Suck the Smell of the Sun from Textos or Chance Encounters #5
How do I write our way in without building a wall, a gate?
Here I am looking for an answer from your words, forced instead by circumstances back into my inner resources. “I stood there unable to speak or move. I had calcified. I had turned to stone.”1 Straining to focus, I eventually achieved clarity, realizing that I projected onto the exchanges I entered into the ideal of “passionate conversation” and diligently recorded this observation into a notebook full of others like it, as if for the later perusal of some grey old king of literature.
Having outlasted my youth, I imagine my potential as a quarry full of stone, effortfully wrested from the earth, hewn into blocks, and used to construct “plantation logics, detached optics, and brutal architectures.”2 Frankly, it kept me awake—especially when it didn’t. To sleep, I struggled against the struggle to make sense of events. “Babel or no, this is a cursed building, doomed to incompletion, to ravagement by the usury of time.”3
“In Book III, a Romantic literary Pietist enters the library in the hope of unraveling tangled skeins of evidence.”4 One of two beavers working the same log from either end to dam the Connecticut River.
1 Call Me Zebra by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
2 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
3 The Construction of the Tower of Babel by Juan Benet, translated by Adrian Nathan West
4 Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives by Susan Howe
Suck the Smell of the Sun from Textos or Chance Encounters #6
What is the relationship between love and literature?
Wanting to cut through my bullshit, I paid it special attention, swinging around an ornamental sword and knocking over three vases out of every five.
“my eyes and from them came an endless moment.”1
“Against the grain of the fact that I couldn’t choose it, there was an enchantment I’d chosen.”2
“for two gross of statues
a few thousand battered books”3
This vision of exchange as tabulation, though an idea, was a most difficult opponent,
time thickly enfolded by the ongoing circulation of water in the mall’s fountain.
We sat beside it,
“but through the command you shall be able to kindle it again when humanly considered it would cease.”4
“You made me take that line out before but here it is again. The world.”5
As seen looking through an arch or into the subterranean swirl of dreaming.
1 “Chapter XXI” from R E D by Chase Berggrun
2 “Remind” from Black and Blur by Fred Moten
3 “Revolutionary Letter #92” from Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima
4 “You Shall Love” from Works of Love by Søren Kierkegaard, translated by Howard and Edna Hong
5 A Tonalist by Laura Moriarty
Suck the Smell of the Sun from Textos or Chance Encounters #7
How do you read a house?
You can’t spell “stranger danger” without anger in each word, so why not focus on
the construction of a tent stitched with the name of everyone you’ve ever slept with?
“If there is any natural phenomenon I detest, it is precisely the sun—the whole heliotropic sphere of life”1 as seen looking through an arch or into the subterranean swirl of dreaming.
I was dreaming of Joan of Arc.
“In what ways we might enact a beholden-ness to each other, laterally?”2
“I can’t tell you how it is for those who are not monsters, because I do not know how to speak to them.”3
“A vague fear obscured the whole scene into a diorama of ruin.”4
“What was the game, I wondered? But I was soon distracted.”5
Wanting to cut through my bullshit, I paid it special attention.
1 Permission by S.D. Chrostowska
2 “The Hold” from In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe
3 “TRANS MEMOIR 4-7” from SEA-WITCH by moss angel witchmonstr
4 “Chapter VIII” from R E D by Chase Berggrun
5 Hav by Jan Morris
—
Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts. She is the author of Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2014) and Soft Investigations (Daisy Mayhem, 2019).