we are touching, we are never really touching (superposition). Moorer (2015). Charcoal, acrylic on paper.
Month: July 2015
Pain Organ
StandardThe pain organ is neuro-endocrine but only rarely chemical. It communicates with the bod via quantum tunneling (like photosynthesis, like smell) and cannot be seen with current imaging technology except as a possibility. It has been guessed at, its shadow glimpsed in MRIs, the sketches of pain victims. It is often mistaken for a tumor, but its removal results not in cessation of pain, but its increase as it escapes into the rest of the body. Occasional its removal results in death. Pain cannot be contained; it always has a remainder.
Empathy Ghosts
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Watercolor & graphite on paper, photoshop.
Pain Economy
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We no longer make products/things at work; we make pain. (Maybe we have always made nothing but pain. For ourselves and others. In hours of sitting or standing in crippling positions, in mind-numbing (literally) boredom, and forced cheer.) We produce pain and they, the pain capitalists, profit from painkillers we produce and consume by limiting access to them/creating scarcity. They limit our access to pain free space and pleasure events while forcing us to reproduce pain. Narcotics, alcohol, prescription opiates, religion, heroin are some of the only paths out of pain space and into some place like pleasure. We live in a pain economy where we make pain all day long then pay to have it, if not removed, (never actually killed) then distanced, delayed. Pain is demonized, minimized, then normalized. Medicalized so that we can be told we are drug-seeking when we seek the condoned, licensed, capitalist-approved paths to pain-free space. But we need to be diagnosed so we hope to make our pain visible, to make our pain (the pain that now exceeds what capitalists can extract via work) worth something so that we can pay to enter the mythical pain-free space via painkillers/money. We exchange our lives and hours for pain hoping to redeem it for painlessness or maybe just pleasure which is never the opposite of pain.
It is the constant because we work at it day and night. It is only when we exceed our painspace, when we can no longer work to reproduce the pain of others (by serving and making them pain food (food that will create and numb pain simultaneously) by creating pain-saturated objects that are consumed by workers who must work (at pain work in pain spaces) more to buy them) that we are worthless to the pain economy.
We invade and colonize other countries, force them to adhere to our painkiller restrictions (‘drug laws’), force them to make pain in greater amounts, store it in banks, while shrinking the space that is painless, moving it farther and farther away. It only exists in the virtual, in media, the unreachable. A global Empire of Pain.
Bodies & Value
StandardAccepting my chronic illness isn’t some inspirational meme shit. It means knowing and accepting that a lot of my time is not going to be ‘productive’ or ‘valuable.’ That my body is not the kind of body valued and consumed by our culture anymore.
It’s letting go of everything you thought meant something about your ‘self.’ And it’s fucking terrifying because what are you if you have no value in a hierarchical system that judges you and categorizes you based on how valuable you are (how well your body fits in the beauty and health system, what kind of work you do for others to profit from, etc.)? You have to figure that out. You’re in the real frontier. Be careful you don’t just appropriate someone else’s land, struggle, oppression. Find your own way, your own place somewhere beyond ‘value.’ Value is just a convenient way of converting you, your body, your work into $ for someone else to take. We don’t even know how to talk about the things we do, the bodies we do them with, without using that term or something related.
People read Marx and think of factory work, of profit off of that labor. But it’s about profit off of every aspect of our lives. Every move we make with these bodies or don’t make is money for someone else. You think you own your body until you’re ill, then you begin to understand that it was never yours and maybe you can do something about that by not doing anything with this body that refuses. This body that is simultaneously worthless and invaluable.
Unified Theory Of Everything
StandardMy body used to be the entire world, the universe, until you happened to it and showed me that there were things out there that could also be in here. That there are things bigger than me that I am inside already. That I could be consumed and still live. You are still consuming me and I, you, like some binary system. But one of us is not always the black hole, the gravity sink, and one of us is not always the smaller star. We orbit. We erode.
How To Be A Body In Multiverse
StandardMaybe dark matter/energy is moving faster than light, that’s why it is dark. So it can’t be in this universe.
Like you. You are always in darkness.
Always moving toward (away?), but never arriving.
No matter how much desire there is between us, folding space and time. Pulling us into that event horizon that is bigger than the universe. We are never touching. There is no stuff to touch. Scaling down and down, in and in, there are only fields of radiation moving against and through each other. That’s all touch is.
Maybe you are another universe.
With different physical laws.
And we are just trying to communicate and cohabitate in multiverse.