So I trudged on into another year. I think the extent to which I recorded things gets a bit more sparse, since at a certain point I don't know how much more you can say about the factory. I shared my discontent with my family and such, and eventually I got put into a nice office position at the same business instead, which I earnestly took to after a month in the Philippines. I have a lot to say about how going back affected me, but that's not within the scope of this page. Anyway, the office proved immesurably worse for me. I had a very public psychotic episode--it was not much a place of privacy for these things--and cut everyone off promptly afterwards. Things have been a lot more stable, but I'm a little ambiguous on where to go from here. Bahala na.
Investigation as an informal divinity. [I don't know what this means from me] Gravity is very literal [used as a metaphor for force]. [My coworkers have] an acute sense of weight, an intuition for labor. Uniformity of mass. We are our senses. Numbers are important for how much of possibility they incorporate. Divination was a form of hermeneutic bounding of psychosis in antiquity, defining delusions limits. We can never be fully grounded [in a psychotic state], only structured [in terms of how things we see are interpreted], but in a sense, it does create a form of 'freedom' [of providing you with more choices than you had before]. It fundamentally comes to the question of why the world spoke to me then, why it speaks to me now ['then' being a period in Thailand where everything around me seemed to provide some insightful metaphor for things at the time, 'now' as to why I would always find dead birds, signifying my sense of loss of agency, among other things.] It always will. Life feeds thought, the sight of a rabbit in the distance sets the seeds for something new (or known) within me. Like a stone that floats to the surface, coins unturned, colors. Philosophy is vulgar divination. Most divination is vulgar anyway. [Tarot, feng shui], the numogram means more than you would think, but this verifies part of my view that a lot of philosophy really only [works around how someone already thinks in terms of like, metaphors or imagery]. The things you were looking at never changed, it was a difference between repetition or form. none of it is actually real. Without love it cannot be seen.
Xu Lizhi, Bodhissatva of my suffering, saint of steel and plastic.
It's like a repeating motif: Smoke, water, autumn. It tastes like birch and static. Each is a pastiche of things too vague to describe in full. Your body rots and is made fresh anew. Drink.
Shiver and shake, a flourish of cards, like an opening lotus. This is the birth of the senses, the origin of your synaesthesia. I am who I was by the book, reciting songs to christen my dreams, and drawing breath to christen my death.
Jacotot's Precept on Universal Education: "Everything is in everything"
You can relate all knowledge to eachother. Grids are walls are prisons.
I actually wrote obsessively during this whole period. More than these dates seem to let on, but it's all poems. I think, past the point of reasoning out why the factory was the way it was, I just sort of ended up focusing on the emotions related to it and coping through poems instead of long lengthy diatribes. I don't really want to post most of them, though. I guess I can post fragments about literal factory sensations. I don't know. Six months on from that job, I just want to forget it all. Maybe something will change and I'll share it. At the very least, I will post the two things I wrote immediately before leaving the factory and immediately after leaving the factory.
my hand sweats into
tree sap and corpse fat
firm against the fizzing
alkaline acids through which
oxygen clambers out and
draws breath, and
white rises to the surface and
like the armed wing of capital,
metho spray represses that
foam, an organ who is
bubbles, cells
but even still
i draw breath
dry winter air
in dance with peroxy
my lungs constrict;
the fruit of wage,
a minute ticks,
but still I draw breath
a bellowing wind within me
and out of me
all around me
invisible party
I coronate into
corresponsences
confer upon
corrugated iron
and corpses while upon
corporates I climb from
corruption or nylon
workwear and into bed
because today, mi corazón
I found a sparrow dead
Astringency, debris, fading printer paper heat. To my left is notes on geometry– I'm trying to figure out the diagonal of a square as a means of understanding square roots, but Lockhart is playing hardball with me and I'm not following his reasoning– and to my right are notes taken during a thousand phone calls, full of company names, product codes, requests; and then automatic drawing, ostrogothic poetry, and tagalog lyrics, scrawled whilst trying to look busy, but at this point it's more obvious that I'm bored and have nothing to do. I recall something from The Pale King, about how boredom is something you brave, something I'm probably the target audience for. I have always lived so frenetically and impatiently, I do not understand slowness, but I still try to. I feel like I'm deaf and trying to hear. I miss Manila like first love. My landlord tells me to get my bike's serial number because her daughters bike was stolen, by "some lowlife"; this is the High Life apparently, this office; please get me out of here! Tea is the only luxury I care for and I know how cheap it is overseas. I've otherwise never wanted for much. I guess this and a guitar. Maybe also Morrowind. Okay, well, I want for more than that. I feel very alone. I want a hug. Gloomy clouds. This tea is swill, the more I drink, the pickier I get. It wasn't always this way. I should really buy some shoumei, I kind of just want to drink white tea and tieguanyin. Tea isn't anything in particular. It's what you need it to be. I need it as a stimulant, and as something to remind me of the person that I like to be. It's big and sweet somewhere and way too astringent. I watched a video about a Chaozhou grandpa and he said that good tea should try to avoid it, that it can be bitter because you will be rewarded with sweetness. I make another batch–to apologize as one would eulogize, sorry as in sorrow–my mind repeats this phrase— ah, this tea is really nice, sorry da hong pao, I've been really depressed lately. You don't deserve to be treated like that. Maple syrup.
and so we kept our stomachs full and our rooms warm for another six months, just as I did for as many years prior
but the pit in my stomach grew larger and larger, and the fire in my heart grew colder and colder
if I starved, but felt full; if I froze, but felt warm,
I want to vomit this rotten fruit of my labor
I probably would not live with this regret or this shame
I would not die in mourning