Hypno-Noumenal Somatrons: hyper-flow ensembles: Part V: Affect & Memory (Rage)

///The "What Is Culture" post that won the poll a couple days ago is taking a bit longer than I expected, so that'll be along in the next couple of days. I know I promised it would be short, but, well....

In the meantime I'll move on to the second "Memory" experiment, "Rage: FuryVectors." I internalized a long time ago that anger and rage were wrong, and to repress them, redirect them. As a result, I've struggled for many years with anger management. It took a long time and some therapy to realize that anger is healthy--just the ways it was exercised upon me weren't.

This experiment aims to partially address that, but to also go beyond the familialism of the formulation I got in therapy. Like whatever latent social libido that causes us to occasionally, if indirectly, recognize our own collective power ("If we all get face tats they can't not hire all of us," "If we all storm Area 51 they can't shoot all of us," "If we all don't pay rent they can't evict all of us," etc.), there is much latent revolutionary potential in rage, and much to lose if we learn that it is an inherently reprehensible emotion. "Cooler heads win out," say oedipalizers, parents, and state politicians. Our anger is not always simply sublimated resentment of our parents, it's not just anger at the cop giving us a speeding ticket, or one shitty bank fee, or one unreturned security deposit--it's a manifestation of a deeper anger, a broader anger, an anger which feels as if it comes from every direction at once because it does, because it's systemic, because it's the result of a million manifestations of a rotten socius--an anger with the potential to be harnessed and redirected into a politics of meaningful resistance.

I don't claim that this experiment addresses the way to do this or even fully engages with the potential, as it is, after all, an experiment for an individual, but I hope it proves to be able to help one begin to realize the potential of an untapped or sublimated rage, and what might be done with all that potential energy.

As always, feel free to post your results in the forum page or send them to me directly, and thanks to @GlitchTVBot on twitter for the post picture.\\\

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Art by GlitchTVBot

AFFECT:

MEMORY (Rage) Experiment: FuryVectors

1. wistfume Focus on a memory in which you felt intense, justified anger but were unable to express that anger because you were afraid, or powerless, or frozen.

(I am roiling in a classroom; at home faced with articulation; at Hebrew school when they ask about the Flood; in a field of low grain under an iron sky; at the DMV floating linoleum; in a police car sulking in dread; in a wet black parking lot after a break-up; driving past plantation prisons and shotgun shacks on the Emmett Till Highway).

Belly-breathe and percolate that rage in your stomach. Pull it out of the air and your memory. Write 10 words in a column.

2. screethe Focus on a memory in which you lost control of an unjustified rage, at your partner, your sibling, your child, your friend, your student, your parent, your mailperson, your waitress, your cashier. Were you older? Notice the control you felt. Did you feel strong? Notice the relations of power that enabled your release. Do you feel ashamed?

(I tremble subsumed, shaking, a neutron generator splitting seamless—my fist is through the drywall; to children I scream “power,” I watch them shake and feel good; at a lover I snap ruddy and cruel, micro-dosing vindication for the righteous.)

Belly-breathe and percolate. Allow space for this rage, and your shame. Allow it to join the percolation. Write 10 words in a column.

3. promise & complicity Focus on a memory in which you felt justified anger on someone else’s behalf, in a classroom, in a hospital waiting room, at work, at a party, at your friend’s house, in a police station, in traffic. Did you do anything? What, if anything, stopped you? Notice the relations of power that enabled or stopped you, that encouraged your complicity or activity.

(In a classroom—I am silent—a teacher doles reprimands, drunk; where maternal supersounds reign, my sister sobs in an agonized fury; in another classroom—I am another silence—another teacher reads racist jokes after asking, “there’s no black kids in the class, right?”; in a courtroom awaiting mercy i am silent while an incarcerated woman begs a gothic arbiter to see her daughter; driving past a pulled-over sedan, two black kids curl in sirenflash while the third yells panic at the police, pull over across the street, watch, am watched, leave.)

Belly-breathe anger and guilt into your diaphragm. Feel it incorporated into your body. Write 10 words in a column.

4. b(r)oil Focus on something you are angry about now. This can be as broad or narrow as is relevant.

Have you expressed your anger about this? What, if anything, is stopping you? If you have, how? How did you feel?

(Dripping wrath on bullshit documents; watch the Times run Saudi apologia beside headlines screaming ‘genocide’; gas trapping death & the lake of my childhood drying, salinating, blackening, leaving aquarian corpses to rot in the bake; my friends orbiting obliteration, plummeting bullshit paychecks into drugs because it’s cheaper than help; O grape of the gaseous flood, blend the four wines and watch the last whale mourn!; a mother (mine?) stumbles valiant through traumatic tatters, declaring war on airfabric—vibrant, vital, loved & loving, but without peace.)

Belly-breathe and let your fresh rage flow into the rage you’ve percolated. Breathe anger through your body. Write 10 words in a column.

5. funnel Allow your anger to coalesce, blend, dissolve, and become a single fury. Smash something with a bat (an old vacuum, a CD player, a TV, a table, a painting, a drum). Gush your anger, roiled in your stomach, through your arms into a focused act of catharsis.

Allow your anger validation, accept it uncritically and openly, and channel its intensity into a focused act of obliteration.

(everything shakes in the head sigilfucking eyesockets of corporate egregores taste bitter almonds, pennies cleave risen, shrieking, angelic hoops fuck severed teeth in a blooded zenith pigkill a lockjawed splatter, orgastic the drum of chaos arouses the root by a maelstrom of deaths, the youth cures— despair in total power)

Below your columns, free-write a paragraph about this experience.

6. vector Read “The Uses of Anger” by Audre Lorde and “On Violence” by Frantz Fanon.

Consider your place in the relationships Lorde and Fanon set up. Consider the role of your anger in these relations, and how best you can strategically change the way you utilize your anger.

(Securicrat, cop, parent, teacher, it coalesces into a transcription, a mainframe, hardware. Wet hard reverbs will ripple out, but too slow—comfort is an ignorance, unlike the fear that traps me there. Polearms lay rustic, pre-shattered on epistemic hulls. My adolescence, villaesque, gave me iced lemonade & sliced quesadillas & the guilt of the metallic growls of chattel groundskeepers outside—)

Below your previous paragraph, free-write a paragraph about this experience.

7. splatter For each word in the columns, write two words you somatically associate with it beside it. For each paragraph, write 5 parataxic words.

(Learn how to aim; hate the Family instead of your parents, the Police instead of your arresting officers, Heterosexism instead of yourself, White Supremacy instead of the fetishization of your guilt. Wet reverbs shake the core—focus kinetic trauma into a movement of disassembly, a construction of support. Bend the frame, shatter, force it open to its death. Sow and reap on a smooth plane.)

Write a poem using what you’ve generated.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MEMORY (Rage) EXPERIMENT hazards; magnitudes; ordinance; revolts

these are the bricks on which we bash conscience—

i am soaked bracing ; steel wristlocks twist clocked outside a ransack, a biting. drained rage in a dead light til the clout of a barbed mercy.

now an exaltation—

drywall drywall drywall

blood glomming in white dust, i am a shotgun racking; i creak gutted & break arms with you ,

lunging femoral; God is like hate for children.

stained, i practice horrible euthanasia. freedom is a federal slogan & so cosmic landscapers fill cages locked in decadent grottos, sneering wet & everywhere. listen to distance and whisper the shame of witness.

genocide becomes globe straps— a corpse with one thousand bodies— i am an anger which turns inward, & ought to.

ignition lock— discover the eighty trophies of villainy— a howling is a hatching— a yellow griefsmoke palls:

Let there be breakers and let there be firings— Let there be furnaces and let there be strikes— Let there be noons and let there be riots— surge & carve the red wind:

i love those who in any stage have died for the good cause. i crave to be urged, (executed). we were covered warmly, organed. i am become those who pray to coalescence. to test doom you must see it through fire. we sucked idle nectar. how does the world verb? i see the eyewitness washed entirely away from the axe. theodicy for the wretched, jesus with a whip— no more asking, we’ll wield the barbell of all dead soldiers. a thing is mentionable if it shoots straight & stands tall enough to see. gold passed through a bulb of deep water.

succeed me.