M Coe - Texting with Walter
After a brain injury left me struggling to create spontaneous writing, I turned to existing texts to aid my process through collage. Using old and discarded books from the free cart at the library, I started tearing away words and worlds from their original context and found creative solace in the new formations I saw. I've never used this method with texts that I cherish, as I felt guilty ripping through the meaning that I connected with the object.
This past winter, however, I found myself with two copies of Illuminations by Walter Benjamin. I wanted to groove with Benjamin's argumentation and cruise the text for signs of a queer movement that does not rely on "progress" as we know it.
I wanted to play with the physical aura of the text through mechanically reproducing it a la photocopier; enter the enchanting embodying of that via zine exchange. Playing around with the notion that Benjamin is texting me THROUGH me, THROUGH his own text; I think WOW! "At any moment, the reader is ready to turn into a writer" and this twisting and turning and unnameable energy, untameable energy, of speculation steers me momentarily away from singular despair towards a collective practice of creating.
This is a poem, a collection of fragments read together, that attempts to recall knowledges that "exist only in lightning flashes" like texting on devices. It dances around relationships to others, time, self, labor and collectivity. How does the illumination transpire? What do we use in our bodies to hold on to intuition and care?
cloud-busting, unravel, activated
