Getting off the pot

slugs, futurological ennui and how mercury has no effect on my bowels whatsoever...

This has been a long time coming - whatever this is and will be - my imposter syndrome other half reminds me that I’m a fraud, so I’m going to start using her incessant self-bullying as a motivator (typical trauma response) to evidence my claims of being some form of - or formless - writer.

planetary poos

The few days leading up to my routine uterine evacuation always leaves me constipated. When the muscles of my lower abdomen finally desist from withholding the result is a shitty, bloody mess. I feel obligingly grateful to my own body that I can now go through a regular menstrual motion without much pain or discomfort that a painkiller can’t fix. Compared to the last several years of acute pain anxiety, deafening gut punches in the early mornings, shrieking stabs in my asshole (that always occurred when I was operating a moving vehicle) and what felt like having my bladder being put through a meat grinder: I now only have a day or two of whimpering, hot water bottles and bleached underwear with the odd, poorly inserted menstrual cup wreaking havoc in my vulva. I can’t ignore the fact that almost immediately after ending a relationship that was a backpack of bricks for most of my 20’s, nearly all of the described symptoms above have stopped. The constipation is, if anything, a preliminary reminder to bunker down for the onslaught and so I am only mildly inconvenienced by missing my morning or evening poo.

However, this past week has been a bit weird. My period had come and gone yet my bowels hadn’t fully recovered, which naturally I found concerning but not enough to really impact my daily life (the privilege). In the pub last night amid the launch of the 2022 Photo Festival, Late Night Art boozing and some random man’s springer spaniel nibbling my earrings a bit too affectionately, I learned about Mercury’s relevance whilst weeing in the upstairs toilets. Astrology isn’t really a thing for me: other than reading horoscopes and the personality traits of my star sign (which always leave me with a minor identity crisis afterwards) I admit it can be fun to indulge and speculate on our place in the universe. It’s become cult-like and ironically religious for some but as long as no one is getting hurt, then don’t stop believing if it gives you some form of joy on this planet.

As I weed, I poked my head out of the cubicle door to talk to my bathroom companion and she confessed to me that her arse was not in a good state the previous few days. Normal food, normal work, not much to cause digestive problems and yet there she was: using the words chronic and diarrhoea in the same sentence. I couldn’t really say I was experiencing the former but the latter rang a few mute bells. She explained how it could be down to the fact that Mercury was in retrograde; a contemporary seminal phrase that I am only familiar with for its meme value. She didn’t say it offhandedly but rather was very intent on looking me dead in they eye and proving she wasn’t mad. Out of compassion, I figured that perhaps Mercury’s rotations could be a good enough reason if I gave it some consideration.

I decided to look up exactly what is Mercury in Retrograde; my web searches aligned and revealed a surprising result. You may notice on car ads the wheels seem to be spinning in the wrong direction, it’s to do with speed of the frame rate not keeping up with the wheels and so our brains fill in the missing images. In relation to Mercury, it spins faster around the Sun than the Earth due to closer proximity (88 days to our 365 for a full revolution) so sometimes, in the late dusk or early dawn, Mercury appears to be going backwards. This isn’t due to any technological phenomenon like the car ads, but when Mercury outlaps Earth it looks like it has quite literally turned around and started going the other way, which if this were the case, means our solar system would be on the brink of collapse. That’s something to shit your pants about but thankfully it’s just an illusion. Pop astrology has filled in the tiny gap of this visual conundrum as the reason for all of our petty problems. Mercury is just minding her own business and doing exactly what she’s supposed to be doing. I’m going to give the gal a break and reduce my bowel problems to stress or poor dietary fibre, you know, things that are within my actual control.

Memo for the future: Mercury appears in retrograde.

slugs, Slug and slugging

Wednesday afternoon I worked in the garden to distract myself from aforementioned poo issues that morning. I have been quite committed to my new hobby ever since things actually started growing, which requires patience and attention; good muscles to exercise. Four sunflowers, two tomato plants, two dozen lupin seedlings, a handful of lavender seedlings, two sweet pea seedlings, two tomato plants, a cherry red geranium and a pink begonia all required re-potting and being transplanted outside. The sun reminded me of France and the air had the slightest whiff of petrichor, a delicious combination making it easy to refrain from going into the studio. I dug out shovels of compost and top soil, the whites of my nails turned black as I made arrangements of dirt and delicate growths in various sized pots. I spent a lot of this intellectual downtime thinking about doing this newsletter and all the things I wanted to write in it. I want it to be a blended casserole of talking about and criticising art but as part of a wider experience in relation to the world and not as a singular case by case type of study. Creative or embodied, I’m not sure what style or tone I want it to be as I’m not entirely comfortable with the sound of my own voice. It’s still misshaped and needs moulding, like my other sculptures, I take a long time to like things that are of me.

I’ve wanted to write and have been talking about it for years, yet always consoling my hurt feelings of rejected pitches and awards with the promise that I would just do it my own way and for myself. My procrastination and life commitments were more consistent than my self-appointed duty to my dreams, and eventually I became more comfortable in the longing of it all. My bitterness kept my appetite whetted, cloaking my vision when scanning the pages of news sheet criticism sections, I silently scoffed. Yet I’m not alone in wondering why some of those writers cannot just admit they didn’t like something instead of rendering their language unbearable by adopting an approach akin to writing audio description for the blind? It indulges ekphrastic solipsism with every issue and it bothers me more because Ireland is small enough but if it’s Catholic guilt or dry humour that keeps our dialogues so polite then as artists we end up in a vacuum within our own community. Which is more terrifying if you ask me. I don’t fancy myself as a caveat for change in this department but I’m also bored of doing nothing. So this newsletter may take on different forms, I might even write multiple newsletters, as long as I’m typing or scribbling I feel as if I’m at least not dwelling on the not doing. As a new acquaintance of mine says “We all want that sweet sweet validation.” and clicking the publish button is exactly that.

As I deliberated these very words, my ass up and my face down in a black plastic bag of earth, I felt something cold and wet on my left index finger. I didn’t take notice of it as my attention was more focused on the possibility of a spider hopping out of the bag and on to my face; my arachnophobia highly present in my thoughts at all times in this warm weather. I glimpsed two halves of a squishy slug at either side all smeared under and over my dirty finger, the greys, greens and browns becoming one, and I quickly flicked my hand away, wiping the mucus on my pants. They’re little creeps so they are, leaving their trails of silver on all the soft surfaces of the house at night, as if they’re looking for something and want to get caught.

I was sent a PDF copy of Slug by Megan Milks from a friend the other week, it’s one in a book of other short stories, and yesterday I finally got around to reading it. Spoiler alert, in case you want to read it before continuing. I was disappointed by my choice in when and where I decided to read this text after I was finished. I could have been at home alone or just in a more comfortable place - than my cold and hard floored studio - to masturbate. Touching oneself in a place where one might get caught is not a vibe for me, my anxiety affects my sex life enough without adding my oppressive shame to places I work in daily. One day that might change, but not on this Thursday afternoon. The story is compellingly filthy from the start, the main character Patty is after my own heart in her fetish for role-play and sadomasochism. Milk’s full fat speculative forms strobe back and forth between Patty’s multiple partners and sexual encounters, lingering in the character’s general dissatisfaction of having sex with human men, whether it’s a fantasy or reality (very relatable). Her encounter with the slug is half sci-fi, half wet dream, part crime drama, all smut. I love Milk’s seamless embodiment of sexual desire in a highly sexed person - here an audio description would be perfect. The erotics of slime and slithering are palpable as Patty gets fucked by something that’s mostly mouth; coming while being crushed. The scene is slow and superb, a massage inside the brain of my clitoris and something to keep in mind for quieter nights. But I’m not going to reduce Milk’s story to spank bank material, and it’s not worth being left as an ambiguous “she lived happily ever after as a slug”. I think this story is about awakening desires and accepting how that can change your identity, even the very fabric of your body itself. This narrative, I feel, is a strong analogy of coming to terms with perversities; the body undermining its definitions, becoming blobby and squishy, rejecting all it thought it was, moving through the world in an entirely new and irrevocable way. Previous behaviours, tastes and attractions all morph into new dialogues with the main character’s surroundings, the language of everything fundamentally reversing - like words for humans are what smells are for dogs. It’s a short story so I highly recommend, a gross millennial Anais Nin if you need a reference to guide you there, I look forward to actually buying the book and reading the rest.

In a reading group with some peers yesterday we discussed Paradoxical Modernismo[-9088a by McKenzie Wark from the book Futurity Report, selected by Dorothy Hunter. In it she muses about the multiple facets and farces of what the future as a subjectivity is and how it influences conditions of living in the present (that’s what I got from it anyway, theory takes a while to sink in with me) mostly regarding human perceptions and constructions of time. It’s a text about the economy of speculation, which is also the economy of fiction, of storytelling, because even a documentary isn’t necessarily 100% “true”. Thinking about the future of the world, the future of writing, the future of sex; it’s stories like Milk’s Slug that visualise the idea that our options might not be what we wanted or imagined but offers us potential beyond the limits of our own desires, the limits of our culturally shaped thoughts and the limits that make us resist the truth:

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. One can pair this remark with a lesser-known one by Haldane: “The future will not be as we should wish.” Lurking in the Marxist modernism of the interwar years is what one might risk calling a kind of posthuman empiricism. Haldane ’s thought experiments on bee philosophy and barnacle science point toward ways in which perception really was being extended by inhuman perceptual apparatuses toward a nonhuman world, and indeed reconfigured what that nonhuman world and what that human species-being could actually be or become. This is our last paradox, then: only by becoming inhuman will the human endure.

I get up in the mornings now and check on my sunflowers in case they’re not coping well outside. The warmer nights are probably much nicer outdoors than in the house I’m living in, it’s at least comfortable, which makes the summer days a pre-mourning for the dread of winter. Not that myself and my housemates can even afford to heat the house in the winter, but using an electric heater is now beyond our affordability too. I might even end up washing myself at the sink with water from the kettle whilst my breath defrosts in mid-air. That’s an immediate future that’s easy to imagine, pessimistic and possible. When my flowers die off and sleep for the colder months, they can snooze rent free while I drag my seasonly depressed ass out of bed each morning in the dank, dark mornings when I could be hibernating until the following year. I wonder how slugs get on in freezing temperatures.

I want to dedicate this first post to the magpie who flew into my dining room fireplace and died in front of me because my anxiety put me in freeze mode. She flapped into the ceiling, landed on her back and helplessly stared at me while I stood there shaking with a towel in my hands. Her legs shrank back into her body, her wings quivered and closed up, her eyes blinked shut and never re-opened. I put her gently into a shoe box and brought her to my local parkland, I snuck in behind a bush while no one was looking and shimmied her out onto the soft floor of weeds and tall grass. A bit of me hoped that once I walked away she would magically come back to life as if it were a fairytale, and since I probably won’t get around to checking if her wee corpse is still there or not, I can pretend that she did. Despite witnessing her passing, touching it even, it must be that human urge to believe something better comes after death and to reject the totalisation of mortality.

Whatever stories we tell ourselves to survive I suppose.