🏮🧞‍♀️ 06 Ultuary 2024 🌹

Feast of Djinn, Feast of Flying Lanterns

Today:

-make art for Dispatches

-finish typing up notes from maroon journal

-read more of Neoliberalism's Demons

-start Orientation Document

..

🏮🧞‍♀️

regulation, rupture, efference, refuge, ...

...
from earlier:
Self harm can function as a refuge and it also requires refuge. I would usually find a public or private bathroom, turn the water on full blast, lock the door, and set to work.

the first cut, the first several, were surreal, uncertain, anti climactic. (I've written elsewhere of times when the ritual failed, when the charm couldn't or wouldn't be coaxed out. In such cases the prayer could not actualize itself and never progressed beyond the cold metal bite of those initial thin, pooling red slashes, no matter how many times I underlined them. if the spell took, however, the first hesitant, uncertain, desperate cuts would give way to a more confident, rhythmic swell, and the color of the bloodstreams as they multiplied would take on a hyperbolic quality, like when stare so long time at a blue background that you become saturated by it, and then flick your gaze to something orange or yellow, and your exhausted cones fail to respond, letting you glimpse a tint of pure unmodulated heat not usually found in everyday vision.

the brightness, the terrible glory of that crimson against lacerated skin, is one of the many things I can reference but not quite communicate to one who has not had this experience, or others like it. it is the color of revolution and sacrifice and frenzy, inseparable from the other accidents of the sacrament, the pain and the resolve and the feel of my skin under my knife or razor or fingernails, the breathless high, the momentary transformation of the despair into something that, if it still cannot be dispelled, can at least be acted upon, acted through.


running the blood down the drain whenever it risked reaching my clothes or the floor, then resuming the orderly, tightly spaced lacerations. between 30 and a hundred slices, running maybe two inches perpendicular to the length of my forearm.

it took about 8 days to heal such that my skin would be whole and sensitive, so by alternating arms every 4 days I was able to establish an intense somatic calendar, a rhythm to go along with both the ritual. time was easy to lose when this enchanted. I had to consider not just how much blood I could lose before becoming too faint to bandage and clean myself, but also how long it would take me to clean the sink in general. I made it a point of pride never to let anyone stumble across me while engaged in the rite itself. i remember that ten minutes was just enough to do everything satisfactorilly, if I needed to steele myself before class or a meeting with an advisor. alone in my apartment, I could take my time, draw out the pain if I especially needed to focus, or melt into a revery and take my time cleaning up afterwards. thus the act itself was framed by a carful partition of time and space, a refuge which separated me from the demands of appearing sane and functional and productive so that I could gather my strength and transubstantiate the static background of despair into something specific, something solid.

four days between sessions, eight days to heal. a session could give between several hours and a couple days of relief, focus, productivity. though I don't meet all the criteria for Bipolar Type 2, both at the time and now I understood these respites to be brief manic or submanic episodes, fresh hells in their own way but mobile, dynamic, and therefore to be treasured . treasured and also budgeted, because cutting, like many addictions, operates by the hungry logic of diminishing returns, so that after a week or two of cutting the relief would dissipate more quickly, the sessions would need to be more intense to reach the necessary delirium, and the craving to cut again would resume within hours instead of days. other refuges would need to be saught out--i lacerated my legs, the souls of my feet, submerged my arms in 5 gallon bags of ice, exercised to the point of collapse, made myself sick with hard liquor and fasting. all of this was necessary, all of this was important, and if Facebook with the same mental state as I find myself in then, I would do it all again, because rituals like these work. why or how they work are problems of psychological theorization, but the fact that they do, that when your whole operative persona breaks down and you have a way of getting things running again you take it no matter how distasteful or bizarre you might have found it days or hours ago you use it and are grateful for it, that seems to me to be the opposite of disordered.

there are other rituals too. twice a day I would change my bandages or walk to the health center to have them changed for me. the intensity of the practice returned, half inside half out, half i did this, half the feeling of it being done.

the efficacy of the thing trapped between an intuitive visceral addictive grasping and simultaneously bewilderment, removed curiosity, and disbelief that such behavior could be desired, so that in desiring the thing i feel like a stranger to myself.

..



this disharmony of internal self understanding, self knowledge, exemplifies the kind of Internetworked yet distinct modalities which I use to compass and imagine myself through my experiences, capacities, beliefs, and actions. modules need material time and space and procedures and particularities to talk to each other and, once feedback loops are established, to themselves. they need handshake protocols to play and rewrite memory into the ongoing spooling of thought, experience, interest, desire, so that working memory, short and long term memory can be more than an incidental record but an ongoing reference. they need to get their disagreements out in the open or else leave them stuck down neurological culs de sac.

one such material protocol makes use of the flood adrenaline and serotonin summoned by self inflicted violence, consciously experiencing and examining and overcoming the deep wired habits of avoiding pain, and more particularly avoiding m"damage to human body envelope". the rituals of self harm for me are experienced as a political negotiation, collaboration, visiting building, as well as conflict, judgement, punishment. they are a component of that formula which gives rise to the emergence of a persona, coemergent with the expirence and framing of desire, sense of self, agenda, consolidated interests, operating identity by which actions over any length of time might be strung together.

what is it like? I am multiple, and if there is a module that is advertising, that decides exception and determines which impulses and feelings and rationals are friends and which must be violently repressed, it is not an uncontested module. it is not until the part of me determine to cut myself actually goes through with it that the question of dominance between the cutting part and those parts which cry out against it can actually be settled. once the decision is made and I do cut a sense of resolve is achieved. further decisions follow more easily, as if upon the completion of the ritual the component parts of my mind have been newly reminded which parts are in charge and what it feels like for the other parts to follow their orders. thus it is by a bloody paradox that the efficacious fiction of monadic unity of self, sovereign in my soul, able to declare by mental fiat my real decisions and act as a unified agent in pursuit of them, is only brought about by the intensely painful contestation of will among the waring frameworks for understanding myself, habits, feelings, and sense of surroundings. thus, not unlike Plato and Hobbes and Schmitt, their is a microcosmic parallel between the internal machinations of the person and the organization of the polity.



(see other minds, especially the sections on the evolution of the nervous system, the efference system, distributed intelligence, bicameral module of the brain.




..

from Zeph ☿️🐙10,091✒️⛩️, 🏮🧞‍♂️10,097⛩️


Next:
page 40-49