glassy extremities, delicate rot

a short collection of loose accumulations and desirable habits.

Experimenting with a kind of confessional/dear diary-esque post. Kinda unsure how I feel about it but heck, writing is boundless and immense in its forms.

(i) weird time and wired bodies

In a few days and if all goes well, I will be confirmed as a full-time research executive in a small department of a local organisation. I have been at this for about three months now after about a decade long of hairy hustles as an independent art worker. Now I’m afforded the luxury of time, in a hybrid work arrangement where I am only required to LARP my full-time self, corporate casual wear, a different name and a separate persona, every Tuesdays and alternate Mondays each week. I have a work laptop, a work phone and a work body that I attend to during my work hours. The tasks are hinged on tentacular precision. This new body with many snaking hands, switch between machines and fumbling the fn/ctrl keys, take zoom calls between walks with my daughter through sneaky lunches and skipping dinners. It truly feels like a pretend hustle, performing at full time mode but in micro fragments.

What is too much and what is too little in the act of production and labour? I don’t know and I don’t really care too much for it to be honest. The study I’m involved in will only last for a year. Am I attempting Tehching Hsieh’s Time Clock Piece? Fuck no.

As the artist told me when we met this winter: ‘I am recording time.’ Hsieh posited that ‘life time’ and ‘art time’ need to meet on the same level in performance. In a 2020 interview with Collecteurs Museum, he noted: ‘The water level of my art and life need to be the same, so I can sail into art from life, and transfer life time to art time.’ The synchronicity of life time and art time is so essential to his work, Hsieh told me, that he sets the clock to local time now when installing it for exhibitions.

Maybe back then these different time streams are demarcated pretty clearly but these days our wired selves are occupying different times occurring simultaneously and intersecting haphazardly in our single “life time” stream; something that is opposite of fluid, as in not flowing but rather a whirlpool suction spiral thing that makes time feel rather weird. In true-fashioned irony, as part of the study I’m conducting, my team is tasked to tracked the multiple working states that our participants are in as most are holding on to more than one job, or half a job, or not really a job but the unpaid work of caregiving. What is full-time in comparison to part-time? Is it the hours, the salary, the workload? Is it financially sufficient, emotionally satisfying, secure and in what sense? How then is fatigue measured and against what?

Three months in and all I want instead is to find, and cultivate newfound joys. My still body soaking up the witching sun at 6pm as I stand untethered to any devices soaking in the air and quiet, waiting for my daughter’s school bus to arrive, or switching public transports whilst heavily plugged into a current book narrating the feminist reproductive powers of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and ending up missing my stop, or long drawn lunches as I delicately rot into my floor, to the slowing of my restless body as it disengages. I do not wish to hack time to be efficient, through sheer penetration of will and a desire to do a billion things and accomplish it with capitalistic excellence. Neither do I wish to rest and luxuriate in some aftercare/afterwork indulgences. Instead, I just want to sit in it, this joy, the full-time or part-time of it, the life time of it and let everything else fumble and fall apart a little.

(ii) choice cuts

For those who know me, y’all know that I’m a hoarder. My house is a mess of things. However with the resources I have acquired of late, my partner and I spend an entire day last week throwing out about 12 big black trash bags that we unceremoniously discarded to create more space in the house. The whole process was delightful and delicious.

While still infected by the throw-everything-away bug I am attempting to clear the 23,000 images and videos on my device. I have decided to, slightly ceremoniously, share the screenshots of some of the things/books I read this year before I delete them. With no context of course. And if you are an disorganised digital hoarder like me, you may have guessed that I have forgotten to include their original sources. Tbh, the intention was (and the dream still is) to kind of habituate into a practice of note-taking and annotations but this will do for now.

Also I’m kinda glad I’ve read a little more this year. There’s something about cultivating old habits once again, a meeting of an old dear friend. Each year I find myself obsessing over a single book: reading (or listening to) it once through and then reading specific parts several times. This year though I encountered four of such books; Tania Rozario’s Dinner on Monster Island: Essays, Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea, Sophie Rosa’s Radical Intimacy and Jude Doyle’s Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers 10/10 chef’s kiss across the board. That said, choice cuts for me goes beyond a list of the best things. It’s the things I want to hang on to and take pleasure in for as long as I’m allowed, feel it merge with and transform my entire being, things with a deep and lasting presence.

I feel this soft desire to be intentional with my choice cuts; with my things and my time, what I consume and the company I keep. There’s no longer urgency to acquire so much or do so much just to be of value. Writing this, I tried looking for a word that is the opposite of urgency and all I got are words with negative connotations such as minor, trivial or unimportant. But what I feel right now comes from the accumulation of the non-urgent, everything else that took its time to reach me. Maybe it’s the brink of leaving my 30s and entering my 40s but it’s such a satisfying feeling to know that what I’ve been tending to have begun to bear fruit and I’m finally in my savour era and it’s fucking sweet.

(iii) not eaten, but merely consumed

Last week, a dozen trees of three different species were planted along the road opposite my house. These were readymade trees, grown elsewhere and then transplanted to places where older trees had been cut down. Most of the trees looked as though they were about to die, the brown leaves falling to the ground each time the workers moved them. To secure their flimsy state, a pole is placed parallel to each tree, and then attached to a rope from a plastic ring hanging loosely around the trunk. I did not notice this before, or maybe not the function of that design and began to track other trees that held the same mechanism. Further down the road, almost towards the next street was a line of older readymade trees. I found the same poles and rope attached yet the plastic rings wrapped tight around the bark which was spilling out and over them.

The ring cannot be removed and instead the tree bark will grow over it, devouring the plastic ring into its body. Here’s a clearer explanation of the process:

“The living tree has the most amazing capacity for self-repair and it will simply incorporate foreign objects into its structure. This act of edaphoecotropism, as it is called, is not harmful to the tree. The living tissue of the tree itself simply flows around an object and engulfs it. In so doing, the tree binds itself to the item and the connection actually becomes stronger as time passes. If you were to carve back the tree, you would find that the item inside will still be perfectly formed, not eaten but merely consumed!"¹

There is a phrase in the Malay vernacular, kawan makan kawan or friend eating friend, similar to the “it’s a dog eat dog world”. However the frequency of friends hurting each other is more pertinent in the Malay world probably that we do not say orang makan orang or human eating human. Instead the saying acts as a warning to be wary not of enemies but of friends. I can’t deny that among all the relationship variants, it is friendship that have left me equally battered and beguiled. I am still figuring it out tbh.

Anyhoos I can’t help but think of all the bridges I’ve burnt over the last few years, to repair and preserve myself and maybe burning bridges, an old military tactical term to stop an enemy’s attack by cutting off all access, is not really the way I want to describe it. Not anymore. Essentially burning bridges with someone means that there is no possibility of going back to how things were and no possibilities of reconciliation. It means you have cut all the connections someone may have with and to you. But that’s not the fully the case. Instead, though it is true that these friendships may have ran their course, if I were to carve back parts of me, I’d find them there intact, the connection (in their absence) becoming stronger as time passes.

I will not destroy what has been forged during our time as flimsy beings flailing together to root ourselves, as we find ways and means to support each other. Instead I honour these connections, no matter how short or violent they may be. After so long, this wondrous revelation arrived, glassy extremities as I witness the end of our beautiful shared thing with clarity. There’s something about the saying that time heal all wounds where we do not acknowledge the scars enough. I’m glad I am finally able to, with kindness and love.

Hope you enjoy these messy rumination as I carve out a longer post in the coming weeks. Till next time my loves, hydrate, ressociate and stay in love.

1. https://perfectplants.co.uk/blogs/gardening/do-trees-eat-bicycles?srsltid=AfmBOorq-KoFdyGOzCkFUkWwpEX9PjF55Y79VyRzyz0xG0hO3UYkJ7yy