(oops i am sorry, that was mean of me...)

try again :

hello! welcome. you are funny and cute. i like you 😀❤️🌻

and, if you like me too, we could be friends yes? not on facebook but for real. you could subscribe to my newsletter and/or join my cult and/or give me some (or all!) of your money ha ha.

and yes, i am on tiktok.

(but the first part, that will be my epitaph.)

fast forward forty years and i laughed very hard today when i encountered the word cloaca and learned its meaning :

In animal anatomy, a cloaca is the posterior orifice that serves as the only opening for the digestive, reproductive, and urinary tracts (if present) of many vertebrate animals. All amphibians, reptiles, birds, and a few mammals (monotremes, tenrecs, golden moles, and marsupial moles) have this orifice, from which they excrete both urine and feces; this is in contrast to most placental mammals, which have two or three separate orifices for evacuation. Excretory openings with analogous purpose in some invertebrates are also sometimes referred to as cloacae. Mating through the cloaca is known as cloacal copulation, commonly referred to as cloacal kiss.

is it possible that the australians were saying, not clacker, but cloaca?

christian boltanski collected his heartbeats and in one of his shows there was a LED display which showed the number of seconds he had been alive. what made the work interesting, and what makes it interesting now that he is dead, is two, or possibly three things.

one, it demonstrates the limits and perhaps the arbitrariness of measuring time since it is impossible to say which specific second 'you' were born; two, the changing LEDs show 'you' hurtling towards your death at an alarming rate; and three, the second LED display showing the number of seconds the museum's youngest employee has been alive. now that the LEDs of boltanski's counter have stopped changing, the other one continues.

so it goes.

In 2009, Christian Boltanski was commissioned by the Australian art collector David Walsh to allow himself to be filmed in his studio, and have a live 24-hour feed transmitted back to Walsh in his native Tasmania. The project incorporated a grisly and complicated bet on the amount of time Boltanski would live, according to which Walsh will have purchased the work — The Life of CB — for more, or less, than it was worth. “I have already won the bet,” he says with quiet satisfaction.

https://www.ft.com/content/182368ec-3212-11e8-ac48-10c6fdc22f03

in a typically idiosyncratic blog post about boltanski's death on the MONA website, walsh writes of the night he met christian boltanski : “The world vastened for me that night.” which reminds me of a simpsons word, 'embiggened'.

boltanski once said, as i wrote in my book, that an artist is simultaneously a clown and a priest. this made it possible for me to take both my-so-called-self and my art making less seriously as well as more seriously depending on what was required and how i was feeling at the time.

the effect of boltanski's work on me was not to make the world vaster but to make 'me' smaller — in a good way.

‘Als je een steen werpt, en je geeft die steen bewustzijn, dan zal de steen rationeel verslag doen van zijn vlucht.’ — Spinoza

Het is goed mogelijk dat deze uitspraak van Spinoza bekend was bij Heidegger, die met het idee kwam dat ieder mens 'geworpen' is — door iets of iemand, wie kan het weten? Maar dat doet er niet toe. Wat er toe doet is dat mensen zijn als stenen die door de lucht vliegen. Onderweg willen we héél graag deze of die of een andere kant op en/of denken we te weten welke kant we opgaan en waarom. Maar in feite weten we helemaal niks en donderen we uiteindelijk gewoon op de grond, al dan niet na ergens keihard tegen aan te zijn gevlogen. ❊

ten years ago when we were having dinner in a vegan restaurant in chicago with a large group of brilliant and beautiful people all completely in awe of her, she zoomed in on the person who was probably less familiar with her work than anyone else in the room except the waiting staff and asked all about me. one of the interesting things she said was that she saw no discontinuity at all between my former life as an artist/academic and my then new life as a writer/narrative therapist/spiritual carer.

she made me promise i'd send her my book when it was finished and wrote to me after she read it and she was very nice about it. she was 'asking for a friend' who had been diagnosed with cancer what i thought of stephen jenkinson and my answer was : not much. he reminds me of a cult leader, and as is sometimes the case with cult leaders, about fifty percent of what they say is interesting and good, the problem is with the other fifty percent.

i would like to think that she found something in my book that was useful to her. i would have like to have had a conversation about death and dying with her. i am sure she would have had something seriously interesting to say about it.

i would have liked to have said to her that i see no discontinuity between being alive and being dead, but it does make writing and thinking impossible and that is a great pity, especially in the case of lauren berlant.

for six months of each year we were the same age.

...

so i got vaccinated. — even though you've had covid? yeah. it's kind of stupid but that's the government advice. and i don’t have the time or energy to spend on having an informed opinion beyond that. and also i don't have an opinion about whether you or anyone else should be vaccinated or not.

i had a reaction as i almost always do with vaccinations.

a few hours afterwards i start feeling woozy and weird and exactly like i did when i had the actual virus. it is like i could feel my entire body going into overdrive to make antibodies. so i lay down, felt grumpy and out of sorts and basically had all the symptoms listed as side effects on the government website as occurring in 'a large number' of vaccinated people, and then some : feverish, headache, muscle aches, pains in the joints, nausea, exhaustion. because of CFS (or whatever the fuck the 'undiagnosable disease' that i have is — it is a syndrome — who wants to suffer from a syndrome?! although i do rather like the the anti-superhero called syndrome in the incredibles who devoted his life to creating a world in which everyone would be “super”.) i feel like this more or less everyday anyway but this was 3x worse, essentially a 48 hour case of the flu, and i was not expecting it. i had covid. i've got antibodies. why should getting vaccinated make me ill — again?!

three days later and i feel more or less normal and not at all like the government is controlling my brain but then they would make the microchip in such a way that you didn't feel like the government is controlling your brain i guess.

ah well. onward!

good job pfizer. thanks everyone. (i think...)

🙂

a wisp of water vapour floating

up into in your mesosphere and turning into ice

crystals on specks of soot from the smoke trails of meteors

and hanging gossamer-like on the edge of your space

(apologies to paul simons)

jeroen brouwers who is a big name in dutch literature says you have to have three published books before you can call yourself a writer but i am more inclined to the view of lauren berlant, who when i met her for the first time asked me : and you, are you a writer too? and i said : well i write, yes, but am i a writer? i don't know. lauren explained that for her when she started calling herself a writer it enabled her to take her writing practice seriously and this was immensely valuable. so from that moment i called my-so-called-self a writer and she was so right. what matters is whether you take your writing seriously, whether you consider it a practice. within a year or two i had finished my book and it was published and i became a writer with a published book.

clearly it is important for me to finish this damned second book that i have been working on for six years and which keeps shifting and changing right before my very eyes but it has no relation to whether i think of my-so-called-self a writer.

😂 that's a great story. you should write a novel. almost everyone should write a novel.

because i am prone to making pronouncements like that i have my computer set to insert the word 'almost' whenever i type 'everyone' or 'always' because it's so annoying when people write almost everyone and almost always. there! that's what it does. and if you really want to write 'everyone' or 'always' you can just go back and delete the 'almost'.

also : almost everyone should have therapy. but the problem is that most therapists are a. incompetent b. egomaniacs and c. money hungry — and anyway there's not enough therapists for almost everyone to have therapy.

but if you're not writing a novel what are you doing? you're wasting a life. onze lieve heer gave you a life, or someone or something did, i don't care if you're religious or not, life is a kind of like a gift. right? that's number one. the least you can do is leave behind a novel. my old boss, who was known in the popular press as doctor death and who had ambitions to be a stand up comic, used to say, ok so life is a gift but you should be able to return it, which is a great line and it's true of course but generally i am a heideggerian as far as that's concerned at least.

i have a sort of friend who is a famous and successful novelist (i am not going to name drop him) who told me : don't put names of philosophers into your writing without explaining who they are and what they have to say — but i am not sure i agree. he says if you don't do that it's just name dropping. is he right? i am sure as hell not going to try and explain heidegger. maybe i could just say 'an old nazi philosopher'? that would complicate things!

also i believe writing a novel can be cathartic and almost everyone should have at least one catharsis, but 'spiritual cleansing', that's two bits of bullshit in one! 'spiritual cleansing' would require a reiki therapist probably and i don't believe in reiki therapists although they do exist. they call themselves 'reiki master' ha ha and the problems starts right there. i know this because i have a dear friend who became a 'reiki master' and i love her but i don't love her when she starts talking about reiki and that's a problem. the last time we met, she made a long journey to visit me and i didn't have much time and when i saw her i was so happy but then after a while when she started talking about reiki i became so tired and i wanted to get away from her. it was sad and i felt awkward because i do love her. i just wish we could be together without her talking about reiki.

or actually you know the problem is not only the reiki it's that she subjects me to a monologue. monologues can be great and this is why almost everyone should write a novel (or have a blog ha ha) but not if the monologue is happening in real life in real time, it's super alienating and almost everything is a monologue. in real life/time what is urgently needed is dialogue but real dialogue is rare.

ha ha everyone should be engaged in a dialogue.

i went back and deleted that 'almost'.