“So sonic intensity is tantamount to submerged embodied historiography.”

: (Th.Donov. on Fr. Moten): "Translate to color."  In the comment stream.  And looped up, like a baby.  Though if I had another baby, which would depend, quite frankly, upon meeting  a competent and ecstatic South-Asian medical professional in the next thirty days: I might put it down (the baby not a suitor) on a sheepskin rug to roll around a bit.  More than I did.

Though perhaps I'll begin there, when I could not write. Nursing, I'd glance up at the window to the woods that pressed close around our house.  That Spring, the trees shed a thick gold powder from their thin cones.  I'd track this drift.  Once, I looked up and the whole pane was filled with a blur of wings, thirty or more  birds vibrating against the glass.  Migrating finches.  A solid color.  Yellow.

I guess, tonight, eight years later, I've just got these two things, which are less than notes, and if I can, as I write, I'll convert them to questions.  For you:

1.a. Transgenerationally, what happens to the marks on a body, the marks a body received in the time or era that preceded this one?  I've been thinking about that silver color; how a pooling scar is in some sense genetic.  Becomes the quality of the body that passes between bodies.  Its ambience.

b. Poetry, like brainspotting/eye movement technologies, releases -- in one version of a North American genre -- an embedded stream of images.  These images leave the body in a session, in a sequence: which is neither witnessed nor reorganized in speech.  Stories, for example, are not repeated to another person who then recounts them, to make sure.  Make sure of what?

2.a. Color is/as a race mark.  I think of a country* as red, and diaspora as: well, perhaps you see it in your own mind at the instant I do.  That oil spill.  That wine stain.  That ink.  The acrylic paint tilting out of its container. Tracking color to its most distal fleck, questions of surveillance, carnal lithography or -- love : arrived.  Not love.  Something else.  Similarly, I saw that saturation was a precursor to vibration: a red "dot," which was not a dot, it was a body: breaking up.

b. I studied, from the psychiatric research of Dinesh Bhugra and Kamaldeep Bhui, on migration and mental illness, the strict, unexpected relationship between consistent, low-level racism (its tonal qualities, an almost imperceptible eye-roll when the Asian or Caribbean [origin] person/[British person] walks [walked] into the store) and psychosis. I tried to write an account.  My account failed.  Instead, I began to consider color, and the image, too, in a different way.  The long poem as a place, for example, to reverse the shards of ochre clay so that they re-formed an urn.

..........

"I want a book that heals as much as it separates." -- Cixous.

But the book breaks, as it always does, because it can't be written.  What might a healing narrative look like?  And does this complicate an experimental aim, the desire to leave a place and never return?