what can we make out of it – make it into – what can I make out of this – squint and the blurred edges refine, slightly, pinch my forefingers and thumbs together and raise them to my eyes to telescope, to focus – a trick learnt at school before I knew I needed glasses and shouldn’t someone have pointed it out that to make a tiny telescope with ones fingers is not ingenious, creative, resourceful, but a sign of something being wrong – the eyes lacking in some way – reduced in function – this the common companion of creativity, resourcefulness, ingenuity – its springing into being from wrongness – in response to a problem – as a result of an issue – which I, knowing little, had not realised – now bespectacled, my telescoping is intellectual – raising my mind to the point of light – squinting – what can be made out

made into – delved into – dove into – thought into – reasoned into – shaped into – a reflexive turn – an inward look – a recursive action – a spiral down – up – through – into – from what is already – what constitutes – what is contained in

careful looking

ethical regard

how fraught to think of scratched pages of notes, texts built of diagonal line and arrow and underline and vertical line of emphasis || next to the things I really care for || as containing or constituting an ethics – how fraught to consider the ethics of these texts – my response – my response – my responsibility – in how I look – in the telescoping of my vision – my critical lens – its constitution – my constitution – I have

a strong stomach, inherited from my mum’s nana apparently but these days I get easily queasy and what does that say about the weight each life is freighted with – about bearing your ancestors and their propensity to keep things down

o but why bring up vomit now

more an invocation of our inherited inability to vomit – still, by narrating its absence it did appear, didn’t it, in the text – I vomited just the once during labour and had in that moment a contraction at the same time – remembering now this great bodily intensity – this surging forth – this expulsion – strange sense of peace – looking down at myself with wonder – an invocation of or a pleasant distraction from pain – but anyway

where was I

creative labour

used to think of red roses and the international workers’ movement yet now am hunched on the bathroom floor making noises I’ve never heard myself make – making into – 

mum’s nana bore ten – ten! – children

knew those noises well, could apprehend them, their || ethics ||

sorry to bring up the body                  but

I appear to be stuck there now

during this conference I wrote motherhood – as ventriloquism – destruction of the self – also violence – new knowledge – how to apprehend this – new responsibility – the physical, the psychological – the situated self – as a response to abstraction? – the proliferation of the I – inventive, situated, reaching beyond the self – a text’s own sense of questioning, reflection, into its own body –

the body (the text?) as the site of reaching, turning into, reflexion

as an alibi, or a meditation

            as an archive of loss – the same route – root – site – sight – of new life – mulch – creation – etc –

but reading it now, I’m not sure what it meant.