to keep telling her he was an Artist and the Artist they wanted to show her with in the gallery. She said no.

It would have been the best. This is how I feel about the whole thing.

Standing outside Flemington Mews. It is raining and it is winter. I meet Ander under a bridge in Footscray.

Only poor people take public transport. ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ A truck drives past and drain water sprays over flimsy Uniqlo 1-ply Povera HeatTech.

I am capable of change. So is the patient of a Stroke.

Corruption pushes possibility forward. A corruption can be anything.

I talk to her on the phone she laughs when I call Meow cruel she says they are just losers but then I explain.

He drops me home, he asks if I live in a half-way house, I ask him how the fuck he would let me live in a half-way house? I never see him alive again.

“Phantasy, without being either in some measure embodied in reality, or itself enriched by injections of ‘reality’, becomes more and more empty and volatilized. The ‘self whose relatedness to reality is already tenuous becomes less and less a reality-self, and more and more phantasticized as it becomes more and more engaged in phantastic relationships with its own phantoms (imagos).

Without an open two-way circuit between phantasy and reality anything becomes possible in phantasy. Destructiveness in phantasy goes on without the wish to make compensatory reparation, for the guilt that prompts towards preserving and making amends loses its urgency. Destructiveness in phantasy can thus rage on, unchecked, until the world and the self are reduced, in phantasy, to dust and ashes. In the schizophrenic state the world is in ruins, and the self is (apparently) dead. No amount of frantic activity seems to have the power to bring back life again.”²⁵

There are certain types of emptiness I could not withstand.

“Real toads invade the imaginary gardens and ghosts walk in the real streets.”²⁶

Wretched Worms wriggle around the world wide web.

The negative pull of the Tudor House sun spins out and I am outside his parents’ house █████████████████████████████

“There is something final and definitive about an act, which this type of person regards with suspicion. Action is the dead end of possibility. It scleroses freedom. If it cannot be utterly eschewed, then every act must be of such an equivocal nature that the ‘self’ can never be trapped in it.”²⁷

In the industrial sized lot, I pile up mounds of Words. ████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████

He would say “I don’t think you actually like me.”

I think of the Yarraville Club where Ander and Rohan worked. Of driving around Sunshine with Dom. Of Mitcham Café Bonjornio’s in Adelaide. Accent On Beauty at 1 Wemyss Avenue, Torrens Park, SA. Myers Place 1 and 2. ███’s parents’ bedroom. ███’s sisters bathroom. ███’s red pinstripe cotton pillowcase. Angels are angles. It’s about Attitude. In NA they would say surrender but I want to go against the stream. I like what’s down the stream, degraded, eroded, perverted. A boyfriend, An Art School, some potential. Sans Soma. No body. Hate Tao want Heroin.

The only person I can imagine reading this and liking it could be Zac.

Writing about these Ghosts I pray To Love these Imagos Haunt me I treasure. Idolater. Idol worship. Clay Golem. Clay. Calum.

The it-girl is an amulgumation of fractured shards of a Divided Self. The shimmering it-ness is a smoke sign from the Angel to trace back to the primal Mother wound, to be healed and made a Home. Home wares and Interior design, a place for spiritual materialism, as a treatment of Positive on Negative not to become Positive but to become Whole on Hole. Live Through This. Swing the energies of both around so they mix like spit and cum, everything stops hurting when a sperm and Egg complete. You can not play the game and win. It is either/or. I wait for feedback from my supervisors they are both on leave. ███ never reads the text. This text has never been read by ██████

Wrapping is dazzle.²⁸

Aggressive mimicry.

Decorator crab.

Life outside.

Jana Euler shark.

“Hegel (1949, pp. 349-50) says this about the act:

The act is something simple, determinate, universal, to be grasped as an abstract, distinctive whole; it is murder, theft, a benefit, a deed of bravery, and so on, and what it is can be said of it. It is such, and such, and its being is not merely a symbol, it is the fact itself. It is this, and the individual human being is what the act is. In the simple fact that the act is, the individual is for others what he really is and with a certain general nature, and ceases to be merely something that is ‘meant’ or ‘presumed’ to be this or that. No doubt he is not put there in the form of mind; but when it is a question of his being qua being, and the twofold being of bodily shape and act are pitted against one another, each claiming to be his true reality, the deed alone is to be affirmed as his genuine being - not his figure or shape, which would express what he ‘means’ to convey by his acts, or what anyone might ‘conjecture’ he merely could do. In the same way, on the other hand, when his performance and his inner possibility, capacity, or intention are opposed, the former alone is to be regarded as his true reality, even if he deceived himself on the point and, after he has turned from his action into himself, means to be something else in his ‘inner world’ than what he is in the act. Individuality, which commits itself to the objective element, when it passes over into a deed no doubt puts itself to the risk of being altered and perverted. But what settles the character of the act is just this - whether the deed is a real thing that holds together, or whether it is merely a pretended or ‘supposed’ performance, which is in itself null and void and passes away. Objectification does not alter the act itself; it merely shows what the deed is, i.e. whether it is or whether it is nothing.”²⁹

I am afraid then I am dead.

Dazzle bandaids responsibility.³⁰

To take Action and clean up the garden it’s intolerable.

I want a big rich life.

The onotologically insecure can not.

“We are the masters of our own fate, we are the captains of our own souls.”³¹

Always the Mother and the Father are Gone.

Hal Hartley Trust.

Tao plaits and weaves. Tao plaiting is strengthening, tensegrity. I let love in.³²

A mural in a park outside my old apartment in Fitzroy said “CL B” with a space for a K, kismet, Jungian, later I realised it read “CLUB”.

“It can readily be understood why the schizoid individual so abhors action as characterized by Hegel. The act is ‘simple, determinate, universal…’ But his self wishes to be complex, indeterminate, and unique. The act is ‘what can be said of it’. But he must never be what can be said of him. He must remain always ungraspable, elusive, transcendent. The act is ‘such, and such … it is this, and the individual human being is what the act is.’ But he must at all costs never be what his act is. If he were what his act was, then he would be helpless and at the mercy of any passer-by. ‘In the simple fact that the act is, the individual is for others what he really is’, but this again is precisely what he most fears might happen, and what he seeks to avoid by the use of a false self so that ‘he’ is never what he really is with others. ‘He’, his ‘self, is endless possibility, capacity, intention. The act is always the product of a false self. The act or the deed is never his true reality. He wishes to remain perpetually uncommitted ‘to the objective element’—hence the deed is always (or at least he believes it to be) a pretended, a supposed performance, and he may actively cultivate as far as he can that ‘inner’ negation of all that he does in an effort to declare everything that he does ‘null and void’, so that in the world, in reality, in ‘the objective element’, nothing of ‘him’ shall exist, and no footprints or fingerprints of the ‘self shall have been left. Thus the self withholds itself from ‘the objective element’ both in respect of perception and of action. There can be no spontaneous action as there can be no spontaneous perception. And just as commitment in action is avoided, so perception is felt as an act of commitment that endangers the freedom to be nothing that the self possesses.”³³

The act is you come over and then say your going home. You go to a party instead.

The act is I wait for your contact after I finish my milestone and you do not contact me. Then I contact you and am angry, then we go to dinner, I book Trattoria Emilia, we pay halfhalf. The act is I buy my own drinks, drugs. The act is I don’t naturally have your attention.

I pursue Acting. Let the chapters rain down.

I print the draft in one big bound brown or ivory hardcover cotton cloth and write in the edits, blue pen.

The perception is spontaneous therefore I could not know what it is. How free do you want to be? Completely fucking free. 29” waist free. Your girlfriend free your wife free your babymother free Germany free Berlin free you stop existing free but not in a way where I further grieve you free reference reference stand-in Ghost. Go, please!!

“The self, as long as it is ‘uncommitted to the objective element’, is free to dream and imagine anything. Without reference to the objective element it can be all things to itself- it has unconditioned freedom, power, creativity. But its freedom and its omnipotence are exercised in a vacuum and its creativity is only the capacity to produce phantoms. The inner honesty, freedom, omnipotence, and creativity, which the ‘inner’ self cherishes as its ideals, are cancelled, therefore, by a coexisting tortured sense of self-duplicity, of the lack of any real freedom, of utter impotence and sterility.”³⁴

The world is a mirror ██████████████████

A tool to hack at the ice wall at the end of the Earth. I become connected to the ground.

The Phantom Camp rewards Phantom Production, and the Free Market demands ontologically robust producers. Beautiful People with Beautiful Problems.³⁵ The Phantom Camp is a beautiful place because it lets you stay there until you feel better. You have to want to leave, such is a failing and strength of the Phantom Camp.

████████

██████████ “be an Island onto yourself.”³⁶

We are prints of parents. Photography. The petri dish loves Bladee. References take us further away. An Angel shakes its head, fucks with your gravity, your not listening. Platos Cave sign says Locals Only and I agree, not everyone is a Fine Artist.³⁷

“Now, although the self has an attitude of freedom and omnipotence, its refusal to commit itself to ‘the objective element’ renders it impotent: it has no freedom in ‘reality’. Moreover, even in its own enclave, in its detachment it is constantly subject to (as it feels) the threat of an implosive or engulfing ‘reality’, and whereas it is preoccupied by itself and its own objects, it is still hyper-acutely aware of itself as an object in the eyes of others. Thus, the paradoxical difficulties of the schizoid individual are aggravated by the special nature of the schizoid system of defences which we have described.”³⁸

I’m writing to graduate.³⁹

“The individual has perhaps always the choice of endorsing his position of detachment, or of attempting to participate in life. The schizoid defence against ‘reality’ has, however, the grave disadvantage that it tends to perpetuate and potentiate the original threatening quality of reality. Participation of the self in life is possible, but only in the face of intense anxiety. Franz Kafka knew this very well, when he said that it was only through his anxiety that he could participate in life, and, for this reason, he would not be without it. For the schizoid individual direct participation ‘in’ life is felt as being at the constant risk of being destroyed by life, for the self’s isolation is, as we said, its effort to preserve itself in the absence of an assured sense of autonomy and integrity.”⁴⁰

In His Toyota Yaris he picks me up we drive to Melton I cry in the passenger seat.

I stare out my window in a North Melbourne strangers-sharehouse directly at The Royal Childrens Hospital.

His car’s numberplate is ██. I look for it everywhere.

The more you look for what you want the less likely it is to come.

“The better you look the more you see.”⁴¹

You must be self satisfied to be attractive. Not wanting for anything. Highly motivated and ambitious and desiring.

We are at your old sharehouse in North Melbourne in your bedroom it is raining outside we are stoned we are watching Jeffrey Star and Shane Dawson and laughing you are running your fingers through my hair with one hand and I am resting on your chest as we watch the laptop screen. Your mum buys you Happy Socks and you have no possessions, just a few folded up vintage Levi’s jeans.

We all develop coping mechanisms to survive.

It-girls fractured off splinted from the sun and towards the Black sun negatively rotating down a drain, Dazzling a fisherman. The fisherman baits the it-girl and reels her in, takes her home. In the absence of the fisherman (of no one coming to get her) the it-girl can catch herself by stopping, wanting to, turning around, following the traces of the splintered-off shards of Self, collecting them up one by one like bread-crumbs, Hansel and Gretel e-girl, and chaperoning herself back home.

“The self of the schizoid has to be understood, therefore, as an attempt to achieve secondary security from the primary dangers facing him in his original ontological insecurity…

In the absence of a spontaneous natural, creative, relationship with the world which is free from anxiety, the ‘inner’ self thus develops an overall sense of inner impoverishment, which is expressed in complaints of the emptiness, deadness, coldness, dryness, impotence, desolation, worthlessness, of the inner life.”⁴²