I am but thirty years behind myself. Here are five minutes only it took all day.

This week I am almost in the mood to construct a long, wide-ranging, single draft from beginning to end and yet relatively coherent manifesto. 

Almost.

I have become preoccupied with voice. Voices, even: those whose near- but not-quite-appearance earned me the “psychotic features” feature of my Official Psychiatric Diagnosis–well, one of them. I have several spread through time and space and now in binary code–but not just those voices. And my voice, or those voices I can describe as available for me to use consciously and willfully even if I have my skepticisms regarding will including a question nobody has answered yet in a way I find useful which question goes mainly like will: what the fuck is it and why are we so attached to the idea of it. I confess I do not “get” will as an entity or function or even faculty although I sometimes get some little where if I approach will as a name that gets passed around among a small circle of verbs having to do with wishing and desiring and commanding and otherwise employing agents of action with or without their consent.

But not just my own voices those which seem to obey what is called me and those which seem to obey the more occult me’s whose functions are not clear beyond their our being indiscriminate attempts to survive the world as they we see it: double-binds chained up into triple- and quadruple-binds to the point that uncertainty issues as its own exponential feedback loop quickly pegging the meters and shredding paper wire and splintered wooden cabinets who crash to the ground and into the crowds huddled around the stacks as though distorted signals were only nutritious if embraced bodily the bass notes picking us up off our feet and setting us back down again 120 times every minute.

But also voice in general: who made the first vocal noise on Earth and what did it sound like when mineral and salt and metal and gas all gathered their breath at once to voice almost nothing other than the interminable lines of divisions and multiplications and the branches and the flowerings and wanings and the iterations and the iterations and the daily business of securing stellar energy in some digestible form or another enough to live through the next day or night or month or winter.

Was it a croak or a squeak or a peal of lungs over ossified vocal folds in announcement of announcement.

We are here.

Where.

Here.
 
 
Here.
 
 
 
Here.

So I have been reading and I have been writing but I have not been speaking or that is I whose life’s work has been determining what to say.

to all of this.

have been keeping mum.

It is an ancient imperative I suspect at least as old as my ancestors’ graves on that Asian peninsula we call Europe wherever they might have been lain some thousand or so places who no longer have names that they themselves know to answer to.

This was going to be a cut and paste. Here is one from a letter I wrote to a friend not long ago.

—

I have some observations and I have some hunches and I have some ideas but mostly I cannot make out whether or not I have a voice. I may have one. I do not really know if I do or maybe it is that I exercise my own voices for my own auditors and everyone in here is fine with that but when I consider any degree of broadcasting any of these voices even in the smallest ways (should I be writing this? I do not know but I seem to be able to keep writing today so I am going to keep writing today) we bombard ourselves with questions and second and third and fourth guesses about the propriety of ourselves, we, myself, all of me speaking at all.

All of the accounts I read whether of my immediate family or my more distant relations in time and space to the extent that these accounts are fitted to typically heterocompulsive protestant imperatives to that extent I cannot find my place in any of them. I could not possibly have existed before now or that is what they tell me or that is what they tell me in not telling me anything more than what they do the covers of family bibles recording sons and daughters of sons and daughters of sons and daughters as though this were all that ever proceeded from the mouths of humanity or even the only possible terrestrial issue these accounts do not account for me at all.

This other thing too: the language I have been given or the terms with which I have heard my life or lives similar to mine explained and described and discounted and disposed of issues from and reiterates such monstrously outsized shame as a throttle and lash that it is hard to maneuver around without sustaining multiple lacerations at my own hands. It is as though the abusive methods that trained me up in the way I should go worked so as to establish internal agents unable to do other than continue to offer abuse.

I was very well trained as I was growing up to exceed expectations especially when I perceived those expectations as having their hopes bound in some point above. Above me, that is: in stature, power, authority, and all that go with them to render the whole deal of growing up quite awful. Which is not so different from what other children felt. On the other hand I do not know many others who had a Lake of Fire held over their heads or under their feet as the consequences of not only not exceeding expectations but of not examining yourself minutely for other signs of rebellion–and this was just one item on a very very long list of things to do and not do and you had to be very careful and watchful because Satan could trick you into thinking you were doing the right thing when really you were doing the opposite and even though that might seem like it was all on Satan it turned out in the end to be your fault or you were going to be tortured forever as a result and this was certainly reasonable even if by the time you were 16 it would begin to show its absurdity at 7 you took it all very very literally. That is I did.

—

It was inconceivable to doubt what the preacher said even only to oneself. Your opinion was not only emphatically unsolicited but understood as refuted without hearing: silly, selfish, sinful–a scale yes but usually involving divine judgment as early in the process as necessary to make a clearly open-and-shut case whose sentence needed be no more than one single sentence if it were in need of pronouncing at all.

“I never had to spank her. I could just look at her a certain way and she would be crushed.”

It was true. Crushed I was.

It occurs to me to mention something about cultural social capital and how it is constructed by others and by oneself under conditions where oneself is expected always to be speaking from the seat of shame and where this extends to gender and sexuality in particular to make certain subject positions–let’s say however many might be on the “ftm trans* spectrum” in sociological discourse but on a sort of spun off trajectory into a wtf is gender and I may have a beard and I do love it yes but please stop assuming I am a man sort of spot or station or region or place–difficult even to describe much less speak from as though anyone would be tending their ear in a direction nobody would know even where or how to point.

It would not be theoretical exactly although it would have to be no matter what else it was.

For now though the mention is the best I can do for it.

There may be more.

There is more.
In fact.
In fact there is more. Already. In so many words. So many that I am running out of storage space again.