Status Updates From Axiomatic

‘—she says Vietnamese is—food with a profound history. ‘Love my food, you’ve also got to love my culture.’ At first I think—Desperation, pain, shame, fear, bodies buried in oceans / unmarked graves in other people’s countries—these are your branding apparatus? ‘People don’t listen to stories unless they can eat them or feel them or wear them—I don’t want anywhere to feel like home. I don’t want to anchor like that.’’

‘The past found him—through a stranger’s story—spun—into the vortex of his own—history. So much of the past works like that—vortex-like. ‘The past shapes the present,’ they teach—in schools—Shapes? Infiltrates more like, imbues, infuses, it is invisible this past, it is gas—odourless, colourless chemical agent bouncing around in the lungs, crackling in the spaces between us, in the air the culture breathes in, out.’

‘On the street as anywhere, people are good and bad, both at once. Poverty, neglect, abuse—disadvantage—biochemistry—residential zipcodes—Borges’s Infinite Library of Larkin’s they-fuck-you-up—fables—More echoes than in an echo chamber—Books are imperishable—because they are so ready to survive, dispersed across the world—memories—We are the—vessels containing, spilling all over the place, those who came before us.’

‘All the talk about the sanctity of human life. As if knowing your life is precious is a default state—I sit back & wait for the lecture—the legal shit sandwich–‘Despite your intelligence & commitment you’re still relapsing.’ Did I hear respect expressed in a court of law for a woman who has gone back to drugs more times than Marina Abramovic invited a snake to orbit her head? People’s lives aren’t straightforward—’

‘—I always dreaded film sequences in which—life—a normal, long life—gets condensed into a few emblematic scenes—Time as a straight line is a monstrosity. Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto—‘I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me’—How come, I ask. ‘Because people are people.’ I overheard her say, ‘I couldn’t do what you’re doing’—I tried hard, tried & failed to figure out if she meant it as a compliment’

‘What a ubiquitous phrase it is—back to normal—but perhaps not as glib, nor so obscurantist, as it sounds—Freedom is—like full moons, glistening like melons washed by monsoon rain. Don’t use my tragedy to mask your moral failure—We hug like two people on a train platform—strangers who love each other with the love that belongs not to them, but to the world around them that has gone off its axis. Time is not a river.’

‘Possible description of a human life: salad days at our peak—casserole days when it’s over. And for those we leave behind—post-casserole eternity,—‘robots don’t procrastinate, they don’t have feelings, they are machines that are made to work.’ I am interested in perspective shifts. Voice shifts. Third person. First person. A rose garden floating—no explanation of its reason for being, a silent, fragrant signifier.’