subliminal suicide

Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.

We have a world of pleasure to win and nothing to lose but boredom.

Most people’s deaths are a sham. There’s nothing left to die.

I have an almost daily confrontation with the spectre of my own death and the loss of the people whom I love. I’m not particularly religious so I do not have that to fall back on as a means of solace. I am genuinely envious of you folks who do have religion in your life in many ways, but I think this actually provides me an interesting advantage:

I am NOT afraid to love people. People I know, people I have only just met. I’m not afraid to look like a jack-ass or to speak my mind because I know tomorrow, I or they, might be gone. I’m moved to tears by shit that other people find mundane, and I think that’s because I have this countdown timer in the back of my head and I know all too clearly that it will either be me getting left again…or I’ll be doing the leaving. Folks with a belief in the afterlife have a built in “do over” setting in their psyche. I however think you get one chance to get it right or wrong, but either way this is the one shot you’ve got.

I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

Our bodies are occupied territories. Perhaps the ultimate goal of performance, especially if you are a woman, gay or a person “of color,” is to decolonize our bodies; and make these decolonizing mechanisms apparent to our audience in the hope that they will get inspired to do the same with their own.

A scar is the sign not of a past wound but of “the present fact of having been wounded”: we can say that it is the contemplation of the wound, that it contracts all the instants which separate us from it into a living present.

There is no god, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

Every moment you steal from the present is a moment you have lost forever. There’s only now.

There is no ‘natural’ human sexuality. This is not to say that our sexual feelings are ‘unnatural’ but that whatever feelings and activities our society interprets as sexual are channeled from birth into socially acceptable forms of expression.

Further, an early epistemic marriage between queer theorizing and the dominant methodologies of poststructuralism in the U.S. academy has had the effect of constructing queer theory in a way that eviscerates histories of colonialism and racial formation, frameworks that could themselves point the way to a radical activist scholarship in which race, sexual politics, and globalization would be understood together rather than being positioned as theoretical and political strangers.